News - page 2301

Apple seems to be changing its tune on VoIP apps for the iPod touch. Less than a week after it was submitted, Toktumi’s Line2 VoIP app has been approved by Apple. The $14.95 a month app turns the iPod touch into a fully-featured telephone.

“Interesting was how quickly it was approved – less than a week from submission!” says Toktumi’s founder and CEO, Peter Sisson. “I think its an important development.”

Already available for the iPhone, Toktumi‘s Line2 app joins Skype and Truphone For iPod on the touch, but boasts more features, Sisson says. As well as unlimited U.S. and Canada calling and low international rates, the app has a host of “professional-grade” features, such as call waiting, conferencing, call transfer and visual voicemail.

“It turns the iPod touch into a serious telephone,”Sisson says. “It’s a real telephone. You use it over Wi-Fi and you’re spending $15 a month and that’s it.”

In January, Apple approved an update of the Line2 app on the iPhone to make and receive phone calls over a 3G or WiFi. The approval was in stark contrast to Apple’s earlier stance on VoIP apps, which seemed hostile. Apple’s position was highlighted by the spat over Google Voice, which Apple still hasn’t approved for the App Store.

On the iPhone, the Line2 iPhone app provides with an additional number. It’s pitched at business users as a way of separating business and personal calls.

It also provides a host of advanced, business-oriented call control features like caller-specific call forwarding, after-hours settings, voicemail by email and an auto-attendant (“Press 1 for…”). And it can be used to avoid roaming charges when travelling overseas.

Avaliable as a free 30-day trial, Line2 is $14.95 a month, pay-as-you-go. Here’s the iTunes Link.

Hit the jump for a couple of videos showing how it works.

In a bit of irony, Apple reportedly is hesitating to sign longterm deals with flash memory suppliers because of high prices which some blame on Apple’s heavy use of the chips in a growing array of devices. Although demand is weak for the flash memory in some areas, prices remain high due to chip makers desire to please large customers.

The reason why prices can be so high with a weaker demand is the “major suppliers are limiting their supply to the market,” reports trade publication Digitimes. The tight supply could drive flash memory prices even higher and mean suppliers “may not be able to satisfy customer demand in the second quarter,” Digitimes added Tuesday.

Excitement over the iPad’s introduction continues to accelerate production of new App Store entries more than six weeks after Apple unveiled its tablet device. Indeed, the number of new iPhone OS apps produced rose 185 percent since the iPad became public January 27.

“Over six weeks since Apple announced the iPad, Flurry continues to measure a significant increase in iPhone OS new application starts within the system,” Flurry Analytics’ Peter Farago writes. The company said a large number of the new applications are “custom version of existing applications tailored for the iPad.”

A new app called Silent Bodyguard features a panic button that sends an SOS distress signal with GPS coordinates to potential rescuers without alerting onlookers.

While the $3.99 app, available on iTunes, isn’t the first ICE (in case of emergency) app, this one is backed by Dr. Clint Van Zandt, former FBI chief hostage negotiator and criminal profiler.

Van Zandt says the app may prove useful in situations where a person is trapped or in grave danger but can’t place a call or create a text message. In Silent Bodyguard, users program in contacts for SMS alerts, calls or email addresses to reach in case of emergency.

Silent bodyguard is the brainchild of Los Angeles mom Jo Perry whose daughters came a little too close to becoming crime statistics for comfort.  Her youngest daughter was the classmate of a girl abducted and killed while  on an errand and her oldest daughter attends the same University as the graduate student recently murdered in a lab.

Perry, who co-developed the app with Justin Leader, points out that once activated, the SOS messages will continue to be sent out every 60 seconds, updating location. Even if it goes out once, four emergency contacts will know that the user is in some kind of trouble. The alarms keep going out until turned off.
The idea is that you can communicate distress when you can’t make a call or a text. Perry keeps hers in a pocket, not her purse, just in case.

