Bogus Pokemon evolves into iTunes smash hit; 2012: The Year Scam Apps Killed the App Store — As someone who used the Android Market before either of Apple's app stores, the thing I found most mind-boggling about Apple's was the lack of any apparent way to get a refund if an application doesn't work. It… Continue reading No Refunds
Year: 2012
Comfy headphones
"Before I switched to closed Sennheisers for my primary headphones..." — I think this writer should try the Beyerdynamic DT250 (80Ω version for standard headphone outs). They won't block out as much external sound as some, but they don't radiate much either, they sound clean and balanced, and they're as comfy as an old pair of… Continue reading Comfy headphones
Sad Lion
Mountain Lion may drop support for older Macs (The Verge) It appears that OS/X 10.8 won't work on many Macs more than about three years old. Apparently this is a consequence of cleaning up its 64-bitness, and so losing support for 32-bit EFI bootloaders. (The 10.7 release already dropped support for 32-bit CPUs, such as… Continue reading Sad Lion
The Third Pad
I've become used to thinking of Apple's product releases as falling into two categories: "outreach" or "consolidation". Outreach releases are new products, or products introducing features that users will be unfamiliar with or that are novel enough to be headliners in adverts. Consolidation releases do essentially the same as the previous release, but faster or… Continue reading The Third Pad
Hard edges, small keys
Joanna Stern reviews the MacBook Air as a Windows laptop. I enjoyed this—I've considered in the past whether the MacBook Air would be a suitable laptop for me even though most of the time I don't run OS/X. (Conclusion: probably not any more, though it might have seemed that way once.) She does highlight the… Continue reading Hard edges, small keys
Wrapping a C++ library with JNI, part 3
In this series... Introduction, outlining the general steps from starting with a C++ library to being able to build and run simple tests on some JNI wrappers; Part 1, in which I design some simple Java classes and generate the stub wrapper code; Part 2, in which I add just enough of the implementation to… Continue reading Wrapping a C++ library with JNI, part 3
The Breakfast Post 