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The Apple Store went down for a little bit today, and while we all got hopeful for a Core iX MacBook update, most of what Apple ended up delivering was the usual assortment of Valentine’s Day deals (and why not? An iPod gifted to a loved one usually lets you steal a base). But there was one significant new product to be had: Aperture 3, a significant 64-bt update that adds up to 200 new features to Apple’s pro photo software package.

Some of the more frivolous new features are the ones you’re already using in iPhoto ’09: face detection and tagging, along with direct Flickr and Facebook exporting. Others are entirely new: Brushes, for example, brings reversible and non-destructive painting to Aperture, including Photoshop stalwarts like dodge, burn, contrast and saturation curves.

Aperture 3 databases have also been written: you can now merge and sync libraries, which should make it easier for professionals to take their libraries on the road. Slideshows have also been significantly improved, integrating photos, audio, video and text into single files that can be exported to iTunes and played natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Aperture 3 costs $200, although existing users can opt to pay $100 to upgrade. There’s also a 30-day free trial available.

Will Apple unveil a new line of MacBook Pros today? Some signs point to the possibility the Cupertino, Calif. may announce new laptops with faster chips to coincide with this week’s Macworld Expo 2010.

The first tea leaf isa French gadget blog which quotes an anonymous source. The source “who works for Apple just tell me that the new MacBook Pro line will be launched tomorrow,” according to blogger Steve Hemmerstoffer. The MacBook Pro, which has not seen a major change since last June, could receive faster Intel chips.

Perhaps in a bid to become the world’s leading iCollege, Abilene Christian University will publish an edition of the school paper designed for iPad.

The Texas institution — where the IT studies department was rechristened iSchool — started equipping freshmen with iPhones and iPod Touches back in 2008. The iSchool also started prepping iPhone devs of the future with a 2009 programming course.

Since 2007, they’ve also published the twice-weekly school paper dubbed “The Optimist” (a commentary on future journalists?) for the iPhone.

“The faculty as a whole and the department discussed it, and we said we have to do this,” Dr. Cheryl Bacon,  chairwoman of the department of journalism and mass communications told The Daily Orange. “It’s just too good of an opportunity to pass up.”

Apple says it will stay “nimble” on pricing for its newly-released iPad, dropping the price to attract more customers. This comes as a new survey indicates a doubling of consumers not interested in buying the device once the tablet shifted from rumor to reality.

“Apple seemed to indicate it would respond with price cuts if demand for the device wasn’t revving up the way it liked,” Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope said. Shope met with Apple officials last week. Shope said Apple “will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated.)”

The best thing about Macworld was always the parties. MacWeek’s annual Mac The Knife Party was a drunken bacchanal for the ages; Peachpit and O’Reily put on nice literary soirees with cash bars; and Microsoft’s events always had fancy hors d’oeuvres.

Even Apple, a stranger to shows of public hospitality, once threw parties with generous helpings of food and booze. I got so ploughed at one event, I forgot my heavy laptop bag — computer, camera and all. Apple designer Jonny Ive kindly picked it up and lugged it about all evening until we ran into each other later at a nightclub, and he handed it back.

Peter-Paul Koch is a man with opinions about the mobile web. And his latest opinion is a trifle controversial: Mobile Safari, he says, is this generation’s Internet Explorer 6. All the rage now, but destined to be hated by webdevs of the future.

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!

But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

• The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
• For the first time since the eighties, it now includes a Saturday. Expect big crowds, lots of kids.
• There’s 250 exhibitors, down from 400 last year. Here’s the Exhibitor List.
• Attendance is expected at about 30,000 visitors. (But most Expo visitors this year got free passes instead of paying the usual $25 fee).
• People are hoping this isn’t the last Macworld but consider the history. As Jim Dalrymple notes: “Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Boston/New York — it failed; Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Tokyo — it failed; Apple pulled out of Apple Expo Paris — it failed.”
• Macworld Expo Floor Hours: Thu 2/11 12pm-6pm; Fri 2/12; 10am-6pm Sat 2/13; 10am-6pm
• Twitter hashtag is #macworld2010

And here, in chronological order, is the top 5 things to do at the show:

Someone is looking for a Steve Jobs look-alike for an “impersonator event” on Friday and Saturday in San Francisco’s SOMA — the area around Macworld.

