I’m more of a Marvel guy (though I’m liking The CW’s “The Flash”), but the DC Comics superhero movie franchise finally seems to be moving at full speed. As Josh Lasser at Hitfix reports:
Following “Batman v Superman,” the next title up will feature Suicide Squad. Then, in 2017, we’ll get “Justice League Part One” and a stand-alone “Wonder Woman” movie. The next year, 2018, will offer a movie version of “The Flash” with Ezra Miller and “Aquaman” with Jason Momoa. A “Shazam” movie, which has Dwayne Johnson as Black Adam will come out in 2019 as will “Justice League Part Two.” “Cyborg” with Ray Fisher will hit in 2020 and a new “Green Lantern” as well. Stand-alone Superman and Batman films are also in the works.
The new Harry Potter-universe prequel series screenwritten by J.K. Rowling will also feature at least three movies, and multiple Lego-themed movies are also in the works.
No word on if Warner Bros. or any other major film studio will be releasing any non-franchise movies between now and 2020…
HBO CEO Richard Plepler, speaking at an investor presentation hosted by HBO parent company Time Warner, said the company will start selling a digital version of its service that won’t require a pay-TV subscription in 2015.
Plepler said the company will go “beyond the wall” and launch a “stand alone, over the top” version of HBO in the US next year, and would work with “current partners,” and may work with others as well. But he wouldn’t provide any other detail.
“Over the top” is industry speak for providing video content directly to people via the Internet, rather than using cable and satellite companies. For years people have speculated that HBO might try to sell subscriptions unbundled from TV providers, and this is the first positive thing HBO executives have really said about it.
But in the aforelinked piece, Re/code’s Peter Kafka strikes several notes of caution. All we know is that HBO is going to launch a service. There’s no telling what it might be. It might be only available from cable companies who are Internet providers. It might be a limited service that doesn’t show current episodes of shows, or only keeps them available for a few weeks. It might be HBO GO, some new service, or even an HBO partnership to provide content to another web streaming provider.
Nobody knows. But if my Twitter stream is any indication, a whole lot of cord cutters and would-be cord cutters are really excited about the possibility of paying HBO directly to watch the next season of “Game of Thrones.”
The email author wrote that “feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they’ve wronged.“
Sarkeesian is a smart woman who has endured ridiculous amounts of abuse for doing something that we did in week one of the introductory course I took my freshman year in college: Write a cultural critique.
Being part of the cultural conversation and having the things you enjoy analyzed critically is part of being a successful, popular part of the culture. (And yeah, sometimes it’s painful to have the thing you love raked over the coals. But it comes with the territory.)
Gaming has reached the point where we shouldn’t debate if it’s art or not but rather critically analyze its failings.
Instead, women like Sarkeesian receive death threats. It’s sick and sad.
In the latest episode of undoubtedly someone’s favorite podcast, Myke Hurley and I talk about the life and death of Apple conferences, preview the forthcoming Apple event, and summon Siri without saying her name.
This week Jason and Myke talk about Çingleton and the rise and fall of Mac conferences, the Mac App Store and the pains of App Review, the upcoming Apple event, the disappointment of long-running TV and Movie series and a new name for summoning your digital assistant.
This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by:
Dash: Create beautiful dashboards with a few clicks. Sign up now to get one free private dashboard.
Pilot: They help clients build remarkable digital products.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
It’s a year of milestones. IDG has announced that it’s putting Macworld/iWorld on hiatus. (The MacIT event, previously an adjunct to Macworld, will remain.) Paul Kent of IDG World Expo sent me this statement this morning:
“We are announcing today that Macworld/iWorld is going on hiatus, and will not be taking place as planned in 2015. Our MacIT event, the world’s premiere event for deploying Apple in the enterprise, will continue next year with details to be announced in the coming weeks.
Since 1985, Macworld events have brought together a community to celebrate the incredible innovations that Apple has brought into the world, shining a spotlight on the developers who add value to the user’s experience in infinite ways. As Apple products and the related ecosystem have changed, so has the marketplace, and we are proud to have played a part in that evolution. Literally thousands of companies and hundreds of products have come to market at Macworld, and countless professional relationships have been forged. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the Apple community for allowing us to host these events and be a part of the incredible story that is the Apple market.
