Lonnie Lazar - page 7

Valentine’s Day is almost over but maybe you have someone on your list who might appreciate your going uber-digital in your expression of affection, even if it’s a tad belated.

Then you might want to check out QR loveCode, a quirky little free app for iPhone and iPod Touch that gives you a choice of several love messages you can embed into QR coded thought bubbles on a series of stylistic digital art pieces you can share via email.

QR codes are big in Japan, where many cell phones come equipped with QR decoding software that works through the phones’ camera.

Here in the US, the recipient of your QR loveCode message will need to download QR scanning software in order to read your message. But guess what?

There’s an app for that.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2010 — Much of the buzz on the Macworld floor this year has to do with audio and how Apple products and platforms create a nearly endless array of creative possibilities to leverage audio in documenting and networking people’s lives and endeavors.

One of the more exciting products we’ve come across in that regard is the new Mikey from Blue Microphones, an external stereo microphone for iPod and iPhone that brings stunning clarity and flexibility to portable audio recording.

Just moments after getting a review copy of the device and downloading Blue Microphones’ free field recording app from the AppStore, we recorded this interview with Stanford University professor Dr. Ge Wang talking about Smule, his iPhone app company, the future of music collaboration and Apple’s upcoming iPad.

Check the clarity of Wang’s responses and how they stand out from the cacophony of dozens of other people yapping within feet of us as we chatted on the Macworld expo floor.

Modern day hippies and endless jamming may not be among the first images that spring to mind when you think about Apple’s products and customer base, but check this promotional video for the premier Jam Band confab in the United States, the High Sierra Music Festival, and see how well the two play together.

High Sierra impressario David Margulies does a quite credible job of mimicking the classic Steve Jobs Keynote presentation method introducing the 2010 festival, to be held 4th of July weekend in Quincy, CA — he even incorporates images of the highly anticipated iPad to excellent effect and coins a new catch-phrase especially suited to his product: there’s an act for that!

The High Sierra clip is obviously a spoof, but it actually works to engage the viewer in the content, suggesting the elements of Job’s presentation style — if not, perhaps, the mock turtleneck and jeans — lie at the root of any successful product pitch.

SAN FRANCISCO MACWORLD 2010 — It’s hard to miss the FastMac booth at Macworld. Just to the right of the Expo floor’s main entrance, the growing gadget and peripherals company has a prime space on the first aisle that was chock-a-block with visitors clogging the walkway to peer in at product demos and snap up the company’s awesome Apple-oriented t-shirts on the conference’s opening day Thursday.

We received an exclusive demo of a product FastMac is rightfully excited about — an updated version of its iV extended battery and portable charger that could soon mute some of the widespread criticism of the iPhone’s anemic battery life.

Many products in the extended battery class are clumsy and brickish. Despite their utility they often fall into disuse because they fundamentally alter the sleek and sexy feel of the so-called Jesus Phone. The new iV, which will apparently come in two flavors, the iV Light and an as-yet unnamed version, could make many power hungry iPhone users rethink the proposition.

With a new, super light-weight construction and supple rubber-like feel, the next-gen iVs will come with a full enclosure for 100% protection of the phone in a form factor that barely increases the weight and dimensions of the naked phone.

With a built-in LED light that calibrates with the iPhone’s camera, still and video captures in low-light situations should help elevate iPhone photography to new levels of quality and creativity.

The still-unnamed product, which should be available “soon,” according to FastMac principal Michael Lowdermilk, will incorporate a red LED which, in combination with a free remote control app, will turn an iPhone into a universal remote that can be used to change TV channels, stereo settings and a host of other useful and disruptive functions.

With no looking back, Macworld is clearly moving on in the post-Apple era and companies such as FastMac stand to gain increased attention with innovative products such as the iV — this is definitely a company to watch.

“Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

— For What It’s Worth, Stephen Stills

That sound, the one emanating Wednesday from the stage at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and reverberating throughout the blogosphere and interwebs, the one heard in literally millions of conversations at lunch counters and water coolers and dinner tables across the globe, was the sound of another ding in the universe.

