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Jean-Louis Gassée now writes a weekly column about Apple, but back in the day he was head of the Macintosh division under Apple CEO John Sculley. After his removal by Sculley in 1990 following nine years of service, Gassée started Be, Inc which developed BeOS, a multithreaded, multi-CPU operating system.

Speaking at a Churchill Club event honoring Steve Jobs, Gassée told the audience he was thankful that Apple did not buy BeOS because he “hated Apple’s management.” Instead of BeOS, Apple decided to acquire NeXT and use its OS as the basis of Mac OS X. Gassée called this decision “Jobs’s acquisition of Apple” and paved the way for him to reclaim his company.

Besides Gassée’s comments, the almost two-hour-long presentation is filled with memories of Steve Jobs from his former colleagues including Jim Atkinson, Deb Stapleton, Andy Hertzfeld, Regis McKenna and Larry Tesler. There’s even an unexpected appearance by Chris Espinosa who was not on the panel, but in the audience as an attendee. The program is embedded below and well worth a listen.

[Via 9to5mac]

Jean-Louis Gassée glad Apple chose NeXTSTEP over his BeOS originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What’s better than controlling your iPhone 4S with Siri? How about just thinking about something and having it happen? That’s what a group of hackers have accomplished with Project Black Mirror.

They’ve connected an iPhone 4S up to a setup that uses a MacBook Pro and an Arduino open-source microcontroller along with electrocardiogram pads that are attached to the head of the “test subject.” The Arduino is set up with a program that recognizes Siri commands from the ECG pads and sends them to a voice synthesizer, which then feeds the commands into the iPhone’s microphone jack.

The guys who came up with Project Black Mirror want to create a product out of this; perhaps a hat that you could wear and a sleeve that would provide the necessary input to Siri. As such, they’re attempting a Kickstarter campaign to polish up the project and bring it to fruition. Check out their Kickstarter pitch below.

By the way, the guys are in need of help starting up a business in the US (and I’m busy and can’t help them), so if you want to volunteer to give them a hand, be sure to visit their website (link above) and let them know.

Control Siri with your mind and lots of hardware originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple sent out the following emails to developers this afternoon:

iTunes Match Update

As we prepare for the launch of iTunes Match, we will be deleting all current iCloud libraries on Saturday, November 12th at 10 AM PST.

Please turn off iTunes Match on all of your computers and iOS devices. On your computer, choose Store > Turn off iTunes Match. On your iOS device, tap Settings > Music, then turn off iTunes Match. On your Apple TV, please choose Music > Turn off iTunes Match.

The songs on your computer should not be affected. As always, please backup regularly and do not delete the music you add to iCloud from your computer.
Best regards,

Apple Developer Program Support

Though Apple doesn’t overtly say that the iTunes Match launch is impending, the email differs from others Apple has sent to developers in the past by mentioning a specific time for the deletion of developer’s iCloud libraries and also states that it is “[preparing] for the launch of iTunes Match.”

On November 1st, Apple officially missed the release date for iTunes Match. They had previously said the service would be available “by the end of October.” When iTunes Match does officially launch, it will cost users US$24.99 per year. The service will scan your iTunes library for titles, match them with copies in the cloud, and then allow you to replace whatever copy you may currently have in your iTunes library with a non-DRM, high-quality 256-Kbps AAC copy.

Apple email suggests iTunes Match launch soon originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For the jailbreakers among you, you’ll be happy to hear that iOS 5.0.1 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch can indeed be jailbroken with Redsn0w. RedmondPie has tested and confirmed that Apple’s latest version of iOS 5 can be tether-jailbreaked by using the latest version of Redsn0w. Redmond does note that the “SemiTether” patch continues to work, but iOS 5.0.1 “will not function to a satisfactory degree” on devices using SemiTether until users connect to Redsn0w on a Mac or PC.

