Tag Archive for 'apple'

On Steve Jobs

Published on October 5, 2011 in personal and tech.

Like many others, Steve Jobs inspired me. About a year ago, a colleague of mine and I were in Santa Clara, CA for a developers conference. On the last day, there was a long stretch between the closing keynote and our flight out, and I insisted that we take a short detour on our way to San Jose and see Apple HQ. It was only a quick stop on a nerd pilgrimage, but a small part of me thought that we’d get a look at Jobs.

It didn’t happen, but seeing 1 Infinite Loop was an opportunity to pay homage to man and a company that has inspired me greatly over the last 15 years. From the first time I used a Mac in journalism school to the iPod reinvigorating my love for music to the time spent building an iPad app at work this week, my adult life has been unmistakably marked by Jobs’s vision at Apple.

He was an inspiration and a visionary and will be missed. God rest his soul.

Tags: , . Closed

Matt Drance on Google’s patent lamentations

Published on August 8, 2011 in business and tech.

From Apple Outsider:

It is a textbook example of why you don’t open your mouth before you’re ready to talk. This was a chance to set the record straight and turn the tables in this debate, and Google blew it. Most of the mistakes made were simple, avoidable failures of communication.

Like Drance, I agree with Google’s core premise that the patent system seems broken, but they failed to articulate the core issues and came off as whiny losers under the current rules of the game.

Tags: , , , . Closed

Apple Opens App Store to Third-Party Development Tools

Published on September 9, 2010 in tech.

Via MacRumors:

Apple today announced that it is making several changes to its App Store developer policies and procedures, with one of the most significant changes being an easing of its earlier move to ban third-party compilers such as Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler it had built into Flash Professional CS5. Under the new policies, such third-party tools will be permitted as long as the apps generated by them do not download any code.

This is a good move that potentially opens app store development to a much larger community and should help get regulators off of Apple’s back.  I’m excited to see some of the potential tools that could arise, but I am still skeptical as to how Apple will handle this loss in control of the app development process.

Notes

Tags: , , , . Closed

Wired goes inside the Apple-AT&T relationship

Published on July 19, 2010 in business and tech.

Sounds like a top to bottom clash of cultures and a divorce waiting to happen.

When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”

Tags: , , . Closed

OSU to start up iPad initiative

Published on July 1, 2010 in tech.

TUAW is reporting that my alma mater, Oklahoma State University, is starting a pilot program to evaluate how iPads can be used in the educational space. Handing out MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads isn’t a new concept, but this is one of the few instances where the use of the devices is being monitored to evaluate its academic value to the student.

…OSU is really interested in how their students will go about using them. The results should be intriguing, not only for the lucky college kids who get to use iPads all semester but also for Apple and for other schools that are formulating plans over how to share and use technology. It certainly seems like having an iPad at college would be helpful in the traditional ways (you could read textbooks or take notes on it), but it’s cool that OSU is thinking about new ways to use it as well, such as apps for tests or connections across local Wi-Fi for networked learning.

The program will start with a mere 125 students among a 20,000-plus student body. The iPad is thought of by many as a potential game-changer for education. So it will be interesting to see what the OSU experiment finds.

Tags: , , , . Closed
Stop SOPA