Tag: Apple

Categories
Technology

Interesting Keyboard

At Apple’s recent keynote, there were a number of interesting announcements from the fruit company around a number of their product lines. The focus, rightly so, is around Apple Watch for now, but it is the newly announced redesign MacBook keyboard that has me the most intrigued.

I’m not a keyboard aficionado, but it is something I constantly use every day. I use Apple’s keyboards, Microsoft’s latest Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop Keyboard & Mouse, and Lenovo’s last-generation keyboard on the ThinkPad X220 and have never been able to settle on a single model or type of keyboard.

The smaller distance, larger keys, and metal click all makes the MacBook keyboard one of the most interesting. Most of what I use right now uses the scissor mechanism and the new butterfly mechanism looks to be a marked improvement in many key areas.

So I’ll wait and play with one at a store in the future. Whether Apple brings this new mechanism to the rest of their line, I am not sure.

Categories
Business Technology

Apple’s Billions at Work

Wondering what Apple might do with its billions of dollars of profit each quarter?

I think they’ve been telling us for a while, and it fits in really nicely with some of the concerns people have had about Apple for a long while.

the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is going to be building a data command center in Arizona in the husk of GT Advanced Technologies. Not a bad ending for that sordid affair.

Along with the data center itself, there are plans for a 70 megawatt solar array to be put on/near the site to provide power, much like the North Carolina data center they are also expanding. They also have data centers under construction in Oregon and Nevada.

It takes a lot of up-front capital to try to get these sorts of facilities off of the ground and Apple has cash.

Categories
Life Technology

Why the Mac App Store

The App Store (both Mac and iOS) has its fair share of problems.

However, it has allowed me to offload many problems I had to deal with in the past when it came to recommending, purchasing, and installing software. Mainly, it has to do with enabling others to do that part so that I don’t have to go and visit that person every time they have a question.

My mother records her piano students at various times during the year for Statewide Graduation with the Suzuki Association of Minnesota. Those files need to be converted to MP3s and then submitted for judging before a student can be accepted.

In comes Pro Audio Converter and the Mac App Store. I send her the link, she can purchase and download using her Apple ID with attached credit card information and I get an email back later that day saying that everything worked just fine.

In the past she never even purchases the software because she doesn’t like giving her credit card information out over the web if she doesn’t know the company. Apple, being a corporation that she knows, handles the trust issue and then OS X handles downloading, installing, and showing her where to find the software.

The added benefit is that I don’t see three mounted images on her desktop where she runs the programs out of the next time I visit.

So she gains some independence from me taking care of the software side of things and I gain time. That’s a win-win in that situation.

However, let’s not minimize the issues the App Store has. There are needs for resources to make App Review faster and better, better management to keep policies in-line across the company, and continued development to make sure that new apps can show up on the store as well. Those are real needs.

There are real wins, for real people, with the App Store as well … and that is really cool.

Categories
Life Technology

Stanford iOS 8 Course Now Available

The Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift course from Stanford University is now available on iTunes U …

… and it is entirely in Swift! Obviously.

I’m done with the first lecture and half through the second. I’ve started a number of the old classes, but never finished since I ended up finding them after they had all of the materials available and my tiny little brain was too intimidated to stick with it.

This time I am hoping to keep up with the material as it is released. Hopefully that will help me push through. So far, so good.

Categories
Technology

Apple Is Always Doomed

2015 marks me being a Mac and Apple user, in one form or another, for a decade. While I’m an infant compared to many longtime Apple users, I feel like I am finally getting some perspective on the company and its products after using them for an extended period of time. Now that I do the math, I’ve been an Apple user longer than I was a Microsoft user before (10 vs. 7 years).

I’ll start with this controversial statement: Apple is not perfect.

Not even close, really,

However, Apple has never been perfect and you have always been able to find problems with every software release. The “it just works” moniker has always been marketing. This is nothing new.

What is new is the scale of Apple.

Today there are just so many more people using Apple’s products that you are going to be hearing from more people. It is much easier for opinions to find their way to the “surface” of the Internet today than in the past and the media is paying closer attention to what people are saying online in a bid to try to stay afloat.

That means we are going to hear of more problems.

Two articles featured prominently over the weekend. First came Apple has lost the functional high ground from Marco Arment (and more recently his following up titled What it’s like to be way too popular for a day). I can’t really disagree with much of what he wrote because there are issues with the software that Apple has been recently releasing.

My problem is that it has always been this way … and it will always be this way.

The Functional High Ground by Daniel Jalkut states it very well, and from a person who worked for Apple starting in the 90s.

And now it’s 2015, and in the immortal words of Kurt Cobain: “Hey! Wait! I’ve got a new complaint.” Don’t we all.

That sums it up for me. I’ve been reading about how Apple’s software has been horrible since I started using a Mac. I read about how Windows was/is/will be horrible since before my parents owned a computer running Windows 95 (thank you PC magazines). Software stinks. I deal with more issues at work from Google Chrome than any other piece of software right now (beating out even Adobe’s products at the moment).

Software stinks and there is no other way to state it.

Apple needs to get things figured out because they are burning up good will from some people, but they are not unique in that situation. Google is there for others (the Google Apps Admin interface is a mess). Microsoft has been there for many for a long time (and Windows 8 didn’t help in some respects).

Apple is always doomed, and to a great extent will always be doomed because they set the bar high for themselves. That’s a good thing, but lets cut the hyperbolic headlines and stories and get back to trying to make things better.

Image by Barry Goble from Flickr