Apple

Apps that make the iPhone and iPod touch game-changers in tech

Posted 14 Dec 2008 by Laura Scott

iPhone screenshot
The online world changed for me this year. I discovered the handheld — or rather what the handheld promises to be. I had a Palm 700p before. It was a good phone. Qwerty keyboard. Great reception. Worked just about anywhere. But after more than 2 years with the Palm, I just had to try the iPhone, the multitouch interface, the motion sensor. But I had no idea what worlds would be opened up over the months since — mostly not by Apple directly, but by the creative minds creating some applications that strike me as almost mind-blowing.

I almost didn't go for it. For many months I resisted. I'd had AT&T service before, and did not want to go back. But that GUI tempted me.

It's a good GUI, and even the awkward keyboard laid out for 9-year-old fingers is saved by the rather smart active spellcheck.

But ever since firmware 2.0, the iPhone has been something else.

Apps.

Me not available

Posted 13 Jun 2008 by Laura Scott

When the Apple Store came back up after revamping, somewhere around the WWDC this week, I went to http://me.com and was redirected to the Apple MobileMe page.

But for the past 2 days now, me.com has been down. DNS is hell.

Fear of the white hat

Posted 4 Apr 2008 by Laura Scott

Via MacWorld:

“This is not good; this is a security risk,” he said. “We’re a bank.”

Wilson said it has taken him the better part of a week to remove Safari from his network and prevent it from being reinstalled.

In an e-mail interview, Susan Bradley agreed that the updates are creating a problem for administrators and making users less secure. “It impacts all of us when more potential attack surface is installed in a group of folks that are vulnerable enough as it is,” said Bradley, who is chief technology officer with Tamiyasu, Smith, Horn and Braun, Accountancy Corp.

Of course I don't have any stats, but I wonder how many of these IT folks are the same ones keeping IE6 alive.

Unboxing the Apple iPhone

Posted 25 Mar 2008 by Laura Scott
iPhone box

Last week, after suffering through the appalling un-usability of the Blackberry 8830 "worldphone" throughout DrupalCon -- which followed more than a year suffering from my worst technology purchase ever -- I bit the bullet and swallowed my distaste of Apple's increasingly closed-and-controlling technology, and my lingering resentment of AT&T Wireless (ugh) by going into the Apple store and buying an iPhone.

Yeah, I know. I'm sooooooo late to the party.

I was drawn by the user interface, not the newly "opened" application development path that has gotten all the press. The user interface was enough.

And wow, did my interest ever pay off!

Apple's in the wrong, but Safari really is the better browser

Posted 22 Mar 2008 by Laura Scott

As a citizen and computer user, I agree that Apple is wrong to push Safari on Windows users:

Debate is raging today over the news that Steve Jobs has made good on his summertime promise and is now sending Apple's browser Safari along for the ride when Windows users are prompted to update iTunes or Quicktime.

Users can deselect the additional software download, but let's be realistic - there's got to be millions of people unwittingly downloading Safari onto their computers right now. Downloading software has to be opt-in, not opt-out.

EULA blues: How can I synchronize Yojimbo without .Mac?

Posted 31 Jul 2007 by Laura Scott

After comparing many programs for my regular note-taking, I keep returning to Yojimbo. The tagging system and spotlight support are enough for me to find my misc notes. Syncing via .Mac has a nice wrinkle in that it will merge changes to individual files, so if you update a file on one computer, and another file on the other computer, when you sync them both changes are reflected on both machines. Still, while the tagging approach can be fast, creating more complex relationships is difficult, if not impossible. In the end, Yojimbo is not ideal, and I'm still planning on trying alternatives, but this is what I have.

What's worse, I'm kind of painted into a corner because BareBones has decided, in their wisdom, to provide no way at all to export your items except one at a time. There's also no way to export for backup, unless you want to manually back up the Yojimbo Application Support folder in your user Library.

Welcome to the Apple Couldn't Care Less Plan

Posted 17 Jul 2007 by Laura Scott

It doesn't take a "genius" to know that there is something seriously wrong with my MacBook Pro. When you can't hold a wi-fi connection and get the gray screen of death two or more times a day, you pretty much have a worthless piece of junk taking up space.

I took it into the Apple Store on Twenty-Ninth Street and was greeted by a guy dressed more for playing ultimate frisbee than for working pretty much any kind of retail. I told him about the problems I was having and he snorted -- this was a familiar problem, apparently.

He walks me up to a computer "to make an appointment." Apparently nowadays you cannot have a problem with your Mac unless you have an appointment. Those of us with unscheduled failures can just twist in the wind.

After having to type in my contact information, he navigates to a screen and says, "You can have an appointment tomorrow."

"I need an appointment to have a problem taken care of?" I asked.

The pleasure of unboxing an 8-core Mac Pro

Posted 1 Jun 2007 by Laura Scott

It's not just that we were unboxing a top-of-the-line Mac. It's that we were experiencing the unboxing of an Apple product.

unboxing a Mac Pro

The box itself was a little battered. Opening the box entailed cutting the shipping tape along the top opening. In fact, that's as hard as the unboxing got. No more tape to cut or structured plastic to try to rip open. One seal. That's it. (Compare that with opening your typical DVD.)

unboxing a Mac Pro[Note: Please pardon the darkness of the shots. I blame a dark room and a built-in flash.]

It's been apparent for a while that Apple knows what it's doing in terms of presentation and customer experience when it comes to the big moment when you open the package for the first time. The Mac Pro is no exception. Feast your eyes on keyboard and a black box with simple writing. No inserts. No "STOP! READ THIS BEFORE OPENING!" No 3-foot-wide fold-out idiot's guide to connecting a computer.

An Apple Store a day keeps the dreadful designs at bay

Posted 24 May 2007 by Laura Scott

So we learn from Secret Notes:

Apple's stylish stores and computers, all of which feature unrestricted Internet access, have become such the hang-out and gathering place for MySpace junkies that the powers that be have elected to block the popular social networking site from its systems.

By the close of business Thursday, most Apple retail stores will have implemented the block, designed to reduce the level of loitering at the stores.

More likely Apple's design aesthetic just cannot brook dreadful MySpace page designs appearing within their bricks and mortar.

The horror! The horror!

"We don't want the whole world to be a college dorm"

Posted 5 May 2007 by Laura Scott

So says Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business and US sales for Sony BMG. That's right, the company that betrayed such contempt for the consumer by deliberately infecting its music CDs with its Rootkit, before stopping when it faced major PR and legal backlash, still has plenty of contempt for the consumer.

The article on the Forbes website -- itself littered with interstitial and numerous pop-up ads that make you just want to hurry back and experience more -- covers how music industry executives are fretting over life in the digital age.

“No intellectual property business is going to cross the digital divide without figuring out how to protect its content and to ensure that transactions are associated with the acquisition of content,’’ Nash said. “The music industry simply has to solve the content security problem or risk the obsolescence of its business model.’’

Pages

Subscribe to Apple