News - page 2146

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’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.

Cedars School in Greenock, Scotland, has become the first school in the world to deploy an iPad to every child in the age groups it serves (roughly 5 to 16 year-olds). We’ve mentioned this effort before, so Cult of Mac decided to check in on the project again for our Education special and see how they’re doing.

“The iPad has become far more embedded in our school day than I ever thought it would become,” Fraser Speirs, the architect behind the project, wrote on his blog.

Remember those wildly popular, hideously happy “slap bracelets” born of the late ’80s that — like Oakley Iridium Frogskin sunglasses — adorned those young individuals who were blissfully devoid of any sense of fashion whatsoever? Well, Griffin thinks it’s time to bring them back — but this time, they’re making them cooler, by sticking iPod Nanos in them and turning the whole thing into a Swatch (another fashion gift from the ’80s) -ish watch.

A cool $25 will get you (or the giftee of your choice) one of Griffin’s silicon Slap Cases for the 6th-gen Nano, in one of several retina-destroying colors.

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.

Ever since we posted about  Let’s Create Pottery HD last month, we’ve been wondering when the app — that lets users have a go at creating virtual pottery on the iPad — would be out (or even be practical) on the smaller screen of the iPhone/iPt.

Last week, developer Infinite Dreams released the iPhone version, then added further enticement to get our hands dirty by releasing a free, try-before-you-buy version of the app a few days later (Which is a good thing, because the paid version looks like it might be a little prone to crashing, judging by the comments).

Still, the lite version checks out pretty well, and the full version, with its expanded creative options, is on sale right now for just a buck.

Apple has finally approved the native Google Voice app after a 16 month delay.

Download it from iTunes here. It’s free, offers low-rate international calling and push notifications for new text or voicemail messages. It’s quicker than the HTML5 version, and has access to the iPhone’s contact list.

More info on Google Voice Blog.

Could this be a white iPhone 4 for Verizon? Note:

1. The lack of a SIM card slot (Verizon doesn’t use SIM cards)

2. A new external antenna design (Goodbye Antennagate)

3. The Verizon symbol in the upper left of the screen.

Wouldn’t it be great? But I call BS. The photo looks fake. It’s too good. Shots of prototypes are usually crappy. This looks too staged. I’ll bet it’s a Chinese knockoff.

Below is the full-size image.

Via CoveringWeb.

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:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpXdk-dkQ_E

Filmmaker Greg Richters had enough with blue screens of death and viruses. So he made this aggro ode to Microsoft which ends in flames.

“I used PCs all the time but I got fed up with its bugs and constant crashing and so I switched to Mac three years ago,” he tells Cult of Mac.

The video shows a frazzled Microsoft user fighting his virus-ridden PC, until it explodes in its face — something that does actually happen with PCs.

(And a few Apple devices, too, we note. But not as many? And what’s with all the burning and blowing up of innocent computers lately?)

Anyway, the message? “Just say no to Microsoft, get a Mac,” Richters tells us.

Via Films United

Research in Motion has taken to YouTube to compare its recently unveiled PlayBook tablet with the leading iPad from Apple. After RIM CEO Jim Balsillie last week said its tablet would beat Apple on price, now the Canadian BlackBerry maker now has a video claiming to show web browsing on the PlayBook is faster than the iPad.

The video, showing the PlayBook loading pages at a faster clip and with complete Adobe Flash support, reminds one of an earlier showdown between Apple’s iPhone 4 and RIM. Earlier this year, Apple briefly posted a video on its website hoping to illustrate the iPhone 4’s much-discussed troublesome antenna was actually a problem shared by other major handset makers, including the BlackBerry. After a storm of complaints from its rivals, Apple quickly removed the video, instead announcing a free bumper program.

The competition is scrambling to keep up with Apple after they finally succeeded in landing the Beatles catalogue for iTunes: in the hour since the announcement, Amazon has already dropped the price of at least two Beatles offerings to undercut Apple’s own prices on the same albums.

