Apple and Mac related stuff.
I debated long and hard whether to upgrade to the iPhone 5 or not. Three minutes later I decided to upgrade. I will attempt to write something coherent about it that is different from all the hundreds of reviews out there. If you want a review, Ars Technica is a good place to start.
Read more…
The Samsung vs Apple trial opened today. Apple is accusing Samsung of “slavishly copying” its designs, specifically for the iPhone and the iPad.
Samsung is a gigantic company that can put together impressive high-technology products like almost no other company in the world. They build components (screens, chips) and they build end products. They should be admired for this.
But it’s obvious to me that there is a deeply ingrained culture of copying other companies’ successful designs and not respecting their intellectual property. They make the highest quality, most reputable KIRFs. The phone market is probably where this shows the most obvious. This is not new and is not just about Apple.
Examples:
Does this phone remind you of any other phone? Perhaps one that was quite successful a just few years ago? If you can’t see how this phone is a close copy of Blackberry, then let me convince you: coincidentally, this phone was named “Blackjack“. Is that close enough?
Here’s a slightly older model. Its thin flip-phone form factor may remind you of a very popular phone made by Motorola in the mid-2000s: the RAZR. It could have been worse, of course… they could have called it Samsung BLDE. Instead Samsung kept all the vowels and called it Blade. To avoid confusion, of course.
And here is the Samsung Galaxy at the heart of the lawsuit, next to an iPhone. Even the background color of the phone app icon is the same! At least they did not call it sPhone or iSamsung. So… copy or gigantic coincidence?
There’s many more examples floating around the web: cables, packaging, their tablet. We’ll see how it develops. Samsung may get away with it because what they did is still legal as defined by the law. But nobody should pretend that there’s no copying going on.
Solid State Drives have been replacing Hard Disks on computers lately. Instead of storing data on a rotating magnetic disk, they store data in flash memory: basically silicon chips that keep data even when powered off. They are lighter, use less power, have no moving parts, and most importantly are way faster than hard disks. The problem is that, compared to their rotating counterparts, they are (still) more expensive.
Still, prices have dropped dramatically recently. Shlomit’s computer was feeling a little sluggish so I decided to give it a nice little upgrade.
After waiting for a good price on DealMac for a few weeks, I bought a 256 GB Crucial M4 for $180, a very good deal at the time of this writing, to replace the stock 250 GB spinning disk.
The upgrade is reasonably simple, here are the steps:
Really, the speed difference is amazing. Everything is snappy. Opening programs like iPhoto or iTunes happens in less than a second.
If you have a computer that’s 1-2 years old and you want something much faster without buying a new machine, strongly consider upgrading to an SSD. You may have to sacrifice capacity but I think it’s worth it. Just put your pirate movie collection in an external hard drive and/or pay $25 to keep your music on iTunes Match.
If you are buying a new laptop, make sure you get one with an SSD. If it’s too expensive, get a slower processor instead to make up for the difference. You will be surprised at how most slow tasks are dramatically sped up by an SSD. Don’t believe me? Check out this video of a side by side comparison:
On Monday Apple released a new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. It has an incredibly high resolution screen with 5.1 million pixels. Four times as many as the regular 15″ MacBook. Compare to your big full HD 1080p TV, which has only around 2.1 million pixels.
So a regular person sitting in front of this computer at a regular distance cannot see the individual pixels on the screen.
This is another step in Apple’s quest to kill the pixel: sure, screens will still be made out of pixels but you as a user could not care less, everything will look perfectly smooth.
Need more proof? This is how you select screen resolution on this new Mac:
Yep, they only mention anything related to actual numeric screen resolution as a little side not in grey letters.
There are lost of rumors about the next iPhone primarily centered around the screen. The leading rumor says that the screen will:
I think it’s plausible. Some ramifications of this rumor are:
One thing that most people don’t understand, however, is that making such a phone is not just as simple as slapping the parts together. Rather, it’s a balancing act. Increasing the screen size – all other things equal – implies higher power requirements thus shorter battery time. Apple will also want a faster processor, a thinner form factor, LTE, etc. Can it be done? Maybe – there are other variables: new thinner and lower power screen technology; more advanced chip manufacturing processes; a smaller Dock connector could all help.
We’ll see soon enough.
In 2007 I posted a long list of “seemingly obvious” missing software features on the iPhone, which ran what was then known as OS X Mobile and today Apple calls iOS. Since then, most were either implemented (video, VoIP, games, etc.) or are no longer desired (Flash, Java).
I thought I’d revisit now, a month away from WWDC where there is a good chance that iOS 6.0 will be announced, even though I don’t think any of these are “seemingly obvious” anymore.
Do you have any other suggestions?
Last night I was reading some online documentation on Safari on my iPad and was annoyed by the small font size. On most web sites, the text is formatted in narrow columns and you just double tap to zoom in perfectly. In this case that wouldn’t work well because the text spans from edge to edge on the site. You’ve probably bumped into a similar situation on your iPhone or iPad.
This morning I looked around for a solution. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for ; but I combined and modified some of the things I found and created two bookmarklets: one that increases the font size of the page you are in, and one that decreases it.
There are two ways to install them.
Method A
If you use iCloud to synchronize bookmarks between Safari on your Mac or PC and your iPhone/iPad, then the easiest way is to do this from your computer. Just drag the two links below to your Bookmarks Bar.
Let iCloud take care of the syncing for you.
Method B
If you need to do this from your iPhone/iPad because you don’t use iCloud for syncing bookmarks, then things are a little harder. I won’t describe the process here because others have already done a great job. The only difference is that you will use the code from my bookmarklets:
Font-:
javascript:var p=document.getElementsByTagName('*');for(i=0;i<p.length;i++){if(p[i].style.fontSize){var s=parseInt(p[i].style.fontSize.replace("px",""));}else{var s=12;}s-=2;p[i].style.fontSize=s+"px"}
Font+:
javascript:var p=document.getElementsByTagName('*');for(i=0;i<p.length;i++){if(p[i].style.fontSize){var s=parseInt(p[i].style.fontSize.replace("px",""));}else{var s=12;}s+=2;p[i].style.fontSize=s+"px"}
Once you have installed the bookmarklets, use them the same way you use a bookmark. I recommend putting them on the Bookmarks Bar for quick access, as shown:
This is how the original website looks:
And this is how it looks after increasing the font size a couple of times:
In order to reset the font size back to its default, just reload! Hope you find this useful.
You probably heard about the Flashback Trojan infecting Macs through a security hole in Java. Apple has now (finally!) addressed the flaw and even shipped a removal tool.
When the whole thing started, I
Finally installed the very last update from Apple, which includes a removal tool. To my surprise I got this message:
Guess there has been a lot of misinformation about this out there. My advice: run Software Update!
A new iPad is out. It’s not iPad 3 nor iPad HD. Just iPad. Kind of how Apple used to name the new version of the iPod. And it’s “Resolutionary” – lame pun intended by Apple, not by me.
The biggest change, at least in my mind, is the new “Retina” display. Four times as many pixels in the same area, making each individual pixel so small that you cannot effectively see them anymore. That’s it! The pixel has died, you no longer need to worry about the number of pixels in your iPad; more pixels would be pointless since you cannot see them already!
And so the death of the pixel continues.
And if it’s anything like the difference between the screens on the iPhone (3G, 3GS) and the iPhone 4(S)… it’s going to look amazing.
