In 1996, Pixar CEO Steve Jobs and Toy Story director John Lasseter went on the Charlie Rose show to talk about the creation of the world’s first computer-generated movie and Pixar’s position in the movie industry.
Instead, Jobs was left to field a multitude of questions about about his roles at Pixar and Apple. Getting a serious grilling about his role at Apple, the former Pixar CEO fields questions on the Internet, Microsoft and his competition – providing a real insight into the movie company and Apple’s visions for the future at the time.
Makes you wonder where all those years went, that was 15 years ago…Image Credit, Reddit
Apple has been awarded a multitouch user interface patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office—a patent that has sparked debate among Apple watchers regarding whether it's broad enough to concern Apple's competitors or not.
The patent itself was filed in 2007 and describes methods for interacting with a webpage or other screen element using one or more fingers, depending on what the user is trying to do. For example, one finger might be used to scroll or move the screen around (a la moving the map around on Google’s mobile Maps page), while two fingers might be used to pinch or zoom on certain details within that page or element. The patent doesn’t go into much detail on the GUIs on the device that hosts the screen elements, nor does it expand its description to explain other forms of multitouch functionality.
If there’s one thing I don’t do enough of it’s walking, so when this little app popped into my inbox earlier today with the subject “Turns Walking into a Game”, you can appreciate why it caught my attention.
Arookoo (itunes link) is a free app developed by Reader’s Digest Association and Vivity Labs. It encourages you to get walking by turning the normally rather monotonous action into a series of challenges.
The app aims to keep its users motivated and fit by sending them on challenges and exploration tours of their local city. Expectedly, in return, the user gains rewards for their activity.
To use the app, it does advise you to keep it running in the foreground and provides a neat little screenlock function to do so. What impact this will have on battery life remains to be seen.
The app has a couple of online components. Firstly, at Aroookoo.com, there are a variety of fitness tracking tools plus an Arookoo Community for added motivation – note that you do need to sign up on the iPhone app itself. Additionally, for you Facebook addicts, The Arookoo Social Game on Facebook turns your friends into world explorers as players walking around a virtual world collecting stars and discovering tools and treasures hidden within the game – not particularly “healthy” but fun nevertheless.
The most exciting element of Arookoo, at least for myself, is the interaction via the iPhone app. The app has clearly been given some serious love and has more than enough features to keep you entertained: a scavenger hunt, challenges, levels to unlock, daily rewards, ability to compete with friends, team mode and more. The app also offers a built in health tracking tool that not only lets you track your calories burned but also makes it possible to insert details of food you’ve eaten to learn how long you need to walk for to burn the calories off! Unfortunately, the latter requires you to purchase an in-app upgrade for $2. Hey, it had to make money somehow right?
If this all sounds very cool, it’s because it is and I for one am planning on giving it the best part of a month to test out. Will it stick? Time will tell but if you spot me walking with intent, I advise you stay out of my way. 🙂
For some developers, Apple’s keynote today was more of a kick in the crotch than a bear hug.
And yet, like someone trapped in a dysfunctional relationship, they’ll keep coming back for more. That’s because even though it may run roughshod over a few developers from time to time, Apple still has a lot of what they need.
Traditionally a lovefest for OS X and iOS programmers, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is when the company unveils new software features, lays out details of various application programming interfaces, and invites programmers to peek under the hood at the operating systems.
Many of the new features shown at the WWDC keynote Monday looked very much like ideas first seen in iOS apps from independent developers. For instance, mobile Safari’s new “Reader” feature reformats web pages cleanly and without formatting, much like Arc Labs’ Readability app. Its “Read Later” feature works a lot like Marco Arment’s Instapaper.
As soon as the news broke, Arment posted an eloquently pithy tweet on how he felt about the news:
Other developers may have felt the same way. The new iOS 5 will let people take photos using the phone’s volume-up button as a shutter button, a feature that first appeared in TapTapTap’s CameraPlus app. (Ironically, Apple forced TapTapTap to remove the feature.) To-do apps like Remember the Milk will be threatened by the new Reminders feature. GroupMe’s messaging might be made obsolete by iMessage. For a longer list, see the New York Times story on which apps are threatened by Apple’s upgrades.
Similar tactics won Microsoft opprobrium in the 1990s, when the company incorporated features into Windows that had previously only been available through Windows software created by Microsoft developers. It contributed greatly to the impression that Microsoft was a ruthless company that would even stab its closest allies in the back, if that’s what it took to make its OS more competitive.
Yet few developers, even those most directly affected by the OS upgrades, are likely to defect. Apple enumerated the reasons why they won’t at the beginning of its presentation on iOS:
200 million iOS devices sold
25 million iPads sold in 14 months
15 billion songs sold in iTunes
130 million books sold in iBooks
425,000 apps, including 90,000 iPad-specific apps, in the App Store
14 billion app downloads from the App Store (in less than 3 years)
225 million accounts in iTunes (all customers for which Apple has credit cards on file so they can purchase apps or content with a single click)
In other words: Where else are you going to get easy access to 225 million potential customers’ credit cards, without breaking the law?
Even Arment softened his stance later in the day, after reflecting on the news. He spelled out the ways that Instapaper can still compete with Safari, by offering a better service, more social network integration, and other features not built in to iOS.
The most critical data point may have been this one: Apple senior vice president Scott Forstall said, “Apple has paid out more than $2.5 billion to developers for apps in the App Store.”
$2.5 billion. That’s a huge pool of potential revenue for developers to tap into, and it’s why more than 5,000 of them are here in San Francisco, letting Apple show them the goods — even if it kicks them in the face once or twice while it does it.
So, it looks like Apple may have unleashed its iMesssage app without telling its carrier partners. If true, Apple just thumbed its nose at AT&T, Verizon and others. You see, the iMessage app lets iOS users send messages to each other without using their SMS plan. If you have enough iOS users in your circle of friends, you can easily ditch your text messaging plan. [Via Daring Fireball and Business Insider]More »
For some developers,
