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Steve Jobs says that multitouch must be horizontal, but for some reason, I don’t think this is quite what he had in mind: the Table Connect for iPhone is a close-to-complete project that marries a 58-inch multitouch surface with your jailbroken iPhone 4 through a 30-inch Dock Connector… not only charging your iPhone but turning your desk into your iPhone.

I’d want one to perch my iMac, but seeing as how I’ve never once seen the surface of my desk underneath its perpetual detritus of tobacco ash, beer bottles and discarded Starbucks cups, it might be money ill spent.

[via Engadget]

Probably since I can no longer cram one into my pockets along with my house keys ever since I donated my parachute pants to charity, I haven’t found Apple’s notebooks to be nearly as prone to scratches as the iPhone. Your mileage may well vary, though, so rest assured that Zagg’s invisibleSHIELD line of protective coatings are now available in sizes suitable for sticking on a new 11- or 13-inch MacBook Air.

Valve’s excellent Steam for Mac digital delivery service is having a Halloween sale this weekend, pretty much guaranteeing that if it’s spooky, on the Mac and features zombies, ghosts or monsters, you’ll be able to download it for the price of a Monster Mash.

If you’re a Mac gamer, here are the titles that are available at a discount this weekend:

• PopCap’s Plants Vs. Zombies — $4.99 (50% Off)

• Valve’s Team Fortress 2 (now featuring the Horseless Headless Horsemann in a scary new map) — $9.99 (50% Off)

• Valve’s Left 4 Dead Bundle — $14.99 (50% Off)

• Amnesia: The Dark Descent — $10.04 (33% Off)

All five of those games are terrific, and if you’ve got Boot Camp installed, there’s even more horror-themed titles to choose from.

Apple’s just seen fit to tighten up the Terms and Conditions applying to iTunes rentals… and in doing so have finally closed a loophole that allowed rented television shows to be transferred between the iPad and other iOS devices.

Here at Cult of Mac, we love the crowd-sourced, gadget-creating think tank at Quirky.com, and their latest is a fantastic answer to the tangle of USB cables snaking out of the back of your iMac.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyFL_ZKgTaQ

Need to put a spring in your step on a fall Friday?

Check out this video by Japanese break beat duo Hifana, it came out awhile back but we think it’s awesome.

The idea? For an ad campaign to showcase the flexibility of Nike Free Run+ shoes in Japan, they DJs use the footwear to make music, contorting and twisting the shoes to get different sounds, then battle it out DJ style

A MacBook Pro is at the heart of the operation that one half of Hifana, Daito Manabe, set up to make some sweet footie music. Nike gives a nod to the Apple power behind the project with a blink-and-you-missed it shot of a pair of MBPs in the beginning of the video.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6h-hpNZDFo

At last week’s Back to Mac event, Steve Jobs made a pretty compelling argument against imbuing multitouch into desktop and notebook displays. He argued — rightfully, I think — that multitouch is only workable ergonomically when a gadget can be positioned horizontally: if you have to keep leaning forward to interact with a touchscreen, you quickly develop gorilla arm.

I was pretty satisfied with that answer as to why Apple wasn’t exploring multitouch displays in their current iMacs, Mac Pros and MacBooks, but if you’re not adverse to a case of gorilla arm or two, Troll Touch is now offering a couple of options to bring multi-touch to Apple’s 27-inch LED-backlit Cinema Display.

Earlier this week, Apple finally launched a local version of its online retail store in China.. and within 10 hours managed to completely sell out of all available iPhone 4s. As 9to5Mac notes, since Apple’s attempted on cracking down on iPhone 4 scalping in its retail stores by forcing anyone looking to buy a handset from them directly online, this effectively means there’s not a single iPhone to be had in the country… unless you’re willing to pay a scalper his premium.

Apple’s latest record-breaking iPhone sales was enough to make the Cupertino, Calif. company the No. 4 mobile phone vendor worldwide, passing BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, according to research firm IDC. Although Apple has consistently scored among top smartphone vendors, this is the first time the iPhone maker has made it into the top ranks of general cell phone providers.

