Top-level category for all Apple, Mac, and OS X related topics.
Over at Macworld, I wrote about an incident involving my iPhone 5, its unintended dive into 10' of lake water, and its surprising resuscitation:
Life after death: Resuscitating a drowned iPhone 5
Two weeks post-incident, and the phone continues to work perfectly. I'm still amazed.
This morning, I wanted to send someone an iTunes App Store search URL, so that when they clicked it, they'd see the list of matching apps in the iTunes App Store. There's no apparent easy way to do this within iTunes, but after much futzing about, I figured out how to structure a URL that will open to to the search results screen in the iTunes App Store.
Because Apple has separated iPhone apps and iPod apps in the store, there are actually two separate URLs, one for each type of app. The iPad version of the URL is:
itms://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearch?entity=iPadSoftware&free=0&genreIndex=1&media=software&restrict=false&softwareTerm=TERMS+TO+SEARCH+FOR&submit=seeAllLockups
And for the iPhone, it's identical except for the entity bit:
itms://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearch?entity=software&free=0&genreIndex=1&media=software&restrict=false&softwareTerm=TERMS+TO+SEARCH+FOR&submit=seeAllLockups
Hopefully obviously, replace TERMS+TO+SEARCH+FOR with the keywords you want to use for the search, separating words with the plus sign. You can then use the URL for whatever you like: send it to someone, add it to your bookmarks bar, whatever. When clicked, the search will run and the results will open directly in the iTunes App Store for either iPad or iPhone apps.
For example, iPad Apps related to the word foobar, or iPhone apps about hopping frogs.
You can further customize the URL to find anything you want—not just apps, and using additional criteria—within any of the various areas of the App Store. Read on for the details on how to do that.
Back in mid-1993, I was working as a Financial Analyst for Apple in Cupertino; I'd been there for a few years, and had recently taken on a new role with a group called Software Dispatch. Software Dispatch was a new business, launched in those halcyon pre-Internet days, to distribute software on CD-ROM. And not just Apple software, but software from many different developers—there were over 80 signed up for the inaugural CD-ROM. (The official press release is an interesting read.)
On the CD-ROM, users would find encrypted versions of each app, along with a demo version they could use to try before they bought (see, Apple, you can sell software with trial versions!). If the user liked what they saw, they'd call a 1-800 number, pay with a credit card, and be given a decryption key to unlock their software.
But what made the business really unique for Apple in 1993 was that Software Dispatch was planned for Windows machines, too. I still remember how odd it was to see Windows machines on developers' desks when I walked through our area—there just weren't many visible Windows machines on the Apple campus at that time. While Apple had little trouble signing up Mac software vendors for the CD-ROM venture, it was different on the Windows side. And that's what led to the strangest business meeting of my career…
Note: Dropbox—sadly—removed this feature in July of 2017, so don't even bother reading any further.
Did you know that Dropbox lets you create photo albums? No? Me neither, until this morning, that is. And it turns out, it's incredibly easy to do:
That's it, your'e done. The only time-consuming portion of the process is uploading the images; creating and sharing the album takes almost no time at all. That's about as simple as it gets.
Now assume you want to do the same thing using iPhoto: create a web-based slideshow of images for anyone to see via a shared URL. Sure, you could use iCloud's Photo Stream, but that's not a web-based solution. Instead, you'll need to use File > Export in iPhoto, and either create a Web Page or a Slideshow. Slideshow is really misnamed, though, as what it really creates is a movie of your images. So Web Page it is.
While writing up this week's Watch It selection (The Stunt Man), I was rewatching the movie on my TV, and wanted to switch over to the computer. I own a many-years-old DVD version, so I popped it into my iMac, fired up HandBrake and set to ripping it. But I got nothing—HandBrake ripped a 4KB file, then claimed it was done. Not a good start.
A glance at HandBrake's activity window showed this error:
libdvdread: CHECK_VALUE failed in ifo_read -- error message
Searching on that error message pointed to an error in dvdnav, and some suggested ways of working around it, including installing a patched version. There were also other errors, and searching on those indicated something about the copy protection was causing a read error with the disc.
I also tried RipIt's built-in rip-and-compress, but it also failed. After mucking about with those two apps, and nearly every other video-related app I own, here's how I finally managed to rip my legally-purchased version of The Stunt Man:
I'm posting this here mainly so I remember what I did, but perhaps it'll help with your stubborn discs as well.
I've been tracking and updating Apple's financial results for many years, and have a number of charts that I update each quarter. I don't do much with them, other than stare at some of the numbers in amazement, but they do show some very interesting trends.
If you like numbers (really big numbers) and trends and graphs, perhaps you'll find these of interest, too. There are 10 charts in all; click on the first one at right to start the pop-up slideshow. (You can expand images within the slideshow by clicking the icon at the top right of the window. Note that some of these are really wide!)
Here's what you'll see, in order: Sales Mix for the "Big Four" products; overall revenue and profits by same quarter by year; iPad, iPhone, iPod and Mac units sold by same quarter by year; and those same four categories by year.
I'll post updated versions each quarter, and like this time, without any financial analysis: lots of people get paid money to discuss and guess on that subject; I just enjoy looking at the numbers.
