This is a really good look at advertising and how the old school buyers are trying to deal with Amazon and Apple. Buyers are used to getting information, but neither company will share customer habits or other data with them. Welcome to the 21st Century. Guess who is sharing customer information more freely? Google.
This is pretty early in Johnny Cash’s career. Great video.
Jim and Dan talk about the Pirates of Silicon Valley, Apple, Microsoft, the heart of innovation, Guns n Roses, and more.
Sponsored by Hover (use code SLED for 10% off your first purchase once you sign up), FreshBooks (enter AMPLIFIED in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section to support the show and to enter for your chance to win a birthday cake!), Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME214 for 25% off), and MailChimp.
This looks good, especially having apps available for both platforms.
Samsung’s Galaxy S5 will have a fingerprint sensor in the home button, just like the iPhone. Who didn’t see that coming?
Ryan Neudorf really seems to like it.
P.S. Kickass paint job on the travel trailer.
Banerjee noticed that braille printers can cost more than $2,000 and wondered if he could drop the price, according to his father, Niloy. A Mindstorms kit is $350 and easily modifiable, giving Banerjee most of the parts he needed to build the printer.
Big fan of Lego Mindstorms. We have several in our house. This is one talented kid.
I am going to give this a try. I love the idea of being able to play Zelda on my iPad. Very cool!
Not a good defense in my opinion.
King games have been downloaded on 500 million mobile devices, almost one game for every person in Brazil and the U.S. What’s more, about 408 million of those consumers play at least one game a month; some 124 million play every day.
Those are staggering numbers. But is this success long term?
In anyone else’s hands, I would worry about the user experience with touch controls embedded in the chassis. The potential for bad experience is huge if major changes are made to the keyboard, trackpad and screen. But Apple has consistently delivered in this area. Looking forward to seeing what the future holds for laptops.
Donovan Hutchinson shows you how to use transforms to create a 3D object and animate it with nothing but CSS.
It’s like there’s nothing that can’t be done with CSS these days.
Just beyond description.
Saved is the tool that makes budgeting and tracking your expenses delightfully simple. Saved helps you visualize your budget and savings every single day of the year to track how much you’ll be able to spend on your loved ones, holidays, and vacations.
It’s free to download.
An all-time classic song.
I really enjoyed this. I’ve seen logos that I had to stare at in order to figure out what it was—that’s not a good design.
Betabeat:
For those of us in the startup, Silicon Valley-makes-the-world-go-round tech industry, the name Sam Biddle incites fear (in the timid), disgust (in the short-tempered) and a chuckle (for those with a good sense of humour).But before the 27-year old Brooklyn-based tech stroke gossip blogger wrote his first word, there was another Sam Biddle, the “real Sam Biddle”, as she jokes, who has beaten cancer and raised two children while building a global empire for nail artisans.
Anyone else have this issue? I share a fairly common name and have gotten all kinds of misdirected tweets for an NFL football commentator, a pastor in Haiti and Larry King’s wife.
I agree completely with Gruber. If you make a decision for your company, own it and explain it clearly for your customers. Don’t bullshit.
Congrats to Shawn.
Lauren Goode takes you on a detailed walk through your options. Two stand out. The first is to have an iCracked tech come to you:
I went to iCracked’s website last Tuesday and requested a tech. Within seconds I had a text message from a repair tech. We chatted on the phone, during which time he gave me an estimate. We scheduled an appointment.
On Thursday he showed up at my door with his toolkit. The repairs should take under an hour and average around $99, according to the company. It took my iTech around 25 minutes to fix the iPhone 5S, which was great. But it cost $213, including components, labor and tax.
Afterwards, I tested it to make sure it was working properly. So far, it’s been working as it should.
Another option is to fix the screen yourself using an iFixit repair kit.
I purchased an iPhone 5 repair kit for around $165, including tax and shipping, from iFixit’s website. Within a couple days my kit arrived in the mail. It included a new iPhone 5 screen, a suction cup, two tiny screwdrivers, a plastic pry tool and a magnetized project board with a dry-erase marker – a good idea, since the screws you’re working with are speck-sized.
Then I went to iFixit’s iPhone 5 online repair guide. This is published by the techs at iFixit, but also offers helpful comments and suggestions from other users. The company just put out its iPhone 5S repair guide today, but there’s a reason why I opted to test the DIY kit on a broken iPhone 5 and not my iPhone 5S: I was concerned I might damage the cable that runs under the TouchID fingerprint sensor and disable it.
Disassembling the phone was the easy part (see video below). I was a little bit surprised when I got to the end of those steps, popped the new display in the phone and the iFixit guide told me to just reverse what I had done. Um, okay.
Aside from handling really, really tiny screws, the dicey part was reconnecting the earpiece speaker and camera sensor. I was positive those weren’t going to work once I reassembled the thing. Miraculously, they worked.
It took me an hour and ten minutes to replace the screen myself.
Personally, I would go the iFixIt route. I love taking things apart and putting them back together. Sometimes, the things even work again after I am done with them. Heh.
Good article, Lauren. I learned a lot.
Very interesting piece (behind free reg-wall) on Google’s slow move into sports broadcasting, an area traditionally dominated by the major networks and satellite/cable conglomerates.
