To be honest, I’m writing about DrBlinky for two reasons, both of them frivolous. One is the name: DrBlinky. Who couldn’t love a name like that?
The other is the Indiegogo pitch video, a triumph of cheesiness and amateur earnestness, but in a (very) good way. Put it this way — if Will Ferrell and Ricky Gervais ever teamed up to do a parody Kickstarter-style promo, it would look like this.
No one uses iTunes anymore. iTunes is like that one cool guy from high school who used to be a lot of fun to hang out with, but then everyone grew up and he’s still out there prowling the streets of your hometown, getting drunk, attending local football games and hanging out with high school kids. He just failed to grow up like everyone else, and that’s kind of what’s happened to iTunes. It’s antiquated and bloated. People dread using it and even though iTunes 11 is supposed to drop this month, we don’t think that’s going to change much.
What can Apple do to fix iTunes? Is there even a way to do it? It’s an ugly and slow app but it’s still important, so it’s not like Apple can just nuke it altogether and start over. Should Apple divy up the functionality of iTunes to other OS X apps the same way they do with iOS? We haven’t played with iTunes 11, but the demo at last month’s keynote didn’t make us too hopeful. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what Apple should do to fix iTunes.
The iPad mini will be announced next October 23rd, but when’s it actually going on sale? Common sense and looking at what Apple has done in the past would dictate November 2nd, which is what previous internet rumor suggested. Now we’re hearing confirmation of that date from loftier sources.
If it’s anything like the other products in the ever-burgeoning Beats franchise, the Beats Pill is likely a triumph of pricing over quality. It comes in at a Jamboxian $200, stands just two inches high, and works like any other portable speaker — via Bluetooth.
The iPhone 5 has been a sell-out since it went on sale on September 21, and it’s still incredibly difficult to get hold of in some markets even a month later. With five million units sold, it’s the fastest-selling iPhone to date, so it’s no surprise one analyst is predicting that iPhone sales could be even better than originally expected.
One of the consequences of the iPhone 5’s streamlined, ultra-thin design is that you can no longer just pop off the backplate of the device and replace it. That means no more Don-Draper-esque teak backs or glowing Apple logos or anything else that you could do to deeply personalize your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.
So what do you do if you want to customize your iPhone 5 without having to slap a bulky case on it? You skin it. And RAW out of Brooklyn is making some of the best custom skins for the iPhone 5 around out of quality leather and wood grain to give your handset a classier look.
If you have any idea what an ollie is, or a 50:50 grind, or a heel-flip (or — if you grew up in the 1980s, an acid drop or boneless), then you should buy True Skate right this minute. Seriously. I’ll wait.
Why? Because — despite some v1 limitations — True Skate is the closest you’re going to get to a dead-on skateboarding sim in 2012. The only things missing are the security guards to come and harass you, and bad fast food.
Microsoft claims its new Surface RT tablet, which begins shipping later this month, has a display that’s superior to the Retina display in the third-generation iPad. But according to DisplayMate CEO Dr. Raymond M. Soneira, that may not be the case. After some basic comparisons, Soneira found the Surface tablet’s display is “significantly less sharp” than the new iPad’s.
Lomo has launched yet another gorgeous new film camera, and this one looks as lame as all the rest. It’s called the Belair X 6-12, and it’s medium format.
Apple has begun work on the first phase of its Prineville data center, which will include clearing and flattening the land for one of two 330,000 square-foot buildings. Each building is said to be more than twice the size of a typical Costco store, and this initial phase of construction alone is expected to cost Apple $68 million.
One thing’s clear: the iPhone 5 isn’t going to be a cakewalk to jailbreak. It’s based upon an all-new chip and an all-new operating system, and so far, the Dev Team has been stumped as to how to get a jailbreak out to the masses. But now Planetbeing, a member of the Chronic Dev Team, has given iPhone 5 owners a ray of hope: he says he’s almost figured out a full tethered jailbreak for the iPhone 5, and from there, an untethered jailbreak is on the horizon. But there’s a big catch: it can only be run from a developer account.
Earlier this week, Stainless Games brought the 1997 reckless driving sensation that is Carmageddon to iOS, and I haven’t been able to put it down since — it’s as good today as it was 15 years ago on the Dreamcast. However, it does have one issue holding it back: a save game bug that could wipe all your progress.
New, mini iPads; new, thinner iMacs; 13-inch Macbook Pros with Retina displays; you could wait till Tuesday to discover all the great products Apple’s about to unleash into the world, but that’s what grandpas do. Join us on our newest CultCast, and find out everything we know and expect from next week’s big media event right now. And, um, no offense to actual grandpas, cause I love grandpas, they’re the best.
Plus: 3rd-party lightening adapters and cables—they’d make great stocking stuffers, am-i-right? We’ll tell you when you can finally expect to see them in stores.
All that and more on our newest CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes, or easily stream The CultCast via Apple’s free Podcasts App.
Read on for the show notes!
Here’s a nifty little tweak that’ll help you write new emails a little quicker: It’s called SpotMail, and it lets you create new emails from directly within Spotlight on your jailbreak iOS device. All you have to do is type in the recipient’s email address and hit search.
