It was a nice "time travel" for half an hour as I watched the clips. I checked what was it like when I was 8 years old, then when we moved to the big city, when I was in middle school, when I entered the college, and then graduated, when I moved to US, when I got married, and when I got my first child. I did not see these before only except the famous 1984 ad.
Unofficial Apple Archive
121–130 of 155 posts
Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#122Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#123[deleted]
Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#124Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#125My own random Apple-connected moment of delight. In 2005, when they announced Dashboard widgets, I was running a data-visualization site built off Google News called Buzztracker [0]. It was a really simple idea and hackneyed execution, but it worked and was quite popular: it mapped the news from 1000s of sources onto a map, allowing you to navigate via geography into the day's events.
I took an afternoon and knocked out a widget edition of the site. If I remember correctly, you submitted your widgets to Apple.com and they had a little gallery. Well, I came home a few days later and my server was melting: thousands of hits/second from apple.com. It turned out they decided to make the entire homepage of apple.com a hot-link to my widget. [1] It stayed that way for about 24 hours — June 17 - 18, 2005.
I love this era of the 'net — when apple.com would just link to a dev's or designer's project. I almost fell out of my chair. Printed the screenshot out. I still remember the bar I went to that night, who I had a celebratory drink with in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, sort of marveling at the absurdity of it all.
The exposure didn't have any marked direct effect on my career or work, but it did boost my confidence in that maybe I wasn't working on such useless stuff in isolation on the other side of the world.
[0] http://buzztracker.org — the maps don't work because the SSIs are broken; but we often forget, Google News was one of the first times world-wide news was consolidated into a somewhat homogenous format (most sites weren't using RSS when it launched in 2001/2), certainly not one you could easily scrape and process global news patterns.
[1] https://craigmod.com/images/misc/buzztracker_apple.jpg
edit: grammar
Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#126I love the early 2000's Apple aesthetic. I'm not sure if it was actually really good, or I just associate it with a happy time in my life. I still have an iTunes playlist with all of the music from the dancing silhouette iPod commercials, and I get the warm and fuzzies when I listen to it. I wish there was a high-quality archive of these commercials online to relive some of those memories. Unfortunately, every time I…
>> I'm not sure if it was actually really good, or I just associate it with a happy time in my life. I am a collector of Macs from around this time. I just picked up an orange G3 Clamshell iBook, and I absolutely adore my 'pixar lamp' iMac G4. I'm considering internal hardware mod projects to get these two up to a reasonable speed.
Ah yeah, I've been keeping my eye out for a great deal on a clamshell iBook G3 for years. I have two iMac G4's (15" and 17"). One day I'll get the 20" ;) Classic hardware with an equally-classic operating system.
Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#127Am I crazy or is right-clicking totally broken on this website? Is this intentional? Maybe a joke about the old iMac hockey puck mice?
It is. One of the articles mentioned that they are trying to prevent piracy (rolls eyes) so maybe that’s what it is.
That's awkward, since it's not this website author's content to be "pirated". All copyrights for the site's content belong to Apple. Further, it's trivially easy to press F12 and use the browser dev tools to get at anything on the page.
Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#128First video I watch: "You are strictly prohibited from making a copy or modification of, or from rebroadcasting or re-encoding, this broadcast without the prior written permission from Apple Public Relations"
I'll be surprised if it's online for another week (not that I want that to be the case).
At the same time, the right-click blocker, referral link to Rogue Ameoba, and soliciting of donations just rub me the wrong way. To be honest, these all should have been uploaded directly to archive.org or something.
It's kinda disappointing, as I've gone to apple.com/pr for years and downloaded press images of the products I find cool/appealing. I always hoped there'd somehow be an archive of all the awesome presentations and stuff over the years. It's bittersweet that there's such a rad archive online, but it's approached in such an exclusionary way.
Actually it's even worse than I thought -- went to copy one of the Vimeo links (since I could see the videos are hosted on Vimeo) and they are not viewable outside of the applearchive site? https://player.vimeo.com/video/372119562 for example. "Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here."
Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#129Apple's design of 10-15 years ago looks excellent even today. Truly - good design does not lose its attractiveness as styles and standards change. Most icons, fonts, panels, colors of most of their old software and promotional materials look very pleasant, even in low resolution.
I especially notice this with iOS. iPhone OS (back when it was called that) was a masterpiece of design with every app having its own, different personality while being simple & efficient to use.
The last few iOS releases are a disaster on both fronts. Design-wise it’s completely blank, flat & empty, and usability wise a lot of the apps are just shadows of their former selves. Music, messages, maps, App Store, podcasts, etc. Even basic text editing was downgraded.
Re: Unofficial Apple Archive
#130What's interesting about this is how design and presentation has been a part of Apple's DNA since basically day one. When they launched the Apple II in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire, there were dozens of other micro-computer startups there as well. But Steve had the foresight to hire a professional product designer to create the foam molded case, and professional graphic artists and marketing people to design…
Steve Jobs.
It hasn't been there since he passed - they've been coasting, and it's starting to show.