oscarordane: Editor's desk: Training dragons

Monday, August 20, 2012

Editor's desk: Training dragons

Editor's desk: Here there be dragons

Been a busy week, so I'm going to rock the bullet points, Phil Nickinson style.

The picture up top is from last night. I went to see the live version of Dreamworks' How to Train your Dragon, and to say it was spectacular would be to do it a disservice. They combine 20 projectors (at $100k a pop), an incredible wire rig, and several full sized, brilliantly realized animatronic dragons into something you truly have to experience to believe. Watching Toothless take off did indeed make me believe a dragon could fly. If it comes to a city near you, check it out. And if you're up for it, stick around and meet the dragons afterwards. They're state-of-the-art-of-FX, and will not fail to impress.
Apple vs. Samsung is winding down in the U.S., but Motorola vs. Apple is picking up. While some may wish everyone involved would just cut it all out, they're big businesses and big money is involved, and until there's patent reform and much better precedent, it isn't going anywhere, any time soon. So he question is, how does iMore cover it? Regular updates? Ignore the law and focus on interesting tangents like iPhone and iPad prototypes? Ignore them completely? What kind of coverage would you like to see?
As promised, we're continuing to roll out iMore 2.0 features. Here's the latest -- you can now subscribe to comments and get email alerts only when someone responds to you, or when any new comment is made on a post you've subscribed too. Consider it a beta for now, but try it out and let me know what you think of it, and how useful you find it?
So Twitter tightened the ropes on 3rd party client developers one step further this week. I've already given you my opinion, and linked to what other journalists and developers are saying. But to drive it home a little more sharply, I plan to crank up my app.net and Google+ activity from now on. Good services turn bad only when users sit by and do nothing. Give me your feedback, but do it @reneritchie and +Rene Ritchie for change, how about that?
The iPad mini looks like it's the real deal, but while we've learned it's going to be announced on September 12 alongside the iPhone 5, we haven't heard when it's going to ship yet, other than "October" (and that was a long time ago -- schedules can and do change). We also learned it was going to be $200 to $250, but that was back before the Amazon Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7 failed to achieve any significant traction in the market. So here's the question for this week -- when exactly will the iPad mini hit store shelves and what exactly will be the price?