Joel Housman

Front-end Web Developer, iOS Developer, Man About Internet

Posts from the “Apple” Category

Time and Taste

Posted on April 23rd, 2012

Marco Arment, at Marco.org writes: Improving poor taste in upper leadership is almost as difficult as treating severe paranoia: people who don’t value taste and design will rarely recognize these shortcomings or seek to improve them. With very few exceptions, companies that put out tasteless, poorly designed products will usually never change course. Anyone who wants to compete well against Apple is going to need good taste at the top and deep-rooted design values throughout the company. ∗

Jobs’s Biographer to Page: What Part of “I’m Going to Destroy Android” Didn’t You Understand?

Posted on April 5th, 2012

John Paczkowski, [at AllThingsD](John Paczkowski): During a lecture Wednesday evening at the U.K.’s Royal Institution, Isaacson took issue with Page’s remarks, stressing that Jobs was hardly kidding around when he threatened to destroy Android, which he lambasted as a stolen product. “[Apple's iOS] is almost copied verbatim by Android,” Isaacson said as reported by Macworld UK. “And then they licence it around promiscuously. And then Android starts surpassing Apple in market share, and this totally infuriated [Steve]. It wasn’t a matter of money. He said: ‘You can’t pay me off, I’m here to destroy you.’” The actual quote, verbatim, from Jobs to Isaacson was this: “Our lawsuit is saying, ‘Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.’ Grand theft. I will…

How To Install Instagram On Your Android Phone In 23 Easy Steps

Posted on April 4th, 2012

Sarah Pavis, at Buzzfeed: Step 3. Try to download Instagram from the Google Play app. Find that it is compatible with anything at or above 2.2 (Froyo, 2 major releases behind current). If you have an older Android phone like the HTC Nexus One (not to be confused with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus or the HTC One) that has limited internal memory then odds are you many not have enough internal storage space available because the Instagram app is 16MB (which is large for an Android app). Comically sad.

Half of U.S. Homes Own Apple Products

Posted on March 28th, 2012

Half of U.S. homes own Apple products – USATODAY.com: “That’s more than 55 million homes with at least one iPhone, iPad, iPod or Mac computer. And one-in-10 homes that aren’t currently in that group plan to join it in the next year. But Apple doesn’t have to worry about brand saturation any time soon. Americans don’t stop with just one device. Homes that own least one Apple, own an average of three. Overall, the average household has 1.6 Apple devices, with almost one-quarter planning to buy at least one more in the next year. “It’s a fantastic business model — the more of our products you own, the more likely you are to buy more,” says Jay Campbell, a vice president of Hart Research…

This American Life Retracts Apple/Foxconn Story

Posted on March 16th, 2012

This American Life is retracting their popular episode about Apple and their Foxconn factories, claiming that part of the story was fabricated. Ira Glass, writing about the reiteration, on the This American Life blog (Andy Baio has a mirror up as the site is getting hammered.): I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products. The…

The iPad Reviews Are Out

Posted on March 15th, 2012

The embargo from Apple to the writers who had been given review units was lifted last night. At 9:00 pm last night, my Twitter feed was flooded by authors posting their reviews. I spent most of my evening reading a great many of them. I wanted to share the few that I thought were best. John Gruber: iPad (3) Jim Dalrymple: Review: iPad third generation Jason Snell: Review: The third-generation iPad MG Siegler: The New iPad Makes Apple’s Tablet Domination Clearer Than Ever Joshua Topolsky: iPad review (2012) The consensus: The retina display is a sight to see.

The New iPad’s Greatest Feature: The Battery

Posted on March 11th, 2012

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet’s Hardware 2.0 blog: While Apple has undoubted put more power efficient technology into its next-generation iPad — for example, dropping the processor architecture down from 40nm to 28 nm would have resulted in quite a significant power saving — the more dramatic improvement has been the battery itself. Between the release of the iPad 2 last year and the announcement of the new iPad yesterday, Apple has nearly doubled the capacity of the battery, taking it from 25Wh to a massive 42Wh. Measured in milliamps this boosts the battery from 6944 mAh to a monstrous 11,666 mAh. Kingsley-Hughes covers much more in this article that I would like to quote here, but when I was trying to decide exactly…

The iPad Is Unbeatable

Posted on March 9th, 2012

Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate: Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours…

Why The iPad Has And Will Continue To Dominate The Tablet Market

Posted on March 9th, 2012

Matthew Panzarino, writing for The Next Web: In a Neilsen survey from earlier this year it was shown that almost no respondents stopped using their smartphones after purchasing a tablet, while 3% completely stopped using their desktop computers and 32% reported that they were using their desktops much less. Consumers treat phones and tablets as separate entities, they look at them as different tools for different purposes. He goes on to discuss many other points, in a well written piece that does a very good job of laying it all out.