Lonnie Lazar - page 5

In the wake of work produced by the Stanford Laptop Orchestra and the many people worldwide using Smule applications on the iPhone, you knew this was coming: Four creative youngsters calling themselves the iPad Orchestra perform a nice piece of modern orchestral music here, using Seline HD, a new live performance and improvisation app optimized for the iPad.

Seline HD features an ergonomically designed playing surface called ioGrid, suitable for players of all hand sizes. It’s intended to support the playing of melodies with two hands, while keeping the iPad on the knees or on a table. A fully adjustable 16-note scale is divided into 2 parts (odd and even), which are then mapped to the left and right grids.

The app is capable of playing any melody but produces its own character and sound. A player can choose from 20 built-in factory voices (flutes, bowed strings, reeds, synth leads and more) and 9 drone voices. Drones (chorded synth pads) are generated on-the-fly, based on a complex analysis of the player’s melody line, courtesy of the app’s CrystalClarity HD sound engine, and provides an excellent background layer for melodies.

Seline HD player is also equipped with a full range of recording possibilities, including direct recording to .wav files, deleting, and doubling tracks. Overdubbing (layering tracks) is possible and encouraged as an excellent way to create complex orchestrations. Two available onboard effects – grand stereo reverb and dub delay – provide finishing touches to any composition.

Seline HD is available now in the iPad AppStore at the introductory price of $5.99.

Rolling Stone‘s Special Issue of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time made its debut Tuesday on Zinio, a digital publishing platform that could spell the difference between “survive” and “thrive” for old-school media publications looking to keep the doors open in coming years.

With a stable of top-tier periodicals such as National Geographic, Esquire, American Photo, Car & Driver and many more, Zinio definitely leads the way in showing how paper publications might remain not only relevant but vital and attractive to a new generation of “readers” weaned on the sizzle and flash of gaming and 3D entertainment.

Publication is morphing into something beyond simple words and pictures, evolving into an immersive medium that both pushes ideas and information out to consumers — and draws them in with interactive features and activities that take one beyond the superficial layers of what an article or essay might seem to offer.

Thus, with such crucial stakes at hand, did Zinio, Apple and Rolling Stone produce something of a mixed scorecard with the 500 Greatest issue.

A new survey published Wednesday indicates 93% of iPhone 4 owners are happy with their new Apple devices, down slightly from 99% of iPhone 3G S owners who copped to their ecstasy in a 2009 survey.

Market research firm Change Wave reportedly surveyed just 213 people to reach its conclusions, which may well make them statistically meaningless in the light of the millions of iPhone 4 smartphones in circulation since its public release in late June.

Brouhahas over the device’s revolutionary antenna design and concerns over security holes in its operating software might lead one to question whether more than 9 in 10 consumers remain truly “happy” with their purchase.

[Via Technologizer]

One of the prettiest apps for iPad just got even better Tuesday with new support for iPhone 4’s Retina Display technology enhancing the concert and music poster app, Rock Show.

Portland-based developers Neutrinos, LLC have been steadily improving Rock Show since its initial release and with version 2.0 announced an exclusive mobile-only poster sale that sold out in just two days. Rob Banagale, Neutrinos CEO, said, “As far as we know, Guy Burwell’s 7/29/2010 Silversun Pickups poster was the first retail item that could only be bought on an iOS device, not the web.”

Rock Show lets users browse, share and order directly through the app hand-made, limited edition concert and music posters that are often hand-packed and shipped directly by the artists who created them. With over 250 posters in the current catalog, Banagale feels his company is on to a good — and growing — thing.

At times, it seems, store employees fill many Apple retail outlets at a near one to one ratio with customers. Which raises a question about just what those employees are doing on the clock, for this summer’s favorite prank is quickly becoming jailbreaking Apple devices right under those employees’ noses — or behind their backs, as the case may be.

Perhaps it’s nothing more than bored kids on summer break with nothing better to do, but since our report Monday of a self-proclaimed “bored” anonymous prankster jailbreaking all the display phones at an unnamed Apple store, at least three more incidents of similar mischief have been reported.

Jonathan Mann — the “Song a Day” dude — is at it again.

Steve Jobs probably won’t show this video at the press conference today. But he should.

“Big” changes rumored for Apple’s approach to customer service at the retail level are bound to impress legions of the company’s newest consumers while raising the enmity of long-time customers and customer service employees alike.

New guidelines for handling on-site service requests and repair jobs at Apple’s retail stores are coming down the pike, according to a report Wednesday, as well as to communiques rumored to have recently hit Apple’s internal Retail News Network.

The gist of the company line is that walk-in customer service issues will soon be addressed in tandem with those presented by customers already holding scheduled Genius Bar appointments, and that as many repairs as can be done so will be queued for overnight turnaround — all without the hiring of additional staff to meet what is clearly growing retail traffic and demand for service interactions.

