Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.
Travis Hammond is a graphic designer located near Baltimore, Maryland. He works for a private auction firm and a local magazine, and does freelance photography and design work. He’s also a bit of an Apple nut, if these among many other examples of his Mac, iPod and iPhone inspired creativity are any indication.
See more at his website and his Flickr pages
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The busiest shopping day of the year is traditionally the day after Thanksgiving, known in the Retail Trade as Black Friday. And this year, anticipation appears to be building for some of the best Black Friday deals to be had for netbooks, the super-cheap small laptops from many manufacturers that may get even cheaper for a retail minute.
Here’s a custom Google search for Black Friday deals, and you’d be well advised too, to be on the look out at local hardware retailers for returned notebooks pre-installed with Linux.
We’ve seen rumors of deals to be had on a Dell mini-laptop, and powerful arguments for why netbooks may just dominate the holiday shopping season.
When you get your hands on your mini-deal, see the references below for tips on how to get ’em to run OS X:
Install OS X on an Acer Aspire One – courtesy of reader Javier Canadillas; thanks, Javier!
Guide to installing OS X on Lenovo IdeaPad S10
If you come across ways to get OS X on other netbooks, be sure to let us know about it in comments.
One of my favorite Mac programs is Garage Band. As a musician and songwriter, I am endlessly impressed with how much creativity and flexibility Apple has built into the program, for my money the star of the iLife bundle.
I learned about a new little trick for creating one-touch sound effects using Garage Band‘s Musical Keyboard, as described by writer Christopher Breen in MacWorld.
You can map up to 18 of the program’s built-in sound effects (select Sound Effect from the Software Instrument Info pane), or pre-recorded AIFF files dragged from the Finder, to keys on the Mac keyboard (as shown above) and save the whole set as an “Instrument” to be called for use in creating any new podcast or other recording project.
Be sure to see Breen’s article for the step-by-step instructions for utilizing this handy tip.
Mac userTom Klaver says, “Command-Tab in this case brings me command-slap, because when I invoke the command-tab keystroke to switch to another app, almost every time this weird unidentifiable
thing happens.”
Anyone else experiencing this problem?
Think you’ve got the hands or, in the case of iPhone, the fingers of a surgeon? You’ll soon be able to find out with a new mobile game from developer ngmoco, inc.. Dr. Awesome, Microsurgeon MD is an iPhone game that lets you import friends from your address book and “perform surgery” on them in a Qix meets Trauma Center gamescape environment, according to blogger Brandon Boyer at Boing Boing.
Check out the trailer above and get scrubbed.
“Meninos is a creative team with experience from a wide range of clients, specialized in illustration, graphics and motion design,” according to the website copy. the iPhone icon coaster set pictured above is but one of many whimsical designs available on what appears to be a website based in Brazil.
“We start making this products for personal use, then for friends and now we sell for friends of friends,” they say. All products are designed and created (hand made) by the artists and designers at Meninos studio, where they like to make things simple and different.
The AppStore “is causing a sea change in both the mobile phone industry and the gaming industry that threatens the viability of all competitors,” according to technology stock analyst Jason Schwarz at Seeking Alpha.
Calling the AppStore bigger than the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone, Schwarz points to comments made by Steve Jobs during Apple’s recent earnings conference call with industry analysts, in which he pointed out that the company is now benefiting from being at the center of a cycle in which cool applications beget more sales, thereby creating an even larger market which will attract even more software development.
Schwarz writes that Apple and the AppStore have “brought the Internet to the level…everyone expected during the tech bubble…[with] efficiency of distribution [that] is impossible for the traditional model to compete with,” and goes on to identify Apple stock, trading in the $80 range, as “a unique wealth building opportunity.”
Some Cult of Mac readers have lately complained about the preponderance of iPhone and iPhone app-related coverage we have been publishing, but the fact of the matter is that AppStore development is exploding. It represents where much of Apple and Mac oriented creativity exists right now. And if Schwarz is right when he says “Modern day society values its computers and phones above all else,” then AppStore news and product development are likely to increase and not fade away.
On a day when HP beat Apple to the punch with the idea of a multi-touch notebook, Apple fan and Flickr user nthnschrdr‘s design for a multi-touch Mac Pad is something worth dreaming about…
Be sure to go to the Flickr page and check out the photo’s embedded notes.
MacSign is a French website where you can get your Mac and Apple news delivered in sign language. The “newscasters” in the Welcome segment all wear long-sleeve black t-shirts for that authentic Apple feel, and the site makes nice use of Keynote ad QuickTime in its design. Segments are avaialable for download as Podcasts in iTunes and can be streamed to AppleTV as well.
