Sending your kids to a “summer camp” put on by the second-wealthiest corporation in the world is just so damn creepy. I mean, it is inside a retail store.
posts
iOS Growing Like Mad
Saying “Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise” isn’t quite as true as it used to be, it seems.
iCloud Artwork
The Javascript image might be my favorite.
Small Big Shoes to Fill
Everyone I know who has owned a 12-inch PowerBook G4 looks back with fondness about that being the best Mac they have ever owned. It was a perfect blend of power and portability, and it invoked an affinity from its owners that few Macs in history have.
A few years from now, I believe we’ll look back and say the 12-inch PowerBook was the best laptop we ever owned until our MacBook Airs. The MacBook Air is the new 12-inch PowerBook — the new blend of power and portability that also invokes a fondness that few Macs in the lineup can.
Marco Arment Refuses Venture Capital Dollars for Instapaper
ReadItLater just raised $2.5 million to bulk up its content shifting operation while online document site Scribd, a start-up with $26 million in funding, just launched a new reading app that has similar features. Meanwhile Apple is preparing to go live with iOS 5 that also allows users to read web content later.
If you’re Marco Arment founder of Instapaper, known for popularizing the time-shifting reading genre that is now suddenly quite popular, what do you do? Nothing, really.
Android Trojan Records Calls
A new Android trojan has cropped up that records phone calls and related information, according to a blog post by an employee of security company Total Defense. The trojan is triggered when the Android device places or receives a phone call. It saves the audio file and related information to the phone’s microSD card, and includes a configuration file with information on a remote server and settings used by the trojan.
iPhone 4 on Sale
According to reports from Engadget and Phone Arena, both Radio Shack and Target planned to offer between $30 and $50 off of the price of an iPhone 4 with a two-year contract. We verified Monday morning that Radio Shack has a current promotion running through Saturday, offering the iPhone 4 for $169.99 and $269.99 for the 16GB and 32GB models, respectively. Radio Shack is also offering up to $100 credit for the trade-in of a previous iPhone model, dropping the price to as low as $69 with contract.
Slam Dunk?
From AFP548’s Lion Server review:
Does this mean that OS X Lion Server is a slam dunk upgrade for everyone? No. In fact there are some folks that I don’t think I could even recommend to remain on the platform. If you are making a living doing web and mail hosting on Mac OS X Server then you are probably going to be better off moving to some other Unix or even Windows. The total gutting of web configuration when it comes to sites and virtual domains means you are going to be doing a lot of the same work in Apache2 conf files as you would be elsewhere. You can certainly get the job done on Lion Server and he price is right, but there just isn’t a compelling reason to do so.
Lion Server Reviewed
Andrew Cunningham at AnandTech:
Lion Server’s main problem, from an IT person’s point of view, has less to do with the software’s functionality and more to do with Apple’s software support model. Lion Server is a good product that maintains most of the appeal of past OS X Server versions, but like the client version of Lion, it’s clearly a transitional product that makes many changes and foreshadows many more, and there’s less tolerance for that sort of thing in the server room than on the client end. If your organization depended on something like the Print or QuickTime Streaming service in Snow Leopard Server, or the ability to join Windows clients to Open Directory, Apple decided that those services were obsolete and got rid of them; now you’re stuck having to find something else to do the same work.
XP Slipping in Web Share
Another month rolls round, bringing with it another bunch of browser market share statistics. July was the first full month during which Firefox 5 was available, so it was the first indication of how well Mozilla’s new Rapid Release schedule would play in the market.
First the overall market share numbers. Internet Explorer is down 0.87 points to 52.81 percent. Firefox is down 0.19 points, to 21.48 percent. Chrome and Safari both made gains, of 0.34 and 0.57 points each, to 13.45 and 8.05 percent respectively. Finally, Opera fell slightly, by 0.08 points to 1.65 percent.
The Sweet Spot
The MacBook Air has never been a laptop for everyone. It began as a niche laptop for a tiny sliver of the population, but in the intervening three years there’s been a sea change. Today, most people in the market for a Mac laptop should seriously consider the MacBook Air. Sure, there are some people for whom it’s a poor fit—but I suspect they are increasingly the exception, not the rule. (There’s a reason Apple’s marketing slogan for this version of the Air is “The ultimate everyday notebook.”)
It Lives
It has more linen, unsurprisingly … and the ugly-as-sin Address Book from the iPad and OS X Lion.