It’s unfortunate that Apple has ended this program. Every single printer I’ve owned in my adult life was purchased using the rebate that came with a new Mac. I have a feeling it will be a long time before I buy another printer.

John Gruber:

I think the current behavior of the iPhone mute switch is correct. You can’t design around every single edge case, and a new iPhone user who makes the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the mute switch silences everything, with an alarm set that he wasn’t aware of, and who is sitting in the front row of the New York Philharmonic when the accidental alarm goes off, is a pretty good example of an edge case.

I’m with John on this one. I bet it’s much more common for someone to fall asleep with an alarm set and the ringer switch set to off than it is for someone to have an alarm go off in an inopportune moment when they believed the ringer on/off switch would silence that alarm.

The design of the ringer on/off switch is by no means perfect, but it’s as close as you can get without adding unnecessary user confusion through extra prompts or potentially confusing options in the Settings app.

I signed up last month and finished the first course a couple of days ago. It does a really good job of teaching people with very little knowledge of programming languages how to code.

I’ve actually been searching for a learning tool like this over the past year or so because I’ve always had the itch to learn programming. But, everything I found felt like I was fighting an uphill battle every step of the way. Codecademy makes it feel easy and, only one course in, I already feel like I’ve learned a lot.

A super fast external drive that runs off of a single Thunderbolt cable that both transfers data and powers the drive. Elgato makes fantastic peripherals. And, at $430 I’d expect nothing but the best.

Dave Caolo on his use of Siri:

Siri is handy in the kitchen. I often use it to set timers. I also have Siri turn my alarms on and off before bed. In those instances, a verbal request is faster than swiping and tapping. Unfortunately, I don’t use it for anything else. Many people say it’s a great way to read and respond to text messages. In my experience, Siri reads incoming texts well but often fails when transcribing my words.

I too haven’t found myself using Siri as often as I thought I would. But, I do still use it often enough to find it incredibly useful. I also use Siri to set timers and actually didn’t know that it was capable of turning on alarms. But, the real use case for me is in sending text messages while I’m driving.

While I don’t drive very often, usually just to and from work, I like to let my girlfriend know when I’m heading home. She likes to have dinner ready for me when I get there (her choice, not mine) and appreciates the heads up so that she can have it on the table when I walk in the door. This way we’re not eating right before we go to bed. Siri is perfect for this. I jump in the car hold the home button and use Siri to text message my girlfriend.

I haven’t found the transcription of my words to be much of a problem. Siri always seems to have an easy time figuring out what I’m saying, at least compared to my girlfriends experience with Siri. She’ll often use it to try to look something up while we’re at the dinner table and it just fails at understanding what she’s saying. I then try it on my phone and Siri almost always recognizes what I’m saying right away.

Transcription is a tricky technology and works well for some while others are left correcting it by hand. I’ve had a lot of luck with Siri’s ability to understand what I’m saying and that’s likely why I use it more often then others.

AppleInsider:

According to a source familiar with Apple’s plans, the company plans to begin operating Apple-branded areas within 25 larger Target stores in locations which can’t support a standalone Apple Store.

I doubt my local Target will be one of those locations but I’d be very happy if I didn’t have to travel two hours just to check out new Macs.

Aside from the neck on that desktop PC, they’re not bad looking machines. But, I don’t know why anyone would want to be in the Windows-based PC market right now.

John Gruber regarding DigiTimes’ claim of an iPad 3 with a full HD display to be announced in March:

Wait a minute. What’s going on here? A DigiTimes report about Apple and the iPad that’s completely accurate? No completely made-up nonsense? Is something wrong with me?

DigiTimes seems to have a formula to all of their rumors, lead with information that is most likely true and then follow it up with something that will never happen.

Gruber goes on to quote the rest of the sentence from DigiTimes’ article that claims an iPad 4 will be released in October, which he believes to be inaccurate.

Neil Hughes:

Apple has explored building displays with dynamic backlight adaptation for better picture quality, particularly when watching letterboxed widescreen movies on a high-definition screen.

This is based on an Apple patent that depicts what could be a television screen that would use dynamic backlighting to keep darker areas of the screen (or black bars in letterboxed movies) darker by dimming the backlighting in those areas.

But Apple patents everything they think of, so this in no way confirms that Apple will use this technology in their television.

Speaking of $300 tablets, RIM has slashed prices on every available model of their BlackBerry PlayBook to $299. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

(Via TechCrunch.)

James Wang:

Apple’s pricing strategy for its iPad series is crucial to the tablet market. It remains to be seen at what price level Apple will set its entry-level iPad. For Wi-Fi only models, US$299, US$349 or US$399 may all be possible.

