iCoolsoft HD Converter for Mac 5.0.6 Version
Released

post from prMac on 19 January 2012 11:27:00 PM. © prMac

iCoolsoft HD Converter for Mac is a powerful Mac HD video converting tool that can convert all kinds of HD videos to popular HD formats, general video/audio formats, special video/audio files playable on various portable players, and so on. Now the latest released version 5.0.6 of HD Converter for Mac is updated with full support of Dual Core CPU and with all codec integrated and the supporting for iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S. Completely new screen with the full screen mode.

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No Embedded Fonts in iBooks Author Output

post from Daring Fireball on 19 January 2012 08:03:54 PM. © Daring Fireball

Apple:

For best results with iPad, use the Format bar to select fonts;the Format bar’s font list includes only fonts that are availableon the iPad, so the book should look the same in iBooks Author andin iBooks on the iPad. If you use the Fonts window to select yourfonts, all fonts available on your computer will be listed.Selecting a font that is unavailable on the iPad may haveinconsistent results when you view the book in iBooks.

Regular books from the iBookstore support embedded custom fonts, so this is a little disappointing. Hopefully it’s just a didn’t-get-around-to-it-yet 1.0 limitation.

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Unprecedented, Thats for Sure

post from Daring Fireball on 19 January 2012 07:04:24 PM. © Daring Fireball

David Smith, on iBooks Author’s licensing terms:

If I create a textbook using iBooks Author and then decide to madeit freely available to the world (à la Khan Academy) I cando that without any restriction. Simple click ?Export? withiniBook Author and the resulting file can be distributed by anymeans I choose and then loaded in iBooks. The mind boggles at whatthings may come out of this.
All Apple is doing with this restriction is saying that if youdirectly profit from this free tool and platform that we havecreated, then we deserve our cut. Which seems entirely fair to me.

I’ve been pondering this, and I’m thinking Apple’s perspective is about two things. First, it’s about Smith’s argument above. You don’t get to use this free tool to produce books that you sell directly to customers, circumventing Apple’s store. Think about the textbook business, where a publisher might sell thousands of copies of the same book to each school district. This isn’t just about selling iPads — Apple wants its 30 percent.

Second, it’s about not wanting iBooks Author to serve as an authoring tool for competing bookstores like Amazon’s or Google’s. The output of iBooks Author is, as far as I can tell, HTML5 — pretty much ePub 3 with whatever nonstandard liberties Apple saw fit to take in order to achieve the results they wanted. It’s not a standard format in the sense of following a spec from a standards body like the W3C, but it’s just HTML5 rendered by WebKit — not a binary blob tied to iOS or Cocoa. It may not be easy, but I don’t think it would be that much work for anyone else with an ePub reader that’s based on WebKit to add support for these iBooks textbooks. Apple is saying, “Fuck that, unless you’re giving it away for free.”

With these licensing restrictions, Apple is attempting to get the lock-in benefits of a proprietary file format without the proprietary file format.

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http://david-smith.org/blog/2012/01/19/ibooks-author-unprecedented/

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Franklin Jr. launches kid's app authored by Emmy
nominated artist

post from prMac on 19 January 2012 06:18:00 PM. © prMac

Leading animation artist/director Chris Robertson releases children's mobile app and ebook in partnership with Franklin Jr. eBooks and Apps. The Tooth That's On The Loose! v1.0 - Humorous, animated and interactive tale of T.B.Wiggly, a slippery, shifty little varmint! s available as an app and an eBook for iOS, Android, Nook, & Kindle Users. The legend is told in narrative fashion by an old coot named Sheriff Tex. So pull up your bootstraps, saddle up, and mosey on over partner and enjoy!

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Vook: iBooks Author has limited appeal for
writers, readers

post from Apple on 19 January 2012 06:04:13 PM. © Apple

Following Apple’s unveiling of e-book publishing platform iBooks Author Thursday, I reached out to Vook, the startup founded in 2009 by Brad Inman that provides a top-to-bottom publishing experience using a software-as-a-service model. Vook is currently in private beta post-pivot, but it plans to offer push-button publishing and distribution using a drag-and-drop interface. That should sound familiar after Apple’s earlier announcement.

