Leander Kahney - page 50

Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington has written a nice essay giving thanks this Thanksgiving — to Steve Jobs.

Arrington rightly points out that our world would be very different if Jobs hadn’t returned to Apple 12 years ago. Mobile phones would still be horrible, computers would still be ugly and the music industry would have collapsed.

“… What would our world look like without him? We’d likely still be in mobile phone hell. Chances are we still wouldn’t have a decent browsing experience on the phone, and we certainly wouldn’t be enjoying third party apps like Pandora or Skype on whatever clunker the carriers handed us. Even if you use an Android, Palm Pre or newer Blackberry today, you must thank Apple for pushing open the doors to mobile freedom. Think back to the phone you had in 2006, and then tell me you don’t love Apple for the iPhone alone (yes, I’ve moved on, but the iPhone was the genesis).”

I’m with Arrington. Let’s give thanks for Steve Jobs.

Here’s four iPhone apps that may come in handy on Black Friday if you decide to brave the crowds. All three help you keep track of Black Friday deals from your iPhone:

• TGI Black Friday — Free. Displays BF ads from all major retail stores. Search ads, create personal shopping lists and compare prices. Powered by TGIblackfriday.com and DealCatcher.com. App Store Link.
• Black Friday Ads — Free. Listings by store. View actual ads as PDFs. Twitter, Facebook and email connectivity. App Store Link.
• Black Friday Wish — $0.99. Verified Black Friday deals “hand picked and verified.” Compare prices across stores to find best deal. Add unavailable items to wishlist and get alerts if/when they go on sale. App Store Link.
• Black Friday — Links to Black Friday deals posted to FatWallet.com forum “uncovered by other consumers like you.” App Store Link.
• ShopSavvy — Free. Scan a barcode to pull up prices at competing stores. App Store Link.
• Mall Maps — You Are Here— $2.99. Figure out where you are in the mall. Includes floor plans for major shopping malls. App Store Link.

AppShopper has the full list of iPhone/iPt Apps on sale for Thanksgiving.
Highlights include:

Terminator Salvation : The official game — $0.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Brothers In Arms Hour of Heroes — $0.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
The Sims 3 — $4.99 (normally $6.99) App Store Link
SimCity — $2.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Trivial Pursuit — $2.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Wolfenstein RPG — $1.99 (normally $2.99) App Store Link
Command & Conquer Red Alert — $6.99 (normally $9.99) App Store Link
Star Trek — $0.99 (normally $1.99) App Store Link
CoPilot Live North America — $19.99 (normally $34.99) App Store Link
Scrabble — $2.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Tetris — $2.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Shoppee — Free (normally $2.99) App Store Link

Did I mention I’m in love with my new sound system, the heart of which is the T-2 vacuum tube amplifier from Neuhaus Labs?

Custom designed to bring iTunes to life, the amp sounds unbelievably awesome. But in my review I neglected to rave about its aesthetics. This thing glows!

Hit the link for some more dimly-lit tube porn.

It’s dangerous and illegal, but I like listening to music when I’m riding my bicycle. Nothing like a bit of techno to get the blood pumping on a foggy morning. Trouble is, sound-isolating earbuds — the ones you jam deep in your ear canals — can get you killed. They sound great, but they block that firetruck running a red light with sirens blazing.

Altec Lansing’s Backbeat 906 Bluetooth headphones, which have great sound quality, don’t isolate you from the environment, and best of all, have no wires. Paired with an iPhone, they can be used for music and phone calls, even on the bike.

It’s vey liberating. Once you go wireless, it’s hard to go back.

Here’s the Top 5 Secrets for making a killer website to showcase your iPhone app, courtesy of the WebDesignerWall blog.

“To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd.”

Here’s the list:

• One Page — Your app’s site should be one page. No more, no less.
• iPhone Image — Use an image of an iPhone running the app as the main design element. Drop shadow or reflection optional.
• Apple App Store Badge — The download button should be Apple’s App Store badge. Easy to spot and instantly recognizable.
• Animated Screenshots — All sites show screenshots of their app, but animated screens show it in action.
• Display Pricing — It’s frustrating for prospective customers to not know the price up front.

