John Brownlee - page 246

Apple’s most useless-out-of-the-box product, the “hobby” Apple TV, has just gotten a minor update.

Don’t expect this to revolutionize (or even improve) the usefulness of your dust-catching Apple set-top. It’s an update so inconsequential that Apple couldn’t even be bothered to write up some change note for it.

That said, Apple TV users are piecing together that the update, once applied, is mainly to improve the way that the new Aperture 3 pro photo software suite shares images with the Apple TV over the local network, while bringing support for iPhoto and Aperture’s Places and Faces features.

If you don’t care about that, there’s another reason to tempt you top upgrade: users are reporting that the update seems to fix intermittent issues the Apple TV has when switching the HDMI output cable.

If you’re interested, you can update the firmware of your Apple TV to 3.0.2 through the “Update Software” option under Settings > General. Otherwise, we’ll be sure to shake you all awake when Apple finally gets serious about Apple TV.

My original theory that Apple ruled out a camera in the iPad because they couldn’t figure out a way around the double-chin dilemma is starting to look sillier by the moment. Apple clearly intends to put a camera in the iPad… in the second generation. First-genners looking to video conference? You’re just out of luck.

Need more proof? Here’s the latest Apple job posting looking for a software quality engineer to exclusively work on video and image capture for the iPad Media Group.

Despite widespread criticism of their mobile broadband service and the crushing network demand of millions of iPhone users, AT&T isn’t exactly spending a lot of money beefing up their nationwide 3G coverage… and now they have announced that they’ve just signed deals with Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson to roll-out LTE in 2011.

LTE is to 3G what 3G was to EDGE, theoretically offering transfer rates of between 140 to 300Mbps… and if they want to keep the iPhone as an exclusive, it’s important for AT&T to roll it out before their competitors. In fact, maybe the impending LTE roll out explains why AT&T has been so reticent to beef up their 3G network: they’ve known for awhile that 3G is a dead duck, and all they need to do is keep service good enough to get through the next couple of years until LTE comes.

Or at least that’s what I hope it was. Frankly, AT&T’s handling of its 3G network was of such staggering ineptitude that unless they ignored it on purpose, I have no faith that their LTE roll out will be anything besides a debacle.

Either way, you can now probably put a firm date on the iPhone 4G: June 2011.

With the App Store Review Team’s undisguised animosity towards approving apps that “duplicate” innate functionality of the iPhone’s built-in applications a stark fact of the iPhone development scene, releasing a third-party web browser for the most widely adopted smartphone on the market is a risky proposition… but Opera’s going to try it anyway, having just announced that they will be previewing Opera Mini for the iPhone next week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Before Firefox and Chrome smudged a lot of their luster, Opera was one of the most cutting-edge browsers out there. In the last couple of years, though, most of Opera’s users are in the mobile phone sector: in fact, before the iPhone, Opera Mini was one of the only options out there for using a (relatively) full-featured browser on a mobile phone. A huge chunk of Opera’s money these days is made in the mobile phone and smartphone sector, so it’s no wonder they want to get their browser on the iPhone.

Unfortunately, Opera Mini is going to be at a marked disadvantage here. Even if it can get past the App Store approval process, Safari is allowed to run on the iPhone in the background while Opera will have to open and reload anew every time the user switches apps. Until Apple allows third-party apps to stay loaded in the background, I’m just not sure I see a market for another iPhone browser.

On a physical keyboard, my own digits are pounding pistons capable of rattling off text with enough pressure pounds per inch to bore through a human skull at roughly 120 words per minute… but get me on an iPhone, and all of my speed typing skills go to pot.

I’m more impressed with this video of some guy typing at an incredible rate of 56 words per minute on the iPhone in portrait mode, then, than I would be at the touch typing tornado of a polydactyl secretary with an IV drip of amphetamines smashing out text at three times the rate.

Simply amazing… and I’m willing to bet some of you out there can do even better, self-proclaimed “fastest iPhone texter in the world” or not.

