Apple : In depth: Fruits of the Apple tree: 20 tech marvels that came from former Apple bods |
| In depth: Fruits of the Apple tree: 20 tech marvels that came from former Apple bods Posted:  10 tech marvels that came from ex-Apple employeesApple attracts the best and the brightest, but the problem with the best and brightest is that they won't necessarily stay with you forever. Some hires may think a little too differently to be comfortable in Cupertino, others may decide to risk everything on a moonshot rather than settle for corporate conformity. Some left because Steve Jobs started acting all weird to them, and some because Sam Sung is a terrible name for someone who works in an Apple Store*. Here's a selection of devices, services and startups whose stories began when their Apple adventures ended. 1. All Android devices
Most people know that Android creator Andy Rubin co-founded Danger, the smartphone firm that Microsoft bought in 2008. But not everybody knows that a decade before he founded Danger he was a manufacturing engineer with Apple. In 2011, Apple's lawyers claimed that Rubin's "inspiration for the Android framework" came from his time in Cupertino. 2. Blossom One LimitedApple doesn't do cheap, and neither does the Blossom coffee company: its coffee machine, designed for commercial rather than home use, is a hefty $11,111. President Jeremy Kuempel previously worked for Apple, Tesla and BMW, and the firm boasts not just former Apple employees but NASA ones too. Maybe making a decent coffee is rocket science after all. 3. Eightly
Eightly, "a completely new way to enjoy your social lifestyle", is currently in stealth mode - but founder Andy Grignon isn't, telling the Financial Times that he "got yelled at all the time" by Steve Jobs. Grignon worked on the iPod, developed iChat AV and OS X's Dashboard and was part of the original iPhone team. 4. FlipboardEvan Doll was a senior iPhone engineer at Apple, and he co-founded the social news app Flipboard in 2010. Flipboard allows you to discover and curate your news that interests you from around the web and share it with your friends. 5. InklingMatt MacInnis, a former Apple education executive, founded Inkling in 2009 to produce interactive electronic books. Inkling's platform, Habitat, is used by some of the world's biggest book publishers. 6. LinkedInBefore creating the business network LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman worked as a user experience architect at Apple. A serial entrepreneur, Hoffman founded ahead-of-its-time social network Socialnet and was a founding director of PayPal too. 7. Luxo JrPixar's loveable lamp wouldn't be a familiar sight in cinemas if it weren't for former Apple CEO Steve Jobs: during his time as an ex-Apple employee he turned Pixar from a hardware maker to an animation studio. 8. Lyve
Right now, Tim Bucher is preparing to launch a touchscreen device that stores millions of photos and videos - but back in 2005 he was suing Apple for wrongful termination. He joined Apple in 2003, became head of Macintosh Hardware Engineering and oversaw the development of the Mac Mini. His departure was weird, to say the least. Bucher says that Steve Jobs and Tim Cook wanted him to leave, but didn't tell him why. 9. MeeteorEx-Apple stories don't always have happy endings: Meeteor, a professional social network created by former Apple project manager Chris Lee, was dubbed "insanely great" by Business Insider in 2012. It shut down in early 2013. 10. Mass Effect, Titanfall and FIFA 14
In 1982 Trip Hawkins was Apple's director of product marketing and sitting on a tidy pile of cash thanks to Apple's IPO. He quit Apple and invested a reported $200,000 in setting up a new company, Amazin' Software. Amazin' became the rather better known Electronic Arts in late 1982. 10 more marvels from ex-Apple staffers11. MoovMoov is the so-called "Siri for sweat" motion tracker. It claims to be the world's most advanced fitness tracker, and you'll never guess where its creator, former Halo developer and Microsoft researcher Nikola Hu, used to work. Here's a clue. It rhymes with "grapple". 12. Nest
Nest's creator, Tony Fadell, is famed as "the father of the iPod". He's not the only ex-Apple brain that joined the Googleplex when Google bought out Nest this year. The firm employs an estimated 100-plus former Apple engineers, product designers and executives. 13. PaperAt Apple, Mike Matas worked on the user interface for the iPhone and iPad. As design lead for the iOS app Paper he's responsible for one of the most beautiful iOS apps around. 14. PathPath co-founder Dave Morin worked at Apple for just over two years, leaving the firm to join Facebook in 2006. He left Facebook in 2010 to co-found Path, a social networking site. "We wanted to build the Apple of the internet," he said in a 2013 interview. 15. PosterousThe blogging service Posterous comes from the brain of Sachin Agarwal, who worked on Final Cut Pro for six years and left Apple just before the controversial Final Cut Pro X. The self-described "Apple fanboy" quit his dream job because he felt a "burning need" to make online sharing better. 16. Square Card Reader
