John Brownlee - page 206

According to the most recent edition of SPA! magazine, Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t intend to revisit Japan anymore. Also, he’s a secret ninja.

As reported and translated by F’ed Gaijan, the temperamental Apple founder apparently became furious when passing through security at the Kansai Airport on his way out of the country after a quiet vacation near Kyoto with his family.

The problem? Japanese security found shuriken, or ninja throwing stars, in his carry-on luggage, and insisted upon confiscating them. Since Kansai Airport does not have any procedures in place for dealing with private jets and other VIPs, so Jobs was going through security the same as anyone else.

According to SPA!, a red-faced Job tantrumed: “I’m hardly planning to hijack my own private jet! What a country! I’m never coming back!” Then, calling upon his incredible kuji-kiri ninja abilities, Jobs melted into the shadows, never to be seen in Japan again.

Paul Devine — the former Apple global supply manager who traded insider information to accessory makers in exchange for kickbacks, $150,000 of which he stored in shoeboxes under his bed — has agreed to protect Apple’s corporate secrets in his upcoming trial, according to Bloomberg.

The protective order was composed by the San Francisco U.S. Attorney’s department, and notes that discovery in the case against Devine could bring to light material that is “intended to be kept secret and is trade secret information.”

As such, Devine has agreed to help protect any trade secrets that might be revealed during the pretrial bargaining process. However, it seems that if a plea bargain can not be reached, this information could still be presented in court, making this agreement with the prosecutor’s office more of a wheel-greasing move for a plea than a show of rediscovered loyalty and good will to Cupertino.

Somehow, Cult of Mac managed to completely miss OS X’s ten year birthday yesterday… an embarrassing lapse to be sure. Luckily, MacWorld was not going to let the anniversary pass without baking a cake, and so we’d take the time at this point, if you haven’t already seen it, to read their incredible retrospective on the first decade of OS X.

The entire article is worth a read, but this quote at the end from Avie Tevanian, the former VP of Software Engineering at both Apple and NeXT, was extremely interesting to me:

Apple had a 20 to 30 year lifespan in mind for OS X during its development, says Tevanian, but he suspects its fundamental underpinnings may last even longer.

Given OS X’s ten year birthday, that means that unless Apple has reconsidered its position, their Mac operating system may still be around in another decade or more. Even more striking is Tevanian’s insistence that the underpinnings of OS X will last more than 30 years: given Linux Unix is 41 years old, it’s not unheard of for the fundaments of an operating system to last that long, but it’s amazing to see just how long-sighted Apple’s vision for the best desktop operating system on Earth actually was even in its nascent years. It seems like we can expect OS X not only to last until 2020 or later, but make its way through the entire zoological gamut of jungle cats before it finally sheathes its claws.

Over the weekend, Apple announced that they were ending their free iPhone 4 case program come September 30th, blithely quipping that “we now know that the iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than we originally thought.”

Apparently, Consumer Reports remains unconvinced, though, because they are continuing to not recommend the iPhone 4 to customers, according to a recent update on their blog.

Our tests found the Bumper successfully mitigates the iPhone 4’s reception issue, which was a weak point in the phone’s otherwise-stellar performance in our tests. And we agree with Apple that not all iPhone 4 owners will experience reception difficulties with the device.

But putting the onus on any owners of a product to obtain a remedy to a design flaw is not acceptable to us. We therefore continue not to recommend the iPhone 4, and to call on Apple to provide a permanent fix for the phone’s reception issues.

It is arguably Consumer Reports’ scathing denunciation of the iPhone 4’s antenna problems that caused “Antennagate” to become as much of a public relations disaster for Apple as it was. Will Consumer Reports’ withheld blessing continue to plague Apple and re-open the issue once the bumper case program ends, or is the fire effectively put out? While I agree the iPhone 4’s external antenna makes it more susceptible to attenuation than other phones — no matter how much finger pointing and bar-fiddling Apple does — I think the fire’s largely been put out: even dropping one call more out of a hundred than the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone you can buy. At this point, Consumer Reports just looks petulant.

iOS 4.1’s ability to take high-dynamic range photos has been a much buzzed about new feature particularly to amateur photogs looking to maximize the quality of their casual smartphone snaps, but Apple does not appear to have gone it alone: according to some excellent research done by MacRumors’ Eric Slivka, it appears that Apple acquired a small, Cambridge-based company called Imsense to bring the feature to an iPhone near you.

