Adam Rosen - page 9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXkoIBDXwd8

Taking their iPhone Where No iDevice Has Gone Before, a father and son in Newburgh, NY recently took a weekend science project to new heights.  Luke and Max Geissbuhler attached an HD Video Camera, iPhone and some styrofoam packing to a weather balloon, then launched their homemade satellite on a journey that lasted 72 minutes and climbed over 100,000 feet into the atmosphere!

Halloween is Big Business in historic Salem, Massachusetts.  It’s now High Tech too.  For the 29th Haunted Happenings Celebration, the annual festival of witches, ghosts, and fall in New England, the town has created a new Haunted Happenings App for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

The app features info about the Festival Calendar of Events, local attractions and museums, restaurant and retail listings, and directions on how to get to Salem (tip: plan ahead and leave time).  Users also have an opportunity to purchase tickets for some events and attractions directly from the app.

Let the Frightful Fun Commence!  [via boston.com]

Macs are solid machines, but (like many of us) they have a tendency to slow down and get more lethargic over time.  Launching and switching programs takes longer, the dreaded Spinning Beach Ball appears more often, and soon even simple tasks become arduous.  What’s going on?

Many things can decrease performance, but several culprits are common: not enough disk space, not enough RAM, and running too many apps at once.  I see these in my consulting business regularly.

Who says old computers are worthless?  The (former) Mac Museum of Franklin Park NJ, which we reported up for sale on eBay last week, has found a buyer. Closing price after 20 bids: $10,000!

The Museum’s models include the Lisa, Mac 128k, Plus, SE/30, Color Classic, Mac Portable, TAM, Newtons, etc., along with lots of posters, peripherals and paraphernalia.  It’s a very respectable price for a longtime labor of love, hopefully the buyer will be able to fulfill curator Gil Poulsen’s goal of making the collection more publicly available.

In related news, Vintage Mac collectors worldwide are now updating their own inventory valuations…

Vintage Macs come and go, Vintage Mac Museums typically tend to Grow.  One particularly impressive Museum is Moving On. The Mac Museum of Franklin Park, NJ has been put up for sale on eBay:

Due to the owner’s pending relocation, The Mac Museum of New Jersey is closing its doors, and this wonderful collection of vintage Macs and rare Apple products is being sold.

This famous collection and its curator have been featured on CNN, MacAddict magazine and The RetroMacCast podcast. The auction of consists of more 20 rare and distinguished Apple products, several books, manuals, installer floppy disks and CDs, along with nine framed posters, speciality items and more. Note: This collection will only be sold in its entirety as a complete collection. [eBay]

Models include the Lisa, Mac 128k, Plus, SE/30, Color Classic, Mac Portable, TAM, Newtons, etc., along with lots of posters, peripherals and paraphernalia.  A trove of Mac lore indeed; if I had the room, and the money, I’d love to add this all to my own collection.  How much is all this Mac history worth?

We’ll know on October 7, when the auction ends. Some lucky collector will take the prize – then need to pick it all up in a big truck themselves!

[via RetroMacCast]

Taking a break from the Smartphone Wars to fight a growing threat, Apple and RIM are speaking with one voice when it comes to a common scourge afflicting their App Stores:  No More Fart Apps!

According to Alan Panezic, RIM’s Vice President of Platform Product Management:

For us, apps are all about adding real value to the end-user’s life and creating revenue for developer. We don’t need 200 fart apps in App World. Those are apps you’ll use three or four times then never open again. [recombu]

This mirrors the sentiment expressed by Apple three weeks ago with the release of their App Store Development Guidelines:

We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted. [Apple]

You know the scourge must be serious when Apple is forced to take this stance even though their own Director of Applications Technology (and Influencer of App Store Approvals), Phillip Shoemaker, previously developed fart apps for the iPhone.

This was probably inevitable.  I suspect we’ll survive.  But Cartman is furious.