Apple’s accompanied its surprise announcement of the Beatles coming to iTunes with the expected press release, but this one’s more worth reading than normal: it’s filled with winning quotes from Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

After a decade’s absence from the most popular music store on earth, the Beatles have finally come to iTunes today… and to pay tribute to Beatlemania both past and present, Apple is celebrating the occasion by streaming The Fab Four’s history making concert at the Washington Coliseum back in February 11th 1964 on the official Apple.com website.

[polldaddy poll=”4096031″]
The Fab Four are finally on iTunes. Is this the moment that you have been waiting for — or have you already ripped all your Beatle’s CDs and couldn’t care less?

Let us know in the comments.

There’s no shortage of iPad docks out there, but most offerings force you to dock in portrait position, which can make typing on your iPad via a Bluetooth keyboard something of a pain.

Altec Lansing’s latest dock, the Octiv Stage, fixes that by allowing you to swivel the iPad when it’s docked between landscape and portrait, while also packing in some impressive speakers to add a little bit of oomph to your iPad’s audio output.

It’s a nice looking dock, if a bit beefy, but unfortunately it has an equally beefy price: $150.

As predicted, Apple’s big iTunes announcement today wasn’t iTunes in the cloud, or streaming, or a subscription fee… it’s John, Paul, Ringo and George. After ten years, the Beatles and their music catalogue have finally hit iTunes.

Although it’s not been announced on Apple.com as of writing, the Beatles’ presence on the iTunes Store now commands most of the upper fold. The entire catalog seems to be available, along with a link to the band’s page, the Beatles Box set and more. You’re even getting a decent deal on the Beatles Box Set: it cost $250 when it was released last year, and currently costs $154.99 on Amazon at a heavily discounted price. Apple’s price? Just $150 for every Beatles song ever recorded.

The sudden resolution of Apple’s decades-long standoff with Apple Records, first for the Apple trademark and then for the Beatles catalog, has happened swiftly. One thing’s for sure: however Steve got Apple Records and EMI to agree to iTunes’ terms, it’s going to make one hell of a read when the story finally comes to light.

Although many of us already own the Beatles’ catalog — I have the full collection of the recent remasters already converted to lossless MP3s — and while many will be apathetic to this news, this is a big win for Apple, as the record labels release their death grip on one of the last digital music holdouts.

CDs and records aren’t the future of music anymore: iTunes is, and the labels have finally been forced to give up one of their last aces-in-the-holes in order to stay relevant.

$300 is a lot to spend for an iPad satchel, but if you’ve just got a pressing GQ shoot coming up, Palmer & Sons’ exquisite iPad hip bag is probably the most fashionable way of toting your iOS tablet around we’ve seen yet.

It’s made of Havana Brown leather (with Italian cognac available to order) and features brass rivets and panic clasp closures throughout. Just don’t call it a murse. Mad Man Palmer and his psychopathic, skin-happy sons don’t like that at all.

When future iPhones gain near field communications technology, the way we use our mobile phones is going to undergo a dramatic evolution. Imagine being able to pay for a cup of coffee by waving it in front of a cash register, or even taking your entire Mac’s file directory with you on the road and automatically transferring it over to a new machine just by bumping it against the display.

That’s all plenty cool, but another way NFC will make the iPhone a cooler device is by building-in a lot of the functionality of apps like Bump, which allows you to share your contact information with another person who has the Bump app installed simply by brushing iPhones together.

I hope NFC also enables another cool function that Bump has just integrated into their app — : music sharing — only with more sophistication. The most recent update to Bump allows you to specify songs from your iTunes collection that you want to share with a friend. It doesn’t do this by squirting the MP3 to your “bumpee” however: instead, Bump stays on the right side of the music labels by plucking the song information from your MP3’s tags and redirecting them to a YouTube clip of the same song. From there, your bumpee is free to enjoy the song and if he likes it, buy it directly from ITunes.

