YouTube

Samsung is continuing its approach of pushing anti-iPhone ads on its YouTube channel. Today’s ad showcases two friends, an iPhone user and a Galaxy S5 user, speaking to each other about the upcoming iPhone 6’s larger screen. “Dude, iPhone might be getting a bigger screen” excitedly states the iPhone user  “That hasn’t happened yet?” slyly responds the Galaxy S5 user. Check out the full advertisement for yourself below:

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Following the release of YouTube Creator Studio for Android, Google has now made the app available for iOS devices. What’s the Creator Studio, you ask? Well, Google has finally created an all-in-one app hub for YouTube creators to access channel/video-specific information. Basically, it’s only helpful if you actually make (or plan to make) YouTube videos.

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdjAX5A-6qE&feature=em-uploademail]

Just over a week ago, thousands of Apple employees, including CEO Tim Cook, took to the streets of San Francisco to take part in the Pride Parade. The company has not been hesitant to share its views on LGBT rights, and the parade was yet another instance of that. This evening, Apple uploaded a video to its official YouTube channel showing off all of the effort that went into the Pride Parade last week and its “unwavering” support for equality and diversity.

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<a href="https://twitter.com/ifostore/status/477263528198279170">Image of the large crowd</a>

Apple’s first Tokyo Apple Store opening since 2005 occurred today in the city of Omotesando. The new store features two floors and a fully glass exterior. Apple published a video showing preparations for the store earlier this week. As she promised in a memo to employees earlier today, Angela Ahrendts is on hand for the opening:

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Apple has shared a video on its official YouTube channel of its preparations for the June 13th grand opening of the Omotesando, Tokyo Apple Store. The video is just under a minute long, but it does provide some perspective into the lengths that Apple takes to prepare stores for their openings. You can view the video below:

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Amazon has just announced its Apple TV competitor, dubbed ‘Fire TV’. You can buy it now from Amazon.com for $99. The product roughly resembles an Apple TV in size and shape, but is thinner by a few millimetres and has square (rather than rounded) edges. Spec-wise, Amazon claims it is three times as powerful as Apple TV or Roku. It runs on a quad-core processor with 2GB RAM. The fireTV can stream video at 1080p over HDMI, alongside Dolby Digital surround sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHoNQrxG_8M

Input comes via a Bluetooth remote that features a five-way directional pad and some ancillary buttons. The remote has an inbuilt microphone, so you can speak show titles to have it automatically search for them.

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Following several months of anticipation, Apple’s first official Apple Retail Store in Turkey will open in Istanbul on April 5th. The new store is located in the center of the Zorlu Center mall, and the official announcement has come in the form of emails to customers in Turkey and on a banner around the physical store…

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The Chromecast, Google’s streaming HDMI dongle came out last summer. It is compatible with any Android device running 2.3 or later, iOS device with iOS 6 or 7, and any Mac or PC. Initially, users were able to stream Netflix or Youtube from an iOS device and Android device, Google Play Movies and Music only on Android, or cast websites using the Chrome browser on a computer. The Chromecast works differently from Airplay in that you can multitask and do other tasks on the device or you can let it go to sleep while streaming.

Very quickly after its release, Chromecast has received support for Hulu +, Pandora, and HBO GO. Last month a major update added ten new apps including Plex, Vevo, Songza, Red Bull TV, Post TV from the Washington Post, Viki, RealPlayer Cloud, Avia, Revision3 Internet Television and BeyondPod. The most recent update the Chromecast received allowed users to stream Google Play Movies and Music directly from the Chrome browser on a computer.

In this How-to, we’ll discuss how to setup the Chromecast, use it with a Mac and iOS device and explore its gaming potential.

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Adobe VideoBite, an iOS app designed to make video editing as quick and easy as possible, has been updated to allow titles, photos and music to be added, turning it into a fully-fledged editor while retaining its simple user-interface.

