by Dan Minea
If reports from Taiwan are to be believed, hardware manufacturers are struggling to create Windows 8 on ARM (Windows RT) devices that are competitively priced against Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The reason? According to Digitimes, OEMs have to pay Microsoft $90-100 for a Windows 8 license.
Ignoring the shady source, this sounds about right. The price of the iPad is low, considering the technology you get with it.
Today, it all seems too late. The iPhone is the most popular camera on Flickr, but the feeling isn’t mutual. Flickr isn’t even among the top 50 free photography apps in iTunes. It’s just below an Instagram clone in 64th place. By way of comparison, an app that adds cats with laser eyes to your photos is 23rd.
If you don’t innovate or progress, you die. Simple law, highly applicable on the Internet. Sad thing to see Yahoo “blackberry”-ing Flickr into the ground. I still have a paid account there, but I probably won’t renew it next year.
- app is slow
- inconsistent information notification icons say there are new messages or responses, actual window does not show anything new.
- app is slower than mobile web site while everybody is used to speedy apps, the Facebook mobile web site is faster than iOS app, and offers almost the same functionality.
- tons of other bugs scrambled views, photo upload, text boxes disappear, no sharing.
I hate the Facebook’s app experience, it’s one of the worse apps I have. It’s biggest flaw of all: it so DAMN SLOW! I only hope that some of Instagr.am’s app awesomeness can be passed on to resurrect Facebook’s official app. It’s understandable now why they postponed its launch on the iPad for so long, because it sucked and still does.
So basically, we can call this the “HBO has to take one for the team” model. We can get a similar result with a slightly weaker model which doesn’t require long-term corporate cross-subsidization but treats HBO as autonomous from the rest of Time Warner. In the short-term, HBO itself is highly dependent on cable companies. The target market for a la carte HBO Go would be households with broadband but no cable, or about 5% of all US households.
Though the reason behind the dependence to cable operators is clear, it still defeats the purpose of such an app. And the options I have where I live are even more limited, only a couple of operators giving you access to HBO Go. It’s a half-ass step into the future by HBO.
The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don’t make sense anymore.
Save? Save where? You know, down there. Adding the Arrow to the 3.5″ floppy makes me smile. Is it pointing to under my desk? What’s a floppy? Why not a USB key? Maybe a cloud icon? That will be easy since there is only One Cloud Icon in the world.
Perhaps these icons lost their obvious meaning to the new generation, but they are a good reminder of the history of computers and Internet. They are vintage, so to speak, and I wouldn’t want to change them.
So what’s happening is that Facebook has an extraordinary window into the activities of other up-and-coming social networks and other competitors. (The same is true for Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Foursquare; it’s just that Facebook has a much bigger window.) With its remarkable war chest, it can endeavor to buy even more of our time and data than it owns today.
So it hasn’t peeked yet, but it will grow further by acquiring companies based on the huge amount of data they collect from them. Not a bad shift in progress direction.
Today, we’re announcing the App Center, a new place for people to find social apps. The App Center gives developers an additional way to grow their apps and creates opportunities for more types of apps to be successful.
The time of “either you have an app shop or you don’t exist” is coming. Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook. Is Twitter next? There’s an idea: get an app shop, people, don’t get left behind.
Rovio has announced that their wildly popular Angry Birds game series has passed one billion cumulative downloads. This one billion download mark is a total for all versions of the game on all platforms.
The title says it all. Incredible number, even if you have to realize it includes all the free versions downloaded. So it’s not 1 billion sales, but still. It’s amazing how big of a potential a simple app has nowadays. 1 million isn’t cool anymore. You know what’s cool? 1 billion.
“In the future, many will look at decisions made by Apple and debate whether Steve would have made the same decision. That’s a pointless exercise. As civilization advances, as market conditions change, as new threats and opportunities arise, Apple will face circumstances that Steve Jobs never imagined. Tim Cook and his executive team will make their own decisions.
“But I have no doubt that their decisions will be based on Steve Jobs’ principles—the same principles that have made Apple the most valuable company on earth.”
What’s the point in asking a question that has no answer? “Would Steve have done this?” “Would have he approved this?” He is Apple’s inspiration now and nothing more. Life goes on and yes, no one is irreplaceable.
The problem is, we must choose between capturing these moments or viscerally experiencing them as they unfold. That we can’t do both simultaneously seems obvious — we aren’t really enjoying the live concert if we’re busy taking photos of the band. Recent research hammers this home, showing that our performance drops when we try to perform both encoding tasks (experiencing what’s around you) and response selection tasks (capturing stimuli) at the same time. So next time you have a big meeting, ask yourself whether you’re better off 1) as an active, fully engaged participant; or 2) frantically scribbling down comprehensive notes for later use, while ignoring critical room dynamics that can turn meetings on a dime — non-verbal cues, power postures, and nuanced changes in tones of voice.
How often have you seen tourists just look at things without snapping their camera frantically? How often have yourselves just enjoyed the beauty of something without trying to document it?
I’d rather view things with my own eyes than through a camera lens. If you’re missing the live experience you’ll never get it back months later when glancing through hundreds of photos. It just isn’t the same.