Apple has settled claims with state regulators who allege the company mishandled electronic waste. Photo: Thomas Dohmke
Two main news items came from Apple’s annual shareholder meeting held Thursday: CEO Steve Jobs wants to hang onto the company’s $25 billion in cash for “big and bold” future investments and the firm borne of the desktop computer now considers itself a “mobile devices company.”
“This is not something we’re ordaining from the top. This is something our customers are saying with their dollars,” Jobs said, according to Reuters. Apple could get half of its revenue from the iPhone by 2011, an analyst said Thursday. However, Jobs stressed there are no plans to scuttle Apple’s line of desktop computers.
Steve Wozniak hasn’t given up his desire to appear in the spotlight: after hamming it up on “Dancing with the Stars,” he’s going to show his adorable mug at a Roller Derby event on March 6 in San Francisco.
Woz will be on hand when the Bay City Bombers Roller Derby team takes on Thunder at the Kezar Pavilion in Golden Gate Park. Tickets for the “family friendly evening” are $5-$10, organizers expect a sell out.
“Steve Woniak has been a Bomber fan for a few decades,” said team owner Tim Patten. “He will be the official game starter at the event.”
(Too bad they spelled his name wrong on the flyer.)
No idea whether the “official game starter” means he’ll be taking an initial spin on the banked track, but we really, really hope so.
Boxee is Apple TV done right. It’s a great, Net-connected, “social” media player that allows you to play video from all over the Web as well as files from file-sharing networks. It streams content from sites like Netflix, Pandora and Last.fm, and makes it easy to get entertainment recommendations from friends. It transforms the Apple TV into a truly-useful internet video device.
The beta adds a much-improved that’s easier to navigate. Boxee on Apple TV was previously available only as an early alpha version. The latest beta was released in January but was unavailable for Apple TV users — until now.
A group of Boxee users have updated the ATV-Usb creator to install the Boxee Beta.
Users who already have Boxee Alpha installed on their AppleTV can simply update Launcher and then update Boxee to install the beta, no patchstick needed.
The iTunes store is pulling off and putting on sexy apps faster than you can stuff a dollar bill in a g-string.
Case in point: the Hooter’s girls are back in bikinis to “clean” your iPhone screen. Hooters Calendar Screen Wash was quietly reinstated Feb. 24 and is now back on sale. The $0.99 app is for a +17 audience, though it doesn’t seem to be any more prurient or wholesome than some of the babes-in-bikini apps that were yanked over sexual content. Another five Hooters-related apps, from several different app makers, also appear to have been reinstated.
No one seems more surprised than the creators, On the Go Girls, who remarked on the company blog:
“Wow! Surprising! We are shocked! Our Hooters Calendar Sexy Screen Wash was restored to the App Store last night 2am PST.”
No-name bikini apps still seem to be AWOL from the iTunes store, which makes me wonder whether it’s more a question of brand-name franchises like Playboy and Sports Illustrated flaunting their stuff than one of women complaining about them.
Ever wondered what your mouse pointer actually does all day? Ever wanted to have a way of tracking where it goes while you work, and exporting that information as a map of your daily mousings?
It’s simple, it’s free, it’s fun, and it’s brilliant: it watches your mouse movements for as long as you want it to, tracking the times when the pointer is moving rapidly and the times it spends standing still in one place.
It plots all this on a view of your computer’s desktop, showing the movements as fine lines and the stationary periods as enlarged blobs.
Remember the cool 3D effects in ‘Avatar’ and wishing you could see more? Well, maybe you can with a pair of sunglasses the maker touts as similar to walking around with a 67-inch screen resting on your nose. Add the ability to pipe in video from your iPhone and you’ve got the Vuzix Wrap 920.
The $350 sunglasses work with 2D and 3D video formats, are NTSC and PAL compatible, and work for six hours on two AA alkaline batteries. The glasses, which weigh less than three ounces, include two high-resolution 640 x 480 LCD displays with a 60Hz progressive scan update rate.
