Yearly Archives: 2012

UI vs UX

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Dain Miller takes a look at the differences and misconceptions of UI and UX.

Oracle sues patent troll Lodsys

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Oracle has filed a legal complaint against Lodsys — the company that’s taken aim at app makers on Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and other technology platforms for infringing on its patents — with the hopes of invalidating them.

Go Oracle!

Apple TV, AirPlay and why the iPad is the new TV apps platform

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Jeremy Allaire, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove:

Apple will not anytime soon launch a competitive subscription video product to cable.(but)…the iPhone and iPad in your pocket or handbag is the next-generation TV set-top box, and it is both highly personal and highly social and capable of bringing hundreds of thousands and soon millions of rich interactive applications and experiences onto your TV set.Apple will release a new Apple TV add-on product, though I expect that rather than using the current “puck” design it will instead be a thin black bar, perhaps 1 inch tall and 3 inches wide, that can easily mount to the top of almost any existing HD capable TV set. Like the existing Apple TV, it will have HDMI and power jacks on the back, but it will also include a high-def camera built into its face, as well as an embedded iOS environment that provides motion sensing and speech processing.

Very interesting analysis and, I believe, almost exactly the way Apple’s future on your television will be.

Apple dominates tablets, everyone else fizzles

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Apple continued to lead the market with nearly 65% of worldwide units and surpassed 67 million cumulative shipments in its first eight quarters of availability. iPad can’t claim the highest mobile broadband (3G/4G) attach rate for media tablets, though Apple retains its title of shipping the most 3G-enabled tablets by outpacing the number two competitor by a factor of eight.

The battle is for second place.

Android growth slows

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The concern has to be that rather than seeing the net adds growing–as they have for two years with only two contiguous months of decline–Android net adds have been falling for four months.

iOS held steady and that’s just with the iPhone. Imagine the growth if they included the iPad.

Meechu for iPhone [Sponsor]

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Headed to WWDC next week? Leave your business cards at home for shimming tables. Take Meechu with you on your iPhone and connect to all the cool people you meet quickly and easily. When you meet someone, open Meechu and … Continued

Beardatheon

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The latest comic from Nitrozac and Snaggy at The Joy of Tech.

Absence note from President Obama

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Ryan’s son Tyler missed school to see his dad introduce the president, so Obama wrote him what just may be the best absence note ever collected by a 5th grader. Try punishing the kid for truancy now.

Magnetic iPhone mounting system

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This looks kind of cool. It’s on kickstarter with only four hours left and they currently $400 to meet the goal for the project.

Paper Camera

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I have a confession to make – I’m a iOS photography app junkie. Show me an app that has even a little bit of cool to it, and I’ll drop a few bucks on it in a heartbeat. Consequently, I have a couple hundred photography apps!

A downside to many apps is you have to take a picture first and then run various filters on the app, never knowing exactly whether or not the filter is suitable for the image or vice versa. Thanks to David Chartier, I found a new app this morning that solves that issue – it runs filters on a live image!

It’s called Paper Camera. It’s really clever and original and I highly recommend it.

Facebook iOS 6 integration

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My guess is that Apple will keep things simple with at least the initial Facebook/iOS integration. Beyond authentication, there will probably be a Facebook button in the existing share screen which will allow you to share something to your Facebook Wall.

Sounds like the Apple way to do it.

The shapes of CSS

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Now this is amazing stuff. Look at all of the shapes that can be done with CSS.

This is Vinyl Tap!

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andBoom:

Vinyl Tap brings the golden age of music listening to your iPad. Beautifully re-imagined turntables allow you once again to experience music the way it was intended.Remember the joy you felt when you pulled out that beautiful, black record from its sleeve and placed it gently on to your player, listened for that comforting crackle of the needle in the grooves as you lay back and closed your eyes? Vinyl Tap will enable you to enjoy reminiscing or have the vinyl experience for the first time using your iTunes library.

iStorage 2

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I’d like to thank iStorage for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop.

The ultimate file manager for iOS. Connect, browse and edit your files in the cloud.

Sandboxing deadline arrives: What it means…

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Macworld’s Lex Friedman:

Depending upon whom you ask, Friday, June 1 is the best or worst thing to come to the Mac App Store since it opened its doors in 2011. As of now, new and significantly updated apps submitted to Apple’s Mac App Store must implement sandboxing.Sandboxing refers to compartmentalizing what data and features a specific app is granted access to; apps each can metaphorically play exclusively in their own sandbox, accessing only that data which Apple has granted that app entitlements to see. The plus side of sandboxing is that it means, in theory, that your apps will become safer and more trustworthy: Your Mac prevents them from accessing files they shouldn’t access.But that security comes with a price, at least in some cases.

Google park the self-driving car and fix FeedBurner

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I can appreciate why Google is working on all kinds of new technologies like the self-driving car, but I think it’s time to fix some of the things it’s been ignoring for a long time. The big one for Web publishers is Feedburner.

Adjusting volume

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For people with mild OCD we’re always trying to make sure the volume level is set at an even number – say 14 or 28. Some people need it to feel even “more even” at 10 or 20.

It’s amazing how many times we do this — set the volume based on a number instead of how it sounds. But what happens when your new car doesn’t show you the volume level?

iOS 6

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Rene Ritchie wrote a very in-depth piece on some of the things Apple could improve on with iOS 6. He didn’t just look at elements of the current OS, but also what Apple could learn from Android, webOS and Windows.