In a media world with so much visual and auditory competition for our attention, a visit to the MacSign site is a disarmingly placid experience.
Coming November 28 from my favoite iPhone case-maker, Incase, is the PowerSlider for iPhone3G, a combination hardshell case and power solution.
For about $100, the PowerSlider promises to protect your iPhone investment in a cool-looking “soft-touch” hardshell, and its rechargeable lithium-ion polymer (1330mAh 4.2V) battery will more than double the 3G’s battery life, according to company specs.
The case comes with a custom USB cord to let you charge and sync without removing the phone from the case.
Additional power supplied by the PowerSlider will give you up to 330 hours of Standby time; up to 5 hours of Talk time on 3G network and 10 hours on 2G network; up to 7 hours of video playback; and Internet use of up to 5 hours on 3G network and 6 hours on Wi-Fi.
PowerSlider will be available at Apple Retail Stores, Best Buy Mobile stores, and on the web at both Apple and Incase.
There’s been a lot of hoo-hah about Apple’s video DRM restrictions that make it impossible for some content you own to be displayed on some display screens you also own.
OrbLive is an iPhone app that that streams video from a Windows PC to the iPhone. It can deliver any video or audio that’s stored on the the PC, YouTube content and, most important, live television if you have a TV tuner installed on your PC.
Orb is the first application to deliver such functionality through the App Store with a streamlined interface that also allows access to live Internet television and cable/antenna television with a properly configured tuner.
Orb Networks says the application is “coming soon for Mac and Linux computers.”
But who knows how long this party will last? Apple recently banned Cast Catcher, a streaming Internet radio application in the same vein as AOL Radio and Pandora (both of which have been available through the App Store almost since its inception), because the application “transfer(s) excessive volumes of data over the cellular network.” Orb, with full video and audio streaming over 3G, ostensibly falls into the same category.
Via iPhoneAtlas
For at least two weeks running now, the most popular free app on the iTunes AppStore is Stylem Media‘s Backgrounds app.
Offering thousands of wallpapers in expected categories such as Nature, Beaches, City, Cars, Stars, Sunsets, Patterns, Swirls, Hearts, Animals, Models, Trees…the app appears to be a wild success.
Has the iPhone begun to diminish Apple users’ reputation for creativity? I mean, how hard is it to find a wallpaper of your own design?
So, you’ve got your iPhone but you just lost your job? Or you’re looking to move to where the opportunities are in this contracting market? Job Compass could be the app for you.
Not yet available on the AppStore, but with the final version of the app having been submitted to Apple, this $3.99 offering from Securicy Ventures will leverage the iPhone’s location-aware capabilities and seamless integration between maps, web and email.
Job Compass’ protocols are patent pending, according to Securicy spokesman Titus Blair, who told Cult of Mac, “we have over 2+ million listings with more added daily. You can email the listing to yourself inside the app (without leaving) as well as apply online if you want.” Blair added that future releases will offer driving directions and other cool job hunting tools to help refine the search and locate relevant jobs.
It’s said in a declining economy, smart people go where the opportunities are. Job Compass might be just the thing to help you find one right around the corner.
Google’s voice search application for the iPhone is nothing short of spectacular. After tantalizing would-be users with either a PR goof or a brilliant marketing ploy that resulted in a delayed release on the AppStore, the updated version of Google Mobile finally hit on Monday and I got it on to my phone last night.
It’s like the home screen says, “For voice search, just bring the phone to your ear and speak. Really, no buttons required!” The program offers to let you watch a video to learn more, but it’s about as easy as it gets to call up a search results page that gives you just what you’re looking for simply by speaking into the phone.
When I searched for “70 Harper” the program returned results for “cindy harper,” but when I amended the search to “70 harper street, san francisco” I got a Google map pinned exactly to the address I spoke into the phone. Speaking about the incredible performance of this free app with my colleague Leander Kahney this morning, he agreed Google has served up something pretty amazing, saying, “it even understands my weird English accent.”
Say what you will about Google having worn out its welcome, or being on the downside of its rise to Internet glory, this advance in mobile search technology is a huge leap forward in this reviewer’s opinion. The iPhone may not yet be a fully functioning Star Trek communicator, but Google’s voice search brings it closer than many thought we might get.
Apple released a firmware update today designed to fix trackpad issues reported by users of new MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers released in October.
Affected users can download and install the new firmware from the Software Update function in OS X or go to the Apple Support download site and retrieve it from there.
