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>> Postings for December 2011

Simon Jary - Apple's crazy S words

Fri, 23 Dec 2011

Safari  In 2003 Apple released its own browser called Safari. Surfin’ Safari. Surfing the web. Geddit? As of October 2011 Safari accounts for nearly 9 per cent of web traffic, behind Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. However, as the browser on Apple’s iPhone it accounts for a massive 62 per cent of all mobile traffic.

Sagan  Superstar space gazer Carl Sagan was annoyed when he learned that the Power Mac 7100/66 was code-named after him. He wrote to Apple demanding it change the code name. Apple’s project engineers changed the name to BHA, standing for ‘Butt-Head Astronomer’. In April 1994 Sagan sued Apple for defamation of character, but lost.

Simon Jary | Read more...


Andy Ihnatko - What lessons can we learn from the Kindle Fire?

Wed, 14 Dec 2011

First, that “The Love Guru” isn’t such a terrible movie after all. Oh, it’s bad. Absolutely. But nothing so bad as what I had been expecting after reading the aerobically-bad reviews that were published on the weekend of the film’s release. “Only my dog, who once ate a five-pound bag of flower and then spent the next several days passing a large block of paste through his system, can understand the intensity of pain that I went through during the 87 minute running time of this movie,” wrote the collective soul of public movie critics.

It’s an exceptionally-bad movie, sure. But I was expecting Category-5 (“Sex And The City 2”) bad. This was merely a Cat 3 (the recent Russell Brand remake of “Arthur”). I learned this because I impulsively rented this movie as a test of the device’s video playback quality; now I pass this wisdom on to you.

Andy Ihnatko | Read more...


Simon Jary - Apple gets the right Rs

Fri, 09 Dec 2011

Radius  There was once a day when computer displays were sexy – in a geeky way, of course. Mainly those monitors were made by Radius. We shouldn’t be surprised that this company’s products were cool, as it was set up by a breakaway bunch of brilliant engineers from Apple’s original Macintosh team, including Burrell Smith (Mac motherboard maven), Andy Hertzfeld (self-proclaimed “Software Wizard”), Mike Boich (the first Apple Evangelist), Matt Carter (digital type guru, and designer of Verdana), Alain Rossmann (the brains behind WAP), and others.

Its first product was a game changer – the Radius Full Page Display, which was the first large screen for a PC and pioneer of multiple-screen computing. Its next monitor was the Radius Pivot. Believe me, if you were using a Mac in the late 1980s you wanted a Radius Pivot. The full-page Pivot could be rotated 90° between landscape and portrait modes, with real-time remapping of icons, menu, and screen drawing. This stuff still
looks cool on an iPad. Twenty years ago it made grown DTPers and designers faint with envy. It was designed by Terry Oyama, who helped design the original Mac case.

Simon Jary | Read more...