[via TUAW

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1NpU0NwKKk&feature=player_embedded

Courtesy of PopCap Games’ Twitter account, I can now tell you the exact date that my girlfriend will plant herself in her apartment with her iPod Touch and gradually undergo a zombie-like desiccation process herself: February 15th. Because that’s the day that Plants vs. Zombies is finally coming to the App Store.

Plants vs. Zombies is an adorable, hilarious and disgustingly addictive tower defense game in which you must set up rows of specially powered anthropomorphic plants to fight off wave after wave of brain-munching zombies. You can play it over at Pop Cap’s site for free, or buy it for OS X for $20. And let me tell you, if the iPhone port is half as good as the OS X version, we’re looking at one of the best iPhone games of the year.

It never takes long for the Dev Team to pry open the seams of the latest iPhone OS firmware, tickle its insides and come up with a fresh Jailbreak. Less than a week after Apple released their iPhone OS 3.1.3 update, the Dev Team followed it up with an update of their own: Pwnage Tool 3.1.5.

Here’s the caveat: the iPhone OS 3.1.3 update was pretty insignificant. The only real bug fix for non-Japanese users was improvement of the battery life indicator in rare cases. If you haven’t noticed a problem with your jailbroken phone, especially an iPhone 3G or 3Gs, you shouldn’t upgrade, since if you mess up your Pwnage, you risk losing your carrier unlock forever.

Apple’s refusal to spec their devices with memory card readers continues to irritate. My assumption has always been that the lack of an SD card reader on the iPhone has to do with two things: discouraging customers from buying the lowest priced iPhones and cheaply supplementing the storage with an SD card instead of shelling out a couple hundred more on the higher-capacity models, and making sure iTunes is the only real entry to shift to the device.

Still, when Apple updated the iPhone OS to firmware 3.0, adding functionality for iPhone peripherals into the mix, it was only a matter of time that we’d see an aftermarket SD card reader accessory… and here it is, ZoomIt.

Essentially, you plug the ZoomIt SD reader dongle into your iPhone or iPod Touch’s dongle connector, launch the free ZoomIt app and you’re free to shift any file supported by the OS to and from your device.

Of course, this isn’t really an expandable storage solution, but it wouldn’t be a bad way to backup photos from your camera while you’re on the road… and it should even work on the iPad. You can pre-order the ZoomIt now for $50, with a ship date in April.

The Apple Store went down for a little bit today, and while we all got hopeful for a Core iX MacBook update, most of what Apple ended up delivering was the usual assortment of Valentine’s Day deals (and why not? An iPod gifted to a loved one usually lets you steal a base). But there was one significant new product to be had: Aperture 3, a significant 64-bt update that adds up to 200 new features to Apple’s pro photo software package.

Some of the more frivolous new features are the ones you’re already using in iPhoto ’09: face detection and tagging, along with direct Flickr and Facebook exporting. Others are entirely new: Brushes, for example, brings reversible and non-destructive painting to Aperture, including Photoshop stalwarts like dodge, burn, contrast and saturation curves.

Aperture 3 databases have also been written: you can now merge and sync libraries, which should make it easier for professionals to take their libraries on the road. Slideshows have also been significantly improved, integrating photos, audio, video and text into single files that can be exported to iTunes and played natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Aperture 3 costs $200, although existing users can opt to pay $100 to upgrade. There’s also a 30-day free trial available.

The Internet can always be counted on to promptly deliver simulacrums of the latest announced Apple product created in two distinct geek mediums: LEGO and papercraft.

Last week, we had the inevitable LEGO iPad, so it was only a matter of time we got the origami version. Here it is, courtesy of Obamapacman: a DIY iPad papercraft mockup.

It’s a pretty simple project. Just print the model out on a color printer at 150 DPI, cut along solid lines, fold on the dotted lines and glue the yellow seams together; then off to the local cafe, prowling for Apple-loving geek girls, gullible suckers or both!

Late last week, a word of warning to iPhone and iPod Touch app developers was posted on Apple’s official developer site: “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.”

It’s a strange little note. The iPhone’s Core Location functionality is already opt-in, and it seems useful from both a developer and user’s standpoint if advertisements are tailored to a user’s individual experience… and location is a big part of that.