The actual job isn’t specified, but looking like Steve is important, of course, but so is “punctuality.”

“If necessary, we can provide a black turtleneck and glasses,” the Craigslist ad says.

Pay is $100 a day. Wanna bet it’s handing out Gold Club flyers?

Full text of the Craigslist ad after the jump and check out our Gallery of Uncanny Steve Jobs Look-Alikes

Last month, we wondered how many people would care about the iPad’s restrictive DRM shackles, which makes Apple the only available supplier of software for the iPad through the fact that users can only download software onto the gadget from Apple’s App Store (unless someone figures out a way to jailbreak it — which’ll probably happen within the first 48 hours after it ships, considering the fact that the iPad’s OS is based off the continually jailbroken iPhone, and the supposition that every genius hacker on the planet is spending every waking moment thinking about it).

Anyway, apparently the answer is: thousands.

At the time, Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ remark about ebook pricing being the same whether sold by Cupertino or Amazon seemed rather optimistic. At the time, Amazon controlled ebook pricing and the ebook market, while Apple had just released the iPad. However, just weeks after the tablet was unveiled, Amazon will now adopt Apple’s price structure when the iPad starts shipping in March.

“By agreeing to accept a new pricing model, Amazon has publicly acknowledged the sudden emergence of a rival that may not only threaten its highly popular Kindle franchise but also its total domination of e-books,” the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend.

The clever people at Information Architects have released a free Omnigraffle template for iPad app design.

For those of you who’ve never used it, Omnigraffle is a wonderful visual design tool that can be turned to all sorts of tasks. It can create any manner of diagram, but works even better when enhanced with template themes that add specific visual widgets.

This particular set of widgets gives you almost everything you’d need to mockup an iPad app of your own. It includes drop-downs, alerts, the software keyboard, and loads more. Various bits of text are customizable, so your mockup looks as real as possible.

It will be even better when Omnigraffle itself is ported to the iPad – something that Omni Group boss Ken Case told us they would do as soon as possible (more about that here.)

The Internet can always be counted on to promptly deliver simulacrums of the latest announced Apple product created in two distinct geek mediums: LEGO and papercraft.

Last week, we had the inevitable LEGO iPad, so it was only a matter of time we got the origami version. Here it is, courtesy of Obamapacman: a DIY iPad papercraft mockup.

It’s a pretty simple project. Just print the model out on a color printer at 150 DPI, cut along solid lines, fold on the dotted lines and glue the yellow seams together; then off to the local cafe, prowling for Apple-loving geek girls, gullible suckers or both!

Late last week, a word of warning to iPhone and iPod Touch app developers was posted on Apple’s official developer site: “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.”

It’s a strange little note. The iPhone’s Core Location functionality is already opt-in, and it seems useful from both a developer and user’s standpoint if advertisements are tailored to a user’s individual experience… and location is a big part of that.

The wording is also worrying: what does “primarily” mean? That’s another one of those vague App Store Review Process wordings that just leads to headache down the line.

There are a few interpretations on this. When Apple tries to launch their own in-house iPhone ad network, they may want to position location-based advertisements as a major advantage of their service. On the other hand, this simply could be about limiting advertising-based apps from needlessly hogging the GPS radio and draining battery life.

If I were to guess, I’d say the latter is true. Hopefully Apple will clarify matters in due time.

[via Boy Genius Report]

The first signs of how the iPad will be handled internationally are appearing, including talk of carrier subsidies. Months before Apple said it will announce international deals for the tablet, one carrier is already planning to sell subsidized iPads requiring two-year 3G contracts.