Vook’s head of product and acquisitions Matthew Cavnar told me on the phone that while the company is “kind of flattered” by some aspects of iBooks Author, since they look very similar to its own product, it isn’t fearful of being elbowed out of the market now that Apple’s decided to play.

Cavnar says iBooks Author helps raise the status of e-books in general, and helps promote them as a valid alternative to apps, which is good for Vook and other e-book publishers. And while the e-book creation tool “looks great,” in Cavnar’s opinion it’s an option that comes with trade-offs many content creators and publishers won’t be able to swallow. Specifically, he sees a problem with the portability and limitations of the e-Books Author ultimately produces.

“When people want e-books, they want e-books anywhere,” Cavnar told me. In light of that, he believes that any cross-platform solution inherently holds more appeal for publishers, since they also hold more appeal for end-users. Being platform agnostic appeals to what Cavnar calls “the switcher demographic,” which is basically anyone who works or plays on more than one company’s platforms.

iBooks Author won’t be as appealing to those users since it creates a file that is not quite epub2, not quite epub3, and not quite XHTML5, according to Vook’s blog which makes it “one channel only,” or essentially proprietary. Also, while Apple will let you distribute the book independent of the iBookstore, if you want to make any money on the product, you have to go through the iBookstore and the iBookstore only. Exclusivity as a requirement won’t likely go over great with authors.

Apple’s clearly trying to encourage writers and publishers to go all-in on its platform. If it had done this before Android rose to a majority position in the world’s mobile market, it might’ve had an easier time convincing folks that was acceptable. Now, however, cross-platform solutions like Vook still have a good chance of staying in this fight, by being where customers are at, instead of where the big players would like them to be.

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Hands on with Apple’s iTunes U: An
education

post from Apple on 19 January 2012 04:03:18 PM. © Apple

In university, I used a single clipboard/portfolio to store my notes from every class, then mostly piled the day’s work on the floor according to subject matter. Now Apple has launched a new iTunes U dedicated app, which makes keeping track of course material ridiculously easy compared to my days of academic foraging.

Most students and educators who’ve been in school in the past 10 years have probably run across Blackboard, or some similar system for managing courses online in an interactive digital environment. Generally speaking, those systems are lacking in a lot of ways: navigating them can be difficult for new users; the same content can easily be filed in multiple places, leading to confusion; they usually aren’t engaging or attractive in terms of visual design.

Apple’s iTunes U addresses all those problems. It uses a UI that mimics the real world, which some people say is the wrong approach, but should help students and education professionals who grew up using traditional tools transition to digital methods. iTunes U also organizes things organically and according to common-sense logic, which should provide a greater uniformity of experience regardless of who’s putting together the course package. Finally, like all Apple products, it invites touch and interaction. There’s actually something satisfying about tapping off tasks and assignments listed in each course package.

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You can also see all the additional course materials, including notes, slide shows and video, and download them individually. Course materials are also available once you subscribe from the course pack itself.

The courses in iTunes U work on a subscription model, so you’re automatically kept up-to-date as a course proceeds. The course catalog makes it easy to find what you’re looking for, with specific sections for post-secondary education, programs from outside universities and colleges, and K-12-targeted material. Like Apple’s other digital marketplaces, it also provides highlighted courses chosen by Apple’s team, as well top charts and categories.

From the perspective of someone who’s designed a course syllabus and planned a class of study, this definitely seems like a great tool for educators. You can lay out exactly the course of action students need to take, complete with videos, slides and assignments listed as items in a list, where you can access them directly. It not only makes it easier for students to follow an instructor’s thinking, but should also help instructors better plan, organize and imrpove their courses.

