Two weeks ago, we mentioned that the ALK’s CoPilot Live app, an already inexpensive iPhone GPS option, went on sale for $20 (from $35) during Thanksgiving.
Today, ALK announced they’re introducing a similar deal — now $25 — through the end of December.
To make the deal even more enticing, they’re making available a “Premium Live” package that includes live traffic info and routing (from the same source as the $80 Navigon app), a live Internet local search feature and something I haven’t seen before on a GPS app: A live gas-price feature that can route you to the cheapest gas near your location.
The Premium Live option runs an extra $20/year, but the savings from hassle-free routing to cheap gas might just make the package valuable enough to pay for itself.
Apple: forbidden fruit in prison. CC-licensed, thanks to 1Happysnapper on flickr.
Two guards in Washington, D.C. were arrested after allegedly smuggling in must-have items for prisoners — namely iPods, cell phones and chargers.
An inmate tipped off the FBI in October 2008 that corrections officers were getting contraband tech — along with the usual stuff like cigarettes — for a price to prisoners.
Two male corrections officers and a female security guard were arrested this week for federal bribery charges on suspicion of accepting cash to smuggle cellphones and iPods. The men are now on administrative leave, the woman was released on personal recognizance.
An undercover FBI agent posing as the brother of an inmate bribed one of the men $300 to smuggle an iPod and charger inside the big house.
Why are iPods verboten in prison?
According to an email sent to Washington Post’s Crime Scene blog , Apple devices are so sought after they constitute a security hazard:
“Inmates may use the components of devices such as iPods to compromise security equipment within the correctional facility. In addition, such items are in high demand and may be stolen or used by inmates to gamble with others…this has the potential to trigger conflict, assaults and other violent behavior.”
Wonder if the playlist on the decoy iPod had “I Fought the Law” on it or some irony-free offerings…
It appears Apple’s iPod touch-based point-of-sale system is drawing interest from retailers looking to use the current proprietary hardware and software for selling more than Macs and iPhones. The Cupertino, Calif. company is considering commercializing the system following massive interest.
“Since the debut of the iPod POS, inquiries have been coming from all directions, including from end-user small businesses, larger chains and system integrators,” according to ifoAppleStore. The iPod maker has instructed Apple Store salespeople to collect contact information from people expressing interest “apparently to create a database of potential customers,” the report said.
Yet another analyst Thursday joined the chorus of voices singing Apple’s praises in a sluggish PC market. Mac sales will grow 26 percent in 2010, far outstripping PCs forecast to grow just 16 percent year over year.
Looking forward, Robert Cichra, analyst with Caris & Company, predicted Apple will have 4 percent of the market share for 2010, providing what the analyst termed “considerable headroom” for more growth.
Apple’s App Store next year will reach the 300,000 mark, tripling the number of applications available for the iPhone and iPod touch, according to one analyst’s preview of 2010. The continued growth of the App Store is at the leading-edge of what analyst firm IDC sees as a ‘platform shift’ to mobile devices and away from the PC.
“We predict at least 300,000 iPhone applications by the end of 2010,” wrote analyst Frank Gens. Many of the new apps will come from businesses as consumers and companies pick the iPhone for their most commonly-used applications.
PCalc: one of many early but regularly updated apps that's now harder to find on the App Store.
James Thomson of PCalc fame noted late yesterday on Twitter that the App Store’s again updated the way it deals with app sorting: “Looks like sort by release date in [the] App Store only sorts by original release date now, not update date. Say hello to page 342 of Utilities…”
Thomson’s referring here to PCalc now being housed on the penultimate page in the massive utilities section, because it was one of the earliest apps on the store, released on July 11 2008. However, the app was last updated on October 18.
Although release date sorting was open to ‘abuse’, dodgy developers regularly updating apps to move them to the top of the list, it strikes me as a bad decision to list apps by their original release dates, regardless of how often they’re updated. What impetus does a developer have to update a major app released in 2008, if no-one’s going to see the update unless Apple deigns to include it in ‘new & noteworthy’ or ‘what’s hot’? This decision could start a spate of app removals and ‘updates’ via entirely new products, reducing the likelihood of free updates for long-time users.
