Former Apple executive Scott Forstall recently spoke with thePhilosophy Talkshow, for a wide-ranging chat during which he offered rare insights into how Apple once thought about product design.

Who is Scott Forstall?

Stanford alumni, Scott Forstall began working with Steve Jobs back in 1992 when he took a position at NeXT.

When Jobs moved to Apple, Forstall followed, eventually becoming Apple'-™s senior vice president of iOS software.

He left the company in 2012 following the great Apple Maps debacle, and is now a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer. This means he has deep insight into how the company used to think about product design.

Brave Software on Tuesday previewed part of its unusual advertising model in a developer version of the Brave browser.

The firm also said users of the browser will share between 15% and 70% of the revenue earned from its strategy, which relies on blocking websites' intended online advertisements and replacing them with its own ads.

"This version provides a preview for users to test ad display and delivery but does not yet include advertiser confirmation or user payment for ad views," Brave Software wrote in a Jan. 15 unsigned post to the company's blog.

It's the late 1970s, and this data center has a high-performance IBM 360/75 mainframe that sports a massive 1 MB of core memory -- one of only four in the world, reports a computer operator pilot fish working there.

"I was a smoker and, of course, smoking in the computer room was forbidden due to the smoke detectors," fish says.

"One night shift I was the lone person in the building. I was walking through a hallway not even close to the computer room when I heard a very loud whooshing noise that sounded like hundreds of tires being deflated at the same time."

Fish runs to the computer room and sees a cloud of white, heavy fog covering the entire room. He knows what happened: The Halon fire-suppression system has deployed.

Throughout enterprises large and small, collaboration apps and services are breaking down silos, connecting colleagues in more effective ways and resulting in stronger employee engagement. These tools are enabling companies to transition to a purely digital world and transform business operations with relative ease.(Insider Story)

Google plans to go global with Chrome's ad-blocking in July, expanding the practice from North America and Europe, where it's been in place for nearly a year.

Beginning July 9, 2019, Chrome will ... stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly display (disruptive ads)," Ben Galbraith, senior product director of Chrome, wrote in a Jan. 9 post to a company blog.

Google first directed Chrome to "filter" online ads - its preferred label for the practice - in February 2018. Then, the company announced its browser would expunge all ads from sites that displayed advertisements identified as the most annoying on the web. The "disruptive" ad types were those that violated the "Better Ads Standards" set by an industry group named "Coalition for Better Ads" (CBA).

As far as computers go, Chromebooks are almost shockingly low-maintenance. Google's Chrome OS operating system updates itself silently and automatically '-” as do most of the core apps associated with the platform '-” and it doesn't get gunked up and slowed down over time, as traditional operating systems tend to do. There's no antivirus software to fret over, either, and little in the way of complicated settings or compatibility concerns. By and large, things "just work"" '-” like, for real.

It doesn'-™t matter if we buy them less often, we'-™re all going to continue to buy smartphones. The congregation of loyal iPhone users will continue to grow, which means Apple'-™s biggest challenge isn'-™t mobile '-" it'-™s Mac.

Wave bye-bye to Windows 7

Apple has a huge opportunity.

Over a third of all the Windows PCs on the planet are running a version of the Microsoft OS that is about to die a cold and lonely death, Windows 7. That installation is just 12 software patches away from forced retirement, after which enterprise and consumer users will be forced to upgrade, to pay Microsoft way too much money to support the old OS, or to upgrade.

Pilot fish gets a job working as a field engineer for a small local tech company run by a pair of married couples.

"Every morning I would get a list of service calls for the day at the morning meeting," says fish.

"The couples that ran the company had really bad chain-smoking issues. Both of the guys had heart attacks in their 30s and 40s, but I guess Mr. Nick O' Tine was a hell of an attraction.

"So every morning, the couples lit up and smoked for an hour or two straight while we went over the day's agenda in an enclosed room with no ventilation.

"By the end of each meeting, I smelled like an ashtray.

"After three months, I just couldn't take it, and I finally quit."

Google Keep lets you create notes and to-do lists that sync across your computer and phone or tablet. It's remarkably handy in a variety of ways. You can tag and search all your notes so they'-™re easy to find later. You can share your notes with other users and collaborate on them. You can record voice memos, and Keep will transcribe them as text notes. You can include images in your notes, and if text is shown in an image, the image shows up in search results. You can create time- or location-triggered reminders based on your notes.(Insider Story)

After failing to meet its own shipping timeline in 2018, Apple is now thought to have two manufacturers ramping up production of its AirPower wireless charging pad, according to a Hong Kong-based website that specializes in device charging news.

As first reported by MacRumors, the website ChargerLAB tweeted out this morning that it had "just learned from credible source in supply chain" that Chinese manufacturer Luxshare Precision has begun manufacturing the AirPower multi-device wireless charger. ChargerLAB followed its initial tweet with another claiming a second Apple supplier, Pegatron, will begin manufacturing AirPower chargers on Jan. 21.

A year from today, Microsoft will issue the final public security update for Windows 7, ending the operating system's 10-year run.

Here are some of the important numbers related to Windows 7's final 12 months.

10

The label for the version of Windows slated to replace Windows 7 as the default OS in the enterprise. Currently, Windows 10's adoption rate lags behind Windows 7's at the same point in its post-launch timeline. In March 2013, 41 months after its debut, Windows 7 powered approximately 49% of all Windows PCs.

Based on the exciting changes that are rolling out for modern SharePoint, I think 2019 is going to be the '-'year of modern'-" for SharePoint intranets. Within the next few months, most of the key barriers to '-'going modern'-" will have been removed the point where many more organizations will jump in. There are still a few big rocks that I know several of my clients are waiting for '-” including the ability to easily schedule the publishing of pages, multi-lingual sites, and audience targeting in navigation '-” but we know these are either planned or top of mind for 2019. (See my summary of all the roadmap slides from Ignite 2018.)

It was no surprise that many of the exhibits at CES 2019 were centered around wireless and 5G. Perhaps because I'-™m a wireless analyst and columnist, I view the world through this wireless lens anyway. But it should be obvious to everyone at this point that 5G is becoming very real...and that is very exciting for a number of reasons.

It'-™s important for everyone '-" every company, executive, investor, worker and customer '-" to understand the transformation that'-™s occurring. The future will be amazing'-¦and it will all be connected, operated and stored virtually, using wireless, the cloud and the IoT.

Sure, there was plenty of wireless news last week at CES from wireless networks, smartphone and tablet makers and more. But if you looked closely, there was also so much from a growing variety of companies who are using wireless to transform themselves and their industries.

Flashback to the early 1970s, when this IT pilot fish first starts working for a government office with not one but two mainframes.

"In our computer room, the two mainframes were about five feet tall and stood side by side," fish says.

"One day, our computer operator happened to place a hand on each mainframe.

"He only found out that the machines weren't properly grounded after he was flung against the wall on the other side of the room.

"So he went to the branch chief to report the problem.

"The branch chief, in turn, went to the computer room, stood in front of the machines and placed a hand on each of them.

"After he picked himself off the floor, he called the mainframe support staff to get it fixed."

Blockchain offers enterprises a new method for transacting over a distributed, trusted network, but plugging the technology into existing databases, ERP systems and a client/partner base is no small task. And in many cases, it isn't even needed.(Insider Story)