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.
Are Microsoft employees “nuts for the iPhone?” According to a Wall Street Journal piece, yup… and that’s starting to cause some problems at Redmond as they prepare to roll-out their own would-be iPhone OS killer, Windows Phone 7.
Essentially, everyone within Microsoft knows that their current smartphone operating system, Windows Mobile 6.5, chonks hoad. Microsoft employees are technology lovers, and so they have naturally gravitated to the best smartphone out there. Microsoft’s done its best to stem the tide of Microsoft employees defecting to the iPhone, initiating a policy early last year that prevents employees from expensing any non-Windows phone, but it hasn’t had as much effect as you’d think.
Now, Windows Phone 7 is on the horizon, and by all accounts, the war against iPhones within Microsoft’s campus is heating up, with several employees feeling the need to hide their Apple handsets from their managers.
In the Hackintosh community, the MSI Wind is somewhat legendary for being the first netbook out there that could essentially run OS X out of the box, with all features working and no hardware hacking required.
Now it looks like the venerable Wind has another Apple bragging point: with its keyboard ripped out and its display replaced with a touchscreen and reversed, the MSI Wind U100 makes a good poor man’s substitute for the iPad.
Sure, it doesn’t use the iPhone OS — it’s running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 — and it’s got some rough edges (it can only be turned on and off by wiggling a little paperclip in a hole), but if you were hoping that Steve Jobs was going to announce a MacTablet on January 27th instead of a big iPhone, this might be just the project to devote your weekend to.
Although most famously known for his system-crushing, next-gen 3D engines, id software’s John Carmack has been a passionate enthusiast of iPhone app development. He’s personally cited the platform as a return to the older school of game design, where a single enthusiast can turn out a great game in a matter of a couple months, and id software’s (excellent) iPhone ports of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were basically pet projects of Carmack himself.
No surprise, then, that Carmack is interested in the iPad. Speaking to Kotaku, Carmack said: “”Apple doesn’t give us anything ahead of time either, so haven’t put hands on it ourselves, but we certainly are expecting to try to have our Rage title for the iPhone, iPad, whatever, working across there.”
Rage is id’s upcoming post-apocalyptic, Mad Max inspired FPS and racing game, the first title to be released running id’s bleeding edge id Tech 5 engine. I’m not buying that the iPad has the oomph to run Rage at all: rather, I imagine that he is talking about bringing a spin-off title to the iPhone and iPad, similarly to the way Doom Resurrection brought Doom 3 to the App Store.
Either way, it’s exciting news, and Carmack remains as mouthbreathingly charming as an uber-dork as he could possibly be: the id software founder says that, given his druthers, he wants to budget a couple of months into every year where he can just disappear into his programming lair and code iPhone games.
When the iPad was first announced, Apple promised that the process for signing up for 3G service would eschew the iPhone’s Mephistophelean contract with AT&T. Instead, it would be simple, allowing end users to sign up and cancel their 3G service on a month-by-month basis.
If these screenshots of the iPad’s Settings panel are anything to go by, Apple’s been just as good as their word here. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, how signing up for 3G could be any simpler: you don’t even have to deal with AT&T.
Apparently, all you do to sign up for 3G is open up the iPad’s settings, plunk in your credit card information and then specify your order size: 250MB of data per month for only $14.99, all-you-can-gobble for $29.99. Simple! And if you sign up for the 250MB plan, you’ll get three alerts — 20 percent, 10 percent and empty — to let you know when you’re running low on data and affording you the option to top up with some more.
This is about as painless as it gets. I just hope international telecoms follow AT&T’s lead here and keep it simple, stupid. There’s just no room in my budget for yet another two-year data contract at this point.
This week, Consumer Reports published the results of their latest tech support survey, and no surprise here: Apple came out as the number one company in both laptops and desktops.
As usual, Consumer Reports asked 7,000 subscribers about their satisfaction with tech related dealings with various companies. At the end of the day, Apple scored 86 points out of 100 in laptops, and 87 points out of 100 in desktops. What’s amazing is that second place didn’t even come close to challenging Apple’s tech support dominance: in the laptops category, Lenovo was 23 points behind, and in the desktops category, Dell was 55 points behind.
Good for Apple, but if anything, this is just confirmation of what we knew already: if you control both your hardware and your software, you’re going to have better luck responding to customer problems.
U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble claims to be unconcerned about the iPad’s threat against their own e-reader, the Nook. Indeed, they are so excited about the possibilities of the iPad that they are now promising iPad owners that they can expect to download their own free Barnes & Noble e-reading software just around the time of the iPad’s launch, which will allow individuals to buy any of more than a million eBooks as an in-app purchase.
