Lonnie Lazar - page 29

Forget about what they manage to crank out of Cupertino. What is it about Apple that drives such innovation all over the rest of the globe?

A federal court judge on Friday granted a preliminary injunction requested by IBM that ordered Mark Papermaster to cease working for Apple until further notice.

Apple announced on Tuesday this week that Papermaster would be joining the company immediately in his new role as the head of the engineering teams that make the iPods and iPhones, reporting directly to CEO Steve Jobs. After Friday’s ruling by the court in the southern district of New York, Apple said Papermaster would comply with the court’s order.

“We will comply with the court’s order but are confident that Mark Papermaster will be able to ultimately join Apple when the dust settles,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said.

Kenneth Karas, the U.S. District Court judge in White Plains, New York, where the case was filed, didn’t immediately explain his ruling, saying he would release a full opinion in the future. He scheduled a follow-up meeting for November 18 to map out a time line for the case.

The suit grew out of Papermaster’s 26 year employment at IBM, where he was responsible for many of that company’s innovations in the development of silicon chip processor technology. He signed an agreement not to compete in similar employment with another company for one year, but quit abruptly on October 24th and planned to start at Apple this week.

Via Reuters, Trading Markets

UPDATE: This post has been edited for statistical clarity.

iPhones fail at roughly half the rate of Blackberry smartphones after one year of operation, according to a study by Square Trade research. Square Trade, a company that sells add-on warranties covering electronic devices beyond their manufacturer warranty periods, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. According to their data, the malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the Blackberry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.

The study projects the failure rate for the iPhone after two years will be between 9.2 and 11.3 percent, compared to actual two-year failure rates of 14.3 percent for BlackBerries and 21.0 percent for Treos.

Of course, the sample size producing these numbers is a tiny fraction of the millions of smartphones on the market and may or may not be a truly accurate picture of the actual failure rates of the three kinds of phone.

Interestingly, the study found neither battery life nor call quality problems to be major issues for the iPhones that did fail. As was true with all three models in the study, the predominance of failure-related issues had to do with the touchscreen interface.

One area where iPhone does appear to lag its two main competitors is in failure due to accident: 12 percent of iPhone failures happen because the owner drops it, spills liquid on it, or otherwise stops treating it like the sensitive mobile computing device it is.

Via MobileCrunch

Earlier this week I seem to have touched a chord with a post about Tony Fadell’s “transition agreement” and the reimbursements Steve Jobs gets from Apple for expenses incurred in the operation of his private plane.

Several readers took me to task for illustrating the post with a hastily-cadged, photoshopped fake of a Gulfstream jet with a big Apple logo on it, which is fair enough, if somewhat lacking in the sense-of-humor department.

With thanks to reader Hihosilver, who sent in a real picture of Jobs’ plane on the runway at the San Jose airport, I was led to a couple of interesting airplane fan sites, where more pics of the Apple CEO’s gorgeous jet can be found. For your pleasure and amusement then, here’s a gallery, so the next time you see a Gulfstream Aerospace G-V at cruising altitude or taxiing on a runway near you, you’ll be able to tell if it’s likely to have Steve inside.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a developers’ conference in Australia yesterday he thinks the idea of using Webkit as the rendering engine for Internet Explorer is “interesting” and that his company “may look at that” as the Microsoft web browser continues to evolve.

Asked directly why IE remains relevant and what is the value of a proprietary rendering engine “when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster,” Ballmer responded by admitting that Microsoft would need to consider the future of the browser and determine if there is any lack of innovation for the company to capitalize upon with “proprietary extensions that broaden its functionality.”

Since defeating Netscape, once the lone challenger to its dominance of the browser market, IE has been wildly outpaced by the likes of Firefox, Safari and Opera in the past five years, while the speed and standards compliant advantages of Webkit have led a number of developers to make it the foundation for their web browsers and other web related tools. Among them are Nokia’s mobile browser, Google’s new Chrome, and of course the mobile Safari browser used by Apple’s iPhone.

With Microsoft having long preached the gospel of praising developers for the innovations brought to its core product, the company would no doubt gain the undying gratitude of the developer community should it adopt Webkit and free developers from the extra work currently required to make their code render predictably in Internet Explorer.

Via AppleInsider

Today, Stanford professor Dr. Ge Wang and his company, Smule, introduced Ocarina, the first and only app that transforms the iPhone into an expressive musical wind instrument.

The app synthesizes sound in real-time, just like a regular instrument, based on actual gestures including wind input, tilt, and finger placement over the four holes overlaid on the multi-touch pad. Unlike other iPhone audio apps, the sound is not pre-compiled but is generated by the notes, gestures and nuance of the individual performer. As a result, it allows an iPhone user to explore and master the musical sounds of an entirely iPhone-native version of an ancient flute-like instrument.

