Thu, May 31, 2012
Dreamweaver CS6 is a powerful Web builder with great code-editing, CSS, and site management capabilities. It introduces great additions for working with a couple of CSS3 properties and for building mobile-friendly websites. However, this version seems to be slipping behind in some of the core technologies Web designers depend on. Lack of HTML 5 tools, disorganized CSS creation, and an ineffective design view make it difficult to build sites using current standards and techniques.
Apple has acknowledged that yes, part of its motivation to launch the iBookstore was to make money, but says its agreements with e-book publishers were a result of individual negotiations.
What we should think about however is this “polar opposite” business model. Apple is running this as a “hobby” or as an internal experiment. Sales are (relatively) tiny but it generates some profit. Volumes are small but they are growing. It’s taking a heck of a long time. It’s asymmetric to the prevailing model the company relies upon. It’s beneath contempt from all observers. Sounds familiar?
Apple TV, for now, is mainly a U.S.-only business, as opposed to the iPhone/iPad/Mac/App-Stores business. If we believe there's potential in Apple TV, that potential is huge.
To me, this is what a preliminary WWDC conference schedule would look like if Apple were set to announce a new developer platform, like, say, apps for Apple TV.
Can't wait.
And if the Apple TV is not going to change fundamentally, that it is still using an up-down-left-right-select remote control, the apps potentially can also be used in the non-iPod-touch line of iPods.
Flexibits’ Fantastical, a menubar-based calendar application to quickly enter new events with natural language recognition, has today been updated to include native integration with Reminders, a feature that Apple rolled out with its own app in iOS 5 last year.
Quip, a new Twitter app by Glasshouse Apps (makers of The Early Edition), takes a unique approach at filtering the typical Twitter timeline by conversations, images, and retweets.
Wed, May 30, 2012
Quip, a new Twitter app by Glasshouse Apps (makers of The Early Edition), takes a unique approach at filtering the typical Twitter timeline by conversations, images, and retweets.
Aside from sharing some design DNA, the thermostat unit can also be controlled from iPhones, iPads, iPods and Macs -- we presume that Android functionality is still there.
Want an alternative way to jump back to the iPad’s main screen without fumbling around for the Home button? The “multitasking gestures” feature, new with last year’s iOS 5 update, lets you use movements from all four fingers on the screen to replicate certain functions normally performed by clicking the Home button once or twice.
Answering questions from conference hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Cook said his company is doubling down on Siri, played coy about Apple’s approach to the gaming and television markets, and spoke emotionally about Jobs’s death.
For some, it seems to be rooted in network configurations since the problems only happen when the system is behind a corporate proxy or firewall configuration, and not at home. However, this is not shared by all people with this issue, and others cannot seem to get any secured Web site to load regardless of the network configuration.
Cook took the opportunity to reflect upon the lessons he learned from Jobs before his death last October, explaining that the founder never wanted Cook to dwell on what he would have wanted after he died. Instead, Jobs wanted Cook to avoid thinking about the past and instead look to the future, focusing on creating the next great thing.
"When he called me to his home to talk about being the CEO and subsequently the discussions we had, he told me, 'I witnessed what happened at Disney when Walt passed away,'" Cook said. "He said that people would go to meetings, and all sit around and talk about, what would Walt have done? How would he view this? And he looked at me with those intense eyes that only he had, and he told me to never do that, to never ask what he would do. Just do what's right. And so I'm doing that."
You don't have to a CEO to say those words. Tell your kids too.
One of the best reasons for a closed system is privacy and security. I don’t know about you but my iPhone contains massive amounts of very private data. From bank passwords, credit card numbers, and access to all my bank accounts. If the system were open I would have no guarantee that that data was still safe — hell even with Apple my address book is occasionally uploaded for no reason. If Apple has a hard time policing every app when they go through the approval process, how would I as an individual approve an app to make sure it was on the up and up?
Daylite 4, the new version of the Mac and iOS CRM solution from Marketcircle, gets its first major redesign in a long time. Daylite has a decade-long history with the Mac as a powerful CRM tool that helps businesses keep track of customers, sales and related projects.
Path Finder is more than a browser though, it is an ultra wide Swiss Army knife chock of multi prong tools waiting to get work done. I would recommend Path Finder to anyone who is discontent with the options of the Finder, or works with multiple remote servers on a regular basis. The dual pane view and tabbed browsing make juggling multiple Finder windows unnecessary, and the popup File Transfer queue keeps all of the activity in one place.
Diet Coda is great. Seriously. This app might not be your first choice to do serious work on (yet). However, if the only reason you’re taking your huge, heavy laptop with you on that otherwise relaxing vacation is just in case you get the 5-alarm-fire call from your boss because of a major bug that needs to get fixed right now (don’t they all?), Diet Coda and an iPad with an LTE/3G connection could be all you need.
Tue, May 29, 2012
Using the app, you can create various processes that trigger different outputs. When your phone detects the sound of toast popping out of the toaster, it will send you an email telling you it’s ready. If your phone is moved, the accelerometer can trigger a beep or flashing light.
Feel like flattering your favorite blogs or podcasts by donating a nice little chunk of change to your favorite writers or podcasters using iOS as a delivery medium? Yeah, not gonna happen.
Apple continues to plug at potential loopholes in the App Store financial model.
I’ve been aware of this for a while and have written and spoken about it frequently. But I only just now realized that I’ve never seen a public list of apps that are broken by sandboxing. Yes, it doesn’t mean the end of the app — users can still sideload it outside of the App Store — but it does cut the app off of Apple’s “blessed and trusted” mechanism for purchasing, installing, and updating safe apps.
The Store makes life so much easier for every user.
Also:
Ben Brook: I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent trying to dig through old emails and guess at old passwords to get registration credentials for old software. That used to be the sole reason that I never deleted software from my Mac.
After Effects CS6 is the most important upgrade the program has received since the first major update in version 7. It's not just a bunch of additional features and add-ons, but rather a truly rebuilt, reworked, and enhanced powerful compositing and motion graphics creation tool.
Mon, May 28, 2012
Sun, May 27, 2012
Fortunately, I had prepared for this day as Mom's unofficial IT guy, a sort of back-up tech helper to the professional assistance she gets at her Mac shop.
As a result, little of her data was irretrievably lost. And once she had purchased a current-model aluminum iMac, getting her back up and running was relatively painless.
