News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Apple is reporting tremendous sales of iPads, making it “the most quickly adopted non-phone electronic product” with 3 million sold in the first 80 days and an ongoing rate of 4.5 million per quarter.
Link: http://www.cnbc.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
If you have an older iPhone 3G and have found that it slows to a crawl under the latest iOS 4, there is a solution: downgrade to iOS 3.1.3. Note that this method only works for the iPhone 3G and not the 3GS—but there’s an entire forum dedicated to downgrading the 3GS, so perhaps it’s possible.
Thanks to Josh for this link.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
Apple has donated the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum. As with so many other components of the original Macintosh, MacPaint was an innovative and groundbreaking piece of software. The source code has even been studied by software engineers as an example of how to properly write code. I also find it interesting is that it’s so small—a mere 5822 lines of Pascal and 3583 lines of assembler. For modern programmers, that’s just a drop in the bucket.
Link: http://www.businessweek.com/…
(via TechRepublic)
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had a third partner when they first started Apple Computer. His name is Ron Wayne. And like the fifth Beatle, he left too early to get any of the benefits. The linked article gives specifics.
Link: http://www.mercurynews.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
This is really neat! Get the Scrabble app for the iPad, and you can use iPhones as the tile racks (via the Tile Rack app).
The nice thing about Apple products is that they’re easy to use. Apple is the master of user interface design. The bad thing about Apple products is when you need to do something they don’t expect you to do. Case in point: I moved my iTunes directory to a different hard drive, removed the old hard drive, and then expected everything to work.
I was able to change the directory in iTunes, no problem, but my library still thought most of the songs were on the old hard drive. I figured I could export the library, make changes, and then import it, but I was wrong. You can export via iTunes, but you can’t import—go figure…. After some investigation, I found the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file (a text file) and changed its entries to reference the new drive. That didn’t work either. After launching iTunes, it un-did the changes.
I learned that iTunes stores the library information in a file named “iTunes Library.itl”, which uses a proprietary binary format and cannot be easily edited. The XML file is generated from the library.
A web search found the linked article, which discusses how to restore an iTunes library from the XML file. The secret is to replace “iTunes Library.itl” with an empty file. iTunes will then recreate the library from “iTunes Music Library.xml”.
Link: http://hifiblog.com/…
The linked article has an embedded video showing what happened when the author gave an iPad to his two-year-old daughter. Her proficiency is almost scary, which says something very good about Apple’s ability to design user interfaces.
Last week Apple introduced its latest invention, the iPad. Despite the fanfare, I don’t believe the iPad will dramatically change the state of the art. I expect the chief reason for buying an iPad will be its advanced e-book reading capabilities.
The iPad has been described as a large iPhone. It can run all existing iPhone apps without modification. It runs the Safari web browser but has no support for Flash, which disables quite a few websites. It does not have a built-in camera, nor does it allow you to make phone calls (even VoIP is prohibited for now).
Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…
Link #2: http://www.engadget.com/…
A 13-year old boy gave up his iPod for a week and used an old Sony Walkman instead. It took him 3 days to realize there was a flip side to the cassette tape. (I once owned the same Walkman model that he used.) His reactions are quite interesting and show how far we’ve come in the area of portable music. On another note, the Walkman was recently named as the top music invention in the last 50 years.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)
Apple does not like Mac clones, but Psystar is going against Goliath and selling them anyway.
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
Link: http://www.psystar.com/…
At the WWDC last week, Apple made made several announcements about the iPhone. For current users there’s the upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0, which has many new features, including the following:
The OS will be available on June 17th.
Then there’s the new iPhone 3G S, which is similar to the iPhone 3G but has twice the speed, four times the disk space, and almost double the battery life. Engadget has a side-by-side comparison, and Consumer reports has a good overview. The 3G S will be priced at $199 (16GB) and $299 (32GB) for new and end-of-contract customers in the United States, and will go on sale June 19th.
The real controversy over the iPhone 3G S, however, is what’s happening to existing iPhone owners. If you’re already in the middle of less than a year into an AT&T iPhone contract, the prices go up by $200 (there is a cheaper way to do this). Additionally, the current iPhone 3G is being reduced in price to $99. So if you recently purchased one at the higher price, too bad for you. (There was an available credit, but it expired on June 14th.)
If you purchased a new 3G on or after May 9th, you can trade it in for a 3G S for a small restocking fee. According to the Consumerist, “AT&T has extended its one-month price protections for recent 3G purchasers to May 9 so iPhone 3G users who bought their phones that day or later can still turn it in and get the new iPhone 3G S for the same price on June 19. To qualify for this extended return policy, customers will need to visit an AT&T retail store and pre-order iPhone 3G S between June 8 and by June 18.”
Thanks to Josh for suggesting this topic.
Update: AT&T has changed its upgrade pricing for current subscribers who are 11 months or more into their contract. And it turns out that I was wrong in the article above—it was previously possible to get the less expensive 3G S prices if you were a year or more into your current contract.
Myst is my all-time favorite computer game. It’s now available as an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch—with enhanced graphics to boot!
Link: http://osxreality.com/…
(via digg)
