John Brownlee - page 97

Brains have been dashed out and arteries spilled over the perfect parking space. Finding a good spot in a busy neighborhood and keeping it secret and safe is the kind of thing many commuters approach with Gandalfish intensity. The rule of thumb is: if you find a good parking space, by all means, never, ever give it up willingly.

Here’s a better idea, though. Instead of fighting tooth and claw for that el primo parking spot, why not keep it in the family instead, passing it onto others in exchange for information about other awesome, open parking spots in the same neighborhood? In other words, why not let parking generate you some good karma? That’s the idea behind a new app, Kurb Karma, and it looks awesome.

You sometimes here people talk about the iPhone 4S as if it’s a minor upgrade, but even if you’re not wooed by Siri, the camera on the iPhone 4S makes it worth a whole new phone in itself if you have even the most cursory interest in photography. The 8MP back-side illuminated sensor provided by Sony is a marvel — arguably the best camera sensor on a mobile phone outside of the crazy new Nokia PureView 808 — and a serious, serious upgrade over the 5MP OmniVision sensor found in the iPhone 4.

But don’t count OmniVision out for Cupertino’s iPhone 5 business. The Californian digital sensor maker have just announced a crazy 16MP back-side illuminated sensor that could theoretically put the iPhone 4S’s image quality to shame. Even better? Since they are capable of shooting video in 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, they’d take perfect images and videos for those rumored new Retina Macs we’ve all been hearing about.

If you’re the kind of web monkey who finds himself spitting up or slurping down loads of files over good old FTP, this is a fantastic deal: Forklift by Binary Nights — widely hailed as one of the best and most elegant FTP/SFTP clients and file management programs available for the Mac — is usually on sale for $29.99, and depending on how much FTPing you do, a pretty good deal at that. But right now? You can grab it for less than a buck, no strings attached.

In yesterday’s minor bugfix update, Instapaper developer Marco Arment posted this fantastic personal note, thanking users for allowing him to work from home and spend time with his wife and newborn baby. Could there be a better reason to subscribe to Instapaper, or for that matter, support your favorite app developers?

Have you ever wondered how your iPhone knows up from down, or when you’re shaking it? It’s all because of the tiny accelerometer chip inside the device, but how does it work? It’s not like the iPhone’s got a metal ball bearing rolling between two points in there, so what gives?

As it turns out, there’s actually a lot of crazy cool tech in there.

It’s looking increasingly likely that when Tim Cook takes the stage at the annual WWDC keynote on June 11th, Apple will announce new MacBook Pros and possibly iMacs, and if the rumor mill is to be believed, these new machines won’t just be slimmer and ditch their optical drives… they’ll be the first Macs with Retina displays.

What everyone widely expects from Retina display Macs is an iPhone or iPad-style resolution doubling. So if the current 15-inch MacBook Pro has a 1,440 x 900 display, the Retina 15-inch MBP would have a 2,880 x 1800 display.

What the rumor mill is missing is that there’s no benefit to Apple handling a jump to Retina display Macs this way. The reason the iPad and iPhone going Retina was such a big deal was because they had really pixellated displays. Before the iPhone 4, the iPhone had a display that was only 53% close to being Retina. The iPad was slightly better, at 61%. Roughly, both the iPad and iPhone were only about halfway there, which made the easiest fix to just double the amount of pixels per inch.

But Apple doesn’t need to do this with its line of Macs. In fact, it’s likely that most “Retina Quality” Macs will have fewer pixels than your new iPad. Here’s why.

Anytime a new jailbreak comes out, there’s a degree of confusion about what devices are supported, whether it’s safe to upgrade your firmware, etc. That’s as true now on the eve of pod2g’s upcoming iOS 5.1.1 Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak as it ever was before. Thankfully, pod2g and fellow jailbreak maestro MuscleNerd have put together a quick info sheet about everything you can expect when the untethered jailbreak drops later this week.

The summary? It’s safe to upgrade your devices to iOS 5.1.1 now, and the only iOS device that Absinth 2.0 won’t crack open is the third-gen Apple TV. As for the release date? Plans are this week, if everything goes to the plan.

“Nice murse,” the supercilious toad said, burrowing his chin into his neck pouch.

