Leander Kahney - page 57

Apple is already setting up shop for Wednesday’s “It’s only rock & roll” press event that will likely see new iPods with cameras and the return of Steve Jobs to the public eye.

Apple has already hung a big banner on the front of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco — the venue of a press event next Wednesday at 10AM. The company last week sent invites to reporters with the line: “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.”

The banner out front shows a rockin’ iPod chick kicking her feet in the air as she freaks out. The company has also hung a big banner inside the front door with a white Apple logo on a silver background.

There are no other posters visible inside the venue. The center is crawling with security guards.  There are half-a-dozen security guards with Apple-logo shirts at the front, back and sides. Apple will likely have a 24-hour security detail until the event starts on Wednesday.

There’s a TV van already parked to the side on Third Street. The van is likely there to transcode video from the event for distribution via iTunes and Apple’s website, which the company typically does just after the event ends.

The event will likely see the introduction of new versions of the iPod touch and iPod nano with built-in cameras, which has all but been confirmed by dozens of cases for the new devices. There will also likely be a new version of iTunes with built-in hooks to social software like Facebook.

The event will also probably mark the return of Steve Jobs to the public stage. It’s hard to imagine he’d let the event happen without him, even if it’s just a few words at the start. But let’s hope he’s well enough to MC the whole show. He’s been missed in the last year. No one does an Apple event like Jobs.

More pictures after the jump.

All the icons for folders and apps in Snow Leopard are now drawn in glorious 512 x 512 pixels. It’s a step toward making the operating system resolution independent, and perhaps also to make Snow Leopard a touchscreen friendly OS.

But it’s also obviously done just for the art of it. These icons are real beauties. They are full of great details and little surprises. One icon contains the words to a song, visible only if you blow it up to its full size.

Hit the jump for a gallery of hardcore icon porn.

Twitter user livelovelight just posted this picture of Steve Jobs’ car in a handicapped spot at Apple’s campus. The snap was posted at 2.43 PST — about half an hour ago. Steve’s car is probably still there.

Forty minutes earlier, livelovelight tweated that he’d just missed Jobs: “At apple headquarters. Just missed steve jobs by 2 minutes,” he said.

Jobs is famous for parking in the handicapped spots (check out this hilarious gallery), but perhaps now he’s recovering from a liver transplant he has a genuine handicapped permit. I don’t see it hanging off the mirror though. He must have taken it with him.

And here he is talking to Jonny Ive. This picture was uploaded to Skitch about 33 minutes ago.

Adobe’s Flash is fixed in the Mac OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard update that’s in the hands of a limited number of developers.

The seed updates Adobe Flash to version 10.0.32.18. Snow Leopard shipped with version 10.0.23.1, which is known to be insecure and needs to be patched to close various security holes. (If you’re running Snow Leopard and haven’t updated Flash, follow this link to download the latest version).

Apple seeded the update less than a week after shipping Snow Leopard on August 28. The other fixes seem to be relatively minor. According to World of Apple, which has published the seed notes, the 71MB update includes:

– compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems
– an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly
– some printer compatibility drivers not appearing properly in the add printer browser
– an issue that might make it difficult to remove an item from the Dock
– instances where automatic account setup in Mail might not work
– an issue where pressing cmd-opt-t in Mail brings up the special characters menu instead of moving a message
– Motion 4 becoming unresponsive

It’s not unusual for Apple to continue working on the operating system after the launch of a major OS update. In the past, the first update has typically been released in a couple of weeks.

You just installed Snow Leopard. Now what?

Here’s the best 10 tips and tricks we found for putting the beast to best use.

Multimedia Messaging Service is coming to the iPhone on September 25, AT&T just announced in a press release. The service will be available at no additional cost to iPhone customers with a text messaging plan (which start at about $20). But there’s still no word on tethering (which allows your computer to access the internet via the iPhone’s data connection).

The MMS announcement comes as AT&T draws fire for its slow, unreliable data network. MMS is likely to put more strain on the network, but AT&T claims it is ready.

“The unique capabilities and high usage of the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities required us to work on our network MMS architecture to carry the expected record volumes of MMS traffic and ensure an excellent experience from Day One. We appreciate your patience as we work toward that end.”