A simple workaround would be for Apple to provide an alternate sort option of ‘recently updated’, which would, presumably, make everyone happy. In the meantime, some of the earliest developers for the platform who care about updating their apps just got another kick in the crotch.
Magazine publishers are drooling at the upcoming Apple tablet because it will allow them to repurpose their content for the digital age with minimal changes — and possibly charge for it.
Wired magazine, for example, has for a long time been trying to find a way to republish the mag digitally — but preserve the layout, especially the splashy ad spreads for advertisers. So the tablet is perfect for them. It’s the mag — on a screen.
Sports Illustrated is the latest magazine to join the fray with a slick-looking demo you can watch above.
It actually looks pretty cool. It’s an interactive magazine that preserves the best of the format — the big pictures, the slick ads — with digital-age multimedia and interactivity. Maybe the tablet will save the mag industry after all?
Well, a reader of Day Lyon’s Fake Steve blog created this portrait of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer from snaps of Microsoft’s most memorable product — the blue screen of death. Check out the detail of Ballmer’s tongue:
This is actually quite astounding. Dear Reader Fraser has created a mosaic using 80 random Windows crash shots to portray Uncle Fester. Below is a detail of the tongue. Click on both to see them in greater detail. The full file is really amazing — we hope to make it available as a download soon so that you can print it out, frame it, give to people you don’t like as a winter solstice holiday present — you get the idea.
For what it’s worth, Fraser says he’ll create a poorly drawn portrait of anyone — just check out his site, PoorlyDrawnPortraits.com. Much love, Fraser. You sick bastard.
I’m more of a dog person, but the “Cats Love Macs” photo stream on Flickr is one of my guilty pleasures. (Yeah, I know).
Love this recycled iMac now in use as a cat basket that British Macintosh support/dev user nicknamed Mikmac created for pussy Pixel, who snuggles up in it quite nicely thanks to a soft pillow where the computer’s hardware once was.
Courting disaster? London cab with built-in charger. CC-licensed, thanks to Lars Plougmann on flickr.
So you’re shopping, or going ice skating, or heading to some place where hot mulled wine makes the holiday cheer flow.
You take a cab — the parking! — and when grappling with scarf, gloves, maybe a kid or two and some packages, leave your iPhone or iPod on the taxi seat. This is the grim scenario taxi drivers in London paint of the holidays — your favorite device left to the seasonal altruism of the driver or next passenger.
Some 10,000 mobile phones are left behind by customers every single month in London alone, plus another 1,000 iPods and memory sticks. December is the worst month — or best if you’re of the finders-keepers mentality — for expensive gadgets left behind, according to a survey by Credant Technologies.
Steve McMenara, from TAXI magazine, said: “This is the worst time of year for forgetting property at the back of cabs, especially mobile phones and laptops. More people travel into London to buy their Christmas presents during this period who are not regular cab users, they hop a cab to get back to their train stations – and it’s always about an hour later we get a panicked call on their mobile phones asking for them to be returned.”
London taxi drivers say they manage to return 80% of devices left behind; in New York just 66% of cabbies handed lost devices over.
“Back in the good old days when a Window was something you looked out of, and a Mac was something you wore in the rain, it used to be small items like brollies and briefcases stuffed full of boring office papers. Now it’s laptops, smartphones and thumb drives, all chock-full of valuable information to an identity thief,” said Sean Glynn, vice president of Credant Technologies.
Mirror's Edge for iPhone. Image credit: Touch Arcade.
Touch Arcade reports that EA’s action adventure game Mirror’s Edge is coming to iPhone in January. Although originally boasting a first-person perspective viewpoint, with your character sliding under barriers, jumping across ledges, and doing all manner of death-defying leaps and bounds, it’s likely the iPhone version will be closer in character to Mirror’s Edge 2D.
