The first alarm app for families.
I’ve recently finished designing a collection of 50 wallpapers made for iPhone home screens. Without app icon shadows, iOS 7 can make the home screen look quite cluttered. I started with very simple ambient colour spectrums and decided to make a few more.
Beautiful wallpapers by Thomas Ricciardiello (via Mike Rundle). I’m trying one of the Light Spectrum ones on my iPhone now (I’ve been using an Apple default one since September). It’d be great to have iPad versions.
Ben Thompson has a good post about the differences between “computing” tasks on the Mac and the general-purpose nature of the iPad. I agree with his conclusion:
Ultimately, it is the iPad that is in fact general purpose. It does lots of things in an approachable way, albeit not as well as something that is built specifically for the task at hand. The Mac or PC, on the other hand, is a specialized device, best compared to the grand piano in the living room: unrivaled in the hands of a master, and increasingly ignored by everyone else.
Forget about this stuff and forget about “convergence”. My question is: for the future, does Apple think that the iPad – and by extension, iOS – will become suitable for traditional computing tasks?
Right now, Apple’s answer is that the Mac and iPad can coexist, each in a different space – and I believe that’s accurate. But as more people will choose tablets and smartphones as their primary computers in the coming years (with Mac sales further shrinking alongside the rest of the PC industry), will they start wondering whether spreadsheets, layouts, and photo management can be done on a multitouch display?
Does Apple think that their customers will want more from the iPad? And how would they deliver more without making the iPad more complex and less “magical”?
Pushpin, a full-featured Pinboard client that used to be my personal favorite before iOS 7, has today been updated to version 3.0, which brings a new design, a split pane interface on the iPad, and several other features. On the iPhone, I now prefer Pinswift, but Pushpin remains the best Pinboard experience for the iPad, which is where I spend most of my time bookmarking links and discovering new ones every day.
On January 24, 2005, Majo posted the video on his site for the Mac’s 21st birthday. The traffic was overwhelming. To watch, you had to download the 20MB file, and majo’s site soon crashed. We were SlashDotted, kottke.orged, and etc. He begged for mirror sites, and a bunch of other people helped out. I wrote a blog post about the video. I watched the comments come in from around the world as people woke up and discovered the “lost” video (that I didn’t realize had been lost). The comments show how excited people were to discover the video, and how eager they were to help by mirroring it. It was a pretty cool day.
Like many other “lost videos”, there’s a good story behind Jobs’ Macintosh intro (via Daring Fireball).
See also: how the original Macintosh demo was actually put together, by Andy Hertzfeld.
Nice surprise in Apple’s 30 Years of Mac website: a font including all the icons for every Mac model from the original Macintosh up to the latest modern Macs. For those interested, the Unicode code points used by Apple. These are beautiful line drawings and a good easter egg.
Macminicolo, the first Mac mini colocation service that has been hosting Mac mini servers for over 9 years, has today announced a Mac Pro colocation service, called MacProColo. The service will allow users to send their new Mac Pros to take advantage of the benefits of a data center to have powerful, dedicated hosting with all the benefits of OS X and the Mac Pro’s advanced technologies.
From the company’s blog post:
We tested the Mac Pro quite a bit in the data center. It performs incredible and there is no issue with heat. The Pro does pull quite a bit more power though. (And in a data center, power is one of the biggest expenses.)
For most people, the Mac mini will easily do the job and will also be less expensive for purchase and for colocation. In my opinion, I think most people will want the Mac Pro on their desk and the Mac mini in the data center.
Speaking to MacRumors’ Jordan Golson, Macminicolo’s Brian Stucki noted that the fan of the new Mac Pro makes it easy to get air through the machine, and he added that heat dissipation won’t be an issue in most data centers.
We’ve been running MacStories on Macminicolo for over a year now, and I couldn’t be more satisfied with the service’s uptime and the company’s support. We’ve changed a few hosting providers over the years, and while setting up a dedicated Mac server for our needs required some time, it was absolutely worth it. We won’t need a Mac Pro upgrade (at least not for the time being), but I can personally vouch for Macminicolo and I’m looking forward to reading about other websites switching to MacProColo.
Details about pricing are available here.
iFixit:
Join us as we live the time-traveler’s dream—the deep, lucid, Orwellian vision of hope, fear, and nostalgia that is 1984. Just in time for its 30th anniversary, we laid hands on an ‘84 original: the Macintosh 128K. And, you guessed it—we’re tearing it down like it’s the Berlin Wall.
They give it a repairability score of 7/10. Don’t miss the face-to-face photo of Old vs New in Step 7.
Also worth checking out: Macworld’s unboxing of the Macintosh (via John Siracusa).
To celebrate 30 years since the introduction of the original Macintosh (January 24, 1984), Apple has launched a special webpage and released a commemorative video focused on the impact that the Mac had on modern technology.
Thirty years ago, Apple introduced the Macintosh with the promise to put the creative power of technology in everyone’s hands. It launched a generation of innovators who continue to change the world. This 30‑year timeline celebrates some of those pioneers and the profound impact they’ve made.
In the video, Apple shows musicians, designers, photographers, teachers, scientists, and other users who, with the Mac, have been able to be more creative, more productive, and more satisfied with computers thanks to the Mac’s constant evolution and refinement. In an interview with Macworld published yesterday, Apple’s Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi shared their thoughts on rumors of “convergence” of iOS and OS X and stated how, because of its nature and design, the Mac “keeps going forever”.
Apple’s special 30 Years site features beautiful photography and special icons for old Macintosh models displayed in a scrollable timeline at the bottom. Each Mac model has an associated story of how it was used – for instance, Apple talked to Moby, the Miller brothers (creators of Myst), and educators, among others, about the role that the Mac had in their lives.
Apple’s mini-site focuses on people and their stories rather than computer specs. In the timeline, the only product-only preview photos are the original Macintosh (where there are photos of Jobs and part of the original Macintosh team) from 1984 and the latest Mac Pro, displayed in 2014 (even though it was technically released in 2013). Apple is also allowing readers to answer questions to a poll about their first Mac, with results displayed in each model’s page under a “What people did with it” section. Unsurprisingly, Apple chose to celebrate human creativity instead of advancements in technology, which has been a common theme in the company’s campaigns lately. The 30 Years site is exceptionally well done.
As reported by 9to5Mac, Apple is also celebrating 30 Years of Mac with special window displays at its retail stores. As part of Apple’s press tour for the Mac’s anniversary, ABC’s David Muir interviewed Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, and Bud Tribble; the full interview will air tonight, and a first excerpt is available here.
After my friends and I graduated from high school in July 2007, we decided to take a vacation to Spain and go see our favorite bands in Benicàssim, at an annual music festival. That was the year when Arctic Monkeys were already pretty popular thanks to 2006’s record-smashing debut album and Favourite Worst Nightmare (but they were still shy on stage), and just a month after the iPhone went on sale in the United States.
