John Brownlee - page 125

We thought we’d put this Apple television business to rest as a pipe-dream, but then Steve Jobs’s biography came out, where he claimed he had finally “cracked” the TV problem. Now the rumor mill has started itself up again with renewed vigor, and the latest report from Nick Bilton over at The New York Times: his sources tell him that Jobs thought that the “industry was totally broken” a real Apple-branded television set “isn’t a matter of if, but when,” a “guaranteed product.”

Fancy a break from the constant tintinnabulation of your iPhone? Here’s a great Siri tip spotted by the guys over at OS X Daily: just press down the hold button and tell Siri to “turn off all alarms.”

Once you’ve been able to catch your breath, turning your alarms all on again is as easy as saying “turn on all alarms.”

We reported yesterday that our favorite Photoshop-on-a-budget app, Pixelmator, was hitting the big two point oh today, and so it has.

It’s available now on the Mac App Store as a free upgrade to previous users, or a $29.99 purchase new.

The biggest additions to Pixelmator 2.0 are content-aware fill, vector drawing and editing tools, wrinkle, blemish and damage repair tools for photos, new retouching tools such as smudge, sponge, burn, and more. In addition, Pixelmator 2.0 gets full OS X Lion support, a new interface and some impressive speed and stability improvements.

For 90% of us, Pixelmator was already a better and cheaper replacement for the industry standard, Adobe PhotoShop. With 2.0, closes the gap another few percent, and becomes even more of a no-brainer to recommend to just about everybody.

Ever since Steve Jobs’s untimely death and the release of Walter Isaacson’s biography, America’s been going Steve crazy… but you know where Jobsmania is even worse? China. In fact, from the launch lines, you’d think it was the iPad 3 that was coming out, not a book.

PBS will be airing a new, hour-long documentary next week about the life of Steve Jobs, and unique to the program will be rare interviews with His Steveness himself, including a never-before-broadcast interview from 1994 where Jobs expounds upon his life’s philosophies.

The program will be called “Steve Jobs – One Last Thing” and will air on your local PBS affiliate on November 2nd at 10:00pm. Here are some more details of what to expect.

Up until now, the Angry Birds have stayed terrestrial, pushing their beaks no higher than the cumulus clouds in their squawking, feather-strewn war against the evil Pig Armada.

That’s about to change. The Angry Birds are going to outer space. No, Rovio’s not doing a sci-fi themed Angry Birds sequel, although that’s not a shabby idea: NASA is sending some iPads to the International Space Station, along with an Angry Bird plush toy.

A few weeks ago, we posted the video below to show how Apple saw Siri and the iPad coming back in 1987. We didn’t tell the story behind the video though, which is equally fascinating.

Ever since it first landed in 2010, iPad users have been clamoring for a native port of the great Mint.com app, which allows people who use Intuit’s great personal finance tracking service to watch their spending and savings on the go. Mint.com’s website worked, but just barely: it was really designed with a desktop experience in mind.

Well, the wait’s finally over. Mint.com has just been updated to a universal app, and the iPad version is just a gorgeous piece of work.

Friends sometimes tell me I have a hollow leg, but they don’t really mean it: they just mean that my rampant alcoholism is frequently imperceptible. If it were literally true that I had a hollow leg, I’d probably be tempted to do something crazy with it… like, say, run an Apple Dock Connector up through it and turn my upper calf into an easily accessible iPhone dock.

That’s why I’m so green with envy reading this Telegraph story about Trevor Prideaux, a British man born without a left arm who modified his prosthetic to be a smartphone dock. The only problem? He crammed a Nokia in there, not an iPhone!

Although for many years Macworld was the place where Apple showed off their new products, the company decided to orphan the expo in January 2009, claiming trade shows were now superfluous with the dawning of the Internet.

Of course, Macworld’s recreated itself since then as a place for third-party companies to show off their wares, but as Apple has increasingly emphasized its iOS side of the business, the Macworld name has started seeming anachronistic.

You probably won’t be surprised what Macworld’s organizer’s are renaming the conference. You may be surprised at what a charmless mouthful it all is, though.

Did you buy a song off of iTunes for $1.29 before May 2010 with an iTunes Gift Card that said each song cost only $0.99? Thanks to the efforts of lawyers at Kurtzman Carson Consultants, you may be eligible for a class-action payout!

Make room in your piggy bank: you could be up to three dollars and twenty-five cents richer today than you were yesterday!

The class action lawsuit basically deals with iTunes Gift Cards that had been purchased when Apple was transitioning to $1.29 iTunes plus DRM-free songs from their previous standard of $0.99 DRM-protected tracks.

The cards claimed that each iTunes track only sold for about a buck, when actually, Apple had jacked the price of their songs by thirty cents. The class-action lawsuit filed by Gabriel Johnson in July 2009 claimed that consumers became confused by the discrepancy, and deserved their money back.

It seems ridiculous — Apple clearly wasn’t trying to rip anyone off — but the lawsuit continued for the past two years. It has now finally been reconciled, with both parties agreeing to settle out of court to prevent future expense.

If you’d like to file for your three bucks, head on over to Kurtzman Carson Consultants.

A poll of over five thousand consumers aged eight to twenty-four has found that Apple is the most popular electronic brand in America today.

Not that it’s in particularly flattering company. In fact, just looking at the companies kids today like, it seems as if most of our nation’s youth spend the majority of their time gorging themselves on junk food. Go figure!