Jailbreaking is best left to the more experienced, tech-savvy users, but if you’re feeling adventurous, RedmondPie has all the details on how to jailbreak your Apple device running the very latest iOS release.

iOS 5.0.1 For iPhone, iPad, iPod touch can be jailbroken with Redsn0w originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Next week, Landmark Theaters in 19 US cities will screen a 70-minute “lost interview” featuring Steve Jobs. The interview was done in 1996 by Robert X. Cringely for his PBS series “Triumph of the Nerds” and is being released in unedited form as Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview.

Philip Elmer-Dewitt, writing for Fortune, said that his favorite section of the interview is when Jobs answers the question “What’s important to you in the development of a product?”. His response features a scathing blow to John Sculley — “John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work” — as well as a sweet parable about the process of designing a product.

In the interview, Jobs reminisces about an old man who lived down the street when he was a young boy. The man showed him a rock tumbler, and he and Jobs went out and got a handful of plain old rocks, then put them into the can with liquid and grit powder. They closed up the rock tumbler, turned it on, and then the man told Jobs to “come back tomorrow.”

The next day, the man opened the can and inside were these “amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in through rubbing against each other like this (clapping his hands), creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.”

Jobs goes on to say how that is a “metaphor for a team that is working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these beautiful stones.”

The interview will only be shown for two days in the US, so be sure to get your pre-sale tickets now. The theatrical trailer for the interview can be viewed below.

Steve Jobs’s story of the stones originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You’ll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what’s happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today’s Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here.

No Flash? Click here to listen.

Daily Update for November 11, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While 11/11/11 is important to people for different reasons, today is Veterans Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day (or Armistice Day) in Commonwealth countries. Veterans Day is a federal holiday for honoring military veterans while Remembrance Day remembers those who died in the line of duty.

However, the resources out there on the App Store for Veterans Day are fairly thin, and it’s sad. I would love to see an app such as the ones the Canadian government has done for Remembrance Day.

• We Remember (Free): We Remember is for our Canadian readers and helps to find a ceremony near you. You also can check out the Veterans Affairs Canada Facebook wall, watch videos from the Veterans Affairs Canada YouTube channel, share the app and download wallpapers. There is also a free Veterans Affairs Canada official app as well.

• USO On*Patrol Magazine HD (Free): This iPad app is the digital edition of the United Service Organization’s On Patrol magazine, which is a quarterly publication which pays tribute to those who serve in the military and remembers the sacrifices they’ve made. They also provide resources to soldiers and veterans for programs geared toward them. There are a great numbers of riveting stories to read, and the magazine makes the digital transition.

• Veterans Photo Effects ($1.99): This allows people to create their own tribute to veterans using patriotic elements within the app. While originally geared toward Memorial Day, it’s been retooled a bit for Veterans Day and is a good program to use with your children if you want to create a tribute page for a loved one and share it with friends. A good future update to this app would be the ability to bring in your own images to use.

Apps for Veterans and Remembrance Day originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It turns out Sprint’s locking down of the iPhone 4S SIM wasn’t exactly a bombshell. Shortly after the iPhone 4S launched, Sprint told Jason Snell of Macworld that the locking policy would eventually go into effect.

According to Sprint, the company will “allow existing customers in good standing to unlock the SIM for international use if needed in the future” if customers explicitly ask for the unlock. That’s decent of them, but it also makes me wonder why Sprint is bothering to lock the SIM in the first place. I doubt very many people are looking to buy the iPhone from Sprint and then migrate to AT&T or one of the other US-based GSM carriers.

Happily, this means Sprint customers will not be locked into exorbitant international roaming rates. Instead, so long as Sprint honors the request to unlock the SIM, customers will be able to swap in a SIM from a local carrier and pay local rates.

While that may sound like a hassle, I can tell you from personal experience that it works quite well; I put an Australian SIM in my NZ iPhone during a weeklong vacation in Melbourne earlier this year, and the process went extremely smoothly. Then again, iPhones sold in New Zealand are never locked to a specific carrier, so that definitely made the process easier than it might have been otherwise.

