Apple posts

Even months after his death, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is still inspiring people. These words spoken in the video below can be applies to just about anyone and in 46 seconds have the ability to change lives. That’s not a “fanboy” overstatement. Jobs is revered by some and disliked by others, and after his death there has been much published that points to certain character flaws, but it doesn’t take away from this clip: “When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family,…

Laugh synth for iOS has just been released, compatible with both iPhone and iPad. Laugh Synth makes it possible create laughing sounds with a simple touch of the screen to control different characteristics of the laugh. Users can even sample their own sounds to create custom laughs. This is as easy as recording any sound you want (laugh, scream, burp, meow, whatever) and trimming to only use the portion of the waveform you want. Touch the screen to control the pitch and the level of effects present in the sound. Add reverb or other effects to further enhance the laugh. Have a look at the app by watching…

In the not-too-distant past, Macs were a relative rarity in the laptop bags of those attending open source conferences. Not so anymore. I recently had the chance to go through some download data from SourceForge for an article on the site’s blog and talk to Community Hacker Rich Bowen about what the data meant. Windows downloads led the pack by far, and Mac and Linux download levels swapped positions over the past couple of years. Bowen told me out he saw people whipping out MacBooks at ApacheCon and other places he never would have seen them a few years back, anecdotally supporting the overall trend…

When you have a brand like Apple, you’re always going to be a target. They have people watching for trademark violations and infringements of intellectual property who are constantly on alert, but many get pushed aside as minor and not worth pursuing. When it comes to porn, Apple doesn’t push it aside. They filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Forum for 7 domain names that include the word “iphone”, including iphone4s.com. As of this article, the domains are still pointing to porn, so be careful what you check out. Here’s the list: iphonecamforce[dot]com iphonecam4s[dot]com…

The Kindle Fire was just the start of Jeff Bezos’ and Amazon’s “Holiday Gadget War 2011″ against Apple (and everyone else). From now until next Monday, Amazon is selling all non-iPhones for a penny with a 2-year contract. The phones on the list aren’t old models, either. Included are the new Motorola DROID RAZR, Samsung Galaxy S II, LG Revolution 4G, and HTC ThunderBolt 4G. Many of the phones on the list retail for over $600 and are sold by carriers and retailers for over $200 with 2-year contracts. With the $199 Kindle Fire already expecting to break 5 million units sold in Q4, Amazon is clearly trying…

Anyone who questioned why Apple has been focusing so much on trumping Samsung in the courts around the world can now have a better understanding as Samsung propelled ahead of Apple last quarter in world-wide smartphone sales. Over 100 million smartphones were sold last quarter and 27.8 million of them were Samsung compared to 17.1 million iPhones. “Samsung has come out with products that appeal to all the different form factors and specifications out there,” said T.Z. Wong, a Beijing-based analyst at researcher IDC. “That is a strategy they have executed very well.”…

In the world of public relations, you sometimes have to toot your own horn when others won’t. That seems to be the case with AT&T, a company that has been in need of more victories in light of poor customer relations and retention as well as a legal battle on their hands over the merger with T-Mobile. To that end, they announced today that they activated one million iPhone 4S’ shortly after launch, making it the most successful iPhone launch in the company’s history. With Verizon going through their second and Sprint having their first, it is actually very encouraging news for the telecommunications…

Steve Ballmer can never be called shy. Within moments of opening his appearance oat the Web 2.0 Summit this week, he started his offensive against Google with jabs about their Apps cloud collaboration software and Android, then went after the Apple iPhone. As a speaker at the event 2 years ago, Ballmer lauded the recently-released Bing. Yesterday, he noted that Bing’s reach had more than doubled since then, going from 7% market share to 15% itself and twice that when you factor in Bing-powered search such as Yahoo!. “Together with Yahoo, we’re between 25 percent and 30 percent market share,” Ballmer…

It’s hard to decide whether this is a testament to how technology is advancing and making things more accessible to people of all ages or whether we’re training the children of today’s society to rely on electronic devices, losing part of our heritage and enabling a reliance on technological innovations to define our methods of media and communication. Either way, it’s adorable. According to YouTube user UserExperiencesWorks: Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand,…

News media, investors, and Twitter users everywhere expressed feelings of being “underwhelmed” by the Apple 4S announcement last week, but that didn’t stop the latest iteration from having its best pre-order day ever, breaking the one-million pre-order mark in 24 hours for the first time in company history. The phone is identical to the iPhone 4 in appearance, but it’s now powered by a dual-core A5 chip, has an upgraded 8MP camera with improved optics, offers iOS 5 and iCloud, and introduces the personal-assistant software Siri. “We are blown away with the incredible customer response to…