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Apple has introduced a new Technical Note for OS X 10.6.3 that allows third-party developers to use hardware acceleration to decode H.264 video.

Adobe’s failure to deliver acceptable performance under OS X has long been blamed by the company on the lack of this functionality. Only Apple computers boasting GPUs supporting the functionality (such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M) will be able to take advantage of it.

“We will be enabling support for hardware accelerated video decoding for Flash Player on Mac,” Adobe spokesperson Matt Rozen told Macworld. “Now that the required APIs are available, we are working on an additional Flash Player release to follow shortly after Flash Player 10.1 to include this functionality for the hardware configurations supported by the new APIs.”

Adobe’s only got themselves to blame here on out. Let’s hope they finally get Flash fixed on OS X.

The Apple gadget press is all a-twitter over news of yet another semiconductor company with ties to the Cupertino, Calif. consumer electronics giant. In a bit of Hollywood-style dishing of talk of discord, Imagination Technologies Ltd. is seen as going up against ARM to develop an iPhone-like graphic console for the home.

Apple is a 10-percent owner of Imagination, which makes the PowerVR graphics core for the iPhone. In a deal to be announced at the Embedded Systems Conference, Imagination will partner with MIPS Technologies, Inc. to display a high-definition chip meant for a home set-top box. Both Imagination and MIPS are rivals to ARM, who’s chips are the basis of an Apple design found in the iPad.

One of the secret new features of the new MacBook Pros is inertial scrolling, which causes the trackpad to function like the iPhone’s touchscreen when scrolling; in other words, your screen scrolls with momentum informed by how hard and fast you swipe your fingers down or up.

TUAW has a post up about the new feature, positing that it should be possible on “all multitouch Apple trackpads. They’re wrong: the feature should already be possible on every Apple touchpad out there, multitouch or not, as indicated by the SuperScroll software.

The big question is: if all Apple touchpads are capable of inertial scrolling, does the functionality in the new MacBook Pros indicate Apple will roll it out across all Snow Leopard machines in a forthcoming update?

How do you feel about inertial scrolling? Is it something you’d use if it was rolled out to existing Apple laptops? Let us know in the comments.

Burbling up as flotsam in the eBay Apple stream, then yanked beneath the waves just as quickly by the webbed fingers of Cupertino’s eldritch lawyer things: these two iPod Touch prototypes marked DVT-1 and DVT-2, complete with built-in cameras. One of the iPod Touches is non-functioning, while the other runs a provisional “Switchboard” operating system. They look to have been legitimate, but regrettably, they were pulled before Nick Denton could click the “Buy It Now” button.

The question, of course, is where did they come from? Well, we know there’s at least one pissed off ex-Apple engineer with access to prototypes running around as an indignant free agent these days…

When Apple first revealed the $30 iPad Camera Connection Kit, which contains a little dongle that allows you to use a USB 2.0 cable to transfer photos from your camera to your iPad’s iPhoto library, a lot of people wondered if it might be used to connect other USB devices as well.

As it turns out, you can: you can use the Camera Connection Kit to hook up an audio headset and a USB keyboard.

Not terribly exciting, but as the Camera Connection Kits begin to be shipped, it might hint at more exciting USB interoperability to come. A game pad certainly would be nice.

With the addition of the Xbox-Live-like Game Center to iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has finally made a serious commitment to gamers and game developers after nearly a decade of ignoring them on the OS X platform.

Expect that commitment to continue to deepen: Nintendo games expert and journalist Matt Casmassina of IGN has just been hired by Apple as their new Global Editorial Games Manager.

“Anybody who has read my work through the years will know that I’ve long been a huge Nintendo fan, but if there is one company that could entice me away from covering Mario and Zelda it’s the one owned by Steve Jobs. Beginning early May, I will join Apple as global editorial games manager, App Store,” Casamassina wrote on his blog.

In an age when voice and video from half a world away can be sucked up from the soup of electromagnetic radiation invisibly swirling around us, plugging in my iPhone to sync with iTunes makes me feel like a caveman. I’ve been waiting for an app that would allow me to wirelessly sync my iDevices for awhile, and now, it looks like it might be here: Wi-Fi Sync by Greg Hughes allows you to pair your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to your computer through WiFi, no wires required.

Geeze, one week we’re giving away app codes and the next week $120 Headphones and $17 Screen Cleaner courtesy of the guys over at Monster.

Monster’s Jamz In-Ear Headphones look to be rugged. There’s a video below with some guy going to town on them with various weaponry. I like that Monster goes for “accurate and clear audio.” None of this tweaked out bass bottomed garbage kids are listening to nowadays.