Before being bought by Apple, Imsense did business in a technology called “eye-fidelity” which used software algorithms to remap image tons in order to produce nearly instantaneous Dynamic Range Correction in both standard and HDR photos. While the iOS 4.1 implementation of HDR is done in the classical fashion of blending three separate exposures into a single image, Imsense’s Eye-Fidelity algorithms appear to be used in iOS 4.1 to further spruce the resulting image up and make the colors pop.

It seems surprising that Apple could make any move to buy a company and not immediately be found out, but it appears that the acquisition went down under everyone’s nose back in July, with three Cupertino officers named directors of Imsense on July 15th, 2010. Could Apple once again be getting a tight grip on the secrecy they’ve lost handle of over the past year?

If you’ve been drooling over the 27-inch iMac’s gorgeous 2560 x 1440 display and eager for Apple to make good with an updated Cinema Display at the same dimensions in order to employ it as the window into your Mac Pro’s soul, it looks like your wait might soon to be at an end.

Over on the Mac Pro customization page, additional wording suggests you supplement a newly purchased Pro with the 27-inch Cinema Display… despite the fact that the only current options for purchase are the existing 24- and 30-inch flat panels.

You can look at this in one of two ways: either this is news to be excited about as Apple prepares to officially launch the 27-inch Cinema Display, or as your last chance to order the soon-to-be-discontinued 30-inch, which boasts just a few more vertical pixels than its successor. Best get moving if you’d rather have one of those.

Currently, Apple makes it extraordinarily easy to squat on a great app name, even if you don’t have a great app to go with it. Just pay them the standard $99 developer’s fee and reserve your perfect app name for as long as you want it, with about as much ease as registering that mot juste domain through GoDaddy.

Obviously, it’s not an ideal system, in that it practically encourages squatters to sit on great names that other app developers with real software to show for their ideas can use. Luckily, it seems like Apple is now ready to crack down on App Store squatters with a new set of rules aimed at discouraging the practice.

Here’s what the new policy looks like: you can still stake a claim to an App Name, but you need to produce a binary to show for it within 90 days. Otherwise, Apple will send you a nastygram, and give you another month to get cracking on your app: if those thirty days pass without any software to show, your claim will be deleted.

It’s a better system than the one currently in place, sure, but it’s still pretty easy to get around: any old fart, flashlight or soundboard app can be submitted as the binary, with no actual pressure on the developer to actually publish it to iTunes. Still, at least that makes remedial iOS programming chops a prerequisite for App Store squatting, which is surely a higher barrier to entry than $99.

What’s more important to you? Your iPod… or your wedding ring? Your iPhone… or your dog? A new survey conducted by a company called Protect Your Bubble has found that, in the UK at least, most people would be less willing to give up their Apple products than any other possession.

By a significant margin, the iPod beat out other objects as Facebook respondents’ favorite things, with 12% of respondents reporting it as their most cherished possession. 11.5% valued their Blackberry over all other wares, while Apple’s iPhone crept in at 10%.

Comparatively, only 9% of respondents chose their laptop, another 9% dog, 5% their cat, 4% their car and a mere 1% their wedding ring. It appears that more people in the UK these days are married to Apple than they are to their spouse.

Here’s another way of looking at the design of Apple’s new iPods: they didn’t redesign the Shuffle or Nano at all. They just cut the last Nano in half.

[via Reddit]

Much to the chagrin of consumers who want a cheaper alternative, Apple is notoriously protective of its MagSafe patent… so much so that they have a rich history of suing the third-party builders of MagSafe knock-offs.

