The Apple Tablet is coming, and if our own tipsters are anything to go by, the UI will require a “steep learning curve” and a complex vocabulary of new gestures. We won’t know for sure what to expect until Steve Jobs sends his fingers dancing across the tablet’s slate-like surface on January 27th, but until then, Patently Apple has hit the US Patent Office archives, prophesying what we can expect.
Kotaku, of all places, is reporting that they have received their invitation for Apple’s January 27th event. The Loop has also received an identical invitation. Leander presumably has one rattling around in his mailbox as well.
“Come see our latest creation,” the invite reads, superimposed over a multi-chromatic palette paintgun-like spatterings.
No surprises here. From the colorful splotches of e-ink to the mention of a “latest creation,” that invite all but confirms the January 27th unveiling of the Apple Tablet. All we need to do now is wait for Steve Jobs to pull it out on stage, give it a name and spell out the details.
Over 2,000 workers in the Chinese city of Suzhou went on strike last week after persistent rumors circled that their employers, Taiwan-based Wintek Corp, would not pay a promised productivity bonus for 2009. They certainly seem to have earned that bonus: the workers build the touchscreens used in Apple’s iPhone, only the most popular and bestselling smartphone on Earth.
According to reports, the workers are outraged, flipping vehicles and damaging facilities in protest. Needless to say, production has halted in the meantime.
It’s hard to imagine this is going to go well for the workers. If conditions at Wintek’s factories are anything like those at Foxxconn’s iPod facilities, most of Wintek’s employees earn less than fifty dollars a month, and work 15 hours a day. They’ve doubtlessly earned whatever meager bonus is being held back. It’s easy to understand their frustration. Too bad the Chinese government isn’t the sort to look favorably upon worker rebellion.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BP5ax1qs5o
Digg founder Kevin Rose has become an investor of the Square iPhone payment system (which was in turn created by another social networking visionary, Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey), and so he’s posted an informative video tour of the technology on YouTube.
Next week, Apple will either officially unveil their much-rumored tablet device, or the lot of us are going to look like complete idiots. Either way, it should be a fun week, but as anticipation boils to a pitch, we might as well keep ourselves entertained with a look back at the prehistory of Apple’s last tablet launch: three Newton prototypes evocatively codenamed the Bic, the Cadillac and the Batmobile.
Like a modern-day Hatfield and McCoys, Apple and Nokia are at it again, the latest shot fired by the Cupertino, Calif. firm, asking the International Trade Commission to block imports of the cell phone giant. The legal action comes after Nokia asked the same commission to ban imports of iPods, iPhones and Macs.
The action was posted on the ITC Web site without any comment from Apple. Nokia, however, said it will “study the complaint when it is received and continue to defend itself vigorously,” Nokia spokesman Mark Durrant told Bloomberg by text message over the weekend.
A year ago, I took a month’s vacation and enjoyed the coral, sugar cane and sunshine of the small island nation of Mauritius. My days were spent drinking rum cocktails out of a dodo’s skull, my serendipity only occasionally interrupted by a small, translucent lizard darting across my ankle. On the other hand, the evenings were more dire, and largely spent waking fearfully every fifteen minutes only to discover several dozen small centipedes slowly skittering towards my bed, thirsty for eye jelly. No matter what time it was, the Internet sucked: although 3G was ubiquitous, the island’s internet was supplied by a single, badly oversaturated cable strung from Madagascar.
In other words, even in tropical paradise, there’s some horrors lurking unseen beneath the surface. The Mauritian iPhone sit rep is more proof for that supposition: while telecom Orange is indeed selling the iPhone in Mauritius, there’s no Mauritian App Store, leaving all local iPhone customers in the lurch.
Could Apple unveil a touch-enabled iMac this year? While many have viewed the touch-based iPhone and highly-expected tablet as two discrete products, the Cupertino, Calif. company may produce a “22-inch touch-enabled all-in-one PC” in 2010, according to a Chinese report.
Digitimes, citing the Commercial Times, report, suggests the 22-inch desktop computer would fill a gap between Apple’s current 21.5-inch and 27-inch non-touch iMacs. HP and others already produce touch-based PCs.
According to the report, Apple has already outsourced the touch-screen panels to a Taiwan-based company, Sintek Photronic. The reported move by Apple is seen as part of the company’s evolving line of devices, embedding touchscreen technology in all of its products.
Apple is expected to announce a new product next week, possibly its highly-rumored tablet. For weeks, speculation has surrounded Jan. 27 as a date when the company will roll-out a tablet, new iPhone or iPhone OS 4.0 software. Two days prior, on Jan. 25, Apple is expected to release its financial performance for the first quarter of 2010.