Do consider using one master family account on all devices to manage iTunes purchases, and use that same shared account to track the location of all of your devices. As an added bonus, you could use the calendar, contacts and reminders with this shared family iCloud account as well. Once you have each device configured with these basics, let each family member decide which third-party email service they want. This may well be the best strategy to employ, until Apple sees fit to enable multiple users per device.
Apple ID continues to confuse families around the world.
Sat, May 26, 2012
Moom brings order to the chaos of a busy Mac by moving and resizing windows as you prefer.
Apple's lead designer Sir Jonathan Ive has reaffirmed his desire to stay at the computing giant. He said he wanted to stay with "the same team I've been fortunate enough to work with for the past 15 years."
I'm linking to this article just to remind you that it's Sir Jonathan Ive. Don't forget.
iTunes is dead. But it’s still the big play. Microsoft became trapped in the Windows legacy and now, it appears, that Apple is becoming trapped into the iTunes legacy. How is it possible to make a radical transformation, with regards to media management, on the majority of iOS devices without addressing the the train-wreck that is iTunes?
I use iTunes as a music and podcast player on my Mac every day. I also use Applescript to compose my playlist. I will be sad to see iTunes go away.
(On the other hand, I don't get iTunes media store here in Singapore, so I've never used that part of the app.)
Fri, May 25, 2012
CS6 extends the performance gains of CS5 to a wider range of users, particularly mobile editors with the proper laptop configuration. But what makes CS6 a worthy upgrade is its focus on enhancing its raison d’être: more fluent video editing.
At nearly $40, Curio Core is one of the more expensive organizer options in the Mac App Store. But it’s not the priciest; it offers a lot more features than many cheaper apps; and it presents them in a friendly, easy-to-learn package. If you want to get the best of your next massive project, consider Curio Core a great place to start.
Apple doesn’t provide APIs for apps to serve as AirPlay receivers. Rogue Amoeba backwards-engineered the protocol, and coded their own iOS AirPlay receiver implementation using (they claim, and I have no reason to doubt them) only public APIs. I think the bottom line is that Apple is saying that apps are not allowed to act as AirPlay receivers on iOS.
All-in-all, the venture was well-worth the price — but that’s taking largely into consideration the fact that I’ve recently gotten into iOS development. If you’re looking to “switch” completely, I think it would be worth the price, but again, there are many ways I use Windows that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to on any other OS, so be sure to take that into consideration before you take the leap.
However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch.
With strong sharing options, support for Versions (another feature most iOS text editors are lacking), images, custom CSS previews, and all the other features of version 2.0, WriteUp 3.0 has still some rough edges, but shows an incredibly promising, and possibly even more powerful text editing future.
For Facebook devotees, Camera is probably the better app; it integrates more tightly with the service, and shares photos from all of your preexisting Facebook friends. But members of the Instagram community who prefer it there, with those filters and added options like tilt-shift, needn’t envy their Facebook Camera-using friends.
Justnotes’s interface is simple but effective, mirroring the elegant look of the Simplenote iOS app and website—if you’re already using Simplenote, Justnotes is a no-brainer purchase. But it’s also a very nice OS X notes app, and its sync options will make it especially appealing to those with iOS devices and multiple Macs.
Thu, May 24, 2012
It’s an excellent upgrade, making significant improvements upon what was already a very good coding environment.
As much as I love my iPad, I prefer to do my code work on a Mac with a real keyboard and mouse. But on those occasions where that’s just not possible, or where I need to make such a small change that digging my laptop out just seems like too much effort, Diet Coda on my iPad can perform quite well in its stead.
Expectations: Perhaps the single hardest thing about building an app for the App Store is that we’re all so accustomed to great apps. Sure, we’ve all seen a few lousy ones, but Apple sets the bar high with its own software (GarageBand, anyone?), and plenty of third-party developers offer up excellent apps of their own.
What's clear is that Cook is behaving like his own man, putting his stamp on Apple -- including some moves that will court controversy with the Apple faithful, watchful as they are for the slightest deviation from their perception of the Steve Jobs playbook. Cook consistently pays homage to the legacy of Jobs, but he doesn't apologize for charting a new course. He seems, at the end of the day, to be honoring one of Jobs' dying requests: that Apple's management not ask "What would Steve do?" and instead do what's best for Apple.
A senior Victorian public service IT chief has warned that governments trying to design helpful apps for iPhones and iPads are most likely to encounter Apple as an obstacle.
Victorian Department of Health digital services unit manager Gerardine O’Sullivan made the comments during the CeBIT trade show in Sydney on Wednesday.
Apple Australia spokeswoman Fiona Martin said she was not familiar with the Victorian Department of Health’s specific situation.
While the Command key is perhaps the most used modifier keys on the system, its primary use is in combination with other keys. At its basics, you hold the command key while typing another key or combination thereof to perform a specific action, but in addition there are some convenient features in the Mac OS that only take a single addition of a Command key press in order to activate.
The ads, titled “Joke” and “Life” show Malkovich casually talking to Siri with short sentences and a series of single words such as “weather” or “evening”, perhaps in an effort to showcase both Malkovich’s particular attitude and Siri’s capability of handling short commands with seemingly no context (“evening” returns a series of calendar appointments, “linguica” displays local restaurants).
That restriction could well mean that the only opportunity you’ll get to truly change browsers is when your two-year smartphone contract expires or you decide it’s worth shelling out another few hundred dollars for a new tablet.
Even without fully utilizing Diet Coda’s set of features, I’m happy to see the app filling a particular void in my workflow — and even better, with style and prowess.
Two years ago, Microsoft declared that the future of video on the web would be powered by HTML 5. Today, however, a lot of web video content is still delivered via Adobe Flash technology. So, in a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft is integrating Flash directly into Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and doing so in a way that does not undermine the safety and reliability of the Metro environment.
I wonder. Is Microsoft still doing the embrace, extend and extinguish thing?
Google has gone big with the changes in the latest version of its mobile search app for iOS, starting with full-screen searches and views for the iPhone. Other changes introduced in Google Search 2.0.0 Wednesday include speed improvements, an enhanced yet simplified user interface, and gesture tweaks for easy navigation.
What has occurred to me, though, is that Apple could, with the (presumed) upcoming WWDC introduction of iOS 6, further encourage developers to be flexible in this regard by changing the way notification banners are displayed.
If Apple introduced something like this in iOS 6, they could encourage iOS developers to adopt the recommended APIs to be responsive to changes in available vertical screen space. For now, they could pitch this in the context of shrinking screen space in response to on-screen notification banners, but, come October, apps that do the right thing would automatically be responsive to, say, a new device with 176 more pixels.
