AT&T Sues Verizon For What It Considers Deceptive 3G Ads
My Clippings November 5th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
Want to get under AT&T's skin? Make fun of the company's 3G coverage. The wireless provider on Tuesday filed suit against Verizon Wireless for what AT&T considers to be false and misleading advertisements.
Verizon has been running a series of TV and print ads that compare Verizon's 3G coverage with AT&T's. AT&T claims Verizon violated false advertising and deceptive trade laws and filed suit in Georgia district court in an effort to get the judge to pull the ads.
In one of the ads (above), a Verizon customer wanders around a college campus watching videos on a smartphone, as a map of Verizon's 3G coverage area–which covers the U.S. almost in its entirety–follows behind. The camera then flashes to an AT&T 3G customer, and the ad says, "If you want to know why some people have spotty 3G coverage, there's a map for that." The AT&T 3G coverage map pops up, with large sections of the country blank.
Another ad features a group of Verizon customers getting together at a restaurant while another friend–an AT&T customer–sits on a bench, presumably having missed a call from the others. "If you want to know why your friend's 3G coverage keeps her out of touch, there's a map for that," the ad said as the AT&T 3G coverage map appeared again.
AT&T said it contacted Verizon about the ads on October 7 and asked the company to remove them or make them more accurate. Verizon responded by removing the "out of touch" line and putting a "voice and data services available outside 3G coverage areas" line in small font at the end of the TV ads, but AT&T was not appeased.
"Verizon's purported solution has done nothing to change the misleading message in its advertisements. By continuing to include the 3G coverage map in its advertisements, Verizon is still conveying a message that AT&T has no coverage in the white or blank space included in the maps, and thus AT&T customers cannot use their wireless devices in large portions of the United States," AT&T said in its lawsuit.
Verizon was not convinced.
“These ads are serving to inform customers where the coverage critical to operating a smart phone is available,” a Verizon spokesman said in an e-mail. “Considering their limited 3G coverage, our competitor should examine whether they are misleading customers with their fastest 3G network claim.”
Tags: advertising, flash, Google, IO, ma, man, php, Remove, video
Silverback brings advanced usability testing to the Mac
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Design, Developer, Utilities, Video, Beta
Silverback, a new OS X application from the renowned UK-based design team Clearleft, was a mystery for quite a while. The app had a site with some neat visual tricks and a gorilla with a clipboard, and it said the application was for designers, but what did it do? The suspense was killing us! We finally had a chance to test Silverback this week, and if you design websites or application interfaces, this program is worth the wait.Silverback basically turns your Mac into a full-featured usability testing station. Add a new project, add some users, and have them come sit down and test out your interface. Silverback hangs out unobtrusively in the background, capturing video of the the entire screen, including a cute (and useful) effect that marks where your tester is clicking. This in itself would be handy, but Silverback also takes advantage of your built-in iSight camera to include a picture-in-picture of the tester’s reactions, on top of the screen capture.
This way, you can see everything the user is doing in real time, and they can speak comments aloud as they come up, rather than pausing to write them down. Usability testing the old-fashioned way generally involves expensive setups and lots of instructions, but Silverback is intuitive to use and provides straightforward and informative results. Silverback is currently in private beta, so some testers can test its testing functions (this makes our heads hurt a little bit.)
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Silverback brings advanced usability testing to the Mac
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Design, Developer, Utilities, Video, Beta
Silverback, a new OS X application from the renowned UK-based design team Clearleft, was a mystery for quite a while. The app had a site with some neat visual tricks and a gorilla with a clipboard, and it said the application was for designers, but what did it do? The suspense was killing us! We finally had a chance to test Silverback this week, and if you design websites or application interfaces, this program is worth the wait.Silverback basically turns your Mac into a full-featured usability testing station. Add a new project, add some users, and have them come sit down and test out your interface. Silverback hangs out unobtrusively in the background, capturing video of the the entire screen, including a cute (and useful) effect that marks where your tester is clicking. This in itself would be handy, but Silverback also takes advantage of your built-in iSight camera to include a picture-in-picture of the tester’s reactions, on top of the screen capture.
