iTunes finally sold its ten billionth song, and as promised, Apple has given the lucky downloader a $10,000 iTunes gift card (or one ten thousandth of a cent for every iTunes song ever sold).
But sorry, guys! It wasn’t you… well, unless your name is Mr. Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia, in which case, congratulations. Sulcer’s magic download was “Guess That’s The Way Things Happen” as sung by Johnny Cash.
I guess that is the way that happens. That lucky bastard!
[via TUAW]
It’s been years since I’ve used the Opera browser, but the latest beta version offers at least one tempting reason to switch: it’s fast. Really fast. So fast that it just smokes every other browser on the OS X platform.
It’s all thanks to Opera’s new JavaScript rendering engine, Carkan, and a new vector graphics library called Vega that handles all the graphics rendering. Seth Weintraub runs the math over at Computerworld, but the bottom line is that Opera 10.5 beta is about 10 percent faster at rendering pages than the previous champ, Safari 4.
After January 27th’s unveiling of the iPad, it became abundantly clear that Apple has meaningful plans for iPhone OS outside of the smartphone arena. In fact, given the App Store’s runaway success, it’s just good business sense for Apple to try to get iPhone apps on as many devices as possible: not just phones, portable media players and tablets, but more traditional laptop and desktop machines as well.
The question is, then, when will OS X and iPhone OS begin to converge? When will OS X become compatible with iPhone OS?
In a recent New York Times blog post, Nick Bilton examines this very question, and talks to a former senior Apple Engineer to get to the bottom of whether or not iPhone apps could run natively on OS X one day.
Humorously pitting herbology against zombology, Popcap’s superb tower defense game Plants vs. Zombies was a long time coming to the iPhone… but once it the excellent port finally hit, it was destined to be a success.
I doubt even Popcap, though, realized exactly how much of a runaway hit they had on their hands, though. They’ve just issued a press release, announcing (with just a hint of stupefaction) that Plants vs. Zombies sold over 300,000 copies in its first nine days.
Costing just $2.99 on the App Store, that means that they’ve brought in just a little under a million dollars on the game since its release. Popcap’s a big name in casual indie gaming, sure, but even so: that’s real walking around money.
They deserve the success. Plants vs. Zombies for the iPhone is such an excellent port that it’s actually easy to forget it hits desktop machines first: playing it on an iPhone just feels like how it was always meant to be played.
I only hope the success of Plants vs. Zombies galvanizes Popcap to continue to add some of the desktop version’s excellent minigames, puzzles and survival modes to the iPhone version, perhaps as in-app purchases. Once you hit a certain skill level in Plants vs. Zombies, Endless Survival is just the only way to play, and I’d easily drop another $5 on PvZ if Popcap gave me the option to do so.
Every couple of years, Square-Enix dusts off the first couple of games of the Final Fantasy series, gives them a vigorous spit polish and then throws them on the gaming handheld du jour. So if you haven’t played Final Fantasy I or II on the original NES, PSP, PlayStation, GBA, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, ad infinitim… good news! You can now pick up both Final Fantasy I and FInal Fantasy II are now available over on the App Store.
The original Final Fantasy game includes five bonus dungeons, as well as the Soul of Chaos and Labyrinth of Time extras added to some of the more recent ports of the game. As for Final Fantasy II, you also get five bonus dungeons, as well as the Soul of Rebirth and Arcane Labyrinth packs.
These classic RPGs will keep you busy for dozens of hours, so from that perspective, $9 is a steal… but I’ve never personally felt that the first couple of Final Fantasy games aged particularly well, and while the new sprite work is undeniably attractive, the gameplay and story in the games seem more like an archeological curiosity of modern gaming than anything I’d want to revisit. So I’ll hold on to my $18 for now… but wake me up when Square-Enix gets around to porting Final Fantasy VI to iPhone OS, would you?
AT&T’s 3G service may be widely reviled, new data from PC World in collaboration with wireless analysis firm Novarum indicates that not only has Ma Bell done a lot over the course of the last year to shore up thew weaknesses in its network, but that in most cities it’s one of the fastest and most reliable networks around.
