As the technology world at large now knows, Apple will host a special media event on September 12 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The next version of the iPhone is likely to be the star of the show, but Macworld's staff ruminates on what other surprises the event might bring. read more..
Peer-to-Peer car sharing service, Getaround, is making waves in the crowded sharing economy market, signing up over 10,000 cars in the last year. Before Getaround raised $13.9 million from VCs, such as Shervin Pishevar and Marissa Mayer, the startup was shot to Silicon Valley fame after winning TechCrunch Disrupt's battlefield competition in 2011. read more..
Take a deeper look at Christian music sensation TobyMac. He kicks off his Eye On It tour in Arlington, Tex on Oct. 4. http://facebook.itunes.com/ZYL
Take a deeper look at Christian music sensation @[10162931178:274:TobyMac]. He kicks off his Eye On It tour in Arlington, Tex on Oct. 4. http://facebook.itunes.com/ZYL read more..
Cloud-based storage and synchronization services, like Dropbox and Apple's iCloud, offer convenience for those of us who are on the go, and need (or want) access to our data no matter where we are. But as useful as these types of services are, they introduce significant risks for data you store there. Here's what you should know about how cloud storage services keep your data safe, and some ways to make sure that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. read more..
With Apple having launched OS X Mountain Lion to the public today, reviews of the company's latest Mac operating system have begun pouring in. Many of the reviews are quite extensive, but we've selected a few choice excerpts to highlight general reaction to the release.
- John Siracusa, Ars TechnicaThe Mac is a platform in transition. In Lion, OS X began shedding the well-worn trappings of traditional desktop computing at an accelerated rate. This trend continues in Mountain Lion. Where Lion stumbled, Mountain Lion regroups and tries again—while still forging bravely ahead in other areas.
As the second major refinement-focused release, it's easy to view OS X 10.8 as "what 10.7 should have been." The flip side of this argument is that the real-world mileage we’ve all put on Lion has helped Apple make the right kinds of adjustments in Mountain Lion. If we'd had to wait for two years after 10.6 for the next major release of OS X, chances are good that the worst of the missteps in Lion would just be landing on our doorsteps today. I'll take 10.8, thanks.- Jason Snell, MacworldAll told, I found Mountain Lion to be a stable, solid release. Even prerelease builds were far more stable than I’ve come to expect from OS X betas, leading me to wonder if Apple’s new annual schedule is leading to more careful incremental updates (with fewer bugs) rather than great leaps (with more, nastier bugs).- Nilay Patel, The VergeUltimately, this is pretty easy: you should spend the $20 and upgrade to Mountain Lion, especially if you have a newer Mac. You’ll gain a handful of must-have features, and everything will get faster and smoother. I haven’t really missed Snow Leopard at all since upgrading, which is remarkable considering how much I disliked Lion.
- Brian Heater, EngadgetTaken as a whole, the features mark a fairly aggressive bid to fold the best of OS X and iOS into one product -- a strategy we first saw with the introduction of the Mac App Store on Snow Leopard, and with the arrival of Launchpad last year in Lion. [...]
That said, it seems time for Apple to make a bold new pronouncement on the desktop front. The company appears to have most of its resources invested in the mobile side -- and there's no question as to why: the iPhone and iPad have reinvigorated the company, making it a computing player on a scale that no one (save, perhaps, for Jobs himself) could have predicted a decade ago. Still, it might be hard for OS X users not to feel neglected -- many of the latest new features feel a bit like iOS hand-me-downs. When and if Apple rolls out a new operating system this time next year, hopefully we'll be seeing a very different side of Mac OS.- Jim Dalrymple, The LoopThere will be tens of thousands of words published on Wednesday when Mountain Lion hits the Mac App Store, but let’s face it, what you really want to know is whether Mountain Lion is worth the upgrade. Let’s get that out of the way now — yes, it is definitely worth it.
Mountain Lion costs $19.99 and comes with more than 200 new features — that’s a bargain at twice the price.
- Jesus Diaz, GizmodoIf Apple doesn't want Microsoft to steal their innovation crown with Windows 8 Metro, they urgently need a new vision that breaks with this unholy mix of obsolete 1980s user interface heritage and iOS full screen skeumorphism.
