You’re headed out of town for a long weekend. What do you do? If you’re Dan Moren, you don’t write the remainders column—you make a sucker do it instead. Hi, folks. I’m the sucker, and this is the Remains of the Day for Thursday, November 4, 2010.
Worldwide Smartphone Market Grows 89.5 percent (IDC)
Research group International Data Corporation (IDC, a member of the IDG family just like Macworld) released a report Thursday that showed the worldwide smartphone market growing by—well, you can read that headline up there as well as I can.
More relevant from the Apple side of things is that Apple came in as the second-largest vendor of smartphones, behind Nokia and ahead of RIM, Samsung, and HTC. Apple’s big quarter led to 17.4 percent market share, but the market is growing so rapidly that despite growing sales 90.5 percent when compared to the same quarter a year ago, Apple’s market share only grew by one tenth of one percent.
Led by the Galaxy S line of Android phones, Samsung showed growth of a staggering 454 percent. If I’ve got my math right, at this rate every man, woman, and child on the planet will own three Samsung phones by the end of the year.
iPads on a plane! and iPhones, too… (SugarSync)
Online file-syncing service SugarSync has updated its iOS app () with a nifty new feature: the ability to save files locally on your iOS device so you can access them during those times when you’re not on the Internet. Like when you’re on a plane, or using an iPod touch while you’re away from Wi-Fi, or when you’re watching a parade with hundreds of thousands of other people in a city not known for its stellar AT&T coverage. There’s also a new security feature that lets you lock the app, preventing people from accessing your synced files.
More Content, More Devices (Hulu Blog)
The $10-a-month Hulu Plus subscription service (), which lets you watch all sorts of new TV series on your computer or iOS device, has now left its invitation-only preview period. That’s right, folks: if you want to stream full episodes of Raising Hope or The Event on your iPad, you can now give the folks at Hulu money without begging them to take it.
Kinect has problems recognizing dark-skinned users? (Gamespot UK)
We all saw this one coming, didn’t we? Following the scandal of HP’s racist webcams, Gamespot UK reported that two “dark-skinned GameSpot employees had problems” getting Microsoft’s new Xbox Kinect face-tracking software to work right.
This report was quickly debunked by Consumer Reports, which reported that Kinect can see dark-skinned people just fine, and by the way, HP’s webcams aren’t really racist either.
Now can we get back to the real scandal here? If you don’t have a gigantic open play area in front of your TV, you can’t use Kinect. For those of us who live in the Bay Area, this is a dealbreaker, ladies.
iPhoto 9.1 update adds additional print product options (Macworld)
Okay, now you’re asking yourself, why is the Macworld remainders column linking to a story on Macworld.com itself?
The reason for this tautology, friends, is to call your attention to a Soviet-like act of revisionism by the otherwise upstanding folks at Apple. When we published our first look at iPhoto ’11 we pointed out that the original version of iPhoto didn’t ship with support for calendar printing, but that Apple planned to add that feature in plenty of time for the end-of-year “calendar shopping season.”
And with today’s iPhoto 9.1 update, Apple delivered. So what about that Apple tech note explaining that iPhoto 9.0 doesn’t print calendars? Is gone, comrades. Like an agricultural minister airbrushed out of a Politburo photo after falling out of favor, it was never there. Fortunately, Google sometimes works just like the bracing winds of glasnost: there’s a cached version of the page providing the truth about those dark days when iPhoto ’11 couldn’t order calendars.
Why delete the tech note, though? What if some people haven’t updated to iPhoto 9.1 and are confused about why they can’t print? More to the point, what about people who have linked to Apple’s explanation? Deleting pages from the Internet as if they had never existed is just bad form, if you ask me. (And if you’d rather ask Dan Moren, sorry—you’ll have to wait until Monday.)