The wording is also worrying: what does “primarily” mean? That’s another one of those vague App Store Review Process wordings that just leads to headache down the line.

There are a few interpretations on this. When Apple tries to launch their own in-house iPhone ad network, they may want to position location-based advertisements as a major advantage of their service. On the other hand, this simply could be about limiting advertising-based apps from needlessly hogging the GPS radio and draining battery life.

If I were to guess, I’d say the latter is true. Hopefully Apple will clarify matters in due time.

[via Boy Genius Report]

After Super Bowl Sunday… Monday morning. A single artery slightly to the left of my pineal gland pumps gin-infused headache into my frontal lobe in simultaneity with the overhead clock’s incessant tick.

How to write about Apple products when the aftermath of last night’s alcohol-soaked football madness makes me incapable of doing anything but watch that staccato timepiece twitch towards some impossibly far-off time: to when my fingers can type their way out of their tremens; to when my mouth isn’t ash-dry as the taste of the Colts’ humiliating defeat, when I can spill out words of a new Apple product or rumor as readily as I am — here, now, in hangover hell — to vomit up my spleen?

Tic. Tic. To the feeds. And suddenly, a way out of my nauseous, neuralgic writer’s block. A clock, just like the one torturing me, but created from the casing of an old iBook G4, with the pendulum of an Apple mouse flowing into upwards into churning horological guts.

An Etsy find, sure, and already sold out… but this I can write about. Now if only the feeds would spit out some Apple-inspired hangover cure, or a video from the Woz about why the New Orleans Saints suck. Perhaps then I’d somehow find a way to make my way through the day.

Primate Labs’ Geekbench is a tiny little benchmarking application with one really neat funcitonality: run it on your system and it’ll upload the results to their servers, allowing users to easily compare benchmark scores across computers to inform their next purchasing decision.

That’s swell, but hardly news in and of itself… except that over the weekend, someone downloaded the GeekBench app and ran it on a system referring to itself as a MacBookPro6,1, the commonly acknowledged successor to the current MacBook Pro line. Oh, and it’s packing an Intel Core i7 M processor.

Silicon Insider posted this interesting graph putting into perspective exactly how large Apple is, compared with the other big three tech companies out there. And it’s all about cash.

Essentially, Apple is the second most cash rich company out there, with a little under $39.8 billion in cash and short and long term securities to call upon. Microsoft’s technically ahead of them, but it’s a comparatively small lead of a paltry $0.6 billion dollars… and while Apple’s cash reserves continue to rise, Microsoft’s have leveled off over the last half year.

Then comes Google, with only $24.6 billion in cash and investments, and finally Intel, with $18.9 billion on hand.

All of these companies have major assets, but Apple is clearly positioned to become more cash rich than Microsoft in the coming months. We’re on the brink of a huge transition in the tech landscape: the day that Apple is bigger than Microsoft. About time.

The Siri iPhone app wants to make getting dinner reservations or concert tickets as easy going to a concierge: all you have to do is open the app, tell it what you want, and it’ll arrange the rest.

For example, say you’re in New York City for an important business trip, and, after an evening of drinks with your colleagues, you all decide — as one sometimes does — that you want to go to a concert… specifically, by an industrial metal band specializing in sadomasochist leitmotifs.

All you’d do in that case is launch the Siri app and say, “Get me tickets for four to the next Genitorturers concert.” And that’s it. Siri will automatically identify your location through GOPS, then search its partners including OpenTable, MovieTickets, StubHub, CitySearch and TaxiMagic for the show.

Neat stuff, but knowing how finicky voice recognition can still be, using Siri might be less like getting your evening sorted through a concierge than screaming into the hearing horn of a shell-shocked veteran. You can grab it for free through the App Store.

Magazine and news publishers are collectively hoping that e-readers and tablet computers will save their businesses, and Apple’s eager to get them on board in developing high-quality animated versions of their publications to help get an iPad into each newspaper and magazine reader’s home, so it’s no surprise that Steve Jobs met with fifty top executives of the New York Times yesterday.

