In today’s tech world we all know how important storage is! Earlier this week Seagate announced its plans to buy LaCie, for those unfamiliar with Lacie, it is a French company that specializes in data storage products, especially popular among the Mac communi are their rugged hard disks, and their Thunderbolt enabled devices.
Seagate will buy the 64.5% of the company currently held by CEO Philippe Spruch and the rest in cash upon completion of that transaction (via Forbes):

Seagate Technology plc the worldwide leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions, and LaCie S.A. a leading manufacturer of consumer storage products, today announced an exclusive agreement with the intent for Seagate to acquire a controlling interest in LaCie.The transaction would combine two highly complementary product and technology portfolios, adding LaCie’s line of premium branded consumer storage solutions, network-attached storage solutions and software offerings to Seagate’s array of mainstream consumer storage products.

Full press release below:

SEAGATE AND LACIE ANNOUNCE EXCLUSIVE AGREEMENT WITH INTENT FOR SEAGATE TO ACQUIRE CONTROLLING INTEREST IN LACIE

May 23, 2012

Seagate has Offered to Purchase LaCie CEO’s 64.5% Ownership Position;
Seagate to Subsequently Commence Tender Offer for Remaining Outstanding Shares

Expands Seagate’s Product Line and Capabilities in the Growing Consumer Storage Market

CUPERTINO, CA and PARIS, FRANCE – May 23, 2012 – Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX) the worldwide leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions, and LaCie S.A. (Euronext: LAC), a leading manufacturer of consumer storage products, today announced an exclusive agreement with the intent for Seagate to acquire a controlling interest in LaCie. Seagate has offered to purchase from Philippe Spruch, LaCie’s chairman and CEO, and his affiliate, all of their shares, representing 64.5% of the outstanding shares of LaCie. Following receipt of governmental approvals and the close of this transaction, Seagate would commence an all-cash simplified tender offer (followed as the case may be by a squeeze-out procedure) to acquire the remaining outstanding shares in accordance with the General Regulation of the French Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF).

Seagate has offered Mr. Spruch and his affiliate €4.05 per share in cash, minus a potential adjustment depending on the cash and debt position of LaCie at closing. This price may be increased by a possible price supplement of 3% in the event that the threshold of 95% of the shares and voting rights of LaCie would be reached by Sparrow within 6 months following closing, resulting in a maximum potential price per LaCie share of €4.17. Without the price supplement, the offer currently values LaCie at an approximate €146 million, or $186 million total equity value, including acquired net cash of approximately €49 million, or $65 million, as of March 31, 2012. The €4.05 per share price represents a premium of 29% to LaCie’s average closing stock price over the 30 trading days ended May 22, 2012.

Ricol Lasteyrie & Associés was appointed today as independent expert by the board of directors of LaCie, to deliver a fairness opinion on the price that would be offered in the context of the tender offer, including in the perspective of a potential squeeze-out procedure.

The transaction would combine two highly complementary product and technology portfolios, adding LaCie’s line of premium branded consumer storage solutions, network-attached storage solutions and software offerings to Seagate’s array of mainstream consumer storage products. The combination would accelerate Seagate’s growth strategy in the expanding consumer storage market, particularly in Europe and Japan, and add strong engineering and software development capabilities, as well as relationships with several key retailers.

The transaction is expected to be neutral to Seagate’s fiscal 2013 earnings per share.

Following the close of the sale of his shares to Seagate, Mr. Spruch would join Seagate and lead the company’s consumer storage products organization. Reporting to him would be Patrick Connolly, who currently serves as vice president and general manager of Seagate’s retail group, as well as Pierre van der Elst, who currently serves as deputy general manager of LaCie. The financial terms of the new position of Mr Spruch are not determined as of today and would therefore be described subsequently, including in the tender offer documentation.

