Mac - page 85

We’ve already reported how Apple is working on a remote computing system that will be enabled by the iPhone 5.

Equipped with a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip, the iPhone 5 may allow user to load their Home folders on guest Macs when they travel, or log in at school or work. All the user would have to do is tap their iPhone 5 on a NFC-equipped Mac, and the machine would load their Home folder files, settings and preferences.

But if Apple equipped all of its products with NFC chips, which are used for short-range authentication, the technology could be used for super-easy set-up of a new Apple gear, or for easily transferring files and media between different Apple devices.

For example, users could easily connect a new iPad to their home Wi-Fi network, say, just by bringing the tablet within four inches of a NFC-equipped AirPort base station.

“Imagine you touch an AirPort with a new iPad and the Wi-Fi is connected — with full security — in less than a second,” said Gerald Madlmayr, a NFC expert based in Vienna. “No configuration is necessary any more. This makes this technology pretty useful.”

Stuck for a gift for the Mac lover in your life? How about our brand new, limited-edition MILF T-shirt?

Just in time for the holidays, we’ve launched our first venture into fine geek apparel: a limited-edition shirt designed just for fans of the Mac. (If you don’t get it, hit the jump for a clue).

Just $22.99, the shirt is limited to 100 copies, so it’s super exclusive. Order it before the 19th you’ll get it in time for the big day.

We’ve teamed up with MightTees, the Seattle-based t-shirt empire famous for classics like His Steveness and Say Anything.

The CultofMac MILF shirt is totally custom branded. 100% designed, made, and printed in the USA. 100% sweatshop free. It’s awesome. A very fine tee indeed.

As we previously reported, Apple has ambitious plans to put users’ Home folders in the cloud to make them available on any machine.

The system will use the iPhone 5, which will likely include a Near Field Communications chip, as an authentication mechanism. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless connection technology that would turn the iPhone into an electronic wallet or security passkey. Bump the iPhone 5 near a compatible NFC-equipped Mac, and the computer will load the user’s home folder and preferences.

However, it was unclear whether users would be able to load all their files onto the host machine. After all, iTunes and iPhoto libraries can get pretty large. Loading a massive iTunes library onto a guest machine from the cloud could be a lot of heavy lifting. And how about the applications to run them? What if the host machine didn’t have Photoshop installed?

Apple’s solution is that only a subset of user’s data and content libraries will be made available, according to a source familiar with a test version of the system. Specifically:

iPhoto is one of Apple’s most popular applications. Bundled with every new Mac since 2002, millions of people have imported and manipulated billions of photos with this useful software. Every time you plug your iPhone or another camera into your Mac, iPhoto leaps to the assistance (whether you want it to or not).

With success come challenges. One common thing I’m asked about as an Mac consultant is how to manage iPhoto libraries that have gotten out of hand – thousands of photos, lots of duplicate items, and sometimes multiple copies of libraries. How do you get all this under control?

Good piece from music writer/analyst Bob Lefsetz on why he’s an Apple fan:

That’s what’s selling Apple. Friends. People hear these amazing stories and take a chance. And they become members of the cult and have insanely great experiences and drag their friends in too. To the point where anything Apple sells, people will buy. Just like you’ve got to have the latest work of your favorite act.

Bob Leftsetz: Customer Care.

Looks like Apple will be offering offering about 10% off for Black Friday — if Apple Australia’s prices are anything to go by.

Apple has posted sale prices down under, offering 10-15% off many items, including iPad (A$50 off),, iMac and MacBook Pro (A$121 off) 13-inch MacBook Air (A$121.00 off), iPod nano (A$25 off).

The best deal looks like the iPod Touch at about 20% off (up to A$51). Also on sale are the Time Capsule, Magic Trackpad, and a range of iPad accessories. The same savings are likely to carry across to U.S. sales, which are one-day only.

Here’s details of Apple Australia’s other sale items:

Body Dysmorphic Disorder from flight404 on Vimeo.

Check out this awesome video of Kinect hacker Robert Hodgin manipulating the Kinect feed in realtime with Cinder, a C++ programming environment for creative projects. (Hodgin posted the source + OSX project here: https://code.google.com/p/ruisource/downloads/list)

And here’s one with his cat:

Fat Cat from flight404 on Vimeo.

Via Kottke.

