Giles Turnbull - page 43

Over at Howard Forums, user Windsor43 relates the hilarious tale of how an SMS message from him to his wife autocorrected the word “nah” to “nag”.

“Thanks, Steve,” Windsor43 says, “for making my wife almost Think Different.”

I suspect most of us can relate to that one. I tend to sign off messages to loved ones with “gx”, but the iPhone likes to correct that to “Gf”. Is that supposed to be short for “girlfriend” or something? No matter; my wife is used to it already.

(Yes, we’ve heard the rumor about an autocorrect toggle switch in the next iPhone update. Let’s hope it’s true for Windsor43’s sake.)

Have you got any amusing tales of autocorrect woe? Confess all in the comments.

I cooked up many reasons to justify buying an iPhone, and the fact that it had a camera (no matter how poor quality) was one of them. I liked the idea of having a camera that was so well integrated with the rest of the software on the machine.

As it turns out, third-party software that makes use of the camera is the stuff I’m getting most excited about, and playing with most often.

The most recent addition to my iPhone home screen is CameraBag, purchased for just 1.79 of our fine English pounds (which is about 3 of your fine American dollars).

This is Miles the iBunny, enjoying the comfort of his hutch, formerly a classic first gen iMac.

Owner Lisa Balbes of Balbes Consultants told us: “Four Macs is not enough for one family. We currently have six for our family of four (one is an original SE). We pass them down through the family, and my pet rabbit Miles is at the bottom of the Mac chain. Here he is in his iBed.

“I travel a lot for business, and recently realized I had visited several Apple stores. I have now made it a goal to eventually visit all of them. Does that qualify me as a Mac fanatic?”

I don’t think we need answer that one, do you?

OObject is a curious bloggish sort of site where each post is a collation of objects, brought together under a particular theme. They have a whole category for Apple stuff, including the 19 all time worst Apple products, 12 blatant iPod knock-offs, and 15 best Stevenotes.

You’ll probably be most interested in the 15 best Apple product concept mockups, though. You’ll have seen most of them before, but it’s nice to see them all together at last.

The list of 20 famous Mac users could do with a little work, though: putting Steve Jobs in there doesn’t really count.

Former Think Secret blogger Nick Ciarelli is writing about Apple once more, this time at Tina Brown’s new tabloidy Huffington Post clone, The Daily Beast.

In Not So Secret Apple, Ciarelli argues that Apple’s famously fierce legal attack dogs have calmed down somewhat since the day, a few years ago now, when his constant flow of Apple product leaks and scoops at Think Secret brought them crashing down on him, and his web site to a grinding halt.

Ciarelli interviews editors of several Mac and gadget sites and their opinion is unanimous: Apple realized that the lawsuits and cease-and-desist demands were generating nothing but bad karma, and only confirming that the clamped-on stories were true. So a new policy has been initiated, more leaks are emerging and in higher-profile media, and everything’s a little more relaxed in the legal department than it used to be.

He writes: “But maybe Apple has also realized that when it threatens, subpoenas, and sues web sites run by some of its biggest fans, its actions create a torrent of negative PR that ultimately tarnishes Apple’s brand.”

If that’s the case, I wonder if Ciarelli is tempted to return to Mac rumor-chasing? He was very good at it, after all.

(While you’re looking around The Daily Beast, be sure to read the hilarious and very open Q&A with Tina Brown, in which she explains what it’s all about, and says she’s not jealous of Arianna Huffington at all.)

This is the actual Mac plus that Scotty tried talking to in Star Trek IV, spotted and photographed by Marcin Wichary at the Star Trek: The Experience exhibition shortly before it closed last month.

Note how shiny and clean this particular Plus is. Bet it boots up shiny and clean, too. And if it has problems, it can run a Level One Diagnostic.

Now that the Experience has left the Las Vegas Hilton, it has no home of its own. Where is this Mac now? Probably packed away in a container somewhere. Possibly wrapped up in Spock’s Vulcan gown that it was once displayed alongside.