We are committed via our MacIT event to bringing together the product developers innovating with enterprise iOS and OS X based solutions, and the growing legion of professionals empowering their organizations through these tools. We are exploring exciting new partnerships, venues and delivery opportunities through which MacIT can continue to serve this market, and we look forward to announcing our plans for this event within the next few months.”
It’s a sad moment, just as the Macworld layoffs and announcement of Macworld print going away were sad. But time marches on.
While technically this is a “hiatus,” I think it’s safe to assume that the Macworld Expo as we knew it won’t come back. Maybe it will take some other form—there are lots of amazing Apple-themed events out there—but I’ve got my doubts. The MacIT conference is a good one, and I’m glad it will be continuing.
All my best to everyone at IDG World Expo who worked on this event over the years, and most especially to Paul Kent, who stewarded the event through some really difficult years.
This week in 1989 a massive earthquake hit the Bay Area just before the start of game 3 of the World Series, which in an enormous coincidence was between the two local teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s.
I was in my first job interview at that very moment, for a position on my college newspaper1. When I came out of the interview room, I mentioned to someone I was going to rush back to my dorm room to watch the game. They informed me it had been cancelled due to an earthquake.
Over at Fox Sports, my pal Erik Malinowski has a great profile of Fay Vincent, who was the (unlikely?) commissioner of baseball during the quake.
“I was proud of what happened,” Vincent tells me, “partly because I wasn’t sure whether I was making a good set of decisions. You never know.” In the days following the World Series, he was able to better absorb some of the reality that he had just led baseball through an all-timer of a catastrophe. The odds that a major earthquake would strike during a World Series that involved both Bay Area teams? There’s no plan for that. Everything had to be done on the fly, left only to instinct and the counsel of those he trusted.
Related: ESPN’s documentary series “30 for 30” premieres a film about the earthquake tonight, “The Day the Series Stopped.”
While Mobile Safari is fast and loads website reasonably well, it cannot upload and download files. It can upload pictures, but that is it. Mobile Safari needs a way to upload and download any type of file into iCloud Drive (a mirrored from the Mac downloads folder).
Apple keeps making strides here, and it feels like the addition of iCloud Drive as a consensual more-or-less filesystem for iOS has finally unlocked the possibility of letting apps upload and download files at will. But Mobile Safari, at least in iOS 8.0, is behind the curve.
Here’s hoping that in an iOS 8 update, we’ll see Mobile Safari support uploads and downloads—it would really be a shame if this had to wait until iOS 9.
The process of paying with your $650+ smartphone at a fast food drive through could potentially be risky if you have to hand over your iPhone to the window attendant, but McDonald’s training materials (received by 9to5Mac and seen above) for accepting mobile payments including Apple Pay show employees instead extending card readers to customers from the drive through window.
My trip to Canada this weekend reminded me just how different the American purchase process is from other countries. In Canada (and all the places I’ve been in Europe), you don’t hand your credit card to someone and let them walk away. You’re generally handed a little device (wireless or wired, it varies) and allowed to approve your purchase yourself, add a tip, confirm the whole thing. If you’re using a chip-and-PIN card, you don’t even need to sign anything.
Well, my fellow Americans better get ready for change. Not only is Apple Pay coming, but chip-and-PIN is replacing swipe-and-sign in about a year1. This is one of the reasons Apple’s smart to introduce Apple Pay right now, because in the U.S., all the credit-card hardware is about to be swapped out. It’s the HDTV transition all over again, in credit-card-reader form.
Technically the cards will be chipped and credit-card companies can choose whether to require PINs, so you could theoretically still be signing things, but over time the PIN will almost certainly win out over signing. ↩
There’s some sort of physics about Apple rumors. The rumors for every product everywhere end up getting compressed into a single layer that’s one event long. That’s why every product ever rumored to be coming from Apple has been rumored to be on the agenda for Apple’s event this Thursday ever since that event was announced.
Here’s the well-connected John Paczkowski of Re/code, knocking down one rumor with the Re/code version of a “nope”:
Apple may well have a new MacBook Air with Retina Display in the pipeline, but it’s not going to unveil it this week… As I reported earlier this month, this event will be headlined by Apple’s latest iPads, a new hi-res iMac and OS X Yosemite.
