When the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK beta was first seeded to developers, an entry inside the USBConfiguration.plist indicated that a device identified only as iProd0,1 existed inside of Apple. The .plist item was nested among the usual iPhone and iPod Touch identifiers, as well as iPhone3,1, which turned out to be the iPhone 3GS that was released this past June. As shipping products from Apple don’t have a leading zero in the identifier, we speculated then that it was a prototype device that was in active testing.
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Schmidt Steps Down From Apple Board
Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006.
“Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.”
ForkBombr on Twitter
Almost 60 percent of you read my content via RSS. All ForkBombr content is published in the feed, and will continue to be in the future. Today, however, I’ve added another way to follow Forkbombr: Twitter.
I’m not one of those guys who thinks social media will save the world, or that social media can fix all the world’s problems. It can’t and it won’t. However, Twitter does make life easier, so if you want to get notified when I post something new, simply follow @forkbombr. The RSS feeds this account and it updates about every 45 minutes or so if I have posted new content. I monitor the @replies on the account, so feel free to say hello.
On Word
Word, to this day, is still largely a digital representation of a bunch of 8½ by 11 pieces of paper. Pages have numbers which you must use to reference them, and every page has a header and a footer. Word does have a display mode called “Draft” that makes it look more like an endless stream of toilet paper than separate pages, but I always switched to “Print Layout”—partly because Draft was so ugly, but mostly as a kind of unconscious reflex, a need to “know” what the printed form would look like even though I was rarely printing things out any more. Even in Draft mode, the pages are still there, and are always the same size.
App Brings Handwriting to iPhone
Macworld’s Brian Beam has posted a review of SpeedText, an iPhone app that allows users to create notes using handwriting as opposed to the iPhone’s software keyboard.
Of course, this type of app stirs up memories of the Newton. Beam:
So yes — SpeedText doesn’t approach the nerdy-coolness of the Newton. Then again, most people don’t have a Newton lying around the back of their closet. In that case then, the app is a solid note-taker, particularly if you’d prefer scribbling to the built-in keyboard of the iPhone or iPod touch and so long as your note needs remain simple. SpeedText can certainly handle simple notes — at least until something better comes along.
The Backlash
On the Apple Tablet and Snow Leopard
Cult of Mac has published an interesting article discussing the rumored Apple tablet:
The tablet is Apple’s answer to the exploding netbook market, but it won’t be a piece-of-junk netbook. The last thing Apple will do is glom a touchscreen onto a low-cost laptop. It won’t even put a touchscreen on a regular desktop like an iMac. It makes little sense to touch an iMac’s screen when it is sitting upright. But drop the iMac into your lap, and touching objects on the screen makes perfect sense, and seems perfectly natural.
On the iPhone Versus the Mac
There’s still a ton of Woz in the Mac, I am typing this on a gorgeous unibody MacBook Pro, which is probably the most lovely computer I’ve ever used. The software I’m using has never been approved by Apple, and can be downloaded from the Internet. Next to it is an iPhone, which I use only as a phone, an IM device and a communicating camera. It sucks as a phone. The IM is okay and the camera is really nice. But as a platform it’s a complete total disappointment.
Head of English Catholic Church Warns About Email and Texting
The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned that excessive use of emails and mobile phone text messaging is creating shallow friendships and undermining community life, according to an interview published on Sunday.
Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, also said that popular social networking sites led young people to form “transient relationships” which put them at risk of suicide when they collapsed.
AT&T Slams Apple to FCC
TUAW:
Yesterday, AT&T responded to press questions about this by sending a P.R. email:
“AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it.”
Ouch. It is going to be fun to watch how Apple handles this.
On Google Voice, the FCC and Bad Choices
Google Voice, of course, is Google’s new online service that allows you route all your calls through a new, independent phone number. The service also transcribes and stores voicemails, SMS messages and more. It’s quite handy, but it’s complicated to use from the iPhone, as it requires a user to launch Safari and use a somewhat painful mobile site to make calls and send texts.
To remedy this, a couple of iPhone developers created apps that replicated the functionality of Google’s site but in a way much easier to use.
Apple Patches iPhone OS
Apple Inc said on Friday it has issued a software update to fix a vulnerability that security experts said could allow hackers to take control of the iPhone and use it for identity theft.
The security flaw in Apple’s hugely popular smartphone was disclosed Thursday at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, a major forum for exchanging information on computer security threats.
Researchers showed how iPhones could be broken into by sending computer code via the phone’s Short Message Service (SMS) system. Mobile phones use SMS to send and receive text messages along with software upgrades.