December 27, 2011
You should consider having sex with a bearded man
Don’t be scared. Get freaky with a beard tonight.
Not even considering Android or Windows Phone devices
Matt Alexander is the owner and editor of ONE37.net, a writer, a technology enthusiast and a contributing writer for The Loop.
Last week, I bought an iPhone 4S. I hadn’t planned on buying one, but my upgrade became available eight months ahead of schedule, and I couldn’t help myself.
When I learned that my upgrade was available, my mind didn’t stop for a moment to consider an Android or Windows Phone device, I simply went straight to the Apple Store and bought a 4S.
Nothing out of the ordinary, right? The iPhone 4S is the successor of one of my favorite devices of all time, the iPhone 4. I write a great deal about Apple, and am highly invested in the iTunes ecosystem. On a personal level, my decision makes perfect sense.
And yet, what has caused me to take pause, is that the aforementioned “decision” lacked any of the characteristics typical of a decision. Rather than cognitively weighing options, my decision was more instinctual and basic. There was not a moment that I pondered the purchase, or contemplated an iPhone competitor, I just took the new information regarding my upgrade, and went directly to an Apple Store.
You might suggest that it’s because I’m some sort of “fanboy” (or “fanboi” depending on how skewed your vocabulary is), but if you have read what I have had to say for the past two months on ONE37 and The Loop, you’ll know that’s not the case.
I went out and bought the best product for me. I instinctively picked what I know to be best, and I’m happy for it. Yes, I could’ve gone out and bought a Windows Phone or the Galaxy Nexus, but what would I have gained?
That’s not to say I don’t want those platforms to have any sort of success — I find Windows Phone to be a very compelling platform — but for the modern Apple smartphone user, there’s simply no current, defining reason to switch.
Knowledge is a difficult thing to fight, and it is being fought incorrectly by just about everyone out there. Once a user has experienced a seamless environment, regardless of the manufacturer, do you really think they will willingly stick with or switch over to something more clunky and difficult to work with?
Rather than building something seamless and easy, manufacturers are keen to slap on a UI skin, copy a hardware feature or two, and put out twelve oddly named phones per year.
Sure, those phones are selling, and of course Android marketshare is growing, but do you really think the users are dedicated? Is there really anything about Android that makes users averse to switching to something else? When reaching an upgrade, does the average user know precisely what they’re going to get next and why?
In building the iOS platform, Apple has removed the need for much of what I used to be cognizant of. With AirPlay, I no longer concern myself with how I can play a video on my television from one of my devices. With iCloud, as long as my phone is connected, I have backups, seamless contacts, and calendars. With iMessage I can text internationally for free without thinking about it. As such, as the market stands, I have no compelling reason to seriously consider switching to another platform.
That might sound like my life has been dumbed down, but that’s incorrect assertion. My life has just been made easier. There’s that much less in my digital life for me to be considerate of. No longer must I verse myself with codecs and conversion techniques in order to enjoy my media, or with firmware hacks and overclocking to get the best features and performance out of my hardware. My technology just works, and it does so in the background. I enjoy applications that help me work and live, and I no longer have to focus on the underlying mechanics that facilitate that.
Other manufacturers can tack on a similar feature set — be it cosmetic or software-based — but no matter how good any one of their individual products is, there is quite literally no compelling reason for me to take pause when driving to the Apple Store until the ecosystem matches up. The Galaxy Nexus may well be a fantastic phone, but what can Android bring to the table that my Apple devices cannot? What would make my life easier in having a Galaxy Nexus?
Until manufacturers can answer these questions, and I can do something appreciably different and better using their products and ecosystems, then there is no reason for me to take pause when shopping.
That is not fanboyism — that is being a reasonable, informed consumer.
How not to win friends and influence people
Public relations is an indispensable tool for a company to help shape public opinion about its products, services and identity. So stories like this are shocking.
And if you think that Ocean Marketing CEO Paul Christoforo was just having a bad day, think again. This isn’t the first time he’s crossed the path of an upset customer and handled it poorly.
It’s certainly a good lesson for any other firm thinking about hiring this firm to be their public face.
Italy fines Apple for misleading customers ∞
Italy’s anti-trust body has fined units of U.S. technology group Apple Inc a total of 900,000 euros for failing to adequately inform customers about their rights to product guarantees and assistance.
‘Say good morning to Jimmy Hoffa, boys’ ∞
New York Post:
“When Tony Jack passed the middle point of the bridge… he nodded toward the huge tower’s foundation,” Humphreys writes.“Say good morning to Jimmy Hoffa, boys,” he said.
[Via One Foot Tsunami]
Disagreements and comments ∞
Rian van der Merwe on taking comments off his site:
Oh, comments. I’ve gone back and forth on this so many times. Sometimes I leave comments open, other times I close them. Sometimes I close comments on a post, get called out on Twitter about it, and then open it up again. It’s confusing and it’s causing me headaches. So I’ve made a decision to close comments on all posts, at least for a month or so, or until someone writes a convincing argument on why sites should have comments.
I’ve gone back and forth on this many times, but I must admit sometimes it doesn’t seem worth it to keep the comments on. Ten years ago comments were a way for the readers to express their opinion on a story — for many that was the only avenue they had to interact with the author.
