iPhone Battery charger with flashlight & LED from RichardSolo
Back in the mists of time at the dawn of the Gadget Age, Richard Thalheimer’s Sharper Image was one of the more highly regarded purveyors of well-made, interesting and sometimes even useful products for the discerning gadgeteer. Starting out as a catalog selling jogging watches in 1977, The Sharper Image eventually grew into a heavy hitting company selling high-end consumer gadgetry through dozens of retail stores throughout the US as well as its monthly catalog and website, before imploding in bankruptcy in 2008.
The end for The Sharper Image was drawn out over a couple of years and after being forced from his position as CEO in 2006, Thalheimer founded RichardSolo, an online venture completely unrelated to The Sharper Image, in 2007. Recently RichardSolo debuted its own line of portable charging solutions for iPhone, iPod and other smartphones, proving sometimes it’s smart to dance with the date that brung ya.
The RichardSolo lineup is eerily reminiscent of items that might have been found at The Sharper Image back in the day, updated of course to reflect technology’s advances: in addition to chargers, there are cases, speakers, docks headsets and personal stereo devices, all in the $29 to $199 range and all featuring a design aesthetic positioned to lend the buyer a claim to a certain degree of coolness. Beyond the realm of personal gadgetry the company offers everything from massage chairs to body monitors to travel and Earth Friendly items. And yes, even jogging watches.
Plainview is a web browser with a difference. It’s a full screen browser, lacking any bells and whistles at all except just the one: no chrome, if you’ll forgive the pun.
So all you get is web content from floor to ceiling. Everything else gets hidden away, including your Dock and your Menu Bar.
So, you might wonder, why on earth would I want that? Good question.
Boxee is Apple TV done right. It’s a great, Net-connected, “social” media player that allows you to play video from all over the Web as well as files from file-sharing networks. It streams content from sites like Netflix, Pandora and Last.fm, and makes it easy to get entertainment recommendations from friends. It transforms the Apple TV into a truly-useful internet video device.
The beta adds a much-improved that’s easier to navigate. Boxee on Apple TV was previously available only as an early alpha version. The latest beta was released in January but was unavailable for Apple TV users — until now.
A group of Boxee users have updated the ATV-Usb creator to install the Boxee Beta.
Users who already have Boxee Alpha installed on their AppleTV can simply update Launcher and then update Boxee to install the beta, no patchstick needed.
Remember Casey Neistat? He and his brother caused a stir back in 2003 with The iPod’s Dirty Secret, a viral video about the iPod’s irreplaceable battery.
Now he’s got a really nice, artful little film about Chatroulette, a web app tha lets you videoconference with random strangers all over the world (hence the roulette). Check it out. It’s well 5.57 minutes of your time.
John Gruber's Daring Fireball is getting comments, thanks to DaringFireballWithComments.net.
UPDATE: Just got word that Gruber is NOT cool with the site, and is demanding it be taken down. This about 20 mins after this post was published. Guess the “reasonably parodic period” is up. That was quick.
I’ve just been IM-ing with John Casasanta, the brains behind DaringFireballWithComments.net – a website that mirrors Apple pundit John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog — with the addition of reader comments on posts.
Casasanta says he’s received a short note from Gruber, who says he’s cool with the site. Gruber even gave Casasanta permission to keep the site up for a “reasonably parodic period” of time.
“This absolves me of any lawsuit,” says Casasanta, who runs the super-popular MacHeist software marketing operation.
As reported yesterday, DaringFireballWithComments.net mirrors everything on Daring Fireball — posts, ads and all — but allows anonymous commenting on posts. Gruber’s blog is famous for not having comments, an ethos at odds with most other web publishers (except Engadget, which has temporarily shut down its “out-of-control” comments system). Casasanta is mirroring Gruber’s site as a “social experiment.”
Meanwhile, most of the comments on DaringFireballWithComments.net so far have been exceptionally moronic, partly proving Gruber’s point that comments are a distraction.
Casasanta says he is unconcerned by the stupidity (which appears to be mostly purposeful. People are being deliberately dumb) and is willing to give it time. “It’s kinda what I would’ve expected so far,” he says.
One option is moderating the comments, but Cassanta says it hasn’t been discussed yet.
Gruber hasn’t responded to a couple of notes I sent him asking for comment, and hasn’t yet mentioned the mirror on his site or Twitter stream. As some have noted, with about 40,00 followers, Gruber’s Twitter stream acts as Daring Fireball’s behind-the-scenes comments system.