There you go. Re/code says new iPads, Yosemite, and a Retina iMac.
I’ll be at the event on Thursday to bring you the facts. But fear not: Within minutes of the event’s conclusion, all unproven rumors will re-coalesce around a new rumor about the next Apple event sometime in 2015.
All the podcasts need to run and hide before the big, bad Apple event comes and blows them all away into irrelevancy… So we recorded this week’s Clockwise this weekend in Montreal with special Canadian Guests Georgia Dow and Rene Ritchie. It’s a rare occasion when Dan Moren and I were recording together in the same room! Crazy times.
Live from Montreal: Expectations of Yosemite, dreaming of Macs with color selections, the Mac App Store, iOS 8, and keeping up with the Cardassians.
This week’s Clockwise is brought to you by Dash, a super cool website that lets you quickly create real-time custom dashboards.
I think Brianna’s great and I’m just sick about the events of this weekend. She and her husband Frank have all my support and respect, and that’s despite Bri’s shocking claim on this week’s podcast that one of my favorite TV shows of all time is, in fact, “the worst of Star Trek.”
At Cingleton this weekend I got to spend some time with Bri’s Isometric co-host Georgia and for a while it just became a praise session for Brianna’s indomitable spirit in the face of some truly horrible behavior. She’s great. Even if I side with Frank on the question of Captain Kirk.
Also posting over on The Incomparable last week:
I reviewed this weekend’s “Doctor Who” episode, “Mummy on the Orient Express,” live in Montreal with my pal Dan Moren.
I’m in Montreal for the Cingleton conference. On Saturday Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software gave a presentation in which he announced that the next version of BBEdit would not be sold in the Mac App Store. (The existing version will remain, and existing Mac App Store customers can upgrade to the next version directly with Bare Bones.)
Siegel’s talk was notable for its restraint and care. This was not a scorched-earth denouncement of the Mac App Store. In fact, at the end, he admitted that it’s not impossible that BBEdit might return to the store someday, if conditions change.
Siegel crafted his presentation as a list of reasons that weren’t the reason Bare Bones was abandoning the Mac App Store. It wasn’t Apple’s 30 percent cut, he said, because while that’s a lot of money, developers get a lot of service from Apple in return. It wasn’t the complete severing of his relationship with his customers, even though it’s frustrating that only Apple really knows who is buying the software and it doesn’t share that data. Nor were it the marketing challenges, the difficulty conforming to Apple’s submissions guidelines (including sandboxing and forcing some features in to add-on downloads), or the numerous problems involving the development tool chain—including the one time that a BBEdit update silently crashed the App Store’s submission tool.
But, of course, all of these frustrations were cumulative. And, Siegel said, many of those frustrations occur at the very end of the development cycle, when the final code is being shipped and the marketing plan is being executed. He likened it to Max Q, the aeronautical term for the period of maximum atmospheric stress on a flying vehicle.
The end result? A lot of soul searching and a realization that being in the Mac App Store just wasn’t worth it for Siegel or Bare Bones, that the added stress and frustration and everything else just wasn’t counterbalanced by the benefit of being in the premier storefront for Mac apps.
For many Mac apps, the Mac App Store is a good home. And the store itself continues to evolve. But in the past few years developers have gotten a better view into all of its quirks and frustrations, and for some of them it’s just not worth it. I suspect BBEdit will do just fine back on its own, and the Mac App Store will continue to chug along, its library imperceptibly poorer.
[While Cingleton does sometimes make presenter videos available after the fact, there’s no video of this presentation available now, and there probably won’t be soon. So you’ll have to take my word for it.]
This week, Six Colors has been sponsored by Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems. It’s kind of hard to even explain what Tinderbox is, because it’s so versatile and I know people who use it for a variety of different tasks.
The people who make Tinderbox call it “the tool for notes,” and that’s a clear way to describe it, but beneath that simple description is incredible depth. Tinderbox is a professional tool for capturing, visualizing, and analyzing your facts, tasks, and ideas
Tinderbox lets you create smart documents that help organize, reorganize, and evolve your thoughts over the course of months and even years. It’s a great tool for writers planning their next book, teachers planning their courses, product developers and designers who need to create their next big thing, and anyone who wants to organize their thoughts.