Even by only slightly mimicking the Finder, Files.app could reset the past five years of “simple” iOS interactions in one big fell swoop. Photos itself, which is extremely straightforward, is criticized for its file management features. Now imagine that applied to the general concept of “files” with folders, views, sorting options, settings, and previews.
If an application is running at the time you shut down the computer (or restart or log out), that application will reopen its zombie windows the next time it is launched, even if you have told it not to.
If you’ve never heard of Instapaper, here are a few tips on how to get started. If you’re already an Instapaper fan, I’ve also got some ideas about using it efficiently.
Wed, May 23, 2012
The next step I’d like to see as iOS matures is a way for the ecosystem to get more access.
Kids for years have sat too close to the television for too long or played hours of Madden on family room game players. But pediatric neuroscientists and researchers who have studied the effects of screen-time on children suggest the iPad is a different beast.
A well-designed iPad app is more engaging because often the place on the screen that a child touches is the same as where the action happens. Many researchers hope this will help children learn.
This is likely a fight for Apple not worth having. In the complaints, Apple’s partnerships with the publishers look in every way anticompetitive and anticonsumer. The case could drag on in the court for years, and even if Apple prevails, the e-book market will undoubtedly have evolved so that any Apple victory is likely to be moot.
What Apple did with its so-called Aikido move was flip consumers to the mat. If Amazon posed a threat to book retailing, or if the company’s pricing strategy was predatory, then someone should have gone to the courts or authorities. A few people carving up a burgeoning industry among themselves in a backroom deal wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t fair to consumers.
"And then you start to draw to try to describe and develop this fragile idea. Then a remarkable thing happens at the time you make the first object, the time that you actually give form and dimension to the idea. In the whole process, that's the one point where the transition is the most dramatic and suddenly you can involve multiple people. It brings focus and it can galvanise a group of people, which is enormously powerful."
If you work for IBM, you can bring your iPhone to work, but forget about using the phone’s voice-activated digital assistant. Siri isn’t welcome on Big Blue’s networks.
The reason? Siri ships everything you say to her to a big data center in Maiden, North Carolina. And the story of what really happens to all of your Siri-launched searches, e-mail messages and inappropriate jokes is a bit of a black box.
“We’re keenly aware that when we develop and make something and bring it to market that it really does speak to a set of values. And what preoccupies us is that sense of care, and what our products will not speak to is a schedule, what our products will not speak to is trying to respond to some corporate or competitive agenda. We’re very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people.”
I wrote about a thing that bugged me — and Daniel Jalkut wrote an AppleScript that solved the problem for me.
Apple is so important to the group of companies that build tech-related electronics products that without Apple there would be negative growth, according to Citibank.
But, if there is no Apple, won't Dell sell more laptops?
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols,
ZDNet:
Recently a fundamental security bug in sudo was discovered, In some network this security hole could allow a cracker unlimited control of Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix systems. Fortunately, the bug has now been fixed.
With today’s 5.3 update, Keyboard Maestro gets even more powerful, and adds support for one specific area that is going to dramatically speed-up my workflow once again: image manipulation.
Designed for non-verbal adults and children, the app has over 100 large, clear icons with recognizable images from your everyday environment. People can click on the icons to build sentences and then hit the speak button to speak. There's also a group of emoticons so people can communicate how they feel. It has a simple, logical UI that makes it easy for people to share their thoughts with others.
It hasn’t worked this way for ten years or so. But I still hit cmd-H many times a day expecting to end up in the Finder. Instead nothing happens.
I have the exact same problem.
Let’s Sing combines my love for music (and guessing songs) with a streamlined way of embarrassing myself (in a good way) to people that wouldn’t otherwise hear me “na na na na-ing” the latest Nicki Minaj. It’s about your voice, your friends, and it’s fun.
Tue, May 22, 2012
For new users who want something reasonably powerful but simple to use, I think MoneyWiz is a great choice and one that I personally use. Having the trio of apps (iPhone, iPad and Mac) and the excellent sync service makes MoneyWiz very flexible. Just imagine going to the shops, buying something on your card and as you leave you enter the expense onto your iPhone and it’s automatically synced over when you open the iPad and Mac app up at the end of the week to check on your budgets for the month.
Even though sandboxing restrictions means more work for developers, users should notice little change to most applications.
The one I chose is the easiest to use, most flexible, and gives me the most control. The Mac app that does the online backup is called Arq. The online storage system I use is Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Do Apple retail outlets provide a guarantee of economic growth? And if so, should taxpayers be forced to ensure they come to town?
Top amongst the hallmark additions is code-folding, for collapsing snippets of code that take up precious screen real estate but don’t require frequent review. The other big feature finally arriving in Coda is support for autocompletion of custom variable and function names; Coda already offered that functionally for pre-defined function names, but now learns your codebase’s custom controls as well.
I talked to a few iOS app makers, and interestingly, many of them are not convinced Apple would actually “pull an Android,” as one developer put it, and make it more complicated to design for a bunch of different screen sizes (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4/4S and something new).
Mon, May 21, 2012
OS X's Mission Control lets you manage the screen clutter that accompanies today’s advanced computing environment by providing a bird’s-eye view of all your open applications and windows. You’re the one really in control when you learn how to manage Mission Control’s features.
Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals a technologically advanced flyback switching power supply that goes beyond the typical charger. It simply takes AC input (anything between 100 and 240 volts) and produce 5 watts of smooth 5 volt power, but the circuit to do this is surprisingly complex and innovative.
DIY, a Web site and mobile app, will encourage children to build things, document them with an iPhone or iPod, and then receive rewards for their work.
Sun, May 20, 2012
According to a report, Apple gets hugely preferential leases just to open its stores in certain cities and locations. Why is anyone surprised?
I wonder if there are any countries that are courting Apple too. For example, there are no Apple stores in Singapore...
There's value in an app whose sole purpose is to make it easy to share things privately with social or professional groups. And although there are other apps similar to Glassboard, this one has the benefit of being very straightforward and simple—no muss, no fuss.
Sat, May 19, 2012
Whether your interests run to playing your favorite DVDs on your iPad or to dragging and dropping music files onto your iPhone, I've got you covered.
In an email sent to registered Mac developers earlier today, Apple has confirmed it will begin enforcing a deadline on Sandboxing for Mac App Store apps on June 1, 2012.
If you’ve noticed that you’re repeatedly hunting through multiple Home screen pages and folders for a particular app, here’s how to detect where its icon is hiding, and how to move it to a more memorable location.