Now it appears that Cupertino is going after another one, having filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the Sanho Corporation in the California Northern District Court. Details are still sketchy, with the actual complaint part of the lawsuit as yet unrevealed, but Patently Apple speculates
that this is all about the MagSafe connector baked into Sanho’s third-party HyperMac batteries.

Sanho seemed to think they’d dodged Apple’s MagSafe patents with the HyperMac line, since their products are actually made of recycled official MagSafe products… but Apple may well see things another way… a shame, given the amazing charging capacity and stellar quality of the HyperMac line, which can juice up a MacBook Pro for up to 34 hours.

If you’re looking to buy a HyperMac, then, best get one now. If previous MagSafe lawsuits are anything to go by, they’ll be C&Ded into extinction soon enough.

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This video purports itself to be real footage of iOS 4.0 running on an HTC smartphone, but it’s almost certainly just a skinjob: not only would hacking iOS to run on another device be nearly impossible without access to the source code, but there’s some tell tale signs (like missing folder animation, wallpaper that moves along with pages and the ability to delete the iTunes and App Store icons from the homescreen) that this isn’t what it appears to be.

Nonetheless, we’re impressed, if just by the fact someone went to so much trouble to make Android look so much like iOS. Of course, if you’re going to put in those kind of man hours, one wonders why you would bother buying the inferior phone to begin with…

[via HardMac]

The days of two competing jailbreak app stores is over: like two rogue gas giants, Cydia and Rock are smashing together and fusing into one bright star.

According to Modyi, Cydia founder Jay Freeman, also known as Saurik, and Rock’s Mario Ciabarra have agreed to an acquisition deal, in which Saurik’s company will acquire Rock Your iPhone, Inc. Over the next ten days, Rock apps will transition over to Cydia, and after those ten days are up, Rock will be no more, with existing Rock customers needing a Cydia login to continue to buy apps.

Ciabarra will be employed by Cydia and focus on app development, his true love. As such, expect his Intelliborn line of jailbreak apps, including MyWi, MyProfiles, My3G and Intelliscreen to continue to be updated, albeit under the Cydia umbrella. Sounds like a win for everybody involved.

Stuck on an iPhone 3G or 3GS and jealous of the iPhone 4’s sexy ability to stitch three photos together for a beautifully optimized high-dynamic range snapshot of what it sees out of its tiny oculus? A Cydia tweak is on its way just as soon as the Dev Team releases their iOS 4.1 jailbreak, bringing HDR capability to legacy devices. Of course, the iOS 4.1 jailbreak is still an unknown amount of time away, so we could be waiting on this for sometime… but at least there’s some hope in sight.

All good things must come to an end, and now that Apple has largely put the fires out on the public relations nightmare of Antennagate, they’ll be ending their free iPhone 4 case program come September 30th… unless you complain loud enough.

Says Apple:

We now know that the iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than we originally thought. A small percentage of iPhone 4 users need a case, and we want to continue providing them a Bumper case for free. For everyone else, we are discontinuing the free case program on all iPhone 4s sold after September 30, 2010. We are also returning to our normal returns policy for all iPhone 4s sold after September 30. Users experiencing antenna issues should call AppleCare to request a free Bumper case.

Of course, given how backed up Apple is sending out free cases, even if you order one now, you’re not likely to have a bumper around your iPhone before next year. Perhaps that’s the bigger takeaway from Apple’s decision to end the program: if you’re really having problems with your iPhone 4’s reception, you couldn’t afford to wait for Apple to finally get around to sending you one anyway.

With few exceptions, the best way to predict what Apple is going to do is to look at what they’ve already done, which is why it’s best to take this rumor reported by Apple Insider with a grain of salt: they claim a FaceTime-equipped iPad will be coming in time for the holidays.

Apple Insider, on their part, realize that that their source — “a person with proven knowledge of Apple’s future product plans” — is giving them insider intel that defies Apple’s history of yearly generational cycles in their iPod and iOS line-up, but claim nonetheless that “there [is] an ambitious push inside Apple to verify the refresh for a possible launch ahead of this year’s holiday shopping season,” and that the testing of the FaceTime-equipped iPad has already reached the advanced testing stage.

