This Week's Sponsor:

Collections Database

A Powerful Database with iCloud Sync

Posts tagged with "steve jobs"

Steve Jobs Biography Gets A Classic Cover

There are many pictures of Steve Jobs, and perhaps one of the most iconic is the scraggly bearded CEO posing for the camera, hand up to his chin as he imagines Apple’s next greatest device (at least I like to think that). The image will also be making an appearence on the cover of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs (previously: The Book of Jobs), can be seen on the Barnes & Noble storefront with a publication date set for November 21st. You can currently preorder the hardcover for $20.40 (list price is $32.50), with B&N’s digital eBook availalbe for $14.99.

[via AllThingsD]

How The iPad Changed A 9-Year Old Girl’s Life→

How The iPad Changed A 9-Year Old Girl’s Life

Evonne Barry at the Herald Sun tells the story of Holly Bligh, a 9-year old girl from Melbourne, Australia, whose life has been changed forever since she started using an iPad instead of regular paper and textbooks. As the publication reports, in fact, Holly has albinism, a condition that, alongside her skin, also affects her vision. Before the iPad, Holly’s parents and teachers were forced to print out papers with larger characters in order to let her read properly. The iPad, with its multitouch capabilities, changed that. Holly can now read her books with ease thanks to pinch and zoom, and her mother says the device is improving her ability to be independent from teachers as well.

But there’s more. Holly’s mother, Fiona, decided to send an email to Steve Jobs to personally thank him for producing a device that contributed so deeply to the betterment of her daughter’s life, and he replied.

Within hours of directly emailing multi-billionaire chief executive Steve Jobs, she was thrilled to receive a response.

“Thanks for sharing your experience with me. Do you mind if I read your email to a group of our top 100 leaders at Apple?” he wrote.

Mr Jobs signed off with “Thanks, Steve”, and asked for a high-resolution photo of Holly with her iPad.

This isn’t the first example of how the iPad as a revolutionary device changed the lives of children affected by different conditions and disabilities. Still, it’s always nice to hear a good story, rather than speculation on the next MacBook Air or Sandy Bridge CPU. Make sure to head over the Herald Sun for the full article.

Permalink

Steve Jobs Email Confirms iWeb Will Be Discontinued

MacRumors has posted what they believe to be a legitimate email from Steve Jobs to a customer, in which Apple CEO sort of confirms that iWeb, the website creation tool bundled in the iLife suite and connected to MobileMe’s hosting service, will be discontinued come the official end of MobileMe services next year. Following the announcements at WWDC that saw the introduction of iCloud and the support document that detailed how existing MobileMe subscribers will be given instructions to migrate to iCloud this Fall, many wondered what would happen to old offerings like the aforementioned iWeb and the me.com web apps, which didn’t see any announcement or confirmation at the developers event. iWeb allowed users to design and update websites on a Mac, then host them through MobileMe. Steve Jobs suggests users will have to find an alternative design tool and provider to host the websites.

The email:

Q: Dear Mr. Jobs,

Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites?

I have invested a lot of time and effort and the thought of re-training sucks more than mobileme ever did.

A: Yep.

Sent from my iPhone

MobileMe subscriptions were automatically renewed to June 30, 2012, free of charge for all existing free (trial) and paid customers. It’s not clear at this point which other MobileMe services won’t make the transition to iCloud as Apple hasn’t confirmed anything but the information from the support document so far, but several tech pundits started believing that iWeb was headed towards discontinuation when it didn’t receive a substantial update with the iLife ‘11 suite last year.

Apple Wants To Build A Spaceship-like Campus In Cupertino

Amidst the software announcements at WWDC that finally confirmed the existence of iOS 5 and iCloud, a new build of Lion and the Apple Design Awards, Apple has been busy releasing new software for its platforms and devices. But this week has turned out to be more than just software for the company, as CEO Steve Jobs explained to the Cupertino City Council earlier this week Apple’s plan to build a new campus in Cupertino: a spaceship-shaped, 4-story building to host 12,000 employees and completely revolutionize the way Apple operates in Cupertino. The proposed project is impressive: not only it really looks like a mothership landed on Cupertino, it’s green and eco-friendly in the way it should be built using curved glass thanks to Apple’s retail experience. Not a single piece of glass in the building would be a straight piece – it’s all curved. Parking would be underneath, the number of trees would increase from the current 3,700 to 6,000 with some “apricot orchards” as well – furthermore, it would be located in the 98-acre campus Apple bought from HP last year.

Overall, it’s an impressive project for Apple – and we suspect it may have something to do with a rumor that claimed Norman Foster was collaborating closely with Apple to build a revolutionary campus based on modern, green technologies and renewable energies. Apple would rely on its natural gas facility and use an electricity grid as backup.

As Steve explained to the Cupertino City Council:

It’s a pretty amazing building. It’s a little like a spaceship landed. It’s got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle… It’s a circle. It’s curved all the way around. If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It’s all curved. We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building… It’s pretty cool.

You can check out Steve Jobs’ detailed proposal of the new mothership after the break. [via MacRumors] Read more

Authorized Biography of Steve Jobs Now Available For Pre-Order

The previously announced biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which will be the first ‘authorized’ biography of Jobs, is now available for pre-order. iSteve: The Book of Jobs will be released on March 6th, 2012. The description of the book from Amazon provides:

From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In iSteve: The Book of Jobs, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs’ family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, iSteve is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.

