This is likely just a traffic grab, but according to the Quick PWN blog reporting “inside sources”, Apple’s forthcoming tablet will indeed be called the iSlate, but it won’t be a tablet computer: it’ll be an eBook reader, and positioned to go head-to-head with the likes of the Kindle and Nook.
You might have missed Welcome to Macintosh when it debuted at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco earlier this year, and you may have chosen to save $15 by not picking it up on iTunes, but no need to fret : the indie documentary that intimately examines the history of Apple will be airing next Monday.
The documentary, which features interviews from Andry Hertzfeld, Guy Kawasaki, Jim Reekes and Ron Wayne, will air on CNBC on January 4th, 2010 at 9:30PM ET. Woz isn’t in it, but he liked it, describing it as “on the mark” and the best indepent film regarding Apple that he has seen. He also said how much he appreciated how “unbelievable” it was to see people “say that great of things about me.”
Ars Technica also liked Welcome to Macintosh: “”If you liked Pirates of Silicon Valley or read Revolution in the Valley, then this film is for you.”
So gentlemen, set your Tivos, then let me know if it’s worth the rent: we don’t exactly get CNBC over here in Germany.
[via TUAW, image via Thomas Marban]
If your New Year’s Resolution, like mine, is to budget more frugally, thus sparing your kneecaps another loan shark shattering, you might want to download the App Store Expense Monitor.
if you spend as much on apps as I do, you might not: I had previously been unaware that mere numbers could punch their way through my solar plexus.
What the App Store Expense Monitor does is scrutinize your iTunes library, locating all of the apps you bought through all of the iTunes accounts on your computer, and then adds up the total based upon their current price. If the current price isn’t the same as what you paid for it, you have the option to edit the prices, which is a nice feature.
A handy if depressing little program. I had no idea how much all of those little $0.99 cents purchases could add up. Apparently, if I’d never bought an iPhone at all, I could have afforded to pick up that kidney transplant I had my eye on… and that was just in 2009.
[via Lifehacker]
We’ve all learned to live with the iPhone’s woeful reception, but with more and more phones following Apple’s lead and circumcising any and all protuberant nubs from their streamlined smartphones, it’s easy to forget that the iPhone’s reception issues could be fixed with a protruding antenna.
Apple’s own thinking seems to be leaning towards the re-integration of an external antenna into future versions of the iPhone or iPod Touch. According to a patent recently granted to Apple by the US Patent and Trademark Office, Apple may be considering adding a push button style antenna to future devices, in order to ensure “high-quality wireless transmission and reception.”
Don’t worry: we’re not looking at a slide-out set of bunny ears. The antenna design is elegant: the iPhone would retain its streamlined design until the antenna was called for, at which point it would pop out a tiny little antenna nub. If your reception is good enough, you just push it back in.
However, as Patently Apple notes, the most interesting patent detail is that it may utilize a coaxial cable. That implies the ability to pipe in cable television.
Personally, I doubt we’ll see this patent in action any time soon: elegant or not, a pop-out antenna strikes me as too much of a kludge for Apple to take seriously. Still, the prospect of a cable ready iPhone or Apple Tablet is too tantalizing not to report.
When two luridly titled apps called Tits & Boobies and Pussy Lovers appeared on the App Store, it wasn’t long before Apple told the developer to cover himself, for god’s sake. The apps were quickly pulled, even though (as you might have guessed) the apps were nothing besides a couple of suggestive puns slapped on top of slideshows of birds and cats.
Business as usual: puritanical Apple does not like even the scent of pudenda acridly wafting through the App Store. However, Apple’s stated reason for pulling the apps is rather unexpected: it appears that their main complaint about the apps was there just weren’t enough breasts and vaginas in them.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8FnACj25xM
Those purveyors of Apple-themed, auto-tuned hip-hop, the Pantless Riders, are back, two years after their first Mac or PC rap with a spoof of The Lonely Island’s I’m On A Boat.
