John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
If you’re looking for that last minute gift, an Apple Store is a fine destination. But if, like my hirsute Uncle Bob, your wrapping skills max out at wadding a clump of disintegrating newspaper around your gift and entombing it in an impenetrable, inch-thick layer of duct tape upon which you’ve written your season’s greeting in bold, permanent marker, the Apple Store might also have you covered: select Apple Stores are now offering free wrapping.
The way Apple is handling wrapping is smart. Instead of buying your iPod or MacBook Pro and then thrusting it at some beleaguered wrapper temp, already light-headed from papercut induced blood loss, Apple has set up an express line which sells exclusively pre-wrapped gifts.
When Apple purchased streaming music service Lala a couple of weeks ago, the most plausible use for such an acquisition — the addition of streaming functionality to iTunes — promptly caused our butts to scuttle in anticipation of iTunes-in-the-cloud.
Still, the buy was problematic. Considering that it has been rumored that Apple was buying LaLa to kill it and that it was a purchase made just to thwart Google, some wondered if Apple, in a worst case scenario, intended to shutter the entire site, or in a slightly better case scenario, would simply shut Google out of LaLa… an action that would promptly kill Google’s Music Search, which is powered by LaLa.
Luckily, it looks like Apple has no plans to shut Google out of LaLa. “We have enjoyed a good relationship with Apple for many years, and that continues to be the case,” R.J. Pittman, Google director of product management, told BusinessWeek. “We are agreeing to continue to leave the service as it is.”
Even so, this has to be a lesson to Google: make sure you own the companies and tech that power your search methods. With Apple now in control of LaLa (and consequently, Google Music), Google can’t be resting easy.
You can take your business school degree and cram it up your plush Christmas stocking: iPhone games developer Tapulous, best known for their rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge, are now bringing in $1 million a month in sales.
In the laughable understatement of the year, Tapulous says they are profitable. Tap Tap Revenge has been installed on over one-third of all iPhones and iPod Touches. CEO Bart Decrem says that he experiences his company to exponentially grow as the mobile app market gets broader. “It’s going to be big and all of a sudden people are going to say, ‘holy cow, where did those guys come from?'”he said.
That’s great for Tapulous and its small constabulary of employees — it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys — but they are, of course, in the minority. I suspect Tapulous just has too much momentum to stop: they launched an iPhone game early inspired by a very popular and casual-friendly genre of music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and they can ride that early success for awhile. Things are doubtlessly not so rosy for the developers trying to get their apps noticed in a sea of a hundred thousand now.
According to Judge WIlliam Alsup’s ruling against the notorious Mac clone makers, Psystar has until December 31st to comply with a permanent injunction against the company from selling computers that have been modified to run Apple’s OS X operating system. But will Psystar come back from the dead?
There’s conflicting reports coming out from both Apple and Psystar’s camps concerning the fate of the Florida computer retailer. Psystar attorner Eugene Action was recently quoted by the Dow Jones Newswire as saying that “[Psystar] will not be in business” and that the company would be “shutting down immediately” by laying off their eight employees.
That seems pretty clear cut, but now K.A.D. Camara, who also represented Psystar in their legal battle against Apple, is saying the opposite: “Regrettably, Mr. Action was misquoted in an early story that seems to have been picked up elsewhere,” he said. “Psystar does not intend to shut down permanently.”
It’s hard to imagine how the tiny little company, already $2.7MM in the hole after having to pay Apple damages, will manage to survive: they aren’t known for anything besides their Open Mac computers, and they only ever successfully sold a handful of them. My guess this is just a blanket denial to keep options open, and the reality is more likely that they will have to close. Sayonara, Psystar.
Mark your calendars. It looks like we have a date for next year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.
Thanks to an update to the Moscone Center’s summer schedule, it now looks like this year’s WWDC will be held from Monday, June 28th, 2010 to Friday, July 2nd, 2010. There’s no official confirmation just yet, but the Moscone Center has blocked off those dates for a “Corporate Event.”
That can really only be one thing. It overlaps nicely with the third anniversary of the iPhone’s release… and, not so coincidentally, the presumed lapse of AT&T’s exclusivity deal. Even if Apple doesn’t reveal a new iPhone model at WWDC this year (and they will, if only to bump screen resolution to be competitive with the likes of HTC Droid and the Nexus One Android smartphones), I imagine we will all be happy to hear the announcement of new carrier choices. God knows we need the option.
