Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, one of the most outspoken figures on all things Apple, told clients on Wednesday that Steve Jobs’ absence from this year’s Macworld Expo signals “the beginning of a shift in leadership roles” at the company.
“Steve Jobs remains CEO of Apple, however, yielding this year’s Macworld keynote to Phil Schiller, along with the participation of Tim Cook and Phil Schiller at the October event is, in our view, a clear message that a leadership shift is underway,” he said.
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Time picks Obama as "Person of the Year"
Time’s managing editor, Richard Stengel:
Beyond his mastery of the issues, Obama revealed a more personal note: a slightly rueful sense that the world was tightening around him, that he would no longer be able to take a walk or shop for groceries. He seemed to be girding himself for the loss of being simply a regular citizen.
In addition to a lengthy article and interview, Time.com has some photographs of the President-elect in college and a section devoted to Obama-themed are found on Flickr. It’s a lot of material, but my favorite is a piece by Obama’s brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, about a basketball game with the President-elect.
On Macworldgate
Let’s cut to the chase. Cue Apple PR:
Apple today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show,
Wait, what?
Today’s announcement has taken the Internet by storm, but not many believe it to be about Jobs’ health.
GUI Gallery Struts Hard to Find Stuff
I stumbled across this website last night that has screenshots of every graphical user interface I could think of, and a whole lot more. Highlights include Apple’s OS for the IIGS, BeOS, and Windows Bob. Seeing Bob brings back the pain.
The guy who hosts this site, Nathan Lineback, really hates Internet Explorer. So much, I wonder what it did to him when he was a kid.
MobileMe, Leopard Get Some Love
Apple updated their MobileMe service today. Highlights include:
- Resolved an issue that could cause some contacts to temporarily disappear on iPhone or iPod touch when syncing with MobileMe over an intermittent network connection; iPhone Software 2.2 is required to take full advantage of this
Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac sync automatically within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at www.me.com; Mac OS X 10.5.6 is required
This Makes Me Want to Buy a Newton Again
NCX is an application designed by Simon Bell to mimic the original Newton Connection Utilities functionality in the pre-OS X days. As you can see from the home screen above, it offers tons of options for your Newton data, including backup, package installation, Newton Works import and export capabilities, and Mac keyboard functionality.
Being able to exchange data reliably with an OS X machine is the trickiest part about using a Newton these days.
More Stuff You Can’t Make Up
CNN:
President Bush made a farewell visit Sunday to Baghdad, Iraq, where he met with Iraqi leaders and was targeted by an angry Iraqi man, who jumped up and threw shoes at Bush during a news conference.
Among Muslims, throwing shoes at someone, or sitting so that the bottom of a shoe faces another person, is considered an insult.
The man was dragged out screaming after throwing the shoes. Bush ducked, and the shoes, thrown one at a time, sailed past his head during the news conference with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in his palace in the heavily fortified Green Zone.
On Silly Workarounds
Macworld, on the Office 2008 + Spaces bug:
Symptoms of this bug include: an inability to bring Word document windows to the foreground by clicking them, an inability to assign two Word documents to separate spaces, and plain old crashes of Office applications.
The work-around for now is to not use Spaces if you plan on using Office 2008. Or at least don’t start switching among different spaces while Office 2008 applications are open.
x86: An Invite for Mac Hacks?
Apple wasn’t always opposed to Mac clones. For a brief period in the 1990s – when Steve Jobs was still exiled from Apple – Apple CEO Michael Spindler licensed the Mac operating system to several manufacturers: Power Computing, Motorola, Umax, APS, Radius and DayStar. When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, one of the first items on his agenda was to destroy the clone program and eliminate these cheaper alternatives to Apple’s goods.
Apple Adjusts App Store Listings
In the wake of recent criticism of the App Store, Apple has adjusted the way free and paid applications are listed in iTunes. AppleInsider:
TouchMeme’s Krishna Vegesna tipped AppleInsider off to the overnight design tweaks, which “accomplished three important things,” according to the iPhone app developer. First, he said, Apple now highlights the most popular applications on each category page.
As part of this new grouping, the Cupertino-based company has also separated the most popular Free Apps – which previously dominated the most popular listings – from most popular Paid Apps, breaking each out into separate sidebar modules that flank the general listings for each category. In addition, the new layout is more consistent in design with the AppStore application on the iPhone, Vegesna noted.
David Watanabe Unveils Ski Lodge, Plays With Our Emotions
David Watanabe, creator of the popular NewsFire RSS reader, has announced a new iPhone application called Ski Lodge ( iTunes Link). The application shows off his talent of making bold, sharp design choices, also seen in his other applications, Xtorrent, Acquisition, and Inquisitor.
NewsFire, while now free on the Mac, is expected to show up in the App Store at some point, based on a single teaser Watanabe posted on Flickr. Comments on the image show a strong desire among users:
Google Chrome Out of Beta
That’s right, Google’s Little Browser That Could is out of beta, and strutting around town with an official 1.0 label.
Sporting some fancy tricks for Windows users, and based on Webkit, (like Safari, Opera and others) Google’s browser is growing quickly in usage, due to its speed and stability, but still only is used for roughly 1% of all browsing.
It’s hard to believe Chrome has only been out for a few months. PCWorld: