John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
If you’re an Aperture user frustrated with your Mac’s inability to read your new camera’s RAW shots, Apple has just sent their latest Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update slaloming down the Software Update chute, emblazoned with the version number 3.3.
Most of these cameras are micro four-thirds or similarly mirrorless cameras. The update adds native OS X RAW support to the following models:
• Canon PowerShot SX1 IS
• Olympus E-PL1
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-G10
• Samsung NX10
• Sony Alpha DSLR-A390
• Sony Alpha NEX-3
• Sony Alpha NEX-5
The update extends RAW compatibility to Aperture 3 and iPhoto ’09 users, and weighs in at just 5.6 MB.
In order to save battery life, Apple very intelligently limited the kinds of API calls multitasking apps could make in the background under iOS 4 to audio, VOIP and location. It’s a clever compromise, but it leaves a lot of common multi-tasking applications in the lurch: for example, your newsreader can’t update your list of RSS feeds when the app isn’t in focus.
The makers of Pastebot, a clipboard manager for iOS devices, were frustrated by the limitations of iOS’ multitasking capabilities, so they figured out a clever solution to keep Pastebot running in the background: they programmed it to play a silent audio file so that Pastebot was always kept in memory and didn’t need to be relaunched between every copy.
Needless to say, Apple wasn’t entirely thrilled with this solution, and rejected the app… but it was only because Pastebot played a silent audio track without user approval in the background, and that music’s only purpose was to keep the app in memory. The fix was simple: offer users the ability to choose which track Pastebot loops in the background. If a user wants to specify a blank track, so be it.
Apple was happy with this solution. It makes me wonder whether the same approach could be used with other apps like Reeder, or 1Password Pro, or Instapaper, that might benefit from running in the background.
Put on your deerstalker and take a gander at the patina of filth stained into my 27-inch iMac keyboard and I can’t say I’d blame you for ascribing any number of stomach-churning hygienic deficiencies to my person. Perhaps you might imagine me to be some blind, albino grub of tapioca-like consistency typing his posts from the plastic kiddy pool filled with chocolate sauce from which he bastes (you wouldn’t be far off), or as a man who habitually deep wipes with Apple products.
In actuality, I’m not nearly that filthy, but I’m also a smoker. Worse, I’m a pipe smoker, and so my aluminum keyboard’s crevices tend to fill with latakia detritus, and the ASDF keys occasionally stained with tiny spatterings of tar.
Well, okay. I guess I am pretty filthy, when it’s all put down like that. Worse: in my aluminum keyboard, I have an analogue to the yellowing and browning of my lungs. As I hammer out posts over the course of the day, chain-smoking all the while, my keyboard functions as a sort of X-RAY in QWERTY of the carcinogenic staining of the life-sustaining meat bladders inside me.
I was glad to see TUAW’s pro-tip on easily keeping your white, non-glossy Apple product squeaky clean, then: the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, a sponge made of melamine foam that apparently works a champ, and is certainly better for my Mac’s finish than my last cleaning solution: nail polish removal wipes, which was just a stupid idea in retrospect.
Anyone else got any tips on getting their keyboards white again? I’ve tried the good old pencil eraser in the past, but I’ve found cleaning the indian rubber dust afterwards pretty irritating. Let us know your tips in the comments.
While it’s not too hard to imagine a luxury accessory company coming up with an iPod dock similar to this NeverNeverLand fever dream of one of Yanko Design’s Lost Boy designers, no effort has been made on Yanko’s part to explain just how that iPod Touch would hover in mid-air. Pixy dust, perhaps.
All that Yanko will venture to say is that “it streams music, connects to your iPod and computer and daisy chains with other units should you want to expand the system.” It also defies gravity, which is a first in consumer electronics: I hope the designer’s got a patent to back that up.
Take a quick visit to JailbreakMe, let Comex benevolently exploit a huge security hole in iOS’ native PDF rendering, then install the $4 My3G program through Cydia and you can have FaceTime running flawlessly on your iPhone 4 even without a WiFi connection. But how much is that FaceTime call going to drain from your monthly data allowance?
9to5Mac has done the tests, and it’s actually not as bad as you might fear: in fact, the average FaceTime call only uses about three megabytes of data per minute.