A joke so obvious that the humor-bereft Mad TV joke-writing bullpen thought it up two years ago? Sure. Moreover, there’s better reasons to think Apple’s choice of the iPad moniker is a terrible branding mistake.
Even so, you might consider dropping $40 on this iMaxi Apple iPad Case being sold by the Atwoodian Etsy outfit Hip Handmaids… if only because, as a device touched by God, it may very well suffer from the occasional stigmata.
Apple’s update to its professional photography application, Aperture 3, was met with excitement by OS X shutterbugs when it was unceremoniously released on February 16th, but since then, complaints that the program will suck up pretty much all of the free space on your hard drive during the library upgrade process have been widespread.
A new Aperture 3 patch addresses some of the issues that users have been having with the program, including fixes for:
• Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
• Importing libraries from iPhoto
• Importing photos directly from a camera
• Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
• Face recognition processing
Unfortunately, though, Apple is still warning that Aperture 3 may eat up your entire hard drive during the upgrade process, claiming that users experiencing problems need to temporarily shift their library to a different hard drive with more space. Since I’ve talked to some people who’ve seen terrabyte drives fill up completely during the Aperture 3 upgrade process, this isn’t entirely welcome news.
Gamers looking for a solid digital delivery platform on the Mac are notoriously hard up. Actually, scratch that: Mac gamers are notoriously hard up.
The good news here, then, is that recent betas of Valve Software’s popular Steam delivery system contain files that strongly hint that the “App Store for Windows Games” service is coming to OS X. These files are a new “osx.menu” file and graphics for Mac window buttons.
The bad news, unfortunately, is it’s not likely to make much difference: one of the reasons Steam is so great on Windows is because it has tens of thousands of games available for it. The library on the Mac is far more paltry, and OS X gamers are simply better off using Steam through Boot Camp to play the latest games than waiting two to four years for a company to maybe get around to releasing a sloppy OS X port of a game the PC world has already forgotten about.
Steam’s a great service, so I don’t doubt it’ll be useful… but publishers aren’t getting any more serious about OS X as a gaming platform. If you’re not on iPhone OS, Apple gaming is just pretty much dead. The best can be said about this development is that it may indicate that Valve is interested in porting its own games to OS X, all of which require Steam in order to run. Team Fortress 2 or Portal on the Mac is a pretty thought, but hardly likely to revolutionize anything.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gebf8X69tE0
When sinewy-armed Germans Austrians put on some Rammstein, begin to use the word “dude” with abandon and then take a drill to a Powerbook, you just know schiß is about to get extreme.
So what the heck is this? A couple of mean-looking Teutons hack apart a PowerBook and instead of making it into a flame spitting metal dragon or perhaps a battle axe with a special funnel to allow disemboweling juices to sluice out of the handle, they make the wussiest snowboard ever.
It’s just very disappointing. Germany Austria has a long, sometimes ignominious maker’s history of repurposing old metal into some of the most awesome death machines around. These guys, on the other hand, ruin a perfectly good PowerBook, turn it into a snowboard, take it to the slopes and end up displaying all the equilibrium and fluid grace of a toddler pushed off the top of an icy hill while balanced precariously atop a garbage pail lid.
Update: The original post said these guys were German. I, a Berliner, apologize for the inexcusable mistake.
[via Macenstein]
The iPad’s hardware keyboard dock is the best hope for users looking to do serious writing on Apple’s latest device, but if a picture posted by MacRumors forum-goer macduke is anything to go by, it might also reveal some of the tablet’s still unannounced software capabilities.
Although the iPad keyboard dock is mostly similar to the Apple aluminum keyboard, the function keys have been replaced by various shortcut buttons. From left to right, these keys are: Home, Search, Brightness Down, Brightness Up, Photo Album, Keyboard Toggle, Blank, Skip Back, Play / Pause, Skip Forward, Mute, Volume Up, Volume Down and Lock Screen.
That all seems straight-forward enough, but it’s that Blank key above the 6 that is causing a flurry of speculation. Apple doesn’t leave blank function keys on its laptop keyboards, which the iPad’s keyboard dock is most similar to. Therefore, it seems hard to believe that Apple couldn’t think of a perfectly good use for that key.