Accompanied by the body-suit wearin’ P.C. Pain, the Pantless Riders’ message is the same as that of their last dropped beats — Macs rule — but it speaks more deeply to me, if only because I can’t help but laugh every time they surf through the stars on the facce of an iPhone or an iPod Nano, or Wozniak’s name gurgled through the servo-controlled voice box of a robot castrati.
[via Gizmodo]
With the revaluation of recent filings made by Apple for both the Magic Slate and the iSlate trademark, it seemed a lock that Apple’s forthcoming tablet — whenever it ends up being announced — would at least eschew branding itself as a “tablet” in favor of the word “slate.” Still, Apple loves to muddy the rumor waters, so it’s no surprise that Apple has filed for another trademark that could describe a tablet device, called the iGuide.
Although our record is sullied by a few occasional missteps generally caused by a lone rumor- monger tickling our plush, erogenous wishful thinking zones, the Internet’s grown remarkably adept at seeing new Apple products coming. Most gadget bloggers and tech pundits would be willing to part with a digit if Apple doesn’t at least announce a tablet next year: there are just too many supply reports, patent and trademark filings and industry insiders telling us to expect one. The same was true with the iPhone: we all knew an Apple phone was coming. We were just laughably wrong about what the iPhone turned out to be.
It’s worth keeping that in mind as we come up on January’s presumed announcement of Apple’s tablet: the chances of it being what we expect (a large iPhone) are probably as wrong as our belief that the iPhone would be just an iPod with a SIM card in it. To remind us all of exactly how wrong our predictions were, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken has posted up a fantastic speculative prehistory of the iPhone, correlating all of the earliest predictions about what the iPhone was going to be and then fact-checking them against reality.
After word leaked to the Internet that AT&T was preventing residents of one of the largest and most populous metropolises in the country from buying iPhones online thanks to wide scale fraud, every hour that passed without iPhones available on AT&T’s official website was further egg-on-the-face of a carrier that has, in recent months, become synonymous with incompetence and bad customer service. There was no way it could have lasted for long, and so it didn’t: AT&T is now selling iPhones through their official site again.
With Microsoft’s Office 2010 suite planning to ephemerally transmutate into the digital cloud, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Apple is intending to make the same transition with their iWork suite.
In point of fact, iWork is already partially in the cloud: iWork 2009 introduced the ability for users to upload and comment on documents onto a website. It’s a natural move for Apple to want to extend that capability, as increased pressure is put upon purely native office applications by the likes of Google’s online productivity applications.
No surprise, then, that Apple seems to be readying a future version of iWork to integrate more dramatically with the cloud. According to a recent job posting, Apple’s iWork division is looking for an “energetic, highly motivated software engineer” to help them both design and develop a “scalable rich internet application.” Expertise called for is Javascript development, experience developing scalable rich internet applications and experience developing presentation, collaboration or word processing projects.
That certainly looks like iWork in the cloud, doesn’t it? Moreover, the wording suggests that Apple isn’t just looking to supplement an existing team’s developer staff, but put together a whole new one. That likely puts any new, cloud-based version of the iWork suite a couple years away, but it is a tantalizing hint on what we can expect in the future from Apple’s most ignored office suite package.
On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — who is believed to be linked to al Qaeda — attempted to ignite an explosive device made of pentaerythritol on a plane as it neared Detroit, and promptly had his ass kicked for him by fellow passengers. Hooray! Christmas was saved! But that’s not going to stop the grinches at the US Transporation Authority from making your holiday traveling a paranoid nightmare: they have just issued revised travel restrictions for all flights coming into the United States, and those restrictions mean some pretty profound inconveniences for gadget lovers.
According to the official TSA Security Directive, all passengers must now be subjected to a thorough pat-down before they board the plane. All planes must have their passenger communications systems disabled through the flight, which includes phone, GPS and internet services. Finally, starting in the last hour of the flight, passengers are not only not allowed to leave their seats… they aren’t allowed to have any personal items on their laps or in front of them. That means no iPods, no iPhones, no MacBooks… not even a book. Swell.
