Collageshine

post from Find Mac Stuff on 14 June 2011 11:13:20 PM. © Find Mac Stuff

Collageshine gives you an easy way to make photo collage by adding your photo into different[...]

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Photo Blender

post from Find Mac Stuff on 14 June 2011 11:12:02 PM. © Find Mac Stuff

Photo Blender blends your photos with soft edge transparency on different background images. You[...]

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HTC Desire Wont Get Gingerbread

post from Daring Fireball on 14 June 2011 11:03:32 PM. © Daring Fireball

HTC, on Facebook:

Our engineering teams have been working hard for the past fewmonths to find a way to bring Gingerbread to the HTC Desirewithout compromising the HTC Sense experience you?ve come toexpect from our phones. However, we?re sorry to announce thatwe?ve been forced to accept there isn?t enough memory to allowus both to bring Gingerbread and keep the HTC Sense experience onthe HTC Desire. We?re sincerely sorry for the disappointmentthat this news may bring to some of you.

Very surprising.

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http://www.facebook.com/notes/htc-uk/desire-and-gingerbread-update/22560766080205
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Celeb Quotations Released for iPhone

post from prMac on 14 June 2011 07:53:00 PM. © prMac

3y3 is proud to announce Celeb Quotations 1.5 for iPhone, a comprehensive quotes application with more than ten thousand quotations from famous people. You will be able to search quotes, browse by author, send quotes by email and more amazing features for no more than a dollar. You can also maintain a list of favorites quotes simply by tapping on the quote you wish. Hold more than ten thousand quotations within the palm of your hand.

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http://prmac.com/release-id-26831.htm

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Its All Software

post from Daring Fireball on 14 June 2011 07:03:46 PM. © Daring Fireball

Here’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing about iCloud:

Here’s how Google and Apple’s vision of the cloud differ: forGoogle, the cloud means cloud + web; for Apple, cloud computingmeans cloud + software, with the internet stuff happening behindthe scenes.
All of the cloud computing services Google offers to consumers,like email, word processing and spreadsheets, happen within thebrowser. To Google, the point of cloud computing is to replacedesktop software with the web.

Many — maybe even most — observers share this view of the differences between Apple’s and Google’s approach to cloud-backed software. I think this view is wrong. Where Gobry writes “for Google, the cloud means cloud + web”, he glosses over what “web” is. Web apps like Google Docs and Gmail don’t somehow obviate the need for client-side software. They just change where the client-side software runs, and what APIs it is written against.

In both cases, there are client-side user-facing apps, and back-end services and canonical storage running on servers in the “cloud”. We don’t talk about “AJAX” much any more because it’s become so ubiquitous. But what it means is client-side software written in JavaScript, running in a web browser, communicating with a server using APIs.

Client-side apps and cloud-based servers. Apple’s primary focus is on native Cocoa Touch and Cocoa apps running on iOS devices and Macs. Google’s primary focus is on HTML/CSS/JavaScript apps running in web browsers. Google is not getting away with less work. If anything, they’re doing more work, because it is harder to create good user experiences inside a web browser. Where Google benefits from its strategy is reach — Gmail and Google Docs run anywhere with a PC-caliber modern web browser. Cocoa apps run only on Apple-made devices.

Neither company is dogmatic about these priorities, however. Apple has web apps at MobileMe — which I believe will soon become web apps for iCloud. Google has native apps written for Android (and don’t forget, for iOS, too). But there’s no mistaking where each company’s primary focus is.

The mistake — perhaps this is where Josh Topolsky went wrong — is to think that what you see in your browser when you type gmail.com is Gmail. It’s not. It’s a web-based client to Gmail. Admittedly, it is the flagship client to Gmail — the place where you can manage everything regarding Gmail. And users can and even should think of it as being Gmail. It’s a complete encapsulation of a powerful fast email service. But a major chunk of it is a client-side app written in JavaScript. (View source in your browser and see.)

I’m biased, insofar as I consider Apple’s strategy more appealing than Google’s. But that’s because my interest lies in having the best possible user experience — the best-looking UIs, the lowest-latency responses, the smoothest animation, the most elegant designs. I share that interest with Apple. Google’s interest is in reaching the largest possible audience. That’s why I chose, at the outset of this paragraph, to say that I find Apple’s strategy “more appealing than”, rather than, say, “superior to”, Google’s. Apple’s strategy is correct for optimizing the quality of the user experience. Google’s strategy is correct for maximizing the number of users for its apps.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Google’s strategy involves less work. That’s what I meant last week, when I wrote:

Google?s frame is the browser window. Apple?s frame is thescreen. That?s what we?ll remember about today?s keynote tenyears from now.

There’s a simplicity-based argument in favor of web-based apps. Nothing to install, no data that the user is responsible for managing and backing up. Apple solved this with the App Store, though — local native software with truly simple, obvious, easy installation and complete encapsulation of data. Yes, web apps are one solution to the problem where Mac and PC users had to be, to some extent, system administrators. But Apple’s App Store model shows that there are ways to solve that problem without eliminating native apps.

