Timelapse of 20 years of Apple.com. From the launch of the site in 1996 (Powerbooks and Mac OS 8) through to the iPhone 7 of today.
Stuart McIntyre
Social Business strategist, podcaster, blogger, founder of Social Connections and conference speaker
Apple to create stunning new HQ at Battersea Power Station
Apple is to create a spectacular new London headquarters at Battersea Power Station in a massive coup for the developers behind the £9 billion project.
Safari 9 Responsive Design Mode
Do you host a site or platform that you need to make available to a wide range of desktop and mobile devices, including those Apple iThings running iOS9?
Then you need to check out Safari’s Responsive Design Mode (found in the Develop menu in Safari 9 for the Mac). Take a look at this (video courtesy of Casey Liss):
Yes, you can test your site in all the new split-screen modes available in iOS9. This feature is already proving to be useful for testing a number of my own sites, including this one:
I have a feeling it will come in handy for checking customer projects too, not least custom themes and layouts. This session video from WWDC 2015 covers the feature in great detail (and much more besides…)
Managing Macs at Google Scale
Interesting deck and audio shared at the Lisa ’13 conference earlier this month by Clay Caviness and Edward Eigerman, discussing how Google manages its large estate of 43,000 OS X systems. (Sadly it is not available on YouTube or Slideshare and cannot be embedded here.)
Get it while you can: 1Password for iOS
Most folks that know me well know that I am a huge fan of 1Password, the cross-platform app from AgileBits that allows passwords to be generated, stored and made available across your entire computing estate:
1Password is a password manager that goes beyond simple password storage by integrating directly with your web browser to automatically log you into websites, enter credit card information, fill registration forms, and easily generate strong passwords.
Your passwords, identities, and credit cards, are just some of the confidential information that 1Password stores in one secure place, protected by the only password you will need to remember.
For the Thanksgiving weekend, AgileBits dropped the cost of their universal iOS app by 40%, from $17.99 to $9.99 (£6.99). Right now, the app is still available at that price, so if you’re new to 1Password or else already have their Windows or Mac apps, now could be the time to get it on iOS…
Imagining a 13-inch iPad Pro
Great piece by Rene Ritchie of iMore.com:
The minute Apple launches one hotly rumored device, be it the iPad Air or Retina iPad mini, a new rumored device races up to take its place in the mill. Enter a 13-inch “iPad Pro” – a concept that leapt to every geek’s mind the moment they heard Apple adopt that other MacBook brand. And since Apple’s already gone down in size, where’s left to go but up? Now I’m not so much interested in the rumor – there will always be rumors – but in how Apple could realize such an object. In how iOS could be scaled to that screen size, and what it would provide beyond the existing, 9.7-inch iPad, or the 11-inch or 13-inch MacBook Air.
After debating the ins and outs of how Apple might accomplish the iPad Pro, he concludes with:
Whether or not Apple will or even should make a 13-inch iPad Pro remains to be seen. Certainly a lot of artists, designers, photographers, maybe even gamers would love as big an iPad as Apple can provide. Regardless, increasing screen size is a painful thing. If Apple does indeed go to a 5-inch iPhone or a 13-inch iPad next year or at some point in the future, they’ll have to figure out the best way to handle it for them, for their customers, and for their developers. They may even have to re-visit the concept of how apps manifest on the screen. If and when they do, will it still be one step at a time? With the iPhone’s increase in size preface another increase in density? Will the iPad’s increase in density preface an increase in size? Or will Apple rip the resolution bandage off all at once?
I would likely snap up an iPad Pro in an instant.
Whilst in years gone by, I couldn’t imagine travelling without a full-fledged OS X laptop, I’m increasingly finding that the apps and features on my iPad allow me to accomplish the tasks as well, and in some cases better. Tools such as Jump Desktop and Prompt give me full server access, the Chrome browser gives me all my sites and bookmarks, 1Password has all my passwords and access details, Dropbox has all my files and EverNote has all my notes, images and snippets of code. Most of my favourite enterprise apps now have excellent mobile apps (way better than their desktop ones, if they exist) – Jive, IBM Connections, IBM Sametime etc. Add in great Twitter clients like Twitterrific and Tweetbot, and cool and powerful editors such as Editorial and I really do have my office with me wherever I go.
