Earlier this year, Sanho — makers of the super useful Hypermac line of batteries — found themselves in a pot of hot water boiled by Apple’s legal team, who objected to Hypermac’s use of repurposed (and patented) MagSafe cable connectors to juice up hungry MacBooks.
You can’t keep a good product down, though. HyperMac has just relaunched the HyperMac line, this time working around their reliance upon old MagSafe cables so as not to draw Cupertino’s ire once more.
Yesterday we reported that Google’s DNS service might be to blame for AppleTV’s slow HD streaming speeds on some devices.
Here was the problem, as we summarized it at the time:
Basically, iTunes streaming content is hosted by Akamai, which uses different local servers to route downloaders to the fastest available connection. Services like Google DNS, or other generic DNS providers, are trying to route all users the same way… the equivalent of trying to cram a few thousand people through a single door at the same time.
OpenDNS has just reached out to us, though, to assure both Cult of Mac and its readers that users of their service that they can expect fast AppleTV streaming, all the time.
Laura Oppenheimer of Open DNS writes:
OpenDNS has arrangements with a number of CDNs that make this a non-issue for the vast majority of OpenDNS + Apple TV users. That said, with Akamai, especially internationally, it’s still suboptimal. It’s entirely workable, but not as optimal as it could be.
In general, North America isn’t really an issue since we have a sufficiently dense network topology. That said, we’re very open to working to improve end-user CDN routing with Akamai, just as we have with other large CDNs.
In short, if you’re having problems with your AppleTV and you live in North America, give OpenDNS a try. If you’re an international user, though, Apple’s Akamai hosting isn’t what it could be… and you might experience problems no matter what DNS provider you use.
Remember that supposed iPad Mini flaunted by famous Taiwanese racecar driver Jimmy Lin earlier today? We thought he was holding a fake, but we may have been more right than we knew: according to reader Greg Mills, it’s a Photoshop fake.
Square Enix just released a iOS port of one classic JRPG from the SNES era, Secret of Mana, and now it appears that they’re teasing another: Joystiq just sussed out a cryptic new teaser site for what appears to be a smartphone compatible (and hopefully iOS specific) port of Chrono Trigger, their famous 16-bit time travel RPG first released way back in 1995.
Chrono Trigger is still one of my favorite games. The site says “Spring 2011.” Oh please, oh please, oh please.
Need an external battery pack that doesn’t just dangle from the foot of your phone like a bulbous, electrically-charged bunion? The Octopus might be just what you’re looking for.
Taking its name from the suction cups of a cephalopod’s tentacles, the Octopus sits in your gadget bag until your iPhone runs out of juice, at which point it can be slapped onto the back of your device and connected to the Dock Connector thanks to a flexible cable.
If you allow the Octopus to fully charge your iOS device, you can expect your iPhone to comfortably juice to about half power, which should give you either ten hours of extra video or four hours of extra talk time.
Not a bad idea compared to some of the bulkier combo battery cases, and cheap to boot: the Octopus will only cost you $30
Greetings, Space Marine. You have been recruited by the StarCraft League to defend the Dominion against Zeratul and the Protoss Armada. If you’re too cheap to accept your mission, though, head on over to Blizzard‘s web site, where they’re now offering up for free download the long belated demo for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the latest iteration of their famed, Korea-rocking space warfare RTS.
Don’t feel like ordering direct from Apple? AT&T’s now ready to sell you an iPad 3G directly at the usual $629, $729 and $829 prices, with the same no contract deal as through Apple’s online store. But surely you want to give your money directly to Ma Bell out of sheer loyalty to the AT&T experience, right?
You probably know of Instagram, the hipster app du jour which allows you to easily apply a number of attractive, quasi-Polaroid-esque filters that spruce up your iPhone or iPod Touch pictures to give them a more artistic and sometimes twee look.
But you probably know more than of Instagram. You probably use it. After all, they just racked up one million users.
According to Instragram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Instagram started with just 80 users, and their ultimate “audacious goal” was just to let people share media in open community. The growth they’ve seen is phenomal, though: since mid-October, they’ve lured in over a million souls.
“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”
How big is Instagram? Users are now collectively uploading three photos per second, to contribute to a library of almost ten million photos.
