Pixar released a new teaser video for Toy Story 5 last night at Disney’s 2024 D23 conference. However, it turns out the “new” video might not actually be so new after all.
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The Incredibles 2 movie from Disney and Pixar was released to own earlier this month, and now the family friendly film is getting LEGO-fied into a Mac game after debuting on Windows and console systems earlier this summer. Feral Interactive has shared a new trailer for the upcoming LEGO The Incredibles RPG for macOS ahead of its launch.
Michael B. Johnson, who heads the Pixar team that develops the tools used to create its animated movies, tweeted that his team had been given the chance to test the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil – and described palm-rejection as perfect.
Lovely of our friends from Apple to stop by to let us take iPad Pro & Pencil for a test drive […]
It has perfect palm rejection as far as we were able to see …
Disney today announced it’s expanding the number of devices that can access its Disney Movies Anywhere service for viewing digital copies of Disney movies online and through various apps. Among the new additions, the company is making its movies available through the Amazon Video apps for users in the US.
In addition to the Amazon Video apps, which is available for various smart TVs, set top boxes, and mobile devices including iPhone and iPad, the Disney Movie Anywhere content is now accessible through the new Disney Movie Anywhere apps on Xbox 360 and Amazon Fire devices. To access the content through Amazon Video, you’ll first have to authenticate your Amazon account in your Disney Movies Anywhere account settings.
While the Disney Anywhere content is already available through iTunes on the Apple TV, Disney is planning to bring a dedicated app to competing platforms, Roku and Android TV on September 15th. No word on Apple TV, but with Apple planning the introduction a new model tomorrow, it’s possible the device could get the same treatment in the near future.
The Amazon Video app is available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store. For a limited time, Disney is giving away a free copy of Pixar’s Monsters, Inc movie to those that connect a new iTunes, Amazon Video, VUDU, Microsoft Movies & TV or Google Play
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There aren’t too many cool apps that launch first on Android, but Google Spotlight Stories is one. It plays sweet, animated stories using a mix of 2D and 3D imagery – the cool part being that you can ‘look around’ the scene simply by rotating your phone.
Immerse yourself in a world of storytelling made just for mobile. Engineers and critically-acclaimed filmmakers are bringing stories to life using the latest advances in mobile technology. Using 3D and 2D animation, 360° spherical cinema-quality video, sound sphere audio and sensor fusion techniques, the screen is now a window into a story that unfolds all around you. Look anywhere, follow individual characters, watch it over again and again. It’s a little different each time. Google Spotlight Stories is your mobile movie theatre.
There’s some heavy-duty talent behind the creation of the stories, the debut story Windy Days being created by former Pixar animators, and Help by Justin Lin, director of The Fast and the Furious …
Last year iOS 8 brought with it support for custom third-party keyboards. Some of these are designed to help you type faster, but some just make it easier to inject GIFs and other media into your chats. This week the cutest keyboard landed on iOS courtesy of who else, but Disney.
Just as its name suggests, the Disney Gif app puts hundreds of GIFs right inside your iOS keyboard. Choose characters and scenes from films including Star Wars, Lion King, Aladdin, Toy Story and Frozen. Disney also included support for Inside Out, which is a no-brainer decision since its main characters — each representing a feeling — work perfectly as GIFs.
Disney Gif uses the copy and paste of iOS so it’ll work system-wide wherever that functionality is supported. It shouldn’t be too tough sifting through the bunches of GIFs because Disney has organized them by emotion and story. The main Disney Gif app is available as a free download, but there are a couple in-app purchases including Frozen Emoji.
Visually express yourself in a whole new way with Disney Gif! Whether you’re feeling happy, sassy, villainous or magical, there’s no better way to show how you feel than with your favorite characters and moments. Whatever your emotion or reaction, we have a Disney, Pixar, or Star Wars gif for that!
Check back often for new content!
Explore and share gifs from some of the most loved stories, including:
Inside Out
Frozen
Star Wars
The Lion King
Tangled
Aladdin
Beauty and the Beast
Finding Nemo
Toy Story
Up
ABC Shows…and so many more! Happy gif-ing!
Features:
– Browse through hundreds of gifs categorized by emotion or story
– New and trending content added frequently
– Chat gifs to your friends and family straight from your Disney Gif keyboard via text, email, or any app that supports the copy and paste of imagesLEGAL DISCLAIMER:
Before you download this experience, please consider that this app contains social media links to connect with others, in-app purchases that cost real money, push notifications to let you know when we have exciting updates like new content, as well as advertising for The Walt Disney Family of Companies and some third parties.NOTE: Disney Gif requests full access so we can access the internet and you can send cool gifs. We don’t save your key strokes or compromise your privacy.
