Hasta La Gadget!

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Last week’s Switched On discussed Nokia’s quest to help Microsoft create a third mobile ecosystem alongside those of Apple and Google. That word – ecosystem – has clearly passed into the pantheon of buzzwords, leveraging many synergies from purpose-built paradigms. And yet, building and maintaining ecosystems is something few companies really understand. True technology ecosystems are more than just successful platforms or throwing many products together simply because they are owned by the same company. They are characterized by strategically implemented nurturing.

One concept that Apple seems to have adapted from natural ecosystems is the concept of the water cycle you probably learned about in grade school. Apple turns up the heat on the life-sustaining water of innovation that passes between the well-grounded Mac market and the soaring growth of the iOS market. Apple alluded to this cycle in its Back to the Mac event. After inheriting many technologies from Mac OS X, iOS began offering Mac OS X launch screens, full-screen apps, app resuming, and document autosaving. This week’s announcements, though, show that the cycle may soon be heading again in the other direction as Apple showed off two Mac technologies that may well wind up strengthening the iOS ecosystem.

Continue reading Switched On: Back from the Mac

Switched On: Back from the Mac originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The nine-dot pattern lock option is one of those uniquely Android things — it’s been there ever since the G1, and even if you don’t personally use it, odds are good that you recognize it. So when we see it on an iPhone — apparently on an app used by Apple internally — you can appreciate why we’re going to do a double take. What you’re looking at here is one of several screens obtained by 9 to 5 Mac, allegedly showing a version of Apple’s employee-only AppleConnect app with support for pattern locking to keep prying eyes out. It seems that the app enforces some minimum gesture length to constitute a secure lock — and considering some of the forensic science going on there, we bet it’s gotta be pretty long. Of course, none of these means we’ll see the feature show up in an actual iOS build, but the site says that the company’s testing the mechanism in other internal tools… and if nothing else, Apple seems to be acknowledging that lock patterns aren’t a terrible idea.

[Thanks, Jacob]

Apple adds pattern locking to an iPhone app that you can’t have? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 21:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Although not as iconic as the Nakagin Capsule Tower, the New Sky Building (aka Gunkan Mansion, or “Warship Condo”) stands as a landmark to architectural imagination. Could you ever imagine a concrete block with a battleship turret perched on the top like some grounded sea fortress? It exists in Tokyo.

Designed by Youji Watanabe, it is a testament to the Seventies Metabolism movement and the third in its creator’s “Gunkan” series. Although finished in 1970 for years it has resembled a monolithic ruin.

Actually a transformation was slowly taking place. It seems that restoration work is finally complete on the building and tenants are to be allowed in from April. Re-baptized the Higashi Shinjuku Building, the ideal renters being targeted are creative types who want quirky office spaces, communal residences, or gallery and atelier spaces. Unfortunately, the interiors do not appear to feature any naval motifs.

This article was written on December 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

Here’s a quick reminder for those of you who want to enter any of the Giveaways from yesterday but haven’t actually entered. You have less than two hours at this point to do so. Each giveaway ends at 5:00 PM Central time at which point we will pick and notify the winners!

• SyncBack SE – If you have files you want automatically backed up, this is a must have! There are three $30 coupons available for this one. ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE!
• MediaMonkey – Ultimate Media Manager for all of you music junkies! There are five licenses we have to give away worth $19.95 each. ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE!
• Object Desktop – Offers the ultimate package for customizing Windows! We have one annual subscription valued at $49.95 for one lucky winner. ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE!
• DVDFab Platinum – If you like being able to backup and/or copy the DVD’s that you own, you’ll want a copy of DVDFab Platinum! We have 3 licenses valued at $79.99 each to giveaway. ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE!
• xplorer² – Windows Explorer Replacement – Great for both power and casual users alike who want the extra features! We have ten licenses valued at $29.95 each to giveaway. ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE!
• Multiplicity – Make use of several computers! We have one license valued at $49.95 to giveaway. ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE!
• DVD Profiler – Essential for all of you DVD collectors out there! It’ll make things so much easier. We have three licenses worth $29.95 each to giveaway.ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE!
• Pingdom  – Those of you that have a website of your own or plan to have a site of your own will certainly enjoy having a website uptime monitor. We have 50 Pingdom basic accounts to giveaway which is valid for one year and valued at $119.40 each. FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS HERE TO GET AN ACCOUNT!
• OnClick – A suite filled with useful utilities like FindOnClick and UndeleteOnClick. We have two coupons available worth $30 each. ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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If you’ve got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often — as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on. While we haven’t experienced the issue personally, we’re hearing that the bug effectively reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users complete with welcome messages. For its part, Google says that the issue “affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase,” engineers are working to fix the issue right now, and that missing messages will be restored as soon as possible. We’ll soon see if this is a momentary setback… or a lengthy wakeup call.

Update: No fix yet, but Google’s revised its estimate as to how many users might have been affected by the issue — “less than 0.08%” — which means we’re probably looking at closer to 150,000 individuals, rather than 500,000. We’re assuming that the revised estimate means that the initial count wasn’t precise, and not that customers are ditching Gmail in droves.

Update 2: Google’s provided promising but terribly vague guidance on when the situation will be resolved: “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish into the cloud? (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 18:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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