“The app is simple, but because we designed it to be silent and for “stealth” activation, it’s not the usual on-off button people are used to, ” Perry told CoM in an email. “That’s why people don’t always “get it” at first. The home screen is designed to look like a photo viewer, not an alarm. Again, to make it easy to use when a person feels threatened in the presence of people who might be hostile. Joggers, college students, realtors, etc. can find themselves in scary situations with people around whom they can’t just dial a friend and say, “I’m scared.”

We do like the idea, but wonder what you’re supposed to do when the first thing the perp grabs is your iPhone…

While most Apple watchers have been concentrating on the iPad, something unexpected happened: sales of Macs and iPods rose higher than financial experts expected. The new retail numbers makes one analyst believe Wall Street is in for a surprise for the March quarter.

According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s interpretation of retail sales figures supplied by research firm NPD, Mac sales are up 39 percent compared to the same period a year ago, far above the prevailing Wall Street expectations of a 22 percent nosedive. Likewise, iPod sales, according to the NPD data, increased by 7 percent through February, up from a 17 percent drop financial experts were expecting.

As a result, Munster believes Apple will sell 2.8 million to 2.9 million Macs for the second quarter, a tad higher than Wall Street’s expected 2.7 million second quarter results. The analyst also foresees 9 to 10 million iPods sold during the period, up from the Street’s prediction of 9 million.

The rosy picture comes with some provisos, though. First, it should have been easy for Apple to beat expectations, given 2009 got off to such a sluggish start. Another point that Munster makes is that while unit sales are up, the average selling price is lower. The average price of a Mac is down 10 percent compared to the 7 percent Munster had expected. Although the analyst had expected the average selling price of iPods to be higher, the actual ASP inched up just 3 percent, compared to the 15 percent the analyst had expected.

[via Barron’s and Fortune]

A judge upheld a ruling to let Steve Jobs raze a crumbling mansion in Woodside, California, though a preservation group may appeal the decision, again.

The saga of the sagging 30-room Jackling mansion is a long one. Jobs bought it in 1984 and lived there for about a decade, then rented it until 2000. Built in 1925 for copper magnate Daniel C. Jackling, it sat empty, overgrown until Jobs was granted a demolition request in 2004. (For a good look on just how run down, check out Jonathan Haeber’s amazing photos).

A local preservation group called Friends of the Jackling House went to court and kept the bulldozers at bay.  In May 2009, Jobs submitted more documentation to bolster his argument that razing the house was more feasible than restoring it.

This week a supreme court judge upheld the council’s decision, so Jobs can apply for another demolition permit.

Earlier this month, Apple had already come clean that many of the iPad’s accessories would not actually be available for purchase simultaneous with the April 3rd release of the tablet itself. At that time, the ship date for accessories like the iPad keyboard dock and spare iPad power adapter was placed in mid-April. Now they’ve been pushed back even further, to sometime in May.

Those aren’t the only accessories to slip. The official iPad Case has also slipped: instead of being available along with the iPad on April 3rd, it’s now slated to a mid-April shipping date.

These aren’t huge delays, but it does show pretty clearly that Apple is having some supply chain problems. It also bodes poorly for Europeans like me who were looking to pick up an iPad keyboard dock at launch: it looks like these accessories might be in scant supply for awhile, with all the spare units going to supply the American market.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suCe4-SWsHo&feature=player_embedded

There’s more than one company to experiment with iPhone payment schemes lately, and while the likes of Square looks pretty good, I think there’s something beautifully simple about the way PayPal’s iPhone app handles transactions: you just open the app, type in the amount of money and bump your iPhone against the iPhone of the person you want to pay. There’s no dongle required.

It’s about as simple a solution to paying someone using my iPhone as I can think of. The only problem is that it requires you to entrust your financial dealings to the consistently crummy PayPal service. Although I must admit, the embedded video is so endearingly corny, I’m having a hard time hating PayPal too much this morning.

