All Apple All Day

Sorry for the long absence! We just finished up our summer vacation, visiting my sister in London, with side trips to Paris, Wales, and Dublin. We traveled by air, land and sea - with a 10 year old, and a 2 year old. It wasn't easy. But traveling with iOS devices makes things a lot easier. Here are our Top Five iOS tips for traveling abroad, with kids.

It's only 5 days until the WWDC Keynote.... Only 4 shopping days left until Keynote Eve! I've written at length on this site about the importance of the Apple CEO Keynotes in fostering the unique relationship between Apple and its fans. Today's High Five lists the 5 Greatest Keynotes that Apple has ever given us:

It's been a busy few days here at the AAAD household. I'm starting a new job next week - still computer lawyering, but moving in-house - and we're working to get our new tenants in place when the lease expires June 1.  On the fun side, I got to chop down my first tree today. Just like George Washington! Tomorrow, it's replacing a garbage disposal unit, more tree-chopping, and general cleanup.  That's some quality landlording!  There's an iOS connection to all this - over the last year, I've learned quite a bit about how tech can help out first-time landlords.  But that property management stuff can wait for tomorrow. Today, a Videogame High Five!

The slogan of AAAD is "building an iOS home, bit by bit."  We're trying to leverage Apple and iOS to the greatest extent possible. These are some of the best, most   helpful uses of iOS that we've seen so far.

By now, you've probably tried a ton of iOS games. And your App Store account probably has hundreds of games in your "Not On This Device" folder. This High Five isn't the "greatest iOS games of all time". I'm not putting Angry Birds or Plants v. Zombies on the list. It's the games we're enjoying the most right now.

I never owned an Intellivision. I was an Atari kid.  But my best friend had an Intellivision, and it was - in many ways - obviously superior.  In other ways, it was ridiculously inferior. The controllers were hardwired to the console!  And no joysticks!

Continuing our "Vintage Gaming" run of High Fives, here's a second look back down memory lane - this time, to the Atari 2600. The 2600 was groundbreaking and ubiquitous. Everyone, it seemed, had one. (Except for one of my friends, who had an Intellivision - a topic for another High Five.) And there were LOTS of games available for the 2600. Wikipedia says 565 in total, and I have no reason to doubt them. (Of course, back then a cartridge would claim that it contained 5 "games" if you were allowed to adjust the difficulty to make the ball move at 5 different speeds. So it's an unverified number. But there were hundreds of individual cartridges.) I was about 8 when I got my Atari, and almost immediately, we realized that the best games were being made by Activision.

   I've got a son in first grade. And like most first graders, he's absolutely enthralled by video games - "Skylanders", primarily, but also "Clash of Clans" for iPad and "Mario Kart 7" for 3DS.  While I don't game much anymore, I can still appreciate the obsession - after all, I was a member of the very first  generation of kids to spend all day with home videogame consoles.  And I was even more obsessed than my kid is today. The Great Video Game Crash happened when I was about 9 years old. I didn't even notice.  I was too busy playing "E.T." and "Swordquest: Fireworld on our first game system - the Atari 2600. 

Today was the first day of intrasquad Cubs games down in Mesa, Arizona.  And while the future of the team looks bright (OF prospect Jorge Soler homered, SS prospect Javy Baez crushed a ball that SS Starlin Castro turned into diving putout), this could be a long season.  Who cares! It's still baseball. This year is our 5th consecutive year of buying the 9-pack of tickets. For the first time I can remember, the Cubs basically allowed us to pick any 9 games we wanted, with no April Wednesday afternoons forced upon us.  Our tickets arrived last week. It's a mix of Saturdays, Sundays, and night games. A pricier 9-game pack than usual, because we only purchased games that were in demand - but the Big Games are always more fun.  We'll be using the MLB At The Ballpark app this year to log our attendance at Wrigley, and on roadtrips to Brewers and White Sox games. The app got some pretty good reviews last year, and I'm curious to see what it can do. 

No one talks about the iPod anymore. I only know of two types of people using them these days - preteens using iPod touches for gaming, and people using old Nanos or Shuffles for running.   And, I suppose, my sister, who has an iPod permanently residing in a dock and acting as her home stereo system. But for about 6 years, from 2001 until the iPhone's announcement in 2007, it was THE gadget.  Music only, and we liked it that way. When the iPhone was just a rumor, one critic memorably said "I love my iPod. I don't want it to ring ." These are the 5 "Greatest" iPods. They're not necessarily the 5 "best" iPods - obviously, the Touch is the most capable, "best" iPod. But can it really be called the "greatest", when it's practically an afterthought in the Apple product line? And these iPods aren't being graded on a curve, either. Obviously, the original iPod was the most revolutionary for its time

Let's fire up the Wayback Machine and take a look at the Top Five tech items from a decade ago!  ( "Wayback Machine": a reference that is, in itself, so dated that it makes me seem older than a post about VCRs and CDs .) 10 years ago, I was a second-year attorney in downtown Chicago. The Cubs were starting a magical season that would end.... well, it would end just tragically. And for the first time, I had some disposable income. And I did my best to dispose of it. I was a fixture at the North and Clybourn Best Buy, and constantly tracked eBay (and later, Craigslist) for bargains. These days, it's difficult to find a true "bargain" on eBay - everyone seems to know precisely what everything is worth, and if you describe/photograph your item properly, you can more or less guess the final auction price.  eBay functions about as closely to a "perfect market" as anything this side of the NYSE, which is amazing when you consider that

There are quite a few lists of "Apple's Greatest Flops" floating around the web. This isn't EXACTLY one of those lists. Some of these products sold pretty well. One was everywhere. Instead, this list focuses on products that didn't have a purpose, that had a tragic flaw or were tragically underpowered - products for which Apple probably wishes they could have a "do-over". We aren't going to talk about the Apple Newton MessagePad on this list, because at least there was vision  involved. That product's failure was in that it arrived too soon (1993) and tried to do too much, and with too little connectivity. It was essentially a PalmPilot, with attempted handwriting recognition, 5 years too early. If you take a Newton, add a cellular radio, and allow it to exist in a world with cellular networks (like, say, 1998), or home wifi (like, say, 2002) it's a phenomenally powerful device for the nineties, right? Basically, a proto-iPhone. Let&

This is the first in a new AAAD feature - the High Five. A list of 5 items that fit into a common theme. Today, the top five Apple products I never owned, but that I'd really wanted. (And in many cases, still want, and plan to incorporate into our new house.) Some of them were flops that washed out of stores before I'd had a chance to get one - others were major sellers that came out when my only disposable income was a weekly allowance. One is a best-seller that's still part of the product line.  This isn't a list of "quirky Apple products no one remembers", like the QuickTake camera or the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, or the Mac TV. Today's list consists of 5 Apple things that were well-known enough for me to Apple-geek-out over, but that for one reason or another, I never acquired. Let's get started after the jump with the computer pictured right here.....