Rob LeFebvre - page 101

Check out the image above, and then marvel that Samsung put this together for the court case it lost to Apple a couple weeks back in US District Court. Judge Lucy Koh understandably excluded the slide from Samsung’s final argument documents – these comparisons have nothing to do with the actual merits of the case, but rather show that Apple was asking for a lot of money in damages.

Regardless of the facts, though, this image is pretty hilarious. It does show what a crazy amount of money companies are taking in and/or losing in our current “touch economic times,” rendering the phrase meaningless when set next to these kinds of figures.

I love movie trailers. I can while away a ton of time just tapping through new trailers via iOS’s universal iTunes Trailers app, checking out all the movies I’d like to see. It’s pure eye-candy, and usually contains most of the good stuff from movies, without all the annoying filler (I kid, I kid–sort of).

Of course, one of the (many) guilty pleasures of owning a new iPad is the super high resolution it affords. When playing movie trailers, then, why not be sure to have your iPad default to the 1080p High Definition when you’re watching the latest Cloud Atlas trailer, for example? Why not, indeed! Here’s how.

Before the Display preferences were available in the menu bar in OS X, connecting my Mac to an LCD projector was a tedious thing. When it arrived a few OS X versions ago, I showed everyone I worked with how much easier it was to use this, instead of hopping into the System Preferences every time they hooked their Mac up to an external monitor or projector. Then OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion came along and replaced the Displays menubar item with an AirPlay focused one, and I’ve missed the original ever since.

The developers behind third-party app, Display Menu, thought the same thing and fixed things for us all.

So you want to know what apps will best take advantage of your new iPhone 5 when you get it in your hot little hands this coming Friday? One way is to start searching AppShopper using a search string that includes “iPhone 5.” This will net you a real-time list of all the apps currently in the app store that have the text string in their “What’s New” update description in the App Store.

Closing its fourth round of funding, the mobile credit card processing company just raised $200 million, making it worth a staggeringly large $3.25 billion. The company, built by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame, allows anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or other compatible mobile device, to accept credit cards. Square is widely seen as the industry leader in the mobile payment-with-a-dongle space (I just made that term up), as evidenced by other dongles released shortly thereafter by the likes of PayPal and Intuit, among others.

In what may come as no surprise, the COO of Square, Keith Rabois, is on record at All Things D, saying that the transition from current registers and point of sale devices (like ATM card-swiping devices) to iPads or other tablets will happen within the next year and a half. Square’s partnership with Starbucks is only the first of the steps being taken actively by Square to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mint.com, the slick and extremely useful financial tracking website, also has iOS and OS X apps to natively keep an eye on your finances. The Mac app came out in early July of this year, and was updated to version 2.0 at the end of August. Today, however, it has gone from being a free app to asking for a cool $4.99.

One of the more useful features of modern browsing, the AutoFill function started on the desktop, then made its way to the iPhone and iPad a while ago. It lets your iOS device hold all the form data, populating the oft-repeated fields with your personal info like your name and address. That way, you don’t have to type it all in all the time, which is brilliant on a mobile device with a small touch-keyboard.

When you share a device, like I do with my iPad at home, you may not want to share this personal data. Until a proper multi-user experience comes to iOS, the best way to get around this is to clear out your personal info, and then turn off AutoFill. Here’s how.

In OS X Mountain Lion, you can set a Calendar notification for a repeating event on your iPhone, then get that notification on your Mac. Conversely, you can set a Calendar event on your Mac and get it when you’re out and about with your iPhone. Pretty slick, right? It’s all a part of Apple’s new iCloud integration, and it works pretty well.

But what if you really don’t want to be notified of a certain type of event when you’re on your Mac? In OS X Mountain Lion, you now have a few more options for notifications that come from Calendar.

MacHeist 4’s first nanoMission is live as of now, according to an email I just got from the organizers. Solving this one will net you one copy of NetShade, a $30 anonymous proxy software for your Mac that will let you search all those websites privately. While the prize isn’t a slam dunk by any means, it’s a nice little bit of kit for relatively little effort along with a bit of fun. Oh, and you’ll also be helping MacHeist donate 25% of the proceeds to a charity cause, so it’s definitely worth the karma points.

So, I’m hanging out on Twitter, basking in the Tweet-flow (you know what I mean, right?), when I start to notice this thing happening. FTL. I see it in a tweet by a game developer I follow. Then I see it in a tweet by another smart person I follow. Then it’s almost everywhere. FTL. FTL. Starship captaining (is that a real word?). FTL.

I think, “For the Loss?” Well, maybe. Or perhaps, “Faster Than Light,” says my inner sci-fi geek. Looking it up on the interwebs, I see that it does, indeed, refer to the speed at which we cannot go, and it is for sure a sci-fi geek’s dream. I also notice that it came out today, which is why everything’s all a-twitter.

Sword of Fargoal 2, an upcoming game for Mac OS X, iOS, PC, and Linux, just launched a fund raising project on Kickstarter. This will be a sequel to the iOS and Mac OS X game that was itself a re-imagining of the original Commodore 64 game from 1980.

The team is high-end, as it includes original developer Kevin McCord, developer Paul Pridham (Saucelifter, Punch Quest), Emmy award-winning animator Charlie Canfield, and British composer Daniel “LittleBigPlanet” Pemberton–all of whom contributed to the highly-reviewed iOS/Mac port from a couple years ago, published by Chillingo/EA.

The Kickstarter campaign was launched to help take the sequel, Sword of Fargoal 2, from 80 percent done to fully done. The extra funding will help the team add new music, animations, and graphics to the game, as well as polish up the game engine itself to ensure fluid movement and controls.