[via 9to5Mac]

Of all the eccentric Mac-lover accessories out there, these clocks might be some of the most phoned-in I’ve ever seen: they’re basically just old Apple keyboards clawed out of an electronics dump with their keys shaken loose and stuffed with cheap horological guts.

Even so, I’m sort of tempted by the iMac Bondi Blue Clock: it seems like just yesterday when I was bringing one back home for the first time. Oh, how time passes for an Apple fan.

What do the crafters at Geekware do with all of the keys they’ve got left over after they make a clock? No surprise there, really: they try to convince you they’re jewelry. Again, I’m guilty here of thinking these Apple key cufflinks are absolutely ridiculous and yet kind of wanting to own a pair.

When a pair of rugged adventurists decides to trek 700km across a frozen lake in Siberia, chronicle the expedition in a daily blog complete with photos and videos — and share it all on the Internet — it should come as no surprise when Apple hardware and software features prominently among their gear.

Vašek Sůra and Pavel Blažek set out from the southern end of Lake Baikal in Siberia on February 23 in temperatures dipping below -20℃ to become the first Czech team to make a winter crossing of the lake. They marked their crossing of 500km Monday in stylish fashion. “Please, don’t judge us too harsh,” Sůra wrote in their blog, “after all, we’ve been here for almost three weeks and we need to entertain ourselves somehow :-)”

Last Friday, they posted about the gear they are using on the expedition, undertaken by just the two men with no kites, dogs or outside support to assist the trek or help them with their nearly 200lbs. (each) of supplies. Among the Apple gear is a MacBook Air (128 GB, solid-state drive, 2 GB). They use a satellite modem operating on the Immarsat network to upload and download to the Internet. Their Apple software includes OS Snow Leopard, iWork and iLife tools, and to process the photos Sůra uses Aperture.

The day they were hoping to post a video commemorating the 400km point they ran into some problems getting the camcorder to communicate with the laptop. “Vasek thought that there’s something wrong with the laptop,” wrote Sůra, “but as we have a Mac here with us, I was sure it cannot be in the laptop – nothing can ever be wrong with Mac!”

Of course it was the USB cable.

If there’s a good thing about the recession, it seems to be bringing some fine Apple memorabilia out of storerooms and closets.

Cliff and Dick Huston — ex-Apple engineers, for the record employees 27 and 25 — have decided to part with a treasure trove of Cupertino collectibles by auctioning them on eBay.

How many iPads did Apple sell over the weekend? One estimate puts it at 152,000 – that’s actually down from the initial excitement when some pegged pre-sales at 20,000 per hour.

By Sunday, the rate of sales had fallen to 1,000 per hour, according to Venezualan-based blogger and analyst Daniel Tello. Tello estimates 120,000 iPads were pre-ordered on the first day due to “pure overexcited fanboism.” Tello based his estimates on the order ID numbers submitted to Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity Board.

You’re all going crazy with your iPad ordering. Meanwhile, over on Vimeo, BrewBeau has some craziness of his own going on.

BrewBeau writes: “I’m a recent PC convert who waited patiently while Apple worked out the kinks with their latest iMac release of the 27″ Intel powered 2.8GHz quad core i7 iMac. It’s a thing of beauty and I wanted to relay my experience of getting my new machine.”

His video is one of the following:

• a respectful homage to the classic Mac unboxing genre
• a piece of insightful investigative journalism from a Windows user trying to exposé the Cultish behavior of Mac users
• a creepy, insidious poke into the mind of a man obsessed by sex and technology; there are experts who call it “sextology” (see Note below)
• funny as hell

Whatever. You watch it and make up your own mind:

(Note: This is a lie.)

Are Microsoft employees “nuts for the iPhone?” According to a Wall Street Journal piece, yup… and that’s starting to cause some problems at Redmond as they prepare to roll-out their own would-be iPhone OS killer, Windows Phone 7.

