Baseless Prediction: The next Mac Pro, made in the USA(?) and coming out in 2013, should probably be...

...a cube.

+= Next Mac Pro?

Oblong -- the next Apple? Or are they just the next Commodore?

Google is the greatest web company ever. They weren't the first one, though. And in fact, most of the things they did were things others were already offering to the general public, except that they just made it all better:

The Onion, America's Finest News Source, ...

...just in case you didn't know, is a news satire organization. They don't really put out real news. If you didn't know, that's fine. Because anyway, I guess, in the same way, people are always able to spot sarcasm, right?

So if you see articles like this, you'll know how to react:
http://www.theonion.com/video/new-iphone-geared-towards-collegeaged-girls-comes,30769/

Just saying.

What people don't know about Professional Bloggers. And for-profit corporations.

Professional bloggers write things that strike at the emotions. They write mostly opinion pieces, which, last I heard, are not facts. Case in point, one article from Gizmodo:

Is Windows 8 really that simple? NO.

Some guy posts this video on Google+ (I know, right? What the hell am I doing on G+! LOL), and says "Genius, filmed in real life. Is Windows 8 really that simple?"

On the lighter side of things, can you guess what my emoji stand for in this image?

Haters gonna hate.

One blogger said:

Fired execs, Scott Forstall & Steven Sinofsky, forming one company would be...

Wow, I can't imagine what kind of new things they might come up with. A new cross-device OS that'll kill Windows and iOS and Android and maybe Xbox, too? But, maybe it should have emulators to be able to at least run Windows and Android, ala the OS X Bootcamp. I was thinking they could hook up with Firefox and make that Firefox OS a reality that we all can really use. But then again, they should probably thinking up new computing paradigms altogether. No more mice. Not just touch screens. Or voice. Maybe, go 3D.

And then again, Forstall technically isn't leaving Apple until 2013, and only Sinofsky is totally out of Microsoft. I am really wishfully thinking that Forstall, for this next year at Apple as "special advisor to the CEO", is actually just dreaming up the next new thing. He isn't gonna be SVP of iOS anymore, sure. But maybe he can become SVP of [insert name of next new thing here] by the end of 2013. He is such a talent that Apple probably wouldn't really want to go to competition. A jerk, but is a talent. Reminds me of someone.

App for Grabs #2: Web Browser for Today's Desktop OSes

App for Grabs is a new series I'd like to start on "i" on Tech. It's basically an idea I have for an app (whether for mobile or desktop or web), but it seems no one has written that exact app just yet. So, I put this app idea up for grabs. Hence, the name. If you're a developer and you grab this app idea, please feel free to contact me for donations and royalties! :D  And I'd be happy to give you more app ideas. If you're evil and you don't even want to credit me, well, I will let the world judge you.

Anyhow, here's my second App for Grabs. More like new app features.

App for Grabs #1: "One-Touch" Voice Mails

App for Grabs is a new series I'd like to start on "i" on Tech. It's basically an idea I have for an app (whether for mobile or desktop or web), but it seems no one has written that exact app just yet. So, I put this app idea up for grabs. Hence, the name. If you're a developer and you grab this app idea, please feel free to contact me for donations and royalties! :D  And I'd be happy to give you more app ideas. If you're evil and you don't even want to credit me, well, I will let the world judge you.

Anyhow, here's my first App for Grabs.

Three kinds of Apple fanboys

I realized there are 3 kinds of Apple fanboys.

A. People who are fans of Apple products only.
B. People who are fans of Apple history and culture, it being a business.
C. Both A and B.

"A" fans are usually just fans of recent Apple products. They only got to know about Apple since it became popular over the last decade. They see Apple products as lifestyle (i.e. "luxury" / expensive) products that they want but not necessarily need to have, and buy them often despite the costs and publicly perceived "flaws." They often demand the latest and greatest from Apple, or for Apple to offer things that are seemingly better than the competition. They want Apple to give higher resolution cameras, higher resolution screens, faster processors, more memory and storage, and so on. If Apple releases an update to a relatively new product these people bought, they are mad as hell at Apple, because suddenly, they're not the most popular kid with the shiniest gadget on the block anymore. "A" fans think Steve Jobs is Apple.

2013 and Scott Forstall

People seem quick to discount Apple since losing Steve Jobs to tech heaven back in 2011. People now think Apple needs another Steve Jobs, or else!

Would Steve Jobs be mad at today's Apple? If Steve Jobs were alive, Apple would probably not start their decline, right?

