 Cult of MacRead Leander Kahney's latest commentary about Apple and Mac News in Wired.com's Cult of Mac Blog, including Mac, Mac Pro, MacBook, iMac, iBook, Mac mini, iPod video, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iTunes, iPhoto, iPhone, Apple TV, OSX, Steve Jobs, and Macworld. http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/ другие подписчики этой ленты также читают >> |
- Steve Jobs Makes $1 Salary; CFO Makes $71 Million
Apple's executives raked it in last year, and Steve Jobs took his customary $1 in salary. According to an SEC filing reported by Marketwatch: • Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer realized $56 million in value from the exercise of options...
Apple's executives raked it in last year, and Steve Jobs took his customary $1 in salary. According to an SEC filing reported by Marketwatch:
• Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer realized $56 million in value from the exercise of options during 2006. Oppenheimer also received a $615,000 salary, a $450,000 bonus and restricted stock valued at $14 million.
• Chief Operating Officer Timothy D. Cook received restricted stock valued at $22 million, a salary of $697,000 and a $525,000 bonus for 2006.
• Jobs has received the majority of his compensation through an equity grant and isn't eligible for a bonus, according to Monday's filing. He doesn't receive any other compensation, the company said.
lkahney - AppleTV: A Comprehensive User Review
Thomas Fitzgerald spent some quality time with his AppleTV and wrote up this thorough and interesting review. His conclusion? It's a great product, well thought out and executed. It is the Apple TV's integration with iTunes that makes it a...
Thomas Fitzgerald spent some quality time with his AppleTV and wrote up this thorough and interesting review. His conclusion? It's a great product, well thought out and executed.
It is the Apple TV's integration with iTunes that makes it a truly fantastic product. Again it's the little things. When you watch something on your iPod, and then sync it, it knows your playback position. When you watch a podcast, (if you set it to sync only recent episodes) it removes it and sends the next episode (but cleverly it waits till you have watched it to the end before it does so) Synching seems to happen often and as soon as you change something it will sync. It's pretty impressive and seamless. Another cool thing is that if you have slideshows set up in iPhoto when you sync your photos it remembers the music you had set with that slide show. I know it's simple little thing, but it just struck me as being indicative of the seamless integration across all Apple's products, that competitors just can't or don't want to achieve.
...Even if you live outside the US and don't have access to movies and TV shows on iTunes there are plenty of ways to get content onto the Apple TV. Two must have pieces of software are mediafork (aka handbrake) and visual hub. Visual hub does an excellent job of transcoding all those divx movies you may have acquired through whatever method you may have acquired them (and I'll make no comment or suggestions on that topic) with no significant loss in quality, which is a pretty impressive feat. Media fork does a similar job with DVDs.
lkahney - Whither Digital Album Art?
The record companies are selling more and more music online, but they're paying scant attention to digital packaging: there's no good album covers for online music. That's the conclusion of Adrian Shaughnessy at Design Observer, who's spent the last few...
The record companies are selling more and more music online, but they're paying scant attention to digital packaging: there's no good album covers for online music.
That's the conclusion of Adrian Shaughnessy at Design Observer, who's spent the last few months researching online alternatives to album art. And unfortunately, there aren't any.As downloading threatens to become the main distribution method for recorded music, it is widely believed that the album cover will be replaced by some new online format — perhaps animated — that will make CD packaging redundant. Well, I might be missing something, but I've found nothing in the digital arena that offers a viable alternative to a well-designed CD or vinyl album cover. Instead, I've discovered a grim-faced resistance movement amongst dozens of tiny record labels determined to hang onto physical packaging and expressive cover art, no matter what.
CoverFlow in iTunes -- which displays a JPEG of the album when a song is playing -- is a start. The artwork is static and there's no lyrics or band bios, but the artwork certainly helps navigate the music collection. It also makes the music feel like a collection, rather than just a bunch of files.
There are signs that the record companies are looking at iTunes and the iPod as a platform for designers to play with.
George White, Warner Music Group's senior VP of strategy and product development, put together a digital packaging demo for Apple to re-imagine album artwork as more than a JPEG on an iPod.
"We've been looking at a few technologies (for digital album art), and have been trying to bring these to Apple, to encourage them to bring that level of experience to the iPod," says White. "A very simple demonstration that we've done takes the Gnarls Barkley liner notes and does a fly-through (using Adobe Flash Lite). You're actually moving through the lyrics and artwork. It's sort of like a theme park ride through the album. It's really, really cool-looking on an iPod."
(Apple did not respond to questions about whether it's considering any of Warner Music Group's suggestions.)
White also pointed to Warner's Wamo pack, which gave Japanese cell phone users digital albums with ringtones, video, full tracks and artist interviews. Wamo packs aren't new -- they launched overseas a year ago. But White says Warner plans to produce more of these bundles. He also mentioned that while Wamo packs use Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, or SMIL, for their interactive menus, Adobe's Flash Lite would be a better candidate for "the level of sophistication people expect from Warner Music Group's artists."
(Adobe confirmed that Warner's iPod/Flash Lite demonstrations had taken place, but said that the company "has not announced any joint plans for Flash or Flash Lite to be used in next-generation digital albums.")
lkahney
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