So if the more extreme of Rene’s ideas did come to fruition and we had a 13” iPad Pro with 4K display, I really do think that the days of trawling round with multiple kilos of keyboard, USB, SSD, trackpad and the like would be over. We shall see!
The difference between the iPad and the Microsoft Surface
But the Surface ends up proving the wisdom of Apple’s limitations. The iPad may not allow you to do everything, but Apple has made sure that it’s great at what it can do. The Surface, by contrast, will let you do everything you want. The problem is that you’ll have no fun doing it.
Upgrading to Mountain Lion?
If you’re thinking of upgrading your Mac to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, here are a few tips:
- Read Jon Siracusa’s incredible 24 page review of the new release
- Check that your Mac is compatible
- Check that your key apps are compatible
- If you run VMWare Fusion, get the Tech Preview
- If you run Skype, get the very latest version
- Remember that none of the IBM products is yet supported on Mountain Lion! Lotus Notes 8.5.x has some issues, not least because the new OS X Notes application shares the name Notes.app. Check Alan Hamilton’s post for a workaround.
- If you have an alternative, don’t upgrade your primary machine first!
- Make a copy of the ‘Install Mountain Lion’ application outside your Applications folder before installing (you can then copy this on to other machines instead of re-downloading)
- Do not upgrade on the day you record a weekly podcast 😉
As a member of the Apple Developer Program I’ve been running the betas of Mountain Lion for the past few months and have had very few issues. I love Notification Centre and the new Messages apps. Definitely evolution rather than revolution, but worth upgrading all the same. At $19.99 for all your Macs, you really can’t go wrong!
Slideshare goes HTML5, and the push for simplicity
An announcement from Slideshare:
- Embedded presentations can be viewed on iOS devices
- New features in embedded presentations will be updated dynamically
- The embed code is shorter and simpler
- The embed has new Twitter and Facebook share buttons (we find that presentations with share buttons get shared 30% more)
Great to see Slideshare bringing their embed functionality up to date – I’ll be updating all my links over the coming weeks.
It is becoming a real rarity now to see social sites use Flash as anything else than a fallback mechanism, which I see as real progress. It’s not just mobile access either, it is very apparent that browsers run more efficiently even with multiple HTML5-rich tabs open and desktops don’t get bogged down when streaming video is playing.
Its interesting that there are a series of posts doing the rounds this week referring to the ‘scandal’ that Apple might ditch the 30-pin dock connector on the next iPhone, yet this is clearly just the pace of progress. Requirements change, technology is invented, at some stage hard decisions need to be made on what gets left out – that’s the price for targeting simplicity. In the past 15 years we’ve seen the death of the parallel/serial/keyboard/mouse ports on PCs (all because of USB, first popular on the iMac G3), the fading of the VGA port (dropped for DVI, then Mini Displayport then Thunderbolt on successive generations of Macs, though admittedly still used on many PCs), and now the fading of the optical drive (discarded on the Macbook Air). Each time a technology has been discarded it has seemed a shock or a reach too far, and yet on every occasion it has turned out to be the best decision for both the vendor and the users alike. In the same way it has become clear that Apple made the right decision not supporting Flash on iOS back in 2007 – user experience on the web has improved substantially as a result.
Steve Jobs regularly talked about how hard ‘simple’ is to achieve, and how really hard decisions need to be made to get there. It seems that this is seen as ‘anti-enterprise’ in some places, that organisations must be able to expect that features they hard at version 1 will still be supported at version 5 ten years later, whether they were positive features that are still relevant or not. Backward compatibility is important yes, but I would argue that defending the retention of all previous features or functions stifles innovation, destroys user experience and results in poor productivity and business value. I would love to see more ‘enterprise’ vendors be willing to throw off the shackles, drop some older out-of-place features and target simplicity as their number one aims.
‘Not as cool’
Samsung Electronics Co. won a legal ruling after a U.K. judge said its Galaxy tablets aren’t “cool” enough to be confused with Apple Inc.’s iPad.
The design for three Galaxy tablets doesn’t infringe Apple’s registered design, Judge Colin Birss said today in London in a court fight between the world’s two biggest makers of smartphones. Consumers aren’t likely to get the tablet computers mixed up, he said.
Judge Colin Birss said, the Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.”
The Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” Birss said. “They are not as cool.”
Do we need to say any more?