Smule’s audio engine (CHiP) and the Smule Sonic Network make it possible to hear live performances around the world. With the globe view, you can hear performances, and see the origin of that performance.

Dr. Wang, in addition to being CTO of Smule, is director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, and the author of the Chuck audio programming language.

Formation of the first iPhone Philharmonic cannot be far behind. Perhaps one day, iPhone music will be its own category at the Grammys.

Poolga has what we think is a pretty excellent collection of iPhone and iPod Touch wallpapers created by a talented and creative group of “designers, artists, illustrators and dopey street bums ” from around the world. According to the site, they do it because “we hate the standard wallpapers and cheesy nature themes available everywhere.”

Check out a few of our favorites in the gallery below and visit the Poolga site as well as their Flickr page – they add new stuff every few days.

Webmonkey thinks iTunes sucks. And gives 10 reasons to bolster the case for saying so, including serious gripes about the infelicity of its library management, slow performance and its demands on system resources.

We agree with the complaint that iTunes refuses to let you take music off your iPod and put it in the library while almost every other music app out there manages to handle that task. And we’re resigned to the inevitability of iTunes for iPhone and iPod updates, but maybe there are better apps for managing a collection of digital music, like Songbird and Amarok.

What do you think? We’re listening…

Plenty of people are tut-tutting today about the lavish “transition agreement” outgoing iPod guru Tony Fadell signed in order to spend more time with his young family and act as special adviser to Steve Jobs during the coming year. And surely $300K per year in salary, with stock options worth upwards of $8 million makes the worst economic downturn in 50 years seem like something a 39 year-old guy might survive.

But reports filed with the SEC indicate Apple reimburses Steve Jobs for expenses traveling on the company’s private Gulfstream jet to the tune of 2/3 Fadell’s annual package per quarter, and even that number is well down from the amount the company was spending on the corporate jet just one year ago.

Puts the whole financial crisis thing in perspective, doesn’t it?

In an emailed response to another user disappointed in the performance of the glass trackpad on his new MacBook Pro, Steve Jobs said, “Software Fix coming soon,” according to MacRumors.

We reported on the possible dustup over quirky trackpads on Monday, noting the growing number of threads related to user concerns about it in Apple’s discussion forums. In comments to our post Cult of Mac readers, on balance, haven’t seemed to find it much of an issue, but if a software patch is indeed forthcoming, that should be good news to all who have been bothered by the problem.

If you’re looking to pick up an iPhone cheap, you may want to avoid any opportunities that arise for you in Russia. It seems there’s an increasingly popular scam there where people want to quickly unload their iPhone with a nearly discharged battery in order to quickly raise funds for a train or plane ticket. They show you the phone with an Apple logo that lights up momentarily when the power button is pressed and say, “just charge it and you have an iPhone!”

Not surprisingly, the insides look something like what you see in the gallery below, complete with a steel plate to give the fake phone some heft, and batteries to produce the lit-up logo. At least the fake Rolex watches tell time, don’t they?

With refreshed Apple iPod and notebook computer product lines having hit the shelves in the past few months we wouldn’t exactly call it a lump of coal in our stocking, but some people are bound to be disappointed there will be no new products from the company in time for holiday gift buying.

Apple spokesman Bill Evans said, “”Our holiday line-up is set,” according to a report today at Macworld.

The official word out of Cupertino would seem to quash a host of recent speculation regarding the MacMini, AppleTV and even the iMac, which was already juiced with new processors in the spring.

Seems logical Apple would feel comfortable with the lineup it has in place going into what promises to be a nervous retail season amidst what some are calling the worst economic downturn in 50 years.

Erratic behavior with the glass trackpad on new Mac notebooks appears to be a growing concern for some Apple customers. A buyer emailed Steve Jobs over the weekend complaining the trackpad on his new MacBook Pro was not registering physical clicks consistently and received a telephone response from Apple support indicating the company is investigating the matter, according to a report today at AppleInsider.

A survey of the discussion forums on the Apple website indicates nearly 100 threads have been opened in the past week on the subject of “trackpad problem” for the new unibody aluminum notebooks, with most users complaining the trackpad does not always register a click when it should, while some also report the pad loses all functionality at its outer edges, and several believe the sensitivity of the trackpad leads to erratic, unpredictable behavior.

With any new product there is bound to be something of a learning curve while users become familiar with its capabilities, and the new trackpads certainly have been designed to support a wide range of two, three, and four-finger gestures that could be causing some users confusion and frustration.

I asked my colleague Pete Mortensen, who wrote glowingly about his new MacBook a couple of weeks ago, how he’s finding life with the new trackpad. “I actually do get some of those issues some of the time – not always, but sometimes,” he says, noting, “it’s worst in the bottom edge dead center. Moving up a little or millimeters to the side fixes it.”

How about you, dear reader? Have you found the new trackpads quirky? And if so, do you think it’s something you’ll get used to, or does Apple have a production issue on its hands?

I asked Pete if the trackpad behavior made him long for his 12″ PowerBook G4 and he replied, “I don’t miss my 12″ G4 at all!”

Image credit: Josh Helfferich

Back in October, blogger John Gruber wrote off the Apple Retail Store Field Trip program for K-12 schools, calling the taint of education with consumer advertising “sickening” and “appalling.”

Over the weekend, however, Fraser Spiers, a teacher in the UK, posted an account of the field trip his class took to an Apple Store across the pond that makes Gruber’s dismissal seem mean and wrong.

According to Spiers’ account, “The teacher in charge considered that the lesson had been very well designed from an educational perspective and was very appropriate for the age and stage the children were at.” Students were provided a half dozen computers in the store and given instruction on making podcasts in GarageBand, including using Photo Booth to add chapter artwork and burning the CD in iTunes. At the end of the trip each student came away with a CD of their finished podcast and a free t-shirt.

While it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical about corporate interests getting too closely involved in education, Apple’s field trip program isn’t exactly egregious on the scale of, say, ChannelOne, the 12-minute television program seen daily by an estimated eight million public school students in the United States. Studies of ChannelOne programming found that 20 percent of its air time is spent on coverage of ”recent political, economic, social and cultural stories,” while the other 80 percent is advertising, sports, weather and natural disasters.

Given Apple’s longstanding relationship with and loyal embrace by the K-12 education market in the US, together with the fact that kids get what Speirs described as “a high quality and low cost afternoon trip that the children thoroughly enjoyed and learned from,” I’d have to come down on the side of giving the company props for offering a unique and valuable service.

Virginia Commonwealth University design student Kyle Buckner had an assignment “to create a pedestal to hold [a] ‘precious object’.”

We hope he received an A+ for the hand-carved wooden stand he created for his iPhone. Complete with Home Screen icon “leafs” that connect to a rod that spins inside the stand’s main arm, Buckner’s piece is made completely of wood, save for bits of plexiglass which connect each icon leaf to its “branch” on the stand.

Via MacLife

Other World Computing, an Illinois-based technology company, announced today the availability of a new service that converts your existing Intel Core 2 Duo based MacBook into a tablet computer that lets you draw and write directly on the screen.

Called Modservice, for prices starting at $1300, OWC will convert your Apple machine into an Axiotron Modbook.

MacBook owners who want to convert their computer into a Modbook can also have OWC upgrade the base features of the MacBook for additonal performance and capabilities. Available services include memory upgrades up to 4.0GB; higher capacity and/or faster internal hard drives up to 500GB; and faster DVD and CD burning with a new SuperDrive. They offer a Hard Drive Data Transfer option so your data can be backed-up and reloaded after the Modbook conversion is completed.

The Modbook has the same input/output features of the MacBook, retaining the full range of MacBook connectivity options via 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 (two ports), FireWire® 400 (one port), Bluetooth 2.0 and AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi 802.11n.

Intended for artists, mobile users, students and professionals, the Modbook uses integrated Wacom pen-enabled digitizer technology to offer users unique flexibility and control over the creative process.

It should be noted pre-modded Modbooks are also available from Axiotron, starting at $2200.

Possibly in a fit of friendly rivalry with its competitor Fortune magazine, atop whose list of the 50 Most Admired Companies in the world Apple sits for 2008 at #1, Forbes magazine featured its list of the 10 biggest Apple failures this week, a gallery of which we reproduce for you below.

There are at least a couple of items here that grabbed a few hearts, but what do you think? Are these all Apple strikeouts? Let us know in comments.

Apple’s continuing quest to develop in-house microprocessor design capabilities hit a roadblock today, when IBM filed suit seeking to block one of its chief design architects from joining the Apple team.

Mark Papermaster, IBM’s former vice president of microprocessor technology development, had hoped to join the company in November to begin working closely with Steve Jobs and other Apple executives shaping the development of proprietary processors for servers and handheld devices.

In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York, IBM attorneys described Papermaster as “IBM’s top expert in Power architecture and technology.” He most recently managed IBM’s blade server division and is also the author of several papers on chip development at IBM. The New York computer giant used to make PowerPC processors for Apple before the company switched to Intel’s processors in 2005.

CNet writer Tom Krazit penned a wide ranging article discussing the various possibilities Papermaster’s move to Apple could signal, from increased focus on ambitions in the enterprise market and cloud computing services, to continuing development of mobile platform processors begun with the company’s purchase of PA Semi earlier in the year.