What was surprising, though, was Jobs’ attire: a magical top hat, of the sort championed by Mr. William Wonka and Miss Marlene Dietrich.

According to New York Mag, “When Apple recently booked the cellar dining room at Pranna for a talk with 50 top executives from the New York Times, even restaurant higher-ups didn’t know who their VIP guest would be. But last night, Jobs came strolling in wearing what our source calls “a very funny hat — a big top hat kind of thing.”

Like the hat, most details of the meeting are anecdotal. Jobs apparently admitted he likes to hold the Sunday edition of the New York Times in his hands, ordered a mango lassi and penne for dinner (neither of which were on the menu) and otherwise just showed off Apple’s new device to executives while answering questions.

Overall, it seems like the NYT executives present were interested in the iPad, but unwilling to lock themselves into a single delivery platform. Business as usual, in other words. Still, who knew that the man who hasn’t once been seen in the five years wearing anything besides blue jeans and a black turtleneck was such a secret dandy?

Now that we all know what the iPad is going to look like, the library of concept designs we used to illustrate the old “Apple Tablet” rumor posts look pretty silly, but they’re occasionally worth examining for ideas just not on what Apple could do with the iPad next… but what accessory makers might do.

This Yanko concept for the “MacView” tablet seemed like a pipe-dream even a few weeks ago, but what I particularly like is the iMac-like display shell it slides into in desktop mode.

Really, there’s no reason an accessory maker couldn’t make that work. Since the iPad can be paired with any Bluetooth keyboard, all this really is is a stand: design a free app that automatically pairs your keyboard with your iPad and you’ve got a pretty decent, touch-controlled iMac Mini.

In the wake of widely reported yellowing and flickering display issues on Apple’s line of 27-inch iMacs, rumors have it that Apple has halted production until they get to the bottom with the problem.

Apple’s denied the production halt, but if a UK-based Apple Authorized Service Provider speaking to Gizmodo is to be trusted, the situation’s a lot more dire than Apple is letting on.

Amazon obviously has a lot to fear from the iPad, and they seem to know it, if their latest acquisition is anything to go by: they have just purchased Touchco, a small company that makes very cheap multitouch displays. Oh, and they are merging it into their Kindle division. Duh.

Touchco’s touchscreen technology is pretty cool: not only is it cheap, but it’s sensitive to pressure, and can detect an infinite number of simultaneous touches. It’s also totally transparent, which means it won’t mute the full color LCD screens for which it is designed like other touchscreens solution.

It’s pretty clear Amazon’s planning a truly impressive, full-color, multitouch update to the Kindle… but they need it sooner rather than later. The iPad’s not even out yet, and it looks like Apple’s won the battle. Better crack the whips on those Touchco engineers, Amazon.

In November, Apple was kind enough to make it simpler for people checking out music through links on the web to view that album or artist’s information without actually launching iTunes.

Called iTunes Preview, the feature allowed users to click on an iTunes music link and be taken to that song, artist or album’s preview page, where you could read reviews, see the album cover, check out the user rating and listen to little song snippets. You only needed to leave your browser if you wanted to download the album.

iTunes Preview was a feature I loved: simple though it may be, it made it a lot easier to check out an artist or album when people mentioned it on the web.

Now Apple has just rolled out the same functionality for apps in the App Store, and it works the same way. Now, if you want to see an app, the only reason you need to load up iTunes is to actually download it.

I don’t want to use iTunes in any capacity as a web browser: I want to open it only when I want to suck some app or video or album down. iTunes Preview’s continuing slow rollout is a welcome improvement on the way iTunes links work.

H.264 is a very cool compression standard indeed, and intimately familiar to most Mac users as Apple’s own codec of choice for iTunes, Quicktime and the iPod. It’s also the codec driving YouTube and Vimeo, and the one used for streaming HTML5 video by both Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

The only problem? H.264 is neither free nor open-source. If you’re Apple and you want to use H.264 to serve HTML5 video in your browser, you need to pay MPEG LA, the owners of the codec, a $5 million licensing free. This has raised some eyebrows by the likes of Mozilla Firefox, who want HTML5’s video compression standard to be the free, open-source Ogg Theora. Their argument, summarized, is it’s foolish to build the next decade’s internet video standards upon the back of a licensed codec when there’s a free alternative that works nearly as well.

