John Brownlee - page 221

If you want to give your MacBook more of the oomph of a desktop, the DeskBook Pro dock from Zemno would be a neat little solution… except for its mind-boggling expensiveness.

Like most laptop docking stations, the DeskBook primarily functions as a port multiplier: slot your MacBook in and you’ll expand your available USB 2 ports to six, as well as two FireWire 800 and one FireWire 400 ports.

The DeskBook Pro also operates as an external hard drive, with two bays that can accept either a 500GB hard drive or a battery. Don’t expect the battery to juice your MacBook, though: it’ll only power the DeskBook away from a power outlet.

Additionally, the DeskBook packs a DVI-out port for the connection of a third monitor to your MacBook. The important thing to note here, though, is this monitor will be driven by USB, so you’ll want to go light on it: it won’t hold up to more performance-intensive tasks.

Not a bad array of functionality, all told, but the price is enough to prevent this from being dropped in many shopping carts: $600 without the $180 hard drive or $150 battery pack. If you want a desktop that bad, at that price, you might as well just buy an iMac.

Prince is one of the most played musicians in my library,but I can’t buy any of his newer albums on iTunes: he won’t license his music to Apple. Why? According to a new interview, it’s because the “Internet is over” and iPod and iPhones fill our heads with malevolent “numbers.”

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it,” Prince said in an interview with the Daily Mirror.

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

This, of course, is typical nuttiness from The Formerly Known Formerly Known Artist: Prince, who is also a big believer in chemtrails and, as described by Kevin Smith, has some very curious opinions about the appropriation of both camels and women for a God-loving Christian’s personal use.

But all can be forgiven for “Sign ‘O’ The Times.” I think I’ll go listen to it on my evil, number-spurting iPod now.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gEAeE9kd2E

It was only a matter of time before some plucky app developer divorced the iPhone 4’s flash functionality from the Camera.app proper to create a bitchin’ Strobe app… but huskily-voiced 15 year old John H. Meyer is the first dev out of the gate with Strobe Pro, an app sure to please photographers and ravers alike.

Strobe Pro probably won’t be particularly useful when used with the iPhone 4’s built-in camera, but paired with a DSLR as a strobing flash could result in some startlingly effective shots. As for the app itself, I’m particularly impressed by Strobe Pro’s wicked slick transparent view mode.

Strobe Pro isn’t available on the App Store yet, but it should be out as soon as it gets through App Store approval.

Machine-carved unibody aluminum is fine and all, but sometimes I miss the less austere Apple aesthetic: the cheery white plastic, the GLBT-friendliness of the rainbow logo. For just $3.50, you can retro your iPad up with this wonderful retro logo decal for the iPad.

As Charlie Sorrel over at Wired notes: “If Apple was in any way nostalgia-minded, it should include these stickers in the boxes of its products instead of those awful, thin white stickers that we throw away by their thousands every day.” Amen to that.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAKhftX0cjk

This isn’t exactly going to replace your HDTV or iPad, but check this out: a 1920 x 960 display made up of 12 daisy-chained iPod Touches, with a thirteenth iPod Touch as a remote. Just imagine how many pixels this would be pushing spread across 12 Retina Displays.

How’s iPhone 4 carrier unlock coming along, you ask? Jolly well, says Dev Team member MuscleNerd.

Despite the fact that the baseband-unlocking code used by ultrasn0w on the last three iPhones won’t work on the iPhone 4 due to a baseband change, a carrier unlock should still be attainable.

“Next step is to keep the task backgrounded like we did for 3G/3GS,” MuscleNerd wrote on his Twitter feed. “Backgrounded task is the unlock.”

Great news for those of us who want to migrate our phones to different networks, or use the when we travel abroad without paying exorbitant rates.

[via BGR]

Superficially, the iPad’s incredible multi-touch screen has a lot of potential for graphic artists, but in reality, the lack of a stylus and the tablet’s own inability to distinguish applied user pressure gimps the iPad’s ability to challenge the venerable Wacom tablet.

