Sat, Jan 28, 2012
As you can tell, I think this is an extremely powerful tool for educators who want to provide their courses to the world, or even improve the experience of their local students. iTunes U has allowed me to take a class I taught for only two semesters and put it in front of tens of thousands of people worldwide, with more discovering it every day. All of this is provided for free (assuming you have an iOS device or something capable of running iTunes). While the new iBooks textbooks received most of the attention from last week's Apple event, the improvements to iTunes U should also have a significant impact on education.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes,
ZDNet:
Supply chain issues aren’t an Apple issue, they’re an industry-wide problem, and part of the blame has to rest with us, the consumer - we constantly demand more for less, and our insatiable demand for gadgets and devices has created a culture where a blind eye has been turned to abuses in the past. That now, thanks to the efforts of companies like Apple, is changing.
The annual pilgrimage by Apple fans shows no sign of letting up, even though Apple pulled out three years ago. After all, says Kelly Trent with Wiley Publishing, which puts out the Dummies guides, "Macworld has always been a fan event for people who live and breathe Apple. That hasn't changed just because Apple's not here. Their love remains so strong.''
While the target audience for Macworld | iWorld is your typical consumer, there are a few vendors in attendance focused on reaching developers. If you’re a developer yourself, or maybe work with developers in your company, you might want to stop by the following vendors during the show, or check out their sites if you aren’t able to attend.
Chris Preimesberger,
eWeek:
Attendance is down noticeably over 2010 and previous years, and there are fewer vendors showing their wares. There is more room to roam in the main expo hall, parking is easier to find, and that's certainly good for attendees.
Although this still ranks as one of the most interesting and innovative of all the IT-related shows each year, the intensity has ratcheted down. Apple reported a high of 45,572 attendees in 2007; this year's numbers aren't yet available, but early estimates are that about 22,000 people will attend the show this week, IDG World Expo told eWEEK.
When we’re talking over the air, there’s not one single highway to get us from Point A to Point B; there are multiple spectrum bands, technologies and costs associated with them. In this age, using wireless is like engaging in multimodal commuting. You use cellular to drive to the train station and the high-speed rails of Wi-Fi fly downtown. Meanwhile, you’re sharing those rails and highways with thousands of other commuters in neighboring airwaves that are the equivalent of bikers, skateboarders etc.
That’s where Farhi missed a big opportunity to tell D.C. that instead of focusing on cars and the single highway, it should look around at all the other technologies out there. Stop listening to the carriers, who actually do have spectrum they can deploy if they want to work a little harder and spend a little more, and start thinking about how Wi-Fi or white spaces broadband (Super Wi-Fi) can play a role in taking congestion off over the air data networks.
Under most circumstances, this would seem to be someone else’s problem. Cellphone contracts are “tiered” so that those who use a network more than others pay more for the privilege. You want to ask Siri silly questions? Go to town — but you (or, in this case, I) will get the bill at the end of the month. By the same logic, a customer who wants better service on an airline can pay for it by buying a first-class ticket. The marketplace provides.
Except on the data skyway, it’s not that simple. Cell and data networks are like any common resource; they have limits. And once they hit their limit, regardless of which group is using its share and then some, there’s no more to go around.
Personally, I believe Apple has never been in a better position to do the right thing. Tim Cook has already responded--even if just internally--to employee and media concerns over Foxconn and other plants. He promises the company will "dig deeper," and he notes:
"We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people."
That's exactly right--and yet, it hasn't been enough, for reasons of priority and profit. It's time to do more. We'll be watching.
It turns out, iCloud itself is a fantastic addition to iOS 5 for the end user, but between concerns on Apple’s long term plans and de-facto technical limitations, we might have to wait a little longer to have all our apps iCloud-ready, fine-tuned for an optimal experience.
