The world’s most comprehensive mapping of Apple products, this print shows every computer released by Apple in the last thirty years, from the original Mac through the MacBook Air. Products are sorted according to type, including the connections between various form factors which have arisen as Apple has invented–and reinvented–insanely great products.
It’s an 18-inch x 24-inch poster and there are only 500 available.
You really have to see this to appreciate it. Ellen tells an entire story of what made her happy using only photos. You can see and feel why each particular image made her feel the way she did.
Much more dramatic than writing 1,000 words explaining your week.
Android is definitely winning… the race for the most malware, that is.
According to a new study from the Juniper Global Threat Center, malware on Android rose an incredible 472% since July 2011. That’s only a few months.
“These days, it seems all you need is a developer account, that is relatively easy to anonymize, pay $25 and you can post your applications,” wrote Juniper in its report. “With no upfront review process, no one checking to see that your application does what it says, just the world’s largest majority of smartphone users skimming past your application’s description page with whatever description of the application the developer chooses to include.”
And that is where Apple sets itself apart. When developers submit apps to the App Store, they have to go through rigorous checks to make sure the app meets Apple’s guidelines.
“The main reason for the malware epidemic on Android is because of different approaches that Apple and Google take to police their application stores,” wrote Juniper. “Android’s open applications store model, which the lacks code signing and an application review process that Apple requires, makes it easy for attackers to distribute their malware.”
Sure, apps have slipped through and Apple has made some mistakes in the past, but at least they are not approving apps willy-nilly.
And if you think things can only get better on Android, think again.
“The Juniper Global Threat Center found that the months of October and November are shaping up to see the fastest growth in Android malware discovery in the history of the platform,” wrote Juniper.
Andy Baio:
Nonetheless, I found his other blog in under a minute — a thoughtful site about technology and local politics, detailing his full name, employer, photo, and family information. He worked for the local government, and if exposed, his anonymous blog could have cost him his job.
Kind of amusing.
Jason Snell at Macworld:
So you’ve bought iTunes Match, which gives you access to shiny new 256kbps AAC versions of your audio files. But by default your iTunes library is still packed with your old files. So how best to upgrade all of those old files, in place, to the new versions?
I tried this on a few songs last night and it worked flawlessly.
Peter Ha at The Daily:
Like most convergence devices before it, the Kindle Fire doesn’t do anything exceptionally well (except for buying things via Amazon) but the price is right at $200. Buyer beware. Perhaps the rumors of this model being a stopgap before the real Amazon tablet is released next year are true.
Ouch.
Brian Caulfield for Forbes:
Record sales to businesses helped Dell post stronger than expected third quarter earnings, even as the Round Rock, Texas-based company fell short of sales expectations Tuesday.
It’s cute that Dell’s still around.
Nancy Gohring:
Stanton, chairman of venture capital firm Trilogy Partners, said he spent a fair amount of time with Jobs between 2005 and 2007. “He wanted to replace carriers,” Stanton said of Jobs, the Apple founder and CEO who died Oct. 5 after a battle with cancer. “He and I spent a lot of time talking about whether synthetically you could create a carrier using Wi-Fi spectrum. That was part of his vision.”
Gibson.com:
A member of the British Parliament is moving to make guitar god Jimmy Page a knight, according to the NME. Conservative MP Louise Mensch is suggesting knighthood for the Led Zeppelin guitarist, announcing the news on her Twitter page: “I’ve proposed Jimmy Page. Waiting to see if that finds favour with Honours Directorate. I hope so.”
One of the greatest ever.
Shawn Blanc does a great review:
It is clear to me that the UP is not a workout tracker as much as it is a low-level activity monitor. Or, put another way, I’d say the UP is an easy-to-use tool to help you become more aware of your own activity.
The UP would die on my wrist.
Apple on Tuesday named Arthur D. Levinson as the Chairman of the Board.
Levinson has been a co-lead director of Apple’s board since 2005, has served on all three board committees— audit and finance, nominating and corporate governance, and compensation, according to Apple. Levinson will continue to serve on the audit committee, the company said.
“Art has made enormous contributions to Apple since he joined the board in 2000,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “He has been our longest serving co-lead director, and his insight and leadership are incredibly valuable to Apple, our employees and our shareholders.”
Cook also announced that Robert Iger, Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company, will join Apple’s board and serve on the audit committee.
Christian Zibreg for 9to5Mac:
Dag Kittlaus, a 44-year-old from Norway, is living an American dream with his wife and three kids in a nice Chicago suburb. His life took a turn for the better following a special phone call from Apple last year. Norwegian publication E24!, which profiled the entrepreneur in a lengthy article, explains that Steve Jobs himself bothered to give Kittlaus a buzz.
That must have been an amazing phone call.
Scorecerer 5.6 for iPad works seamlessly with any DAW, including Cubase, ProTools, Logic and MOTU Digital Performer. For solo musicians using a DAW sequencer to play backing tracks, for example, it’s easy to insert a program change into the Scorecerer track that will trigger the correct page to be displayed automatically at exactly the right moment so there’s no need to tap the screen or fumble with a foot switch.
Amazing. The apps for musicians on iOS devices just keep getting better.
Florian Mueller:
I’m starting to see a pattern. For any intellectual property issues facing Linux (or at least the most popular Linux derivative, Android), Linus Torvalds has a standard answer at hand: after admitting that he doesn’t know the facts, he claims that “this [whatever it may be] seems completely bogus.” Or, interchangeably, “totally bogus”.
Great article from Florian.