It’s a very clever implementation, but imagine if Apple baked this into iTunes properly via NFC, complete with MP3 squirting. Microsoft’s Zune has had something like that for awhile, but I’d just kill to see it on an iPod.

When Steve Jobs was asked why Apple was deprecating in-house Java development for OS X, he explained: “Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms. They have their own release schedules, which are almost always different than ours, so the Java we ship is always a version behind. This may not be the best way to do it.”

Yesterday, Apple announced how it planned on passing the Java torch back to Oracle: they would be partnering together for the OpenJDK project to make sure that both Oracle and the open source dev community had the tools they needed to keep Java on the Mac alive past Java SE6.

Ostensibly, Apple’s move to deprecate Java would be good for Mac security, in that users will no longer be forced to wait for Apple to update their home-baked Java when Oracle fixes some security vulnerabilities in their build.

According to Charlie Miller, co-author of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook, though, this may make the Mac even less secure than it was before.

There’s a lot of Mac bundled out there, and they usually all offer pretty incredible deals on Mac software, but let’s face facts: usually, there’s only one or two applications you really want. If those two apps cost less than the asking price of the bundle, and if you were going to buy them anyway, then getting an additional eight apps for free is an obvious win… but what if you’re more ambivalent, or just plain cheap?

Enter MacBundles, which has an interesting new twist on the bundle software concept: the BYOB store. Essentially, this lets you look at their $50 bundle and either buy it all in a go or pick-and-choose the apps you want for $5.95 each… as long as you order a minimum of five.

First there were smartphones, then came the mountains of apps. Now rivals Apple and Google are racing to introduce to iOS and Android the ability to initiate secure mobile transactions via a simple tap of your handset. The latest shot was fired by Google’s CEO Monday, who introduced its tap technology entrant as part of an upcoming update of its Android OS codenamed “Gingerbread.”

Speaking at a conference on Web 2.0 technology, CEO Eric Schmidt said the new Android software would support Near Field Communications, a chip allowing nearby devices to communicate. While a horribly-forgettable name, the technology holds intriguing possibilities for companies seeking to expand the boundaries of mobile commerce. A hint can be seen at your local grocery store, where many payment terminals permit you to simply tap your credit card in order to initiate a transaction.

According to both federal prosecutors and Cupertino itself, former Apple manager Paul Shin Devine was crooked, accepting almost $1 million in kickbacks from accessory makers in exchange for insider knowledge gleaned from his position as Senior Operations Manager of the iPod division.

On his part, Devine says he’s not guilty, but that claim certainly seems disingenuous: not only is he facing 23 counts of money laundering and wire fraud, but when investigators raided his home they discovered over $150,000 in cash squirreled away in shoeboxes.

Now prosecutors are saying that Devine has more, and they want him to open his safety deposit boxes to see if he’s withholding even more money from them.

The case has already had a devastating effect on Devine and his family: although he is currently out on bail, but he was only able to secure the money necessary for release by allowing his mother to put her house up on lien. I really hope he ends up being innocent of the charges: it’s one thing to rip off Apple, but another thing entirely to let your mother risk homelessness to protect you from justice.

When you’re under as much scrutiny as Apple, even the smallest change or briefest of retractions is bound to provoke comment, so it was no surprise that when Apple briefly pulled the Mac OS X Server 10.6.5 update was briefly pulled yesterday, it almost immediately raised questions about what was going on.

Not to fear, though: it’s now back online with a 1.1 version number, available for download from Apple Support or by hitting up Software Update.

Despite the fact that it’s one of the best games the Mac has to offer, we’ve never talked about Minecraft here at Cult of Mac. Let’s remedy that, shall we?

Since the iPad launched, scams luring gullible folks in with mirage of free ones have proliferated almost as fast as the device itself.

Now that desire for Apple’s magical tablet is at its peak — only world peace is slightly more desirable — watch out for the iPad bait-and-switches.

McAfee Labs investigated the top 12 Scams of Christmas — sing along with us now — and the first to put dancing plums over the eyes of eager consumers are iPad scams.