Steve Jobs in 1995, interviewed by Bob Cringely
The passing of Steve Jobs has been one of those unreal events that you knew could very well happen, but were certain it would not. It was an unsurprising total shock. The November release of Robert Cringely’s documentary, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, offers another chance to reflect on what it means for Mac users to continue using Apple products without Jobs guiding the company. After all, Apple already let us down once before in the past when, after having fired Steve, their standards slipped. To the point that Jobs, in the interview, was foreseeing Apple’s imminent demise.
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Written by Yves
The OS X lion
The summer of 2011 was a good season for the Mac. Not only does Apple computers’ market share continue to grow faster than that of Windows PCs’, but the platform received a very nice refresh with the launch of Lion and the addition of the Thunderbolt connectivity across the line.
I had already rounded up the main features of Lion in my previous report, now I have tried them. As a writer, the very first thing I enjoyed using in the text editing features that come with the system was the newly adopted AutoCorrect system akin to the one found on iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, iPod touchs). It’s working in Mail, Safari (and the WordPress Editor takes advantage of it—not Google Docs, alas), TextEdit, and Pages, for the obvious ones. How nice it would be to see it implemented in a native Mac CAT tool… (Wink, wink, nod, nod.)
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Written by Yves
The keyboard viewer
It has been over a year already since my Challenge for a New Decade post, calling for a native Mac CAT tool—in other words, a Cocoa-based program, developed with the technology shared by Apple to create powerful, simple and elegant applications. The only advance we have seen in the past year was the return of Wordfast (Classic) on a brand new version of Word. Nothing very native in all that, a sort of Back to the Futureexperience that makes you feel like a corrected wrong doesn’t really make a right. Continue reading »
Written by Yves
Unless you have been living in a cave for the past 9 months, you cannot help but know that the iPad is a huge success, from New York to London and Paris to Shanghai. Last fall, when Apple revealed its new MacBook Air lineup, this product line claimed its place as heir to the iPad, becoming the new benchmark for all things Mac in the upcoming year.
First, the hardware: The new MacBook Air models have built-in flash storage, not to be confused with the Solid State Drives that are now so 2010! Like the iPad, the MacBook Air provides features that we have been wanting for a long time, but that were not readily available due to the high cost of the components that allow today’s feats: no moving parts, quick start and app launch, instant resume from sleep, and extra-long hibernation period—up to 30 days! The iconic 12″ PowerBook of yesteryear finally has a more than worthy heir in the super sexy 11″ MacBook Air. Amazingly, that machine with its low clock rate processor still manages to outperform the previous generation Air. See those benchmark results. Continue reading »
Written by Yves
