News - page 2231

Apple’s decision to restrict what companies can serve ads to iOS-based mobile devices has caught the eye of federal regulators who reportedly have opened an investigation into the practice. The Cupertino, Calif. company plans to launch its iAd service July 1.

Although its unclear whether the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission would lead the investigation, regulators have “taken an interest in Apple’s actions,” according to the Financial Times, which cites two unnamed sources. The probe seems centered on an iOS developer agreement that limits user data to “an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads.” Rivals argue the language blocks Google’s AdMob, as well as Microsoft’s advertising service.

From Barcelona-based Herraiz Soto (the same people who brought you zen text editor Ommwriter) comes another idea for your notebook Mac: Bros and Mos, aka Stick with me baby.

They’re decorative stickers that add a little personality to the Apple symbol on your computer’s lid.

The Bros are hairstyles; the Mos are moustaches.

The stickers are made with 3M Controltac (whatever that is) and the designers say they won’t leave any nasty sticky marks on your laptop. But they are easy to put on and peel off as the mood takes you.

Each sticker costs eight Euros – about $9.60 at today’s exchange rate. But that does include shipping.

We’ve known for some time that the iPhone and iPod Touch are not as secure as we would like them to be — and unfortunately the same can be said about the new iPad. The lack of built-in encryption leaves our personal data on any of these devices at risk. Luckily for iPhone and iPod Touch users third party vendors are supplying apps that help fill some of these gaps in security. One such app, which was popular on the Palm OS platform, is SplashID from SplashData, Inc., which stores all your passwords, logins, and banking details.

Looking for a stylish and affordable way to hook your iPhone or iPod to your 50-inch plasma? Konnet Technology has just unveiled its new, $49.95 ReflexDock Pro, which looks like a pretty fantastic tool for the job.

In addition to piping out your audio and video to a larger screen thanks to included AV Out cables, the ReflexDock Pro also will charge your iPhone. It even includes features like Advanced Sound Reflection, designed to enhance audio and speaker quality when the iPod or iPhone is docked. And yes, Virginia, it’s iPhone 4 compatible.

My only criticism is actually the image Konnet is choosing to use to showcase their product. Sure, it’s a pretty accurate appraisal of how an iPhone-compressed video will look when smeared across a 50-inch plasma without the proper encoding, but creative license and all.

According to Slashgear, the ReflexDock Pro should be available soon on Amazon.

According to a new report by Reuters citing three inside sources, everyone’s favorite television streaming service Hulu is preparing a subscription-based service that will be available on numerous non-PC devices, with the iPad and Xbox 360 prominently named.

Other than that, there’s little information, but rumors in the past have indicated that a premium Hulu service would be subscription-based and get you access to a complete library of older content, as opposed to free Hulu’s library of newer episodes and randoms.

Since Hulu hasn’t announced anything at this week’s WWDC, if the rumor is true, it’s likely that they will announce their plans for the Xbox 360 console at next week’s E3 gaming expo.

The question is: Netflix is already available for the iPad, and it already offers a lot of old television shows available for streaming. Is there room for another subscription-based service on the iPad streaming much of the same content?

A few days after Tweetie for Mac was named a winner in Ars Technica’s design awards for best Mac OS X software, Tweetie and Twitter for iPhone developer Loren Brichter has said that an iPad version is in the works… and he soon plans to get back into the update cycle for Tweetie for Mac as well.

Yesterday, we posted an iBook that had been hollowed out and modded into a working iPad keyboard dock.

Today? The same concept, but accomplished far more elegantly with a vintage Mac Classic… complete with a custom MacOS desktop to keep things appropriately retro.

AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui has responded to the recent change in the iOS developer agreement which precludes ad companies owned by Apple competitors in the smartphone arena from collecting the same user statistics available to third-party ad agencies and Apple’s own iAd.

Not so surprising? He’s not thrilled about it.

Last week, as Valve released the Half-Life 2 games to Steam for Mac, hey noted on their forums that the OS X port of their frenetically cartoonish team multiplayer game Team Fortress 2 needed a little more time to bake.

Now, in the least oblique hint ever, Valve teased last night that Team Fortress 2 will be available on the Mac later today.

Big things are happening RIGHT NOW at Valve. Things involving cultivated tree-fruit. BIG things. Things that rhyme with “grapple.” Things that rhyme with “Speem Gortress zmavailable on the Babac.”

If the last few weeks’ Steam for Mac releases are anything to go by, Team Fortress 2 should debut on the Mac at a roughly 30% discount to entice new players.

