MLB Simplifies Pricing for iPhone and iPad Apps

post from Daring Fireball on 21 February 2012 10:03:39 PM. © Daring Fireball

Christopher Meinck, EverythingiCafe:

In previous years, baseball fans who subscribed to MLB At Bat werecharged an additional fee to use MLB At Bat for iPad and yetanother charge for the iPhone app. This year, we?ve just confirmedthat MLB At Bat 12 will be free with your subscription, whichremains at $119.99 for existing subscribers. New subscriptionswill be priced at $124.99. This enables you to receive 150 SpringTraining games and all 2430 regular season games (some games aresubject to blackout), with no added cost for either the iPhone oriPad apps.

I like this change. Previously they had separate free and paid apps, plus the subscription fee for watching live ballgames. This is much simpler: apps are free, subscriptions cost $125. Easy. (If you like baseball, trust me, it’s money well-spent.)

(Via 9to5 Mac.)

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.everythingicafe.com/mlb-at-bat-12-to-be-offered-free-with-subscription
-2/2012/02/17/

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Dells Predicament

post from Daring Fireball on 21 February 2012 10:03:39 PM. © Daring Fireball

Dustin Curtis:

After basically admitting defeat in the consumer PC marketand promising to focus on enterprise IT and “mobile services”last year, Dell has found itself in the midst of a confusingtransition. It is caught between two markets that aredramatically changing. Consumer PCs are dying. Enterprise ITproblems are being solved increasingly by “cloud-based” solutionsusing generic or custom-built equipment. The future viability ofDell’s hardware products, which already have razor-thin margins,does not look great.

Put another way, Dell has no strengths in any market that’s growing. They’re a relic.

As a side note, I found this quote from Michael Dell interesting. The Journal asked him what had most surprised him since returning as Dell CEO four years ago. He replied:

I’d say [the] rapid rise of the tablet. I didn’t completely seethat coming. Tablets aren’t really new, in the sense that thetablet PC idea’s been around for a while. Obviously, more recentproducts have been much more successful.

“More recent products”. I’ve started to notice a trend where Apple competitors can’t bring themselves to mention the iPad by name. There are no other successful tablets. It’s just one: the iPad.

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Read The Full Article:
http://dcurt.is/dell-s-predicament

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iPhone Mail Tip: Re-Open Most Recent Draft
Message With One Tap

post from Daring Fireball on 21 February 2012 09:03:34 PM. © Daring Fireball

I seldom use draft messages on the iPhone because it’s so cumbersome to get back to them. This tip might change that. (Via Dan Frakes.)

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Read The Full Article:
http://obamapacman.com/2012/02/how-to-quickly-save-access-saved-mail-draft-on-iph
one-ipad-ipod-touch/

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Ubuntu for Android

post from Daring Fireball on 21 February 2012 09:03:34 PM. © Daring Fireball

Newly announced project from Canonical to create Android phones which you can dock and get a full Ubuntu desktop. Perhaps the first realization of Philip Greenspun’s “Mobile Phone as Home Computer” idea from 2005? This is sort of the opposite of cloud computing. Cloud computing is “access your stuff from any device”; this is “take your stuff with you”. I don’t think this is the way to go, but it’s an interesting idea.

Jamie Keene at The Verge has a hands-on with a prototype.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

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Helpful Tip for Messages for Mac Beta Users With
Mac.com AIM IDs

post from Daring Fireball on 21 February 2012 09:03:34 PM. © Daring Fireball

Dan Frakes:

With Messages beta, my colleagues don’t see me as being online.Fewer work interruptions, I suppose.

I had the same problem. I could see my AIM buddies, but none of my AIM buddies could see me. (Listeners of The Talk Show live broadcast last week could hear me discover this problem.) I think the problem only affects AIM users with a @mac.com AIM ID. When you upgrade from iChat to Messages, Messages assumes you want to use @me.com as your AIM ID. Apple itself treats example@me.com and example@mac.com as synonymous, but AIM does not. So what Messages is doing is logging you in as example@me.com, but you need to be logged in as example@mac.com for your buddies to see you.

Solution: Delete your AIM account in Messages’s preferences, then recreate it. In addition to restoring your visibility to your buddies, it also restores your ability to transfer files.

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Read The Full Article:
https://twitter.com/danfrakes/status/172130401144422400

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The Curious Case of the (Cr)apps That Make Money

post from Daring Fireball on 21 February 2012 07:03:16 PM. © Daring Fireball

More on App Store scam apps, from Trevor Gilbert at PandoDaily. Apple needs a zero tolerance policy on this crap. (Via Shawn King.)

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Read The Full Article:
http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/21/the-curious-case-of-the-crapps-that-make-money/

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Clear

post from Daring Fireball on 21 February 2012 07:03:16 PM. © Daring Fireball

Speaking of Phill Ryu and Impending, they collaborated with Realmac Software on a new to-do list app for the iPhone. I don’t like everything about it (I don’t think apps other than games and video players should hide the status bar, for one thing), but my complaints are niggles. In the large, it’s a damn clever app, with a very thoughtful interaction design focused on letting you do a few simple things very easily.

My cardinal rule of to-do list apps is that priority should be implicit by task order. Drag more important/urgent items up, drag less import/urgent items down. Clear gets this right. Apple’s Reminders app gets this completely wrong.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/clear/

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Sandboxing Deadline Extended to June 1

News from Apple:

We have extended the deadline for sandboxing your apps on the MacApp Store from March 1st to June 1st to provide you with enoughtime to take advantage of new sandboxing entitlements available inOS X 10.7.3 and new APIs in Xcode 4.3.

If you’re interested in a deep, thoughtful take on the problems Mac developers are running into with sandboxing, Daniel Jalkut wrote a good piece last week. For some concrete problems encountered in a sandbox-enabled app as things stand today, see Craig Hockenberry’s brief piece on xScope 3.0, and Manton Reece on his decision to pull Clipstart from the Mac App Store.

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Read The Full Article:
https://developer.apple.com/news/index.php?id=02212012a

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Phill Ryu on the Rise of Scam Apps in the App
Store

At one point this week, two of the top ten paid iPhone apps were outright scams. Phill Ryu has a good set of suggestions for Apple should address this. Being able to get a refund within a short window after first installing the app, for example.

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Read The Full Article:
http://impending.com/2012/02/2012-the-year-scam-apps-killed-the-app-store/

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Oscar Voters: Old White Men

John Horn, Nicole Sperling, and Doug Smith, reporting for the LA Times:

A Los Angeles Times study found that academy voters are markedlyless diverse than the moviegoing public, and even more monolithicthan many in the film industry may suspect. Oscar voters arenearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, The Times found. Blacks areabout 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%.
Oscar voters have a median age of 62, the study showed. Peopleyounger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership.

Pretty obvious that Academy membership skews old, white, and male — and always has — just by looking at the movies that have won Oscars. Or by looking at the great movies that didn’t win.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-unmasking-oscar-academy-pr
oject-html,0,6763063.htmlstory

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