Good to see some benchmark numbers. Worth noting that all the new MacBook Pros use Iris integrated graphics, with the exception of the high end 15″ model. I’m looking forward to seeing the benchmarks for that high end model, which uses Nvidia’s GeForce GT 750m with 2GB of dedicated video memory instead of the integrated Iris solution.
The Artery:
The Boston and St. Louis symphony orchestras are home to some of the country’s most talented musicians, but neither is above some good old-fashioned smack talk ahead of the World Series.
Trash talking band geeks prove that band geeks can’t trash talk.
Doug Field worked for Jony Ive and will now be VP of Vehicle Programs for Tesla.
If you use Mail to access Gmail, you’ll definitely want to read this article. The rules have changed.
Hundreds of fake reviews of BBM.
BlackBerry’s BBM app was downloaded 10 million times within 24 hours, but at least on Android, some of its many positive reviews seem to come from a less than savory source. Writer Matt Baxter-Reynolds noted yesterday that a huge number of reviews contained the exact same praise for BBM:
Thank you so much blackberry team. I was waiting this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth Blogger Terence Eden looked through more reviews and found more evidence that somebody was astroturfing the Play Store. In addition to the sheer numbers he found, at least one person seemed to have accidentally copied and pasted more of the text than intended: “Dear Mr Ahmed, please post the following comment on the new BlackBerry Messenger APP…” Fake reviews are a frequent issue across many sites, and a September crackdown resulted in fines for 19 companies. More recently, Samsung was fined for hiring commenters to talk up its own products online and leave negative comments about those of its competitors (allegedly HTC.)
Who would do this? Blackberry? Someone looking to harm Blackberry’s rep? Definitely an unneeded black eye.
Spend some time with Activity Monitor to get a sense of the energy usage of your particular installation.
Apple’s new suite of energy saving settings, App Nap — not to be confused with Power Nap — doesn’t really have an interface. Which is fine! The whole idea behind App Nap is that it runs in the background, looking for apps that fit certain criteria like whether they’re maximized or currently downloading or playing media.
That doesn’t mean App Nap can’t benefit from some occasional monitoring. The venerable app, Activity Monitor, has a new tab labeled “Energy” that lets you do just that. It lists your currently running programs and daemons, their energy usage, and whether the application is App Nappin’. If you see an app that has a disproportionate energy impact, kill it, and consider uninstalling it.
Good article. Pass it along.
This is bad news. Bad for Microsoft and bad for our planet.
The result is a tablet that is practically unrepairable and is therefore, in essence, disposable. The Reg has criticized Microsoft before for adding to the pile of discarded tech in the world’s landfills, and we’re disappointed to report that the Surface Pro 2 does nothing to slow this trend.
The original Surface tablet got the same score. Was hoping the Surface 2 would show some advancement in that department. To be fair, the 4th generation iPad did not do much better, scoring a 2 out of 10. We’ve got to do better than this.
Vitali Klitschko and his brother Wladimir are world championship boxers and, together, one of the greatest sports stories ever told. If you are at all a sports fan, watch the documentary Klitschko. You’ll see what I mean.
Both brothers made their professional debut on November 6, 1996 in Hamburg. Since then both have been heavyweight world champions in boxing. They have stated they will never fight each other.
There is a lot to admire about both brothers. Vitali made his fortune as a boxer, then went on to get his PhD and serve as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament. And now Vitali is running for president of his native Ukraine. Fascinating story.
I had no idea this was Bryan Cranston. Love it.
A special free issue, celebrating the Loop Magazine’s re-design. Including an exclusive piece by Matthew Modine: “What I learned from Stanley Kubrick”; “Who would buy an iPhone 5c?” asks Daniel Eran Dilger; “Based On A True Story” – Matt Dusenbury is talking about movies; Chris Domico is wondering “Where Is The Music Pendulum Now?”; and Jim Dalrymple’s “Thoughts on Apple’s iPad and Mac event”
Download the app and the issue free for iPhone and iPad.
I’m so proud to announce that The Loop Magazine 2.0 went live on the App Store this morning. We’ve been working on this app for quite a while and I’m confident that there isn’t a better magazine experience anywhere else in the world.
To celebrate the release, I’m giving away the latest issue for free. You won’t want to miss this one—Matthew Modine talks about what he learned from Stanley Kubrick. Just download The Loop Magazine and read.
The new version of The Loop Magazine takes advantage of technologies in iOS 7 to give readers the best possible interactive reading experience. It’s easy to navigate issues and articles by simply using gestures on your iPhone or iPad.
The Loop Magazine has been built using Glide, a new App building technology that can create and update Apps simply by putting files in a DropBox folder. It’s the easiest system I’ve ever seen to build a magazine.
Here are some of the features:
iOS7 Features:
General Features:
I feel compelled to add to John Gruber’s take on Frank Shaw’s blog post. I think John is being too charitable.