To show us what could easily be, the guys at Ten One Design have put together this video in which they demonstrate an iPad capable of sensing the pressure applied to a Pogo Stylus.

It’s an impressive video, but there’s a rub: Ten One Design has to use a private API call to make the pressure function work, which means that it’s nothing we can expect to see on the iPad unless Apple rolls it into their UIKit framework.

Get on it, Apple. Through the dark times, it was artists and graphic designers who supported your brand; now it’s time to give them the drawing tablet they’ve always wanted.

Between cameras, gaming consoles, phones and laptops, proprietary cables and chargers are an irritating reality of the modern tech head’s life… and any solution that promises to consolidate them is going to find an audience with at least a few consumers with an OCD about clutter.

The iDapt charging station looks to be one of the more ambitious of charging stations, capable of juicing over 4,000 gadgets through a sleek base station capable of charging up to four devices at a time, in addition to a constabulary of interchangeable tips.

Naturally, it’ll charge anything that uses an iPod dock connector, as well as pretty much every other portable gadget under the sun. For $60, it looks like a good solution, although iDapt’s making its real bank by selling the adaptors, not the base station… and there’s just no getting around the fact that it’s way past time the world got a device charging, syncing and docking standard the way AV has HDMI.

Apple’s response to the ongoing iPhone 4 “death grip” debacle is largely cosmetic, but at the end of the day, Cupertino’s made sure that everyone knows that “if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.”

Throwing the gauntlet down and challenging your customers to return their phones if they aren’t happy with Apple’s fix is pretty daring, but at least Apple seems to be putting their money where their mouth is: Computerworld notes that simultaneously with the release of the iPhone 4 Reception memo, Apple quietly changed the terms of its return policy to exclude the customary 10% restocking fee.

According to Computerworld, Apple’s dropping the restocking fee to defend against class-action lawsuits that might otherwise cite the 10% fee as losses to be recouped. Personally, I think it’s simpler than that: Apple’s just not the kind of company to promise a full refund, then shortchange you.

Ever since Apple purchased streaming music site LaLa back in 2009 and Cupertino’s acquisition of a massive data center in North Carolina, safe money has been on iTunes moving into the cloud. But why haven’t we seen it yet?

According to an interesting rumor posted by Electronista, it all comes down to licensing.

Currently, Apple has a deal with the music industry that allows customers to stream music from their own computers to other devices, Airtunes. However, this existing licensing agreement doesn’t apply to streaming music directly from Apple’s servers, which would require an entirely new deal to be inked.

If Apple’s going to announce iTunes Live this year, it would be at September’s iPod event… but according to Electronista, many record label executives haven’t even heard of Apple’s service, which may indicate that we won’t see streaming iTunes this year at all.

[via Boy Genius Report

Macs tend to be a bit underpowered when it comes to the GPU, but information gleaned from the firmware of the most recent Mac mini suggests that future iMacs and Mac Pros may be getting a beefy spec bump soon.

Specifically, the latest Mac mini OpenGL firmware reference support for the NVIDIA GeForce 480 and the Radeon HD 5000. Both cards are about to be superseded by newer offerings from both NVIDIA and ATI, but for Mac users, they would still represent a significant performance bump.

What’s curious here about the news is that Apple is again considering using ATI GPUs in their products. NVIDIA has been the sole supplier of discrete GPUs to Apple since late 2006, so if ATI is about to get back into the game, it would mark quite the transition.

Comex, the creator of the wonderfully painless iOS 3.1.3 jailbreak solution Spirit, is still tirelessly plugging away at his Flash for iOS project, Frash.

Porting Adobe’s official Flash app from Android to the iPhone, Comex has demonstrated Frash working on the iPhone before, but now he’s showing it running on the iPad to boot with support for the iPhone 3GS and iOS 4 promised soon.

Interested in helping? Comex has put out a call for developers to help him move the project along. If you’ve got the skills, help Comex out, if only so we can get to the bottom of Apple’s claims that Flash will destroy the iPhone’s battery life once and for all.

In the iPhone, Apple has the biggest non-dedicated mobile gaming device in the world, while in the DS, Nintendo controls the most successful dedicated mobile gaming console. There’s a war on, and while it won’t be a battle to the death, Nintendo understandably doesn’t want to give Apple any more help than it has to when it comes to gaming… least of all by creating iPhone versions of its more popular franchises.

During an investor Q&A, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata confirmed that you shouldn’t expect an iPhone version of Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda anytime soon.

“Other companies don’t share Nintendo’s values or traditions when it comes to creating devices,” he said. “We are absolutely not thinking of [releasing software on other platforms].”

Iwata wasn’t specifically referencing the App Store, of course, but the message is clear: Nintendo’s gaming franchises are long-term strategic assets Nintendo isn’t going to lend for a quick buck to promote another console. If you want Nintendo games on your iPhone, you’ll have to turn to jailbreaking and emulation.

[via TUAW]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvo2g7RkVSo&feature=player_embedded

Things to do over the weekend with your brand new iPhone 4, or Apple’s most fragile and shatterable handset yet? Why not strap it to a few helium balloons and send it off for a little jaunt along the troposphere. They weren’t entirely stupid, though: recovery of the iPhone 4 seems to have been assured by a long length of fishing wire.

[via TUAW]

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It’s Independence Day Friday, and let’s face it, after a week of iPhone 4 reception controversy, we’re all a little tired, so let’s all take a moment to chuckle over this: Futurama‘s 31st Century parody of the Apple Store and the iPhone.

In an extraordinarily thorough review of the iPhone 4, Anandtech has gone into the reception issues of the iPhone 4’s antenna in the greatest depth yet.

Mapping the bar representation of the signal strength against the actual signal strength, Anandtech found that over 40% of the signal strength is represented by 5 bars. You need to love over 40dB of signal to go from five to four bars, but only 10db to go from four to three.

On average, the iPhone 4 loses 26.4dB of signal when tightly held in your hand, and 19.8dB of signal when held naturally… a significant jump over the 3GS when it comes to signal degradation when held, thanks to Apple’s decision to allow the iPhone 4’s antenna to come in direct contact with human skin. Since over 40dB of signal strength is measured in the fifth bar, that means that if you’re in an area of great AT&T service, you might not notice a drop at all… but it’s still happening. If you’re in an area of worse coverage, though, the signal drop will be dramatically visible.

The iPhone 4’s widely reported reception problems is the carcass, and the buzzards have been circling for awhile, but the first just dropped down for the feast: the first class action lawsuit against Apple and AT&T has just been filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, and predictably, it focuses on the iPhone 4’s antenna.

The claims are that Apple and AT&T were guilty of general negligence when it comes to the iPhone 4’s reception issues, with Apple specifically guilty when it comes to a defect in the design, manufacture and assembly of the iPhone 4. Additionally, Apple is cited for a breach of warranty, while AT&T and Apple both are accused of deceptive trade practices, intentional and negligent misrepresentation and fraud by concealment.

The lawsuit was filed by Ward & Ward, PLLC and Charles A. Gilman, LLC. on behalf of Kevin McCaffrey, Linda Wrinn and a number of other iPhone 4 users… and it’s not likely to be the last one filed, since the same firm that sued Facebook and Zynga is said to be looking into their own suit.

This is one design decision that is turning into a major headache for Apple, whether the iPhone 4 has a design flaw or no.

The Core77 design blog has scored a rare interview with Jonathan Ive, ostensibly about the iPhone 4, but really about the way a physical and emotional connection to raw materials can not be extracurricular to design.

“It is that direct experience, the hands-on, that is the key; like experiencing the iPhone 4 itself, it cannot be done without the physical connection. “It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it,” Ive explains, going on to add that years upon years of making his own models with his own hands is what gave him a deep understanding of the materials he’s worked. “And it’s important to develop that appetite to want to make something, to be inquisitive about the material world, to want to truly understand a material on that level.”

It’s a fantastic read: an uncommon glimpse into the mind of one of the most brilliant (and soft-spoken) visionaries in tech. Very much worth a read.

