News - page 2265

As a Mac gamer, I thought the recent announcement of the Steam digital games delivery service coming to Mac was very exciting. Even if Steam never becomes as popular on the Mac as it is on the PC, it will bring us, at the very least, some great Valve titles like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and Portal.

But best case scenario? Steam on Mac gets just the same vibrant games economy that the PC version enjoyed. But to do that, developers need to be on board.

Luckily, it looks like at least two game developing studios are going to take the plunge. Gas Powered Games, who created Supreme Commander 2 and Dungeon Siege, plan to develop for Mac in all products going forward, saying that porting games to the Mac is relatively easy since they’ve got identical internal architectures, unlike the PowerPC days. Unfortunately, that sounds to me like they’re talking about using CrossOver to make their ports. DICE is also now talking more seriously about bringing their Battlefield series of games to the Mac as well.

The big risk here is that developers will choose to use CrossOver or other DirectX wrappers to do their ports, which is the last thing the Mac gaming scene needs. I hope Steam leads to developers seriously devoting time and resources to OS X game development… not just an expansion of the lazy porting we’ve seen over the last few years.

Birdfeed has long been one of the best Twitter clients available on the App Store, but it was expensive for a Twitter app ($5), which limited the number of people using it. So while existing customers might be sad at first to note that Birdfeed has been pulled from the App Store, it’s actually good news all arond: the app was actually just aquired by Thing Labs and rebranded as the excellent and totally free Brizzly for iPhone app.

Brizzly is a neat little web service that integrates Facebook and Twitter into one interface. Using Brizzly on your iPhone will require you to sign up for the free Brizzly service, but like the recent release of the Meebo app, once you sign up you never need to worry about it again.

Otherwise, Brizzly builds upon Birdfeed’s foundation, keeping some of the best features of that client including the helpful character countdown widget and a simple and intuitive user interface, while introducing new features of its own like lists, a pull-down refresh feature borrowed from Tweetie 2, and the Brizzly Guide which allows you to edit and add explanations to Twitter trends. The other usual features are all there too: support for multiple Twitter accounts, photo support, saved searches, custom tabs and so on.

If you’re looking for a good free Twitter app, Brizzly looks like a very safe bet. You can download it now over at the iTunes App Store.

It was as recently as December that Apple quietly bumped the specs of their Mac Pro line to use 3.33Ghz quad-core Xeon CPUs, but if ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes and his sources are to be believed, we could see the next Mac Pro as soon as next Tuesday, March 16th.

According to Kingsley-Hughes, the next Mac Pro will pack the Intel Core i7-980x CPU… which jives with a rumor we heard late last year, which also hinted a March release.

The Intel Core i7-980X is a 32nm chip, maxing out at 3.33GHz but packing six cores and twelve threads per chip… which could ultimately result in a dual-core Mac Pro boasting twelve physical and twenty four logical cores. Each Core i7-980X CPU also has 128MB of Intel Smart Cache, hyperthreading support, an integrated memory controller and supports DDR1066MHz memor. In other words, Mac Pros built on the Core i7-980x processor will see a huge performance boost over the current model.

Unfortunately, Kingsley-Hughes doesn’t have anything to report on the other high-end, pro-level Mac waiting for an Intel Core iX upgrade: the MacBook Pro. I think we can all take it as read that it’s coming, though: we’ll just have to bide our time patiently in the meanwhile.

As the first example of what will likely be a growing trend, Google — always a progressive front runner in getting their products on Apple’s devices as soon as humanly possible — have just revealed an iPad-friendly version of Google Reader called Google Reader Play.

Google Reader Play makes RSS feeds more accessible to tablet users by treating each news feed like a Flickr slideshow. Only one news item is shown at a time: each is recommended based on what a subscriber has previously liked. It also pulls items and shared articles from a subscriber’s own Google Reader account.

It’s not quite iPad ready just yet — load Google Reader Play up on your iPhone and you’ll quickly discover you can’t swipe to flip to the next item, which is an obligatory interface feature for the iPhone OS — but I’d expect all of these tablet-specific problems to be resolved by April 3rd.

[via Gadget Lab]

Apple’s done such a great job with multitouch that every time a new iPhone OS update adds a fresh polydigital shortcut to the mix, my only real surprise is that it wasn’t there already.

It looks like the iPhone OS 3.2 update will be no different. According to Beta 4 SDK spelunkers over at 9 to 5 Mac, two new files called “3Tap.plist” and “LongPress.plist” are now located in the “gestures” library folder and are new to the iPhone OS SDK.

