Lonnie Lazar - page 12

Parents with children aged 8 – 12 and relatively easy access to an Apple Retail Store might consider enrolling in Apple’s free summer camp workshops during July.

Beginning the week of July 13, Apple stores will offer a series of 3 hour workshops where kids will be introduced to Macs and Apple software and learn how to make a movie, create a photo slideshow, write and record a song or craft a presentation.

Space in each workshop is limited and kids are limited to no more than two workshop sessions each for the summer, but it is a free opportunity to kill six hours out of what can be a long, boring summer break for some – and a chance to get hands-on instruction with some of the hardware and software many kids are likely to encounter in school during the coming years.

The workshops break down into two weekly sessions in movie making, music, photography and presentation arts, where Apple instructional staff will teach kids the ins and outs of iMovie, GarageBand, iPhoto and Keynote.

A quick check of some of the session availability shows all sessions in New York City’s Apple stores are already full, though the rest of the country – even in populous California cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco – have spots still open.

Apple also offers similar youth programs year-round to help cultivate the next generation of evangelists.

Location based software applications in Blackberry’s new App World store are four times more expensive than similar titles in Apple’s App Store, according to a Skyhook Wireless report released Wednesday.

The company’s Location Aware App Report (PDF), a monthly survey of titles available in the online stores of mobile handset manufacturers Apple, Blackberry and Android, found the App Store offers a greater percentage of paid to free apps across a wider variety of title categories than either Blackberry or Android.

With over 35,000 apps in the App Store at the time of the survey (around 10,000 having been added since), and 2,300 of them location aware, Apple’s average price for a paid location aware app was $3.60. In contrast, the average price for a location aware app from Blackberry’s App World store was $13.60, while bargain-basment titles could be had from Android’s Market at an average price of just 84¢

The survey results are skewed in that Apple’s App Store has been open nearly a year, while Blackberry’s App World is only in its second month of operation. On the other hand, in its first six months of operation, the App Store saw more than 800 location aware apps released, while Android’s Marketplace produced fewer than 200 in its first two quarters.

For now, location aware software developers have shown a clear preference for Apple’s iPhone platform, even if some seem to believe the Blackberry platform might support quite a bit more revenue per title.

Credit: Dystopos, used under a Creative Commons license.

Wal-Mart is busy re-vamping the electronics departments in 3,500 of its giant retail stores, in a move to both fill the void left by Circuit City’s recent bankruptcy and to compete with another electronics mega-chain, Best Buy. But some believe it’s also actively lobbying Apple to become a distributor for more than just iPods and iPhones.

Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart is widely perceived as a low-end discounter whose vast properties are largely filled with the cheapest, most useless junk Americans could dream of importing from China, which makes Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes’ opinion that Wal-Mart is angling to one day carry Macs all the more disconcerting.

Speculation over Apple’s interest in expanding its fewer than 10,000 worldwide distribution points comes amid recent data indicating that Microsoft’s advertising blitz over the past year has succeeded in re-positioning devices that run the Windows OS as value propositions in the computer world.

But this Mac user wonders whether a move into retail’s hoi-polloi might cost Apple more in the long-run than it would gain from the increased revenue that would surely come from the greater retail exposure a distribution deal with Wal-Mart could represent.

There has always been something satisfying, from the user perspective, about the panache of owning an Apple product; in many respects – as mythical as the concept of an “Apple premium” might in reality be – some Apple owners believe they get more for their money, and are willing to pay for the sense of exclusivity the company’s limited distribution network provides. Similar perceptions have maintained the public’s high regard and brand loyalty for companies such as Bose and Bang & Olufsen for years.

If the demands of a rebalancing global economy and of shareholders’ inexhaustible lust for profits cause Apple to seek a different path it would be a real shame, and likely signal the beginning of the end for the company that once implored the world to Think Different.

Apple published a support article Monday indicating “It’s possible to receive a small and quick electrical (static) shock from your earbuds while listening to iPod or iPhone.”

The article reads like a schoolbook primer on the nature and causes of static electricity and points out that the condition is not limited to Apple hardware, that static can potentially build up on almost any hardware and could be discharged using any brand of earbuds. Support staff also helpfully note that receiving a static shock from a pair of earbuds does not necessarily indicate an issue with the iPod, iPhone, or earbuds.

OK. And the company found it necessary to publish this information because…?

Have iPod and iPod users been experiencing an inordinate build-up of static electricity with their devices?

Let us know in comments below if you find it shocking to use your Apple mobile device in windy, low-humidity conditions.

