Articles for November 2011

Podcast Episode 66: Upstream Players. The Three Guys (Mark, Karl and Werner) discuss that Apple allows a Tethering app, the top 5 websites visited on Black Friday, Apple Store sales setting records, HTC cuts forecast 23%, expects sales to shrink, Microsoft exec: Siri is nothing special, we’ve had it for over a year, Apple new MacBook Air series to compete with ultrabooks in 2012 Q1, Amazon Kindle sales jump 4X year to year, Kindle Fire leads and Best Buy: Playbook out of stock due to high demand after $300 price drop. All this and much, much more in Episode 66: Upstream Players.

Note: This list is inspired by two great forces: David Letterman and Napoleon Dynamite

10. All of your product names all begin with "Microsoft".
9. Your company also builds fantastic refrigerators.
8. Napoleon Dynamite thinks your products have skills.

Apple's stock price is off over 10% in as little as one months time. Aiding the slide, DigiTimes has reported that Apple has slashed (yes, slashed) component orders for iPhone, and Apple can't keep iPhones in stock, possibly due to supply shortages. To top it off, Kindle Fire is now out in the market for only $199, backed with amazing hype. Does this mean the end of Apple is near? Should everyone "Repent Now" from Apple?!

Bloomberg recently created a buzz about a forthcoming Apple HDTV, in conjunction with Sharp Electronics. But this is not where the immediate attention should be focused. Our information points towards a Tuesday, January 25 Apple's Special Event from Apple.

Podcast Episode 65: Phasers Set on Whimsical. The Three Guys (Mark, Karl and Werner) discuss the Adobe's Creative Cloud, Adobe killing Mobile-Flash development, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer denies that we ever left the Windows era, RIM to make Blackberry's Whimsical in 2012, and ARM's new CPU promises to increase performace 10x. All this and much, much more in Episode 65: Phasers Set on Whimsical.

Adobe customers could previously upgrade their Creative Suite from three versions back. So customers could upgrade to Create Suite(CS) 5, from CS 4, CS 3, and CS 2. Many customers either can't afford or don't want to spend the extra cash to upgrade every version. These customers usually upgrade CS every other or every third update. That will all change with Creative Suite 6.

Pixelmator has come a long way since it was introduced back in September of 2007. It has become a full feature photo editor and graphic creation application. Yet, there are still some important features missing.

With Pixelmator 2.0 coming out earlier this fall, the developers have plugged up many of the holes for features that were missing, but not all. One of the holes they didn’t add was layer styles. While everything in layer styles can be done in Pixelmator, layer styles offer two big advantages over the manual methods. Layer styles are editable and are much faster to create. Duplicating layers is an easy work around for future edits. Are there work arounds for speeding up the process?

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet was releasd today, and based on the initial reviews, the secret we T-GAAP-ers already knew about is now out of the bag: The Kindle Fire tablet is no tablet.

Podcast Episode 64: The Great Vacation. Down one man, Mark & Werner discuss the new JC Penney CEO tapping former Apple co-workers, Adobe pulling the plug on Flash for mobile browsers, Flash to be continued by RIM for its Playbook, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, strike ad alliance to take on Google and Facebook and much, much more in Episode 64: The Great Vacation

Photoshop is the most feature rich photo editor on any platform, but that does not mean it is always the best tool for every job. Just recently the developers of Pixelmator released version 2.0 of their photo editing application. The question this article will attempt to answer is "Can one use Pixelmator instead of Photoshop?" not whether Pixelmator is better than Photoshop.

Despite its lower price, Pixelmator does have a number of advantages over Photoshop and those include:

Making lists is a daily task in this modern era. It is one of the reason why post-it notes became so popular. The smartphone has completely changed the way we think, create, save, share and access lists where ever we go.

Apple release an app called Reminders with iOS 5 this fall. This one application will cause many applications in the App Store to become obsolete, as Apple has brought it's ease of use and refinement to the to-do list genre.

In the wake of Amazon's 7" Kindle Fire tablet launch, Barnes & Noble has shot back across the Amazon bow with their own vision of a 7" device. Yesterday saw the release of the 7" Nook tablet, which delivers a dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage with an SD card slot, and a 1024 x 600 dpi display. The new Nook delivers a bit more than the Kindle Fire, but it also runs $50 more at $249. But does this have any effect on what is actually a true tablet, the iPad?

Steve jobs ripped the 7" device market, stating they would die out, as they were too small to do real work on them, and that they are "...tweeners; too big to compete against a smartphone, and too small to compete with the iPad". This is akin to no-mans-land in Tennis. No one ever wants to be standing where the ball bounces. Go to the net or stay behind the baseline, it's that simple. But are 7" devices not worthy of the tablet moniker? Is there a market for this space?

When Steve Jobs re-joined Apple in 1997, he drew a grid on a white board that looked something like this

Podcast Episode 63: Cornholio. The Three Guys (Mark, Karl and Werner) discuss the opening of Apple 5th Ave flagship store in NYC, PBS's show: "Steve Jobs - One Last Thing", iPhone 4S battery life issues, rumors about Amazon updating the Kindle to 8.9" and CBS who apparently turned down Apple's Streaming Service. All this and much, much more in Episode 63: Cornholio.

Does anyone question Steve Jobs' extreme pursuit of perfection? The new glass, unveiled today at Apple's 5th Avenue store in Manhattan, only serves to underscore how different Apple approaches, well, everything. But it also delivers a subtle message to their competition: Don't think for a moment you can fake being us, because you can't. 

Analysts are an interesting breed. They are paid to give their opinion on what the future will hold for a particular company or industry. However, often times they don't know what they are talking about or don't know their subject matter well enough to get it right. Think of an analyst like the local TV weatherperson. They may know about the weather and how high pressure relates to low pressure, but with all their knowledge, they keep their job as long as they're entertaining, not whether the forecasts are completely accurate.

Watching video online has become main-stream as more people have broadband Internet access. Most of the networks offer video streaming services for some of their content. Yet, not all video streaming services are created equal.

Steve Jobs was an amazing visionary... or was he? If you think about it, the senior managers at Infinity Loop may just have been great fans of Star Trek. For example, we all thought the touch interface used on the iPhone and iPad was revolutionary. But you don't have to look far to see this was really just a copy-cat of something envisioned in the 80's...