Tag: iPod

Tales from the Orchard: Kickstarter campaign offers nostalgic Apple pillow collection without saying so …

 

 

 

By Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac

I wouldn’t have foreseen much overlap in the market for Apple memorabilia and that for throw pillows, but one Kickstarter campaign seems to be proving me wrong …

The Iconic Pillow Collection is a set of throw pillows mimicking the designs of five key Apple products through the years:

• The Apple II (1977)
• Macintosh (1984)
• iMac G3 (1998)
• iPod (2001)
• iPhone (2007)

It smashed through its admittedly modest funding goal on the first day.
Creator Roberto Hoyos is clearly concerned about Apple’s lawyers having a thing or two to say about the project, as he manages to describe the pillows without once using either the brand name or the names of any of the products.

Remember your first computer? Your first time using a GUI? Your first glimpse of that candy-colored desktop? Your first MP3 player? Your first smartphone? No matter what age you are, one of these things has impacted your life in some way. And to think, they all came from the same beloved company!  These devices let us realize our creative potential, connected us to each other to form meaningful relationships and of course… Changed. Our. World. At Throwboy we chose to pay tribute to these 5 iconic and important products that shaped our favorite technology company.

As MacWorld notes, even the Apple logo is missing, replaced with a rainbow-colored outline of a pillow. All the same, all five products are instantly recognizable.

Hoyos told MacWorld that his company works officially with Twitter, Microsoft, Patreon, Netflix and Google – but that Apple wasn’t interested.
You may want to consider the risk of Hoyos receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Apple prior to production, but if you want to give it a go, individual pillows cost $39 while the complete set runs to $165, with shipping expected in January.

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Tales from the Orchad: Apple seems to have forgotten about the whole ‘it just works’ thing.

 

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet

This is the phrase that Steve Jobs trotted out year after year to describe products or services that he was unveiling. The phrase expressed what Apple was all about — selling technology that solved problems with a minimum of fuss and effort on the part of the owner.

Well, Steve is now long gone, and so it the ethos of “it just works.”

2017 was a petty bad year for Apple software quality. Just over the past few weeks we seen both macOS and iOS hit by several high profile bugs. And what’s worse is that the fixes that Apple pushed out — in a rushed manner — themselves caused problems.

• A serious — and very stupid — root bug was uncovered in macOS
• The patch that Apple pushed out for the root bug broke file sharing for some
• Updating macOS to 10.13.1 after installing the root patch rolled back the root bug patch
• iOS 11 was hit by a date bug that caused devices to crash when an app generated a notification, forcing Apple to prematurely release iOS 11.2
• iOS 11.2 contained a HomeKit bug that broke remote access for shared users

And this is just a selection of the bugs that users have had to contend with over the past few weeks. And it’s not just been limited to the past few weeks. I’ve written at length about how it feels like the quality of software coming out of Apple has deteriorated significantly in recent years.

Now don’t get me wrong, bugs happen. There’s no such thing as perfect code, and sometimes high-profile security vulnerabilities can result in patches being pushed out that are not as well tested as they could be.

I also recognize that Apple has changed almost beyond recognition since Steve was on stage at keynotes telling us how stuff “just works.” Apple’s products are far more complex, the company is selling stuff at a rate that it could have once only dreamt doing, and the security landscape is totally different, and vulnerabilities now put hundreds of millions of users at risk.

But on the other hand, Apple isn’t some budget hardware maker pushing stuff out on a shoestring and scrabbling for a razor-thin profit margin. Apple’s gross profit margin is in the region of 38 percent, a figure that other manufacturers can only dream of.

And Apple is rolling in cash.

All this makes missteps such as the ones that users have had to endure feel like Apple has taken its eye off the ball, and that it’s perhaps putting increased effort into developing and selling new products at the expense of keeping users happy.

Apple owes a lot of its current success to its dedicated fanbase, the people who would respond to Windows or Android issues with “you should buy Apple, because that stuff just works.” Shattering that illusion for those people won’t be good in the long term, which is why I think Apple needs to take a long, hard look at itself in the run up to 2018 and work out what’s been going wrong and come up with ways to prevent problems from happening in the future.

Do you think Apple has dropped the ball when it comes to the finer details of their software? Sound off in the comments below!

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Tales from the Orchard: Apple’s Michigan Avenue retail store has a major design flaw.

 

How the Apple Store in Chicago became a dangerous place this Winter.

 

 

By Mark Kauffman of Mashable

Ominous, high-hanging icicles have turned Apple’s sleek, MacBook-inspired waterfront store in Chicago into a potentially perilous environment.

