[VIDEO] This video was originally shown during the WWDC keynote. I love the incredible attention to detail. For the designer in me, this is like candy to watch.
Some might see this as a move of OS X towards iOS. I see it more as both OS X and iOS moving toward a more beautifully detailed common future.
Reuters:
David Marcus, who has led eBay Inc’s fast-growing payments unit PayPal for the past two years, will step down this month to run Facebook Inc’s messaging products, the companies announced on Monday.
In the newly created role of vice president of messaging products, Marcus will oversee the Messenger service within Facebook’s social network as well as the free Messenger mobile app, but not WhatsApp, said Facebook spokeswoman Vanessa Chan.
Roughly 12 billion messages are sent every day on Facebook, and the Messenger app has more than 200 million users, according to the company.
Given the complete lack of a messaging component in PayPal, I wonder what drove Facebook to make this particular hire.
I’m a big De Niro fan so this is a must see for me. The documentary is called Remembering the Artist Robert De Niro, Sr. It’s running periodically on HBO, available on-demand, and on HBO Go.
[VIDEO] Fantastic! I’d love to see a “making of” video.
Couldn’t agree more.
Some of this is comparing Apples to oranges (sorry), since there are ecosystem advantages to building with iCloud, as opposed to, say, Box. Still, nice to see all this data on the same page.
People have long been talking about MAC address tracking, the technique malware and marketers use to build a picture of where your device goes and the networks you log into. That may all be about to change, due to a change Apple made in iOS 8.
Interesting case being made for the iPhone, and not iCloud, being the center of the coming universe.
With iOS 8, Apple encourages this trend by pushing nascent ecosystems to focus on mobile. Nearly every aspect of the “new” ecosystem Apple showed this week revolves around having the iPhone as the center of your digital experience
Before this morning’s opening bell, Apple was at a post-split price of $92.22. I wonder how long it will take for the stock to hit $100.
Interested in learning about Swift, but not ready to commit to the entire iBook yet? Read the linked article. Well written, detailed, but just focusing on the highlights. But when you’re done, RTFM.
In September, 2012, Stephanie Wilson, a twenty-eight-year-old Australian who lives in West Harlem, bought a pair of Hunter rain boots from Saks Fifth Avenue. She was digging for her receipt in the paper shopping bag when she discovered a letter inside that, in its urgency, started higher than the ruled paper’s printed lines. “HELP! HELP! HELP!!” a man had written, in blue ink on white paper. He opened, “Hello!! I’m Njong Emmanuel Tohnain, Cameroonian of nationality.”
Great story.
This is simply incredible.
In 2012, Apple won the year’s biggest patent verdict—more than $1 billion against Samsung. The company also lost one of that year’s biggest cases when an East Texas jury ordered it to pay $368 million to a company named VirnetX for infringing patents related to FaceTime and VPN On Demand functions used in iPhones, iPads, and Macs. VirnetX is a company some call a “patent troll” because its only business is now patent enforcement. Then, in March, US District Judge Leonard Davis ordered (PDF) an ongoing royalty to be paid to VirnetX. The number was downright stunning: 0.98 percent of revenue from iPhones and iPads sold in the US.
Disruption always rankles the incumbents. Makes sense. The incumbents are fighting for their livelihood.
Responding to Virginia’s all-out ban, Uber sent the letter in the main post out to their Virginia customers yesterday.
Tetris was the killer app that brought Nintendo’s GameBoy into the mainstream.
Thirty years ago today, Russian computer programmer Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov created Tetris. Unveiled behind the Iron Curtain, the deceptively simple, maddeningly addictive game soon left the Soviet Union. It lived on dozens of platforms, but its Lennon-McCartney (Lenin-McCartney?) partner was Nintendo’s Game Boy. And the duo defined modern mobile gaming as we know it.
The article is a nice read, but take a look at the comments. Hint: Search for “Woz”.
30 Rock made me appreciate Tracy Morgan as an actor. Heal quick, Tracy.
TechCrunch:
Spotsetter looked to combine friends’ recommendations, trusted reviews and other signals in order to reinvent maps as a more social experience.
Initially available as a web and mobile application, Spotsetter used a patent-pending algorithm to pull in users’ content from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, as well as venue content from over 30 review sites and lists from trusted sources like Yelp, Zagat, the New York Times, Michelin, and TripAdviser. As of last summer, the company said that it had processed 5 million user profiles, 40 million venues, and 1 million curated venue content items from around the world.
