Soon on MiCMAC…

What you will find soon on MiCMAC…

Of course you will continue to find articles about Apple and its strategy and history.

The next one being about what actually happens between “lazy” Adobe and Steve Jobs and you will learn that the “laziness” of Adobe is not that recent and why Steve Jobs has probably more than enough of them…

There will be also “hands on” articles showing the best solutions to audio, video or system problems.

First will come an article about the best ways to add subtitles to movies in iTunes, appleTV, etc.

Next, an article on making a much better keyboard layout than the french one (execrably implemented by the way!). This article will be written in French since it’s dedicated to people using the physical french keyboard and there will be a way to download the resulting .keylayout file.
But if there is interest amongst English readers I could also write an article about modifying the english keyboard layout as well since some options are not very logically chosen…

About front facing cameras in iPads, iPhones, MacBooks, iMacs…

Cy Starkman is right on the spot in a comment of RoughlyDrafted Magazine:

“Even MacBooks et al have the camera placed wrong. You either look at the camera or the person, ultimately everyone looks at the person and appears to be looking down.

It’s useless. Camera phones included. If anything else this is why it hasn’t taken off.

I personally never used the camera on any Mac even though I bought iGlasses for it, except for a brief test.
I don’t like to feel stupid and look at people looking stupid! And that’s what you get when you use these cameras with that wrong angle…
And I guess most people are like me on this. It will take off only when it will be done right!

We don’t need no f#####’ flash!

frame16976.png

Frame 16976 of the latest Apple podcast

There’s a solution for Those Blue Boxes!

John Gruber asks in his latest contribution “Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?”

The answer is easy: somebody just needs to write a little app for the iPad and the iPhone just like the wonderful ClickToFlash.

This time when you click, there’s no way to make Flash happen of course, but it just sends a message to the webmaster of the site, saying “please go for open web technologies” with some helpful URLs directing him to the specifications of HTML5 and also some examples of what can be done!

Nobody else can do something better about those blue boxes on the iPad. Nobody else either can do anything for Flash. The beast is dying!

Flasher, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

The Tablet is for the rest of them

It’s not for the rest of us.
But of course we will be more than happy to use it as well.
That means it’s the computer for everybody, the computer that everybody will want!

When Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh in 1984, it was marketed as the computer for “the rest of us”.
Thats was supposed to be the people not willing to use a command line interface. Some, because they were tired of it, as they had to use it against their will (and because there was nothing else). Some, because they didn’t want to learn these boring interfaces.

It was sure fun and easy to use for some of us. But even in the ’80s, I’ve always been aware that most Mac users were using no more than 10% of the capacities of their computer and had difficulties understanding and remembering the relation between menus and keyboard shortcuts, how the file system was workin’, this and many other things.

It’s the system, stupid!

I would like to make some clarifications, beyond the marketing gimmicks and the bad habits.

There are a lot of things said about the system that the “Tablet” is supposed to run.
The last one being that it’s running a variant of the iPhone OS. The people thinking that way are not thinking “different”, they are thinking “wrong”.

There is no “iPhone OS”!

But there is OS X for iPhone, OS X for iPod touch, OS X for Mac. There will soon be OS X for the “Tablet” (whatever it’s name will be – iBook would be OK for me).

26 years ago, The first step…

January 24, 1984 – The first step: Introduction of the Macintosh

26 years ago, on that day, Steve Jobs introduced to the world the first computer with a graphical interface for a price acceptable at the time. It was very exciting then but with the distance it appears as a preview, a prototype of what would come…

OCTOBER 12, 1988 – THE NeXT STEP: THE MACINTOSH DONE RIGHT

Steve Jobs, three years after his rebellion against corporate America who took over Apple with the help of the felon John Sculley, unveils to the world not only a new computer with a more sophisticated graphical interface but also the very first iteration of a platform most of the people will use in the future

Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted…

I created MiCMAC, probably the first Macintosh publication 100% made with a Mac, starting in end ‘84, early ‘85. There were only two programs at the time: MacWrite and MacPaint. And that’s the two I began with. But since MiCMAC was printed to paper and had no advertising it came to a very expensive end in ‘91. I had to be a fugitive for a few years.