Sprint iPhone 4S unlocking policy not new, can be undone originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to Chitika, an analytics company, Mac OS X Lion only holds 16% of the Mac OS market share, trailing behind Snow Leopard (56%) and Leopard (22%) — indicating poor adoption of the newest operating system in comparison to previous releases.

Even though Apple announced over a million downloads of Mac OS X Lion with in the first day of its release, and in October Tim Cook announced that Apple had sold 6 million copies of Lion since its launch, claiming a massive 80% growth over Snow Leopard, according to Chitika, that pace has significantly slowed down. Chitika cites stability issues (Wi-Fi and MacBook Pro battery performance) and dislike of the iOS-like UI features as reasons for the supposed slow adoption of the new OS.

Now we’ve all had our gripes with Lion, but from where we’re standing, we’re pretty much happy with what the OS has to offer. So we thought it would be great to see just how many of our TUAW readers are running Mac OS X Lion, as opposed to Snow Leopard, Tiger or another operating system.

[Via BGR]

View Poll

Poll: Which version of Mac OS X are you running? originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It only took one phone call to turn Siri’s Dag Kittlaus’s life around. Before the call, he was the head of a Silicon Valley startup and afterwards, he was a multimillionaire working with Apple. In an interview with Norwegian publication E24, Dag Kittlaus talks about his time working at Siri, the sale of his company to Apple and his life as an entrepreneur now that Siri has officially launched in iOS 5.

In the interview, Kittlaus recalls the sacrifices he and his family made during the early years of Siri. It entailed a risky move to Silicon Valley, little money, long hours at work and lots of time away from his family. He also talks about his brief time at Apple after the acquisition. Unlike most companies which are driven by the bottom line, Apple, he says, is driven by the desire to create the best products in the world.

His conversation with reporter Eirik Mosveen is a refreshing, personal look at a Silicon Valley success story. You can read the whole interview on E24’s website.

[Via 9to5mac]

An interview with Dag Kittlaus, the man who sold Siri to Apple originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you run Lion server and have problems with podcast streaming or want to view local volumes on your server, you’ll want to read two new technotes on Apple’s support site. Spotted by MacNN, they will tell you how to setup https to serve up podcasts and how you can tweak your settings to view a mounted local volume or a shared folder via SMB.

One article (Technote TS4126) addresses podcast streaming and SSL certificates, a problem which arose in OS X server 10.7.2. Unlike earlier versions, this version of Lion server streams podcasts using a secure https connection. In this issue, users visiting your Lion server cannot view podcast thumbnails. When they try to playback content, the thumbnail is missing and only a blank window appears.

To fix this issue, server administrators can either purchase a signed security certificate from an established Certificate Authority or use a self-signed certificate. If the admin chooses the self-signed route, users attempting to view a podcast will be presented with a warning about an untrusted certificate. Once the user accepts this certificate as coming from a trusted source, they can gain access to the podcast content.

The other technote HT5028 has two command-line tweaks for server administrators. The first will let admins view any volumes mounted locally on the server and the second will let them access shared folders over SMB. Once entered, admins will have to reboot the server to make these changes stick.

Apple addresses Lion server issues with new technotes originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iOS 5.0.1 seems a bit of a mixed bag for users, and that’s probably a charitable description. Apple support boards are filling up with page after page of reports from users that their iPhone battery life is worse than it was before. Some users say their battery life was fine until the upgrade. Others say it is far worse, and a few are seeing some improvement. Since one of the main features of the update was to fix battery life bugs, it’s hard to call this update anything but a failure. Even if the reports are hallucinatory, the PR is very, very bad. Think ‘antennagate‘.

Here’s a sample of some of the comments:

“Was running iOS 5.0 yesterday and had great battery life on my iPhone 4…. Update with OTA last night to iOS 5.0.1 and now just sitting at work and not surfing it is down to 55%. It has only been off the charger for 2 1/2 hours…. I haven’t even talked on it today. Wow Apple… what a fix!”

“After installing iOS 5 in my iPhone 4s I noticed that my battery was drying 1% for every 1Min 36Sec. I believe every 1hr 20 Min i will hzave to charge my mobile. And there is no option to downgrade to 5.0. Irritating.”