As usual, then, what we are looking at is totally ineffective retrograde security measures that only make traveling more inconvenient and frightening for innocent travelers, while terrorists will continue to get around them. What’s most ironic is the old security measures — if they’d been successfully implemented — would already have stopped Abdulmutallab at the gate. That means that even the new security measures wouldn’t have stopped him, because the failure was one of implementation. And Abdulmutallab didn’t even have an iPod.
Over at InfoWorld, Randall C. Kennedy has posted up his thoughts on the forthcoming Apple tablet, conservatively placed under the non-confrontational headline, “Why Apple’s rumored iTablet will fail big time.”
Kennedy’s points are all good ones, if a bit petulantly phrased. First, he points out the history of the tablet PC, noting that every major computer manufacturer has experimented with tablets, with all experiments ending in failure, because tablets are underpowered and awkward to use on anything but a desk or table Kennedy then points out that for most of us, typing on a hardware keyboard is simply faster than using a pen or stylus. For regular computing, Kennedy says, a laptop or netbook is simply going to do anything a tablet can do, quicker, more efficiently and more precisely.
Those aren’t bad points, but Kennedy is ignoring the fact that all past tablets have failed precisely because they weren’t fully realized products.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp29W61pwTA
Gunman seems like a keen little iPhone app. Think of it like suburban Lazer Tag, replete with a healthy dash of augmented reality, but missing the cute beeyooping space guns or the likelihood of being shot to death by a trigger happy cop.
In Gunman, two iPhone-toting players square off in a suburban deathmatch arena. First, each player identifies the shirt color of their opponent; then, using their iPhone’s built-in camera as both gun barrel and sights, they take aim and shoot at one another, shaking their iPhone to reload their virtual glocks. If the Gunman app detects that the opponent’s shirt color was in the iPhone’s crosshairs when the shot was fired, it will register a kill and vibrate the iPhone of the perforated victim.
It looks like a lot of fun, and for this holiday week only, it’s on sale over at the App Store for only $0.99. You can check out Gunman’s trailer above. Matrix techno ahoy!
[via 9to5Mac]
For the crime of selling Hackintoshed PCs with OS X pre-installed, Florida-based Psystar, Inc. got the sort of suing from Apple usually consigned to the pages of slash fiction written by the most depraved of litigation fetishists. If the word “reaming” can be used in polite society, that’s what Psystar got, and from the resulting hole agape Apple’s lawyers reamed out every last, ill-begotten penny.
Needless to say, Psystar’s now resorted to rattling around the Web 2.0 equivalent of a beggar’s tin cup as they plead for alms. Since they can no longer sell their line of Mac clones to make money, and since they appear to have decided not to risk Apple’s wrath further by selling their Rebel EFI software until the courts have clarified its legality, Psystar is now asking for $20 to $100 donations on their website.
If charity isn’t your bag, they’re also selling t-shirts for $15. The t-shit reads “I sued Psystar” on the front and “…and all I got was a lousy injunction.” on the back. It’s sort of a nonsensical slogan, unless Steve Jobs buys one of these, but it’s also flat-out misleading: Apple was awarded $2.7 million in damages from Psystar, which they have presumably yet to pay.
Finally, Psystar have announced their new business plan, taking the injunction into account. It’s smart: they’ll basically sell desktops that are built using only components that have Snow Leopard drivers available for them, leaving it to the end user to install OS X on the machine, or not, as they see fit. In other words, they are still targeting the Hackintosh community, just legally. It’s a good idea. I bet they wish they’d done that in the first place.
Many of us have gumdrop iMacs sitting on our desks, too adorable to dispose of, too antiquated to be of any use. One of my New Year’s Resolutions, in fact, is to finally figure out what to do with my bondi blue iMac. My earlier thoughts tended to gravitate towards Hackintoshing the sucker into a competitive, modern machine, but tinkerer Klaus Diebel has screwed another notion into my brain: why not turn my gumdrop iMac into a coffee maker?