They conducted their test using “lots of movement” so that the FaceTime compression algorithm was kept on its toes, and a five minute FaceTime call ended up slurping up 14.7MB of data. That’s pretty modest usage against a 2GB cap. Clearly, the prohibition against 3G FaceTime isn’t in consideration of iPhone 4 users’ wallets, then… but AT&T’s own congested 3G network.
Apple is facing yet another anti-competition complaint today after the Attorney General for the State of Connecticut launched an investigation into the state of the ebook market.
Asked to defend itself along with Amazon over the deals the two biggest ebook sellers in the country have been striking with publishers to guarantee favorable pricing and exclusive titles, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says that the way Apple has been running its new iBooks business prevents other marketplaces from offering lower prices on the same titles, taking a sledgehammer and hobbling block to the already-atrophied legs of its competitors.
Blumenthal says that Amazon and Apple have reached agreements with the largest book publishers, guaranteeing that they will receive the best prices for e-books over other competitors. As indication of anti-competitiveness, Blumenthal has pointed to a list of New York Times best sellers that are identically priced at Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and Borders’ e-book stores, which he argues is a strong implication of price-fixing.
For right now, Blumenthal is just collecting data, and has invited Apple and Amazon to meet with his office to address his concerns. You can read the full PDF of his letter to Apple here.
Make me put a plump thumb on my favorite iOS app and the Remote.app icon will soon be coated with a greasy, opalescent print of my epidermal ridges. For those of us with a constabulary of Airport Expresses, the freely downloadable app singlehandedly turns our networked homes into the equivalent of a far more expensive Sonos setup.
Unfortunately, Remote.app hasn’t been updated in months… which prompted Gizmodo to raise a plaintive cry as recently as last week. What’s the hold up? It hasn’t even been updated to natively support the iPad, let alone the iPhone 4.
As it turns out, Remote.app is the product of a single engineer who has since been moved to other projects, according to Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal.
Ever since Apple bought the web-streaming music service Lala, our teeth have been aching in anticipation of our iTunes libraries vaporized from our hard disks and existing in the Wonkavision like ionosphere of the cloud.
According to CNET, though, we may very well have a while to wait before Apple truly capitalizes upon its Lala purchase… and when it does come, it might be a far more modest proposal at first than even Cupertino would like.
In talks with the four major labels, Apple is apparently downplaying expectations, saying that if they launch their cloud-streaming iTunes functionality in the next few months, it will be “modest in scope” when it comes to streaming music.
Say goodbye to that wedge of magnetized plastic in your wallet. If AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have their way, the future of credit is your smartphone… and they are going to war against the likes of Visa and Mastercard to accomplish it.
According to Bloomberg, the three carriers are working with Discover and Barclays, testing a system in four US cities that would enable special smartphones embedded with NFC (near field communication) chips to make credit card payments with just a wave of the hand.
Making a credit card payment from your iPhone isn’t exactly a new idea: Visa already lets you do this with special payWave cases, and Digg founder Kevin Rose is backing Square, which is a similar idea.
The point here, though, is that it’s the carriers who are making the most concerted push yet to consolidate and bring ubiquity to smartphone payment systems, by cutting out the biggest credit giants entirely.
If you don’t mind taking a blowtorch to your pretty unibody iMac and trephining it a bit, you can easily add an eSATA port for the connection of external hard drives to your beautiful 27-inch. That surgery’s not for the meek, though: luckily, OWC will be happy to do it $169 in under 48 hours… and for a gasp-worthy $1649 more, they’ll even cram in a 480GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD. Yowza!
If you’re having issues with sluggish iOS 4 performance on your iPhone 3G, Apple’s apparently launching an investigation, but according to Boy Genius Report, there’s a stop gap solution. Just go into settings and turn off Spotlight Search.
Here’s how you do it. Go to Settings, tap on General, then Spotlight Search. Now untick everything. Apparently, turning off all the Spotlight indexing solves the sluggishness issues… although I don’t have an iPhone 3G to test myself, so corroboration from our readers would be welcome.
Although an official fix from Apple would be welcome, this seems like a pretty good band-aid to me: I barely use the Spotlight search option on my iPhone, and I’d certainly be willing to sacrifice it entirely for a performance bump.
Apple’s never been really serious about Mac gaming… which makes it all the more miraculous that we’re currently living in a golden age of Mac gaming, largely through the efforts of Valve Software to bring native ports of their Source engine games as well as the Steam digital delivery service to OS X.
