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.
It’s April 3rd weekend, which means a good number of you will be trying out some of the first iPad games to hit the App Store. I, living in Germany, am not be so lucky: my own iPad won’t be delivered until some still unknown date in the farther-flung days of April. Instead, I’m still stuck gaming on my iPhone, but luckily, I’ve got one of the best and hardest-core games on the App Store to entertain me this weekend: Sword of Fargoal.
If you need to write to a mounted volume over SMB, you might want to hold off on updating to OS X 10.6.3 if you haven’t done so already: Apple support forum users are reporting major problems in multiplethreads that SMB is borked.
Reader Eric Dube writes:
[T]here seems to be a systemic issue with the latest 10.6.3 update from Apple breaking write access to SMB shares for many users. The problem occurs when you try to copy a file with extended file attributes to the SMB share – files without extended attributes can be copied. I can honestly say the problem breaks connectivity to every one of my SMB shares that I’ve tried and need to access on a daily basis. So far there’s no word from Apple (numerous people including myself have reported the issue though) or any known workaround that works (other than copying the files from a terminal prompt instead of the finder.)…
At this point, I’m already considering backing out the update and going back to 10.6.2 since that works just fine. It appears to be a wide-spread problem, so it might be worth looking into to warn users about.
It certainly seems to be a wide-spread issue, although not one that affects me personally. Have any of you guys noticed this problem since updating to 10.6.3? Let us know in the comments, especially if you found a solution that has worked for you in getting around the issue.
Her at CoM, we’ve sent trackback hugs to our good friend Richard Gutjahr before for his fine, funny Apple Tablet inspired mock movie poster Photoshops. But as clever as Richard’s last round of mock-up posters were, the iPad still hadn’t been officially announced, and he didn’t even know what the Apple tablet was going to look like yet. His latest posters are all the funnier for being tablet accurate.
We’ve got a couple more after the jump, but be sure to hit up Richard’s site for the whole collection.
I may hate April Fool’s Day, but I can still appreciate a good gag product when I see one, like this iPhone-to-iPad Converter. It’s like a microfilm reader for your iPhone: Just slap your iPhone in, let the display upscaler do its thing and you’ve got an iPad for just a fraction of the price suckers like Leander are paying for it!
Remember this grossy? The greasy hair, the unshaped moustache adorned with old bits of scrambled egg and dollops of congealed bean juice, the belly as super-inflated as the abdominal cavity of some male pregnancy fetishist’s dream hunk? His name’s Greg Packer, and in 2007 he was the first guy in line outside of Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store, waiting for the iPhone.
Camping out then made a modicum of sense, since Apple needed to activate your iPhone in store back in 2007… but here he is again, camped out three days ahead of time to grab an iPad and first in line, despite the fact that you’ve been able to pre-order an iPad either for delivery or store since March 12th. In other words, there’s no real reason to stand in line three days ahead of time this time around if you had the foresight to pre-order.
We’re all for honest enthusiasm and anticipation of Apple products here at CoM, but on the other hand, we’re also proponents of hygeniene, common sense and a facsimile of a life. This guy was christened the “iLoser” back in 2007, and he really seems intent on defending the title three years later. Best of luck to him: my guess is there won’t be much competition.
Mostly because every oom in my house right down to the bathroom contains a pair of speakers hooked up to an Airport Express, the true killer app on the iPhone and iPod Touch is Apple’s official Remote app, which allows you to control and stream your iTunes library with painless ease.
I always assumed that the Remote App would work perfectly well on the iPad, but just in case it was in doubt, iTunes 9.1’s preference panel spills Remote on the iPad as a fact. Whether Remote will be a universal app, or get an HD overhaul is still unknown, but since I expect my iPad to pretty much live on my coffee table as an e-reader, casual browsing machine and photo album, I’m still pretty excited.
Although only in the prototype phase right now, these wooden iPad cases Substrata look gorgeous.
Coming in flavors of dead tree flesh including walnut, zebrano, wenge, mahogany and maple, and shipping with both hinged and sliding lids, the Substrata iPad cases (replete with microsuede lining to prevent scratches) should be available in June for an unknown but probably fairly expensive price.
Update: Picture me boring a hole through my throbbing temples with my fingertips. PC World has just confirmed Netflix for the iPad. The pictures of the app are even hosted on Apple’s servers and the app is listed on AppShopper, so short of a linkable announcement, this is as official as it gets. The Netflix app will be free to download, but you’ll need a Netflix subscription to stream video, which starts at $8.99 a month.
In other words, due to the web of lies and trickery bloggers weave on April Fool’s Day, I’ve been punk’d by real news. I hate this day so much. See the original (discredited) post positing this was in all probability a prank below.
