Lonnie Lazar - page 24

What would an impending Apple-oriented convention be without some rumor-mongering to pique the interest of the faithful and get tongues a wagging? Ahead of Macworld 2009, slated for January 5 – 9 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, one of the more persistent rumors has involved the supposed announcement of a smaller form-factor iPhone, dubbed the iPhone Nano.

TUAW reported an interesting escalation of the iPhone Nano rumor Monday, showing evidence of an iPhone Nano case being marketed by XSKN, a company that began selling iPhone 3G cases in mid-May of 2008, almost 2 months prior to Apple’s release of the phone. In early September, XSKN was showing off new 4th Generation iPod nano cases, prior to the Let’s Rock event where they were officially unveiled.

As you can see from the screen shot I captured tonight from the XSKN website, the company is taking orders for cases for a product called iPhone Nano.

If that’s not enough to whet your whistle, how about the photo, below, which someone submitted late Monday on the down-low to MacRumors.

Wonder if Phil Schiller will use the traditional “one more thing” phrase on this item or if perhaps Apple has something else up its sleeve.

Via TUAW, MacRumors

In the hustle bustle of modern urban life, especially during holiday seasons fraught with travel delays, white-knuckle driving on treacherous roads, crowded shopping districts (though maybe not so much that, this year) and kids on vacation underfoot, a little bit of peace and tranquility can seem like the greatest of gifts.

Now you can give such a gift to yourself, a friend or loved one, with Freeverse’s Tranquility app for iPhone and iPod touch.

For just $1.99, drift off to sleep or catch a few peaceful moments during a stressful day. With a beautiful visual interface and new audio tweaks in the recently updated version 1.3 (requires iPhone 2.2 firmware), you can choose from a full 60 minute relaxation and meditation track, or from other themes such as Flowing Water, Ocean Waves, Desert Wind, Gentle Rain or Thunderstorms, even Pink Noise – an enhanced form of white noise.

Tranquility is the other side of Freeverse, the award-winning app developer responsible for Moto Chaser, Burning Monkey Casino and Big Bang Sudoku, among many others. Available now in the AppStore.

Writing Monday for the eWeek blog, AppleWatch, Joe Wilcox gave the iPhone a D in telephony and a C for battery life, saying he simply could not recommend the device as a phone. Despite singing the praises of Apple’s mobile platform he gave it an overall grade of B- and seemed mighty pleased to announce that everyone in his family has rejected the iPhone in favor of an iPod Touch + some other cell phone.

I find Wilcox’s assessment curious and wonder how many of the other 8 – 10 million iPhone owners feel their device is so disappointing from the telephony and usability standpoints that they’d actually prefer to carry two devices around instead of one. Follow me after the jump to learn what Wilcox thinks is so bad about iPhone and where my own assessment takes me in response.

‘Tis the Season of Giving and for a site such as MacHeist, where you can get bundled amazements year-round, giving really means giving. This Christmas, sign up for a MacHeist account and come to the MacHeist Giving Tree on Christmas to see what free gifts are under the tree just for you.

Refer your friends and get additional gifts with your name on them.

eMusic is into the gifting spirit this season, offering a 12 song set of Christmas tunes available to download for free.

The playlist includes songs by an eclectic mix of artists ranging from Twisted Sister to Eartha Kitt, The Brian Setzer Orchestra to Lisa Loeb, with Shawn Lee’s Ping pong Orchestra and Kidz Bop Kids thrown in for good measure.

Classic seasonal favorites include Jingle Bells, Deck the Halls and Auld Lang Syne, as well as Bach: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and Angels We Have Heard On High.

Well worth checking out, after all – who doesn’t love free music?

Via Distorted Loop

When it comes to competition, the one between Apple and Dell often breaks out beyond traditional metrics such as revenue, profits, market share and units sold.

Many years ago, before Apple reinvented itself under the return stewardship of Steve Jobs, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell was famously quoted as saying the best thing a new commander could do with the Apple ship would be to shut the company, sell its assets and give the proceeds to the shareholders.

This fall, around the time of Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call, when Jobs took a rarely exercised opportunity to bask in glory of his company’s recent success in a lighthearted, congenial chat with analysts, many technology writers were quick to point out that Apple had more than enough cash on-hand to buy Dell outright, should the Board choose to do so.

In a recent blog post, Bob Pearson, Dell vice president of communications and conversations, sought to extend the competition between the companies to a battlefield on which many will be made and broken in the next decade – the environment.

