News - page 2117

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — As one of the key architects of the original Macintosh, programming legend Bill Atkinson is in a good position to make sensible predictions about the future of tomorrow’s computer interfaces.

And he says the future of computers is smartphones with natural language interfaces. We won’t be tapping on our iPhone’s screens, we’ll be talking to them in natural language. And they’ll be talking back.

We’ll wear a tiny video-equipped earpiece that will see, hear and record everything we do. On the other end, in the cloud, will be a virtual personal assistant that will act as a cognitive prosthesis.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — When Apple discontinued the Xserve server last year, there was a huge outcry from the IT crowd.

But as one school in Hawaii has demonstrated, the Xserve platform is a dinosaur.

You don’t have to be an artist to create one of the coolest DIY Apple accessories around, but if you want to use your iPad while working out on your exercycle, stairmaster or treadmill at home it couldn’t hurt.

Of course, you could drop a lot of dough on a commercial device that may or may not perform up to expectations in the real world, or even import top gear that looks like something out of a sci-fi fantasy.

But why not look around the house for a few simple materials that, with a bit of creative ingenuity, you can employ to do the job just as well?

Another sign I should move to San Diego: After playing around with their 15-watt solar panel and a 6oWh HyperMac battery, the folks at Voltaic have found the two perfectly compatible — meaning a MacBook can be taken completely off the grid, and theoretically used without ever needing to be plugged in. Voltaic says you should get about 45 minutes of runtime for every hour in the sun for a 13″ MB/P (much less for more power-hungry units). You can even use the HyperMac to power your MB while it’s charging.

The 60Wh HyperMac battery is $170, and Voltaic’s 15-watt solar charger is $200; that’s just under $400 to create a MacBook that’s perfectly happy out in the boonies (as long as the boonies are bathed in lots of sun).

Apple’s product release cycle can seem mysterious if you’re new to the fold, but old hands know roughly when to expect the next refresh of each of Apple’s product lines. So when the Three Guys and a Podcast blogs say that new iMacs should be due in March, they aren’t really saying anything that MacRumors’ Buyer’s Guide couldn’t tell you.

More interesting than the new Macs in March revelation is some of the other predictions Three Guys and a Podcast have put together: they expect that solid state drives will be coming to all Macs starting this year, loading the OS on one drive while pairing them with larger traditional HDDs for storage. The end result should be much, much speedier Macs all around (trust me on this one: my 27-inch top-of-the-line iMac has collected dust ever since I got my 11-inch MacBook Air).

Additionally, we should see Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors in this year’s Macs, as well as improved (but not Retina Display) resolutions in the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs, thanks to Apple’s ongoing investments in display technology. A modest refresh for right now, but just wait until the next refresh, when Apple tackles the iMac line with more radical redesigns in mind. I can’t wait.

Remember Apple’s recent comments it did not believe the iPad would cannibalize sales of other products, such as the iPod or Mac? While many considered such a positive outlook as whistling past the graveyard, one analyst Wednesday came to the Cupertino, Calif. company’s defense.

“Although both iPhone and iPad have crossed over and are selling more units than their internal competitors, the old guard has not faded away,” writes Asymco analyst Horace Dediu.

UPDATE: Apple has pulled the Verizon pricing pages. But they were up long enough to get the details.

The prices for the Verizon iPhone are now here. Here’s what we’re looking at.

Launching in the traditional 16GB (MC676LL/A ) and 32GB (MC678LL/A) varieties, the Verizon iPhone 4 will only come in black, which ends speculation for right now that the CDMA iPhone’s debut would afford Apple an opportunity to launch the long-delayed white iPhone 4.

Available talk plans are 450 minutes of talk time per month for $39.99, 900 minutes per month with unlimited calls to five people for $59.99 per month, and unlimited talk time for $69.99 per month.

As previously discussed, data comes all-you-can-eat for $29.99, with an additional 2GB for tethering available for $49.99 per month.

As for text messages, you can either pay-per-use at the rip-off rate of $0.20 per text and $0.25 per video or picture. Plan-wise, you can either opt for 250 messages for $5 per month, 500 messages for $10 per month, or unlimited for $20 per month.

As with the AT&T models, a 16GB iPhone will cost you $199 subsidized, while the 32GB model will cost $299.

When Verizon announced the iPhone was coming to their network in February, there weren’t many surprises waiting for attendees: the Verizon iPhone had been strongly rumored for years, with those rumors solidifying vagueness into near certainty since November of last year, when the New York Times reported the Verizon iPhone’s imminent arrival as fact. The handset itself wasn’t anything special, just an iPhone 4 with CDMA guts. In fact, about the only thing that surprised everyone was that the Verizon iPhone would operate as a mobile hotspot for up to five other devices over WiFi thanks to a new Personal Hotspot app.

Pretty cool… but Verizon was being tight-lipped about how much it would cost, if anything. Well, wonder no more: Verizon has just confirmed that the feature will cost $20 per month on top of your existing data plan.

