steve sande
Latest
Daily Update for February 18, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 29, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 28, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 27, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
How the Mac shaped my career and life
The celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Mac really pointed out to me how much the brainchild of Steve Jobs has affected my life so far. The Mac literally changed my life. In 1983, I was an engineer for a small natural gas pipeline company in Denver and wasn't really sure that I wanted to continue that career. Fortunately, I was working in a special projects group, and our vice president asked me to work up a five-year plan to start bringing "personal computers" into our company. He wasn't sure why we'd really want them, but he was getting budget requests for them and wanted us to have a coherent direction. After doing a lot of interviews -- what we'd now call requirements gathering -- and checking what was available, I decided on a path of buying IBM PCs, and that's what we started to do. When the Mac came out on January 24, 1984, my boss and I went to see it at a local store, and I was immediately smitten. It wasn't until the more powerful 512K model appeared later in the year that I bought one, and then things got interesting. Compared to the PCs in our office, the Mac seemed like the future. I began carrying it to work every day (it weighed 16.5 pounds), and I was quickly able to get it to do things that were amazing at the time. For example, MacProject was an Apple application that allowed us to begin implementing a project-management system for our pipeline. In 1985, when Aldus PageMaker arrived on the scene, I was totally amazed at what it could do and bragged to our office manager that I could lay out the company's annual report on the Mac for much less than what they were spending to have a design firm manually lay it out. It was tough with version 1.0 of PageMaker, but I was able to do it and have the output sent to film for printing. That resulted in the entire office department requesting Macs, and at this point we pretty much tossed the "five-year plan" in the recycle bin. The Mac was the first device that Microsoft Excel ran on, and it was able to handle spreadsheets that were huge compared to what Lotus 123 could do on the PC. Before I knew it, a lot of managers in various departments were asking for Macs. Next, we realized that we could network the Macs. Our first networks in 1985 used AppleTalk cables strung between cubicles and offices, but it worked. Once we had the network, used mainly for printer sharing, we started looking for other things we could share. We bought some of the early networked fax modems (remember fax machines?), and in 1988, we set up our in-house email system using Microsoft Mail. A few years later, we set up a store-and-forward dialup email system that brought email to our remote offices throughout the state of Colorado. I began to attend Macworld Expo in the late '80s, and this was about the time that I found I was no longer doing much engineering work. By 1990, we had enough Macs in our office to justify starting an in-house IT group that I became the manager of. Our parent company wasn't thrilled with Macs, so I found myself spending most of my time arguing with their IT procurement staff. Our pipeline subsidiary continued to be at the leading edge of IT. I gave talks at some industry seminars in the late '80s and early '90s about our use of HyperCard for training and other purposes in the company. In my personal life, the Mac was also quite important. Early on, I recognized that if I became a Mac developer, I could get significant discounts from Apple on hardware, which they don't do anymore. I started by writing and selling a flat-file database program, the name of which I don't even remember. Later, after HyperCard came out, I sold a number of "stacks" through Heizer Software's stack exchange. When the Newton was introduced -- another amazing Apple innovation -- I wrote several programs for it. I also used my Mac to create newsletters for a few groups that I was a member of, taking advantage of the wonderful world of "desktop publishing" Apple had invented. In 1986, I started up a bulletin board system for Mac and Apple IIGS users called MAGIC (Mac and GS Information Center), which ran until 1994. That site grew to two Macs and four modems (and phone lines), and eventually tied into Fidonet and the rest of the world. I used a number of different BBS programs over the eight years of MAGIC, including FirstClass and TeleFinder. I had my first view of the World Wide Web in 1994 at WWDC, and through the amazing book by Adam Engst of TidBITS fame, I was setting up my first website later that year. I called the site "PDANTIC.COM" -- it was all about Personal Digital Assistants like the Newton -- and you can still find traces of it out on the Wayback Machine. It's almost scary to know that I've been "blogging" for close to 20 years. Career-wise, our subsidiary was swallowed back into our parent company in 1994, which meant that I was helping out a lot of Mac users -- about 1,200 or so company-wide. Unfortunately, our parent company also decided that anyone who worked in IT would be outsourced to IBM (actually a spinoff called ISSC that later became IBM Global Services). I won't detail the next nine years, only to say that despite having to work on a project to move most of the Mac users over to Windows 95, I stuck it out for that long. It was when I bought a 12-inch aluminum PowerBook in 2003 that my dissatisfaction with my career began to boil over. Coupled with anxiety attacks I was having at work, I finally decided to quit and go out on my own. There's a story in there that involves MacJournal and how it helped me out the door of IBM, but that's something for another time. After that point, I relied on the Mac and other Apple products for my livelihood. That's involved having books about the Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and more published, being a Mac consultant (ACN) for a while and all the while working on other personal websites about mobile technology. The last of those was iPhoneRanch, which didn't last too long before I somehow became a freelance writer for TUAW. This year will mark six years of blogging here and working with some of the greatest bloggers on the internet. So for the past 30 years, my life has been intimately intertwined with the Mac and Apple. There have been some days (the late 1990s) when I didn't think the company would survive, and I cringe to think of what our tech world would be like if Jobs hadn't turned the company around. I owe everyone at Apple a big thank you for making this a very interesting life for me.