Uh-oh.
9to5mac:
When entering a credit card number into a form online to, for example, make a purchase, Safari already allowed users to quickly select credit cards stored in its Passwords & AutoFill settings. You can still do that, but in iOS 8 you’ll now also have the option to select “Scan Credit Card” and snap a picture of the card. Apple then uses optical character recognition of sorts to input the number into the text field in Safari.
That’s pretty cool!
Apple has an incredibly strong corporate culture. That culture remained fairly constant under the black-turtlenecked tutelage of Steve Jobs. Tim Cook eased the company into his own style of leadership, and the acquisition of Beats has the chance to expand that evolution in a very positive way.
You spent hours making your design perfect. The images have been meticulously Photoshopped. The calls-to-action have been revised and refined countless times. You know exactly where you want the user’s eye to land and precisely how you want it to move. And with the emergence of eye-tracking technology, it’s finally possible to know whether or not it actually works.
This is a great idea. Use eye tracking to figure out what images work best, and where to place them to bring the user’s attention where you want it.
Does the name Peter Norton ring a bell? Ever hear of Norton Utilities? If you answered yes to either of these, I think you’ll find the linked article fascinating. A lot of these pictures brought back memories. Guess that just proves how old I am.
Washington Post:
Earlier this year, Virginia officials slapped the app-based services with more than $35,000 in civil penalties for operating with out proper permits. On Thursday, Richard D. Holcomb, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, sent a cease and desist letter to both companies.
“I am once again making clear that Uber must cease and desist operating in Virginia until it obtains proper authority,” Holcomb said in the letter. (You can see copies of both letters below)
With its action, Virginia joins a growing number of states that have banned or sought to limit the app-based services from operating. In Maryland, Uber is currently appealing a decision by the state’s chief public utility law judge that said it must file an application to operate as a for-hire carrier.
This is clearly a speed bump for Uber and Lyft. Question is, is this a growing trend?
Don Zimmer died yesterday at the age of 83. Here are a few things most folks don’t know about him:
Zimmer met Babe Ruth (in 1947), was a teammate of Jackie Robinson (1954-56) and played for Casey Stengel (1962). He was in uniform for some of the most iconic teams in history: the team that lost the most games (’62 Mets) and the team, including postseason play, that won the most games (’98 Yankees). He was in uniform for the only World Series championship for the Brooklyn Dodgers (1955), one of the most famous World Series home runs (Carlton Fisk’s shot in 1975), one of the most famous regular season home runs (Bucky Dent in 1978), the Pine Tar Game (1983), the first night game at Wrigley Field (1988), the first game in Rockies history (1993), and all three perfect games thrown at Yankee Stadium (Don Larsen, David Wells and David Cone).
An amazing baseball life.
Apple’s new Swift programming language is designed, over time, to replace Objective-C. Swift is much easier to grasp, though not nearly as easy as BASIC, since Swift is designed to support much more complex tasks. But Swift is much, much easier to grasp than Objective-C.
[VIDEO] Now that’s talent.
Microsoft VP Nick Parker:
“We’ll reach price points that are very industry competitive for 7, 8, 10-inch devices,” Parker said, speaking to reporters after his keynote at Computex, Asia’s largest computing show. “They will really surprise you. Last year, we were in the 3s, 4s, 500 dollars. This year, we’ll be 1s, 2s, 3s.”
Not sure if this is a move to move inventory through the pipeline or an attack to build market share from the low end.
I am a big fan of escape rooms. The basic premise is, you are locked in a room and need to solve a series of puzzles to get out, perhaps to another escape room. There have long been virtual escape rooms. My favorite of these is The Room series on iOS.
The linked article explores some real life escape rooms. They range from pure puzzle sets to a more theatrical presentation. Personally, I’d love to see a video game that marries the best of both worlds: A multi-player implementation of an escape room that gives you a virtual presence in an escape room, a real social experience.
[VIDEO] The video in the original post does a great job of walking you through a nice chunk of the interface changes that come with iOS 8. Many of these were shown off in the keynote, but I thought this video made each feature easier to grasp. Definitely worth a watch.
Earlier this week, Samsung announced their first Tizen smartphone, sending a shot across Google’s bow, from the Android side. Apple then followed up with their announcement that Bing would be the default search engine in Spotlight searches. This change in Apple’s search defaults is much more subtle, but no less important.
[VIDEO] Terrific. All the way through.