[Techmeme]

Jonathan Ive, Apple Senior VP of Design, has been named the #1 most creative person in business by Fast Company magazine.

Citing Ive’s decade-long influence over Apple’s rise to prominence as a trendsetting company with global reach, Fast Company‘s “100 Most Creative People in Business” list builds on an interview the magazine did with Apple’s young design star not long after he’d produced the groundbreaking Bondi Blue iMac. “We feel that we’re just getting going,” Ive told the magazine then, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Robert Brunner, Apple’s previous design chief, and the man who hired Ive and recommended him as his successor, said, “He likes to make perfect stuff,” describing what sets Ive apart from his peers in the design universe. “Ive has this design ability combined with a craftsmanlike mentality,” Brunner added, pointing to Ive’s understanding of the interplay between design and manufacturing as keys to the success of more recent products such as the iPhone and unibody laptop computers.

At first blush, something called Bacterial Orchestra – Public Epidemic No.1 might seem cause for a call to the Centers for Disease Control.

In fact, however, it’s a music art project slated for the Volt Festival June 6th in Uppsala, Sweden, where organizers hope hundreds of iPhones will communicate through audio – creating a musical organism. The result, according to Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke, will be a self-organizing system they describe as intelligent neural music.

The idea builds on an installation, called Bacterial Orchestra, the pair took in 2006 to Brazil, Germany, Norway and elsewhere. This year, the new generation, called Public Epidemic No.1 is spreading beyond the microphones and loudspeakers of the original installation.

Cornéer said the current project could be hosted on any mobile phone but they chose the iPhone “because it’s popular and the centralized App Store makes it easy for the epidemic to spread.”

Check out the clip from the first test of the project above and follow after the jump for more detail on how it works.

It could be a while before Ge Wang and the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) starts to feel the heat, but the The London Geek Community iPhone OSCestra served notice last week at the City’s Open Hack London that experimental iPhone music performance is alive and well.

Wang, of course, founded Smule, developer of the internationally popular Ocarina app, as well as the recently released Leaf Trombone (App Store link), and conducts SLOrk, the renowned ensemble of student computer scientists and musicians using 20 MacBooks to compose and perform new music.

The London-based iPhone OSCestra is a crew of eight musicians, conducted by a chap using a Wii controller, who opened their lone performance so far with an impressive (and authentically geeky) performance of the “Doctor Who” theme.

Jim Purbrick apparently conjured the idea for the venture just a few hours before the Open Hack event, a one-day symposium sponsored by Yahoo! on May 8 that brought together tech-savvy hackers for a day of coding and communicating.

Purbrick and his music mates downloaded the free app mrmr (App Store link), an app that supports customizable audio controllers and sends data wirelessly to other devices using OSC (Open Sound Control). A controller could be a piano-style keyboard, a bank of faders, or an array of knobs and buttons — essentially interactive widgets that allow users to control sound and music.

The free desktop application OSCulator caught all the data, and sent it to Ableton Live, a powerful performance and production platform.

In this instance, the orchestra performed using a bank of synthesizers running within Live. If you’re interested in going beyond Garage Band and making music on your Mac, it’s worth checking out the Live demo.

[GigaOM]

YouTube user LeopardOctober has posted videos, screenshots and information about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on YouTube since mid-March or so, and in the last few days has put up some interesting clips of a few things we can expect to see when the new OS debuts June 8 at WWDC.

The first video above shows that users will be able to set the default behavior of Spotlight so that performing a search can ‘search this Mac’, search the current folder or use the previous search scope.

In the video below, we see users can assign an application to a space or all spaces, quickly from within the Dock.

LeopardOctober has several additional clips on the YouTube channel with embedding disabled, so you’ll need to head over there to check ’em out.

The videos posted are from fairly late builds of the Beta (10A261 and 10A286), which has reportedly been ‘frozen’ at 10A354 for the final release software.

[Thanks Rafael!]

Image credit: MobileGuerilla

It must be a measure of how divorced from reality the US financial establishment has become when one of its most venerable voices discounts $20 – $45 million as ‘not a lot of revenue.’

That’s the figure range Jeremy Liew, an analyst at Lightspeed Venture Partners, estimates would be Apple’s take from sales on the first 1 billion iPhone and iPod Touch applications downloaded through the iTunes App Store.

