An Apple board member faces scrutiny at her own company, Apple throws another log on the open-source fire, and the Siri-based Apple TV set may listen a little too well. The remainders for Friday, October 28, 2011 are so ready for the weekend.
Avon CEO Andrea Jung Under Fire (Wall Street Journal)
Avon CEO—and Apple board member—Andrea Jung is taking heat at Avon for her management practices, or lack thereof. The company recently announced it’s facing a pair of SEC investigations, and ditching its sales targets. Investors, apparently, are worried that it signals a pattern. Fortunately, Avon has a plan to reassure them by going door-to-door.
Welcome to the Apple Lossless Audio Codec Project (MacOS Forge)
Apple has open-sourced its Apple Lossless codec under the Apache license, providing the source code for its encoder and decoder software, along with a command-line conversion utility. This may encourage third parties to use the format, which provides high-quality audio at around half the size of uncompressed audio files. Don’t worry, this move won’t make Richard Stallman any more bearable.
iOS 5 Already Powering 1 in 3 Eligible Devices (Localytics)
iOS 5 has been out for two weeks now. We know users of Apple technology are generally fast to update, and the stats seem to prove it. Just one week in, 31 percent of all iOS 5-compatible devices had already upgraded to Apple’s latest and greatest. Leading the way, not surprisingly, were users of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4. Compare this with yesterday’s widely referenced report on Android phone updates, which graphically portrays the difference between how the two mobile-device platforms approach software upgrades.
Jack Donaghy Demos the Siri-Based Apple TV (via Daring Fireball)
So, uh, there may be minor problems if your Apple TV set is voice controlled. Nothing that we can’t fix with subtitles. Or convincing actors to come to your house and perform personally for you.
Product News:
Pocket God: Journey to Uranus 1.05.0 – Bolt Creative has updated its interactive universe game with the latest episode: Decapithon. You’ll face the walking dead, just in time for Halloween. $1.
LoopMash HD 1.0 – Steinberg has released an iPad-native version of its iPhone virtual instrument app. It includes more than 250 audio loops, 30 presets, 24 scenes per preset, 19 live performance effects, 4 studio-grade effects, and intuitive 30D swipe-page navigation. $12.
Aperture 3.2.1 – Apple has updated its professional-level photography software to version 3.2.1, fixing a bug where Aperture could quit unexpectedly at launch on Core Duo Macs, another problem where the Crop tool would switch to the incorrect orientation or resize incorrectly, and some rendering issues when cropping with Onscreen Proofing enabled. Additionally, location menus now show up correctly on the map in the Places view when “Photos” is selected in the Library Inspector. Free.