[via SlashDot]

The new iPod nano’s diminutive size keeps inspiring geeks worldwide to a variety of hacks.  News today from Japan of the iSpeck’s ability to fit nicely inside the display slot on an old Sega Dreamcast VMU.

The Sega buttons do not control the iPod (yet?) but it’s safe to say this case offers good drop protection, and the headphone cord coming out the side doesn’t look as dorky as with an iWatch.

More photos and videos of the making on the vendor’s original Japanese website.  [via TUAW]

Never letting a good opportunity go to waste, Scoopertino reveals that Steve Jobs’ recent incident at Japan’s Kansai International Airport was actually a field test of Apple’s newest product:

“iPod ninja fits into that sweet spot between the iPod touch and a small handgun,” says Apple spokesperson Ted Wetmore. “It gives you peace of mind. You can either enjoy your music on the device — or you can fling it at anyone who looks at you funny. With a little practice, you can take down a foe at 50 feet.”

However, there is a dark side to the new iPod. As iPod ninja sales boom, some blogs are already reporting a “death grip” problem even worse than the one that plagued iPhone 4. If you hold iPod ninja in a certain way, you may require immediate medical care.

“There is a learning curve,” admits Mr. Berry, “and Apple does recommend the use of a protective case.” [Scoopertino]

Credit card, photo ID and criminal background check required for purchase.  This could have the potential to be a real killer product….

[via iPhoneSavior]

The iPod Click Wheel’s days seem numbered at Apple.  With the iPod nano having abandoned tactile functionality for a touchscreen (and iWatch emulation), and the iPod shuffle never having earned the honor, only the iPod Classic (itself a senior citizen) now sports the versatile, groundbreaking interface.

Many a jogger, commuter or pocket-iPod user has spent countless hours twirling the Click Wheel dial and listening to music – not to mention playing Brickles!

Or sometimes, you make music with the Click Wheel.  As nostalgically shown by Matt and Keith over at Matt’s Macintosh (who clearly seems to be enjoying his Final Cut Pro workstation)!

Apple’s Find My iPad feature strikes again, this time a cross-country escapade with a happy ending.  It begins when Southwest traveler Curtis Cogdill left his iPad on the airplane when traveling from Sacramento, Calif., to Portland, Ore:

After some discussion as to whose fault it was, Cogdill used his iPod Touch and Apple’s Find My iPhone MobileMe app to locate the iPad. While the family was in Oregon, the iPad had taken a cross-country trip to Orlando, Fla.

“You could zoom all the way in,” Cogdill said. “You could tell it was sitting where an airplane would be sitting at the terminal.” [CNET]

But the story doesn’t end there.  The wayward iPad soon took another journey.  While tracking his iPad, Cogdill watched as his beloved iSlate left the airport and traveled to a nearby home.

Lost, then found, then stolen – what a day.

Fortunately the story has a happy ending.  A Southwest supervisor, along with the police, recovered the iPad soon after the rightful owner contacted the airline.  The family is happy with the outcome, and MobileMe likely has another lifetime subscriber.

[via CNET]

Like a time travel scenario where you meet your own grandfather as a child, enthusiasts working with the Einstein Newton Emulator project have ported the Prodigal PDA to the iPhone.  The current implementation is only available as source code and runs a bit slow, but is an actual working version of NewtonOS complete with handwriting recognition and familiar input gestures.

Your choice of smartphone may tell more about you than you realize. Various sources are reporting on a Nielsen Mobile Insights survey about mobile phone usage; among other findings: iPhone users prefer chicken, while Android owners love ribs.

[coupons.com] examined its mobile coupon usage from the different platforms and came up with some staggering results. Did you know that women’s body wash coupons were routinely used by iPhone owners while men’s body wash was often purchased by Android owners?

If that doesn’t floor you, you should know that iPhone owners buy baby products 42 times more than Android users. Google OS users are more apt to use pain-relief coupons though, probably because of the headaches of using Android’s multimedia player. [intomobile]

According to the Wall Street Journal additional details from the survey reveal that a higher proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds use Androids than iPhones, BlackBerry users tend to use their phones more for business purposes than entertainment, and iPhone users tend to be more affluent and better educated.

