From the wonderful city of Manchester – birthplace of The Smiths and The Fall, unfairly mocked as Rain Capital of England – comes something wonderful and simple for your iPhone: the MoviePeg.
If ever you needed a sign that Apple was a different kind of technology company, this is it.
What other computer manufacturer would remove its top-selling, hype-inducing, industry-altering new product from the prime spot on its website home page, and replace it with an obituary to an investor?
This is one of those “Here’s to the crazy ones” moments, a corporate action that is uniquely personal. This is one of those times when the vast corporate entity that is Apple speaks with a very human, very uncorporate tone.
Jerome York was a huge figure in the auto and technology business sectors. Apple’s tribute to him is a reflection of just how important a role he played in the company’s early history.
Next week sees the opening of the CanSecWest digital security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.
It’s also going to be host to the annual Pwn2Own contest, where a variety of computers are offered up as prizes to the first individual who can crack their way into them.
This is the fourth year of Pwn2Own and the total prize money has ballooned to US$100,000. Nice work if you can get it.
This year the browser targets are: Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, Mozilla Firefox 3 on Windows 7, Google Chrome 4 on Windows 7, and Apple Safari 4 on MacOS X Snow Leopard.
There’s also a separate part of the contest aimed at mobile devices, which this year will be: an Apple iPhone 3GS, a RIM Blackberry Bold 9700, a Nokia device running Symbian S60 (probably the E62), and a Motorola phone running Android (probably a Droid).
There are some interesting omissions from the target list this year: no Ubuntu desktops? No Opera Mobile?
In 2009, the a MacBook Air was the first device to be won. Wonder how Snow Leopard will fare this year?
So another MacHeist has been and gone, and no doubt a lot of Cult readers jumped in to get their bundle of apps for a bargain price.
But not everyone thinks it’s necessarily such a good idea.
Knox Bronson got in touch to tell us about a little video he’d made.
It’s called Pixels at an Exhibition, and it documents the creative efforts of people who took part in the iPhone photography exhibition at the Giorgi Gallery in Berkeley, California, in December last year.
On Windows, when you’ve finished using a particular piece of software, you close it with the X symbol in the top right corner of the application window.
Many switchers assume that the window close control in the top left of an OS X application window does the same job: but that’s not quite true.
You’re all going crazy with your iPad ordering. Meanwhile, over on Vimeo, BrewBeau has some craziness of his own going on.
BrewBeau writes: “I’m a recent PC convert who waited patiently while Apple worked out the kinks with their latest iMac release of the 27″ Intel powered 2.8GHz quad core i7 iMac. It’s a thing of beauty and I wanted to relay my experience of getting my new machine.”
His video is one of the following:
Whatever. You watch it and make up your own mind:
(Note: This is a lie.)
If – like me – your fridge is black, then these shiny iPhone app fridge magnets from Jailbreak Collective will look very smart indeed displayed on the door.
Just 13 bucks gets you a set of these icon almost-replicas. I say almost because if you look carefully, you’ll see they’re not identical to the Apple originals. But they’re close enough.
Only problem is, they look so smart on a decent black background that it’ll be a shame to spoil the effect by using them to hold shopping lists, receipts, and all that other fridge/paper junk you use fridge magnets for.
Might be worth getting an extra fridge just for these then.
(Via geek.com.)
Soft Sailor is a tech blog I’ve not encountered before, but today I stumbled across a very odd post indeed. Published just yesterday, it recommends downloading something a little bit unusual: Internet Explorer 5.2.3.
Which is only, let’s see now… about seven years old.
The author Dragos Pirvu writes:
“Although it’s not that popular on Mac computers, Internet Explorer is also available on Apple’s Mac OS X platform and it’s doing a fairly good job.”
And what’s more:
“Although it does have some security leaks, some Mac OS X developers are still using Internet Explorer to create CSS files and others.”
So that’s it. While the rest of us have needlessly upgraded to all this new-fangled stuff like Safari and Firefox, it’s the CSS devs who have faithfully – yet secretively – kept IE5 alive as a CSS editor. Who knew?
At long last, the Welcome to MacIntosh documentary (which we’ve mentioned here a few times) is now available to watch online, for free. .