We’re riding the leading edge of smartphone growth that’s resulted in an explosion of traffic over the AT&T network. Wireless use on our network has grown an average of 350 percent year-over-year for the past two years, and is projected to continue at a rapid pace in 2009 and beyond. The volume of smartphone data traffic the AT&T network is handling is unmatched in the wireless industry. We want you to know that we’re working relentlessly to innovate and invest in our network to anticipate this growth in usage and to stay ahead of the anticipated growth in data demand, new devices and applications for years to come.

The MMS service will allow iPhone users to send and receive messages containing images, audio, video. MMS is widely available in other countries, and can be enabled on many iPhones with a simple hack.

Tethering is not likely to be announced for several months as AT&T builds out its network with 2,100 cell towers and 100,000 new backhaul links.

The cruel but funny People of Walmart website is looking for a developer to create an iPhone app for the website.

If you’re interested in making an iPhone app to make fun of misfits — and possibly get sued for publishing their unauthorized photographs — contact People of Walmart at [email protected].

Surely you’ve seen the viral website, which publishes candid-camera style pictures of the various meth tweakers, rednecks, and other sundry weirdos that frequent the nation’s largest retailer, along with cruelly funny captions.

Just a few weeks old, the site is often down due to server overload. The developers are also looking for a new host that can cope with the traffic.

Via QuickPwn.

Now you can create tilt-shift photographs on your iPhone thanks to a new app called TiltShift Generator.

Available now for 99c (the price rises to $2.99 in two weeks), the app makes those fake miniature pictures so popular on the internet.

Created by developer Takayuki Fukatsu, the app works by selectively blurring parts of the picture to simulate a very narrow depth of field, making the subject look like a miniature.

The software can be used to create other effects, like vintage-looking photos.

If you want to try it out before plunking down your hard-earned 99c, the developer also offers a free online web app, and a free Adobe Air version. More sample pictures after the jump.

Link to TiltShift Generator on iTunes.

Developer’s website.

Coinciding with Steve Jobs return to the public eye next week, Penguin Portfolio is reissuing my book Inside Steve’s Brain with a new chapter about how Apple will cope without its dynamic CEO.

Published in April 2008, Inside Steve’s Brain was a New York Times best-seller and an international hit (translated into 15 languages and a best-seller in Brazil and Italy). But the book was written before Jobs’ recent liver transplant, so the publisher asked me to update it for a second edition.

Jobs will take the stage next week at Apple’s special press event to show off new holiday iPods to the press. He has to: If he doesn’t show up Sept. 9, there’ll be a media shitstorm and Apple’s stock will tank.

Jobs’ last public appearance happened exactly a year ago. Last Sept. 9, he presided over a similar iPod event at the same venue. Bloomberg had accidentally published Jobs’ obituary, and when he appeared onstage he flashed a slide with Mark Twain’s famous line: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Indeed. One liver transplant later, Jobs is still with us, thank God. But there will be a time when Apple will have to do without its supreme leader, and as I explain in the new chapter of Inside Steve’s Brain, the company will be both royally fucked and totally OK when the inevitable happens.

Duracell’s cheap and cheerful little rechargeable battery pack is “perfect,” Gizmodo says in a nice little review of the new gadget.

Just released, Duracell’s $20 Instant Charger is good for about half a charge of an iPhone, or a full charge of an iPod nano.

“Duracell’s Instant Charger is a perfectly executed little gadget,” Gizmodo says.

The site has seen plenty of pricey chargers with all the bells and whistles, which are usually superfluous. Gizmodo is charmed by the Instant Charger’s purity: it’s basically a rechargeable litium ion battery hooked to a USB port, and that’s it.

You plug in your own charging cables, so it’s good for iPhones, iPods, digital cameras, Bluetooth headsets and any other gadget that comes with a USB cable.

The Instant Charger ‘s bigger brother, the $50 Powerhouse Charger, stores enough juice to charge an iPhone 3G 1.2 times, or an iPod nano 4 times, Giz says. But it isn’t as compelling as the Instant Charger, which is perfectly simple and cheap.

The British security firm Intego has published a security memo that provides a clear and detailed view of Apple’s new XProtect anti-virus system in Snow Leopard.