Now, the image itself was initially posted over at iLounge, snapped at the January 27th iPad announcement. Is it possible that key is blank so as not to leak some yet-announced feature of the iPad? Say, a dashboard, or perhaps (even better) a multitasking app switch screen? No word from Apple yet… but we should know within a month.
Update: Reader Seth points out that there’s a lot of commentary on this exact same issue over at 9to5Mac.
Thanks to the App Store, the iPhone and iPod Touch have a wide library of frankly excellent remote apps available to most users. If your device can accept commands through WiFi or Bluetooth, the iPhone family is the best universal remote out there… but with most homes filled to the gills with dumb gadgets that can only be controlled by blinking infrared beams, that’s a big “if.”
Power A’s latest product, the iPhone Universal Remote Case, adds the IR functionality to the iPhone and iPod Touch, allowing it to communicate with any of your household’s stupidest devices. The IR transmitter’s built right into the sleek case, which adds a minimal footprint to your existing device.
Once your handheld’s ensconced, controlling every gadget in your house is as simple as loading Power A’s app, which will even update itself with new device profiles overtime. Not bad indeed… although that $60 price seems a bit much.
The first generation iPhone’s metallic underbelly was undeniably magnetic to objects like the sharpest ridges of house keys, and in that sense, the current iPhone’s backing is an improvement: the plastic just doesn’t pick up scratches like the metal iPhone backplate used to.
Still, there’s something ghetto about a plastic iPhone, isn’t there? It just doesn’t feel like an Apple product anymore unless it has been hewed out of a piece of aluminum. Martin Schrotz seems to have felt the same way, because he decided to ditch the plastic backplate of his cherished iPhone 3Gs and replace it with a custom titanium body he forged himself.
The process wasn’t without its pitfalls. “I had the original cover measured digitally, and I then started to draw the new cover in CAD. It’s made out of a special titanium alloy that is RF transparent. I had tried aluminum but that was a complete disaster.”
The Apple logo is a bit big for my taste, but otherwise, I’m jealous: my first-generation iPhone has always felt firmer and more substantial in my hand than my girlfriend’s second-gen iPod Touch, but barring Apple restoring the metal-backed option to their iPhone line, this is about the only way in town to marry the performance improvements of Apple’s later handsets with the heft of their first design.
Ladies, gentlemen, please stifle the gasps and shrieks of surprise that the following announcement may well startle out of you. I recommend pushing your first into your mouth until your lips are elastically wrapped around your wrist.
Ready? Good. Prepare for a shock. According to Apple’s latest iPad SDK Beta 3 documantation, the iPad uses Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX Graphics Hardware for its GPU, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch.
I can see by your expressions that you didn’t find his revelation quite as heart-stopping as I thought you might. A steely nerved bunch, I see.
I suppose you’re right, though: iPhone and iPod Touch Apps have been confirmed as being fully backwards compatible with the iPad, despite the latter device’s significantly larger touchscreen display. That implies similar guts. It was probably to be taken as read that Apple, an investor in Imagination Technologies, wasn’t going to go too far afield of the iPhone’s architectural pairing of an ARM-based CPU and a PowerVR SGX GPU.
So not, perhaps, a revelation at all, but this should at least comfort existing app developers, who now know for certain they are working mostly with hardware elements they are familiar with. Even so, Apple warns: “[B]ecause the processor, memory architecture, and screen dimensions are different for iPad, you should always test your code on an iPad device before shipping to ensure performance meets your requirements.”
[via MacRumors]
They might have cancelled the follow-up to their cute little rolling blob series, Rolando, because it couldn’t be turned into a “freemium” title, but iPhone game startup Ngmoco clearly isn’t doing bad itself: they’ve raised $25 million in capital fund and purchased Freeverse.
Who is Freeverse? They’re another popular iPhone gaming company, responsible for titles such as Moto Chaser and Skee-Ball.
The move should allow Ngmoco to take their successful “freemium model” — in which games are free for users to download or play, while the developers themselves make their money through in-game advertisements and in-app purchases — and roll-it out to their recently acquired Freeverse titles.
