News - page 2239

Celluloid-worthy beauty Anna Chapman, arrested by the FBI for belonging to an Russian espionage network called “the illegals,” may also go down in history as the spy who loved Macs.

On January 25, the 28-year-old told her 175 Facebook friends: “My new Mac has been the buy of the year…Love it!”

It wasn’t an easy relationship, though. According to the FBI documents, her spy job was plagued by network problems that made transmitting her weekly Wednesday intelligence reports via a private wireless network at Starbucks and Barnes and Noble in New York a major hassle. Documents didn’t mention which Apple laptop she used.

It looks pretty official at this point that whatever measures Apple is going to take in fixing the iPhone 4’s reception problems, free bumper cases isn’t going to be one of them. Just in time, then, comes this quick and easy guide on how to use silicone modeling clay to make your own cheap bumper, which will not only protect it from a shattering fall, but also prevent the glass surface from getting scratched on tables and the like. Extend the sugru a little farther over the iPhone 4’s antenna danger spot at the lower left corner and that should help minimize dropped bars when you’re gripping your iPhone 4 as well.

If you’re hoping to get some sort of solution for your iPhone 4 antenna woes by calling up tech support, think again: Apple’s internal procedures when it comes to the iPhone 4’s reception have been leaked, and officially, there’s no problem with the iPhone 4 antenna unless there’s signal problems when you aren’t holding it.

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs furiously sent emails trying to knock down reports of antenna problems with the iPhone 4, the Cupertino, Calif. company apparently was busy looking for antenna experts. And little wonder the sense of urgency: the iPhone 4 could comprise half of the iPhones the company sells this year, according to a Wednesday report.

A day before the YouTube videos appeared of dropped calls due to holding the iPhone a certain way, Apple posted job notices seeking iPad and iPhone antenna engineers with at least 10 years experience. The engineers’ job is to “optimize the radiation performance for mobile devices,” according to the posting.

One analyst warned investors Wednesday an unconfirmed report that Verizon Wireless will get the iPhone in January 2011, may be just more dead-end speculation. “Similar speculation has emerged before, so barring independent confirmation or a press release from one of the parties, it’d be rash to pop the champagne,” Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner wrote.

Although the idea of Verizon gaining the iPhone makes many analysts salivate at the prospect, so far it has only been a parlor game. Apple has defended the exclusive U.S. carrier in the past, and AT&T has recently taken steps to improve its 3G service.

What’s been rumor, speculation and a good way to fill blog space is now…well, still all of the above; but the rumors are beginning to sound more and more like hard fact — that Verizon has bagged the iPhone.

Just days after the iPhone arrived at Apple stores, and one day after on the same day it hit AT&T’s outlets, Bloomberg News says “two people familiar with the plans” claim that Verizon will begin selling iPhones next year in January. The two sources spoke anonymously; not surprisingly, neither Bloomberg News nor anyone else running the story has been able to get an official comment from either Apple or Verizon.

Apple has announced via their iOS Developer newsfeed that iOS apps that were developed and compiled for iOS 2.x will no longer be supported. Developers are being advised to re-build their apps in Xcode targeting iOS 3.x or later. Developers that continue to submit or have existing apps compiled against iOS 2.x will face removal of their app from the iTunes App Store.

In the same announcement Apple directed developers to their iOS 4 Readiness Checklist which includes a “wealth of technical resources” to help developers to take advantage of resources in iOS 4. Instructions and information about submitting iOS 4 apps to the App Store are also included.

Apple released iOS 4 as a free update for all iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and the 2nd and 3rd generation iPod touch devices. iOS is fully compatible with all of these devices with the exception of the iPhone 3G and 2nd generation iPod touch which do not support all of iOS 4’s features. Apple has uncharacteristically offered iPod touch owners a free update, since in the past they had to pay approximately $10 for an OS update.

If you are squeamish or faint of heart and love all things Apple you just might want to skip reading this post, but on the other hand if Freddy Krueger is your friend and all the gut wrenching destruction of his movies are for you then keep reading. We’ll take a look at three videos that show Apple’s latest gadget the iPhone 4 getting blended, microwaved, and shot.

Responding to a recent New York Times piece linking the horrific warfare in the Congo with the minerals used in our gadgets, Steve Jobs wrote a new iPhone 4 customer explaining Apple’s policy in dealing with mineral purchases:

We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.

That’s a refreshingly blunt admission of relative impotence: Apple’s doing what it can, but ultimately, their suppliers are in turn supplied by people who could well be lying about their source. Short of a way to independently verify where minerals are coming from, Apple’s got to take people at their words.