Hutchison Australia reportedly will begin offering the iPad with a $455 (333 Euro) rebate when customers sign-up for a two-year contract offering 5GB of data for $41, or 30 Euro.

After Super Bowl Sunday… Monday morning. A single artery slightly to the left of my pineal gland pumps gin-infused headache into my frontal lobe in simultaneity with the overhead clock’s incessant tick.

How to write about Apple products when the aftermath of last night’s alcohol-soaked football madness makes me incapable of doing anything but watch that staccato timepiece twitch towards some impossibly far-off time: to when my fingers can type their way out of their tremens; to when my mouth isn’t ash-dry as the taste of the Colts’ humiliating defeat, when I can spill out words of a new Apple product or rumor as readily as I am — here, now, in hangover hell — to vomit up my spleen?

Tic. Tic. To the feeds. And suddenly, a way out of my nauseous, neuralgic writer’s block. A clock, just like the one torturing me, but created from the casing of an old iBook G4, with the pendulum of an Apple mouse flowing into upwards into churning horological guts.

An Etsy find, sure, and already sold out… but this I can write about. Now if only the feeds would spit out some Apple-inspired hangover cure, or a video from the Woz about why the New Orleans Saints suck. Perhaps then I’d somehow find a way to make my way through the day.

Primate Labs’ Geekbench is a tiny little benchmarking application with one really neat funcitonality: run it on your system and it’ll upload the results to their servers, allowing users to easily compare benchmark scores across computers to inform their next purchasing decision.

That’s swell, but hardly news in and of itself… except that over the weekend, someone downloaded the GeekBench app and ran it on a system referring to itself as a MacBookPro6,1, the commonly acknowledged successor to the current MacBook Pro line. Oh, and it’s packing an Intel Core i7 M processor.

Was the iPad originally meant to be a killer TV platform? An analyst speculates the iPad would be the perfect platform for Apple to launch its vision for anywhere television, tying Apple TV, iTunes and network programming into one sleek and stylish portable DVR.

“Imagine a portable set top box, but with its own killer screen,” wrote Berstein Research analyst Craig Moffett. “Navigation of programming guides and iTunes listings would occur on the iPad, using an intuitive touch interface. Output would go directly to the widescreen TV on the wall.”

What will Macworld 2010 look like without Steve Jobs? For starters, the annual gathering of Mac fans will see less than half as many exhibitors Feb. 9-13: 220 this year versus 500 in 2009, the last year Apple said it would officially support the San Francisco event.

Without as many exhibitors (particularly Apple) what will Macworld focus on? It’s all about “community,” organizers say. The goal is to replace Steve and the home ship with enthusiasm ginned-up by the faithful. To help with the revival atmosphere, Macworld 2010 will feature New York Times tech columnist David Pogue, writer-director Kevin Smith, media maven Leo Laporte, Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber and probably the most-talked-about Apple product since the iPhone: the iPad.

Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its shipments in the fourth quarter, earning it 3rd place among smartphone makers. The handset had 14.4 percent of the market, making further inroads on No. 2 Research in Motion, according to researchers at IDC.

The new data show Apple had a nearly 82 percent year-over-year growth rate, jumping to 14.4 percent of the smartphone market in 2009, up from 9.1 percent in 2008.

“Apple’s iconic iPhone added another chapter to its short history by nearly doubling its shipments from the same quarter a year ago,” according to the report entitled “Worldwide Converged Mobile Device Market.”

Silicon Insider posted this interesting graph putting into perspective exactly how large Apple is, compared with the other big three tech companies out there. And it’s all about cash.

Essentially, Apple is the second most cash rich company out there, with a little under $39.8 billion in cash and short and long term securities to call upon. Microsoft’s technically ahead of them, but it’s a comparatively small lead of a paltry $0.6 billion dollars… and while Apple’s cash reserves continue to rise, Microsoft’s have leveled off over the last half year.

