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.

First off, Virtua Computers has a new office on 38th and 8th.  The location is centralized to our clients and has proven to be efficient.  Second off, Autriv Software Development saw the release of it’s newest product, BlackBook, a contact management software that is server based.  The release party was held last week and was met with strong praise from Mac Consultants in the city.

The new year also brings in the promise of new hardware from Apple.  We are likely to see an upgraded or all-new iPad 3 along with a new iPhone in the Summer or Fall.  Rumors have been piling up regarding the iPad 3′s specs.  Of these rumors, we can look toward a new display (hopefully retina), beefed up processor (A6 upgraded from the A5 in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S), better camera with an LED flash, upgraded battery, SIRI, and the announcement could land on Steve Job’s birthday, February 24th.

Again, we hope you had and continue to have a great start to the new year!

See you later!

We created twitter and facebook updater commands using Python. In Dragon Dictate we use the same Applescript as we did for our Movie Listing post – just changing up what Nigel actually says and the dialog box.

Code is after the jump.

Twitter

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import mechanize

if len(sys.argv) != 2:
	print "usage: " + sys.argv[0] + " "
	sys.exit(1)

message = sys.argv[1]

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'] = 'USERNAME'
br.form['password'] = 'PASSWORD'
br.submit()

r = br.response()

br.select_form(nr=0)
br.form['tweet[text]'] = message
br.submit()

Facebook

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import mechanize

if len(sys.argv) != 2:
	print "usage: " + sys.argv[0] + " "
	sys.exit(1)

message = sys.argv[1]

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('http://m.facebook.com')

br.select_form(nr=0)
br.form['email'] = 'USERNAME'
br.form['pass'] = 'PASSWORD'
br.submit()

r = br.response()

br.select_form(nr=0)
br.form['status'] = message
br.submit()

In both situations – change where I put in USERNAME and PASSWORD with your appropriate credentials.

These scripts require the Mechanize module, so download and install it. They say it hasn’t been tested for OS X – but it seems to be working fine for us.

Good luck and Happy New Year!

A quick rundown of pre-CES stuff:
Verizon will not be showing an iPhone – but a android based 4G LTE device….but since everyone is expecting a VZ iPhone after the new years, lets just keep that one under wraps
Apple will announce a CDMA based iPad – so Verizon might get the iPad?
More rumors about the iPad 2. Since Apple doesn’t make an appearance at the MacWorld conference anymore, they may show this off at CES or we may need to wait till their regular Feb/March event.
The iPhone 4 antenna-gate was ranked amongst the top technology “fails” of 2010. We all remember it, we are just trying to forget it.

Anyway that’s it for now – after the new year we will be back and strong with more videos and more good juice Apple stuff!

Happy New Year everyone – from The Big Apple Blog

Tomorrow – video! promise!

I know you guys REALLY wanted today, but it’s just been one of those kind of days….

Tomorrow though – I promise.

Justin