In my continuing saga to be as lazy as possible, I have brought back my Apple Remote into use. It has practically no use except when away from the computer you can change the iTunes track. So been as I use Spotify almost as much as I use iTunes why can't I do the same.
Turns out you can with a little SIMBL plugin, http://themacbox.co.uk/smr/
In an interesting twist, Computer World is reporting that a federal judge ruled last week that the Mac clone maker Psystar can continue its countersuit against computer maker and Mac OS developer Apple Corporation. Neowin
So what is Apple's next move, well thats quite simple. If you can't beat them fairly beat them unfairly. I can see Apple taking some of that Cash on Hand, and buying Psystar outright and effectively putting them out of business.
Well at least some stores are banning the popular social networking sites from the instore computers. While alot can be said including that its an evil move by a big corporation. Although it is since been found out that Apple is not doing this by a policy and it appears only a handful of stores are operating the policy.
I personally think that Apple will enact such a policy across all stores soon, they want to stay profitable after all and time is money. The time spent dealing with questions and people who a clearly not there to buy only to check their gmail account has to stop. Apple has a massive retail presence based on quality of staff, if they are to keep the quality of staff high and thus maintain this appearance through the oncoming storm, they have to draw the line at some point.
Via TinyComb TechCrunch
There has been lots of talk about Apple is doomed to fail with the iPhone as a software Platform and the Android platform is going to be so much better, simple because its open.
Firstly, take a look at the iPhone. Its a fantastically designed device, and the attention to detail is insane - that's not to say the Android platform isn't. But it is a sensible justification that the platform needs to slightly closed to allow a continuity of quality to be maintained. Secondly, the iTunes to iPhone facility has yet to face any real competition, its far from perfect but there is a seamless connection from buying to using. You click buy and the app or music is downloaded and synced to your phone, without having to drag and drop, move or do anything manually. However there is growing concern that the closed nature of the platform will be its undoing see Pull My Finger [1] Read more...
Twitter has come under attack for being a great service that has a poor record of up time Link1 - TechCrunch, Link 2 - TechCrunch. Well news on the street is Twitter survived the several thousand posts it recieved during WWDC, including my own meager posts. But at what cost.
I laughingly joked that the next feature for twitter to disable to ensure it stayed up, was to turn off twittering. In reality it was nearly at that point the following features were cut for the duration of the Keynote:
- @ Replies
- Everyone Tab
- Archive Tab
- Public Timeline
- Limit number of API requests from 30 Request Per Hour to 10
- Updates by SMS
- User Deletion and Restoration
It seems to me that the vast majority of the functionality of twitter was culled to ensure uptime, the community was just lobotomised with no thought. I applaud twitter for staying online, but it shouldn't have cost the features that make Twitter, Twitter and not just some meta-blogging platform.
Twitter has got plenty of issues with scaling, if anything WWDC has proved that twitter cannot scale with demand. To use a analogy, a TV station does not cut the commentary of a football match because the system cannot cope with the demand, this is essentially what Twitter did to the community.
It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up! Only one unexpected disruption occured and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service distruption some time after Steve Jobs' keynote. With that single distruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%
I love Twitter, and despite the fact I don't really get it yet. I don't want to see it disappear because it couldn't handle its popularity.