Ignoring the Zune HD (as most consumers seemed to have done), the dominance of Apple’s iPod Touch over the touchscreen media player market has gone essentially unchallenged ever since it first debuted in fall of 2007… but Samsung — makers of the popular Galaxy S smartphone and the Galaxy Tab — are looking to change that at this year’s CES, when they unveil the Galaxy Player.
When Apple updated the iTunes 10 icon earlier this year, it sparked huge controversy among Mac users everywhere — many branded the new icon ugly, lifeless, and unconventional. The debate showed that lots of Mac users like to see beautiful apps with beautiful icons.
Here are 15 of our favorite Mac OS X icons from 2010 that stand out for being beautifully designed, brilliantly colorful, and wonderfully unique. We’ve selected icons that make you want to find out more about an application, and that you’d proudly place in your dock for all to see.
We hope you like them. Check them out after the break. If you know better icons, please tell us about them in the comments. Free apps for the best ideas.
Still got a lump of cash around after Christmas? An eBay seller has just posted a rare prototype of the first portable Macintosh for sale to the highest bidder.
Made from American Rosewood treated with a variety of washes and finishes, I love the look of Trunket’s wood finish stickers for the iPhone 4, right down to the adorable elephant icon. If only the font of Trunket’s logo itself didn’t look like something that would be more appropriate on some terrible nu metal band’s debut CD jacket. $24 a pop.
With Motorola’s upcoming Android Honeycomb tablet and Research in Motion’s imminent PlayBook both set to use new dual-core ARM processors, the iPad 2 will have make a similar jump if it is going to stay competitive according to a recent analyst note.
Last week, VoIP service Skype crumbled under the strain of holiday calling. In the aftermath, Skype published some support documents to help users out, but then quickly pulled them after it was discovered that not only were they looking to roll out FaceTime-style video chat to the iPhone, but also release a native iPad app… and rounding everything out? A juicy hint about the Verizon iPhone.
Eager to keep your nubile teenage daughter from using the new iPhone she got for Christmas as a sexting terminal? Cupertino’s just patented technology to keep her blossoming libido as virginal as the App Store.
Verizon may be getting a late Christmas present, if a new report proves correct. Apple is planning to ship between 20 million and 21 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2011 – 5 to 6 million of those CDMA-based. (Another 14 million to 15 million of the Apple handsets will reportedly be GSM.)
According to a Taiwan-based industry publication, citing unnamed suppliers, Asia will also get the CDMA phones. However, this latest talk of CDMA iPhones could bolster the already red-hot speculation Verizon will launch an iPhone early next year. The move would break the exclusive stranglehold AT&T has held ever since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.
Chances were, if you received some electronics this Christmas, it bore the Apple logo. Products made by the Cupertino, Calif. company were the most-gifted items, according to the online elves at Amazon.
Despite being No. 1 in “Most Wished For” TV and video products, No. 2 Roku actually reportedly was found under most trees. Amazon’s Kindle e-reader again topped the list as bestselling electronic device, the same as it has the whole holiday season.
When Stephen Colbert pulled the soon-to-be released iPad out of a custom pocket in his tux at the Grammys, he set the bar for wearable geek fashion pretty high.
Too high, maybe.
Of all the cool ways you can carry Apple’s new tablet computer, here are five that will earn you a citation from the fashion police and make your blind date run.
What’s past is present, at least in the Vintage Tech World. 2010 saw some significant stories involving those attic treasures: an Apple 1 sold for a whopping $213,000, a Mac Museum for $10k, and an Apple II Festival turned 21. Meanwhile iPads were spotted co-habitating inside old Macs, obsolete status befell our PowerPC friends, and The Macintosh Way lived again.
Travel back in time for this review of the Year in Vintage Apple News.
As part of our review of all the great things we’ve come across in 2010, we’ve picked 15 of our favorite iOS icons that stand out from the rest for being beautifully designed, brilliantly colorful, and wonderfully unique.
We’ve selected icons that make you want to find out more about an application, icons that you’d proudly place on your home screen for all to see, and icons that represent the awesome apps behind them.
There are, of course, hundred of thousands of iOS apps in the App Store, and we’ve selected just 15 of our favorites – we hope you like them. Check them out after the break.
Of course, we probably missed a bunch. Please nominate your favorite icons in the comments. We’ll give out free app codes for the best ideas.
Happy holidays everyone! This video summary of Apple’s past year is pretty cool. The launch of the iPad and iPhone 4; iOS 4 and The Beatles on iTunes? It was a pretty big year.
Made on a Mac with Final Cut Studio by Kelvin Choi.
Earlier this week, Apple removed a WikiLeaks app from the App Store and joined the shameful ranks of U.S. companies that oppose press freedom.
Here’s the disgraceful episode as seen through the eyes of Next Media Animation, a Taiwanese tabloid that animates the news.
Jobs kicks WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange out of the App Store. He returns to hug other companies that have tried to privately censor WikiLeaks (Amazon, PayPal, Visa and Bank of America etc.). Outside, Assange pulls out an Android phone and fires up the banned WikiLeaks App.
As Next Media shows, you can’t suppress the truth. My Christmas wish is that Steve Jobs would get on the right side of this immensely important story. Unfortunately, he’s not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfOZ58USCyI
Via MICGadget. Thanks Chris.
There’s a lot of fantastic Apple-centric projects trying to get off the ground thanks to crowd-sourced funding site Kickstarter, but if you’re green-conscious to boot, why not check out Eric Strebel’s Solar Vox, a portable gadget charger perfect for juicing up your iOS device?
