Apple
Silicon Alley Insider on *that* Steve Jobs rumour
SAI spots an uncorroborated, anonymous post that says Jobs has had a heart attack. Publishes it, causing an immediate drop in Apple share prices. O noes! Uncorroborated, anonymous bollocks turns out to be bollocks!
Time for some retrospective justification:
We viewed it as significant, however, both for those who care about Apple and Steve and as a first meaningful test of “citizen journalism.”
Meaningful test my arse.
A small, vocal minority, however–including some members of the mainstream media–believe we should have waited to comment on the iReport story until we had heard back from Apple.
How about just checking whether there was any likelihood of the story being true? Charles Arthur:
First of all: what time would it be in California, where Jobs lives? Hmm, at 2pm on a Friday in London, it would be at least 8 hours behind - in other words, 6am. That at once gave a doubtful cast to two of the points in that “report”.
Who and where could the “insider” be? Not someone at Apple. While there might be people at 1 Infinite Loop who’d work until 3am or 4am, Jobs wouldn’t. He’s got a family and, well, a life. So he would have been at home. So the “insider” would be inside to what? The hospital? Paramedic dispatch? In which case they either wouldn’t know that it was a major heart attack, or what the symptoms were.
SAI commenter Mark Centz:
Whether journalists are just plain citizens or professionals, there is still the obligation to confirm facts wherever possible.
How Apple can make iPhone developers love it again
John Gruber hits the nail on the head:
Here is a complete list of what Apple must do to increase developers’ trust in the App Store system:
State the rules.
Follow the rules.That’s it.
“RealPlayer: like the Black Death, but made of software”
Feeling ranty? Techradar’s just uploaded “48 things we hate about tech“, which enabled yours truly to cheer himself up by being nasty about things. Any I’ve missed?
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I’m thinking about iPods
Later today the boffins at CERN will switch on the Large Hadron Collider, which will - depending on who you believe - usher in a brave new era in physics, turn the planet into Swiss cheese, or open a portal for Satan to come and enslave us all. Which may well overshadow the latest iPod.
It’s a really nice upgrade, I reckon, but I do wonder where the iPod can possibly go from here. Pico-projectors that enable you to show video on nearby walls or bald people’s heads? Integrated kazoos?
Tangent: during the keynote Steve Jobs made it clear that he wasn’t too happy with third-party accessory firms leaking supposedly secret products, as happened with the nano. I wonder if pre-release access to Apple’s plans is going to be more restricted now. Why help add-on manufacturers get to market quickly if they’re going to blow your big reveal?
Thoughts on using Apple’s Time Machine as a remote wireless hard disk
Nope - at least, nope for iPhoto and iTunes libraries. This is a job for Captain Ethernet.
Baby-proof my iPhone
An unusual request: does anybody know of a crystal case for the first-gen iPhone that *doesn’t* let you use the touch screen? I want to use it as a portable video player for baby bigmouth, but the touchscreen means she turns off the clips in seconds and then beats me around the face with the phone. Any ideas?
It’d be great if there was a preference that turned off the touch interface during video playback…
iPhone 3G: never mind “it just works”; have you tried turning it off and back on again?
As I mentioned earlier, O2’s 3G network has gone to crap today in my bit of Scotland - but talking to customer services, they were very keen to send me a checklist for 3G problems anyway. “We’ve sent this to a lot of iPhone customers”, the rep told me. Here’s the checklist exactly as it was emailed (hence the crap formatting).
Turn Airplane Mode on, wait 15 seconds, and then turn Airplane Mode off
again. This resets all of iPhone’s wireless connections.2.Try restarting iPhone
To turn it off, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red
slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider to turn off iPhone.
To turn iPhone on, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple
logo appears.
Does iPhone appear frozen or stuck? Try pressing and holding the Home
button for 6 seconds to close a frozen application. Then try restarting
iPhone again.3.Reset the SIM
To remove the SIM card, insert the end of a small paper clip into the
hole on the SIM tray.
