Pete Mortensen - page 4

Ken from Cooks’ Den has whipped up this snazzy iPad Thai dish in honor of the holy tablet’s launch. Who’s hungry?

Cooks’ Den via BoingBoing

We all know the wait for the iPad, at least in the U.S., will be over on April 3, right? Wrong. True connoisseurs know they need to wait until June 1, when Mervis Diamond Importers will unleash the hideous and despicable Diamond iPad on the world. It’s a bejeweled and bedazzled monstrosity boasting 11.43 carats worth of diamonds to make your magical technology device far more ugly and way more likely to cut your fingers as you watch a movie or read a book on it. All for the low price of $20,000 and your dignity.

For the truly elite only. Do you have enough cash and little enough common sense to go for it?

Mervis via Gizmodo

No app’s banning from the App Store has caused more gnashing of teeth and anger than the loss of Google Voice (no, not even the removal of the weak girly picture apps). While it’s understandable why AT&T would want to keep free phone calling and SMS off of their network, it’s still infuriating. As a GrandCentral user from way back in the day (before Google bought it), it annoys me that I can’t have a native interface to my account.

That said, suppliers of Voice are fighting back. Google has made a very nice web app available through Safari, and now Riverturn, makers of the popular VoiceCentral app for iPhone before its removal, has written a web app nearly as good as the native version. Called “Black Swan,” the web app won’t work at all in Safari. Instead, you save a bookmark that populates itself with your Google Voice data and then configures itself perfectly. It’s available in an ad-supported free version or for $6 to get a premium version including photo importing, better customer service and a Do Not Disturb feature.

I’ve been using it all day, and it’s pretty slick. The one flaw I see so far is that it won’t sync my contacts from my phone for regular use, which limits its usefulness as my primary dialer. Still, it’s by far the best way to access Google Voice without jailbreaking. Check it out!

Apple just premiered the very first iPad commercial during the first ad break of tonight’s Academy Awards. It was very good, just a rock song and demoing every imaginable feature while continually rotating from portrait to landscape. We’ll post as soon as Apple or Youtube does. Embed from Engadget now in post. Real Apple version here.

Thanks for the finds, Mitchell and Paolo!

Edit: And CNET caught Steve Jobs on the red carpet.

Just a shade over nine years ago, Apple launched iTunes, a fairly late, fairly average MP3 player with CD burning built in. And though it lacked many of the features of Audion, then the best music player for Mac, it not only became the market leader, but it set the stage for the iPod, widespread legal music downloads, legal TV, the iPhone, and soon the iPad. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes saved Apple. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes is now Apple’s most successful piece of software ever in terms of users.

But it would also be no exaggeration to call it the worst piece of software Apple makes and the one thing that could disrupt Apple’s current march to mobile device dominance. It has bloated into a crashy kludge that the rest of the Apple universe depends upon. Despite a lot of good intentions from amazing software developers, iTunes has become Apple’s Internet Explorer 6 — an unmitigated disaster.

If you’re like me, the last fortnight has seen little activity other than watching Olympic skiing, skating, curling, hockey, luge, bobsled, Nordic Combined, curling, complaints about NBC, curling, aerials, and curling. With the Closing Ceremonies now a rapidly fading memory of Shatner songs and giant inflatable beavers, there’s never been a better time to start slowly weaning yourself off the XXIst Winter Olympiad. And there really isn’t a better option than the deceptively simple “Vancouver 2010,” the well-made official iPhone game of the recently departed Winter Games.

Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune has a mole at the Apple shareholders’ meeting today. Not much to report, other than that Steve is in good spirits and cracking jokes, but there is one piece of pretty huge news: Apple is planning to open 25 stores in China, signs that the company sees a lot of untapped growth potential in Asia, where it currently has a retail presence in Japan and one store in Beijing so far. The iPhone launch has been regarded as disappointing in China, but this could good go some way to changing things.

Inside Apple’s Shareholder Meeting (Apple 2.0)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k0V4Zk4Nqs

We told you a few weeks ago that Square|Enix was bringing classic titles from its long-running RPG series Final Fantasy to the iPhone. Today, we bring you the first footage of the game in action (and a screenshot showing the interface).