Square's payment system wasn't invented by a former Apple staffer, but the latest version of its card reader comes from a team headed by former Apple engineer Jesse Dorogusker. Dorogusker worked on projects including the Lightning connector and the intriguing iPod-compatible "smart bike" during his eight years with the firm. 17. StirThe Stir is no ordinary desk: it moves from sitting to standing, learns your work patterns and urges you to get up and move. Creator JP Labrosse was one of the first 35 employees of Apple's iPod division and led the engineering teams for two iPod programmes. 18. StorehouseMark Kawano's app makes it easy to organise photos, videos and words, and it's a very good looking thing. You'd expect nothing less from the man who designed iPhoto and worked with developers to make attractive iOS apps. 19. Twitter Not the service, but the app. The app (which was bought by Twitter) was created by former Apple Graphic Engineer Loren Brichter. Brichter now makes Twitter's official desktop and mobile apps. 20. UpthereUpThere is a "mystery startup" from Bertrand Serlet, former Senior Vice President of Software and Engineering at Apple and the man largely responsible for OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. He left Apple in 2011 "to focus less on products and more on science" and founded UpThere in 2012, which promises to be the future of the cloud. And that's pretty much all we know, as UpThere is still in stealth mode. * Sam Sung worked for Apple in Vancouver, much to the internet's amusement. He now works for a headhunting company. |
| Updated: OS X 10.10: what to expect Posted:  With OS X Mavericks, Apple showed it still had tricks up its sleeve regarding desktop operating systems. Long-time apps like Finder got welcome upgrades and rubbed shoulders with newcomers from iOS, such as iBooks and Maps. Multiple display support was given an overhaul, and iCloud Keychain made its debut, to help Mac and iOS users keep regularly used online details safe. There were big improvements to battery life and app efficiency, and to ensure everyone with a supported Mac could upgrade with a minimum of fuss, Apple scrapped price tags entirely, making Mavericks the first free major OS X update. But what happens next? When will the successor to Mavericks appear, and what will it offer? What will it be called, and what will it look like once Jony Ive's got his claws in deep? As ever, Apple is keeping quiet, but we've made some educated guesses about what's to come in OS X 10.10… OS X 10.10 name and brandYes, OS X 10.10 − which is the version number that's already been found in analytics − not OS X 11.0. Version numbers don't need to jump from something-point-nine to something-point-zero. 10.10 is simply the tenth 10.x update and not the same as 10.1. Also, anyone clamouring for OS X.1 should probably be mindful that 1) OS X is now the product name, not a version number, and 2) Tim Cook would sooner make the next iPhone out of dead bees than use such a foul combination of characters. In recent years, numbers have counted for little anyway − we've come to know OS X by its codenames. Previously, these were big cats, but Mavericks showcased a switch to Californian locations, which is set to continue. The internal codename is Syrah, a dark-skinned grape/red wine, but that's going to change before the public release. The unknown is which location is going to be used. Mavericks is a surf spot but the word has a dual meaning, positioning Apple as unorthodox. Apple's chosen name for OS X 10.10 will doubtless attempt to highlight individuality once more, or some other important aspect of OS X. We just hope we won't see OS X Alcatraz: the most locked-down OS X ever. OS X Death Valley is probably one to avoid, too. OS X 10.10 price and release dateMavericks was free, and so it stands to reason that OS X 10.10 and all subsequent releases of OS X will be too. This makes a lot of sense, because Apple is primarily a hardware company (and a very profitable one), and so it can afford to give away its operating systems, unlike Microsoft, which makes a huge amount of money from licensing and direct sales of Windows. Expect OS X 10.10 to again be a digital-only update via the Mac App Store. As for when OS X 10.10 will appear, Lion saw OS X move to an annual release cycle, although this slipped a little with Mavericks, reportedly so Apple engineers could get iOS 7 ready in time for the release of the iPhone 5s. It wouldn't surprise us to see this as the actual plan this year: an announcement at WWDC and then a final release in 'fall 2014', which will probably mean October.
