Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco freelance writer who heads up Cult of Mac Magazine, our weekly publication available on iTunes. You can find her on Twitter and Google+. If you're doing something new, cool and Apple-related, email her.
The UK’s first iPhone photo show in a gallery called “An Exhibition for Hipstamatics” has been held over until February 11 at the Orange Dot Gallery in London.
The show features 157 prints – the same number of Hipstamatic 100 analog cameras made in the early 1980s that inspired the iPhone app – considered the best works from web site Hipstamatics.com. The site allows contributors to share and showcase their best hipstamatic shots alongside some inhouse originals.
And, if you love the pic so much you’d like to hang a copy, you can also buy prints online.
A dad whose daughter ran up his credit card while playing the Smurfs’ Village app has launched a Facebook group to convince Apple to ban in-app purchases in kids games.
The fledgling group – as of this writing, it has 20 members – started after Tobias Feldt’s daughter bought a load of Smurf extras by accident.
Feldt says Apple refunded the purchase immediately, with no questions asked – as it often does in these cases – but he decided the incident shouldn’t end there.
Feldt has tried to teach his two children to play games responsibly. His oldest daughter, age nine, was “devastated” when she found out that she had run up a bill playing the game.
Back to the future? The computer in 2004 movie "The Incredibles."
If a device works on a movie audience, it’ll also work as a real-world product. That’s the “meta lesson” from Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff who study how sci-fi interfaces in movies make it off the silver screen and vice versa. (Is that the coolest job ever, or what?)
Despite the unfortunate late-afternoon slot – the tide of Macworld attendees was on its way outside – about a hundred people showed up to listen to findings on their forthcoming book, “Make It So – Learning from SciFi interfaces.”
Noessel, an interaction designer and Shedroff, program chair of the MBA in Design Strategy at the California College of the arts, believes that Steve Jobs may have used the 2004 Pixar movie “The Incredibles” to test whether audiences would accept the idea of a tablet computer.
Your scrawl, captured with digital pen and saved with Evernote.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 – The twin booths for Livescribe and Evernote are mobbed this morning. Though the alliance between the popular virtual notebook and productivity suite and the MP3 pen was announced a few months ago, there’s something about seeing what they can do together that makes for a real-two-great-tastes-that-taste-better-together moment.
Ray Toledo of Evernote is busy fielding questions from teachers — three stop by while I’m there — who are asking questions about how to use the service to keep notes in a cloud system that can be accessed by students. He shows them how Evernote can recognize handwriting so you can take a picture of a whiteboard then search for the term in your database, share it online with groups or send it as an email.
It’s not the first time he’s been asked these questions — Evernote has an ongoing series on how to use the service in education — and he also assures them that the free version is probably sufficient the needs of most for pennywise educators. (As an Evernote aficionado and prolific clipper, I’d tend to agree. I’ve never exceeded even a third of 40 megabytes free space per month.)
They’re also showing the slick looking Echo, but Toledo assures me that if I update the software for my 2GB Pulse model, I can still integrate with the note service.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Five minutes on the show floor at Moscone West and the florescent lights, flashing cameras and jostling crowd have got me wanting to bolt.
So I put on some headphones for a demo of Naturespace, an app that billed as “holographic audio” that promises to help users “relax, meditate, escape and sleep.”
Gary Goldstein tells me the “aha” moment that started the company came by accident. A group of sound engineers left a high-end mic recording in a forest by accident and came across the recording months later.
Transported back to the idyllic scene, they realized there was a huge difference in sound quality between studio recorded nature sounds and those captured outdoors with optimal equipment.
There are currently six free tracks for your iPad, iPhone and iPod and another 80 available ranging from $0.99 to $3.99.First timers at Macworld, they came to show off an iPad version of the app launched late 2010.
Although some of the tracks (“Peyote” and “Loki” ) might do a little more for you than soothe, as will the incredibly powerful lightning storms. As a fan of computer assisted meditation, I liked the app — especially since the sound has been optimized for Apple earbuds — great if you are an insomniac (like me) who never goes to bed without an iPod loaded up with some droning audio books handy.