[Via Business Insider, Digitimes]
Nowadays, you can’t launch a mobile device without an accompanying app store. Right after the iPhone, Apple launched its App Store – the same for Nokia, RIM, Android and others. In a sort of Marshall McLuhanesqe moment, the app – not the device – will soon become all important.
“Application stores will be a core focus throughout 2010 for the mobile industry and applications themselves will help determine the winner among device platforms,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director for Gartner. Indeed, consumers will spend $6.2 billion in mobile application stores this year, racking up 4.5 billion downloads in 2010.
CoM reader Paul sent us these pics of his office where the IT department shoots hoops on a backboard with an Apple logo.
After the cardboard backboard from the Nerf caved in under one too many slam dunks, Paul had a brainwave:
“As we were scrapping an old PowerMac G5 for parts, I realized that we could recycle the door to become our new heavy backboard. Two short screws were used to attach the plastic bracket to the door and another two longer ones to go into the concrete pillar in the office wall.”
Users of Mac OS X are spoilt for choice when it comes to notepad apps. We have dozens of text editors and word processors to choose from. There are more browsers than we can shake a collective stick at.
But email clients? Well, there’s not so many of those. And one developer, Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame, says he’d like to see at least one more.
People think Texans own the whole “bigger-is-better” thing. But just look at the size of Canada — yeah, Canadians know a thing or two about big. No surprise then, that it’s a gang from Canada who are trying to squeeze billboard-sized images from the iPhone’s wee 3mp sensor.
Yelp is kinda like that know-it-all friend who collects all those old Macs and watches Dr. Who obsessively: full of obnoxious, sarcastic comments, but more precious than gold when information is needed.
Those who don’t yet have Yelp on their iPhones, go get the free app now. It’s ok — we’ll wait.
Sometimes, you can just punch and punch and punch a guy until he’s squirting gray matter out of his tear ducts and he just won’t stay down. Psystar’s that guy. Though meatily pounded into a puddle of pulsating goo by Apple’s lawyers, the Florida-based Hackintosh makers have officially filed a notice of appeal in order to revoke the injunction made against them, prohibiting them from selling hardware with Apple’s operating system pre-installed.
Lower the pitchforks, everyone. A mere day after everyone’s favorite hirsute, technosexual bear became widely vilified on Mac blogs for claiming that the HTC Nexus One was his new favorite gadget, the Woz has clarified matters to Gizmodo:
Actually, everyone got it wrong. My favorite phones are my iPhones. When asked what my favorite gadgets were I took it to mean new gadgets I was playing with (that I considered good). I am not a switcher but I’m not going to tell people that the Nexus One is not a good gadget. Same for the Droid. I continually buy and play with new hot gadgets because I gets asked about them all the time. I have had prior Android phones that I didn’t consider good. I usually have between 2 and 6 different cell phones on me, more when there are interesting product introductions.
I try mainly to make good comments but I’m honest about flaws too. I don’t get into arguments trying to claim that there are objective reasons that make one person’s phone better than another’s. It’s subjective. You can’t win such arguments, only have a stressful life doing so. I have no problem praising and learning from non-Apple products as well as Apple products, when they are good.
Okay, Woz, we’re placated for now. Just don’t let it happen again.
Opening tonight in Brooklyn — an art exhibit based on obsolete Apple technology that examines the “fetishizing” of products that are soon discarded.
The installations include a mechanical interpretation of Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement speech, and a doormat with Bill Gates’ face on it.
See the video and several pix after the jump.
Is this the best MacBook vinyl sticker mod yet?
“I made this the other day for an Apple fan, a BIG Apple fan,” says its creator, JiroBot, otherwise known as New Yorker Jiro Baskin.
Compare to the clever Snow White mod and the equally witty Carmen Miranda mod (hit the jump).
Still, Steve gets my vote. Anyone seen its rival?
Aside from “where’s the tablet?” the most-often heard question in Apple circles is “what’s happening with iPhone 4.0?” Now a developer weighs in, claiming programmers already have a version of the new OS.
“We’ve submitted an updated app for the new iPhone 4.0 software,” according to an e-mail CNET received from what they term a “prominent app developer.” The note seems to contradict yesterday’s report that Apple was delaying releasing OS 4.0 due to concern it could provide clues to its long-awaited tablet device. The tablet is said to share much iPhone technology.
