April 4th, 2008
Update: Adobe reconsiders Photoshop Express TOS
You’ll recall that Adobe last week announced Photoshop Express beta – a free Web-based tool that allows you to crop, rotate, tweak, twirl, correct, and show off photos on Photoshop Express or Facebook. For free. You’ll also recall the ensuing flap that surround its onerous Terms Of Service (TOS) that, among other things, stated:
“Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.”
Adobe today revised the terms of service for the Px beta based on the heavy user backlash.
The original terms of service implied things Adobe would never do with the content within Photoshop Express. Thus, revisions were made to clarify our intent:
Adobe’s Rights – Adobe has retained only those limited rights that allow us to operate the service and to enable you to do all the things the service offers. If you decide to terminate your Photoshop Express account, Adobe’s rights also will be terminated. Adobe doesn’t claim ownership of your content and won’t sell your images.
Shared Content – Adobe clearly states the rights you’re granting other users when you choose to publicly share Your Content.
The revised terms of service take effect April 10th.
April 4th, 2008
New iPhone case says it can boost reception
Griffin Technology on Friday announced its ClearBoost case for the iPhone. The company says that the case’s built-in booster antenna improves reception, avoids dropped calls and helps isolate the iPhone from interference.
The $29.95 case is made of polycarbonate and covers the back and sides of the iPhone.
But Griffin says users may not see additional bars in the signal display.
ClearBoost works by adding a booster antenna to your iPhone. But adding more antenna does not necessarily show up as more bars in your signal display. It’s important to remember that the bar graph on your iPhone shows an average of many factors affecting signal strength. With ClearBoost, you can expect to see improvements that won’t necessarily be reflected in the number of bars on your iPhone.
These improvements will, instead, translate into an increased ability to maintain connection with the cellular network, with more stations available to your phone, and less interference from signal reflections. This means fewer dropped calls, greater coverage areas, and faster Web browsing and file transfers.
Many sites are dissing ClearBoost, saying that the case is ugly and ruins the style of the iPhone. And it covers up the engraving that you may have paid for.
This criticism is nonsense. Any technology that makes the iPhone a better phone is a good thing.
April 4th, 2008
Rumor Mill: What you’ll be coveting from Apple next
Hey there, it’s Jake here again.
Jason stepped away from his MacBook Air and left it logged into his ZDNet blogging account (Wheeee!) so I figured that I’d pen another quick roundup of the latest rumors on the Apple front– before he gets back.
iPhone 3G. Inventory is constrained across the U.S. and AT&T’s Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega stated at CTIA 2008 that he expected all of their “smart integrated devices” to be 3G within the next couple of months. Draw your own conclusions here people. iPodObserver posted an image that they claim represents what the rumored 3G iPhone will look like – sporting a glossy black back instead of the satin nickel look found on the current model.
New Mac mini. The mini was last updated on 07 August 2007 and it’s been 242 days or (7 months, 29 days) since it was updated and is, well, due. The mini has been updated on average every 188 days in the past. According to AppleInsider, the mini could receive the following upgrades:
- 45-nanometer Core 2 Duo (Penryn), starting at 2.1Ghz (currently 1.83GHz or 2.0GHz)
- 3MB of shared L2 cache (currently 2MB or 4MB on-chip L2 cache)
- 800MHz front-side bus (currently 667MHz)
- Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics processor (currently Intel GMA 950)
New iMac. iMacs were last revved on 07 August 2007 (just like the mini) so all of the above applies here too, the average update cycle has been 205 days in the past. iMacs will most likely retain the same form factor and screen sizes as the currently shipping models but will get a bump to the latest Intel Penryn processor with more RAM and bigger hard drives, yadda, yadda.
Lots of rumors from last week’s installment are still floating around:
- Unlimited/flat-rate music
- The Beatles on iTunes
- 3-D display hardware
- Double-sided panels
- Apple DVR
What have you been hearing?
April 4th, 2008
WWDC ‘08 sessions and labs announced
Apple has posted a list of initial sessions and labs that will be part of WWDC ‘08. The list includes more than 60 how-to technical sessions and hands-on labs you can take at this years conference which takes place in San Francisco from June 9–13, 2008.
The formerly named World Wide Developers Conference gives developers “direct access to Apple engineers and experts and offers an invaluable opportunity to get your critical questions answered.”
