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After a rough day windsurfing, the Apple sweatshirt is just the thing. And a perfect companion to our sweatpants.
- Apple made a windsurfer.
- Apple made sweatpants.
- Kickstarter. Now.
(via MeFi)
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Say “iTouch” again! Say “iTouch” again! I double dare you, motherfucker! Say “iTouch” one more goddamn time!
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ScottJackson.org EXCLUSIVE: Sneak Peek at Mac OS X Lion.
Hope I don’t get a takedown notice.
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Some Snippets About Product Placement
Apple doesn’t pay for product placement.
On Meg Ryan using a PowerBook in You’ve Got Mail:
“Our arrangement was simply a loaning of equipment in exchange for exposure in the hands of Meg Ryan,” said Suzanne Forlenza, manager of product placement for Apple.
That’s the same Suzanne Forlenza who’s been in charge of product placement since 1994. There’s a nice old profile on her and her efforts from apple.com (ca. 1999) here:
And then she had her first big hit. “With Forrest Gump, there was no product, just the Apple logo,” Forlenza recalls. “They called up and said, ‘We have a kind of wacky idea — what do you think?’ They wanted to use our letterhead for the part where Forrest Gump finds out he’s become a millionaire because he’s invested in what he thought was a fruit company.” Paramount used the Apple letterhead, and 78,873,439 people saw it.
Moving away from Apple…
Futurepedia (the BTTF wiki, duh):
The product placement department had made a deal with the California Raisin Board, accepting $50,000 to place a reference to raisins in the film. Since raisins do not photograph well, the placement was on a bench upon which Red the Bum was seen sleeping when Marty returned from 1955. “When the California Raisin Board saw it,” recounted [co-writer Bob] Gale, “they were livid,” and the money was refunded.
Total number of pairs of Wayfarers that had been sold prior to the 1983 Risky Business product placement in 1983: 18,000.
Number of pairs of Wayfarers sold in 1986: 1.5 million.
[Crazy Taxi] featured a whole load of national chain stores, such as Tower Records, KFC, Fila, and Pizza Hut. The advertising made the city feel realistic and definitely enhanced the gameplay. […] The advertising was totally in keeping with the game, and because there was such a variety, it never really felt like you were watching an advertisement.
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Ryan On Today's Apple Event
New Apple TV
Problem for me (and a lot like me) is that, outside of the US, the content selection is abysmal. Netflix is a nice addition, and with the service coming to Canada this fall, makes the $99 device a bit more enticing. But I already have a PS3 and an Xbox 360 that can stream Netflix, and everything stored on my Mac.
Netflix? Is that like Blockbuster, the place that I get into my car and drive to so I can pay for them let me have a disc for a short amount of time and then charge me extra if I don’t return it when they want me to? Anyway, content selection outside the US is abysmal — the Australian iBookstore is still just Project Gutenberg books. Our iTunes Store doesn’t even have Kindergarten Cop (just kidding — it does, and I totally watch that movie all the time).
Other miscellaneous snark:
- I think AirPlay looks really cool. If nothing else, it means the Remote app should finally be getting an update soon. It hasn’t seen an update since July of ‘08. I’d love a version of the Remote app for the iPad.
- Couldn’t they have killed Cover Flow and not the iPod Classic?
- The iPad gets its task tray on the bottom in landscape mode, but the iPhone doesn’t. Every time I double-click the home button on my iPhone in landscape mode and the task tray appears perpendicular to everything else on the screen, I sigh.
- What’s with this trend of “and it’ll be available next month?” I kinda miss “and we’re shipping it today.” I can’t help but wonder whether this shift happened because Apple realised they could, er, milk product launches a bit more by announcing the product a month before they ship it. Give people time to start lining up, etc. (There’s not seriously going to be a line for the new Apple TV, is there?)
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4.
People much smarter than me have reviewed this thing, so I’ll just say this: yes, I can do the grip/reception thing a little bit, and no, it’s not a big deal. I can only do it in my room, where I have shitty reception, and even then it only goes down one or two bars. In addition, I’ve always held my phone up to my right ear, which is why the real news to come out of Antennagate for me was that people use their phone with their left hand. I think it’s because the toilets flush the other way in the US.
Update: After a few more hours with this thing, I can report that I’m getting reception in places I wasn’t with my 3GS. So who knows. Maybe the 3G chip in there is better.
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What you can see here is that, for this theme, the geolocation data has actually been put on a pin on a map …
This part of the WWDC keynote didn’t get enough attention. At first, I thought it was just an iPhone 4 feature. Then I tried it on my 3GS. Sure enough, after I recorded a video the little location indicator appeared up on the right-hand side of the status bar.
In iOS 4, videos have geolocation data.
It’s not Exif metadata, but still. I can see on a map the exact stretch of beach where I took that great video of me and my friends throwing the frisbee around on our weekend trip, and we can find our way back there again some time. Or whatever. Cue Scott Forstall crazy eyes.
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Developer Stories
Every single one of these videos gets me super-psyched to write software using Apple’s tools. Which means they’ve done their job. These videos so aren’t meant for the general public (“What’s a SDK?” asks Joe Q. Public) — they’re meant to get developers pumped to write for the iOS platform.
