John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
TechCrunch is reporting that Apple will release the first Gold Master release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion sometime in the near future.
It’s an interesting rumor. Although they are classifying the release as “GM1,” Apple traditionally releases Gold Masters only a few weeks before the actual software ships. If Lion is already at Gold Master status, barring any huge problems, Apple must be fairly convinced that Lion is fully baked.
Lion is slated for a Summer release date, but if Apple does release even the initial Gold Master in the next month, it bodes well for Lion debuting very early in summer… and very possibly late spring.
With any other company, you’d chalk this up to coincidence, but with Apple, you suspect meaning: Swedish designer Mattias Östergren noticed that the iPhone 4 fits exactly inside the dent below the trackpad in the MacBook Air that allows the ultraportable laptop to be easily opened.
At the very least, it shows what the base unit of reference for Apple’s designs are these days: everything’s measured in terms of iPhones.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the Smart Cover, he put it forward as a solution to the status quo, where you have this gorgeous device and yet the only way to protect it was to sheathe it on all sides. The resulting cover is a nifty gadget in its own right, but it’s not exactly very protective: while it’ll guard the screen from being scratched in your bag, it won’t cushion your iPad 2 if it falls, and it won’t protect the back.
XGear’s Smart Cover Enhancer probably won’t protect your iPad 2 from much of a fall, but it will at least save the back of your iPad 2 from a gouging while working with your existing Smart Cover.
When Apple first debuted the Smart Cover, we knew we’d see third-party copy cats, but who knew that the first one to be available for order would be so beautiful: Minot’s wooden iPad 2 cover.
Apple’s already the most valuable company in tech, but are they on target to become the biggest company in tech as well? According to analyst George Colony, who founded the Forrester Research group, they’re on track: they’ll outgrow both IBM and HP in the next two years.
Apple had to shave a lot of extraneous features off of the MacBook to come up with a device as blade-thin as the latest MacBook Airs, and while we can obviously point to things like the presence of an optical drive as hardware that didn’t make the cut, one lesser known edit is the traditional notebook security slot, which allows you to fit your laptop with a lock.
MacLocks has a solution: the MacBook Air Lock and Security Case Bundle, which works with both the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs. It’s basically a case that you fix to the bottom of your MacBook Air, which comes with a security slot through which you can fix any compatible lock.
The MacBook Air is extraordinarily portable, so it’s natural you’d want to try to protect it from a run-by snatch and grab when you’re out writing at the local cafe. Even so, though, the MacLock solution seems to work by permanently grafting a case to the bottom of your Air, presumably by some sort of exoxy.
Do you want to protect your Air so much that you’d be willing to graft a case onto its underbelly permanently? $75 then. Me, I’ll continue to take my Air along with me when I have to go to the toilet.
Apple has stopped selling MobileMe to customers, and told educational institutions to push free 60-day trials of the service as a stop-gap, so we know a relaunch is coming soon.
Rumor has it that the relaunch will see Apple start to realize its streaming iTunes ambitions with the addition of a music locker. Users would upload songs they want to be able to access from any device. This would allow Apple to compete with services like Spotify and Rdio without cutting the legs of their iTunes digital download empire out from under themselves.
We’ve heard these rumors from so many sources at this point that we’re pretty sure. What we haven’t heard anyone do yet, though, is put a price on the new locker service. Now Music Void is doing just that, saying that the MobileMe iTunes locker services will cost somewhere around $20 per year.
iOS 4.3 is jailbreakable, but the iPad 2 isn’t… yet. The new A5 SoC presents a new and unique challenge for jailbreakers like the Dev Team, but if history is any guide, they’ll have a working jailbreak sooner or later, and quite possibly sooner rather than later, if a new tweet by Dev Team member p0sixninja is anything to go by.
Here’s hoping we’ll see an iPad 2 jailbreak in a few weeks: I’d like to cram a few more icons in my dock.
Ouch. Due to the vagaries of international time zones, it’s already March 25th in New Zealand, and that means that fans over there in Middle-Earth can order themselves an iPad 2… except even if you order one right now, you’re looking at 2-3 weeks before it is delivered. Imagine what that number will be like later today!
It’s not really a surprise: although Apple is going ahead with international orders, clearly they don’t have the supply to handle even America’s launch, let alone an international one. My guess is we’re looking at least a couple of months of iPad 2 scarcity before Apple can supply enough iPad 2s to everyone who wants one.