There are several interesting tidbits: Apple’s new XProtect system cannot recognize all the variants of the Trojans it is supposed to protect against, for example.

Also, the XProtect system does not spot Trojans hidden inside .mpkg files downloaded from the internet, a major weakness, according to Intego. (Apple’s installer recognizes two types of files — .pkg files for simple packages, and .mpkg files that contain multiple packages to be installed.)

The memo is patently self-serving — Intego sells several anti-virus and privacy packages for the Mac — but nonetheless provides a clear and detailed view of what Apple’s new XProtect system does — and doesn’t do.

The full memo after the jump.

Vonage’s App has been approved for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the company is looking for volunteers to help beta test the app.

“Interested in Vonage app beta? Few spots left. Follow me & send your email address via DM. Lots of interest..cannot guarantee spot.” says the official Vonage Twitter feed.

The offer was posted at about 7.40 AM PST and should still be good — for a little while at least.

The Vonage app will allow customers to make cheap VOIP calls on the iPhone — but over Wi-Fi only, like the similar Skype app. AT&T bans VOIP on its 3G cellular network.

The more I play with Snow Leopard, the more it looks like it’s designed to run Apple’s upcoming tablet.

Look at Expose in the Dock — the new feature that reveals all an application’s open windows when you click and hold the application’s icon. It’s tailor-made for fingers. Even more convincing is Stacks in the Dock. Hit a folder icon in the dock, and up pops the folder and all its files. Each icon is a big target for your finger, and the window has a big, fat slider for scrolling up and down (no more fiddly little arrows at the top or bottom). Both of these UI tweaks scream ‘touchscreen.’

And then today I discovered an unheralded feature that the minute I saw it, I thought, “Game over! Here’s rock-solid proof that Snow Leopard is designed for touchscreens. This is a tablet operating system.”

Rockstar Games’ critically-acclaimed Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is coming to the iPhone/touch this fall, the company says.

Released last year for the Nintendo DS, the game got reave reviews and is still the highest-rated DS game on GameRankings, with an average review score of about 93%.

“Chinatown Wars is a big fat raspberry to the competition; a masterclass in not only hand-held development, but video game design as a whole, exploring exactly how to craft Liberty City around the console’s unique strengths without compromising the series’ character,” said the Daily Telegraph.

The game follows the misadventures of Huang Lee, a young Triad, as he investigates the mysterious death of his dad, kills his rivals, steals cars, deals drugs and evades the cops — all in a miniature version of the company’s infamous virtual playground, Liberty City.

Sounds fun. Here’s the trailer:

As expected, Apple is hosting a special “Rock and Roll” media event on Sept. 9 and is sending invites to members of the press.

The tag line for the event is: “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” —  a play on the Rolling Stones song “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It).”

Some had speculated the event would be tied to the reissue of the Beatles catalog on the same day: 09/09/09. The band is re-issuing its entire remastered catalog and The Beatles: Rock Band game. But using a line from Rolling Stones now makes that seem unlikely.

The event is likely to showcase Apple’s holiday lineup of iPods, which are widely expected to get cameras, and a new version of iTunes with social networking features.

Although many are hoping the event will also see the introduction of an Apple tablet, that seems unlikely. But an appearance by Steve Jobs does not. If he hosts the event, it’ll be the first public appearance by Steve Jobs since his liver transplant earlier this year.

The event is being held at 10:00 AM PST at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the venue of several previous Apple media events.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking for insider traders of Apple stock — possibly Apple staff — who made suspicious trades of the company’s stock, according to the Huffington Post.

The SEC is asking brokerage firms for the identities of clients who made suspicious trades, HuffPost financial columnist Dan Dorfman says.

The SEC is looking at suspicious stock trades during four specific time periods, which is unusual, Dorfman says; investigations are usually limited to single time periods — not multiple.

Insider trading is the buying and selling of stock by people with access to information not available to the general public, and is closely watched by the SEC. Insider trades often revolve around news that moves the company’s stock, such as good or bad revenue reports, or the announceent of new products.