As a result, RIM pushed Sony Ericcson out of the top five for the first time in six years, according to IDC.

The iPhone’s been big in Japan for awhile: back in 2009, it commanded an amazing 72.2% market share of the nation’s smartphone segment. That’s a huge chunk of the pie, but because most Japanese customers were gravitating towards featurephones over smartphones back in 2009, that 72.2% market share only actually translated to 4.9% of the entire Japanese cell phone market.

Not to worry, though: smartphone sales in Japan have continued to grow over the last year, and the iPhone is still the best selling smartphone in all of Nippon.

If the back of your iPod or iPod Touch looks anything like the back of my iPod Touch, it probably looks like it’s spent a few hours in a rock tumbler on a low stuffed with diamonds… but if a new Apple patent application pans out, Cupertino may already have some plans to unleash new scratch-resistant coatings on their gadgets in the near future.

Although there are a lot of gadget makers looking to come out with their own answers to the iPad in the coming months — most notably RIM with the BlackBerry Playbook and Samsung with the Galaxy Tab — you’ve got to give them credit: the tablets they are releasing aren’t just iPad clones.

You can’t say the same for this tablet though, plucked out of a cheap electronics shop in the alleys of Shaghai: it’s an iPad clone through and through.

The iPad is synonymous with Apple, but according to Taiwan-based company Proview, Cupertino is stomping all over their trademark on the ‘IPad’ name… and they want Apple to pay up.

Thinner at its thinnest point than even the edge of an axe blade, Apple’s new MacBook Airs could conceivably be used to split a skull or two, but according to the always-paranoid Transportation Security Administration, it’s still less dangerous than a small bottle of water: if you have to go through an airport security checkpoint with your 11-inch Air, the TSA has determined that it never once has to be taken out of your bag for closer inspection.

First Apple surpassed rival Microsoft in market capitalization, now the Cupertino, Calif. company has beaten the business that Bill built in terms of flat-out revenue. The iPad maker recorded a record $20.34 billion this quarter, compared to Microsoft’s $16.20 billion.

Apple didn’t just beat the Redmond-based software giant, but stomped Microsoft’s best ever three-month period: $19 billion in revenue. The one area Microsoft still leads is profit margin. The company reported $5.41 billion compared to Apple’s $4.31 billion. Apple’s profit margin was below expectation this quarter as it dealt with keeping costs low for the iPad and the extra expense of a free bumper program in response to problems with the iPhone 4.

Here’s Devonthink To Go for iPad and iPhone, and it has a lot to offer.

For starters, there’s two-way sync between desktop and mobile databases. Documents that have been edited in other apps can be “opened back” in Devonthink, which will update its database accordingly. And plain text files can be edited inside Devonthink To Go itself.

Halloween, with its legions of black-clad kids running around and darting out into the street, introduces its own variety of driving perils. So in addition to warning other users of speed traps and red-light cameras, Trapster users can now mark two new location types on its map this Halloween: haunted houses and trick-or-treat zones.

The free app works through crowdsourcing, which means any registered user can add markers which then become viewable to other Trapster users; and if users find a marker that’s inaccurate (say, if some user tagged their in-laws place as a haunted house), it can be removed with enough votes against it. Now if only the had a marker for houses with the best candy…

One tech-savvy 12-year-old girl spooked a would-be kidnapper by pretending to make a phone call on her iPod Touch.

Police in Delaware are still trying to track down the creep who tried to lure the girl into his van the other evening as she waited to be picked up outside Stanton Middle School.

She told police that a man in a white van pulled into the school driveway and told her to “get in the van.”

There’s been a lot of hoopla about magazine apps from the likes of Popular Science and Wired, which we reviewed favorably. But these standalone apps are doomed to failure, argues Web designer Khoi Vinh.

Stand-alone magazine apps appeal to publishers and their advertisers, but are totally at odds with the way users are interacting with their iPads, argues Vinh, who is famous for the celebrated redesign of the New York Times‘ site.

