John Brownlee - page 187

There are many good ways to promote your product or service. Here at Cult of Mac, we’re particularly taken with people prancing around in animal costumes, then being hit in slow-motion by a barrage of baseballs while the product’s name flashes on the screen. Advertising’s not so hard after all.

Of course, not every advertiser is so inventive, and so there is a lesser school of guerilla advertising: destroying a beautiful and expensive gadget in a web video in lurid, torture porn detail, then directing viewers to a stupid, countdown and uninformative website that the viewer will forget the second it fails to illuminate.

In this case, the site in question is Say Hi To Space, and while the video is beautifully produced and an industrial drill a novel way to destroy an iPad, one can’t help but feel that the iPad’s lack of a camera is just a slight-of-hand justification for the iPad’s destruction… one that will ultimately lead us to a website that has nothing to do whatsoever with Apple or its products.

Apple intends on using the 100 acres of land they purchased for $300 million from HP last month to build a partially domed, green-friendly campus with an intensive subterranean road and transportation network, according to a recent report by a Spanish paper… and they’ve already hired the visionary architect to make the futuristic, utopian campus city happen.

Mophie’s back with another Juice Pack, this time meant to both charge and ensconce your iPhone 4, while simultaneously protecting it from drops and guarding the antenna from finger-induced signal attenuation.

When the Mac App Store launches, it’ll have the same dichotomy that the iOS App Store has: free apps and paid apps. Don’t expect Apple to use the launching of the Mac App Store to finally introduce a new demo category, though… Apple is now telling developers that they will not accept demos, trials or betas for Mac App Store review.

According to a new posting on their Developer News Portal, Apple will only accept feature complete versions of apps, saying:

Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore. The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps.

It’s a strange move for Apple to make. Surely, insisting that developers host demo and trial versions of their apps simply means that Apple is going to risk losing out on money generated by customers who want to try before they buy. If a customer downloads a demo from the software maker’s website, surely he’ll go directly back to that website — or click a link inside the software itself going to the website — which means Apple will miss out on its 30% commission.

Moreover, in saying that developers can’t submit trial, demo or beta versions of their software, Apple’s Mac App Store Review Team is still leaving a loop hole open for developers to submit Lite versions of their apps, a la iOS, which are demos in their own right. So what’s the point?

[via MacStories]

Although rumors often cast him as an apoplectic, purple-faced tyrant stamping through his Cupertino headquarters, Apple’s Steve Jobs is the most beloved of any major tech CEO by his employees, according to a Silicon Valley Insider chart.

Ranked by his own employees, His Steveness hovers at the 95% mark as far as employee approval ratings go, relegating the naysayers as a small minority of malcontents.

If you want to get rid of the number pad on your iMac desktop, you now have no choice but to go wireless: Apple has quietly discontinued its compact wired keyboard, making either the $69 Apple Wireless Keyboard and the $49 Apple Keyboard With Numeric Keypad the only (official) keyboards in town.

The compact wired keyboard — part number MB869LL/A — was introduced in early 2009 with the new iMac revision. Neither it nor its wireless brother (which came in the same design, albeit without the compact wired keyboard’s two USB ports) have ever been my style: I’ve never been able to grow accustomed to the lack or miniaturization of some important keys, let alone the omission of the number pad.

Still, if you like keeping your desktop as compact as possible but don’t like changing batteries on your keyboard, it’s a bit of a blow. Better stock up: Amazon’s still selling the old wired keyboard for $49.

Could Apple be planning on signing a deal with legendary radio shock jock Howard Stern to exclusively host a new iTunes show? That’s the rumor amongst Sirius investors, and it’s food for thought, if not terribly likely.

Next week’s release of the Unreal 3 Engine based Infinity Blade is likely to set a new graphics milestone for iOS when it’s released next week, but it’s not likely to be the exception: Epic Games have just announced that they will soon release the Unreal Development Kit (or UDK) for iOS to developers, allowing them to use the next-gen Unreal 3 Engine in their games for free.

Apple has made their first step in providing point-of-sale, or PoS, systems to other retailers. The systems are modified iPod Touches that allow employees to ring up purchases, accept credit signatures and wirelessly print receipts to stationed printers through the store; if that sounds familiar, it’s because this is the same EasyPay system Apple uses in many of its own retail stores, albeit rebranded as “ZipCheck.”

Last month, Verizon’s CEO said that his network would have to “earn” the iPhone and strongly implied that their upcoming rollout of their 4G network would be what would do it.

Maybe so, but they are off to a shaky start when it comes to servicing the Apple faithful: Verizon has officially launched their 4G network by offering their first LTE modem to the public… but don’t expect it to work on your Mac.

Short of your old Friendster or Myspace accounts, Ping is probably your least-used social network. Heck, if bits and bytes could collect dust, Ping sure would have on my machine.

So my guess is that not even the biggest Apple fan will get too indignant about Business Insider listing Ping amongst their fifteen biggest flops in the tech industry in 2010.

Punch drunk Adobe has just released the latest beta of their Flash Player for Mac, and while we wouldn’t be caught dead installing it on our new Airs, for the rest of Mac owners, it may very well represent a substantial performance improvement over Flash Player 10.1.

The biggest new feature in Flash Player 10.2 is “Stage Video” which Adobe claims will allow for high-performance video playback while using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” Basically, Stage Video is a full embrace of the GPU, offloading the entirety of the video rendering pipeline — from H.264 decoding to color conversion and scaling — to your Mac’s graphics chip.