How about ask these instead:

This is just an experiment. I'd like to call it, "The never ending blog post." :D

WARNING: Bandwidth hog. Do not view on a mobile data connection. ADVISORY: You have the option to press the back button, or close your web browser altogether.

Can your iPhone do this? LOL

Baseless Prediction: Future OS X codenames

If you're a Mac fan, you know what this list means:

Who needs an iPad mini?

Well, of course there are those who like the "glitz" that Apple products give them. It's like a status symbol.

Old Tech

Ever had any one of these? I have a few more, but these are all I was able to dig up.

A few insignificant stabs at the Goliath

Let's distribute the power a little bit, right? How about rewarding an old friend?

Mobile Safari

Chrome

Safari

A brief summary of why Apple sued Samsung

Here's a very, very brief summary of why Apple sued Samsung for $2.8b and not others, and probably why Apple easily convinced the jury that the case is theirs (but only for $1b, not $2.8b):

http://bit.ly/T9Lek1

On people saying "Apple has no choice, it has to come out with an iPad mini."

Sorry to say but it seems you people don't know Apple just that well yet.

#lightbulbmoment How to make sure you don't get trapped in your own filter bubble

In a recent post, I wrote links to websites and a video describing how using Google might trap you into a filter bubble of your own, and how an alternative search engine could help you avoid that.

After discussion with a friend though, a light bulb went up.

What if someone creates a program that could artificially and regularly post arbitrary queries to Google? That way, Google becomes confused as to what filters exactly they will use when they send you search results. Of course, that would eat up some resources on your computer, but I think it's not going to be so much and it could be worth it.

To all developers out there, any takers? Or any thoughts?

[Mac / OS X Tips] Let your computer read text for you. For free.

What do these names have in common? Karen, Lee, Sangeeta, Moira, Fiona, Tessa, Daniel, Emily, Serena, Agnes, Jill, Kathy, Princess, Samantha, Vicki, Victoria, Alex, Bruce, Fred, Junior, Ralph, Tom, Albert, Maged, Ting-Ting, Sin-Ji, Zuzana, Ida, Ellen, Claire, Xander, Mikko, Julie, Sebastien, Thomas, Virginie, Anna, Steffi, Yannick, Alexandros, Eszter, Damayanti, Paolo, Silva, Kyoko, Narae, Yuna, Stine, Agata, Raquel, Joana, Simona, Milena, Laura, Javier, Paulina, Diego, Monica, Alva, Oskar, Narisa, and Aylin.

They're all the different (normal) voices available for you to use in OS X on your Mac, starting from OS X Lion. For previous versions of Mac OS or OS X, there are a lot fewer options to choose from. But basically they have support for 22 different languages including more than one different variants of English, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. There are also a few funny "novelty" voices for American English.

So yeah, this has been a feature of the Mac since it was introduced in 1984. Siri's voice is actually the same as Samantha's voice.

Check out how to enable speech recognition on your Mac on this TUAW article. If you plan to install all the voices though, it will take up close to 20Gb of space on your system, so better choose only the ones that you could really use.

"Microsoft Did the Impossible: The New Hotmail Is Fantastic"

Check out the article on Gizmodo. If you want, you can go right ahead to the new Hotmail, but actually it's not on Hotmail.com, it's on Outlook.com.

Google tracks you. Here's an alternative search engine.

First, check out this website: http://donttrack.us/
And this: http://dontbubble.us/

Then learn about online "filter bubble" concept introduced in this TED Talk:

An opportunity for Yahoo!

You guys have probably heard about Yahoo! hiring its new CEO, Marissa Mayer, who was employee #20 at Google, and mom-to-be. It was a big surprise move for Yahoo!, but there was quite a warm reception towards the hire. Mayer is the 5th CEO of Yahoo! in the last 5 years. With Mayer on the helm, people are now more hopeful about the fate of Yahoo! which just hasn't grown as much as the 8-foot behemoth that its younger distant cousin (Google) has.

I am a little bit sentimental about Yahoo!, as it was my first picture of the internet. I remember advertised on an old ISP's brochure back in 1995 a photo of the old Netscape browser loaded with the Yahoo! homepage with that old red Yahoo! logo, a search bar, and a directory of websites. The brochure said something like "all the information in the world right at your fingertips." Something like that.