Then comes Google, with only $24.6 billion in cash and investments, and finally Intel, with $18.9 billion on hand.

All of these companies have major assets, but Apple is clearly positioned to become more cash rich than Microsoft in the coming months. We’re on the brink of a huge transition in the tech landscape: the day that Apple is bigger than Microsoft. About time.

The Siri iPhone app wants to make getting dinner reservations or concert tickets as easy going to a concierge: all you have to do is open the app, tell it what you want, and it’ll arrange the rest.

For example, say you’re in New York City for an important business trip, and, after an evening of drinks with your colleagues, you all decide — as one sometimes does — that you want to go to a concert… specifically, by an industrial metal band specializing in sadomasochist leitmotifs.

All you’d do in that case is launch the Siri app and say, “Get me tickets for four to the next Genitorturers concert.” And that’s it. Siri will automatically identify your location through GOPS, then search its partners including OpenTable, MovieTickets, StubHub, CitySearch and TaxiMagic for the show.

Neat stuff, but knowing how finicky voice recognition can still be, using Siri might be less like getting your evening sorted through a concierge than screaming into the hearing horn of a shell-shocked veteran. You can grab it for free through the App Store.

Magazine and news publishers are collectively hoping that e-readers and tablet computers will save their businesses, and Apple’s eager to get them on board in developing high-quality animated versions of their publications to help get an iPad into each newspaper and magazine reader’s home, so it’s no surprise that Steve Jobs met with fifty top executives of the New York Times yesterday.

What was surprising, though, was Jobs’ attire: a magical top hat, of the sort championed by Mr. William Wonka and Miss Marlene Dietrich.

According to New York Mag, “When Apple recently booked the cellar dining room at Pranna for a talk with 50 top executives from the New York Times, even restaurant higher-ups didn’t know who their VIP guest would be. But last night, Jobs came strolling in wearing what our source calls “a very funny hat — a big top hat kind of thing.”

Like the hat, most details of the meeting are anecdotal. Jobs apparently admitted he likes to hold the Sunday edition of the New York Times in his hands, ordered a mango lassi and penne for dinner (neither of which were on the menu) and otherwise just showed off Apple’s new device to executives while answering questions.

Overall, it seems like the NYT executives present were interested in the iPad, but unwilling to lock themselves into a single delivery platform. Business as usual, in other words. Still, who knew that the man who hasn’t once been seen in the five years wearing anything besides blue jeans and a black turtleneck was such a secret dandy?

Add Hachette Book Group to the growing list of publishers using Apple’s iPad to drive a wedge between Amazon and its requirement for $9.99 pricing on ebooks. The company joins Macmillan and HarperCollins adopting Apple’s “agency model” pricing and making waves in an area Amazon once dominated.

“There are many advantages to the agency model, for our authors, retailers, consumers, and publishers,” Hachette USA CEO David Young said Thursday night. “Without this investment in our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer,” he added. The remark about a lack of diversity in ebook retailers was an obvious dig at Amazon, which until the iPad, enjoyed the lion’s share of control over pricing.

Just days after Apple asked an iPhone app developer to remove references to Google’s Android Marketplace, the Cupertino, Calif. company is advising location-aware applications can’t simply help Google’s AdMob serve location-based advertising.

“If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store,” Apple warns.

Now that we all know what the iPad is going to look like, the library of concept designs we used to illustrate the old “Apple Tablet” rumor posts look pretty silly, but they’re occasionally worth examining for ideas just not on what Apple could do with the iPad next… but what accessory makers might do.

This Yanko concept for the “MacView” tablet seemed like a pipe-dream even a few weeks ago, but what I particularly like is the iMac-like display shell it slides into in desktop mode.

Really, there’s no reason an accessory maker couldn’t make that work. Since the iPad can be paired with any Bluetooth keyboard, all this really is is a stand: design a free app that automatically pairs your keyboard with your iPad and you’ve got a pretty decent, touch-controlled iMac Mini.