Frank starts with some twisty little prose, criticizing Apple for giving away iWork with all new iOS devices:
Surface and Surface 2 both include Office, the world’s most popular, most powerful productivity software for free and are priced below both the iPad 2 and iPad Air respectively. Making Apple’s decision to build the price of their less popular and less powerful iWork into their tablets not a very big (or very good) deal.
I am not a fan of snark, and this was snarky. Frank didn’t say, “throw in the iWork apps for free”, which is what happened. Instead, he implies that Apple raised the price of the iPad so that us hapless customers have no choice but to pay for something we don’t want. That might be considered true if the price of the iPad went up, even one penny. But the iPad Air added a bunch of new features, found a way to slim down significantly, and kept the price the same. Oh, and, we’ll throw in our productivity apps, too.
There was no decision to build the price into their tablets. That’s just snark.
And so it’s not surprising that we see other folks now talking about how much “work” you can get done on their devices. Adding watered down productivity apps. Bolting on aftermarket input devices. All in an effort to convince people that their entertainment devices are really work machines.
In that spirit, Apple announced yesterday that they were dropping their fees on their “iWork” suite of apps. Now, since iWork has never gotten much traction, and was already priced like an afterthought, it’s hardly that surprising or significant a move. And it doesn’t change the fact that it’s much harder to get work done on a device that lacks precision input and a desktop for true side-by-side multitasking.
Really Frank? How many tablets in the world have Word on them? How many have Pages? I would wager that any iPad productivity app will have more “traction” than any comparable Surface app.
And I use my iPad every single day, all without a single bolted on aftermarket input device, just the ones I was born with.
As to precision, I would love to see a side by side comparison of the iPad and Surface touch precision. I can’t imagine the Surface even coming close. Yeesh.
As they did with the recent iPhone launch, Apple plans on opening their retail stores at 8 a.m. on launch day, November 1, to begin selling the iPad Air. The iPad mini with Retina display is coming later in the month.
This text is from the Apple iPad retail site:
Buy iPad Air at your favorite Apple Retail Store beginning at 8:00 a.m. on November 1. We’ll set it up just the way you like.* iPad mini with Retina display coming to stores later in November.
* Supplies may be limited and are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Last month, I wrote about LADEE, NASA’s experiment in laser communication from the earth to the moon and back, replacing traditional radio communications.
Though there were a few glitches along the way, the experiment now works flawlessly and it looks like we have a much faster way to communicate with spacecraft near the Earth and, most importantly for potential Mars explorers, far from Earth as well.
“We could send 30 channels of HD video down from the spacecraft,” said Cornwell. “For example, you could do telepresence with this. Future missions to the moon or asteroids will have astronauts. They may need to see a doctor or need instructions on how to fix something and they could do it in HD video.”
A very important step for further space missions.
John Gruber talking about Microsoft’s Frank Shaw:
Betting against the iPad as a device on which people can work, for any meaning of “work”, is a bad bet in the long run. Shaw though, is doubling down on just that bet.
Shaw would do better by getting Microsoft to make a product that people actually want to buy.
For more than four decades, “Beggars Banquet” has remained one of the most acclaimed and popular Rolling Stones albums. Released in 1968, it marked a return to swaggering rock ‘n’ roll, and gave the world enduring classics such as “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man.”
Wow, nice!
Designed for iPhone and iPad.
For science geeks.
I just downloaded this app—it looks great.
Homage to William Higinbotham:
Fifty years ago, before either arcades or home video games, visitors waited in line at Brookhaven National Laboratory to play Tennis for Two, an electronic tennis game that is unquestionably a forerunner of the modern video game. Two people played the electronic tennis game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer and used an oscilloscope for a screen. The game’s creator, William Higinbotham, was a physicist who lobbied for nuclear nonproliferation as the first chair of the Federation of American Scientists.
John Siracusa dives deep into Mavericks
While I’ve posted on this topic before, the rules and the solutions are evolving. While the NFL remains committed to their deal with DirecTV, the public remains determined to watch the games on line in real time.
The only Americans who are technically allowed to watch NFL’s live streams are those customers who purchase DirecTV’s (DTV) all-access Sunday Ticket package, a deal worth $1 billion to the NFL.
What’s a cord-cutting fan to do? For just a couple of dollars you could digitally pretend to be from somewhere overseas, which would give you access to every single NFL game, live and in high definition, through your Internet connection. And while doing so almost certainly violates the NFL’s terms of service, it might not be otherwise illegal.
That’s the promise of Canadian startup Adfreetime.com, one of a handful of providers to offer what’s called a DNS-switching service.