Apple has cordoned off, with caution tape and signage, vulnerable areas where the sharp ice could fall. Chicago blogger Matt Maldre first spotted the architectural mishap, brought on by this winter’s severe Arctic blast.

The architectural company Foster + Partners designed the carbon fiber roof to mimic a flat MacBook Pro laptop. They even emblazoned an Apple logo atop the roof — just like on the actual devices.

The building might be a design marvel — with pure glass walls and svelte steel columns — but it apparently lacks much winter utility, notably for a place specifically designed for public gathering, conducive to a social, urbanite atmosphere.
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At the Apple event in September, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, Angela Ahrendts, said forthcoming Apple Stores would be “town square” spaces.

But perhaps not in winter. There are no gutters to catch falling snow or ice. Nor is the roof sloping, so icicles that do form aren’t dangling from 20 some feet overhead.

Indeed, it’s common for icicles to form on buildings in Chicago, especially during these freeze events; so the Apple store isn’t uniquely forming sharp icicles. But come winter, this particular “town square” can become a precarious place.

What are your thoughts on Apple’s “Design over Function” dilemma with it’s newly designed Retail stores? Tell us about it in the comments below!

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App of the Week: WALTR2

This wireless app helps avoid the mess of transferring data with iTunes.

 

 

By Cult of Mac Deals

Usually when want to move a file from your computer to your iPhone, you’ve got to deal with iTunes. That means dealing with its often unintuitive interface and sync settings. Let’s be honest, iTunes isn’t exactly user friendly.

That makes WALTR 2 a welcome alternative. It’s a app that lets you to wirelessly transfer content between devices, skipping iTunes, converters and other headaches. And right now, you can get WALTR 2 for just $19.95 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Basically, WALTR 2 is a straightforward file manager that spans between devices. Once your device is connected, just drag and drop music, ringtones, videos, PDFs, ePUBs, and more into any Apple device. That includes the entire lineup of Apple iPods, all the way back to 2001’s original iPod Classic. Additionally, WALTR automatically converts audio and video formats as needed, retaining metadata, removing a key stress point from the process of moving content. Plus, the whole process works over WiFi. So forgetting your USB cable isn’t a problem.

Buy now: Get WALTR 2 for $19.95. That’s half off the usual price.

 

What do you use to manage music on your iPhone? Tell us about it in the comments below!

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App of the Week: Dayone: Superb journal app trades simplicity for sophistication

The new version loses some of its predecessor’s gorgeous simplicity, but compensates with powerful and useful new features.

 

By Nathan Alderman of MacWorld

It’s hard to improve upon perfection. The original Day One made keeping a journal on your Mac easy and fun. Day One 2 wants to do even more, but to fulfill those ambitions, it’s partly sacrificed the original’s beautifully simple design.

 

What’s changed, and what hasn’t

 

It’s still a snap to start typing a new entry in Day One 2, either from the app itself or its convenient menu bar widget. The latter also provides customizable reminders to write down your thoughts at a given time. Day One 2 tags entries with the date, time, any custom tags you care to create, the current weather, and your GPS-based location.

Don’t want your journal knowing too much about you? You can deactivate location info when crafting a new entry.

Don’t want anyone else reading your journal? A password-lock feature will keep it safe from prying eyes.

Day One 2 adds the ability to keep up to ten separate, color-coded journals at once; for example one to serve as your personal diary, another for business notes, and a third to jot down ideas for that novel you’ve been planning. And where its predecessor only allowed a single photo per entry, Day One 2 supports up to ten, dragged and dropped from Photos, Safari, or the Finder. Paste in a YouTube or Vimeo URL to embed that video in your finished entry, as well.

The Mac version adds a Photos view (previously an iOS-only feature) to the existing Map, Timeline, and Calendar views, and now lets you edit multiple entries at once. You can also view and search by additional information gathered by Day One 2’s iOS versions, including motion and step data and the songs you had playing while you composed a given entry. (The Mac app doesn’t include these features, which at least partly makes sense, unless you frequently take long hikes while typing on your laptop.)

To accommodate these new features, Day One 2 sprawls across greater screen space, stuffed with more, smaller icons. While Bloom Built has clearly worked to keep the interface clean and appealing, it’s definitely more cluttered than its predecessor’s. Figuring out each of the many new buttons remains fairly easy, but still not as easy as in the old version. Editing multiple entries particularly threw me, until I spotted a series of related icons that quietly showed up in an unexpected corner of the window.