Interested in picking up an iPad but a couple of bills short? The electronics sweatshops of Shenzhen again come to the rescue with their own counterfeit iPads, completete with WiFi, Bluetooth, 4GB of storage and a cute, knock-off operating system skinned like OS X 10.0.
The company who makes them, Shenzhen Huayi, says their iPad looks like a giant iPhone… although I’m guessing he’s never seen one, since this is a big iPod if I ever saw one.
If you’re a collector of Apple knock-offs or just a poor SOB, the “iPad” can be yours for just $290, and it’ll be available on Saturday simultaneously with the release of the iPad proper.
If you’d told me yesterday that I’d be eagerly anticipating a new release by nu metal doofus band Linkin Park, I would have promptly puked up my entire central nervous system… but today, I’m holding my stomach, keeping my mouth closed and my nostrils pinched shut, because Linkin Park’s upcoming iPhone game doesn’t just look good… it looks fantastic.
Perhaps what’s so great about Linkin Park 8-Bit Rebellion is that it somehow manages to cater to both Linkin Park fans (a blight on the species which makes a strong argument for eugenics) and those who find the band’s metal-and-rap-for-fratties musical style nauseating in equal measure. It’s a game with a sense of humor about its subject, not exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Linkin Park.
The game pits the members of Linkin Park in 16-bit pixel art glory, battling an infection of 8-bit sprites with fun weapons ranging from flamethrowers to super lasers. Even better: Linkin Park’s oeuvre of unlistenable audiophonic vomit is taken and distilled until each song has become a fun, warbling chiptune, which you can choose to listen to instead. Excellent!
Even Linkin Park haters like me should check out the trailer above: this may be the iPhone game I’m looking forward to most right now, god help me.
Although his fingers are always yellow with nicotine and his teeth are always brown with Marmite, Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel is my very favorite of secret boyfriends, and it’s mostly due to that wonderfully sinuous memory of his.
The latest fragment of mnemosyne plucked from the pickled depths of Sorrel’s gin barrel mind? Charlie realized that the iPad Camera Connection Kit — Apple’s suggested method for directly transferring your digicam’s photos to your tablet — looks remarkably similar to 2005’s iPod Camera Connector, which allowed you to do the same thing on your iPod Photo (albeit, without the USB dongle). In fact, they look identical.
What that means is that if you happen to have that old, useless iPod Camera Connector dongle collecting detritus in a drawer, you may well just be be able to slap it into your iPad when it’s delivered. Or you may not, but if you ask us, there’s no real reason for Apple to change the tech here when they can just recycle an old piece of hardware for an entirely new generation of device.
With the iPad’s imminent arrival, we knew it would be coming, and now it’s here: load up “Software Update” now to slurp iTunes 9.1 down to your Mac. The update weighs in at 102.1MB.
As reported, the changes involve the addition of a “Books” category, some improvements to the way Genius Mixes are handled and the new, universal ability to downgrade songs on the fly to 128kbps AAC when transferring them to your device in order to save space… function previously limited only to the iPod Shuffle. Hurrah!
The only real thing to watch out for here? Some users are reporting issues syncing iTunes 9.1 with their jailbroken devices. The issue seems to be rare, and may be solved by a reboot, but if you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, you might want to be wary here.
In the final frontier of the App Store, the upcoming, Star Trek-inspired iPADD app boldly goes where no app has gone before beaming the tablet technology of the 24th Century to the iPad of the day.
Oh, sure, it’s just a neat little skin with some clever sound effects for a rudimentary journal program (the “Captain’s Log”) , e-mail, Twitter and Facebook… but even so, this is going to be a big hit at the Con.
Sometimes, I look at my iPhone and, fighting the quell of soul-sickness, remark to myself “Yeah, I guess it’s a pretty good phone, but I wish it had a cord.”
Cords, after all, are very useful things: they allow even the cheapest telephone to enjoy the dual-function of a tethered nunchuck, can be wound tight around you if you get cold and are just eminently necessary if, like me, you happen to be an auto-erotic asphyxiator trying to get through a long distance relationship.
The Desk Phone Dock for the iPhone gives your iPhone back its cord. It’s a docking station featuring two built-in speakers, a microphone, volume control, instant mute, and both USB and AC power sources. Want to call your girlfriend? Just dial her contact, pick up the ivory handset and garrote yourself with abandon as she picks up and remarks in dulcet tones, “I thought I told you never to call me again.”
All joking aside, this is a pretty gorgeous docking station. If you want to use your iPhone like a landline when you’re at work, the Desk Phone Dock isn’t just functional, but its design is totally inkeeping with a Mac-friendly workspace.