The Menu Bar sits at the top of your screen at all times. Let’s take a moment to get to know it. It’s worth doing, because the Menu Bar is going to be one of your best friends.
When you used Windows, you were used to see menus inside each document window. File, Edit, all that stuff – every window had those menus built-in.
On the Mac, those menus do broadly the same job. They’re just in a different place.
Digital Americana has just popped up out of nowhere, claiming to be “the first literary & culture magazine developed especially for the interactive tablet experience.”
Or to put it another way, it will be “a new interactive magazine made exclusively for the Apple iPad”. And anyone can contribute.
I love Simple Desktops. You can guess what sort of web site it is.
Just simple desktop backgrounds. All of them are fantastic, and all of them look great on your Mac.
They’ve been collated by Tom Watson, who says the designs he features are for people who “want less, but not boring”. You can submit your own designs if you like.
And if these are too minimal for your taste, you might prefer to go hunting around the Command Shift 3 Flickr group where you’ll be sure to find plenty of inspiration and links to more frenzied desktop backgrouds. Personally, though, I’m sticking to the beautiful minimalism of Simple Desktops.
This first tip starts with the very basic basics. Lots of more advanced stuff is coming very soon.
The first time you start your new Mac, you’ll see a screen that looks similar to the one above. If all you’ve ever used before is Windows machines, it might seem a little weird and intimidating.
So, here’s a super-quick guide to the geography of the Mac desktop.
Running across the top of the screen is the Menu Bar.
The Menu Bar stays there all the time, it is ever present. You’ll be using it a lot, so take a good look at it. We’ll cover the details of the Menu Bar in another post, coming soon.
At the bottom of the screen is the Dock, which also stays in sight all the time (but it doesn’t have to). Those symbols you see down there are applications, or programs, that you can use. Click on one to launch it.
The Dock does lots of things, some more useful than others. It’s also very adaptable; you don’t have to leave the Dock looking like that. You don’t have to have that particular set of icons on it. You don’t even have to keep it down there at the bottom of the screen. The Dock is yours to command: you can make it much more useful by customizing it a little. As with the Menu Bar, we’ll take a closer look at the Dock – and how to bend it to your will – in another post.
(You’re reading the first post in our series, 100 Essential Mac Tips And Tricks For Windows Switchers. Find out more.)
In the few short hours since we announced our new series, 100 Essential Mac Tips and Tricks For Windows Switchers, we’ve been overwhelmed by the response from you gorgeous Cult readers.
We’ve been deluged with emails from brand new, recent, and soon-to-become switchers asking questions and looking for help. It’s clear that there’s plenty of people out there with tips to share and questions that need answers.
So, to everyone who’s sent something in already: thank you. You guys rock. We will do our best to answer all your queries as we go along.
We’ve also had some mails from long-term Mac users who understand OS X just fine, but often encounter newcomers facing the same problems over and over again. Thanks to you guys too; your observations are spot-on and will come in very useful during this series.
If you have a tip you think should be included, or a question about something that’s been puzzling you ever since you shut down Windows for the last time, send them all along to us at 100tips@cultofmac.com.
Starting tomorrow, Cult of Mac will be publishing a series of posts simply called “100 Essential Mac tips and tricks for Windows switchers.”
These will be short, simple posts explaining one thing at a time. They’re aimed very squarely at people who don’t know much about OS X. Complete beginners who have only recently started using a Mac, and still don’t quite understand how it all fits together.
The posts are also a work in progress, and we’d love to hear your ideas for things that should be included on the list.
So if you are one of those newcomers to OS X and you have a question you want answered; or if you’re an experienced Mac user and have noticed something that your newbie friends always get wrong – let me know. I’ll be delighted to hear your suggestions and use the best ones in future posts.
Send your ideas to 100tips@cultofmac.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
Back in January, we reported on the blurry images of some ancient Apple Newton prototypes that were doing the rounds on the internets.
Since then, Grant Hutchinson, who was mentioned in that article, has taken a fantastic set of photos of the Newton “Cadillac” prototype. We asked him if we could show you some of those photos here, and he kindly said yes.