“We are focused on educating workers about their rights, so they are empowered to speak up when they see unsafe conditions or unfair treatment,” wrote Cook, who served as Apple’s chief operating officer and oversaw its supply chain prior to becoming the company’s CEO. “We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues. What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain.”
After spending several months really getting to know Lion, I've uncovered a plethora of little-talked-about functions that are well worth knowing about. Here are more than 15 new and useful features in Lion for you to explore.
The primary function of shorteners is to allow tweets to contain URLs without the links eating up too much of Twitter’s 140 character limit. That’s fine. However, an unintended consequence is that, when these URLs show up in Safari’s History, they all have a title of “(no title)” and an indecipherable “http//t.co/” address.
What I discovered was a Mac app with features that are almost identical to those of its iOS counterpart, but with quite a few advantages thanks to the Mac platform.
Fri, Jan 27, 2012
Prominently featured is a slideshow object that lets users drag a collection of photos to the app, with options for timing, transitions and caption control adjustable in the Object inspector. The traditional Photo Grid now supports displayed captions derived from page contents.
So tech industry, it’s time to step up and take care of your people. Fanboys and girls, it’s time to step down even when you know an article has a slant that’s not completely fair. All of us need to accept that there is a human cost to our devices, and we need to accept that the human cost doesn’t have to be as high as it is. And then we need to demand better.
A fast-growing media company has hit upon an iPad loaner program, which replaces laptops for occasional travelers. The Apple tablet's simplicity compared to the laptop makes it much easier to administer and use.
Thu, Jan 26, 2012
A new study published by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, in conjunction with researchers at Microsoft (a long-time Apple rival), is the first of its kind to examine the physical effects on the head, neck and shoulders of spending time staring at a tablet.
The good news is that it is not all bad news. The researchers found that people are more inclined to move around and shift positions when they use a tablet compared with people who are sitting at a desktop computer. That's definitely good. However, tablet users that hold the device almost at their lap, or rest the tablet in a case on their lap, are putting a lot of strain on the neck muscles -- much more than someone using a laptop or desktop computer.
The New York Times partnered with Caixin, a Chinese business magazine, to publish the article in Chinese. The goal was twofold: to share the content of the article with readers in China, and to solicit Chinese comments for translation into English that might prove illuminating for readers of the English-language article on NYTimes.com.
Below are five alternatives that focus on the music, without the bloat.
Yoink has been improved considerably since its debut, making it a useful utility that's easy to integrate into your workflow.
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs remains a major sore point for most Americans. But owners of some of the nation’s most popular electronics — including iPhones and iPads — are less concerned than other Americans about where their purchases are made, according to a nationwide survey conducted by The New York Times.
Apple, meanwhile, remains a hugely popular American company. More than three-quarters of respondents said they had a very favorable or mostly favorable opinion of Apple.
Long pressing—that is, tapping and holding down on a part of your screen—provides a lot of handy shortcuts on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Here's a look at practically everything you can with this technique to save you a bunch of time typing and navigating your device.
While Apple has certainly shown that at times they’ve let their power corrupt, they’re still guided by the fundamental principle we fell in love with: Superior products through superior design.
So while I wish Apple success in disrupting the textbook market, I also hope that the company will further develop its iBooks Author tool, adding templates for other genres of publishing as a well as an ePub export tool.
Essentially, it’s an App Store specifically for businesses, where they can purchase iOS apps in bulk. It allows developers to custom-tailor software for specific businesses; it also gives Apple another entry into the business market.
Owners of the mid-2010 Mac mini and mid-2010 MacBook also have firmware updates to call their own. And like the MacBook Pro firmware release, these updates enable Lion Recovery from an Internet connection on their respective Mac models.
If you're a FileVault 2 user, remember two things: use command+R when booting to go into recovery mode, and you can always decrypt your drive if FileVault 2 gets in the way of fixing a file system issue. Of course decryption won't do anything for physical drive problems, so always back up first and make sure you don't overwrite backups from before the disk trouble started.