I can not even tell you how much I’m looking forward to this. Any interest in a Cult of Mac Team Fortress 2 match this weekend? It’ll give some of you the long craved-for opportunity to smash the back of my head into jelly with an aluminum baseball bat while simultaneously shooting me with a bazooka!

Up to 114,000 iPad owners have had their privacy breached thanks to a snafu on the part of AT&T that ultimately (but inadvertently) traded user convenience for security.

The vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Goatse security, who were able to write a script that harvested iPad 3G owners’ ICC-IDs (or integrated circuit card identifier, used to identify SIM cards to a network) and email addresses through the exploitation of a hole on AT&T’s website.

Extra Credit for originality here.  Over on Etsy.com – which seems to be full of fashionable iDevice accessories –  Mtodonnel offers this whimsical iPad sleeve made from “refashioned and refelted boiled wool”.  Complete with black turtleneck sweater top and a front pocket for your cords, it looks comfortable and vintage.  Wonder if the iPad gets itchy while inside?

Thanks to iPhoneSavior for the tip.

Not content with the standard definition on their X170 action-cam, Drift Innovation has just revealed their new HD version, capable of thrilling the pants off viewers with first-person shenanigans rendered in 1080p.

The 170-degree viewing-angle-lensed HD170 — kudos to their marketing department for the refreshingly self-explanatory name — also sports a ton of slick features: RF remote, 300-degree rotating lens, night-mode, an LCD screen and more mounts than a Texas rodeo competition.

The HD170 will be available in late July for $330.

Apple has set up the most astounding wall we’ve ever seen. It is filled with 30 24-inch Apple Cinema displays that are synchronized and powered by 30 Apple Mac Pro workstations is a Matrix movie like waterfall that displays the top 50,000 apps in the iTunes App Store.

An application built for The Financial Times newspaper was named the best iPad or iPhone application designed, according to organizers of Apple’s 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference. The WWDC Wednesday released the 10 winning designs for 2010, the first year without a Mac OS X category.

The 10 winning entrants were evenly split between iPad and iPhone designs. The winners were picked from among more than 225,000 App Store possibilities. Designers earned more than $1 billion so far from Apple’s software application store.

Although much talk about Apple’s recent announcement revolves around the new iPhone, CEO Steve Jobs had some interesting news concerning its long-standing competition with Amazon over the future of publishing. The iPad has spurred 5 million e-book downloads since the tablet device was introduced 65 days ago, giving the Cupertino, Calif. company 22 percent of the e-book market, Jobs claimed.

While Gartner slammed those numbers as being produced by “some sort of voodoo algorithm,” they prompted one writer to suggest Amazon needs to take another tact in selling its Kindle e-reader: an electronic version of the paperback book. The Seattle-based Internet bookseller should cut the Kindle’s price to $49 – or even give it away – to combat the iPad, Seth Godin wrote at his blog. Godwin told the Wall Street Journal Amazon cannot directly take-on Apple’s hardware. “If all Amazon does is try to come up with something sort of like an iPad but less colorful, they are going to fail,” he said.

iPhone and iPod speaker docks are usually interchangeably designed affairs, which is what makes the brightly colored iCrystal speaker from Speakal such a breath of fresh air: the dock itself is a lovely Pantone hue of red (black or white are also an option), connected to two alien eggs breaking open to reveal the day-glo, audiophonic yolk: the iCrystal’s pulsating speaker pods, which promise to deliver 360 degrees of sound.

The iCrystal runs on AA batteries, and can connect to televisions, stereo systems or non-Apple MP3 players through a 3.5mm auxiliary input jack. The iCrystal plays and charges all iPods and iPhones to date, although it’s unknown if there’s anything preventing it from similarly docking an iPhone 4.

The iCrystal is available now from Speakal’s website for just $79.99.

If you’re looking for some new external storage to rock your Mac, Western Digital has just announced some new drives specifically tailored for Mac Heads.

Coming in flavors of one and two terabytes, the My Book Studio LX line come in brushed aluminum cases which, if you squint, kinda-sorta match the Ive aesthetic.

The drives come with both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, and are available for $199 and $299 for the 1TB and 2TB models, respectively. They’re available now.

Providing you’ve got the wherewithal to jailbreak your iPad, Apple’s tablet makes a fine SNES emulator, thanks to SNED HD for iPad, which looks absolutely amazing at the iPad’s 768p resolution. Even better, you can pair it with the ControlPad app for iPhone for more convenient controlling with your iPad docked or balanced on your knees.