The company lists a resource for more information that currently goes to a “Not Found” page, but may provide additional information at some point.
When I wrote about the new voice capabilities of Google’s iPhone search app on Friday, I was a little surprised it was not yet available on the AppStore. But it was relatively early in the day and I figured it would show up at some point. This morning, Charlie Sorrel writes at GadgetLab that Apple “forgot” to put Google’s app on the store.
Can that really be true? Sorrel refers to the fact that Google is subject to what he calls the “same arbitrary application approval scheme as everyone else,” and calls attention to a post by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch naming Google as the aggrieved party, saying “Apple really screwed up.”
I wonder. Might it not have been prudent for Google’s PR machine to have confirmed its application had been approved and was going to be available before kicking into high gear? Apple has thus far no comment on the situation and, as of this writing the voice search-enhanced Google Mobile app is not available on the AppStore.
We’ve written before about some of the creative ways Mac users act to protect their gear and to foil the nefarious intentions of would-be thieves. This week brings another, called MacTrak, from GadgetTrak, Inc., makers of the new anti-theft software for mobile devices.
MacTrak features location-awareness from Skyhook Wireless’ Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) and integration with Flickr to capture the location and images of laptop thieves.
“Skyhook’s cutting-edge location technology allows our software to send the location of the device to the owner along with a photo of who is using the system, greatly increasing the chances of getting the stolen device back,” says Ken Westin, founder and CTO of GadgetTrak.
When a MacTrak-enabled laptop is stolen, the device owner can remotely activate tracking for their stolen system. Once the stolen device connects to the Internet, MacTrak determines the device location using WPS. It will also activate the Mac’s camera and photograph whoever is using the device. The image, location and network information are then uploaded to Flickr and an email is sent to the owner with the same information. Data will continue to be sent over time until tracking is disabled.
“Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning can pinpoint the location of a stolen device within 20-30 meters even in dense urban areas or indoors, meeting the tough performance standards of security applications,” says Kate Imbach, director of marketing at Skyhook Wireless.
You can buy MacTrak directly from GadgetTrak.
The Google Mobile team is expected to enhance its iPhone search product with a voice recognition add-on as soon as today, according to a report in the New York Times.
Having already reorganized the way it delivers the results of an iPhone search request earlier this week, the Mountain View, CA search engine company is taking another step toward perfecting the way it handles the challenges of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices.
“Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” says Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.
With teams of voice recognition engineers working in New York, London and Mountain View utilizing trillions of search queries Google users have made over the years, one aspect of the service relies on a statistical model of the way words are frequently strung together, according to Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance Communications before coming to Google.
The service also takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer to put itself into “listen” mode when the phone is raised to a user’s ear, a design development contributed by a Google researcher in London.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering, according to the Times report.
The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.
As of this writing the add on was not yet available on the AppStore, but as Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University says, “whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months.”
Via New York Times
Njection Mobile is a new iPhone app designed to alert you to speed traps, red light cameras, and speed detection devices using the phone’s 3G and GPS capabilities.
The app uses a native Microsoft Virtual Earth Web Services (VEWS) implementation, leveraging the mobile tile set to speed up map displays, and provides what promoters call “one of the best mapping experiences on the iPhone.”
Drivers may be alerted audibly to approaching speed traps based on several different criteria. The application uses an Active Intelligence Selection System to alert users to the most relevant speed trap, based on speed, direction of travel, and current time. Users can submit and verify speed traps directly from the iPhone as well.
The $9.99 application’s features include:
Njection Mobile is compatible with both 3G and Edge network protocols, though the developers caution it may not work as well without GPS.
Word comes from Le Macbidouille of Apple’s plans to set up shop in the “Carrousel of Louvre” at the famous gallery complex in Paris.
Slated to begin at the turn of the year, Apple has apparently expanded upon plans originally announced over a year and a half ago, and may become a very high profile tenant at an attraction that drew over 8 million visitors in 2007.
According to the report published at HardMac (conveniently translated into adorable French-English for the non-French-speaking reader), Apple has taken “many options in France, primarily in shopping malls in construction, such as the Odysseum in Montpellier,” and declared “2009 should be the year of Apple Stores in France.”
Here’s a gallery of the space Apple may be converting at the Louvre complex, and sure enough, you can almost see an Apple store in it, can’t you?
Fans of comics’ “Golden Age” now have a great way to feed that jones on the iPhone and iPod Touch with Comic Zeal from Bitolithic.
The $1.99 app lets you download an unlimited number of classic comics from the 1930s and 1940s, a period that saw the arrival of the comic book as a mainstream art form, when the medium’s artistic vocabulary and creative conventions were defined by its first generation of writers, artists, and editors.