In truth, it makes sense: the Nook’s not really doing much business, and the iPad is going to be huge. Unlike the closed ecosystems of other e-readers, Barnes & Noble can launch all feet in and essentially parasite off of the iPad’s success.
The question is: will Apple allow Barnes & Noble and Amazon to open competing e-book stores? I tend to doubt it: Apple’s taken strong stances in the past against the duplication of functionality, and they are going to want to keep a stranglehold on the iPad e-book marketplace, the same way they control the iPod’s music and video marketplace. The more booksellers on the iPad, the better from a consumer perspective… but I really worry that Apple’s going to stamp down hard not just on commercial e-reader apps, but fantastic existing apps like Stanza.
Still confused about which iPad to pre-order? In collaboration with handsome Wilson Rothman, Gizmodo’s lovely own Rosa Golijan put together this handy, haiku-ified iPad buying guide which — while thoroughly tongue in cheek — more or less lines up with my own feelings on the matter: if you’re buying the iPad WiFi, there’s little reason to invest in more than the base model, while the 32GB iPad 3G will likely be the least regrettable purchase in the tablet’s first generation over the long term.
As a Mac gamer, I thought the recent announcement of the Steam digital games delivery service coming to Mac was very exciting. Even if Steam never becomes as popular on the Mac as it is on the PC, it will bring us, at the very least, some great Valve titles like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and Portal.
But best case scenario? Steam on Mac gets just the same vibrant games economy that the PC version enjoyed. But to do that, developers need to be on board.
Luckily, it looks like at least two game developing studios are going to take the plunge. Gas Powered Games, who created Supreme Commander 2 and Dungeon Siege, plan to develop for Mac in all products going forward, saying that porting games to the Mac is relatively easy since they’ve got identical internal architectures, unlike the PowerPC days. Unfortunately, that sounds to me like they’re talking about using CrossOver to make their ports. DICE is also now talking more seriously about bringing their Battlefield series of games to the Mac as well.
The big risk here is that developers will choose to use CrossOver or other DirectX wrappers to do their ports, which is the last thing the Mac gaming scene needs. I hope Steam leads to developers seriously devoting time and resources to OS X game development… not just an expansion of the lazy porting we’ve seen over the last few years.
Birdfeed has long been one of the best Twitter clients available on the App Store, but it was expensive for a Twitter app ($5), which limited the number of people using it. So while existing customers might be sad at first to note that Birdfeed has been pulled from the App Store, it’s actually good news all arond: the app was actually just aquired by Thing Labs and rebranded as the excellent and totally free Brizzly for iPhone app.
Brizzly is a neat little web service that integrates Facebook and Twitter into one interface. Using Brizzly on your iPhone will require you to sign up for the free Brizzly service, but like the recent release of the Meebo app, once you sign up you never need to worry about it again.
Otherwise, Brizzly builds upon Birdfeed’s foundation, keeping some of the best features of that client including the helpful character countdown widget and a simple and intuitive user interface, while introducing new features of its own like lists, a pull-down refresh feature borrowed from Tweetie 2, and the Brizzly Guide which allows you to edit and add explanations to Twitter trends. The other usual features are all there too: support for multiple Twitter accounts, photo support, saved searches, custom tabs and so on.
If you’re looking for a good free Twitter app, Brizzly looks like a very safe bet. You can download it now over at the iTunes App Store.
According to Kingsley-Hughes, the next Mac Pro will pack the Intel Core i7-980x CPU… which jives with a rumor we heard late last year, which also hinted a March release.
The Intel Core i7-980X is a 32nm chip, maxing out at 3.33GHz but packing six cores and twelve threads per chip… which could ultimately result in a dual-core Mac Pro boasting twelve physical and twenty four logical cores. Each Core i7-980X CPU also has 128MB of Intel Smart Cache, hyperthreading support, an integrated memory controller and supports DDR1066MHz memor. In other words, Mac Pros built on the Core i7-980x processor will see a huge performance boost over the current model.
Unfortunately, Kingsley-Hughes doesn’t have anything to report on the other high-end, pro-level Mac waiting for an Intel Core iX upgrade: the MacBook Pro. I think we can all take it as read that it’s coming, though: we’ll just have to bide our time patiently in the meanwhile.
As the first example of what will likely be a growing trend, Google — always a progressive front runner in getting their products on Apple’s devices as soon as humanly possible — have just revealed an iPad-friendly version of Google Reader called Google Reader Play.
Google Reader Play makes RSS feeds more accessible to tablet users by treating each news feed like a Flickr slideshow. Only one news item is shown at a time: each is recommended based on what a subscriber has previously liked. It also pulls items and shared articles from a subscriber’s own Google Reader account.
