Cover Up

So what exactly are they hiding ? For those of you who have visited the one spot on earth that NEVER closes down...EVER...you might wonder what exactly is going on at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in NYC. Everyone is familiar with the glass entrance to the underground store that has become a must-see stop on every tourist's New York tour. And here we are, past 10PM on a weeknight and the glass entrance is entirely covered up (in a way that makes it IMPOSSIBLE to see what exactly is being done to it...from any angle), flatbed trucks and cranes are positioned outside, workers and labourers are coming in and out of the building, occasionally the main entrance gets blocked and people are sent to the back entrance. It is clear that something big is going to happen. And then one cannot avoid thinking: does this have anything to do with the imminent debut of Apple's new Mac operating system, Lion ? The timing is ominous. Friday is July 1st and Lion was announced for July. Also, judging by the round the clock work being done my own feeling is that they are gearing up for something maybe as early as this weekend, or at the the latest early next week. And since Lion will only be available as a download, sprucing up the store may have something to do with hardware, and one cannot help but think about the often rumoured MacBook Air update. 

A few more days and the mystery will be revealed. But I have a pretty good feeling this will happen sooner rather than later.

Apple hurting those they should be thanking

For those of you who complain that I am just an Apple fanboy, here is the perfect example of Apple doing the wrong thing and hurting those they should instead be bending over backwards for. About a decade ago I was one of these early adopters who jumped on the company's first ever iteration of their cloud service (although we did not refer to it in those terms back then): iDisk and mac.com. They later changed it to mobile.me and of course I went along with it. During those ten or so years I produced gallery pages of movies and pictures online, created web-pages with iWeb...you name it: a significant online presence predicated on the assumption that Apple would continue to give us a home for all of this so long as we continued to pay for the service.

And now that Apple is about to introduce the iCloud service you would think that they would reward the early adopters and those who committed early on to this online endeavour. Well, surprise surprise: on an FAQ just published by Apple here they are making it quite clear that as of next year in June, we're on our own. That we now need to somehow get all that content offline, back to our computers and find other homes for it all. 

Shame on you, Apple, for hurting those of us you should be thanking. Shame on you.

Let Me Out

And here is one more thing a smartphone will do for you: open and close locks, doors, gates, you name it. Judging by the video this is a nicely executed solution to one more problem we did not even know we had. Product site is here.

iPad Magic

Words won't do this video any justice. Just watch it.