At the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s cosmic exploration on the evolution of mind in the universe, a bunch of man-apes in Africa discover a mysterious, jet black monolith. Upon touching it, almost worshipfully, they make an evolutionary leap in intelligence and begin to use the bones of animals as clubs to wage war upon competing tribes of apes.

2001’s monolith is iconic, and it’s common to joke about the similarity in shape between Kubrick’s big, ominous slab of intelligence-evolving basalt and Steve Jobs’s iPhone, but man, whoever built this 2001 docking station for his iPhone out of LEGO bricks — complete with tiny LEGO bones and monkeys, with the iPhone standing as the monolith above a worshipful tribe of man apes — just ran with it.

Siri won’t just joke and tell you that the best smartphone around is the one you’re using Siri on. She’ll also be ironic and tell you the iPhone 4S is the least popular smartphone on Earth.

Oh man, this is awesome. Check out this killer iPad stand that Reddit user cwtfozzy built for himself out of the base of a lampy old iMac G4. Wish I still had one bunging around so I could get Ive’s Lamp back in my office. That thing just had such panache.

Damn cool work, Foz! How about posting a step-by-step DIY?

Source: Reddit

Ask what the next revolutionary feature for the iPhone will be, and NFC is a common answer. NFC — or near-field communications — is an ultra low-power chip that allows two devices to communicate small strings of information within a couple feet of each other.

Why’s it so revolutionary? The most commonly cited “magic” that NFC would bring to the iPhone would be the ability to use your device to pay for goods and services, just like a credit card.

In other words, instead of pulling out your wallet to buy groceries, get onto the subway or pick up a MacBook at the local Apple Store, you’d just tap your iPhone against a point-of-sale terminal near the register instead. The NFC chips in both would communicate and you’d be on your way, no signature or PIN code required.

Pretty neat, huh? NFC would theoretically allow Apple to take a cut of real world sales made of even non-Apple products. They’d become a mobile payment company. That seems like such a no-brainer that everyone from Bloomberg to The New York Times.

The only problem? Never going to happen, because Apple has already deployed its mobile payment solution, and it’s hidden inside every iPhone 4S that has already been sold.

Do you have a hard time keeping your Mac windows where you want them? Sick of manually adjusting the ever-changing Tetris puzzle of your OS X desktop? Think the green + button at the top left of every Mac window is beyond useless at intelligently resizing an app?

You’re not alone. You want to download Windownaut, a new app that supercharges that green + button to allow you to quickly and easily snap your windows to any location you want on your Mac’s display.

There’s nothing that really needs changing about Apple’s patented “Slide to Unlock” functionality, but ever since Apple introduced the Smart Cover for the iPad 2, there’s been a conceptual disconnect between how you unlock an iPhone — by sliding — and how you unlock an iPad — by unfolding an origami-like cover off of the display.

It’s not really anything Apple needs to fix, but short of releasing a tiny little iPhone-sized smart cover, I think this “Fold To Unlock” design created by Anton Kudin is just an excellent conceptual bridge between the lockscreen and the smart cover.

Check out the concept in its full, high-res glory below.

Up until Mountain Lion, OS X’s “Cat” codenames kept on evolving from Cheetah to Puma to Jaguar to Panther to Tiger to Leopard. Once Lion hit, it seemed Apple had peaked, with no bigger lions to choose from, but then Cupertino surprised everyone with Mountain Lion.

Where to next, then? As the brilliant webcomic XKCD makes clear, there’s not a lot of good cat names yet, once you count out code names that have already been tech products, like Lynx or Ocelot. OS X Housecat? Please.

I’ll take OS X Saber-Toothed Jungle Cat though. Yes please.

Source: XKCD
Via: Gizmodo]

We all know that Pixar, the revolutionary computer animation house Steve Jobs helped build in his wilderness years, makes the Toy Story films at least in part on Macs, alongside other Unix-based machines.

Back when Toy Story 2 was being made in the late 90s, though, the Unix-based nature of the machines Pixar uses for their animation almost led to the complete destruction of the film when an employee accidentally used the “rm *” command on the machine the film was being stored on. In seconds, all of Toy Story 2 was lost: a year’s work of other thirty people.

Not to worry though. A Mac-loving mom she had at home saved the day, and made sure that Toy Story 2 reached theaters on time to delight a generation of kids and adults alike.