I’ve read a lot of Steve Jobs interviews but until now I’d not seen this 1985 interview from Playboy.

It catches Steve Jobs at age 29, one year after the Macintosh was launched. He is by far the youngest person on Forbes’s list of richest Americans and one of only seven who made their fortunes on their own.

He’s portrayed by Playboy as the Mark Zuckerberg of his era: a Valley wunderkind with a magical gift for foreseeing the future. Of course, it’s interesting to look back and see how the future actually panned out.

Jobs comes across as a confident and knowledgeable, but not brash and arrogant. Here’s a few of the highlights:

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

We are a culture on the go. We work, eat, play and study on the move, multitasking all the way. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to understand the appeal of Apple’s new mobile devices, particularly iPads and MacBooks, on college and grad school campuses everywhere.  Many schools are getting in on the act directly, and facilitating mobile computing by providing iPads and MacBooks to their incoming students.

“The trend in higher education computing is this concept of mobility” said Greg Smith, George Fox University’s chief information officer, “and this fits right in.”

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

Apple had traditionally enjoyed 50 percent of the educational market, however a tight economy coupled with lower PC prices led by netbooks until recently depressed the Cupertino, Calif. company’s classroom reach to just about 20 percent. While the iPad is credited with many advances, it also sparked a comeback for Apple, making the $500 tablet competitive with PCs in the secondary and higher education markets, according to Needham & Company’s Charlie Wolf earlier this year.

Wolf’s prediction, made before the iPad really hit the street, has been confirmed again and again.

It seems like everyone except Steve Jobs was underwhelmed by the Beatles on iTunes announcement today.

The reaction here, on other blogs, and on Twitter was unanimous: Who cares?

Most Beatles fans have already bought the CDs and added them to iTunes. The music is 40-50 years old. Half the band is dead.

Perhaps Apple overplayed it a bit, announcing that this was a day we’d never forget. Then it turned over the homepage, iTunes and Ping to The Beatles. There’s even four TV ads. Overkill? Maybe.

But seen from Steve Jobs’ point of view it is gotta be a big deal. Symbolically, at least. This is the day iTunes triumphed over the old music industry. It marks the complete obsolecence of the old distribution system and the triumph of the new.

The Beatles catalog was one of the last trump cards held by the old music industry. Giving it up is an admission that iTunes has prevailed. Music is fully digital, and there’s no going back. The other holdouts — AC/DC, Led Zeppelin Garth Brooks (CNet has a list here) — must surely follow.

Jobs has been working on this for seven years or more. To him, it’s a massive validation. Like he says, a day that won’t be forgotten.

NVIDIA has just announced a mid-range upgrade graphics card for the Mac Pro: the Quadro 4000 For Mac.

Aimed at workstation applications (video, graphics, scientific data crunching), the Quadro 4000 falls in the middle of NVIDIA’s professional lineup. It features NVIDIA’s latest Fermi architecture, boasting 256 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

But for a mid-range card, it’s pretty pricey: $1,199 when it ships later this month. The PC-compatible card is about $700. It shouldn’t take long for GPU hackers to create a Mac-compatible ROM. We’ll keep an eye out.

Here’s NVIDIA’s full press release:

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

Computer scientist Alan Kay is one of the most foremost experts in computers in schools, and yet he believes technology in education has largely failed.

Kay is a pioneering computer scientist, a former Apple fellow, and famous for formulating the Dynabook concept that predicted laptops and tablets 40 years before they became commonplace. Kay was a researcher at Xerox PARC in the seventies on technologies that Apple later commercialized in the Lisa and Mac. Among many honors, Kay has won the prestigious Turing Award for work on object-oriented programming. During the mid-1980s he was an Apple Fellow at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.

Computers have been in schools for the last 30 years, but with few exceptions, they haven’t been used to their full potential.

Kay says the education system has squandered 30 years of technology in classrooms. He likens the modern factory educatory system to a monkey with a microscope. The monkey looks at its reflection in the microscope’s barrel but doesn’t look through the eyepiece — it utterly misses the point.

Computers have become tools of distraction, Kay said, instead of education. He singles out Guitar Hero as the best example of this — players get the fantasy of virtuoso guitar playing without learning a single note.

“When I look at computers in schools, this is what I see. It’s all Guitar Hero,” he said during a keynote speech at CES earlier this year.