Foxconn’s recent move to more than doubling the salaries of their factory workers was a good first step in stopping the cycle of suicides that has plagues the Chinese electronics manufacturer over the past six months… but the gesture was a bit muted by Foxconn’s policy of compensating the families of suicide victims by almost ten years’ salary. It incentivized self-murder, and the cash payout can be traced as the reason of at least one jumper’s death.

Yesterday, in a wise move announced at their annual shareholder meeting, Foxconn announced they would be discontinuing the compensation scheme. It’s about time, although Foxconn themselves were reluctant to lay the blame on the feet of their compensation scheme: instead, they predictably blamed the media for inspiring copycats.

At the same meeting, the company also announced that it will be relocating a good chunk of their manufacturing work, largely due to the worsened earnings forecast prompted by their recent wage increases. Basically, it sounds like Foxconn — sick of employees and their easily frayed psyches getting in the way of their bottom line — want to do what they can to get rid of them entirely: they plan to build a fully automated facility in either Taiwan or Vietnam.

In the meantime, Foxconn will be shifting some orders to Vietnam to reduce workload in their Chinese factories, although this move supposedly won’t result in any layoffs.

Psst. We’re not going to tell you where to get it, but if you happen to have some seedier connections, we can tell you that yesterday’s Gold Master Build of iOS 4 works on any iPhone or iPod Touch, whether or not its UDID has already been reported to the dev center. That means, if you know where you’re looking, you can install iOS 4 on your device right now… provided your device is a 3G, 3GS or second or third gen iPod Touch. Make sure to grab the right IPSW for your device.

Better? If you’ve got a 3Gs, you can already jailbreak it, although we recommend being cautious and if you don’t know what you’re doing, wait until the Dev Team releases the new 4.0 compatible PwnageTool… which they swear should be available within the month.

With the launch of Apple’s own iAd network imminent, Cupertino has chosen to clarify its position in regards to third-party advertisers: app developers are still allowed to pass on certain non-device data to ad companies besides iAd, but you need Apple’s explicit permission to do so… and you definitely can’t do it if the ad company in question is owned by Google.

As found in the developer terms’ revised section 3.3.9, Apple says that developers can pass on certain kinds of data like user location or UDID to Apple-approved third-party companies. They then explicitly say that the companies receiving the data will never be approved if they are owned or affiliated with developers or distributors of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or “development environments other than Apple.”

In other words? A big cock block to Google-owned AdMob. The big question is this: can Apple really avoid an advertising anti-trust case by only excluding advertising megaliths like Google from collecting the same data as the smaller advertising companies allowed to freely play in the iOS walled garden?

This antique iBook has been hollowed out and transformed into a working iPad keyboard dock, with a new Apple aluminum keyboard replacing the iBook’s and the iPad itself nuzzled into the iBook’s LCD display hollow, connected together through the umbilical of the official iPad Camera Connection Kit.

This user hack is a bit of a kludge, but we don’t care: we love it anyway. Sure, it can’t close without scratching the iPad’s display, and it would be even cooler if the iPad charged when the iBook was plugged into the wall socket. It reminds us of Lenovo’s now-cancelled Ideapad U1 hybrid tablet/notebook, and makes us wistful for the day Cupertino itself will try to merge the iPad with the MacBook into a single iBook-like device. We can dream!

Step 1: Open Safari 5’s preferences, and go to the Advanced tab.

Step 2: Click “Show Develop menu in menu bar”

Step 3: In the Develop menu, select “Enable Extensions”

There’s no shortage of wisecracking about the iPad; its introduction left us wading through a glut of humor (both insipid and genuinely funny). Wisecracking from the iPad, however, is much rarer.

That’s Adam Kontras — also known as the guy with the longest-running vlog, now plugging along for ten years — in the clip above, arguing with his iPad about which one of them is the “iPad comedian,” not coincidentally also the name of his new project.

After watching the back-and-forth, we’re still not clear which of the two can claim the title — but we’re pretty certain the whole thing is hilarious.

Update: Some of you may have noticed the name of Adam’s gig is actually “The iPad Comic,” and not the “iPad Comdedian” as claimed above; laughter can be disorienting.

Despite the leaks and purported advance photos of Apple’s new iPhone 4, analysts found enough in Monday’s presentation to tell investors the new handset likely means greater profits for the Cupertino, Calif. firm. High profile analyst Gene Munster Tuesday declared the iPhone 4 “significantly more advanced than the next best alternative.”

By including features such as videochat normally found elsewhere, such as computers, “the iPhone is taking unit and dollar share from other device categories,” Munster wrote. The new iPhone means Apple likely could beat Wall Street’s expectations for 8.7 million devices sold this quarter, the Piper Jaffray analyst said.