Apple is all talk and no walk, to paraphrase Pearson’s criticism. He is apparently unappreciative of new Apple advertising touting Mac notebooks as “The World’s Greenest Family of Noteboks.” Pearson goes on to list some specific measures Dell has taken to reduce its carbon footprint and describes interactions with suppliers that will reduce Dell’s responsibility for millions of pounds of unnecessary shipping and packaging waste. Apple’s advertising is dismissed as “wild claims” and mere “rhetoric.”

Fighting words, perhaps, to some. Edible Apple has a nice critique of Pearson’s post – much ado about nothing, in short – though I can speak to one suggestion Pearson has for Apple that they might consider at One Infinite Loop. Pearson says “be part of the conversation,” and goes on to whine about Apple employees not being permitted to write blogs, which seems an off-the-mark complaint.

But I have been working on a story for a green designs publication for over a month, trying to get someone at Apple to speak with me about the very things the company advertises in its “greenest family” spots – and I’ve run into a brick wall. There are over two dozen Public Relations Vice Presidents on my list of Apple contacts, and from what I can tell none of those people seems interested in speaking to journalists – even to those of us who are nominally interested in helping Apple tell its story to a wider audience.

Dimensions is a virtual toolbox offering a bakers’ dozen of functional tools animated with gorgeous 3D graphics that turn your Apple mobile device into something far more useful than any other cameraphone/musicplayer/gamestation-computer could hope to be.

Among the things you can do are:

*     Use the caliper to measure to a precision of 0.156mm or 0.006 of an inch.
*     A flexible tape measure lets you measure interior furniture, fabric and more up to 2.5 meters or 8        feet.
*     Another tape measure handles interior and exterior distances up to 5 meters or 16 feet.
*     A third measuring tool uses the iPhone’s camera to measure distances up to 25 meters, or 82 feet.
*     Distances over 80 feet, up to a mile, can be calculated with the measuring wheel.
*     The podometer uses GPS location services to measure thousands of miles or kilometers.

All calculations can be rendered in metric or Imperial scales. Dimensions was 2008’s best selling app in AppStores France and Italy, the #2 seller in Japan, Belgium and Switzerland, according to advertising placed by its developer, pocketDEMO.

And here we are in the US spending all our money on Sim City and Pull My Finger – it’s no wonder we’re a laughingstock in Europe.

$2 at the AppStore. C’mon, people – get to work!

There are many fine and useful offerings coming out of the Freeverse development shop and I recommend a visit to the website, but I want to talk right now about a couple of their iPhone/iPod Touch games – Flick Fishing, which you can see in the video above, and Flick Bowling.

When I got into this gig, I didn’t intend on becoming an iPhone game addict, but I’m beginning to understand why some people chase the mobile handset dragon.

Ancient wisdom in fishing circles holds that the worst day fishing beats the best day working. Well, Flick Fishing is an app that will give you a mighty realistic taste of a day on the water during that smoke, or coffee, or lunch break on a day when you’re stuck at work.

Choose from 6 locations, 9 types of bait and tackle, a dozen tournaments and dozens of unique species of fish, for a far more satisfying virtual fishing experience than you’d think 99¢ might buy. You can even use Network and Hotseat play to compete against your friends and show off your trophy catches by email with the “Brag” feature.

If you’d rather kill some time with a virtual indoor experience, you could do a lot worse then Flick Bowling. There are a couple of other bowling games on the AppStore, but Freeverse’s 99¢ program knocks ’em down in the first frame.

Excellent 3D animation and realistic bowling alley sounds, along with great music – and customizable bowling balls in the latest version – make Flick Bowling an oddly relaxing way to feel good about doing nothing in particular. You can choose from varying levels of difficulty and bowl solo, against your friends or against a built-in opponent. Between frames you can switch over to iBeer and come back to pick up where you left off.

With only five shopping days left until Christmas you’ve probably just got enough time to take care of your last minute stocking stuffers to make the Mac or iPhone lover on your list say “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!” with a protective skin that’s also a work of art – from San Francisco-based Infectious.

Choose from 43 eye-catching, original designs like the ones above for your iPhone, or a selection of 85 from the laptop gallery, to personalize your Apple gear in style. Infectious features designs from artists all over the world and has ongoing open submissions if you are an artist who sees any blank surface as a canvas.