Three fingered tap is apparently undefined in iPhone OS, which is news to me, although long press brings up the context menu to cut, copy and paste, so its sudden addition to the gesture library could indicate some change to the functionality in the future.

Anyway, we may not get these new multitouch gestures in time for iPhone OS 3.2, but take heart: clearly, Apple’s got the fulfillment of all your triple-digit tapping desires well within their sites.

Steve Jobs may be one of the most admired CEOs in the tech industry even if he’s not the richest.

Jobs ranked 136 — down from up 43 spots since last year — in the annual Forbes list of billionaires, far behind Bill Gates (no. 2), Larry Ellison (6), Google founder Sergey Brin (24), Steve Ballmer (33) and Michael Dell who came in at no. 37.

Here’s how they explained his ranking:

“Following months of rumor and speculation, cultish king of the iGeeks presented the highly anticipated iPad in January; ten-inch, multi-touch computer intended to fill gap between smartphone and laptop. Delighted: nerds everywhere. Scared to death: newspaper and magazine publishers. Also unveiled new iBookstore and iBooks application in direct challenge to Amazon’s Kindle; several book publishers have committed to content agreements. Apple shares up 100% in past 12 months. Reed College dropout founded Apple in 1976. Revolutionized music industry with iTunes, iPod. Best investment: bought Pixar from George Lucas in 1986 for $10 million. Created string of hits (Finding Nemo, Toy Story); sold to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock. Today is Disney’s largest shareholder; stake worth $4.2 billion.”

Via Softpedia

With just a few weeks to go before the iPad hits stores, here’s the best way to ensure you’re at the head of the line to get one (or three).

If history is any indication, the iPad will be in short supply when it goes on sale April 3. Plus there are rumors of production delays that may further constrain supply.

The best way to get one is to place an advance order on Apple’s online store the minute Apple starts accepting them on Friday March 12.

Trouble is, no one knows what time Apple will update its online store. But there’s a way to get alerted.

Thanks to a bunch of nerds in Berlin, you can be pinged the minute the store is taken offline and, more importantly, when it comes back up.

AppleStoreCheck.com constantly monitors Apple’s online store for changes. Sign up, and the service will alert you by email, RSS or Twitter the minute Apple starts taking iPad pre-orders.

As AppleStoreCheck says: “We’ll check the Apple Store for new products and changes – so you don’t have to.”

iPad pre-orders will initially be limited to US customers, but includes both iPad Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi+3G models, which will ship later. The iPad will be available to pick up from the Apple Retail stores on April 3, or delivery through the mail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODKbpiWbyUA

It’s not like director Tom De Nolf doesn’t have 35mm film cameras and a bunch of other video-making tech at his disposal; no, De Nolf was so surprised by the video capability of his recently purchased 3GS that he chose to shoot the above music video using just three iPhones.

HP and ARM are ganging-up on Apple’s iPad, introducing new videos highlighting the tablet’s lack of Flash support and warning the Cupertino, Calif. company may not have the stage to itself much longer. Indeed, the chipmaker says there could be at least 50 iPad-like tablets introduced just this year.

HP’s “slate” device, with Windows 7, will be able to display the “complete Internet — including Flash,” the PC maker announced this week. The company also introduced a number of videos highlighting its device’s compatibility with Adobe’s Flash.

Digital Americana has just popped up out of nowhere, claiming to be “the first literary & culture magazine developed especially for the interactive tablet experience.”

Or to put it another way, it will be “a new interactive magazine made exclusively for the Apple iPad”. And anyone can contribute.

There’s been a tremendous amount of peek-a-boo over racy apps in the iTunes store lately. Following a purge of apps with names like Epic Boobs — which once squeezed their way past censors — some of them were re-instated.

Most of the offending apps, however, were produced by small shops. The hotties available on the iTunes store from big franchises — like Playboy and Sports Illustrated — were left untouched.

In this now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t fest, Apple, however, seems to have ignored an implicit gentleman’s agreement with German publisher Springer.

Springer owns tabloid Bild whose “Shake the Bild Girl” app undresses women with a shake of the device, leaving them naked, like the babes featured in the print edition.

Apple now wants them to remove the Teutonic ta-tas from the app — leaving the women in bikinis — raising the ire of the publisher. Springer reportedly sold 100,000 downloads of the app which costs €1.59 a month ($2.15, circa), also available with a PDF edition of the print tab for €3.99 ($5,40)  a month.