Essentially, everyone within Microsoft knows that their current smartphone operating system, Windows Mobile 6.5, chonks hoad. Microsoft employees are technology lovers, and so they have naturally gravitated to the best smartphone out there. Microsoft’s done its best to stem the tide of Microsoft employees defecting to the iPhone, initiating a policy early last year that prevents employees from expensing any non-Windows phone, but it hasn’t had as much effect as you’d think.

Now, Windows Phone 7 is on the horizon, and by all accounts, the war against iPhones within Microsoft’s campus is heating up, with several employees feeling the need to hide their Apple handsets from their managers.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcvN-eVfR4s

Gary Katz, patron saint of kids and parents stuck indoors with his iPhone theater in a box, has now developed a download version. (The mail-order version cost $20.)

For just $12 you get high-quality images and a choice of walls, ceilings, roofs and curtains and plus extras for a touch of customization.

It comes with instructions, you provide the laser printer, safety scissors, glue and shoebox.  In about an hour, it’s showtime!

In the Hackintosh community, the MSI Wind is somewhat legendary for being the first netbook out there that could essentially run OS X out of the box, with all features working and no hardware hacking required.

Now it looks like the venerable Wind has another Apple bragging point: with its keyboard ripped out and its display replaced with a touchscreen and reversed, the MSI Wind U100 makes a good poor man’s substitute for the iPad.

Sure, it doesn’t use the iPhone OS — it’s running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 — and it’s got some rough edges (it can only be turned on and off by wiggling a little paperclip in a hole), but if you were hoping that Steve Jobs was going to announce a MacTablet on January 27th instead of a big iPhone, this might be just the project to devote your weekend to.

Although most famously known for his system-crushing, next-gen 3D engines, id software’s John Carmack has been a passionate enthusiast of iPhone app development. He’s personally cited the platform as a return to the older school of game design, where a single enthusiast can turn out a great game in a matter of a couple months, and id software’s (excellent) iPhone ports of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were basically pet projects of Carmack himself.

No surprise, then, that Carmack is interested in the iPad. Speaking to Kotaku, Carmack said: “”Apple doesn’t give us anything ahead of time either, so haven’t put hands on it ourselves, but we certainly are expecting to try to have our Rage title for the iPhone, iPad, whatever, working across there.”

Rage is id’s upcoming post-apocalyptic, Mad Max inspired FPS and racing game, the first title to be released running id’s bleeding edge id Tech 5 engine. I’m not buying that the iPad has the oomph to run Rage at all: rather, I imagine that he is talking about bringing a spin-off title to the iPhone and iPad, similarly to the way Doom Resurrection brought Doom 3 to the App Store.

Either way, it’s exciting news, and Carmack remains as mouthbreathingly charming as an uber-dork as he could possibly be: the id software founder says that, given his druthers, he wants to budget a couple of months into every year where he can just disappear into his programming lair and code iPhone games.

When the iPad was first announced, Apple promised that the process for signing up for 3G service would eschew the iPhone’s Mephistophelean contract with AT&T. Instead, it would be simple, allowing end users to sign up and cancel their 3G service on a month-by-month basis.

If these screenshots of the iPad’s Settings panel are anything to go by, Apple’s been just as good as their word here. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, how signing up for 3G could be any simpler: you don’t even have to deal with AT&T.

Apparently, all you do to sign up for 3G is open up the iPad’s settings, plunk in your credit card information and then specify your order size: 250MB of data per month for only $14.99, all-you-can-gobble for $29.99. Simple! And if you sign up for the 250MB plan, you’ll get three alerts — 20 percent, 10 percent and empty — to let you know when you’re running low on data and affording you the option to top up with some more.

This is about as painless as it gets. I just hope international telecoms follow AT&T’s lead here and keep it simple, stupid. There’s just no room in my budget for yet another two-year data contract at this point.

[via Gadget Lab]

If – like me – your fridge is black, then these shiny iPhone app fridge magnets from Jailbreak Collective will look very smart indeed displayed on the door.

Just 13 bucks gets you a set of these icon almost-replicas. I say almost because if you look carefully, you’ll see they’re not identical to the Apple originals. But they’re close enough.