“Seagate has a strong commitment to the growing consumer storage market and bringing the most dynamic products to market. LaCie has built an exceptional consumer brand by delivering exciting and innovative high-end products for many years. This transaction would bring a highly complementary set of capabilities to Seagate, significantly expand our consumer product offerings, add a premium-branded direct-attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO. “We are also excited that Philippe, who is a true visionary and leader in the consumer storage business, would join Seagate to run our consumer storage products organization.”

“With the proliferation of devices and content being shared and stored today, consumer demand for high-quality branded storage solutions continues to grow,” said Philippe Spruch, LaCie’s chairman and CEO. “We are excited about the potential for this combination to benefit customers and employees by creating significant scale and opening up new markets. We look forward to making the resources of a much larger company available to our customers around the world.”

LaCie will initiate the information and consultation process required by its employee representative council in relation to the contemplated transaction, in accordance with French law. Upon completion of this process, Seagate and Mr. Spruch would execute a definitive share purchase agreement and finalize the purchase of the controlling interest held by Mr. Spruch and his affiliate. This share purchase transaction is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2012 pending completion of the relevant governmental reviews. Seagate would then commence a tender offer for the remaining outstanding shares of LaCie (followed as the case may be by a squeeze-out procedure), subject to a clearance decision from the AMF. The tender offer is expected to be completed in the third calendar quarter of 2012.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approval in the United States (antitrust filing), France (approval of foreign investments by the Ministry of Finance) and other jurisdictions (antitrust filing in Germany) and to other customary closing conditions.

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC served as financial advisor and Allen & Overy LLP served as legal advisor to Seagate in connection with the transaction. De Pardieu Brocas Maffei A.A.R.P.I served as legal advisor to LaCie.

Everyone knows that people tend to buy things when they are on sale, well the developer behind Dropzone experienced exactly that yesterday. The Mac app normally sells for $14 in the Mac App Store, but the developer participated in Two Dollar Tuesday and drop the price of Dropzone to only $2.

At first he was a little unsure if this was the right choice, however after looking at the numbers the developer quickly realized that Dropzone made an astounding $8,000 in one day. The dev says the money is “beyond my wildest dreams.”

A quick summary of Dropzone:

Drag a file onto the Dropzone menu item and your fully customizable grid of destinations flies smoothly out using core animation. Drop the file onto a destination and Dropzone will take care of the rest. Whether you’re opening an app, uploading a file or sharing your photos on Flickr. When sharing via FTP, Dropzone copies the URL for your upload to the clipboard ready for pasting into an email or instant message. It’s a super fast way to share things with your friends.

Whats interesting is that Dropzone wasn’t anywhere near the top 100 paid apps, however within hours of dropping the price, the app soared to the number 3 spot in the top paid overall chart in a matter of hours.

Here’s a visual representation of the download numbers:

This is a guest post by Juri Vasylenko of Ramotion - one of the most skilled interface design and icons creation studios out there.

If you ask any developer what is the most unlikeable task is, most of them would answer that it is the UI customization.

That’s an obvious point because developers are technical specializes and they like to solve logic task most then cut. PNG’s and build user interfaces. However, the GUI is the first thing that users see in the app, and largely, the applications success depends on how attractive app is.

During the few lasts projects we have seen, that app user interface creation is the most time-consuming task, and we’ve been thinking how we can work on this task with more productivity in mind.

Borrowing experience from game development, where all the UI assets are stored in sprite sheets, we decided to try the same approach in UI-oriented app development.

Here is an idea how it can work.

Using one of the GUI templates, developers can compile an app skin template (sprite sheet) and plist where are stored coordinates of each element (buttons, icons, etc) and send this sprite sheet to the designer.

So the main task for the developer is to create the UI with native elements and link each one to the image in sprite sheet. After that the designer will replace each item in sprite sheet to a customized asset and send them back to the developer.

If everything is designed well, the developer would only need to replace the old sprite sheet to a new one and run the app with a new skin.

