Tag: Apple

Space. Magic. What more could you ask?

An ebook of David Levine’s short story collection, Space Magic, including his Hugo Award-winning story “Tk’Tk’Tk,” is out from Book View Café today.

An ebook of David Levine’s short story collection, Space Magic, including his Hugo Award-winning story “Tk’Tk’Tk,” is out from Book View Café today. You’ll find it at amazon.com, in Apple’s iBookstore, at nook.com, and at the Book View Café online store.

This includes some of the finest speculative fiction I’ve read. David’s explorations of astonishingly imaginative “what if?” scenarios are precise, rigorous, and often deeply moving. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Levine Space Magic“This Endeavour Award-winning collection pulls together 15 critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy stories that take readers from a technicolor cartoon realm to an ancient China that never was, and from an America gone wrong to the very ends of the universe. Including the Hugo Award-winning “Tk’Tk’Tk,” the Writers of the Future Award winner “Rewind,” “Nucleon,” “The Tale of the Golden Eagle,” and many other highly praised stories, Space Magic shows David D. Levine’s talents not only as a gifted writer but as a powerful storyteller whose work explores the farthest reaches of space as well as the depths of the human heart.”

The collection is $5.99, and the stories in it are available as individual ebooks for 99 cents each. Highly recommended.

Book View Café (“Because you can never have too many ebooks”) publishes works by Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Anne Gilman, Jeffrey A. Carver, Phyllis Irene Radford, Linda Nagata, Chaz Brenchley, and many other speculative fiction, mystery, and romance authors. While you’re there, check out Chris Dolley’s Reeves & Worcester Steampunk mysteries, including What Ho, Automation!

Working for Steve Jobs

Tonight I join the worldwide chorus to say, again, “Thank you, Steve.”

I joined Apple as a writer early 2000, just after the launch of iTools (later .Mac, now MobileMe, and soon to become iCloud). I left in 2006, after working on .Mac and the iTunes Music Store.

My favorite picture of Steve Jobs from May 2003, the launch of the iTunes Music Store.

I loved every day of that job, and left for reasons that had nothing to do with Apple but a lot to do with my family and my life in Seattle. (I’d been commuting from Seattle to Cupertino for one or two days every week, which wasn’t ideal.)

This story is about my last day working at Apple — or rather, the night before, which I spent at a hotel near the Apple campus. I went to bed that night feeling sad about leaving, and wondering if it were a mistake. In the early morning hours, I had this dream:

I dreamed I was at a games party, playing cards at a large table with friends from all parts of my life. The party must have been at Apple, because Steve was there, walking from group to group. He came by my table, stood behind me, and looked at my hand — leaning over me and turning the cards so he could see them.

This made me a little nervous. It wasn’t until Steve walked away that I realized that he’d somehow slipped an additional card into my hand.

I woke up from the dream and realized immediately what it meant: Apple wasn’t meant to be my whole career, but what I’d experienced there was going to help me with the rest of my work — and the rest of my life.

And so it has. Profoundly.

Tonight I join the worldwide chorus to say, again, “Thank you, Steve.”

Some thoughts on audiences and marketing

Apple’s success illustrates what happens when you align your product marketing with your audience.

Good sales result when marketing activity is properly aligned with an organization’s audience.

Watching financial analysts trying to explain Apple’s performance and projections got me thinking about this equation.

Apple’s audience has changed profoundly in the past two or three years. Apple used to sell high performance computers to a small audience of UI geeks; now it sells handheld digital devices to the masses, with pricepoints ranging from dirt cheap (iPods and low-end iPads) to pricey.

In other words, Apple’s new profits are coming from a new fair-weather audience of people who like a pretty, easy-to-use, fun gadget.

And Apple’s changed its marketing to reach that audience as well as its traditional one.

This is a lesson worth studying. Somehow, Apple’s leadership has managed to avoid continuing to design products for themselves and has stepped outside of their own heads (and their friends’ heads) to design gadgets for the man on the street.

This isn’t the only reason why Apple succeeds, but it’s a key part of the equation.

I mention it because I see so many organizations these days obsessed with what key insiders think is important rather than what consumers (and their competitors customers) are looking to buy. You can call that vision, but it’s pretty narrow vision. For your organization to succeed, you need to get into your customer’s heads — and not just the dozen or so customers you play golf with.

(I have to note that when Apple gets into its customers heads, it seems to be looking at their dreams as well as their conscious expectations.)

Verizon: Waiting for the numbers

I had a lot of fun talking with Larry Sivitz at Seattle24x7 about the iPhone and my ebook on using it.

The long-awaited announcement this morning of the Verizon iPhone went the way of most long-awaited announcements and raised more questions than it answered.

As someone who writes about iPhone issues, I confess I’m stuck. The facts have been reported, including the only surprise: The Verizon iPhone is going to have the capacity to function as a mobile hot spot, meaning your laptop (and up to four other devices) will be able to use it for Internet access. Although jailbroken iPhones have this capability, iPhones activated through AT&T currently don’t.

I don’t think this feature is enough to have most AT&T iPhone owners switch, particularly because the iPhone 4 is likely to be surpassed in capabilities by the iPhone 5 expected to be released in June and because you have to believe that AT&T is going to make a similar service available.

Verizon did not announce pricing for the data plans. Until they do, or until AT&T makes a move, there’s not much substance to talk about. Not that I’ll let that stop me! I had a lot of fun talking with Larry Sivitz at Seattle24x7 about the iPhone and my ebook on using it. Here’s the article.

Easy, elegant web publishing for the Mac

The latest version of Steve Sande’s ebook Take Control of iWeb ’09 is out!

The latest version of Steve Sande’s ebook Take Control of iWeb ’09 is out!

iweb-09_160x136

I’m excited about this for two reasons. One is that I was the editor of the book, and it’s wonderful to see a project completed and released to the world. The other is that Apple’s iWeb’09 (part of the iLife suite) is a great piece of software for anyone who wants to do a simple, attractive website without paying a fortune or having to learn web design. The Apple-designed iWeb templates include pages for blogs, movies, podcasts, photo albums, and more. Steve’s book provides all the guidance you need to put up your site, including some amazing tricks for photo special effects.

I’m currently using iWeb ’09 to publish my own online resume and for a website I run for a friend. My resume is hosted on Apple’s servers as part of the $99-a-year .Mac service. But my friend’s site is hosted on a third-party server — this is the first version of iWeb that makes it easy to publish to any host you want.

Here’s a free sample from the ebook in PDF form.

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