Daily Update for January 24, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 23, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 22, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 20, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 16, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
TUAW TV Live: The best Apple-related books and authors
Sure, nobody reads anymore. But if you really want to become an expert in one topic or another, you need to pore over every word that's ever been published on the subject. Today, Shawn "Doc Rock" Boyd and I will talk about those books and/or authors that we follow or admire, with a special focus on those favorite tomes that have made a difference in how we work or play. These books don't have to be technical in nature -- there are some histories of Apple, old books describing products that no longer exist and personal favorites that have little or nothing to do with coding or how to use our favorite tech. To join in to watch the live feed and participate in the chat, just click here. You'll join us on the AOL On Network. If you can't watch the entire show today, come back to this page within 24 hours to see the latest video below. Past shows are also available on the TUAW YouTube channel. Show Notes The Apple Revolution by Luke Dormehl Steve Jobs Automator for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Visual QuickStart Guide The Visual Quick Start Guide series, especially those by Maria Langer. Maria's also publishing some books under the Maria's Guides company name. Take Control Series Not really a book writer but a screencaster, and that's Don McAllister. But he does have ScreenCastsOnline Magazine now.
Daily Update for January 15, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 14, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 13, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 10, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 9, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
TUAW TV Live: A look at CES announcements (Updated)
The Consumer Electronics Show is still in full swing in Las Vegas today, bringing more hype and product announcements in one week than you'd ever think possible. While TUAW doesn't have a presence at this annual event, our siblings at Engadget and TechCrunch have been walking the floors, doing interviews and otherwise keeping an eye on the newest in consumer electronics. From the ridiculous to the sublime, my cohost Shawn "Doc Rock" Boyd and I will chat about what we think are some of the best announcements made this week. And of course, we'll have quite a few products to make fun of as well. To join in to watch the live feed and participate in the chat, just click here. You'll join us on the AOL On Network. If you can't watch the entire show today, come back to this page within 24 hours to see the latest video below. Past shows are also available on the TUAW YouTube channel. Due to some technical issues during today's episode, the video is in two parts: Part 1 Part 2 Show Notes Braven BRV-X Fast Camera Vizzywig LaCie: Fuel, 1 TB of wireless storage for iPad, iPhone and Mac. $199, is AirPlay compatible, uses Seagate Media App to allow you to browse and view media. Up to five devices at once can access storage, or you can stream HD movies to three devices at the same time. Can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot by sharing a single connection for up to four other devices. Christofle Sphere, a $490 hand-silvered bus-powered USB hard drive. 1 TB. Way too expensive and slow. Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 Tiny 1 TB SSD RAID array, with two Thunderbolt 2 ports, can be set up as RAID 0 or mirrored RAID 1. Mophie Space Pack 16 GB or 32 GB of storage with a 1700 mAh battery pack, $150 or $180. Available in March. Evernote PostIt Notes FINSix AC adapter - tiny laptop adapter Intel Edison, dual-core PC on an SD card 3D Systems iSense 3D scanner for iPad - $499 Parrot Jumping Sumo and Micro Drone Pebble Steel Romo
Daily Update for January 8, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 7, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Daily Update for January 6, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