Ideally you would want to have a library that puts all the images to a dictionary and apply the skin to the item automatically.

It’s only a theory at this stage though, but we will try to do that in practice and inform you about our results here in future!

Feel free to follow Ramotion on Twitter for the latest news & stories regarding interface design and on Dribbble to see their latest creations.

Those that follow the patents awarded to Apple might have noticed that Apple was awarded a patent on Thursday for a multi-point focusing system that integrates with devices capable of multitouch input.

The awarded U.S. patent No. 2012/0120227 for “multi-point touch focus” basically describes a system that allows for users to select two or more areas of focus on a touchscreen.

The patent states that since cameras are becoming more and more developed the risk of a picture not turning out as expected increases. So to solve this dilemma, Apple proposes a solution that combines multitouch input, live-preview imaging and advanced auto-focusing algorithms and tracking assets.

From the patent abstract:

A camera includes a lens arranged to focus an image on an image sensor and a touch sensitive visual display for freely selecting two or more regions of interest on a live preview image by touch input. An image processor is coupled to the image sensor and the touch sensitive visual display. The image processor displays the live preview image according to the image focused on the image sensor by the lens. The image processor further receives the selection the regions of interest and controls acquisition of the image from the image sensor based on the characteristics of the image in regions that correspond to at least two of the regions of interest on the live preview image. The image processor may optimize sharpness and/or exposure of the image in at least two of the regions of interest. The image processor may track movement of the selected regions of interest.

Since this form of system will require a substantial amount of computing power, the patent does suggests that a dedicated chip be used to process the raw sensor data as well as control the camera’s operation. Readers might know that previous iDevices have all used the main SoC to process image data.

Many of those that have tried the new Mountain Lion have stated that Apple seems to be moving more and more towards an iOS like system by adding more and more features currently incorporated into iOS.

The latest addition to the developer preview brings the Automatic Download function for apps purchased from the OS X App Store. In the same manner as iOS, when you download an app, it is automatically downloaded on any Mac that is logged on the same account.

The pop-up dialog for the feature has been added to Developer Preview 3, but the functionality doesn’t actually work yet. When it does, you’ll have the option to enable the feature so that apps can be synced across multiple machines, or to simply ignore the pop-up window and micromanage everything instead.

Apple continues to make tweaks and improvements to Mountain Lion ahead of its release this summer. As 9to5mac notes

“Previous additions to the Preview have included a “Do Not Disturb” feature, Twitter notifications, as well as various bug fixes. The main focus of Mountain Lion has been to bring some iOS features across to the desktop, such as a Notification window, a new Messages app with support for iMessage, Game Center, Reminders, AirPlay Mirroring, and Gatekeeper.”

People say time flies well this is one of those moments. Almost four years ago Apple first introduced us to the App Store. The guys at MacStories has an in-depth look back at that time.

In four short years, Apple has gone from telling the world that all you need is a web app and not to install apps on your devices to an industry that has created almost half a million jobs.

Developers have also changed from releasing pointless apps, let’s be honest who needs a farting piano app, to apps that actually change how we manage our days.

Macstories mentions something interesting when they state that “Apple’s own success may be its biggest problem” the App Store is simply growing too fast!

What do you think is the success of the App Store going to cause its ultimate demise?

After the huge success of our earlier giveaway we have again teamed up with Packt Publishing!

This time three lucky winners stand a chance to win a copy of the newest addition to their hugely successful Unity series.

Keep reading to find out how you can be one of the Lucky Winners.

Overview of Unity iOS Essentials:

•  Dive straight into game development with no previous Unity or iOS experience
• Add multiplayer, input controls, debugging, in app and micro payments to your game
• Implement the different business models that will enable you to make money on iOS games

Read more about this book and download free Sample Chapter

How to Enter?

All you need to do is head on over to the book page (Unity iOS Game Development Essentials Beginner’s Guide)and look through the product description of these books and drop a line via the comments below this post to let us know what interests you the most about the book. It’s that simple.