Goldstein says he doesn’t have a favorite, but frequently uses the app for a quick mental escape. His current winter favorite is the soothing sounds of warm Hawaii.
Three years after opening doors in Beijing, China has Apple’s highest-grossing stores worldwide, outselling New York’s iconic Fifth Avenue “cube” location.
“Apple has an iconic product, and they are well-positioned in China,” said Ted Dean, president of Beijing-based technology consultant BDA China told Business Week. “There is a category of consumer in China that wants the best-in-class product, and they are willing to spend to get it.”
Apple’s Fifth Avenue store sells the equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz C300 in iPods, MacBooks and iPhones per square foot and is the top-selling store on the tony street.
But the four Apple stores in China generate, on average, the highest traffic and highest revenue of any company stores in the world, Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said during the Apple earnings call recently.
Apple plans to open doors on 40-50 stores worldwide in 2011, over half of them will be outside the U.S.
Looks like we should update our bucket list of Apple stores to visit.
A city in Northern California is crowdsourcing first responders with an iPhone app.
Called Fire Department, the app is the aimed at the 20,000 people in San Ramon trained in CPR.
Developed by the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District for the city about 34 miles east of San Francisco, the free app sends citizens 911 alerts, including requests for CPR.
If the cardiac emergency is in a public place, the application uses GPS technology to alert citizens about urgent CPR requests. The app also tells citizen rescuers to the exact location of the closest public access Automated External Defibrillator (AED).
“It’s volunteerism in an entirely new way,” said San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District Fire Chief Richard Price.”It’s volunteering 2.0.”
Lawyers defending a pair of brothers accused with murdering for the mob want to give them iPods so they can review the evidence against them, ensuring they have adequate time and means to prepare a defence.
Fotios “Freddy” and Ty Geas, brothers and reputed mob enforcers, are accused in the 2003 murders of organized-crime boss Adolfo Bruno and henchman Gary D. Westerman.
Their lawyers say they have had only two hours per week over four months to pore over thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of audio recordings, all of it potential evidence offered by prosecutors for a trial at U.S. District Court in Manhattan beginning March 8.
Heading to San Francisco to MacWorld? Here are some things to do during your precious free time – between strippers, actors and coffee, we’ve got you covered.
1. Go to a Strip Club
Eleven of the city’s big name strip clubs in North Beach are offering free or discounted admission with your Macworld badge. They include the SF classic hotspots like the Hungry-i, the Condor and the Garden of Eden as well as Centerfolds and the Gold Club.
It begs the question: do they think Macworld is exclusively a man’s world, or that all Macs are horny and lonely? You decide.
Extra tip: if you’re into multitasking — and don’t mind the smell of strawberry body oil while you eat — the Hustler Club reportedly has an excellent happy hour buffet.
If you’re looking for something to do in San Francisco during Macworld, eleven of the city’s strip clubs are offering half off admission with your Macworld badge.
When I first spotted this two-page centerfold ad in SF Weekly I wondered: do they think Macs are more randy or just more lonely than other tech people?
There are tech conferences every day of the week in San Francisco – this is the first time I’ve seen a big ad for a group of strip clubs promoting discounts for tech-conference goers.
Also: don’t they know a lot of the attendees are women? You can see from our last year’s “Faces of Macworld” gallery by Traci Dauphin that Macworld isn’t necessarily a man’s world. Dunno. Maybe I should gather a fistful of dollar bills and some geek girls for an expedition.
Apple’s iPad tablet computer may be the perfect vehicle to view glossy magazines, but the iTunes subscription model has some publishers ready to turn the page.
On both sides of the Atlantic, publishers are grumbling about Apple’s iTunes store. Some popular US publications, including the New York Times and Playboy, recently announced web-based subscriptions that will offer more flexible options and control over content than iTunes. In Europe, Apple faces a probe by Belgian antitrust authorities over whether it is abusing its market position by requiring that publishers only sell subscriptions through iTunes.
Although publishers aren’t necessarily keen to pay Apple a cut of each subscription they sell, that’s not the only issue. Sales through iTunes means that Apple controls subscription data — and access to their own subscribers.