Once all the snickering about feminine hygiene finally dies down, once Apple finally puts the iPad into the retail chain that saw 50,000,000 people walk through the doors in the most recent fiscal quarter, once people — aside from jaded technology journalists and geekazoids — get the iPad in their hands, Apple’s description of it as a “magical and revolutionary” product will begin to come into focus.

Why?

Who knew Hitler was such a geek?

Apple introduced a whole new category of mobile device today with the iPad and in so doing has opened new vistas for software development that could eclipse the iPhone App Store’s 140 thousand titles in short order.

Not suprisingly, Apple VP Scott Forstall waxed giddily about the fact that iPhone apps will run on the iPad straight away, saying, “We built the iPad to run virtually every one of these apps unmodified right out of the box. We can do that in two ways — do it with pixel for pixel accuracy in a black box, or we can pixel-double and run them in full-screen. This is really cool.”

But the presentation also showed how developers have a new palette with the iPad’s display that broadens the development horizons quite a bit.

“If the developer takes the time, they can also take full advantage of the large touchscreen display in the iPad. We did that with our own internal apps, and we expect developers will want to do that too,” Forstall noted.

The new SDK is available today and includes all the tools developers need to create custom apps for the iPad.

If astronaut Leroy Chiao has anything to say about it, Apple’s iPhone may be the first smartphone in space.

The former NASA astronaut, who has four missions in space under his belt, including a six and a half month stint on the international space station, has been a Mac nut since 1985. Today he is the Executive Vice President of Excalibur Almaz, a commercial venture that hopes to be putting space tourists into true space journeys by sometime in the next few years.

Chiao was disappointed to have to abandon his preference for Macs during his time as a NASA employee (because NASA was a PC-only shop) but says his first purchase after leaving the US government space program was a new Mac.

He’s an iPhone user, too — although he relies mostly on his 3 year-old twins for app selection so far — but he’s confident Mac and iPhone both have roles in his company’s plans — as long as they “play well with the systems on board.”

What it is:  BumpTop for Mac is OS X software that gives you a whole new way of looking at and using your desktop, one that brings your computer screen into the realm of 3D imaging and instantly grows your monitor’s real estate – no matter how large or small – into a more productive palette than anything you’ve seen before.

Why it’s cool:  BumpTop represents a total re-thinking of the 20 year-old design artifact that is the standard desktop UI.

Now you can view your computer screen as a real desk, or more accurately perhaps, as the floor of a four walled room – and use all the space to put your stuff in piles, tack important things on the walls and slap sticky notes on everything – just like in real life.

Desktop minimalists are hereby free to skip the rest of this post.

When Shawn Ahmed travels to places such as Bangladesh to fight poverty he counts on iPhones and Macs to help him do battle.

Ahmed is the founder of a one-man global relief effort he calls the Uncultured Project and is using technology and social media in inventive ways to engage people across the globe in their common humanity.

In partnership with the Save the Children Foundation and USAID, Ahmed went last summer to a cyclone devastated village in Galachipa, Bangladesh to distribute non-food relief items to victims of the disaster. He provided individual donors to Uncultured Project real-time receipts for their generosity using his iPhone and TwitPic.

As seen in the clip above, Ahmed used his iPhone to show villagers in another Bangladeshi community videos made by the people in the west who helped bring safe, clean drinking water to their lives. “This is not a charity,” Ahmed said, “it’s an experiment in community.”

The 28 year-old native of Toronto, Canada quit his scholarship graduate studies at Notre Dame University after being inspired by Dr. Jeffery Sachs (author of The End of Poverty) to try and make the world a better place — one meaningful difference at a time.

“I’ve also been using the iPhone to report real-time in the field,” Ahmed said in an email. He makes extensive use of Twitter and YouTube to break down the distance between his supporters and the communities they support. Connecting to them with his iPhone, Ahmed said, “I hold votes on how I should help people in Bangladesh. Voting has led [to] school supply distributions to orphans and much more. And, of course, all my videos are edited on a MacBook.”

The Uncultured Project’s YouTube channel just went over 10,000 subscribers and Ahmed is hopeful for the prospects of his unpaid, unemployed, uncultured journey to help the poorest of the poor: “It’s about inspiring others to believe that we can be the generation that ends extreme poverty.”