The SEC would not reveal any details of its investigation, but traders contacted by Dorfman speculated that it concerned reports about Steve Jobs health and liver transplant, and/or sales of the iPod. News about either create volatility in Apples stock, which insiders can profit from.

As Dorfman notes, Apple’s stock has been great for traders: insider or not. It’s almost doubled in 8 months, jumping from $85.35 to $170.05, just below the 52-week high of $176.25.

Extra-large Apple tablets with screen sizes measuring 13-inches and 15-inches have been spotted in China, and one was running OS X, according to Gizmodo.

Citing a “100% reliable” source, two prototype tablets were seen in a factory in Shenzuen, China. The touchscreen prototypes were made of aluminum and shaped like big iPhones, the source said.

One of them “was running Mac OS X 10.5.” When I asked, the source didn’t know if these were built for demonstration purposes, or if they were preproduction units. The company has a tight relation with Apple but “it’s not FoxConn.”

Many of the rumors surrounding the tablet have focused on a 10-inch model running the iPhone OS. But as we’ve noted before, Apple has made Snow Leopard a very touch-centric operating aystem, with scores of UI touches designed for fingers.

Of course, Apple is famous for its rigorous prototyping process and always makes hundreds of variations of upcoming products before deciding on the final form factor. But many observers think it’s only natural that Apple will eventually offer tablets with several different sizes, just like it offers different sized MacBooks, though possibly not at launch.

UPDATE: The Yankee Group also says the numbers are way high, and AdMob defends its estimates, kinda, sorta. See below.

Estimates that the iPhone App Store is worth $2.4 billion a year are utterly ridiculous, iPhone developers say.

Mobile advertising firm AdMob on Thursday got a ton of press for estimating that the iPhone App Store earns billions. The number was extrapolated from a survey of about 1,000 users — and is massively overstated, iPhone developers say.

“Do the math and that’s a ridiculous claim,” wrote developer Layton Duncan of Polar Bear Farm, an iPhone developer based in New Zealand.

Duncan did the math: $2.4 billion divided by the 65,000 apps in the App Store is $37,000 per app, per year. And while some developers earn that, many do not. Long Tail anyone?

David Barnard of App Cubby, a developer based in Austin, Texas, says AdMob’s number is at least 5x too big. The iPhone App Store is worth $250 and $500 million per year, estimates Barnard, who keeps a close, professional eye on App Store sales.

Earlier this week we took a look at how Apple’s upcoming tablet will be a paradigm shift by introducing a different kind of computing. Here in more detail is how Apple’s tablet will be great for gaming.

After a long wait, the new Facebook 3.0 App for the iPhone is finally live on the App Store. It offers several new features, including the ability to upload video from the iPhone 3GS, like posts and photos, and RSVP to upcoming events.

If the App Store still says version 2.5, ignore it — version 3.0 will download says developer Joe Hewitt.

Download Facebook 3.0 here.

New features include:

– See your upcoming Events and RSVP
– See Pages and post updates and photos to Pages you administer
– Write Notes and read your friends’ Notes
– Upload videos from an iPhone 3GS
– Complete photo management (create albums, delete albums, delete photos, delete photo tags)
– Change your Profile Picture
– Like posts and photos
– See the same News Feed as the Facebook website
– Visit links in a built-in web browser
– Quickly call or text your friends

Spotify’s app for the iPhone has been approved by Apple and should be available to premium customers shortly. But alas, not in the U.S. — at least, not yet.

“The current status as of right now is it’s been approved and we hope to add the app to the more than 65,000 apps on the app store very soon,” an Apple spokesperson told PaidContent. “We’ve been in constant communication working with the developer and have already notified Spotify that the app will be in the app store very soon.”

This is fantastic news for music lovers, and a big surprise from Apple. If there’s a real threat to iTunes, it’s Spotify.

Spotify’s streaming music service has taken the world by storm with a library that rivals iTunes — about 6 million tracks — and an interface to match. It’s dead easy to search, build playlists, and find new artists. It’s basically iTunes in the cloud — but free.

The $20-a-month premium service dispenses with the occasional ads, which aren’t intrusive. A premium account will be required to use the iPhone app.

So magnificent is the service, it already has 2 million subscribers in Europe and is adding 50,000 new users every day. It is set to come to the U.S. some time later this year, or maybe next, pending licensing agreements with the record labels.