Infectious makes adhesive art for walls and automobiles, too, so don’t let your Apple gear limit your imagination. The skins are easy to install and easy to remove when you’re ready for a change. The iPhone skins, which include device backing as shown above as well as a complementing strip of art for the phone face around the home button, regularly sell for $15 but are on sale for the holidays at 1/3 off.
See the website for details.

‘Tis the season for Holiday parties and overindulgences of many kinds, not the least of which can sadly include having too much to drink. It’s fitting then, that December is National Drunk Driving Awareness Month and we wondered how our iPhone might help us avoid the embarrassment and possible tragedy of too much drinking and driving.

Cheers! is a handy app from Addison Hardy that will help you estimate your blood alcohol content (BAC) over time, as long as you remember to add each drink you consume into the program. It factors in weight, gender and the time of each drink to help you make a reasoned estimate of your BAC after you’ve had last call and are ready to head for home. An excellent feature of this $3 program is that it will use your physical location to help you call a taxi if you’ve had too much to drink and drive.

A similar app that comes at the problem from a different angle for just a buck is Drink Timer, from Simpsonics. With Drink Timer you enter your drinks and a calendar wheel tells you when you’re estimated to have zero alcohol in your system from the time you stop drinking. So if you’re out on a Friday night and being good about entering your drinks into Drink Timer, and you look down to see that calendar reading, say, Monday, you may want to throttle back a bit and have a nice warm cup of tea when it comes time for the next round. No Taxi services with Drink Timer.

r-u-drunk? is a game you can use to approximate the embarrassment and shame you’d face if a cop pulled you over driving in that condition. With 5 tests, including a balance test and a straight line test that make use of the iPhone’s accelerometer, it also has an alphabet typing test, a hand-eye coordination test and a simulated breathalyzer. Given the hit and miss nature of typing on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, you might want to start out with that one and if you can pass it, have another glass of champagne. The developers at MobilityWare market this $3 app as a companion to drinking games and it falls under the AppStore’s 17+ rating category.

Last but not least is iMeter, a 99¢ app that could actually help you save lives with its big graphic “meter” you can use to show your drunk friend that he is in fact talking too loud and that his BAC is at danger levels. Simply announce what you’re going to measure and when the meter loads on the iPhone’s screen, you control the “level” the meter will read out using a slider similar to the one used to unlock the phone. Comes complete with funny sounds and pop-out animation for maximum meter readings.

Please remember that drinking and driving is not a laughing matter and it is never fun to play games when real lives could be at stake. The Holiday Season is a time to celebrate with friends and family and to enjoy the spirit of giving and togetherness that make being part of a “cult” special. Drink responsibly and remember that Taxi feature if you use Cheers!

It’s probably a good bet Phil Schiller is not going to introduce an iPhone with a built-in video camera in a few weeks at Macworld. In the meantime, Sol Lipman and 12seconds.tv have created a 99¢ app for the iPhone that lets you take 3 photos (either on the fly or choose from your camera roll), record 12 seconds of audio, which it ties into a multimedia masterpiece “video slideshow” you can then share with your friends and an unsuspecting world.

Slideshows are automatically uploaded to servers at 12seconds.tv, where users have an account from which they can manage their body of work. Every video has its own page (sort of like Flickr) and any video can be emailed, downloaded or embedded.

One of the 12seconds dev team told us, “we tried hard to keep the app simple and straightforward and fun.” From all appearances, they have succeeded. The slideshows make effective use of the “Ken Burns effect” that will be familiar to anyone who’s made a slideshow in iPhoto, and the recording quality of the iPhone’s microphone is surprisingly good.

Another consideration behind limiting the final output to twelve seconds was that “twelve seconds is about the ideal amount of time for most user-generated content,” according to David Speiser, who consulted with Lipman on development of the app. “The goal is to keep the barrier for consumption really low – no matter how badly a video might suck, you know you’ll never waste more than twelve seconds of your life watching it.”

Recent weeks have seen renewed discussion about the security vulnerabilities of Macs and the OS X operating system, though, as usual, it is primarily PC interests who say, “your day of reckoning is gonna come” and Mac interests who say, “Apple computers are the safest computers under the sun.”

Meanwhile, Apple released a security update on Tuesday that quashed 21 security bugs, news of which was taken by those on both sides of the debate as evidence their argument is right.