“If Apple allowed real subscriptions in iTunes and shared the user data they collect with publishers, that might end the war right there,” said Marco Formento, Global Digital Director at De Agostini Editore, an Italy-based group which publishes in 13 languages and 30 countries. “Otherwise, a lot of publishers will go around Apple to keep that contact with their clients.”
Mike Daisey isn’t afraid to rant. The mercurial storyteller first made a name for himself on stage by decrying the state of American theater. Tech is a natural target for him – he’s survived a stint at Amazon.com and takes apart computers to relax – so he really makes his point forcefully with a two-hour monologue called “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” onstage now through Feb. 27 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. (See our review of the show here.)
During our 40-minute conversation, I get the uncomfortable feeling he’s ranting directly at me. In fact, the show takes tech journalists to task for being subservient to the industry as well as missing the whole story of where all the shiny gadgets we report about so breathlessly come from. Ahem.
Cult of Mac talked to Daisey about why both Apple fans and PC people will enjoy his show, as well as his own gadget gear and why donning Steve Jobs’ signature black turtleneck on stage would’ve been “fucking stupid.”
Perhaps it’s another case of putting your tweet in your mouth, but Playboy founder and patriarch of the sexy mansion of the same name has announced, yet again, that his centerfolds will be available as mamma made them come March.
It’s not yet clear whether Playboy would be sold via iTunes — another bone of contention this week as one Euro-crat called the anti-trust on Apple for these subscriptions making the claim that Apple is abusing its position.
Small, sleek and fast: this video shows what a great cash register an iPad can make for a high-traffic small business. Here it is getting the java going for the crowds at Joe in Grand Central Terminal in New York.
ShopKeep.com is behind the point-of-sale app designed for small businesses that can also print out receipts and even makes a satisfying ka-ching when the sale rings up. The iPad register also transmits sales to its web-based BackOffice so that managers using ShopKeep’s BackOffice can track sales in real time and can manage inventory, run reports and export the data.
We’ve been seeing a lot of iPads in small businesses like restaurants, but this may be the first cash register to face a similar commuter onslaught.
The folks at ShopKeep tell us that they’re also ringing up tabs in New York with iPad cash registers at Steve’s Ice Cream on 42nd Street and 5th ave. and at Joe in the Northwest Corner of the Columbia University building.
Sure, iPad tills aren’t quite taking over Manhattan, but soon they may be a common sight in small businesses.
Mike Daisey in "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs"
Master storyteller Mike Daisey takes to the stage in a one-man show about Apple founder Steve Jobs debuting in Berkeley.
Titled “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” the monologue will likely have a new resonance since Jobs announced his medical leave from the Cupertino company January 17.
“It is almost impossible to imagine Apple without him, and there’s a palpable sense of loss and change as the tech industry struggles to know what this will mean for its future,” Daisey wrote on his blog after the announcement.
In addition to being “obsessed” with Apple, Daisey is his known for talking intelligently about tech on stage, from his monologue on Nikola Tesla called “Monopoly!” to recounting his own stint in the customer service trenches at Amazon.com in “21 Dog Years.”
Behold TankBot, a nifty little robot you can control with your iPhone, iPod or iPad.
Plug in the dongle and you can use your iDevice to control TankBot as it navigates, roams and clears obstacles. Then charge it up with a USB cable instead of batteries, a 30-minute charge gets you 15-minutes of over-hill-and-dale action.
Perhaps the best part: the price should hover somewhere under $20.
Desk Pets International brought it out at the New York Toy Fair, it’ll be in stores sometime this year. They are touting it as the first cheap robot toy that fully integrates with Apple devices.
All I know is that every year, I pretend to buy something for a nephew when it’s really for me. TankBot is going on the nephew wish list.
A game developed by a 14-year-old has knocked Angry Birds from its perch as the top free game in iTunes.
The game, called Bubble Ball, is a physics puzzler developed by Utah teen Robert Nay. Nay wrote the 4,000 lines of code using Corona SDK. He did have had a little help from his mom, Kari, who lent a hand with the graphics. Although he’s only in the 8th grade, Nay has been programming for six years and currently codes in languages including HTML, PHP, AJAX and Java Script.