Looks tasty, though I admit I’ll be more excited when Final Fantasy IV comes to the iPhone. That’s a must-download. And don’t even get me started on Chrono Trigger…

Via TouchArcade

The AR.Drone feels like the future of video games. A combination of a flying, hovering, and downright smart helicopter with four rotors and lots of sensors, and an iPhone augmented reality app, the Drone allows gamers to see the world through cameras on the chopper, to augmentedly dogfight with friends, and even to attack robots that only they can see. Basically, it was the hit of CES, and it shows an entire class of games that the iPhone makes possible.

On Friday, the AR.Drone from Parrot took the stage at the venerable TED Conference in Long Beach alongside everyone from Bill Gates and complexity theory genius Benoit Mandelbrot to Andrew Bird and Sarah Silverman. But before then, the little helicopter from the future hit northern California, making a cameo at MacWorld and, in a stroke of luck, briefly landing in my control on Thursday. And I came away more impressed by the actual device than I had been by video and demos of it.

You can tell Jay-Z is disappointed he doesn’t have one. And then he remembers he has his own brand of vodka and millions of dollars.

Via Engadget

Though the announcement of Apple’s iPad has met with the typical mixture of hyperbolic praise and hyperbolic criticism (no one can talk sensibly about it), there has been one consistent complaint that most would agree is valid: a device this powerful should be capable of some form of multitasking. But I think I have the answer.

What it is: Skimble is a fitness-tracking iPhone app that stands out from the crowd by keeping track of rock climbing, swimming, and even yoga.

Why it’s cool: Maria Ly created Skimble because she found no good tools for tracking the sports she had become passionate about in recent years. Basically, she’s become a very good rock climber in a very short time, and didn’t have a way to really track that progress and get a clear picture of how far she had come. She also does a lot of yoga, and, unsurprisingly, Nike+ doesn’t work so well for quantifying the impact of your Downward Dogs and Sun Salutations.

Fortunately, Maria’s a talented software engineer, so she was actually able to do something about it. And, as a rock climber (though one not quite so good as Ly), I can say that Skimble is just about perfect for tracking your climbing and bouldering efforts. I put into action at my local climbing emporium Mission Cliffs yesterday, and I was easily able to click a button to select the difficulty of the climb, the fashion in which I finished it, and a note (typically the name of the route). And as a result, I have a record of where I succeeded, where I failed, and where I maybe over-did it (that would be the late 5.12a I threw in).

Steve Jobs will never pitch a product more effectively than he did at the announcement of the iPhone. He said he was introducing three products: “A revolutionary phone, a widescreen iPod, and a break-through internet device. And they’re all one product: The iPhone.”

I thought back to that legendary pitch when I saw Steve affix one of his weakest lines ever to the iPad, a device I think actually has remarkable potential:

Image via Gizmodo

That’s right, the selling point is that it’s “Our most advanced technology in a magical & revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.” Really? Your selling points are advancement, magic, revolution, and cheapness? The best thing that line has going for is that device and price rhyme. First of all, almost no one buys magic. More importantly, Apple should never make price a central selling point; other companies can make cheaper knock-offs and then Apple has to re-convince people that that higher prices are justified. Once you try to become the price leader, you can’t really try to go premium again.

But the tagline was also a summation of the one problem that kept coming up for me as I watched the iPad announcement: the device simply does not have a killer app. A killer app, is the use that shows why a new technology is worth buying. For example, microwaves didn’t start selling until microwaveable popcorn was introduced and PCs didn’t sell until spreadsheet software was launched. The iPhone’s killer app, quite honestly, was Safari; the iPhone could certainly do a lot more than browse the web, but for many people, seeing the New York Times home page in multitouch made the sale.

The iPad? Well, I’ll say that the most impressive thing I saw today was the New York Times home page all over again. It’s even better than mobile web browsing than the iPhone. So what? That’s not enough to get me to spend $500. But not to worry. I believe the killer app for iPad is on the way, and possibly by launch. It’s called iLife.

On Sunday night, I made a set of predictions for what to expect from Wednesday’s keynote. It was intended to be direct, straightforward and make a clear forecast of what we would actually see. How’d I do? Let’s go to the tape.