With $23 billion in the bank, Apple is on a spending spree, a habit some expect will only increase in 2010. The Cupertino, Calif. company has acquired three companies within the past five months, a tactic many tech giants are using to stay abreast of rivals.
Apple, once known only for its Macs, must now compete with Google and Nokia for cell phone market share. “As mobile computing takes shape, Apple, Google, Nokia and other traditional tech titans have become more active in searching for startups that can help them with the new terrain,” BusinessWeek writes.
Mac fans searching for the latest tidbit about Apple’s highly-expected tablet may have gained an unlikely (and probably inadvertent) ally: the Cupertino, Calif. company’s own lawyers. Thursday Apple’s legal team tried to shut down a public ‘bounty’ for clues to a tablet, but opened a whole new avenue for tablet trivia.
In a cease & desist letter to Valleywag, a silicon valley gossip site, Apple’s law firm made mention of “an unannounced and highly confidential Apple product.” The site, which was offering $10,000 for a photo, $20,000 for a video, $50,000 for pictures of Steve Jobs holding the tablet – even $100,000 to play with the rumored device for an hour, seemed non-plussed by the threats.
The dev channel version of Google Chrome for Mac has been updated with a long-awaited new feature: a bookmark manager.
Short of sexting and posting Facebook status updates illiterately quoting homonymously mangled Lady Gaga lyrics, few teen activities seem as ubiquitous as descending upon the local Apple store in one lolzoring, bubble-gum-smacking biomass and stupiding it up for everyone. Usually that stupid is pretty much confined to Photo Booth, but one New York teenager set a new record in Apple Store idiocy when he walked into the Apple Store at the Staten Island mall and typed up a terrorist threat.
According to 1010Wins, 17-year old Jason Barry walked into the store and wrote this note on one of the display Macs, signing it as a friend’s father.
I have threatened your store and all its employees with a bloody death … whoever the crew maybe working, or the innocent citizens that walk in … will be eliminated with the force of a… bomb loaded with C4, strapped to my chest.
Outside of the sheer moronism of gangly pubescent youth, Barry doesn’t seem to have had a reason for the threat. His typical toe-shuffling excuse of “thinking it was funny” is pretty weak, but as a stupid teenager up until the age of 29, I at least understand: imbecilically doing something “for laughs” and having it blow up to involve the police is practically a rite of passage for teenage males.
It’s sad in a way. I have no doubt Barry was kidding around, but he’s looking at a seven-year conviction and being on watch lists for the rest of his life. Not a great pay-off for such a lame joke: he’d have gotten a better pay-off with a simple pantsing.
[via Macworld]
TotalFinder is starting to cause a buzz in the Mac community. The app aims to bring something to Finder long-rumored to be coming from Apple itself: tabs. We spoke to developer Antonin Hildebrand about his project, the reasons behind it, and his plans for its future.
Please note: TotalFinder is alpha software that integrates with Finder. Run it at your own risk and ensure you back up your system before installing it.
At 4:53pm on Tuesday, Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince was struck by a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake that essentially vaporized the entire city. Casualty estimates are still unknown, but with the earliest guesses ranging anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 dead, it is clear that only international effort is going to be able to cope with the aftermath’s sheer scope of human suffering.
To that end, Apple has figured out a smart way to leverage their existing iTunes infrastructure to easily allow users to donate money to the American Red Cross for Haitian Earthquake Relief. Just decide how much you can afford to give — denominations of $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, and $200 are supported — and click the donate button. The money will automatically be deducted from your credit card and sent on to the Red Cross, with no margin to Apple.
It’s a nice gesture on Apple’s part, but you may want to donate directly to the Red Cross, since Apple warns that since iTunes does not share personal information with external companies. From a purely practical perspective, that means the Red Cross can’t acknowledge the donation… and you can’t deduct it.
However you decided to donate, give what you can. Haiti’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
For all of its problem, $60 for a MobileMe account is still a great deal if you need to store a lot of photos or movies online… the only problem is there hasn’t yet really been a good way to take your photos or movies with you on the road.
Apple’s latest MobileMe app, MobileMe Gallery, plugs that hole. It’s a companion to the other recently released MobileMe, app, iDisk, allowing you to browse and share the photos store on MobileMe from your iPhone and iPod Touch.
It works great, with snappy performance and local cashing which allows users to view photos even when offline. All of the usual multitouch functions are supported, including pinch zooming and landscape orientation.
If you have a MobileMe account, there’s no reason not to pick MobileMe Gallery up: it’s a free download on the iTunes App Store.
