Mel Martin

Now doing consulting and recently wrote a book on film producer Samuel Bronston who made El Cid and Fall of the Roman Empire. I also did the commentary on Fall of the Roman Empire with Bill Bronston, the son of the late producer. I'm an amateur astronomer, and take lots of high resolution photos of galaxies and nebula from my backyard observatory in Arizona.

Mel Martin's Latest Posts

Dragon Go! for iPhone gets smarter by adding more services

by Mel Martin (Feb 21st 2012 8:10AM)

Dragon Go! fron Nuance was already a great way to find information by voice on the iPhone. It's free, and I often used it as a demo to show what the iPhone could do. Then, along came Siri and it got the Lion's share of attention from users and the press. With a new version of Dragon Go!, released ...

New York Times seems to fall from Apple's favor (Updated)

by Mel Martin (Feb 17th 2012 7:30PM)

Update: Both David Pogue and Andy Ihnatko responded to our request for comment about when they got briefed on Mountain Lion. Pogue did receive an advance briefing and a loaner laptop. See below for details. The New York Times appears to be pouting a bit, according to the Washington Post, because ...

Mountain Lion's Gatekeeper adds additional security options to OS X

by Mel Martin (Feb 17th 2012 8:00AM)

With the many updates and new features announced for the upcoming OS X release of Mountain Lion, one may have slipped by, but it's an important feature. It's also likely to become controversial. Gatekeeper gives users some extra security when running third party software. Apple says Gatekeeper will ...

Coverage? for iOS tells when you can and can't get on the cellular network

by Mel Martin (Feb 16th 2012 8:00PM)

Coverage? is an iOS app that tells you where to expect coverage from all the major US carriers. The maps are based on coverage maps from the cell companies, but they are interpreted, updated, and quite a bit more useful. You can see all major US carriers, and overlay them. I initially looked at ...

AT&T talks about the bandwidth crunch and blames customers

by Mel Martin (Feb 16th 2012 7:00AM)

AT&T has issued some comments on a blog post about the ever-increasing need for bandwidth. AT&T Sr. VP for technology notes that data volume on its network doubles annually, and adds that wireless traffic data has grown 20,000%. The timing of the post probably isn't coincidental, with ...

Apple patent shows teleprompter tool may come to iMovie and Final Cut Pro

by Mel Martin (Feb 14th 2012 6:00PM)

It's no secret that Apple gear is big in video production. The iPhone has been used to produce and edit news stories in the field, at least one Texas reporter shot a complete story on an iPad 2 and The Daily, a newsmagazine for the iPad, has done that as well. Patently Apple reports that Apple is ...

Open source media player VLC to get complete rewrite and Blu-ray playback

by Mel Martin (Feb 13th 2012 6:30PM)

VideoLan says it will soon release a major 2.0 release of its open source VLC media player, which will contain many new features of interest to OS X users. The new VLC will support Blu-ray playback, if you have the proper hardware, a full screen mode in Lion, and a new interface that looks similar ...

WeatherBug for iPhone gets new GUI and adds features

by Mel Martin (Feb 10th 2012 6:00PM)

There are many weather apps for the iPhone, but I'm a frequent user of the free WeatherBug app. The free version was recently updated to version 2.0 with a completely new GUI and added features such as automatic updating of weather data at your current location, along with pollen and UV data for ...

Apple stock soars, company worth more than Google, Microsoft combined

by Mel Martin (Feb 9th 2012 12:30PM)

Whoa! As of this writing (noon EST) Apple stock has reached a new high of US$493.85, which is a record share price. It also gives the company a market capitalization of $465 billion, which exceeds the combined totals of Google and Microsoft. Apple passed Microsoft in Market Cap back in May of 2010. ...

Australian pilot sues because he doesn't have an iPad

by Mel Martin (Feb 8th 2012 2:00PM)

Virgin Australia Airlines First Officer David Kloster is suing his employer for almost one million dollars, claiming he hurt his back while lugging around almost 40 pounds of charts and manuals. Documents filed with the Queensland Supreme Court on Kloster's behalf state that the airline "...failed ...