Oh how small was the world wide web back then. That was around the same time we first had a legit brand new PC. We have had second-hand XTs with green on black monochrome screens and a DOS-based OS before that. Our new PC had a color screen, a CD-ROM drive, and Windows 3.1. And we bought it with a modem and immediately applied for an internet connection. The PC had Netscape pre-installed, which was pre-configured to have www.yahoo.com as the homepage. Yahoo! was the first website I ever visited. It was also my default homepage for a very long time.

Now, until just a few weeks back, I had iGoogle as my browser homepage. Yahoo! to me has just become a mess with all that clutter of news that I'm not interested in and so forth. Yahoo! Messenger's video chat is just not fast enough anymore. Skype is just the king of video chat. And Gmail Video Chat is just so much more accessible. Yahoo! Mail - oh, again, all that clutter. Gmail is just so much better with the cleaner design and all its (spam) filters. Yahoo! Groups - how ugly is that site nowadays. There's Facebook now for that.

But iGoogle is going away soon. So now I've had to live with over a dozen extensions on my web browsers just to access the same info from the "gadgets" I had on iGoogle, but it's nowhere near the iGoogle experience. I want a mission control view of all things important to me when I launch my web browser. E-mail. Chat. Weather. Time zone clocks. A list of links to my favorite websites. My calendar. Notes. Tasks.

Of course, Microsoft's Metro "live tiles" UI could fill that gap, but still, I want all that when I launch my browser - on a desktop PC or on a Mac or a mobile device. Also, I probably won't be using a device that runs Windows 8 or Windows Phone within the next two years at least.

I see this being the homepage of the internet (again) as one opportunity and a key strategy for Yahoo! Bring the old widgets and "My Yahoo!" back, but in a form fit for the internet today, of course. If they can become everybody's homepage - that's a lot of eyeballs and visibility and brand recall again. Be ever present at the starting point for many on the internet: the browser. They could strike deals with companies to become the default homepage on web browsers (with Apple, for example, on Safari on both OS X and iOS). Be useful again. Don't have clutter. They just need people using their products again.

Of course, simply capitalizing on Flickr's popularity, and just simply drastically improving it, should also be a no-brainer. Flickr could be their ticket to the social networking party, to compete at least with Google+, which is said to be frequented by photographers. Facebook is already the undisputed king of social.

And maybe YM, too. But cloud storage and services are seemingly the new thing now. They should probably dip their toes in that, too. Think iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. And even Amazon's S3 service. All the players are playing that game. How about acquiring Tumblr? Well, I don't know if Tumblr is open to an acquisition, but that would be great for Yahoo!. Twitter is definitely out of the question, as it itself is a king in social micro-blogging (and in a sense, a competitor of Tumblr). But Yahoo! definitely needs to get into the content creation space like blogging. Bring back Geocities, but a whole new Geocities. Well, it's not that simple.


The key is, by being that "homepage" of the internet again, by bringing back to life something like the "My Yahoo!" service, they will be creating a platform. It's all about creating platforms. Facebook, Twitter, not to mention Windows, Xbox Live, OS X, iOS, Android, Chrome. Developers can develop widgets (i.e. mini apps) for the Yahoo! homepage. Everything can live there. Games included, and so on. There's of course the Chrome Web Store, but it just doesn't cut it for me. It's one thing to play Angry Birds, and another thing to play Angry Birds while looking at my e-mails and the weather and a few other widgets.

Hmmm. I just looked at My Yahoo! right now, and I guess the problem is just it's really ugly. The columns are just so wide on my current screen resolution. It was still made for 640x480 screens. I guess that's all the problem with all of Yahoo!. They haven't been updated (properly). Of course, functionality first before form, but functionality is not something that they own. That said, yes, new products are necessary, too. But that said, it's easier to build on what they have right now. The new products will just come for as long as they stay alive and they attract talent.

When will we have ultra-reliable, sufficiently fast, but not significantly expensive/elitistic* internet in the Philippines?

By elitistic I meant "generally inaccessible to most people," or too expensive to the point that only the 1% can really benefit.

Anyways, any predictions as to when 1000Mbps internet will arrive in da Pilipinz?

This webpage shows a short video clip of the public launch of Google Fiber in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Google introduces scientific calculator interface

You can actually already do many calculations using Google Search. For example, google "sqrt(pi)" and you will be given the square root of 3.14.... But now, Google introduces a full scientific calculator interface once you do google a calculation, to continue with further calculations. Check out the example at this link.

Open letter to YouTube

Dear YouTube/Google,

I'm already starting to get fed up with this. Most of my videos uploaded on YouTube are my own personal recordings, with overlain music I mixed using GarageBand's royalty-free loops (as stated in Apple's terms."