As a publicly traded company, Apple submits its financial reports every quarter to let their investors know how well the company is doing. However, Apple is under no obligation to share specific financial results about each of the individual products it sells, data that it is still trying to protect via the court in the Apple v Samsung case in Northern California.
However, rabid interest in the specifics continues unabated. In a survey reported today, CNN Money asked 61 Apple analysts, 31 from Wall Street and 30 independent analysts, what their estimates were for specific device sales in the quarter that just ended on September 29, 2012. Turns out, the analysts estimates were all over the place when it came to predicting the number of iPads sold.
Apple released a small Java update for OS X users this Wednesday. The update effectively removed the Java applet plug-in that typically comes pre-installed in all web browsers on the Mac. Why? Well, Apple has been trying to distance itself from Java for quite some time, mainly due to the fact that most malware spreads via Java vulnerabilities.
Take the recent Flashback trojan, for example. Millions of Macs were comprised because hackers were able to exploit a security vulnerability in Java on the browser. You could visit a bad site with a corrupt Java applet and get infected. After this week’s update, Java is no longer included in browsers like Safari.
There are few jailbreak hackers in the world regarded as highly as Nicholas Allegra, also known as “comex.” In the earlier days of iOS, Allegra released JailbreakMe, the first and only web-based jailbreak of its kind. He has worked on numerous jailbreaks throughout the years, but recently he’s been working off the radar.
Allegra has been in hiding for the last year because of Apple. The 20-year-old Brown student’s expertise in iOS security was noticed by the all-seeing eye of Cupertino last August, and for the past year Allegra has been working as an intern at Apple, presumably helping patch the vulnerabilities he so adeptly reverse engineered. As of today, Allegra no longer works at Apple, and there’s no telling what he’ll do next.
Telltale Games announced today that iOS users can now download Episode Three of The Walking Dead: The Game, entitled “Long Road Ahead,” to their iPhone or iPad. It’s the third of five episodes in the critically acclaimed series based on Robert Kirkman’s zombie drama, The Walking Dead, which started as an award-winning comic book, then made its way to become a critically-acclaimed television series on AMC.
By now you’ve heard about the many problems with Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6. It can be unreliable and just flat out wrong pretty often, and many well-known locations are either missing or severely misplaced. Maps will get better over time, but Apple has a lot of work to do.
David Bonnefoy upgraded to iOS 6 on his iPhone and noticed many of the same issues that have been reported on for weeks. There were also several points of interest that were misplaced due to overlapping streets.
Although I’ve used a Mac exclusively since 2005, before that, I was a PC guy, which means I have lots of gauzy memories of halcyon days well-spent in front of a menagerie of beige boxes falling backwards in time through a decade of classic PC gaming, starting with the old 8-bit Ultima games and Nethack under DOS and continuing well into the Windows era with games like Grim Fandango, Half-Life, Planescape: Torment and System Shock 2.
I love the Mac, but the one thing I miss about having a PC is easily playing classic PC games without loading them up in Boot Camp or Parallels. Luckily, it looks like that’s about to change, as GOG.com — a digital distributor of classic PC games updated to work on modern machines and distributed without DRM — is now releasing their titles to work on Mac.
It seems financial printer RR Donnelley made one hell of mistake earlier today, causing Google’s stock to drop 9% before Google was able to halt trading. What did they do? They filed an early draft of Google’s earnings without authorization.
Aside from being fatter and heavier than the the last-gen model, and running hot, and taking like a year to charge, the iPad is almost perfect. Apart from all those problems, of course.
But while those issues all stem from jamming a multi-million-pixel display into a mobile device, the iPad’s speaker is another matter. It sounds just fine — if you’re standing behind the iPad that it.
The SoundJaw Unlimited — itself a sequel to a thinner product — fixes that. And fixes it good.
White gadgets became an iconic symbol under the careful craftsmanship of Apple. When Apple released the original iPod 11 years ago in classic Apple white, everybody wanted one, and eventually every gadget manufacturer in the world tried to copy that style.
Over the last few years though, black iDevices have started to gain in popularity over their white brethren. Black is classy, professional, and always down for a good time, whereas white is starting to come off as fun but a bit more feminine. Some people think white is making a comeback, but a new study suggests that nearly 70% of Apple owners prefer black over white now, and there’s no turning back.
Google just announced their newest Chromebook. It runs Google’s Chrome OS. It has an 11.6-inch screen with 1366 x 768 resolution, 6 hours of battery life, a 100 GB flash storage drive and it only costs $249. It’s beautiful. It looks just like the 11-inch MacBook Air. And of course, it’s made by Samsung.
Image: Matt Buchanan
A flurry of rumors have surrounded the failed video app start-up Color over the past 24 hours. First a rumors hit that Color was going to completely shutdown after failing to gain widespread use after a year. A few hours later a second rumor claimed that Color wasn’t shutting down, they were just being bought by Apple.
It appears that both rumors were completely wrong and sort of right at the same time. Color – as a company – isn’t being purchased by Apple for an eight figure sum, but Apple is buying Color’s team of 20 engineers for a modest figure of $2 million to $5 million.