Next, the popular Apple Music client that creates smart playlists, has just received an important feature with its latest update. With version 1.6.3, it now syncs Magic Djs and preferences across all your devices by using the iCloud.
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The smart playlist maker and Apple Music client Next is now available for Mac users as a free update for those who already have the iPhone or iPad apps purchased. Using the power of Mac Catalyst, Sorcererhat is extending the places where you can use Next, a perfect companion for Apple Music subscribers or those Apple users who have a local library on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
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Michael Hawley – whose many achievements included helping Steve Jobs write his famous ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’ commencement speech – has died from cancer, aged 58 …
Tekserve, once the go-to third-party repair shop for Apple products in New York City, announced last month that it would be closing shop on August 15 after being in business since 1987. Now that Tekserve has officially closed shop, Apple fans will have the opportunity to purchase some museum-worthy vintage Apple and NeXT gear through auction.
Former OS X chief Bertrand Serlet is finally ready to talk about his cloud startup UpThere after founding the company in 2011. While Sertlet isn’t completely taking the wraps off the company he assembled after leaving Apple four years ago, UpThere is opening a beta for its cloud service today following nearly three years of silence. The service is said to be similar to iCloud, Dropbox, and similar cloud solutions, but UpThere’s strategy is fast access to data stored online and not syncing content across devices. The beta will preview two products coming down from UpThere…
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[Ed. Note: This is a guest post by Lontih Khatami who [disclosure] works at the same studio, Universal, that produced the film but did not work on the film. Spoiler: it’s better than iSteve]
Interested in seeing the new Steve Jobs movie that Universal is releasing this weekend in select markets (with wide expansion set for October 23)? Well, me, too. Only I’ve already seen it five times within the past dozen days. And I eagerly await my next few viewings.
You’re probably wondering how I’ve been able to see this inevitable Oscar contender so many times prior to its initial release. The more important thing to ponder, though, is “Why would anybody WANT to see it so many times in such a short timeframe?” The answer to that question, quite simply, is because the movie is masterfully made, and it works on so many different levels. Not unlike so many of the products the title character brought into this world…
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If you like a little Steve Jobs memorabilia and want to contribute to a good cause, the Marin School has three Steve Jobs business cards up for auction, spanning 1984 to 1990, providing one each for NeXT, Apple and Pixar.
Bidding started at $600, and was up to $2,405 at the time of writing. The cards were collected by a family who used to do catering for the former Apple CEO, reports Business Insider.
The Marin School is a private school offering financial assistance to 18% of its students to allow access to students from all socio-economic backgrounds.
The recent biography Becoming Steve Jobs was backed by Apple, in contrast to Walter Isaacson’s earlier biography which was attacked by several Apple execs. Tim Cook, recently named by Fortune as “greatest leader,” spoke extensively about Jobs during an interview with the magazine.
Becoming Steve Jobs, the new biography of Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, will be officially released tomorrow by Crown Business/Penguin Random House, and is currently available as a pre-order from Amazon ($12+) and Apple’s iBookstore ($13). While some of the book’s material will be familiar to avid followers of Jobs and Apple, there are some interesting details inside about how Jobs’ companies Apple, NeXt, and Pixar interrelated.
On NeXT: The book notes that the computer industry changed during Microsoft’s leadership, shifting to an environment where companies — the largest buyers of computers — were seeking reliability and stability rather than innovation. According to the authors, NeXT’s key failure was that it successfully identified a real market for $3,000 workstation computers targeted at the higher-education market, but went so far beyond that price point — in some cases in pursuit of industrial design goals — that few actual customers existed for its product.
NeXT, which was headquartered in the same business park where Steve Jobs first saw Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and graphical user interface, came tantalizingly close to undermining Microsoft at a key point in its growth: IBM licensed the NeXTSTEP operating system for use in workstations, and might have used it to compete against Windows personal computers.
“But Steve… held up IBM for more money, leading to another round of protracted negotiations. He overplayed his hand. Cannavino stopped taking Steve’s calls and just abandoned the project, although there was never any real announcement that it was over. It was a minor disappointment for IBM, ending its ‘Plan B’ fantasy of creating a real alternative to Microsoft’s new Windows graphical operating system for PCs.”