The only downside is that it’s tied to the computer. But Spotify’s iPhone app promises to change that. The app can cache full playlists to be played offline — thousand of songs can be stored on the iPhone and played at any time. You can store up to 3,333 songs — that’s 10 days constant listening — and the songs will sync over WiFi, no USB cable needed, according to Wired.com. Bye, bye iTunes. This is the future of music. Why would you buy songs any longer?

There was speculation that the app wouldn’t be approved by Apple because it is such a threat to the iTunes business model. Some feared Apple would argue that the Spotify App replicates core functions of the iPhone: IE. playing music. This was the reasoning Apple used for not approving the Google Voice app, which is still under review because it replicates the iPhone’s telephony functions — or so Apple argued to the FCC.

So big surprise that Apple’s giving the go-ahead. Of course, the app might be crippled in key ways. But perhaps the company is softening its stance in the face of ongoing controversy about the App Store? Or perhaps Apple is afraid it might become the target of an antitrust case, a la Microsoft?

Fingers crossed Spotify comes Stateside sooner than later. Here’s a cool video of the Spotify app in action. Watch the offline song caching feature at about 28 seconds in. .

UPDATE: See Developers Call BS On $2.4B iPhone App Store Number

The iPhone App market could be worth $2.4 billion a year, reporter Om Malik of GigaOm estimates based on new numbers from the mobile advertising firm AdMob.

This is a very big number for such a new marketplace; no wonder Microsoft, Google, Palm and everyone else is trying to replicate it.

AdMob is a mobile advertising firm that serves up ads inside apps running on the iPhone, iPod touch and Google’s Android phones. In a survey of more than 1,000 users in July, Ad Mob found:

* Apple’s App Store sells $200 million worth of applications every month, a run rate of about $2.4 billion a year, according to Malik.

* Android apps are bringing in about $5 million a month, or $60 million a year.

* iPhone users download about 10 apps per month, and one in four apps is paid for.

* iPod touch users download 18 apps a month, but only two of those are paid for.

* 50% of iPhone users download at least one paid app a month.

* 40% of iPod touch users download at least one paid app a month.

* Users who download paid apps spend about $10 per month; and the average app price is under $2.00.

The upshot: Users are happy to spend money on apps, especially if they geta chance to ry them frst with a free or lite version.

The iPod Classic is also about to get a camera, according to a new report in Taiwan’s DigiTimes newspaper.

The iPod Nano and Touch are about to get cameras – likely on September 9 when Apple is widely expected to unveil its holiday offerings, including a new version of iTunes.

But until now, the iPod Classic hasn’t been mentioned. The Classic is the last iPod based on a spinning hard drive, and is likely to be phased out as the capacities of flash memory increases and prices drop.

According to DigiTimes, the Classic will feature a 3.2 megapixel cameras supplied by Taiwan’s, OmniVision.

OmniVision will supply “3.2-megapixel CIS products for the new iPod nano, iPod classic and iPod touch models which will be launched in September,”  the paper claims.

This strikes us as unlikely. The selling point of the Classic is its storage capacity, not add-ons like cameras.

Now this is what I call an iPod sound system. Most iPod speakers are pretty weedy. Not the Mix Boombox IMT800, a digital ghetto blaster released on Thursday by Altec Lansing. Available now for $300, the Mix Boombox promises to be loud and heavy.

Altec Lansing also announced a stylish — and loud — 200-watt computer speaker set: the Expressionist Ultra MX6021.

More images and details after the jump.

Stock in the internet phone company Vonage jumped a whopping 36 percent on news it will likely soon have an iPhone app.

Vonage’s stock saw its biggest three-day rally since the ailing company went public in 2006, Bloomberg reports. The rally is tied to news that Vonage has submitted an app to Apple. The app will likely be approved after a minor technical glitch is fixed.

What the app does, no one is saying, but it’ll likely rival Skype, offering low-cost VOIP calls over Wi-Fi. Vonage also offers visual voicemail.

The company is in deep trouble and is danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. It has lost about 100,000 customers in the last year as customers opt for cheap digital-phone service by cable companies.