Insert the SIM card using the same method.4.Check APN
Select settings, then general, then network, then cellular data network. Please make sure the following info is there:
APN - mobile.o2.co.uk
Username - vertigo
password - password5. Try the sim in another handset
Remove sim, put into another handset. If you receive 3G or EDGE coverage while doing this, then the issue is with your handset. If your sim still does not work in another handset then your sim card may be faulty.6.Try restoring iPhone using iTunes.
Connect iPhone. When it appears in the Source list, click on Restore in
the Summary pane.
Note: This will delete all media and data. All settings will be reset
as well. If possible, sync iPhone with iTunes before restoring to back
up your most recent settings.If none of the above works, please call 2302 from your iPhone to arrange either a replacement handset or sim
Hmmm. That O2 has a checklist for iPhone customers suggests that they’ve had a lot of queries from iPhone 3G owners whose 3G isn’t behaving. That’s not good, is it? It’s like coffee machine owners whose kit does everything but make coffee, or hairdryer owners whose hairdryers don’t dry hair. And since when was “try rebooting… if that doesn’t work, try wiping it and restoring it” an everyday way of troubleshooting Apple kit?
iPhone 3G connection problems? Might not be your iPhone…
…or at least, it might not be if you’re in the West of Scotland. O2’s data network has gone tits-up and there’s no red-hot 3G action for anyone round these parts.
O2 network issues aside, is anyone else following the reports of iPhone problems and getting a flashback to the first Xbox 360 red rings of death? Just a few isolated problems, nothing serious, definitely not a manufacturing problem or a design flaw…
Four things I learnt on the internet today
“The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks” and 38 hours is considered a success. The LA Times on attempts to prevent fanboys watching camcorder copies of The Dark Knight.
The crackdown on file sharing may be bad news for people who don’t file share. “…service gets worse as you wait in a queue wondering why your broadband has gone down, while the 50 people in front of you all have perfectly functional internet connections but are wondering if a lawyer is going to show up at their door.” Charles Arthur on the possible consequences of anti-P2P letters.
Apple’s PR strategy is hurting its share price. “Apple, on the other hand, has had stellar financials, huge hit products, and massive growth sales for all its product lines. With those results you would expect Apple to outperform Microsoft.” Comment by Ian Betteridge on Dan Lyons’ post about Apple share prices.
Caffeine is self-regulating and works almost instantly. “Women generally metabolize caffeine faster than men. Smokers process it twice as quickly as nonsmokers do. Women taking birth-control pills metabolize it at perhaps one-third the rate that women not on the Pill do. Asians may do so more slowly than people of other races.” NY Magazine on the wonders of caffeine (via Metafilter).
Instapaper: a potentially brilliant iPhone application
Of all the iPhone apps kicking around, the one I’m liking best is Instapaper. It’s a simple solution to a genuine problem I have: there are loads of things online I’d like to read, but when I come across them I just don’t have time to read them - so I bookmark them and immediately forget all about them. With Instapaper it’s just a matter of hitting the Read Later bookmarklet in your web browser, logging in on the iPhone and reading the articles when you’ve got time to do so. I particularly like the choice of Web View, which is the original page, or Text View, which gets rid of extraneous content.
I say it’s potentially brilliant, because while it’s a great wee app there are a few issues for me. Updating from my iPhone is desperately slow (although that may be my connnection); I can’t find a way to mark things as read to make them disappear; and with big articles you often need to locate the printer-friendly view (not Instapaper’s fault; it’s the fault of websites who’d rather split an article into seven hundred ad-stuffed pages). Oh, and it’d be nice to be able to control the style sheet for text view so I could specify my own fonts and sizes. The “mark as read” thing is apparently in version 1.01, but I don’t see it in the iTunes store yet; other features are promised for a future upgrade, possibly splitting the app into a free version and a paid-for premium edition.
The faults are minor, though, and it’s a brilliant wee application - and you don’t need to be an iPhone-toting hipster to use it, as Instapaper works perfectly well as a browser app too. However, I do think it makes most sense as a portable application, because it’s great for killing time on buses or when you’re generally hanging around waiting for something. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re in the habit of spotting interesting things online that you never quite get round to reading.