Today, MPEG LA confused the debate a bit by announcing that H.264 will stay royalty-free for free Internet Video until 2016…. but while it probably ends the Internet Video codec battle, it’s not a development that ends the debate.

As a toddler of a Mac switcher, I still have the stray folder or two of legacy files from my days mucking through the morass of the PC experience. One of the files I’ve guarded most carefully was my old Trillian IM chat log files: four years later, and I’m still anticipating migrating in the legacy chats, spam, files and cybers of my nascent instant message years.

Looks like I now finally have the opportunity: Trillian, the popular Windows multi-protocol instant message client — is now available for the Mac in an open alpha.

And it’s ghastly. Basic IM support works well enough, but there’s a load of issues. The contact lists don’t automatically slurp in your friends’ pictures. Audio and video chat don’t work. You can’t view your logs. You can’t have group conversations. There’s no e-mail integration. The preference and customization options are slim. &c.

It’s strange to see Trillian for Mac after all these years waiting for it… and realizing that, thanks to Adium, I’ve totally moved on. Still, if you have fond memories of Trillian from back in your Windows 98 days, the somewhat unstable alpha build is a free download. But then again, so is Adium.

Our eagle-eyed patent scouring friend Jack Purcher over at Patently Apple has noticed a cool new filing trickle through the USPTO pipe, which deals with tablet computer with advanced touch technologies.

The patent describes technology which uses a touch-capable bezel that could control things like music volume, track skipping, zooming functions or even gaming controls. Given the iPad’s pretty sizable bezel and Apple’s recent forays with display-less, touch-capacitive surfaces (e.g. the Magic Mouse) this seems like it would be a great addition for next-generation iPads… especially in addition to a touch-capacitive back.

This is a very Apple thought process. We’re unfortunately a long way away from eliminating bezel entirely from our devices, and as much as Apple might want out iPads to just be slates of glass in our lap, it’s not going to happen anytime soon, Making the bezel actually useful is the next best thing.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that major publishers have approached ScrollMotion to adapt their textbooks for use on the Apple iPad.

You may have seen ScrollMotion’s existing e-books in the App Store: the company takes existing books provided by publishers and adapts them so they look good on the iPhone or iPod Touch’s smaller screen, then enhances them with built-in search, indexes, dictionaries and interactive flourishes.

Not very surprising that a company devoted to translating e-books to a format that takes advantage of the iPhone’s innate capabilities would be looking to do the same thing for the iPad. But according to the Journal, ScrollMotion has a long list of big-name textbook publishers already lined up,including McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Perason Education and Kaplan.

This development makes apparent the huge advantage the iPad has over the likes of the Kindle DX in the college textbook market: not only is the iPad a fantastic student tool in its own right for things like note taking and playing around with study-specific apps, but its textbooks can be truly interactive in a way Amazon’s currently can not.

That’s a revolutionary leap forward in the way students learnt… and the iPad is priced cheap enough that almost any student can afford to own one.

The current iPhone OS SDK contains no official API support for USB syncing apps, but that hasn’t stopped persistent developers from getting around the issue by dropping their files into the iPhone’s DCIM folder and using private APIs to allow desktop apps to access your iPhone’s contents.

It was a hack, and developers knew Apple wouldn’t tolerate it forever, which makes it no surprise that several developers (including the makers of the popular e-reading app, Stanza, are now reporting that Apple is asking them to remove USB syncing capabilities from their apps.

This is a temporary inconvenience, but not really a bad thing. The beta SDK for iPhone OS 3.2 has official APIs for accessing an on-device shared storage folder, which will allows an iPhone to be mounted as a readable and writable disk when plugged into a computer through USB.

End result? Official, less buggy USB app syncing support come the end of March. Just don’t upgrade any apps that currently use the DCIM method of USB syncing until iPhone OS 3.2 hits iTunes.