We were a pain, I know, bugging you guys to vote for us in 2010 Golden Retrevo Awards.
But it paid off — we won a 2010 Golden Retrevo Award for outstanding achievements in the “All Things Apple” space. The awards honor the “best and brightest independent gadget blogs on the web.”
Retrevo is an up-and-coming electronics shopping/review site, which claims more than 5 million visitors a month. Here’s the full list of Golden Retrevo Award winners.
Many — if not most — people await the future, some with great anticipation, others with more anxiety. But designers are a breed apart. Designers create the future today.
Yanko Design’s brilliant 2009 design retrospective showcases the web magazine’s passion for modern industrial design and original ideas. The feature highlights a number of talented, undiscovered designers, a few of whom chose Apple products and other computer technology ideas as jumping off points for products we’d not be surprised to see in production one day soon.
Check out our gallery selection of Yanko Design’s best thought provoking tech and transportation ideas for 2009, along with a couple creepy borg-like innovations we’d just as soon see remain on the drawing board.
As a blogger, it’s hard to know quite from just what angle I should tackle modder Will Urbina’s utterly wonderful but certainly unholy amalgamation of a Xbox and a Hackintosh.
Should I describe it as a hideous, pupal cocoon that has been secreted by Microsoft to encase the imago of the Macintosh struggling to free its wings within? Or is OS X just the magic employed a soul-devouring hag, who — once bedded — lets the charm drop and reveals herself as the uggo she is?
Either way, Urbina’s creation is probably a psychoanalytically diagnosable incubus in the mind of Steve.
Called the OS Xbox Pro, Urbina’s project takes a translucent Microsoft Xbox chassis and crams it with Hackintoshable guts, including a pair of 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550s, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT GPU, 8GB of RAM, a 16GB solid state drive, and four additional hard drives. One drive boots Windows 7, the other OS X Snow Leopard (retail bought, Urbina assures), with two other hard drives for video editing. The end cost was $1500 for component from New Egg, which is just a little bit less than the cost of a 27 inch iMac.
The impetus to Urbina’s profane cross-breed case mod? Although he prefers Windows, Urbina needed a work machine to use Final Cut Pro.
The end result is sure to have Cupertino weaving a circle around it thrice and shutting its eyes in holy dread, but personally, I just can’t think of a better use for an old Xbox than to make it into a Mac.
Here’s the Top 5 Secrets for making a killer website to showcase your iPhone app, courtesy of the WebDesignerWall blog.
“To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd.”
Here’s the list:
One Page — Your app’s site should be one page. No more, no less.
iPhone Image — Use an image of an iPhone running the app as the main design element. Drop shadow or reflection optional.
Apple App Store Badge — The download button should be Apple’s App Store badge. Easy to spot and instantly recognizable.
Animated Screenshots — All sites show screenshots of their app, but animated screens show it in action.
Display Pricing — It’s frustrating for prospective customers to not know the price up front.
The colleague said the designer was expecting his temp job to turn into a real one, but hadn’t.
“He believed he was in a temp-to-hire position, and after three months of extra hours and butt-kissing, turns out it’s just a temp position. He was a good worker too. I’d have recommended him. Too bad he burned his bridges… Obviously he had contemplated quitting long enough to make this thing, but still refused to speak to anyone about his feelings. Ironically, he complained about the ‘divas’ at his last job.”
Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, is launching an online community focused on fixing high-tech products rather than throwing them away.
Best known for its awesome teardowns, the Mac-oriented repair company iFixit is launching a online community devoted to fixing high-tech products, rather than tossing them away.
“The world has a problem with rapidly consuming devices and tossing them aside, ignoring long-term environmental impact,” said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens on the company’s blog. “With your help, we are going to change that. I’m confident that we can change our culture of ephemeral ownership.”
Currently in private beta, iFixit Answers looks like a cross between a forum and a wiki. In a blog post announcing the launch, Wiens outlines four points that should be of interest to all publishers focused on building productive online communities:
It’s important that posts get more useful over time. It’s not uncommon for a traditional repair forum response to become the canonical source for an answer to a problem, only to get outdated and stagnant as technology changes.
It’s important that we recognize expertise. It matters if the author of an answer is a professional technician, or has helped 200 people fix their problems.
It’s important to make helping people fun. There’s a rush that comes from helping someone solve a tricky problem, being recognized by people for the research you put into a question before asking it, or testing your hardware diagnosis mettle against others.
