Robbers demand iPhones; BlackBerry and Droids given back

Written by

Katy Tur for NBC New York:

Twice at 526 114th St., and once at 556 114th St., the suspects demanded the victims hand over their iPhones, police said.The first victim complied, but the second only had a Droid, according to police. The thieves apparently didn’t want a Droid — so they took cash instead.

Another victim said she was insulted the robbers didn’t want her BlackBerry. Sad that the criminals have better taste then they do.

Horseshit

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Joshua Topolsky talking about MG Siegler and John Gruber’s comments about the Galaxy Nexus:

This doesn’t get under my skin because I have some kind of allegiance to one brand or another. It doesn’t get under my skin because I fundamentally disagree that Android 4.0 lacks the polish of iOS.It gets under my skin because it is a pompous, privileged, insulting, and myopic viewpoint which reeks of class warfare — and it is indicative of a growing sentiment I see amongst people in the tech community.

Popcorn.

Nokia, T-Mobile talk Windows Phone

Written by

Brian X. Chen

Both companies have challenges ahead. Nokia is trying to regain relevance in the mobile market, hence the partnership with Microsoft. And T-Mobile USA has been positioning itself to be acquired by AT&T. The two men were asked how their companies were going to help each other during this transition period.

Six future CSS layout features

Written by

Divya Manian:

A few concerns keep bobbing up now and then for Web developers, one of which relates to how to lay out a given design. Developers have made numerous attempts to do so with existing solutions. Several articles have been written on finding the holy grail of CSS layouts, but to date, not a single solution works without major caveats. At the W3Conf, I gave a talk on how the CSS Working Group is attempting to solve the concerns of Web developers with multiple proposals. There are six layout proposals that are relevant to us, all of which I described in the talk:

I hate caveats.

Android fans lineup for Galaxy Nexus

Written by

Zach Epstein:

The turnout isn’t quite what Samsung’s stiffest competitor draws when it releases a new iPhone, but we rarely see lines form for smartphone launches so this could indicate healthy demand for the world’s first 4G LTE-enabled Ice Cream Sandwich phone.

Okay, lineup is a relative term. I’ve seen this many people queue for a coffee.

GuitarToolkit 2.0 for iPhone and iPad

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GuitarToolkit 2.0 is a huge new release of one of the App Store’s top-rated apps for guitar players. GuitarToolkit 2.0 features an all-new iPad version that is free for existing customers, and GuitarToolkit+, an amazing new in-app purchase that adds interactive Chord Sheets, Custom Instruments, and Advanced Metronome with a powerful drum machine. Advanced Metronome is available now for iPad and coming soon to iPhone and iPod touch.GuitarToolkit is a collection of essential guitar tools, including an extremely accurate tuner, a precision metronome and a massive library of chords, scales and arpeggios – all on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

This app is made by Agile Partners, the same people that make AmpKit+, TabToolkit and other music apps. When it comes to music apps for the iOS, I love what these guys do. I own every app they make.

Time’s Person of the Year

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While I, of course, agree that the protests this year were of enormous significance, I cannot help but feel that this award is somewhat contrived.The inclusion of the Occupy movements across the United States in the same article as the bloody overthrow of Gaddafi? Seems a bit much.

I’ve seen a number of comments similar to this today.

Dave Mustaine: Guitar Prodigy for iOS

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Want to shred like Megadeth? Never thought you could? Guess again. This is the app for that. The Dave Mustaine: Guitar Prodigy interactive App gets you — whether beginner or expert — playing the right notes at the right times within minutes — on your guitar.

I’ll definitely be giving this a try.

Lipstick on a pig

Written by

Marcelo Somers:

Companies like HP are more excited about telling people who they are and what they do instead of showing it through their actions.I’m a big fan of branding as a process of defining who you are, but the failure of business today is that we’re breeding a generation of employees who are more excited about telling than showing.

One of the things that Apple does really well is delivering technology and products. It doesn’t make promises before a product is released, but rather it wows people when it goes to market.

Redesigning HPs brand and identity

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Moving Brands partnered with HP as their lead agency to set a creative vision for the HP brand. The vision was to transform the world’s biggest technology company into the world’s most powerful brand. HP would become the blueprint of a moving brand, built for a moving world.

