Thursday, August 25, 2011

Quick post About Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs resigned yesterday from his highly paid job. If I remember well he is working for a $1 (One dollar) salary at Apple. He doesn't need the salary anyway since he own a large chunk of Apple shares and evaluated at 8.3B by Forbes

The NY Times published a list of Apple Patents with Steve Job co-listed as inventor

Check it it is very instructive and you  could see that he was really a creative nerd. He even had an input on those glass stairs in Apple Stores. 


Steve Jobs’s Patents - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

IOS5 allows OTA IOS updates and WiFi Sync


IOS 5 is still in Beta testing but many new features appeared in the latest betas and they are extremely importants for lazy or "technically challenged" users.

IOS5 allows OTA (Over The Air) IOS update, WiFi Sync, iCloud backups and many other very nice features.

This means that you will never have to connect your iPad to a computer for Sync and updates anymore. iPads will become totally free.

With iCloud you can backup your stuff to your iCloud account, reload from the "Cloud", and share stuff between different devices over the air.

Neat stuff! As always Apple is way beyond the competition. All other tablets will have a lot of work to do and spend tons of money to reduce the difference.

There is no date for release but it should be in September. The GM version is still not out and Apple released 6 Betas which is a record. Observers and ... hackers say that it is caused by many additions in IOS5:
  • LTE support (ATT LTE)
  • Support for a low end iPhone8 low cost 8GB but with iCloud you don't need storage anymore
  • Totally new notification system memorizing alerts, showing them as banners etc...
  • iMessage  (Pseudo SMS between Apple devices)
  • FaceTime over 3G
  • etc etc

Friday, August 12, 2011

New release of IOS5 Beta 5

Something tells me that Clouds are not simple to manage. Apple released a few days ago a Beta5 fo IOS5.

This is quite unusual, because we get a GM (Gold Mine oops Master) release generally after 3 Beta, very rarely four, so with five Beta you can be sure that Apple engineers are busy cleaning up bugs and ironing out the last wrinkles in IOS5 before release.

The stress on the engineering team must be multiplied by the fact that Steve Job had a few "words" with the "MobileMe team" in May and it was not ... nice. See article here.

I know I know, some people out there would die for these IOS5 Betas, but to be honest I did not yet load one on my devices. This for multiple reasons....

I own just the bare minimum apple devices, my iPhone is a vintage 3G which I use as my phone, the other devices are iPod is 3rd gen I think, and an iPad 1st gen. Yes, I am a developer, with apps on the store and I don't have even an iPad2 and iPhone4.

Apple doesn't have programs to sell low cost devices to developers like Google has with Android and dishing out $800 for an iPhone4 is way too much, $700 for an iPad2 is also too much.

Most important reason is that Betas are a one way street, means you can't go back easy to previous IOS if there is a serious bug. So if you loaded a buggy IOS (rare but possible) on your phone, bye bye iPhone, bye bye iPad.

Third and last, the developing computer Mac or iMac. If you load the new SDK on your developing machine, you also may have a problem. Apple does not accepts submissions compiled with Betas, so you either should have a second development machine or load two different compilers and SDKs on the same development computer. This is risky.

So that's why I didn't load IOS5 and check the new features, There are tons of them and between Lion and IOS5 wow here wowo there.

If you click on enough publicities on the right side maybe I could get some $$ and buy a new iPad2.