What does this mean for our international readers? The same as it meant for Americans: if you want an iPad 2 anywhere near launch day, you need to go to your nearest Apple Store and wait in line. Expect supplies to be even more constrained abroad than in the United States, though.
As an American who lived abroad for a decade, only to recently move back, I know the sting of overseas prices for Apple-products. In many ways, it feels that the rest of the world subsidizes America’s low prices on Apple products.
Case in point, this chart by Setteb.it, comparing iPad 2 prices in the US with 18 out of the 25 countries that will launch iPad 2 tomorrow, March 25th. This is the sort of data that just rubs salt on the wounds of a European, since even a base 16GB iPad 2 WiFi will cost about $175 more than it would have if they bought the iPad 2 in the States.
This might seem a little misleading, since Europe’s VAT is quite high, and usually hovers around 20%. However, Apple’s still passing on a premium to EU iPad 2 buyers, even after VAT is subtracted. For example, Brits looking to buy the 64GB iPad 2 3G will pay about $63 more for that model than yanks… and that’s after the British number has been adjusted for VAT.
Prices like these are why when I lived in Europe I would schedule all of my Apple purchases around trips to the States: the money you can save on buying a MacBook Pro and an iPad together in the States more than pays for the plane ticket.
Israeli company Tawkon sells mobile applications that “monitor” your exposure to mobile phone radiation. The idea is that if you experience a sudden spike of radiation while you’re talking, it’ll warn you so you can quickly hurl the phone as hard as you can across the room, douse yourself with lead paint, duck, cover, then resume the conversation.
We’ve seen Tawkon try to capitalize upon the Antennagate controversy to drive interest in their services before. Similarly, it looks like they wanted to capitalize upon the tragedy at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant to launch a renewed push into the App Store.
Now Steve Jobs himself has told them enough panic-mongering is enough: in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and the resulting wave of radiation panics here in the United States, Jobs told Tawkon that Apple has “no interest” in publishing their app.
Tawkon’s launching on Cydia instead, which is fine, but I’m with Steve on this one: given that the iPhone has no native radiation-detecting mechanism (and therefore isn’t accurate), combined with the fact that there is no medical basis for fearing cellphone radiation exposure and the heightened fears about radiation both domestically and abroad, this just isn’t an app that needs to be on the App Store.
If you run a WordPress blog either on your own server or through WordPress.com, your blog just became Flipboard-style cool on iPad, thanks to an awesome new feature which turns any WP blog into a beautiful, flickable animated magazine… all through the magic of HTML5.
Designed by Onswipe, the feature lets you flick through stories, tap into them to drill down through them and swipe to browse. The animations are gorgeous. Here’s an example, though you’ll need to have your iPad handy to see the magic.
If you’ve got a blog hosted on WordPress.com, this functionality should have already gone live for you. On the other hand, if you’re self-hosting a WordPress blog, you’re just a plugin away from making the functionality live for your visitors.
Very, very cool. Let’s see if we can get Leander to spring here on Cult of Mac.
I’m madly in love with my 11-inch MacBook Air, but sometime I wish I had a little more screen real estate for it… an external display that was as portable as it is.
Toshiba’s new portable LCD, the creatively christened Mobile LCD Monitor, looks like just the thing: it’s an iPad-thin 14-inch unit, allowing you to add a 1366×768 secondary display driven entirely by USB, no AC adapter required.
Remember Word Lens, the jaw-dropping iOS Babelfish that allowed you to just point your iPhone at a sign in Spanish and turning it into English (and vice-versa?)
Well, if you’ve got an iPad 2, good news: your camera-equipped tablet is now fully supported in the latest version of the free app.
Of course, “free” should be surrounded by insidious quotes, because in reality, there’s nothing free about Word Lens. You can download it for free, sure, but the app does nothing without buying either the Spanish to English or English to Spanish modules as an in-app purchase… each of which costs $9.99.
Word Lens is still one of the biggest jaw-dropper programs on the App Store, though. If you’ve got an iPad 2 and are just itching to show someone what it can do, picking up Word Lens for free $9.99 is a choice option.
It’s sitting on my iPad just waiting for some playtime, but I picked up Forget-Me-Not by Nyarlu Labs by dint of this wonderfully pithy description courtesy of Touch Arcade: “the magical lovechild of Pac-Man and Rogue.”
I’m a huge fan of rogue-likes, but coming from a heritage of text input and computer terminals, their input mechanisms tend to be too complicated to translate to iOS.