This way, you can see everything the user is doing in real time, and they can speak comments aloud as they come up, rather than pausing to write them down. Usability testing the old-fashioned way generally involves expensive setups and lots of instructions, but Silverback is intuitive to use and provides straightforward and informative results. Silverback is currently in private beta, so some testers can test its testing functions (this makes our heads hurt a little bit.)
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Steve Ballmer’s Windows 7 pitch features MacBook Pro in the background
My Clippings October 23rd, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
Filed under: Humor, Cult of Mac, Odds and ends
Talk about embarrassing. Steve Ballmer guest hosted on NBC’s Today Show yesterday to talk about the Windows 7 launch. Sadly for Steverino, Matt Lauer talked a lot about Apple and the iPhone. Even worse, sharp eyes noticed an NBC-produced graphic in the background with a Windows 7 logo appearing on the screen of what clearly is a Mac laptop.
You can watch the video here. That’s probably not the kind of quality control Microsoft would have liked.
Thanks to Bill for sending this in (no, not Bill Gates)
[via TechCrunch]
TUAWSteve Ballmer’s Windows 7 pitch features MacBook Pro in the background originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Apple, email, Google, Humor, Inc., ma, Mac, man, Microsoft, video, wind
CeeVee Makes Web-Based Resume Building Quick, Easy, and Free
My Clippings October 22nd, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
You don’t have to have a fancy Microsoft Word template or a gorgeously tweaked document layout to build a clean looking and complete resume. Sure, you can choose a pretty template for your favorite desktop publishing or word processing app, but if you’re like me, you wind up spending more time tweaking the look and feel of the document than editing the actual text.
Thankfully, there’s CeeVee: a free Web-based resume builder that not only helps you put your resume together and fill in the important details about your skills and your work history, but it also helps you share it on popular social networks that may help you get a job.
CeeVee is free to use. You’re immediately launched into the process of creating your own resume on the Web once you’ve signed up. You can upload a photo if you’d like to include one with your resume. You can also add or remove sections that are applicable to the types of jobs you’re applying for, and tweak all of them in-line. The service offers a number of clean-looking themes and typefaces to choose from, all of which read well on the Web and lend themselves to easy sharing and printing.
Once you’re logged in, the majority of the page is taken up by your resume. Controls for adding and removing sections are on the right side of the page. For example, there’s a huge debate over whether or not “summary” or “objective” sections in resumes are worthwhile, so depending on how you feel about them you can add or remove a summary section from your resume with a single click. You can edit the contents of each section in-line with the rest of your resume, so you don’t have to leave the resume view to see how your changes will affect the overall document.
CeeVee’s resume builder makes it easy to copy/paste information from a resume you may already have, or to add information about your work experience, studies, and special skills from scratch. The entire resume interface is interactive, but when someone else views it they only see the static page with all of your information on it that they can easily print. Also, since many of us work for companies that don’t take kindly to their employees updating their resumes, you have the option to make your resume private at any time so no one can see it.
Tags: Build, cli, Google, Information, IO, ma, man, Microsoft, Photo, php, Printing, quick, Remove, video, wind, XP
Adobe ships Lightroom 3 free public beta
My Clippings October 22nd, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
Adobe has introduced a free public beta of Lightroom 3, it software for digital photographers.
Adobe’s Julieanne Kost has created three videos which detail 25 new minor refinements in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 that could impact your workflow, these clips are available here.
Writing on the Lightroom blog, developer Tom Hogarty said, “We've come a long way since our very first public beta on January 9th 2006 at Macworld.(We didn't even have a crop tool in the first release!) For this latest release we went back to the drawing board and revisited what we believe are the fundamental priorities of our customers: Performance and Image Quality.
“Lightroom has been stripped down to the "engine block" in order to rebuild a performance architecture that meets the needs of photographers with growing image collections and increasing megapixels. The raw processing engine has also received an overhaul right down to the fundamental demosaic algorithms that now allows unprecedented sharpening and noise reduction results.”
Lightroom users can organize, enhance, and showcase their images all from within a fast application that’s available for Mac and Windows.
Some of the new features include:
- Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
- State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
- Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
- Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
- Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
- Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
- New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
- More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)
Full release notes are located here.
Download the software here.