The Solar Vox needs $35,000 of funding to become a real project, so if you’ve got Gaia tattooed anywhere on your body or just want a way to juice your Touch when you’re out hiking, maybe drop a few bucks on this one and help make it real.
For the iPhone user who has everything except his arms, meet the NoseDial, a new app that makes your contacts larger so that you can dial them using simply your face’s bulging proboscis. You don’t have to be a double amputee to use it, though: it’s also good if you’re trying to call someone with gloves you don’t want to take off.
Our favorite gadget vivisectionists over at iFixIt have just released a new iPad app that aims to be a free, easily-referenced glossary for their healthy library of open source self-repair manuals for every gadget under the sun: from the first generation iPod to the new, nigh-un-self-serviceable MacBook Air.
The Cherokee Language isn’t one that doesn’t get a lot of play off of the reservation, but you’re probably carrying around at least one terminal for it in your pocket: the Cherokee Language is now a part of iOS.
It’s actually been on iOS for a while now, since iOS 4.1, but the road to getting there was long: three years ago, the Cherokee Nation made a request of Apple that they would add their language to those supported on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. In September, though, Apple finally baked it into their mobile operating system along with approximately fifty other languages.
Cherokee Nation’s language technology representative Joseph Erb was pretty excited to see it added. “There are countries vying to get on these devices for languages, so we are pretty excited we were included.”
Cherokee is a dying language, and only 8,000 members of the approximately 300,000 strong tribe still speak it. Perhaps a few more will be turned on now that it’s a part of the most respected mobile operating system on Earth.
It’s close to Christmas, but not so close that there’s no stupid to report, so here’s your Yuletide dose: French site La Vie and photohournalist Jordan Pouille are again claiming that Foxconn is Hell on Earth.
Not that you’d come to that conclusion yourself, as the photoessay itself consigns itself to bookending shots of the barred windows at Foxconn’s dormitories (to prevent suicides) with shots of workers going to work, performing coordinated dances, shopping at malls, listening to pop music and shopping for food. What an Auschwitz, right?
I automatically love any story about a robber who tries to stick up a restaurant, only to have to deal with the armada of cooks in the kitchen arming themselves with cleavers and knives and preparing to go to war. I was once in a restaurant in Malden, Massachusetts that avoided being robbed in just the same manner.
That said, it’s rare that I get a chance to write about these amazing incidents of robbers vs. line cooks on Cult of Mac, but here we have an exception, when 20-year old Jerome Taylor made the mistake of falling afoul of a blade-wielding kitchen crew when he tried to rob a New London, Connecticut restaurant using only his iPhone.
Needless to say, the robber — 20-year old Jerome Taylor — failed. Although he brandished his iPhone like a gun, the cooks quickly flooded out of the kitchen, ready to slice and dice. Terrified by the charge, Taylor suddenly “became apologetic and told the cooks he was only kidding and that he needed money for his child.”
He seems to have convinced the staff, because they begged the police not to file charges. It didn’t work, though: Taylor was still charged with attempted robbery and interfering with an officer.
Next time you need money for Christmas for your child, Jerome, maybe try selling that iPhone on eBay instead of robbing a restaurant. Don’t you know they shove all the disreputable, violent lots back in the steamer of the kitchen? Those guys would cut you sooner than look at you.
You might not agree with her position, but you’ve got to admit that this is one precocious kid: a thirteen year old iPhone owner is set to go into court next month to contest what she and her family claim was an unjust charge levied by Apple Korea to fix an iPhone 3G which they claimed had been water damaged.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg might have made TIME Magazine’s title of “Person of the Year,” but the austere Financial Times has a much different take, and they’re giving the title to none other than Steve Jobs… and while there’s many reasons the Financial Times think Jobs qualifies, most of it boils down to the iPad.
It’s Christmas Eve, and if you don’t have today off, you’re probably just counting down the hours, so why not count down a third of one with this: a recent Defcon talk hosted by a hacker named Zoz, whose Quicksilver G4 was stolen over two years ago by a burglar named Melvin Guzman.
How did Zoz know Guzman was the perp? Easy: he had OpenDNS installed so when Guzman brought the Mac on line — two years later — he was able to SSH in. He also had VNC installed, which allowed him to see what the thief was doing on his machine.
And what was he doing? Mostly browsing countless porn sites with names like “elephantasses.com” as well as taking pictures of himself naked for online dating sites. Ultimately, Zoz was able to send the cops to the precise address of the guy who had stolen his G4 an entire country away, and recover it… but not before he consigned Guzman once and forever to the pantheon of stupid, stupid thieves.
Even if Apple thought Antennagate was overblown, let’s face it: their last attempt to put the iPhone’s antenna into the exposed edges of the device didn’t work out so well, prompting a PR catastrophe so bad that Apple was actually forced to hold an emergency press conference… something they never do.
That in and of itself suggests pretty strongly that Apple’s going to try something new for the iPhone antenna in future handsets, and if a new patent is any indication, that new approach to hiding the iPhone’s antenna may be by hiding it under the iconic Apple logo.
When you try to open a file that your Mac doesn’t already have a default app registered to, it doesn’t know what to do, so it either asks you to choose the application you want to use, or it will — if you so desire it — unceremoniously dump you back to Finder.
That’s actually not a very elegant way to handle unrecognized file extensions. Windows has a better system, for goodness’ sake: it will automatically search the web for applications that can open the file.
Luckily, with the arrival of the Mac App Store in January as well as the release of Mac OS X 10.6.6, that’s all slated to change. As it turns out, Apple has very cleverly deigned to integrate the App Store into the prompt you get when OS X doesn’t know what to do with a file: you can now search the Mac App Store for one that’ll work to open it. Keen!