Perched like Olympians upon the penthouse patios of the gleaming skyscrapers that perforate the very sky of the home of the brave, you Americans are noble and blessed creatures who almost always get the latest Apple products long before the rest of us unfortunate indigents of the Earth’s farther flung butthole shores.
This Saturday, for example, you will be unwrapping the gold leaf from Apple’s latest magic slab of aluminum, the iPad; meanwhile, here in Berlin, Germany, I will be spending my day hiding from the desiccating European sun in my ramshackle bamboo hut, my only past time listening to staticky iPad news over the wireless radio once given to me by a missionary I later ate, all the while compulsively blinking to keep the flies from laying eggs in the jelly of my eyes.
Still, hope is on the horizon for the strangely chattering aborigines of exotic foreign climes like Canada, Australia, Asia and Europe. Apple has promised an international iPad rollout in late April, and now it looks like we might have a date: April 24th.
The rumor comes from unknown site iPad In Canada. Their source has said that Apple employees have been told that April 24th has been marked as a “black out period” for staff, meaning that they can’t take leave on that date. If true, it strongly implies that at least Canadians can expect to get an iPad on April 24th…. and may be able to pre-order the iPad as early as this week.
The rumor should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, but the date certainly aligns with what Apple’s been hinting. As for me, I guess I should begin collecting bartering my beads and pelts with the traders so I have the scratch to buy one by April 24th.
If you want to do any serious typing on the iPad, the iPad Keyboard Dock is going to be a must-have accessory… but what if you want to use your existing Bluetooth keyboard? It’ll already work just fine with your iPad just fine, but the challenge is one of positioning. You need some way to prop your iPad up, monitor like, while you type.
The BookArc from TwelveSouth is a parabola of aluminum lined with silicone to slap your iPad into when you want to do some serious typing. Unlike Apple’s own dock, it supports both horizontal and vertical docking, so you can type in any position.
There’s no launch date or price for the BookArc yet, but if the MacBook Arc is anything to go buy, expect it to cost about $50. That’s probably too much when you can just buy yourself any one of the many kickstand-boasting protective iPad cases about to come to market and have all of the BookArc’s advantages while maintaining portability.
When you’re out and about, it usually behooves you to keep a coiled iPod docking cable with you, if just to charge your devices… but they’re easy-to-forget in their ungainliness.
Scosche’s latest product is an elegant solution to the problem of ubiquitous cable possession: the flipSYNC USB charger and transfer cable will juice up and sync your iPhone or iPod when you need it, and when you don’t, it coils up into a keychain about as small as your automobile’s alarm fob.
The flipSYNC is available from Scosche’s official site for only $20.
Although a few wishful thinkers held out hope far past Apple’s announcement, it’s pretty clear at this point that the iPad’s not going to have an OS X like dashboard out of the gate… but that’s not to say a third-party developer can’t step in to pick up the slack.
Cernegie Mellon Student Rich Hong has just released this teaser video for his widget-based dashboard app for the iPad. It looks and acts just like OS X’s own Dashboard capabilities, which is great. Just pluck this in your springboard and you”re golden.
There’s no telling if Hong’s Dashboard app will catch-on — third-party widget support will be key here — but it looks fantastic. In fact, with the right widgets, an iPad Dashboard app might allow for some remedial multi-tasking (say, writing a report while simultaneously referencing an article in an adjacent browser widget) until iPhone OS 4.0 creeps out.
You only had to listen to the gasps that filled the room when Steve Jobs announced the iPad’s price to figure out that Apple’s tablet is incredibly inexpensive… not just for what it is, but for an Apple product.
In case you needed further proof, though, check out this incredible infographic by Vouchercodes.co.uk that puts the iPad’s dirt cheap price in perspective.
How cheap is the iPad? Not only is it 43 times cheaper than the Apple Lisa (the most expensive computer Apple’s ever sold), but it’s the cheapest major new product Apple has ever introduced short of the iPod.
Early adopter or not, there is simply no reason to feel bad about picking one up at $499. Apple products just don’t come at a better value.
Artist Andrew Fulton wants an iPad, but like most artists, his means are meager. He shaves with a rusty bottle cap to save money on razor blades, he’s sold all the kidneys to the black market that he can, and his only nourishment is Mulligan Stew or the stray baked bean stuck to the inside of a discarded can. What’s a poor pencil slinger to do?
Well, Fulton’s happened upon an ingenious little plan to buy an iPad: sell Apple fans iPad-related art to raise money for his own device. His drawings are cute, quirky, marvelous and bizarre: I thought the iPad-slicing ninja was my favorite until I saw the tongue-kissing duo of blue-skinned aliens sucking face between Apple tablets.