Over the weekend, Seth Myers’ made a joke about the iPhone’s inability to actually place a call thanks to AT&T’s shoddy service during “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live. The joke was terrible, but as terrible as it was, the entire audience immediately burst into hysterical laughter: they all knew what he was talking about.
Fanboys we. Ever since Paramount released the first official Iron Man 2 trailer, we’ve been looking for a reason to post a link to it. After all, Robert Downey Jr’s sublime cockiness and his high regard for the fusion between technology and design is pansexual geek porn for all.
Still, the grim-knuckled assertion that Tony Stark uses a Mac seems like a tenuous reason at best to direct readers of an Apple blog to watch Scarlett Johannson sultrily pose in a leather cat suit, or a shirtless Mickey Rourke to flail a couple of electric whips about.
Luckily, though, Apple accompanies the roll-out of the new Iron Man 2 trailer with a refresh of the Apple trailers page design, which brings it more in line with the way the iTunes Store now displays information. It’s an incremental roll-out, and the only other trailer to get the treatment so far is Shrek Forever After… but I don’t think that’s any reason to link you to a fourth installment of sassy donkeys and fairy tale fart jokes.
Anyway, enjoy the trailer, comforted by the fact that you are edifying yourself in the constantly evolving world of Apple interface design. Then join me in the comments to talk about all the robot smashing going on: is it just me, or does this trailer just sort of run out of steam halfway through?
With USB 3.0 finally agreed upon, which allows for potential throughput of up to 4 gigabits per second, peripheral makers are slowly but surely dipping their toes into the waters of the new spec. Yesterday, LaCie announced that they were joining the fray with the world’s first USB 3.0 Dual-Drive RAID storage solution.
LaCie’s 2Big USB 3.0 is a dual-disc RAID 0/1 storage solution powered by Symwave’s dual SATA and RAID bridge controller. LaCite boasts that the 2Big will be capable of the highest throughput ever achieved in a USB 3.0 external storage product: it will even allow users to transfer high-definition uncompressed video at speeds up to 275MB per second, or prefer real time streaming and editing of multiple high-definition files at once.
That sounds like a great match for the Mac platform’s plethora of video professionals, but here’s the catch: there’s no support for USB 3.0 on any current Macs. Still, it’s pretty much a lock that you can expect at least one USB 3.0 port on Apple’s next Mac Pro refresh: USB 3.0 is exactly the sort of transfer standard that would appeal to the Mac Pro’s core audience of video professionals, especially considering Apple’s long-term effort to distance itself from Firewire.
If you’re interested in the LaCie 2Big RAID, you can luckily wait around for Apple to catch up with the USB 3.0 spec: both the 2Big and the Mac Pro refresh are due in the first quarter of 2010.
I’ve never been such a big fan of using voice search on my phone. Take Google’s own voice search app for the iPhone. As far as translating my own search terms, it does pretty well, but it has an issue with ambient noise. For example, I may need Google’s help to spell the longest town name in Scotland, but I’m pretty sure the correct spelling isn’t “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogery BEEP HONK SCREECH CRASH chwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.”
Still, voice search enthusiasts who own iPhones now have another program to loudly and emphatically yell at. Following up on last week’s Dragon Diction app, Nuance has released Dragon Search
It works very similarly to the Google Mobile app: you simply tap a button, clearly say your search term, and then beam your search query up to Nuance’s servers, which promptly spits back the applicable results. Where Dragon Search differs from Google’s efforts is it can easily extend its search beyond just Google results: it will also search iTunes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube, Yahoo and Bing.
If you’re interested, the app is free for now, although you should move soon on that free download: the free introductory offer ends soon.
We’ve lamented the iPhone’s unsuitability to be used as a weapon before. An iPhone wielded in the sock makes a satisfying nunchuku, don’t get us wrong, but in the viscera-choked inferno of the modern battlefield, you’re just never going to be able to close the projectile-perforated distance between you and your enemy enough to give him a really meaty thwack upside the head with one.
But while the iPhone’s physical design has inferior potential to cause mutilative harm to your fellow man, the App Store presents marvelous opportunities for the art of warfare. At least, that’s what U.S. military contractor Raytheon thinks, having just announced a range of military-oriented apps for the iPhone that will help soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan use their handsets for war.
Six iPhones daisy-chained together to simulacrum the full ivory-and-ebony array of a piano’s 88 keys, progressing upwards through five octaves from a low C. Upon them, Mario Raimondi of the El Desafio foundation turns in a note-perfect rendition of Yann Tiersen’s “Comptine D’un Autre Été: L’après Midi,” which you might recognize from the Amelie soundtrack. A beautiful song, and we can only marvel at the dexterity required to tickle such small keys without relying on any haptic feedback whatsoever.
The only question is: what app is Raimondi using? It looks a bit like Mini Piano. Anyone know for sure?
Lou Reed’s a strange one, but then again, you’d pretty much expect him to be: as a teenager, the Velvet Underground founder was institutionalized by his parents and underwent a course of electro-convulsive treatment in order to cure his “homosexual feelings”… a traumatic event that I’ve always felt directly inspired Reed’s 1975 double album of recorded audio feedback, Metal Machine Music, which certainly sounded like brain synapses wildly misfiring. Reed’s latest accomplishment? A surprising foray into iPhone App development called Lou Zoom, which may be just as much of a waste of money as Metal Machine Music ever was.
As you can see, Lou Zoom basically just strips down your contact list to its barest essentials and explodes the text with a large point Helvetica Neue font, although it does include some improved search functionality as well. Frankly, it’s not much of an app: it looks pretty terrible, and only seems like it might be even marginally useful to the visually impaired. Still, Lou Reed “designed” it, so you can expect to pay $2.50 for it.
Lou, you know I love you.You are one of the greatest guitar players of the 20th century. You have single-handedly changed the course of rock and/or roll. But you can’t be all things to all men. It’s okay if you’re just a rock god: you don’t need to be an iPhone app developer too.
Although their App Store approval procedure has recently been modified to automatically reject apps that use them, Apple’s stance prohibiting developers from using private API calls has been looking a bit wobbly lately. First, Steve Jobs personally approved an app that used a private API to enable video streaming, and now comes word that Apple will officially allow developers to use the UIGetScreenImage() private API call in their applications.
According to the Apple forum moderator who outlined the change over in the official developer forums: “After carefully considering the issue, Apple is now allowing applications to use the function UIGetScreenImage() to programmatically capture the current screen contents.”
Developers should expect, however, to update their applications if a “future release of iPhone OS… provide[s] a public API equivalent of this functionality,” at which point, “all applications using UIGetScreenImage() will be required to adopt the public API.”
That’s an interesting development for a couple of reasons. For one, it actually allows streaming video from the iPhone camera on even older model iPhones, just by pasting enough UIGetScreenImage()s together. More interestingly, it implies that Apple is working to create public API equivalents of a lot of their most in-demand private API calls, which should expand app development possibilities dramatically by the time iPhone OS 4.0 rolls around.
Although they’re certainly not head turners like the 3D head tracking patent Ed wrote about earlier today, Apple’s latest two patents describing improvements to the iPod interface are at least more likely to hit a device you own sometime soon.
The first patent suggests on how an iPod or iPhone might track an individual user’s preferences in order to improve the overall user experience. For example, if you skip the first 22 seconds of a particular song consistently, your iPod would automatically skip it for you next time you tried to play it. The same approach could be used for volume, equalizer settings, etc, as well as dimming songs in the track listings that are continuously skipped in favor of bolding ones that a user prefers.
Apple’s other patent application is pretty simple, but it’s a great, common sense idea: when a user tries to play a video on their iPod or iPhone, the operating system does a quick check against the battery life to determine if there’s enough juice left to play the whole thing, and, if not, warns the user.
Both patents seem like pretty useful additions to the iPod’s already robust user interface, and fairly easy to implement to boot. Don’t be surprised to see these features creep into an update sometime soon.
Macupdate, the other big name in Mac software bundling after MacHeist, have just released their latest Holiday Bundle, comprising over eleven full-featured applications for just a tenth of their usual combined retail price.
The App Store approval process might be editorially cryptic, but it is, at least, pretty straightforward: you submit your app to Apple, wait a few weeks, and then get back your yea or nay. Apparently, though, this timely process does not accurately reflect the pressing urgency of millions of translucent-skinned and lanugo-haired Scandinavians, waiting for Apple to approve SVT Play, an app that would allow them to stream Swedish public television to their iPhones and iPod Touches.
Instead, the Swedes have stormed the Apple campus at One Infinite Loop and are threatening to camp out until Steve Jobs personally approves their app.