When Mirror’s Edge appears on the App Store, Langdell will have no option but to challenge it, under the precedent he’s already set. And Apple will have no option but to pull the game, based on what it’s already done regarding Killer Edge Racing and Edge (now, temporarily, Edgy in the US and UK). It’s one thing when Apple stamps on an indie’s head, but it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when an EA game gets yanked unceremoniously from the store, due to spurious rights-infringement claims. Popcorn at the ready!
Like an iPhone for Titans: a hypothetical lozenge in ebony, aluminum and glass!
We never quite see the end of Tablet Mac rumors on the Internet, and it’s easy to get swept up in the madness of crowds over the skintiest of them. Let’s not let too much foam collect in the saucer of our collected under lips over the latest headline to hit the feeds, though: “Apple takes control of TabletMac trademark” looks pretty exciting at first blush, but it’s probably just business as usual for a large company protecting its trademark.
The development comes by way of Axiotron, that neat company that will take your MacBook and $699, rip out its display, replace it with a pen-based screen, break its spine at the coccyx and flip it around one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees to give you a Tablet Mac. In fact, they went as far as to register a trademark for TabletMac with the Trademark Office.
Sometime in the last year, though, Axiotron transferred the TabletMac trademark to Apple. It’s easy to take that trademark transfer as significant (bolded), a sign that Apple is soon to send a hoary Jobs down from Mount Silicon with a divine, multitouch tablet of its own.
In reality, though, if Apple is working on a Tablet Mac, it’s unlikely to be called any such thing. I suspect the real source of this is just standard protection of Apple’s “Mac” trademark, and the whole thing was settled as easily as an email rattled off to Axiotron: “Hey, you guys are doing cool work. Transfer the TabletMac trademark to us before we have to rearrange your face.”
Edit: As several readers have pointed out, the film is also available on Hulu. Check it out.
MacHeads, the documentary on, well, the Cult of Mac, is now available to view for free online courtesy of SnagFilms, a documentary library. As Lonnie reported way back in January, the film premiered at MacWorld 2009 before an audience of more than 1,000 before seeing release on Amazon Unbox and iTunes.
To check it out, just click Play on the marquee above. Enjoy!
The iPhone can already be used to buy coffee; now it can sell it too. Square, a new venture from Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey, lets retailers swipe credit cards using a tiny reader that plugs in to the audio jack on an iPhone.
Using an iPhone to collect money is nothing new, and apps like Credit Card Terminal and iSwipe Pro have been around for awhile. But Square marks the first time a card can be physically swiped — and, says a post in Wired’s Epicenter, that also means the ability to accept gift cards.
Square’s website says that card swiping can begin immediately after account setup, with “no contracts, monthly fees or hidden costs.” Square also says it will do cool little things like email customer receipts and keep track of how many lattes to go till that free tenth one.
If it works as advertised, the system might spread quickly among retailers and consumer alike simply because of its elegance and ease-of-use. And as you may have noticed with Dorsey’s previous project, sometimes that’s all it takes to change the game.
Yup, it’s just that easy — Kentucky-based MHA’s new Airlock app turns your Mac into a proximity sensor that un/locks the computer’s screen when your iPhone enters a user-defined range; it can also do nifty things like run apps when it senses your iPhone enter or exit the area. And there’s nothing to install on your iPhone, it just sits there and looks pretty (and broadcasts a Bluetooth signal, of course).
Yeah. Well, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, Airlock would have nothing to do with my iPhone — repeated attempts failed to get my 3GS to even show up on the pairing screen. MHA says they’re aware of the problem, that it seems to affect newer iPhones, and that they’re working to fix it.
Until that happens, I’ll just have to laugh at the clever writing on MHA’s website and marvel at technology’s potential.
Airlock is downloadable for a limitlessly renewable three-hour trial; $7.77 will let you use Airlock without having to ask to try it every three hours.
Japan carrier Softbank Tuesday introduced a new wrinkle in its attempt to tempt that country’s cell phone-hungry citizens into adopting Apple’s iPhone. The company said it will give a 16GB iPhone 3GS to anyone willing to sign-up for two years. A 32GB iPhone 3GS is priced at about $6 per month.