There’s no indication that DigiTimes has any information specifically pointing to a $299 price point. It reads as pure speculation to me. And, I don’t think it’s very well thought out.

I don’t see any reason for Apple to lower the starting price point of the iPad by that much. Apple generally doesn’t make big leaps in pricing like this, especially when it’s not at all necessary. If Apple does announce two new iPad models they would likely be aimed at the high and mid-end of the market, as DigiTimes suggests. But, I wouldn’t expect them to drop the price of the iPad 2 below $399. This would allow Apple to own the entire tablet market from $399 and up.

Refurbished models, though, are a different story. It’s entirely possible that Apple will sell refurbished iPad 2s for $299 but not with any consistent availability. But, I don’t think refurbished models was what James Wang was writing about.

(Via The iPhone Blog.)

Kara Swisher reporting for All Things D:

According to sources close to the situation, Apple is planning an important — but not large-scale — event to be held in New York at the end of this month that will focus on a media-related announcement.

Her sources tell her that it isn’t the iPad 3 or the rumored Apple Television set.

we have decided that this coming January will be our last keynote presentation and booth at CES. We’ll continue to participate in CES as a great place to connect with partners and customers across the PC, phone and entertainment industries, but we won’t have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don’t align with the show’s January timing.

I never understood why CES was in January. It suffers the same problem that Macworld did: why would companies want to announce new products a month after Christmas?

(Via Engadget.)

This is exactly the type of system that Apple needed to put in place. There’s been numerous occasions where I’ll watch a couple of episodes from a new TV show and like it enough to want the season pass, but after spending $6-9 on episodes I don’t want to spend another $24+ just to get the season pass.

I had the chance to use an Oona on a long car trip today. It was an hour and a half both ways and we used my iPhone 4S to direct us to our destination using TomTom’s navigation app. It was even able to hold the iPhone in place with both a headphone and power cable weighting it down on both ends.

The only downside I’ve found is that the iPhone is a little wobbly while being held by the Oona. But, the Oona’s compact size and versatility makes it one of the best smartphone stands out there.

I’m not sure if they’d be able to ship it in time for Christmas but the Oona would certainly make a great gift for anyone who uses their smartphone as a navigation device.

If you’re unhappy with the latest version of Twitter for iOS, Tapbots has temporarily lowered the price of their Twitter client to $0.99. This is a great opportunity to purchase one of the best Twitter clients around.

David Richards:

Apple will launch their new Apple TV in time for the last quarter of 2012, with sources in Japan telling SmartHouse that 3 sizes are being planned including a 32″ model and a 55″ model.

(Via CNET.)

What a wonderful way to relive your childhood. Each new “page” pops open like a pop-up book and most objects react when you tap on them. I was a huge fan of A Charlie Brown Christmas when I was a child and actually own a hard-cover copy of The Joy of A Peanuts Christmas.

A Charlie Brown Christmas was developed by Loud Crow Interactive and I hope to see a lot more like this from them in the future.

The demo is meant to be viewed on other mobile devices. They even went to the trouble of making it open in fullscreen when saved to an iOS device’s home screen.

The interface looks slick and the demo is impressive, but I wish they would have made it a bit more interactive, you basically have one path through each of the tiles and none of the other “buttons” work.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Google’s Gmail application has returned to the App Store today after their buggy 1.0 version was pulled earlier this month.

I don’t really understand why Gmail users would want to use this instead of Mail, but I guess I’m just not as much of a “power user” as they are.

It’s two weeks late, but its’ finally here. I haven’t signed up for it yet, but think I’ll be doing so before too long. I have a lot of music that I ripped from CDs years ago. It would be nice to upgrade that music to a higher bit rate without having to dig the discs out of the closet and re-rip the whole lot.

David Heath:

Steve (or someone close to him) spotted a loophole in the California vehicle laws. Anyone with a brand new car had a maximum of six months to affix the issued number plate to the vehicle.

So Jobs made an arrangement with the leasing company; he would always change cars during the sixth month of the lease, exchanging one silver Mercedes SL55 AMG for another identical one. At no time would he ever be in a car as old as six months; and thus there was no legal requirement to have the number plates fitted.

I thought Steve Jobs was cool because he just didn’t care about have a license plate on his car, but the truth makes him seem like even more of a badass.

I’m a little late linking to this but it’s a fantastic idea. It’s essentially The Deck for RSS feeds. And, it’s something I knew would happen eventually — it just seems like the next logical step for a growing list of independent online writers.

Even the most expensive thermostats are still just ugly beige boxes. Nest is a drastic improvement over every thermostat on the market, in both functionality and design. Nest is a bit expensive ($249) but with all of it’s wonderful energy saving features, it can pay for itself in no time.

Every Apple geek wants this book.