The 1984 Superbowl aired, what is considered, the best commercial ever made. It is called “1984″ and adheres to the concept of the book and movie 1984 (it poked fun at the lack of variety in pc’s and showed off the Macintosh computer). Ridley Scott directed this commercial and many consider it to be a classic. This year’s Superbowl came and anything Apple related was nowhere to be seen. We aren’t getting nervous yet, but as the product cycle for many Apple products is passing (iPad), only questions are arising to what is next. Samsung managed to buy Superbowl advertising space and continued with their campaign that pokes fun at Apple fanboys/girls while they wait in line for what seems to be a new iPhone.

New Apple products, including a new iPad, should be announced very soon (past launches for products have shown to be around February/March.

Apple has a market value of around $416 billion and has an effective business model that continues to top projections, even after the death of former CEO Steve Jobs. Operating CEO Tim Cook mentioned that numbers could have been higher if Apple could manufacture iPhones faster in response to the demand.

With the expected iPad 3 release in March, we are excited to see what Apple has cooked up for 2012.

Copyright lowendmac.com

So on the Mac’s 28th birthday we say “Here’s to the crazy ones”.

I checked out the Physics textbook and WOW! I liked Physics in high school, and I can see how much more I would have liked it had I had an iPad with this textbook. Not only is the content right there and easy to navigate, there is motion and interaction with the textbook. Bravo to the textbook companies for taking full advantage of the iPads technology to make this a sweet looking textbooks. Students will be proud!

Along with updating iBooks, Apple released the new iBooks Author. The authoring tool is meant to help textbook creators built and publish their textbooks, but clearly has other potential. For example that writing career I always wanted – now can be done with ease, and I still get 70% of my sale price

Washington Post Copyright 2011

Good Afternoon on this chilly December day in New York.  This is the newest member of Virtua Computers Inc., Anthony, and I’m updating our blog on two topics: the Grand Central store opening and Apple TV rumors.

First off, Apple has opened yet another beautiful store in NYC, it’s Grand Central location.  I visited the store when it opened to the public on Dec. 9th and there was a mob of people in the 23,000-square-foot store.  The store is located in the middle of the terminal and wraps around on the upper floors.  Check it out, it’s easily the most accessible Apple store to visit since it’s a subway stop away from home.

Secondly, there have been talks of Apple TV with improvements to the system and hardware rumors.  Apple recently came out with Siri, a voice activation/assistant on the iPhone 4s, and the rumors point to integration into the Apple TV system.  Sources are also pointing to wireless streaming capabilities, voice/motion controls, and features that enable the sharing your content across multiple devices.  I believe Siri and added motion sensing technology could allow Apple to become a big player in the home entertainment.  Google TV seemed like a great idea, but consumers don’t seem to be keen on using a remote control to type on their tv, but improvements like these on the Apple TV platform look promising.

-Anthony

Tim Cook has already stated “Apple is not going to change”. Unfortunately for Tim, the stock price and valuation did change – so he better hurry up and get the iPhone 5 out soon. PS for those who keep asking me when it’s coming out, I’ll know when you know – but I’m gonna guess around October.

We hope that Steve was leaving for his own accords, and not for health reasons, but in either case we welcome Mr. Cook and know he’ll do a great job. Now bring back the LaserPrinter!

And everyone expected it to be back up pretty quick, considering it was a Wednesday. But something terrible happened and the store is not only down with the sticky but down down, as in DEAD! As of 1:40pm – I can’t access the store. I hear some other people can’t either. Sounds like a bigger issue, or maybe Johnny unplugged the servers:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today, I got a mix of python and AppleScript to get Nigel (my DLA) to tell me when someone mentions me on Twitter. Only problem now is finding a Twitter application that will trigger the script.

Ok first part is the AppleScript. For temporary purposes I’m using the official Twitter app found the App Store:

set whosaid to text of (do shell script "python /Users/YOURUSER/scripts/mentions.py")

say ("Sir," & whosaid & "mentioned you on twitter.  Shall I read outloud?")
tell application "Dragon Dictate"
	set microphone to command operation
end tell
set answer to text returned of (display dialog "Yes or No" default answer "Yes")
if answer is equal to "yes" then
	tell application "Twitter"
		set mention to text of first status of mentions timeline of current account
		say ("They said" & mention)
	end tell
else
	say "ok sir"
end if

Clearly you have to change the location of where the script is – and you need Dragon Dictate (as always) to get the response piece done by voice. You could have it not use the Dragon Dictate, but where’s the fun in that.

Ok – now for the mentions.py code (requires Mechanize and BeautifulSoup – which you should have installed from the Facebook and Movie listings scripts):

#!/usr/bin/python

import mechanize
import urllib2
import BeautifulSoup
import re
import HTMLParser
import subprocess
import sys
import time
import datetime

br = mechanize.Browser()
br.set_handle_robots(False)
br.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1')]

br.open('https://mobile.twitter.com/session/new')

br.select_form(nr=0)
br.form['username'] = 'YOURUSERNAME'
br.form['password'] = 'YOURPASSWORD'
br.submit()

r = br.response()

br.find_link(text='Mentions')
mentionspage = br.click_link(text='Mentions')
br.open(mentionspage)
m = br.response()

soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(m)

whosaidit = soup.findAll('strong', limit=1)
for whosaid in whosaidit:
	name = whosaid.find('a').contents[0]
print name

So what happens here, is the Python script will get the username and only he username of the person who mentioned you on twitter. That will then be passed to the Applescript for Nigel to say “Sir, NAMEOFPERSON, mentioned you on twitter….shall I read?”, and you can tell him yes or no.

Now to find a way to trigger it. If anyone has any ideas, please post here.

Justin

So you can easily turn on File Sharing or Web – but in order to do the nitty gritty stuff (like DNS or Open Directory) you have to go to a support kbase article and download Server Admin. The same Server Admin application you know and love from 10.6 and earlier.

Now once you have all that setup, you can make users in the new Server application, but you have to go into their profiles via a website to really be tweak their settings. What used to be in workgroup manager is now through this profile window. I couldn’t find this profile button for about an hour until I turned on Web services, and scrolled down to the bottom of http://127.0.0.1. Even with this profile window – I’m still slightly confused on some of these items, but alas I’ll spend my weekend figuring it out.

Now if only my new laptop got here I’d be all set

If there is anything good in the new by this afternoon I’ll do a video, if not….we’ll try again tomorrow.