Leaving aside for a moment the 15:1 – 40:1 ratio range of free to paid apps Liew pulled out of thin air to arrive at his estimates, it should be noted that the Barron’s writer reporting on Liew’s analysis allowed that the App Store “is significantly changing the way way people think about mobile devices, and has triggered a response from Research In Motion (RIMM), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Nokia (NOK) and Palm (PALM).

If true, Liew’s figures would mean Apple is seeing a revenue boost of roughly 0.1% from the App Store, but the mere numbers do not account for the intangible benefits to Apple’s public awareness or the number of hardware sales being driven by the venture. The company, and Steve Jobs in particular, always said the App Store was never intended to be a big profit generator, that it was rather a vehicle for helping the iPhone change the way people think about mobile computing.

By that measure, Apple’s take from the App Store is incalculable.

For now, it’s only the head in a custom-made R2-D2, but soon the whole astromech will obey the orders of an iPhone, including the possibility of firing sounds and sending text to its head displays.

The controls use either the iPhone’s accelerometer or the multitouch screen, and if rumors of a magnetrometer in the next gen iPhones are true, we could be looking at some very interesting robot applications both in the App Store and in the jailbroken universe soon.

[Thanks Lance]

Image credit: Mike Seigafuse. Used with permission.

Microsoft was slammed this week by PC industry security experts for releasing security patches to fix vulnerabilities in Windows versions of PowerPoint, while announcing that Mac users would remain at risk until patches for OS X are completed in June.

“Microsoft is the one big company screaming loudest over ‘responsible disclosure,'” said Swa Frantzen, a security analyst at SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center (ISC) in a post to the ISC blog late Tuesday, adding, “[But the] policy cuts both ways: You need to obey the rules yourself just as well as demand it from all others involved.”

The Windows manufacturer, claimed Frantzen, ignored its well-known best practices for responsible disclosure Wednesday by revealing that Office for Mac 2004 and Office for Mac 2008 contain three unpatched vulnerabilities, and by releasing information about the same bugs in Windows. The combination, he said, could be used by hackers to craft exploits targeting Macs.

Analysts from Gartner and nCircle took varying poistions on the debate, according to an article in Computerworld, and Microsoft itself had no comment further than the statement the company released along with the Windows patch.

The larger question in some minds would be why any Mac user would use PowerPoint over Keynote, but that’s a different debate.

It’s fitting, one might say, that the San Francisco Giants provide home fans at AT&T Park the most sophisticated digital amenities in all of professional sports. After all, San Francisco is the nominal home of Silcon Valley (with apologies to San Jose) and the headquarters of many of the cutting-edge internet and social media companies in the world today.

Free Wi-Fi has been a staple of the game experience at AT&T (formerly Pac Bell) Park for years, with the Giants having been one of the first professional sports teams to offer the service to fans and working journalists alike.

Things really began to change at the ballpark in the past two years, however, after the introduction of Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, Bill Schlough, the team’s CIO, said in an interview with technology journalists this week.

Since the iPhone’s introduction around the same time the Giants hosted 2007’s All Star Game, usage of the park’s Wi-Fi network has gone up 537 percent. Users of the Wi-Fi network at the park are now able to use an innovative and exclusive system called the Giants Digital Dugout, which offers fans two unique benefits.

The first is a “food finder,” which can direct fans to the closest concession location for the exact kind of food or beverage they want, and the second is a collection of video replay highlights that includes, within three minutes after it happens, any controversial call by an umpire. Replays of such calls are banned from being shown on the ballpark’s in-house video systems, so that feature in itself could be worth bringing your iPhone to the game – even if it’s not ever likely to get the upms to reverse a bad call.

[ZDNet]

An App Store gatekeeper, whose name may or may not be Peter, officially positioned Apple as a ‘Holier Than Thou’ company recently, by rejecting the whimsical photobooth application Me So Holy.

The app would have allowed users to place photographs of themselves or others inside pre-set figure avatars that could let cousin Jim appear to be the face of Jesus, or Joe Bob to be Mohammed, or Mary Jane to be a bodhisattva, or, you get the picture.

Apple rejected the app, saying it “contains objectionable material,” according to Me So Holy developer Benjamin Kahle.

Someone at Apple must have not gotten the Jesus phone memo.

With less than a month to go before the anticipated launch of iPhone 3.0 firmware and a widely expected upgrade to the hardware, widely reported claims by a poster on a Chinese Apple fan site suggest the next version of Apple’s revolutionary smartphone will sport a faster processor, more disk storage and a much improved camera, among other upgrades.