I’m not sure whether this is more useful as flame-bait or marketing demographics, but it’s fun!

[via Digg]

Well that didn’t take long.  Steve Jobs quipped that the new iPod nano would make a good wristwatch, and last week brought news of the first iPod nano watch band.  Now several contenders are offering products for sale.

And the iWatch was born.  And it was Good.

Provided you’re willing to look like a geek with a headphone cord dangling from your wrist when you listen to music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGmRKSds9OY

Proving a thing or two about making the most of what you have – unlike Microsoft – Amazon has come out with a cute ad poking fun at using the iPad in bright sunlight, and its premium price to boot.

I’m an iPad fan, but I will admit the little Never-Say-Die eReader does win on these fronts…

[via Digg]

Celebrating the release to manufacture of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft employees held a mock funeral Friday for the iPhone and Blackberry on their Redmond campus:

Employees dressed up in fancy dress and also modified cars to include Windows Phone branding. Aside from the crazy outfits the workers made fake hearses for giant BlackBerry and iPhone devices. Employees cheekily claimed they had buried the competition with Windows Phone 7. [Neowin]

Mourners and pallbearers were seen holding signs such as “Windows Phone 7 OS Platform buries the competition” and performed a funereal dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller as part of the remembrances.

The latest iPhone Killer launches on October 11.  Is it too early to call this another premature obituary?

[via AppleInsider]

All Mac applications and system functions have preferences, but there are often more options available than are accessible via the User Interface.  Using the Terminal in Mac OS X in conjunction with the defaults write command, you can control behavior of the Finder, iTunes, etc. in ways that you otherwise can’t.

We noted the use of this command with the iTunes 10 button fix last week:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window 1

Following is a list of some other useful commands I’ve compiled which will work in Snow Leopard.

At long last Apple has released iOS 4.1, which includes bug fixes for iOS 4 performance issues on the iPhone 3G.  Having suffered for months with 4.0 on my 3G,  I rushed home yesterday to upgrade when hearing that 4.1 had gone live.  After a day of use my impressions are definitely more positive than with the change from v3 to v4, but I wouldn’t describe the improvements as overwhelming.

The worst delays appear to be gone.  Under iOS 4.0 my 3G was experiencing delays of up to 10 seconds when opening  apps like Messages and Settings, these now launch in a few seconds.  Email messages load quicker, the on-screen keyboard is responsive with a shorter initial delay, and searching my contact list is relatively efficient again.  I was also able to start a song playing in iPod mode then jump around to several other apps without any skipping in playback.

I’m still experiencing notable delays when loading the Calendar app.  The iPhone appears to update my calendar via MobileMe each time I load the app, blanking out the screen before returning a few seconds later with my data.  I thought this was a bug in 4.0 but perhaps this is a change in the app’s behavior?

My overall (subjective) impression is that iOS 4.1 on the iPhone 3G is a tune-up of iOS 4.0, but isn’t a performance improvement over iOS 3.  The most egregious problems do appear to be fixed and the device is useable again.  That’s most important.

iPhone 3G owners, what’s your experience been so far?  Let us know in the comments.

Four school districts in California have teamed up with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in a pilot project to test the use of iPads in math education.  400 iPads will be distributed among six schools in the program for use in algebra classes:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt today announced a year-long pilot of the first-ever full-curriculum Algebra app for the Apple iPad. The pilot also represents the launch of HMH Fuse™, a new mode of curriculum delivery where interactive platforms and mobile devices bring learning to life for students by moving beyond the one-way experience of a print or digital textbook.

Through the revolutionary iPad environment, students can receive feedback on practice questions, write and save notes, receive guided instruction, access video lessons and more with the touch of a finger. The app’s multi-dimensional functionality combines instruction, ongoing support and intervention, allowing teachers and students to customize learning and meet individual needs.