What is it?
Political GPS is, hands down, the best way to leverage your iPhone or iPod Touch as a tool for political activism.

Created by Thomas Huntington, this handy dandy app can help pinpoint your personal location in the political spectrum, provides unprecedentedly comprehensive contact and biographical information for every senator and member of congress in Washington, DC, allows quick access to the full text and summary of every bill passed by the US Congress, back to the 106th — including all versions and amendments — and features the full texts of such seminal documents of freedom as the US Constitution, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Why it’s Cool:
Did you resolve to become more politically active in the coming year?

Perhaps you’re disenchanted with the return you seem to be getting from your vote in 2008 for Barack Obama or your local senator or congressperson. Perhaps you find yourself firmly in the Libertarian/Conservative quadrant of the political compass and smell both blood and an opportunity to swing the balance of power rightward in November’s midterm elections. Perhaps you’re just intrigued by the idea of a tool that might help you make your voice more easily heard with your representatives in congress.

Political GPS is the app you’ve been waiting for.

No flashy graphics or a fancy GUI here, but a quick 30 question survey helps you place your own political leanings on a compass-like map that measures general attitudes toward ideas of economic and social freedom, plotting your answers on axes measuring liberal/conservative and anarchist/totalitarian tendencies, as well as those for communism/libertarianism and socialism/fascism.

You can view your results in a theoretical landscape or plot them against the views of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Ronald Reagan.

Full disclosure: this writer’s views aligned most closely with Ghandi and the Dalai Lama.

Then the real fun begins. Political GPS’s Congress Tracker gives you detailed information for each member of the US Congress. From biographical information and links to each member’s website to in-depth voting information and the ability to easily contact each member by phone, email, or Twitter, Political GPS helps you to learn more about your congress.

The search engine built into political GPS is far more robust and sophisticated than something you might expect to pay $2 for. Search representatives by name or state, search congressional bills by topic, content, title, or bill number; the member tracker and bill tracker databases are linked, too. Comprehensive information about the laws passed by congress and the people passing them has never been so easily accessed.

Full text access to historical documents is the lagniappe in Political GPS. Easily study the US Constitution, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man right inside the app. Organized by Articles, Sections, and Amendments, it’s easy to go right to the area you want to read and it’s all easy on the eyes with large fonts and antique parchment backgrounds that give the documents a weighty feel without making them harder to read.

For anyone who believes in the idea that you should be the change you want to see in this world, Political GPS is certainly one of the coolest tools available to American iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Where to get it:
Political GPS is available at the Apple iTunes App Store in both free and $1.99 versions. But really, just pony up the $2 and make your voice heard.

Many — if not most — people await the future, some with great anticipation, others with more anxiety. But designers are a breed apart. Designers create the future today.

Yanko Design’s brilliant 2009 design retrospective showcases the web magazine’s passion for modern industrial design and original ideas. The feature highlights a number of talented, undiscovered designers, a few of whom chose Apple products and other computer technology ideas as jumping off points for products we’d not be surprised to see in production one day soon.

Check out our gallery selection of Yanko Design’s best thought provoking tech and transportation ideas for 2009, along with a couple creepy borg-like innovations we’d just as soon see remain on the drawing board.

An iPhone application developer has upped the ante on criticism of Apple’s App Store approval policies with apprejections.com, a website devoted to collating “all the known examples of rejected Apps.”

Adam Martin, CEO of UK-based Red Glasses, makers of three iPhone apps (and a software development start-up with a curiously thin web presence), created the site earlier this month to document and share all known examples of “what is actually rejected” from the App Store — and he pulls no punches in his critique of Apple’s process for deciding which apps and updates make it onto the iTunes App Store.

“Apple has a secret, undocumented, unquestionable, random process for deciding which applications to “allow” onto the deck,” claims Martin on the site. Ironically, his own BrainGame Summation (iTunes link) app had an update rejected this week for using a common workaround to bugs in the official Apple APIs; the worrkaround previously appeared to pose no approval problems but has apprently been the basis for several recent rejections.