At least with this iPhone you don’t have to worry about managing or forgetting its cookies. A Japanese bakery called Green Gables whips up these handmade smart cookies — the “camera” on the back is an especially nice touch — but fortunately they spared us the glossy black frosting and made them out of what looks like gingerbread instead.
If you’re looking for a more slavish copy to sink your teeth into, there are other options.
Since its inception, Google’s Android operating system seemed aimed at guys. Now we have more proof in the form of an AdMob survey showing Android men outnumber iPhone women 73 percent to 53 percent.
Some 43 percent of iPhone users are female, compared to just 27 percent of Android-based phone owners, AdMob said Thursday. The survey found not only a gender split, but also an age gap between the two smartphone platforms.
When or if Apple will unveil a refreshed MacBook Pro line is the latest parlor game among Apple owners. Along with watching for unreleased Intel procesors and checking Best Buy’s inventory, fans may have to wait until March or April for a new MacBook Pro, one analyst is suggesting.
A new MacBook Pro could be unveiled in late March, the end of the current quarter, or in April, when the next quarter begins, says Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu. Wu bases his claim on low inventories of the MacBook.
Apple appears to be investigating ways to do away with the iMac’s keyboard, replacing it with a touchscreen that should detect shapes, such as a key. Harkening back to the days when letters were sealed with insignias to prove the sender’s identity, the Cupertino, Calif. company would use “signets” for security-related tasks.
The shape-detecting technology, first outlined in a 2004 patent, then updated Oct. 30, 2009, permits “improved techniques to allow different authorization levels” on computer networks.
When researching a recent article for TechRadar, about great iPhone games that should be ported to iPad, I asked a few devs about their plans for the platform. Most remained tight-lipped, but Reto Senn was happy to spill a few beans regarding Orbital, an absurdly addictive one-thumb orb-destruction game that’s currently my favourite iPhone app, and which was seen demoed on iPad at Apple’s recent press event.
“It was a surprise for us that Orbital appeared on the iPad and was playable at the press event. We didn’t know about this beforehand,” says Reto. “We’ve looked into the possibilities [for iPad] and we’ve decided to create an iPad-specific release, dubbed Orbital HD. The new version will have pin-sharp textures so the game takes advantage of the higher resolution screen. We’re also re-designing the user interface, because the bezel, larger screen and weight of the device will have users hold the iPad in a different position to iPhone, in order to play Orbital.”
In terms of gameplay, Reto reveals that although gameplay will stay the same “so highscores will be comparable with the iPhone version,” there are plans in the works to add some unique features to Orbital HD: “We’re designing a two-player mode so it can be played like a table-top arcade game. Multiplayer is one of our favourite features of Orbital and the iPad is the perfect device for that kind of gameplay—with its large screen it’s like a portable table-top arcade game.”
The iPhone 3GS. Creative Commons-licensed photo by Fr3d: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fr3d/2660915827/
The iPhone, initially a sideline to Apple’s main Mac sales, could account for up to half of the Cupertino, Calif. firm’s revenue by 2011, according to an analyst. The company is on track to sell 45 to 50 million handsets next year, more than double the 20.7 million iPhones sold in fiscal 2009.
Toni Sacconaghi, analyst with Bernstein Research, in a note to investors, said the iPhone could become 45 percent to 50 percent of Apple’s revenue, up from 30 percent in 2009. The analyst forecasts iPhone sales will reach 40 million to 50 million units in fiscal 2011, a dramatic increase from 20.7 million sold in 2009. The company should report sales of 8.7 million for the first fiscal quarter of 2010, he adds.
Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune has a mole at the Apple shareholders’ meeting today. Not much to report, other than that Steve is in good spirits and cracking jokes, but there is one piece of pretty huge news: Apple is planning to open 25 stores in China, signs that the company sees a lot of untapped growth potential in Asia, where it currently has a retail presence in Japan and one store in Beijing so far. The iPhone launch has been regarded as disappointing in China, but this could good go some way to changing things.