Annnyway: Borg teddy bears.

Photo used under Creative Commons license. Thanks to Marcin Wichary.

This is more like it. Visual IT has done a deal with the Geographers A-Z Map Company to produce a licensed copy of the Mini London A-Z for iPhone.

Yes, iPhones come with the Google Maps app, but this is a very different thing, for two reasons.

Everybody say: “Ohhhhh.”

It’s tiny. It runs Leopard 10.5.2. 80GB. 1GB. 1.6GHz Atom. Niiiiice.

This little MacBook Mini is just what many, many people have been hoping for (myself included).

Shame it’s not real.

I’ve never got on very well with the Dock, the app launcher Apple puts at the bottom of the screen. It does very little that I find useful, and many things that simply bug me. Thank goodness for the Command+Option+D shortcut that hides it out of the way. That’s where my Dock spends most of its life out of my sight.

That said, there are still some aspects of daily computing life that need to be kept close to hand. Things that I want access to, at a moment’s notice, no matter what app I’m using. And things I want to use, briefly, without leaving that app.

And that’s why I spend a lot of time investigating and trying out various Menu Bar widgets and applications. The Menu Bar is the mini dock at the top right of the screen where the system clock lives, plus other customizable widgets called Menu Bar apps.

My goal has always been to get the greatest utility from the smallest number of Menu Bar apps – because of course, Menu Bar space is limited.

Consequently I’m very, very fussy about what apps get to stay there.

The current line-up looks like this, from left to right:

XMenu, ByteController, I Love Stars, Anxiety, Jumpcut, Time Machine, iChat, MenuMeters, Airport, Volume, Battery, Bluetooth, clock, Fast User Switching, and Spotlight.

Read on for a guided tour of some of the third party extras in that list.

Here’s one for the ZOMG THERE MUST BE NO CABLES VISIBLE types among you. Yes, you know who you are.

This is the iDesk. Of course, you knew it would be called that.

This guy was photographed by Flickr user Rodrigo Galindez in a Berlin coffee shop.

On close inspection, it looks like he’s glued some kind of laminate on to the lid of his MacBook Pro, and made a good job of neatening the edges and the corners. He gets extra points for marrying the wood effect with the sleek metal of the computer and the horizontal stripes of the classic Apple logo, and with a purple jacket. Fantastic.

Mysterious Berlin Mac user: who are you? Do you have any other decorated computers?

(Photo used under Creative Commons license. Thanks to Rodrigo.)

Apple has decided to drop the iPhone dev NDA for released software.

It said that “the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success”. That’s putting it mildly.

Unreleased software – or even unreleased features inside released software – is still covered by it, however.

This means the lives of software developers (and quite a few book publishers) will now be a lot easier.

That sound you can hear is iPhone devs everywhere breathing a sigh of relief.

Royal Hawaiian Apple Store Grand Opening from hawaii on Vimeo.

Here’s nicely edited footage of the opening, just a couple of days ago, of the new Apple Store in the Royal Hawaiian Center in Waikiki.

There’s also some behind-the-scenes preparation shots, of the kind you don’t see very often given how secretive Apple is, showing the build team putting the finishing touches on the store frontage just hours before the opening ceremony itself. Which includes dancing and acoustic guitars.

The BBC web site ran an interview with Woz yesterday, but to be honest there’s not much in it that the average Cult reader won’t know already.

Some of the better quotes:

“You become what you want to be in life. I wanted to be an engineer. I didn’t want to run a company.”

“Lack of resources forces you to do a lot more original thinking.”

“I wanted to do a great engineering job and every time I designed something great, several times in our life, Steve would come and say: Let’s sell it!”

The only fact in the piece that was new to me was the number of cellphones Woz owns: 10. I’m surprised it’s only 10.

Picture of Woz by Eric Rhoads, used under Creative Commons license.

