News tagged ‘AAC’

The Bookseller reports that Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson easily became the most popular book in the States and United Kingdom during its first week of availability. For example, in the United States the book sold 379,000 copies.

Despite being on sale for just six days in the US, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is already the 18th bestselling book of the year. It sits one place ahead of John Grisham's The Confession (Dell) and one place behind Rick Riordan's The Son of Neptune (Hyperion) in the year-to-date BookScan US bestseller list.

As we reported, Amazon had previously announced that the book was poised to become the best-selling book of 2011 despite a release late in the year. And we will probably be able to watch a film adaptation of the autobiography soon, because Sony Pictures has already acquired the movie rights to the book.

Apple has announced via MacOSForge that the company is launching the Apple Lossless Audio Codec on an open source basis.

“Apple is making the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) available as an open source project. Full details can be found on the Apple Lossless Audio Codec project page”.

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Earlier this month we reported that Sony Pictures had acquired rights to the recently-released Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson. As the company is planning to adapt the story  for the big screen, Sony suggest that the best person for writing screenplay would be Aaron Sorkin, who had successfully transitioned the story of Facebook to film The Social Network. He also gained fame for his work on A Few Good Men, The West Wing, and most recently Moneyball with Brad Pitt.

Sony is moving forward with a Steve Jobs movie based on Isaacson's book. And one of the writers being courted by producers to pen his story, according to a person who was briefed on the project but not authorized to speak about it publicly, is Aaron Sorkin, Hollywood's chronicler-in-chief of the complicated visionary. Sony and a Sorkin representative declined to comment on the writer's potential involvement.

Noteworthy, Jobs tried to hired Sorkin to write a film for Pixar, bur he declined his proposal, giving the following explanation:

The truth is I don’t know how to tell those stories. I have a young kid who loves Pixar movies and she’ll turn cartwheels if I tell her I’m writing one and I don’t want to disappoint her by writing the only bad movie in the history of Pixar.

Reuters suggests that Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson may become the best-selling book of 2011 on Amazon. But it is not surprisingly. Apple’s fans and others show extraordinary interest in the late Apple CEO’s life, especially after his death early this month.

The book is the best-selling book on Amazon.com and is also listed as the top-selling electronic book on the company's Kindle eBook store.

"The way things are trending, it could very likely be our top-selling book of the year," Amazon spokeswoman Brittany Turner said in a statement.

But now the book is ranked #13 on Amazon’s list of best sellers. Noteworthy, some analysts predict that the digital version of Steve Jobs’ biography outsell the print version. It is know that digital sales of best sellers are typically coming at 50-70% of total sales. Though, Amazon prefers do not comment the difference between digital and physical version of the book.

The Steve Jobs biography as it was promised have been released today and is available now in all regions. You may download the book on Apple's iBooks or purchase via Amazon.com. The book is an authorized biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Steve Jobs, himself, reached out to Isaacson to suggest the author write a biography on Jobs. Due to the unprecedented level of candor Jobs extended to Isaacson, the book has already made plenty of waves ahead of its public release, which was moved up to Oct. 24 after Jobs passed away on October 5th. Isaacson had asked Jobs prior to his passing why he had agreed to participate:

In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

A couple of days ago, we already posted some quotation from the forthcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. The other interesting thing, we have recently known, related to Jony Ive, Apple design chief. The book claims that Steve Jobs grated Ive nearly complete freedom to do as he sees fit.

He [Steve Jobs] called Jonathan Ive, Apple's design chief, his "spiritual partner" at Apple. He told Isaacson that Ive had "more operation power" at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself - that there's no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do. That, says Jobs, is "the way I set it up."

Ive, Apple's Senior Vice President for Industrial Design, has been at Apple for nearly twenty years, the last fifteen of those as design chief. Ive's team is said to operate out of a secretive high-tech lab on Apple's campus where he is given ultimate flexibility in his work.  Such freedom in works obviously helps to guard against a watering-down effect that could occur if his designs were subject to the approval of and revision by others in the company.