And most important, we need to close the feedback loop between the people answering questions and those asking them. Repairing things is uniquely tangible — when you use a solution proposed by someone, you know for a fact whether or not it worked. Finding out that the answer you gave someone actually fixed their problem is one of the greatest feelings in the world.
It’ll be very interesting how iFixit makes good on these points. The future on online publishing is nurturing community, and Wiens has nailed some of the key points. We’ll be keeping a close on the project.
It’s been said countless times: one indicator of Apple’s superiority over Microsoft and Dell (and other major computer and electronics manufacturers that are — for the most part — associated with Windows) is the fact that Apple inspires creativity in the general populace on a scale that dwarfs the influence of any other computer-oriented company you’d care to name.
Some evidence of this can be found in the following gallery of 10 simply awesome wallpapers themed around nothing more complicated than the Apple logo. Perhaps you know others in this specific genre that belong in this class — we invite you to let us know about it in comments below.
And if you can find anything comparable out there built around a logo from Microsoft, Windows, Dell, HP, etc., do let us know about that, too.
When a gadget has a doppelganger, the differences between the two are automatically thrown into sharp relief. Because Seagate’s DockStar runs on Pogoplug technology and uses the Pogoplug interface, our review of Cloud Engine’s Pogoplug a few weeks back pretty much covers the DockStar completely.
The DockStar performs the same exact function as the Pogoplug: it’s an instant, easy-to-use internet connection for any hard drive. Transfer files to a USB thumb drive or portable drive, plug it into the DockStar, then access the files from anywhere on the Internet. But there are three differences between the two products — one of them a big catch.
The Pogoplug from CloudEngines looks like a boring power adapter, but it’s a fantastic little gizmo that turns any USB hard drive into your own little cloud server accessible over the Internet.
Just stick a router and USB hard drive into the $99 Pogoplug, plug it into the wall and baboom — instant cloud. Which means I can dump my important files and media onto a drive, and as long as I’m online, I can access those files, anywhere, anytime.
A picture from PeopleofWalmart.com. The caption reads: "Yes you see that correctly. It is an old man with big supple delicious looking breast implants."
The cruel but funny People of Walmart website is looking for a developer to create an iPhone app for the website.
If you’re interested in making an iPhone app to make fun of misfits — and possibly get sued for publishing their unauthorized photographs — contact People of Walmart at info@peopleofwalmart.com.
Surely you’ve seen the viral website, which publishes candid-camera style pictures of the various meth tweakers, rednecks, and other sundry weirdos that frequent the nation’s largest retailer, along with cruelly funny captions.
Just a few weeks old, the site is often down due to server overload. The developers are also looking for a new host that can cope with the traffic.
ID Software’s browser-based shooter Quake Live is finally available for Mac users — mostly.
An update to the game’s servers means the game can be played on Safari on the Mac, but not Firefox.
“This update is Safari only, but we’ve pushed a ticket with the folks at Mozilla and hope to have the Firefox build fixed very shortly,” ID says.
Based on the popular Quake 3 Arena, Quake Live is a free, browser-based shoot-em-up. It features more than 40 arenas and five game modes, including duel, capture the flag and group deathmatch. Players can frag each other or computer-controlled bots, and can be matched according to skill level. The game requires a plugin to play. It is not Flash based.
The game went online earlier this year, but Windows only. It’s been wildly popular: more than 113,000 player accounts were created in the first six hours.
Here’s a clever way to use Twitter to get attention for a new iPhone app — get Twitter users to tweet about a MacBook prize giveaway.
Taptaptap is giving away a $6,000 custom MacBook to a lucky follower of the company’s Twitter stream, drawn at random.
The competition is hotting up as Twitter users retweet the details and the promotion spreads virally. More than 10,500 people have entered so far, less than a day after the competition opened.
To enter, users must follow Taptaptap’s Twitter stream, and then broadcast details of the competition by updating their Twitter status with the competition URL: http://tweetblast.taptaptap.com. The winner will be drawn at random on August 27.
The competition is to promote Taptaptap’s new app called Convert, a unit calculator that costs $1 (launch special).
The winner will get a brand new ColorWare Stealth MacBook Pro — a limited edition MacBook Pro that’s been customized with a soft-touch, matt black coating. Only 10 made, says ColorWare, and worth $5,999.
If you enter, keep an eye on your Twitter account. The winner will notified with a direct message. If they don’t respond within a week, a new winner will be chosen.