As a business model, it makes a lot of sense: with the average price of apps ever plummeting, Ngmoco’s freemium approach allows them to give most users what they want — a free, simple game to play — and squeeze revenue out of them anyway. I don’t necessarily think that leads to very sophisticated games in the long run… but most people don’t want sophistication, they want entertainment.
Danish newspaper Information‘s latest cover was a delightfully dead pulp fake of the iPad’s touchscreen display.
The cover story is the same “print is dead” piece we’ve seen countless times before, prophesying that the only future of publishing is digital, with the iPad as one of many Messiah-like devices that must be embraced by the public in order to save the traditional print industry.
Well, the iPad certainly isn’t going to hurt the chances of print, but if the recent reports that the New York Times is considering charging its subscribers $30 a month for the iPad version is anything to go by, the biggest hurdle is going to be getting old media to run their businesses more intelligently and efficiently in the digital age… and nothing Steve Jobs can do is going to help them with that.
[via TUAW]
A potentially revolutionary way to stream next-gen video games to hardware technically too underpowered to run those titles natively, thin client OnLive might be the best thing to happen to gaming since, well, the Internet.
Essentially, the technology works by making a game into an interactive, streaming video, rendering all the gameplay on a beefy server, compressing the video and shooting it off to you as you play. Imagine, for example, playing a shooter like Crysis — which can cripple even a top-of-the-line PC — on your iPhone. Actually, scratch that, because you don’t really have to: at this year’s DICE Summit in Las Vegas, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman gave a brief demonstration of Crysis running on Apple’s handheld.
If the idea of playing full-featured, next-gen games on your iPhone doesn’t get you excited, it gets better: Perlman has also confirmed that OnLive will support tablets, clearly giving a wink and a nod to the iPad.
The only question is: will OnLive be able to solve the latency issues inherent in the thin client gaming approach? Perlman swears it’s feasible, as long as each OnLive user is within 100 miles of a server, but a high ping’s a deadly thing in an FPS. OnLive could very well be a revolution… but at the end of the day, I think we’ll be more likely to be playing slower-paced games like Civilization V through our iPad OnLive client than Crysis.
Office for Mac isn’t exactly a software suite most Apple fans pick up unless they absolutely have to, but if you don’t mind compromising your integrity a little bit, you can pimp Office on Twitter a little bit and automatically enter yourself into a drawing to win one of two 2.53GHz, 15-inch MacBook Pros.
All you need to do is either follow officeformac on Twitter, or retweet @officeformac while including the #officeformac hashtag. With a little bit of luck, you’ll win one of the garishly repainted, Office-branded MacBook Pros.
Unfortunately, it’s only open to residents of the US or Canada, which means Microsoft is missing a golden opportunity to bribe at least this Germany-based Apple blogger into saying some good things about their products. If you’re interested, you better get moving: the give-away ends on Thursday.
[via TUAW]
Just like my fascination with the bulbous iMac G3 series, I tend to be fascinated by the shapes of gadgets, and in my explorations at the local Berlin flea market, I have a habit of picking up delightfully non-conformist pieces of obscure and obsolete retro technology, never quite knowing what I’m going to do with them.
That’s why I love this guide over at Unplggd explaining how to convert a vintage 8-track player into an iPod speaker dock.
It’s not really very hard: all you do is take an 8-track cassette adapter, plug a regular cassette adapter into it, and plug in your iPod.
It’s intuitive, but not particularly ingenious or elegant. The real reason I’m delighted with this DIY, though, is because I just picked up almost that exact same 8-track player a couple of weeks ago, and now I can turn it into something more useful than an overly precious conversation piece. If you’re over 30 or 35, you’ve probably still got an 8-track player just like this in your garage: do some digging, and you’ll probably find that you can do the same.
According to Macworld, Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs is slated to be honored with the Jim Henson Celebration Honor, an annual award given out by the Jim Henson Company to acknowledge people who “reflect the core values and philosophy of the legendary Jim Henson and the company he founded.” Core values like loving cookies, bottlecaps, pigeons and monsters, one hopes.
According to the announcement, Jim Henson feels that the honor should go to an individual, organization or product that makes the world a better place by inspiring people to celebrate life. A co-founder of Apple, Jobs has led the company and the creation of its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, iPod media player, iTunes media store and Mac computers.”