Link.

Objectified, the documentary about industrial design, is airing on PBS tonight. The critically-acclaimed documentary features Apple’s Jonny Ive, among others, geeking out about design.

It airs at 11pm on KQED in San Francisco. Check your local listings.



A freelance designer quit his job in the most original way yet. He created a custom warning dialog resembling the unexpected quit dialogs in OS X.

The message, posted on his work machine, says:

“The designer you treat like shit has quit unexpectedly.

Your company and other employees are not affected.

Click Renegotiate to discuss terms for new contract. Click HR to find out how badly you fucked up.”

Unfortunately the “Renegotiate,” “Ignore” and “HR” buttons don’t work — it’s just a Photoshop mockup. The company is unnamed.

The message was found by one of his former colleagues, who posted it to Redditt.

The colleague said the designer was expecting his temp job to turn into a real one, but hadn’t.

“He believed he was in a temp-to-hire position, and after three months of extra hours and butt-kissing, turns out it’s just a temp position. He was a good worker too. I’d have recommended him. Too bad he burned his bridges… Obviously he had contemplated quitting long enough to make this thing, but still refused to speak to anyone about his feelings. Ironically, he complained about the ‘divas’ at his last job.”

Via Methodshop. Thanks Jon.

More Thanksgiving iPhone app sale action.

At 8:00am ET tomorrow, the CoPilot Live turn-by-turn GPS navigation app will go on sale for $19.99. The app is normally $35 and has got generally good reviews. Gizmodo calls it the best cheap GPS app (it has some quirks, but what do you expect for $35? I mean $20?).
The app features pretty 3-D maps, text-to-voice directions and monthly map updates. Maps are stored locally on the iPhone/iPt (weighing in at about ~1.3GB), which means no blackouts in the boonies.

The sale lasts all weekend. The app is fully functional, the company says, and there’s no additional fees for updated maps.

App website.
iTunes link.

The iLingual app is clever translation software that speaks foreign phrases with video of your mouth saying the words. Launch the app, snap a picture of your mouth (or someone else’s) and hold the iPhone in front of your mouth. The software animates your mouth to make it look like you’re actually talking French (or German and Arabic). Well, sorta.

Either way, it’s a lot of fun and it’s free (sponsored by the Emirates airline). Great way to break the ice with the locals, who always appreciate tourists trying to speak the language. Watch the app being tested in Paris in the video above.

• iLingual French.
• iLingual German.
• iLingual Arabic.

Via 9to5Mac and Gizmodo.

It’s not just HDTVs that are on sale this Black Friday. Lots of iPhone developers are dropping prices for the holidays also.

App Cubby, for example, maker of the popular Gas Cubby app for tracking gas mileage, is dropping the cost of its apps by 30 percent through the Thanksgiving holiday. Several other developers have also temporarily dropped prices, including DOOM Resurrection and BeejiveIM.

A good way to track apps on sale is to check App Shopper’s “prices” view. There’s a lot of crap, but to spot the good stuff, keep an eye on an app’s icon. A good icon generally means a good app. A good icon

Here are some links for apps on sale:

• Gas Cubby — iTunes — AppShopper
• Trip Cubby — iTunes — AppShopper
• Health Cubby — iTunes — AppShopper
• DOOM Resurrection $2.99 — iTunes — AppShopper
• BeejiveIM $6.99 — iTunes — AppShopper
• Tipulator $0.99 — iTunes — AppShopper
• Mathemagics: Mental Math Tricks $0.99 — iTunes — AppShopper

Please let us know if you see other good ones we should highlight.

The season finale of Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” reunites the Seinfeld cast. Larry is watching an episode of Seinfeld set in 2009. George is an iPhone developer who made a fortune with “iToilet,” a GPS app that tells you the location of the nearest public restroom. Unfortunately, George lost it all by investing with Bernie Madoff.

Via The Raw Feed.

