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Trapster is a popular iPhone app that alerts drivers to police speed traps, red light cameras and DUI checkpoints. It’s attracting between 15,000 and 50,000 new users a day. Among those new users are are some of the most unlikely – the police themselves.

Trapster is partnering with several police departments to get cops to add their own traps to the database. The company is training cops how to use the software. The Travis County Sheriff’s Department in Austin, Texas, is already publicizing its use of the app, and the company expects to announce more partnerships soon.

“It’s more effective at slowing people down than issuing citations,” says Trapster founder and CEO Pete Tenereillo. “It’s not about revenue; it’s about enforcement.”

Travis County Deputy Tom Carpenter told a local TV news crew the same thing: “Our job is compliance, so if I can slow traffic down by just being there, that works too,” he says.

Tenereillo disclosed  more interesting facts: Trapster’s biggest competition is not nav apps, but Pandora. And even though navigation apps are popular, people hardly use them.

So you’re browsing around and doing your stuff, and you see some video on a web page that you want to watch.

Most of us will just watch it in situ, but what if it’s something special? What if it deserves to be displayed with a little more respect for the medium?

Enter Extract from Zach Waugh in Baltimore.

It’s a tiny utility that displays web videos in a minimal, chrome-less window of their own, very similar to the way QuickTime Player does its job in Snow Leopard.

Using Extract is as simple as pasting in the embed code for the video clip you want to watch.

Introducing Extract, Zach says: “Extract will also modify the embed code so that the video will expand as you resize the window. Then you can have it as large or as small as you want it.”

Here’s a quick demo video (which of course, you could always watch in Extract if you’ve already gone and grabbed it):

Auteurist is an all-purpose multitool for writers with iPhones, boasting an impressive array of features and different writing modes.

Its developer has been keeping users up to date with progress at the Auteurist Posterous, and in the latest post looks in detail at the challenges of creating a decent scriptwriting mode.

One interesting approach is to make the script on the iPhone screen look right, even though it doesn’t actually follow any rigid formatting rules. It looks as it should, and that’s sufficient on the iPhone screen; yet when you choose to export the finished script to a desktop computer, Auteurist will do the proper formatting on-the-fly, ensuring the final output meets the standards that people who read scripts will expect.

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s interesting to see the progress as it happens. And as the developer notes, things will get much more interesting when a future version of the app is ready for iPad.

Part of me wants to run a mile away from writing apps on the iPhone, simply because I can’t imagine wanting to write anything of any length on it. But another part of me knows the feeling of being struck by sudden inspiration, and having nothing but an iPhone with me to start writing on.

Fans of classical literature rejoice. Project Gutenberg – the publisher of thousands of free, public domain eBooks – is coming to Apple’s iBookstore. Having previewed Apple’s iBookstore, AppAdvice.com reported this morning that the iPad book store will include free access to more than 30,000 public domain titles, including Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and if Apple doesn’t ban it, the Kama Sutra.

The report confirms speculation that the iPad would be compatible with free eBooks.

The iPad certainly hasn’t made the once-untouchable Kindle look cutting edge, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves: the Kindle’s still got some advantages on Apple’s e-reading tablet. For one, the Kindle’s e-ink screen is much easier for long reading sessions than the iPad’s LED-backlit LCD display… and because of the power efficiency of e-ink, the Kindle can go weeks at a time without needing a charge. For a lot of people, the Kindle is going to be good enough, especially for the $259.99 price.

The problem is, while the Kindle has some advantages on the iPad, what it’s doing technologically is easily done for less. Enter the Kobo, a $150 e-reader that smartly shaves a few specs to undercut the already-ailing Kindle by over a hundred bucks.

According to tech apocrypha, after Commodore International released their revolutionary PET 2001 home PC, a couple of scruffy young men named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak plopped down in Commodore’s offices with a cardboard box full of circuit boards and tried to pitch the more established electronics company the first Apple II prototype, a revolutionary home PC with far more advanced color, graphics and sound capabilities. Jobs and Woz had no money, and they wanted Commodore to push the Apple II to market.

Instead, Commodore balked, following up the PET 2001 with the VIC-20 in 1980, and then finally bringing to market the computer they would become best known for: the Commodore 64. Largely thanks to a sub-$200 price drop, It went on to sell 17 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer of all time with an astonishing 30-40% market share between 1983 and 1986. The computer was such a success that was only discontinued in 1994.

Oh, how things change. Now, Commodore International is basically dead, and the company Commodore shuffled out the door is one of the most profitable computer companies on Earth. But after sixteen years, the Commodore 64 has finally raised a mottled hand out of the grave. Can it compete with Apple once more?

Brick-and-mortar media may seem tepid about the iPad, but their sales people are not.

According to the Wall Street Journal,  interactive iPad ads are selling for figures reminiscent of their paper counterparts, back before magazines made the endangered species watch.

Both Time and The Wall Street Journal are charging — and have sold — iPad ads costing from $200,000 – $400,000, depending on the length of the ad run.

Time will charge $200,000 for an ad in the first eight issues. Clients so far include Unilever, Toyota and Fidelity and three other unnamed “major advertisers.”

Ads in the pricey iPad edition of The Wall Street Journal cost $400,000 for four months.  Coke, FedEx and four other “major advertisers” are already on board.

People magazine said it took just two days to line up six advertisers for the first three months of its iPad edition, which won’t even launch until late July.

“Mind-blowing” games, video and interactivity are getting ad folks to write checks, Steve Pacheco, FedEx’s director of advertising, told the Journal. “You are taking something that used to be flat on a page and making it interactive and have it jump off the page.”

Via WSJ

I have ridiculously sensitive eyes; the kind of eyes that feel like they’re being repeatedly stabbed with chopsticks if more than just the slightest bit of light hits them before they’ve had time to adjust.

So when I ran across the press release for Wake Up Now? describing an app that makes the iPhone call out the time, I was intrigued.

Police in rural England are offering kits that capture DNA traces so locals can mark high-tech valuables such as iPods in the hopes of preventing thefts.

The CSI-worthy plan comes from cops in Fleggburg, an idyllic-looking village of 909 people in Norfolk, England.

Similar to the home kit pictured above, the product made by Selecta consists of a water-based adhesive containing a locked-in DNA code, a UV tracer and a series of microdots which can be easily applied to property “such as a TV or an iPod,” police said.

The fluid marks the property with a unique code which is revealed when scanned with a UV light. The DNA marking allows police to place the burglar at the crime scene, which could increase chances of a conviction.

Apple reportedly has inked a deal worth $240 million for Samsung to supply 3 million additional 9.7-inch iPad displays. Although no time period was provided, the deal was confirmed by an industry executive who talked with a Korean publication.

“The most expensive component in the iPad is the display and touch-screen interface that costs $80 for all models,” the person wishing not to be identified told The Korean Times. The iPad display also costs five times as much as the handset’s screen, the person added.

Digital is… well, what is it exactly?

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.

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.

My guilty little secret is that my ugly Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook is my favorite Mac laptop.

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.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI&feature=player_embedded

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.

[via 9to5Mac]

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.

Not content with their DIY touchscreen analysis experiment back in January, the team at Moto Labs have gone one better, and repeated the test with more handheld devices and a fairer test environment.

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.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mP-0Y8bLzc

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.

Novatel have just announced some fantastic new functionality for their wonderful MiFi series of mobile WiFi hotspots: live iPhone and iPod Touch media streaming.

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.

[via Gadget Lab]

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.

On our part, we recommended Space Miner: Space Ore Bust, a humorous, lite RPG spin on Asteroids.

Here’s some of the games you recommended that tickled our fancy.