Jim Henson’s daughter and current CEO Lisa Henson explained the decision further: “Steve Jobs has continuously broken new ground with technologies that allow existing media in all forms to be easily enjoyed and also by providing fantastic tools for artists, photographers, musicians and filmmakers of all skill levels.”
In some ways, it seems a bit strange — Steve Jobs’ flavor of creativity and imagination is vastly different than the messy, colorful and googly-eyed insanity of the Muppet Workshop — but Henson himself was an model for Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” campaign. Perhaps the difference between the two individualist imaginers isn’t so different as it first appears after all.
Ever since the iPad’s January 27th announcement, the big questions have been when Apple will actually start allowing customers to pre-order their new tablet, especially given a mid-to-late March launch.
We may now have our answer. According to a rumor on the AppAdvice, a reliable source is telling them that Apple will allow people to pre-order an iPad as soon as February 25th… in other words, this Thursday.
If Apple does start pre-orders on Thursday, we can probably expect the WiFi iPad to be sent out and sold live starting on March 26th, 2010. As 9to5Mac notes, Apple tends to sell new products on Fridays, and the 26th is approximately sixty days from the iPad’s announcement.
Of course, the iPad still hasn’t been approved by the FCC quite yet, so whether or not this rumor turns out to be true depends on whether or not we see the iPad bubble up in the FCC’s database before Thursday. Still, it feels about right: Apple needs to start pre-orders soon to make their March ship date, and since I’ll be on an international flight this Thursday, this historically lines up with my own admittedly anecdotal rule that Apple will always start selling or allowing pre-orders for new products I want to buy from them when I am physically, geographically or financially incapable of doing so.
What you are looking at is a screenshot of the contents of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK, and those circled files? Look at their names. That’s just About as clear an indication as there can be that a forthcoming iPhone, the iPad or both will be able to make video calls.
That’s not all. 9to5Mac has also dug up some references in some of iPad’s telephony applications of imbedded video chat strings.
I’ve always been fond of the Rolando series by Ngmoco: I think they were the first App Store games that showed me that the iPhone could be just as serious a gaming platform as the Nintendo DS or PSP.
I really liked the first couple of games, which is why it’s a shame that Ngmoco is now telling IGN that they are cancelling the third game, essentially because they can’t make it a “freemium” title.
What they mean by that is that Ngmoco wants all of their games to be free to download through the App Store, and they will make their money selling in-app purchases like extra levels, characters, etc. They’ve had great luck with this model with their Eliminate Pro shooter… but they just can’t figure out how to make this model work for Rolando 3.
It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me: surely, Rolando 3 could make its development budget back even without the “freemium” aspect, and I don’t really understand why Ngmoco can’t just sell expansion levels and different skins if they are intent on the freemium model.
Either way, it’s sad: the Rolando games are still really cute, and I’ll always remember them as the titles that first got me to take the iPhone seriously as a gaming handset.
You can always count on Apple to be secretive. Trade Privacy LLC, a trade data protection company, has determined that Apple has successfully managed to block public access to their shipping freight import records in the lead up to the iPad launch.
What this means, essentially, is that it should prove impossible to guess when the iPad is actually in the country and slated for launch based upon publicly available US Customs records.
That’s not a big deal, because we roughly know when the iPad is going to hit these shores (late March), but it will also make it harder to predict future new products and product line refreshes based upon Cupertino’s freign import data. That’s previously been one of the more valuable sources of concrete data about what products Apple will suddenly say are “available in stores now,” so this is a pretty big victory for the obsessively secret Apple… if less so for professional Apple rumor-mongers like me.
Well, that’s certainly nice: in the span of a couple of months, Apple has been making a lot of progress bringing iTunes to the web browser, including letting users see item information and even preview tracks without launching iTunes. Now Apple’s taken it to the next step: you can now browse actual categories of the iTunes Store in HTML.
This isn’t likely to be a feature you’ll use regularly, but it’s indicative of an ongoing trend, where Apple has brought iTunes, piece-by-piece, to the web. Maybe it means nothing, but I think what we’re looking at here is the beginning steps of the online, cloud-based iTunes we’ve all been waiting for.
[via TUAW]