Big-screen monitors with built-in HDTV tuners are a great way to upgrade your screen — you get a monitor and a high-def TV thrown in.

Dell Small Business offers the Viewsonic 24″ 1080p Widescreen LCD HD Television, model no. VT2430, for $249.99 with free shipping. That’s tied with our mention from last week and the lowest total price we could find by $20. Sales tax is added where applicable. Features include a 1920×1080 (1080p) resolution, 1,000:1 contrast ratio, 5ms response time, 300 cd/m² brightness, built-in speakers, one HDMI input, and VGA, component, and other video inputs.

Until I tried Neuhaus Laboratories’ T-2 vacuum tube amp, I thought I had a pretty good speaker system hooked to my Mac. It was a three-piece ensemble with a pair of nice satellites and a honking big subwoofer. It pumped out 200-watts and I thought it sounded great.

But then I hooked up the T-2 Amplifier, and it’s literally night and day. I know this sounds like an old cliche — but it’s true. Even a half-deaf old punk like me (too many ear-piercing concerts) can hear the difference. It’s striking — and it’s absolutely glorious.

Cover Up is a new $0.99 iPhone app that masks embarrassing bathroom noises with other bathroom sounds, like running water, a hand dryer or blow dryer.

Trying to mask the sound of a giant anal raspberry is like spraying deodorant to mask a pooey smell: it never really works. But it may be useful if you’re known to the person in the next stall.

More info at Coverup.me.

The Pogoplug is a fantastic little gizmo that turns any USB hard drive into your own little cloud server accessible over the Internet. We gave it a very enthusiastic review.

Now the company behind the device has issued version 2 — updating both hardware and software — and it’s all about multimedia.

The repair and teardown experts at iFixit are releasing more than 240 repair guides for every Mac mini and most iMacs produced since 2004. The company is also now selling iMac repair parts, from hard drives and RAM to power supplies and disassembly tools.

“The repair manuals include in-depth disassembly guides, model identification tips, troubleshooting techniques, and upgrade information. The 241 new repair guides use 1,452 photos to clearly communicate each step of the repair. iFixit repair guides are well known for world-class photography and clear, concise step-by-step directions.”

• iMac repair manuals — cover all 17″ and 20″ iMacs manufactured since 2004, including both G5 and Intel models.
• Mac mini repair manuals — cover all Mac minis since its inception in 2005.

Looking at Google’s Chrome OS demos today, I noticed a giant omission that bodes ill for its future: it’s not optimized for touchscreens.

Chrome looks like a nifty version of a desktop OS, like a version of OS X or Windows, that pulls a lot of data from the cloud. Yeah, it’s slick, thoughtful and forward thinking, at least in one sense: Cloud apps are clearly the future, so why not the OS also?

But it looks like a traditional WIMP OS (window, icon, menu, pointing device). Why isn’t Chrome optimized for finger controls? The future of computing is mobile devices; and the future of mobile devices is touchscreens. As far as I can tell, Google didn’t mention touch at all, and none of the press asked about it.

Google says the Chrome OS will be launched by this time next year, by which time Apple will probably have reinvented the mobile computing experience with a multitouch tablet.

Apple’s tablet will do for netbooks what the iPhone did for cell phones — make the competition look hopelessly antiquated, whatever OS they run. Google says the UI is still under development and is subject to change; they’ll have to change it radically if they want a chance of competing with Apple, which has already adapted Snow Leopard for touchscreens.

Like Steve Jobs says, quoting hockey player Wayne Gretzky, Google needs to be aiming for where the puck’s going to be, not where it’s at now.

Gizmodo’s Brian Lam tested the new 27-inch Quad-Core i7  iMac and found it’s a beast. Geekbench benchmarks showed a 2x to 3x improvement over the Core 2 Duo model, but most impressive was a real world DVD ripping test, using Handbrake:

On the Core i7 iMac, it took 43 minutes to rip a DVD, Storm Riders, a surfing film from the ’70s featuring Gerry Lopez (my favorite) and others. On the Core 2 Duo machine, it took 147 minutes! I know this is basically a DVD read test coupled with decoding and video conversion, but the results have me excited because this is a real task that takes my computer a long time to do, performed by a program that hasn’t been revised in a year.