AT&T’s 3G service may be widely reviled, new data from PC World in collaboration with wireless analysis firm Novarum indicates that not only has Ma Bell done a lot over the course of the last year to shore up thew weaknesses in its network, but that in most cities it’s one of the fastest and most reliable networks around.
A joke so obvious that the humor-bereft Mad TV joke-writing bullpen thought it up two years ago? Sure. Moreover, there’s better reasons to think Apple’s choice of the iPad moniker is a terrible branding mistake.
Even so, you might consider dropping $40 on this iMaxi Apple iPad Case being sold by the Atwoodian Etsy outfit Hip Handmaids… if only because, as a device touched by God, it may very well suffer from the occasional stigmata.
Still using Aperture? It might be time to give it up. Photo: Apple
Apple’s update to its professional photography application, Aperture 3, was met with excitement by OS X shutterbugs when it was unceremoniously released on February 16th, but since then, complaints that the program will suck up pretty much all of the free space on your hard drive during the library upgrade process have been widespread.
A new Aperture 3 patch addresses some of the issues that users have been having with the program, including fixes for:
• Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
• Importing libraries from iPhoto
• Importing photos directly from a camera
• Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
• Face recognition processing
Unfortunately, though, Apple is still warning that Aperture 3 may eat up your entire hard drive during the upgrade process, claiming that users experiencing problems need to temporarily shift their library to a different hard drive with more space. Since I’ve talked to some people who’ve seen terrabyte drives fill up completely during the Aperture 3 upgrade process, this isn’t entirely welcome news.
Gamers looking for a solid digital delivery platform on the Mac are notoriously hard up. Actually, scratch that: Mac gamers are notoriously hard up.
The good news here, then, is that recent betas of Valve Software’s popular Steam delivery system contain files that strongly hint that the “App Store for Windows Games” service is coming to OS X. These files are a new “osx.menu” file and graphics for Mac window buttons.
The bad news, unfortunately, is it’s not likely to make much difference: one of the reasons Steam is so great on Windows is because it has tens of thousands of games available for it. The library on the Mac is far more paltry, and OS X gamers are simply better off using Steam through Boot Camp to play the latest games than waiting two to four years for a company to maybe get around to releasing a sloppy OS X port of a game the PC world has already forgotten about.
Steam’s a great service, so I don’t doubt it’ll be useful… but publishers aren’t getting any more serious about OS X as a gaming platform. If you’re not on iPhone OS, Apple gaming is just pretty much dead. The best can be said about this development is that it may indicate that Valve is interested in porting its own games to OS X, all of which require Steam in order to run. Team Fortress 2 or Portal on the Mac is a pretty thought, but hardly likely to revolutionize anything.
Remember Casey Neistat? He and his brother caused a stir back in 2003 with The iPod’s Dirty Secret, a viral video about the iPod’s irreplaceable battery.
Now he’s got a really nice, artful little film about Chatroulette, a web app tha lets you videoconference with random strangers all over the world (hence the roulette). Check it out. It’s well 5.57 minutes of your time.
When sinewy-armed Germans Austrians put on some Rammstein, begin to use the word “dude” with abandon and then take a drill to a Powerbook, you just know schiß is about to get extreme.
So what the heck is this? A couple of mean-looking Teutons hack apart a PowerBook and instead of making it into a flame spitting metal dragon or perhaps a battle axe with a special funnel to allow disemboweling juices to sluice out of the handle, they make the wussiest snowboard ever.
It’s just very disappointing. Germany Austria has a long, sometimes ignominious maker’s history of repurposing old metal into some of the most awesome death machines around. These guys, on the other hand, ruin a perfectly good PowerBook, turn it into a snowboard, take it to the slopes and end up displaying all the equilibrium and fluid grace of a toddler pushed off the top of an icy hill while balanced precariously atop a garbage pail lid.
Update: The original post said these guys were German. I, a Berliner, apologize for the inexcusable mistake.