The Tablet Will Have a Custom UI, but Closer to iPhone Experience Than Mac

Probably the biggest question on everyone’s mind is what operating system will power Apple’s tablet of the future, with the leading candidates being Mac OS X and iPhone OS. The more I’ve thought about it, neither is perfectly suited to running such a device, which will be more focused on content creation than the iPhone but less so than the Mac. I’m therefore willing to say that the Tablet is a lock to get its own user interface built on top of core OS X technologies. It will be heavily gesturally driven (yes, even more so than the iPhone), and have far more precise sensing than the current iPhone screen. That said, this UI will more closely resemble the iPhone in look and functionality than it will Snow Leopard. Multitasking is still of less overall utility on a purely touch device than it is on one with a keyboard and mouse combo, so expect full-screen applications, no overlapping windows and possibly iPhone apps that run as widgets on a Dashboard.

NAILED IT! I was wrong about the apps as widgets on a Dashboard, but that’s a tiny miss — and I think it would have been better than the actual solution, which is to run iPhone apps as either iPhone resolution or blow them up to double size.
Score 9.5/10

One of the most crucial announcements of today’s iPad introduction was the launch of iBooks, Apple’s e-reading application, which has a bundled iBookstore that allows users to purchase e-books on the go. By all accounts, the experience is compelling and fun.

But there’s a big question here around content access. Though Steve Jobs listed off about 8 book publishing partners for the platform, he didn’t mention access to a specific book store partner like Borders, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. And that’s pretty troubling. Even though Apple’s going with the open-source ePub format, which means books from Barnes & Noble should work, there’s no direct mechanism yet for connecting the two, and the import experience remains to be seen.

And I’m not confident in Apple’s ability to populate an amazing bookstore on their own. The movie selection of iTunes leaves a lot to be desired, and I fear the same for books without a partner on-board who really knows the field. Janky as the Amazon Kindle is, its library selection is unmatched.

iBookstore: Slamdunk or Slamflop? You decide!

Always fun to see long-term Apple design language tics show up in brand new products. The wedge shape of the iPad in its case set up for horizontal typing is making me remember the Apple IIc. Pretty rad.

Image via Recycled Goods

This is my last chance to say something before the great and terrible Steve holds his tablet aloft (and even then, rumormongers might have beaten him to the punch), so let me give you a bit of a long-view perspective, something usually left out when we’re discussing whether we’ll see a 10-inch or 11-inch LCD panel on the device.

You see, I’ve been thinking a lot about Apple and its insane run of success over the last nine years. Consider this: In 2001, Apple’s revenue was about $6.5 billion. In 2009, that revenue was $42.3 billion. Essentially, the company grew by more than 550 percent in eight years.

How exactly is that possible? Was it the great products? Partly. Great leadership? Sure. Killer marketing? No question. But more than all of those combined, the secret to Apple’s success was that it defined and followed the right strategy and the right era. Steve Jobs is king of the world right now because he hit on the idea for the digital hub.

UI Designer Dustin Curtis has posted a pair of Apple Tablet pictures that he initially claimed were given to him by a friend in the know. The Tablet as depicted is basically an over-sized iPhone, but with the nicest proportions yet. Those pesky reflections and shadows are a near-dead giveaway even if Dustin said he was reasonably sure the reflections had been deliberately messed up to throw people off the trail.

Time will tell. What do you think?

One more photo after the jump.

Fantastic interview by Doug Evans and Alan Pottasch with Steve Jobs from 1993 about Paul Rand, widely regarded as one of the greatest corporate identity designers ever (think IBM, UPS, ABC). Rand designed the logo for NeXT (below), which very quickly helped to build the company’s brand without a massive ad campaign.

Seeing Jobs talk about someone more self-driven and fanatical about excellence than himself is always fun. And it includes an amazing quote: “I’ll solve your problem. You pay me.”

Via Darren Geraghty

Well, it’s finally here: Tablet Week. Or, as I like to think of it, it’s time for there to be Just One More Thing. We all know how significant we expect this announcement to be. A major new advancement in computing, a killer device for a market that has failed time after time, and, just maybe, the last great breakthrough product of Steve Jobs’s amazing career.