Pixelmator 3.0 FX is the most advanced version of Pixelmator to date, introducing lots of new features and improvements, including the following:
- Layer Styles: Thanks to non-destructive Layer Styles, creating polished and advanced compositions is now so much simpler, faster, and more enjoyable
- Liquify Tools: Shape images in multiple ways—slightly twist an element, add an artistic detail, or completely distort an entire image
- New Image Editing Engine: The new state-of-the-art image editing engine harnesses the full power of the latest OS X technologies making Pixelmator feature rich, yet blistering fast
- OS X Mavericks support: Tags, Multiple-Displays, App Nap support and more.
Another great looking release from the Pixelmator Team. This is easily one of my favorite apps on the Mac. Ever.
Serenity Caldwell
Some users (including yours truly) are reporting issues where the Mac App Store doesn’t recognize their copies; when they click on an iLife or iWork app’s price, they receive the following alert: “[App] is already installed and was not purchased from the Mac App Store. Do you want to buy [app]?” Macworld spoke with an Apple spokesperson who noted that there’s currently an issue with some legacy customers, and the company is working on a fix.
I’ve been asked quite a few times today which Apple announcement I thought was the biggest—the blockbuster release that people would be talking about for days and weeks to come. That’s actually a very difficult question to answer, given the scope of the announcements.
If there was any event in recent memory that demonstrated the depth and scope of Apple’s products, it had to be this one. Every new product tied into the last and the next announcement in one way or another. Whether iOS or Mac, software or hardware, the connection was there.
The new iPads were clearly the products that everyone was waiting on throughout the event. I had some time after the event to play around with the new devices and gather some quick thoughts.
The iPad Air is everything you would expect from something with that name. Clearly an iPad in looks and functionality, but it’s also so light and seems less bulky than the previous generation iPad. It’s hard to imagine that Apple could make the iPad any thinner and lighter than it was, but they did. You can tell just from picking up the iPad Air that it’s different—it’s that obvious.
The iPad mini has been my most used iPad since it came out and I don’t see that changing. The most requested feature for the mini is here—a Retina display.
I never found the display on the iPad mini to be bad at all, and I used it all the time. However, there is no doubt that having the Retina display will make the reading experience1 much better. Of course, having the new A7 chip means the iPads are really powerful too, so no apps are going to be able to slow them down.
I was kind of surprised that neither iPad included the new TouchID fingerprint sensor. I must admit, I thought they would have it.
The new Mac Pro is just a beast of a machine. Much smaller than previous generation Mac Pros, but packing so much power. Everything about the Mac Pro, from the processors to the GPU and the I/O screams professional. I can’t wait to get this thing in my studio—it will be the first “desktop” Mac to actually sit on my desk in many years.
What’s amazing about the MacBook Pro is not that they made it faster or that it has faster graphics or that it has better battery life. What’s amazing is that they did all three.
For me, battery life is becoming one of the most important considerations for my portable computer. I’m tired of trying to find a plug wherever I go to top up the battery and I’d be willing to sacrifice a bit of power for better battery. Luckily, it doesn’t look like I’ll be making any sacrifices with the new MacBook Pro.
The last item on the list from the presentation is software. You may look at the software announcements and think they aren’t that significant, but this is huge.
Apple took iLife and iWork on iOS and Mac, and made them free when you get a new device. Then they took the new version of OS X Mavericks and made it free too.
Everything you need to operate a Mac or iOS device is free. Spreadsheet, photo, music, presentation, word processing, and movie-making software, all free.
Huge.
I can’t wait to get my hands on all of these products to test them out, but I think Apple really made a statement today about doing what’s best for its customers. That’s what it’s all about.
I use my iPad mini mostly for reading emails and surfing the Web for work, so sharper text means a lot to me. ↩
With their revolutionary Voyage-Air patented hinged necks, each guitar folds in half at the neck heel and fits comfortably into a specially designed gig bag.
Cool.
iRig BlueBoard is the first wireless MIDI pedalboard for iOS and Mac that allows you to control your music apps and more from the floor. Now control parameters of your MIDI-compatible apps like AmpliTube wirelessly from the floor. Switch between presets, change patches, turn effects on and off and control effects like volume wah pedals all from the stage floor without worrying about tripping over wires. Setup is as simple as turning the iRig BlueBoard on and telling it what you want to control. iRig BlueBoard features four backlit soft-touch pads housed in a sturdy, stage-worthy chassis, two TRS expansion jacks for connecting additional MIDI controllers like expression pedals, and is powered by four standard AAA batteries.
IK Multimedia’s iRig BlueBoard allows guitarists, vocalists and keyboard players wireless control of Core-MIDI-compatible music-making apps running on an iPhone (4s or later), iPad 4, iPod touch (5th gen) or Mac (models from June 2012). The pedalboard has four backlit pads up top, which can each be assigned controls to switch between presets and banks, tweak parameters or change patches on the fly. Expression, volume or wah pedals can also be connected to the two 0.25-in jacks on the side of the device for control of onscreen dials and knobs.
Lots of good stuff in this update, including a calibration fix for the iPhone 5s accelerometer.