YouTube has aggressively chased content over the last several years, and may have created the infrastructure to expand it to historic levels. YouTube has already inked a deal with the NBA D-League to air more than 90% of games, and is predicted to bid for MLS soccer rights in 2014.
Imagine watching the Olympics on YouTube, NetFlix, Hulu, or on some network that isn’t even born yet.
Kirk McElhearn walks through the process of sharing files between two AirDrop capable iOS devices. My instinct is to email any files I want to share. I asked Kirk when he would use AirDrop instead of email. His response:
That’s what I used to do. AirDrop is faster for photos or PDFs. It’s just one step less. And if files are too large such as very big PDFs, they might not fit through email. For photo: AirDrop: Tap, tap, tap, done. By email: tap, type address, send, check mail on other device, wait, tap to save, etc.
I found this writeup fascinating and I’m glad to know how this works.
Finally, why can’t you share files between OS X and iOS? This is surprising, since they both have AirDrop. I’d often like to move photos from my iPhone to my Mac more easily than by syncing. And I’d occasionally like to send PDFs to my iPad to read without having to sync or send them by email.
Agreed.
To help combat the rising tide of spam, some users have turned to disposable email addresses that can be easily destroyed or deactivated once abused by a spammer. These accounts usually forward mail to a permanent email address without exposing said address to unwanted parties. This saves users from the hassles associated with changing a permanent email address, such as remembering and notifying important contacts.
As it stands, the disposable email system is cumbersome, says Apple, and may require obtaining accounts from sources other than their primary provider. The generated account names are usually easily recognizable and are sometimes not accepted by certain automated online services that block bots.
Apple proposes an automated system that in some embodiments automatically creates and handles a temporary email address, associating it with a permanent non-disposable address. If and when a disposable account is misused, the user can dump it and move on to a new one without ditching their permanent address.
I do this exact thing — create a series of temporary email addresses whose sole purpose is to draw spam away from my main email accounts. This sounds like a good solution.
Former Apple interface designer Bas Ording tells how text selection made its way into the iPhone interface.
Ording — who left Apple last year after 15 years with the company — worked on multiple versions of the iPhone from the first generation model onwards. Other than the text selection patent, his main contributions included the look and feel of the iPhone’s pre-iOS 7 virtual keyboard, and the device’s scrolling functionality — including the recognizable “bounce” effect seen when you reach the bottom of a page.
Good read.
In response to Apple’s release last week of their Supplier Responsibility report, Greenpeace posted this comment:
“Apple’s increased transparency about its suppliers is becoming a hallmark of Tim Cook’s leadership at the company. Apple has flexed its muscles in the past to push suppliers to remove hazardous substances from products and provide more renewable energy for data centers, and it is proving the same model can work to reduce the use of conflict minerals. Samsung and other consumer electronics companies should follow Apple’s example and map its suppliers, so the industry can exert its collective influence to build devices that are better for people and the planet.”
[Via Peter Cohen]
Wall Street Journal:
Starbucks isn’t an Olympic sponsor and is therefore forbidden to have an official presence here. But after Mr. Glinton, a journalist for NPR, trailed the mystery cup for several hundred feet, its owner told him that he was out of luck. It came from the”Office,” she said – the Olympic broadcasting center where NBC has its own secret Starbucks.
The best line of the piece had to be from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review sports columnist Dejan Kovacevic who carries around an empty Starbucks cup and pours other coffee into it. He said, “It’s a status symbol,” he explains. “It shows I’m not some kind of lowlife.”
If you believe that, you’re still some kind of lowlife.
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I’m a huge fan of Olympic hockey. The rink size and rule changes make the game more exciting, allow for better skating and passing. I also think the scoring is better, with 3 points for a regulation win, 2 points for an OT win, and 1 point for an OT loss.
Opinion aside, I’ve been scratching my head trying to understand the rules for moving from round to round. The linked site lays all that out nicely.
From the SlickLogin site:
We started SlickLogin because security measures had become overly complicated and annoying.
Our friends thought we were insane, but we knew we could do better. So we set out to improve security while still making it simple for people to log in.
Today we’re announcing that the SlickLogin team is joining Google, a company that shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and authentication should be effective without getting in the way. Google was the first company to offer 2-step verification to everyone, for free – and they’re working on some great ideas that will make the internet safer for everyone. We couldn`t be more excited to join their efforts.
From the linked article:
The idea behind SlickLogin was, at the very least, quite novel: to verify a user’s identity and log them in, a website would play a uniquely generated, nearly-silent sound through your computer’s speakers. An app running on your phone would pick up the sound, analyze it, and send the signal back to the site’s server confirming that you are who you say you are — or, at least, someone who has that person’s phone.
I think this is an interesting idea, but I struggle with the details. If Apple does not change their mechanics (and why would they?), a user would have to take their phone out of their pocket, fire it up, and take some action to get the phone to listen to the sound played by the web site. That sounds like a non-starter to me.
And if Google goes it alone, building SlickLogin support into the OS, they’ll still have a hard sell getting web sites to adopt a system that is unavailable to half the phones in the world.
Still, this technology is compelling. It’ll be interesting to see Google’s next move here.