I would buy it. It would make me cooler and I’m part of the Apple Cult. It would be better than Evian. Which is naive spelt backwards. Did I just blow your mind?
From here.
Tag: Apple
iPhone Users: an infographic
I think I might be a fanboy. Though I suspect there is a bit of overlap between some of the categories.
From here.
Word Lens = Amazing
Check this out.
I downloaded the free version (a Spanish to English or English to Spanish module will set you back 4.99). And it works. Magic.
Steve Jobs is Ninja
You knew Steve Jobs was cool. But you didn’t know how cool. It seems Jobs tried to carry some ninja stars, called shuriken, onto a private flight out of Japan.
If he was a real ninja he wouldn’t have been caught.
From Bloomberg:
“Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said he’ll never return to Japan after officials at an airport barred him from taking Ninja throwing stars aboard his private plane, SPA! magazine reported in its latest issue.
A security scan at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, detected the weapons inside the executive’s carry-on luggage in July as he was returning home to the U.S. from a family vacation in Kyoto, the Japanese magazine reported, citing unidentified officials at the airport and the transportation ministry.
Jobs said it wouldn’t make sense for a person to try to hijack his own plane, according to the report. He then told officials he would never visit Japan again, the magazine reported.”
For those wondering, here’s how to throw a ninja star (from Slate).
“It’s all in the wrist. Place a stack of shuriken in the palm of one hand—ninjas used to carry nine, an auspicious number. Brush the thumb of your opposite hand across the top star. The inside of your knuckle should catch in the center hole, enabling you to bring the star in between your thumb and index finger. From there, it’s sort of like throwing a frisbee. Bring your arm forward and flick your wrist to spin the star. Just don’t move your arm across your body in an arc—that would ruin your aim.”
Privacy infographic
I’m not paranoid about the data Facebook, Google and Apple are gathering about me. Because I put too much stuff out there voluntarily for that to be overly concerning, and I don’t do anything I wouldn’t want the world seeing anyway. But some people find this sort of thing scary.
From here.
One for the iHaters
My friend Marshall suggested I post a piece of anti-mac propaganda on my blog. Little did he know that I, like Anakin Skywalker before me, have converted to the dark side. But I’m all for balance, and while I won’t yet post anything that links my use of apple technology with wanting to sit in Starbucks (I have standards), I will post this hilarious advertisement posted on Craigslist advertising a vacant room in New York.
Via Obvious Winner.
The iPulpit
Preaching from the iPad is such a great justification for buying one. I’ve said that since day one. I want to write an iphone program (though I have no talent) that functions as an autocue controller for text on an iPad. Autocue controllers are traditionally knobs that twist either sitting in the hands of a newsreader (that’s what they were at ABC online when I had a job interview/audition there a bunch of years ago) or the producer (that’s what they were when I was reading the news for QUT News on Bris 31 when I was at uni).
Anyway, that’s a digression. If you’re already ahead of the curve you’ll want one of these iPad lecterns so that you can preach the gospel unhindered, like Paul at the end of Acts.
From Little Mountain Productions, via PastorGear.
SumoPad
Fat fingers are synonymous with sumo wrestlers and incompetent carpenters. But its the former group who are turning to the iPad to solve their communication problems, and thus their links with the nefarious criminals the Sumo industry is plagued with. Apparently. At least according to this story (and this one). It seems the powers that be in the sumo world think that criminals will find it hard to grasp the concept of emails.
They suggest that sumos, because of their fat fingers, pretty much don’t use mobile phones. And that they rely on faxes and telephone calls for communication.
The cult of Mac
Some people take their Mac fetish to a spiritual level – and it seems with good reason. There’s probably a conspiracy theory book in this. Apple has styled itself as a religion. Maybe.
Here are some potential “religious elements” identified in an interesting study, covered in this article from the Atlantic, entitled: “How the iPhone Became Divine: New Media, Religion and the Intertextual Circulation of Meaning“, it followed an earlier study on “The Cult of Macintosh.”
- a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
- a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
- a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
- and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company…”
The scholar responsible for that article summed up the Apple experience:
“When you’re buying into Mac, you’re buying into an ideology. You’re buying into a community.”
It’s funny. In a day and age where the church is trying to figure out how to learn from Apple, Apple seems to have flipped the metaphorical apple cart – in basing its business practices on the church.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams on the Apple experience
Scott Adams is pretty brilliant. I’m sure anybody familiar with Dilbert will agree. Here is his description of the iPhone.
Recently I bought something called an iPhone. It drops calls so often that I no longer use it for audio conversations. It’s too frustrating. And unlike my old BlackBerry days, I don’t send e-mail on the iPhone because the on-screen keyboard is, as far as I can tell, an elaborate practical joke. I am, however, willing to respond to incoming text messages a long as they are in the form of yes-no questions and my answer are in the affirmative. In those cases I can simply type “k,” the shorthand for OK, and I have trained my friends and family to accept L, J, O, or comma as meaning the same thing.