“Yes have the same problem. Was looking forward to having normal battery life on my new phone, but the new 5.0.1 update actually made it worse. I’m about to throw away my iPhone and go back to a blackberry… At least the blackberry held its charge for 2 full days.”

In my own experience my battery life dropped dramatically when I installed iOS 5 on an iPhone 4 last month. When I upgraded to the iPhone 4S there wasn’t any improvement, and the battery life was certainly behind the performance I had experienced before iOS 5 appeared. One bright spot was when I applied the 5.0.1 update from an airport via their WiFi. What an improvement over tethering to a computer — the whole process took about 12 minutes.

Of course all the battery life experiences are anecdotal, and it may be that we’re all using the new features so heavily that we’re driving battery performance down. Of course, that won’t explain why phones just sitting by themselves overnight are draining faster the before iOS 5 or iOS 5.0.1 appeared. It’s pretty obvious there is some fire under all this smoke.

Apple hasn’t commented on any of this new furor so far, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see iOS 5.0.2 coming to an iPhone near you soon.

[Editor’s note: I’m seeing improved battery life, but it’s clear there is something at work here and it’ll probably take Apple a bit longer to figure out why some iPhones (mine is an iPhone 4) are draining faster and some are not. – Victor Agreda, Jr.]

Update: Apple confirmed to All Things D that the battery drain issues may persist for some.

iOS 5.0.1 upgrade may not fix your battery woes (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s your chance to get a humorous behind-the-scenes look at an Apple retail store. The employee-made video is an entertaining look at Apple’s Steps of Service which are introduced during a new employee’s Core Training. The first five steps according to the video spell out APPLE:

• A – Approach the customer with a “warm welcome”
• P – Position, Permission, Probe – Tell the customer what you want to do, ask permission, and then ask them questions to determine their needs.
• P – Present the appropriate product solution that fits their needs.
• L – Listen to their concerns.
• E – End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return.

The video is a rare look at Apple’s closely guarded retail polices. Other official training videos reportedly exist, but they have never leaked out like this. According to a Macrumors commenter, this particular video was filmed after hours by employees and was shown once at a store meeting. It was left to die on the Internet until Macrumors stumbled upon it and brought it back to life.

[Via ifoapplestore]

Retail training video shows Apple Store behind the scenes originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has begun taking unlocked iPhone 4S pre-orders in the US Online Apple Store. The preorders list a 1 to 2-week ship time and and are available for all three storage capacities in white and black. I just put an order in for my unlocked iPhone 4S and the confirmation email lists a delivery date of between November 28 – December 5. Currently unlocked iPhone 4S pre-orders are for delivery only and cannot be placed online and then picked up in an Apple retail store.

Unlocked iPhone 4S models come in both white and black and cost US$649 for the 16 GB version, $749 for the 32 GB version, and $849 for the 64 GB version. Unlocked iPhones allow a user to simply insert a carrier’s micro-SIM card in to use the phone on any GSM network in the world. The unlocked iPhones will not work on CDMA networks, including Sprint and Verizon in the US.

Unlocked iPhone 4S now available for pre-order in the US originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to the photo search engine Skylines, iOS devices account for 39% of all photos posted on Twitter. Of the 24 million photos posted to Twitter in the week of October 22nd to October 29th, Twitter for iPhone came in highest with 21%, Instagram accounted for 13% and the iOS 5 Camera and Photos app accounted for 5%, bringing the total to 39%.

Apple’s new iOS 5 introduced integrated Twitter functionality, bringing posting of photos to Twitter directly from the Camera and Photos App. iOS 5 has only been out since October 12th and it’s already the 7th biggest photo client for Twitter.

Other big players were Twitter for Blackberry at 12% and Twitter for Android at 10%. Twitpic accounted for 8%, but was not counted towards the iOS percentage because it is a multiplatform client.

Read Skylines’ report on their blog here.

[Via TNW]

Report: 39% of photos on Twitter posted from iOS devices originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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