And there’s more…
After first grouping together last year to offer huge discounts on popular apps from independent developers, App Santa is coming to town for the second year in a row with up to 60% off popular iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps to celebrate the holidays.
This year App Santa includes discounts on over 40 paid apps for iOS and OS X from developers including Tapbots, Realmac Software, Agile Tortoise, Readdle, Supertop, Junecloud, and more. The discounts kick off today and will run through December 26th giving you a chance to save money for yourself or gift apps to your family and friends. Check below for a list of confirmed App Santa apps this year:
The Hollywood Reporter has learned that Christian Bale will not star at Steve Jobs in the upcoming biopic:
Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the actor has fallen off the Jobs biopic that is being directed by Danny Boyle. […]
Sources say Bale, after much deliberation and conflicting feelings, came to the conclusion he was not right for the part and decided to withdraw.
Just last month, the film’s writer Aaron Sorkin had stated that Bale would star as the Apple co-founder in the movie as Bale was “best actor on the board in a certain age range.”
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Sprint is readying its own program that allows customers to roll in the cost of phone hardware in their monthly bill, according to CNET. Sprint’s program is reportedly called One Up, and it works in a similar fashion to the recently launched AT&T Next, T-Mobile Jump, and Verizon Edge initiatives.
All of the carrier programs principally work the same, with a few nuanced differences. Sprint’s One Up lets customers pick up a phone with no money down and pay for the device in 24 monthly installments. A phone that costs $649.99, for instance, will cost $27 a month (with the difference tacked on to the 24th payment). If a customer leaves the service early, that person is on the hook for the balance of the device cost, due the following month.
Unlike with a typical U.S. carrier contract, Sprint’s new program (like those from the other U.S. carriers) will allow customers to upgrade to a new device every year. The (subsidized) cost of the phone will be divided up into 24 installments and added to the customer’s monthly bill. A customer can trade-in that current hardware towards the new phone that they would like to upgrade to.
Notably, the new Sprint One Up program is claimed to launch on September 20th, which just so happens to be the launch date of the new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c.
AT&T <a href="http://www.wap.org/journal/iphoneeverywhere/">Line</a>
Following major announcements from T-Mobile and Sprint (and rumors about big device upgrade changes at Verizon Wireless), AT&T has made its “network related” announcement that it teased last week. The company has introduced a new program named “AT&T Next.” Similar to T-Mobile’s new “Un-carrier” offering, AT&T Next allows users to upgrade their smartphone or tablet device each year (T-Mobile, though, allows this to happen twice a year).
“With AT&T Next, customers can get the newest smartphone or tablet every year with no down payment. That’s hard to beat, and it’s an incredible value for customers who want the latest and greatest every year,” said Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive officer of AT&T Mobility.
In a change from the typical ways of purchasing a phone upfront with no contract or at a subsidy with a contract, AT&T Next allows a customer to purchase a smartphone or tablet with $0 down payment and pay for the device with a monthly cost. For example, according to AT&T, a customer who wants a Samsung Galaxy S4 can purchase the device with no down payment and pay an extra $32 per month (on top of their standard monthly service bill). More details below:
We’ve heard some stories in the past of Steve Jobs’ involvement in the construction of the Pixar campus in Emeryville, California and the main building, now named “The Steve Jobs Building” in honor of its co-founder and former CEO. In it’s recent tour of the building, senior design project manager Craig Payne, who happened to come with Steve to Pixar from NeXT, told BuzzFeed another interesting story about Jobs’ attention to detail during the project:
“So Steve loves the Hills Brothers building in San Francisco, and he wanted to replicate that [brick] palette,” says Payne. “So we found a company in Washington state that agreed to match that as best as possible. It was like five different colors of brick. So they made a 10-foot-high by 10-foot-wide panel of the brick, and Steve said, ‘I love it.’ He even said, ‘I want to eat it,’ which is a funny comment. It was done. We found our brick.”