Apple promises to post more session soon. Registration costs US$1,295, or US$1,694 with an ADC Select membership.
A sampling of the iPhone sessions already scheduled:
- 3D Graphics for iPhone using OpenGL ES
- Address Book for iPhone
- Core Animation Lab
- Creating Rich User Interfaces for Web Content in Safari
- Creating Unified Ruby on Rails Applications for Safari
The Mac sessions:
- Adding Rich Graphics and Media to Web Content in Safari
- Advanced Media Application Development
- Application Accessibility Advanced Techniques
- Cocoa Fundamentals
- Cocoa Performance Techniques
The IT sessions:
- Best Practices for Large-Scale Xsan 2 Deployments
- Creating Unified Ruby on Rails Applications for Safari
- Customizing and Extending Leopard Server Wiki Server
- Deploying and Scaling Leopard Server Collaboration Services
- Deploying Network and Portable Home Directories
April 4th, 2008
New Apple campus two years behind schedule
Apple announced plans for a new campus in Cupertino, CA two years ago to support its growing workforce and even considered abandoning their current digs at One Infinite Loop in the process. They’ve since decided to stay in Cupertino, using both locations.
According to a story in Fortune plans at the new site are running behind schedule.
Apple has not applied for permits to build on the site, confirmed Ciddy Wordell, a project manager for the city of Cupertino who is in charge of the North Vallco development area where the new Apple land is located. “They must go through a planning approval process, get a use permit and an architectural review,” Wordell said. “It might even involve a general plan change.”
In April 2006 Jobs anticipated that “It’ll take us… three or four years to design it, get all the approvals and get it built.” Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said that Apple hoped to break ground “in a few years.” He also said that Apple would “hopefully complete a second campus in around four years.”
The new Apple campus is comprised of nine parcels of land it acquired and is bounded by Interstate 280, Wolfe Road, Pruneridge Avenue and Tantau Avenue – about a mile from the current campus. Google map. (Image courtesy of City of Cupertino)
Jobs expects the new campus to house 3,000 to 3,500 employees when it eventually opens.
April 3rd, 2008
Wayback Machine: Microsoft’s shot to kill Quicktime video
Ten years ago, give a week or so, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced QuickTime 3.0 to the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention. Behind the scenes in the months before the introduction, Microsoft was playing hardball with hardware and software vendors over its new A/V APIs along with demands to kill the QuickTime competition.
In hindsight, the debut of QuickTime 3.0 heralded a new way for Apple to sell software, one that will play out in a big way in the iPhone and iPod touch mobile platform.
In the Department of Justice’s long antitrust battle with Microsoft over the browser and video playback, Apple executives gave evidence surrounding QuickTime 3.0, including mentions of NAB 1998. Along with the new Quicktime, the show was the venue for Microsoft’s announcement of Advanced Authoring Format (AAF). (I didn’t attend that NAB, having worked the Seybold New York conference the week before.)
Essential Information still has online excerpts of the testimony Apple’s then-senior vice president Avadis (Avie) Tevanian to the DOJ trial. The direct testimony (in PDF) can be found here.
In meetings and in memos, Microsoft told Apple that it would have to get out of the video playback business. The professional content creation segment might be okay for Apple, however, video playback for any Windows machine would be done with Microsoft ActiveX technology.
“Microsoft’s proposal, the substance of which is contained in documents marked as Trial Exhibit 912, entitled QuickTime/DirectX Convergence Proposal, includes the following provisions: (1) the parties would cross-license their codecs to each other and collaborate on all future codecs, (2) Apple must adopt Microsoft’s inferior DirectX run-time platform for Windows, (3) Apple must adopt Microsoft’s inferior, proprietary streaming technology, and (4) Apple must adopt Microsoft’s new, inferior AAF file format for authoring.”
“Microsoft’s proposal amounted to a forced abandonment of one of Apple’s most successful and innovative products. … Accordingly, Steve Jobs told Microsoft that Apple had no interest in giving up QuickTime. Microsoft’s response conveyed a simple message: Microsoft would drive Apple out of the multimedia business.”
April 3rd, 2008
64-bit Photoshop to be Windows only, at first
Photoshop Senior Project Manager John Nack posted a piece on his blog called Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe’s 64-bit roadmap where he divulges that Photoshop (CS4) will be available in 64-bit versions for Windows, but only a 32-bit version for OS X.