He only wants $20 for a duotone drawing or $125 for a full-color strip. I’m sure some of our readers wouldn’t mind becoming a patron of the arts to help a fellow Mac fan get an iPad of his own.
With the iPad mere days away, no one’s likely to evacuate their various collection sacks if a new version of iTunes supporting iPad syncing drops this week. It’s a certainty, and MacRumors has a round-up of features to expect.
According to MacRumors’ source, the biggest change will be to add a new “Books” section for managing e-books, which will fuse with the existing “Audiobooks” category. To make everything easy, iTunes will automatically detect whether you’ve got an iPad or iPhone connected, to eliminate confusion as to whether or not books can be synced to the device.
Some big changes are also coming to Genius Mixes, iTunes 9’s auto-generated playlists, and will allow for more nuanced user control including the ability to rename mixes and rearrange them by dragging and dropping, as well as delete any unwanted Genius Mixes.
Another improvement is that all iPods will now have the option to auto-covert the bitrates of digital audio files to 128kbps AAC in order to save space and fit more songs on a device.
Apple’s been pretty explicit that for right now, there is a maximum order of two iPads per customer… but no one told Apple founder, celebrity dancer and tech enthusiast Steve Wozniak. The affable beardo with the head bigger than the sun has told Newsweek that he’s buying three iPads this weekend.
On Woz’s part, one of the iPads will be the stock WiFi and another 3G model. He’s also ordered an iPad for a friend.
Woz seems to think the iPad will be a big hit: “The iPad could lower the cost of acquiring computers for students. I think it’s going to be huge in the education market. Think about students going off to college. They want an Apple product, but their parents don’t want to spend that much. Now they have the ideal thing.”
As for Wozniak, he’s mostly going to use the iPad for mobile web browsing. “At first I thought, this is not for me. I have the iPhone for mobility and a computer for my computer life. [But] with the iPhone there are certain things it just doesn’t do well, mostly in browsing. It’s horrible to navigate a map on an iPhone because of the screen size.”
Although it’s never going to replace the iPod in most people’s pockets, Microsoft’s done a lot to overcome the initial missteps with their Zune line of portable media players.
In fact, if not for the overwhelming advantages of the App Store, I’d recommend the Zune HD to people over the iPod Touch. It’s a fantastic media player with a beautiful high-definition screen and a great interface, and it’s available at a wonderfully down-to-earth price: the 32GB Zune HD only costs $199 compared to the 32GB iPod Touch’s price of $299.
Only the Zune platform’s woeful app marketplace makes it a sucker buy for those who want the most of their PMPs: if all you want to do is watch movies or listen to MP3s, the 32GB Zune HD is a great deal.
Now, Microsoft is teasing the imminent release of the 64GB Zune HD. There’s no price available yet, but my guess would be $299, which is $100 cheaper than the 64GB iPod Touch. Whether or not you think that’s a good deal depends a lot on how invested you are in the App Store, but if you’re looking for a great, next-gen PMP at an affordable price, this is one Microsoft product that even an Apple fan can feel pretty good about owning.
Eager to plunge your Companion Cube through a gravity-defying dimensional riff in pursuit of the ephemeral promise of imaginary cake? Dying to invisibly sneak up on a sandwich-munching Heavy and slide a butterfly knife between his vertrebrae? Have a zombie-killing date scheduled with three buddies in New Orleans’ French district? Want to do all of it on your Mac?
Well, good news! Valve Software’s games delivery service, Steam, is now accepting Mac beta testers. It’s easy to sign up: all you need to do is go to the page and log in with your Steam user name and password. A quick poll and system check later, and you’ll be officially entered.
I’ve entered, and so should you: perhaps a Cult of Mac Left 4 Dead II multiplayer night is in our future later this month.
The iPad has a lot of untapped potential as an image editing tablet… but the only way to load your images on-the-go is to lug a laptop around with you or spring for the iPad Camera Connection Kit, which gives users a couple of options to load images on their iPad: either by connecting their digicam through USB or, if all else fails, slap in an SD card and read your snapshots off of physical media.
It’s not a bad solution, though we’d prefer a USB slot. The only problem is that up until now, the Camera Connection Kit has been MIA on the Apple Store. Well, no longer: you can now order the kit for $29.00, with a ship date of late April.
I’m actually less interested than the iPad Camera Connection Kit for loading images onto my iPad — I’ll always be able to slurp in photos through iTunes — but I can’t help but wonder if the Jailbreaking community’s going to figure out a way to allow SD cards plugged into the card reader to function as expandable storage on the iPad. That right there is going to give a lot of incentive to people to hack their devices.
