Officially, it’s “a computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988”. It’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac, and it’s a joy for old-timers like me to behold.
What you see when you start Digital is how computers used to be. Back in the days when Cult of Mac would have been a roughly-stapled fanzine sold for 50 cents a copy (please send a stamped addressed envelope).
But it’s more than a nostalgia trip. It’s something else. Built by Ontario-based author Christine Love, Digital promises much more than just nostalgia. You might even get to save the world by exploiting a buffer overflow. That’s how old-school nerd superheroes used to do things.
The iPhone 3GS. Creative Commons-licensed photo by Fr3d: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fr3d/2660915827/
Although much of the buzz about Apple surrounds the iPad, the venerable three-year-old iPhone has a great deal of life, one analyst argues. Indeed, if Apple takes this analyst’s suggestions, the handset’s market could increase seven-fold. Key factors are expanding carriers selling the iPhone and offering a phone that doesn’t require a data plan.
Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi told investors Wednesday that it will become “increasingly difficult” for Apple to get beyond its current 39 percent of the global smart phone market without expanding the major carriers selling the iPhone. If Apple added 13 of the world’s largest carriers – such as Verizon Wireless, NTT DoDoMo and China Mobile – the Cupertino, Calif. company jump from selling 29 million phones worldwide in 2009 to 557 million, according to the analyst.
Early last year, Palm bet the farm. They hired a bunch of ex-Apple engineers, killed off all of their old Palm OS devices and announced a new smartphone operating system, webOS, the first truly exciting alternative to the iPhone OS since its unveiling in 2007. They went all in, with their only conciliatory gesture to the existing Palm OS ecosystem a third-party emulator.
Unfortunately, as great as webOS is, that gamble hasn’t paid off for Palm: they are now in dire financial difficulty, and it looks likely that the once revolutionary mobile device maker will soon only be remembered as a footnote in smartphone history.
It’s a shame, and the death of Palm might otherwise have signified the final death of PalmOS, which — before the App Store — was perhaps the most vibrant, crowded and creative platform of mobile app development.
Good news for Palm OS nostalgists, though: the StyleTap emulator has just come out on Cydia, allowing anyone with a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch to use it to run Palm OS apps. It’s a bit pricy at $49, but at first blush, StyleTap looks pretty flawless. If the impending death of Palm has you finally considering trading your Pre in for an iPhone, StyleTap will help make that transition a bit easier.
Maintaining the pretense of objective journalist integrity by reporting in third-person upon itself, the Wall Street Journal claims that “according to a person familiar with the matter,” they’ll be charging you $17.99 a month to read on your iPad.
That’s ten bucks less than a monthly subscription costs… but that’s still a hefty price tag for digital content. My gut instinct is that only existing Wall Street Journal subscribers would be tempted by an annual $216 subscription… it’s not a price point that is going to attract new customers. That multimedia content better snap. What do you think?
With every CanSecWest comes new proof that our Macs and iPhones are nowhere near as secure as we optimistically believed, but the latest hack to come out of the famed security conference’s Pwn2Own hacking contest should be enough to alarm everyone: a pair of European researchers have shown how just visiting a website can compromise a fully patched iPhone and hijack the entire SMS database.
The two researchers — Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralph Philipp Weinmann — lured a target iPhone to a malicious website and stole the iPhone’s entire SMS database (including deleted text messages) in just twenty seconds.
It’s certainly not the prettiest (a Frankenstein) or the most powerful (a sloth) but it’s the one with the twenty hours of battery life spread between two interchangeable batteries always swinging from a satchel (read: man purse) on my hip.
What was once a lackluster Windows XP lilicomputer is now, thanks to the OSx86 project and this wonderful guide, the one Mac I’m always guaranteed to have on me.
On Monday, April 12th, Adobe’s going to unveil their Creative Suite 5. We don’t know much what’s going to be different, except that Flash CS5 is finally supposed to allow developers to export Flash-based applications as App Store .ipa files.
That said, the video above gives a tantalizing look at one of the new features in Photoshop CS5: content-aware tools, which allow the program to make educated guesses on what you want to fill or replace a section of image with.
You need to watch the entire clip to see how impressive this is, but by the end of the video, CS5’s content aware tools have gone from simply plucking stray shadows and lens flare’s out of shots to seamlessly autofilling 30% of a missing panorama in just a few seconds.
Sure, these examples are obviously cherry-picked by Adobe to apply to the strength of Photoshop CS5, but if their content-aware tools are even half this good at release, CS5 seems like a must-have update.
Sprint and HTC have leaped ahead in the race for 4G, with today’s unveiling of HTC’s new, Sprint-powered EVO 4G smartphone, likely to be the first smartphone in the U.S. able to run on a 4G network when it hits stores this summer.
