Apple News, Analysis and Podcasts
 Unless you've been living under a rock the past few months, it has been virtually impossible to escape Microsoft's Surface ad campaign. TV, the web, and probably soon, radio and direct mail Surface SPAM will be entering your life. The Redmond software giant is using a massive portion of it's $1.5 billion advertising budget to promote Surface. However, advertising budgets do not equal sales, something that Microsoft does not seem to understand. Surface sales continue to fail even the lowest of expectations.
Microsoft launched the Surface under a campaign known as "The Surface Movement" containing youth oriented Dubstep music, with young and attractive business professionals, all dancing with Surface tablets. This ad campaign failed miserably, so Microsoft is trying a new approach. This week the campaign shifted to an all out attack on Apple's iPad. Two ads have been released so far, but they are attempting to use Apple's ad format in an effort to discredit the iPad as limited and dated when compared to Surface. The main issue with these ads is they approach the viewer as if it were 1990, assuming the public is truly ignorant about what make tablets work.
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 Apple, Inc's World-Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) is fast approaching, and while Apple CEO Tim Cook has allued to having no new hardware arriving until this fall, software will be the big focus for Apple's annual developers event. A new version of Apple's mobile iOS and desktop OS X software is going to be shown, but perhaps more important than these fundamental pieces of Apple's ecosystem is iCloud. The future of computing, how we access and manipulate data is rapidly moving to server-side solutions, or "cloud" architecture, and Apple has been falling behind its competition at a rapid rate.
Google and others have taken an aggressive approach in developing a wide array of cloud services and tools, wasting little time in building robust ecosystems. Google, clearly out in front with an impress user base, has built a formidable Microsoft Office competitor in Google Docs. But Google's cloud platform has gone well beyond email or users loading and creating documents stored online. Google's entire cloud platform covers development for data mining, custom cloud storage, Enterprise search and much more.
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Microsoft’s latest Windows 8 mobile phone ad is admittedly somewhat clever. It shows a wedding where the bride’s side of the aisle is filled with Google Android phone users, while the groom’s side is made up of all iPhone users. Another, and more subtle note, is that the Android side is filled with mostly hip, young people, while the iPhone side of the aisle is populated with older people (40+). During the ceremony an iPhone user asks a person from the Android aisle, “Would you mind moving your enormous phone?” because the Android person is using their oversized phone to take a picture. This question is really a thinly veiled derogatory statement. What quickly follows is a humorous exchange of insults between Android and iPhone users. Soon after a fight breaks out.
Standing in the middle of the fight are two caterers who have red and yellow Nokia Lumia phones running Windows 8. For some reason they aren't drawn into the fight nor does the fight ever come to them. As they stand in the middle of this chaos taking pictures and scrolling through the Windows 8 tiled interface (for whatever reason), one caterer asks the other, “Do you think if they knew about the new Nokia Lumia they'd stop fighting all the time?” The other caterer responds, “I don't know. I think they kinda like fighting.” The commercial ends with a man ripping his shirt open (ala Superman) and tattooed onto the center of his chest is an Apple logo. Immediately he is knocked over from behind by an unseen Android user. Microsoft’s tag line is “Don’t Fight. Switch.”
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 What the next version of AppleTV will look like or whether it will even be called AppleTV (some rumors think it will be called iTV) is anyone's guess. Mark Reschke has postulated that the next AppleTV will include a 60" screen and be 4K. It is not a far fetched idea, if Apple can keep the price down so mere mortals can afford one. Apple surprised everyone with the incredibly low introductory price with the original iPad. They certainly could do this for a 4K HDTV too.
Yet another feature rumored to be on the horizon for the next generation AppleTV is Siri. Siri would change the way people interact with their TVs. Instead of looking for that silly remote that likes to hide between couch cushions and run away to rooms far, far away, you could just use your voice to control what show or movie plays on your TV. However, a big feature no one seems to be talking about, that would be huge, is Game Center for AppleTV.
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Apple's former Senior VP of iOS, Scott Forstall has been missing in action ever since his abrupt ousting by CEO Tim Cook in October 2012. Forstall does has a Twitter page up, with an impressive 60,988 followers, but has yet to post a single tweet. Forstall is following one account, and it's Conan O'Brien. Ironic, since O'Brien was also treated with little respect upon being ushered out the door by NBC.
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 Photoshop is the best image editor on the market. It is being used in a vast number of professions, from medical imaging to 3D graphics. Will that change with Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which has change the way users purchase Photoshop? Under Creative Cloud, users no longer purchase the software, but rent it for $240 a year. For many users, this price is just too expensive.
Users who can’t afford, or don't want to spend $240 a year for Photoshop are now looking for alternatives. This is a difficult task as there are really no feature-to-feature competitors to Photoshop. Yet most people looking for an alternative do not use all of the features of Photoshop. The following is a list of possible alternatives for some users and how it can replace Photoshop.
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Adobe has been changing the way their customers can buy their software lately. During the past decade, users of Adobe's software were stretching out their upgrade cycles, choosing to forego every single update, as the costs didn't justify, and the new features were not that compelling. Many were upgrading only when a major OS or hardware change required them to do so. When Creative Suite 6 came out, Adobe told its customers that they would only be able to upgrade from one version back instead of 3 or 4. This meant users could not upgrade every other version, doubling the cost for many.
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Sony recently announced aggressive price points for its all-new XBR 55" and 65" 4K Ultra HDTVs. Sony will be launching the 55" base model for a seemingly jaw dropping $4,999, while its largest 84" set continues to drop jaws for the exactly opposite reason, coming in at $24,999.
Rumors continue to swirl about Apple entering the market with an all-in-one Apple TV plus HDTV device rumored to be called "iTV." Assuming Apple dives into the living room, a recent article by Mark Hibben sheds some light on why Apple would be wise to jump into the game with its own 4K set (displays with 4x more resolution than current 1920 x 1080 HDTVs).
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 The Mac OS is a mature operating system. It is a good looking and clean interface that stays out of the way so users can focus on their work. The gradient gray interface minimizes distractions while shadows create depth for better window separation, but with all these great features, there is still room for improvement.
There still are many ways Apple can improve how the OS interacts with the user. One of those areas is spotlight. Spotlight is great for searching for items on the computer in real-time, and it is lightening fast with solid state storage, yet Apple could make it so much better.
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 Recent rumors about features found in Apple’s forthcoming OS X 10.9 seemed to come out of nowhere last week. While the next Mac OS update appears to focus on the “Power User” with tabbed Finder windows and tags, there are still a few things on my OS X Wish List I'd like to see Apple deliver.
1) My primary computer is a 13" MacBook Air. While traveling I make do with the built in display, but when in the office I always have a second monitor connected. There is pain when going from a single monitor to dual configuration and then back to single monitor. The Finder windows (and other app windows too) do not remember where they were in a single or dual monitor configuration. Finder needs to remember how windows were arranged when in dual-monitor or single built-in display modes are used. The Dock should also remember its different placements, dependent upon monitor configuration (e.g., single display to the left, dual on the bottom).
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