Next week (June 2 - 6) is Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. This is the premier events for folks who develop Mac, iPhone and iPad software, and it is so hard to get a ticket that this year Apple instituted a lottery for tickets. The keynote address is at 10am Pacific time on Monday, June 2, and will be streamed live (but you need a Mac, iPhone, iPad or Apple TV to watch). Apple typically uses this event to preview new software, and sometimes to announce new hardware. Last year at WWDC, Apple previewed iOS 7, and two years ago, Apple previewed iOS 6. I suspect that apple will preview iOS 8 on Monday, and even though the new operating system probably won't be available until September or October, it will be interesting to learn some of the new features that are coming later this year. And if you believe the rumors, Apple may have some other interesting announcements next week too. We'll see. But enough looking ahead, here are the news items of note from the past week.
- Sam Glover of Lawyerist.com links to an article on The Legal Skills Prof Blog that links to a studies collected by Education Week that show that people tend to skim text when they read it on a screen instead of paper. As Glover notes, considering the increasing number of judges who reads briefs on an iPad, this is something for legal writers to keep in mind. I think that it underscores the need to use an introductory paragraph that quickly gives the gist of your entire argument so that the judge doesn't miss it in the brief.
- Another interesting article in the Legal Skills Prof Blog describes the commencement speech that Apple's General Counsel, Bruce Sewell, gave at his alma mater George Washington University Law School. I wrote about Sewell when he took the job at Apple back in 2009.
- This week, Apple announced that it is buying Beats, which manufactures premium headphones and has a streaming music service. Apple is paying $3 billion, making this by far the largest acquisition in Apple's history in terms of dollars. I'm sure we will learn more about the acquisition at WWDC on Monday.
- Karen Haslam of Macworld UK wrote an a good article on Ken Segall, the man who was responsible for lots of Apple's ads, but as Segall himself notes, will probably be best remembers as the man who come up with the name "iMac" (which of course led to the name for the iPhone and iPad). Segall is also one of the guys behind the funny site Scoopertino, which I discussed back in 2010.
- Speaking of Segall, he recently wrote a good post on his blog about the origins of the Apple Store.
- Darrell Etherington of TechCrunch says that he reviews a lot of smartphones and explains why the iPhone is the best.
- If you have ever given an iPad or iPhone to a kid, you know that they basically need no instruction and can figure it out in minutes ... and give them a week or two and they probably know more than you do. Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac posted a cute video in which today's kids react to an Apple II. Funny stuff.
- And finally, here is a cute video created by Marty Cooper, an animator who has worked at Blue Sky, ReelFX, and Rovio. He has an interesting technique where he draws on a transparency and then holds that up in front of objects in the real world and then takes a picture with his iPhone. By changing the drawings on the transparency and combining all of the pictures taken with his iPhone, much like a stop motion film, Cooper creates animations. He posts many of these animations to his account on Instagram, and he recently combined some of his best animations into a short movie that he calls Aug(De)Mented Reality. In this interview of Cooper on the House/Fire blog, Cooper explains his process and shows off how he does it in some pictures. Here is the Aug(De)Mented Reality video, which is great fun:
