You could argue that Apple has changed the way we do things several times. The way we buy music, use our phones, operate our computers and so on. But the world has pretty much overlooked one of Apple’s greatest ideas yet: messages.
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Sign up | See SampleIt started with iMessages, an iPhone/iPad app that lets you send text messages between Apple hand-held gadgets without cost. Instead of using the cellphone network (and paying 20 cents each or whatever), texts you send using this little app get sent across the Internet, costing you pretty much nothing.
These Apple messages have many advantages over regular text messages. For example, the tiny word “received” appears beneath any message you send to let you know that your recipient’s gadget has received it. (If the recipient has turned on “Show read receipts” in Settings, you’ll even see the word “read” to let you know that the person has actually read the message.)
If you’re in a back-and-forth conversation, the text messages show up on a single screen, scrolling up in conversation balloons like a chat session. While the other guy is typing, you see “…” in his balloon, so you know he’s working on a response and not just ignoring you.
You can send pictures and videos through Messages. And you aren’t held to the usual 160-character limit of phone text messages.
And if you have more than one iGadget — say, an iPhone and an iPad — you’ll find the same message threads on each one. You can pick up on a chat from wherever you left off on a different machine.
Above all, Messages means that you can keep your text messages. They’re not locked onto your phone, like regular text messages. And they don’t scroll away forever, like regular text messages. You can go back and refer to them whenever, and they’re backed up every time you back up your device.
So: Messages is cool. And coolly clever, the way it cuts the cellphone company out of the revenue stream. But that’s not the big news.
Apple announced recently that this summer, it will release a new version of Mac OS X called Mountain Lion. And Mountain Lion will come with a new Mac app called Messages. You can download the beta version of Messages free, right now, even before Mountain Lion is available. (It’s actually just a beefed-up version of the previous iChat program, and still includes all of its audiochat and videochat features.)
O.K., this is where things get crazy. Suddenly your computer and your phone are sharing the same communications stream.
First, this means that you can now send text messages from your computer, using a full keyboard, which is a fairly radical change right there.
You’ve been able to do that computer-to-phone trick before, but it’s been tricky. For years, I’ve been using Google Voice to send text messages for that very reason: on its Web page, I can send text messages, free, to phones, with the full comfort of mouse and keyboard. And you could sent text messages from chat programs — but only with special codes, and, of course, without the ability to resume the conversation on a different device.
But Messages is the first time there’s been a low-friction, mass-available way to send computer-to-phone messages.
The second huge change is that now you have your entire hard drive full of attachments — photos, videos, documents — to send to people’s phones. From your computer.
Third, Messages preserves all of these exchanges, just as the iPhone did. But it’s far more useful to have your transcripts on the actual computer. Now you can archive them, search them, copy and paste them, print them, forward them and so on.
Finally, Messages blurs the line between text messages, chats and e-mail. Or maybe it erases the line completely, and creates something entirely new.
(One wild side effect: It gives birth to this frequently asked question: “Are you on the phone or the Mac?” For the first time, there’s no way to know. You can’t tell if someone’s being terse because she’s tapping out her responses with one finger on glass, or because she’s on her computer but just distracted.)
Messages is in beta testing, so there are some kinks to work out. They’re actually kind of cool: side effects of the disruptive Messages change.
For example, when I’m conducting a chat on my Mac, the iPhone in my pocket goes nuts, vibrating or dinging madly with each line. Remember, the phone believes that each line of the chat is an incoming text message. Sure, I could go into Settings and turn off the ringing and vibrating — but that’s a lot of trouble every time I start or stop chatting on the Mac.
Similarly, a number of times, I’ve had this bizarre situation: I’ve conducted a chat during an airplane ride on the laptop. Then, when I land and turn my phone back on, it’s tied up for seven minutes, furiously downloading all of those “text messages” that happened while it was asleep, frantically vibrating or dinging.
I mean, this is logical. It’s what Messages is supposed to do: sync the phone, tablet, Touch, and Mac. But there should be a setting somewhere: “Don’t alert me when downloading messages I’ve already read.”
There are also some bugs, including some creepy sequencing errors. I’ve seen text messages appear chronologically in the wrong place in the Mac transcript, for example. Even among Mac-to-Mac chats, I’ve sometimes seen messages appear too soon in the transcript.
Finally, I don’t know if I’m typical, but I had some trouble getting started. You have to have an iCloud account (it’s free) to make the syncing work between devices, and somehow I had to enter the proper e-mail address in the phone’s Settings before everything worked.
I hope Apple gets around to solving these glitches. In the meantime, Messages will be changing the lives of heavy texters everywhere. Phones, tablets, Touches and computers are now all equal citizens in the world of short typed communications. Photos, videos and documents can now be part of computer-to-phone correspondence. Your dialogue can be archived and preserved forever.
In other words, for heavy communicators, the one small modification Apple has made to the rules has changed the game completely.
They offer very good webinars. The 1 p.m. ET webinar would be at 7 a.m. Hawaii time.
An excellent blog post by Laura Shoe on upgrading to Lightroom 4 from version 3
Nice. :-)
"Fearless Felix" Baumgartner has jumped 2,500 times from planes and helicopters, as well as some of the highest landmarks and skyscrapers on the planet — the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro, the Millau Viaduct in southern France, the 101-story Taipei 101 in Taiwan.
He's also leapt face-first into a pitch-dark, 620-foot-deep cave in Croatia — his most dangerous feat yet, he says, but soon to be outdone.
This summer, Baumgartner hopes to hurtle toward Earth at supersonic speed from a record 23 miles up, breaking the sound barrier with only his body.
