Connecting to 3rd and 4th generation iPads and the iPad mini, the Intuous Creative Stylus is a brand new pressure sensitive stylus from Wacom that aims to simulate pen on paper. The pen can react to 2048 different levels of pressure, enabling you to paint the perfect stroke. Powered by a AAAA battery that Wacom claims lasts up to 150 hours, the aluminum brushed pen connects to the latest iPads through Bluetooth 4.0, enabling you to rest your palm naturally on the iPad, while additional shortcut buttons can active various features in supported apps. At launch, the Intuos Creative Stylus will integrate with apps like Autodesk SketchBook Pro and Wacom’s newly revamped Bamboo Paper for sketching and taking notes. Wacom’s latest pressure sensitive stylus will run you $99.95, is available in black or blue, and comes with an additional carrying case, battery, and replacement nibs. You can order the pen online today from the Wacom Store, or wait until the pen hits Best Buy stores in October.
Wacom Introduces the Intuos Creative Stylus for iPad
Google Maps Gets Traffic Data From Waze, Waze Gets POIs From Google Search→
Today on the Google Maps blog, Google detailed some of their upcoming changes to Google Maps and their recent acquisition, Waze. For the Google Maps app on iOS and Android, you’ll start seeing crowdsourced traffic data from Waze users.
This means when Wazers report accidents, construction, road closures and more on Waze, the updates will also appear on the Google Maps app for Android and iOS in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Switzerland, UK and the US.
On the flip side, Waze is also integrating Google Search into their apps for more accurate search results. Online, the Waze Map Editor is now integrated with Google Street View and satellite imagery, making it easier to compare, correct, and update local street data.
You can download Google Maps and Waze for free from the App Store.
Here’s to Another Five Years
Apple wasn’t a brand that my friends and I conversed about in high school, our infatuation being PCs that weren’t Dell and graphics cards and the latest processors and Counter Strike. Apple was a part of my life insofar that they were the guys who made the cool MP3 players. I had an iPod video, and later an iPod touch, but I knew nothing of Steve Jobs. Macs were also unknown to me, but later I would realize that I used an iMac G3 with the weird puck mouse a few times in middle school. In my junior and senior years one of my classmates had the first iPhone, but it was just an iPod with a phone[1].
It wasn’t until after I graduated that Apple became a thing. No one knew it at the time, but 2008 was the last year that Apple would offer the polycarbonate MacBook in black. I remember having this sort of sudden fascination with it: how simple[2] it was, how different it was. This would be my college laptop, despite being in a price range that was out of budget and running an operating system that I wasn’t familiar with.
When the sales tax holiday came around, I made the decision to go all-in. I purchased the fully loaded MacBook in black, complete with an incredible 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processor[3], 4 GBs of memory, and 250 GBs of storage. Being my first laptop, I also purchased an AirPort Extreme so I could have Wi-Fi in the house. The Apple Store was accommodating between me and my overprotective bank, letting me use their phone behind the counter since my Nextel Motorola had no reception.
While the purchase itself was an experience, it wasn’t until I got home that I fully began to appreciate what I had in my hands. Out of the box the laptop was charged and ready to use. There was a prompt to sign up for MobileMe, but otherwise the laptop had no stickers or bloatware. Everything about it was perfect[4].
My MacBook, which I would come to call the BlackBook, had an unbelievable impact on how I thought about computers. It didn’t have the most powerful guts, but it had a great keyboard and trackpad, and the display was pretty good. I thought the MagSafe Power Adapter was brilliant, the magnetic connector certainly saving my bacon plenty of times in the classroom as the cord was sometimes yanked by a wild knee. The sleep indicator light became a reassuring delightful detail. All of those little details really added up.
The BlackBook would be the computer that soldiered on. A hard drive died, a replacement solid state drive died[5], and I upgraded the memory to an unrecommended six gigabytes, keeping it current. I replaced the battery in its third year and I’m probably due for another replacement. The fan started making noises in its fourth year but it never ceased to function so I tolerated it. It didn’t run Mountain Lion, but it did run Lion and that was good enough until Mavericks[6] was announced.