In some recently leaked internal slides detailing Microsoft’s plans for the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, this nightmarish iMac-like monstrosity was revealed as a possibly forthcoming new multitouch all-in-one PC.

What the f… I mean… what is this thing? It looks like some horror that the utero-absorbed fetus of Johnny Ive’s Dark Half twin might design, or something that might creep out of Steve Job’s closet in the night, hungry for rape.

Jeez, Microsoft.

Apple’s accidentally hinted at the existence of iWorks for iPhone a few times in the past now, but these blurry images over at 9to5Mac are the first plausible look at the software, demonstrating a beta of Pages for iPhone running on an iPod Touch.

Sure, this kind of image is something that could be easily spoofed by a programmer with a jailbroken iPhone, but I suspect that it’s legit: with iMovie for iPhone, Apple has already demonstrated itself to be ready to start porting over their desktop apps to iOS.

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As a film, Michael Korbel’s Apple of My Eye is schmaltzy enough that it might make you want to puke out a kidney. The plot can best be best described thusly: old man walks down street with granddaughter, looks into a window, hallucinates for thirty seconds about being a lilliputian riding a toy train.

“Grampa? GRAMPA?” the alarmed girl asks as her dead-eyed grandfather wobbles back and forth, clearly in the throes of a ministroke. “Let me tell you a story!” he cries. The film ends just before the little girl’s inevitable response: “Oh, great. I’m sure it’ll be a humdinger.” *eyeroll* “Let’s just get you back to the assisted care facility, okay?”

Pretty putrid. In fact, if it weren’t filmed with an iPhone 4 and edited with iMovie for iPhone, I’d tell you to watch something more interesting. But it was, which makes Apple of My Eye impressive, tacky though it may well be. If anything, it just goes to show how good the iPhone 4’s video capabilities are… at least when wielded by professional cinematographers under ideal lighting conditions.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6L07nPrjzo&feature=player_embedded

Don’t have an iPhone 4 but still want to use iMovie for iPhone? There’s no real reason it can’t work on the likes of the 3GS, and so it does, with a little jailbreaking.

The hack’s easy enough. If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, you just edit the info.plist file of the app and change the “Minimum System Version” to 3.0.0 and “Front-Facing Camera” to False. Launch the app again and you’ve got the ability to edit videos on your last-generation iPhone, seemingly without much performance degradation.

Amid all the iPad hype and iPhone fever comes a lone voice from Wall Street, cautioning that even with Apple, the rules of gravity still apply. Revenue and growth by the Cupertino, Calif. maker of consumer electronics will start to slow, an analyst warned investors Tuesday.

Despite projections of $75 billion in revenue in fiscal 2011 and $85 billion for fiscal 2012, “the law of large numbers should cause revenue and earnings per share growth to slow meaningfully during the next two years,” Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner writes.

AT&T began selling the iPhone 4 on a first come, first served basis Tuesday after suspending pre-orders for the eagerly-desired handset. When pre-orders began June 15, the exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier announced they experienced their busiest online sales day.

Although the carrier provided iPhone 4s June 24 to customers who had initially pre-ordered the device, today is the first day AT&T will sell the handset to those who were not able to place a pre-order. Once inventory is depleted, buyers will be given the option to have the iPhone 4 delivered to their home, business or an AT&T store.

If you’re going to steal an iPad, try not to target an Apple employee.

Case in point: two thieves had the bad luck to swipe a pair of iPads from the home of an Apple employee in San Jose.

The 31-year-old employee had already installed Apple’s Find my iPhone app, a free service to MobileMe paying subscribers that launched days just days earlier.

He called the police, then fired up the service from his iPhone. When the police arrived, they tracked the iPad and radioed in the location of the getaway car.

“He’s heading north; he just made a left,” the officers told the dispatcher.

Since they couldn’t pinpoint the exact car, they had to wait, watching the little icon move across a map of the city until it arrived in a cul-de-sac in a residential area where police could make their move.

By the end of the day, officers had returned all of the stolen equipment, identified by serial numbers, to the manager.

Two thieves in their early 30s had ransacked the Apple employees’ house for a total of $20,000 in computer equipment and other electronics including two iPads, an iBook, three laptops and an old PC, according to police reports.

Despite Apple’s earlier statements that it was “all over” the issue of a recent spate of suicides at a Chinese plant manufacturing iPhones, that interest apparently has limits. The Cupertino, Calif. company is “reluctant” to go along with a plan to pay some Foxconn workers $300 per month to build the iPods and iPhones, according to a Monday report.

