News - page 2194

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.

Ars Technica stumbled upon an interesting tidbit while reviewing their 11-inch MacBook Air.  They found a compelling reason for Apple to not install Adobe Flash on the MacBook Air and it wasn’t just because they wanted to make sure users always had the latest version of Flash.

This is going to become the Must Have item of the Holiday Shopping Season for Apple iOS device owners.

Trust me.

With the release Thursday of 5.0 Beta for Mac OS X, Internet communications giant Skype took a big step on the path to aligning the Windows and Mac versions of its flagship calling platform.

Mac users who’d grown used to the modular UI of previous versions may find the new, more unified interface arresting initially, but there’s no question Skype designers have brought their software well within the confines of the “iTunes” UI model and new Skype for Mac users, should there be any left on the planet, ought to feel right at home from the get-go.

The big news with the new release is support for group video calling, for which Skype borrows from Safari’s curved pane effect to display the feeds of individuals on a group call, with the more important feature being that it just works.

If you’ve decided to pick up one of Apple’s miraculously thin new MacBook Airs, but have a large media or photo library, you’re probably going to have to pick up an external USB hard drive to go with it: those SSDs are blisteringly fast, yes, but they’re not exactly voluminous.

What external hard drive can match the Air’s resplendent svelteness, though? Try the Hitachi G-Drive Slim. It’s only 0.39 inches thick and clocks in at 320GB for $99.99. That’s not a lot of storage space for the price, but then again, neither is the Air.

The super slim runway model MacBook Air is the best MacBook I’ve had so far. It’s thin, light, and zippy fast for the work I need to do – like this blog post and everything I need to do while mobile so far. Unfortunately it managed to slip out of manufacturing and into our hands with a few issues.

Now there is definite proof that at least some of the video issues are related to sleep/wake and that Apple, who has been completely quiet about it – knows that the problem exists, but isn’t publicly acknowledging it.

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

Well, what do you know: the guys over at Plex, who make one of my favorite media center apps for the Mac, have jailbroken their second-gen AppleTV and managed to get the Plex client up and running on the little $99 box.

The proof of concept’s a little rough around the edges, but once this is polished up, it could be a huge boon for AppleTV owners hoping to expand their box’s capabilities. Sure, you still need to stream your media from a paired Mac, but Plex supports a lot more codecs than AirPlay. I can’t wait to see this project progress.

This is a pretty neat spin on the freemium model: Capcom Arcade is a free title that bundles many of Capcom’s classic arcade games — including Street Fighter II, Commando and 1942 — together in a virtual arcade. Just like in a real arcade, to play the games, you need tokens, which you can buy in-app. Otherwise, Capcom Arcade is happy to dole out free tokens every day, which you can then use for a limited number of plays.

It’s a clever little approach. Usually, freemium games use in-game virtual goods to make money, but Capcom’s turned that idea on its head by making a play of their games themselves into a virtual good to be consumed. I wonder if other classic arcade publishers with a presence in the App Store will catch on: Sega, I’m looking at you.

[via Touch Arcade]

Been holding out for redsn0w before jailbreaking your iOS 4.1 device. Good news: the Dev Ream has just released the latest version which will allow you to jailbreak your iPhone 4, 3GS, 3G, 3rd or 4th generation iPod Touch and second generation AppleTV on either Mac or Windows machines. It uses geohot’s limera1n exploit, and also adds “custom bootlogos for iPhone3G/iPhone3GS/iPod2G users (with qualifying bootroms)” and an option that implements the ‘DFU’ button in PwnageTool” in Windows.

Interested? Grab it here, and let the hacking commence.