John Brownlee - page 185

We all love Dropbox, right? For two years, it’s allowed us to keep our most important files synced across multiple computers and devices, complete with a generous 2GB freebie limit (easily expandable by recommendations and promotions).

It’s hard to believe that such an awesome service wasn’t even version 1.0, but apparently not: last night, Dropbox rolled out their first whole point release, bringing along a huge slew of improvements including — most importantly — selective folder sync.

Selective Sync allows you to select which folders and files within your Dropbox get shot down to your other computers, which can be determined in each computer’s control panel. This allows you, for example, to save some of your poor MacBook Air’s paltry 64GBs from the sheer bloat of your Dropboxed media collection. Lovely.

There’s more improvements than that, naturally. The 1.0 updates includes hundreds of bug fixes, reduced resource usage (50 percent in memory alone) and some user-friendly interface tweaks.

You can grab the 1.0 update here.

Sure, this is a pretty big gimmick, but we’re impressed none the less: behold an 11-inch MacBook Air driving four displays at once. From right to left, the MacBook Air is driving a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display through the Mini DisplayPort a 7-inch Mimo 720-S display through USB, its own internal display and an Apple IIc running a terminal session through a serial cable, presumably through another USB adapter. This, my friends, is the most lurid Mac porn you’ll see all day,

Not to continue to pimp our own Infinity Bladeelegiac masterpiece.

Interestingly, though, it turns out that Infinity Blade — a game that seems like it would be impossible to pull off on any other console — was not designed for iOS to begin with.

In fact, as Chair co-founder Donald Mustard makes clear in a recent interview, it wasn’t designed for an iPhone or iPad… it was designed for the great gaming device that Apple missed out on: Kinect.

Here’s how a subsidy on your smartphone is supposed to work: in exchange for a shorter upfront price, you agree to a two year contract for cellular services. Baked into your mobile bill is a certain amount of surcharge that helps pay off the full price of your phone, but after twenty four months, you own that phone entirely, and should be able to bring it to any network you care to, because after 24 months, you’ve paid it off.

As you probably know, though, this is not a position on mobile phone subsidies that is likely to get you a lot of sympathy at AT&T. In fact, there’s no official way to unlock an AT&T iPhone once your 24 month contract is over: even though you now own that smartphone, it’s still locked to AT&T’s service.

Honestly, that’s crap, and has driven a lot of American iPhone owners down the road to jailbreak. Canadians, though, seem to have it a lot easier: if you’ve gotten your iPhone from Rogers, a $50 fee at the end of your contract is enough to have the network unlock your phone to work on a competitors’ network.

Thursday was a big day in insider trading busts, as four new arrests were made by the Securities and Exchange Commission cracking down on insider trading.

One of those arrests, though, is particularly interesting to Apple enthusiasts: Walter Shimoon, an executive for Flextronics (an Apple supplier), was one of those busted on Thursday, and as it turns out, one of his violations was to pass on information about both an iPhone update and the iPad before they were official.

The kitchen computer is a wonderful, wonderful prospect — recipes to be references, emails to be responded to over cooking — except for the prospects of smoke and steam and spatters of hot grease. Doubly so the prospect of cooking with an iPad, which is simply too beautiful, too pure a device to put near an open flame.

Enter various rack solutions, none of which have caught our eye for their permanence, but this is pretty ingenious: The Original Kitchen iPad Rack, an acrylic rack that temporarily hooks into an installed mount on the underside of your hood or cabinet for when you need it. Otherwise, you just slot it off and take it away.

Works for iPad quite well, natch, but it also works on other recipe-accessing tablets, including the Kindle and Galaxy Tab. For only $29.99, this may well make a good last minute stocking stuffer.