“Apple point-blank refuses to document the criteria – or even to discuss the matter on anything except a case-by-case basis,” Martin writes, though he does allow that “in most cases, rejections [are] perfectly reasonable, and/or Apple had officially warned developers “don’t do this; we won’t allow it”.

But the site does take App Store gatekeepers to task for being, among other things, “unskilled staff [who] are given a technical tool (the secret static-analyer) [sic] which they don’t understand – but trust 100%, [causing them to] reject apps that haven’t done anything wrong, but which the tool (incorrectly) flags.”

Martin acknowledges that the fledgling site has only just gotten started, but writes that he’s “been following reports on app-rejection for over a year,” and aims to catalog everything unusual and unfair about the mysterious process for joining the 100,000 (and growing) iPhone apps available now on iTunes.

It’s now gone from “easy” to “tricky” to avoid having your App rejected by Apple, according to Martin.

We’ve written before in this space about Apple’s unique status as a Muse to creative people. In fact, the initial impulse for this post was a search for striking pieces of art created on the iPhone.

Those are out there, too, in droves — and we’ll be featuring them soon in another gallery post.

Today, however, we bring you something we didn’t quite expect to find: a series of art pieces that shed a bit of perspective on the dark side of Apple.

Isamu Sanada’s day gig is photography, but his passion is Apple mock-up design.

An amateur designer of fantasy Macintoshes with a website that showcases dozens of his speculative designs for Apple gear, Sanada got his mock-up cred back when he posted an amazingly prescient take on the Titanium G4 PowerBook months before the real deal was released.

Though he’s gotten lots of praise for his designs, Sanada has been quoted regarding his design chops humbly, saying, “Apple’s thought is more splendid than my thought.”

Hit the jump for more Steve Jobs lookalikes and if you find one out and about — or happen to be one yourself — send us a pic or post it on our Facebook wall and we may feature yours in a gallery post down the road.

Security software developers must think Mac users are quite daft. Tuesday afternon Symantec sent out a press release flogging its ‘discovery’ of a new trojan horse targeting Apple’s OS disguised as a ‘space invaders’ style video game in which killing invading aliens results in the program deleting files from the user’s hard drive.

Ooo.

The game in question is an art project called Lose/Lose that first appeared on the web back in September, created by digital artist Zach Gage and featured in Electrofringe’s current exhibition of online art, Electro Online 2009.

The idea behind the project is to use game mechanics to call into question the idea of mindless killing for fun. Are gamers so obsessive they must kill aliens at any cost? In the game, each alien is based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted.

Gage asks, “Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?”

The game has a clear warning at start-up that says, in scary red letters: killing aliens in this game will delete files from your hard drive.

Now Symantec is sending out an alert flagging the art project as malware.

“A new threat cleverly disguised as a classic video game is targeting unsuspecting Mac users,” Symantec said in an email to CultofMac.com. It continued:

The Trojan horse, known as Trojan.Loosemaque, is designed to look like a Space Invaders/Galaga style game. However, for every alien ship the user destroys, the program deletes a file from the home directory.   Symantec – the world leader in online security – recently discovered this new Trojan horse targeting Mac users and video of it in action can be seen here. Online games are increasingly becoming a target for virus creators, and this threat shows it’s a possibility regardless of the platform. While the author of OSX.Loosemaque actually informs people on his website that the game deletes files, there’s nothing stopping someone with more malicious intentions from modifying it and passing it on to unsuspecting users who don’t have security software installed.

Symantec is not the first company to flag Gage’s project. Security blockers such as Sophos’ Anti-Virus and Intego’s VirusBarrier X5 also define the game as a threat.

So is it art or is it malware? Are Mac users equipped to know the difference? Seriously, what do security software companies take us for?

An Estonian website claimed Tuesday to have broken news of a major bug in iPhone’s Safari app that could put unsuspecting iPhone users at risk of running up huge bills with their cellular service providers in certain cases.

The danger appears related to Safari’s failure to close connections with web servers that run Motion JPEG to stream video over the Internet. In the case where an iPhone user uses Safari to browse, for example, to the webcam on the island of Keri and then closes Safari in favor of another app or simply returns to the iPhone’s home screen, data continues to stream over the phone’s 3G or EDGE connection from the Motion JPEG-running server.