Expecting the release of the Steve Jobs’ authorized biography that is set for release next Monday, its author Walter Isaacson was interview by a correspondent of CBS show 60 Minutes  where he revealed that Steve Jobs had regretted an early decision to delay surgery for his pancreatic cancer back in 2004.

"I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,'" Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by [60 Minutes correspondent Steve] Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."

Isaacson noted that Jobs receive cancer treatment after the surgery, telling people that he had been cured. As far as Isaacson knows, an earlier surgery would give Steve Jobs much better change or at least more time.

Sony Pictures is reportedly working to acquire right for a film that will be based on Steve Jobs authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, according to Deadline.

I’ve just learned that Sony Pictures is making a hefty deal to acquire feature rights to Steve Jobs, the upcoming authorized biography by former CNN chairman and Time Magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson.

History of Apple and Steve Jobs were already the topic of the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. The movie tells us about founding of Apple and covers events up to the return of Steve Jobs at Apple in the late 90s. And now Sony Pictures is said want to shoot a movie about Steve Jobs. It is unclear whether the movie will indeed shoot and when such a film might be targeted for release.

AllThingsD reports that Simon & Schuster has rescheduled release of Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs to October 24th. The previous date of release was November 21st.

The fully authorized by Steve Jobs book is based on over 40 interviews with Jobs and interviews with over 100 of his friends and family members and will include full details on Steve Job’s life. The Wall Street Journal reports that Isaacson last interviewed Jobs four weeks ago. At that moment Jobs already knew that he would die soon. The last interview will be included in the book. Of course, the book causes a great interest of Apple fans. Since yesterday the book orders on Amazon has increased by 40,000%.

An hour ago Apple's Board of Directors released a statement in which it is said that company co-founder and longtime CEO has passed away.

Apple has already updated the main page of the website and asked for "thoughts, memories and condolences" to be sent to rememberingsteve@apple.com.

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There are lots of benefits, when you're a president. One of them - you get Apple gadgets before everyone else does.

In an interview ABC's George Stephanopoulos, President Obama reveals that Steve Jobs gave him an iPad 'a little bit early', reports the National Journal.

“Steve Jobs actually gave it to me, a little bit early. Yeah, it was cool. I got it directly from him.”

Today Amazon announced their tablet called Kindle Fire. It has 7" IPS display, custom android OS, weights 413g, has 8Gb of storage, Wifi. Unfortunately it does not have 3G. The price is attractive though - $199. Shipments start November 15.

We are not sure that this device can be a real iPad killer. However it will definitely compete with other Android tablets, like Blackberry Playbook, HP Touchpad and others.

More specs:

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This year Amazon released its Cloud Player and Cloud Drive services that allow users to store music and other media data on Amazon’s servers and access them from different devices connected to the Internet. After Apple announced iCloud last month, some showed an interest in Amazon tweaking its products to keep with iCloud.

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Apple recently released iOS 5 beta and iTunes 10.5 beta. It is available only for Apple registered developers. But you can try it too. Remember that you do it at your own risk. Below you will find iOS 5 download links for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 3G, iPod Touch 4G, iPad 1, iPad 2, Apple TV 2G and download links to iTunes 10.5 Mac and Windows.

Keep in mind that your iDevice will need to be activated, your UUID needs to be registered in Apple. Installing iOS beta on a non-activated device will render it useless. If you need help with registering UUID - write us, we will try to help..

Remember that currently there is no jailbreak for iOS 5 released. UPDATE: If you need a jailbreak - download it here.

(!) You will probably not be able to restore back to 4.х. UPDATE: how to go back to 4.3.3.

You can download iOS 5 beta 2 here.

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Yesterday Apple introduced new service called iCloud. US users can try it today using iOS 4.3.3 and iTunes 10.3. To understand what is iCloud, what is it for and how can be used, we recommend to read official Apple text about iCloud.

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