Bubble Ball launched December 29, shortly after iTunes announced that Rovio’s Angry Birds ruled the roost as the top paid and free game.
Nay’s game has had some three million downloads since launch.
What’s it like?
Players try to move a bubble from point A to point B. To keep things moving along, players use geometric shapes to create ramps, platforms and catapults to send the bubble to its destination.
Simple, but perhaps that is what catapulted it to the top of the crowded gaming heap on iTunes.
I haven’t played it yet, but looking forward to checking it out: I’ve got three versions of Angry Birds on my phone already.
Police in Louisville, Kentucky used the “Find My iPhone” app to arrest an iPhone thief — well, more some guy who saw an unattended iPhone and took it.
It’s the latest happy ending story for the app, which debuted in June 2010, and first made the police blotter about a month later when cops recovered stolen iPads and iPhones belonging to an Apple employee.
Police say the iPhone perp is 19-year-old Kyle Just, who walked off with the phone he found on a table outside the Golden Nugget Bar. The owner says he put the phone down while having a cigarette, then turned around to find his iPhone missing.
Two members of the Goatse Security group, who outed an AT&T security breach that exposed over 120,000 iPad 3G customers’ personal data, were hit with criminal charges in federal court.
Prosecuters said that Daniel Spitler and Andrew Auernheimer were each charged with a count of fraud and a count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.
The charges come seven months after vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Goatse security, who wrote a script that harvested iPad 3G owners’ ICC-IDs (or integrated circuit card identifier, used to identify SIM cards to a network) and email addresses through exploiting a hole on AT&T’s website.
The number of accounts compromised — first thought to be about 114,000 — was upped to 120,000, some of them belonging to celebrities or other notable public figures.
The F.B.I announced that it will be holding a press conference later today to discuss charges against the pair.
Reuters reported that neither Goastse nor Apple had any immediate comment, we’ll keep you posted.
With the announcement of his leave from day-to-day operations at Apple, Steve Jobs set off a flurry of speculation and sent some stock prices skittering.
A MacBook with swollen battery, CC-licensed via camerons on Flickr.
MacBook Pro owner Tommy reports that his 1.5-year-old replacement battery is swelling and that an Apple service rep told him that this is “normal.”
First, nobody seemed to know what to do with me or who I should talk to. Second, while they Apple Customer Representative could look up the age of my computer by the serial number, they had no way of tracking (and “proving the age”) of my battery by its unique serial number. Third, while nearly everybody I talked to seemed to show much concern over this safety issue, the “Senior Customer Representative” who finally spoke to me was quite apathetic about my battery problem. According to him, this issue is normal and the result of wear-and-tear on the battery and, more importantly, this was Apple’s official position.
Since the battery is too old to be covered by Apple’s one-year warranty, the rep refused to replace it. That is, unless it might cause bodily injury or fire.
Some of the crowds passing through Grand Central Terminal in New York will be carrying coffee drinks purchased from an iPad cash register at Joe.
ShopKeep.com is behind the point-of-sale app designed for small businesses that can also print out receipts and even makes a satisfying ka-ching when the sale rings up. The iPad register also transmits sales to its web-based BackOffice so that managers using ShopKeep’s BackOffice can track sales in real time and can manage inventory, run reports and export the data.
We’ve been seeing a lot of iPads in small businesses like restaurants, but this may be the first cash register to debut in such a high-traffic area.
You can’t see bare-chested women in the iTunes store, but a big fat nude male torso that makes music is perfectly acceptable.
Enter the Belly Jam app, wiggly musical goodness offered gratis on iTunes. OK, musical goodness is pushing it, but the idea is you touch the tummy or chest to make 16 different sounds.
The mechanism — slap that fat to make a soundtrack – is similar to apps like iBoobs, where users shook the iPhone to jiggle a pair of breasts.
Are your apps crashing? Is your beachball spinning?
Ask for guidance from the Hindu deity Ganesh, widely revered as the “remover of obstacles.”
Here a marble sculpture of the elephant god is shown troubleshooting with an Apple computer in a shop in Mahabalipuram, a locale known for its sculpture workshops Southern India.