Oh, sweet Bacchus. Forget those other iPod Nano watchbands we’ve seen: here’s the only one that matters. Called the “Richard Tracy Nano Watch Strap,” this project — kicked off via Kickstarter, only to ignominiously fail to raise its funding,– is not only one of the first Nano watch bands to have a high quality leather strap, as opposed to some plastic nonsense… the frame even contains a built-in beer opener, perfect for helping to remove the childproof cap from some brews, thus medicating your delirium tremens.

Like we said, this failed to get a following over at Kickstarter, so you can’t actually buy it. Maybe spreading the word, however belatedly, will inspire them to give it another go.

ACHTUNG: Creator Jason Hilbourne says that these are, indeed, for sale… just at Think Geek. Only $49.99!

Google’s Marissa Mayer (and the rest of us plebs) must be disappointed to hear that Steve Jobs has not been awarded Time Magazine’s 2010 “Person of the Year” award. Instead, it was awarded to Mark Zuckerberg, the translucently pale lizard man who created Facebook pictured on above.

Steve didn’t totally get the short shift, though. He was declared one of Time Magazine’s “People Who Matter.”

“With each passing year Steve Jobs and his sleek Apple products not only succeed in impressing the techiest of tech addicts, they also manage to create a whole new batch of gadget enthusiasts,” the magazine noted, pointing to the iPad and the redesign of the MacBook Air as examples.

They also noted that this year, under Jobs’ leadership, Apple became the largest technology company in the world.

This isn’t the first time Jobs has been denied the “Person of the Year” award by a thin margin: in 2009, Jobs was one of the top seven finalists. He’ll make it one of these years.

At the beginning of the month, Adobe put Flash Player 10.2 up for download, which added a new feature called “Stage Video” to the mix which Adobe claimed would allow for high-performance video playback while using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” How? Basically, it offloaded the whole video rendering pipeline to your Mac’s GPU.

Sounds like a step up from the current status quo, but there was only one problem: it wasn’t backwards compatible, so sites across the Net would be required to update to the new code to take advantage of Stage Video.

Now Adobe says that many of the bigger players in Flash Video — most notably YouTube — have updated their Flash Player to take advantage of the speed increase.

Nice to hear, of course, but we’ll stick to HTML5 for the moment, until we see some power efficiency benchmarks come down the pipeline. In the meantime, enjoy the video above, in which an Adobe engineer wears a vintage Starfleet shirt that is comically too small.

Are you a developer who wishes your game could look good as Infinity Blade? Great news: Epic is publicly releasing their Unreal Development Kit for iOS today, which should vastly simplify the creation of a games’ graphics and animation. Best, it’s free… within limits.

Having sound issues with your 27-inch LED Cinema Display? Apple’s just pumped a fix down the pipe to deal with occasional audio loss experienced by some users.

Previously, Apple’s own tech note explained that some users were noticing that sound from an LED Cinema Display connected to a Mac would intermittently drop sound, and that users may have to unplug the display or even reboot to get the audio working again.

Seems like a big gaffe, but apparently, the new update will fix these issues. That said, it’s a rather unique update by Apple’s standard, so remember to follow the instructions included in the updater application to letter, to minimize accidental explosions, implosions and trans-dimensional vortices.

[via 9to5Mac]

Although Cupertino never tips its hand ahead of time, past experience indicates you can set your watch (at least by the month) for their product refreshes, so no shock here: it’s now being reported that Apple will launch new MacBook Pros in the first half of 2011, which probably equates to a April 2011 timescale, along with new iMacs, which were last updated back in January.

Don’t have an AppleTV, or even a TV, but interested in beaming some of your iPhone’s videos to that inviting 27-inch iMac display? TUAW’s always ingenious Erica Sadun has put together a tricky new piece of software that fools your iPhone or iPod Touch into thinking its an AppleTV.

The iPhone’s impressive GPU is supplied by Imagination Technologies, and it’s already powerful enough to run advanced 3D graphics engines like the Unreal 3 Engine. Unbelievably, though, it’s slated to get a lot better, after it was announced that Imagination has just acquired Caustic Graphics, a company with even more impressive 3D graphics technology to boast of.