“Today they censor nipples, tomorrow editorial content,” Bild Digital CEO Donata Hopfen told local media.

The issue has raised enough ire that the Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) asked The International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP) last week to approach Apple over the issue.

More to come.

Via the Guardian

Apple has told its Taiwan suppliers to produce around 5 million iPads by mid-year, one analyst said Tuesday, citing unnamed sources. FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger called talk of production delays “just false alarms” after Apple recently announced an April 3 U.S. availability date for the first iPads.

If correct, Berger’s projection would be a bit higher than previous expectations of between 4 million to 5 million of the tablet devices. Late last month, China-based Foxconn Electronics, Apple’s chief supplier in the region, denied reports of a “manufacturing bottleneck” and estimated 1 million iPads would ship in April.

Verizon sees a way to cash-in on the iPad, despite AT&T having the exclusive data contract for the Apple tablet device. In a memo, the rival wireless carrier sees the new Apple gadget as “an opportunity for VZW” and urges employees to promote its MiFi wireless router as a stop-gap connection method until a 3G iPad is available in late April.

The memo, obtained by Engadget, notes the 3G iPad will cost $130 more than the Wi-Fi version to be released in April. However, that advantage could be reversed when the 3G iPad goes on sale, potentially making an iPad and MiFi combo more costly for subscribers. (Unlimited data will cost $29.99 from AT&T.)

Over six months after it was first unveiled, iTunes LP is a total bust. Apple launched its interactive album format with a library of six iTunes LPs: since, only 23 more have been added to iTunes.

What the heck happened? According to Paul Bonanos writing over at GigaOm, it all comes down to two things: the iTunes LP is incredibly expensive to produce, and Apple really never wanted to do it in the first place.

Forget Plants vs. Zombies… how about Tweets vs. Zombies?

Tweet Defense is a cute little tower defense game for the iPhone and iPod Touch that boosts your units power based on your Twitter activity, including status updates and number of followers, as you fight off wave after wave of the undead. A Twitter account is not strictly obligatory, but if you have one, your Twitter statistics will boost your units in various ways: for example, rate of fire, range and damage increases.

According to Tweet Defense’s executive producer, Nelson Rodriguez: “We wondered what it would be like to take your social network and your activities there and turn it into a game. We ended up with a full on tower defense game that uses your friend list and your tweeting activity to impact how powerful your towers are.”

It certainly looks like fun, and at $0.99 on the iTunes App Store, Tweet Defense is easily within the impulse buy category. Now if only I had more Twitter followers to boost my range.

This is kind of a no-brainer once you actually think about it, but according to Mobclix, a mobile device advertising agency, the number of eBooks available on the App Store has surpassed the number of games for the first time ever, with 27,000 eBook apps to 25,400 games.

The reason here is pretty simple: there’s little barrier to entry in releasing an eBook app. All you do is grab a public domain title, wrap it in a remedial interface, slap a $0.99 price on it and hope for the best. Once you’ve programmed the wrapper, you can pump out eBook titles like this quickly and indefinitely, making it an easy moneymaker for more unscrupulous App Devs. Games, on the other hand, require you to have more advanced programming, artistic and design ideas.

For me, the most interesting aspect to this data is what it means for the iPad. Apple wants you to do all of your eBook reading in the iBooks app, but companies like Penguin are already talking about doing a lot of their more interesting work in app form. The eBook glut on the App Store can’t be something Apple wants to encourage to continue when the iPad comes around, but major publishers are doing the same thing.

My guess is we’ll start seeing a purge of crap eBook apps shortly after the iPad’s release. I’m okay with that… as long as they don’t touch my beloved Stanza.

Hadouken! I hope you’ve been practicing your hurricane kicks and lightning cannonballs, because Capcom’s much anticipated port of its beloved Street Fighter IV fighter is now available for $9.99 over on the App Store.

We all love Steve, but it’s still common knowledge that our beloved Apple leader can be a bit ornery, especially when he feels like his intellectual property is being threatened. Of course, he doesn’t always get it right, as evidenced by a great little blog post made today by former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who explains how Jobs threatened to sue Sun over Project Looking Glass and its graphical effects.

Over at his blog, Schwartz writes:

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”

But Schwartz has a ready retort…

I love Simple Desktops. You can guess what sort of web site it is.

Just simple desktop backgrounds. All of them are fantastic, and all of them look great on your Mac.