That’s not the case anymore. You have Twitter, easily accessible email addresses and of course many people have their own blogs to write out their thoughts.
Instashuffle [Sponsor] ∞
Instashuffle is a way to browse Instagram in an endless image stream. And it is now free. On the App Store for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad with iOS 5 and later.
December 26, 2011
GoDaddy accused of thwarting domain transfers ∞
Jason Snell for Macworld:
In a post on its blog, fellow domain registrar Namecheap reports that customers trying to transfer their domains away from GoDaddy are being delayed. The post accuses GoDaddy of “returning incomplete WHOIS information” as a part of the transfer process, a practice which is against the rules of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the process manager for the domain-name system.
I transferred a domain from GoDaddy last week and it went just fine. However, after losing more than 72,000 in five days, things may have changed.
Esquire interviews Slash ∞
A couple of quotes from the interview:
Guitars are like women. You’ll never get them totally right.When I see footage of Guns N’ Roses, I see that fucking hunger and attitude. You could not fuck with those five guys. It was just raw. It was this lean, hungry thing on its way up. It was as sincere as any rock ‘n’ roll that I’ve ever heard, and I’m proud of that.
I’ve interviewed Slash a number of times and he’s a great guy.
Apple’s iOS vs. all Android phones this quarter ∞
Matt Richman:
Using those numbers, Apple will sell 59.38 million iOS devices, slightly less than devices running Android. But, if Apple does report “the largest blowout in company history”, then Apple will outsell every Android vendor combined.
Well that settles it, Android is winning.
44 Photoshop Web design layout tutorials ∞
Lots of great tutorials for different types of Web sites.
CleanMyMac ∞
Thanks to CleanMyMac for sponsoring The Loop during Christmas week.
GoDaddy loses 72,354 domains in five days ∞
TNW:
It looks like these PR moves to save face, and business, are completely futile. According to TheDomains, 21,054 domains were transferred away from Go Daddy on Friday alone. At $6.99 a pop, that would make for a loss of $147,167, not taking future renewals into account.
I started transferring my domains just before Christmas.
December 23, 2011
Biogrify beta testers wanted ∞
Create a fun visual snapshot of your life. Life is not a static bio; it’s an evolving story.
Biogrify is a new web app where you can create an interactive infographic about your life. I have to say, this looks really interesting. You can sign-up to beta test — no guarantees you’ll get accepted.
RIM faces legal challenge over ‘BBM’ ∞
Reuters:
Research In Motion, still smarting over having to change the name of its yet-to-come operating system, faces a similar trademark challenge to its popular instant-messaging service BlackBerry Messenger.
Because things are going so well for RIM, they just needed someone else to jump in the ring and clobber the shit out of them in court.
Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA ∞
Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”
Win.
[Via Ars]
The same, but different ∞
Matt Alexander:
Rather than building the best device for the user, manufacturers are intent on differentiating themselves from increasingly similar products. Absurd product names, enormous screens, and LTE connections cannot, and will not, disguise the fact that all of these devices are running the same operating system and have largely similar internals.
BOOM!
Android shit sandwich ∞
And Gruber nails it again.
Bacon Christmas Tree
Merry Christmas Peter.
Polish parliament to buy 500 iPads ∞
MacKozer notes today that 500 iPads are being purchased by the government. Here is the original, untranslated story.
The Loop Members: Where is your money going?
When I relaunched The Loop in September 2011, I offered readers the opportunity to become a member of the site. With your $3 monthly membership you got access to a full text RSS feed, but mostly, you helped offset the cost of running the Web site. I thought it was time to let you know where that money is going.
Thanks to the membership payments, The Loop is running on brand new cloud servers. Over the past month or so I tried a few of the big name server companies, but they didn’t work out very well. Finally, I found CleverKite, a startup cloud server company with very reasonable prices and great equipment.
The Loop now runs on SSD-equipped servers, so any bottleneck with hard drives is virtually eliminated. Speed has become an increasingly important feature for me and being able to deliver that to the readers is paramount.
Back in October, when Apple held its iPhone 4S event, the traffic on the dedicated Web server I had at Liquid Web was too much for it to handle. Within minutes of the event starting, my server went down and stayed down for much of the event. Unfortunately, Liquid Web could offer no solution to the problem.
I left the event, angry and frustrated, vowing to never let that happen to me or you again. I believe I’ve found the solution.
The page load times for The Loop before September 1, when the site design changed, were in the 10-15 second range. After the site changed, page load times dropped to about 3-5 seconds (in the US). While good, it wasn’t good enough.
With CleverKite and the use of world-class CDNs around the world, I now measure page load times in milliseconds.
In North America, pages load in under a second. While Europe, Australia and Asia take a little longer, after a couple of weeks of testing, pages are being delivered in under 2 seconds to those regions as well.
Between the servers, CDNs, optimized coding and of course, the help of reader’s membership money, The Loop is more stable and faster than it has ever been.
Peter and I are committed to bringing you the most interesting content we can, everyday. We appreciate your support in helping us pay for everything, reading the site and sharing with your friends.
