If you didn’t live in a world where QuickBooks already existed, if there wasn’t another universe that you could look at where there was a program that already does more than QuickBooks for Mac does, if you didn’t know how things could and should be, QuickBooks 2012 for Mac would seem like a pretty good product. Unfortunately, the knowledge that QuickBooks could be better (and isn’t) makes QuickBooks 2012 for Mac something “less.”
How long has QuickBooks and other Intuit products been “less” on the Mac now?
My sources tell me that RIM originally outsourced much of the hardware design and production of the PlayBook to mega-ODM Quanta.From there, Amazon’s team determined they could build a tablet without the help and experience of Lab 126, so they turned to Quanta, which helped them “shortcut” the development process by using the PlayBook as their hardware template. Of course, it’s never quite that simple, and as I’m told Amazon ran into trouble, and eventually sacrifices were made (like using a slower processor).
I first wrote this post on my public Facebook page in May of 2010 as a response to friend requests from readers, publicists and other people whom I hadn’t actually met. Since then, things have changed: Facebook’s privacy implications have gotten trickier, Plaxo and MySpace vanished from relevance, LinkedIn is more useful, a follower-etiquette question has come up on Twitter, and Google+ has brought its own social-networking issues.
Some people really stress out over whether to follow back or not. I don’t.
Looks like J.P. Morgan’s Gokul Hariharan made a small error in his analysis of Apple’s iPad-based fortunes when he reported a 25% drop in iPad orders among Foxconn factories in Asia. Apple (AAPL) shares took a sharp downturn after the word was out, but both Hariharan and traders forgot one thing: Foxconn has a new plant in Brazil that will be spewing out iPads like nobody’s business by December.
Oh come on, seriously? J.P. Morgan analyst Gokul Hariharan said this morning that Apple had slashed manufacturing for the iPad by 25 percent. Turns out he was wrong.
“Facebook does not track users across the web,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “Instead, we use cookies on social plugins to personalize content (e.g. Show you what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do (e.g. Measure click-through rate), or for safety and security (e.g. Keeping underage kids from trying to signup with a different age). No information we receive when you see a social plugins is used to target ads, we delete or anonymize this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information.
Nik Cubrilovic claimed last week that Facebook was tracking its users even after they log out of the social networking service.
Shoppers are starting the holidays earlier this year. While Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales have become the norm in retail today, PayPal’s data indicates that another spike in holiday shopping is emerging. Right after dinner on Thanksgiving Day, shoppers are getting a head start on their holiday shopping right from the couch on their smartphones and tablets.
PayPal is predicting that couch commerce will really affect retailers for the first time this year.
I was having a beer and talking to someone at WWDC (I can’t remember who — probably the beer’s fault) and he pointed out something that is true for me too. I follow people, not companies.
That holds true for RSS feeds and Twitter. I’m not so much interested what news a Web site has, but I’m really very interested in what some writers have to say about the news.
I have a folder in my RSS application that is specifically for those people. I’m sure you can guess most of the names in there, but that is the folder that I pay the most attention to during the day.
When companies post news, they go into a Tech or Mac folder and I’ll skim the headlines to see if there’s anything earth shattering. Most of the time, there’s not.
I understand that many people like to follow companies on Twitter because they don’t like all of the chatter of the individuals. That’s certainly true in some cases too.
However, as I look through Twitter and my RSS, I see an increasing trend to follow and engage individual writers, musicians and other people that I find interesting.
I’m not sure if it’s the same for everyone, but thought it was a worthwhile trend to mention.
Apple (AAPL) shares fell sharply in early trading Monday following a widely reported note to clients from J.P. Morgan’s Gokul Hariharan to the effect that multiple supply chain vendors in Asia have registered a 25% cut in fourth-quarter iPad 2 orders from Apple…What Hariharan — and the traders who dumped Apple shares on the news — seem to have missed were the reports out of South American that Foxconn, in partnership with the Brazilian government, has built an iPad plant in Brazil that is ready to start churning out product by December.
Oops.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt cites analysts Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and Bullish Cross’ Andy Zaky as doubting Gokul Hariharan’s report.
One thing I knew for sure was that I’d never trick readers, or lie to them, or otherwise be shady. It’s not me. And even if it was me, it’s too easy to get caught. The easy path was the one where transparency was shining brightly.
meta.DJ is targeted at modern DJ-style performances and lets you blend your iTunes music tracks with drum machine beats, sound fx, synthesized instrument parts, mix effects like delays, stutters, filters and more.
I don’t usually link to articles written about me, but this one is different. Chris Martucci emailed me a few questions on how I choose what to post on The Loop. I looked at his site and like it, so instead of emailing him a two-line response and the obligatory “Good luck,” I decided to call him so he could ask whatever he wanted.
It’s interesting to see what someone takes away from listening to your advice.
On 24 September 1980, Bonham was picked up by Led Zeppelin assistant Rex King to attend rehearsals at Bray Studios for an upcoming tour of the United States—the band’s first since 1977. During the journey, Bonham asked to stop for breakfast, where he drank four quadruple vodkas (sixteen shots, between 400–560 ml). He then continued to drink heavily after arriving at the rehearsals. A halt was called to the rehearsals late in the evening and the band retired to Page’s house, the Old Mill House in Clewer, Windsor. After midnight on the 25th, Bonham fell asleep and was taken to bed and placed on his side. Benji LeFevre (who had replaced Richard Cole as Led Zeppelin’s tour manager) and John Paul Jones found him dead the next afternoon.[17] Bonham was 32 years old.