I have no doubt that huge numbers of people will play it, nor that many of them will love it. Yet it’s also “one more installment” of a famous franchise and changes from its predecessors are primarily superficial. While still terrific, Diablo doesn’t feel vital like it once did.
Viddy, while similar to many photo-sharing apps, is exclusively for editing and sharing video. Users create, edit, and share short videos within the app. Videos can be customized with lo-fi filters and soundtracks and then shared with social networks.
Fri, May 18, 2012
As of Thursday afternoon, the issue was addressed, and content on the iTunes Store once again displays the word "jailbreak" without censoring it. The change applies to music and applications.
Maybe some Apple executives in Beijing is demoing how certain words can be quickly censored, and he simply forgotten to turn it back off. :)
The Retina display has brought iPad magazines up to par, as a reading experience, with their print counterparts. And when you consider the other advantages of iPad mags—you can have lots of them on hand, you can read them in the dark, you never lose your place—the electronic version wins the day.
Despite reports earlier Thursday suggesting that Apple would disallow Mac App Store apps from employing systemwide keyboard “hotkey” shortcuts, sources close to the matter confirm to Macworld that such apps remain welcome in the cozy confines of Apple’s software store.
Good to hear.
Of course, at this stage, we are simply hearing rumors. And it sort-of make sense for Apple to ban hotkey functionalities from individual apps, but provide a OS-level system for users to customize.
The Mac can throw up all kinds of error codes and very few of them make sense (or have much published about them). Instead, just assume something’s mucked up and go from there.
EdgeCase is designed to restore that lost screen boundary when you have multiple displays. With EdgeCase running, whenever the pointer hits the shared edge between two displays, it stops dead.
Bang On uses DuckDuckGo’s ! syntax to search specific sites. Now that can be a pain to type, so Bang On has hot keys that you can tap to add in these syntaxes. This is neat, but not Earth shattering.
Where Bang On shines is in two areas: customization and voice.
Basically, every time you visit a site that has a follow button, a “tweet this” button, or a hovercard, Twitter is recording your behavior. It is transparently watching your movements and storing them somewhere for later use.
Thu, May 17, 2012
Apps which use hotkeys to let you jump to what you want to do while you work on what you must do. And they're on the way out of the Mac App Store as Apple paves the path to safer, more consumer-oriented computing.
Apparently, Apple will allow hotkey apps that are already in the Mac App Store before June to offer only bug fixes. New apps and any apps that add features (i.e. non-bugfix releases) will not be allowed to support hotkeys.
I use FastScripts and Alfred daily. I will be sad if their future on the Mac are restricted.
One of the most common questions we get about the Zombies, Run! Kickstarter campaign is, “How did you distribute over 3000 copies of Zombies, Run! to backers when you only get 50 promo codes per version and 100 devices for internal testing?”
It’s a crucial question because Kickstarter campaigns usually involve backers pre-ordering the product, and while that’s perfectly easy on platforms like Steam or Android, it’s more complicated – but not impossible – on iOS. But still pretty straightforward.
The enhancement to Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker adds the capability to retrieve user data associated with iPhones from Apple's iCloud online backup service. Backups to multiple devices registered with the same Apple ID can be retrieved using the technology, providing investigators has access to a user's original Apple ID and password.
Apple is reportedly filtering the “Jailbreak” term from the iTunes items. All the categories are affected with this filter including Apps, songs, albums, podcast episodes, and iTunes U episodes. One of our readers told us that this filter is also blocking the term even in iBooks.
The Mac App Store in OS X is Apple's new means for delivering software and OS upgrades to Mac users. Some people have removed the store from their systems to keep their OS free of commercial links, but doing so makes upgrading to OS X Lion or later versions of OS X much more cumbersome.
What you get is Spaces with flare– multiple Desktops that are easy to manage with just the right blend of functional tools.
I happen to write things for a living, but the practice is far from limited to those who earn a paycheck by doing it. Some of us just enjoy emptying the thoughts from our heads, while many others have a professional obligation to be good at communicating with words. Whatever one's purpose - journaling, drafting stories or composing work-related documents - the iPad is a pretty good place to put words together.
When you are working for someone else, the things you create make you money that month, and they make someone else money for months and years after that. When you work for yourself you don't make as much immediately, but you get to keep reaping the benefits month after month.
Wed, May 16, 2012
Adobe has a winner of an upgrade in InDesign CS6. The combination of improvements to its digital publishing tools, PDF forms authoring, language support, and dozens of workflow refinements make this an upgrade that will surely pay for itself.
Apple Inc., which is expected to launch its next-generation iPhone later this year, has ordered screens from its Asian suppliers that are bigger than the ones used in iPhones since they debuted in 2007, people familiar with the situation said.
Production is set to begin next month for the screens, which measure at least 4 inches diagonally compared with 3.5 inches on the iPhone 4S, the latest phone from Apple, the people said.
Peter Mahoney, Nuance’s Chief Marketing Officer, said that Apple was popularising voice technology just as they had popularised digital music or the computer mouse. He said voice commands were growing in popularity as more processing power became available, and claimed that adoption has now “reached the elbow in the curve”.
He admitted that there was a long way to go before voice technology achieved “full Star Trek-ness”, but he said that Apple’s Siri voice assistant was “driving a real, unprecedented renaissance in interest around voice”.
“Social magazine” Flipboard may have to think up a new tagline for itself, as tonight the company is rolling out an update which greatly expands its focus beyond text-based content to also include audio. The rollout features integrations from NPR, PRI (Public Radio International) and social sound platform, SoundCloud.
Two ways to make text larger automatically in your web browser. (When I first read the headline, I thought Christopher Breen is going to tell us how to automatically smart zoom. I would like that.)
Glassboard, a communications app for small businesses and groups, has gotten a stellar update, bringing a completely redesigned app with improved notifications, new navigation and file sharing support. More importantly, it’s good enough that it could help you kill off a ton of the email mucking up your creative process.
Due provides just enough task-tracking functionality without the hassle of a full-featured GTD app, allowing me to actually get things done—instead of spending the day making lists.
Tue, May 15, 2012
The latest update to OS X Lion - OS X 10.7.4 - is causing some issues for users including lost network connections, problems with RAID storage devices, frustration at lost resolution options, and more. But amongst the grumbles, many are glad that Apple has decided to stop defaulting to open all windows at start up.
If you don’t have access to a corporate VPN, you do have an alternative: VPNs-for-hire that anyone can use, which provide many of the same protections as those company VPNs. These services rent VPN access by the month or by the year. Their servers live in data centers around the world, and you use the client software built into OS X or iOS to protect connections between your machines and those servers.