Of course, Diebel’s iMac CS is a lot more clever than just a coffee maker crammed into an empty iMac shell: it’s also a functional Mac, as well as a working, subwoofer-amped stereo system. It turns out that the Mac Mini’s optical disc slot lines up perfectly with the gumdrop iMac’s, with no other alteration necessary, so if you want to use the iMac CS as a desktop computer, all you need to do is hook up an external display and a mouse and keyboard. Why external? Because the iMac’s built-in screen now squirts out liquid joe. As for the JBR subwoofer, it beefs up the sound of the included Mac Mini, although if you attach an iPod to the iMac CS, it will automatically mute the Mac Mini and output your tunes through the iMac CS’s speakers, replete with sphincter-loosening bass… possibly messy funtionality, given all the coffee you’ll be drinking.
It’s a great little mod. Better yet, if you’re lazy, you can just pay Dubei to make you one, although you’d better be prepared to pony up: the raw materials of the mod cost between €300 and €400, even before you add in the price of the gumdrop iMac and the Mac Mini.
[via TUAW
After leading his company through a year of unbridled financial success and unparalleled market share growth in both the home computer and smart phone sectors, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will finally take home his paycheck. He earned a buck this year. That’s ten thin dimes.
Of course, we’re all Apple fans here, so we know that’s Jobs’ customary salary. We also the man’s hardly hurting for money: he’s sitting on 5.5 million shares of Apple stock, which is worth a cool $1.1 billion. Additionally, he owns a 7.4 percent stake in Disney, valued at $4.5 billion. In other words, the man can afford to buy us all an iPod.
Still, has a buck ever been harder earned?
Those who know what the Apple Tablet actually is have had a circle of secrecy woven around them twice by Cupertino’s Mephistophelean lawyers, but with all the ballyhoo right now about a late January announcement, it’s still easy to forget we actually don’t really know the first thing about the forthcoming device. How big will it be? What will the hardware be like? Is it more like a Macbook without a keyboard, or is it just like a big iPod Touch? What operating system will the Apple Tablet even run?
It’s been assumed for awhile that the Apple Tablet will probably be more iPhone-like than Mac-like, since Apple wants another platform on which the App Store can shine. It now looks like that assumption is correct: Apple has reportedly told select developers to ready full screen version of their apps to demo on the Apple Tablet in January.
The camera in the iPhone is pretty crummy, even when compared to the constabulary of terrible camera sensors installed in other smartphones. When the iPhone 3G came out with a 2-megapixel camera provided by Aptina, the competition was boasting 3.2MP, and when the iPhone 3Gs matched that ante thanks to a sensor from OmniVision, other phones raised the bet to 5.
So there’s reason to believe a report from Taiwan’s Digitimes that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone will again boost its megapixels to match the likes of the Motorola DROID, which has a 5MP sensor. According to their sources, OmniVision is set to supply a 5-megapixel camera for the next-generation iPhone, due to arrive in the second half of next year.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql0V4SNt-c4&feature=player_embedded
With yesterday’s release-then-nearly-instantaneous-pull of the Nescaline NES emulator, the message should be clear: jailbreaking is the only real option for iPhone emulation enthusiasts. Good news, then, for jailbreakers: ZodTTD has has released the Nintendo 64 emulator N64iPhone through Cydia just in time for Christmas, with one killer little feature… Wiimote support through Bluetooth pairing.
Emulation tends to be slow on less beefy hardware, and it doesn’t look as though N64iPhone manages to defy expectations in that regard: even when using the Wiimote, the emulator appears tricky to control, with notable slowdowns. Still, at least it’s working. Heck, at least it’s real, unlike the last N64 emulator we wrote about, which turned out to just be a clever video.
If you can deal with slowdowns and convoluted controls in your quest for mobile Metroid Prime, you can download N64iPhone through Cydia for just $2.50.