The app downloads full comics to store locally on your device for easy access offline, and takes full advantage of the iPhone platform’s pinch-zoom and fingertip scrolling so you can move around pages quickly and zoom in to detail as you wish. A recent update makes turning pages with the swipe gesture a breeze and counts as an excellent improvement to the original released version.
“I had been itching to do some development for the Mac but when we learned the iPhone and iPod contained most of OS X I knew I had to do SOMETHING on the device,” Melbourne-based developer Emiliano Molina told Cult of Mac. “During that time, a colleague let me borrow some of his most precious comic books. The most leisure time I had was on the train but I couldn’t risk damaging them,” he says, “eventually I realized that what I needed was a digital version of those comics on the iPod.”
The Comic Zeal library contains an eclectic mix of titles that have fallen out of copyright, such as Romantic Adventures, Strange Worlds, Racket Squad and a personal favorite of this reviewer, Eerie.
Molina is also developing what he calls the Comic Zeal Creator, which allows you to convert the CBR/CBZ files of comics you find on the internet into Comic Zeal’s CBI format, so you can upload your own favorites to the iPhone for storage and later access. The Creator remains in Beta and can be downloaded from the Bitolithic website.
Apple released a significant update for 4th generation iPod Nano Tuesday night. Software Version 1.0.3 includes a number of fixes to cover art and photo distortion issues that some users had been experiencing, and delivers support for the eagerly awaited Apple in-ear headphones with mic and remote.
Although the headphones were announced in September when the iPod Nano line was refreshed, they have remained as yet unavailable.
Nano users can obtain the new software by connecting the digital media player to their computer and launching iTunes. Follow the prompts for downloading and installing the software.
Flickr user Mickphoto has put up a couple of extensive photosets showing how he hacked an MSI Wind to turn it into an Apple “netbook” he calls the MacBook Nano.
Many have expressed a desire for a small, super-portable Apple notebook and Mickphoto’s creation has a certain je ne sais quoi that’s sure to get the notice of Apple enthusiasts – if not the Apple legal department – and keep the netbook conversation going.
Click on a few shots in the gallery below and visit Mickphoto’s Flickr pages for more. Is this Apple evangelism, a labor of love, or is it over-the-top? Let us know your thoughts about the MacBook Nano in comments.
Third party iPhone app developers may be able to update and execute arbitrary code from their applications at will, circumventing Apple’s App Store approval process, according to a report at TechCrunch.
The exploit stems from a trick documented by developer/blogger Partick Collison, who figured out a workaround to allow for the display of dynamic default.png images that load when an app is opened on the phone.
Jason Kincaid, who writes for TechCrunch, believes this security flaw makes it possible that “using the same technique with arbitrary code would likely allow a developer to update and execute whatever code they’d like at will.”
Kincaid notes that this is only an issue insofar as Apple purports to retain control of everything that appears on the AppStore. Developers enjoy the capability of running malicious code in just about every Windows or Mac desktop application you can buy without a screening process similar to the one Apple maintains before allowing iPhone and iPod touch applications to be distributed through the AppStore.
It’s also worth noting that no developer or application has been found to have used this particular exploit to run malicious code to date, and that Apple could act to close the loophole before anyone’s phone is put at risk.
First made available through the iTunes Store on April 28, 2003, the timeless power ballad “Don’t Stop Believin'” has become the top-selling catalog track in iTunes history and the sole catalog track to have crossed the 2million (double platinum) threshold.
Following its original release in 1981, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” the second single from Journey’s groundbreaking chart-topping “Escape” album, peaked at #8 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart and at #9 on the Pop Singles chart. Propelled by what the All Music Guide has called “one of the
best opening keyboard riffs in rock,” “Don’t Stop Believin'” quickly established itself as one of Journey’s signature songs while helping to spawn the “arena rock” genre.
“Don’t Stop Believin'” hit a grand slam in 2005 when it became the unofficial theme song for the Chicago White Sox, World Series Champions. Journey frontman Steve Perry performed the song at the World Series Championship celebration in Chicago.
The song enjoyed a massive resurgence in popularity in June 2007 after serving as the soundtrack to the climactic final set-piece of HBO’s hit mafia family television series, “The Sopranos.” Download sales
of the song on iTunes rocketed an incredible 482% for the period from Saturday, June 9th (the night before “The Sopranos” finale) through Tuesday, June 12th, of that year, at which time Hillary Clinton also chose it as her presidential campaign theme song.
