Posts tagged iphone
“The iPhone 5 is the only smartphone you’ll ever need. Except for Republicans, because smartphones don’t exist in 1950.” - Apple
BREAKING NEWS: Microsoft Unveils an alternative to the iPad and by alternative they mean it’s another gynormous piece of crap…
Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.
Along with the details we were able to gather from our sources, we also spoke to two experts in the field of digital publishing to get a clearer picture of the significance of what Apple is planning to announce.
So far, Apple has largely embraced the ePub 2 standard for its iBooks platform, though it has added a number of HTML5-based extensions to enable the inclusion of video and audio for some limited interaction. The recently-updated ePub 3 standard obviates the need for these proprietary extensions, which in some cases make iBook-formatted e-books incompatible with other e-reader platforms. Apple is expected to announce support for the ePub 3 standard for iBooks going forward.
GarageBand for e-books
At the same time, however, authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors saying that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.
Our sources say Apple will announce such a tool on Thursday.
And Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis agrees that such a move would be very likely. MacInnis previously worked on education projects at Apple before leaving the company in 2009 to pursue his own ideas about creating interactive digital books. Inkling currently offers a variety of digital textbooks with interactive features, including the ability to share notes with classmates and instructors, via an iPad app.
“When you think about what Apple is doing… they are selling tens of thousands of iPads into K-12 institutions,” MacInnis said. “What are they doing with those iPads? They don’t really replace textbooks, because there’s not very much content on offer,” he said.
Don’t expect that content to come directly from Apple, however. “Practically speaking, Apple does not want to get into the content publishing business,” MacInnis said. Like the music and movie industries, Apple has instead built a distribution platform as well as hardware to consume it—but Apple isn’t a record label or production studio.
But what Apple does provide is industry-leading tools for content production, such as Logic or Final Cut Pro, to help create content. The company also produces tools like GarageBand or iMovie that make such production accessible to a much wider audience.
Will Apple launch a sort of GarageBand for e-books? “That’s what we believe you’re about to see,” MacInnis said (and our other sources agree). “Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn’t just get flushed down the toilet—I think you’ll see some of [that code] repurposed.”
Mobile, social learning
Technology-in-education expert Dr. William Rankin also believes digital books will expand with tools that will enable social interactions among textbook users. Rankin, who serves as Director of Educational Innovation of Abilene Christian University and has extensively researched the use of mobile devices in the classroom, was one of three authors of a white paper on the effects of digital convergence on learning titled “Code/X,” published in 2009.
In that document, Rankin and his colleagues laid out their vision for the future of learning, which included an always-on, always-networked digital device called a “Talos.” That device turned out to be very similar to the iPad that Apple announced just six months later.
“What we saw coming was a change in the kinds of places that learning would happen,” Rankin said. Since the device would always be with the student, it would give her access to information anytime and anywhere. “For that, you need a different kind of book.”
Such digital texts would let students interact with information in visual ways, such as 3D models, graphs, and videos. They would also allow students to create links to additional texts, audio, and other supporting materials. Furthermore, students could share those connections with classmates and colleagues.
“What we really believe is important is the role of social networking in a converged learning environment,” said Rankin. “We’re already seeing that in Inkling’s platform, and Kno’s journaling feature. Future digital texts should allow students to layer all kind of other data, such as pictures, and notes, and then share that with the class or, ideally, anyone.”
Exactly how what Apple announces on Thursday will impact digital publishing isn’t certain, however.
“Think about how meaningful simply authoring and publishing to an iPad will be for K-12,” MacInnis said. “However, it might not be great for molecular biology.”
MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices. Apple can “kick up dust with the education market,” which could then create visibility for platforms like Inkling. This could then serve as a sort of professional Logic-type tool for interactive textbook creation complement to Apple’s “GarageBand for e-books.”
“There will be a spectrum of tools and consumers, and we will continue to fit on that spectrum,” MacInnis opined. “I don’t know if the publishing industry will react to it with fear or enthusiasm.”
Steve Jobs’ pet project
We know that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was working on addressing learning and digital textbooks for some time, according to Walter Issacson’s biography. Jobs believed that textbook publishing was an “$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.”
According to our sources close to his efforts, however, Jobs’ personal involvement was perhaps more significant that even his biography purports. Jobs worked on this project for several years, and our understanding is that the final outcome was slated to be announced in October 2011 in conjunction with the iPhone 4S. Those plans were postponed at the last minute, perhaps due to Jobs’ imminent death.