Josh Topolsky, in his piece questioning Apple’s commitment to web-based apps, wrote:

There is no native application for the Mac or iOS that replicatesthe shared document editing of Google Docs; there?s no mailapplication that exists for the Mac which will allow me to accessmy important information from anywhere in the world with orwithout a device in hand; there is no photo sharing service foriOS or the Mac which is as flexible or accessible as Flickr.

The first clause isn’t true, I’d argue. Shared document editing is not an inherent advantage of Google Docs being web-based; native client could do it just the same. As the document changes, those changes are reflected live in your browser by way of a stream of API calls between your browser, executing on some device in front of you, and Google’s remote web server. Shared document editing is a difficult problem to solve and Google Docs deserves credit for solving it well, but it has little to do with being rooted in a web browser.¹

The third clause is about public sharing: web sites versus web apps. And agreed — Apple hasn’t addressed how iCloud will replace MobileMe’s galleries in this regard, and Flickr is better than MobileMe’s gallery anyway.

But that second clause — “there?s no mail application that exists for the Mac which will allow me to access my important information from anywhere in the world with or without a device in hand” — is key to Topolsky’s argument. Access anywhere. Where his argument falls down is “without a device in hand”. Many people may depend upon shared or even public PCs to access their Gmail and Google Docs accounts. But that’s a different audience than Apple’s. When am I without a device in hand? Never. As with MobileMe, there will be web app interfaces for iCloud for those times when all you have is a web browser on someone else’s machine, but Apple’s vision for “access anywhere” is “iPhone everywhere”.

And I’d argue that SubEthaEdit is existence proof that shared document editing can work well in a native app with no web interface. ↩

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2011/06/its_all_software

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Nanaimo Studio introduces Hungry Monster for
iPhone and iPod touch

post from prMac on 14 June 2011 01:36:00 PM. © prMac

Seattle-based Nanaimo Studio today introduces Hungry Monster, their new kids' application for the iPhone Hungry Monster. Hungry Monster is an interactive game for children age 2 and up. Created by Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist, Steve Breen, the app is Nanaimo Studio's first for kids. The humor and simplicity of Hungry Monster makes this an app that kids will want to play again and again.

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http://prmac.com/release-id-26827.htm

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Putting His Money Where His Job Is

post from Daring Fireball on 14 June 2011 01:03:45 PM. © Daring Fireball

From the J.C. Penney press release announcing Ron Johnson taking the job as CEO:

As a demonstration of his confidence in J. C. Penney’s long-termpotential, Mr. Johnson requested and has committed to make apersonal investment of $50 million in the Company through thepurchase, at fair market value, of 7 1/2-year warrants on 7.257million shares ofJ. C. Penney Company stock. The warrants cannotbe sold or hedged for the first six years of their term and have astrike price of $29.92, the closing price of the stock on thebusiness day prior to Mr. Johnson’s commitment to purchase thewarrants.

So instead of being given stock, he’s buying it.

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http://ir.jcpenney.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=70528&p=irol-newsCompanyArticle&ID=1573712

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Paul Thurrott on iOS 5 and Lion

On iOS 5:

Best features were literally copied from other mobile platforms.

True!

On Lion:

Since making the transition from its buggy Mac OS past to the moredurable and reliable Mac OS X, Apple has delivered a decade’sworth of minor, purely evolutionary updates, and Mac OS X 10.7“Lion” is just the latest.

True!

One could argue that these are purposefully antagonistic ways of saying these things. With Mac OS X in particular, to my recollection, Thurrott has had this same take for every single major (i.e., new cat name) release. Every single one, he’s considered to be “minor” and “evolutionary”. But man, compare Lion side-by-side with Mac OS X (“Cheetah”) and you’ll weep with joy at how much better it’s gotten. This is how Apple rolls — steady, relentless, incremental progress.

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http://www.winsupersite.com/article/apple/apple-ios-paul-thurrott-136418

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Horace Dediu: Why an Unlocked Phone in the US
Matters

Horace Dediu:

The way to think about it is that the iPhone has just become more?liquid? and it can now flow to parts of the world where ithas been difficult to acquire. The iPhone was already liquid tosome degree with unlocking and sales through Hong Kong/UK, but theUS market?s retail footprint and the lower costs that resultwill boost liquidity dramatically and probably increase volumessubstantially.

Makes sense. In other words, these unlocked iPhones sold in the U.S. aren’t for the U.S. — they’re for the parts of the world without carrier deals with Apple.

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http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/14/iphone-liquidity-why-an-unlocked-phone-in-the-us
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gogoDocs for iOS streams Google Docs Audio and
Video to your AppleTV

Sounds Broken Inc. has announced gogoDocs 1.1.4, an update to their wildly popular Google Docs reader for the iPhone and iPad. gogoDocs now supports viewing documents, listening to audio and viewing fullscreen video, as well as sending video and audio to the Apple TV and other devices via AirPlay. Background syncing, blazing fast custom PDF viewer, automatic bookmarking, forward as email, document filtering, make gogoDocs an essential tool for all Google Docs and iOS users.

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http://prmac.com/release-id-26822.htm

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