Thinking back, the black model was a good choice. Unlike the white MacBooks, cracks that developed in the surrounding bezel didn’t show as well. The black never did end up looking dirty, although fingerprints were constantly a problem. The oils from my wrists have stained the plastic making the black appear blacker and slick. It stood out from the crowd and it continues to look impressively modern. The keyboard, the trackpad, and the quality of the laptop itself far exceeded my expectations. The keys still feel just as good as they did when I first bought it. The trackpad’s button no longer has that new-click-feel, but it still works just as it always has.
I’ve repaired a lot of laptops of all shapes and sizes for spare cash in college. In 2013, no one else does two finger scrolling well. Apple was getting it right in 2008.
It was because of the BlackBook that I would eventually find myself watching Apple Keynotes in the back of the classroom while the professor was lecturing, and it was because of the BlackBook that I started creating my own WordPress site which eventually led to this one. Little did I know that I would end up using the laptop for an extended four years in college, and it was the machine I would continue to use for a year afterwards. Needless to say that it has been a significant part of my young adult life.
As much as I don’t want to give it up it’s finally showing its age. I will open up the case and blow the dust out and replace the fan. I’ll reapply thermal compound to the processor and reassemble the heat sink so that the laptop runs cooler. It still has life in it.
But it’s time to say goodbye. Five years is a long time to own a computer, and it’s impressive how well the BlackBook withstood the test of time. Apple is moving forward and I’m ready to embrace the latest they have to offer. Needless to say that Apple has made me a fan for life.
Today I’m using a new Mac, the latest MacBook Air, and it’s even more wonderful than the first. It has backlit keys that adjust to ambient lighting and new function keys I’m not used to and an even better display. There’s no button on the trackpad and my headphones finally work with the combination headphone + microphone port. It has USB3 and Thunderbolt, significantly faster interfaces than USB2 and FireWire. And the battery life is amazing[7]; I can use my laptop for two or three days without having to charge it. It’s never gotten hot, and I haven’t heard the fan even after watching hours of streaming video from my favorite websites. Being my first aluminum Mac, I can’t help but appreciate what a marvel of engineering this is.
Here’s to another five years.
- But it was just an iPod with a phone. Oh my god how naive! ↩︎
- I dismissed the Powerbook because I thought the keyboard looked weird and because the lid wasn’t magnetic. Because latches were so passé in 2008. The other alternatives were PCs that were running Windows Vista and underpowered netbooks. ↩︎
- Apple then released the aluminum MacBook in October that had an Nvidia chipset instead of the basic Intel chipset. Thus I learned a hard lesson in Apple release cycles. ↩︎
- The computer I had throughout high school was a Compaq desktop that my uncle had picked out and my grandmother then purchased when she visited in the summer of 2004. It was also quite the beast, having a 2.5 GHz Celeron D processor, one gigabyte of memory, and 40 GBs of storage. This was when ribbon cables were still the norm. It’s fitting that a Compaq was my first computer as Tim Cook is now the CEO of Apple. What a coincidence. ↩︎
- The MacBook had a first revision Serial ATA interface for the hard drive, so I couldn’t take full advantage of a SSD. However, the read and write speeds are still so much faster than a mechanical drive that it was like breathing new life into the machine. And to think today’s MacBook Airs have PCIe-based flash storage. ↩︎
- OS X Mavericks fixes all of the things that didn’t work quite right in Lion. ↩︎
- I swear that the battery on this MacBook Air lasts longer than my iPad. I can’t wait for this to be the standard. ↩︎
The Prompt: You’ll Live To Regret That Decision→
With Federico on the beach, Myke and Stephen discuss Larry Ellison, the future of Apple and iPhone rumors.
