AppleMagazine #166

Robin Williams, a comic and sitcom star in the 1970s who became an Oscar-winning dramatic actor, died Monday at 63 in Marin County. The Marin County Sheriff’s Office said he appears to have committed suicide.. The news of the beloved actor’s death rocked the nation. Channels broke into their usual programming to make the announcement, and within minutes, Williams dominated online trending topics. Even President Obama noted his passing. Along with an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry poem, Williams’ daughter, Zelda, tweeted: “I love you. I miss you. I will try to keep looking up.” Williams, hailed as a comic genius, was a star of movies and television for more than three decades. He also suffered from substance abuse problems. The actor “has been battling severe depression of late,” his publicist Mara…

HOST OF CELEBRITY NAMES JOIN IN WITH THE CAMPAIGN What do Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Dr Dre, Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have in common? The answer is that they’re all celebrities who have thrown themselves head-first into a seemingly unassuming ‘challenge’ that has turned into a true viral phenomenon in recent weeks: The ALS Association’s Ice Bucket Challenge. The premise is simple enough: you’re a prominent public figure who agrees to have a bucket of ice water poured over your head, having the event recorded so that it can be witnessed by YouTube viewers around the globe. In the process, you also nominate three of your friends to be subjected to the same treatment. But of course, as tends to be the way with these things, this…

‘EDM’ FINALLY BREAKING THROUGH IN THE UNITED STATES Are you partial to a bit of EDM? Let’s correct ourselves there: if you’re into EDM, or electronic dance music to give it its full moniker, then “a bit” of it probably isn’t good enough for you. For those in the United States who like to play as hard as they work, there’s often nothing quite as fabulous as EDM. I EDM is a term applied to a broad range of percussive electronic dance music genres, generally produced for nightclubs and other dance-based entertainment environments. Of course, electronic dance music in general is nothing new. Some might say that it was truly born when legendary disco producer Giorgio Moroder and vocalist Donna Summer decided that a dance song could make perfect commercial…

iPHONE 6, WATCH AND APPLE PAY ALL BREAK COVER Tuesday, September 9 2014, at 10am PDT. Finally, we had a date and date for what could surely simply be described as “the big one” - quite a term, given that the world had already seen quite a few “big ones” from this particular source. Those of us who are ‘in the know’ when it comes to all things tech - and that seems to be almost all of us, these days - have seen events like this before. We’ve read all of the chatter on the rumor blogs beforehand, contemplated what we might expect to see ourselves, talked about it with friends and all manner of other things. Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about the latest major Apple launch. And…

OUR COMPLETE LOOK AT THE NEW HANDSETS Were you watching the Apple keynote on Tuesday, September 9 when the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus broke cover? If not, why weren’t you? After all, it was only one of the most significant events in Apple’s history, and certainly the most important major launch since the 2007 emergence of the original iteration of the iconic handset. It was all the more befitting, therefore, that the keynote took place at Cupertino’s Flint Center for the Performing Arts, where the late Steve Jobs took the wraps off the first Macintosh in January 1984. But of course, Jobs would have also appreciated as well as anyone that his company could never live in the past, and his baby - now passed into the hands…

Last week, we begun to talk about the many ways in which technology has helped to make us happier. In the second part of our bumper article, we look at communication, sleeping, creativity and sharing... COMMUNICATION HAS ALSO CHANGED DRASTICALLY Also easily forgotten is just how profoundly even the now most everyday technology has changed the way we communicate with each other. Just a few decades ago, if you had a family member or relative at the opposite end of the country and wished to get in touch with them, you’d need to pick up the phone. Before phones existed, it was a case of sending a letter and waiting weeks for a reply. Of course, the emergence of mobile phones certainly made a big difference, but the Internet has…