Less than a week after a report leaked that Google is deeply involved in creating a TV service, a prominent Apple analyst now says Apple could revamp the HDTV market in the next two to four years.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told investors Tuesday Apple is “uniquely positioned” to enter the HDTV market with what he calls a “premium all-in-one” alternative to the high-definition sector. Munster believes Apple could sell a product for $1,999 that would replace the HDTV, the Blu-ray player, your digital video recorder, cable box and game console.
Ported and expanded from the popular Amiga shareware game Deluxe Galaga by the original author, Edgar Vigdal, the 2D space SHMUP Warblade features well over 100 levels, multiple power-ups and dozens of enemies. Without a doubt, its one of the best Galaga-inspired arcade shooters on OS X… and now it’s heading to the App Store.
Most SHMUPs require extremely precise controls, but Warblade is no danmaku, and the game’s level design is forgiving enough that it looks like the iPhone’s touchscreen will work out pretty well. Vigdal claims that the port is 80% done, so we should see it on the App Store soon.
I’m pretty excited: the App Store seems woefully short on good SHMUPS. Until someone gets around to porting Cho Ren Sha 68K to the iPhone, Warblades looks like it’ll be the best SHMUP gaming on the Apple handheld is going to get.
Using any application that supports UPnP/DLNA media steaming for the iPod Touch (e.g. PlugPlayer), the latest update will allow you to stream music and movies to your Apple handset from the MiFi’s microSD card slot.
With microSD cards now coming in capacities up to 32GB, what this means is that you can now pretty easily double the capacity of your media library if you’re willing to pick up a MiFi… and while the MiFi might be a redundant addition to your gadget bag if you’ve got an iPhone 3G, it would be an excellent way to keep your iPod Touch mobile and media rich without signing a two-year contract.
In an endless sea of interchangeable memory cards, Eye-Fi has managed to stand out from the crowd by infusing their line of postage stamp sized SD cards with WiFi capabilities… and looking hip while doing so.
Their latest card, the Eye-Fi Pro X2, is a lightning-fast, Class 6 SD card that will wirelessly sync you photos or videos to iPhoto without ever once having to pull out your digicam’s mini-USB cable. The Pro X2 can also automatically upload to MobileMe, Flickr, Evernote, Picasa, Facebook and YouTube through the card’s 802.11n WiFi chip, and it’ll even send notifications automatically by email, Facebook, Twitter or SMS when you’ve uploaded something new. It all happens invisibly as soon as your Eye-Fi card is within range of a hotspot it can connect to.
Eye-Fis are fantastic cards, but they don’t come cheap: the Pro X2 costs $150 for an 8GB card.
The phone has not been completely eclipsed by Apple’s iPad when it comes to reading your daily newspaper or magazine. Tuesday, publishing giant Hearst Corp. inked a deal with Samsung, naming the cell phone maker its “preferred e-reading service partner.”
Samsung’s smart phones, such as its newly introduced Galaxy S, will include software from Skiff allowing owners to read newspapers or magazines on a phone’s 4-inch screen. Along with creating gadgets such as the 11.5-inch e-Reader device introduce during CES in January, Skiff makes e-reader software for computers, tablets and phones.
On Friday, we started something new here at Cult of Mac: we asked you what iPhone games you were playing that we might recommend for our weekend gaming feature.
Forget all the talk about e-books, gaming and other applications on the forthcoming iPad. It’s only natural that the most ubiquitous media on the planet — advertising — is making plans how to best use the tablet’s 9.7-inch screen. Major publishers, automakers and retailers are preparing ad campaigns specifically tailored to the iPad’s unique characteristics.
PointRoll, an analytics firm, and AdMarvel, which delivers ads, reportedly will team up to develop interactive ads for the iPad, according to the marketing news site Clickz. Although the two ad players hesitate to name names of companies seeking to get their brand before iPad owners, they did provide a glimpse into what sorts of ads we might expect.
Despite what Apple and even my fellow Cultists of Mac tell me, for me, the iPad isn’t a compelling gaming or productivity platform (at least primarily) and it’s not a viable laptop or even netbook replacement. For me, the iPad is a thing, attractive lozenge of aluminum and glass that will usually sit on my living room table on top of the pile of magazines and newspapers that are usually placed there. Despite Steve Jobs’ assertion that people don’t read anymore, the iPad is an e-reader, first and foremost…. and it’s going to be the best e-reader ever released.
It does not appear that I’m alone in this opinion. comScore recently polled 2,176 iPad customers and discovered that over one-third of them said that they mainly thought they’d use the device as an e-reader.
Dip a human being in glue, roll him up in crushed glass and steal $2,250 from his wallet and it’s called torture, but when CrystalRoc does the same thing except for calling the crushed glass “Swarovski crystals,” not only does no one call the cops, but George Michael excitedly calls up his personal shopper for one.
It’s all just semantics though. It’s still torture.