Apple was hesitant about the plan, which included building a plant for up to 300,000 new workers outside the main Foxconn site in Shenzen, because it might affect production, the Financial Times reports. However, Apple now seems to be onboard. Although Foxconn makes devices for other electronics companies, Apple is the plant’s largest customer, giving it a large say in decisions.

Cult of Mac reader Ryan proves that Trix are not just for kids with this quick iPad stand made from an empty cereal box.

“I got the idea when i first got my iPhone 3G two years ago… At the time I made a stand out of a paper Starbucks cup for my iPhone. I was reminded of that this morning after scouring the Internet for a practical and affordable stand. My cousin finished a box of Trix and as she was making her way to the recycling bin, I decided to do a little recycling of my own.”

The finished stand should support your iPad in either portrait or landscape, plugged in or running on battery.

He’s reckons the project took about 10 minutes — here’s a complete how-to on his blog — and if you’ve got on how to improve his design, let him know.

Hold the phone — and don’t bother holding it “correctly” — law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for  iPhone 4 owners for a possible class action lawsuit.

They are looking for people who “recently purchased the new iPhone and have experienced poor reception quality, dropped calls and weak signals.”

It’s a tough call for many cult of mac-ers: if you ordered ahead, waited in line and found the iPhone 4 drops reception faster than Britney Spear’s panties, you’re probably not happy about it. They’re banking that enough of the 1,700,000 iPhone 4s sold in just the first three days of the device’s release have enough unhappy owners to warrant a class-action suit.

They are not the only ones demanding Apple give customers some satisfaction: Gizmodo has stomped its sour grapes into a petition demanding the Cupertino company give up some free cases that may help fix the faulty phones.

Do you put faith in Steve Jobs’ claims that the slight snafu will be soon fixed or would you be willing to talk to the lawyers about it?

Via Valleywag

Perhaps you’ve seen a few XtraNormal text-to-video movies already. It says here you’ll be seeing more in the not-too-distant future.

Perhaps you’ve even seen this one already, but no matter, it’s funny enough to be worth watching again and again and again. Definitely NSFW for strong language, esp toward the end.

[via TechCrunch]

Details, details. Seems the EXIF data pushed to photographs taken with iPhone 4’s nifty new 5MP camera report the photographs as having been taken with a 3G, according to a discussion thread over at Flickr Help. One intrepid Flickr Pro user has crafted a script to handle the problem and even Flickr staff are admitting to having to use “a little hack and a script” to get the proper EXIF data displayed for iPhone 4 images.

Looks like there’s another to-do on the iOS4 patch everyone’s looking for any day now to fix that non-existent antenna problem.

If you haven’t already played Giana Sisters, you’re missing out! It’s one of the best platform games on the iPhone & iPod Touch and I highly recommend you try it. If you share my love of Giana Sisters, you too will be pleased to hear that a HD version is making its way to the iPad soon, according to Touch Arcade.

Originally released in 1987, The Great Giana Sisters was first developed for the Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64 and other consoles of the era. It was quickly pulled, however, after running in to legal trouble with Nintendo due to its similarity with Super Mario Bros. The game was reborn in 2005 when it was renamed simply Giana Sisters, and made its way on to mobile phones, and a few years later, the Nintendo DS.

Today, 5 years on, Giana Sisters is one of the best platform games in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and Touch Arcade have reported today that its developers, Bad Monkey, have sent them a bunch of screenshots for their upcoming HD version of the game. You can check them out and find out more info here, or read Touch Arcade’s review of the current game here.

If you can’t wait until the iPad release on 9th July, you can find the iPhone & iPod Touch version in the App Store here.

In an intriguing move, Amazon has updated its Kindle software application for the iPhone and iPad with features not available on the company’s e-reader hardware. Users of Apple’s iOS-based devices can now read Kindle e-books with audio and video.

Examples of Kindle editions already available with audio and video feature a cake-making video and audio clips of bird songs. Other expanded editions available on Amazon include “Les Miserables”, “Rick Steves’ London” and “Knitting for Dummies.”

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Although usually the model of reasonableness and imperturbability, Downfall’s Adolf Hitler is none too happy with the iPhone 4’s reception problems. It’s enough to make a Nazi an Android fanboy!

The iPhone 4 was selling like the proverbial hotcakes during the first days the iconic handset was available to consumers, one analyst told investors Monday. Indeed, on June 24, when the new phone went on sale, 60 percent of Apple Stores and all participating retailers had no stock left by the end of the day.

“We believe initial weekend volumes were 1 million plus,” Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore wrote Monday. “But shipments could have been dramatically higher if there was more supply,” he added. Apple announced Monday it sold more than 1.7 million iPhone 3 units between Thursday and the end of Saturday, June 26.