Jobs predicts that in the absence of credible competitors, Amazon would begin offering publishers less favorable terms.
"What the iPad has done has given her a sense of control that she never had before," Siddiqui said. "She knows when you touch it, something is supposed to happen. She knows she doesn't need to cry, she needs to point."
At first, Sharia enjoyed watching movies and playing games. However, through therapy and at home, she was introduced to apps such as Proloquo2Go, First Words, ABCs and Me and Puzzle Me, to name a handful. She soon learned to put together short sentences like "I want Dora" to express what she wanted.
While it’s expected that beta software is unfinished and you use it at your own risk, it’s abnormal for a beta version of one product (Messages Beta for Mac) to affect a finished app on a different product (iMessage for iPhone).
Apple has now brought OS X 10.5 (Leopard) up to speed with Lion, at least when it comes to security. The company issued updates to Leopard users on Monday with Leopard-friendly copies of the Flashback removal tool that was released to Lion users last month, as well as the ability given to Lion users last week to disable out-of-date versions of Flash in Safari.
I would be surprised if iCloud wasn’t a very large part of WWDC this year.
The new features, which could be announced at Apple's world-wide developer conference beginning June 11, will allow iCloud users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users and to comment on them, [people familiar with the matter] said.
The Cupertino, Calif., company is also working on a new feature that will allow iCloud users to sync their personal videos via iCloud, these people said, adding that Apple also plans to allow users to access "Notes" and "Reminders"—two of its apps for jotting down quick thoughts—through iCloud.com. Currently, those items have to be accessed via apps for those features.
Mon, May 14, 2012
Our anti-stalking guide for iPhone users spells out the subtle (and often invisible) ways in which someone could track you via your own phone, and it teaches you how to change your settings to keep yourself in control.
Apple’s impact on design has enjoyed much acclaim and is noticeable in almost any new technology designed. But what may be overlooked is the impact Apple has had on the user experience and how users interact with technologies. And that impact goes far beyond just Apple devices.
At 3:00 PM yesterday, I had a meeting scheduled across town, and in order to ensure that I remembered in plenty of time to get there, I had set an alert to go off an hour ahead of time. Precisely as requested, at 2:00 PM, my iMac beeped and flashed a reminder on its screen. So did my MacBook Pro. And my iPhone 4S, and my old iPhone 4 that I now use for testing. And my new iPad, and my iPad 2 that’s still in use. And my wife’s Mac, and her iPhone, and her iPad, since I shared my calendar with her. That’s right: Nine devices in our household beeped and displayed reminders for the very same event!
Apple’s Braeburn Capital is the fruit of policies based on the belief that low taxes are the elixir sure to cure all the state’s economic ills.
What has happened is that companies like Apple might register here and open a small office or a warehouse to take advantage of the tax structure, but they do little else. Sure, that’s better than nothing, but that’s hardly the way to build or diversify the economy.
Though most companies file design and product patents simply to keep their property safe, Isaacson says Jobs' motives were slightly different: Jobs was promoting the value of design as well as function.
Design is a function.
In other words, if you installed Flash Player 10.1.102.64 on your Mac in November 2010 (or later), Apple considers your installation “up to date.” That was more than 18 months ago. Since that time, Adobe has delivered 17 Flash Player updates that affected the Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms.
Sun, May 13, 2012
Recent versions of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash Professional—the company's high-profile Creative Suite applications—have security vulnerabilities on both Mac and Windows platforms. Late Friday night, Adobe confirmed its plan to issue free patches to fix the problems in all three applications—a reversal of its previous strategy that would have forced users to pay for a CS6 upgrade in order to rectify the problems.
On top of criticising the company for imposing its own moral judgement on apps and content, the duo also questioned whether Apple devices were stopping people from contributing to their digital worlds.
Of course, there's really nothing from stopping Apple customers to also use the Web from inside the walled garden.
Sat, May 12, 2012
This is a high-pressure switch for Apple. Regressions will not be acceptable. The purported whiz-bang 3D view stuff might be great, but users are going to have pitchforks and torches in hand if practical stuff like driving and walking directions are less accurate than they were with Google’s data. Keep in mind too, that Android phones ship with turn-by-turn navigation.
The most important aspect of the new Maps application is a powerful new 3D mode. The 3D mode does not come enabled by default, but users simply need to click a 3D button that is conveniently and visibly stored in the app. Perhaps under the fold like the current traffic, pin, and map view buttons. This 3D mode is said to essentially be technology straight from C3 Technologies: beautiful, realisitic graphics based on de-classified missile target algorithms.
Fri, May 11, 2012
Having originally been rejected for inclusion in Apple’s App Store, Dropbox-centric camera app Cambox was today approved by Apple, signifying that Dropbox’s amended SDK has appeased Apple’s App Store approval teams.
The other day, with the battery running down, I had an idea. I charged up my old iPad, so it would serve as a backup, next time the battery ran down on the new iPad. And the next day I got to use it, and here's the thing -- I like it better than the new one! It's lighter, the battery lasts longer, and when it runs down it charges much more quickly. Having gotten used to the new iPad, the old one feels like an upgrade!
This gadgety interface which is very hard to navigate makes for nice eye candy, but it is the least user-friendly interface of any feature in OS X.
Thu, May 10, 2012
Apple Inc and its key supplier Foxconn Technology Group will share the initial costs of improving labor conditions at the Chinese factories that assemble iPhones and iPads, Foxconn's top executive said on Thursday.
Foxconn chief Terry Gou did not give a figure for the costs, but the group has been spending heavily to fight a perception its vast plants in China are sweatshops with poor conditions for its million-strong labor force. It regards the criticism as unfair.
PDFPenPro is an excellent PDF editing tool that offers even more features than it’s possible to cover in this review. While I’d be happier with text editing options that have a more integrated feel, PDFPenPro makes editing a wide array of PDF files a snap. OCR, iCloud file sharing, document indexing, form editing, an a broad array of other features make PDFPenPro an excellent PDF editing tool and a supreme bargain.
One of the new security features is that Safari will automatically disable old versions of Adobe’s Flash Player.
Apple has just pushed out a major update to OS X weighing in at over 700 MB. The update brings a number of patches to Lion, including a major update to FileVault that patches the recent security bugs.
The orangutans at Miami's Jungle Island apparently are just like people when it comes to technology. The park is one of several zoos experimenting with computers and apes, letting its six orangutans use an iPad to communicate and as part of a mental stimulus program. Linda Jacobs, who oversees the program, hopes the devices will eventually help bridge the gap between humans and the endangered apes.