That the next iPad will boast at least a forward facing camera for FaceTime calling is a given… but releasing it less than a year after the first iPad seems like an invitation for customer backlash.

Perhaps recognizing this, Apple Insider’s report ends up contradicting itself later, on, saying that the FaceTime-equipped iPad will arrive “no later” than the first quarter of 2011. Given that the first quarter ends in March, that’s close enough to a year after the iPad’s debut that it seems unlikely that Apple will meaningfully break their historic product cycle for a second-gen iPad, no matter how much they want FaceTime to be the de facto standard for video calling.

The classic Grand Theft Auto 3 trilogy — including Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas — is finally coming to OS X later this year, according to Rockstar Games.

Look for the long-awaited release of the classic Grand Theft Auto Trilogy (Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) for Mac – most likely later this year.  We’ll have much more info and a proper announcement soon. 

It’s about time, but don’t mistake the release of these titles as Rockstar finally getting serious about a commitment to Mac. The PC versions of the latest game we are talking about here — the superlative San Andreas — is well over five years old, which means it’ll run just dandy with a Wine translation layer on a modern Mac. Still, something’s better than nothing, although at this point, I’d be happier if they ported Bully.

Heartened by Apple’s recent decision to loosen their restriction on outside frameworks for the development of iOS apps, Adobe has announced that it will be resuming work on its Flash-to-iPhone compiler.

Apple’s announcement today that it has lifted restrictions on its third-party developer guidelines has direct implications for Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, a feature in the Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool. This feature was created to enable Flash developers to quickly and easily deliver applications for iOS devices. The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases.

Meant to be a headlining technology in their Flash CS5 software, Adobe was forced to abandon development of the compiler after a change to Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement prohibited the use of translation tools in app development.

Apple’s change of heart again makes development in Flash — if not Flash on iOS proper — a viable option again, and is a rare victory for Adobe in their conflict with Apple.

Last year, Apple pulled Google Voice’s official application from the App Store without either ceremony or explanation. The move always seemed pretty suspect, and intended more to protect the interests of AT&T than iOS users, but it seems that there is good news on the horizon: Google Voice is likely heading back to the App Store.

According to the developer of the third-party Google Voice application GV Mobile, he emailed Apple’s approval board after the release of yesterday’s App Store guidelines, pointing out there seemed to be no provision at all explaining a Google Voice ban, and asking what the chances were of getting his app reinstated. Apparently, the response was encouraging, and Kovacs was led to believe that if he resubmitted his app, it would likely be improved.

On Google’s part, they say they have nothing to announce at this time, but if third–party Google Voice applications start getting approved again, it’s very likely the official app will soon possible. Let’s hope that Kovac’s exchange wasn’t a fluke and Apple has come around on its senseless ban against Voice once and for all.

The moment Steve Jobs quipped about the new Nano’s perfect suitability as a time piece, we all all recognized the obvious accessory void that would quickly be filled: iPod Nano watch bands.

Here’s the first: a 22mm Maratac Nylon band that will slip through your nano’s clip and comes in matching colors for just $17.

The wisdom of tethering your headphones to your wrist is, of course, debatable, as is the necessity of charging your wristwatch once per day, but if you’re so inclined, it’s now just a Jackson away from being done.

iTunes is huge, and getting huger every day… but so are its operating costs. According to a new report by Asymco, iTunes is pushing almost a billion dollars a year to run.

Currently, Apple’s iTunes operating costs come in at $75 million a month, which is two and a half times what it cost to run iTunes just last year. Multiply that by twelve and you have the yearly budget.

Right now, iTunes is only $100 million shy of the $1 billion mark, but if you assume iTunes will continue to grow at 2009’s rate, iTunes might just cost Apple over $2.25 billion to keep afloat by the end of 2011. Somehow I’m guessing they’ll be able to afford it.

[via 9to5Mac]

Rockstar Games’ superb iOS entry into their infamous Grand Theft Auto series has finally hit the iPad with Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars HD, a native port that improves the already superlative game’s lighting, polygon counts and even the games’ already impressive explosions.