 

That syncing feeling

 

Version 1 relied on Dropbox or iCloud to sync journal entries across its Mac and iOS iterations, but version 2 uses Day One Sync, Bloom Built’s own free, proprietary system. This has alarmed some iCloud-loving users, but Bloom Built argues that the new service works better, faster, and more securely than either of the old solutions.
I had trouble getting Dropbox to work with the original Day One, but I have no such complaints about Day One Sync. Setting up an account took mere minutes, and synching entries between my Mac and iPad happened almost instantly. Though any data you sync via Day One’s system is already securely encrypted, Bloom Built says it’s planning to add even stronger private key encryption in the months ahead.

Day One 2 also temporarily lacks its predecessor’s Publish feature, which automatically turned entries into blog pages, although Bloom Built says it’s rethinking that ability, and will add it in a future update. I can see how Day One 2 might evolve into a powerful online publishing platform, especially if its makers keep their other on-the-horizon promises of stronger social media integration and the ability to turn your journal entries into a printed book.

 

Bottom line

 

In my tests, Day One 2 offered speedy searching, excellent online help files, and responsive, bug-free performance. It’s become slightly more complicated than its predecessor and it costs four times as much. But this superb journaling app remains pleasant to behold, easy to use, and a tough act for any rival to follow.

Download DayOne for iOS here.
Download DayOne for Mac OS here.

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Tales From The Orchard: Goodbye iPod and Thanks for all the Tunes.

 

By David Pierce of Wired.com

THE IPOD DIED slowly, then all at once. After nearly 16 years on the market, more than 400 million units sold, and one Cupertino company launched into the stratosphere on its back, Apple quietly pulled the iPod Nano and Shuffle out of its virtual stores today. The iPod Touch still lives on: In fact, Apple now offers the Touch with 32 gigs of storage starting at $199. But that’s not a real iPod; it’s an iPhone-lite. Today officially marks the end of Apple’s era of standalone music players.

OK, so you’re probably looking at your smartphone and wondering why you should care that a music player, which offers one very old and outdated version of one feature on your phone, no longer exists. That’s fair! It’s been years since the iPod sold in massive numbers—Apple even stopped reporting its sales separately in earnings releases, relegating iPods to the “Other Products” category with dongles and headphones and those crazy cases for your Apple Pencil. Back in 2014, right around the iPod Classic’s discontinuation, Tim Cook said that “all of us have known for some time that iPod is a declining business.” There’s just no room left in the market for an iPod.

In a way, though, the death of the iPod feels like a critical moment for an entire generation. When I think of high school, I think of my hideous gold iPod Mini, stolen from my car in the school parking lot with a hard drive full of Zeppelin and Creedence and all the other music I thought I was cool enough to like. I think about handing my iPod to friends, and the deep fear of what they’d find. (I swear that Hoku album is my sister’s, I have no idea how it ended up there.) The way some people think about flipping through the LPs in a record store, or obsessively organizing their CDs into a hefty black Case Logic binder, some people remember their iPod: plugging it into the computer, waiting forever for iTunes to open and sync, managing metadata and curating playlists. Most of all, the feeling of a clickwheel whirring underneath your thumb as you searched for the perfect track.

The iPod hit shelves right after Napster caught fire. Pair the thrill of piracy with Apple’s gadget and an ample hard drive, and music was suddenly set free. Those iconic white headphones were instantly ubiquitous, music lovers able to soundtrack the world however they wanted. “It gives them control of the journey, the timing of the journey and the space they are moving through,” Dr. Michael Bull, a professor at the University of Sussex, told WIRED in 2004. “It’s a generalization, but the main use (of the iPod) is control.” Sure, there were other portable music gadgets, but MiniDisc and Walkman were bigger, clunkier, and more complicated. You had to plan what you wanted to listen to ahead of time. With an iPod, you had all your music, all the time.

You could argue that the iPod killed the album, making playlists and Shuffle Mode the primary methods of listening. It definitely helped kill paid-for music, because who can afford to buy all 5,000 songs to fill their iPod? Eventually, the industry caught up, trading downloads for subscriptions and albums for Discover Weekly playlists. Music became so readily available that companies had to invent new ways to find it—Alexa works much faster than a clickwheel. That’s the beautiful irony here: The music industry Apple helped create, dominated by streaming and algorithms and discovery, no longer has a place for the iPod.

If you have some nostalgia, Apple will be selling the last remaining iPods in Apple Stores, at least for a while. You can also buy a gadget like Mighty to use with Spotify, or an Apple Watch or HomePod, which Apple surely sees as the iPod’s spiritual successors. More likely, you’ll just stick with your phone, which represents the present and future of how you listen to music. But as it goes away, take a minute and remember what the iPod brought to the world. It set music free.

Do you have a favorite iPod story? Tell us in the comments below!

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