We asked Kay to expand on these ideas in this exclusive Q&A. Kay talks about the importance of using technology to create educated voters capable of participating in a democracy, and Apple’s general disinterest in education.

You would imagine Steve Jobs’ home office to resemble Mission Control, with multiple monitors and a big, fancy desk.

But instead it’s surprisingly modest and simple, as revealed in these 2004 photos by famed photographer Diana Walker.

The consensus is that tomorrow’s big announcement isn’t streaming iTunes or anything to do with the cloud, but the Beatles finally coming to iTunes.

Look at the image above (via Techcrunch). Coincidence? Also, The Wall Street Journal and Billboard are reporting that the big announcement tomorrow is the Beatles on iTunes.

Says the WSJ:

Steve Jobs is nearing the end of his long and winding pursuit of the Beatles catalog.

Apple Inc. is preparing to announce that its iTunes Store will soon start carrying music by the Beatles, according to people familiar with the situation, a move that would fill in a glaring gap in the collection of the world’s largest music retailer.

Of course, the Beatles-on-iTunes rumor is as old as the hills. It was last aired in the run-up to Apple’s September 1st music-focused media event. Seems every time there’s an Apple event, it’s the Beatles.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

When Newton North High School in Newton, MA was rebuilt recently as a new, state of the art facility, a primary goal was to teach students information literacy using current technology. With a generous budget and the opportunity to start fresh, the result is a school with five Mac-based computing labs, over 130 new iMacs, and a library that rivals one found at many colleges.

It’s enough to make any Apple user envious, and much of the potential is still untapped. “With a lot of this being so new,” says Phil Golando, IT Manager, “we don’t even know all the ways we can use this stuff.”

Artist Michael Tompert takes Apple’s products and wrecks them with blowtorches, sledgehammers, handsaws and handguns. His large-scale prints of the detritus are surprisingly colorful and beautiful.

“It’s an alternate viewpoint,” explained Tompert at a preview of his first gallery show, which opens in San Francisco today. “They’re beautiful inside. They’re beautiful when you open them up.”

At a preview last weekend, Tompert’s three kids sat on the floor playing with iPhones and iPod touches underneath their father’s artwork. The irony was lost on no one. In fact, it’s our obsession with Apple’s products that Tompert is commenting on.

Feast your eyes on this beautiful gallery of Apple products destroyed in the name of art. The work is by artist Michael Tompert, whose show opens tonight in San Francisco. But you don’t have to be in California to enjoy the pictures. We have all 12 prints — plus detail shots — in the gallery below.

The photo above, called “Breathe,” shows a 2008 MacBook Air shot with a 9mm Heckler & Koch handgun.

Is the writing on the wall for iTunes?

For the first time, U.S. music fans are streaming as much music as they download — and streaming is set to overtake downloading in a matter of months.

NPD Group says 30 percent of U.S. music consumers streamed music in August; the same percentage that downloaded music to their computers.

But streaming is growing fast. In a few months, it will far outstrip downloads, NPD Group spokesman Lee Martin told Evolver.fm.

Incredibly, the new numbers also include downloads from peer-to-peer file sharing networks as well as legal downloads from iTunes and Amazon.

Apparently, the convenience of streaming services, which now offer instant access to vast libraries of music of a wide variety of devices, even beats out piracy!

Good thing Apple has a $1 billion server farm coming online soon (if not already). But when are we going to see streaming from iTunes?

Evolver.fm: Americans Now Stream As Much Music As They Download

UPDATE: I go to dinner and all hell breaks loose. Sorry for the bogus info. My bad. I should have checked this out first. Apparently, this combo update is not good — it causes kernel panics. Here’s a legit link to the 10.6.5 combo update on Apple’s site: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1324

Here’s the hidden URL where you can download the Mac OS X 10.6.5 Combo update. This combo update is not visible on Apple.com

Some folks think it’s usually better for your OS to install the combo update. From what we understand, the combo update does a more complete update than incremental updates applied through OS X’s Software Update. For example, system glitches caused by earier updates may be fixed because the combo update reinstalls everything that was included in previous updates (in this case, everything in 10.6.1 through 10.6.5).

It can also help avoid update headaches, we’re told.

Thanks Roman Zavřel of Letem Světem Applem.