Not only will retail staff be expected to possess Genius-level understanding of the product line, they will also exhibit model habits of efficiency and productivity, according to the company’s plan.

As with anything involving art, opinions may vary on who makes the best cover for your Apple mobile device. I’ve always been partial to the output from GelaSkins, myself. To begin with, the selection is vast, with an art style that speaks to just about any kind of taste from the utilitarian to the bizarre and their DIY option has always seemed the perfect way to truly personalize your device.

GelaSkins have now announced a new line of covers specifically for the iPhone 4 that may solve the much-talked-about antenna reception issue and definitely offers a layer of coolness utilizing the custom home screen supported in iOS4.

Preset designs from all of GelaSkins’ online catalogs are now available for the iPhone 4, along with customizable skins through the Do-It-Yourself service.

The new line of GelaSkins for the iPhone 4 cover the front and back of the device, giving it both style and scratch protection. Optional skins also cover the sides of the iPhone 4 with the desired design, with users being able to opt out of the side coverage if they want to showcase the phone’s metal frame.

The DIY GelaSkins design service offers users the option to turn their own artwork into custom covers (not only for iPhone 4 but for any device GelaSkins can be made to cover). And iPhone iOS4 users can now download free, matching wallpapers that continue the image through the iPhone 4’s screen, offering a continuous design as shown in the images included here.

All GelaSkins vinyl protective covers are removable using patented 3M adhesive, which prevents air bubbles from forming and allows for easy application.

iShred LIVE, a free application from Frontier Design Group, and GuitarConnect, from the venerable peripherals company Griffin Technology look to raise the bar for making Apple’s flagship portable devices essential pieces of gear for musicians of any skill level.

The $30 GuitarConnect cable features a 1/4″ spur that connects easily into guitars, basses, or any instrument with a 1/4″ input, and a stereo 1/8″ mini-plug that connects directly to iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad for use with audio applications such as iShred LIVE. The 6 foot cable provides an additional stereo 1/8″ mini-jack to connect headphones or audio cable for connection to a home stereo, amp, mixer, or other audio source.

iShred LIVE (iTunes Link) is a mobile app with amp modeling and stomp box effects for guitar, bass, and other instruments, letting users play real instruments through their device.

Perhaps you’ve seen a few XtraNormal text-to-video movies already. It says here you’ll be seeing more in the not-too-distant future.

Perhaps you’ve even seen this one already, but no matter, it’s funny enough to be worth watching again and again and again. Definitely NSFW for strong language, esp toward the end.

[via TechCrunch]

Details, details. Seems the EXIF data pushed to photographs taken with iPhone 4’s nifty new 5MP camera report the photographs as having been taken with a 3G, according to a discussion thread over at Flickr Help. One intrepid Flickr Pro user has crafted a script to handle the problem and even Flickr staff are admitting to having to use “a little hack and a script” to get the proper EXIF data displayed for iPhone 4 images.

Looks like there’s another to-do on the iOS4 patch everyone’s looking for any day now to fix that non-existent antenna problem.

Jonathan Mann once wrote a tune about Paul Krugman that went wildly viral and landed him on the Rachel Maddow Show. Now he’s written one about Steve Jobs and it remains to be seen where this one might take him, but it’s at least a pretty good song by our reckoning: “he’s the best at what he does though I hardly can define/what it is and what he has and that kinda blows my mind.”

Mann is a busy, creative guy who’s led a very interesting and adventurous life so far, which you can hear more about on his YouTube site. He has been writing a song and making a video a day since January 1, 2009 and while he admits he wants to be a star, he also cops to simply “trying to make my way through life.”

In addition to Steve Jobs’ Head (song #541), he recently posted song number #543, Let’s Get Along, which he shot and edited on his new iPhone 4. A dedicated Apple fan, Mann also uses a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro to record his material.

How come no one ever uses Windows gear to write songs about Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates?

[thanks to Derek for the tip]

Well, that didn’t take long. Within days of the iPhone 4’s public launch savvy entrepreneurs are already jumping on the device’s video chat capability to expand their offerings — and opportunities — in the sexual services industry.

With promises of a free iPhone 4 and a “very competitive salary” to women who want to participate, an online interactive pornography firm in New York has an ad up on Craigslist with a job description including “talk to potential clients and chat with them and perform various acts as desired by clients.”

The firm is requesting information and pictures – and hopes to launch before 9/1/2010.

