News - page 2122

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — If there’s one thing we’re hearing over and over at Macworld this year, it’s the word “enterprise.” There’s a lot of companies getting ready for a huge wave of iOS deployments by enterprise in 2011.

One company ready to jump on the enterprise bandwagon is FileMaker, whose FileMaker Go iOS app allows FileMaker databases to run on the iPad or iPhone. That means businesses can make custom database apps — everything from email clients to iTunes clones — without going through Apple.

“A lot of people think they have to develop their own app to do something but its not necessarily necessary to do an app,” said FileMaker spokesman Kevin Mallon. “If you’ve got FileMaker Pro, you’ve got an app.”

According to FileMaker, its database software is currently the only way enterprise can get custom apps on the iPhone or iPad without coding a custom solution and submitting it through the App Store.

The pharmaceutical company Merck, for example, created an iOS app to share the company lexicon of drug names, special acronyms and competing drug companies’ names and terms.

“You don’t have to be a serious programmer to do an app,” said Mallon. “It’s dead easy.”

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — The world was supposed to go paperless decades ago, but we’re still swamped with paper. You can take pictures of business cards and receipts every now and again, but for serious paper junkies, something like Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1100 Mobile Scanner may fit the bill.

The ScanSnap S1100 is claimed to be the smallest scanner in the world. Powered by USB, the sheet-feed scanner can suck up everything from receipts to multi-page AT&T phone bills.

Launched at CES earlier this month and being shown at Macworld this week, the ScanSnap S1100 can scan directly into desktop software like iPhoto and Word, or cloud-based apps like Google Docs and Evernote. The scanner costs $199.

When President Obama gave his annual State of the Union speech Tuesday night, he dedicated a significant portion of it to the dismal state of America’s education system.

Some educational experts responded by noting that that mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad could potentially improve the American education system’s “productivity.”

I wonder whether this is a valid point, or yet another manifestation of Americans’ infatuation with technology.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — If you’re goin’ to San Francisco, flowers in your hair are always a nice touch but this week the iMacworld app on your Apple mobile device could win you $1000.

The free app, available on the iTunes App Store, will not only help you get around the giant Conference and Expo happening Thursday – Saturday at San Francisco’s sprawling Moscone West convention center, but it also has interesting tips and information valuable to locals and visitors alike.

Through a promotional tie-in to another free app called AskLocal — one lucky user is going to win $1000 in a cleverly designed Treasure hunt.

Familiarity with Ask Local will be an advantage to anyone hoping to win the prize, according to a message that greets visitors to the Community button on the iMacworld main page, so if you’re headed to Macworld, you’ve got more to learn about than you thought.

This just in from the remains of CES: Italian design firm Lavatelli has created a prototype emoticon keypad which plugs into a USB port. Soon you’ll be able to express joy, sadness, cheekiness and other ASCIImotion with just the touch of a finger! Email users and internet forum readers are atwitter in anticipation – or perhaps for some, dread.

No word yet if this will be Mac compatible. What would really be handy is a way to add a virtual emoticon keyboard to your iPhone or iPad – now that would be useful! :)

[via Geek.com]

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Despite the demise of the xServe, Apple products can be and are a good fit in the enterprise, according to John Welch of the Zimmerman Agency, who spoke on Apple in the Enterprise at the Macworld Industry Forum Wednesday at Macworld 2011.

First of all Apple is not an enterprise company — it is not Microsoft, not Cisco, not IBM.

But Apple doesn’t need to be an enterprise company to be a source of solid products that work well in the Enterprise, said Welch, who spoke from 20 years of experience deploying Apple products in business.

This is pretty amazing. Hacker Apoc269 has somehow figured out how to make 3D icons on the iPhone’s home screen — and without glasses.

Check out the video. The icons appear to be 3D when the iPhone’s screen is rotated and  looked at from diffferent angles. Very cool.

Coming soon via Cydia, Apoc269 says. So get jailbreaking now.

Via 9to5Mac.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Apple is perceived as closed and proprietary, but the company has been very generous to the open web, and that generosity has benefited Apple in turn, says pundit John Gruber.

Speaking at Macworld 2011’s opening Industry Forum, Gruber noted that most of the best browsers on the market today are based on Apple’s WebKit, an open source browser engine developed and supported by Apple.

Apple allows its competitors to base their browsers on Apple’s technology, including Google, Nokia and Palm. Indeed, Palm’s entire webOS is based on Apple’s Webkit.

Why does Apple do this?

Because an open web is beneficial to Apple. Ten years ago, most software vendors developed for Windows and Apple was locked out. Napster is a good example, Gruber said. Napster was built for Windows, and Apple users were was largely excluded until third-party Mac clients were build much later.

These days, software companies build for the open Web. Twitter and Facebook, for example, were built for the Web.

“When Windows was the baseline platform for the industry, Apple was left out,” Gruber said. “But these days, if companies develop for the Web, Apple is included.”

This wouldn’t have happened if Apple hadn’t supported and encouraged the web as a development environment, partly by giving Webkit away.

“Apple has benefited tremendously from the rise of the Web,” said Gruber. “And the Web has benefited from contributions from Apple.”

Is OS X’s built-in Terminal app just too modern for you? Miss the days of phosphorescent emerald text burning through the convex black screen of an old cathode ray tube, slowly updating itself at 300 baud as it de-syncs and interlaces like crazy?

Me too. Cathode is a new terminal app that uses OpenGL and Cocoa to emulate the look of a vintage terminal, right down to the curve of the screen, the flicker and the jitter.

Geeky? Exquisitely so. As someone who grew up playing Rogue on an ancient IBM terminal, though, Cathode is right up my alley… especially given Nethack’s excellent OS X Terminal port. Now that’s the way a rogue-like is meant to be played!

Cathode is shareware, but use it for too long and the image quality will slowly degrade until you pay $20 for a license.

I generally don’t like corks that I can’t rip out with my teeth or suck on when there’s no booze in the house, but the Kork case for iPad might change my mind: it’s a cork board approach to protecting your tablet that isn’t just environmentally friendly — each case is made of recycled cork — but is also pretty attractive.

$67 will get you one: I’m tempted just so I can attach girly postcards to the back with pushpins.

The Verizon iPhone does not support the carrier’s blistering new LTE wireless network, but a future 4G iPhone will says China Mobile chairman Wang Jianzhou.

“Apple has made it clear they will support TD-LTE,” Wang recently said at the Davos Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We hope that when they develop the next-generation models, since Apple can create CDMA, they can also consider developing TD-SCDMA.”

There’s little doubt that Jianzhou is right, but while there’s little doubt that Apple will eventually take the plunge and release an iPhone 4G, it’s the “when” people are curious about.

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.”