The Estonian report claims to have been able to run up over 740MB of data transfer in a little over an hour in this manner and that the only way to get Safari to properly sever the data link is to browse to another site before closing the app.

The bug would appear to affect only those iPhone users who do not pay for ‘unlimited data’ as part of their standard service plan, and thus poses no risk to at&t subscribers using their phones in the US, or to many European users with similar plans in their home countries.

With the rise of limited data plans in some countries, however, and in the case of users traveling with iPhones overseas using limited International Data plans, this could cause a real problem.

A request for comment from Apple PR remained unanswered at press time.

Adobe made its position on the unavailability of Flash for the iPhone clear Monday with a snippily worded announcement that points the finger squarely at Apple for any iPhone user who might end up at the ‘getflash’ web page.

But an interesting comment on the Reddit thread about the long-standing brouhaha makes it appear the Adobe folks might doth protest too much. Flash would suck the iPhone’s battery dry in less than an hour.

Earlier in the week we asked readers to post pics of their workspaces on our Facebook page for the chance to win a new Magic Mouse — and the response was great. So far, more than 90 of you have taken the time to become fans of Cult of Mac on Facebook, snap a shot and upload your pictures — thank you!

While everyone is waiting with bated breath to find out who’ll win the Magic Mouse (announcement to come tomorrow, Sunday, November 1), we thought readers might like to see a cool dozen of some of the most interesting.

Let us know what you think in comments below and feel free to continue posting your own shots over at the Facebook fan page.

When you’re among the top achievers in your given field of endeavor it only stands to reason you probably choose the best tools available to do whatever it is you do, both professionally and personally.

Our survey of some of the best of the best across a wide range of endeavors shows lots of those at the top of their games choose Apple gear when it comes to computing and entertainment and we offer here a gallery of 10 top machers from the fields of media, sports, entertainment, politics and elsewhere who choose Apple products to enhance and enable their achievements.

There’s a reason the game is called Follow the Leader, isn’t it?

Via ObamaPacMan

‘Tis the season for folks to bust out their best Home Ec skills (or their credit cards) in search of costumery to frighten and delight the young and old alike out trick or treating, or just looking for a few good laughs on Halloween.

Back in 2007, when the iPhone had been out just a few months, we saw a raft of costumes related to Apple’s newest technological wonderment. But so far in the succeeding years, we’ve not seen a whole lot of new takes on the idea and frankly, what we have seen has been pretty lame.

Look at the guy in the picture above. He had to be purposely dressing it down at a party full of Windows aficionados, right? But in the gallery that follows, we’ve had to reach back in time for things better than this. Apple fans seem to have fallen creatively short in recent years.

Is it possible nowadays to dress like a piece of technology known for its elegant design and not look like a complete (and uncomfortable) buffoon?

Let us know what you’ve found out there in comments below, or submit pics of your own awesome Apple-related costume designs and we’ll feature another gallery of the best down the road.

It’s been said countless times: one indicator of Apple’s superiority over Microsoft and Dell (and other major computer and electronics manufacturers that are — for the most part — associated with Windows) is the fact that Apple inspires creativity in the general populace on a scale that dwarfs the influence of any other computer-oriented company you’d care to name.

Some evidence of this can be found in the following gallery of 10 simply awesome wallpapers themed around nothing more complicated than the Apple logo. Perhaps you know others in this specific genre that belong in this class — we invite you to let us know about it in comments below.

And if you can find anything comparable out there built around a logo from Microsoft, Windows, Dell, HP, etc., do let us know about that, too.

Over 6 million songs in the iTunes Music Store. God knows how many albums that translates to, but we must be insane to try and pick 20 albums worth considering for their combination of music and artwork, right?

As long as we’ve got that straight on the front-end, then.

Herewith, a collection of 20 albums available on iTunes, loosely organized by release date (in reverse order) and presented with the thought they might make good additions to the much-ballyhooed iTunes LP upgrade hyped at Apple’s It’s Only Rock and Roll event in September.

No doubt readers may quibble with some (perhaps all!) of our selections; no doubt you’ll have suggestions of your own. Do let us know abut it in comments. All album links open in iTunes.