Apple’s trademarked phrase “There’s an app for that” became political cannon fodder after a Republican candidate called out a Democrat for breaking the rules of a televised debate by looking at a text message.
The best part?
Even though the device delivering that text-message bomb turned out to be a Droid, the Republican posted a doctored photo of his rival and an iPhone calling her an “iCheat.”
The kids have spoken. They don’t want toys for Christmas. They don’t want candy. They don’t want games or CDs or DVDs.
They want iDevices.
The iPad is just about perfect for reading magazines; surprising, then, that more publishers haven’t come out with iPad-specific apps, right? Thankfully, publishers seem to be catching on, and last week saw two tricked-out versions of women’s magazines debut as apps on the iPad.
Nintendo, the mobile gaming pioneer, now sees Apple as the immediate threat to its future, not Microsoft. “Do I think that in the near term [Apple] can hurt us more than Microsoft? Absolutely,” Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime tells an interviewer.
September was a good month for Apple’s push into mobile gaming. Alongside its claim that the Cupertino, Calif. company held 50 percent of the portable gaming segment, and that the iPod touch was the No. 1 gaming device, Apple opened a gaming center for its lucrative App Store. That, along with a survey finding iOS gamers nearly outnumber Nintendo fans is enough to explain why the DS maker sees Apple as the “enemy of the future.”
Laptop users usually have a strong preference for either glossy or matte displays, but unfortunately, if you buy an Apple notebook, you’d better get used to seeing reflections: all of Cupertino’s current notebooks save the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros come with displays of the glossy variety.
So what if you’re twitching for the new MacBook Air, but can’t stand seeing the translucent enantiomorph of your ugly mug overlaid on your desktop all the time? No problem: just call up TechRestore, send in your MacBook Air along with $250 bucks and they’ll rub some fine-grained sandpaper all over your glossy display until it nice and matted.
Sorry, we kid: in actuality, TechRestore will simply retrofit a matte display into your MacBook Air that is identical, spec-for-spec, with the stock one. Not worth a quarter grand to me personally, but then again, I’m a narcissist.
[via TUAW]
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDb7qwrpFqs
Every time a new and much anticipated gadget finally hits store shelves, it is inevitable that a couple losers will buy one just to film themselves destroying it. As you can see in the video above, the new MacBook Air will not be spared this ignominy, as a bewigged Jake Gyllenhall lookalike and an individual who can only be described as the one of the grossest humanoids in the world blow up a new Air with dynamite… and in slow motion.
The white iPhone 4, which has become somewhat of a mysterious species among the vast herds of black-and-silver handsets, may soon appear in the wild. Apple’s new Apple Store applications is listing it among the options for reserving and iPhone.
Although not available at Apple’s online storefront, the white iPhone, in 16GB or 32GB configurations, is listed in the “Reserve product” tab of the application. The option may mean the white iPhone 4 is ready for wider distribution.
Although I actually play them with what can only be described as garish, butter-fingered ineptitude, I love SHMUPs, and so I’m really excited to take Firi Games’ new $0.99 shoot-em-up Phoenix for a spin.
Not only does the graphics and action look absolutely fantastic — a throwback to some of my favorite SHMUPs like Cho Ren Sha 68k — but Phoenix boasts one nifty little trick to separate itself from competition like Cave’s Espagaluga II: while most SHMUPs are all about pattern recognition, Phoenix is totally random, piecing different enemy ships and bullet patterns together on the fly so that no game is ever the same.
Our most beloved of open-source video players, VLC, got a spankingly sexy iPad port last month… and now it’s been updated as a universal binary that supports the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and third/fourth gen iPod Touch.
If you’ve previously downloaded the iPad version, the update also adds the ability to delete files within VLC itself, as well as faster decoding and increased support for some of the more esoteric extensions.
Is there anything VLC doesn’t run on at this point? Besides the AppleTV, that is, which is positively twitching for a port?
VLC is a free download from the App Store. Go get it.
Earlier this month, Microsoft promised that Mac owners born with mental aberrations grave enough to compel them to buy a Windows Phone 7 handset over an iPhone would be facilitated in their madness by native OS X syncing software, and what do you know, Microsoft was as good as its word.
The software is called Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac, and it will allow you to sync content including music, photos, video and podcasts from your Mac to your Windows Phone 7 handset. You can read a review of the software here.
Want to get your iPad engraved with a foul limerick, or a portrait of Woz realized in ASCII, or a hip-hop style roll call of everyone who has ever shown you disrespect, or — I guess — some pithy line of sentiment? Apple’s finally offering to engrave iPads for customers. Like their iPod engraving program, getting some letters laser-etched into your iPad’s case is free if you order the tablet through Apple’s online store.
Isn’t that nice? Just remember that if you opt to get your iPad engraved, you can no longer exchange it unless it arrives as dead as a door stop.
If you’re a regular user of Skype and you’re considering picking up a MacBook Air, be warned: for some reason, Skype version 2.8.x just does not want to play nice with Apple’s new, wafer-thin notebook.
It’s not clear what is causing the problem, but the symptom is obvious: when you first open Skype, the login phase never fully resolves itself. Instead, users find themselves stuck staring at the login window until they quit the app.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq8Dok2Th2s&hd=1
Watch out! A major new security hole in the iPhone software has just been discovered… a bug that allows anyone who picks up your phone to easily unlock it and access all of your phone data under iOS 4.1.
In case you want to try it yourself, here’s how you gain access to a locked iPhone through the security hole. When your iPhone 4 is locked with a passcode, tap the emergency call button, then enter three hash keys. Now tap the call button then immediately hit the lock button.
