Yearly Archives: 2012

ScreenCastsOnline

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Many thanks to ScreenCastsOnline for sponsoring The Loop this week. Established in 2005, ScreenCastsOnline is acknowledged as one of the primary online training resources for the Mac and iOS, publishing two brand new video tutorials each and every week. ScreenCastsOnline … Continued

Engineering Red Hot Chili Peppers, mixing Adele

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Andrew Scheps’ engineering and mixing credits read like a who’s who of popular music. He mixed four tracks on Adele’s Grammy-winning album, 21, and engineered and mixed 11 songs on the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m with You. The latter was one of his many collaborations with production legend Rick Rubin. Scheps has also worked with Jay-Z, U2, Justin Timberlake, Green Day, Metallica, and many others. As a producer, Scheps’ credits include bands such as Favez, The Duke Spirit, and Audrye Sessions.

It’s always interesting to see how the pros do it.

One-in-four iPad purchases made by first-time Apple owners

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The iPad is drawing new consumers to the Apple brand with more than one-in-four iPad owners saying the device is their first Apple product. According to leading market research company, The NPD Group’s recent Apple Ecosystem Study, 33 percent of U.S. homes, (37 million households) own Apple products. While a majority (69 percent) of these consumers own iPods, ownership of iPads is growing.

This is good news for Apple. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac, iPhone or iPad that draws people to Apple, once they start using the product they will buy more. The simplicity of using any Apple products will win people over.

iPhone, iPad claim top spots in Enterprise activations

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The Q1 findings showed that Apple’s iPhone 4S hit a record high, claiming the number one device spot overall, with 37 percent of all activations for the first quarter (four times that of any other device). The iPad 2 claimed the second spot overall, with 17.7 percent of activations for the quarter. With less than one month on the market, the new iPad™, released in March 2012, rocketed to the number four spot with 4.3 percent of all activations for the quarter, and an impressive 12.1 percent of activations in March alone.Good found that iPads collectively represented roughly 97.3 percent of its tablet activations for Q1 2012. Apple’s continued growth is not only being driven by consumers and the overall BYOD trend, but also by proactive enterprise deployment of iPads.

We knew Apple was doing really good in the consumer market, but this is quite impressive.

Pixelmator updated

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Image editing software Pixelmator has been updated to version 2.0.3 with the following improvements:

  • Improves the performance of the Move Tool
  • Fixes memory leaks
  • Fixes a situation where performance would degrade over time
  • Fixes issues with Export for Web
  • Fixes a problem that caused corrupt PXM files

Samsung hires protesters against Apple

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Taylor Wimberly:

We know Samsung has an unhealthy obsession with Apple, but this is getting a little weird. This week in Australia, Samsung hired a marketing agency called Tongue to conduct some kind of guerrilla marketing campaign where they sent a bus of protesters to an Apple store and taunted people with the message “WAKE UP.”

Here’s an idea: just make products that don’t copy everything Apple does.

Is Google Drive worse for privacy than iCloud, Skydrive, and Dropbox?

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The Verge:

The Google Drive cloud storage service launched yesterday to much fanfare, but as with any new Google product, there are important questions about how the company will actually use personal data uploaded to the system. Google sells ads against your data, after all, and the more data you give the company, the more opportunity it has to screw up. That means the Google Drive terms of service and privacy policy are critically important, and there’s been a lot of selective interpretation floating around the web in the past 24 hours — and a lot of comparisons to the privacy policies of competitive services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.That’s great — all web services should be subject to harsh scrutiny of their privacy policies — but a close and careful reading reveals that Google’s terms are pretty much the same as anyone else’s, and slightly better in some cases. Let’s take a look.

You might be surprised to see the answer.

Sprint confirms unlimited data plan for next iPhone

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CNET:

Sprint Nextel is banking that its unlimited data plan will continue to set its iPhone apart from the others — even when the next version arrives.If the next iteration of the iPhone arrives with LTE, Sprint will continue to offer a no-strings unlimited plan, CEO Dan Hesse told CNET.Hesse believes the decision to stick with unlimited has been a boon for the company, drawing in new customers who wouldn’t have otherwise considered the carrier.

He may very well be right. My next iPhone might be one from Sprint.

Squeeze the most juice out of your iOS device battery

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Wired How-To:

How will you make sure your battery lasts long enough?Here’s the rundown on what will — and won’t — make your iPhone or iPad battery last the longest, and some tips to make sure it lasts as long as your device.

Apple to lead tablet market until 2016

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Financial Post:

Over the next five years, the global market for touchscreen tablets is expected to grow to 375 million devices sold in 2016, up from 56 million sold in 2011, bringing the total global tablet install base to more than 760 million.

To infinity and beyond.

iPhone accounted for 78% of AT&T smartphone activations

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Among the 4.3 million iPhones that AT&T sold in the first quarter of calendar 2012, 21 percent of those were new to AT&T. The total 5.5 million smartphones AT&T sold in the three-month period was a new record for the company.

Android is winning!

Clicky keyboards

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Shawn Blanc has a very detailed review of his favorite clicky keyboards, including sound recordings of the sound they make when you type. I found the words per minute and accuracy were particularly interesting.

Google’s Andy Rubin on the hot seat

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Dan Farber:

In 2006 email thread, Rubin said that Sun owned the intellectual property and brand for Java and that the Java.lang APIs were copyrighted. Over the next several years his thinking changed.

Your thinking may change, but the truth remains constant.

No meaningful revenue

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Dustin Curtis:

I think Facebook is terrified of the usage transition from desktop PCs to mobile. A billion dollars for Instagram, as an insurance policy to guarantee that the company will have an anchor in content creation on mobile, is worth every penny.

That’s exactly what I think about the deal.

State of Creativity

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Research firm StrategyOne conducted surveys of 5,000 adults, 1,000 per country, in the US, UK, Germany, France and Japan.The research was designed to identify attitudes and beliefs about creativity and provide insights into the role of creativity in business, education and society.