Tinderbox is a pro-level tool, and normally costs $249, but this week Six Colors readers can save $100 and pick up a copy for $149. A household license has been discounted to $199. And The Tinderbox Way, an ebook about the ideas behind Tinderbox, is also discounted $5 for Six Colors readers. Click here for more information about the offers.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I was listening to this week’s Accidental Tech Podcast when I discovered that Marco Arment’s take on the iPhone 6 in one key area is identical to mine. And though I know that the plural of anecdote is not _data_1, I think it’s interesting:
I still don’t have a case on my phone yet, but I picked up Tiff’s a couple of times and… it feels glorious. Like, “Oh my god, I need this,” with the Apple leather case on it. That is how I want this phone to feel—it improves so many things.
Into the midnight blue…
I’m with Marco. I have always appreciated using my iPhones as they were born, a naked robotic core with no adornment. And I’ve never dropped one. But I’ve been using an Apple iPhone 6 leather case for the last couple of weeks, and really liking it.
Yes, it’s true—the curved glass on the iPhone 6 screen is glorious, and the case completely blunts that feature. However, the leather also makes the entire device more grippable.
I was no fan of Apple’s iPhone 5 cases (the leather models were untextured and boring and hard to put on and take off), but the iPhone 6 leather case feels good and looks good. And it’s potentially a style upgrade: If you don’t like the antenna cut-outs on the back side of the phone, no problem—they’re covered up by a leather back embossed with the Apple logo. And the case lets your phone sit perfectly flat, if you’re bugged by the fact that the iPhone’s camera sticks out.
And as a fan of the deep, dark black color scheme of the original iPhone 5, I can get a darker phone by wrapping my Space Gray iPhone 6 in black (or in my case, midnight blue) leather. It’s a good look. I can’t guarantee that I won’t ditch the case and go back to the robotic core eventually, but I believe this is the longest I’ve ever kept a case on my iPhone.
Apple Inc. suppliers have pushed back plans to mass produce a larger-screen tablet to early next year, people familiar with the matter said, as they struggle to make enough new iPhones to meet strong demand.
I’m sure this will be used as proof in some quarters that Apple is doomed, despite the fact that the driving factor seems to be dramatic demand for new iPhones.
Unannounced Apple products are often reported to be “delayed,” but what does that word really mean? Apple didn’t promise that the product would be available at all, let alone at a given time. Product schedules change all the time, and for plenty of different reasons. (That doesn’t stop the report from throwing some shade on the viability of the iPad market in general, because why not?)
The Journal suggests that Apple’s original plan was to “produce the larger iPad in mass volume beginning in December,” which doesn’t necessarily mean the product was meant to ship in December. Production might have begun in December for a planned January release—we just don’t know. And Apple’s suppliers, which are the source of the story, probably don’t know either.
The latest episode of the podcast that doesn’t waste your time is out, featuring our dreams of new iPads, Google’s responsibility to patrol the Internet, a hail of technology scandals, and iOS 8’s slow adoption rate. And be sure to leave room for pie!
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
“It’s been way too long,” says Apple’s invitation for a special event on Apple’s campus on Oct. 16. (Along with an image that features a certain familiar collection of colors!)
Let the Kremlinology begin! Is it a winking admission that the press was just in Cupertino for an Apple event last month? Is it a promise of updates to the Mac mini, which hasn’t been touched since 2012? Is it a high-school reunion? Is someone trimming his very long beard? (“Nope.”)
All I know is that we’re supposed to meet at the main entrance at 1 Infinite Loop (which is not the usual Apple Town Hall routine) before “an executive presentation” at 10 a.m.
And yes, I will be there! Along with Apple’s very own six-color rainbow, it seems.
The law enforcement officials criticizing Apple should put aside the sense of entitlement they’ve developed in those seven years and spend some time thanking Apple and Google for making things so easy for them for so long.
Law enforcement officials usually play on our fears whenever their powers are limited, but those limitations are what keep our society from being a police state. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Miranda v. Arizona in 1966 led to catastrophic predictions that many criminals would go free and society would be harmed if all arrested people were informed of their rights. Didn’t happen.
That’s what’s happening here. Law enforcement types are suggesting that Apple and Google are making their products safe for child molesters. It’s the same old tired “good people have nothing to hide” argument against privacy rights that’s been carted out for years.