Maybe there’s a business angle there — maybe Apple’s trying to persuade developers to stick with the iOS platform by advertising how great the Apple development environment is. That would certainly gel with what Steve said in his keynote about how iAds is a platform that’s designed to make developers money. If I was an Apple “analyst” (more like analyst/therapist, amirite?), this would be more than enough evidence for me to write a 500-word piece of punditry on how Apple is scrambling to keep their developer flock from jumping ship to the obviously superior Android. Such a blog post would be surrounded by Google ads for viagra, poker and whiter teeth. Because that’s how you make money online. Duh.
However.
Maybe, just maybe, Apple said, “let’s make these short films to inspire people to make awesome things.” That certainly seems like a Jobsian thing to do. Making a dent in the universe or whatever.
Either way: I’m psyched.
(A thought: in a way, these videos are analogous to the software that developers should be writing for the iOS platform: bite-sized, professional, slick, polished, and inspiring. Maybe there’s something to that.)
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The New Hotness
Merlin Mann — June 9th, 2009.
I can sometimes get a little obsessed with the new hotness. This year-old tweet from Merlin usually brings me down a notch, reminds me that gear isn’t a big deal. There’s a time and a place for new computers and phones, but they’re not important to the point that I have sites all about them in my NetNewsWire (not any more, at least).
I’m fine with my old busted joint for now. Your iPhone 3GS isn’t going to stop kicking butt tomorrow, nor is your unibody MacBook, nor is your iPad, regardless of what’s announced at 10am Pacific Time. People (myself most definitely included) sometimes forget that.
I’m reminded of a choice quote from Jeffery Zeldman’s The Setup interview:
I should point out that it’s in the last year or two that I’ve indulged a desire to buy new and high-end equipment. I did most of the important work in my career to date using crappy old equipment. […] You don’t need great hardware to do good work. You just need a passion for the work1.
I don’t think Apple’s going to be announcing that at WWDC. (Who knows, though.)
1:(emphasis mine)
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All The Books Are About Old Apple
I own a couple of books about Apple. I have Apple Confidential 2.0 and Steve Wozniak’s autobiography, iWoz. I’ve also read Andy Hertzfeld’s folklore.org series of essays that got turned into Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made. I think I have another one floating around somewhere, but the ones I mentioned are the good ones.
As a computer enthusiast and software maker person, I freaking love the stories that are in these books. I know this sounds dorky, but some of those stories have actually inspired me. Literally.
Here’s the thing — all of these books deal with the earlier (pre-Steve-Jobs’-return) Apple. I’m yet to see any books or whatever written about the internal workings of Apple since, I don’t know, the iPod. I would love to see books about the recent Apple stuff. Stories about the design decisions around the iPhone? Pfft, sold. I’d buy that book in a heartbeat.
Now, I get Apple’s whole cloak-and-dagger deal. I get why they stay quiet about product development and why they don’t comment on rumours. I’m fine with that, and I honestly think it helps them to make great products. I just really hope that Apple’s penchant for secrecy in recent years doesn’t prevent those stories from being told.
I get the feeling that one of two things is true — either
- Apple was just as secretive back in 1984 as it is now, and it’s just that enough time has passed now that tell-alls can be written about ca. 1984 Apple. If this is true, then we’ll probably get the Apple 2.0 tell-alls some time in the next decade.
- Apple is more secretive now than it was in 1984, and we’ll never get books about recent events written by Apple insiders.
I can’t be sure which is true since I wasn’t around in 1984 to see how Apple was back then. I hope the former is true though, because I feel like there are some great stories to be told about the development of recent products like the iPhone and the Apple TV.
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Apple, Others To Have Standard Phone Charger
Ten top mobile phone manufacturers, including Apple, have agreed to adopt the Micro-USB connector standard for smartphone chargers in the European Union. The shift, planned to begin next year, will allow smartphones from the companies, which control 90% of the market, to use the same charging cables.
I don’t know how Apple is going to make this happen. At first, I just thought “oh, well you’ll just have a 30-pin to Micro-USB power cable”, but then I remembered - wait, it has to be Micro-USB at the iPhone end. Apple’s not going to abandon the 30-pin dock because of the wealth of accessories that are made for it, but they have to put this Micro-USB port somewhere on the iPhone itself. They could always put both on the phone, but [a] that doesn’t sound very Apple-y (not enough DRM), and [b] Apple would then have to make two different phones (one for the EU, and one for the rest of the world).
Wait, here’s a solution: force everyone else to adopt the 30-pin dock connector. That sounds a bit more like Apple’s style. Burn.
But seriously, that could definitely work. And I think that the Dock is the best phone connector out there - extra pins for video output, audio input and playback control. Suck it, Micro-USB.
UPDATE - From Apple:
As we’ve said in the past, we are committed to the Apple dock connector and this initiative will not require us to change it. Today’s memorandum gives manufacturers the option to provide an adapter that connects with the universal charger.
Yes! Go adapters! F yeah!
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How To Tell If A Mac App Is Carbon Or Cocoa
It’s hardly an exact science, but there’s an easy way to tell if an application on the Mac is built with Carbon or Cocoa:
If, when your application takes a while to load something, the cursor turns into the old Mac watch
then the app is probably a Carbon app. If the beach ball comes up, it’s probably Cocoa.
Of course, there may be exceptions, but this is just a rule of thumb.