Microsoft co-founder launches space project

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Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen is planning to build a spaceship that could replace the Space Shuttle and put paying passengers into orbit this decade.

I think I’ll wait a little bit.

Kobot

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The Kobot is a new EV concept for navigating around cities and towns, developed by Kowa Tmsuk. There are three models in this prototype range, the single person vehicles ν (nyu) and β(beta), which with the push of a button from a smartphone can transform so that they can be parked securely in a compact space, and the π(pi) which can hold two people.

Louis CK makes $500k in three days selling $5 video

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The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it

That’s awesome.

Nokia can’t give its phones away

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Om Malik talking about his trip to Helsinki: Walking around the downtown (where I am staying), I have seen many more iPhones than Nokia phones. And most of the startup people I met have some variation of the iPhone. One … Continued

iOS App Store downloads are unique too

Written by

Matthew Panzarino for TNW:

So we contacted Apple and it has confirmed to us that the numbers released about the iOS App Store, currently at 18 billion downloads, with 1 billion downloads a month, are uniques.

Yesterday I contacted Apple and confirmed that the 100 million Mac App Store downloads were unique and did not include Lion, updates or downloads to other Macs. Panzarino took it a step further and confirmed the same for the iOS App Store.

My Living Desktop 5 for Mac released

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Amuse, Inc. today is pleased to announce My Living Desktop 5.0.1 for Mac OS X, an upgrade to their critically acclaimed application that includes dozens of unique, high definition videos to create soothing visual and aural environments on the Macs desktop. In addition to videos of natural beauty shot from all over the globe, the application also allows the user to import their own home movies.

Always thought this was kind of cool.

I would like to thank RIM’s co-CEOs for their incompetence

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The holidays are approaching fast. It’s the time of the year where we take stock of the good (and bad) things that happened over the last 12 months, and figure out goals for the next year.

I would like to personally thank RIM’s co-CEOs for their complete and total incompetence in 2011. Without your lack of attention to the market and the details that would make a great product, my year wouldn’t have been so successful.

10 CSS design resources

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The following collection is a one-​​stop-​​shop for CSS. From the official home page of W3C to gradients and button generators — each of these resources has been carefully reviewed and tested. With these tools, you can accomplish any CSS design task that you want using CSS as the primary, if not only, system for implementing the look and feel.

CNET calls Gruber a ‘fanboi’

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Brooke Crothers on CNET: Take the blog Daring Fireball. It offers some solid analysis. But in the end it’s a fanboi site, assailing the misinformed or pointing out how wrong or disliked the Android competition is. That kind of attitude … Continued

BitTorrent spies

Written by

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for ZDNet:

Think no one knows what you’ve downloaded off the Internet with BitTorrent? Think again.People have privacy delusions about the Internet. They seem to think that just because they don’t sign their real name to a site that no one can see what they’ve been doing on it. Oh dear. So dumb, so wrong.

Nothing is private. Nothing.

Create drop cap effect with CSS3

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Drop caps have been around for years in the print industry, but they are still pretty rare in the web world despite the :first-letter selector having been around for a fair few years. Let’s take a look at how we … Continued

RIM screws up again

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John Paczkowski talking about the four things RIM had to deliver to Indonesia, including a regional data server:

RIM delivered on all four. But evidently it didn’t carry out the fourth in quite the way the BRTI wanted. It put the data center in Singapore, which is not geographically all that far, but a different country and not nearly as “regional” as the BRTI would like. Aggravating matters further, Indonesia has been asking for a local server for nearly three years.

Now Indonesia is threatening to shutdown RIM’s operations. Seriously folks, I could not make this stuff up.

Carrier IQ and the FBI

Written by

Brad McCarty for TNW:

It probably wouldn’t come as a surprise if the FBI were to use data from Carrier IQ, but there’s no need for alarm, just yet. However, that’s contrary to what’s being reported elsewhere, so let’s take a moment to clear the air.

A very sensible article and approach from Brad.

More Kindle Fire bashing

Written by

USA Today:

These early adopters are running into an experience that is often clunky, a touchscreen that isn’t super responsive, a Web browser that struggles on many websites and head-scratching hardware omissions. (There are no volume buttons.)