But now Valve is doing one better. They’ve just announced that they’ll be sharing a lot of their graphics code for the Mac with developers on Steam, which they characterize as the hardest work of bringing a title to the Mac.
Valve’s a great company, but they aren’t doing this out of sheer benevolence: as it turns out, even old Steam games released for the Mac have seen 15-20% sales bumps across all platforms, and that number’s only going to rise. That means more money in Valve’s pockets. There’s huge money in Mac gaming, and even if Apple is mysteriously unwilling to capitalize upon that, it’s good to know that savvy developers like Valve know a good opportunity when they see it.
If you can get it to load, Jailbreak Me is the one of the simplest jailbreak solutions yet. Just visit the site on Mobile Safari and — if you can get it to load — your iOS device running 4.0 or 4.0.1 is jailbroken, no reboot required.
Unfortunately, when it was released yesterday, there were caveats: FaceTime and MMS got knocked out of commission with the jailbreak.
Luckily, Jailbreakme.com has now been updated with a fix to the FaceTime and MMS issues. Already jailbroken? Just open Cydia and upgrade when you’re prompted to.
Finally, here’s the best news: if you’re waiting for a compatible unlock, it should be available in the next 48 hours.
If you’re a BlackBerry warrior who does business in the futuristic desert city of Dubai, it’s about time to consider switching to an iPhone: the telecommunications authority in the United Arab Emirates will be blocking some BlackBerry services come October.
The issue is one of government surveillance. BlackBerries send encrypted data to oversea servers through their own messaging layer, which means that local authorities can’t read that data. The iPhone doesn’t handle messaging, e-mail and the web in the same fashion, making it exempt from the UAE’s criticisms.
Research in Motion has garnered official criticism due to its encryption scheme before. India also threatened to ban Blackberries at a certain point, prompting RIM to ultimately cave on their position. That’s less likely to happen in the UAE: it’s the difference between a potential subscriber base of a billion and a hundred million.
You can view this story in one of two ways as an iPhone owner. On the one hand, if you go to the UAE with your iPhone, the government at least wants the option of snooping on you. On the other hand, at least you can use its full array of services while you’re there… an option that now appears to be completely off the table for BlackBerry owners.
Buy a case or a dock at an Apple store emblazoned with the “Made for iPod” seal of official Cupertino approval, and you put a twenty percent commission directly into Apple’s pockets.
Needless to say, Apple’s just as protective of that revenue stream as some shadier third-party accessory makers are of trying to weasel their way out of paying it. Now there’s a showdown coming: Apple is taking a number of these more scurrilous and skinflint accessory makers to court, saying that the products they make “are of inferior quality and reliability, raising significant concerns over compatibility with and damage to Apple’s products.”
Apple’s suit names Accstation, Boxware Corporation, Crazyondigital, Eforcity Corporation, Everydaysource, Itrimming, and United Integral, and might expand to include twenty other companies.
Of course, this isn’t the only front where Apple is waging this particular crusade: they also frequently change their “Made for iPod” specifications, rendering old accessories obsolete with every new product or new firmware release.
In total, Apple’s out for blood… but something tells me that no matter how far they take this, there’s little they can do to squeeze that blood from the stone of all third-party accessory makers, especially the ones originating from Chinese companies and Taiwanese gadget sweatshops.
The iPad is a fantastic kitchen computer, no question, but consider me skeptical of the FridgePad, a £49 magnet-backed aluminum iPad case meant to allow you to easily slap your Apple tablet to the side of your Fridgidaire.
You know how sometimes you’ll put something heavy under a weak fridge magnet and it’ll slowly slide down the door until it smacks onto the floor? Yeah, that, except with an easily splinterable 1.6 slab of glass.
The iPhone and iPod Touch would make great universal remotes, except for their sad lack of built-in infrared functionality. There’s more than a few third-parties who will add the functionality to your iOS device for a price, but these usually involve bulky cases or easy-to-lose dongles.
That’s why I like GEAR4’s solution so much. Called the Unity Remote, it’s an infrared hub that talks to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad via Bluetooth through a free to download app. You place it anywhere, and when you send it a command from your device, it uses five infrared emitters to blast out the appropriate signals to any home theater device within its 360 degree line of site.
Very cool. It will be available in October, and it looks like it’ll sell for $99.