It’s not quite iPad ready just yet — load Google Reader Play up on your iPhone and you’ll quickly discover you can’t swipe to flip to the next item, which is an obligatory interface feature for the iPhone OS — but I’d expect all of these tablet-specific problems to be resolved by April 3rd.
Apple’s done such a great job with multitouch that every time a new iPhone OS update adds a fresh polydigital shortcut to the mix, my only real surprise is that it wasn’t there already.
It looks like the iPhone OS 3.2 update will be no different. According to Beta 4 SDK spelunkers over at 9 to 5 Mac, two new files called “3Tap.plist” and “LongPress.plist” are now located in the “gestures” library folder and are new to the iPhone OS SDK.
Three fingered tap is apparently undefined in iPhone OS, which is news to me, although long press brings up the context menu to cut, copy and paste, so its sudden addition to the gesture library could indicate some change to the functionality in the future.
Anyway, we may not get these new multitouch gestures in time for iPhone OS 3.2, but take heart: clearly, Apple’s got the fulfillment of all your triple-digit tapping desires well within their sites.
Over six months after it was first unveiled, iTunes LP is a total bust. Apple launched its interactive album format with a library of six iTunes LPs: since, only 23 more have been added to iTunes.
What the heck happened? According to Paul Bonanos writing over at GigaOm, it all comes down to two things: the iTunes LP is incredibly expensive to produce, and Apple really never wanted to do it in the first place.
Forget Plants vs. Zombies… how about Tweets vs. Zombies?
Tweet Defense is a cute little tower defense game for the iPhone and iPod Touch that boosts your units power based on your Twitter activity, including status updates and number of followers, as you fight off wave after wave of the undead. A Twitter account is not strictly obligatory, but if you have one, your Twitter statistics will boost your units in various ways: for example, rate of fire, range and damage increases.
According to Tweet Defense’s executive producer, Nelson Rodriguez: “We wondered what it would be like to take your social network and your activities there and turn it into a game. We ended up with a full on tower defense game that uses your friend list and your tweeting activity to impact how powerful your towers are.”
It certainly looks like fun, and at $0.99 on the iTunes App Store, Tweet Defense is easily within the impulse buy category. Now if only I had more Twitter followers to boost my range.
This is kind of a no-brainer once you actually think about it, but according to Mobclix, a mobile device advertising agency, the number of eBooks available on the App Store has surpassed the number of games for the first time ever, with 27,000 eBook apps to 25,400 games.
The reason here is pretty simple: there’s little barrier to entry in releasing an eBook app. All you do is grab a public domain title, wrap it in a remedial interface, slap a $0.99 price on it and hope for the best. Once you’ve programmed the wrapper, you can pump out eBook titles like this quickly and indefinitely, making it an easy moneymaker for more unscrupulous App Devs. Games, on the other hand, require you to have more advanced programming, artistic and design ideas.
For me, the most interesting aspect to this data is what it means for the iPad. Apple wants you to do all of your eBook reading in the iBooks app, but companies like Penguin are already talking about doing a lot of their more interesting work in app form. The eBook glut on the App Store can’t be something Apple wants to encourage to continue when the iPad comes around, but major publishers are doing the same thing.
My guess is we’ll start seeing a purge of crap eBook apps shortly after the iPad’s release. I’m okay with that… as long as they don’t touch my beloved Stanza.
Hadouken! I hope you’ve been practicing your hurricane kicks and lightning cannonballs, because Capcom’s much anticipated port of its beloved Street Fighter IV fighter is now available for $9.99 over on the App Store.
We all love Steve, but it’s still common knowledge that our beloved Apple leader can be a bit ornery, especially when he feels like his intellectual property is being threatened. Of course, he doesn’t always get it right, as evidenced by a great little blog post made today by former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who explains how Jobs threatened to sue Sun over Project Looking Glass and its graphical effects.
In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”
During CES, Casemate showed off its newest iPhone and iPod Touch wireless charging solution, the Hug, and promised an imminent release date. Two months later, and here it is, ready for shipping in its beautiful but bulky, wirelessly-charging glory.
The Hug is similar to the PureEnergy’s WIldCharge — both allow you to charge your iPhone or iPod Touch by placing it in a case and just laying it down on a charging pad — but the Hug uses a full enclosure case made from injection-molded materials, as opposed to soft silicone. The result is that while the Hug looks more attractive than the WildCharge, it is also bulkier.
It’s also, unfortunately, more expensive: Case-Mate is shipping the Hug right now for $99.99, $20 more than the WildCharge.
Personally, I like the idea of wireless iPhone chargers, but I don’t see much of a point with them, since the iPhone can’t wirelessly sync at the same time. Connecting my iPhone to a docking cable isn’t such a big deal that it’s worth a $100 to me, but your mileage may very well vary.
