Apple

Old companies performing like new companies — how curious

  After reading and reporting on the financial results of AMD and Intel, and reading Nvidia’s cautionary letter to its shareholders, I have been struck by the resiliency and dynamism of these companies. AMD and Intel are in their fifties, and Nvidia is 25. That may not be as old as say General Electric, Konica, or Bayer but those staid … Read more

Autodesk improves customer access to SketchBook

Is it good news or bad news that Autodesk has made SketchBook free and easy for all users? SketchBook started a revolution for Autodesk. It came out of the company’s industrial design portfolio that came with its acquisition of Alias back in ancient times … before tablets and before touch screens. Designers used it as a very high-end napkin. They … Read more

Apple gradually wins back professionals with Final Cut Pro X

Apple has never worried its very pretty head about stuff like backward compatibility. The company has abandoned software, eliminated headphone ports, changed charging ports multiple times, disappeared drives, and tells users to keep up with the times. And you know what? It doesn’t seem to have hurt the company at all.  The latest version of Final Cut Pro, which came … Read more

Getting Grounded; Vuforia Introduces Ground Plane Detection

With its release of its latest AR platform last fall, Vuforia announced the addition of object recognition and ground plane detection, along with support for Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore.  Until relatively recently, targets have provided a stable, if not totally satisfactory base for AR objects to stick to (for lack of a better word this minute). They’re not totally … Read more

Valve’s Steam Link feeds games to mobile devices and Apple TV

Play PC game library on Android and iOS devices  Steam was initially established to provide a means to distribute PC games via downloading over the internet. Valve extended their service in 2015 with Steam Link, which is like Apple TV, Roku, and Shield—a little box that connects to one’s home network (to access the internet), and streams content from Value’s … Read more

On getting integrated

The pendulum swings back — Apple kills Intel’s share price Back in the 1980s and all the way to the mid-1990s the big computer companies at the time were known as the BUNCH – Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell — names that probably aren’t even recognized now. They designed and built everything, as did their main and  competitor … Read more

Have a MacBook and want more (GPU) power?

Hang an external AIB box on it. But not just any box, and not just any AIB. Apple recently announced that it is offering support for certain external chassis equipped with certain AMD AIBs. Such chassis are referred to as an eGPU, an external GPU and frequently called a box or even a bread box, so they become a EGPUBB … Read more

Play games on a MacBook? Why not?

Khronos is making that possible. The Khronos Group announced that the Vulkan Working Group's Portability Initiative has been working with Khronos members Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop to enable Vulkan applications to be ported to Apple platforms. The Vulkan Portability resource page (https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/portability-initiative) links to a collection of free and open source set of tools, SDKs, and runtime libraries … Read more

Demanding attention: the new tech buildings

Back in the go-go years leading up to the Internet bubble. I developed an adage which proved to be faultless, and a dire predictor of a company’s fate—as the building goes up, the company comes down.  However, today with well-established firms like Apple, Nvidia, the amazing Salesforce Benioff tower in down town SF, Amazon, Google, and now Microsoft, that adage … Read more