All will be revealed on Wednesday, but since we’ve got to something in the interceding 60 hours, I’ve decided to go all in and actually make some bets on killer features for the Apple Tablet With No Name. They’re my best guess based on what we know about the existing tablet and eReader markets, soon-to-launch technologies, and past actions of Apple itself. I haven’t touched one, I haven’t talked to anyone who has, and the Apple employees I’ve seen in the last few weeks are people who know even less about the big secret project than I do.

Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.

Gary Snyder, a 79-year-old poet with roots in the Beat scene, lives in the tranquility of the Sierra Nevada foothills. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and he hasn’t heard about the existence of the Apple tablet.

But he loves his Mac.

John Markoff of the New York Times got in touch with Snyder to chat about the latest from Apple, but what he got out of it was a new lens on the world. Or at least computing. Snyder allowed the Times to reprint, with permission, his poem “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh.” You’ve got to head over to read the full thing, but just consider this line:

Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,

And it winks when it goes out,

Could not say it better myself. Is it Wednesday yet?

We’re down to a week until Steve Jobs reveals the latest something or other from Apple at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Arts Center. Most believe it to be some manner of tablet, of course (which the rounded corners in the above teaser image support), or a widget, gadget, or even a doodad.

With such a major whatsit being announced one week from today, speculation is running rampant. The Wall Street Journal periodical publication today revealed an exclusive, courtesy of an anonymous informant: Apple’s tablet will be amazing for reading books playing games reading magazines communicating with your family video-conferencing ALL OF THE ABOVE!

In a breathless run-down, writers Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ethan Smith essentially list off nerds’ every dream feature for the magical device, citing partnerships with the New York Times, EA, Conde Nast, TV channels, the launch of web-based iTunes and, AHEM, Microsoft’s Bing as clear evidence that the Cupertino Craftsmen will be transforming every industry they don’t already dominate.

And the weirdest thing about it? None of it seems implausible. Not one hyperbolic assertion. If Apple’s doing something beyond the iPhone, it should be the world’s most killer video-watching, game-playing, web-surfing, video-chatting, computer-displacing new platform ever conceived. It should actually be beyond what most of us can dream of. I’m just wondering how Steve’s going to introduce it. “Today, we have 17 new revolutionary products to introduce. But they’re all one product. It’s a washer, a dryer, a thimble, a salad, a painkiller, a television, a TV network, a shoelace, a hamster, a handkerchief, a fax machine, a zipper, a bicycle, a foie gras, a US Senator, a secret lover, and your grandmother’s meat loaf. We call it iPad.”

It’s going to be a wild one on Wednesday, folks. Keep those rumors flying.

Wall Street Journal Via Engadget

Console emulators have been a firm fixture of the software grey market practically since the dawn of the Internet. A legal loophole regarding back-ups means that emulation software itself is on solid legal ground (to the degree that Steve Jobs once demoed a PlayStation emulator for Mac during a keynote over significant protest by Sony).

Unsurprisingly, emulation is one of the most popular reasons to jailbreak the iPhone. One (former) console-maker has realized that it’s usually smarter to provide a legal alternative rather than try to squash the bootleg edition. According to Gizmodo, Sega is on the verge of launching Ultimate Genesis, a free emulator that includes Space Harrier II and will enable in-app purchases of what will soon be a large library of titles from the dawn of the 16-bit era. It hasn’t shown up in the App Store yet, but based on Sega’s existing iPhone titles, from Sonic the Hedgehog to Super Monkey Ball 2 means it will be worth waiting for.

Ultimate Genesis: Sega’s Official Console Emulator for iPhone [Gizmodo]

We take pictures to remember our own lives better and tell stories about the people who matter most to us. In older days, we had photo albums. These days, we have gigantic digital libraries on our computers, and a lot of the time it’s pretty disorganized. Sure, the most important photos are grouped into albums and what-not, but little else is. The meaning behind the pictures isn’t obvious.

Apple has taken steps to address this in iPhoto 09, adding in face detection and the ability to take people in pictures for searching by participant and searching by geography via GPS data, but these elements aren’t well-intertwined — and it does a bad job of considering the long view. That’s where MemoryMiner, a very nice piece of shareware from GroupSmarts, steps in.