If there’s one major downside to the iTunes U app, it’s that it’s most definitely exclusionary; students need an iPad, iPod touch or iPhone to take full advantage. Obviously, that’s Apple’s goal: to attract more users by providing appealing software experiences, and I definitely think it’ll succeed based on what I’ve seen so far.

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E-textbook veteran CourseSmart defends its turf

post from Apple on 19 January 2012 04:03:18 PM. © Apple

Apple is not the first company to introduce the idea of interactive and digital textbooks for mobile devices. And the players that are already doing that are, unsurprisingly, not super thrilled with all the attention Apple is getting today. And they’re defending their territory.

CourseSmart, a digital textbook company, that happens to be backed by some of the biggest players in academic publishing — including some of those who Apple announced as partners today — sent a long-ish statement right after Apple’s announcement on Thursday.

The company, which currently has 20,000 digital textbooks and an iOS app, points out that buying iPads and forcing a specific device standard may not go over well with all schools. (“Are they asking students to shell out hundreds of dollars from their cash strapped pockets to purchase a dedicated device instead of using what they already own? Did they really just announce plans to develop a ‘secret’ learning management system with the iTunesU App?” they ask rhetorically.)

But then Coursesmart starts defending its territory: professionally produced e-textbooks from the established academic publishing industry. Not just anyone can make a textbook, they say.

“This content needs to not only be developed by subject matter experts, but, more importantly, edited through an academic lens in order to ensure learning takes place and our youth is prepared to compete in a global economy. Publishers and authors will remain the drivers of high quality content.”

CourseSmart’s texts are mainly for the higher education, and Apple seemed pretty careful to target K-12 with its e-textbook authoring tool. But still — while Apple says it wants to be additive to the industry, its very presence is upsetting to some of the established players. Will Apple start targeting college and university textbooks next? CourseSmart implies that they think so.

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The Audacious iBooks Author EULA

Dan Wineman:

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software?s output. It?s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can?t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

This is Apple at its worst. Let’s hope this just the work of an overzealous lawyer, and not their actual intention.

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http://venomousporridge.com/post/16126436616/ibooks-author-eula-audacity

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China set to surpass 1 billion mobile connections

China is closing in on the 1 billion mobile connections mark, which it will likely surpass before the end of March, according to a new Wireless Intelligence report. China has always been a world power in wireless, but its importance is poised to grow further as its huge population is now embracing mobile data services.

China has long been the largest single market for subscriber growth, but that growth was mainly driven by low-end devices and voice services. Now that all threes of China?s major operators — China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom ? have launched 3G networks, smartphones and other mobile data devices are proliferating. 3G connections surpassed 200 million at the end of 2011, which is still only a fifth of China’s total subscribers, but 3G devices account for 80 percent of all new sales, according to the report.

Demand for smartphones is huge as evidenced by the unruly crowds that formed at Apple?s stores last week for the launch of the iPhone 4S with China Unicom. In October, Apple said China had become its most important market outside of the U.S. for all of its products. China Unicom is also diversifying into Android using Google?s platform to feed the growing demand for cheap smartphones. Wireless Intelligence said that Unicom estimates it will sell 90 million low-cost smartphones this year in addition to 60 million high-end device like the iPhone.

To put those number in perspective, wireless trade organization CTIA reported that in June the U.S. had 322.9 million connections, which already exceeds the U.S. population. According to China?s last census, its population numbered 1.3 billion, which means it still has plenty of room to grow. If China?s huge rate of smartphone adoption continues, the U.S. will could wind up playing second fiddle to China on the wireless global stage

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Twitter Buys Summify, Gives Everyone a Reason to
Use It

I really like this idea from Mike Davidson:

As a closing thought, I?ve had this idea in my head for the last few years of what a perfect news site looks like, and it?s quite simple: a white screen with a list of 5 or 10 links that changes once a day. That?s it. Here?s the tricky part though: the 5 or 10 links need to be THE 5 or 10 links that are most useful to me on any given day.

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http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2012/01/twitter-buys-summify-gives-eve
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