An iOS 7-like interface for OS X 10.10?The radical visual overhaul of iOS has made quite a few people assume OS X will have a similar design language as of OS X 10.10, and the rumour mill is already buzzing about Apple experimenting accordingly. However, OS X Mavericks showcased subtler changes, ditching UI chrome from the likes of Calendar, resulting in a more uniform OS, but still a familiar one. From a system standpoint, we expect to see further refinement. Jony Ive is obsessed with getting UI out of the way, so content can shine, but if every window behaved as iBooks does, removing chrome entirely until it's needed, we suspect Mac users would go nuts. Still, less extreme changes could work nicely on the desktop: flatter, simpler icons; the re-emergence of some colour in an OS that's become depressingly monochrome; and an emphasis on subtle depth, layering and transparency.
New OS X 10.10 apps and featuresIn recent versions of OS X, several iOS apps have made their way to the Mac. Reminders and Notes mirrored their iOS equivalents, making it easier for people to switch between Apple's platforms. With Maps, users could finally work with Apple's maps solution on the desktop and send directions to mobile devices. And then iBooks arrived, primarily, we imagine, because it was simply too absurd that you could buy a book in Apple's bookstore and not read it on your Mac. Of the remaining iOS-only apps, Newsstand would be the most obvious OS X candidate, magazine subscriptions joining books. We can also see a place for Weather − although, surprisingly, even the iPad doesn't yet have an Apple weather app. Smaller features might also make their way across: an optional PIN-style passcode lock; Control Center (replacing or augmenting existing menu bar extras); notification tabs for 'today', 'all' and 'missed', and a Notification Center that's an overlay rather than intrusively pushing everything else off-screen. Moving towards OS X 10.10 we'll also see support for even more 4K and large pixel displays. More iCloud in OS X 10.10The OS X 'Internet Accounts' pane in System Preferences is getting crowded, with various email services, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, AOL, Vimeo, and Flickr. Expect new additions, but also for Apple to increasingly push iCloud. OS X defaults to saving in iCloud, and we're likely to see more developers encouraged to integrate it more heavily within their apps. We could see iCloud becoming more fleshed-out regarding working across multiple platforms and apps, using OS X tagging to automatically build projects, and introducing collaboration features. Additionally, it would be sensible for Apple to rework Time Machine so you can back-up your Mac to (and restore it from) the cloud. This would, though, require a radical rethink in Cupertino regarding the miserly 5GB of space Apple offers for free (and the laughable 50GB maximum), but if Yahoo can offer 1TB of space for free, there's no reason Apple can't follow suit − and never having to worry about your data's safety again, no matter how much Apple kit you own, would be a great differentiator for the company and a huge new feature for OS X. We also expect further changes to OS X's core, with speed and stability improvements to fully take advantage of the Mac Pro's power, while also ensuring the system remains energy-conscious for the next generation of Apple notebooks.
OS X 10.10 and SiriWhen it comes to interacting with your computer, the mouse/pointer paradigm is deeply ingrained, but it's been shaken up by touchscreens, hence Apple's move to gestural input in OS X via the trackpad (and competitors working on hybrid devices). As smartphones have shown, voice can also be a great way of interacting with any device − as long as the system is smart enough. No doubt some will argue there's no place for voice on OS X, because your Mac isn't something you want to talk to in order to get a job done, but OS X's accessibility settings already offer voice-oriented features. These include the means to read text aloud or define speakable workflows. There's no reason this can't be part of the default experience, not least for quick tasks that are otherwise cumbersome to deal with, such as entering calendar appointments or performing tedious maintenance. Imagine an OS X Siri that could offer to automate tidying. "Siri, tidy my Desktop." "OK. Do you want me to add all downloaded music to iTunes, photos to iPhoto, and documents to your Documents folder." "Sure." "And would you like me to do this automatically in future, so you can spend more time being 'productive', searching the web for LOLcats?" On second thoughts…
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechRadar: All latest Apple news feeds To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment