John Brownlee - page 230

There’s plenty of tower defense games available for the iPhone, pitting players against wave after wave of enemies as varied as robots, zombies and monsters, but Fluffylogic’s foray into the genre is sure to pique the interests of any geek who has ever watched The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars: The Battle For Hoth puts iPhone gamers in charge of repelling the Imperial advance with heavy weapon soldier, 1.4 FD P-Tower Laser Cannons and X-Wing Control Towers, while the Empire is provisioned with Viper Probe Droids, Snowtroopers, 74-Z Speeder Bikes, AT-ST Walkers, TIE Fighters, and hulking At-AT Walkers.

Brilliant. The Battle for Hoth is the scenario the tower defense genre was practically invented to simulate. There’s no explicit word on release date or price right now, but Fluffylogic says Star Wars: Battle for Hoth’s release is “imminent,” so keep refreshing the App Store.

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At yesterday’s I/O event, Google officially unveiled their long rumored GoogleTV platform, a software platform that will be baked into new televisions and set-top boxes that merges cable and online video in a single service.

Essentially, Google TV takes advantage of Google’s search business by making it easier for you to find the television you want to watch, whether its pumped out by your cable provider or available on the Internet. Once you find the show you want to watch, you can choose what to do with it, whether that’s watch it, schedule an alarm or record it to your DVR.

Google TV also incorporates a Boxee like home screen, with some special functionality: integration with Android Apps. The service can even augment the television you’re watching: one particularly neat function demonstrated was the ability to automatically translate a television show’s closed caption subtitles into another language in real time.

It looks fantastic… and also makes Apple’s own “hobby” of a television platform look more anemic than ever. If Google can’t prod Apple into taking the home theater market seriously, we might as well just give up on AppleTV for good.

Even the iPhone isn’t powerful enough yet to run Blizzard’s fanatically popular World of Warcraft MMORPG, but thanks to the World of Warcraft Armory App has long given the mobile night elf or orc alike the ability to access their characters’ stats, check the leaderboards, browse items or calculate their talents.

A forthcoming update to the Armory App finally adds in a long-requested killer feature: the ability to use the auction house out of game. The feature is called Remote Auction House, and it allows you to browse the auction house for free out of game, or to pay an extra subscription price of $3 per month to buy, create or re-list items without ever logging into your Mac.

The subscription fee is a bold move, but Blizzard has proved time and time again that the die-hards raiders will keep ponying up. I’ve known more than a few gamers in my time who spend hours a day in the Auction House: a few bucks a month to allow them to do their auction grinding on the subway or at the park would, to them, be a small price to pay for a little more sunshine in their lives.

The updated app is now out, but the Remote Auction House functionality hasn’t yet been pushed live. Expect it soon.

User ratings on iTunes alone can be misleading when you’re trying to decide which movie to buy or rent. A perfectly execrable movie might have a four or five star rating thanks to the efforts of a small pool of fans to bump its rating up.

The latest addition to iTunes seems particularly useful, then, in avoiding buying or renting a dud film: as of now, the iTunes movie store features the reviews of Top Critics and the Tomatometer rating score from the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site to let you see, at a glance, what critics thought of the movie you’re about to buy.

I hope this is just the first step towards Apple bringing more outside review data into iTunes as a whole. Being able to see at a glance if a movie is worth my time is great, but it would be fantastic to see the same sort of aggregation happen when I want to buy a new album, or even an App Store game.

[via TUAW]

Borrowing their aesthetic from the super-dimensional beings who crafted 2001’s monolith, LaCie’s new line of NAS drives, the Network Space MAX, are easily configured to automatically mirror your disks so that all your data is backed up twice, courtesy of the RAID 1 Department of Redundancy Department.

This featureless slab of black plastic contains two hard drives amount to either 2TB or 4TB of data, although effective capacity is half of that, since the MAX drives automatically back your data up twice to make sure you’ve always got a secure backup on hand, no matter what calamity strikes.

Other features include built-in server and torrent downloading functions, which are pretty handy, and a USB 2.0 interface to access the MAX directly from your Mac. If you want to be surer than your Time Capsule that your Mac’s data is absolutely safe, the MAX series looks like a safe buy at prices starting at $279.99.

First revealed back in January at CES, the L5 Remote is a useful little dongle that supplements the iPhone or iPod Touch’s already incredible remote abilities by turning your iDevice into a fully functional infrared universal remotes.

All you do is slap the infrared sensor into your iPhone and load the free L5 remote app. The app comes with presets for many popular devices, but failing that, it’s easy to program your iPhone with your existing remote by bumping them nose to nose and pushing the button on your existing remote you want to program in.

Conceptually, I love the idea of using my iPhone as a truly universal remote, but if you think losing a remote is an irritatingly commonplace occurrence, imagine losing a tiny dongle between the couch cushions. Worse, the L5 remote costs $50: way too expensive when a cheap universal remote can be picked up at Best Buy for half the price.

Until iPhones and iPod Touches come with a built-in IR receiver, I don’t really see the iPhone to squeeze existing universal remotes out of the market.

Thanks to its inexplicable lack of a custom dictionary, the iPhone’s always been a frustrating filter on the gutter-mouthed obscenity enthusiast and the serial sexter alike.

It’s frustrating. More than once, the iPhone has automatically cleaned up some of my most romantic text messages to refer, time and time again, to an earnest plea for me and my girlfriend to go on a “duck hunt…” the most euphemistic description possible of the activity I was actually trying to type.

According to Gizmodo, though, it looks like our frustrations are at an end: he latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta contains a custom dictionary under keyboard settings.

It’s a bit counterintuitive to set up: you apparently need to change the network settings to see the new tethering option before the functionality is revealed. Once you do, though, you’ll be rattling off obscenity-laced Tweets, emails and Facebook status updates with the best of them. You’re welcome!

Although the iPad won’t be released internationally until tomorrow, Apple has already gotten ready for the flood of new devices by flicking the ON switch for the International iPad App Store. For right now, this will only be useful to you if you have imported an iPad from the States but want to use a local iTunes account; wait until next week, though, and you’ll be able to slurp up iPad ads as soon as your local mail constabulary delivers your iPad to your door.

Given AT&T’s almost universal bad press when it comes to the reliability of their 3G network, you’d think the prospect of a Verizon iPhone would have Ma Bell trembling at the prospect of a mass diaspora of unsatisfied users.

With typical arrogance, though, AT&T head Ralph de la Vega laughed at the idea that AT&T had anything to worry about if the iPhone comes to Verizon at the JPMorgan tech conference.

Of course, Vega’s not banking on AT&T’s excellent service to keep customers around. Instead, de la Vega cited the near impossibility of getting out of AT&T’s contracts as the reason why they had little to fear.

With their usual alacrity, the dissection fiends over at iFixIt have again donned their Kruger-like gloves tipped with T6 Torx screwdrivers and gutted a freshly speed bumped plastic unibody MacBook.

Not surprisingly, there’s not a lot of new information: since only the CPU, GPU and battery have changed since the last MacBook refresh, there’s not much new going on in the innards.

However, there was, at least, one pleasant surprise: the new plastic MacBook’s 10 hour battery is an easy swap into older unibody plastic MacBooks. While dropping a new MacBook battery into an old machine isn’t likely to get you the full 10 hours of battery life you’d expect from the newer models, it should still get you some extra oomph…. a nice bonus if you happen to get your existing MacBook’s battery replaced under warranty, and Apple efficiently drops one of the higher-capacity batteries instead.

The latest iPhone HD leak comes not from Vietnam, as we’ve come to expect, but good old Taiwan. Ready for a bombshell? Better pop a Lipitor: it looks like the iPhone HD may very well come in white.

We admit, snark aside, that’s not very exciting. iPhones have come in white before. What is interesting here, though, is that these are pictures of a white iPhone front panel. Traditionally, white iPhones are “white” only on the black plastic backing.

Whether these images turn out to be legitimate remains to be seen: the front panel’s a pretty easy thing to fake. Still, given the pedestrian nature of the revelation and Apple’s own history giving a white option on iPhones, don’t be surprised to see a white iPhone floating around at WWDC.

Apple’s factory leak is just getting bigger, and Vietnam continues to be the undiscovered country of Apple leaks, this time with exclusive photos of the new iPod Touch… this time sporting the long rumored 2MP camera we’ve been waiting for for the past years.

Vietnamese site Tinhte’s photos show a 64GB iPod Touch that looks remarkably similar to the current model, except for the addition of the camera sensor (which, surprisingly, is center-mounted on the back… I thought for sure the rubber foot on the left corner was where the iPod Touch’s camera would inevitably end up).

The biggest surprise here is that the fourth-generation iPod Touch isn’t sporting the same design as the iPhone, but is sticking with the current unibody, reflective unibody casing. And it looks like my wet dream of a microSIM slot in the iPod Touch was just that.

No matter, though: I’ve been waiting for a camera on the Touch for so long, this is easily a day one purchase for me. We’ll know for sure when we can pick one up at WWDC in June, although an early September release is historically the most likely bet.

I’m not sure this vinyl Joker sticker could possibly work better, especially for just $16. After all, who needs a glasgow smile when they have an iPad? Why so serious?

The original Prince of Persia, first released for the Apple II back in 1989, is now coming to the iPhone according to Ubisoft’s website.

Called Prince of Persia Retro, there’s not many details available about the port, except that it will be a universary binary for the iPad and (obviously) support touch controls.

Thanks to references in both Apple’s fifth generation iPod Nano and the Nike+ iPod user guides, we’ve known for a while now that it was likely that Nike had a Nike+ heart rate monitor in the works.

Now, it looks like we’ve got a release date. According to a post on the Nike+ support forums, the heart rate monitor will be released to the U.S. market on June 1st, 2010, with Canada getting it later in the months and international customers getting it sometime in the summer.

Otherwise, there’s no details available, so we’ll have to see what Nike and Apple have in store. At the very least, I hope that when it’s released, there’s functionality to adjust the tempo of your music or even switch playlists according to how hard your heart is pumping. Sometimes, you just need a little audiophonic push to get you over that hill.

[via TUAW]

Sennheiser’s long been a name I trust when it comes to piping my iPod’s audio down into my cochleas, but I’ve never tried any of their Bluetooth headsets. That might change, though, with their new EZX 60, a sleek, light-weight Bluetooth headset featuring digital noise and echo cancellation.

I’ve long been frustrated by Bluetooth headsets’ tendency to amplify background noise and echo my voice, due to the close proximity of the microphone to the speaker, and I’ve found competing manufacturers’ echo-cancellation software to be a bit spotty. Sennheiser, though, rarely steers too far off the mark: I think they’ve probably done it right here.

Otherwise, the EZX 60 is a pretty standard headset, albeit more attractive than most. It features one-hand operation, a soft ear hook that flips and rotates for left ear use, up to 7.5 hours of talk and 300 hours of standby time. You can buy it now for just $80.

Soused and slurring, I know I’ve certainly made the regrettable Facebook status update or Tweet on my iPhone in my time, and if the latest Retrevo survey is anything to go by, it looks like I’m not alone: they claim iPhone users are twice as likely to regret making a Facebook status update as people without smartphones.

Even amongst smartphone users, in fact, iPhone users have a slight lead when it comes to the average Blackberry or Android users when it comes to making an unwise post on Facebook.

Unfortunately, these errant status updates aren’t all worth giggling about: an amazing one-third of the people who told Retrevo they regretted a post claimed it either ruined their marriage or caused strife in their home life. I’ve certainly fallen foul of the latter: it turns out girlfriends don’t appreciate it when you publicly broadcast their gastronomic failings and your own resulting gastrointestinal distress.

What about you, oh Cultists of Mac? Surely, some of our droogs must have some darkly humorous iPhone text, Tweet or Facebook mishaps to relate. The comments are as good a place as any for them!