In the end, he suggests “Papermaster’s hire might wind up as a partial solution to all those questions over what Apple should do with its pile of cash: give a chunk of it to IBM to make this case go away.”

Japanese mobile telecom provider Softbank announced Thursday it will offer iPhone customers a peripheral digital TV tuner slated for arrival by mid-December. With sales of the iPhone in Japan already looking to be only half what the company once expected, Softbank appears to be hoping the availability of high quality One Seg TV broadcasts will lure more buyers to the Apple phone in the saturated Japanese mobile handset market.

The device, with a footprint only slightly smaller than the iPhone itself, is expected to cost about $100 and will also feature the ability to extend the iPhone’s battery when connected to the iPhone by a dock connector.

Color me skeptical that the vaunted Japanese consumer’s love of gadgetry will make this a game changer for iPhone’s fortunes in Japan.

Via Crunch Gear

AT&T announced today the availability of free WiFi access for its iPhone customers at thousands of hotspots nationwide. The company sent text messages to iPhone users and put up an informational web page noting the new service, but some greeted the news with skepticism based on aborted rollouts of the service in May and in July.

Among the hotspots slated to offer the service are airports, hotels and other public locations where one often must pay a fee to access WiFi networks. AT&T even offers a handy Starbucks location finder on its web page. After reading about this I was in the mood for an afternoon coffee, so I went to one of the several Starbucks in my neighborhood and, lo and behold, it worked.

Now, if it works the next time I’m in an airport, I’ll be really stoked.

The Unofficial Senator John S. McCain iPhone Application is an amusing little diversion available for jailbroken iPhones. Made by a Portland, OR-based developer named Alex, who describes himself as “just a guy who makes stuff and puts it on the internet”, the app may have been rejected by The AppStore even before the senator himself has had the opportunity to be rejected by America’s voters.

‘Tis the season for carving interesting designs into pumpkins and Apple fans never miss an opportunity to show their loyalty. Check out our gallery of ghoulish gourds and if you’ve got a Mac-o-lantern to show off, send it in to our photo submission email address; we’ll feature entries on the site.

Instructables shows you how to turn an old Mac itself into a Mac-o-lantern, and you can see another page full of Apple carved pumpkins at The Apple Collection.

Stickers on your Mac are a colorful, yet old-school way to personalize your gear. Kind of like what you used to see on the guitar cases and road gear of traveling musicians back in the day.

Thanks to commenter karina Grotz, we’ve learned about EtchStar, the creative technology company that will custom laser engrave your Mac, iPhone, or just about anything, with something from their hundreds of pre-made images or even with original art of your own.

It’s all the rage among the iCelebrity set down in LA and does offer a unique way to show your style, brand your gear and create something of a theft deterrent.

Check out the gallery of some cool designs below and visit the EtchStar website for more.
All images © EtchStar, LLC.

You’ll remember the $1000 iPhone app, I Am Rich, that made it to the AppStore in August just because it could. Well, for a savings of $100 you can get an app that actually does something useful, like monitor your multiple IP based surveillance cameras.

For only $900 Lextech Labs’ iRa serves the mobility needs of the high-end security industry, enabling users to view multiple video feeds and directly control pan-tilt-zoom cameras from their iPhone or iPod Touch.

iRa is not something you just download and off you go, however. Interested parties are strongly encouraged to locate a surveillance equipment integrator before purchasing the app. End users who download iRa from the iPhone App Store must have a working knowledge of network and digital camera system installation and configuration, with support for the app and for configuring hardware available exclusively through local integrators.

Once installed and properly configured, users can enjoy easy viewing of many video feeds in full screen video view or thumbnail view; pan, tilt and zoom control camera motion; use the touchscreen’s familiar finger drag and pinch controls; and get automatic discovery of properly configured network cameras.

Happy spying!

Google introduced Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch today with a free version of the fascinating desktop program that literally puts the whole world in your hands. I’ve spent a good portion of the morning playing around with it and am pleased to report the satellite imagery and 3D terrain effects are quite amazing.

Earth makes impressive use of touch screen technology and Apple’s accelerometer, letting you spin the globe with a swipe of your finger and literally tilt your view to the curvature of the earth to see the terrain of whatever place you’re visiting. The application has a ton of information and labeling built in, with links to over 8 million Panoramio photographs and Wikipedia articles you can read within Earth or jump to in Safari.

Google’s handy two minute video linked above explains the app pretty well, and there’s additional information at the Google Earth and Maps Team blog.

I’ve also posted below a gallery of screenshots from my journey this morning. Based on my initial experience, I’d say Google Earth is likely to become a popular time wasting app in a hurry.