httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt2_lZFnpbQ
There’s plenty of Twitter clients on the App Store, from Twitter’s official software to power apps like TweetDeck, but watch this peaceful and somnolent video for the somewhat regrettably named Super Twario and you’ll have discovered one of the most pleasant Twitter clients around.
iBooks is plenty impressive, but despite Apple’s own leap into the realm of e-books, Amazon is going strong with the Kindle platform. They’ve managed to price the Kindle affordably enough at this point that few who only want an e-reader are likely to spend another few hundred on an iPad, and they’ve successfully managed to leverage their real strength against iBooks time and time again: if you buy a book through Amazon, you will not only be able to read it on every gadget out there, whether you have a Kindle, an Android smartphone, or a Mac… but thanks to their Whispersync technology, you’ll even be able to keep your bookmarks and annotations synced across every platform forever.
It’s nice to see Amazon fighting so ably against the competition of iBooks to their empire, and even nicer to see a new update to their Kindle for Mac software come down the pipeline which adds improved Whispersync functionality, which will allow you to keep your notes and highlighted passages synced across all your devices. There’s also a refreshed interface which looks much more Mac-like than previously.
If you buy Kindle over iBooks — and there’s absolutely no shame in that — go grab the latest update now.
Apple’s put down webOS before in the smartphone wars, but you can’t keep a solid operating system down for the count: six months after HP acquired Palm, they have just announced webOS 2.0 and the Pre 2 smartphone.
Over the weekend, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg met for some dinner, and smart money would rest on the bet that they were trying to work out some sort of deal where Facebook and Ping come together at last.
But could Apple’s interest be far more bold than merely ironing out some differences? Peter Kafka over at All Things D certainly thinks so: he speculates that Apple may want to buy Facebook outright with its $51 billion in cash reserves.
Here’s Kafka’s reasoning. Asked by Jobs what Apple intends to do with all of its cash, Jobs responded: “We firmly believe that one or more unique strategic opportunities will present itself to us, and we’ll be in a position to take advantage of it.” As Kafka sees it, Facebook’s a good bet for such an acquisition.
Deep down in their guts, iOS and OS X are basically the same beast, distinguished largely by their user interface shells… so could tomorrow’s reveal of OS X 10.7, “Lion,” make OS X’s UI more like iOS than ever before? An unconfirmed report says yes.
According to the report, the upcoming update to Lion will be heavily based on iOS in many of its trappings. It’ll still be Aqua, but “the iOS influence is [more] visible in the new OS user interface.”
We see sexy, elegant and manly iPad satchels all the time, but what about the sandalwood-scented fashionista who wants to sling his MacBook Pro around town with the same proud strut as a GQ model? The Shoulder MacBook Sleeve by Hard Graft might fit the bill.
Made of 100% wool woven into asphalt grey felt, the Shoulder MacBook Sleeve features a tuck-in closure, a dark black removable leather strap held in place by tanned hazelnut leather, as well as a removable extras case for cables and power adapter. Very sexy indeed, and the price isn’t actually bad: just €139.00.
Want to pick yourself up one of Sanho’s amazing HyperMac batteries, which will allow you to recharge your MacBook, iPhone or iPad for dozens or even hundreds of hours on a single charge?
Well, better get moving: Sanho has just sent out a notice saying that they will soon stop selling their line of HyperMac products due to their current legal woes with Apple.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-FhSzoXPTg&feature=player_embedded
If you had a PC in the 1980s, you might have fond memories of playing Sierra’s line-up of classic adventure games: King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, etc.
You’ll probably be delighted to learn, then, that these retro classics will soon be coming to the iPad, courtesy of Sarien.net. Best of all, they’ll be free.
It seems like just the other day that the App Store hit 200,000 apps, but the juggernaut just never stops, and sometime over the weekend, Apple rolled the speedometer over to 300k.
The numbers aren’t official yet, but according to Mobclix, their data shows that Apple added the 300,000th app to the App Store sometime on Saturday.
Is that old iPod Classic just not doing much since you got your 64GB fourth-gen iPod Touch? Wondering what to do with the old clickwheel? Head on over to Toys ‘R’ Us and trade it in for a Voltron or He-Man or Alien Goo Blaster or something. You can get up to $100 in gift cards for your old iPod, depending on how crappy it is.
That one programmer slaving away on Apple’s iOS Remote app has been working overtime, lately: he’s just issued an update to the app, fixing a number of bugs that showed up after the last major revision.
When the iPhone 4 launched in the Middle East — specifically in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar — it did so without support for FaceTime. Needless to say, this prompted some speculation. Why would Apple have dropped theFaceTime capability only from Middle Eastern iPhone 4? Was it a carrier restriction… or was Apple trying to sidestep Middle Eastern governments getting interested in regulating the new video chat standard?
It now seems like the real explanation probably has more to do with carrier restrictions than anything else. According to iRamadah, FaceTime works in the Middle East on the new iPod Touches, despite the fact that even on the iPhone 4, FaceTime is a WiFi-only standard. Seems at this point more likely that the carriers kicked for whatever reason than anything to do with Big Brother.
Two of the richest men in America met a couple of weeks ago to swirl brandy about the translucent skulls of Peruvian albinos and toast evil, say sources.
