 |
|
Currently viewing the category:
"Apple"
I saw a great infographic up over at The Daily Beast/Newsweek that I just had to share. It details what it was that made Jobs as successful of a CEO as he was. There’s a lot that other companies can learn from this list.
Too small? Click the picture for the full size.
Dear Facebook,
Every time you release an update or tweak to your iPhone client, it becomes an even larger piece of shit while simultaneously not actually adding any worthwhile features from the standard site. From what I hear, you don’t even have a native iPad app yet. I can’t speak to your Android app, but knowing your iOS development cycle, I doubt it is any better. Frankly, this is pathetic. For a company that has it’s finger on the pulse of social networking more than any other, you seem to be neglecting an increasingly apparent future in mobile platforms. If you don’t want to get bitch-slapped by the likes of Google+ and Twitter, both of which embrace mobile usage at their very core, it might be time to pump some much-needed development in to native mobile applications. Your iOS and Android apps should mirror the features of today’s and tomorrow’s Facebook, not the Facebook of 2-3 years ago as it currently does. Until that happens, you’re just about begging something like Google+ to usurp your throne.
Sincerely,
Someone who likes your service, but will jump ship if you keep acting like you’re the only game in town.
I don’t know exact numbers, but it is probably a safe assumption that the Facebook app for the iPhone is likely one of the all-time most used 3rd party apps. That being the case, why does Facebook continually expand and improve upon its web-based features, while all but completely ignoring its mobile iPhone platform? Sure, they integrated the “Places” feature pretty rapidly after it was introduced, but it has so far been a flop (Does anyone know anyone who actually checks in somewhere other than their own house using Facebook Places?). Aside from that, they’ve largely left the application completely alone except for minor bug fixes here and there. I’m not proposing anything huge here, but I’ve got some ideas for features I’d love to see integrated in to Facebook’s iPhone app.
- Liking Comments
This feature has been integrated in to Facebook for a while now. Would it really be so hard to update the app so I can swipe a comment to like/unlike it? - Properly Attaching Links & Videos
There are three main status updating options: Text, Photos, Links, Videos. Is there some reason that the latter two on that list don’t make the cut for the iPhone? Last I checked, the newer iPhones handle video quite nicely and can easily copy/paste a link from Safari in Facebook. - Tagging Friends/Pages
This is one of the changes they’ve made lately that really made sense to me. Why this handy little feature hasn’t made its way over to the iPhone is beyond me. - Ignoring Applications
Everyone’s got at least one Facebook friend who uses every quiz, game, etc, that spams their Facebook wall every single time they beat a level or take a quiz. PLEASE let me ignore whatever new annoying application they’ve found from my phone, so I don’t have to remember to look back and find it next time I’m using the web interface.
That’s it for now. Maybe whatever monkey they’ve got programming their iPhone app will see this and take note. Anything else you’d like to see that I missed? Please comment and let the world know.
The rumors were swirling that Apple would be porting the iOS to the Apple TV. Although I suppose this is still something that could happen in the future, it did not manifest for this release. Instead, they chose to just update the software a little bit and write their own programs to support Netflix streaming, YouTube, and Flickr. The addition of Netflix and YouTube are fantastic additions, but what really would have sealed the deal, at least for me, is a third-party App Store. Hulu Plus in particular would elevate the Apple TV from a novelty rental box to a potential competitor to the cable and satellite oligopolies that currently dominate your television. The possibilities don’t stop there, though. Pay channels such as HBO and Showtime could easily release an App tied to a subscriptions service. Depending on the versatility of the included remote, it could even become a gaming system. As Apple has learned from its other iOS devices, the possibilities are quite literally endless when you open up development to third-party developers.
Instead, Apple released a smaller black box that basically does the same thing it did before, but now you rent instead of buy. Coming from a company that is known for innovation, the Apple TV is a pathetic shadow of its true potential.
All the talk over the last week on the Internets has been focusing on the new iPhone 4 or the fully-enabled iOS 4 on an iPhone 3GS, but not everyone is getting a brand new iPhone 4 or already has a 3GS. This review is for those of you, like myself, who are still saddled with the aging (yet still pretty awesome) iPhone 3G. The following review will let you know what you’ll get in the new OS, what you’ll be missing, and will hopefully help you decide if it is worth upgrading.
The Good
The very first thing I played around with when it was done updating was folders. If, like many users, you have compiled 3+ pages of apps that you use frequently enough that you are unwilling to uninstall them and clean things up, then you are probably sick to death of attempting to organize your apps. Folders are like a dream come true. Although I cannot explain why it took Apple this long to integrate a feature that dates back to the original computer operating system GUIs, this is a feature that is truly welcome. Instead of 4 pages of apps that are loosely organized and a pain to navigate through and reorganize, I have managed to condense everything in to a single page with 4 main folders.
Once I was able to move beyond the excitement of having folders (Sad, right?), I popped open the mail app. The new inbox structure is great and navigating through the app just to get to each account’s inbox has never been easier. I’ve never really been a fan of a unified inbox, but from what I understand it is hugely popular and was a very highly requested feature, so kudos to Apple for adding it in. Also, for you business users out there, you can now access more than a single exchange account, so there’s that.
For those of you that do a lot of mobile web browsing, you’ll also notice that not only is Safari faster to load initially, but there are some nice new changes. For starters, you now have a choice of the default search engine and can switch between Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Along with the option of which search provider you want to use, search recommendations have been added and are powered by whichever search engine you select as your default. Supposedly there’s also better better HTML5 support and HTML compliance is extremely high, as my phone scored a 94/100 on the Acid3 Test (Note: Firefox 3.6.4 on Mac OS X 10.6.4 only scores a 93).