Monster’s ScreenClean just does what it says and keeps multiple Apple screens looking clean. Also posted a video below if you want to watch a guy clean his stuff.

Wanna win some swag?

In Part 6 of his memoirs, Macworld founder David Bunnell recalls the magazine’s first cover shoot featuring Steve Jobs, who has a sudden, unexpected change of heart.

“Take a picture of this,” Steve said, holding up his middle finger. We stared in disbelief.

Kyle Conroy, a computer science student at UC Berkeley has just released a project that asks a provocative question: Should you buy Apple’s products or Apple’s stock. Using a large data set combining Apple’s stock price over time and the prices of nearly every Apple product introduced since 1997, he calculates how much your AAPL holdings would be worth if you had spent the price of a contemporary Apple product on investing instead.

For Mac lovers, it isn’t a pretty picture. In some cases, stock valuation has increased as much as 5800 percent. So, for example, a top-of-the-line Powerbook G3 from 1997 cost $5,700 at introduction. If you spent that on stock, you would have $330,563 bucks today. If you bought the laptop instead, it’s currently available for $10 on Ebay.

As a very small holder of AAPL, this makes me cry. Though I have invested a bit more than a 13″ MacBook Pro in stock over the past few years, I also bought that same computer, an iPhone, an iPod nano, a shuffle, and an iPod in the same period. I love them all, but it’s pretty eye-opening to see what might have been. How about you? Any products you wish you’d spent on stock?

Here’s a interesting story about secrecy and making mistakes at Apple. The story is told by Woz, Apple employee number one (check out his hilarious shirt).

While Woz was waiting in line to buy the iPad last month, an Apple test engineer showed him a prototype iPad. It was just a few hours before the device went on sale. Woz, who is still an Apple employee, fired up the Numbers app. Little did he know, the unit was 3G test prototype, and was not to be shown or used outside of secure areas at the company HQ. Unfortunately, Woz’s playing with it must have somehow sent up a warning flag at Apple.

“… I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for 2 minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired. I opted to spend 2 minutes with Numbers on this iPad, trying some stunts I’d seen on Apple’s website demo video. I was not told that it was a 3G model and I had no way to know that. I was told that this engineer had to wait until midnight to show it outside of Apple’s secure area. And I’m an Apple employee who he was showing it to. My guess is that he was allowed to take the iPad outside of the secure area but still not supposed to show it.”

The test engineer was fired for betraying Apple’s ironclad rules on secrecy. The device was not to be shown to anybody — not even Woz. (And worse, Woz told Steve Jobs about seeing the iPad that night. Jobs himself said it was “no big deal.”)

On the other hand, Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who lost an iPhone 4G prototype at a bar, is still employed at Apple.

“Product secrecy is good for Apple and should be strictly enforced, but maybe 10% of niceness and 90% of strictness is OK too,” writes Woz.

It seems mistakes are forgiven, but betrayals are not.

Gizmodo: Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray Powell

In Part 5 of My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs, Macworld founder David Bunnell describes seeing the 1984 Macintosh ad for the first time.

There’s another juicy wrinkle in iPhonegate. The Silicon Valley cops are investigating, reports CNet:

Silicon Valley police are investigating what appears to be a lost Apple iPhone prototype purchased by a gadget blog, a transaction that may have violated criminal laws, a law enforcement official told CNET on Friday.

Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, the source said. Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is in Santa Clara County, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.

CNet: Lost iPhone prototype spurs police probe

Designer Mark Pernice took that love we all have of late-night grimaces immortalized with the Mac’s built in Photo Booth program to another level: he made a mask out of it.

Pernice took one of those gazing-up-the-nostrils, Mr. Bean-on-acid shots of himself, then got master special effects wizard Christian Hanson to whip up a mask from it.

99 year old Virginia Campbell just got her first computer… and it’s the iPad.

Emphasizing Apple’s own “it just works” mantra, Virginia was quickly able to make sense of the iPad’s operating system and use Pages in landscape mode to write the following limerick:

To this technically-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad Pioneer.

My own limericks tend to be smuttier and focus on a strange Venusian improbably named Michael Hunt, but I admire Virginia’s: at the very least, it’s probably the best and sweetest advertising Apple could possibly get.

The latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta features a great new addition to iPhone Mail for GMail users: the ability to archive mail.

According to the good boys at 9to5Mac, it replaces the option to delete your GMail: just swipe on a message like usual and you now get the option to archive as opposed to delete.