The announcement is part of “iPhone for all of Softbank,” a new campaign to launch Friday, Dec. 4. The offer of a free 16GB iPhone 3GS may be a response to a scarcity of iPhone 3G handsets in Japan. Softbank may become one of the first carriers to stop offering the iPhone 3G, reports said Tuesday.
We know that some of you are still sporting a dot matrix printer in your office. Sometimes its rattle and hum almost puts you to sleep. But for those of you that want to forge ahead to the 21st century, we have a great giveaway for you on Twitter.
The Giveaway: 1 Epson Artisan 710 printer with a retail value of $179.99. If you need some convincing that this printer is worthy of your printing projects, check out Eli’s review of this printer here.
Tweet this: “Follow these Mac techies: @cultofmac and get exclusive content, promotions, and giveaways #cultofmac” (you don’t need to include the quotation marks)
Remember to include the hash tag #cultofmac because that’s how we’ll track who enters the giveaway.
You’ll have 24 hours to enter the giveaway, and it’s 12pm EST. right now, so no more entries will be accepted after 12pm EST. on Wednesday, December 2nd. We will announce the winner on Twitter the following day.
Cyber Monday has come and gone, but it’s Giveaway Tuesday at the Cult of Mac. Ready, Set…GO GO GO!
The iPhone is helping all Apple sales. (Credit: Zushi323/Flickr)
The iPhone has joined the iPod in their ‘halo effect’ promoting Apple’s Mac. Mac global sales in September rose 16.4 percent, far ahead of a 2.3 percent year-over-year sales increase for PCs, one analyst told investors Tuesday.
“We believe that the halo effect emanating from the iPhone should be even stronger than that surrounding the iPod,” wrote Needham and Co. analyst Charlie Wolf.
Last month, we reported the rumor that in the titanium ensconced bunkers of their development labs, Apple was busy testing a new, sextuple core Mac Pro, to be introduced in the first quarter of 2010.
Proven true or not, the rumor certainly wasn’t a bad guess. The release of Apple’s new iMacs, which come in Intel Core i7 configurations, has made the beefiest of Apple’s desktops look like a poor deal for the price, capably beating the benchmarks of Apple’s existing, Xeon-toting Mac Pro for a comparable price. Apple needs to refresh their Mac Pros soon if they want to avoid their iMac line cannibalizing Mac Pro sales.
It’s not so surprising, then, to see this rumor dusted off. According to Polish website PCLab, the next Mac Pro will sport dual Intel Xeon Core i9 CPUs, offering 12 physical and 24 logical cores. Their test results of the CPU show it to run about 50% faster than the Mac Pro’s existing quad-core Xeon processor. The Core i9 features 32nm engraving, so it sips power more daintily than the previous chip, which is also in line with Apple’s increased interest in rubbing the animal blood out of their furs and providing more environmentally-conscious machines.
Of course, it takes a lot more than a Polish website to make a rumor a fact, but it’s hard to imagine what other course Apple would take with the Mac Pro line besides the Intel Core i9. And while it means absolutely nothing, Intel quickly asked PCMag to remove the information from their website. Verification by cover-up or warrantless supposition? You decide!
Florida-based Psystar and Apple will submit Tuesday a partial court settlement to the long-running Mac copyright-infringement legal battle, according to a report. Psystar, which had sold Mac clones based on Intel hardware with Apple’s Mac OS X operating system pre-installed, will pay unspecified damages.
The Cupertino, Calif. Apple has agreed to drop most of its legal challenge to Psystar, say reports citing documents filed Monday with a San Francisco court. The computer company also agreed to not pursue the damage award until all appeals are concluded.
Edge gets a change of letter and possible chance at life
UPDATE (December 3): Edgy has been discontinued, following further legal issues with Edge Games. Mobigame says it will now await the ruling of the EA case before attempting to return Edge to the UK and US App Stores. At the time of writing, Edge remains available in some other territories.