You can pre-order iSteve: The Book of Jobs from Amazon right now for $19.80 in paper, or $14.99 for the Kindle edition. Curiously the release date (March 6th), will be on the fourth anniversary of the release of the iOS SDK that allowed developers to build third party apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Video: Steve Jobs Discusses Remote Computing in 1997

Here’s an interesting video from WWDC 1997 brought to our attention by our friend Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger: at the conference’s keynote, as you can see from the video around the 13 minute mark, Steve Jobs starts talking about the “connected” world he lives in where, thanks to networking hardware at NeXT, Apple and Pixar, he’s able to take all his files and folders, his entire “home directory” wherever he goes thanks to what we call the “cloud” nowadays. By storing his personal data in the cloud, on the server, Steve says he doesn’t have to care about data loss and backups anymore – he can simply change computers and, thanks to the speed and RAM capacity of the servers,  have the Home folder quickly coming down from the server in seconds. He says this was already happening in 1990 at NeXT.

Let me describe the world I live in. About eight years ago 1 we had high-speed networking connected to our NeXT hardware. Because we were using NFS, we were able to take all of our personal data — our “home directory” we called them — off of our local machines and put them on a server. The software made that completely transparent…a professional could be hired to back up that server every night.

In the last seven years, do you know how many times I lost any personal data? Zero. Do you how many times I’ve backed up my computer? Zero.

I have computers at Apple, at Pixar, at NeXT and at home. I walk over to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server and I’ve got my stuff, where ever I am. And none of that is on a local disc. The server…is my local disc.

Read more

Apple Confirms: June 6 Keynote with Steve Jobs To Unveil iOS 5 and iCloud

Apple just confirmed with a press release Steve Jobs will be on stage (alongside other Apple executives) at the WWDC keynote on Monday, June 6, to officially unveil iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud, the upcoming cloud service from Apple. The WWDC ‘11 was long rumored to be focused on new software announcements with Mac OS X Lion set to debut this summer and an iOS 5 beta ready to be seeded to developers, but the iCloud launch was far from certain as Apple was rumored to be closing deal with music publishers, but negotiations could still fall off before the WWDC. It’s not clear yet whether iCloud will be a music service or a much larger set of tools part of a MobileMe rebrand, though Apple’s press release seems to suggest just that.

Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

Previous reports indicated iOS 5 would be released publicly this Fall, with betas seeded throughout the summer to developers. The OS was reported to feature new music, location services, “completely revamped” notifications and widgets, as well as a heavy cloud-based underlying structure that, at this point, we assume will be directly connected to iCloud for the web, desktop and mobile. Other rumors in the past months pointed at iOS 5 with new features called “Photo Stream” and “Media Stream” to instantly share photos and videos with your friends through the Cloud, similarly to how a separate report claimed the new MobileMe would be a mix of Facebook and uStream for social functionalities and video sharing.

Apple’s First CEO: Jobs’ Attention To Detail Is Also His Weakness→

Apple’s First CEO: Jobs’ Attention To Detail Is Also His Weakness

Jay Yarow at Business Insider has posted a lengthy interview with Apple’s first CEO Michael Scott, who ran the company from February 1977 to March 1981. The interview is full of interesting details and tidbits that are worth saving in your Instapaper queue, but here’s one we particularly liked about how Scott – who was hired by Mike Markkula to be the CEO as both Jobs and Wozniak were seen as too young and unexperienced – viewed Steve Jobs’ proverbial attention to detail at the time:

I stayed out of it but for weeks, maybe almost six weeks, the original Apple II case, Jobs wanted a rounded edge on it so it didn’t have a hard feel. They spent weeks and weeks arguing exactly how rounded it would be. So that attention to detail is what Steve is known for, but it also is his weakness because he pays attention to the detail of the product, but not to the people.

To me, the biggest thing in growing a company is you need to grow the people, so it’s like being a farmer, you need to grow your staff and everybody else too as much as you can to enable the company to grow, just as much as you need to sell the product.

Check out the full interview by hitting the source link below.

Permalink

Steve Jobs: Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff→

Steve Jobs: Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff

Mark Parker talking to Steve Jobs over the phone, shortly after becoming CEO of Nike:

“Do you have any advice?” Parker asked Jobs. “Well, just one thing,” said Jobs. “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.” Parker said Jobs paused and Parker filled the quiet with a chuckle. But Jobs didn’t laugh. He was serious. “He was absolutely right,” said Parker. “We had to edit.”

Keeping focus is one of the most important things you can do for your brand. Sure you can sell twenty different models of the same thing over and over again, but when you really narrow down your product line to only the best available, the only things you have to sell are good products. It’s more desirable for both companies and consumers when effort is only expelled on the things that count.

“Can anyone innovate like Apple?”  The simple answer: While anyone can learn the principles that drive Apple’s innovation, few businesses have the courage to do so.  It takes courage to reduce the number of products a company offers from 350 to 10, as Jobs did in 1998.  It takes courage to remove a keyboard from the face of a smartphone and replace those buttons with a giant screen, as Jobs did with the iPhone.”\

Carmine Gallo couldn’t have said it any better. While all of what I’ve said might be true, it takes courage. I recommend reading the rest over at Forbes via the read-more link below.

Permalink