Honestly, this isn’t really very surprising. Verizon’s other smartphones also charge $20 for personal hotspot privileges. You may grouse that Verizon’s $30 unlimited data plan for smartphones should cover this — what do they care where your phone is offloading its data to — but in truth, laptops suck up a lot more data than iPhones.

With that in mind, probably the most disappointing aspect of Verizon’s Personal Hotspot plan is that it limits you to only 2GB of data, with each gigabyte ove thatr costing up to $20. Note that Verizon is offering unlimited data to iPhones — which actually use less data than laptops — but enforcing the traditional 2GB cap for more data intensive devices. How backwards.

Back in 2008, when Apple first opened the iOS App Store, the Apple headlines were full of basement developers reporting unparalleled, million-plus sales. It was easy to chalk that app shopping frenzy up to iPhone fever, but I wondered: would developers do as well when the Mac App Store launched, especially if they’d been selling their wares on Macs for years?

Apparently so. Pixelmator has just announced that they have chalked up $1 million in their first 20 days on the Mac App Store.

Pixelmator is probably the cream of the crop of Photoshop alternatives. A lightweight image manipulation tool with support for layers, layer groups, gradients, transform tools and even 64-bit optimization, Pixelmator is currently on sale for $29.99 on the Mac App Store… several hundred dollars less than what a copy of Photoshop would cost you, and for most people, almost as good.

It’s a fantastic product for people who want something more elegantly Mac-like than GIMP but who don’t quite need Photoshop’s more esoterically advanced feature set (let alone price). The incredible success Pixelmator is enjoying makes me wonder if we can expect the Mac App Store to turn the spotlight on other lesser known alternatives to prestige apps and turn their developers into over night millionaires.

The iPad may live up to Apple’s own “magical” pr. If you define the tablet as a PC, than the Cupertino, Calif. company grew 241 percent year-or-year, making it third in global sales, ahead of Dell and just two places behind HP. Wednesday, one analyst firm released numbers of “strong PC industry growth” amounting to 19 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Canalys views the iPad (or ‘pad,’ as the company refers to the tablet) as the second-coming of netbooks. Remember netbooks? They help breath life into otherwise struggling PC sales. “Pads gave the market momentum in 2010, just as netbooks did the year before,” one senior analyst wrote.

Apple has just been awarded a rather elaborate patent for gloves you can use to operate a capacitive touchscreen. You know, like . Or these. Prior art, much?

As it sometimes does, the Apple Store went down in the wee hours of the morning, its virtual space on the Internet reserved by the yellow post-it — inscrutable sometimes-harbinger of new products — that we all know so well.

When the post-it was yanked off, though, Apple.com wasn’t host to a line of new products, but rather a darker and glossier HTML5 redesign.

Mizage, makers of the Divvy window management application, have come up with a clever way round the problem of migrating customers from traditional online purchases to official Mac App Store purchases: if you can prove you’ve bought their app twice, they’ll refund your original payment.

SAN FRANCISCO, Macworld 2011 — Proving that the show can go on without Apple, Macworld 2011 opens today and is bigger and better than ever.

Well, bigger and better than last year.

This is the second year of Macworld without Apple, but the show has attracted 10% more exhibitors than 2010 and is on track for 25,000 visitors, organizers say.

“The show is shaping up good,” Macworld general manager Paul Kent told CultofMac.com. “If the numbers go right, we’re going to have about a 25% increase in attendance.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXPhoYAqRhE&feature=player_embedded

Apple’s new TV commercial for the iPad shows how versatile the device is. The iPad is… for students, teachers, for news, for reading. the iPad is.. iconic.

Even though San Francisco is the most expensive city in the frickin’ country you don’t have to break the bank to enjoy it.

In this post we’ve have put together a super savings guide to help you navigate the show and the city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xVccc22zI0&hd=1

You’ve got to watch this version of Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer performed by the iBand on iPhones and iPads. It’s really pretty good!

And here’s their version of the Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkMFBSUH3pI&hd=1

Thanks John!

The white iPhone’s light-leakage issues may have been fixed with a new kind of paint, the Japanese site Macotakara reports.

As previously reported exclusively by CultofMac.com, the white iPhone 4 was delayed because light leaks into the camera ruining photos, especially when the internal flash is used.

According to the Macotakara, Apple has partnered with an unnamed Japanese company that has developed a “miracle painting material.” The new paint helps Apple control the thickness prior to application, solving the light-leakage issues. However, the Japanese blog posts gives new meaning to the term ‘vague.’ Details are scarce.

Either way, the white iPhone 4 looks to be launching soon. The device has already appeared in both wireless carriers’ websites in the U.K.

Via 9to5Mac.

Verizon is flip-flopping on unlimited iPhone data plans faster than a fish out of water.

This morning, Verizon’s chief operating officer, Lowell McAdam, told the Wall Street Journal that Verizon’s iPhone 4 customers would be treated to an unlimited $30-a-month data plan. Otherwise, the network wouldn’t be able to compete with AT&T, which has grandfathered a lot of iPhone customers to unlimited plans, even though it now offers only tiered plans.