Microsoft has a rather ignoble history when it comes to trying to counter Apple’s hyper-effective and popular “Get a Mac” campaign. Their first efforts were just embarrassing: a series of advertisements featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates awkwardly mumbling non sequiturs at one another. That desperate bid for hipness failed, and so Microsoft launched their Laptop Hunter ads, which were comparatively straightforward: a camera crew followed “real” computer shoppers as they looked for new machines, and documented their ultimate choice of Windows laptops. Simple, pleasant and marginally effective… even if they did repeat all of the old, stupid fallacies about Apple computers costing significantly more than similarly specced Windows machines.
Pretty soon, though, controversy hit. Lauren deLong, an adorable red ead featured in the “Laptop Hunter” ads, turned out to be an actress with a filmography of ten movies to her credit. Since Microsoft’s ads purported to be following “real computer shoppers,” that made the ads’ truthfulness somewhat dubious.
So here’s the question: were the Laptop Hunters ads what the proclaimed themselves to be, or completely fictional? The “behind-the-scenes” footage of the Laptop Hunter ads shoot, as embedded above and first posted back in September, baldly asserts that participants were not told they were in a commercial until after they had picked their machines.
I’m not buying it. Not only are the individuals in the ads just a little too pointed in their dismissal of Apple products — I think a more common response to why a PC users would reject a Mac would be “I’ve always used Windows machines!” and not “It really seems like you’re paying for the aesthetics” — but surely, a professional actress like Ms. deLong would be savvy enough recognize the financial opportunity that had just presented itself if a film crew that had followed her around all day told her she’d be in a national campaign for Microsoft. The next thing she would have said is, “I have to call my agent,” not “How’s my hair?”
If you use the MobileMe to view or share files on your iDisk — and if you use your iPhone to do it — you might want to hit the App Store and click on Updates: Apple has just bumped the app up to version 1.1.
What’s changed? The new features include:
• Tthe ability to auto-complete email addresses when choosing recipients for a shared file.
• Automatic saving of file sharing emails to your Mail account’s Sent folder
• Images can now be tapped-and-held to save it to your photo roll or copy to another app.
• The maximum cache size has now double to 500MB.
• Faster technologies, various bug fixes and numerous localizations.
The MobileMe iDisk app is free, but you’ll need an iPhone running 0S 3.0 or later and a MobileMe membership to use it. Go get it.
In January of 2009, I spent almost $2,500 on a top of the line, 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro, glutted with as much RAM and hard drive space as its belly could handle. Less than four months later, it was stolen.
Oh, it was my own fault. The whole tale involves a midnight rendezvous with a bartender I had my eye on at the time. She had the face of Natalie Portman, the eyebrows of Roger Moore and the constitution of Oliver Reed; in her presence, one drink became two, and two became twelve, and when we stumbled back to my apartment, I somehow forgot my laptop bag back at the bar… but only for five minutes! Alas, five minutes was too late, and by the time I’d rushed back, it was gone.
Since then, I’ve spent a good amount of time upbraiding myself about the loss. What has always bugged me most about the theft was that I always knew that there were countless programs available (such as Undercover) that would help you track down your Mac if it was stolen. I knew about these programs. I wrote about them, even. But I never once installed one. I just couldn’t imagine the scenario where I would have my laptop stolen. Dumb.
The news feeds bring me further fodder for my self-incrimination this morning. Over at TUAW, they are reporting that one of their readers. Jim, managed to safely recover his stolen Macbook using the MobileMe’s service, Back to My Mac, to take pictures of the perps and gather information about them gleaned from watching them surf the web.
It took Jim many months to get his laptop back: it had changed hands at least five times since it was stolen, at least once as payment in a drug deal. But when he got it back, it was in surprisingly good nick… with most of his files still intact on the disk.
That’s great news for Jim, but as another object lesson in my own amazing stupidity, it’s like a punch to the gut. Guess who also didn’t have a MobileMe account when his MacBook Pro was stolen? Yup. What a maroon.
We’ve all been gleefully following the seventeen month legal battle between Apple and Mac clone maker Psystar, but it looks likes the credits are finally about to roll. Yesterday, United States District Judge William Alsup granted a permanent injunction to Apple that will prevent Psystar from ever again selling hardware with Apple’s operating system already installed.
Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz wouldn’t recognize an understated argument if it politely coughed, tapped him on the shoulder, and then promptly blew his face off with a bazooka, so it’s no surprise that his latest post about the so-called “Apple Gestapo” Godwin’s itself from the start. It’s a hysterical and stupid overreaction to the practices Cupertino employs to maintain secrecy about upcoming products.