That’s why I love the look of the approach taken here. Rogue-likes are traditionally RPGs at heart, but by marrying the spirit of Rogue — random levels, malevolent difficulty and permadeath — with the arcade trappings of Pac-Man, Naryu Labs appear to have created some sort of endlessly replayable Pac-Rogue mutation, in which your simplistic avatar explored ever-changing mazes, killing ghosts and collecting flowers, fruit and keys.
Very neat. Forget-Me-Not is a universal app and available on the App Store now for just $1.99.
Right now, if your iPhone runs out of juice, your only option is to slap in a third-party battery pack or rush to the nearest USB outlet. In the future, though, you might be able to just lay it out in the sun to soak up some rays, thanks to a prototype solar panel that is completely transparent and thin enough to work with touchscreens.n
The solar panel is made by a French company, and was spotted by Mark Spoonauer over at Laptop Magazine. The layer is only 100 microns deep, yet photosensitive enough to fully juice your iPhone after laying in the sun for just six hours. It’s makers, Wysips, wants to work with Gorilla Glass to integrate the film directly into future glass panels for handsets like the iPhone 4.
I still think it’s unlikely that Apple would ever recommend you lay your iPhone out in direct sunlight when it’s running out of juice, but Cupertino’s certainly toyed with the idea: back in June, we examined a patent for a solar-powered iPhone with invisible collection cells that seems to be forecasting the creation of just such a solar-charging touchscreen.
A small company called Robocast seems to be making a bit of a cash grab against Apple in a new patent infringement lawsuit, as the former claims that Cupertino has ripped off their automated browsing technology in iTunes, Apple TV and Front Row.
The iPhone 4 integrates an LED flash into the 5MP camera’s lens, but it’s neither big nor particularly bright. Enter the iFlash, a little dongle that snaps onto your iPhone’s Dock Connector and triggers when you take a picture.
Except to what end? The idea here is to supplement your iPhone 4’s LED flash with something beefier, like the way you can buy an external flash for an SLR camera. The problem is that those latter types of strobe have a lot more capability than the iFlash, not least of which is the ability to bounce the flash off of a wall or a ceiling, resulting in a more natural shot.
If you’re taking a picture with your iPhone 4 and the built-in flash isn’t resulting in an attractive image, the iFlash isn’t likely to improve matters. If you really just want to turn every single person at the dance club into a pale-skinned, red-eyed vampire next time you’re out, though, the iFlash is attainable for £19.99.
The venerable iPod Classic hasn’t been update since September 2009, and even that was a negligible update to the last model, the sixth-generation iPod debuting in 2007. The long gap, coupled with Apple’s increasing focus on their iOS devices, have prompted some to ask if we’d see the discontinuation of the iPod Classic sometime soon… especially as it looks increasingly likely that the next iPod Touch might come with as much as 128GB of flash storage.
If you love the iPod Classic, though, don’t pay the morbid speculation any mind. Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself has weighed in upon the matter, writing a (nearly hysterical) MacRumors reader and saying that they have “no plans” to kill off the iPod Classic.
Honestly, that sort of relieves me. It’s easy to look at the iPod Classic as antiquated tech, but I like to think of it like a samurai sword, razor-keen and honed to perfection after countless foldings. That it doesn’t have the same functionality as a ray gun doesn’t make a samurai sword obsolete, it just makes it less flashy, more focused and subtle.
The iPod Classic is aimed at exactly one kind of person: the guy who wants to have his entire music collection in his pocket at all times. As music file sizes get larger, as digital music collections grow, there’s always going to be someone for whom the iPod Touch just doesn’t cut it. Apple always wants to be able to sell those guys an iPod. They’re the guys who built the brand to begin with.
I don’t really know much about Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP except what the guys over at Touch Arcade have written about it here. I know it’s an iPad game with a title that is phonetically spelled like a slight speech impediment. I know it features a cigar smoking protagonist named the Archetype, a protagonist called The Scythian, and supporting characters named Girl, Logfella and Dogfella. I know it’s due out Thursday. And that’s about it.
What else do you need to know, though, that isn’t conveyed in the mystifying, absorbing and utterly gorgeous trailer above? Look at the style of it: simplistic, abstract pixel art brought to life by ultra-realistic, fluid-like motions. Something about it reminds me of Another World. I can’t wait.