I may sound dismissive, but I’m not: Instagram undeniably allows users to take more interesting looking photos than the iPhone’s built-in sensor can natively produce. I guess I just wish that the iPhone and iPod Touch’s camera hardware was capable of taking interesting images without needing a filter app. It can’t, but that’s not Apple’s failure: it’s a limitation on the technology of digital sensors. Here’s hoping that changes.
Considering the depths that Apple fans will plump into a new version of iOS even before it’s released — let alone a month later — we’re amazed to hear that developers are still stumbling upon new features of iOS 4.2… especially when those features are as buzzworthy as augmented reality. Yet that’s just what Occipital has discovered lurking in the firmware of Apple’s latest iteration of its popular mobile operating system.
Apple tried but failed to control the technology behind Microsoft’s incredible gesture-recognizing Kinect controller, but if you wonder what might have been if they succeeded, keep your eyes on this January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That’s where Ellipti Labs will demonstrate what gesture recognition could look like on the iPad.
AirPlay may have been a little bit of a disappointment upon arrival, but TUAW’s Erica Sadun just keeps on managing to make it better. Just a week after her release of AirPlayer, an app that tricks AirPlay into thinking your Mac’s an AppleTV, comes her brand new tool, called AirFlick… and it’s everything that AirPlay should have been out of the box.
What does AirFlick do? It allows you to stream video content from your Mac to your AppleTV: AVIs, MP4s, even streaming video files on the Internet. You name it! “It” being non-Flash video.
When Steve Jobs himself was queried on the possibilities inherent in the seven inch tablet form factor, he replied that they were “dead on arrival” and declared them to be “tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad.”
Despite this, rumors have persisted that 2011 will see the introduction of a 7-inch iPad Mini… and now a famous Taiwanese celebrity and race car driver is claiming to own a prototype.
What if you could propel your band to the top of the iTunes sales charts while simultaneously laundering cash from stolen credit card numbers straight to your bank account?
Why, you’d go to jail, as UK teen Lamar Johnson just found out.
A new update for Tweetie-esque GMail client Sparrow has just hit the Internet in time for the Holiday, adding some important new refinements including the addition of:
• Progress Bar
• Gmail shortcuts
• Quick labeling
• Quick Labeling and Archiving
• Smart recipient auto-complete
• ‘Download message on demand’ option
• Auto-restart on Menu Bar/Dock settings
• Quicklook in the compose window
• Horizontal scrollbar
• Plain text option
Sparrow’s developers also intend to bring the app to the Mac App Store, and so they’re now forking Sparrow into two different apps: one that is free and ad-supported, the other a paid version without ads.
I’m downloading it to give it a try — I’ve loved the idea about Sparrow, but the first betas were just too buggy and feature-poor to deal with. I can’t wait to see if my niggling issues have been fixed.
Yesterday, I packed up almost all of my earthly possessions and allowed a surly, sausage-lipped German and a pleasant Scottish lad to take them all away, to cram them in a shipping container and sail off across the sea.
In that shipment was my 27-inch iMac, my main work machine, and so for the next few months I will be using my 11.6-inch iMac for all of my work and productivity needs. It’s a fine machine for that, but I’m already twitching over the USB port situations… the MacBook Air simply is not a good hub to try to sync three device simultaneously.
I love the look, then, of the Green Wall Charger from VogDuo, a pocketable four-way USB charger that has one awesome perk that competing devices don’t: a timer that ticks down in two hour increments. Once it reaches zero, it cuts the circuit and no further juice is drawn… a cute trick that isn’t just fantastic for maximizing your iPhone’s battery life, but also to maintain a clean eco conscious.
The Green Wall Charger only pumps out five watts per USB port, so a single port isn’t enough to charge an iPad, but VogDuo thought ahead: a Y-connector is provided in the package so you can hook your iPad up to two sockets simultaneously.
Pretty rad. I’d buy this today, if not for the fact it’s not available yet: it won’t make an official debut until CES next month.
If you’re as addicted to Chair and Epic’s Infinity Blade, as I am, today’s a banner day: an update to the elegiac swordfight action game has just dropped, and it adds a slew of new content.
Although Adobe itself is hardly on the ropes, having just scored their first billion dollar year in revenue, Apple continues to pummel Flash into the ground, like a berserker rabbit punching the occipital lobe of a downed enemy.