As reported on Cult of Mac and elsewhere, the indie developer’s game has been the subject of a protracted legal battle against Tim Langdell’s Edge Games, a ‘company’ that seems to operate in a somewhat suspectmanner. Due to threats, Mobigames pulled Edge itself once, and then Apple did so twice, the second time very recently after the indie title was rebranded ‘Edge by Mobigame’.
The latest change, to Edgy, has appeared on the UK and US App Stores without reviews and ratings, and Mobigame confirmed via Twitter that it is “a new product designed for the Amercian legal system […] you can still find the old product on all others continents” [sic]. When asked how updates would be tackled (since the new product is divorced from Edge purchases in the US and UK), Mobigames responded that there would be “no update until EA win in the US/UK, and then maybe EDGE 2. We are working on the new games here, you will love them”.
Mobigame’s reference to EA is regarding the company filing suit against Edge Games, primarily to deal with a spat relating to Mirror’s Edge, but also because “filing the complaint is the right thing to do for the developer community”. In the meantime, it appears Edge/Edgy itself is finally available on a permanent basis, albeit without any chance of updates. On the latter point, the game is stable and fun as it is, and so that’s not a problem; on the former, only time will tell if Edge Games/Langdell takes exception to the Edgy brand, regardless of previous claims that this would settle the matter between Edge Games and Mobigames for good.
In an effort to stop campus gadget and computer thefts, New York police are bringing an ID program to the New York University students.
On Thursday afternoon, police will set up an engraving station in a dorm lobby for students to bring their iPods, cell phones and computers. Operation Identification is part of a city-wide police program to ID valuables that was extended to the campus after an ongoing increase in “iCrimes.”
An infrared pen will mark student gadgets with a serial number that will be housed in an NYPD database, allowing police to access a description, model and owner information, should the device be recovered. After items are tagged, police can view the serial number by shining a light on it.
This isn’t the first iPod ID scheme we’ve seen at a school — one New Hampshire high school recently embarked on the same kind of program — but it is the largest. NYU has nearly 55,000 students.
Once again, it’s debatable whether ID-ing gadgets will prevent swiping or if it would be easier if Apple provided some sort of lock-down system after thefts.
What are the chances of an invisible serial number stopping a quick grab of an iPod in a dorm room at the end of a long night?
It’s Cyber Monday, so there’s a lot of good deals out there today. But these three deals in particular caught our eye:
Logitech’s Squeezebox Radio — $149 at Amazon. The Squeezebox is a fantastic internet radio that looks and sounds great. It makes it dead easy to listen to thousands of online radio stations. Works great with Macs and Apple Airport networks (full review coming soon). Normally $199, but on sale at Amazon for $149. This is a good deal. Recommended.
Samsung 52″ 1080p 120Hz Widescreen LCD HDTV for $1,399 — 52% off at Amazon. Samsung’s big-screen HDTVs are some of the best available right now, but it’s difficult to choose the right one. The company has tons of models with slightly different features. There’s several models exclusive to Best Buy on sale right now, for example, but they tend to be crippled, offering last year’s tech, limited connectivity or slower refresh rates. But the LN52A750 52″ LCD HDTV at Amazon looks like a killer deal. This box is 1080p and has excellent connectivity — four HDMI ports, VGA, component and others, plus two USB (for watching MPEG movies off a thumbdrive). It’s also got a 120Hz refresh rate, which is much better than last year’s 60Hz. And it’s 52% off. The LN52A750 is on sale at Amazon for $1,399.99 with free shipping (that’s a $1,500.00 saving).
Has Apple manipulated flash memory supply and demand, causing prices to fluctuate? An unnamed memory industry official tells a South Korean newspaper the Cupertino, Calif. company “should certainly be blamed for deteriorating the supply and demand cycle in the global NAND flash market.”
The comments are just the latest pointing a finger at Apple for changes in how much NAND, or flash memory, is purchased by the company and the effect on Korea’s memory makers, such as Samsung and Hynix. Anonymous sources told The Korea Times Apple will often order, then buy less than expected, creating an excess inventory and lower flash memory prices. The supposed tactic is being attacked, given Apple’s record profits amidst lean times for chipmakers.
