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Yearly Archives: 2012
Engineering Red Hot Chili Peppers, mixing Adele
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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.
Airfoil Speakers Touch turns iOS device into audio receiver
Airfoil Speakers Touch 3 is available; it lets you
WWDC 2012 is officially sold out
WWDC 2012 is sold out, only a couple of hours after going on sale.
Tor/Forge SF publisher to make ebooks DRM-free
Tor Books is the latest book publisher to make their e-books DRM-free.
Sprint sells 1.5 million iPhones
Sprint sold 1.5 million iPhones during its most recently-announced quarter.
WWDC kicks off June 11
WWDC 2012 takes place from June 11-15.
Squeeze the most juice out of your iOS device battery
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.
Sophos claims 20 percent of Macs have malware – counting Windows e-mails
Sophos claims 1 in 5 Macs has malware on it. But how are they counting?
Apple posts $11.6B profit on $39.2B in revenue
Apple announced $11.6 billion in profits on $39.2 billion in revenue.
ITC says Apple violated Motorola patent with iOS
Apple violated Motorola patents, says an International Trade Commission (ITC) judge.
IT jobs in Antarctica
IT exists as a career option even in Antarctica.
Clickety-Clack
An alternate view on clicky keyboards.
Apple to lead tablet market until 2016
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
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
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
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.
The Unofficial 5by5 Soundboard
I saw Gruber post this today and thought it was is great.
Another look at Apple’s agency model for publishing
Chris Martucci offers a very different perspective on Apple’s trouble with the Department of Justice than the Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz.
No meaningful revenue
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.
Ride the Boston rails with your iPhone this fall
You’ll be able to use your iPhone to pay your fare on Boston’s MBTA Commuter Rail system this fall.
State of Creativity
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.
Department of Justice on weak ground with Apple price fixing complaint
Wall Street Journal’s former publisher explains why the Department of Justice’s price fixing complaint against Apple’s periodical pricing is wrong.
Stream Adobe’s CS6 event live at 10:00 am PT
Adobe is holding its event to talk about CS6 and Creative Cloud at 10:00 am PT today.