My tech journey (Part 3 of 3)

My Presario was with me until December 2009, when I bought a 13" Macbook Air look-a-like from MSI. But unlike the Macbook Air, this MSI thing was half as cheap, all-black, had stickers on, ran the highly unsuccessful and very slow Windows Vista (with a free upgrade to Windows 7), was made of plastic and ran on an Intel Atom processor (i.e. weak). I really only bought it for the looks and for its very light weight, but otherwise it was not so much an improvement in performance over my Presario. I should mention though that the Presario is still being used by my brother-in-law, while that MSI is still with my brother, although I would think he's using his iPad 2 more than that crap.

My tech journay (Part 2 of 3)

1995 also marked the first time I ever coded my first ever website. Well actually it was a website for this I group I belonged to back then. I made my own graphics on Windows' built-in Paintbrush app, wrote the HTML in Notepad, and previewed my creation on the Netscape Navigator web browser. This was the time of HTML 1.1, I believe. The web is now abuzz with HTML5. Between 1995 and 2000, I was able to play around and create some simple Visual Basic apps. In ca. 1997, I also got a part-time job updating the website of the Philippine Basketball Association, to publish scores just after game night ended and the scores and stats were in.

My tech journey (Part 1 of 3)

I've had this thing for computers and technology since I don't know when. When we were young, we couldn't really afford computers. I remember we had just one color TV and actually it was my grandma's and it was in her room. She slept early so we could only watch TV until 7:30pm. Thankfully The Transformers were on from 7-7:30pm on Thursdays (to the best of my recollection) so we were still able to watch them. Saturday mornings are of course cartoon days, likewise.

No Chrome or Firefox for upcoming Windows RT

Image from pricerunner.co.uk

Read the original article on GigaOM. I also heard about this buzz on Tech News Today's episode 499 on TWiT.tv.

Windows 8, as you might know now, will debut the Metro user interface on non-smartphone computing devices. Windows RT though, formerly known as Windows 8 for ARM-based touch tablets (whereas the normal desktop-capable Windows 8 is intended for both Intel-based traditional PCs or tablets), is not going to be running desktop apps. But even so, it is also said to be limiting 3rd party web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox from running on it, whereas it will only run Microsoft's own Internet Explorer and generally allow only limited functionality to 3rd party browsers. For Windows 8 (Intel-based), this is not an issue. The question is, what are Microsoft's reasons? Are they evil?

So much Android

Good for the consumers that there are plenty of choices in terms of Android devices. Bad for most developers if they want to be on every Android device. For big-time developers like Animoca, they make sure their apps work on the roughly 400 different Android devices shown in the photo above. Among other reasons, I think this has lead to generally less developers and less quality apps for Android. Thus, the allure of other platforms.

Hey, I'm talking about both smartphones and tablets here, okay? Go ahead and claim that Android has larger market share in terms of smartphone platforms. I don't contest facts. But you know, I'll be quiet about smartphone model market share, smartphone profits, and tablets (platforms, models, or profits).

NOTE: I first read about this on Cult of Mac.

On rumors of a 7-inch iPad

There have been rumors about Apple releasing a 7-inch iPad, the latest article I've read being one on Cult of Mac. It has been rumored to be called an "iPad mini" as well, and more specifically could have a 7.85-inch diagonal display and look exactly like the Mini Me of today's current 10-inch (actually 9.7-inch), 3rd generation iPad. John Gruber, thru his Daring Fireball blog, mentioned an AppAdvice article about how a 7.85-inch size makes sense.

On Apple "iTV" rumors

There have been rumors about an Apple "iTV" - i.e. Apple's own take on the television that is expected to "disrupt" the TV industry, just as the original Mac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad have disrupted the PC, MP3 player, digital distribution, smartphone, tablet, and not to mention app market industries. This is my very brief take on those rumors.

The latest rumor I've read is this article from Cult of Mac. The new Apple television is said to have Siri and FaceTime capabilities, and it looks like the current Apple Thunderbolt Display (ATD), but with sizes ranging from 40 to 60 inches (whereas current ATDs are 27 inches in size).

Blog... START!

I've been reading more a lot about tech recently, and have even been blogging more tech-related stuff. I love it! So I thought, I should just have a separate blog from my personal blog (the RONJ-BLOG) that is all about tech. And so here it is. As they say in Japanese, "Hajimemashō!" (Let us begin!)