Add another mark in the “winning” column for Apple today, as a judge from the US branch of the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled that Apple did not infringe any of the four patents brought before the commission by Samsung.

Judge James Gildea posted his ruling in a short notice on the court’s website. He also found that Samsung was unable to prove that it had a “domestic industry” that used the patents in question. This last bit has to do with a requirement of the ITC that the patents being brought before the court must actually be used in the same country as that court. This ruling is preliminary; the full ITC panel will review the ruling early next year.

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, an updated release of the venerable Dungeons and Dragons role playing game coming from Bioware, has been delayed until November 30, 2012, according to the company’s forum. The Mac and iPad version was scheduled to release in September, sometime soon after a September 18 PC release date.

Now, all three versions will ship at the end of November.

I don’t know about you, but I spend too much time waiting for the Camera app shutter to open so I can take a photo with my iPhone. The problem with that, of course, is that I miss a lot of shots that way, even when I’m using the lock-screen camera swipe.

Luckily, there’s a simple way to make things move a lot faster when trying to take a quick action shot with your iPhone.

So, you’re a longtime Growl user, and now you get some alerts from Growl, and a bunch of other ones from Notification Center, and your inner OCD-child just wishes it could all come through Notification Center? I mean, Growl 2 will send stuff right to Notification Center, anyway, so why not get a head start on the process?

With the help of a third-party app called MountainGrowl, you’ll be fashionably ahead of the curve once again, you hipster, you.

Today, IK Multimedia announced new, lower prices for all of its professional-level Mac music software and plug-in software. The prices have been lowered on Amplitube, T-Racks, and Sample Tank, as well as updates and price drops on Total Workstation and Total Studio bundles.

The company also updated Amplitube, its popular iOS guitar app, adding new effects models to coincide with the release of its new compatible guitar pedal, the iRig Stomp.

Looks like iCloud.com, Apple’s website for its cloud-based computing service, is no longer a beta. In addition to adding the Reminders and Notes apps that sync with iCloud to your iPhone and iPad, iCloud.com has made some improvements to the Find my iPhone app and added VIP mail to the Mail app.

Update: Well, actually, the Lighting to 30-pin adapter does, in fact, carry an audio signal. It also has an analog to digital converter to make that happen. Thanks to the fine journalist Mike Rose at TUAW, we now can put this “controversy” to rest. The ‘iPod Out’ function is actually a feature that lets remote screens in cars or other devices share song info and other graphic displays from the iOS device. If you own a car with this functionality, you’ll still be able to listen to music via the Lightning to 30-Pin adapter, but you won’t get the same graphic display as before.

The source at CNN, below, was incorrect in their assumption, and I erroneously passed that along to you – my apologies.

While this tip may be moot once iOS 6 happens, it’s still available to you right now.

When you’re in a big city trying to drive somewhere, the route you may choose will vary depending on traffic conditions. There are a ton of third-party apps out there that can help figure out traffic, but why not just use one that’s already on your iPhone? Maps will do the job, and all it takes is a little tap.

OS X Mountain Lion added some new security features to an already fairly secure operating system (not perfect, we know!). One of these features is an alert you get when you use an app that wants to access your Contact information from the Contacts app on your Mac. When you see this, you’re able to allow or deny that app access to your contacts – this is there to help make things a bit more transparent, and hopefully more secure.

Once you’ve given that access, however, that app gets tracked as one that can always access your Contacts info. If you want to change that access, today’s tip will help.

The iPhone 5 and the iPot touch both got a revamp today, as announced at the Yerba Buena center in San Francisco. They both have a new look and a new screen size. The 4 inch diagonal screen is at the same ratio of 16:9 as most HD movies, for one. But what about gaming? Everyone knows how great iOS is for gaming, right? What will the extra length bring to the party? Let’s take a look.

We’ve already become a culture obsessed with the image. From Kodak brownie cameras to a high-resolution smartphone camera in every pocket, the current internet age has produced a vertical fuck load of image data, all filtering through social networks like Instagram or Facebook, not to mention Flickr and Picasa.

Let’s not overlook one detail in today’s iPhone 5 launch: the Panorama.

The new iPhone 5 announcement is expected to happen tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. When all the excitement dies down, however, will the device have the staying power that its earlier versions had? Will it beat out Samsung’s new offerings? Will consumers, perhaps suffering iPhone fatigue, be looking for something that thinks even more different?

It does seem that we know all there is to know about the iPhone 5 and its accompanying operating system (iOS 6), but is that actually true? In an article about the high expectations for the iPhone 5 announcement tomorrow, The Wall Street Journal – well known to be the leak source of choice for Apple – drops a tasty tidbit in a seemingly innocuous paragraph.

The Shanghai Evening post sent a reporter into the Foxconn factory in Tai Yuan, China to pretend he was a new worker. His 10 days at the factory has been published as a diary, exposing the inside story of making the iPhone 5.

The Tai Yuan factory is known from the March workers’ strike, in addition to needing 20,000 extra workers to fulfill orders from Apple for the new iPhone 5, which is expected to be announced tomorrow at a special Apple event in San Francisco.

According to the Shanghai Evening Post, the reporter went through an extensive seven day orientation,which includes a form that all workers must sign to state that there are no environmental hazards. He began to work on the production line for the iPhone 5 on day eight. He was only able to stay two more days, due to the poor working conditions.

YouTube is synonymous with online video. As such, it’s a great resource to find music by your favorite artists, instructional videos, and even video podcasts. You may, however, have noticed that when you press the Home button, the app quits and you are no longer able to watch or listen to the video playing in the background.

Actually, that’s wrong. You *can* in fact listen to a YouTube video in the background, with a fairly neat workaround, brought to you by a frequent reader of Cult of Mac.