The All Things D conference, run by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, took place this week. This was the only conference that Steve Jobs spoke at in recent years, other than the Macworld Expo and Apple presentations. His presence was noted in the form of tributes and frequent references by the other speakers. I reference a few of those today, along with other news of note from the past week:
- [UPDATE 6/11/12: You can now view the entire Tim Cook presentation on the All Things D website.]
- Steven Levy of Wired is one of my favorite tech writers, and he wrote a great article: All Things D is Haunted by the Man Who Isn't Here.
- Apple CEO Tim Cook gave the opening keynote at All Things D. It was an interesting presentation that signalled that we will soon see big improvements to Siri, Facebook integration with the iPhone, and maybe even something new from Apple in the TV space. Jordan Golson of MacRumors wrote a good liveblog as it happened, as did Jason Snell of Macworld.
- Macworld also published an edited, near-transcript of the highlights of Cook's presentation.
- Ina Fried of All Things D reports on a tribute to Jobs by Ed Catmull of Pixar and Larry Ellison of Oracle.
- When I wrote about the Wacom Bamboon Stylus duo earlier this week, little did I know that so many other people would be talking about styluses at the same time. I updated the end of the article to note that Serenity Caldwell of TechHive and Macworld published an article in which she also named the duo the best stylus for writing. Additionally, I see that Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac named a number of "best of" styluses and concluded that the Bamboo Stylus is the best stylus for drawing.
- J.D. Biersdorfer of the New York Times reminds us of the helpful multitasking gestures that you can use with an iPad.
- If you use TABS3 for time entry at your law office, you'll be interested to learn that you can now use Bellefield's iTimeKeep app to enter your time on mobile devices. I watched a demo of this app in action at ABA TECHSHOW this year and I was very impressed.
- Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that you can finally buy an iPhone that uses no-contract, pre-paid plans thanks to Cricket, although it isn't available in all cities.
- You can use Apple's Cards app to create and send a paper card from your iPhone or iPad. It wil be beautiful, but it won't have the personal touch of handwriting. Alex Heath of Cult of Mac reviews Thank You Pen, an app that creates beautiful cards and then uses a room full of machines with real pens to create the appearance that you hand-wrote your cards. Interesting.
- If you like casual games, Bejeweled has long been one of the best. There is finally a version for the iPad with great retina display graphics for the third generation iPad. I bought it and have had a lot of fun with it, and so has my six-year-old son. Click here for Bejeweled HD ($3.99):
- And finally, here is a fun video from magician Simon Pierro that shows how the iPad can quench your thirst:
