John Brownlee - page 245

iTunes is a strong service for music and apps, but it’s video offerings are far shakier, especially when it comes to television shows.
The biggest issue is the price: the average show costs $1.99 on iTunes.That seems to be more than most people want to pay for something that can watch for free on television, or wait a few months to buy on DVD for 25-50% less.

Apple’s been hinting they want to drop the average price of television shows on iTunes for awhile now, but it looks like they’ve finally convinced a network to go along with the plan. According to All Things D, CBS is planning on marking down the price of some of its show (but not all) to $0.99.

It’s a smart move, but the wording makes it clear that CBS still intends to charge full price for their more popular shows. With partners like this, Apple’s got a long way to go towards threatening the cable industry.

Unfortunately, Gizmodo seems to have pulled the story, but before they yanked it down, they posted a fascinating screenshot of Best Buy’s system showing several new dummy SKUs for new Apple products with a release date of February 19th, 2010…. in other words, tomorrow.

Unfortunately, Gizmodo yanked the post before I could grab a shot, so the image attached here is a lower resolution copy pulled from this scraper site. Sorry about that.

Either way, if this turns out to be true, Apple still tends to release new products on Tuesday, so it’s unlikely we’ll see anything new. The $1,999.99 price shown in the shot probably implies a 27-inch Core i5 2.66GHz iMac, presumably a restock. Still, given the display issues plaguing the 27-inch iMac line, the fact that Apple thinks it’s gotten a good enough handle on the problem to start shipping new machines is worthy of note.

I guess we’ll know tomorrow if this is just random database junk or the first glimpse of something more..

FatMan’s latest high-end audio couple is the Wi-Tube and Fat Dock, a combination that allows you to use the Wi-Tube valve amplifier to stream music wirelessly from a docked iPod, iPod Touch or iPhone to anywhere in the house.

The Wi-Tube and Fat Dock handle other media players, of course, thanks to a standard 3.5mm input, but Apple products are this duo’s bread and butter. The Fat Dock not only will stream music wirelessly, but charge any iPod slapped into it, while also offering syncing ability to a Mac or PC through USB.

As for the Wi-Tube amp, it can accept input through RCA as well, while the FatDock can output by RCA, USB, Video or S-Video in addition to its wireless functions. The whole thing is controlled by a bundled remote control.

It’s an attractive combo, but unfortunately it’ll cost you when it hits stores in late April: $599 is a hell of a lot to pay for an iPhone dock.

Apple continues to loosen up the restrictions on app developers using the iPhone’s 3G connection: a little less than a month after Apple finally started to allow VoIP applications to make calls over 3G, and a couple of weeks after Slingbox’s video-streaming app was finally granted 3G-capable status comes the news that Apple has increased the maximum app size for download over the 3G network from 10 megabytes to 20.

That’s not exactly a huge bump, but it should be enough to suck down almost any application that isn’t heavily media based (for example, larger games). It’s almost definitely a move meant to give iPad app developers more wriggle room as they put together apps catering to a larger and more high-resolution display, but iPhone owners should see some tangible benefits as well.

It’s great to see Apple getting less restrictive about exactly what developers can do with the 3G radio. Let’s just hope AT&T’s beleaguered 3G network is up to the task of handling the upped bandwidth usage.

[via Macworld]

I’ve always had trouble explaining my addiction to Keita Takahashi’s surrealist puzzle-action game Katamari Damacy to people who have never had the psychotropic thrill of rolling up a giant ball of cows, schooners and sea monsters for the approval of the binge-drinking, rainbow-clad King of All Cosmos.

If you’re one of those people, and if that last sentence didn’t make a lick of sense to you, then I’m going to have an even harder time describing Takahashi’s follow-up title, Noby Noby Boy, in which the worm-like, quadrupedal BOY must stretch his ever-lengthening abdominal section across the map to reach his one true love, GIRL. So let’s just leave it at the fact that a port of Noby Noby Boy has hit the iTunes App Store for $1.99 and call it a day, shall we?

Except I really can’t, because Noby Noby Boy looks like a very different game on the iPhone. In fact, it isn’t even being placed under the “Games” section, but is rather listed as a Productivity app. Indeed, it doesn’t seem like much of a game at all: according to the App Store Listing, you can use BOY to become the hands of a clock, use BOY‘s body as a notepad and use the GPS unit to stretch BOY according to how far you’ve traveled in the real world?

Neat? Jeez, I don’t even know. Who would have thought that Takahashi could have taken the weirdest game he’s ever made and turned it into an even weirder iPhone productivity app? It’s only 2 bucks, though, so what the hell.

No one should fault a company for protecting its trademark whether in the real world or on the App Store, but the University of Texas has taken things too far, trying to get their former students to pull the useful iTexas app from iTunes because the University claims that it infringes on their trademark on Texas.

iTexas is a free app released by Mutual Mobile that allows students to access their class schedule, search the UT directory, check out their grades, look at the day’s cafeteria menus and more. It sounds like a must-have app for iPhone-toting UT students, and while Mutual Mobile has had complaints from the university before — namely, when the app was called “UT Directory” and used the school colors in the design scheme — they were quick to rename the application and address the concerns.

You’d think that would end the problem, but now the University of Texas is claiming that because iTexas uses the word “Texas” in the App Name, it is too “confusingly similar to [UT’s] Texas [trademark].”

Look, this is just totally absurd in every detail: from the way the University of Texas is gunning for a company for releasing a totally free app with obvious utility to the majority of their students, to the fact that UT got a trademark on a State name in the first place.

Perhaps Techdirt said it best: “Lesson learned. Don’t try to make life better for UT students without first paying the University.”

This is the sort of apocalyptically messy work room that any man can be proud of, but Flickr user Grant ups the ante for Mac fans because of the deliriously implausible and achingly retro home server housed within.

What you are looking at are three old school Power Macs : a 9600/200MP “Kansas” running Webstar 4 and RumpusFTP, an 8500/120 “Nitro” running MacHTTP and a Dual 450MHz “Mystic” with 1GB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive running OS X 10.4.11.

Those are pretty rad, but even better is what’s not in the shot: his Apple Newton web server.

Grant, we salute you. That’s just some amazing mileage you’re getting out of a garage of old-but-still-in-their-prime Power Macs.

[via MAKE]

Hadouken! Although Street Fighter IV almost obliges its players to invest in a special arcade stick in order to be playable even on next-gen consoles, Capcom’s still going to try to bring its famous fighting game to the iPhone and iPod Touch… although the virtual joystick should be enough to arch the eyebrows of anyone who has pumped a quarter into a Street Fighter arcade machine.

Mea culpa. If you bought a MacBook between 2006 and 2007 and your hard drive sounds like an unoiled rock tumbler trying to work its way through a belly full of rusty bolts, you could be eligible for a free replacement, courtesy of Apple.

Admitting that a “very small percentage” of plastic MacBooks (namely, the original 2006 model and the mid-2007 model) “may fail under certain conditions,” Apple is inviting owners with a failed hard drive to hit up their local Genius Bar and see about a replacement.

If you’re one of the unluckily lucky eligible, Gizmodo has some helpful advice from a Mac Genius on how to make sure your computer gets the replacement: “If you really want to freak out a genius bar employee, just sidle up and mention you have a CS-matrix-eligible macbook hard drive replacement. or don’t because we’ll hate you for being douchey.”

Sounds like a good plan… although an Apple Genius calling a customer douchey? Why, hello, Mr. Pot… this is Kettle.

Cell phone cameras are unmitigated garbage. By nature, the CMOS chips have to be small, which means less surface area to suck in light. That’s fine in an emergency, or to snap a lip-pursed Snooki shot of some girls you met at the bar, but right now, you’ll simply never take a snap with a cameraphone that equals the picture quality of even that five-year old digicam lurking in your obsolete gadget drawer.

Worse: all too often, cameraphone makers try to compensate for the terrible image quality of their chips by cramming more megapixels into the chip, which fools buyers into thinking they are getting a better camera, but counter-intuitively just makes image quality even poorer. What’s needed is better chips, not more megapixels.

So it’s exciting to see OmniVision come out with a new, RAW-capable CMOS sensor for cellphones. Shooting in RAW means that no data is lost when your phone converts the image data from the CMOS into a JPEG, so it should improve image quality… especially given the OmniVision sensor maxes out at 5 megapixels.

Although I’m still an Adium man on my primary Mac, I’ve been using the excellent online IM client Meebo for years to keep in contact with a decade’s worth of collected buddies scattered across ever instant messaging protocol under the sun across multiple machines.

Unfortunately, using the Meebo site on the iPhone was never quite as good as an experience. I’m really excited to see, then, that they’ve just released a native Meebo app to the iTunes App Store.

All the best features of Meebo are here, including searchable chat history across all of your Meebo sessions, regardless of machine, and support for just about every IM protocol under the sun. The Meebo app will also push IM notifications to you when the app is closed, and early reports suggest that it keeps you logged in far longer than just about any other IM app out there. It’ll even automatically reconnect when you lose coverage.

The best news, though, is the price: Meebo is completely free. I’ve been a huge fan of the Meebo web service for years: if you do any instant messaging on your iPhone at all, this is worth a download.

Swede and Apple enthusiast Anders Norman saw his every possession melted and charred in a cataclysmic home conflagration that gutted his entire apartment.

The only item left standing? His aluminum iMac: dirty, singed, partly melted, but still cheerily humming along.

Aperture 3 was a much needed update to Apple’s professional photography suite, which had lagged badly behind the competition not just in feature-set, but in performance, since its predecessor did not take advantage of 64-bit processors.

Unfortunately, though, the upgrade has not resulted in measurable performance gains for most users. Far from it: a bug in Aperture 3 causes a serious memory leak on the machines of many users, filling up even terrabyte sized hard drives with bloated caches of unused virtual memory.

Apple has already patched Aperture 3 once, with a 65 meg software update meant to address “an issue affecting the playback of video clips used in Aperture 3 slideshows on Snow Leopard.” Unfortunately, that’s the most minor of bugs compared to the memory leaks now being widely reported.

On their part, Cupertino is staying mum, per usual. That hopefully means they are aware of the issue and have the Aperture team working overtime on a fix.

Anyone using Aperture 3 out there who has experienced the memory leaks? Let us know in the comments. This isn’t a universal problem, so clearly it has something to do with the end user’s machine configuration. Maybe we can figure out the common factor.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RNpMAtqIZ8&feature=player_embedded

In the wake of last week’s report that sausage-mania was gripping South Korea when Maxbong brand sausages were found to be usable as capacitive styluses, there were some small few who doubted the report.

Our retort? This video, showing a South Korean playing Taiko Drummaster with a pair of Maxbong Sausages. As you can see, it works well, but those Maxbongs look a little too thick to be truly decent styluses. I still think a Slim Jim would work better.

Well, that certainly took long enough: Apple has finally allowed a version of SlingPlayer Mobile app to creep through the App Store with 3G support.

And it’s about time. SlingPlayer Mobile is a great little app that allows you to stream video from your television, cable, satellite or DVR to your iPhone. The previous version was WiFi only, due to pressure from AT&T, but Ma Bell claims that they worked with SlingPlayer to optimize their 3G compression scheme, and they are now happy that the app won’t be too much of a bandwidth hog.

That’s good news for home theater enthusiasts: it means you never really need to load your iPhone up with movies at all, but can just stream your library from home. Of course, that functionality has a price premium: it costs $30.

Children — those sticky, mucous-leaking, disaster-prone calamity goblins! — tend to have an unhealthy fixation with their parents’ gadgets. By ‘unhealthy,’ I mean for us, and not for them: no matter how many times your pudge-kneed toddler drops your iPhone into the toilet, common decency prevents us from clobbering the little monster for the affront. The only thing to do is buy yourself a new iPhone, then try to distract your feral, post-fetal doppelganger from indulging his or her innate impetus to destroy it with a plastic toy simulacrum.

Toy makers have been banking on just this for years. Consider all of the plastic laptops and cell phones and MP3 players on the shelves of your local Toys ‘R’ Us. Every gadget under the sun has a bright plastic analogue, ready to be sacrificed to your child’s agency of destruction and save your most cherished gadgets.

Apple’s new iPad, when it is released, is going to be a particulaly tempting object for the average kid to mindlessly throw, smash, bend, smear bodily fluids upon, or all of the above. But Fisher-Price — old saws at this game — have you covered. They’ve just announced their own iPad-inspired device for children, called the iXL.

It looks pretty good. It allows kids to look at photos, read e-books, play music and games, and even dink around with remedial art and note taking programs. Of course, since your kid’s probably just going to smash the dog in the head with it, then use it to blow up the microwave when you’re not looking, the $79.99 price tag might seem a bit much… but it’s better to be out $80 than $499, don’t you think?

Don’t search for Horticulture vs. Necromancy or Vegetables vs. Decomposition, but if you go to the App Store now, Plants vs. Zombies is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch for only $2.99.

Trust me, that’s an absolute steal. Pop Cap Games’ wonderfully goofy tower-defense game — in which rows of flowers and funguses must cheerily hold off wave after wave — was the most addictive game of last year, and not only does Plants vs. Zombies feel more intuitive to play on a touchscreen, but the iPhone app costs 85% less than the desktop port.

For iPhone gamers, this is news that should be met with nothing less than hysterical shrieking and full-on bladder evacuation. Buy Plants vs. Zombies here, then join me in the comments where I’ll explain my patented, never-fail Gloomshroom defense.

Our own lovely modern-day Beatrice, Miss Nicole Martinelli, made passing reference to the latest fad to grip South Korean iPhone owners earlier today, but just in case you missed it: they’re using a particular brand of snack sausage as iPhone styluses so they don’t need to remove their gloves in the winter.

The snack sausages, made by South Korea’s own CJ Corportation, are electrostatically compatible with the iPhone’s touchscreen…. and it’s apparently a useful enough solution to cause sausage sales to surge.

True, some might get squeamish at the thought of carrying around a cigarillo of unwrapped meat in their pockets at all times… but I think this is brilliant. On the other hand, this is perhaps the first practical way to merge both my Slim Jim and Apple hardware fetishes. Kudos, Korea!

It’s just so charming when programmers forget about the App Store and universal binaries for a second, blow the dust off that old Apple IIc+ in the basement and code up something new… like this awesome wavetable synth, programmed, compiled and sold by chiptune musicians 8 Bit Weapon.

Called the Digital Music Synthesizer, the application isperhaps the only wavetable synth for Apple’s 8 bit machines, and runs on the Apple IIe, IIc and IIc+, with support for up to eight voices including acousting piano, vibraphone, acoustic guitar, electric bass, trumpet, clarinet, square wave, sawtooth wave, sine wave, and the banjo. You can listen to a sample of what the Digitial Music Synthesizer can do here.

The best part? You can order a 5.25-inch floppy of DMS from 8 Bit Weapon for only $19.95.

True, it’s probably only of real interest to chiptune artists interested in generating the most accurate retro-bleeping sounds possible, but it’s still wonderful to listen to songs performed on software freshly programmed for Apple computers that may be dead, but not forgotten.

[via Technabob]

Facebook Chat is a wonderful little service opening you up to the incessant, sub-literate, real-time blatherings of the wide array of superficial acquaintances you’ve coalesced over the many years: the dim-witted teenage cousins, the sociopathic ex-boyfriends, the senile but sweet grannies, the LOLing old high school friends.

Or at least that’s what it is like for me, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve already turned Facebook Chat off. It wouldn’t surprise me, though, to find out you’ve got a more articulate gaggle of Facebook friends. So good news! Facebook has just posted instructions on how to access Facebook Chat through iChat, even when you’re not signed in to Facebook proper.

The set-up is pretty easy. All you do is go to the iChat’s “Preferences”, menu, click “Accounts” add a new account, select “Jabber” from the pull-down menu and then type in your screen name ([email protected]) and password. You then edit your “Server Options” to point to chat.facebook.com at port 5222, unticking SSL as you go. Click OK and you’re all set to harass and be harassed by Facebook friends through iChat at any time. You’ll be being brow-beaten for never responding to their chats in no time.

[via 9to5Mac]

The mysterious Mac Pro error that caused Apple’s highest-end desktops to start glowing, vibrating and rip fillings from users’ teeth every time an MP3 was played has spurred Apple to release the Mac Pro Audio Update 1.0.

Unfortunately, it’s only available for Mac Pro (Early 2009) computers running Mac OS X 10.6.2. That leaves out a swathe of other Mac Pro owners who are also reportedly suffering problems, but hopefully, Apple will solve their audio-related CPU overheating issues soon, before their Mac Pros turn into miniature fusion reactors.

Anyone having CPU overheating issues on their Mac Pro tried the fix? How’d it work out for you?

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNAg1v3Hwpg&feature=player_embedded

I’m one of the few avowed fans of Google’s Chrome browser here at Cult of Mac, but it’s definitely got its problems. As Craig eloquently pointed out, it’s a browser utterly dismissive of Apple’s own UI design principles, and the Chrome for Mac beta has a number of shocking holes in its feature set…. biggest among them the lack of a bookmark manager, a cookie manager, a task manager, bookmark sync and extension support.

Guess what features were just added to the Chrome for Mac beta? Hint: Craig’s not going to be any happier.

You should at least check it out: it’s a fuller featured browser than Safari, and the new beta not only brings Chrome for Mac up to spec compared to Chrome on other platforms, but the addition of extensions, managers and sync finally makes Chrome for Mac a serious competitor to Firefox.

If you’re interested in trying it out or upgrading your copy of Chrome, you can download the newest beta here.

The iPhone already plays Doom better than just about any smartphone out there thanks to iD Mobile’s continuing interest in porting their older titles and releasing iPhone-specific spin-off games of their more popular franchises to the App Store… but years before the iPhone’s debut, I was playing Doom RPG on my little Motorola RAZR.

Doom RPG was a great little game that did the impossible: it translated the frenetic first-person action of Doom into a wonderful, story-rich, turn-based RPG perfect for playing on a cell phone’s numeric keypad.

Ever since I got my iPhone, I’ve wished that iD Mobile would port it on over to the App Store… and while they still haven’t done so, they’ve done one better, releasing a sequel for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Doom II RPG. It’s available on the App Store now for $4.

My only question: who is that egghead shooting the demon in the screenshot? That’s not the bloodied, Schwarzenegger-esque marine I remember from Doom days gone by.

Companies seem to be treating the iPad more seriously than they treated the iPhone when it was first announced… at least as far as scrambling to make sure they get their content available on it.

Case in point: Hulu.com, which streams popular television shows to millions of users in the United States through their web browser. According to Techcrunch, Hulu is now in the process of trying to get their content on the iPad… but they’ll need to ditch their online Flash video player to do it.

In truth, that’s not really a big deal. Hulu’s videos are already encoded in H.264, so they should run on the iPad without a problem. As Techcrunch points out, the big issue is making sure Hulu’s ads — all of which are in Flash — are iPad ready. A hurdle, sure, but not a big one… and one that can be gradually rolled out over time. I doubt any of us will mind a few less ads on Hulu through the iPad, at least initially.

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates has never been shy about commenting on Apple’s products, and now, in response to the iPad announcement, he’s pretty much towing the line of the general Windows world response to Apple’s new tablet: meh.

“You know, I’m a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard — in other words, a netbook — will be the mainstream on that,” Gates reportedly told Brent Schlender of BNET.

“So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'”