Tabletop is the first musical environment designed from the ground up exclusively for the iPad. The heart of Tabletop is a modular environment where you can mix and match different devices. Each device has its own uses, characteristics, personality — ranging from classics like drum pad samplers to touchscreen effects. Buy only the gear you need from an expanding catalog and share your creations quickly and easily on SoundCloud
I am really enjoying watching SoundCloud expand. They’re in Pro Tools 10 and countless other apps. It’s all about integration and they get that.
Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Now that’s handy.
Daniel Eran Dilger:
Research by Morgan Stanley involving NPD figures reported by analyst Katy Huberty indicate Apple’s thin new MacBook Air models lacking an optical drive now account for more than a quarter of the company’s notebooks.
I just love my MacBook Air. It’s powerful and so light, it feels more like you’re carrying a magazine than a computer.
Corey Tamas at Macgasm:
The sheister in question approached his mark in Dark Lane, Bentley and offered to sell him an iPad. Once agreeing on a price, they went off to a cash machine together and completed the transaction. After leaving the scene, the buyer discovered he had been sold a bag of potatoes (because why would you ever buy an iPad off a guy on the street and check what’s in the bag before parting ways?).
People, people, people.
For the first time in the entire history of Unicode standard, the full encoding range for dingbats (U + 2700 – U + 27BF) is now covered by a complete, contemporary quality font. Erler Dingbats is a spin-off of the distinguished FF Dingbats 2.0 family, and was designed as a special collaboration between designers Johannes Erler and Henning Skibbe.
Macworld’s Jason Snell has more details on how you can identify your music in iTunes using iCloud status icons. Worth a read for everyone using iTunes Match.
Apple has an explanation for all of those icons you see in your iTunes library after activating iTunes Match.
Andrew Richardson on how he thinks Apple’s new EasyPay feature may work:
Combine the authorized-by-EasyPay transaction record, the customer’s location within the store as reported by the app, and an RFID tag inside the product box. An automated system can determine which products may pass through the security portal without sounding an alarm and which cannot. The key is the customer’s phone.Hand the paid-for product to your buddy and hear the alarm sound as he walks out the door without your iPhone in hand.
I have no idea how it works and how they stop people from stealing.
GamePro:
HealthCanal reports that a new study of nearly 500 12 year olds found noticeably increased creativity among those who played video games, while use of cellphones, the Internet and computers (for non-gaming purposes) were unrelated to that particular branch of the imagination.
The gauge for creativity is the Torrance Test, a broadly accepted academic gauge used to measure creative thinking.
Core Research last week issued an advisory saying it found a security hole in the way Apple sandboxes applications. The problem is what they reported is not actually a security hole.
I’ve done some digging over the past few days and here’s what I found. What Core uncovered was a mechanism that’s only used by Apple for its internal system daemons. This isn’t something that developers would actually use for an application, so it doesn’t affect them — or the user — at all.
In fact, Apple’s documentation doesn’t even point to this mechanism to develop with.
What’s more, this is a blacklist mechanism, meaning that you would have to specify, in detail, everything you didn’t want your app to do. If it’s not specified, then it would be allowed to do it.
This is completely unlike the API that developers will use to sandbox their applications. That is a whitelist API, where you have to specify exactly what you want the app to do — everything else is not allowed.
Core also mentioned that the pre-defined profiles don’t properly limit access, but as far as I can tell, they weren’t supposed to. Not even Apple uses the pre-defined profiles because you must specifically blacklist the things you don’t want it to do.
This has nothing to do with the way the Mac App Store will sandbox apps in 2012. Developers will specify what the app should do and it will work as expected.
There was a lot of talk today about how a new survey rated the Amazon Kindle Fire as the number one Android tablet among developers in North America. While that may be true, it is not the number one mobile OS that developers want to program for — that distinction goes Apple’s iOS.
The report, compiled by Appcelerator and IDC, asked 2,160 Appcelerator developers which platform they most wanted to develop apps for. Apple came out on top with 91 percent saying they were interested in the iPhone. Coming in second place was the iPad with 88 percent saying they wanted to develop for that device.
While Apple saw interest in its platform go up, Android saw a 4 percent decrease in interest among developers, to 83 percent. The release of iOS 5 is thought to be the reason that Android fell.
Now, about the Kindle Fire. It came in at 49 percent of developers showing interest in developing apps for it. Hardly close to the interest shown towards iOS.
The number one drawback of developing for the Kindle, according to developers — fragmentation of Android.
Pixelmator — beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editing app for Mac OS X.
It may come as a surprise to many, but Apple’s iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS are the top two selling phones on the market in the US as of the third quarter.
A new study from NPD shows that Apple’s two previous models topped the list and were followed by the HTC EVO 4G, Motorola Droid 3 and the Samsung Intensity II. According to the report, price had a big part to play in buying decisions.
“Among U.S. consumers who considered purchasing phones in the $200 to $250 price range, 64 percent ended up purchasing a phone for less than $200,” the report reads.
NPD said that the share of U.S. mobile handset sales that were smartphones reached 59 percent in the third quarter of 2011, an increase of 13 percent since the same quarter in 2010. The report also noted that the average price for smartphones has fallen for four consecutive quarters and is now at $135.
Apple on Monday released a new version of iTunes that includes iTunes Match.
iTunes Match will set you back $24.99 per year. The software scans the content of your music library and matches it to the music available on the iTunes Store. Music that doesn’t match is automatically uploaded, so you can play any of your music on any of your iOS devices.
Your iTunes music will also be available from your Apple TV, as you can see from these screenshots. Apple missed its self-imposed deadline of October 31 for the release of iTunes Match, but typical of Apple, the company releases products when they are done, but not by deadlines.
You can download the new version of iTunes from Apple’s Web site. It isn’t available via the automatic software update in OS X yet.
Gruber shares his views on Apple.
John Gruber – Çingleton 2011 from Çingleton on Vimeo.