It feels like Apple has run out of ideas. Or worse, that Apple is too afraid to implement new concepts, fearing it will kill the company's golden goose. Too afraid to change the world once again, as Steve Jobs used to say, one desktop at a time.- MG Siegler, TechCrunchIt must be said that Mountain Lion isn’t really all that different from Lion — hence, the variation of the name (even though mountain lions are technically cougars — insert joke here). But unlike the jump from Leopard to Snow Leopard, which focused on performance and tightening code rather than features, the jump from Lion to Mounta read more..
You know that frustrating feeling when you order clothes online and they fit really poorly, like the target demographic is some weird mix of Kim Kardashian and Yao Ming?Vastrm, a Y Combinator summer 2012 company founded by Jonathan Tang, hopes to give you the perfect, customized fit, starting with polo shirts. read more..
No matter how hard you try to keep your iTunes library tidy, sooner or later you’ll find cobwebs growing in its corners. TrackSift deletes non-existant files, isolates tracks that lack album art, consolidates genres, and more. read more..
Who gets thumped by higher taxes in President Barack Obama's health care law? The wealthiest 2 percent of Americans will take the biggest hit, starting next year. And the pain will be shared by some who aren't so well off — people swept up in a hodgepodge of smaller tax changes that will help finance health coverage for millions in need. read more..
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A spoonful of honey before bed may help little kids with a cough - and their parents - sleep through the night, a new study suggests. Parents also reported that after giving honey to kids, their coughing was less frequent and less severe. Coughs are one of the most common reasons kids go to the doctor, said Dr. Ian Paul, a pediatrician from Pennsylvania State University in Hershey. But, he said, "The therapies for cough and cold symptoms… have problems in that they're not very effective, or not effective at all, and they have the potential for side effects. ... read more..
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A controversial experimental cure for type 1 diabetes, using a tuberculosis vaccine invented a century ago, appears to temporarily vanquish the disease, according to a study in a handful of patients led by a scientist long criticized by her peers. There is no guarantee the results from this early-stage trial, published on Wednesday in the journal PLoS One, will stand up in larger studies, which are now under way. Other diabetes researchers criticized it for going beyond the evidence in its claims about what caused the observed effects. ... read more..
Poshmark, the startup that makes an iPhone app for posting, buying, and selling women's apparel and accessories, has rolled out some new features to accommodate its growing user base. The update its launching today -- curated 'Showrooms' -- aims to help users more effectively sift those items into what is most appealing or interesting to them. read more..
TUESDAY, Aug. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Use of powerful antipsychotic medications such as Abilify and Risperdal to control youngsters with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other behavior problems has skyrocketed in recent years, a new study finds. read more..
TUESDAY, Aug. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Use of powerful antipsychotic medications such as Abilify and Risperdal to control youngsters with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other behavior problems has skyrocketed in recent years, a new study finds. read more..
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. One question I keep encountering is this: "If iBooks Author is so great, can I make enough money selling only through Apple and only to iPad owners to stay in business?" The answer to that is that results will vary. Can you add enough value in an iBooks Author presentation to justify leaving out a large segment of the ebook market? Using proprietary formats, the iBooks Author app allows you to lay out your books and add custom elements in ways that go well beyond the EPUB standard. Your books look exactly as you intend them to; you can build interactive widgets that leverage the power of HTML and Javascript for new kinds of interaction. This extended standard means that iBooks Author excludes Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook platforms, and it also cuts away anyone who might purchase and read your ebook on an iPhone or iPod touch. iBooks Author in its current state is Apple only and iPad only. [Note that you're free to repurpose your text, images and other content for those other platforms if you want to build Kindle/Nook-friendly editions. The iBooks Author licensing agreement says you can't sell the output from iBooks Author anywhere but the Apple iBookstore, but your content is yours and you can use other tools to build for other ebook platforms. -Ed.] That's not the entire picture, however. For some authors, specifically those creating highly-interactive titles, their choice hasn't really been about Amazon-or-iBooks, since standard EPUB represents a fairly static output technology. Their decision is more about choosing between an iBooks Author ebook versus a custom, standalone iPad app. I have encountered book creators who have gone in both directions. iOS development house Tapity chose to go iBooks. Founder Jeremy Olson told me, "To build an interactive digital book, our choice of platforms was really straightforward. Kindle doesn't yet allow the kind of rich interaction that we were looking to build so it was really between building an app versus building an iBook. When iBooks Author was announced in January, the choice was a no-brainer: It's pretty simple: cost to build, time to build, price you can charge, and less competition." Tapity's first entry to this field was Cleaning Mona Lisa. An interactive iBook, it introduced readers to painting techniques and the need for restoration. Host Lee Sandstead offers a series of enthusiastic lectures about the topic through embedded videos. Interactive widgets guide readers through virtual "cleaning" exercises, revealing the hidden colors and details hidden by the debris of time.
