IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
Jason Kottke, writing on Kottke.org:
If you search Wolfram Alpha for "planes overhead", it returns a list of planes passing over your current location along with a sky map of where to look. This is very impressive. My next question is, since Siri searches Wolfram Alpha, will this same search produce the same results using Siri on an iPhone 4S?
Lex Friedman, writing for Macworld:
If you have $25 to spend, you’re about to free up a lot of storage space on your iOS devices. On Monday, Apple officially released iTunes Match to the masses, with an update to iTunes for Mac and PC. The company missed its initial deadline of a late October release, but a note to developers last week indicated the feature’s launch was imminent. iTunes Match, part of the iCloud suite that launched earlier month, stores the entirety of your music library in the cloud, at a cost of $25 per year. Unlike competing cloud storage music services from Amazon and Google, iTunes Match saves a lot of bandwidth and time in your initial synchronization, because Apple can identify which songs in your iTunes library are already available in the iTunes Store. If Apple can positively match a song in your library with any of the 20 million tracks for sale in the iTunes Store, it won’t bother uploading that song; only unmatched songs get uploaded to the cloud. Once iTunes Match is finished indexing your library, you can connect to your music from other computers, along with your iOS devices. Any matched music you stream from iCloud plays back at 256-Kbps quality—even if your original copy was encoded at a lower quality. As an Apple Developer, I've had access to and have been using iTunes Match for about 3 months now. There were some bugs early on that were duplicating my playlists - but it looks as if they've fixed those. I haven't seen any problems like that for weeks now. Still though, with the sometimes shaky stability that iCloud has had so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the initial rush of users doesn't create problems of some type for the short term. Long term though, I see this service as being a winner. You need to download the new version of iTunes in order to use iTunes Match. I recommend you do so.
Adobe Q&A posted over the weekend (late Friday night, I think):
Is Adobe still committed to Flex? Yes. We know Flex provides a unique set of benefits for enterprise application developers. We also know that the technology landscape for application development is rapidly changing and our customers want more direct control over the underlying technologies they use. Given this, we are planning to contribute the Flex SDK to an open source foundation in the same way we contributed PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation when we acquired Nitobi. Daring Fireball's John Gruber sums this up aptly: Translation: “No.”
Matt Drance, writing on Apple Outsider:
Adobe’s announcement clearly states that only Flash Player for mobile is going away. The tools — the things that Adobe’s customers really turn to Adobe for — can now grow freely to please creatives in new, forward-looking ways. I truly believe that a long-term Quixotic commitment to Flash Player would have destroyed Adobe from within. It was an expired product that distracted the company from its core competency of making tools for creative professionals. Adobe still has a lot of work to do if it wants to be a real leader in modern web technology, but this is the right first step.
Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:
Yesterday, Logitech hosted an Analyst and Investor Day and during his remarks, CEO Guerrino De Luca pulled absolutely no punches in describing the "mistakes" the company made with its Logitech Revue Google TV set top box. Calling the company's Christmas 2010 launch "a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature," De Luca told investors that the company had "brought closure to the Logitech Revue saga" by making plans to let inventory run out this quarter and that there are "no plans to introduce another box to replace Revue." I've always been a big fan of Logitech. I swear by my G500 mouse, G35 headset and their 2.1 Speakers/Subwoofer combo which I've used for years. That being said, I'm sympathetic towards Logitech over the finical losses they've suffered at the expense of being Google's guinea pig. Make sure you read the whole article. Lots of good quotes that I wanted to include here, but I didn't want to do so for fear of lifting too many parts of their post which I deem unethical.
Interviews with the talented sound team including Re-recording mixers Stuart Hilliker and Mike Dowson, Supervising Music Editor Gerard McCann, Supervising Sound Editor James Mather, and Sound Designer Dom Gibbs who discuss how they recorded and produced the sound effects for the final Harry Potter movie.
Credit to Jim Dalrymple who linked to this article over on The Loop. Original article:
According to The National, accidents fell 20% in Dubai and 40% in Abu Dhabi. Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim from the Dubai Police department said his force saw the largest decrease among young drivers and men. Jim made a good point: If BlackBerry users had Siri, they wouldn’t need to read their texts manually.
M.G. Siegler, writing for Techcrunch:
In the bigger picture, this is something that Apple seems to understand time and time again that their rivals do not. Technology is an ever-important part of everyones’ lives, but the only way to make it truly accessible to the vast majority of users is to humanize it. That’s Siri. Google, Microsoft, etc — they all fail miserably at doing this. There are many good sections that it was hard to quote just a single paragraph. Read the entire article.