Here are two iPhone home screens. On the left, my iPhone home screen from a few months ago. Everything normal.
On the right, my iPhone home screen from yesterday. And something weird has happened.
An additional line has been added to the status bar at the top, pushing all the app icons closer together. It displays only the characters “O2” – the name of my British network provider. Which is already displayed, of course, in the main part of the status bar. What, as they say, the frak?
Proof once again that it’s the *software* that makes the iPhone camera, QuadCamera is my latest favorite thing from the App Store.
It turns your iPhone into something like a Lomo Action Sampler, only one with much, much more flexibility than the its traditional film-loading counterpart.
James Savage from the RetroMacCast got in touch to share his story of original Mac ownership.
James owns up to having a collection of 170 Macs. I’ll let him explain more…
This is a page from The Magazine, an ezine-in-an-app that’s now available on the App Store for a dollar.
By itself, it’s not much to write home about in my opinion. The presentation is amateurish and the content not terribly interesting. And there simply isn’t very much of it. Not my kind of magazine at all, frankly.
But what’s more interesting is the concept of a mag-as-an-app.
Australian Cult reader Dirk Spennemann is one of those lucky people who, on starting a new job where everyone’s on Windows boxes, can insist on a Mac. His fabulous photo set demonstrates just how much he admires these old Macs, but we wanted to know how he got his hands on that 128k.
Tarus Balog got in touch to tell us this fantastic story of an original Mac that got dumped. Tarus rescued it from certain doom, gave it a little TLC – and found a little software surprise waiting for him.
Get the full story, and some more great pics, after the clicky jumpy thing.
Mac Wind – The Apple Netbook from Sascha Pallenberg on Vimeo.
Here’s an informative video by Sascha Pallenberg, conducting a brief interview with a chap who’s got OS X Leopard running on his MSI Wind netbook.
I’ve heard a lot about OS X on the Wind, but this is the first chance I’ve had to actually see it in action. And I confess, I’m impressed. OK, it’s taken this guy a little bit of hacking around to get the machine working smoothly like this (with all the extras like wifi, webcam, and volume controls working properly) – but the end result looks worth the hassle.
I suppose it had to happen.
If you’ve been online since forever, you’ll remember the Hot or Not meme that was briefly that year’s Lolcats, until something more interesting came along.
But Hot or Not has continued to be hot (or not) ever since. And now you can download the Hot or Not app to your iPhone.
Or you could not.
I can’t decide if this is a delightful sign of the caring Mac community, or if it’s a sickening sign of people who can’t just leave a sick man alone.
Look, over here: it’s Prayers for Steve. Except most of them aren’t prayers, most are simply “Get well” messages. You can add yours. There are, of course, Google ads at the bottom. Could be worse: they could be plastered all over the top and sides too.
I don’t know, maybe I’m being too grumpy. Is this a good idea? You tell me.
We’re celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Mac by asking Cult readers to get in touch with their stories of Mac ownership over the years.
To start things off, here’s Zev Eisenberg (a man who can solve a Rubik’s Cube while reciting pi) to tell us about his pile o’ Macs.
This is Trunk, and it’s possibly the most interesting and enticing iPhone app I’ve seen for weeks.
Dunno if you’ve noticed, but a little meme has been spreading across Twitter during the last few days. It’s called “#firstmac”.
You can guess what happens. You announce details of your first ever Mac, and as long as you add the “#firstmac” hashtag, your comment will be collated with all the others over at hashtags.org.
Browsing through the list, there’s a huge variety of first Macs to be found, but a quick scan through the page (at the time of writing) suggests that the iMac’s various incarnations have been the first Mac owned most often – reflecting the model’s bestseller status.
So then, fess up: what was your first Mac? The first one I *used* was an SE/30 in a cybercafe in Cambridge, circa 1989 or 1990. The first Mac I purchased second-hand was an LCII from a friend. And the first I bought brand-new was a lime green iMac. Those, as they say, were the days.
Except they weren’t. That iMac was underpowered and drove me crazy with slowness and crashes. The first Mac I bought and really enjoyed as a G3 iBook, two years later.
Remember the Talking Moose?
If you don’t, this post will make no sense to you whatsoever.
But if you DO: Hey! Woo! Yay! Talking Moose is back as a Twitter superstar and can provide just as much entertainment from there as it used to back in the day. Probably more.
I had the Moose running on my Lime Green iMac. Annoying as hell. But fabulous none the less.
(You can still get the Moose for OS X, did you know that? Not that you need to now. Twitter! Superstar! Twitter is the new Hotmail, did you hear? Or was it the new Geocities? I forget. Us old timers do that. Often.)
(Via TidBITS.)
I was going to save this one for a “WTF iPhone Apps Of The Week” post, but then I thought – No. This is Too Good. This needs a space of its own.