Deadline:

The contest will close on 31/05/12  PT. Winners will be contacted by email, so be sure to use your real email address when you comment!

Scenario: You have an app and you want to get some mentions on top blogs and review sites. How do you go about it? Send an email and say..

“Here is another RSS reader app that does x and y, please can you review it…”

OR

“Here is an RSS reader app that gives the reader a stunning user experience with its custom User interface…”.

Which of the statements do you think will help in getting your app featured. Review sites and top blogs don’t want to feature yet another me too product.

There has to be a reason why your app stands out from the rest. One way to make that happen is to have a killer visual experience.

Think of the best apps out there today. Flipboard, Path, Pinterest. They all use user experience to set themselves apart.

Granted, these companies have the funding to hire rockstar designers and UX experts and you don’t. That’s where using templates comes in to play.

Here is an example of a template that, when integrated into your app, will give the user a killer visual experience.

Gridlocked – iPad App Design Template

Gridlocked is an iPad App Design template that takes some inspiration from the Pinterest website.

You can get the Gridlocked template here at $47 (instead of $70). The offer ends on Monday 21st May, 2012.

Here are some highlights of the Gridlocked theme

• Gradient Navigation Bar
• Grid View with Irregular Cells
• Table View with Self Sizing Cells
• Comments Table View
• Customize as you wish
• Hovering Detail View

Click here to get the Gridlocked theme before it goes back to the normal rate on Monday 21st May, 2012

Yesterday Research firm Gartner released its latest mobile device data for the first quarter of 2012. The research company found that Apple’s 33.1 million iPhones sold accounted for roughly 7.9 percent of the total mobile phone market. This is not quite in congruence with the numbers from Apple who stated last month that they sold 35.1 million iPhones.

What’s interesting is that Apple’s share doubled from the first quarter of 2011, when the company sold 16.8 million iPhones and represented 3.9 percent of all mobile device sales.

For the first time since 1998 Nokia have been dethroned by Samsung. The new leader sold 86.6 million units and took 20.7 percent of the market, while Nokia was in second with 83.2 million units, or 19.8 percent share.

The whole data can be seen below:

Research in Motion, keeps declining and saw its market share drop from 3 percent in the first quarter of 2011 to just 2.4 percent in the same period in 2012, with sales of 9.9 million handsets.

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit found in the data released by Gartner was that total worldwide mobile phone sales saw a 2 percent decline from the first quarter of 2011. According to Gartner this is the first time since the second quarter of 2009 that the market saw a decline.

It has long been reported that Sony is working on an adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, yesterday Sony announced that Aaron Sorkin, the award-winning writer who wrote the screenplay for The Social Network, has agreed to write the script for the biopic.

Sony Pictures Entertainment announced on Tuesday that Sorkin had signed on to the project, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal says:

“There is no writer working in Hollywood today who is more capable of capturing such an extraordinary life for the screen than Aaron Sorkin; in his hands, we’re confident that the film will be everything that Jobs himself was: captivating, entertaining, and polarizing.”

Readers might know that Sorkin won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on The Social Network and is well known for creating the television show The West Wing.

Isaacson’s book, “Steve Jobs,” was Amazon’s best-selling book last year, even though it was released towards the end of the year and thus only having weeks to reach the top of the charts.
The biography was released after Jobs passed away last October at the age of 56. According to rumors Sony signed a seven-figure deal for the book’s movie rights just days after the death of the Apple co-founder.

While Sony might have the official story from Isaacson, they may find themselves beat to screens by “Jobs: Get Inspired,” an independent biopic about Jobs that could arrive as early as later this year. Actor Ashton Kutcher will take the title role in “Jobs: Get Inspired”, which is currently slated for a fourth-quarter 2012 release. The actor who will take on the role of Jobs in the Sony Picture has yet to be decided.