apple

Customer Care: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly II

Part II: The Ugly Tuesday, in Part I we discussed The Good side of Customer Care, using Godaddy as an example of the Good, and a couple of Canadian wireless carriers exemplifying the Bad. Today we talk UGLY. READ»

The Enduring Genius of Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams is a living legend. As Braun's head designer for almost 35 years, he defined what simple, functional products should look like. On Friday, London's Design Museum opens a mammoth survey of the more than 500 objects that Rams designed in his 50 year career, "Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams." Here are some highlights.READ»

Apple Exec's Backyard Is Designed for Barfing

An Apple exec's avant-garde housing experiment.READ»

Apple Tablet Delayed, but With OLED Screen and Condé Nast Mags

Whee, the Apple Tablet merry-go-round spins and spins: Today adds a clutch of rumors that, if you grapple them all together, are another quietly confident tick in the "it's definitely real" box. But one suggestion is that the beast is ...READ»

Droid's Week One Sales Impress, but Is Android OS the Real Winner?

Motorola's Droid smartphone got serious chunk of press coverage when it launched a few weeks back, and no wonder--it's possibly Motorola's one and only chance for a comeback. But how well did it sell? Flurry did the hard number ...READ»

Apple Reforms App Approval as Facebook Developer Vows "Never Again"

Just a day after being publicly excoriated by an influential developer, Apple has introduced new tweaks to its App Store approval process to make it more friendly to submissions. Joe Hewitt, developer of Facebook for iPhone and an ...READ»

YouTube Experiments With Ads You Can Skip

The company that made its bread on Web advertising has a new idea: let users skip the ads they don't like seeing. Google is testing the new "skippable" pre-roll video ads on selected partners' YouTube clips, according to PaidContent. ...READ»

Blackberry and Palm Apps Getting Better, but Not Fast Enough

Even as Apple celebrates the release of its 100,000th app--and that cash machine it calls the app store--Palm and RIM are running fast to catch up, and woo developers to their platforms. Earlier this week, Palm introduced a Web-based ...READ»

Apple Leapfrogs Nokia as World's #1 Handset Maker

Apple's iPhone division cleared $1.6 billion in operating profits in Q3 of 2009, leap-frogging Nokia as the world's premier mobile money-maker, according to Strategy Analytics and GigaOm. (Chart below courtesy of GigaOm.) That's an ...READ»

What Happens If Apple Grows Too Fast?

CNBC is predicting that Apple may top Microsoft as computing's most valuable firm. But that kind of success might be self-defeating. As CNBC rightly acknowledges, Apple has a long way to go before it can dethrone Redmond, but ...READ»

Is Mobile Rickrolling the First Step in an iPhone Virus Outbreak?

The first iPhone worm is spreading around Australia, changing users' wallpaper to a picture of '80s pop star Rick Astley, the mobile version of getting Rickrolled. It's mostly harmless, but is it a signal that virus makers will soon ...READ»

New "iPhone Nano" Might Not Be an iPhone at All

Apple may be building a miniature iPhone, with a waterproof, ultra-durable capacitive touchscreen, iLounge is reporting. Or is it a giant iPod Nano? The new device, a leaked image of which appears above courtesy of iLounge, would ...READ»

Mon Dieu! Apple Store Coming to the Louvre

There's a price for everything, even in the Louvre: Tomorrow, Apple will be opening up their very first Parisian Apple Store, and it'll sit in the concourse right below I.M. Pei's glass pyramid. According to Bloomberg, this will ...READ»

Can Smart.fm's iPhone App Really Teach You Brain Anatomy?

Dozens of to-do apps and voice recorders have allowed the iPhone to serve as a safety net for all the things that slip through our brains, forgotten. But can an iPhone app really help you remember? The creators of a new iPhone ...READ»

Looking at the Micro vs. the Macro in Design

For designers today, it's the little things that matter. The really, really little things.READ»

• Gadi Amit's blog The New Deal

Chinese iPhone Looks Poised to Fail

At Apple's all-night iPhone launch party in Beijing, there were none of the day-long lines seen in New York, London, or Paris. According to the Financial Times, the Chinese iteration of the iPhone, which went on sale on October 30, ...READ»

iPhone Beating E-Readers at Their Own Game?

With the iPhone still the hottest smartphone, there's much speculation about how its future will pan out. For some the money's on gaming, but new research from Flurry is surprisingly different: eBook apps are overtaking games in the ...READ»

Facebook's Dashboard Revamp Spotlights Games and Other Apps

Facebook wants you doing more stuff on Facebook. Earlier this week, users saw themselves Yenta'd back into stale relationships by Facebook's long-lost-friend algorithm. Now the site is trying to lure you deeper into its apps and ...READ»

Hack My Ride: Ford Opens Up Sync Software Development Kit for In-Car Apps

Ford is planning to open its Sync in-car computing platform to third party app developers, the automaker tells FastCompany.com. The idea is still nascent and there is no hard-and-fast timeline for release, says Prasad Venkatesh, who ...READ»

2009: The Year Mobile Web Use Exploded

Mobile Web usage has been on the upswing ever since the iPhone leaped onto the stage. But new data form Opera suggests it's not just the iPhone that's delivering the Internet to smartphone users. Opera, in its Opera Mini format, is ...READ»

Apple's Tablet Apps Will Live and Die by One Nerdy Thing

For an Apple Tablet to be a hit, it will have to be more than a big-screen iPhone. And the difference between a lithe, touch-based Mac and a giant, lame iPhone comes down to one crucial nerd-factor: memory management. Memory ...READ»

Should Nav and Map App Makers Fear Google?

Earlier we reported that Google was abandoning Tele-Atlas to begin collecting its own mapping data. Now Forbes is reporting that personal navigation companies are afraid that Google will begin making its own PND software, undercutting ...READ»

Did The New York Times' Bill Keller Confirm the Apple Tablet?

Warm-up the Apple rumor engine again, because the mythical iTablet just got a boost from a very significant source indeed: The executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller. Keller was speaking at Nieman Journalism Lab, ...READ»

NASA Rides the Moon-Bomb Wave and Releases an iPhone App

We were all pretty tired of NASA and its endless shuttle missions--until, of course, it bombed the moon. Now the agency is capitalizing on that good PR with a new iPhone app, perhaps hoping that some more public interest will help it ...READ»

Apple Tries to Patent Ad-Supported, Subsidized Mac OS

A new Apple patent filing suggests the company might want subsidize the price of its computers with a complex advertising program that maintains the attention of the user and can lock the computer if the user spaces out. According ...READ»