What better time, then, for Norton/Symantec to release Internet Security 4 for Mac and Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection, designed for those running Boot Camp or other Windows virtualization software on the Mac. Both products integrate all-new firewall and antivirus protection with tools to help protect against the increasing instance of identity theft.

I spent some time this week going over the UI and program features with Symantec’s Mac Product Manager, Mike Romo, and I was impressed with the granularity built in to the software’s control features and pleased to see Symantec has paid attention to creating a UI that says the designers have seen and used Macs themselves.

While automatically blocking attempted exploits using different protocols, Norton Internet Security for Mac’s firewall now also offers application control, which allows users to manage the applications that are connecting to the Internet, protecting Macs from spyware. New location awareness controls let users specify different connection settings for different networks to which a computer may be connected. The software is also integrated with Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Management System, an evolving database of known bad actors. Firewall rules are automatically updated at least once a day to protect against the latest attacking IP addresses.

This is powerful software that should appeal to rabidly security-conscious Mac users – especially the growing cadre of multiple-user businesses, schools and enterprise customers who have adopted the OS X platform – who will be happy with its degree of configurability as well as the extensive live monitoring and event logging it makes possible. Those who want to “set it and forget it” can also feel secure from phishing, malware or hacking threats they believe are lurking out there for the Mac.

Available now for the US from the Symantec online store and through various retail outlets, Norton Internet Security 4 for Mac is US$79.99, which includes a one-year subscription to Symantec protection updates. The suggested retail price for Norton Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection is US$89.99, which also includes a one-year subscription to Symantec protection updates.

You yourself might not be an actual superhero, but with Earthcomber, a free GPS-leveraging search/mapping/social networking app for iPhone and iPod Touch, you can have “superhuman awareness,” according to developer Jim Brady.

Preloaded with a comprehensive database of restaurants, movie listings, events, historical sites, local information and more, the app lets users tag their interests – for example, Greek cuisine, historic buildings, hot chai tea, or free WiFi access. They can also add their own items, and invite friends so they can find them as well.

Earthcomber then scans an area for any matches, using the iPhone’s GPS. Any place that has anything of interest is announced by an optional chime.

Earthcomber is different, according to Brady, because it utilizes multiple technologies so the user doesn’t have to jump from one application to the next to accomplish related tasks. “That’s the whole point,” Brady said. “We don’t have to turn off our eyes to start up our ears, and we sure don’t have to fill out a search box for our brains to work. Earthcomber uses mobile technology as a powerful extension of our natural abilities, so that we can be constantly aware of what’s right around us.”

Earthcomber won Nokia’s 2008 Mobile Rules! competition for “Best Infotainment” application. The company provides USA service today and plans international coverage with a coming update.

Retina-X released the unsubtly named Mobile Spy software for iPhone on Wednesday, a product the company says “will reveal the truth for any company or family using Apple smartphones.”

Mobile Spy operates in stealth mode, invisible to the iPhone user, but permits parents or employers who install it to silently monitor incoming and outgoing text messages (SMS) and call information of children or employees – even if activity logs are erased. The software starts when the phone is booted up, records all call and SMS activity and uploads the data in real time to Retina-X servers, which may be accessed from anywhere on the Internet.

The company says it is working on adding spy awareness to email activity in a future release.

Because the software runs in the background, sending and receiving data across the network while other software is in use, Mobile Spy violates Apple’s iPhone SDK, so you won’t find it on the app store, but it is available on the Retina-X website.

Priced at $100 annually, $70 semi-annually or $50 quarterly, it is compatible with iPhone 3G only.

This holiday season you may want to beware of parents, bosses and spouses bearing iPhone gifts.

“Steampunk lies at the intersection of science and romance,” says one of its foremost practitioners, Jake Von Slatt. “It embraces technology but demands technology return the favor.”

We came across Von Slatt while checking in with our friend Bob Eckstein, whose recently completed project, The History of the Snowman is now out in the world after six years of grueling research.

One of Eckstein’s next projects is producing a graphic novel out of a nautical explorer’s diary from 1850. A full-immersion writer, Eckstein has gotten himself in the mood for the work by transforming his office space into a 19th century Captain’s Quarters. He refitted his computers and office equipment into old ship instruments to lend verité to his efforts, and secured vintage trappings to serve up authenticity to his muse.

Hence, my introduction to Steampunk.

Click on pics in the gallery below and follow after the jump for more of the story.