New from geek jeweler Irina Blok, a superb new take on the digital photo frame. Only 50 of these hand-silk screened frames will be produced, at a price of about 50 bucks each. I predict Irina will have sold the lot before the end of today.

Assuming she does, and you’re too late to get your hands on one, she has plenty of other cool stuff for you to have a look at.

There’s been a lot of hot air posted in recent hours about Apple’s apparent “threat” to pull the plug on the iTunes Music Store if it doesn’t get its way.

This is, to put it politely, nonsense.

Apple would be insane to switch off the Store now. It has invested far too much of its business in products and services that integrate with the Store to just suddenly pull the plug and go home.

The quote that has caused all the fuss is this one, submitted by iTunes vice president Eddy Cue to the Copyright Royalty Board last year:

“If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the … royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss – which is no alternative at all.”

Let’s say that again: submitted by Eddy Cue last year. This is an old comment on an old issue and in no way reflects today’s reality: which is that Apple has invested a fortune in developing a line of products (iPhone, iPod) whose future is inextricably tied up with the Store. Switching it off would be little short of madness.

Of course Apple doesn’t want to run an unprofitable Store, that’s obvious. But what should also be obvious to all is that it isn’t going to suddenly have a tantrum and switch the whole thing off if royalties have to go up. The far more likely consequence is that you and I will have to pay a few pennies more for each song we buy.

Yes, we know the iPhone camera is rubbish compared to most of its cameraphone rivals. But that needn’t stop people being creative with it. People like…

P0psharlow, who has created some stunning panoramic images with an iPhone and some very deft image manipulation:

Fulton Street workers study

Google has released Update Engine, an open source (released under the Apache license) software update framework for Mac OS X.

Of course, there’s already a very successful software update framework known as Sparkle, developed by Andy Matuschak. Judging by this comment in his Twitter stream (“Update Engine looks much better-designed and engineered than Sparkle, though a little clunkier in a few minor ways”), he’s already impressed with what he sees.

In an announcement on the Google Mac Blog, engineer Greg Miller says: “Update Engine can update all the usual suspects, like Cocoa apps, preference panes, and screen savers. But it can also update oddballs like arbitrary files, and even things that require root–like kernel extensions. On top of that, it can update multiple products as easily as it can update one.”

So what’s the difference between this and Sparkle? As I understand things (someone correct me if I’m wrong), Sparkle sits inside each app that uses it, and is used by that app to update itself. Update Engine runs separately and independently, and uses a system of tickets to remember which apps it should monitor and when they should be updated. And, as Miller explains, it can be used to update anything, not just apps but also prefpanes and the like.

New today from the Mac devs at Google is Top Draw, an experimental image drawing app.

I’ll let them explain it in more detail: “The Top Draw scripting language leverages Apple’s Quartz and CoreImage rendering engines for graphical muscle. In addition to the drawing commands that are supported by the HTML canvas tag, there is support for particle systems, plasma clouds, random noise, multi-layer compositing and much more.”

It doesn’t do very much, so don’t download it and expect it to suddenly start editing photos or creating beautiful logos for you. It takes text input and renders images based on it; and for kicks, it can set the result as your desktop background, or act as a screen saver.

Still, fun to play with if messing with JavaScript is your thing. Indeed, still fun even if you have no clue about JavaScript and just want something different on your desktop.

If there’s one thing the British like complaining about more than the weather, it’s the transport system.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the App Store bulging with apps for people on the move. Here are just a handful of my favourites…

There’s Alistair Stuart’s Trains, giving near-as-dammit live information from UK station departure boards: essential for people five minutes walk away from the station door, and whose train ought to be leaving in four minutes.

And there’s Ian Smith’s LondonCam, a highly rated app that displays the latest image from any of more than 80 traffic cams that monitor London’s busiest roads and interchanges.

Traffic UK provides real-time traffic updates for the area around your current location, or for any place you care to name.