Ladies and gentlemen (but mostly, I suspect, gentlemen): I present iPropose. It is an app designed to help the tongue-tied ask for someone else’s hand in marriage.
I think the official blurb from the App Store says everything:
“Make sure the most important event of your lives happens inside your life’s most important gadget. And with iPropose, that special someone will know you really care. iPropose is 100% guaranteed to result with a “YES” or your money back!”
Stop and think, ladies (because I suspect it will be mostly ladies): do you really want to marry a guy who proposed to you on a phone? Do you?
Right, what have we got this week? First there’s Listen. Maybe the name iShell was already taken. So what does it do? You pick a shell and hold it up to your ear, then “close your eyes, take a deep breath, and relax. You’ll feel the weight of the world lift off your shoulders.”
Now then, lovely Cultists. We need your help.
You may have heard that this coming Saturday, January 24th, is a special day in the hearts of Mac aficionados. It will mark the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh computer, the machine that turned Apple into a global brand and kick-started the line of computers that has ended up as today’s line up of Pro, Mini and MacBook.
And what we’d like to do to celebrate the Mac’s birthday is find someone who is still using one.
Is that you? Do you have an original Mac that still boots up? Do you still actually use it for anything?
If you have, or if you do, let us know.
We will EITHER: send a media squad to your home to interview you. Top photographers will take pictures of you and your original Mac for use in magazines like Vogue, Playboy, Country Living, Knitting Monthly and possibly even Wired. A real time satellite link will be set up between your home and the White House so that Barack Obama himself can send congratulations and ask you questions about that 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor. We will also send you a pony.
OR: We might write a post about you.
So, like we said: got a (working) original Mac? We want to know.
(CC licensed pic by ballistikcoffeeboy.)
Look, it’s about time we confessed something: writing all this gubbins about computers is hard work. Bloggers need breaks.
Especially all the Jobs rumor-mongers who have been working FLAT OUT for the last few weeks, typing up the first thing that pops into their heads in order for readers (and the mainstream media, let’s not forget them!) to have something to talk about.
Now Steve’s gone for some well-deserved rest and the wind has been knocked out of the bloggers’ sails somewhat. We need change.
No, not Presidential change. Something simpler. Something to automate this whole business of writing anything-we-damn-well-please about Steve Jobs, his health, and how the World Might End if he isn’t in charge of Apple any more.
So we turn to our friends at MacJournals with heartfelt thanks, because they have knocked up a quick Steve Jobs story template that any journalist or blogger can use to save time from now on.
Jake of 8bitjoystick.com: I use my old Mac SE as a door stopper. I know that’s blasphemy.
Rott3npeanut: I’ve turned my Mac into a PC so I can use it to record.
Giant Pangolin: I turned my Mac into a half-Mac, half-PC for only $159.
SAL-E: I use my old Mac as a grandfather clock
trevyn: I use my old Mac for running Indigo.
Come on, kids. Confess. What do you use your old Mac for? (No file/print/music servers please; something more interesting. The weirder the better.)
(CC pic from jake of 8bitjoystick.com)
There’s a thriving developer community here in the UK, but not such a thriving calendar of conferences and get-togethers.
The people behind MacDev2009 are hoping to change that with their event in April this year.
The speaker list is looking pretty good, including as it does the likes of Bill Dudney (creater of Riddle Racer and Dot Game, among others, Matt Gemmell, whose source code is found in an impressive variety of applications, and Fraser Speirs, (FlickrExport creator and the person who tipped me off about MacDev2009 in the first place).
There will be 11 hour-long sessions during the weekend, aimed at intermediate or advanced developers – not much at all for beginners. The session list looks very interesting. As Fraser puts it: “You really, really want to be at this one if you’re a Mac Developer.”
I’ve spent a week or so playing around with the beta release of Picasa for Mac, and here are some thoughts.
– It’s FAST. It does a superb job of pulling in your iPhoto collection in no time at all. Scrolling through it all is much faster than similar scrolling in iPhoto itself.
– It’s considerate. It makes a point of co-existing with iPhoto, and asks nicely for your permission before making a copy of an image that’s being edited. As a consequence, it means people can try Picasa out without worrying about damage to their iPhoto database.
– It finds your photos without fuss. Start it up, and it pokes around in all the usual places (and any other places you instruct it to poke in), looking for new pictures. These then get neatly added to the archive.
– It does things my mum will love. The collages, the integration with Picasa Web Albums – these are features I have little interest in myself, but my mum (who has never got on well with iPhoto) will love them.
– I like the the color searches (as shown in the photo above). Ask it to find “red” stuff and it will. Great for collages, photo books, or artistic projects.
Naturally, as with any beta, there are going to be some teething problems. One bug I’ve noticed is that right-clicking on an image and selecting “Move to (named) album” doesn’t work. And Picasa does seem to take a loooooong time to look through the images already on the camera, and decide if they are duplicates or not. But it does get there in the end.