Sick of waiting for Apple to make up its mind on when its going to pilot iTunes into the cloud? Skeptical that Google’s going to do it any quicker? Recognize Spotify in the United States for what it is: a pipe dream that the music publishers will never let happen?

Time to throw your collected tracks online yourself, and cloud-streaming music service mSpot is here to help you make that happen, in conjunction with a free, just released iOS app.

Judging by the video above, mSpot’s actually got me interested: $3.99 for 40GB of online storage is actually a pretty decent price, especially given the slickness of their web interface. I’m about to move, shipping my iMac over and working entirely on my 64GB MacBook Air for the next month… maybe it wouldn’t be a shabby idea to throw my music collection up on mSpot before I leave.

Apple’s Camera Connection Kit for iPad is a pretty useful set of dongles for the on-the-go photographer, but it does seem somewhat redundant: why did Apple need to display two different dongles when it could have designed one dongle that read USB and SD cards simultaneously?

Such was the thinking that lead us to admire August’s 2-in-1 Camera Connection Kit for iPad, which smashed together both dongles into one converging, dual-purpose accessory.

Pretty neat, but the fancy lads over at MIC have just one-upped the 2-in-1 Camera Connection Kit… literally. Meet the 3-in-1 Camera Connection Kit for iPad, replete with a USB port, an SD card slot and a microSD card reader.. all for only $29.90. Take that!

Yesterday, we reported that Toshiba would be building new facility in order to supply Apple with high-res displays for future iPhones and iPads… and that Cupertino itself might have sunk some cash in to the project to get it off the ground.

Today, Toshiba’s denying Apple’s involvement.

If you love Chair’s Infinity Blade as much as we did but have played it so much that you’ve simply maxed out what there is to do in the game, great news: Chair’s Donald Mustard has just announced that the first update to the masterful sword fighting game will be coming out next week, just in time for Christmas.

Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster has a spotty history of prediction, but we think his latest pronouncement is probably right: if Verizon’s the next network that gets the iPhone, it will only be at AT&T’s expense.

We’re torn on pointing this out, because it’s one of the crummiest iOS ports in recent memory, but if you’re willing to wrestle with some truly terrible on-screen controls in the pursuit of ultraviolent, misogynistic nostalgia, 3D Realms’ classic FPS Duke Nukem 3D is now free on both the iPhone and the iPad.

Honestly, free’s free, though, and the core game’s excellent enough that, with some patience, this is still a game very much worth playing… the rare game title that manages to transcend its own pan-offensive stupidity.

If you count on MobileMe especially during the midnight hours, be warned: MobileMe is going down for maintenance tonight.

Apple is under fire in Japan today after a group of the nation’s top publishers have claimed that Apple is approving apps for sale on the App Store when they violate the copyrights of many famous Japanese authors.

Verizon has been rolling out its new LTE mobile broadband service across America over the past couple months in a move that is thought to herald the introduction of a future 4G iPhone to their network, presumably next year. Either way, right now, there are no Verizon 4G smartphones… instead, they are selling a series of LTE 4G modems, which are regrettably only for Windows PCs… no Macs accepted.

Luckily, it seems that the plucky hacking community has already managed to put themselves together an unofficial workaround to the situation, bringing 4G support to OS X for the first time… at least for the Pantech UML290.

infinity Blade. We certainly loved it, declaring it to be an “elegiac App Store masterpiece,” but did Joe and Jane App Store agree?

It appears so. According to Appmodo, who looked at the Game Center data for Infinity Blade, 274,000 players have currently registered the game… which means at $5.99 per copy, Epic’s raked in over $1.6MM dollars in just five days.

Toshiba certainly seems to think their business with Apple is important, judging by the latest news the company is now readying a $1.89 billion production facility to help supply Apple with high-resolution LCD display panels. Re: Retina Displays.