News - page 2151

Last week, the Skyfire browser made headlines for two separate “firsts” on the iOS platform.

First up, Skyfire finally did what Adobe couldn’t and brought Flash to iOS, albeit non-natively. Instead, the Skyfire browser converts Flash videos to HTML5 on their own servers, then pumps the HTML5 to your iPhone or iPad instead.

Pretty neat, but I actually like Skyfire’s second accomplishment more: they managed to be the first iOS app to ever “sell out.”

Quite a trick with an infinitely copyable, digital good, but the Skyfire team had a good excuse: their app was selling like such gangbusters that the servers used to convert Flash to HTML5 on the fly couldn’t cope with demand. They’d sold out of bandwidth, not copies of the app itself.

Skyfire has spent the weekend beefing up its servers. The good news is that if you’re lucky, you should be able to buy Skyfire again soon. The bad? Skyfire’s selling the app in batches to make sure they servers don’t get overwhelmed: they’ll put the app back up on the App Store for a little while, pull it, then put it back up a few hours later.

An interesting approach to say the least. If you’re interested in giving Skyfire a spin, check out their Twitter feed for word when the next batch will go live.

Speculation and squatting on app names has been a going on in the App Store for a while. It eventually became so problematic that Apple initiated some serious new guidelines aimed at cracking down on App Store squatters who were sitting atop popular app names without any app to show for it. That policy change seems to have worked in cutting down on name squatting in the iOS app store…. but if early indications are to be believed, it appears that Apple’s forthcoming Mac App Store might have an even bigger squatting problem on its hands, and that problem could keep some of the Mac’s best loved software frozen out of the Mac App Store indefinitely.

Without a front facing camera, there’s not much an iPhone 3GS can do with FaceTime, even if it could be be enabled… but when has the mere logistics of a hack gotten in the way of the jailbreak community? Here it is: FaceTime on the iPhone 3GS, courtesy of iPhoneIslam.

How much is a good iPad app worth? According to a new report, quite a bit more than a decent iPhone app… and the margin between the two is growing every day.

How far in advance would Apple film a commercial for the second-generation iPad? Depending on the answer to that question, Apple might be readying the iPad 2 for release, getting an ad in the can for next April… or, well, not filming an ad for the iPad 2 at all.

The Solid State Drive, or SSD, appears to be the future of Apple devices, including the recently updated MacBook Air. Toshiba, the maker of the SSD in the razor-thin MBA is making the Blade X-gale series more widely available. The drives – just around 2.2mm thick – are available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB configurations to resellers and bulk purchasers.

“Delivering a product that enables superior user experience in a smaller footprint is the ultimate goal,” said Scott Nelson, vice president, Memory Business Unit, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. A denser memory module permits the smaller size, Nelson explained.

Over the weekend, Apple CEO Steve Jobs provided a few (very few) reasons why the Cupertino, Calif. was shelving the Xserve: it wasn’t selling well. “Hardly anyone was buying them,” Jobs explained in an email to a French website.

In a related mini-mystery, an Apple executive publicly affirmed Apple will still support its server customers, but then mysteriously deleted the message.

This just in: RetromacCast reports on another variation of iPhone art, this time a large framed replica of an iPhone.  Created from individual iPhone app coasters, RMC co-host James initially suspected a force of iEvolution at work but was pleased to learn this was a 40th birthday gift from his wife.  Famed Banana Jr creator (and RMC co-host) John assisted with framing details like the home button and speaker.

Wisely, they didn’t attempt to create a white model.  Full photoset on Flickr, coasters from Meninos.

Small, portable, expensive and hard to trace. A young police officer in Samoa must have been thinking the same things most that most iPod thieves think when he devised a plan to get his hands on Apple’s portable music player.

And evidently that “gotta-have-it” impulse was strong enough not only to push him to cross the line between law enforcer and law breaker — but to plan a break-in to get the iPod from the office of the head of state.

23-year-old police officer Aumua Marcus Hunt first pleaded not guilty to one charge of theft, but then copped to stealing the iPod from the government office.

Cult of Mac joined the mobile vanguard Friday with a dedicated mobile version of the site’s content at https://m.cultofmac.com/. An automatic redirect should take mobile users to the leaner, cleaner version optimized for mobile devices but if Internet caching prevents that at present for particular users, simply point your device’s browser to the mobile URL.

Once you’re there, follow the easy steps below to place a Cult of Mac site icon in the next empty space on your (in this illustrated case) iPhone’s home screen, from which you’ll be able to easily access all the great news and information posted here daily.

This is a huge hack: a plucky modder has resurrected a Macintosh SE/30 using a Seagate Dockstar, a small Linux server running a 1.2GHz ARM processor, a few USB 2.0 ports and 128MB of RAM. Not only does it work as a server, but in runs a Mac emulator, and even the floppy drive works… but it reads SD cards mounted on a floppy-shaped protoboard instead of ancient 5.25 discs! He even restored the Mac to pristine condition by bathing it in chemicals to return it to its vintage, unyellowed color. Amazing!

Remember Epic’s stunning display of the Unreal Engine 3 running on the iPhone with Epic Citadel? That was more of a technology demonstration than anything else, but the first proper game running Unreal Engine 3 is coming to the App Store soon in Chair’s Project Sword, a swipe-controlled fighter with an RPG level-up and equipment mechanic…. and as you can see from the trailer above, it looks breathtaking.

As a gamer, I’ve slowly gotten used to the virtual D-pads and buttons in iOS games, but in all honesty, I still miss the tactility of real buttons underneath my thumb pads.

That said, I can’t imagine who would go in for this: the Tactile+Plus is a transparent overlay you put over your iPhone or iPod Touch’s screen to lend tactile feedback to a virtual D-pad.

Comment of the week comes from reader Flash Man regarding the story that Adobe’s Flash kills battery life. Writes Flash Mac:

A new study also indicates that using web and desktop applications will significantly decrease battery life. In fact, in a stunning series of tests soon to be released, scientists have determined that simply running the computer would decrease the battery by up to 50X compared to keeping it in the ‘off’ or ‘standby’ mode. Scientists are looking for solutions to this problem. One five year old girl suggested plugging in some kind of ‘charging device’ to combat this threat. Fanboys quickly dismissed the idea as too simple and instead suggested purchasing multiple Macbooks and having an elaborate series of spares available at all times. Additionally, Apple suggests purchasing an AppleTV and an iPhone to make end users feel better.

If you liked the idea of an iMac G3 coffee maker but held off spending a few hundred dollars because it only made coffee: listen up. Now you can make your morning cappuccino with it.

It’s the handiwork of Klaus Diebel at Kiwidee, who, not content to have made an subwoofer-amped stereo system with an iMac as well as the coffee maker, kept on DIYing.

The result? The iMac Coffee Edition was fitted with an injector system and a milk frother was added, so now it can make cappuccino.

The iPhone is undeniably huge in Japan, where the device accounts for over sixty percent of all smartphones sold. The iPhone 4 alone has been the number one selling handset in Japan for the last 18 weeks.

That’s not to say its dominance is unassailable though. Call it a spin, call it a blip, but this week saw the iPhone fall out of the number one spot in Japan for the first time in over four months, as Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy S smartphone careened into the standings at number one.

Ever played Lazer Tag? If Apple has its druthers, next time you play it, it won’t be with big ray guns and fluorescent sensors, but with your iPhone.

Apple’s gaming plans are described in a newly discovered patent dated April 2009 for “Interactive Gaming with Co-Located, Networked Direction and Location Aware Devices.”

The nitty gritty’s a lot cooler than that dry legalese description, though: what Apple is describing here is away to take advantage of an iPhone’s gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS to turn your handset into an aimable device that can talk to other iPhones that it is pointed at.

Last month, it was widely reported that Apple had reached yet another milestone with its App Store by chalking up it’s 300,000th app. The only problem with that number? It wasn’t true: while there were 300,000 apps in the App Store, a lot of those apps were inactive, meaning Apple hadn’t quite crossed the threshold for their milestone.

Still, time heals all, and now, Apple has actually racked up its 300,000th real app thanks to the average of 5,452 iPad apps and 12,218 iPhone apps uploaded each month.

Apple’s not ready to throw their hat into the USB 3.0 ring just yet. As Steve Jobs made abundantly clear in an email last week, Cupertino’s doesn’t see USB 3.0 taking off, at least until Intel starts officially supporting it… and evidence suggests that Apple might avoid USB 3.0 entirely in favor of Light Peak.

But what if you want USB 3.0 on your Mac now? Well, Apple’s not serving up official drivers yet, but LaCie’s stepping up to fill the void: they’ve just announced USB 3.0 drivers for their line of solutions.

To get USB 3.0 on your Mac, first you’ll need to buy one of LaCie’s cards: either a $49.99 USB 3.0 PCI Express Card or the $59.99 USB 3.0 ExpressCard/34, both of which will bring a couple of USB 3.0 (and backwards compatible USB 2.0) ports to your Mac Pro or MacBook. Then install the free driver and you’re ready to pick yourself up one of those blindingly flash USB 3.0 external drives that are all the rage right now.

Not a bad solution for Mac Pros, but ExpressCards can be fairly irritating to have hanging out of a MacBook, and obviously this won’t help you if you’ve got a MacBook Air, Mac mini or iMac. Still, if you’re committed to being on the cutting edge, LaCie’s happy to take your cash and make it happen.

If you want to avoid a rude wake up call this Monday morning, here’s how to make sure your iPhone alarm doesn’t falter when daylight savings ends in North America on Sunday, November 7.

The snafu appears to be a problem with the synchronization — while the iPhone updates itself to recognize the daylight savings change in your time zone,  it doesn’t update your alarm.

Specifically, it messes up repeating alarms set for anything other than “every day.” That means that your alarm will go off an hour late if you set it for “weekdays,” “weekends” or “every Monday,” for example.

If you’re a network administrator in love with the svelte, stackable design of Apple’s Xserve line, you’d better stock up: Apple has announced that they will be discontinuing the Xserve line starting January 31st, 2011.

With an effete wave of his hand, Steve Jobs could have you and everyone you cared about bludgeoned to death in the night by turtleneck-wearing goons armed with iPhone-stuffed socks, but that’s not enough to make him crack the top ten in Forbes’ list of most powerful people on the planet.

Nonetheless, the strongly spoken Apple CEO has managed to go up quite a few notches on the list, buoyed by Apple’s successes in the mobile arena. He climbed from the 57th spot last year to number 17 this year.

The latest update to Snow Leopard — Mac OS X 10.6.5 — hasn’t even shot down the Software Update pipeline to users yet as a beefy download, but that’s not stopping Cupertino from seeding early builds of 10.6.6 to developers.

In June 2008, on a flight home from Europe to San Francisco, I was given a fascinating demo of some jaw-dropping technology.

I was sitting next Inon Beracha, CEO of Israeli company PrimeSense, which had developed a low-cost chip and software to do 3D machine vision.

The system used a pair of cameras and an infrared sensor to highlight people and track their movements.

On his laptop, Beracha showed me videos of people waving their hands in the air to control Wii-like games. He showed people controlling TV programming menus by gesturing their hands in the air. And, most impressive of all, someone flipping through a photo slide show like they were Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It was so slick, I asked him if it was CGI. It was real, he said, and so cheap, the technology could eventually be found everywhere in the home, office and car.

Of course, PrimeSense’s system is at the heart of Microsoft’s new Kinect game controller, which is getting rave reviews and looks set to be a monster hit. It’s a “crazy, magical, omigosh rush,” says the New York Times‘ David Pogue.

And it almost belonged to Apple.

Apple has released the second update to its new iPhoto ’11 application today, and version 9.1 reintroduces support for creating photo calendars that had disappeared in the iPhoto ’11 release.

The update also provides additional letterpress themes for holiday greeting cards, and fixes several bugs.

This update adds several new print product options to iPhoto ’11. It also improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues.

• Provides the ability to create and order calendars in iPhoto.
• Additional letterpress holiday greeting card themes are now available.
• Fixes an issue that prevented videos downloaded from MobileMe or Flickr from importing correctly into iPhoto events.

The update is recommended for all users of iPhoto ’11.

This is the second update to iPhoto ’11 since its release just over two weeks ago. Apple quickly released the 9.0.1 update last week to address an issue that caused many users to lose their iPhoto data when upgrading from iPhoto ’09.

The iPhoto 9.1 update weighs in at just over 186 MB and can be downloaded via Software Update on your Mac, or from Apple’s download page.