The latest blow? Apple has just launched iAd Producer, a new tool for online advertisers that allows them to create interactive iAd content in an easy, streamlined manner that would have previously required Adobe’s Flash developer tools.
A couple weeks ago, one of my friends brought me a new MacBook Air from the States, and as he delivered it to me, he — a die-hard Windows user — eloquently endorsed Apple’s sexy new, razor thin ultraportable by noting that as far as was concerned, “using this laptop is what living in the future feels like” and that “I’ll definitely buy one, because this computer will get you laid.”
He’s not an exception: I’ve turned more Windows-loving heads with the new MacBook Air than any other laptop I’ve ever owned. It looks like makers of Windows PCs have noticed the same thing, because Acer, Asus and Lenovo are all set to ape the MacBook Air’s incredible design.
There’s already a few hacks out there to allow you to extend the admittedly rather limited AirPlay functionality of iOS 4.2 to run on non-iOS devices: last week, for example, TUAW’s Erica Sadun released AirPlayer, an app that tricks AirPlayer into think your Mac’s an AppleTV.
Now, though, plucky and ingenious hackers are figuring out how to do the same thing on non-Apple hardware, and the first fruit of those labors has now been released for Linux.
Behold! An iPhone fit for a Brobdingnagian! This is the world’s biggest iPhone, located in the heart of London’s famous St. Pancras International Train Station. But while it is impressively enormous, a Bunyan-sized handset for the on-the-go colossus, it’s something of a cheat: it’s made up of 56 interconnected iPads.
Ever since the Wikileaks dumped hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables up on their site for everyone to see, traditional companies have been trying to disassociate themselves from the whistle-blowing wiki. In rapid order, Wikileaks lost the support of its host, Amazon, their DNS provider, PayPal, and MasterCard.
Now Apple’s App Store Review Team has . But is it censorship?
Although the second generation AppleTV is certainly sexy, it’s not quite as “magical” a device as we’ve come to expect from the wizards at Cupertino. Not only are the media offerings a bit limited compared to the competition, but the new AppleTV is prone to some technical problems… most notably reports of bog slow downloads.
It looks like a potential cause for those tortoising downloads on the Apple TV has been identified, though, and it’s not Apple’s fault: it’s Google’s.
Trying to thumb type a search query into your iPhone on the run sucks, and it’s sow to boot. Google knows it, which is why they have the Google Search app, allowing you to just dictate your search query when typing is otherwise inconvenient.
But it looks like Apple might have noticed it too. New job postings indicate Apple is looking to improve the native voice recognition capabilities of iOS.
One of the reasons why modern Mac laptops are able to attain such great graphics performance while maintaining excellent battery life is because Apple switched over to NVIDIA chipsets that marry their own superior mobile GPUs with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors.
Unfortunately, Apple’s reliance on NVIDIA chipsets is also the reason why Mac laptops didn’t jump to the new Core i series of Intel CPUs last year, as Intel has been fighting it out with NVIDIA in court, trying to push the graphics maker out of the Intel-compatible chipset business.
Looks like they were successful. NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says that his company will be permanently exiting the chipset business to focus on SoCs (or systems on a chip).
The other day, as I was stuffing my new 11.6-inch MacBook Air in my tote, I once again felt that bubble of warm gratitude that after twenty odd years of waiting, someone had finally come along and given me the perfect writer’s laptop that I’ve always wanted: the perfect amalgam of extreme portability married to great battery life and a sturdy, pleasant-to-use keyboard.
I’d had such pleasant reveries before, but this time, it was punctuated with a bit of sadness, as I remembered the many journals I’d carried around over the years — a rather absurd addiction of mine, given that I rarely wrote anything of worth in them — and realized that the new MacBook Air was effectively more convenient to carry around than even the composition notebooks I used to lug with me when I wanted to travel light but still be able to do some quick writing if the inspiration struck.
It’s weird that I’m sad that the MacBook Air obviated a kind of notebook that I never really used anyway, but I liked having all sorts of notebooks around, and now there’s no point in buying any new ones. I guess I’ll have to content myself in the future with the likes of this composition notebook skin for MacBook Air, which takes its attention to detail right down to the simulation of the note page’s fuzzy, blue lined rule.