I think replacing delete with archive on the iPhone makes a lot of sense. GMail, after all, has plenty of space, and the real reason to “delete” mail in Mail.app is to easily clear out the inbox. Sure, there’s going to be occasional moments when you’ll want to nuke an email from orbit in a fit of pique… but in those situations, you can still just log into GMail through Mobile Safari to carry out the vaporization. This change prevents people from accidentally deleting important mails. Well done, Apple!

One of the few real advantages Android has over iPhone OS is free turn-by-turn navigation: why spend $100 for the likes of TomTom when your smartphone already does the same thing for nothing? If you do a lot of driving, it’s pretty much Android’s killer app… except now it’s coming to the iPhone.

Or is it?According to a Google representative speaking at a London press conference, Google plans to bring free turn-by-turn satnav to the iPhone and other handsets soon, although they wouldn’t say when. But according to a spokesperson speaking to PC World, they have no definite plans.

I can understand Google’s confusion here. As a company, Google’s all about making information freely available, but free turn-by-turn navigation is a big reason why someone might choose an Android handset over the iPhone. They’re torn: on one hand, they want to get their services in as many hands as possible, but on the other hand, they don’t want to eliminate one of the advantages of the Android platform by offering it on a competitor’s device. It’s a pickle alright.

The CEO of ARM seemed to dismiss a rumor that Apple was considering acquiring the UK chipmaker as unnecessary. He did not flatly denying the chatter which erupted earlier this week, however.

“Nobody has to buy the company,” Warren East told The Guardian. The London-based Standard reported Wednesday Apple was talking about buying the chipmaker for $8 billion, citing UK traders.

The iPad may be too popular for its own good:  Apple seems to be imposing limits on how many you can buy.

When a hospital district wanted to buy 100 of them to equip medical staff, they ran into trouble:

Apple’s ordering system automatically canceled Volosin’s purchase, informing him that he could not order more than three.
“They were limiting people form ordering too many, which I thought was interesting,” he says. “They’re used to dealing with consumers and not bulk orders.”

Now, a medical student who endeavored to buy a bunch of iPads for his pals at the NeoGAF gaming forum, ran straight into “lifetime limit.”

Apple has finally seen fit to update the design of its 85-watt MagSafe Power Adapters to use an all aluminum tip instead of a plastic one, mimicking the design of the 45-watt MacBook Air’s adapter.

Not only will this minimize the 85-Watt MagSafe’s physical footprint, but ditching the plastic should prevent the occasional melting problems we sometimes hear about. It also happens to look a hell of a lot better.

The 60-Watt MagSafe Power Adapter hasn’t been updated yet, but all things in good time. Hey, look at that! As Charli points out in the comments below, they just were.

[via TUAW]

When Jobs announced the iPad, declared the netbook to be dead and claimed that the iPad was a decent productivity machine, I was cynical. Lustful for an iPad I was, but as a blogger, the ability to type in one window while referencing a source in another is invaluable. Simply put, my netbook allowed me to do that, but the iPad didn’t… and until it did, there was little chance I’d ever do serious work on it.

I should have taken account the ingenuity of app developers though. Desktop for the iPad essentially allows you to split screen your iPad. You can specify what functionality you want each split screen panel to have, but for my purposes, I could browse a page in Safari on one side of the screen while using the “Email Composer” on the right side to type in text.

What a perfectly elegant little solution, especially for just $0.99.

The iPhone’s popularity in Japan just keeps growing. Apple’s handset has grabbed 72 percent of the smartphone market on the gadget-obsessed island nation.The Cupertino, Calif. company has doubled its shipments to Japan, hitting 2.3 million all together, according to Tokyo-based researchers.

The iPhone, which began Japanese sales in July 2008, shipped 1.69 million handsets during the fiscal year ended March 31, MM Research Institute Ltd. announced Thursday. Some 3 million smartphones could sell in Japan during the year started April 1, reports say.

In Part 4 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s memoirs about the Mac, Steve Jobs tells a publishing mogul to “belly up to the bar” and hangs up on him.

How’s this for customer service? Steve Jobs personally intervened to get a dodgy iMac replaced. Author Michael J. Weber bought a new iMac, but his Apple machine was a lemon. Perhaps emboldened by Steve Jobs’ recent email responses to customer emails, Weber didn’t waste any time going straight to the top to complain about it:

Steve,
Received a 27″ i7 iMac today that would only boot in verbose mode. Whatever happened to “It Just Works”? This was a top of the line unit built to order in Elk Grove, CA — not China. And it booted like a Gateway 2000!

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