Well, actually, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg probably just discussed Ping when the Facebook CEO was invited over to Jobs’ house for dinner and a walk. Close enough.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAVQPa9L3jg
Steve Jobs’ hypnotic cadence and idiosyncratic showmanship is obviously well-known enough to be channeled by international comedians looking for a laugh: over in Hong Kong, the Mass Transit Railway has just launched a new app, and they did so by hiring their own Chinese Fake Steve Jobs in the form of Law Kar-Ying to reveal it on stage. Law seems to have studied the man he was emulating quite well: he gets everything right, from the gulps of bottled water to the Levis and turtleneck. Hilarious.
[via TUAW]
The introduction of the first iPod back in 2001 officially signaled the beginning of Apple’s millennial renaissance, transforming the company from a computer manufacturer so niche that they were the butt of Michael Dell’s jokes to the biggest company in tech. See an overview of how it all happened after the jump.
Next week on October 20th, we can take it pretty much for granted that Apple is going to unveil the next iteration of OS X, 10.7 codenamed ‘Lion’, along with their annual October MacBook refreshes. What about iLife ’11, though, which we’ve been seeing burbling up for months now in the form of Idiot’s Guides and instruction manuals on Amazon and the like? Can we expect that to be announced as well?
It’s looking good. Apparently, retail employees of Apple’s stores are running low on their supplies of the last iLife software suite, with no new stock due to come in. This is in addition to seeing prices drop on Amazon: an inventory clear out that usually serves as precursor to a new iLife launch.
What’s new in iLife ’11? Hard to say for sure, but rumor has it that iDVD may go the way of the iDodo and the whole suite may have been rewritten from the ground up for 64-bit. There’s also rumors about beefier iOS integration and maybe even FaceTime support. We’ll all know next Wednesday.
Usually when we see an iPhone like this, it’s the handset of some Saudi Arabian oil prince or B-list rapper whose definition of class is synonymous with champagne fused with gold flakes, and whom has duly paid Swarovski some forty or fifty grand to dip his iPhone 4 into some horse glue and then roll it in their overpriced crushings of glass.
This handset is actually different, though. Instead of paying $40,000 for a Swarovski iPhone 4, two Australian businessmen paid customizer Stuart Hughes eight million dollars to plate their iPhone 4s in gold and then encrust them in over five hundred diamonds totaling over 100 karats.
Yesterday, Skype 5.0 dropped onto the PC for Windows users, bringing Facebook integration and group video calling into the mix. That update is not yet available for the Mac, but according to a post on Skype’s official blog, a new version of the popular VoIP application is coming to OS X soon.
I’m worried, though. In the blog post, Skype alarmingly mentions a “complete overhaul, both in terms of the way it looks, and in terms of functionality.”
Look, Skype isn’t a very well designed app by Mac standards, I agree… but have you ever seen the absolutely unidentifiable puddle of mashed up design elements that comprises the Windows interface? If you’ve got a minute, I’ve got an anecdote that might help describe it if you haven’t.
Chipmaker AMD hasn’t been doing well lately. Last year, they chalked up a third quarter loss of nearly $128 million. This year was scarcely any better at $118 million. At least this quarter, though, they have an excuse: the iPad’s killing notebook sales, even according to their own CEO.
Apple’s finally seen fit to make their MobileMe Calendar web app an official product after a long period in beta. It’s now available to all comers, and will allow you to check or update your MobileMe calendar from any computer or Apple device, as well as share calendars with friends and colleagues, or send out invitations to events to your droogies.
The iPad seems a fairly small canvas, but it’s not much smaller than the Mona Lisa, upon which was painted the enigmatic face of history’s most beloved transvestite. Why not sling it up on an easel, then, and do some painting with Remote Palette… easily one of the neatest painting apps we’ve seen lately, largely through its fun cross-device universal functionality.
We’ve posted before about Karas Kustom’s line of iPhone 4 cases, which are sort of metallic girder structures to reinforce your iPhone 4’s fragile front and back plates while keeping your skin from directly contacting the antenna.
We liked them, but some of you gagpuked in the comments about their look, in which case… maybe Karas Kustom’s new range of colors will help sway you? Their iPhone 4 cases now come in silver, black, nlue, red, green, violet, orange, gold and pink anodize… and if you’re willing to pay a little more (well, more than twice as much, really) you can get your Karas case in copper, brass and phenolic, which Karas brags is “three times heavier than the original aluminum cases and will form a natural patina from normal use.”
“Heavier” and “patina” are two words I never thought a company making iPhone cases would be using braggingly in their press release, but there you go. The aluminum cases are the same price as they ever were at $39, but if you want one of the copper or brass cases, expect to pay $89 for your trouble.
Valve Software is a company which has been heaping much love on Mac gamers over the last few months, and whose much anticipated physics-based first person puzzler Portal 2 will be debuting early next year on both PC and Mac simultaneously. It’s about to get even better: they’ve just announced their next game, Dawn of the Ancients 2, coming sometime in 2011. Even better? It’s coming to the Mac.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wP-t_XZ5As
If you ever had an Amiga, prepare to squeal: the Bitmap Brothers have just announced that, in association with Tower Studios and Vivid Games, they will be bringing their famous Amiga game Speedball 2 to iOS.
JBL continues to solidly plug away at the take of making affordable, decent sounding iPhone and iPod portable speaker docks with their latest, the On Stage Micro IV and On Stage Micro III, both boasting a new and eyebrow arching design the company affectionately refers to as “the Weave.”
Compact and easily slung about, the new OnStage units feature aluminum-domed transducers to deliver accurate high-frequency response, as well as a slipstream port design that is meant to optimize bass output while doing away with distortion. The On Stage IV comes with four Odyssey transducers, which will pump out vibrant, deep and limpid sound perfect for most environments, while the On Stage Micro III only comes with two.