When the iPhone was first released in China last year in partnership with China Unicom, it confusingly shipped with 3G but without WiFi.
The reason for the omission, of course, had to do with government censorship: the Chinese government’s Golden Shield Project requires wireless Internet devices to use China’s own WAPI standard, and up until recently, you had to choose between WAPI and WiFi.
That strange and arbitrary rule was actually changed before the Chinese iPhone was released, but by that point, Apple had already redesigned their handset to conform to the previous GSP regulation.
Luckily, it looks like Chinese iPhone owners will be getting WiFi soon. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Unicom Chief Executive Chang Xiaobing is saying that WiFi-enabled iPhones will be coming to his telecom’s customers soon. Existing customers will be compensated for their WiFi-less troubles… a compensation which will probably involve expanded use of Unicom’s 3G network.
It’s excellent news for legit Chinese customers… but with the Hong Kong iPhone black market still thriving, it’s unlikely to make the iPhone the success in China that it is in the rest of the world.
This iPhone 3Gs video camera stabilizer is probably too extreme a DIY project for anyone to actually carry out, but if you choose to brave Google Translate’s gobbledygooked English translation ofthese Japanese instructions, you should be able to get the jist and make your very own iPhone steadicam… just the thing to make your own backyard Evil Dead remake.
Yesterday, Valve yawned open its PR orifice and finally confirmed the huge Mac gaming development that everyone already knew was coming: they’re bringing the Steam digital delivery service to OS X. Today, from that same orifice, we have more details, including the games we can expect to see released next month.
“Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April,” the company has confirmed.
Even better? As hinted, you’ll be able to use the same product key to download and play both PC and Mac versions of the same title.
“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge,” says the company.
A small bit, this, but almost totally unprecedented in Mac gaming, where ports of PC titles inevitably require a separate purchase. Also nearly unprecedented: Mac and Windows players will both be part of the same multiplayer universe, which means they’ll be able to play on the same servers.
Even better news? Valve has said that they’re treating the Mac as a “Tier 1” platform, which means that, from now on, the company will release its own games at the same time as on the PC and Xbox 360. Portal 2 will be the first game to be released simultaneously on the Mac, PC and 360.
Of course, there’s a lot up in the air here… Steam’s not just about Valve games, and if other companies don’t start releasing native ports for OS X (as opposed to the cheap and sluggish practice of dropping them in DirectX wrappers and slapping a $50 price tag on the resulting .DMG), Steam for Mac will never get more traction. Let’s hope Valve’s investment into OS X finally convinces game developers to embrace the fastest growing home computing market out there.
After Street Fighter, Tekken’s one of the biggest fighting game franchises around. It’s no surprise, then, that the iconic Namco brawler would be quick to follow Capcom’s Street Fighter IV as an iPhone-specific port.
There’s nothing official yet, but according to Pocket Gamer, an anonymous source has told them that iPhone and iPod Touch owners can expect the Iron Fist Tournament to come to their handhelds soon.
Of course, when “soon” is is still very much up in the air, although it is apparently in the final phases of development. Hopefully, Namco will figure out a less obtrusive control scheme for Tekken than the Street Fighter IV‘s fighter-obscuring overlays.
Well, it looks like it’s official: after accidentally leaking the existence of a Mac client in their latest beta, and teasing the same in a series of hysterical promotional images, Valve has announced that the Steam games delivery service will indeed be coming to OS X… along with the sequel to their nabacularly terrific teleportation puzzler, Portal.
After all, slowed down by 15% and annotated by Neil Curtis, the iPad spot is just as surreal as the Old Spice ad. In fact, it is rife with goofs, most notably multitouch interactions that have little to no bearing to what the model is doing on screen. As for that iPad model, s/he is practically the Orlando of Apple spots, transmutating from female to male to female again over the course of the ad… all the while magically warping in and out of different pairs of pants.
It’s a bit strange to see a company as detail-obsessed as Apple make so many careless little mistakes… but you’d be hard pressed to catch any of these gaffes at regular speed. It just goes to show that as nitpicky as Jobs can be, the collected Internet will always one-up him.
You’re probably already familiar with Vers’ signature line of wooden cases for the iPhone and iPod Touch. No surprise in the wake of the iPad’s announcement, then, that they have just announced a new wooden iPad Case, which (for $80) will ensconce your tablet in dead cedar flesh.
It looks pretty good, and I like the built-in kickstand, but personally, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of wooden casesl, but that might have more to do with my hysterical phobia of slicing a splinter through the fleshy web between my thumb and forefinger than any real failure of the concept.