Two and half years after the last major version, Mozilla has finally released Firefox 4 for Mac, PC and Linux, bringing dramatic speed and performance enhancements, improved HTML5 support, increased customizability, improved security, a while new interface and cross-platform syncing features to the world’s second most popular browser.
Even though it has taken more than two years for Firefox 4 to creep out the door, Firefox 5 should be coming relatively soon: Mozilla has said that they want to release Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 by the end of 2011 as they adopt a more Chrome-like rapid release schedule.
The impetus to catch up in version numbers with the likes of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera and Safari are doubtlessly part of it, too: although Firefox is about as advanced as any other browser on the market, the lower version number risks the perception of being less advanced. If you knew nothing about web standards and security, which browser would you pick: Chrome 10, Internet Explorer 9, Safari 5 or Firefox 4? Exactly.
Firefox 4 is a free download, clocking in at around 27 megabytes. You can download it here.
Woot! Sparrow for Mac — the Tweetie-like email client that has become my go-to Mac email app — just got its long promised 1.1 update, and it’s a beefy one: it brings universal IMAP support to the mix.
What does that mean? Sparrow is no longer a Gmail only client: it should work with almost any webmail service now. If you haven’t given Sparrow a try simply for lack of support of your choice of webmail, you now no longer have an excuse.
That’s not to say Sparrow isn’t still mostly a Gmail-centric app, though. In fact, Sparrow 1.1 improves upon its predecessor’s support for Gmail functionality and now allows you to switch between your regular inbox, priority inbox and unread items.
Along with stability improvements and bug fixes, Sparrow also features a redesigned preferences panel that allows multiple signature support. Other changes include a format bar in the compose window, a new minimalist mode that hides message previews, improved scrolling performance and multitouch gesture support.
If you haven’t already bought Sparrow, it costs $9.99 in the Mac App Store. There is also a Lite version which can only be used with a single account at a time, but it has yet to be updated to 1.1.
Valve Software’s incredible Steam platform came to OS X last year after years of Windows exclusivity, and as far as I’m concerned ushered in a refreshing new era in OS X gaming, in which Mac gamers were afforded all the same perks on our platform as Windows gamers have long taken for granted on theirs.
It looks like Valve’s love for Apple might not stop at OS X, though. Valve is now apparently looking into expanding Steam into iOS.
Given how difficult it is to get an iPad 2 in America right now, you didn’t have to be a die-hard cynic to think that Apple was going to have to repeat 2010’s one month international delay in launching the iPad internationally.
Not so! Apple wants everyone to know that the iPad 2 will still launch in 25 more countries this Friday.
Apple also announced that all models of iPad 2 will be available in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and additional countries in April.
As with the American launch, customers will be able to purchase their iPad 2 directly at an Apple retail store starting at 5pm local time. If you want to order one online, you can do so through Apple.com at 1am that same day (the press release doesn’t say, but presumably this is Pacific Time).
If you’re an international customer planning on ordering an iPad 2 online, keep in mind that even the U.S. customers who ordered their iPad 2s within minutes of the order page going live had to wait 3-5 business days for their iPad 2 to ship (mine only came yesterday). Also, U.S. customers who didn’t order their iPad 2s quickly now face a 4-5 week wait. Set your alarms and get ready to be patient. To explore more about thehistory on Mac and how previous Apple devices evolved, check out this detailed timeline.
How is Apple capable of launching in 25 countries when they can’t even supply the United States? My guess is that they’ve either been stockpiling iPad 2s for the international launch, or that current US delivery estimate times are massively informed by projected international demand.
Either way, if you’re someone who has been trying to get an iPad 2 at your local Apple Store, only to have a shady gray market iPad 2 smuggler purchase it out from under you every time, take heart! As the gray market overseas is a huge part of what is contributing to current shortages, iPad 2 availability through retail channels should actually improve when the tablet is available in more countries.
With the iPad 2 set to launch internationally on Friday, it’s time to set our eyes upon the next big thing… the iPhone 5’s debut in June or July. Apple certainly is: China Times is reporting that the iPhone 5 has entered trial production and is scheduled for wide scale release in Q3 of this year, which aligns with the iPhone’s traditional late June / early July release date.
As for what the iPhone 5 will look like, the latest report supports rumors suggesting that the iPhone 5 will mostly be similar to an iPhone 4s, with the major differences being a slightly larger 4-inch touchscreen in the same form factor (accomplished by having less room between the side bezels of the device), as well as a metal chassis to make the device lighter and improve antenna sensitivity.