Sure, Apple stuffs the iPhone full of perfectly functional apps before they hit stockrooms. Ok, more-or-less functional. Look, who are we kidding here: Many of the iPhone’s native apps are about as functional as a box of matches; sure, I can get a fire started with it (maybe) — but if I really want to set something ablaze, I’d rather have a butane torch. Or a flamethrower.
Fashion designer Kosuke Tsumura wove old iPods, mice and keyboards into a series of artworks on show at Nanzuka Underground in Tokyo until March 20, Japan Trends reports.
We’ve seen a few artistic reincarnations of defunct iPods but love the way he’s turned that tangle of useless cables we all have in a drawer into something more: the work is intricate enough that it takes awhile to spot the NSFW element in at least one of them.
The iPad’s hardware keyboard dock is the best hope for users looking to do serious writing on Apple’s latest device, but if a picture posted by MacRumors forum-goer macduke is anything to go by, it might also reveal some of the tablet’s still unannounced software capabilities.
Although the iPad keyboard dock is mostly similar to the Apple aluminum keyboard, the function keys have been replaced by various shortcut buttons. From left to right, these keys are: Home, Search, Brightness Down, Brightness Up, Photo Album, Keyboard Toggle, Blank, Skip Back, Play / Pause, Skip Forward, Mute, Volume Up, Volume Down and Lock Screen.
That all seems straight-forward enough, but it’s that Blank key above the 6 that is causing a flurry of speculation. Apple doesn’t leave blank function keys on its laptop keyboards, which the iPad’s keyboard dock is most similar to. Therefore, it seems hard to believe that Apple couldn’t think of a perfectly good use for that key.
Now, the image itself was initially posted over at iLounge, snapped at the January 27th iPad announcement. Is it possible that key is blank so as not to leak some yet-announced feature of the iPad? Say, a dashboard, or perhaps (even better) a multitasking app switch screen? No word from Apple yet… but we should know within a month.
Update: Reader Seth points out that there’s a lot of commentary on this exact same issue over at 9to5Mac.
Despite having just five percent of global PC sales, Apple has 10.5 percent of the revenue, an analyst firm announced Wednesday. For over a half-decade, the Cupertino, Calif. company has been on a steady growth path from just 3 percent in 2004.
“Apple’s pricing discipline in holding Mac prices fairly steady in the face of plunging Windows PC prices translated into dollar share gains that materially exceeded unit share gains,” Needham & Company analyst Charlie Wolf told investors Wednesday.
Thanks to the App Store, the iPhone and iPod Touch have a wide library of frankly excellent remote apps available to most users. If your device can accept commands through WiFi or Bluetooth, the iPhone family is the best universal remote out there… but with most homes filled to the gills with dumb gadgets that can only be controlled by blinking infrared beams, that’s a big “if.”
Power A’s latest product, the iPhone Universal Remote Case, adds the IR functionality to the iPhone and iPod Touch, allowing it to communicate with any of your household’s stupidest devices. The IR transmitter’s built right into the sleek case, which adds a minimal footprint to your existing device.
Once your handheld’s ensconced, controlling every gadget in your house is as simple as loading Power A’s app, which will even update itself with new device profiles overtime. Not bad indeed… although that $60 price seems a bit much.
Nice that it looks like Apple will give some lucky punter $10,000 in iTunes gift card on Steve Jobs’ birthday.
The counter looks close to reaching the magic number today — remember you can also enter the contest without buying anything here.
Just check to make sure your country is eligible — outside the U.S. about 20 are including Canada (parts), Mexico, Japan Australia and a handful of European countries.
Downloaders seem to be buying at alarming rates, if the ticker is accurate, and all of the top downloaded songs are a lot more recent that seven-year-old iTunes. The top five right now : “I Gotta Feeling” (Black Eyed Peas) followed by “Pokerface” (Lady Gaga) “Boom Boom Pow” (Black Eyed Peas) and “I’m Yours” (Jason Mraz) and “Viva la Vida” (Coldplay).