Comment of the week comes from reader Flash Man regarding the story that Adobe’s Flash kills battery life. Writes Flash Mac:

A new study also indicates that using web and desktop applications will significantly decrease battery life. In fact, in a stunning series of tests soon to be released, scientists have determined that simply running the computer would decrease the battery by up to 50X compared to keeping it in the ‘off’ or ‘standby’ mode. Scientists are looking for solutions to this problem. One five year old girl suggested plugging in some kind of ‘charging device’ to combat this threat. Fanboys quickly dismissed the idea as too simple and instead suggested purchasing multiple Macbooks and having an elaborate series of spares available at all times. Additionally, Apple suggests purchasing an AppleTV and an iPhone to make end users feel better.

In June 2008, on a flight home from Europe to San Francisco, I was given a fascinating demo of some jaw-dropping technology.

I was sitting next Inon Beracha, CEO of Israeli company PrimeSense, which had developed a low-cost chip and software to do 3D machine vision.

The system used a pair of cameras and an infrared sensor to highlight people and track their movements.

On his laptop, Beracha showed me videos of people waving their hands in the air to control Wii-like games. He showed people controlling TV programming menus by gesturing their hands in the air. And, most impressive of all, someone flipping through a photo slide show like they were Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It was so slick, I asked him if it was CGI. It was real, he said, and so cheap, the technology could eventually be found everywhere in the home, office and car.

Of course, PrimeSense’s system is at the heart of Microsoft’s new Kinect game controller, which is getting rave reviews and looks set to be a monster hit. It’s a “crazy, magical, omigosh rush,” says the New York Times‘ David Pogue.

And it almost belonged to Apple.

This is a guest interview by Mike Bastoli of The Pixar Blog, a popular news blog about the studio.

Lee Unkrich is the director of Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story 3, the highest-grossing animated film of all time, which was released on DVD, Blu-ray and iTunes today. He also served as co-director of Toy Story 2 and editor of Toy Story, and is a member of Pixar’s Senior Creative Team.

Unkrich is an avid Mac user and Apple ‘addict’ who can be spotted at Apple’s events from time to time. “Whenever I’m invited, it’s something awwwwwwesome,” he tweeted to his 80,000 plus followers on Twitter ahead of the launch of the iPad in January.

Here’s an exclusive interview with Unkrich, who talks about his first Mac, Apple cameos in Pixar’s movies and Steve Jobs feeding his Apple addiction.

Apple’s massive new data center is a 21st-century broadcasting system to rival the TV networks of old, says a leading expert in cloud computing.

Nick Carr, author of the “The Big Switch” a bestseller about the cloud, says Apple’s North Carolina facility is a “broadcasting system” not unlike NBC or CBS, but one that distributes software as well as media.

“Apple increasingly views its mainstream computers, from iPod Touch to iPhone to iPad to MacBook Air, as media players, with “media” spanning not just audio and video but also apps,” Carr wrote in an email. “From that perspective, the North Carolina data center can be seen as essentially a broadcasting system that will enable Apple to make the shift from a downloading model of media distribution to a streaming model. It’s a proprietary broadcasting system (not altogether unlike traditional broadcasting systems), which means it’s a very different model of the cloud from the open model promoted by Google.”

At 500,000 square feet, Apple’s $1 billion data center will be among the largest in the world. The unusual size of the data center suggests that Apple has ambitious plans for cloud computing.

The massive facility is coming online before the end of the year, Apple has said, although what it will be used for, the company hasn’t detailed.

It’s assumed it will be used to stream music and movies from iTunes. Reports suggest the company is going to build a big office complex next door and is “going after the cable market.”

But it goes deeper than that, says Carr. The facility will help transition Apple from a download model of computing to a streaming model of computing.

Here’s what else he had to say about Apple’s unique take on the cloud:

We’ve received a tip about an unexpected application for the NFC chip Apple is expected to build into the iPhone 5.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless connection technology that would turn the iPhone into an electronic wallet or security passkey.

NFC is already in use in Asia and is expected to explode here in the next three to five years, especially if Apple adopts the technology. NFC has been rumored for the iPhone 5, and Apple appears to be gearing up for a NFC revolution. It has made a lot of NFC hires, including a a leading NFC expert and has patented a lot of NFC technology.

If the iPhone 5 does have NFC, applications like an eWallet are a no-brainer. But we’ve been told that Apple is also researching NFC for remote computing.