Back in 2003, Steve Jobs decided to cancel his “nearly worthless” stock options at Apple in exchange for $75 million.

If he had kept them? They’d be worth $10.3 billion dollars in profits today.

Over at Gadget Lab, our favorite yoga-practicing nicotine golem of a gadget blogger, the pseudonymous Charlie Sorrel, has posted a fantastic guide on how to transfer your existing Stanza e-book library into iBooks.

The process is tricky, but as Charlie points out, since Stanza was purchased by Amazon last year, the likelihood of a native iPad port is in question as Amazon focuses on Kindle for iPad. Right now, then, this is the only way to transfer your existing library, along with cover art and keywords, to the iPad’s native e-book reading format. For guys like me, with an extensive Stanza library, this is a must read tutorial.

Software makers Avataron are now ready to turn your iPad into a functional mini-monitor for your Mac with their latest app, Air Display.

The app uses your iPad’s WiFi connection to transmit video data between it and your Mac (although you’ll first have to install a System Preference pane on your desktop or laptop machine). The app even allows the iPad’s touchscreen to be used as a mouse, so you can “click” icons with your fingers on your iPad’s extended desktop.

Pretty neat. Air Display isn’t out yet, but it will be submitted to the App Store next week, and if there aren’t any hiccups, you should be able to download it soon for the price of $9.99… significantly cheaper than even the cheapest of secondary displays.

In theory, the iPad can use the same 30-pin dock donnector to interface with any existing iPhone or iPod accessory, the practicality is that there’s simply no way you’re going to smash it into an existing speaker dock’s iPod port.

The Cerulean RX Stereo Bluetooth Receiver can help with that: it’s a simple wireless adapter that is small enough to fit in any iPod dock and, once connected to your iPad (or any other iPod product), it will happily stream music from across the room over A2DP, no batteries required. And if you’re using it with an iPhone, it’ll even pause and resume music during a call.

A cool accessory that would go a long way to making an iPad work well with a high-end speaker dock, but unfortunately, it’s not cheap: expect to pay $89.99.

Over at 9to5Mac, Jordan Golson put together this simple but illuminating pie chart illustrating Apple’s revenue breakdown by category for Q2 2010.

It really just makes everything immediately clear about Apple’s business, does’t it? The Mac and OS X are also-rans now: Apple’s present and future is the iPhone OS, which accounts for almost as much revenue as Apple’s Mac and iPod units combined. Cupertino’s moving to a mobile future, not one defined by thirty-year old, desktop-oriented expectations.

I can’t wait to see Q3’s numbers. My guess is it’s going to contradict what Apple has been saying in its advertisements all along: the iPad isn’t the future of computing. It’s the present.

When it comes to throwing their muscle around Congress, where does Apple stack up compared to the other big names in tech?

Business Insider has taken a look at the numbers.and the answer is surprising: not that much. In fact, they spend the least of most of the big tech companies when it comes to lobbying a percent of revenue. In fact, compared to Google, which spends half what it spends on advertising on lobbying, Apple’s barely rubbing elbows with politicians at all.

That makes sense though: Google mucks about in the murky waters of privacy, and that means they need to be conscious and have regulators on their side. Apple, by comparison, doesn’t have such a big target painted on their chest… although I imagine that lobbying budget will go up if it seriously looks like the DoJo is going to investigate Apple for anti-trust violations in regards to Adobe’s recent complaints.

[via 9to5Mac]

Fantastic news. Mac gamers! PopCap Games’ entire library of 13 incredible Mac games is now available for the lump sum of just $50.

Well, score one for the Vietnamese. As rumored yesterday, Apple has stealthily upgrade the entry level plastic unibody MacBook to bring it more up to line with the specs of the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Here’s what the new MacBook looks like: on the outside, it’s the same, but its electronic innards now contain a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 250GB 5400RPM hard drive and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M integrated GPU.

The biggest update is actually the battery: it now gets the same 63.5 watt hour batter as the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which gives it up to 10 hours of wireless productivity. That’s actually netbook range, now.

The new MacBook is a better deal than ever, and as usual, it only costs $999.