101 items tagged “apple”
2008
The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.
— Tim Bray
2007
The companies that couldn't beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft's strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.
How Time Machine works. From John Siracusa’s Leopard review. The bad news is that Time Machine doesn’t deal well with huge files that have small changes made to them... such as Parallels VM images.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review. John Siracusa’s 17 page review of Leopard, covering everything from UI tweaks to DTrace sample code. Smart use of embedded video and audio too—I suggest setting aside at least an hour to work through it all.
CSS Transforms. WebKit can now do transforms (scale, rotate, translate and skew) in CSS via a new -webkit-transform property. Transforms behave like position relative in that they don’t affect the layout of the page. You can also provide a full affine transform matrix as a shortcut.
WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage. SQLite strikes again. The WebKit team have included a neat update to their Web Inspector that lets you browse and modify your client-side databases.
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February.
Apple—Web apps. Interesting (and slightly confusing) to see Apple choose “Web apps” as the term for applications targeted at the iPhone and iPod touch.
I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that "It Just Works." By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the "Just Works" factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?
For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.
Ways in Which iTunes’s Just-Released Official Ringtone Support Is Weird, Rude, and/or Just Plain Buggy. I’ve long been saying that the existence of a ringtone “industry” is a bug, not a feature.
The Tale of the Mechanical Virus. “What I had discovered, in essence, was a mechanical virus. It infects Mac laptops and speads via the DVI adapters.”—I really hope this isn’t why my DVI adapter is on the blink.
It Is Estimated That NBC Could Not Have Screwed This iTunes Thing Up Any Worse. NBC’s request that Apple “stiffen anti-piracy provisions” is down-right scary.
The other interesting thing about the 1.0.2 update is that Apple didn't try to prevent the hacks that are out there [...] one would have assumed that Apple would have done something in this release as a sort of "shot across the bow" but they didn't, which bodes well for a future, more open platform.
Django on the iPhone. Jacob got it working. The next image in his photostream shows the Django admin application querying his phone’s local database of calls.
mobileterminal (via) The iPhone now has a GUI terminal application, which can run a comand-line SSH client. Now I really want one.
SproutCore (via) MVC JavaScript framework used to build the new .Mac Web Gallery application.
Die, Marker Felt, Die! How to replace Marker Felt in the iPhone notes application with Helvetica, via some hackery with jailbreak, MacFUSE and iphonedisk. By the time they arrive in the UK it looks like they’ll have been hacked wide open.
I heard that Foxconn - the place that makes the iPods and iPhones - consumes 3,000 pigs a day.
The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution.
Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone (via) Apple’s iPhone developer documentation.
Safari Beta 3.0.1 for Windows. A nice fast turnaround on fixes for security flaws in the beta.
Safari for Windows, 0day exploit in 2 hours (via) Once again, down to handling of alternative URL protocol schemes.
Enabling the debug menu on Safari for Windows. “Turn off site-specific hacks” is one of the menu options.
Safari 3 Public Beta. Safari for Windows. Unfortunately this kills the best excuse corporate Web developers had for getting Macs (“we need to run all our supported browsers on one machine”).
We declined to participate in the XHTML2 Working Group because we think XHTML2 is not an appropriate technology for the web.
Please, fanboys, don't send me dumb notes averring that Apple's failure to police this use of its mark will lead to the end of its ability to stop manufacturers from producing rival MP3 players and calling them iPods. That's a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their kids when they want to reassure them that they'll have a healthy college fund.
Reading Between the Lines of Steve Jobs’s ’Thoughts on Music’. John Gruber’s analysis.
If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.
Thoughts on Music. Steve Jobs comes out against DRM, lays the blame squarely on the big four music companies.