Eating just one Belgian truffle can make you “significantly more likely” to desire a Mac than your more self-controlled neighbor, according to a study due to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Professors Juliano Laran (University of Miami) and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida) conducted a two part study in which one group of participants was given a chocolate truffle, while the other group was required to abstain. In part one of the study, the researchers found, not surprisingly, the group of truffle eaters was more likely than their pleasure-restricted peers to to unleash a “what the hell” syndrome, and revealed a desire for additional treats such as pizza, ice cream and potato chips, while their abstaining counterparts found it easier to resist temptation.

Part two of the study again had people eat or resist a chocolate truffle and asked them to indicate how much they desired several products that are symbols of status [for example] an Apple computer… “People who ate the truffle desired the status products significantly more than those who had to resist the truffle,” write Laran and Janiszewski.

The answer to Apple’s flat Mac sales, then, would appear to be free truffles for every visitor to an Apple Retail Store. Someone get an advance abstract of Behavioral Consistency and Inconsistency in the Resolution of Goal Conflict to Cupertino, stat!

Via The Register UK

Apple doesn’t sell its own iPhone 3G mobile devices on its web store, but you can now get both new and refurbished 3G models online through AT&T. Following last week’s quiet launch of on-line sales for new 3Gs, AT&T began Tuesday also offering refurbished units at $150 for the 8GB model, while both the black and white 16GB models sell for $250. As with new units, purchase of the refurbished phones requires the buyer to sign a two year service contract with AT&T.

Politics, not platelets, are why Steve Jobs is turning over the Keynote responsibility to Phil Schiller at next month’s Macworld Conference & Expo, according to CNBC correspondent Jim Goldman.

Citing “sources inside the company,” Goldman writes that Jobs’ demurral from the Keynote address for Apple’s last appearance at the venerable trade show in San Francisco is assuredly not a product of any inability on his part to perform for health reasons, but is rather a result of the company’s “trying to separate itself from Macworld for some time.” Amid the growing trend of big companies scaling back participation in traditional trade shows world wide, Apple has also in recent years taken the lead in producing its own product release events, such as the ones that introduced the company’s new iPods this summer and new notebook computers in the fall.

Apple also directly reaches millions of visitors who come weekly to its growing chain of world-wide retail stores, and millions more who receive the company’s carefully designed and controlled messaging through visits to the company’s iTunes stores.

Knowing how the Apple-interested universe’s collective pulse begins to race with every inkling of Jobs’ mortality, it’s no surprise to see Monday’s announcement generate lots of speculation and extra volatility in the movement of the company’s stock price. As Goldman writes, however, the party to be concerned about is not Jobs, and not Apple, but Macworld. For some time now it’s been fashionable to imagine scenarios about Apple in the inevitable post-Jobs era. But will there even be a Macworld in the post-Apple era?

Apple today announced that 2009 will be the last year the company exhibits at Macworld Expo.

Citing the declining efficacy of reaching its audience through participation in trade shows, the company issued a press release indicating Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo. Schiller’s will be Apple’s last keynote at the show, which held its debut event in 1985.

The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.

With the increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website, the company is able to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in ways a trade show could never hope to.

Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.

iBend marketing materials call it “the thinnest stand for the iPhone and iPod Touch.”

$5 gets you what appears to be two pieces of plastic or maybe laminated card stock (the website doesn’t say) cut in such a way they could be mistaken for “Snidely Whiplash”-style fake mustaches, but that, when “bent” just so, will hold your device in place on any flat surface so you can look at it (and the video or slideshow you’re watching on it) without having to hold it in your hand. The iBend is thin enough to fit in your wallet, pocket or purse.

iBend is patent-pending and manufactured in California.

What will they think of next?

Via Edible Apple

Apple released the 10.5.6 update to Leopard on Monday with a feature that makes it impossible to jailbreak and/or unlock an iPhone or iPod Touch using PwnageTool or QuickPwn, according to a report at iPhoneAlley.

Blogger Erica Sadun explains in more detail that engineers at Apple propagated to all 10.5.6 loaded Mac systems USB kexts (kernel extensions) that prevent a Mac from recognizing an iPhone or iPod in Device Firmware Update mode, a high level communication protocol used for firmware restores among other things.

The battle between Cupertino and a dedicated band of Apple users who believe the company’s mobile platform should be opened for general use and development outside the limitations of the AppStore has been going on since the original iPhone was unlocked weeks after its initial release in June 2007. Subsequent updates to the mobile firmware have ben decoded within days of their release.

