After almost 12 years, Apple officially kills its iPod Nano and Shuffle from its product lines.
This marks the end of two of the company's must popular products when Steve Jobs first introduced them in the mid 2000's.
“On a sunny day in May, Jonathan Ive — Jony to anyone who knows him — first encounters a completed section of Apple Park, the giant campus in Cupertino, California, that has turned into one of his longest projects as Apple’s chief designer,” Christina Passariello reports for The Wall Street Journal. “A section of workspace in the circular, Norman Foster–designed building is finally move-in-ready: sliding-glass doors on the soundproof offices, a giant European white oak collaboration table, adjustable-height desks, and floors with aluminum-covered hinged panels, hiding cables and wires, and brushed-steel grating for air diffusion.”
“Apple Park is unlike any other product Ive has worked on. There will be only one campus—in contrast to the ubiquity of Apple’s phones and computers—and it doesn’t fit in a pocket or a hand,” Passariello reports. “Yet Ive applied the same design process he brings to technological devices: prototyping to minimize any issues with the end result and to narrow what he calls the delta between the vision and the reality of a project. Apple Park is also the last major project Ive worked on with Steve Jobs, making it more personal for the man Jobs once called his ‘spiritual partner.'”
“Ive is tuned into the look and feel of things wherever he goes. ‘Oh, I’ve got the Faber-Castell pen,’ he interjects, as I use one to take notes,” Passariello reports. “When J.J. Abrams was working on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ive mentioned that he “would love to see a lightsaber that is rougher, spitting sparks,” Abrams says. The director, who says he and Ive were already fans of each other’s work when they met at a dinner four years ago, applied Ive’s suggestion to character Kylo Ren’s weapon. “His lightsaber was as imperfect and unpredictable as the character,” says Abrams. (The inspiration is mutual: Ive told Abrams that he had the look of the original Stormtroopers in mind when he designed Apple’s earbuds.)”
More information in the full article here.
(The Washington Post): Microsoft Paint isn't going anywhere after all.
After an outcry of longtime aspiring digital artists, Microsoft had a change of, umm, art, and said it would not discontinue the classic program. Instead, the company said an app version would be available in the Windows store.
“MS Paint is not going away,” a Microsoft spokesperson, said in an email. “In addition to the new 3D capabilities, many of the MS Paint features people know and love like photo editing and 2D creation are in Paint 3D--the new app for creativity, available for free with the Windows 10 Creators Update. In the future, we will offer MS Paint in the Windows Store also for free and continue to provide new updates and experiences to Paint 3D so people have the best creative tools all in one place.”
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Early Tuesday, Adobe announced that it's planning to put its well-known Flash plug-in in what is called at End Of Life sometime in the year 2020.
The company is encouraging developers to begin and migrate away from the plug in, in favor for other, more updated technologies such as HTML5, WebGL, and others:
But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web. Over time, we've seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards. Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.
The elimination of Flash should not impact users that much, as some current and newer web sites have been all but abandon the technology for years.
Even the late Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs penned a letter about the upcoming demise of the technology before his death in late winter of 2011.