And on why you should invest in Apple as a result (from a story featuring his investment principle: buy shares in companies you hate, because you hate them because they’re good).
My point is that I hate Apple. I hate that I irrationally crave their products, I hate their emotional control over my entire family, I hate the time I waste trying to make iTunes work, I hate how they manipulate my desires, I hate their closed systems, I hate Steve Jobs’s black turtlenecks, and I hate that they call their store employees Geniuses which, as far as I can tell, is actually true. My point is that I wish I had bought stock in Apple five years ago when I first started hating them. But I hate them more every day, which is a positive sign for investing, so I’ll probably buy some shares.
iPad critics should take a tablet
Aha. Worst. Pun. Ever.
An open letter to whinging geeks,
Whinge. Whinge. Whinge. It seems the more of a tech geek you are the more you don’t like the Apple iPad. It doesn’t do what you want it to do. So it’s a bad device. Wrong. It’s a good device precisely because it’s simple and it will revolutionise the way the rest of the tech world (ie “normal people”) do things online, and read media. You think too small.
You know what. Nobody makes hardware for hardcore geeks. They know you just want to pull it apart, overclock it, or install pirated software. All I hear about from my geek friends, and tech geek blogs, is that the iPad is a terrible piece of equipment and Apple are the anti-tech. Apple have pretty strick policies about what can and can’t be installed on their phones, and now on the iPad. I say good on them. They know their stuff best. Perhaps they don’t want you to install background apps because they’ll slow the processing speed of your phone down and ruin its performance. And then you’ll complain. Because you’re (geeks) whingers. They say (or at least Steve Jobs does) that part of their rationale is to keep pornography out of the hands of children (and adults) and I commend them for that.
Apple didn’t invent the super duper tablet computer that you were wishing for as you sat on Santa’s knee last year. But so what. You’re not their market. You’re such a small corner of the market that you are insignificant, and you’ll probably buy one anyway, just so that you can whinge about it not living up to your expectations. It’s their call. They’re a company. They have responsibilites to shareholders (and customers) to make products that make money. They make money when people want to buy their stuff. People want to buy Apple’s stuff. They’re pretty good at what they do.
If you want a tablet computer that meets your needs – build it yourself. Oh that’s right. You can’t. You’re not capable of fitting everything they do into a manageable size. You’re all talk. For now, you should just obey these ten commandments (when the iPad reaches Australian shores)…
What would Steve Jobs Do
This is probably a good question to ask yourself if you’re a product designer or an aspiring billionaire – it’s not going to get you anywhere in the long (eternal) term like the original FLAW (four letter acronym wristband). But it’ll only cost you $5.
iWant
The geek brigade have pretty roundly condemned the iPad (that picture from here). I can’t help but think that they might be missing the point – like this guy suggests – the iPad isn’t an awesomely powerful tool for geekiness. It’s an e-reader with a built in media player.
Today a Kindle 2 is $289 on Amazon.com. A Kindle DX with a 9.7″ screen is $489. For $10 more for an iPad I get:
-8x the storage
-a color screen
-a touch screen
-a touch OS
-a better web browser
-a better media player (iTunes)
-works on my home/work/plane wifi network
-the ability to download apps that do other things like play Scrabble and do Crosswords
Sure, it could have been so much better. Apple could have packed in the features. But then the price just couldn’t have compared with that of the Kindle. Being a recent convert to the Apple Fanboy Club I am going to put my faith in Steve Jobs to deliver a workable product rather than all the Internet critics who apparently know (and expect) better…
YouTube Tuesday: Steve Jobs should cut the adjectives
Why don’t we all pretend, for a moment, that it’s Tuesday – and not Thursday. Because you are a gracious readership.
Steve Jobs’ product launch speeches are truly superlative… or full of superlatives.
You’ve seen almost the same video before (here somewhere). Here’s the launch of the iPad. Reduced to adjectives.
Secret network costs book publishers billions
There’s a big furore going on over the cost of eBooks now that Apple has entered the marketplace. Amazon is fighting a big publisher, Apple is wanting to charge $15 a book. It’s the neverending story.
Ebooks present all sorts of opportunities for pirates – and new law suit opportunities for publishers and distributors.
But there’s a more serious game afoot that is costing publishers billions in lost book sale revenues every year.
Apparently there are these buildings operating in most cities where you can just borrow these books for free.
These so called “libraries” are running right under our noses – often under the auspices of governments. What’s with that. This blogger has a calculation of the loss publishers face (in the US alone) if these organisations are able to continue unchecked.
Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.