But even so, it’s worth a gander, because while Diaz’s interpretations of Apple’s procedures are utterly facile, it’s still a rare and unique look at exactly how Apple manages to keep some of the most widely anticipated products in the consumer electronic market quiet, year after year.
Our own illustrious Craig Grannell might have had issues with Chrome for its willful transgression of Mac interface design principles, but he still liked it enough to make it his new default browser at the end of the day. Looks like Craig wasn’t alone: after last week’s release of the Chrome for Mac beta, Google’s Chrome browser deftly shoved Safari aside in its ascent to the third place slot in the web browser charts.
According to web analytics company Net Applications, Chrome marketshare leaped to 4.4 percent last week, based on the analysis of 160 million unique visitors to 40,000 sites. Meanwhile, Safari only held 4.37 percent of the market. A narrow victory? Sure. But a victory the nonce.
At the end of the day, though, I doubt this means much: at least on the OS X platform, Safari still reigns supreme, with Chrome only accounting for 1.3 percent of all browsers used on OS X last week. Chrome only beats Safari when you take PCs and Linux into account.
I imagine the gains Chrome for Mac has made against Safari in the last week largely come from curiosity. The question is whether or not Mac users will stick with Chrome once that curiosity fades… and once Google polishes off the last of Chrome for Mac’s missing features, they just might. Safari’s just not as good a browser as Chrome for Mac has the potential to be.
Just a week after Apple quietly upgraded their Mac Pro line to use 3.33Ghz quad-core Xeon CPUs comes our first good look at the processor that will likely drive the next significant refresh of the Mac Pro: the Intel Core i7-980x Processor. Naturally, the ‘x’ stands for ‘eXtreme.’
Hot off the 32nm production lines of Intel’s manufacturing factories, the Intel Core i7-980x shifts away from merely improving frequency towards more tangible performance gains. Although the new chips max out at 3.33GHz, each packs in an astonishing six cores and twelve threads per chip, meaning that a dual processor Mac Pro might boast twelve physical and twenty four logical cores, which would represent a huge performance bump to the video professionals who are Apple’s most expensive desktop’s primary customers.
Additionally, each Core i7-980x CPU boasts a 12MB Intel Smart Cache, hyperthreading support and an integrated memory controller, while supporting DDR1066MHz memory and sucking up 130 watts of power.
In short, despite Apple’s last stealthy refresh of the Mac Pro, you should hold off on buying a Mac Pro if you can until the Core i7-980x is released commercially in February or March. Final Cut Pro will thank you.
Remember way back in 2007 when Steve Ballmer famously yanked on his oligarch’s suspenders, chomped down on his cigar and told USA Today: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance?” Ballmer then went on to muse that Apple would only ever succeed in getting two or three percent market share, while Windows Mobile would own sixty to seventy percent of the market.
No. Wait. Stop chortling and high fiving each other for a second, I’m trying to make a point here: those are the words of a man who firmly believes his predictions. History has shown otherwise: Microsoft obviously got caught sleeping at the wheel when the iPhone came on the scene and utterly destroyed Windows Mobile’s place in the smartphone arena. Two years later, and Microsoft still hasn’t released a version of Windows Mobile that is even competitive with iPhone OS 1.0, let alone 3.0. But at least Microsoft is no longer feeling complacent about it: speaking to attendees of the Connect! tech summit in London, Microsoft UK’s Phil Moore made a frank appraisal of Windows Mobile when compared to the iPhone.
In a burst of spontaneous Yuletide cheer not informed at all by an interest in showcasing their new iTunes LP format, Apple has knocked up a compilation of holiday tracks called the iTunes Holiday Sampler for free download… although if you live outside the United States, there’ll be no free iTunes Christmas for you.
What sort of songs will you get for your zero dollars and zero cents? Eh: mostly the typical, marginally inoffensive pablum-like tracks favored by American Apparel speaker systems all through December (*cough* Wynonna *cough* *hack* Sarah McLachlan *sputter* *gag*) although there are some decent groups on display here, including the Vince Guaraldi Trio, Barry Mannilow, Aretha Franklin, Weezer and Stephen Colbert.
In short, there should be something here for everyone. Still, I ask you: what kind of holiday mix doesn’t include MXPX’s “Christmas Night of the Living Dead?” Or at least the Kinks’ “Father Christmas?”