He made it more than halfway there during a critical dress rehearsal Thursday, ascending from the New Mexico desert in a helium balloon and jumping from more than 13 miles up. He is believed to be only the third person to leap from such a high altitude and free fall to a safe landing — and the first to do so in 50 years. The record is Air Force test pilot Joe Kittinger's jump from 102,800 feet — 19.5 miles — in 1960.
"I'm now a member of a pretty small club," Baumgartner said in remarks provided by representatives.
Baumgartner tested the same pressurized capsule and full-pressure suit that he will use in a few months for a record-setting free fall from 120,000 feet. The extra protection is needed because there's virtually no atmosphere at such heights.
That's nowhere near space, but high enough to grab NASA's attention.
Engineers working on astronaut escape systems for future spacecraft have their eyes on this Austrian skydiver, former military parachutist, extreme athlete and, yes, daredevil known as "Fearless Felix."
"I like to challenge myself," Baumgartner, 42, explained in a recent interview, "and this is the ultimate skydive. I think there's nothing bigger than that."
Thursday's test run provided the boost Baumgartner was hoping for.
"That was the momentum we needed for the whole team. Now we are ready for the 90,000 jump," Baumgartner said, referring to the next trial run.
"I could not really feel my hands in free fall as it was so cold. We have to work on this," he added.
Baumgartner's 100-foot helium balloon and pressurized capsule lifted off from Roswell, N.M., on Thursday morning. He jumped at 71,581 feet — 13.6 miles — and landed safely eight minutes and eight seconds later, according to spokeswoman Trish Medalen. He reached speeds of up to 364.4 mph and was in free fall for three minutes and 43 seconds, before pulling his parachute cords, Medalen said.
"The view is amazing, way better than I thought," Baumgartner said after the practice jump.
(Commercial jets generally cruise at just over 30,000 feet.)
After one more trial run, he'll attempt 120,000 feet, or 22.8 miles. The launch window opens in July and extends until the beginning of October; it's based on optimal weather at the Roswell site.
"Keep in mind that at 120,000 feet ... there is no atmosphere to sustain human life," said Dustin Gohmert, manager of NASA's crew survival engineering office at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "To the body, it's no different than being in deep space, save from possibly more radiation shielding from the little atmosphere you have. You need the full protection of the pressure suit."
The record-holder Kittinger was in free fall for four minutes, 36 seconds, and accelerated to 614 mph, equivalent to Mach 0.9, just shy of the sound barrier. For his grand finale, Baumgartner expects to be in free fall for five minutes, 35 seconds, and achieve Mach 1, or 690 mph. All told, the descent should take 15 to 20 minutes.
Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon who heads Baumgartner's medical team, puts the chance of survival as "very high." Injury is possible.
"Sure, I fear" for Baumgartner's life, said Clark, whose astronaut wife, Laurel, died aboard space shuttle Columbia in 2003. "I mean, this is high-risk stuff."
Baumgartner is a perfectionist with a test pilot's personality and drive, according to Clark, and definitely not a flamboyant risk taker. He's survived as a BASE jumper, Clark noted, referring to the sport of jumping off fixed structures and using parachutes to break the fall. "They don't live long if they're not good."
The project, called Red Bull Stratos, is sponsored by the energy drink maker. (Stratos refers to the stratosphere.) The project costs have not been disclosed.
Kittinger's Excelsior mission was Air Force; he was a test pilot when he made his record-setting jump from an open, unpressurized gondola, long before anyone had rocketed into space.
Now 83, Kittinger lives near Orlando, Fla., and has been working with Baumgartner for three years. He took part in Thursday's test, as did Clark.
Kittinger is amazed no one has broken his free-falling record, after so many decades.
"In the 52 years since I did it, there have been a lot of improvements in pressure suits, in communications and life-support systems. But the only thing that really has not changed is how hostile it is at that altitude," Kittinger said. "It's almost a complete vacuum."
That's why NASA is so interested, even though space officially begins considerably higher at an even 100 kilometers, 328,084 feet or 62 miles.
In the nine years since the Columbia tragedy, emergency escape has been a top priority for NASA. The seven astronauts were killed during re-entry at just over 200,000 feet, nearly double Baumgartner's targeted altitude.
Granted, NASA's retired space shuttles will never fly again. But with so many different types of spacecraft in development by so many different companies, NASA wants to keep astronauts as safe as possible and provide a means for escape in the decades ahead.
Baumgartner's experience is sure to provide important lessons, Gohmert said.
Indeed, Baumgartner considers himself a pioneer — and a cautious one. He's following Kittinger's example of jumping in incrementally higher stages.
Kittinger nearly died trying on his own first dress rehearsal.
While jumping from 76,400 feet in 1959, Kittinger's small, stabilizing parachute opened too soon and got tangled around his neck. He went into a downward spin and blacked out. He was saved only by the automatic deployment of his emergency chute.
"I had confidence in myself and my equipment and my team. That never varied," Kittinger said. "Felix has to have the same thing."
Baumgartner insists he won't take any chances. Plus he's spent the past five years surrounding himself with "the right people," most notably Kittinger, a retired Air Force colonel and former Vietnam POW. A lawsuit, claiming theft by Red Bull of the idea, held things up; it was settled out of court last year.
Baumgartner — a lean but muscular 5-foot-8 and 150 pounds — said he minimizes risk through preparation.
"We're not going from zero to hero," Baumgartner said last month.
Like NASA, he's put together a big what-if list: What if this goes wrong? What if that does?
What scares him most, Baumgartner said, sounding like so many astronauts, are the things he hasn't thought of yet.
Simply put, the unknown unknown.
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Online:
Red Bull Stratos: www.redbullstratos.com
National Museum of the U.S. Air Force: http://tinyurl.com/2dsnn6
Wow!
Wow!