There are a few apps I find absolutely indispensable, and Instapaper Pro is at the top of the heap. When I find an interesting long article during the day (for example, this wonderful New York Times piece on the evolution of the science museum from wunderkammer to proslytizer) I just click Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmark and give it the attention it deserves later, in a stripped down, paginated, ultra-readable iPhone-friendly format.
I’ve been eagerly anticipating what Instapaper developer Marco Arment had up his sleeve for the iPad version, and now he’s given users a sneak peek on the official blog. There’s no huge surprises here, which even Arment admits: “No multi-column reading, no fake book-page animations, and no giant newspaper graphics,” he says. Never the less, it looks perfect, right down to the dual-pane navigation view. Even better: Arment says that existing Instapaper Pro customers will get the iPad version for free.
Once Apple.de gets around to allowing me to buy an iPad, I think this is the app I’m most looking forward to giving a try. I intend on buying the stock 16GB iPad WiFi, and Instapaper is that rare app that actually gets better and more indispensable when you don’t have a mobile broadband connection. This is a must have program for everyone who loves reading, and reading’s going to be the thing the iPad excels at most.
According to research by Deutsche Bank that assembled the revenue and operating profits of the top ten PC makers in the world, Apple is destroying the competition when it comes to being profitable.
In fact, an astonishing 35% of the profit to be made in the computer sector is deposited directly into Apple’s piggy banks. This is despite the fact that Apple only accounts for 7% of global computing manufacturer’s revenue.
In fact, only Dell and HP come close at tickling the underbelly of Apple’s precipitous pile of lucre…. but with revenue share numbers vastly more proportional to their profit shares.
As you can see, Cupertino’s head-rippening of the competition continues.
It’s a native app for 10.5.8 or 10.6, and packs a lot of features into a nicely self-contained and fairly minimal little package.
One of those features is tabs: you can add Twitter-wide searches or personal filters to the line of filters that appears just below the text entry box.
YoruFukurou (it means “Night Owl”) supports link shortening, TwitPic pictures, current iTunes song, and loads more. It counts your tweet’s characters, it has a variety of appearance modes and adjustable colors, and a decent set of keyboard shortcuts. In short: it’s neat. It really does cater to pretty much all your Twittering needs – well, certainly all of mine, but then I’m not a terribly demanding Twitter user. (Sorry, can’t bring myself to say “Tweeter”. Euw.)
The BlueAnt T1 is aimed less at your average desk jockey than, perhaps, the amorphously-envisaged NASA engineer testing shuttle engines in wind tunnels all day long. BlueAnt’s patented “Wind Armour Technology” promises to provide clear audio even in winds up to 22mph.
Otherwise, the T1’s sealed design promises to keep out dust and moisture, while removable silicon cases protect the headset from drops. Other features include automated caller announce, voice-controlled answering capabilties and A2DP support which will allow you to hear commands from your iPhone’s GPS software, if you’ve got it.
The BlueAnt T1 should be available in May for about $80.
It’s all fun and games until someone pokes their eye out with a pencil – or Apple focuses on the portable gaming market. That could be Sony and Nintendo’s thinking amid news that the iPhone and the iPod touch now have 19 percent of the market. Even worse for the gaming veterans: Apple saw 500 percent growth in gaming software revenue during an otherwise down market.
Apple had five percent of the revenue from U.S. video game software sales in 2009. While 5 percent doesn’t sound like much, its a 500 percent jump when compared to the one percent the Cupertino, Calif. company held in 2008.
No one here’s going to argue that the App Store can’t be arbitrary and borderline tyrannical… but you know, sometimes developers get what’s coming to them: Zits & Giggles, a high-brow dermatological simulator, has been pulled from the App Store after its creator, Tommy Refenes, told an audience at San Francisco’s Game Developer Conference that he “absolutely f***ing hate(s) the iPhone App Store.” And that f-bomb ain’t “fudge.”
Of course, there’s more to this than that. Refenes seems to have had an axe to grind with Apple, having raised Zits & Giggles price from $0.99 to $15.99 to $299.99 to $399.99 over a period of about six months. Shockingly, the app still managed to sell fourteen copies at the price of $299.99.
What was the point of all of this? To prove how crummy the App Store is because it’s not aimed at “real gamers,” apparently.
“My conclusion to all of this is that the people you’re selling games to on the App store, they’re not necessarily gamers. There are some games that sell very well on the App store, but for the most part, when you have stuff like Street Fighter and Assassin’s Creed, the are a way to sell a brand, just like the Tiger handhelds were,” said Refenes.
Something tells me that Apple couldn;t really care less about some punk kid mouthing off, and this is really about selling a zit-bursting simulator for more than the cost of a real-life visit to a dermatologist.
Whatever, though: I think this is one zit on Apple’s backside we’re all perfectly happy to see excised.
