Apple and Mac related stuff.
I received my free card reader from Square a couple of weeks ago. It’s a little doohickey that plugs into the headphone jack of my iPhone or iPad. Then, using their app, you swipe your credit card and can make payments, which get deposited into my bank account.
So part 1 of my business plan is firmly in place. Now for part 2: What am I going to sell?
Ok, I’m sold. Check it out. Anyone wants to buy my used iPad for cheap?
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I use an excellent free Open Source FTP client for the Mac called Cyberduck. It is available on their website for free, but I have donated to the project. On a whim, I searched for it in the Mac App Store, and there it was… for $23.99. Interestingly enough, the link to the App Store from their website did not work for me.
Is this a rip off? Or is this a way of taking advantage of less technically savvy App Store users?
This is something I was thinking about the other day. Even though computers are becoming more and more complex everyday, they appear to be simpler to the regular, non tech-savvy user.
Before 1984, these kind of users did not even exist. You had to know at least a few arcane commands in order to use the all-text interfaces of those days. Now almost anyone can set up a network and start a video conference. Things that while possible, were really difficult to do some years ago.
The main player when it comes to making things simpler is, of course, Apple. I can think of many examples over the years, but let’s stay recent: iPad. iPad owners don’t need to be aware of some very basic computing concepts. Concepts that we thought were essential to anyone using a computer only a few years ago. Files and folders and filesystems exist under the hood of the iPad, you just don’t need to know about them! Apps are running and they are being terminated, but the user doesn’t ever needs to explicitly quit or close anything (If you see a stylus or a task manager, ‘they blew it’). Most iPad owners don’t know – and don’t need to know – what kind or how fast the processor is nor how much RAM it has… these things did not influece their purchasing choice.
The next concept that Apple is trying to kill is our old friend the pixel. Sure, displays will keep using pixels in order to render images, just like there are still files under the iOS hood, or behind the iTunes or iPhoto library… but the user won’t need to know.
This is what the iPhone 4’s Retina display is about: Make the pixels so small that you cannot even see them. If you can’t see them, why would you care about how many of them there are on your screen? There are already rumors circulating about future iPads having a Retina display one day. Newer reports say that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is building in support for Retina-level displays for the Mac. Once all these screens have pixels so small that you can’t see them, users won’t need to care anymore about them: The death of the pixel. The rest of the industry will follow, as usual.
Farewell, pixel. It was nice knowing you.
Of course this does not apply to me. Steve Jobs created things that can replace anyone in my life a long time ago.
Via Failblog.
Third and final installment….
On this video, you can see Amit demonstrating the power of this table. It’s a lot like Microsoft Surface, but not nearly as slick. It was not powered by a Mac and it wasn’t an iPhone case, so I’m not sure why it was at Macworld. I also don’t remember the company’s name. But given the graceful hand motions of the demo man, I could not skip it.
Click the link to see more amazing thing.
This little toy truck spins on a record and plays it. The sound quality is shit, so for $80 it’s a total rip-off. And I’m quite certain they are not licensing VW’s logo. It probably scratches the record, too. But hey, it’s neat! More info here.
Read more for the best part…
I started following the Macworld Expo since long before the days of the Internet. But this is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to attend. Macworld Expo is famous for being the place where Steve Jobs would use his superpowers to induce mass nerdgasms whenever he unveiled Apple’s latest creation, among others: iMac, iBook, iTunes, Safari, and of course, iPhone.
Sadly, in 2009 Apple decided not to participate in Macworld anymore. When Apple went, so did other large developers. But the Expo is still going year after year.
I bought expo floor-only passes. The conferences didn’t seem attractive enough to warrant the cruelty of putting Shlomit through them. So, a team of three correspondents (we were joined by Amit) from The MKX® attended Macworld.
About 2/3 of the expo area were covered with every imaginable iPhone/iPad case/stand. Still, here are some of the interesting things we saw from the other 1/3.
Read more to see a few…