Only problem is, they look so smart on a decent black background that it’ll be a shame to spoil the effect by using them to hold shopping lists, receipts, and all that other fridge/paper junk you use fridge magnets for.

Might be worth getting an extra fridge just for these then.

(Via geek.com.)

Soft Sailor is a tech blog I’ve not encountered before, but today I stumbled across a very odd post indeed. Published just yesterday, it recommends downloading something a little bit unusual: Internet Explorer 5.2.3.

Which is only, let’s see now… about seven years old.

The author Dragos Pirvu writes:

“Although it’s not that popular on Mac computers, Internet Explorer is also available on Apple’s Mac OS X platform and it’s doing a fairly good job.”

And what’s more:

“Although it does have some security leaks, some Mac OS X developers are still using Internet Explorer to create CSS files and others.”

So that’s it. While the rest of us have needlessly upgraded to all this new-fangled stuff like Safari and Firefox, it’s the CSS devs who have faithfully – yet secretively – kept IE5 alive as a CSS editor. Who knew?

If you’re in the market for an iPad — and you know you are, because it’s killer — you’re probably wondering which model to buy.

Naturally, you’re looking at the cheapest $499 iPad, which has Wi-Fi only, but you’re thinking you might also want 3G. After all, you can pay-as-you-go for data, and who knows when you might need it? And what about storage?

I’ve though it through, and concluded that most people should buy the 32GB iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G, including the wireless keyboard. Here’s why:

This week, Consumer Reports published the results of their latest tech support survey, and no surprise here: Apple came out as the number one company in both laptops and desktops.

As usual, Consumer Reports asked 7,000 subscribers about their satisfaction with tech related dealings with various companies. At the end of the day, Apple scored 86 points out of 100 in laptops, and 87 points out of 100 in desktops. What’s amazing is that second place didn’t even come close to challenging Apple’s tech support dominance: in the laptops category, Lenovo was 23 points behind, and in the desktops category, Dell was 55 points behind.

Good for Apple, but if anything, this is just confirmation of what we knew already: if you control both your hardware and your software, you’re going to have better luck responding to customer problems.

U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble claims to be unconcerned about the iPad’s threat against their own e-reader, the Nook. Indeed, they are so excited about the possibilities of the iPad that they are now promising iPad owners that they can expect to download their own free Barnes & Noble e-reading software just around the time of the iPad’s launch, which will allow individuals to buy any of more than a million eBooks as an in-app purchase.

In truth, it makes sense: the Nook’s not really doing much business, and the iPad is going to be huge. Unlike the closed ecosystems of other e-readers, Barnes & Noble can launch all feet in and essentially parasite off of the iPad’s success.

The question is: will Apple allow Barnes & Noble and Amazon to open competing e-book stores? I tend to doubt it: Apple’s taken strong stances in the past against the duplication of functionality, and they are going to want to keep a stranglehold on the iPad e-book marketplace, the same way they control the iPod’s music and video marketplace. The more booksellers on the iPad, the better from a consumer perspective… but I really worry that Apple’s going to stamp down hard not just on commercial e-reader apps, but fantastic existing apps like Stanza.

Did you buy an iPad when Apple began pre-sales this morning? If so, you weren’t alone. Indeed, Apple may have sold 20,000 iPads per hour, leading one commentator to suggest the Cupertino, Calif. company was earning $10 million per hour on its new tablet device.

The estimate comes from Andrew Erlichson, CEO of Phanfare, a photo share site. Erlichson said he purchased two iPads and noted the order IDs.

Still confused about which iPad to pre-order? In collaboration with handsome Wilson Rothman, Gizmodo’s lovely own Rosa Golijan put together this handy, haiku-ified iPad buying guide which — while thoroughly tongue in cheek — more or less lines up with my own feelings on the matter: if you’re buying the iPad WiFi, there’s little reason to invest in more than the base model, while the 32GB iPad 3G will likely be the least regrettable purchase in the tablet’s first generation over the long term.