October 2011
19 posts
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Contentifying the Apple TV
The opinions from people like John Siracusa, John Gruber and Marco Arment about the next Apple TV have been that Apple needs its own content ecosystem, not to be chained to someone else’s. However, I don’t think that the opportunity exists for Apple to do that, and the benefits of doing so aren’t very clear.
The music and book publishers were not providing digital versions of...
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"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." →
Ten years ago, the iPod was released. A few minutes later, Slashdot found out. It’s fun reading people’s thoughts of the iPod ten years ago.
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It's Coming
I think it’s a sure thing now, though the timing won’t be. Between my own earlier speculation of an Apple TV with Siri integration, the noise that MG Siegler and Dan Frommer have been making about TV’s, and (most importantly) Steve Jobs’s own comments about an Apple TV, I think it’s safe to say that Apple is going to release a TV within a year or two. An A5 Apple TV...
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QR Codes - Looking for its Problem
QR codes, the ugly square barcodes meant to let you pull up lengthy info quickly on your mobile device, aren’t doing too well. In the survey that Sean Cummings did, only 5% of the people he talked to were able to decipher a QR code and get the information, and it took them an average of 47 seconds to do so.
I see three good reasons why this is the case.
It’s not obvious to most...
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"I Finally Cracked It." →
MG Siegler:
That’s what Steve Jobs revealed to Walter Isaacson in an interview for his forthcoming biography.
What was he talking about? The often rumored (and just as often dismissed) Apple television. Not the Apple TV, the current product, a full fledged television.
Ten bucks says that the crack was a usable no-hardware user interface.
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JimCloudman.com, 2012 Edition
Even before the unfortunate events of Tuesday night, my blog was due for a redesign. In retrospect the blog redesign last year might have been more minimalistic and perhaps even better quality in its creation, it didn’t convey fun at all, and the header always looked a bit awkward. The first point was the most important: no matter how nice the writing is and how clean the elements of the...
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Oopsies!
The other day I made the switch to EasyDNS from Dreamhost for hosting my domain name for this site. I didn’t think I was using the hosting for anything, but I saw DNS entries for media.jimcloudman.com. I thought to myself, “There’s nothing that I could possibly be using in there, right?”
Turns out, all the media files for my theme were stored there. They’re gone...
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Ice Cream Sandwich →
In screenshots, Android is starting to look pretty damn good. I think Apple actually took a few steps back because of all those “skeuomorphic” app designs, while Microsoft takes the opposite approach and pretty much forbids their developers to actually design their apps except within tight restrictions1. Their design ideas seem to be a much more pragmatic balance between the two.
...
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Instapaper 4.0 →
I was really hoping that we’d see an interface like that for the iPad. I expect when I get a chance to use it (I’m having issues connecting to the App Store at the moment) that it’ll be as good as Reeder’s interface, perhaps better. Can’t wait to try it out!
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It's The Network →
Shit That Siri Says:
User: “Tell me a joke” Siri: “Two iPhones walk into a bar… I forget the rest.”
I can complete this! Two iPhones walk into a bar. Then the one that isn’t on AT&T walks into four more bars.
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That's the Wrong Response
Marco Arment, four months ago, talking about Reading List:
As far as I can tell there’s no offline storage in Apple’s Reading List function, which Instapaper has.
So what did Apple do with iOS5? Disables offline storage for everyone. Brilliant!
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Too Damn Small →
It sure seems like pretty much everyone agrees on one thing Apple got wrong with iOS 5: the close buttons in Notification Center are way, way, way too small. I too misclick nearly every time.
A simple solution to the problem: they should have made the button 44 pixels wide (88 Retina display pixels) at a minimum. If it’s not that big in any dimension then it’s too small - the HIG...
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Siri and the Apple TV
If you haven’t watched the Apple Keynote, you’ll want to open it up and jump to about 25 minutes before the end. This is the point where Apple introduces Siri. As a feature for the iPhone 4S, it’s a great addition, but I think its true potential lies not with the iPhone, but with the Apple TV. I truly believe it could be Apple’s next great reinvention.
On the iPhone, Siri...
This Is The Life →
I had been listening to Dream Theater’s latest album for a few days now, but after reading the many inspirational quotes from Steve Jobs last night on Twitter and elsewhere, particularly this one, the lyrics of this song suddenly stood out to me. It could easily have been written to be about Steve Jobs and the way he lived his life. If you can tolerate a powerful guitar solo here and there,...
Steve Jobs Passes Away →
The candle that burns the shortest burns the brightest.
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Compelling Choices
Here’s the one-sentence explanation as to why most phones & tablets are failing to attract sales: they aren’t providing compelling reasons for people to buy them.
The iPhone 3G was the first really compelling iPhone:
It provided all of the features people really needed (3G, GPS)
It had the iPhone OS, which was very much better than what came before it
Apps had just been...