Although he’s still a Blackberry man on the mobile front, President Obama is a MacBook Pro user when it comes to his day-to-day work, as this video demonstrating the new healthcare.gov site makes abundantly clear. I particularly like the sitcom-style sticker slapped on the back of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, obfuscating its glowing Apple emblem. It’s clearly a MacBook, but the White House is still being coy, lest the fact that President Obama uses an Apple laptop somehow be misconstrued as, you know, an actual endorsement of the best computer brand on Earth.
MacWorld’s latest cover isn’t really special in that it features an iPhone 4 recursively shot by photographer Peter Belanger on another iPhone 4. Although that wouldn’t have been possible on previous iPhones due to resolution issues, lighting’s ultimately the most important aspect of professional photography, not megapixels or the lens. In ideal lighting conditions, getting a professional level shot from pretty any digicam isn’t all tha hard.
What I find more intriguing is that Belanger also did all of the post-photographic processing on the iPhone 4. Specifically, he used the $3 PhotoForge app to remove a green cast from the resulting image, and the $1 Resize-Photo to boost the DPI for publishing. That’s a little bit of a fudge, but all is forgiven: the resulting cover looks great.
Wisely, Apple has always been adverse to using other people’s technology to drive its business, so with competitor Google supplying the tech for so many Apple services, it’s only common sense that Cupertino’s interested in taking the reins back.
Back in April, Apple managed to do just that, replacing its previous location service partners Google and Skyhook in favor of their own location databases… but only on iOS 3.2 or above.
Our favorite Mac vivisectors over at iFixit have torn down the Magic Trackpad, cutting it apart for access to its hidden hardware secrets.
Unfortunately, there really weren’t many, short of the news that the Magic Trackpad uses the same touchscreen controller trip as the iPhone and the same Bluetooth chip found in the Magic Mouse. It’s something of a Frankenstein device, but that’s a good thing: it’s just more proof about how good Apple has become in making its products from the same parts.
Who knew Sprint was planning something similar? It’s a case called the ZTE Peel 3200, and as near as anyone can figure out, it’s a mobile hotspot that would wrap around an iPod Touch and give it constant access over WiFi to Sprint’s 3G network.
Pretty swank. Combine this with Skype and iOS 4.0’s background VoIP abilities and there’s not a lot missing. If the price is right, this case might end up proving preferable to a two-year AT&T contract.
From the consumer end, the hold-up on the white iPhone 4 has been pretty inexplicable. Exactly how hard can it be for Apple to get the white iPhone 4 right? They release multi-colored gadgets all the time, with no problem whatsoever. What’s the difference here?
Over at the Street, there’s an unconfirmed explanation being floated that actually makes a good deal of sense.
Because both the front and back of the iPhone 4 is made of glass, Apple has to be very careful about light leaking out of the seams and through the backplate of the handset, since they can’t just slap another layer of coating to fill the gaps. On the black iPhone 4, this isn’t as big of a problem, but the white iPhone 4’s back is naturally more transparent than the black’s. Hence the delay.
I’m no engineer, but that seems to grok. It certainly makes more sense to me than the other theory: that Apple had delayed the white iPhone 4 to secretly fix the antenna design.
Panasonic has just announced their newest camcorder, the HM-TA1, a high-definition pocket cam fully compatible with the iFrame standard.
Available in black, red, gray and purple, Panasonic camcorder is compact, weighing less than a quarter of a pound. The HM-TA1’s software is streamlined for social networking, making it easy to upload videos to YouTube or Facebook, while also boasting electric image stabilization and a 4x digital zoom.
Other features of the HM-TA1 include support for SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, a 2-inch LCD and an integrated USB port. If you want one, the HM-TA1 will be available in August for $169.95.
I don’t really know if this neat little iPod Touch case will work, or even if it’s real, but superficially, it’s very promising: the Apple Peel 520M promises to turn your SIM-less Touch into an actual smartphone.
How does it work? Software-wise, presumably through jailbreaking. The hardware’s simple enough, though: just slot your Touch into a case containing an Infineon baseband chip and an 800mAh battery capable of providing 4.5 hours of call time or 120 hours of standby.
So basically, the Peel 520 is a mobile phone that uses a jailbroken iPod Touch as an external cell phone display. Ingenious and cute, but has the whiff of vaporware about it. If the Peel ends up being real, though, it’ll be released in China next week for a pretty reasonable price of around $50. We’ll keep our eyes on the import shops.