Beta status or not, Picasa offers a decent alternative for photo management for people who don’t want to spend the kind of money required for Aperture or Lightroom.
Mac Tower from Sait Alanyali on Vimeo.
So here’s another fantasy Mac design from Sait Alanyli, the guy who did the [L-shaped Mac mini](https://cultofmac.com/l-shaped-mac-mini-might-be-shape-of-things-to-come/5523) concept that we featured here back in December.
This is the Mac Tower, and I have to confess there are some things about it that I find rather appealing. The ideas of a pop-up casing and a pop-up remote are very cute, and the thought of putting a battery inside with enough juice to power a Time Machine backup in case of sudden mains power loss is, well, one of those things you wonder no-one has done before.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: There’s an Apple II conference? And they do it *every year*?
Yup. There is. And they do. And they have been for the last 19 years. They call it KansasFest.
Come this July (21st – 26th), it will be 20 years, and the organizers are celebrating the anniversary with some special speakers and, they hope, lots and lots and LOTS of Apple IIs and associated stuff.
Ian Betteridge is a brave man. Not only is he a Mac user who has switched to Ubuntu running on Dell hardware, he’s also decided to say so in public.
Some of you may recognize his name: for some years, he was a writer for, and then editor of, the UK version of MacUser magazine.
Why did he do it? Partly because of price, partly because he cares about open software running on open platforms. Apple, he says, is a long way from open and seems to be closing things ever tighter as time goes on. (See also his follow-up post detailing the apps he’s chosen to use on Linux.)
What really caught my eye, though, was one of Ian’s asides. Half way through his post, he predicts that “sooner or later”, the “development ecosystem will increasingly come to resemble that of the iPhone, and for much the same reasons”.
In other words, there will be an App Store for OS X software. An App Store that Apple will keep just as tight control over. Only apps that met with Apple’s approval would be cleared for distribution, and only apps distributed in that manner would actually run.
A bold prediction indeed. A fair one, though? And does the Better World of free software tempt you to switch to Ubuntu (or any other *nix variant)? What do you think?
(Disclaimers: I sometimes contribute articles to MacUser UK; and I know Ian Betteridge personally, have enjoyed a chat and a pint with him, and consider him a lovely chap.)
OK so the name isn’t quite as snappy as Quicksilver, but the intent is very similar. And at least one of the developers is exactly the same.
Google’s new Quick Search Box for Mac was coded in part by Alcor, aka Nicholas Jitkoff, aka the guy who created Quicksilver and made keyboard-centric launchers the big hit they are today (on pretty much every platform, not just OS X).
This beta release is a good start. It doesn’t spend ages cataloguing your hard disk (at least, not in an intrusive, tie-your-Mac-up-for-minutes sort of way). And the architecture is designed for expansion; more features can be plugged in via, um, plugins.
Note that this is NOT the same as the Google Desktop Search app that you might have played with a while back. Desktop Search used the same Command+Command shortcut but made much greater demands on your system (at least, that’s how I remember it – it lasted about a day on my machine before I removed it, dissatisfied to put it mildly). I’m not very clear right now whether or not Quick Search Box is a replacement for Desktop Search, although I suspect that is the case, or will be in the medium to long term.
The only thing that the older Desktop Search product has got going for it is that it will run on Tiger, whereas the newer app is Leopard-only.
There’s a way to go yet. This new beast crashes, twice in the time it’s taken me to write these words. But hey, if Alcor’s in charge I have high hopes. High hopes indeed.
Of all the surprises to come out of the CES show this year, Palm’s revival as a serious player in the handheld device market is perhaps the biggest of all.
Most people – myself included – had long since consigned Palm to the dustbin, confident that it would never re-invent itself out of the hole it had fallen into, out-manouevred and out-featured by rival devices.
Not so.
The initial reports coming from CES are that the Palm Pre is an excellent device and offers the iPhone some proper competition.
And at least some of that success might be because the team at Palm has a few former Apple employees on board.
Robert Scoble spells it out:
“How Apple centric is the new Palm team? Well, Chris McKillop is director of Software at Palm … One of the PR people at Palm did PR at Apple. Jonathan Rubinstein, who runs the Palm Pre team and led off the announcement, was a key person in development of the iPod and lots of people followed him from Apple to Palm.”
Partly because my first ever PDA was a Palm, and I was a happy Palm user for many years. I don’t want to see the company fail. And partly because any serious competition for Apple is a good thing – anything that gets people umming and ahhing over whether they should buy an iPhone or a Pre will make Steve Jobs sit up and start paying attention when people ask for simple, basic stuff like copy/paste and syncable text notes.
UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that this post is very similar to another post by my esteemed Cult colleague Mr Mortensen not four hours previously. My apologies for the repetition. At least we can be sure that two great minds here think alike. I’m not having a good week, am I?