That is, until the brick started to be applied to the walls. “Steve looked at it and said, ‘There’s something wrong with those colors,’” says Payne. “Sure enough, they took the production brick and they built another panel next to the one that he approved, and one of the colors was off. We were in a real mess because we were at the point where the brick was going to be laid on the building. We went back to the brick manufacturer, and we were like, ‘That deep brown needs to be deeper.’ They sent, like, three more samples, and after the third sample they said, ‘We’re going to do one more, but that’s it, and if you don’t like it, we’re done.’ They were just at their wits’ end. So I was the sacrificial lamb. I flew up to Spokane. The brick came out of the kiln, the guy grabbed the brick and said, ‘Do you want it or not?’ I didn’t lose my job, so I guess I made the right decision.
You can check out the rest of BuzzFeed’s tour of the Pixar building here.
Steve Jobs bit starts at 22:30
[tweet https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/269132903542300672]
Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind the upcoming Steve Jobs film, explained today that his entire movie would consist of only three scenes. Each scene will be 30 minutes long and will follow Jobs backstage just before the unveiling of the Mac, NeXT, and the original iPod.
Sorkin’s movie is backed by Sony and not much else is known about the picture. “The West Wing” writer took the job shortly after Jobs’ death, and he had been asked by Jobs personally to write for Pixar in the past.
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Forbes just published a piece on the “Untold Stories About Steve Jobs,” as the late Apple cofounder’s one-year anniversary since his death looms around the corner; and while many of the anecdotes are never-heard-before memories from acquaintances, most provide only shallow insights into the innovator’s working mind.
A few of the notable memories:
Check it out for more: Forbes — Untold Stories About Steve Jobs: Friends and Colleagues Share Their Memories
The folks behind the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic, now dubbed “jOBS,” which stars Ashton Kutcher as the late CEO, released a presser this evening to announce the production’s June start date for filming. They also confirmed shooting will begin in the “historic garage” where Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple. The film’s early scenes will even feature Jobs’ Los Altos home where he grew up to maintain “accuracy and authenticity” during the movie-making process.
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[vodpod id=Video.16288813&w=650&h=350&fv=]
The man in the interview above with RT is photographer Doug Menuez. He spent three years capturing Steve Jobs after the legendary chief executive officer was forced out of Apple in 1985 and began work at NeXT computer. In the interview, Menuez gave first-hand accounts of how Jobs worked with engineers and his team at NeXT, and he spent an almost four-year period photographing Jobs and the company. Menuez did not keep in contact with Jobs following those years, but thousands of his pictures currently reside in Stanford’s Apple Collection archives.
Menuez told RT how the project to photograph Jobs initially began:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOlqqriBvUM]
Walter Isaacson, in his biography on Steve Jobs, didn’t go terribly in-depth on the NeXT era of his subject’s life. Luckily, incredible videos from the series Entrepreneurs have become available online and show Steve Jobs working with his team at NeXT. The videos really highlight Steve Job’s leadership style, at least at that phase of his career and show how hard it is to start a company. (via The Next Web)
Check out a few others after the break:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2C2oCsrqcM]
Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s former head of Macintosh product development between 1981-1990, has commented on Apple’s crucial choice of Steve Jobs’s NeXTSTEP as their operating system back in 1996 instead of BeOS, his own creation. Much of NeXTSTEP code would make possible Mac OS X, later adapted for Apple’s mobile devices.
Speaking at a Churchill Club “Steve Jobs’ Legacy” talk event (which is fantastic the whole way through – above) in San Jose yesterday, Gassée remarked (at about an hour in):
Thank god that didn’t happen, because I hated Apple’s management.
BeOS was pretty good, mind you. Positioned as a multimedia platform, BeOS benefited from symmetric multiprocessing, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and BFS, a custom 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. It too was developed on the principles of clarity and an uncluttered design.
So why did Apple side with NeXT and acquired the company on February 4, 1997 for $429 million? In hindsight, even though beOS was pretty good, it was the aquisition of Jobs that was worth to Apple more than the NeXTSTEP software. Or, as Gassée put it, “Jobs’s acquisition of Apple”.