I’ve been fairly critical of Apple’s recent patent bullying — what I call innovation through intimidation/litigation. The Apple Fanclub of bloggers and journalists defend the company’s patent and other intellectual property claims as protecting its innovations from copying, particularly by Samsung. But who’s copying whom?
I don’t know if I’m part of a fan club, but I do know that none of the companies that have come out with similar products to the iPhone and iPad have added anything significant to the design. These companies radically changed their designs after the iPhone was released to make their products look just like Apple’s products.
There are only two reasons to do that — capitalize on Apple’s success and confuse consumers.
Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, implores the United States District Court for the Northern District of California to deny Apple’s request for a US-wide preliminary injunction against four Samsung products (the Infuse 4G, Galaxy S 4G and Droid Charge smartphones, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer), arguing that such a decision would run counter to the public interest as it “would hinder Verizon Wireless in developing and deploying its next generation high-speed LTE [fourth-generation] network, the job growth dependant on that network, and will undercut key public policy goals, including expansion of American’s [sic] access to broadband networks and faster communication with emergency personnel.”This attempt by Verizon to interfere with Apple’s enforcement of intellectual property rights against Android in general and Samsung in particular is a declaration of war that may have far-reaching consequences in the U.S. market. I’m sure that Apple will view this move as a self-serving attempt to game the system in Android’s and Samsung’s favor.
Amazon.com Inc, which revolutionized reading with its Kindle e-reader, is expected to unveil a tablet computer next week that analysts say will seriously challenge Apple’s market dominating iPad.
Okay, they are having a press event, but I doubt it will “seriously challenge” the iPad.
Many thanks to Pixelmator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed for the past two weeks.
Pixelmator is the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editing app for Mac OS X that has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images. With tons of new features and improvements, the next generation of Pixelmator—codenamed Chameleon—is clearly the best Pixelmator ever built. Even more, Pixelmator 2 will be available later this month via the Mac App Store as a free upgrade for everyone who purchased any version of Pixelmator via the Mac App Store.
So why does Business Insider risk undermining all that highly original, distinctive content for what appear to be roughly 18,000 article views? When media companies are asked to grow at a meteoric pace — and Comscore indicates that Business Insider’s unique visitors have nearly doubled this year — the line between original content and borderline theft gets awful blurry. The editorial mission quickly transforms from “What can I link to?” to “How much can I take?”
But what offends me even more than rewriting my titles and burying my links is how their layout so strongly implies that I’m a Business Insider writer and I endorse my name and writing being splattered all over their site
Sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider are the inevitable result of an advertising model that counts page views.
Like Gruber and Arment, I want to give my readers interesting content. Most of time that means that I send my readers to another site to read, but I’m fine with that. If someone has written a good piece, readers should go to that site and read the original.
My job is not to repurpose a story into another story so readers will stay on my site to read it, and hopefully not click a link and leave. My job is to provide my readers with interesting links, opinions, news and commentary, whether on The Loop or another site.
I believe that if I do my job well enough, and people enjoy what I’m offering, my traffic will increase too.
Blizzard Entertainment announced Friday that its launch of Diablo III has been pushed to early 2012, quashing gamers’ hopes that they might get the new game in time for the holidays.
Diablo III is the latest installment of Blizzard’s action role playing game series, in development for Windows and OS X. The game has been in development for several years, but only this week began a large scale closed beta test.
“With every game we make, the temptation is always very strong to launch as soon as possible. However, we didn’t put so many years of work into Diablo III to release a game that was almost ready,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment.
Morhaime added that the beta test is “going very well,” and that Blizzard will use the extra time afforded by the schedule to “deliver an experience that lives up to our vision for the game and the expectations of our players.”
Blizzard plans to add more testers than initially projected, as well. Players with active Battle.net accounts can opt in for a chance to participate in a future test phase.
Writing for GigaOM, David Churbuck outlines what he would tell the new CEO of HP to do:
Get a better board. It sounds like a shit fight in the monkey cage at the zoo inside of HPs board. The CEO needs to stack the deck with allies and advisors, not glory seekers who pull down each other’s pants.
Matt Gemmell on publishing services like paper.li:
Newspapers contain editorial. There’s some kind of journalistic contribution, however brief, in each article. With these online “newspapers”, there’s zero. It’s just a wad of links and extracts, styled to appear something like a newspaper. No commentary by the “publisher”.…Even just a brief remark on why you care about each item enough to share it? Give me a reason to be interested.
I read articles and links because of the contribution the person brings to that article or topic. The contribution doesn’t have to be an essay — sometimes a few words on why they think it’s important is enough.
The war of words between Apple and Samsung is heating up again.
In an interview with AP, Lee Younghee, Samsung’s head of global marketing for mobile communications, accused Apple of “free riding” on its patented wireless technologies. Lee also said that Samsung is going to be more aggressive in defending itself in the future.
Samsung says it holds key patents that allow, for example, for a person to talk and receive email at the same time.
“We believe Apple is free riding” on such Samsung patents, Lee said.
Apple reacted to Samsung’s claims in the same AP story.
“It is no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging,” said Seoul-based spokesman Steve Park. “This kind of blatant copying is wrong and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.”
You can’t argue the fact that all smartphone designs changed in 2007, after the iPhone was released. Companies have been copying Apple’s hardware and software design ever since.