Facebook’s iOS app is terrible.

That’s not a matter of opinion: it’s fact. It’s a festering pile of an app, with an average 2 star rating on the US iTunes App Srore.

The app’s slow. The notifications don’t work. The whole thing’s buggy. In every way imaginable, if you open Mobile Safari and type in facebook.com, you’ll have a better experience.

How could a company like Facebook that sees so much of its traffic come from mobile sources release such a terrible, unuseable app? And why hasn’t it gotten better?

This is kind of neat. Back in early 2011, Apple patented an idea for a way for drivers to control the tunes playing on their iPhones or iPods without taking their hands off the wheel.

The solution? A tiny little ring that fits on your steeling wheel with an iPod clickwheel on top.

The iTV. The Apple HDTV. SiriTV.

Whatever you want to call it, there’s a lot of talk out there about how Apple is going to revolutionize the living room experience by releasing their own proper television set.

There’s reason enough to be skeptical of these reports. From the industry’s notoriously low margins — Sony’s losing billions on their television business — to the fact that consumers simply don’t upgrade their TVs like they do their smartphones, does it even make sense that Apple would want to release their own television set?

Sure, Steve Jobs said he had “cracked” the TV problem before he died, but who’s to say that he wasn’t talking about Cupertino’s existing set-top box, the Apple TV, a $99 puck that anyone can afford and that slurps up streaming content from the web or the iPhones, iPads and (with Mountain Lion) Macs already in the home?

I’ll say it. The Apple TV is not enough, and Apple absolutely must release a revolutionary television set in the next two years.

Why? Because no matter how popular the Apple TV becomes, it will never be essential.

Apple has just released OS X 10.7.4, the fourth maintenance update for Lion, and can be found through Software Update. The update is recommended for all Macs and includes most notably a fix to the blunder left in OS X 10.7.3 that stored passwords in plain text on a user’s hard drive. Full release notes are after the jump:

If you’ve ever used AirPlay to connect speakers or your AppleTV to your iPhone, you’ll know that you’ve got to be diligent about disconnecting your device afterwards, lest you suddenly start piping sounds or video to somewhere else accidentally.

How bad can it be if you don’t remember to do that? Really, really bad. In fact, this is pretty much the worst case scenario we could think of: one Redditor who forgot to disconnect his iPhone from his Apple TV via AirPlay ended up showing his in-laws a homemade pornographic film featuring their daughter.

Seemingly in response to word that three new small regional carriers were going to be offering the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S with a $50 discount, RadioShack has just announced that they’ll be matching the offer.

Starting immediately, if you buy an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S at RadioShack, you’ll get $50 off the normal price on all carriers. That means that the iPhone 4S will be priced at $149/$249/$349 and the iPhone 4 will be available for $49.

If you’re in the market for an iPhone, this is a pretty killer deal. Better act soon, though: the offer ends at the end of June.

World World Robots is a great series by artist Ashley Wood Three A that describe a grungy apocalyptic world in which gas-masked humans are openly at war with various cool looking models of murderous rogue robots, spanning the surface of the earth, the moon and even mars.

There’s an accompanying toy line by Three A, and one of their latest models is this awesome robot inspired by our favorite company. Bearing the designation STEVE-J, the Caesar APP-EL comes with a rainbow shield after the style of the vintage Apple icon, his own miniature iPad and some vintage iPod styling. It even comes in an Apple-inspired box.

Source: The Fwoosh
Via: Reddit

During Steve Jobs’s so-called “Wilderness Years” after he left Apple in 1985 but before his triumphant return to the company in 1997, the company went woefully astray, releasing dud product after dud product and seeing its market share and influence erode as PC makers like Dell took Cupertino’s once proud crown.

Only Steve Jobs’s triumphant return to the company in 1997 righted Apple’s course and made it the company it is today, but speaking to journalist Brent Schlender — who interviews Steve dozens of times over a quarter-century — Jobs said that watching Apple’s disgrace while he was away from the company was like watching your own child turn into a serial killer.

As spotted by MacRumors, it looks like iCloud.com might soon get iOS 5 and Mountain Lion style notifications, with Apple currently testing a new notification service on the website.

What do you think? I’m not sure I need yet another place to get notifications, thank you.

Source: MacRumors