The next gen device will have a 600MHz processor (up from the current 400MHz unit), 256MB of RAM (up from the current 128MB), up to 32GB of storage, a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, as well as a digital compass and FM radio, all while retaining the same battery, basic shape, and screen size, according to the poster, who claims to have a connection at Foxconn, Apple’s China-based OEM for the iPhone.

Could it be? If you’ve got your ticket to the sold-out WWDC ’09 coming up in San Francisco, you’ll likely be among the first to know.

[The iPhone Blog]

If you haven’t make it yet as an iPhone developer, Sam Kaplan and Louie Harboe, a couple of seventh graders from Chicago, may make you rethink your career choice.

The pair’s iPhone development company, Tapware, recently released its first iPhone application called “The Mathmaster” and has a second app in the hopper. Based in Hyde Park and supported by seed funding from a business school professor at the University of Chicago, Kaplan and Harboe have been plotting their success trajectory for years.

“Since the fifth grade, we’ve had this idea of working together and becoming successful,” said Harboe, a professional designer with a portfolio of images and icons at www.graphicpeel.com.

The Mathmaster is a simple tool designed to interest kids in things like square roots and multiplication tables. The pair developed the app in about a month and it was approved by Apple’s App Store within a week.

They hope to launch a second, quirkier advertising-based application around their site sipthatdrink.com in the coming months.

“Our goal was to get approved by the app store, sell a bunch of copies and make more apps,” said Kaplan, who has already completed an advanced placement computer science course and served as a keynote speaker at the National American Council for Online Learning.

Makes paper routes and lemonade stands look very 20th century, doesn’t it?

[EdibleApple, Chicago Suntimes]

Apple is getting down with the ‘Green is the New Black’ concept in a limited, though nonetheless laudable way.

The company is offering to re-cycle, free of charge, any school’s old, unwanted Mac computers, PCs, and other qualifying electronic waste, as long as schools register by July 31, 2009.

The program will only run for one month, until August 31, 2009, and schools must recycle a minimum of 25 pieces in order to participate.

Special consideration is being given to data security, according to Apple, which promises:

* All recycled hard drives will be ground into confetti-size pieces.
* Customers will receive a certificate of destruction for each lot recycled through the program.
* All asset tags and other identifying information are removed prior to destruction.
* All of the electronic waste collected through the program is processed domestically in the United States.

Apple has notified iPhone developers their submissions to the App Store must be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 or they will no longer be reviewed, according to an iPhone Developer Program email.

Existing apps in the App Store should already run on iPhone OS 3.0 without modification, but Apple advised developers to test existing apps with iPhone OS 3.0 to ensure the absence of compatibility issues. “After iPhone OS 3.0 becomes available to customers, any app that is incompatible with iPhone OS 3.0 may be removed from the App Store,” the email read.

iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 and iPhone SDK 3.0 beta 5 are currently posted in the iPhone Dev Center, which means major hoopla in iPhone-world is likely mere weeks away.

What it is: Star Walk is the official mobile astronomy guide for the International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009), a $5 app for iPhone and iPod Touch that makes enjoyment of the celestial universe easier and possibly more enjoyable than anything outside a professional telescope.

Vito Technology, developers of the app, recently updated this popular title with improved existing features and several new functions. The new version (1.5) has even more striking graphics, enhanced speed, more images and a greater depth of information than the release version, which has already spent more than 4 months in the Top 25 paid apps of iTunes’ App Store.

Why it’s cool: Star Walk not only gives you a reliable guide to the present night sky based on your current location, it lets you change perspectives to locations thousands of miles away. It can also take you back in time to look at different events (such as eclipses) in the sky on specific dates; view lunar phases and learn about the discovery of constellations’ images and the reason for their shape. Use the super cool ‘infra-red’ night mode for easy outdoor stargazing without adding your device’s bright lighting to the ambient environment.

The new version has been improved with more stars and constellations to look at, with better and more precise images, more reliability and more speed.

The app makes stunning use of the iPhone accelerometer to change your perspective or point of view with just a swipe of the screen and provides zooming capabilities to allow you to travel in to deep space to find out the state of our knowledge of the outer universe.

New Features in the current version include:

♦ constellations on & off setting
♦ sounds on & off setting – but don’t turn them off; they are way cool!
♦ magnitude selection (allows you to show only stars with chosen brightness)
♦ spatio-temporal bookmarks – must admit to still learning about this one
♦ pictures of all constellations (from 10 upgraded to 110)

I’ve been playing with Star Walk for a couple weeks now and it’s definitely become a favorite app to use for stargazing as well as to show off some of my iPhone’s capabilities to friends and curious strangers.