Just days after we reported on the launch of Alfred for OS X, along comes yet another keyboard-centric file and application launcher: Launchy.
Launchy has a long history as an open source Windows application, doing much the same on that platform that Quicksilver did on OS X. It too supports plugins that greatly boost its usefulness.
Right now, though, you can download a Mac beta and see what you think.
Free, open source operating system Ubuntu will take on a new look in its forthcoming 10.04 release.
Gone is the brown, in comes the auberginey-purple. It’s actually quite appealing and obviously takes a lot of cues from OS X (the file manager windows) and iPhone (the menu bar and its plain white icons).
Reaction among Ubuntu users has been mixed. On ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks Can Ubuntu out-sexy Apple?:
“To me, the UI does indeed look … well … a bit Mac-like. But that might not be a bad thing. One of Mac’s major selling points is simplicity, and while Linux has a long way to go before it’s ready for the computing masses, giving the OS a more refined look might help people feel at home with the OS.”
He also points out that window controls in this theme have moved from top-right to top-left, another OS X-like feature. Some users aren’t terribly happy about that. But Ubuntu is very flexible – if they don’t like the default theme, they can easily switch to another.
I’d say it’s less of an attempt to “out-sexy” OS X, and more of an attempt to just bring things up-to-date. The brown theme served Ubuntu well for many years but it looks old-fashioned compared to Snow Leopard and Windows 7. It needed a fresh look and this one is smart, yet subdued.
Here’s Homer Simpson’s iPhone. Pretty dull, actually. Only one page of apps, and most of them look like the defaults. No iFart? No iBeer? No iDoh?
Wait – what’s that app there? Third row down, third from left?
Ah! Couch Gag! Yeah, one of my favorite apps.
Funny, it never does that when I use it.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is today’s Best Thing Ever.
Panic are the people who make fabulous Mac software like FTP client Transmit and web dev box-of-tricks Coda.
Now they’ve made their own status board – it’s a monitor hung on the wall, displaying an internal web page that aggregates stuff from different sources and displays it beautifully.
One of the things on there is tweets sent @panic – so while you’re watching them and saying how amazing their status board is, they’re watching you right back.
Thank you, Panic, for brightening up the internet this morning.
(Via Gruber and Hacker News.)
Ahh, bless ’em. The hacks at The Sun aren’t famous for hard-hitting investigative journalism, but at least you’d expect them to know an iPhone app when they see one.
A couple of weeks ago a builder fooled them (and the Daily Mail) into believing that he’d taken a photo of a ghostly boy on a building site in Hull.
But as the internet pointed out shortly afterwards, anyone can make the exact same ghostly figure appear pretty much anywhere they like, thanks to the Ghost Capture app for iPhone.
Even funnier are some of the comments posted under the stories. On the Daily Mail’s version, for example, Mel from Stroud says:
“i am mildly psychic and i snese this boy was evacualted from the war,his father died,his mother died of old age,he lives with an old couple and this used to be his school,hopes this helps everyone”
(To be honest, I don’t think for a minute that the journalists at either paper actually believed that the photo was real, and they probably did instantly work out where it came from. But The Sun’s purpose is to entertain as much as it is to inform – so they wrote it up in all innocent seriousness, knowing that readers with a clue would be in on the joke. And that some readers would fall for it.)
(Via Macenstein, Know Your Mobile, Tabloid Watch, and half the rest of the internet.)
Oh. My. God.
Forget the iPad, kids, just forget it forever. You don’t need one anymore. Because the guys at E4 have created… ePad. It’s more than amazing. It’s amazinger.
Don’t just take my word for it. Watch this video for the full details.
The best ideas are always the simplest. This is a fantastic tip from one of the team at Massive Studios, who needed a stand to rest a MacBook on.
Why bother spending money on something made of metal or plastic, when everything you need came in the box, wrapped around the MacBook?
Some Instructables are complicated but this one’s dead simple. All you need provide is a couple of screws – yep, screw them right into the styrofoam, apparently it works just fine – and a blade to slice the foam in the first place, and that’s it.
And if you’re wondering whether someone’s thought of turning an iPhone box into an iPhone dock, the answer is most certainly yes.
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.