The 4.2 update to Evernote for iOS takes the iPhone app into the right direction for note-taking, whether it’s rich text, media, plain text, or a combination of all of them.
Repeat this process for any additional pins you wish to drop. When you need to locate one of these locations, tap the Bookmarks icon in Map’s Search field, and tap the appropriate entry.
How to add multiple pins in iOS' Maps app.
Microsoft today announced the availability of the Office for Mac 2011 14.2.2 Update. According to Microsoft, "this update fixes extremely important issues and also helps improve security. It includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code."
Wed, May 9, 2012
Retailer Brookstone this year will start selling a portable fuel cell able to charge smartphones a dozen times before running out.
Pricing for the Brookstone fuel cell itself was not disclosed but the cartridges themselves, which are made of plastic and hold butane, will cost a few dollars, or “about the same as coffee from Starbucks,” said Mouli Ramani, vice president of business development at Lilliputian Systems.
Photoshop CS6 is overflowing with new features and productivity enhancements. The auto-save feature plus the blur filters alone are worth the upgrade price and the Camera Raw enhancements produce better-looking images faster than ever before. If you dabble in video, CS6 relieves you of the burden and expenditure of learning another program just for video-editing. If you don't work with 3D, medical imaging, or quantitative analysis, you should be fine with Photoshop CS6, which will save you $300 off the price of the extended version. Regardless, if you’re a professional designer or photographer, you simply can’t afford to miss this upgrade.
Regardless of how or why Zoom can be enabled inadvertently, if you’re experiencing this problem, here’s how to solve it. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Zoom, and turn Zoom off. If, on the other hand, you’re thinking, “Hey, it might be nice to be able to zoom the screen on occasion,” you can turn Zoom on, and remember that the magic incantation to invoke it is a double-tap with three fingers.
OnePAD is a new notebook app for iOS that is organized around the idea of using one page for each day. I know lots of folks that are day driven and/or keep paper notebooks this way — allocating a page for each day.
David Saleh Rauf And Jonathan Allen,
Politico:
Unlike Facebook, Google and Microsoft, Apple has no political action committee. And while Google and Microsoft have aggressive news media operations in Washington, Apple doesn’t. That standoffish approach to D.C. may have worked fine in the Steve Jobs era, but the charismatic leader’s death last year left Apple without its reality distortion field.
Apple’s defenders say it prefers to work more subtly behind the scenes and that it has moved the needle on some legislative issues.
As far as I’m concerned, Apple has serious work to do to restore its customers’ confidence. That work needs to start with a competent Chief Security Officer and a commitment to communicate with its customers about security issues. And it needs to cooperate with independent security researchers and its competitors. And yes, that includes Microsoft, which has a tremendous amount of knowledge gathered over more than a decade.
Apps did take over. But not in a way that's going to make any publisher on Earth happy.
Tue, May 8, 2012
Although my first day with iPhoto was filled with many Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moments, by the end of the week I acknowledged that there’s nothing wrong with an app that requires you to actually learn some new things.
Using the Beaming feature, users can wirelessly share edited photos across devices without iCloud, Dropbox, or other cloud-based services. Instead, Beaming uses a shared Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection to allow users to share photos between devices with the iPhoto app installed.
Simply put, Windows 8 could be the ball and chain that drags down Office and SharePoint, as iPad and Android users discover there's life without Office and SharePoint.
Old-school train conductors are finally ready to give up their hole punchers to try something new: the iPhone.
The German news magazine Focus announced Sunday that it has altered the digital version of its current issue, screening the bared breasts of the female front cover model to avoid a possible run-in with Apple.
But take a minute to contemplate that word "assembled." Those Chinese factory workers aren't making Apple products from scratch; they're putting them together from pre-existing components -- components that weren't built in the same factory, or even in the same country. Curious about how the family tree of a typically complex piece of computer equipment, I decided to try to track down the origins of the major components in that computer -- a mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro model. Where did it come from before it got to me? How many parents did it have? The journey travels over much of Asia, of course, but there are also components that come from right here in the U.S.A.
Georges Schmit, Luxembourg Trade and Investment Office,
New York Times:
In the European Union, every iTunes customer, or customer of any other Luxembourg-based business to consumer e-service provider, pays value-added tax (VAT) — a consumption tax similar to the United States sales tax — at the same, lowest possible rate. This is not the result of these e-service providers’ intent to cheat the taxman.
Luxembourg and iTunes S.à.r.l. simply apply prevailing E.U. tax law in a well-functioning Internet-based E.U. single market.
Users howled when Microsoft tried to lock down Windows. Now Apple is upping its own security — and everyone loves it.
Perhaps it's how you do it?
But I think Pontin is right when he says that many of these technical or structural issues weren’t even the biggest problem for content apps. The biggest problem is that apps are walled gardens by design — most allow you to share articles through social media, but they don’t contain links and in most cases they don’t have comments either. And that just doesn’t fit with the way many people consumer content now, especially the assumption that users will download a single app or subscribe to a single provider instead of using aggregators or apps like Flipboard and Zite.
If Apple continues this policy, Snow Leopard users will stop seeing patches about the time Mountain Lion ships. Apple has not set a hard date for OS X 10.8's debut, although it has pegged "late summer."
But Snow Leopard currently accounts for 41.5% of all versions of OS X, according to Web metrics company Net Applications' latest statistics. Assuming Snow Leopard's share continues to drop at the average pace of the last six months, it will still power 34.4% of all Macs in August or 32.6% in September.
Mon, May 7, 2012
While many of the challenges are repetitive, there’s more depth here than I expected. I continued unlocking new tricks and challenges long after I thought I would have run through the game’s options.
As far as users are concerned, the Mac version is identical to the Windows tool: It pings Adobe's servers every hour until it gets a response. If it reaches Adobe and finds no ready update, the tool re-checks the servers 24 hours later. Found updates, however, are applied entirely in the background, and do not display notices on the screen or require the user to take any action.
When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn't really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, "walled gardens," and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media.
Wireless carriers are taking their first steps to change the terms of smartphone deals that have mostly benefited phone makers like Apple Inc., in a push that could leave consumers paying more for devices like the iPhone.
With the latest Lion security update, Mac OS X 10.7.3, Apple has accidentally turned on a debug log file outside of the encrypted area that stores the user’s password in clear text.
So I don't expect that using a computer as a home studio — or for video editing, another data-intensive proposition — would make a meaningful difference in the drive's lifespan.