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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.
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Toshiba Canvio 1TB Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive: $50 shipped (orig. $99) http://t.co/k9A8cmxqnE pic.twitter.com/SocS9TgT8v
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Turn your selfies into dronies with this new iOS/Android controlled mini hexacopter
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…
A Fortune interview with Disney CEO Bob Iger, featured on the magazine’s cover (seen below) today, makes much of the importance of Iger’s relationship with Steve Jobs.
Fortune’s Michal Lev-Ram writes: “If there is one particular relationship that has most shaped [Bob Iger’s] thinking, it’s the six-year friendship he had with another CEO: the late Steve Jobs […]
Ed Catumull, Disney’s animation president, says of the Iger/Jobs relationship: “Steve recognized that in Bob he actually had a partner. In the subsequent years they thought of each other as true partners. That’s what he wanted, and that’s not what he had previously.”
The mutual respect the pair felt for each other was reflected in the fact that Jobs, before his death, asked that Iger be invited to take his place on the Apple board …
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Back in February, Apple and Disney teamed up on a new app called Movies Anywhere that allowed iOS users to access their library of purchased movies—whether bought on the iTunes Store, DVD, or other media (with the appropriate redemption code in the box).
Today, Disney has launched the same service for Android users. Movies Anywhere owners will now be able to access their movie library featuring titles from Disney, Pixar, and Marvel from any of their devices. Because this is a cross-platform solution, movies previously purchased on the iTunes Store will now be available to users on Android devices, and iOS users will be able to watch Disney movies they’ve purchased from the Google Play Store.
Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt says that even at an international conference of 6,000 architects, he couldn’t find a single one who liked the spaceship design of Apple’s new campus building. Though if the single quote given is representative of the quality of the critiques, this may not be saying much.
“Does it have to be a spaceship?” asked an official at the American Institute of Architects.
Pixar president Ed Catmull wrote in his book Creativity Inc that they are failing to understand a key feature of the building, derived from a lesson Steve Jobs learned when leading the design of Pixar’s headquarters …
A federal judge ruled that a lawsuit against Apple and several other companies can proceed as a class-action suit today after determining that a significant number of employees across the tech industry were hurt by “do-not-hire” arrangements between their employers and other companies. The policies in question were practiced by Apple, Google, Adobe, Pixar, and more as a way of keeping their own employees from defecting to competitors for higher pay. Essentially the agreements barred two companies from offering jobs to competing employees for a higher salary. Because doing so gave employees leverage with which to bargain for higher pay at their own jobs, employers were often faced with the decision to either pay any given employee more to keep them around or lose them to a competitor willing to pay more.
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One of Pixar’s early employees, John Lasseter, accepted a Disney Legends award for Steve Jobs. The awarded was accepted and presented yesterday at Disney’s D23 conference. The Disney Legends award is granted to key people in the growth and success of Disney. As Pixar’s creator and a former Disney Director, Jobs certainly made a positive impact on Disney. Lasseter’s speech recounts several encounters and experiences that he shared with Jobs over the course of their time together. A video from another angle is 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.
Last year we posted a photo that originated from a Pixar employee showing the animation company had renamed its main facility “The Steve Jobs Building” in honor of its co-founder and former CEO. Today, PixarTimes points us to the image above showing a tree on the Pixar campus just outside The Steve Jobs Building that has been recently dedicated to Steve:
Dedicated With Love And Gratitude To
Steve Jobs
Our Partner, Mentor, And Friend
Pixar has honored Jobs’ contributions in others ways too, such as the credits of the 2012 film ‘Brave’ which happened to include the same text as the plaque above.
Steve Jobs was CEO of the animation studio until being acquired by Disney in 2006, in turn making Jobs the largest individual shareholder with a seat on the board of Disney. Jobs was also credited as an executive producer of the 1996 blockbuster Toy Story.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has been ordered by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose to give a deposition related to an ongoing private lawsuit that claims Apple, Google, and others entered “no-poach” agreements, as reported by Bloomberg. Cook isn’t the only executive named in yesterday’s order. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt will also be deposed on Feb. 20, as well as Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini later this month.