Are there more things that are awesome about upgrading to iOS 4? You bet, but those are the three that really stand out.
The Bad
The bad points about upgrading your iPhone 3G to iOS 4 aren’t so much as what’s wrong with it once you’re done but what you know for a fact you’re missing and won’t ever get until you buy new hardware. Most notably, multitasking, facetime, and desktop wallpapers. I understand that do to hardware liabilities multitasking and desktop wallpapers had to be disable or they would have just about crippled the phone (at least according to Apple) and facetime simply won’t work without the front-facing camera, but it still hurts to know the awesomeness that others are experiencing which your phone shall never enjoy.
The Ugly
Speed. Sure, a few of the built-in Apps such as Safari and Mail are snappier than ever, but I’ve started noticing more and more that it just seems a bit more sluggish than it ever used to. It is by no means unusable, or even anywhere close to it, but Apple has clearly switch gears to optimizing the software for the newest hardware. Even uglier is the crashing. This really can’t be blamed on Apple because it is an issue exclusively with 3rd party apps, so my guess would be this will be less and less of a concern as the app developers update their code for improved compatibility with iOS 4.
Conclusion
Overall, it is a very solid upgrade for the iPhone 3G. The addition of folders and the improvements made in Safari and Mail are enough to make the upgrade more than worthwhile. If, however, you’re concerned about some of the issues I’ve discussed above, then maybe put it off for a month or two until Apple has released the first bug fix (presumably to be called iOS 4.0.1) and more developers have had a chance to ensure that their Apps are up to date and working properly.
As you may or may not be aware, I started a new blog not too long ago called The Apple Vine. It was fun while it lasted, but I simply do not have the time to upkeep that website to the level that it deserves, so I will be retiring The Apple Vine and once again posting any Apple content that I feel is worth posting here at Chai Life. Thanks to anyone who read TAV and I hope you remain a reader here at Chai Life. I will be reposting many of the more popular posts from The Apple Vine here so you can continue to access them if you so desire.
About once a day (maybe more, maybe less) I will be reposting some of the more popular items from The Apple Vine from there to here.
Based on market capitalization, Apple has official become the largest tech company in the world, passing Microsoft. Thanks in large part to ridiculously successful sales of the iPhone, iPod, and now the iPad as well as continually growing Mac sales, the company has slowly but steadily chipped a way at a market once entirely dominated by Windows-based products. Market cap, according to Wikipedia, is “a measurement of size of a business enterprise (corporation) equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding of a public company.” During regular trading hours today, Apple’s shares (AAPL) dropped $1.11 to finish the day at $244.11, which sets its market cap somewhere around $222 billion. By comparison, Microsoft’s stock (MSFT) fell $1.06 to $25.01, for market cap of about $219 billion. Although this is mostly important to stock investors, specifically those who invest in those two companies, it is a huge first for Apple and is a title I’m sure they are hoping to hold on to for quite some time.
Twitter for iPhone
Category: Social Networking
Last Updated: May 18th, 2010
Current Version: 3.0 (Previously Tweetie 2)
Size: 2.4 MB
Price: Free
Once upon a time there was a @Twitter client for the iPhone named Tweetie. Although it was not a free client like some of it’s stiffer competition (Read: @Twitterrific), Tweetie was generally considered the best Twitter app available for the iPhone. Then, on April 9th, 2010, Twitter itself announced that had purchased the parent company of Tweetie and would be updating the iPhone client, re-releasing it as “Twitter for iPhone”, and dropping the price all the way down to the low low price of free.
This brings us to today, where the first and only official Twitter client has been unleashed on the world. I never used Tweetie, so I can’t really say if the differences between Tweetie 2 and Twitter for iPhone are big changes or even if there are any changes other than the name and icon, but I have been using Twitterrific, so that is my baseline of comparison. With that in mind, the new Twitter client is awesome.
Virtually anything that you can do on the web via Twitter’s website is integrated in to the client. The client goes even beyond that, though. The interface is extremely clean and easy to navigate and understand. The pull-down to refresh method integrated in the client is my personal favorite way of doing it. You can easily view top tweets, popular tweeters, view maps of localized tweets, and just about anything else you might want. You can even edit virtually every part of your profile with the exception of the web design options. If that’s not enough for you, then try swiping across a tweet. It gives you instant easy access to retweet, set it as a favorite, reply, view the tweeter’s profile, and more.
Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is, but it isn’t quite perfect. Ok, so functionally it is pretty close, but visually it is frankly a bit bland. This is where Twitter could really take a page out of the Twitterrific playbook. Twitterrific has an absolutely fantastic look two it and even offers three different style options, whereas the official Twitter app is visually the closest to Twitterrific’s most basic and likely least used style. I’m not asking for them to have a graphic designer spend the next month working full time on revamp of the App’s visual style, but spicing it up a bit wouldn’t hurt.
Despite a few flaws, if you have an iPhone and use Twitter, this is a must have. There really isn’t another free client available that offers everything that Twitter for iPhone does and you wouldn’t want to pay for something you can get for free.
As of first thing this morning, Apple has rather quietly announced an update to it’s entry-level White MacBook. Keeping its price of $999, the laptop now offers a faster 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor as well as the NVIDIA 320M graphics chip used in the latest revision of the 13″ MacBook Pro. It also now boasts the same higher capacity 63.5Whr battery first introduced in the 13″ MacBook Pro. According to the Apple Store online, it is available immediately and ships within 24 hours.
Follow Chai Life
Top Shared Posts
8 
3008 
2757