I was, indeed, at the beach, from where I posted my Editorial review. I finally had time to listen to the episode myself, and there are some good topics that I’ll revisit soon. You also shouldn’t miss Myke’s version of “Ferragosto”.
App Stores and Discovery→
Benedict Evans:
After the web directory the next stage was the ‘portal’ - a page with someone’s ideas of what might be useful. This is what Yahoo became, and it’s also what the front page of the iOS or Android app stores look like now. The purpose of these screens is not to allow people to discover your app or service - they cannot hope to be comprehensive in that way. The front pages of an app store do not exist to help developers - they can’t. Rather, they exist to help the users - to ease them into the idea of apps. But they can only scratch the surface of ‘discovery’.
Curation by the App Store’s editorial team can’t be enough if it’s not backed by robust search and discovery algorithms that can provide better search results and personalized recommendations. These are topics that I explored in July for the fifth anniversary of the App Store – and, to an extent, they can be applied to other content sold by Apple, like books and video.
Some may argue that Apple’s recent acquisition of Matcha.tv may signal an increased interest in content recommendation algorithms. While I have no doubt that Apple is working on this, it’s important to remember that the same was said for Chomp last year, and that didn’t result in an improved App Store search or recommendation experience on iOS 6. Maybe Matcha’s algorithm is truly different though, and Apple will find a way to use it to improve discovery on iTunes/App Store – but I wouldn’t expect improvements to become apparent any time soon.
New AppleScript Rules in Growl 2.1→
I missed Growl’s 2.1 update when it was released two weeks ago on the Mac App Store. The new version comes with pretty powerful new automation features for AppleScript: you can now specify rules that will be run automatically every time a new notification arrives. Check out the documentation and examples here.
Macworld’s Review of “Jobs”→
Philip Michaels reviews “Jobs” (opening in US theaters today):
But the script abandons these elements almost as soon as they appear, and the movie makers’ focus returns to marking off spaces on the Steve Jobs biography bingo card. Jobs sitting enraptured during a class about fonts? Check. Jobs tricking Woz out of his share of a bonus for developing Atari’s Breakout? Check. Jobs showing off the “1984” Macintosh commercial in its entirety? Check and mate. “This is like a video Wikipedia entry,” my colleague Armando Rodriguez told me after we finished screening the movie. That’s a harsh but not entirely inaccurate critique.
This is a common critique I’ve read in other reviews of Jobs as well. It would have been great to have something more than a documentary of Steve’s life and mannerisms starring Kutcher. I’ll still watch the movie, but I’m hoping Sorkin’s take will be something different and deeper.
Digg 5.1 Brings the Most Popular Stories to Your iPhone and iPad
If you’ve settled on Digg as your feed reader of choice, you’ll like the latest batch of updates for the iOS apps, which brings the web’s clients Popular view to your iPhone and iPad. Throughout the app, you’ll also find new ways to filter out read and unread items, thanks to a toggle that slides in and out of view as you browse around. You’ll also find a static toggle in the settings that’ll let you view only the unread stuff. Other notable features include better scrolling and the ability to delete feeds and folders.
You can download Digg for free from the App Store.
You Can Finally Create Magazines of Cat GIFs in Flipboard→
Straight from the Inside Flipboard blog:
Who doesn’t love GIFs? Flipboard readers have already incorporated them into lively magazines like “Just GIF It,” “GIF Pop” and “GIF Me a Break.” Already on Android, GIF support comes to Flipboard for iPad and iPhone—so now anyone can collect and share their favorites in a magazine. (To celebrate, we’ve got some GIF-centric magazines we love featured today in By Our Readers. Tap on the red ribbon to find them in the Content Guide.)
In Flipboard 2.0.5 (App Store link), you’ll also get access to the latest Top Stories in Tech, News, Business, and Sports. Flipboard is also emphasizing the social aspects of their app by making it easier to find curators and prompting you to share your magazine with others once you’ve saved ten articles.