Where to get it: $5 at the App Store.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers and one of the most recognized engineering geeks in the world, joined the Board of Directors of TechForEducators.com – a Sausalito, CA-based purveyor of goods and services designed to improve the performance of educators – the company announced Wednesday.

“Woz inspired a generation of technologists – including myself,” explained Matt Spergel, President of TechForEducators.com. “The Apple II was an engineering tour de force and an amazing learning tool. We are deeply honored to have Steve contributing his infectious optimism and creativity to our company.”

Wozniak has a strong record of support for children and education, having been a founding sponsor of the Tech Museum of Innovation and the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. He also “adopted” the Los Gatos School District, near Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment.

In partnership with the Kids In Need Foundation, TechForEducators.com provides exceptional value to education: for every $1 a customer spends on product at TechForEducators.com, $1.25 worth of free school supplies is also provided to impoverished students. The company carries quality products at competitive prices, all with a money-back guarantee.

“TechForEducators.com represents the best in trying to do good things for our students and teachers,” Wozniak said. “I’m looking forward to the great things they have planned for education.”

AdWhirl, a platform for iPhone applications that allows developers to switch between ad networks on-the-fly, has released a report indicating that applications that crack the top 100 in the Free Apps list can make between $400-$5000 a day in advertising revenue.

Sam Yam, co-founder of the company formerly known as Adrollo, says AdWhirl has signed over 10% of the top 50 applications in the App Store to the platform and is serving 250 million ad impressions per month. AdWhirl’s platform gives developers access to multiple iPhone ad networks at once, allowing them to compensate when one network doesn’t have enough ad inventory, something Yam says happens as much as 40% of the time.

Having launched only in the last month, AdWhirl reports going rates of $1.90 eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) and 2.6% CTR (click-through rate), numbers that should make both advertisers and free app developers optimistic about the viability of the ad supported free app business model.

[TechCrunch]

Perhaps it’s just another indication we truly live in Opposite World, but it seems odd, at best, to find a link to QuickPWN on Apple’s website.

After all, the company has made it abundantly clear it believes the practice of jailbreaking an iPhone or iPhone Touch should be deemed illegal.

Apple is involved in a very public fight with the Electronic Frontier Foundation over the matter and there are obviously many many dollars at stake.

So, yes, odd. Then again, it’s a big company…

[Thanks Adrian!]

For a full page image of the link on Apple’s website, click here.

Kyle Buckner is a very talented fellow and his primary muse is Apple.

We’ve featured some of Buckner’s work before and he’s also got a spread in the June issue of Mac|Life magazine. He may well be one of the hottest Apple-inspired artists in the US right now.

Buckner sent us photos of his most recent school project, in which he was tasked to create a “Bookart”. Apple obsessed as he is, he was inspired to create a scale model of a MacBook.

Buckner constructed the casing out of wood, routering all the corners and then priming, sanding and painting the pieces white. The hinge system replicates the real Mac’s and is fully constructed out of hand cut MDF wood.

After he painted the pieces, he used a pencil to add the fine details. He drew the screen and full keyboard and penciled in every tiny phillips head screw at its location.

His piece is 3/4 the size of an original MacBook.

We apologize to anyone who got too excited by our earlier post teasing that this might be Apple’s new netbook. It’s a Monday night. It’s not football season.

Does anybody remember laughter?

Myst, once upon a time the world’s most popular graphic adventure video game, has arrived at the App Store. The $6, 730MB piece of mobile bloatware, requiring a whopping 1.5GB of free space on Apple’s iPhone or iPod Touch, isn’t likely to revive the title’s popularity, in this reviewer’s opinion.

Even the trailer demands nearly an egregious seven minutes of a curious person’s time to sit through, an eternity in our fast-paced modern world. Over a minute and a half to get past the credits?

This is a group of developers who must think very highly of themselves indeed.

A vocal cadre of iPhone app developers is none too pleased with the treatment they receive from Apple and may be considering a suit for breach of contract, according to a report at TechCrunch.

Examples of complaints on developer forums indicate that some developers remain unpaid for sales of their products on the App Store dating back to last fall and the report cites email exchanges between at least one developer and and the finance department at Apple in which the developer is informed his complaints about not being paid “border on harassment.”

Whether any actual lawsuits are in the offing is purely speculative at this point, but the discord is curious in the light of Apple’s recent recession-beating revenue performance and the stunning, widely publicized success of the App Store.