It doesn’t mean that the Windows version of Photoshop will be twice as fast as the Mac OS X version though. According to Nack, “the speedup due to running in 64-bit mode is around 8-12%.”
However, people working with the largest images will benefit from 64-bit processing:
For example, opening a 3.75 gigapixel image on a 4-core machine with 32GB RAM is about 10x faster.
The reason the Windows gets the x64 nod before OS X is because Photoshop is a Carbon application (like Final Cut Pro and iTunes) and Apple decided to drop their 64-bit Carbon efforts at WWDC in June 2007.
This means that we’ll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa.
Nack states that although the Mac x64 revision will take longer to deliver, “our goal is to ship a 64-bit Mac version with Photoshop CS5,” which he quickly hedges by saying “but we’ll be better able to assess that goal as we get farther along in the development process.”
For more I recommend reading Jon Gruber’s detailed analysis on the Photoshop64 situation on Daring Fireball.
April 3rd, 2008
The Big Apple bites off Apple logo
The city of New York has announced that they’ve got a new logo (pictured at right) for their GreeNYC campaign.
Apple has announced that they’re suing The Big Apple because the logo will “seriously injure the reputation which [Apple] has established for its goods and services” reports Wired.
The city has filed for a trademark on the logo which is on bus shelters, hybrid taxis and Whole Foods shopping bags but Apple has filed a formal opposition (PDF).
Personally, I think that the GreeNYC logo looks nothing like the Apple, Inc. logo but hey, that’s me.
What about you?
Loading …April 3rd, 2008
iTunes leaps to the top of the charts (updated)
In an amazing coup, Apple has become the number one retailer of music in the United States according the latest NPD MusicWatch survey. The results, posted on Ars Technica, show the NPD survey data for January 2008:
- iTunes Store – 19 percent
- Wal-Mart – 15 percent
- Best Buy – 13 percent
- Amazon – 6 percent
- Target – 5 percent
- FYE/Coconuts – 4 percent
- Borders – 3 percent
- Circuit City – 3 percent
- Barnes & Noble – 2 percent
- Rhapsody – 1 percent
- other – 29 percent
Apple passed Amazon to become the number three music retailer in June 2007. At the end of February 2008 Apple became the number two music retailer in the US, behind Wal-Mart.
Why hasn’t Apple press released the hell out out of this fact? Could the jump in January sales be skewed because of the cyclical increase of iPod sales over the holiday shopping season? Has anyone seen the February NPD numbers?
Update: Apple has issues a press release that iTunes is the Top Music Retailer in the US. “Apple today announced that the iTunes Store surpassed Wal-Mart to become the number one music retailer in the US, based on the latest data from the NPD Group. With over 50 million customers, iTunes has sold over four billion songs and features the world’s largest music catalog of over six million songs”
April 2nd, 2008
Approach Adobe Lightroom 2.0 Beta with caution
The company on Wednesday offered its Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 beta for download. While this version is feature complete, it’s more than “rough around the edges,” and users of the professional image editing and photo management software should be wary.
According to a blog post by Tom Hogarty, Lightroom product manager, the Version 2.0 beta version won’t overwrite or interfere with a current Lightroom 1.3.1 installation and won’t upgrade current libraries.
However, Ian Lyons at Computer Darkroom offered a reminder about the develop settings in the beta version. He said its stability is rough.
Unlike the “Public Beta” for Lightroom 1.0 Lr2beta is pretty much “feature complete”, so the intent this time round is to give users an opportunity to “kick the tyres” and provide feedback on bugs etc. Make no mistake, this beta is very rough around the edges and contains many bugs. In terms of stability and bug count it’s much closer to “alpha quality”, and is most definitely not intended for production use.
It’s also important to note that while existing Lightroom 1.x catalogs cannot be read by Lrbeta2, although both will be migrated into the finished version. That being said, Adobe have made it clear that they cannot guarantee that develop adjustments applied with Lr2beta will be honoured in the final shipping version. This is particularly true of localised corrections. Even a quick read through the Known Issues documented in the release notes should be enough convince you that Adobe are not joking when they write Lr2beta is “for testing and feedback”. So be warned!
David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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