Benchmarked: The Quad-Core i7 iMac is Super Fast

Uh, oh. Looks like there’s trouble in Android land. The rapid growth of Google’s smartphone OS is causing developers conniptions as they struggle to support multiple versions of the OS and different hardware configurations. With more than a dozen Android phones on the market, all the different configurations are leading to serious platform fragmentation, Wired.com reports:

“A slew of problems have made managing Android apps a “nightmare,” they say, including three versions of the OS (Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0), custom firmware on many phones, and hardware differences between different models.”

For users, it means buggy apps that sometimes won’t work on their hardware at all. One developer tells Wired.com that instead of concentrating on adding new features, he spends all his time making sure his apps work on all the different hardware and software configurations.

Looks like Google might be wandering into Microsoft territory. Microsoft had exactly the same problem with it’s now-discontinued “Plays For Sure” music-player platform, which became known as “Plays For Shit” because of the difficulty supporting multiple hardware and software configurations.

Just goes to show that there’s distinct advantages over owning both the hardware and the software, like Apple. Apple has released just three different hardware versions of the iPhone, and does a pretty good job of making sure most iPhone owners are running the latest software. In addition, the tightly-controlled App Store ensures a high-level of software compatibility. Even Android developers say its a good idea, according to Wired.com:

For developers, Apple’s autocratic ways may be frustrating, but they can pay off.

“Apple maintains an iron grip on what they do and there’s an advantage to that,” says Kelly Schrock, owner of Fognl, which has three apps on the Android market. “IPhone developers don’t have to worry about fragmentation and creating apps for the iPhone is much easier.”

Threadless, the online tshirt company best known for its community-designed apparel, is expanding into iPhone cases.

Threadless has teamed up with Griffin, the long-time maker of fine Apple accessories, to offer a pair of iPhone cases designed by members of its community.

The two limited-edition cases — Clouds within the Thunder by Joe Van Wetering; and Birds of a Feather by Ross Zietz — are both available now at Apple Stores for $34.99.

No word though on whether Threadless is going to open up iPhone case design to the masses. I’ve put in a call to Griffin PR to find out, and will update here.

Reader Diego sent this in: “This at a restaurant in New York last week,” he says. “No words needed.”

Boy Genius Report has obtained details of Apple’s Black Friday deals — maybe. The site was sent an email flyer, due to go out shortly, that says Apple will offer 25% off all Macs; 30% off iPods (except the iPhone and iPod shuffle); and 15% all accessories as well as Apple software and hardware.

These deals look pretty killer. Maybe too killer. BGR cautions that it’s “unconfirmed.”

BGR says the deals are good only for November 27th, and that Apple stores will open at 6AM.

Link.

MagicHour is a world clock app with great information presentation.

In one screen, the app displays a wealth of info about time, daylight stages and moon phases in different cities. Edward Tufte would cream his pants. All world clocks should be like this.

Via tumbly.dotsar and Robot Wisdom.

MagicHour is $3.99 from the App Store.

Gizmodo toured Apple’s just-opened retail store on the Upper West Side, and calls it a “temple” to the company’s products.

I call it a temple because the architecture conveys a nearly religious aesthetic, a place to worship Apple, beyond any other Apple store you’ve ever been to. The top floor’s a vast open space, enclosed by spartan stone walls which support a massive glass ceiling. The rows of tables in the main room feel like pews.

I can’t tell you – and the pictures can’t show you – how utterly open and expansive the room feels. Apple says it has more demo units than any other store in the world. To give you an idea of the space, the walls are 45 feet tall, and could fit 11 Apple 5th Avenue Cubes inside. It’s the spareness that’s breathtaking. It’s cold. Not literally, but the stone walls, the glass, the sheer space rob it of any sense of warmth or feeling. The only sense of life in room is the products. It’s a temple to them, really.

More pictures after the jump.