Tags: Build, cli, Google, IO, ISO, ma, Mac, man, Photo, video, way, wind, XP
QT Lite Frees You from QuickTime’s Bloat [Downloads]
My Clippings October 19th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
Windows only: No one likes being bugged by Apple’s Software Update Utility in Windows, but many of us deal with it because we need QuickTime to use iTunes or view the occasional video. QT Lite aims to fix that.
If you don’t use iTunes (or any other Apple software), you can finally rid yourself of Apple’s Software Update bloat by replacing QuickTime with QT Lite. QT Lite installs only what is necessary to play QuickTime files and nothing more. It still has all the same settings and preferences as the normal version of QuickTime, though.
QT Lite is very similar to QuickTime Alternative, which we featured as one of our superior alternatives to crappy Windows software. The only difference is that QuickTime Alternative also installs Windows Media Player Classic, so it should also work as a QuickTime replacement if you want to install iTunes without the QuickTime bloat.
QT Lite is a free download, Windows only.
New Screencast: Editable CSS3 Image Gallery
My Clippings October 18th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
We build a pretty typical image gallery design pattern, a grid of images that pop up larger when clicked. But this image gallery page makes use of hot semantic HTML5 markup, loads of visual treats with CSS3 and jQuery, and made editable through the CMS PageLime. Quick reminder, the demo is awesome-est in a WebKit browser (Safari or Chrome).
View Demo Download Files View Screencast
Tags: blockquote, Build, cli, css, Google, ma, man, Photo, quick, video
Curious ION-based MoBo: DFI Hybrid P45-ION-T2A2
My Clippings October 18th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
Just getting back from my holiday and found a rather curious concept from motherboards producer DFI: the hybrid P45-ION-T2A2 packs two PCs onto one motherboard. How is that possible ?
The guys at TweakTown were invited at DFI HQs for an exclusive look at the “thing”. On the same board you can find an Intel Atom+Nvidia ION and a P45 chipset+a 775 Socket. According to DFI, this new approach “allows for two systems to run shared (KVM style) or fully independent of each other, on the one single board.”
Announced at a price-tag of $400, it remains to be seen how many fans this new concept will attract. Personally, I think there are far better options in this price range…
Related posts:
Setting Up Photoshop For Web, App and iPhone Development
My Clippings October 17th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
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Most people who have designed websites or apps in Photoshop will, at one point or another, have had issues trying to match colors in images to colors generated by HTML, CSS or code. This article aims to solve those problems once and for all.
Color Management to Match Colors Across Multiple Devices
In the print world, color management typically involves calibrating your entire workflow, from scanner or digital camera to computer display to hard proofs to the final press output. This can be quite a tall order, especially when the devices use different color spaces — matching RGB and CMYK devices is notoriously hard.
When designing or editing for TV, calibrating the main editing display and using a broadcast monitor are common; these show real-time proof of how the image will look on a typical TV in a viewer’s home. In such a scenario, color management offers many benefits and is highly recommended.
When building Web and application interfaces, the situation is a little different. The final output is the same device that you’re using to create the artwork: a computer display (putting aside for now differences in gamma between Windows, Mac OS X prior to 10.6 and the iPhone, which we’ll cover later.)
There is a catch, though. Even though you’re creating the Web or app interface on the same device that the final product will be shown on, the colors will have various sources: images (typically PNG, GIF and JPEG), style markup (CSS) and code (JavaScript, HTML, Objective-C, etc). Getting them all to match can be tricky.
The Goal
When designing websites or app interfaces, we want to perfectly match the colors that are displayed on screen in Photoshop and that are saved in files with what’s displayed in other applications, including Firefox, Safari and the iPhone Simulator. Not only do we want the colors to look the same, but we want the actual values saved in the files to perfectly match the colors we have defined in Photoshop. Colors should not shift or appear to shift in any way, under any circumstance.
Why Is This So Difficult?
Photoshop applies its color management to images displayed within its windows and to the files it saves. This is a bad thing if you’re working exclusively with RGB images for Web or on-screen user interfaces. With the default Photoshop settings, #FF0000 will actually display as #FB0018, and #BB95FF will display as #BA98FD. The differences are subtle but definitely there.
Tags: Build, css, flash, Google, Information, IO, Javascript, Leopard, ma, Mac, man, Photo, php, script, Snow Leopard, video, Vista, way, wind, XP