And TubeStatus is one of several London Underground monitoring apps, providing timely warnings of line closures and service disruptions. Which, as any Londoner will tell you, are many and varied and frustratingly frequent.

Chloe & The iTunes Babysitter from Jason Bedell on Vimeo.

OK, this one might divide the audience somewhat.

Here’s Jason explaining how the iTunes visualizer has saved his day, kept his daughter quiet, and enabled him to do some work. You can hear the relief in his voice as he says: “Steve Jobs, thank you.”

Is this the best concept in babysitting since, um, TV? Or is she a little young for Apple cult indoctrination?

Do share your opinions in the comments.

Sonic Lighter is slightly different to all the other iPhone virtual lighters; it checks in with the GPS and pings a remote server with the device’s location at the moment the app was started.

The result: a Google Map covered with little red flames, every one of them an instance of Sonic Lighter getting all lit up.

And the map has few surprises: big swathes of red flames across North America, Europe and Japan. But hold on, what’s that, up there? In the Arctic Ocean, hundreds of miles north of the Chukchi Sea, itself north of where Alaska and Russia kiss? It’s a single, solitary Sonic Lighter ignition. Maybe it’s a member of Sarah Palin’s crack squad of Russia-monitoring sniffer dogs. Or maybe it was just some guy on a plane. Either way, we salute you, most-northerly Sonic Lighter user. You should get a prize, or something.

(If anyone’s taken their iPhone to the north or south poles, and has some interesting iPhone pics to prove it, please contact the Cult.)

(Via Gruber)

MacBook update fever has the Mac community in its grip, and everyone’s talking about or leaking images of possible new MacBook designs.

But what about the growing threat of so-called “netbooks”? Those tiny, cheap machines pioneered by Asus and now on offer from pretty much every PC manufacturer around.

ZDNet wonders if Apple will make something similar, or, more likely, reduce its MacBook prices to compete. (I don’t think that’s very likely, but anyway.)

The Apple Gazette declares a resounding no, saying that the netbooks are not affecting MacBook sales anyway. They are reducing sales of more expensive non-Apple Windows laptops, but not hitting Apple products that hard at all.

I’m inclined to go along with the Gazette’s view that reducing the MacBook prices by a little — getting them down to the $700-$800 range — would be sufficient to make sales soar once more. That said, I suspect it’s more likely that the machine will be much improved and stay at roughly the same price that it is now.

Personally speaking, the biggest hurdle to overcome is battery life. I still yearn for a good sized mobile machine that will last for the best part of a day without a charge, and none of the current netbooks, or the MacBook Air, will do that. And I know which of those I’d rather buy.

AC/DC guitarist Angus Young explains it very simply in his high voltage comments on a Telegraph story about the state of the music industry:

“We don’t make singles, we make albums.”

Well that’s one view, I suppose. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall during that interview. What else did he have to say?

Excited Bristol Apple Store staff, preparing to let in the first customers

It’s hard to get the British excited about something, especially a new shop. But that does’t stop the staff at the shiny new Bristol Apple Store doing their level best to get the queue outside cheering and waving. A bit.

It has to be said: this store opening is unlike most others. Central Bristol ground to a halt this morning because an entire shopping mall, encompassing several surrounding streets, was opening for the first time.

The Apple Store was just one among 150 or so shops welcoming new customers. The opening ceremony for the mall included a MC on a cherry picker, shouting bad poetry and exhorting the crowd to spend and spend. And four drummers sat at four drum kits. The sound echoed around the streets and made the echos made the drummers sound out of time with each other. But nobody minded. Dancers and free runners danced and ran freely. And eventually, Mr MC man declared the Cabot Circus (warning: eye-wateringly awful web site) mall open. The masses flooded in to spend their money.

But that was only half the queuing for the Apple fans. The mall opening is over, and now they have to rush down a newly-opened street and start a fresh queue inside steel crowd barriers. And there they wait, for another 30 minutes, while Store staff do the usual whooping and cheering and getting people excited.