[via Business Insider]

What it is: Auto Verbal Pro (iTunes link) is handy, if not quite full-featured augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) software that gives non-verbal people an inexpensive tool to communicate using an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

Why it’s cool: Other high-end AAC solutions such as Proloquo2go (iTunes link) cost well upwards of $100 while Auto Verbal Pro hit the iTunes store a couple of weeks ago at 99¢. The introductory price won’t last long but even when NoTie Software kicks its offering up to $30 it will still be a bargain for the help it can bring to people with autism or other conditions that make it difficult for them to communicate verbally.

With over 100 pre-programmed icons in its intuitive interface, Auto Verbal Pro makes it easy for a non-verbal person to say basic phrases such as “I am tired,” or “I am OK,” and things such as numbers, days of the week, shapes, colors, food items, animals and so on. There are 10 icons which can be custom programmed to utter more complex phrases, such as “This software is the bomb, isn’t it?” and a text entry field in which any phrase can be typed and played through the device speakers. Users can choose between large and small buttons, which can be very useful to the visually impaired or fat-fingered, and between male or female sounding computerized voices in low-fi or hi-fi quality.

While great strides have been made in recent years developing software to speak for us, Auto Verbal Pro showcases some of the limitations that persist. The built-in low-fi voicings are certainly intelligible but lack any kind of nuance or expressiveness. Hi-fi voicings are even more intelligible and slightly more expressive, but they require WiFi Internet access in order to work, since the files live on NoTie’s servers. When a custom or typed phrase is called on to use a hi-fi voice, the software connects to NoTie and plays back the sounds using QuickTime, which results in clunky, irritating delays. Where no Internet access is available, the program defaults to the low-fi voicing.

All and all, this is useful and potentially even quite amusing software; with good reason it quickly jumped into the Top 5 Paid Medical apps on the iTunes App Store.

Where to get it: Auto Verbal Pro (currently English-only, but with French, Spanish, and German versions planned) is available on the App Store for a limited time at 99¢, after which its price will jump to $30. It’s well worth investing a dollar now to see if it’s something that could be useful to you or someone you care about.

Buzz in the blogosphere as hordes of consumers began using their shiny new iPhone 4s on Thursday was all about whether Apple might have a problem on its hands with the device’s antenna. With some uncertainty as to how widespread the problem might be and as to whether it could be something hardware or software related, it does appear possible to hold the iPhone 4 in such a way as to cause it to lose reception and drop calls in progress.

A Macrumors reader reportedly emailed Steve Jobs about the issue, asking “What’s going to be done about the signal dropping issue. Is it software or hardware?” — to which Jobs initially replied in his classic, koan-like manner, “Non issue. Just avoid holding it in that way.”

In a more considered followup response that some are considering an “official statement” from Apple on the matter, Jobs called the problem “a fact of life for every wireless phone,” and advised users to “avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases. ”

No matter how this plays out in the coming days and weeks one thing certain is that, be it truly a hardware problem or merely a software issue — it’s not going to make AT&T any new friends in the U.S.

The best corporate profile of Apple since, well, Leander Kahney’s book Inside Steve’s Brain is in the July/August 2010 issue of Fast Company, published Thursday on the magazine’s website.

Author Farhad Manjoo does a fabulous job of “capturing something that feels like magic” behind Apple and the company’s success by delving into its relationships with current partners such as San Francisco design firm Eight, Inc., by speaking with former employees and others who have watched the company for years, and coming away with 10 essential lessons for any company wanting to become the Apple of its industry.

Of course it’s well known the secret to Apple’s success — notwithstanding Steve Jobs’ personal direction — is nothing more than “discipline, focus, long-term thinking and a willingness to flout the rules that govern everybody else’s business.” And yet, as Manjoo discovers, it’s also much more.

There’s a great series of photographs showing everyday, normal people dressed in the Steve Jobs “uniform” of jeans, running shoes and long-sleeve black mock turtleneck, from which one comes away amazed that only Jobs himself doesn’t look like a total dweeb wearing it. There’s a fabulous graphic by Jeremy Caplan, the iCensus (possibly available only in the print article), depicting who matters (and who doesn’t) in Apple Nation.

And in the end we learn how clues to the future are already built in to Apple’s most current products, and why “we’ll only be able to spot them in retrospect.”

Highly recommended.

Like the Apple gear they love to dissect, iFixIt’s teardowns seem to just get better and better. Benefitting from the kindness of a customer whose iPhone 4 was delivered early yesterday by FedEx, the premier DIY evangelists took apart and photographed in beautiful detail a brand new iPhone 4, describing the many amazements Cupertino designers and engineers have rolled out with Apple’s newest portable communication device.

Among the discoveries this time out are:

• the ease with which the battery is accessed and removed.
• iFixIt’s CXO Luke called Apple’s integration of the UMTS, GSM, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth antennas into the stainless steel inner frame something that can “only be described as a work of genius.”
• The 1.3mp front-facing and 5mp rear-facing cameras have independent boards, making it possible to remove the cameras without damaging the phone.
• 512MB RAM confirmed.
• 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 core processor.
• Chips from Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Numonyx, Samsung, ST Micro, Skyworks, Texas Instruments, and TriQuint.

A look at the photographs — and there are many more at much higher resolution available at the iFixIt teardown pages — really gives one a sense of the delicate beauty beneath the already gorgeous surface enclosure of the iPhone.

Kudos to Apple and its manufacturing partners for delivering such a well-made device, and to iFixIt for tearing the thing apart with such meticulous care and attention.

What it is: i2KQuickage is curiously named but unbelievably powerful photo panorama software from the genius minds at DualAlign, software developers whose primary markets have long been medical communities and defense sorts. There’s no reason to keep this software’s incredible charms from the broader photography market, though – it gives even the humblest talents and rigs (such as those possessed by this reviewer) the power to make arresting panoramic images with just one click of the mouse.

Why it’s cool: If you ever spent time using photo editing software to stitch together several photos into a panorama, you likely praised the heavens with the arrival of auto-stitching and panorama tools to Photoshop. But even Photoshop users — and users of other specialized software such as Double Take, which integrates well with both Aperture and iPhoto — still have to deal with quite a number of considerations to get the job done. Image registration, correction for exposure anomalies across the range of images used to build a panorama, distortion correction, seam selection and blending, and final image processing — Photoshop, Double Take and other solutions all require multiple user choices and steps to achieve optimal results.

i2KQuickage ends all that. Its proprietary algorithms produce stunning panoramas — with the user’s responsibility being no more than selecting the images to be used and clicking the “Create Montage” button. Even using images captured with a camera set in the “Auto” mode, which can led to dramatic differences in illumination and exposure between
images, even with movement of people and natural phenomena (such as waves on a beach) in the photos, the results produced by i2KQuickage are outstanding.

It should come as no surprise that with the iPhone’s early delivery the boys at iFixIt have already got their hands on one and are opening it up and exposing its innards for all the world to see.

The process is ongoing.

Kind of like getting advance notice of a trainwreck, isn’t it?

Perhaps the best iPhone 4 Promo video Apple would never want you to see.

“It’s probably safe to say we invented a new metal.”

[via iPhoneSavior]

If you know (or care) anything about how computers work, you understand that RAM is one of the most important technical specifications by which a device’s overall performance capabilities may be judged. Simply put, more RAM generally equates to more performance, all other things being equal.

The original iPhone and the iPhone 3G each came equipped with 128MB RAM and if you’ve had the opportunity to use one of those devices alongside an iPhone 3G S (which added still camera zoom and video, among other things) or an iPad, you have seen the performance difference between 128MB RAM and 256MB. It’s why Steve Jobs went on about how blazingly fast the iPad is when he introduced it.

It’s only logical that with the dawn of multitasking in the latest iteration of iOS and with on-the-fly video editing via iMovie as well as video calling coming to iPhone 4, the latest hardware needs and is getting a RAM upgrade.

Which is yet another good reason explaining those 600,000 iPhone 4 pre-orders. And perhaps even a good reason for waiting on the next iteration of the iPad.

[via Macrumors]

Who can say Apple doesn’t make it as easy as possible to get in on the application Gold Rush founded on its major Operating Systems, iOS and Mac OS X?

The company posted Thursday 100 in-depth technical sessions from WWDC 2010, offering would-be developers free access to advanced techniques, allowing code monkeys everywhere to better grok the revolutionary technologies in iOS and Mac OS X.

All videos are free for download to registered Apple Developers, and portable on Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Steve Jobs rolled out Apple’s iPhone 4 Monday at the WWDC 2010 Keynote in San Francisco, calling his company’s “new baby” a device that “changes everything. Again.”

But does it?

When Apple introduced the original iPhone in 2007, it altered the entire mobile phone market by emerging into a near vacuum, creating need and desire in millions of consumers who had no idea they needed or desired what the iPhone had to offer.

Today, some believe the iPhone has become passe based solely on its relative ubiquity across the landscape it both created and has managed to dominate for three years.

Others believe competitors such as Google, Palm and Blackberry have in the meantime produced equally effective, if not superior products that will, over time, equalize the distribution of market share among Apple and its rivals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmZkrdhOjeQ

It’s hard to remember when one of Steve Jobs keynote speeches WWDC had a glitch, but the Demo Gods weren’t smiling on Jobs today. Thanks to network problems, Jobs had to ditch on a demo because of Wi-Fi trouble. But maybe it’s not some luckless Apple engineer’s fault: The same thing happened to Google during its developers conference last month at the same venue.

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