Despite the delay, however, ACU’s Rankin believes the time is right for a change to happen in the field. “We’re headed toward a completely digital future at ACU,” he said. “A recent study showed that 82 percent of all higher education students nationwide will come to campus with a smartphone. We need to have resources and tools ready for these mobile, connected students.”
Courtesy of Chris Foresman for arstechnica.com
Nerds, Geeks and Misfits of the World Throw Temper Tantrum: Steve Jobs Action Figure Cancelled After Pressure From Lawyers For His Family, Apple…
SAN JOSE, Calif. - The company that began advertising for an incredibly lifelike Steve Jobs doll won’t sell the figurines after all because of pressure from family and Apple lawyers.
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In Icons had planned to offer the 1-foot (0.3-meter)-tall, lifelike figure dressed in Jobs’ trademark black mock turtleneck, rimless glasses and jeans.
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But the San Jose Mercury News reports (http://bit.ly/AoI1ZQ ) the company posted a statement on its website Sunday saying it had received “immense pressure” to drop the plan and made the decision out of its “heartfelt sensitivity to the feelings of the Jobs family.”
The iconic Apple co-founder died Oct. 5 of complications from pancreatic cancer.
In icons had intended to start shipping the doll in February. The company says any money received for pre-orders will be returned.
Take a look at the (unauthorized) Steve Jobs action figure. It’s so realistic, it’s downright creepy.
The 12-inch figure, which was to have been sold by inicons, was set to ship next month and would have retailed for an Apple-like premium of $99.99. But you would have got quite a lot of detail for your Benjamin. The figure features Jobs’s “uniform” of blue jeans, black mock turtleneck, and running shoes. The figure’s face has glasses, realistic facial stubble, and the unmistakable male pattern baldness.
According to the site’s product page, the figure comes with these features:
One realistic, sculpted head and two pairs of glasses.
One highly articulated body and three pairs of hands.
One black turtleneck and one pair of blue jeans.
One black leather belt and one chair (wood + metal).
One pair of black socks and sneaker(s).
Two apples (one with a bite).
One piece of “ONE MORE THING” hard backdrop.
Information from: San Jose Mercury News, http://www.sjmercury.com, and The Canadian Press, http://www.thecanadianpress.com/
This Christmas, Your Apple iPhone Is Going To Kill You…
THE TWEAKER: Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs
The Tweaker
The real genius of Steve Jobs.
by Malcolm Gladwell
NOVEMBER 14, 2011
Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ”
It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”
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Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase… . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”
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Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:
Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked… . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.
Read More ……….
“Here’s To The Crazy Ones”: The Apple iPhone 4S Is Even For Psychopaths.
Are you a psychopath? Here’s simple instructions on how to use the new iPhone 4S, with Siri.
When Steve Jobs wrote “Here’s to the crazy ones” in the iconic Apple ad, we’re pretty sure he didn’t mean this kind of crazy.
While an insane, probably-should-be-institutionalized manchild may think that an iPhone, like the rest of the world, requires abnormal behavior to make sense of it all, it turns out that users can ask Siri questions without sacrificing bodily tissue or worshipping its power in the nude.
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Think different. But just not insane.
Steve Jobs told Rupert Murdoch that Fox News was a “destructive force in our society,” according to the blockbuster biography of the late Apple CEO. Poynter was the first to uncover Jobs’ blunt words about the network in Walter Isaacson’s new book. Isaacson writes that, after speaking at a News Corp. retreat, Jobs unloaded on Murdoch: This was part of Jobs’ apparent love of tough talk with other powerful people. He also told President Obama that his economic policies would rob him of a second term. Nevertheless, Jobs was a close collaborator with Murdoch, working with him on the mogul’s iPad newspaper The Daily.