"As a team of creatives, building Cleaning Mona Lisa with iBooks Author cost us next to nothing but our time," Olson said. "Just a few thousand dollars. I expect building an app with the same kind of user experience could have cost us close to a hundred thousand dollars to contract out the programming. This makes building iBooks far less risky than building apps."
He pointed out how effective this choice was. "Programming a project generally consumes half or more of the development time. With iBooks Author, we design it and it's done (apart from just a few small HTML 5 widgets we had to program). This also cuts out the process of designing something in Photoshop and exporting it for use in an app."
Going iBooks also helped sustain the book's bottom line for sales. "With apps, $2.99 is a premium price. With books, folks expect to pay more and so $2.99 was an extremely reasonable starting price for our book. With future books we think that we can even charge much more. With higher prices we don't have to worry about the volume so much." Monster Costume CEO Kyle Kinkade opted for a custom app instead. Having debuted in the ebook scene with the highly popular Bartleby's Book of Buttons, Monster Costume is known for producing high-quality, extremely interactive titles with a strong atte read more..
Of course we'd all love an iPad, but if you can stand a smaller form factor and aren't allergic to Android, bargains such as Google's Lexus 7 are available. But how to transfer your media to such a thing? Chris Breen reveals all. read more..
Researchers have developed a genetic test they claim beats the standard diagnostic tool for predicting a man's risk of prostate cancer. The new test could also spare men who have undergone negative biopsies from having to repeat the procedure. This is good news for a family member who had a recent biopsy. read more..
(Reuters) - Bristol-Myers Squibb Co on Thursday said its experimental drug brivanib failed in a late-stage trial to match Nexavar, a cancer treatment sold by Bayer AG and Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc, in prolonging the lives of patients with advanced liver cancer The Bristol-Myers drug is an oral once-daily treatment that blocks receptors to VEGF, a protein involved in many cancers, and also blocks enzymes called FGFR tyrosine kinases that have been linked to cancer. The company said it will continue other trials of the medicine in kidney cancer and against other tumor types. ... read more..
The march of technology amazes me. Yeah, I'm an old guy, but it still surprises me when I realize that the amount of storage that used to fill a data center can now fit in my pocket. G-Technology's G-Drive mobile (made by Hitachi, US$199.99 MSRP for 1 TB) is the perfect example of mass storage in a small, silent box. Read on for a review of this mobile companion and a chance to win one!
Amid continuing rumors that Apple is looking to increase the size of the iPhone display from the existing 3.5-inch screen to something in the range of 4 inches, one persistent concern has been how Apple would deal with the change in screen dimensions.
All models of the iPhone and iPod touch released to date have carried a 3.5-inch screen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, allowing developers to target their apps at a single screen size. With the addition of Retina displays in 2010, the screens now come at much higher resolution, but the extra resolution is dedicated to increasing the visual quality of content rather than increasing screen real estate. The introduction of the iPad in 2010 added a new display size to the mix, but the considerable difference in screen size compared to the iPhone made it reasonable for developers to create custom interfaces, either in the form of universal apps or separate iPad and iPhone apps, for use on the different devices.
But moving to a slightly-larger iPhone display would seem to cause issues for Apple and its developers, with the company seemingly having two options: either increasing pixel size to keep the same resolution but on a slightly larger display; or maintaining pixel size and increasing resolution correspondingly. The former solution would allow existing iPhone apps to fit the new device's screen with no modifications but with only limited utility, while the latter solution would seem to require developers target yet another screen size with their apps.
But as outlined at The Verge, one method for achieving the latter solution in moving to a 4-inch display would be to change the aspect ratio, maintaining the existing 640 pixel width but stretching the height of the display until it reaches a 4-inch diagonal. Simple geometry yields a screen height of roughly 1152 pixels for a 4-inch display, compared to 960 pixels on the current 3.5-inch display.
