Apple Makes Find My iPhone Free

Macworld reports that the “Find My iPhone” service will be free for all iOS 4.2 users starting today. “Find My iPhone” lets you locate your iPhone from any Web browser or iOS device in case your phone is lost or stolen, or you want to track your spouse/children.

A Few Quick Observations about FaceTime on the Mac

• Yes, you can FaceTime yourself from your iPhone.
• Yes, it makes neat echos if you point the phone at the Mac.
• FaceTime on your Mac will ring even if you don’t have the app running.
• I don’t see a way. but it would be great if you could link your phone number and your email address so that people will reach you wherever.

Apple's Problem with TV

John Siracusa, arguing that Apple should go all-in with a set-top box. Make it the only box you need in your media cabinet. Let it record TV, play DVDs, stream Netflix, and sell you iTunes stuff all in one interface.

Something you can watch for when Steve Jobs debuts products are cues that he personally doesn’t have a lot of passion for them. He knows lots of people play and care about games, but he doesn’t. Game Center is important to iPod owners and will help Apple sell to them, but Jobs clearly doesn’t have much enthusiasm for it in his talk. Compare the Game Center segment to any feature at all he talked about when he showed off the iPad for the first time.

Several years ago Apple released Keynote, which was later joined by Pages and Numbers as the iWork suite. Keynote was a program Apple designed specifically for Jobs because he so hated the existing presentation apps out there (that is, PowerPoint). When Jobs wants something, he has his team design the very best (in his eyes) version of it possible.

I really, really wonder what Steve Jobs’s home entertainment center looks like. Maybe he just has an Apple TV and watches pay-per-view movies on it. I’d think if it were the spaghetti mess of wires and boxes most of us have, it’d drive him crazy and he’d direct his engineers to solve the problem. Apple TV would truly be that one box to rule them all. How hard would it be to throw in a DVD slot and a DVR application? That Apple hasn’t is, just guessing here, because Jobs doesn’t watch much TV and isn’t a live sports fan.

How Star Trek artists imagined the iPad... 23 years ago

To understand the thinking that lead to the design of the Star Trek PADD, we spoke to some of the people involved in production of ST:TNG (as well as other Star Trek TV series and films), including Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler.

Ars Technica

LongBox Digital Comics Store Adds to Apple Tablet Frenzy

Andy Ihnatko has been hearing rumors that Apple is courting comic book publishers for its rumored tablet media thing. I hope it’s true, and I hope that they don’t try anything fancy with it. I’ve seen approaches to digital comics that break things out panel-by-panel and try to squeeze comics into the screen. With a nice handheld device, just give me the whole page and let me zoom around if I want. No animations, just art.

Apple's Hypocritical Move to Block Competitors From Accessing iTunes

Farhad Monjoo, writing for Slate, argues that Apple should allow any mp3 player to sync with iTunes, and I agree. Palm’s decision to make its Pre pretend to be an iPod was interesting but strange. iTunes should sync with any player that plugs into it, but since all the music Apple sells (and any music you load in from a CD) is copy-protection-free, Palm could have written its own sync software that reads anything in the iTunes Media folder. People could keep using iTunes to play music and use another utility to sync their Pre.

iTunes: How to Share Music Between Different Accounts on a Single Computer

For future reference: iTunes: How to Share Music Between Different Accounts on a Single Computer.

Rumored Apple Tablet May Be Digital Comics' Future

Andy Ihnatko, in an interview with Newsarama:

I really believe the tablet is absolutely necessary to move comics into the digital realm. […] Publishers trying to go digital, in most cases, have missed the point up until now. They just don’t know how to deal with taking a story designed to fill up an entire page and trying to make it work on a smaller iPhone screen or smaller handheld screen. What they do is they tend to force the path that the reader takes throughout the comic book.

“We’re going to need to see the full page,” said Ihnatko, a comic book reader himself. “We’ll need to look wherever we want to look. Artists will have to have the freedom to design the page however they want it to go for it to really work. That’s why we want a nice, big color screen that can at least give you the top half or bottom half of the page and scroll very neatly and very cleanly.

The article is titled “Rumored Apple Tablet May Be Digital Comics’ Future”. But why is the world sitting around waiting for Apple to do it? “What do you do when no manufacturer seems capable of building the gadget of your dreams? Why not engage in a little wish fulfillment about the most secretive company in the tech business?” asks The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro. Sure, if Apple releases a tablet, it will probably be a great device, but why is the tech world just waiting around, screaming “help us Apple! You’re our only hope!”, as if only Apple can create such a wünderkindle?

Mac OS X Over The Years

Mac OS X Over The Years

It’s neat to see how the interface has been refined over the years.

ThisService

ThisService is a handy MacOS scripting doohickie you can use to turn any Perl, Python, etc. script into a systme-wide service. I’m using it to convert older weblog entries from HTML to Markdown.

Daring Fireball: Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple

Apple forced the makers of a dictionary to remove “objectionable” words before allowing it onto the App Store. Waiting for that Steve Jobs blog post saying they’re changing how they’re going to run that any day now…

I’d been looking for a good iPhone dictionary and was unhappy with the Dictionary.com one, which I deleted almost immediately. Since I already know all my curse words, I’ve bought Ninjawords and will give it a try (link opens iTunes).

Update: Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller responds.