Heartwarming Apple ads aside, I’ve always been rather skeptical of the real-world practicality of video editing on a phone, but I have to confess that VideoBite does make it a very slick process. Trimming clips, for example, involves nothing more than pressing a heart icon at the beginning and end of the bit you want to keep. Adding transitions and music is just as easy, and your finished masterpiece is saved to your camera roll, with exports to Facebook, YouTube and email also supported … 
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(Head to 37:40 in the video to see the telphone comparison)

Harry McCracken tracked down this video from the launch of the Macintosh that hasn’t been seen since 1984. It turns out there was a second ‘launch demo’ a week after the original launch at the shareholder meeting and the videographer forgot he had the video of that (woops!) in his garage. The audience this time wasn’t wasn’t Apple shareholders but actually members of the  Boston Computer Society and the general public, which made for a different type of presentation. The quality and tone of the video is often much different than the one given a week earlier at the Flint Center on the De Anza College campus near Apple’s then HQ.

Over at YouTube, you can watch the Cupertino presentation, along with a sort of a rough draft held as part of an Apple sales meeting in Hawaii in the fall of 1983. As for the BCS version, all 90 minutes of it are there in the video at the top of this post, available for the first time in their entirety since they were shot on January 30, 1984.

The Cupertino and Boston demos may have been based in part on the same script, but the audience, atmosphere and bonus materials were different. In Cupertino, Jobs spoke before investors, towards the end of a meeting which also included dreary matters such as an analysis of Apple’s cash flow.

What’s particularly interesting to me and not part of any other videos I’ve seen was Jobs’ comparison of the Mac (and eventually by extension GUI interfaces) to the invention of the telephone. Fast forward the video above to about 37:40 to see it. As McCracken puts it, the Mac wasn’t necessarily competing with IBM machines but competing with no computer at all.  This metaphor is striking in hindsight.

The video also has a Q&A with the original Mac team which is also pretty interesting if you are into that kind of thing.

McCracken has much more on the video here which is definitely worth a read.

The transcript of the Telephone/Telegraph bit pasted below:

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From 9to5toys.com:

(also don’t forget the Parallels Bundle!)

Stack Social is running another ‘Name your own price bundle’ with some solid offerings starting at $1 and an email address (Update: Now over $3 and rising!). The price goes up as people buy it so it is best to get in early.

The bundle includes:

• Snagit For Mac ($50) – The #1 Rated Screen Capture tool for Mac
• Flux 4 ($140) – Powerful Mac Web Design Made Easy
• Jump Desktop ($30) – Connect and Share With Any Computer in the World
• Boom For Mac ($7) – System-Wide Volume Booster
• MacX Video Converter Pro ($50) – Convert Any Video Format (including YouTube) for
• Playback Across All Apple Devices
• Tunes Cleaner ($30) – Easily Delete Duplicate Songs to Revitalize Your iTunes
• Mariner Write ($50) – A Streamlined, Simple Editor for your Mac
• CameraBag 2 ($20) – Ultimate Desktop Photo Editing
• Chronicle 5 ($15) – Never Worry About Your Bills Again
• Folx Pro ($20) – An Easier and Faster Way to Download Files & Torrents
• Elite Keylogger Pro ($49) – The Undetectable Keystroke Logger for Mac

If you are feeling generous, 10% of all sales go to a charity of you choice – so get in early, and get on the leaderboard (which qualifies you to enter a drawing for a MacBook Air).
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Thefts of Apple products made up 18 percent of all grand larcenies in New York City last year, reports the WSJ, citing NYPD figures. Of the 47,000 grand larcenies occuring in the city last year, 8,465 involved Apple products.

Many of the thefts happen on public transportation, where most people are buried in their devices and aren’t paying attention to their surroundings, said Joseph Giacalone, a retired New York Police Department detective. “It’s easy pickings,” he said … 
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What do 1980, 1989 and 2003 have in common? They were the peak sales years for LPs, cassettes and CDs respectively. After that, a very slight resurgence in vinyl aside, it was all downhill.

Billboard magazine has an interesting piece in which they suggest that perhaps 2012 might join that list – as the year that saw peak sales for music downloads, with streaming services like Spotify, Rdio and now, of course, iTunes Radio the heir apparent …

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From 9to5Google:

Amazon has never shied away from quietly mocking Apple’s iPad and that’s why this new Kindle Fire HDX commercial (via Amazon YouTube) and its distinctly British voice has us laughing. Calling it the “magical new iPad Air” in proper British tongue, the commercial is offset with the American accented intro of the 8.9″ Kindle Fire HDX.

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