Many, though not all users who jailbreak/unlock their iPhones do so to enable them to operate on cellular telephone networks other than AT&T, the exclusive authorized service provider in the US. Others see the advantage of an unlocked phone that can run software developed for it that has not otherwise been approved by Apple for sale and distribution in the iTunes AppStore.

Sadun confirmed with sources inside Apple that the current roadblock to unlocking efforts was deliberate and both she and iPhoneAlley suggested those wanting to operate jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches ought to wait to install the 10.5.6 update on their Macs until developers working to maintain the open mobile platform have devised a workaround.

One possible avenue around the DFU mode restriction has been suggested by Phone developer Steven Troughton-Smith, who told Sadun the problem relates to devices plugged directly to Macs. He relates that DFU mode can be used with a unit connected via a hub and can be pwned as normal, even with the 10.5.6 update.

Chimp 65 Productions announced Monday the premiere of its documentary film “MacHEADS The Movie” at the 2009 Macworld Conference & Expo. The attendees-only special screening is scheduled for Wednesday, January 7, in room 131 of the North Hall of San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

MacHEADS is an in-depth examination of the cultural phenomenon of Apple fandom, using events from Steve Jobs’s historic Keynote addresses, the iPhone’s first release in NYC, and other historic moments in recent Apple history to explore the loyalty of Apple followers and their obsession. The film also combines visual evidence from archives of early Macworld Expos.

“Two years after shooting the first reel at Macworld 2007, we’ve come full circle with this special premiere at the leading event of the Mac community,” says producer Ron Shely. “Macworld Expo & Conference 2009 is truly the natural place for telling the story of Apple and its followers. We are thrilled to screen the movie at the Moscone Center a place of tradition and innovation.”

Director Kobi Shely added, “We wanted to answer the core questions: ‘How was a community formed around a brand, and how did this phenomenon contribute to Apple’s success? During the film-making process, it became obvious that there is a community and there is Apple. Although they correlate, in many ways they are separated.”

The film features several key Mac personalities in the company-community ecosystem, including one-time Apple Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki; Apple’s first official employee Daniel Kottke; and a special guest appearance by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Authors including Adam Engst, who created the first Apple newsletter, Tidbits and Chicago Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko are also featured in the film.

MacMedics get into the Christmas spirit with this little desktop tree, featuring a Bondi Blue Apple tree topper and a snazzy base made from a decommissioned G4 iMac.

Seasons’ greetings from Dana Stibolt and his band of jolly Mac elves, who operate Apple Authorized Resellers and Apple Authorized Service Providers in three locations serving the Baltimore-Annapolis, Washington, and Philadelphia markets.

Full-size image after the jump.

Rogue Amoeba Software added to its lineup of innovative audio software titles Monday with the release of Radioshift Touch, software that lets users listen to internet radio anywhere on their iPhone or iPod Touch.

Powered by RadioTime, an internet radio catalog with thousands of stations from around the world in its database, Radioshift allows users to browse by genre, search by keyword and view listings for thousands of specific radio programs as well.

The app leverages iPhone firmware’s GPS capabilities to serve up local stations based on the user’s location and uses a feature called “SmartStream” to point to the most bandwidth-friendly stations, depending on the connection. Users can access Internet radio via, WiFi, EDGE or 3G.

Radioshift Touch is available at the iTunes AppStore for $9.99.

Given the host of free and low cost music programs available on the AppStore, including the ever-popular Pandora, and ClearChannel’s iHeartRadio, it will be interesting to track the success of Radioshift, with its relatively expensive price tag. Paul Kafasis, lead developer at Rogue Amoeba, has a sterling reputation for developing useful, high quality audio software for the Mac, so we invite Cult readers who try Radioshift to let us know what you think.

Found this pretty cool Mac tree ornament, courtesy of Flickr user Chris Dejabet, who is also responsible for the stocking below, featuring the groovy Mac applique, and it got me thinking that – given the almost unbearable cuteness of Apple products, as well as the legendary inventiveness and creativity of the Legions of the Cult – I haven’t seen a whole lot of Apple-oriented Christmas decorations.

I did poke around a little bit and found some pages at The Apple Collection featuring very handy pdf files you can download to make your very own paper Apple ornaments like Chris’ above.

I’ve included a couple of screen grabs indicating some of the choices available, and if you’re interested in folding more than just wrapping paper this holiday season, click here and here.