Scott Yang's Playground

It was a bit unexpected yesterday. It has been over 24 hours now but the shock lingered on. From the home page of Apple Inc yesterday: Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs, February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011 — R. I. P.

Read this story on Slashdot. “Half the Mac OS X boxes in the world (confirmed on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard) can be rooted through AppleScript: osascript -e ‘tell app “ARDAgent” to do shell script “whoami”‘; Works for normal users and admins, provided the normal user wasn’t switched to via fast user [...]

Apparently the latest iPhone 3G that was just been announced by Apple, will only be available at either Vodafone or Optus when it comes out on 11 July, i.e. no Telstra nor Three. I won’t mind paying $210 up front for this new phone with 3G, HSPA, GPS, WiFi, etc — if its USD$199 price [...]

Via Jason Calacanis, thanks to Mahalo Daily for compressing Steve Jobs’ 2008 MacWorld Keynote into 60 seconds, I have just saved 89 minutes of my life! Yes, it is better and better.

All right. I guess everyone has seen the new MacBook Air when Mr. Stevie pulled it out from the brown paper bag. Wow, it is thin! According to the Apple website, MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don’t lose inches and pounds overnight. It’s the result of rethinking conventions. [...]

John Gruber: Forever is a long time: “There’s only one way to pressure Apple into opening up iPhone development, and it isn’t by developing underground iPhone apps. It’s by not buying iPhones.” You can actually buy an unlocked iPhone in Australia for less than AUD$800 (although I suspect it is going to get more expensive [...]

Yes. It was released this morning. Now the iPod family consists of: iPod Touch 8GB/16GB solid state with iPhone-like touch-screen interface, 3.5″ widescreen display, Safari web browser and Wi-Fi. $419/$549. iPod Classic 80GB/160GB 1.8″ hard disk with an all metal design, 2.5″ widescreen LCD, weight at 140g/162g, $349/$479. iPod Nano 4GB/8GB solid state, 2″ widescreen [...]

Apple has Just unveiled the latest aluminum iMac. It is an all-in-one just like all the previous models, but thinner, faster and (more importantly) cheaper. Starting from AUD$1,698 for a 20 inch 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, to top spec AUD$3,339 for a 24 inch with 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme with 4 logical CPU cores. It [...]

I was wondering why the font rendering on Safari for Windows looks so different. Actually I’ve used a Mac for the last 4 years, but seeing Apple’s anti-aliasing rendering engine working on Windows does feel a little bit strange. Joel Spolsky outlined the differences between two camps: Apple generally believes that the goal of the [...]

Yup. You all heard that? Safari, the default web browser on Mac, now also has a Windows version ready to be downloaded. It is a 8MB download without the Quicktime runtime, but still contains useless attachments like Bonjour and Apple software updater, although these are optional and you don’t need to install them. Anyway, the [...]

TechCrunch: Engadget Knocks $4 billion off Apple Market Cap on Bogus iPhone email. Verdict — someone is getting into serious trouble. Just a side note — it is actually not hard to understand why public companies do not like their employees blogging, especially when it is (1) not moderated (2) talking about work. While small [...]

Thought on Music, written by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on the topic of DRM protected music. Problem: “The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free [...]