Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Apple Blog (5 сообщений)

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  RSS  The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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  • The Apple Horizon

    Can you foresee an Apple horizon, where one day the average Mac consumers out weigh a PC user? How long do you think that'll take to happen?

    The iPod began a new quest for Apple. A company set on innovation has taken our hearts with a simple, compact device for music. Well, it was music at first. Now with the mobility of the browser thanks to the iPhone and iPod Touch, we can love a new device and rely on it much in the same way. The question to me, is where can they go from here?
    (more…)

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    Комментарии к сообщению:
    http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/19/the-apple-horizon/#comments



  • Apple TV 'Take 2′ - Post Upgrade Melancholy

    For the past 24+ hours RSS readers around the globe have been awash with OS X 10.5.2 update news and notes on the ancillary side updates. The Cupertino software barrage continued today, including the Apple TV “Take 2″, which added access to iTunes rentals, Flickr/.Mac photos/movies and HD trailers.

    I started the download before my evening run and it was ready to install when I finally had time to complete the upgrade. What followed was a series of very un-Apple events. From the point I told it to start the process to being greeted with the new main menu I received practically no useful feedback apart from the pretty silver-grey Apple logo and a progress bar. I experienced waiting through at least three reboots, had “static” appear (briefly) and was finally placed into a completely foreign menu system. Apple provided no verbiage on what was going on nor whether each step was truly successful, and there were no “go to apple.com/… to learn more about the update” prompts to help me prepare for the feature changes & additions. While I didn’t need those prompts, I suspect there were more than a few Apple TV users who would have really appreciated them since navigation is – in some places – radically different.

    As far as the new features are concerned, Flickr & .Mac integration work very well (for as long as we have Flickr…sigh) and are easy to configure. I haven’t had the opportunity to try purchasing or renting anything from the integrated storefront (perhaps if they had managed to get Martian Child in on the Tuesday store update I would have had more reason to), but I suspect they made extra effort to get that right given how it sets up a nice, direct revenue stream for them. HD trailers, however, are just horrible. Wall•E (our two year old loves the trailer) stalled five times despite the Apple TV being hooked up via Ethernet and my Comcast link being very solid/speedy (contrast the trailer hiccups with the 180MB 10.5.2 update retrieval which downloaded in just under 2 minutes, though I realize it’s not a completely fair comparison).

    So, overall, I was left a bit disappointed after the update, but look forward to being able to use the new features as Apple expands their video library and improves retrieval of HD content.

    What’s your Apple TV ‘Take 2′ story and what are your thoughts on the update? If you’ve tried purchasing or renting directly from the Apple TV, how easy/seamless was it? Any hiccups with trailers, .Mac or Flickr? Share your experiences over at the Community or drop a note in the comments.

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  • Want to design the future of Apple's Pro Apps?

    Do you possess a relentless attention to detail, a gifted eye for aesthetics and the ability to quickly grasp and distill highly complex matters? Then you just may be qualified to design future versions of Final Cut Pro, Motion and Soundtrack Pro!

    Apple always has job openings, but it’s a bit rarer that they post one at mediabistro.com: Senior Human Interface Designer (free account required)

    Maybe they’re just having a hard time finding enough candidates who not only possess “complete mastery of the Mac OS X platform,” but also have:

    • Minimum 5 years of experience creating innovative and visually stunning user experiences. 
    • Degree in interaction design, human factor and/or visual design (or equivalent). 
    • An outstanding body of work demonstrating the successful delivery of innovative application interface design solutions. 
    • Deep understanding of Apple's human interface design language and the ability to translate it into future designs of Apple's professional applications.
    • Exceptional understanding of fundamental design disciplines (typography, composition, information architecture, color and animation) and principals (affordance, clustering, consistency, usability, etc.) 
    • Ability to create final graphic assets for flawless design implementation 

    Upon further reflection, that list could almost be Steve Jobs’ résumé. Oh, but “the candidate must be a natural collaborator who prefers developing designs in a team environment.” Sorry Steve. To apply for this position, go to jobs.apple.com 

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  • Crazy EDGE Outage

    att_logo.gifAs many folks have reported, AT&T’s EDGE network is struggling in the midwest. Outages have been patchy but seem to have affected entire cities, or at least large areas. But to my knowledge, there haven’t been any accounts of service dropping within inches…until now.

    Here I sit, in downtown Cincinnati, and of the three iPhones in my office, two of them have absolutely no cell service. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Any attempted call immediately fails. They are the equivalent of an iPod Touch, plus a camera. Fortunately for me, mine works perfectly fine and I get to just listen to the frustrations of my coworkers and not experience any of my own. But the rants really fired up when we decided to sit all three iPhones, each with the exact same hardware (purchased within two months of each other), side by side. Here’s what we saw:

    iphones_small.jpg

    Pretty weird. I’ve experienced similar things with people that have other phones on the same network, but never with the exact same hardware. So who’s to blame here? AT&T or Apple? Either way, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the outage, and I can say (from experience) that there are some really grumpy AT&T customers out there.

    So what about you, loyal TAB readers? Can anyone reproduce this?

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    Комментарии к сообщению:
    http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/01/crazy-edge-outage/#comments



  • MarsEdit Update Kicks Your Blogging Up A Notch

    MarsEdit

    I’m not one to get excited about dot-update releases from a software vendor, but a tool that was mentioned in my “must have” post – MarsEdit – has just updated from version 2.0 to 2.1, with that “0.1″ adding far more than a tenth of new features.

    One of my major complaints about the previous version has been the horrendous preview feature. While you could connect MarsEdit up to your site CSS style sheets fairly easily, rendering of your entries was always slow and buggy. The new preview feature is fast, responsive and (so far) bug/crash-free. This makes creating entries more fluid and enables you to trust what you see locally rather than having to preview posts on your site before publishing.

    One other great, new feature is the ability to search your posts locally. If you contribute to a number of blogs (public or private) or just post quite a bit, this can be a great way to go back and see if you’ve already hit upon a topic before. It can also be a great way to gather support materials for a new post. Since you can use MarsEdit as a note-taking system (you don’t have to post drafts to a server), this can also be a fantastic way to organize small bits of info you keep promising to find a place for.

    Finally – for Movable Type and WordPress users – authors have the ability to do free-tagging instead of picking from a list of defined keywords. I’m a huge Drupal fan, and Drupal does have free-tagging support, so perhaps Dan will read this humble post and work on interfacing with the Drupal API’s.

    MarsEdit is not free, but it’s a bargain at $30. Dan is very responsive in the ME forums and both he and the app have a presence on Twitter (when Twitter is actually up, that is).

    If you have any good/bad experiences with MarsEdit please drop a note in the comments and if you have alternative blogging client/post organization suggestions let us know as well (always good to hear from those three ecto users out there).

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