But, as also recommended by Mr Pegoraro, backup your data frequently.
Snapchat allows a person to take and send a picture and control how long it is visible by the person who receives it, up to 10 seconds. After that, the picture disappears and can’t be seen again. If the person viewing the picture tries to use an iPhone feature that captures an image of whatever is on the screen, the sender is notified.
Sun, May 6, 2012
If Randall Stephenson is kept up at night by iMessage, he is a very shallow thinker. Text messaging was dead the second a mobile phone connected to the internet.
Some educational establishments use iTunes U purely for promotional video and public content, whereas others avoid it all together; citing the needs of training and a lengthy process of transitional which is not viable.
Apple indeed has many things to be proud of, but it's too bad that so many Americans are not sufficiently proud of Apple. It's no comfort that they are not really anti-Apple; they are anti-profit. A country that listens to such critics, taxing and regulating its most successful businesses into mediocrity, does not deserve to collect taxes from anyone.
Richard Einhorn, a composer who suddenly lost much of his hearing two years ago, relies on his hearing aid, of course, for general use. But when he is meeting friends at a busy coffee shop — where his hearing aid is not always good at distinguishing their voices amid the clatter — he removes it. He has a better solution.
Sat, May 5, 2012
Slow Feeds by Stefan Pauwels is an iPhone app that does one thing well: it separates “slow” from high-volume feeds, and it lets you check out both within a single interface. It fixes a simple problem with a unique, yet totally obvious approach: it understands the convenience of RSS for either “low” and “high” volume websites, and doesn’t treat them equally.
Apple is preparing updates to its Java 6 runtime for OS X 10.6 and 10.7, which will allow it to better co-exist with future versions of the Java runtime. These updates will soon be available for OS X 10.6 as "Java Update 9" and for OS X 10.7 as "Java Update 2012-004."
What's different with the $399 iPad 2 is that Apple used it as a vehicle to introduce a new hardware platform, or more specifically, a new SoC.
Make sure, if you are buying one, that you are getting the new iPad 2, and not the older one.
When Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive, spoke about the state of the wireless industry at a conference this week, he shared some surprisingly frank comments about the iPhone. In particular, he said that he wished the company had never offered an unlimited data plan for the device and that he loses sleep over free texting services like Apple’s iMessage.
And yet the telco continues to 1. charge high prices for SMS, and 2. not expand SMS to any internet-capable devices.
CornerClick changes your hot corners to activate with a click or a long hover, so you won't accidentally activate them, while also adding tons of other actions you can perform.
The term iTunes Match needs to be taken quite literally. Expecting it to do something other than “match” your local files to ones in the cloud is the extent of its capabilities. The moment your local listing changes, so does Apple’s commitment to giving you the tools to back up your files. It’s not called iTunes Backup, or iTunes Streaming, which actually illustrates an important point – there’s a lot of room for iTunes Match to grow up, and we hope that Apple decides to turn iTunes Match into a legitimate cloud service sooner rather than later.
There is no shortage of stories about lone developers who made an app for the iPhone or iPad and had runaway success. But in the real world, the majority of app makers struggle to break even, according to a recent survey by marketing firm App Promo. Though the survey's methodology is a bit on the light side, numerous developers that we spoke to agree that the results—59 percent of apps don't break even, and 80 percent of developers can't sustain a business on their apps alone—are close to accurate.
Apple has finally given a public nod to OpenStreetMap, almost two months after it began using OSM's mapping data within iPhoto for iOS. The OpenStreetMap team tweeted about the change on Thursday evening, noting that the app, which was updated earlier this week with relatively minor fixes, quietly gained an OSM mention in the credits.
Fri, May 4, 2012
Apple is recalling a batch of Mac Pro towers in the UK after a "small number" sold last month turned out to have defective hard disks.
Dropbox’s ability to let you easily share files on the Internet makes it possible for you to host Web pages as well. While this isn’t necessarily the most elegant solution, it will work until you find a more permanent Web design tool and Web host.
In this article, I’ll give you an exclusive hands-on introduction to RubyMotion and describe how it can be used to build software for iOS. The article includes the full source code of a simple iOS demo application I created that displays the top stories from reddit.
There’s a simple way to curb this kind of corporate tax dodging, of which Apple is only one prominent example: repeal the tax rule that indefinitely exempts offshore profits from United States corporate income tax.
Apple Inc. must face a lawsuit over claims it collected data from customers’ iPhones while they used applications approved by the company, a judge ruled.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, today dismissed some of the claims in the case while allowing others to proceed to pretrial fact-finding.
LibreOffice is a free Microsoft Office-like suite of apps for the Mac (and PC), based on the Open Office open source suite.
"Rock Band for iOS will remain live – the in-app message users received yesterday was sent in error," a representative for EA told us. "We apologize for the confusion this caused. We're working to clarify the issue that caused the error and will share additional information as soon as possible."
For the visually impaired community, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 seemed at first like a disaster -- the standard-bearer of a new generation of smartphones was based on touch screens that had no physical differentiation. It was a flat piece of glass. But soon enough, word started to spread: The iPhone came with a built-in accessibility feature. Still, members of the community were hesitant.
But no more. For its fans and advocates in the visually-impaired community, the iPhone has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary developments since the invention of Braille. That the iPhone and its world of apps have transformed the lives of its visually impaired users may seem counter-intuitive -- but their impact is striking.
Thu, May 3, 2012
Then again, we’ve known about Apple’s App Store policies for nearly a year, and we know Apple’s not bashful about enforcing them. From Apple’s standpoint, the company no doubt believes it’s closing a potential backdoor that might be exploited were it to approve external linking of this sort. The downside is that, in pursuing this sort of aggressive protectionism, the company appears to be obstructing simplicity and usability by problematizing the way interdependent apps interact.
People who own the game have been reporting a pop-up message titled "Dear Rockers", which continues thus: "On May 31, Rock Band will no longer be playable on your device. Thanks for rocking out with us!"
Yes, and thanks for spending money via in-app purchases on songs to play at 69p a time, too.
I think Apple is entitled to their cut too — just so long as they continue to do an excellent job vetting the apps.
Getting a 30% cut on everything also makes things simple for Apple: there is no need to classify things and make arbitrary decisions.
My take on this is that while Mac users must be careful where they surf, and Apple will have to step up its game against these attacks, an unprotected Macintosh is still, in daily use, far less likely to become infected than an unprotected Windows PC. How users handle this depends on their habits and their tolerance, both for risk, and for the downsides of constantly running security software, which can sap resources and be annoying. I advise all Windows users to run such software. But I see it as optional for Mac users, at least today.