But not so fast. McAdam now says the unlimited data plan will be a “temporary offer,” and that Verizon will also move to tiered pricing in the not too distant future. Better act fast.

How long do you think the unlimited data window will be? A week? A month? Six months?

WSJ: Verizon iPhone: $30 Unlimited Data (for Now)

Office for Mac 2011 is without a doubt a huge improvement over the frankly terrible 2004 and 2008 versions, but when you’ve been burned twice before, it’s hard to justify dropping $150 to find out.

Now Microsoft sends word that they’re doing something smart and offering a free 30 day trial of the entire Office for Mac 2011 productivity suite, giving unfettered access to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook 2011.

The download is around 900MB and requires an Intel-based Mac and 2.5GB of space. It can be found on Microsoft’s Office of Mac trial download page.

It’s hard to really recommend a software suite like Office for Mac, especially when there’s free alternatives like Open Office. That said, if you can justify the money and you need what it’s offering, Office for Mac 2011 is a surprisingly excellent suite that feels right at home on the Mac operating system. Why not give it a try?

Back in early December as Verizon began to roll out its next generation LTE mobile broadband network in the United States, they offered customers their first taste of 4G not in a handset but with a USB modem, the LG VL600.

The only problem? It didn’t work on the Mac. That earned our ire at the time, since Verizon had suggested that 4G was what was going to “earn” them the iPhone.

Obviously, 4G wasn’t what brought the iPhone 4 to Verizon — it’s 3G only, just like the AT&T model — but it’s still nice to hear that Verizon intends on fixing the LG VL600 to work with Mac through new drivers, just in time for the sudden onslaught of Apple faithful who will be rushing to the network at the beginning of next month.

Last year, the Apple Peel 520 came along, a neat little kludge of a case that would turn your jailbroken iPod Touch into something a little more iPhone-ish thanks to a build in cell modem and SIM card slot. All told, the Peel 520 would allow you to make and receive calls and texts, while even giving a small boost to your Touch’s battery life.

The only problem? The Peel 520 was a bit bulky. Luckily, it seems like the makers of the original Peel did well enough with their product that they’re going ahead with a second-generation version, which is so noticeably sleeker that it could even be mistaken for a regular iPhone 4.

The improvements don’t end there, though. The Peel 520 couldn’t do data, but the new Peel gets GPRS. No one’s going to mistake EDGE speeds for the real iPhone’s 3G, but even so, it’s certainly nice to have in a pinch.

The next-gen Peel don’t have a price or release date yet, but give it a month or two and you’ll be able to find it through the usual Hong Kong importers soon enough.

The Mac and iOS platforms are no stranger to games in which it is up to the player to fight off the zombie apocalypse, whether with a shotgun or a collection of cheerily bobbing anthropomorphic plants.

Atom Zombie Smasher is a different kind of zombie game entirely though. Sure, it’s Z-Day, but you aren’t the guy in the thick of things: you’re the G-Man watching an entire city go red with the undead from above, ordering your troops to secure city blocks and evacuate citizens, while you do everything you can to make sure you don’t need to deploy the nuclear option. Which you will, and which is half the fun anyway.

A procedurally generated RTS with a wicked sense of humor, Blendo Games’ Atom Zombie Smasher also supports up to four player co-op. If you’re interested, there”s a demo available on the official site to download, and the full version will only cost you $15 more.

Despite Steve Jobs’ promise that it would get better, AirPrint is currently only “all that and a bag of chips” for people who happen to be lucky enough to own a few specialized printers.

Google’s not waiting for Apple to get AirPrint together, though. They’ve just announced Google Cloud Print, a new service that allows you to register your network-connected printers with Google’s cloud services and connect them to your Gmail account. Once you’ve done so, you can print email and any attachment that Gmail can read (including HTML, DOC, PDF and more) directly from the Mobile Safari Gmail interface.

The ability to wirelessly print from Gmail using an iOS device is a pretty swank offering, but unfortunately, it’s not really Mac friendly right now. Enabling the feature allows of downloading the latest Chrome beta from the Cloud Print Website on the computer connected to the printer you want to use… but it’s Windows only, and because Chrome for Mac betas tend to lag behind the Windows beats in features, OS X users will have to wait for Google Cloud Print support to come to the platform… a timescale the search giant itself will only commit to as “coming soon.”

Research in Motion’s PlayBook Tablet could sell 4 million units in 2011, and 6 million devices in the first 12 months following its release, expected sometime this quarter. That’s the word from RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky, who Tuesday morning told investors of results from survey taken after the recent CES.

Although the survey figure is substantially above previous estimates of 1 million PlayBooks sold this year, 6 percent of the 1,100 people polled said they “likely” will buy the RIM tablet. The percentage is half that of a similar survey conducted in February 2010 just after Apple unveiled the iPad, Abramsky notes.