The upcoming release of Tron Legacy is going to be heralded by an glut of tie-in crap, but this Tron-branded iPod dock may be one of the better products of the bunch.

Designed to emulate the iconic, glowing identity disc / fatal frisbee of the Tron films, this dock is a collaboration between Disney and Monter, and it shows… at least in aesthetics. Features-wise, though, there doesn’t seem to be a lot separating this from your usual $100 dock, which makes the $249.99 asking price a bit hard to swallow. Fanboys only.

Firefox has just announced that their not-really-a-web-browser-so-Apple-can’t-reject-us app, Firefox Home, has just been sent off to the App Store for approval

Based upon Firefox Sync technology, Firefox Home allows iPhone users to always have access to their Firefox browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs, as well as access to their “Awesome Bar,” which allows them to browse to a site with the minimum of typing fuss. Find what you want, and Firefox Home passes on any opened pages to Mobile Safari.

There shouldn’t be any hangups getting Firefox Home through the approval process, given the existence of other Safari-competitors on the App Store, like Opera Mini or the Atomic Browser. If you’re a major Firefox user and you want to take your sessions — but not your browser — on the road with you, you can set yourself up for Firefox Home here in wait for an official thumbs up.

It’s easy to extrapolate from the fact that Macs don’t have Blu-Ray drives already (even as an option) that, internally, Apple is banking on digital delivery as the future of high-definition content. Now, for the first time, Steve Jobs has confirmed it in one of his characteristic email exchanges with an Apple fan.

Writing a disappointed Blu-Ray fan about the form’s absence in Apple’s line up, Jobs wrote: “Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD – like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats.”

When his correspondent respond that high-end video formats had a higher uptake, citing the lack of DRM as a main driver behind Blu-Ray growth, Jobs shot down the idea.

No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.

I think you may be wrong – we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over.

I think Jobs is write that Blu-Ray is clearly an interim format, although I’m skeptical, right now, of iTunes’ dominant place in the high-definition video digital delivery ecosystem: iTunes isn’t really making the most impressive show when it comes to video compared to the likes of Netflix, and I don’t really think that’s likely to change until Apple starts taking the Apple TV more seriously than “just a hobby.” Apple needs a competitively priced and featured set-top box to really get their video strategy into play.

Particularly in the Crayola colors, JayBird’s retro-styled Bluetooth headphones look quite attractive to me in a PlaySkool kind of way. They pair with your iPhone through a tiny little dongle and even feature side-mounted control buttons for cycling through your iPod’s music collection without digging it out of your purse, as well as an integrated mic perfect for making phone calls.

They’re a bit pricier than I want to spend on a pair of over-the-ear, foam-covered headphones at $99, but when all is said and done, I still like the style quite a bit.

This is something of a pro tip, but if you have an original 2007 iPhone dock, time to dust it off: DVICE has found that it actually works better than Apple’s new, custom-fit iPhone 4 dock.

The explanation is all about looseness: although the iPhone 4 dock perfectly fits the handset, it’s actually just a bit too tight, making the handset difficult to remove from the cradle with just one hand. The original iPhone dock has none of these problems.

Don’t have an original iPhone dock? Check the eBay listings to pick one up for a song?

It looks pretty official at this point that whatever measures Apple is going to take in fixing the iPhone 4’s reception problems, free bumper cases isn’t going to be one of them. Just in time, then, comes this quick and easy guide on how to use silicone modeling clay to make your own cheap bumper, which will not only protect it from a shattering fall, but also prevent the glass surface from getting scratched on tables and the like. Extend the sugru a little farther over the iPhone 4’s antenna danger spot at the lower left corner and that should help minimize dropped bars when you’re gripping your iPhone 4 as well.

If you’re hoping to get some sort of solution for your iPhone 4 antenna woes by calling up tech support, think again: Apple’s internal procedures when it comes to the iPhone 4’s reception have been leaked, and officially, there’s no problem with the iPhone 4 antenna unless there’s signal problems when you aren’t holding it.