The forum poster, a user by the name of modilwar, was inspired by a comment from a caller named "Colin" on The Vergecast show who suggested that change in aspect ratio as a possibility for a larger display. Using that idea, modilwar developed a series of illustrations showing how this could be achieved.
At the most basic level, an increase in the height of the display would allow Apple to show five rows of icons on each page of the iPhone's home screen, up from the current four rows. Apple would also likely find it fairly easy to augment its own apps to take full advantage of the increased vertical screen real estate.
As for third-party apps, modilwar notes that many apps already utilize standard interface elements such as navigation buttons and bars at the top and bottom of the screen supporting a larger main content window in the middle. In the case of these apps, the main windows could simply expand vertically to show more content than on the current iPhone. Examples include browsers that could show more of a webpage, Twitter apps that could show more of a timeline, and mapping apps that could show more map tiles.
Other apps with custom user interface elements would require a bit more work, but in the meantime could simply be displayed at their current sizes with a 96-pixel wide black bar at top and bottom on the larger 4-inch display.
This new 4-inch screen with a 9:5 aspect ratio would also perform much better at displaying widescreen 16:9 video content, leaving bars on either side of the screen that are only 7 pixels wide, compared to 50 pixels for unzoomed content on the current iPhone.
Modilwar passes off his post as an intellectual exercise simple showing one way in which Apple could make a change to the iPhone's display with a minimum of disruption to the iOS ecosystem, but in a bit of a curious turn the post was picked up by Daring Fireball's John Gruber, who hints that the original idea may not be all that far-fetched.Methinks “Colin” wasn’t merel read more..
One year ago I wrote an article called "Why The New Guy Can't Code," about how the industry-standard process for hiring software engineers is broken, shortsighted, and counterproductive. It remains my most-read TC post. Of course, I was far from the first to say so, and even farther from the last; every few weeks a similar rant bubbles onto the home page of Hacker News.And yet recruiting remains broken. When I wrote that post I imagined that in the subsequent year some sharp startup would come along and turn the game on its ear -- but no. A few have tried: Gitalytics, which tries to use Github data to identify good engineers; Gild, which acquired Coderloop last year and is still going strong; and especially StackOverflow Careers, which leverages the software world's most indispensable site to match employers and employees. But I think it's fair to say that all the contenders so far serve as adjuncts to the traditional recruiting process, rather than replacing it with something disruptively new.All of which adds up to today's very weird situation: there's a desperate talent shortage across the industry, but at the same time, employers are so terrified by the prospect of ever hiring a subpar engineer that the recruiting process has become increasingly gruelling and time-consuming, even though there's little evidence that the standard interview gauntlet identifies good engineers.Of late I'm getting more involved with recruiting myself. (My day job is at the software development shop HappyFunCorp; we're hiring.) And, pending the arrival of that hypothetical revolutionary recruiting startup, I have a modest proposal: stop worrying so much about hiring, and start putting your HR energies into firing. read more..
I received my diagnosis of breast cancer in November 2011. Initially, I used local doctors and hospitals. The course of treatment my local doctor laid out for me was not what I wanted. That's when I starting searching for a local cancer hospital. The closest facility was a two-hour drive from me, but it was worth the effort. read more..
TUESDAY, June 26 (HealthDay News) -- Although the overall lung cancer rate in the United States has been declining in recent years, new research shows a troubling increase in lung cancer deaths among baby boomer women living in some southern and Midwestern states. read more..
Mumford & Sons and friends travel across America in the exclusive movie Big Easy Express. http://facebook.itunes.com/snM
Big Easy Express
Mumford & Sons and friends travel across America in the exclusive movie Big Easy Express. http://facebook.itunes.com/snM read more..
Instead of mailing paper or sending faxes, these days we can email important documents. But for many people, the biggest hurdle to going all-digital is signatures: How do you sign a PDF document? In this week’s Macworld video, we show you how to electronically sign your PDF document using tools you’ve already got on your Mac. read more..
With Apple appearing to have a full slate of announcements lined up for its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote on Monday, we're offering this roundup to summarize a number of the high-profile rumors that have been circulating ahead of the event.
Apple has already announced that it will be previewing iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion at the event, and with Apple also expected to introduce a number of new Macs and perhaps make some additional announcements, the schedule appears to be packed.
