Sam Byford for The Verge:
Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft executive in charge of Windows, has left the company. Julie Larson-Green is to assume control of Windows software and hardware engineering, and CFO Tami Reller will be in charge of the Windows business. The changes are effective immediately, and no reason was given for Sinofsky’s departure.
Looks like it’s management shakeup season these days.
Grand Theft Auto V preview: the inside story:
Driving around the intricately detailed streets, we spot tributes to landmarks like Muscle beach and the Hollywood sign, we see mime artists and weirdos patrolling the pavements, there’s a guy dressed as Jesus – that guy is really out there in Santa Monica, posing for photos with tourists. There are dodgy fast food joints with names like The Lucky Plucker, there are juice bars and boutiques. The sense of place is incredible; a sort of skewed, woozy take on the real thing. Los Angeles. Los Santos. The two are inextricably linked, but it is LA that the game is really thinking about.
Great article by The Guardian’s Keith Stuart for those who love the GTA series and can’t wait for the next episode, due out next year.
I wonder how long it’ll be until we can fly through real cities based on Google’s or Apple’s 3D maps? I can’t be the only one who wants to step into a (virtual) blimp and recreate Google’s IO 2012 performance in a realistic three dimensional world.
Jean-Louis Gassée – Minding The (Apple)Store:
The store is impressive… but its also unpleasantly, almost unbearably noisy. And mine isn’t a voice in the wilderness. The wife of a friend walked in, spent a few minutes, and vowed to never return for fear of hearing loss. She’d rather go to the cramped but much more hospitable Stanford store.
A few days later, I heard a similar complaint from the spouse of an Apple employee. She used to enjoy accompanying her husband to the old Palo Alto store, but now refuses because of the cacophony.
Apparently Apple’s newest Palo Alto store has a noise problem. According to Gassée Apple is aware of the issue. They were using an SPL recorder and employees wearing omnidirectional sound recorders to gather data when he went there to see hear for himself.
China’s Commercial Times (Google Translate):
The industry pointed out that Apple’s new machine together, the new version of the iPhone, iPad and iTV in the first half of next year will be launched, including in low-priced products are also expected to debut, breaking Apple over the years, the practice of the year a new machine.
There are already rumors – take them with a grain of salt – about an upcoming iPhone 5S (plus iPad and “iTV”) that could be out in early 2013. These kind of things have the potential to ruin the ever important December quarter.
Implementing Smart App Banners – A short tutorial by David Smith:
Anyone visiting your site will now get this clean and context aware banner. If you are an app developer please take the 2 minutes needed to implement this. Gaudy popups promoting your app were detestable before but are now downright inexcusable.
Hate it when developers use popups to promote their own apps on websites. A reason to never come back. This should at least help, even though the new banners in iOS 6 are still rather large.
iPhone 5 Pre-Orders Top Two Million in First 24 Hours:
Apple today announced pre-orders of its iPhone 5 topped two million in just 24 hours, more than double the previous record of one million held by iPhone 4S.
Yep, absolutely nobody will buy this thing or is even remotely interested.
It was a big win for Apple today when a jury in San Jose, Calif., awarded the company $1 billion in damages in its patent lawsuit against Samsung Electronics. The jury also decided that 25 Samsung’s
Android smartphones and tablets violated several of Apple’s design and utility patents.
Nice rundown on which devices infringe on Apple’s patents.
Paul Haddad on the Tapbots Blog:
There’s been a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt generated by Twitter’s latest announcement. I wanted to let everyone know that the world isn’t ending, Tweetbot for Mac is coming out soon, Tweetbot for iOS isn’t going anywhere. So sit down, grab a towel and let’s go over some of these API changes.
Matthew Panzarino of The Next Web has some additional insights.
Allan Odgaard on the TextMate Blog:
Today I am happy to announce that you can find the source for TextMate 2 on GitHub.
Sad to see it go. While I hope it’ll live on with an active developer base, I have a feeling that this is it for TextMate. Only time will tell how many people will spend their time developing the app further down the road.
I guess I’ll try Sublime Text 2 once again.
Nathan Olivarez-Giles and Mat Honan for Wired.com:
Apple on Tuesday ordered its support staff to immediately stop processing AppleID password changes requested over the phone, following the identity hacking of Wired Reporter Mat Honan over the weekend, according to Apple employees.
An Apple worker with knowledge of the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Wired that the over-the-phone password freeze would last at least 24 hours. The employee speculated that the freeze was put in place to give Apple more time to determine what security policies needed to be changed, if any.
Amazon made a similar decision earlier today:
Previously, Amazon allowed people to call in and change the email address associated with an Amazon account or add a credit card number to an Amazon account as long as the caller could identify him or herself by name, email address and mailing address — three bits of personal information that are easily found online.
On Tuesday, Amazon handed down to its customer service department a policy change that no longer allows people to call in and change account settings, such as credit cards or email addresses associated with its user accounts.
Good move on both sides, although it shouldn’t have taken so long for both companies to react after the issue and holes were known and malicious persons could take advantage of it. It will be interesting to see how Apple will change their system in the long run.
Mat Honan was targeted last weekend by hackers and lost his personal data after they remotely wiped his iOS devices and MacBook. They accessed his accounts through several loopholes in Apple’s and Amazon’s support systems.
I wonder how many other accounts were targeted and accessed like this without their owners being able to make a big stink and get the proper attention.