Unfortunately, Stage Video has a hitch: it’s not backwards compatible, so websites will have to update to use the latest APIs for their video players before you see any improvement using Stage Video.

If you’re interested in giving the latest Beta a try, it can be downloaded here.

Despite wild speculation and user interest, Apple has yet to launch any cloud-storage and streaming functionality to iTunes, but that’s not to say you’re completely out of luck if you want to access your music no matter where you are: a new cloud-based streaming site named Mougg has just launched, and best of all, it’s free to try out.

Steve Jobs has made no bones about being skeptical in regards to multitouch displays on desktop and notebook Macs, observing that multitouch works best when a display is horizontal: anything else just leads to gorilla arm.

Right now, that means that Macs’ multitouch options are limited to accessories like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, but given the iPad’s success, it’s natural Apple is trying to find a more directly interactive approach to horizontal multitouch, in which the display can convert flush with a lap or a desk when it’s in touch mode.

Now a bevy of new patents have been awarded to Apple, most interestingly in a convertible MacBook-to-iPad-like device, spotted by Patently Apple.

Has your iPhone’s battery been lasting longer through the day since you updated to iOS 4.2.1? There may be a reason for that: Apple’s using network-controlled fast dormancy in iOS 4.2 to better optimize the way in which the iPhone connects to the cell network, which results in a noticeable bump in battery life.

Only Apple knows what new hardware features the iPad 2 will boast when it comes out in April 2011, but one thing everyone can agree on is that it will have FaceTime support by way of at least one camera module.

Now Digitimes is claiming that they know who is going to provide the lens modules for the iPad 2, and no shocks here: they say it’s Largan Precision, who also apparently supply the 5-megapixel lens module in the iPhone 4.

This fleshes out an earlier report that Omnivision would be providing the actual camera sensors, as well as another Digitimes report on the iPad 2 from last week, which rather improbably claimed the iPad 2 would have a USB port and a Retina Display… neither of which are likely.

Although it pays off in compactness, the MacBook Air’s locked down, proprietary construction makes it one of the least self-serviceable or upgradeable computers out there. Heck, you can’t even upgrade the RAM: it’s soldered onto the motherboard.

If you’re brave enough to crack open your Air, about the only thing that will actually prove replaceable to most mortals will be the Toshiba SSD drives, which is what prompted Taiwanese company Photofast to start selling 256GB SSD modules that offered a 30% boost to your Air’s read and write speeds.

Unfortunately, it looks like Photofast’s MacBook Air SSD business has been shut down by Apple, who apparently threatened the company’s >a jref=”https://www.9to5mac.com/38937/apple-makes-photofast-stop-sales-of-speedy-256-gb-macbook-air-ssds?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+(9+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence)”>standing as a member of Apple’s own MFi program, which allows them to make officially licensed Apple accessories.

It’s sucky, especially if you wanted to double your 11-inch Air’s for cheap (as I did), but in all honesty, my butter fingers are probably better off not cracking open my Air’s guts. Apple’s probably done me a favor here.

Mark your calendars. Chair Entertainment and Epic Games’ much-anticipated Infinity Blade will be hitting the App Store on December 9th.

The game will cost $5.99 as a universal app playable on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch (Third and Fourth Gens) and the iPad.

Imagine entering a large, circular war room in the deepest, most hidden bunker of Cupertino headquarters, modeled similarly to the one in Doctor StrangeloveAfter shaking hands with Peter Sellers doing his classic Steve Jobs impression, you’d cast your eyes up at the enormous map on the wall, and as you looked upon it, you’d see countries around the world suddenly light up.

Those lights, though, wouldn’t indicate nuclear explosions… they’d represent the megaton blasts of the iPad launching over the past two days in Taiwan, Denmark, Portugal, The Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, Nortay, Hungary, Finland and South Korea. Later this week, Brazil is also slated to get the iPad.

Of course, you’d never get into such a room. As General Woz Turgidson would be sure to point out, it would be a serious breach of security. I mean, you’d see everything. You’d… you’d even see the Big Board.

Apple’s North Carolina data supercenter is soon to go live, but it will sadly have to do so without the man most largely responsible for its creation: Apple’s Global Data Center Director Oliver Sanche passed away of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day.

Hewn from the trunk of — well — some sort of tree, then sanded down and oiled and hand rubbed and buffed with the bottom of a virgin angel, BlackBox sells these lovely sheathes for MacBooks of all variety for $129 a pop… except, alas, the MacBook Air, which could do with the reinforcement.

The Dev Team has just announced that they have been successful in attaining carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, which is now available through Cydia.

Same old, same old, I know. But what’s more interesting is how the Dev Team managed to unlock these old devices: by patching in a vulnerable baseband from the first iPad firmware!

Whenever it arrives, it looks like Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily won’t be the only iPad-only magazine around: British billionaire and part Virgin Airways owner Richard Branson is also planning on launching a new iPad publication called Project, and it’s likely to be revealed as early as tomorrow.

Did you miss out on that incredible $399 iPad deall TJ Maxx was using to lure customers into their stores this past Black Friday? You might be in luck: a new deals site has just gone online, and their goal is to deliver 32GB WiFi iPads to their customers for a hundred bucks off the standard price.

The past week’s rumor cycle has consistently pegged early December as the date when Apple would simultaneously introduce iOS 4.3, iTunes in-app subscription support and News Corp’s new iPad-only magazine, The Daily… but according to sources, that date is very likely aggressive, and the actual rollout has been delayed until early 2011.