At this point, it’s not really surprising that the iPhone 3Gs’ graphics are capable of pumping out the polygons needed to bring a sophisticated 3D engine to the handset, but it’s still wonderful to watch Epic Games’ Mark Rein play Unreal Tournament deathmatch on his third generation iPod Touch. You can see a video of it in action after the jump.
An iPhone price war currently underway in France may be our first glimpse of what we can expect if, as rumored, AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple runs out next year, and the iPhone comes to other carriers.
Belkin’s latest dongle — the tiny little Bluetooth Music Receiver — is a cute little gadget: it streams music from your iPhone or iPod Touch to any stereo thanks to the magic of A2DP.
It’s simplicity itself. All you do is plug the glowing, cycloptic dongle into your stereo, either through the 3.5mm headphone jack or using your stereo’s RCA cables. Once that’s done, you pair it with your iPhone, iPod Touch, or other A2DP-compatible PMP, and you’re good to stream music to your stereo from up to 33 feet away whenever you want. It’ll even remember six different devices.
For $50, it’s not a bad buy, although I can’t imagine I’ll take the plunge: 33 feet isn’t very far, and I figure Apple has got to get around to letting me stream my iPhone’s music to my Airport Express network through WiFi one of these days.
The iPod is always a tricky thing to manipulate in this chapping, frostbiting weather. In the December wind, the hand freezes quickly in a contorted, blue-skinned claw around the iPod Classic; fingers pressed against the iPhone’s frigid touchscreen tend to break off like icicles at the tips.
For iPod manipulation in these hypothermic months, then, a solution, courtesy of alpine gear makers, The North Face. They’ve just introduced two new jackets — the Hustle Audio Jacket for guys, the Femphonic Audio Jacket for women — which builds an iPod remote right into the sleeves. You can change tracks, play, pause and wiggle the volume around without once exposing your fingers to the ice-fanged bite of the season.
North Face jackets tend to be expensive, so you can expect to pay $350 for both the Hustle and Femphonic audio jackets, but while that’s a couple hundred dollars more than what you can theoretically buy an off-brand winter coat for, it’s only a $50 premium over North Face’s usual coat prices.
Emulators themselves are on fairly well-established legal ground, but the ROM files required to play all of your favorite classic video games are far sketchier. Technically, if you rip a copy of a game yourself as a backup, you’re in the clear… but since few have the technical acumen or equipment to do so, they usually resort to downloading the ROMs from warez sites.
That’s primarily the reason why Apple has traditionally kept its App Store so closed off to emulators. So expect Nescaline, an NES emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch, to be pulled as soon as Apple gets wind of it.
On sale for $6.99, Nescaline has a full feature list, including multitouch, light gun and save state support. It ships with five homebrew NES games, which is certainly legal. Unfortunately, its cardinal sin — at least in the eyes of Apple — is allowing users to input a URL where they can download additional ROMs. That means it’s as easy to put a warezed copy of Castlevania III on your iPhone as it is to cut-and-paste a Google search.
Expect Nescaline to be pulled quick, and if it comes back to the App Store at all, for the download feature to be neutered. Unfortunately, for right now, if you want to play emulators on your iPhone, legally owned games or not, jailbreaking is still your best bet.
Update: That didn’t take long. It’s been removed from the App Store.
Apple’s 27 inch iMac is the sexiest machines in Apple’s already sexed-out line of computers, but it’s been worth waiting to buy one: the first batch had numerous problems, including cracked screens, flickering displays and a yellow, nicotine-like graphical patina.
Rumor had it that Apple was scrambling to replace faulty ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 GPUs on their iMacs, which strongly implied the problem was hardware, not software. Nevertheless, Software Update has just pumped out a Graphics Firmware Update for the 27-inch iMac that “address[es] issues that may cause image corruption or display flickering.”
Jury’s still out on whether or not this solves the widescale problems people are having with their iMacs. Any cultists out there with a 27-incher who can tell us how their baby is handling its new medicine?