Take the recent release of the iPad app version of The New Yorker. Please. I downloaded an issue a few weeks ago and greatly enjoyed every single word of every article that I read (whatever the product experience, the journalism remains a notch above). But I hated everything else about it: it took way too long to download, cost me US$4.99 over and above the annual subscription fee that I already payfor the print edition and, as a content experience, was an impediment to my normal content consumption habits. I couldn’t email, blog, tweet or quote from the app, to say nothing of linking away to other sources — for magazine apps like these, the world outside is just a rumor to be denied. And when I plugged my iPad back into my Mac, the enormous digital heft of these magazines brought the synching process to a crawl.

Instead, Vinh said publishers should be looking to good, entertaining apps like EW’s Must List or Gourmet Live. “Neither of those are perfect,” writes Vinh. “But both actively understand that they must translate their print editions into a utilitarian complement to their users’ content consumption habits.”

What magazine apps have you guys seen that translate well to the iPad? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

Khoi Vinh: My iPad Magazine Stand.

When iOS 4.2 for iPad is released in November, jailbreakers won’t need to wait before they can have their way with their iPads.

iOS jailbreak expert, iH8sn0w, released some images today of a jailbroken iPad running the iOS 4.2 firmware. The image above shows an iPad running the MobileTerminal jailbreak application, that gives users access to the command line.

This is great news for those that like to jailbreak their devices, but it comes as little surprise to many who have expected the jailbreak release for several weeks since its announcement.

If you’ll be jailbreaking your iPad as soon as you’ve updated to the iOS 4.2 firmware, let us know what your reasons for jailbreaking are in the comments.

[via AppAdvice]

[Think Halloween graphic by ~Zefhar]

This Sunday, October 31st is Halloween and if you aren’t thinking about Halloween yet you should be. Since it is almost here.

Do you know what your costume will be this year? Need to add a little zip to your scary get up? Here is a collection of iOS apps that are bound to add some fun to the scariest holiday of the year.

If you download them and get scared don’t blame me about things you hear that go bump in the night afterwards.

We’ve mentioned the IDAPT charging station before, but it has just been updated in a variety of colors in time for the Christmas season.

If, like a lot of us here at the Cult, you have more devices than you know what to do with and not enough time (or power outlets) to charge them all, a single charging station might come in useful.

And if it’s going to be so prominent in your home, you might as well get one that fits in with your decor.

The IDAPT i4 claims to charge over 4000 different gadgets, either via adaptors for the base unit or via USB connection to it. It will charge your iPods, iPhones and iPads quite happily – and all at once. It costs $59.99 including a pack of six mixed adaptors, or you can choose to pick your own selection of four adaptors that precisely match your devices.

As we wrote a couple days ago, the guys over at TechRestore will be happy to take your new MacBook Air and give it a matte display for just $250… but doing the dry run on the operating, they uncovered some of the MacBook Air’s secrets, and according to their CEO, the panels Apple is using in the new Airs are paper thin and absolutely breathtaking.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP1FxPtUMeM&feature=player_embedded

If you’ve been keeping around that old, dusty Sega Dreamcast just to occasionally send your ChuChus into battle against the nefarious KapuKapus, great news: Sega has just released their classic Dreamcast multiplayer puzzle game Chu Chu Rocket for iOS in both a $4.99 iPhone/iPod Touch version and a $6.99 HD version suitable for iPad.

I’ve been playing it all morning, and it’s a fantastic port of one of Sega’s best games, with the only real blemish on an otherwise superb title being the omission of online multiplayer. If you have any fond memories of Chu Chu Rocket at all, picking this up for the weekend is a no-brainer.

Below the jump: Chu Chu Rocket’s absolutely unforgettable original television advertisement.

I love the almost Trapper Keeper like aesthetic of the Mophie Workbook Case, which not only protects your iPad but lets you prop it up horizontally at almost any angle, perfect for typing or watching video. Sure, unlike my old Trapper Keeper, it features a synthetic leather veneer, but for some reason, I less want to put my iPad in it than lock in a bunch of cool robot folders magic-markered in block capitals with their dedicated subject.

Also unlike a Trapper Keeper is the price: a Mophie Workbook will cost you $59.95 if you want one.