Links for Tuesday June 7th, 2011
iMessage is Going to Be Huge! Here’s Our Hands-on Look at How it Works: Great overview from Cult of Mac — It seems like iMessage is truly an SMS killer. It's unfortunate that Apple isn't opening this protocol to 3rd parties, however. This means you'll still need to rely on SMS to communicate with your non-iPhone-using friends.
Hands-on with the Wii U: it's here, and it's amazing: Ben Kuchera, reporting for Ars Technica, says the Wii U's controller feels good in hand, and concludes with this:
'We're calling Nintendo the "winner" of the big E3 press conferences. Everything else was interesting, but Nintendo has truly offered something new... once again.'
It's going to be a long wait until I get to play with this thing sometime in 2012.Verizon iPhone not ready for iCloud sneak peek: I noticed this yesterday too. Maybe iOS5 will be the release that unites the CDMA and GSM iOS trains?
New Mobile Safari stuff in iOS5: I don't know about you, but Apple looks like it's still investing in the open web from where I sit. And the features of Safari in MacOS X Lion appear to be even better.
The Best Overlooked Numbers And Subtle Features From WWDC 2011: Good rundown from MG Siegler — there were a lot of software features announced yesterday. Some quibbles: there was a lot of hand-waving around the whole "Mac App Store is #1" thing, so I wouldn't put a lot of stock in that. And while Apple probably really does have 50 million Game Center users, how many of them are active? It's probably a pretty small number.
Dieter Rams: Apple has achieved something I never did: Interesting tidbit about how Dieter Rams has influenced Jonathan Ive, and the work he has done at Apple.
Nintendo Wii U announced, coming in 2012: Nintendo took the wraps off of the successor to the Wii, the "Wii U", at their E3 keynote this morning. Still no exact details on the CPU or GPU, or the price (I bet those 6.2" touchscreen controllers won't be cheap), but I'll have to admit, you can make some pretty wild games when each player has their own personal display. I'm looking forward to playing some Wii HD next year.
RSA finally comes clean: SecurID is compromised: This is a nightmare scenario for for security professionals — strong 2-factor authentication provided by RSA is the cornerstone of many companies' security policy. It's amazing that this was breached, and it's not clear if RSA will be able to regain trust in their system.