“You’re blowing it with Fox News,” Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.” Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer,” he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Google can only hope that Steve Jobs’ final vendetta doesn’t haunt the Internet search leader from his grave. The depths of Jobs’ antipathy toward Google leaps out of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Apple’s co-founder. The book goes on sale Monday, less than three weeks after Jobs’ long battle with pancreatic cancer culminated in his Oct. 5 death. The Associated Press obtained a copy Thursday. The biography drips with Jobs’ vitriol as he discusses his belief that Google stole from Apple’s iPhone to build many of the features in Google’s Android software for rival phones. It’s clear that the perceived theft represented an unforgiveable act of betrayal to Jobs, who had been a mentor to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and had welcomed Google’s CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, to be on Apple’s board. Jobs retaliated with a profane manifesto during a 2010 conversation with his chosen biographer. Isaacson wrote that he never saw Jobs angrier in any of their conversations, which covered a wide variety of emotional topics during a two-year period. After equating Android to “grand theft” of the iPhone, Jobs lobbed a series of grenades that may blow a hole in Google’s image as an innovative company on a crusade to make the world a better place. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs told Isaacson. “I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death because they know they are guilty.” Jobs then used a crude word for defecation to describe Android and other products outside of search. Android now represents one of the chief threats to the iPhone. Although iPhones had a head start and still draw huge lines when new models go on sale, Android devices sold twice as well in the second quarter. According to Gartner, Android’s market share grew 2 1/2 times to 43 percent, compared with 17 percent a year earlier. The iPhone’s grew as well, but by a smaller margin – to 18 percent, from 14 percent. Both Google and Apple declined comment to The Associated Press when asked about Jobs’ remarks. Jobs’ attack is troubling for Google on several levels. It suggests that Apple, which has pledged to be true to Jobs’ vision, may try to derail Android in court, even if Google obtains more patent protection through its proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of phone maker Motorola Mobility Inc. The derision comes across as a bitter pill for Page and Brin, who have hailed Jobs as one of their idols. It also appears to contradict Schmidt’s repeated assertions that he remained on friendly terms with Jobs even after he resigned from Apple’s board in 2009. Most of all, Google should be worried whether the Android brand is damaged by the withering criticism of a revered figure whose public esteem seems to have risen as friends, colleagues and customers paid tribute over the past few weeks. “The words of cultural icons have a lot of power after death,” veteran technology analyst Rob Enderle said. “This almost sounds like a spiritual leader declaring a jihad on Android as his dying wish.” Apple fans tend to be fiercely loyal, making it more feasible to envision an anti-Android movement taking shape like some kind of political protest, Enderle said. It’s also possible that Jobs’ criticisms of Google may be seen as hypocritical. That’s because some of Apple’s computing breakthroughs were based on technology developed by others. The Mac’s easy-to-use interface and its mouse controller, for instance, came out of Xerox Corp. The bitter divide between two of the most beloved and successful technology companies would have seemed inconceivable a few years ago. In 2006, Google and Apple were on such friendly terms that Jobs welcomed Schmidt to Apple’s board of directors with these words: “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead,” Jobs said. But in 2008, a year after the iPhone came out, Google unveiled plans to release Android as a free software system that phone makers can use to make devices that compete with the iPhone. Jobs was so infuriated that he went to Google’s Mountain View headquarters – about nine miles from Apple’s Cupertino office_ to try to stop the project, according to the biography. Jobs’ persuasive powers failed to sway Google’s leaders. Now, more than 550,000 devices running on Android are being activated each day. Apple, meanwhile, sold about 3 million fewer iPhones than anticipated in the July-September quarter, contributing to a sharp drop in the company’s stock. The newest Android challenger to the iPhone, the Galaxy Nexus from Samsung, is scheduled to go on sale next month. Although there’s no indication in the book that he ever forgave Google, Jobs set aside his disdain for the company long enough to counsel Page nine months ago, according to the biography. After Google’s Jan. 20 announcement that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April, Page called Jobs for some pointers. Jobs told Isaacson that his first instinct was to reject Page with a curt expletive, but he reconsidered as he recalled his times as a young entrepreneur listening to the advice of elder Silicon Valley statesmen including Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co. Jobs didn’t mince words when Page arrived at Jobs’ Palo Alto home. He told Page to build a good team of lieutenants. In his first week as Google’s CEO, Page reshuffled his management team to eliminate bureaucracy. Jobs also warned Page not to let Google get lazy or flabby. “The main thing I stressed was to focus,” Jobs told Isaacson about his conversation with Page. “Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out adequate products that are adequate but not great.” Page has shut more than 20 Google products and services in his first six months as Google’s CEO as part of an effort to “put more wood behind fewer arrows.” It was the type of discipline Jobs instilled on Apple when he returned in 1997 after a dozen years of exile. Jobs killed such products as the Newton handheld device and the PC clones that were allowed to run on Apple’s operating system. It still remains to be seen whether Jobs’ words of wisdom or his grievances will leave a bigger imprint on Google.