The schools involved include Washington Middle School and Hudson K–8 in Long Beach Unified, Kings Canyon Middle School and Sequoia Middle School in Fresno Unified, Amelia Earhart Middle School in Riverside Unified, and Presidio Middle School in San Francisco Unified School District.

The iPad is a natural platform for use in education, it’s a magic sheet of paper which can display text, graphics and video, test students, provide internet access and facilitate student-teacher interaction.  Many colleges and universities have already begun exploring its possibilities.  I don’t doubt it will find a strong niche in grade school as well.

[via SlashDot]

From Vienna comes news of one of the most striking homes (and Mac home offices) I’ve ever seen. Designed by architects Najjar & Najjar, the owner of Villa F is an IT entrepreneur and aficionado of Macs and Lamborghinis.  He wanted a living space that reflected his passions.  The futuristic result is something which wouldn’t be out of place on the Starship Enterprise.

There is a vast open space that connects the entrepreneur’s working space with a lounge area, a bar and a kitchen.  Almost everything inside the Villa F is digitally controlled.  There are Plasma TVs, a huge aquarium with computer generated graphics, LED lighting and sound systems that respond at a click of the mouse. [Born Rich]

Well it didn’t take long after his Apple gig ended for Justin Long to switch to the Dark Side. Known for his portrayal of “Mac” along with John Hodgman as “PC” in Apple’s very popular “Get a Mac” ad campaign, Long is seen using (of all things) a Dell laptop in a promo shot for his new film Going the Distance.  We presume he’s calling his old pal PC for tech support in this photo.

First a jailbroken iPhone, now using a PC.  Justin, Justin, how did things get so bad so fast?

[via Macworld]

It’s official: the iPhone has joined the ranks of iFurniture.  Yesterday brought news of another iPhone coffee table, which joins a proud history of Apple-inspired furniture throughout the years.  In another Geek Trend, some members of the Cult of Apple can now kick their feet up both with and on their iDevices while lounging at home.

Steve Jobs confirmed in his press conference today that iOS 4.1 contains several bug fixes, including a fix addressing the poor performance of iOS4 on the iPhone 3G.  Alas we have to wait another week for the update to be released.  It will be hitting my iPhone as soon as iTunes says it is available.

I think it was notable that Jobs addressed this point very early in his presentation; the bugs mentioned are all major issues and need to be resolved.  The new Gaming Center and real-time graphics rendering of the A4 chip are impressive, but we 3G laggards are just looking to be able to send email and make calls again!

No comments about whether iOS 4.2 will support the 3G and older iPod touch models, the presentation merely included an asterisk that noted *not all models.   I think a cutoff at iOS 4.1 is appropriate for these devices if the performance problems are finally fixed.

Open source devotees, iPhone users and hedonists unite! News today that low cost, OpenBTS GSM cell phone service is being tested at Burning Man in a true trial-by-fire fashion:

Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that’s revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. Where do you want me to begin?

“We make GSM look like a wireless access point. We make it that simple,” describes one of the project’s three founders, Glenn Edens. [Network World]

The economic and environmental potential of the system is promising, particularly for remote and under-developed areas.

For those who like to work when they travel – and can afford a chauffeured Mercedes – news today of the iPad Car!  High end tuning shop Brabus has created iBusiness, a mobile office on wheels.

Based on the Mercedes-Benz S600, the Brabus iBusiness four-seater luxury sedan packs in a range of multimedia features, including two iPads in the rear seats with Bluetooth keyboards and mouse, an ultra-small Mac minicomputer under the rear shelf and a 64GB Apple iPod Touch. The German super tuners have fitted the Mercedes S600 iBusiness with a 15.2-inch TFT display with 16:9 aspect ratio and USB 2.0 ports in the rear compartment to hook up peripherals to the Mac. You can connect to the internet via UMTS and HSDPA. The two iPads control the complete BRABUS multimedia system and the car’s standard S-Class COMAND system with all functions such as radio, navigation system and telephone. [Born Rich]

With this setup, I don’t know that I’d want to get out of the car when I arrived at my destination.