Apple Takes Oscar
I watched the Oscars last night and enjoyed them more than I would have expected. One little item I noticed was how a particular commercial caught my eye well before I actually realized what it was for. I imagine if you were watching, and you’re an Apple fan, you noticed it too: Apple - iPhone - Hello. Once again, Apple impresses on the “cool” scale. Compare it to the “Wow” campaign from Microsoft, which left me saying something more like, “Huh?”
Southwest’s Ding!: Brilliant Web Marketing
Southwest Airlines’ Ding! is brilliant. I’ve taken three Southwest flights in the past month, as it happens, and I’ve found myself spending some time on the Southwest site as a result. Curious (having seen the TV commercial — oh no, TV commercial works!), I decided to spin over to the Ding page and found — to my surprise — that there’s a Mac version of Ding. (I’d assumed it was a Window system tray thing.) I downloaded it, launched it, and it’s been running in the background ever since. (It would make more sense as a Dashboard widget, but I’m not complaining.)
Newspapers Should Go Non-Profit?
After a weekend at the AAN (Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) conference in Washington D.C., I’m surprised and interested to have been forwarded this piece from a reader of the JFP. How dire is the market for newspapers these days? According to this OpinionJournal piece, they might want to think about going non-profit.
Not-for-profit status might be one possibility. Instead of having billionaire moguls as proprietors, we could try to turn them into philanthropists who found nonprofit organizations to buy and operate their local papers. At least one such example exists: the St. Petersburg Times, owned by the Poynter Foundation as a result of a bequest by Nelson Poynter.
Resuscitate Dead iBook Battery
I just took delivery of a brand-spanking-old iBook G3/600 that I got off eBay for a reporter here at the JFP. (All he needs is word processing and e-mail in a portable package, so a $250 laptop works nicely.) I started to fear that I’d gotten a dud, though, thanks to the fact that the battery wouldn’t charge, even after resetting PRAM and the Power Manager. Fortunately, I hit on this article: macosxhints.com - A new way to resuscitate a dead battery, which walks you through a reset in Open Firmware. (I’d seen the technique in the past, but had forgotten about it. Thanks to Google, I barely need a brain anymore.)
He booted the iBook into Open Firmware by pressing Cmd-Opt-O-F at startup. He then typed reset-nvram, hit the Return key, and then typed reset-all. When his laptop restarted, the “battery was recognized and recognized and recharged perfectly. Subsequent readers confirmed that the technique revived batteries they too had given up for dead.”
Confirmed…it works!
Mac Rumors: Apple TV A Gaming Platform?
I hate to say I told you so — especially when the evidence I have that I was “right” is a single post based on the slip of a tongue of a game developer that was then posted to a notorious Apple rumormongering site, but, check it: Mac Rumors: Apple TV A Gaming Platform?.
In a recent interview with Wired, Greg Canessa, the ex-General Manager of XBox Live Arcade, and now Vice President of video game platforms at PopCap games indicates that his role at PopCap will be to help proliferate their games onto multiple platforms, including the Apple TV.
I told you so.
Er, wait…I just read my old post again. Apparently I was ranting about how focusing on games for the Apple TV would be stupid, but that the real killer app would be allowing people to download movies and TV shows directly from the iTunes Store.
Which would, in fact, be the killer app.
I agree with me.
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