I, for one, continue to trust Apple to have my best interest in mind, but I do wish Apple will respond faster in the future.
After over a year of testing addresses with the help of a small team, Patricia Wells, the award-winning author and former food critic for The International Herald Tribune, condensed her favorites into The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, the digital version of her pre-eminent culinary bible of the same name last updated in 1999.
I had heard anecdotally that some people had been having issues with Apple’s recent security upgrade for at least some iTunes accounts, but it’s hard to know what to make of such reports until you experience the problems yourself. And, sadly, I can now understand what others have gone through.
Despite some interface limitations, Amazon Cloud Drive certainly works for quickly storing your documents online. If you prefer full two-way sync, however, you may prefer one of its (ever more numerous) competitors.
The new Apple TV eats near-Blu-ray quality X.264 video for breakfast—but when it comes to audio, the device is a picky one. With AirPlay streaming, on the other hand, audio is much more flexible than video. What's going on inside the diminutive media player, and what should those of us doing our own audio/video encoding keep in mind?
Wed, May 2, 2012
Microsoft has detected a new piece of malware targeting Apple OS X computers that exploits a vulnerability in the Office productivity suite patched nearly three years ago.
The security update that Microsoft released in June 2009, MS09-027, addressed two vulnerabilities that could be used by an attacker to gain remote control over a machine and run other code. Both vulnerabilities could be exploited with a specially-crafted Word document.
As iOS apps become increasingly connected with third-party services and APIs, it’s going to be difficult for developers to keep track of websites and login pages that may or may not contain purchase mechanisms Apple doesn’t like.
Reason for rejection is the fact that if the user does not have Dropbox application installed then the linking authorization is done through Safari (as per latest SDK).
Once the user is in Safari it is possible for the user to click "Desktop version" and navigate to a place on Dropbox site where it is possible to purchase additional space.
Apple views this as "sending user to an additional purchase" which is against rules.
As I look past the horizon, I see more and more developers catering to the diverse audience of mobile gamers and creating more opportunities for gamers like me to lose themselves in beautifully crafted worlds of substance.
Apple's decision to shutter iWork.com comes after its transition of its MobileMe service to iCloud, which provides an online syncing and storage option that is system-wide and usable by any program designed for it, and not only for a specific suite of tools.
Seamless allows you to easily transition a song, podcast, or audiobook mid-play from your Mac to an iOS device, and vice versa. The Mac and iOS apps even coordinate fades on each device, bringing the volume of “Don’t Stop Believin’” down on your Mac as it cranks up the volume on your iPhone.
The Financial Times is preparing to kill off its iPad and iPhone app for good, signalling its final conversion from executable-app to web-app publishing.
Tue, May 1, 2012
While these three apps approach playing music differently, you may find that one of them offers something you are missing in the default Music app. Try them out and see if you get more out of your music.
If you poke a little deeper into that second claim, however, you’ll discover that the facility will not directly run on renewable energy. Instead, Apple’s utility provider for the site will buy renewable energy credits (RECs) to make up the difference.
As a result, Greenpeace hasn’t really budged in its position.
Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough says it will feature materials from the patent office and archival material from the Smithsonian’s collections. It will include an Apple Macintosh computer, mouse and keyboard; a NeXT monitor, keyboard and mouse; an Apple iPod; and copies of documents.
Part of the justification for such an expensive cable is that in order to maintain the high bandwidth in the cable, Apple has needed to implement active electronics to stabilize and condition the signal. While Thunderbolt could maintain connectivity using a cable without such electronics, interference and attenuation of the signal over the distance in the cable would result in degraded performance that would limit bandwidth.
In an e-mail sent to developers this afternoon and forwarded on to CNET, Apple urged developers to start signing their apps and other software with their Apple Developer ID certificate so they will get by Gatekeeper, a security feature that's built into Apple's next OS and designed to keep malware at bay.
Bartender allows you to hide specific menu bar apps or all of them as you like, making the top strip on your Mac monitor just that bit more classy looking.
A few weeks before Steve Jobs passed away, I was at Apple having lunch with a leader there. We revisited the well-known story of Jobs returning to an almost-bankrupt Apple. Jobs could have tried to maximize profits by squeezing every cent out of each of the existing product lines. But instead, he led the charge to remove scores of products. (At the time, Apple had a dozen versions of the Macintosh alone.) Jobs cut out profitable business lines at a time when the company appeared it could least afford to do so, culling the business down to four clear product lines. My lunch companion and I agreed that this atypical move was critical to the Cupertino company's transformation into what is arguably the most valuable business in the world.
But then my Apple lunch companion wondered aloud: "Why don't more CEOs bring greater clarity to what their companies should not be doing?" It's a significant question.
The bright side is that, even with some of America's largest companies paying mere pennies of every earned dollar to the federal government, this isn't the best place to focus on our national revenue crisis. Corporate income taxes account for less than 10% of government revenue -- a quarter of payroll or federal income taxes. We can't prevent Apple and Google from shuttling their dollars around Europe and the Caribbean. But maybe if we acknowledged that international income is international and gave up trying to tax it at the world's highest marginal rate, we could focus the tax revenue debate where it belongs: on Americans earners.
As both stories show, Apple and Google are doing a digital version of what manufacturing companies have done for decades when they shifted production to low-tax jurisdictions, either in the United States or overseas—only with much more ease. Because high-tech firms traffic in intellectual property packaged as a series of electronic bits, these companies are able to outsmart a tax code written in the age of factories.
There is room for even bolder ideas for reforming our tax code to end the loopholes and gamesmanship that disadvantages countries around the world. It's past time to take our fight for tax reform up a notch, with a combination of loud protest and smart proposals.
In our performance tests, we found the two iPad 2s to be nearly as identical as their outside appearances. The 32nm iPad 2’s Sunspider score of 1.8 was identical to that of the 45nm iPad 2. The two iPad 2s also posted identical results for the NY Times page load.
Let’s assume that Apple’s North American sales of $38.3 billion in its fiscal 2011 were taxed at that rate, and do the math: We get $3.7 billion in sales taxes paid into the coffers of states and municipalities, except in those five states that have no such tax. That amounts to more than 1.5 times the $2.4 billion the Times says Apple would have owed the federal government. Factor in VAT and other similar taxes in the U.K. and throughout Europe, and you get the idea that Apple is generating tax revenue aplenty on the sale of its goods.