Do the above correctly and you’ll be rewarded by being dumped into the iPhone’s Phone app. From there, you can access the user’s favorites, contacts, dial pad,. recent calls, voice mails and even send SMS and email messages through the Address book.
It’s a pretty huge bug, and it seems to work on all iPhones running iOS 4.1. This is the sort of thing Apple will patch pretty quickly, but in the meantime, show extra dilligence and care in not leaving your locked iPhone lying around.
Could Apple, with $51 billion burning a hole in Cupertino’s pocket, turn its acquisitive eye toward consumer electronics pioneer Sony? That’s the question getting attention today as rumor of potential purchases by the iPhone maker push Sony stock higher. Like many rumors, the Sony buyout chatter has vaporous origins.
Although analysts appear skeptical as to how friendly such a takeover would be, just the potential of a buyout had Sony’s stock climbing 3 percent. Also fueling the rumor were comments by former Apple CEO John Scully. Scully, talking with reporters, said Steve Jobs always envisioned Sony as Apple’s goal.
Here at Cult of Mac, we love Apple’s new A4-powered update to their “hobbyist” set-top box, the AppleTV… but all is not rosy for everyone. According to reports coming in from users, the new AppleTV might be prone to a very, very subtle skipping problem that — once seen — becomes impossible to unsee.
Next Monday is November 1st and for us would-be wordsmiths, that date has special import as the first day of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Over the next thirty days, tens of thousands of would-be novelists will smash out as much prose as they can, trying to finish the first draft of a short, complete novel before the clock strikes midnight on November 30th.
In order to help novelists prepare for the orgy of fiction that will all but consume the lives of Mac-using NaNoWriMo next month, Scrivener — our favorite project planner for writers and novelists — has seen fit to release the public preview of the much anticipated 2.0 update… and it’ll be completely free to use until December 7th.
Remember last week’s report that said that almost one-third of all iPad owners had never downloaded an app?
We bought it — after all, the iPad is a compelling device right out of the box without ever plugging in a credit card company — but it looks like we were being overly credulous. Nielsen Group, who originally posted the numbers, has just released a huge honking update on their previous numbers… this time claiming that only 9% of iPad users have never downloaded an app.
One of the little secrets that has made Apple the most profitable company in tech is their ability to achieve high margins on their gizmos, but the new MacBook Airs might set a record even for Apple: according to analysts who have estimated its bill of materials, the entry-level, 11.6-inch MacBook Air costs only $718 to make.
That means that for every 11.6-inch MacBook Air Apple sells, they make $281, a profit margin of 28.1%. That’s for the 64GB: buy yourself a 128GB MacBook Air and the profit margin jumps to 34%. Buy a 128GB 13.3-inch MacBook Air and that margin nudges forward again, this time to 37%.
Those margins are excellent, even comparatively: Apple, on average, achieves a profit margin of just 20% on the rest of their laptops.
The AppleTV has been jailbroken and we’ve already seen the release of the first AppleTV app courtesy of nitoTV, but how to install it without an AppleTV version of Cydia? Jailbreak maestro MuscleNerd gives us the four-one-one:
1) Jailbreak your AppleTV using PwnageTool
2) SSH into your Apple TV2, the default password is “alpine”
3) Type “passwd” and enter a new password (if you haven’t already)
4) Type: echo “deb https://apt.awkwardtv.org ./” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/awkwardtv.list
5) Type: apt-get update
6) Type: apt-get install com.nito.nitoTV
7) Type: killall Lowtide
Done and dusted! Enjoy the amazing ability to get weather… on your television! The future is now!
Couch potatoes take note: Peel, a free app that’s a sort of mix between Netflix’s movie suggestions and TV Guide, made its debut last week.
And it’s got a star-studded development team backing it up. Core members of the original iTunes team helped create Peel’s interface, and a team that beat Netfilx’s movie-suggestion algorithm in a competition worked on Peels innards.
Despite the wary uncertainty of several Secret Service agents, Sylvester Cann was able to get President Obama to autograph his iPad at a recent rally at the University of Washington in Seattle. Much to Apple’s chagrin, the autograph was captured through their arch-nemesis Adobe’s Adobe Ideas app.
Obama — cool as a cucumber — seems to have been a sport about it all: he reportedly thought autographing an iPad was pretty awesome.
Photo effects apps are two-a-penny on the App Store now, so if your photography app is going to make a splash it needs to offer something more than just whimsical visual effects and a selection of fake-Polaroid borders.
Pinhole Camera claims to turn your iPhone into a digital pinhole camera. It’s quite fun to use, mocked up like a home-made pinhole cam made of sticky tape and cardboard.
But what sets it apart isn’t the basic photos – it’s the double exposure feature that lets you merge two photos into one.
For the past three years, AT&T’s constabulary of phone-slinging retail monkeys have been rigorously trained in all aspects of the iPhone so as to best pimp Ma Bell’s exclusive handset… but as rumors about the end of that exclusivity have increasingly gained traction, so have AT&T’s efforts to train their employees in other smartphones, says Bloomberg.
Last week, we reported that Apple’s new MacBook Airs were shipping without Adobe Flash preinstalled… a radical departure from the norm for Apple, which has been bundling Flash with OS X (and OS 9 before it) as the default for seemingly ages. Was it a fluke, or is this Apple’s new policy?
Nope, not a fluke, according to Apple, who say that Adobe Flash will not come preinstalled on any of their machines in the future.
iPhoto ’11 is an incredible update to Apple’s casual photo managing/editing suite which makes organizing and tweaking your digital snaps simpler and more streamlined than ever, but only if iPhoto ’11 doesn’t gobble up your existing library as part of the upgrade process… a mishap that is striking an alarming number of upgraders.