Koh told lawyers yesterday that Apple founder Steve Jobs was copied on e-mails at issue in the case, and that she found it “hard to believe” that Cook, as Apple’s chief operating officer at the time in question, wouldn’t have been consulted about such agreements.
The judge said she was disappointed that senior executives at the companies involved hadn’t been deposed before yesterday’s hearing over whether she should certify the case as a group lawsuit. The class would include different categories of employees whose incomes, their lawyers argue, were artificially reduced because of the collusion. Koh didn’t rule on class certification.
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Steve Jobs bit starts at 22:30
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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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As noted by the PixarTimes, a Pixar employee tweeted the photo above showing what is apparently the entrance to the main building on Pixar’s campus newly named in memory of Steve Jobs. Jobs actually played a big role in designing the building itself as CEO of Pixar, as recently noted in the Walter Isaacson “Steve Jobs” biography. Pixar recently honored Jobs for his contributions to the company in the end credits of its latest animated film “Brave”, but the naming of the building is obviously a more permanent tribute to the man who helped form the company. OfficeSnapshots has a good account of Jobs’ role in creating the main Pixar building, much of which is found in the biography (excerpt below):
According to Jobs’ recent biography, the headquarters was to be a place that “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations.”… Jobs also strived for a campus that stood the test of time. Tom Carlisle, Pixar’s facilities director adds that, ”He didn’t want a standard office-park building—one with corrugated-metal siding or ribbon windows. The building had to look good 100 years from now. That was his main criterion.”
Pixar’s campus design originally separated different employee disciplines into different buildings – one for computer scientists, another for animators, and a third building for everybody else. But because Jobs was fanatic about these unplanned collaborations, he envisioned a campus where these encounters could take place, and his design included a great atrium space that acts as a central hub for the campus.
Brad Bird, director of The Incredible and Ratatouille, said of the space, “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.”
And did it work? “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” said John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer “…I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”
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Reuters reported that a judge rejected Apple and Google’s bid last night to have an antitrust lawsuit dismissed. The lawsuit claimed the companies illegally entered “no-poach” agreements in an effort to stop competitors from stealing talent:
District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, rejected the companies’ bid to dismiss claims brought under the Sherman Act and California state law, in a decision released Wednesday night. […] The proposed class action lawsuit was brought by five software engineers, who accused the companies of conspiring to depress employee pay by eliminating competition for skilled labor.
Other defendants in the case included Intel, Adobe Systems, Intuit Walt Disney Co’s Pixar, and Lucasfilm.
This Aside is cross-posted at 9to5Google.
(Image via Zoknowsgaming)
It appears the U.S. Justice Department has some solid evidence against companies including Apple, Google, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and Intel. TechCrunch obtained a document from the DOJ that is now posted to Scribd. Among the pieces of evidence, include:
The DOJ settled with the six companies, but a class action lawsuit is pending. The complaint regards entering into non-poach and no bidding war agreements. The above mentioned companies allegedly lowered employee compensation artificially while hindering mobility.
The plaintiffs seek damages for any salaried employee who worked for one of the defendants during a 4-year period in the late 2000s. That means a lot of Silicon Valley tech workers could receive a payout if the defendants lose or settle the case. The civil case will be heard by Judge Koh in San Jose starting January 26th, 2011
The defendants, including Apple, asked the case to be dismissed, stating that the DOJ found “no overarching conspiracy” and that these bilateral agreements were separate.
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Al Gore had some words on the passing of Steve Jobs at the AllThingsD conference in Asia last night. He said that Jobs was “the kind of guy that comes along once every 250 years.”
On Apple after him, Jobs relayed to Gore that Disney, where Jobs’ served on the board after selling Pixar, fell on hard times after Walt Disney died. Often, the board at Disney would ask “What would Walt do?” and trying to figure that out would end up being the wrong answer. Jobs, according to Gore, didn’t want this to happen at Apple. He wanted Apple to make its own decisions moving forward based on the decisions of the current management team.
Gore wasn’t terribly revealing on specifics but he did say “There’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline and the team [Steve Jobs] left behind is really firing on all cylinders”.
Finally, when asked about Apple’s future, Gore said that the management team is the best in the world and that “Everyone on that management team could be CEO of a world class corporation”. Gore acknowledges this is both a blessing and a curse and, as with the case of Ron Johnson, other companies will be trying to pick them off.
Gore also talked about the AT&T&T-Mobile merger during the Q&A answering a question from TIMN’s Joanna Stern saying that the merger would be unlikely, and would be hard to overcome Justice Department’s challenge.
