Kyle's Bloggg

Ruby Released

parislemon:

Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm (and former Apple executive), has left HP.

With Palm hardware now dead and webOS now open-sourced, the writing has been on the wall for this to happen for a while. To hear HP tell it, this was the plan all along. As Arik Hesseldahl writes:

Rubinstein is said to have no immediate plans, and had completed a 12-24 month commitment to stay with HP after the acquisition. “Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well,” HP spokeswoman Mylene Mangalindan said.

Sounds almost like a prison term.

Apple to announce tools, platform to "digitally destroy" textbook publishing

futuramb:

Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

Now I am becoming really curious about this…

It would be extremely interesting if 2012 and especially 2013 becomes the year of self publishing. Apple has completely changed the music industry, and artists can very easily self publish albums, without the need of a record label to support them. If they do this for (text)books, in the sense that they release both the tools (“Garageband for e-books”) and they open their iBook store to anyway (as they have with iTunes, and the App Store), we may see a flood of self published books to come out. 

iPad 3 Said to Have High-Def Screen, LTE

parislemon:

Hi-def screen has been more or less a forgone conclusion for months (I cannot wait to see what it looks like). Better processor is a no-brainer. But this is the big news in the Bloomberg story from Tim Culpan, Peter Burrows and Adam Satariano:

Apple is bringing LTE to the iPad before the iPhone because the tablet has a bigger battery and can better support the power requirements of the newer technology, said one of the people.

Makes sense to me. Sarah and I talked about this possibility on iPad Today (about 4:30 in) a few weeks ago. 

And if the iPad does gain LTE, the logical next step is that the next iPhone would gain the technology as well. But I’m with John Gruber, it’s more likely, but not a slam dunk. Every single person I know who has a 4G phone still just bitches about the awful battery life when LTE is enabled. There will need to be more power-efficient chips (which seems likely) and/or Apple will have to pull out some battery life magic (also likely) to ensure an LTE iPhone this year.

A higher resolution screen on the iPad 3 is a no-brainer; it’s the next logical step for the evolution of Apple Inc.’s tablet. LTE however? No idea… It makes sense to “trial” LTE on the iPad; test the battery performance and real world usage amongst people on the iPad before putting it on the iPhone. The iPhone 5’s biggest selling point could be LTE, but what needs to be remembered is that this technology is currently pretty much exclusive to the USA. The iPhone is currently a world phone, and Apple would never release a product that wouldn’t be (for the most part at least) the same in all countries. Remember the first iPhone? Apple held out on releasing a 3G phone years into when 3G was already popular, stating that they’ed rather have good battery performance… I too, along with parislemon (MG Siegler), agree with John Gruber, who said “Assuming this is right, it doesn’t guarantee the next iPhone will support LTE too, but it sure does make it more likely.”

Instapaper

thisistheverge:

Kindle makes for a great Instapaper experience — possibly the best — but would love for a way to get article highlights and excerpts back out of the system.

instapaper:

David Smith walks through Instapaper’s new Kindle features:

Getting an $80 Kindle 4 and pairing it with an Instapaper Subscription will revolutionize your reading of web content.

Thanks!

I’ve tried time and time again to get these Kindle subscription services to work for me, but they all seem to have failed doing a good job. The formatting never works for me, nor does it make for a good over user experience. 

I’ll keep my Kindle exclusively for books, whilst using Chrome for my Instapaper reading.