They’ve been collated by Tom Watson, who says the designs he features are for people who “want less, but not boring”. You can submit your own designs if you like.

And if these are too minimal for your taste, you might prefer to go hunting around the Command Shift 3 Flickr group where you’ll be sure to find plenty of inspiration and links to more frenzied desktop backgrouds. Personally, though, I’m sticking to the beautiful minimalism of Simple Desktops.

Boom! Apple broke App Store accounts for many users with multiple accounts recently. On checking for updates and clicking the helpful ‘Download All Free Updates’ button, iTunes rather unhelpfully states: ‘You can not update this software since you have not owned the major version of this software’. Whether this is a bug (which we hope) or a change in App Store policy is unknown at this time. However, since writing about the subject on my own blog and Twitter, it’s clear the issue is widespread, and Apple support has yet to supply any kind of insight regarding a fix.

Previously, App Store updates for users/Macs with multiple accounts were awkward in UI terms but at least logical. You signed into an account, selected Applications, checked for updates and then downloaded what was available. If you noticed a number next to Applications after apps had been updated, that meant updates were available in another account. So you’d sign into that one as well and repeat the process.

Now, all available updates for all accounts are displayed at once, but iTunes isn’t intelligent enough to figure out which apps belong to the active account. Therefore, you try to update everything, iTunes realises some apps it’s showing are tied to a different account, and it throws up the appallingly clumsy dialog error ‘You can not update this software since you have not owned the major version of this software’.

At present, the only solution is to click on every single Get Update link individually, dismiss the dialog if it appears, and when you’ve gone through every app, sign into other accounts and repeat the process.

Perhaps Apple’s cracking down on people with multiple accounts in different countries (although most people I know who do this keep a US account for promo codes, since Apple’s still inexplicably restricting them to the US store). That said, I’ve had emails from people stating that they get the same error with multiple accounts from the same store on a single machine. Therefore, this is most likely a pretty big bug that needs squashing, but if so that’s only indicative of how one of Apple’s most important pieces of software needs some serious TLC, as Pete noted on the 4th.

I currently have a (second-line) support call logged with Apple on this, and will update if I get a response. If you’re also having this issue, please post in the comments.

Like LogMeIn Ignition, TeamViewer lets you access a computer over the Internet from your iPhone. The big difference: TeamViewer is completely free.

Back in January, we reported on the blurry images of some ancient Apple Newton prototypes that were doing the rounds on the internets.

Since then, Grant Hutchinson, who was mentioned in that article, has taken a fantastic set of photos of the Newton “Cadillac” prototype. We asked him if we could show you some of those photos here, and he kindly said yes.

Is global warming finally reaching the icy tones of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer? Probably not, but some observers see a possible thaw in the relationship between the Seattle software giant and Apple. The latest sign comes from comments by Ballmer praising the App Store.

“Apple’s done a very nice job that allows people to monetize and commercialize their intellectual property,” the head of Microsoft reportedly said in a speech at the University of Washington.

Just days after we reported on the launch of Alfred for OS X, along comes yet another keyboard-centric file and application launcher: Launchy.

Launchy has a long history as an open source Windows application, doing much the same on that platform that Quicksilver did on OS X. It too supports plugins that greatly boost its usefulness.

Right now, though, you can download a Mac beta and see what you think.

Free, open source operating system Ubuntu will take on a new look in its forthcoming 10.04 release.

Gone is the brown, in comes the auberginey-purple. It’s actually quite appealing and obviously takes a lot of cues from OS X (the file manager windows) and iPhone (the menu bar and its plain white icons).

Reaction among Ubuntu users has been mixed. On ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks Can Ubuntu out-sexy Apple?:

“To me, the UI does indeed look … well … a bit Mac-like. But that might not be a bad thing. One of Mac’s major selling points is simplicity, and while Linux has a long way to go before it’s ready for the computing masses, giving the OS a more refined look might help people feel at home with the OS.”

He also points out that window controls in this theme have moved from top-right to top-left, another OS X-like feature. Some users aren’t terribly happy about that. But Ubuntu is very flexible – if they don’t like the default theme, they can easily switch to another.

I’d say it’s less of an attempt to “out-sexy” OS X, and more of an attempt to just bring things up-to-date. The brown theme served Ubuntu well for many years but it looks old-fashioned compared to Snow Leopard and Windows 7. It needed a fresh look and this one is smart, yet subdued.