In Apple’s own soothing Siri commercial, dozens of beautiful people living in utopian cityscapes and country vistas effortlessly interact with their iPhone 4Ses as if they were confabbing with the most soliciting of manservants.

In real life, though, things aren’t quite so pretty, as TBS’s Conan O’Brien is quick to point out in this hysterical parody video in which Apple’s original ad is intercut with two disheveled grossies asking Siri to direct them towards the fastest way to Diarrheatown, or compute the circumference of their manhoods.

It is, I’m sorry to say, a perhaps accurate depiction of at least my iPhone 4S post-launch Saturday night.

Back in 2001, a freelance copywriter named Vinnie Chieco who was hired to help Apple come up with a name for their MP3 player took one look at the device and exclaimed: “Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL!” And thus, the iPod was christened.

Chieco was making a tongue-in-cheek pop reference to Stanley Kubrick’s transcendental sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a ship’s onboard AI, HAL 9000, makes an evolutionary leap after coming in radio contact with a monolith circling Jupiter. Acting erratically, HAL 9000 eventually lashes out, revealing a murderous new self-preservation instinct when his human charges want to shut him down.

Perhaps because HAL isn’t exactly cinema’s most touchy-feely computer, Apple wasn’t willing to embrace the association between 2001 and the iPod line. But now that HAL’s soothingly detached cadence and artificial intelligence capabilities have been mimicked by Siri, perhaps it’s time to revisit the connection with ThinkGeek’s new Iris 9000 voice control module that will let you Siri from across the room… or trapped on the opposite side of the pod bay doors rocketing through deep space.

Make HAL proud and help Siri touch the monolith. It only costs $59.99.

Steve Jobs’s quest for perfection was pursued down to the smallest details. It made him the father of some of the greatest products and interfaces in computer history.

As Walter Isaacson’s new biography on Steve Jobs makes clear, though, it could also sometimes make him nightmarish to live with… the sort of obsessive who could make even the most mundane seemingly household decisions into maddening, endless debates.

Steve Jobs was a man who adopted many mentors in his life, but one of his mentors deserves more than a passing look: Robert Friedland, a charismatic, free love wacko who dealt LSD and had his own free love commune on the same apple orchard that inspired Steve for the name of his company. It was also where Steve allegedly got his “reality distortion field” from.

Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated biography of Steve Jobs is releasing today, and we’re already busy poring through it, gaining new insight into the life and philosophies of Apple’s volatile, sometimes enigmatic co-founder.

Throughout the morning, we’ll be live updating this post with some of the best revelations, funniest stories, most interesting quotes and most enjoyable tidbits of the biography.

iPod 10th Anniversary: To celebrate the iPod’s 10th anniversary on Sunday October 23, we’ve been running several special features which we hope will allow our readers to look back at Apple’s most iconic product with fun and fondness.

Over the last ten years, the iPod has gone from a single device designed to hold your MP3s to a family of devices that have literally revolutionized the music industry.

As part of our iPod 10th Anniversary Celebrations, we put together this family tree infographic so you can look back at all of the iPods that have come before, and helped get us to where we are now: the future of digital music.

Feel free to repost this graphic, but if you do, please make sure to link to Cult of Mac. Thanks!

Gene Munster must be having an orgasm right now: in an interview for his upcoming bio with Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs said he had finally ‘cracked’ the ‘integrated’ TV problem.

Don’t read too much into this, though. Jobs may not be talking about the iTV, and just the plain AppleTV.

You don’t need a crystal ball to tell you that the iPad 3 is almost definitely coming in March of next year, twelve months after the iPad 2 debuted. What changes will we see with the third generation of Apple’s tablet? Expectations for the iPad 3 include a Retina Display, a slimmer form factor, Siri support, Apple’s next-gen A6 SoC and even the possibility of LTE 4G.

We won’t know for months whether those expectations are accurate, but thanks to a Japanese rumor site, we do have a lead one one change to the iPad 3: it will have a smaller, redesigned dock connector that will require an adapter to work existing Apple Dock Connector products, according to Macotakara. Argh. Not again.

Steve Jobs once famously said that people don’t read anymore, but he did, and amongst the revelations of Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography of Apple’s co-founder are his favorite books and bands.

You probably won’t be surprised by the bands — hey, Steve loved the Beatles, go figure! — but would you ever have guessed that his favorite books include both Moby Dick *and* Mucusless Diet Healing Systems?

If you’re a Mac Pro customer, you’ve been waiting a hella long time for an update at this point. The last revision to the Mac Pro line, after all, came out in July 2010, which in computer upgrade terms may as well be part of the Metazoic era.

So an update’s right around the corner, right? Don’t hold your breath. It’s looking extremely unlikely that the new Mac Pros will come out before early 2012 at the very earliest.

Another surprising revelation from Walter Isaacson’s upcoming bio of Steve Jobs has leaked out: in the 1980s, Steve Jobs unknowingly met his biological father on multiple occasions.

With every new release, there’s always someone claiming to have filmed the first feature length movie or captured the first professional photo shoot on their new iPhone, and the iPhone 4S is no exception. Here’s the so-called first music video filmed on the iPhone 4S’s incredible new camera.

It’s been a heck of a year for first ever tweeting… especially on Apple devices. In July, President Obama sent his first tweet from a MacBook Pro, and in June, the Pope got in on the action by pushing the “Send tweet” button on his trusty iPad.

Now it’s the First Lady’s turn to get in on the Tweeting action.