Never doubt how much your $3 can help.
BlackBerry 10 doesn’t have email, BBM ∞
BGR:
In what is something of a serious allegation, our source told us that Mike Lazaridis was lying when he said the company’s new lineup was delayed for that reason. ”RIM is simply pushing this out as long as they can for one reason, they don’t have a working product yet,” we were told.
Of course RIM has denied what BGR’s source said. But then again, I don’t believe much of what RIM says these days.
They also said the PlayBook would deliver an amazing tablet experience. Amazingly bad.
Comet Lovejoy from the International Space Station ∞
NASA:
Comet Lovejoy is visible near Earth’s horizon in this nighttime image photographed by NASA astronaut Dan Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, onboard the International Space Station on Dec. 21, 2011.
December 22, 2011
New pro audio magazine available for iOS Newsstand ∞
MPVHub Magazine features the latest in music software tutorials, gear reviews, industry news, interviews with audio experts, and more. It’s where music makers come to learn, with the experts, by the experts.MPVHub Audio features over 100 pages of content in each issue. Featuring the largest selection of Audio DAW tutorials available in any magazine, each issue has at least 20 different tutorials for Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Reason, Live, Cubase, Native Instruments, & Spectrasonics software.
The first issue was available for $0.99. I bought it.
List of SOPA supporting companies ∞
If you were wondering which companies were supporting SOPA, MediaBeat has a complete list.
MacTech expands to 15 events across the US in 2012 ∞
MacTech Magazine announced today a massive event line up for 2012. Where in 2010, MacTech did a single event, and in 2011, MacTech produced seven events; in 2012, MacTech will hold FIFTEEN events spanning the country. MacTech’s event line up includes a combination of well received MacTech Boot Camps for small-to-medium sized business consultants, its new MacTech InDepth series for deep dives on single topics, and its heralded three day MacTech Conference for IT Pros and Developers.
Nice to see MacTech expanding again next year. The Loop has once again signed on as a sponsor of these events for 2012.
Steven Slate Drums 4.0 ∞
Steven Slate:
Imagine having 100 of the world’s best sounding drumkits at your disposal. From punchy tight rock kits, to fat and sizzly vintage kits, and just about everything in between, Steven Slate Drums 4.0 Platinum is the most complete drum instrument on the planet.At the heart of Steven Slate Drums 4.0 is the SSD Player, a state of the art Mac/PC (VST, RTAS, AU) Drum Sampler built from the ground up by the award winning development team behind our TRIGGER drum replacement processor. The SSD Player is extremely easy and intuitive to use. Loading kits, customizing kits, mixing kits, loading and auditioning MIDI grooves, customizing MIDI maps, and routing discretely to your workstation are all a breeze with the SSD Player. It even lets you load your own drum samples to mix in with the Slate drumkits.
I have used Steven Slate Drums since they were first released and love them. One of the best drum samplers on the market. I’ll definitely be upgrading.
Solution for a stolen iPhone and iMessage ∞
Lex Friedman discovers a solution for a problem discovered by Ars earlier this week that would allow iMessages to be sent to your iPhone even after it had been wiped:
Macworld can confirm that perhaps the easiest way to ensure that a stolen phone stops receiving iMessages is to remotely wipe the phone, and then call your carrier and instruct them to deactivate your old SIM. The third and final step? Activate a new SIM in your new phone.Completing those three steps—wiping, deactivating your old SIM, and then activating a new one—ensures that your iMessages will get sent only to you and your iOS devices, and not anywhere else.
iPad gets 83% satisfaction rating
A new study from the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) shows that Apple’s iPad continues to satisfy its customers.
According to the research, 83.65 percent of respondents to the survey were satisfied with the iPad. The survey also asked to rate the user-friendliness of the device — The majority of the respondents rated the iPad as “Excellent” (62%). A smaller percentage reported it to be “Good” (21%) and “Best Imaginable” (10%). The remaining reported it to be “Fair” (4%), “Poor” (2%), or “Awful” (2%), according to SURL.
Asked what they liked best about the iPad, respondents noted the variety of apps available, overall ease of use, the larger screen size, and portability. What people liked least was the poor quality of some apps, the inability to play Adobe Flash, and problems typing with the keyboard.
A total of 13 perent of people said they only used the iPad for work, while 52 percent said they use the device at work. That would indicate some personal use as well.
“Overall, it seems as though Apple is listening to its customers,” wrote SURL. “Many participants from the original study mentioned the lack of a camera and ability to multitask as being the LEAST liked features of the iPad. These were not mentioned as frequently in the current study, as Apple introduced cameras in the iPad 2 and made multitasking abilities available for both the original iPad and iPad 2.”
Steve Jobs awarded a Grammy ∞
As former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs helped create products and technology that transformed the way we consume music, TV, movies, and books. A creative visionary, Jobs’ innovations such as the iPod and its counterpart, the online iTunes store, revolutionized the industry and how music was distributed and purchased. In 2002 Apple Computer Inc. was a recipient of a Technical GRAMMY Award for contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field. The company continues to lead the way with new technology and in-demand products such as the iPhone and iPad.
Very nice.