Thoughts on the Apple Tablet That Doesn't Exist Yet

1. Its interface will not be just like the desktop Mac OS, but it won’t be just a bigger iPhone. Multi-touch, yes, but the iPhone’s interface is based around one app at a time with no multitasking. With a bigger screen this doesn’t make as much sense, yet the Mac OS’s menubars and such wouldn’t work as well with touch.
2. Apple has a marketing hook up its sleeve no one has thought of yet. Like it or not, Apple won’t release a tablet just because journalists right now think it would be cool. It needs a reason to exist, whether that’s enhanced productivity or on-the-go media like never before, but they won’t just put it out there unless it fills some gap, maybe a need you didn’t know you had, between what the iPhone and the MacBook can do.
3. They will likely stress the ability to hook up their skinny Bluetooth keyboard to it.
4. The iTunes Store will start carrying books. They’ll either be in the Kindle format, a new format that Apple invented but claims is part of a new standard, or they’ll just be PDF. If it has copy protection, Jobs will demure when asked why music doesn’t but it does, like when people ask him the same thing about video. Kindle Digital Ink enthusiasts will point out that a brightly backlit LCD hurts your eyes if you stare at it for too long, and its battery life won’t last two weeks. They’ll be right, but Steve Jobs will make a pithy comment about how good his screen is. Unless it has some magic dual screen that goes into book mode.
5. People will start to wonder if maybe the laptop as we know it is on its way out. Maybe all we need is a multi-touch tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard. Computing power in said tablet will still be years away from making this possible. Some will mention the lack of the CD drive as a plus, and some of these will be called out by John Gruber as having said the opposite when the Air came out.
6. They might just call it the “MacBook”. Remember last month when they moved all their laptops (except the legacy plastic one) to the “Pro” level? Well, this one will let you read it like a book: MacBook.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: I'm really thinking maybe I shouldn't have yelled at that Chinese guy so much

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: I’m really thinking maybe I shouldn’t have yelled at that Chinese guy so much

I worked for one summer as a news announcer on WNRN (“New Rock Now”) in Charlottesville, VA. Every twenty minutes in the morning and once an hour in the afternoons I’d read a few headlines and engage in some quick banter with the host. (Aside: the morning shift was “Acoustic Sunrise” which I absolutely could not stand. The host was a very nice guy named, if I recall correctly John, but his music was capital-L lame. Sorry.) One of the stories involved someone who had been killed. I don’t remember what the story was about, but it was a Darwin Awards-esque thing. My uncle, who had been a professional DJ for years in Alaska, gave me a piece of advice: be careful about making fun of dead people.

So when I read Fake Steve Jobs’s piece this morning, I winced. He’s making fun of a guy who killed himself for losing a telephone. But it’s worked its way around the Web, and you may have already seen the following paragraph:

We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused—what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.

And despite I think much of the post being in poor taste, that paragraph is a stunning, sad (and, yes, condescending) piece of editorial. Being a guy from Virginia and not Michigan, labor issues aren’t something I’ve devoted a lot of thought to, but we all are going to have to, soon.

Notes on a Dual-Mode Airport Extreme Network — Luo.ma

http://luo.ma/52/dual-band-airport-network/

This is exactly what I have set up at home, and it works great. 2 notes: the Nintendo DS needs 802.11b connectivity, if you have one; and this works nicely also if you want to hook one base station up to a printer and another up to an external hard drive.

Mac OS X 10.4: How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections

Mac OS X 10.4: How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections

I’ve read this isn’t a problem for 10.5 (Leopard), but good to note for future reference.

stevenf.com - My loving homage to every breathless unboxing...

stevenf.com - My loving homage to every breathless unboxing…

Hilarious. Worth watching all the way to the end to see every single thing that’s inside the box.

Glyphboard

Glyphboard

Handy webpage you can add to your iPhone’s home screen that lets you copy special characters to the phone’s clipboard.

iTunes Script to Download Available Purchases

iTunes Script to Download Available Purchases

If you subscribe to a season pass of a show in iTunes, you can set Mail to run this script whenever you get an email that a new episode is available. It’ll have iTunes download the episode and then delete the message.

iPhone Video Chatting

(Just doing some fanciful thinking about an iPhone with video.)

If a new iPhone comes out that has a built-in video camera, it’s not a leap to imagine they’d introduce an iChat app with it that lets you transmit video while you talk. Problem is, the camera’s on the opposite side of the phone from the screen, so if you point it at yourself, you can’t see the other person’s video. They could put two cameras on it, with one facing toward you, but I don’t see that happening. Maybe instead it’d more one-way in design. The idea that you would be talking to someone and want them to be able to see something cute your cat’s doing or whatever. You take the phone away from your ear (Maybe it automatically switches to speaker even), hit “send video”, and then point the camera at it. Your friend gets the video in realtime, and then you go back to talking. It’s not video chat, but honestly, how useful is video chat? Seeing someone’s face adds a little to the conversation, but not a whole lot, and it means you’re devoting your eyes to the task and not doing the stuff many people do when they talk on the phone like fold laundry, play video games, etc.

I guess Belkin or someone could sell a little video iPhone conference call stand. You’d put your iPhone in it and it would have a few mirrors to get your face into the phone’s camera while still letting you face the front toward you. Or of course a snap-on front-facing camera accessory for $50.

Of course every Mac has video chat built in already, and I don’t know that people use that often. Partly just because my phone can ring at any point, but I need to have my computer awake and be signed into iChat to receive a video chat invitation. Maybe a video iPhone could let me receive a call on my phone and then transfer it to my Mac? The conversation could keep going through Bluetooth but I’d get the video on my Mac with its iSight camera in a better position to have a face-to-face conversation.

Put Safari 4 Tabs Back Where They Belong | Mac Guru Lounge

Put Safari 4 Tabs Back Where They Belong