MyAppleMenu - Wed, Feb 25, 2015

Wed, Feb 25, 2015 The Deep-Thoughts Edition

Happy 65th Birthday, Mr Jack Handey.

Adobe vs. Apple: The Oscars Ad Shootout

Ken Segall's Observatory:

The thing is, when you’re paying millions to run a spot on the Oscars, you’re not just trying to send a message. You’re trying to create some buzz.

In this case, Apple made a pretty good ad. But Adobe made a really good one.

Are Apple's New 'Yellow Face' Emoji Racist?

Caitlin Dewey, Washington Post:

But hold your horses, Apple-haters: The yellow face has nothing to do with Asians, or with race at all. In fact, that bright gold-yellow color — a standard hue for emoticons since the AOL days — it intended to be ethnically neutral. As my colleague Abby Phillip explained in November, when emoji’s governing body proposed the new skin tones, they did it according to an actual, dermatological scale: It’s called the “Fitzpatrick scale,” and it was developed by a professor at Harvard Medical School in the ’70s to describe how different skin tones respond to ultraviolet light.

Forge Is an iPad Storyboard for Your Creativity

Serenity Caldwell, iMore:

I've long thought the iPad was perfect for rough storyboarding: It's not an artist's preferred medium for detail work, but it's portable, and easy to sketch on, and has plenty of storage space. Forge, built by the folks behind the Jot Touch stylus, invites you to explore a hundred different ideas and sketches in storyboard format, iterating and trashing and reinventing as you go. I've been testing Forge for months, and it's become one of my go-to tools for planning and messing around with creative ideas.

Outlook for iOS and Android Blocked by European Parliament

Loek Essers, IDG News Service:

The apps will send password information to Microsoft without permission and will store emails in a third-party cloud service over which the Parliament has no control, DG ITEC added in a message on the Parliament's intranet.

Apple's Packaging

Stuff.

Pointer Events Finalized, but Apple's Lack of Support Still a Deal Breaker

Peter Bright, Ars Technica:

Spec has support from Microsoft, Mozilla, jQuery, and sometimes Google. But not Cupertino.

Apple's Web?

Tim Kadlec:

Apple simply does not play well with other vendors when it comes to standardization. The same sort of things we once criticized Microsoft for doing long ago, we give Apple a pass on today. They’re very content to play in their own little sandbox all too often.

Develop.

The new playgrounds are especially useful for educators. You can insert rich instructional content with paragraph headings, diagrams, and links to additional material alongside the interactive Swift code.

DOJ Is Right About Apple e-Books

Theodore A. Gebhard, Wall Street Journal:

The case was about agreements on a vital dimension of competition, namely price. It has long been a universally accepted proposition in both law and economics that agreements among competitors to set and regulate prices are anticompetitive. Thus, the court correctly found the agreements illegal. It is no justification that the agreements were intended to wrest control over the pricing of e-books from Amazon, the dominant player in e-book retailing.

Notes.

Parting Words

Thanks for reading.