Another lost-to-Google-policies Tweet movie; this time, about a bug in my iMac that was lingering after 24 full hours.
Morning iMac bug update: It's still there, behind the glass, alive and moving, 24+ hours later. Amazing. http://t.co/kcnFH7wI
— Rob Griffiths (@rgriff) November 5, 2012
The bug, of course, was a real one; here's the video that's vanished from the above tweet:
Thankfully, the little buggy vanished not soon thereafter, thankfully not remaining onscreen for eternity.
As a finance guy by training, I've always been fascinated by stock splits, such as the incredibly-rare seven for one split Apple announced yesterday. First off, just how rare is a seven-for-one split? Incredibly rare; since 1980, there have been only three splits bigger than that; all were ten-for-one splits.
By the books in Finance, a stock split adds no value to a person's shares, because it's simply a redivision of their current holdings. Consider someone holding 100 shares of Apple at yesterday's closing price of $524.75 per share:
The Finance books look at that, and say "no change in value, ergo, a stock split has no intrinsic worth." And they're right; there's been no change in value for any investor's holdings. But studies done over the years have shown that stock splits do have a positive impact on investor's holdings:
A 1996 study by David Ikenberry of Rice University measured the short and long-term performance of stock splits. His research included all the 1,275 companies whose stock split 2-for-1 between 1975 and 1990. Mr. Ikenberry compared the split stocks to a control group of stocks for similar-sized companies in similar sectors that had not split. His results were startling. The split stock group performed 8% better than the control group after one year, and 16% better after three years.
Why might that be? I'm sure the studies have detailed financial models to back up their findings, but to me, it boils down to two things…
As I recently wrote about, I'm weird in that I prefer to buy my movies on physical media, versus electronic only. But I also enjoy the benefits that come from having an electronic version of the movie. The recent Frozen Blu-ray release, for example, was perfect: In the box was a Blu-ray, a DVD, and an easy-to-use redemption code for the iTunes digital version.
Other studios, though, want to force me outside the Apple ecosystem, and into the hell that is Ultraviolet. More and more, in fact, this is the norm. Which means I need to make my own digital versions.
For DVDs, this isn't too troublesome (and well documented), but I'm only buying Blu-ray discs now, and that makes things a bit tougher. (Kirk McElhearn discussed Blu-ray viewing/ripping for Macworld last year. Kirk focused on playback; I'm ignoring playback, and expanding on the ripping tutorial.)
If you're interested in creating your own digital copies of your Blu-ray discs, read on to see how I do it.
Sorry for the bizarre headline, but I wanted to make sure I got the proper clickbait, er, SEO, er clickwhoring, er, credit for the following insightful observation. Which is this:
The author, one Lisa Sanders, states that she's now boycotting Apple due to their tax avoidance strategy:
Apple, it’s over. I’m breaking up with you. Because of your tax-ducking ways, I won’t buy another phone or computer or tablet or even song from you.
I hope Lisa is just as willing to give up products from Microsoft—I guess she's going to Linux?—which sheltered over $60 billion dollars in 2012, more than Apple's $54 billion that year. And she better not buy that Linux box from Dell, which sheltered $16 billion in 2012. And she better not use MySQL on that machine, because Oracle sheltered $21 billion. Also, no Western Digital hard drives ($5 billion). Oh, and those shoes? Better lose the Nikes, as they sheltered $6 billion. Credit cards? Citigroup ($36 billion), Bank of America ($19 billion), and JPMorgan Chase ($22 billion) are out; I guess Lisa is going cash-only.
All of the above data was found within 30 seconds of starting to search the web; the source for the numbers is Which Fortune 500 Companies Are Sheltering Income in Overseas Tax Havens? by the Citizens for Tax Justice.
Yes, Apple shelters taxes. Yes, it's very good at it. Yes, it sucks that they aren't paying their fair share. But the reality is that nobody in the Fortune 500 is paying their fair share. Why? Because they owe it to their shareholders not to do so. Lisa almost got that with her mention of Rand Paul:
At last year’s Senate hearings, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said that it would be malpractice for Apple to pay a penny more than the minimum its accountants say it owes.
That's exactly it, but not just for Apple, but for any publicly-held company. Just when I'm thinking she's going to get it, she…goes 100% the wrong direction:
Perhaps Paul feels that the company’s fiduciary obligation outweighs its obligation to help support the nation that made and continues to make its profitable activity possible.
That's how he feels because he's correct: The company's fiduciary obligation comes first, at least when compared to "voluntarily paying more tax than required." Companies like Apple already benefit the country to a tremendous degree. How? By employing people and paying them good wages. Those wages are taxed. The things people buy with those wages are taxed. Add up all those impacts, and Apple (and the others) are definitely helping the economy.
Any public Fortune 500 company is tasked with returning maximum value to its shareholders; that's why the list of abusers is so long and deep. Any company not taking advantage of legal tax reduction strategies isn't maximizing wealth for shareholders.
If we want to fix the problem, we need to fix the law that's allowing the behaviors. Period. Boycotting Apple because they're very good at taking advantage of legal loopholes isn't going to make them pay more in taxes. Change the law, though, and Apple (and everyone else) will do so, because none of these companies are willing to break the law to lower their tax bills.