The biggest advantage, though, is the controls: while an up-sampled Chinatown Wars was technically playable (if ugly) before, the control scheme really needed some tweaking for more adept thumb control. The new iPad accomplishes that quite nicely.

Ultimately, it’s a fine update… but it’s hard to recommend because it’s not a universal app. Instead, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars HD is a whole new $9.99 to spend on a game you probably already own, if you were interested at all to begin with, on the iPhone, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. If this is your first go at the title, though, Chinatown Wars is an easy recommendation: it’s one of the best games on the App Store.

With their usual amalgam of surgical precision, egghead obsessiveness and rock star attitude, the boys at iFixIt have sliced into the last of Apple’s new iPods: the touchscreen iPod nano. And, like we thought, it’s really more of a Shuffle with a screen than a nano with multitouch.

It’s the claims of multitouch that really sticks in the iFixIt boys’ craws: they claim, rightly, that multitouch is officially determined by being able to detect and resolve a minimum of three touch points, where as the nano only employs two… and even then, only for rotating the display, “although how anyone is supposed to comfortably fit more than one finger on the display is a mystery.”

Other interesting facts: the battery is twice the capacity of the Shuffle’s to power the screen, and the display has the most dense packing of pixels this side of the Retina Display on the iPhone 4 or iPod Touch. Additionally, the glass on the touch isn’t quite flush with the case, but sticks out 0.3mm due to the size of the headphone jack. It’s a pretty interesting commentary on how tiny and compact the innards of the new nano are when the headphone jack is one of the thickest components… and perhaps how anal Apple is about device thinness when they’d rather the glass protrude from their device minutely than minutely expand the body.

You can find iFixIt’s full teardown here.

There is a persistent — and perhaps understandable — fear on the part of some Canadians that viral American culture is overwhelming Canada’s own cultural heritage, but a recent decision by Canada’s Privacy Council Office to probe Apple’s iBookstore seems like it borders on paranoia.

The order, first issued on August 20th, puts Apple and iBooks under scrutiny to make sure that the large e-bookstore “aids Canadian culture,” a vague responsibility to be sure. The authority comes from section 15 of the Investment Canada Act, which allows the government to review any investment that “is related to Canada’s cultural heritage or national identity.”

A probe is just a probe, and it seems, for right now, like Canada wants to make sure of Apple’s plans before they allow the full launch of the iBookstore to go through. It seems strange, however, that Apple would be put up the standard of being “of direct cultural benefit to Canada.” How can the widespread proliferation of millions of books be suspected of being a detriment to culture? At least twenty or thirty of those books have to be written by Canadians, right?

AT&T’s beleaguered and spotty 3G network has been the butt of both joke and collective outrage since the iPhone 3G, but Ma Bell is now promising customers that they’re serious about improving things, having dedicated a minimum of $18 billion to improve both wireless and landline network capacity across the country next year.

Not only will this entail infrastructure support, but according to AT&T, they will also install thousands of new cell sites which will expand mobile broadband coverage to millions of customers whose iPhones might currently cling tenuously to the bottom bar of reception. Additionally, AT&T is making noises that they will be increasing the capacity of their data network, hopefully leading to better download speeds at all… or at least not letting them degrade any further.

The money’s also earmarked for moving AT&T along to the next generation of mobile broadband: the blistering LTE 4G standard. AT&T is promising these network enhancements will allow seamless migration to next-gen LTE… good news indeed, if you are just counting down the days to an iPhone LTE announcement.

Apple’s unibody aluminum carving process… applied to dead tree flesh. For the true Apple fan, this $55 MacBook cutting board is a perfect addition to any kitchen, with a wonderful attention to detail: from the choice of material (an appropriate applewood) to the halved Apple logo on the cutting surface.

My only issue is it’s simply too gorgeous to cut anything on: $55 is just too much to spend on an item that is going to be hacked, slashed and stained with grease and tomato juice within a few days. This $40 iPad cutting board may be a better and more frugal fit for the culinary gore show of the Brownlee/Morford kitchen.