News - page 2330

The Better Business Bureau is warning Facebook users to read the fine print when responding to ads.

A recent BBB press release stated that an estimated $1.3 billion will be spent on social networking advertising this year. The large print on ads featured on social networking sites, like Facebook and Myspace, do not always tell the entire story.

The warning about MacBook Air scams is a hoot:

Also common on Facebook are ads to get a free MacBook Air claiming that the company is seeking laptop testers. The ads lead to an incentive marketing program at https://www.colormyrewards.com/ where participants must sign up for various products and services in order to earn their free laptop.

The Fine Print: Customers must complete two options from each of the three tiers, Top, Prime and Premium before receiving their “free” MacBook. Example offers listed in the Top and Prime tiers include signing up for credit cards or trial offers for subscription services such as for vitamin supplements or DVD rental services. In some cases, the participant will need to pay for shipping, and if they aren’t vigilant about canceling the trial offers they signed up for, they’ll begin being billed every month.

Examples of the Premium offers listed on the Web site that must be met in order to get the MacBook are much more expensive and include paying as much as $1,500 for furniture or purchasing a travel package with a minimum value of $899.00 per person.

BBB Warns: Incentive programs can be extremely costly in the long run and the fine print shows that the customer might have to pay a significant amount of money in order to get their “Free” items. It is also a red flag that Apple does not even make MacBook Air in purple, red, pink, or green. (Emphasis mine.)

And as flickr user 4braham noted (image used with a CC license) the Mac in the scam pic isn’t a MacBook Air. Sheesh!

Via News & Tribune

The folks over at life hacker tracked down Steve Wozniak on his, well, life hacks.

A few choice excerpts from a long interview worth the read:

What gadgets and software applications do you use on a day-to-day basis?

Steve Wozniak: I have such a crowded life and crowded schedule. When people send me a link with a gadget, I’ll look at it and buy it if it looks interesting, but I don’t have time to check out everything I’d like to.

I do have a Nixie Tube watch… The biggest benefit in my life comes from my Segway, which I use everywhere I am. If I’m going to San Antonio, for example, I’ll load it in the car and just go everywhere with it. The other crucial thing is my Verizon wireless card, which I have to have because hotel Wi-Fi is just so unreliable.

What are you using to manage your email?

Steve Wozniak: Eudora….The reason I do is, it has an incredible feature that every single mail client should have.

Any feature in the menu list, any action there, can be added as a button. I changed it so I have a vertical menu bar, so I can have tons and tons of pre-made buttons saved right where I want them up top, and I learn where those place are. You can script actions to the buttons, too, so I can quickly copy messages to my assistants. There are scripts I wrote for joke lists so I can forward a message, remove the brackets and formatting, and make sure all the original attachments are included, to a pre-defined “joke” group. Apple’s Mail app just isn’t scriptable enough to really handle my mail buttons.

Some of the buttons will re-direct mail with quote marks, or not. I’ve got another script that will actually customize a mail forward, like my own version of mail merge. So even if something’s going out to 400 people, I can set it to single out certain people and take away all the forwarding markings, so it looks like I singled out someone to send them mail. Which is, I hope, a nice little moment for them.

The near-term economic horizon appears to be surprisingly bright in the Apple/Mac universe, according to a survey released Tuesday by MacTech Magazine.

Despite recent dismal numbers from many sectors of the economy, 90% of respondents in “the Apple market ecosystem” polled by surveyors from MacTech believe 2009 will be “almost as good as or better than 2008”; 62.8% reported feeling good or great when asked about the Apple/Mac segment.

“The MacTech team decided to survey those in the market after seeing two significant trends starkly contrasting the general U.S. economic news,” said Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher, MacTech Magazine. “It’s been easy to get wrapped up in the bad news of the U.S. economy, but the reality is that for the Mac and Apple markets, things are strong and expected to get stronger.”

MacTech’s own advertising results and forecasts appear to support Ticktin’s optimism, with the magazine seeing a 13% increase in ad revenues 1Q09 over 1Q08.

A news editor from another well-known technology-focused magazine told Cult of Mac Tuesday, “after an abysmal holiday season, ad sales for the June issue look to be the best EVER!” MacTech’s Ticktin added “our staff has heard from many MacTech advertisers how well they are doing despite the economy.”

The sunny outlook from Apple-land certainly contrasts with anecdotal sentiment Cult of Mac gathered Tuesday night at an AdTech after-party in San Francisco, where several attendees reported a very down-beat vibe from the bellwether digital advertising conference.

Yahoo also reported Tuesday plans to cut 5% of its workforce in the wake of a nearly 80% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2009, and media guru Shelley Palmer said at the post-AdTech gathering in San Francisco he gives the economy 10 months to show its hand as far worse than anyone believes it is today.

If you’ve ever wondered why some developers can’t stand Apple, perhaps Marco Arment can help.

Arment makes useful websites in New York, according to his bio. He’s the lead developer of Tumblr, the Web 2.0 sharing sensation, and creator of the very popular iPhone application Instapaper, which allows users to save web pages on their devices for reading later.

Arment penned a revealing blog post Monday that serves to highlight the frustration even established developers must endure in navigating the uncharted, fickle waters of Apple’s approval process for third-party iPhone and iPod Touch applications.

After submitting an update to Instapaper that included the mobile phone icon shown in the screen capture above, Arment was informed his update could not be accepted because it ran afoul of SDK guidelines that prevent “use [of] the Apple Logo or any other Apple-owned graphic symbol, logo, or icon … except pursuant to an express written trademark license from Apple.”

A friend of Arment’s had designed the icon and offered it to him for use with Instapaper.

Arment concedes the App Store is “an amazing deal for independent developers” but laments the fact that “problems seem so arbitrary, avoidable, and developer-hostile.”

In the end, the frustrated developer must resolve to “make a different icon from scratch that doesn’t contain any depictions of any Apple products,” with Arment asking, “can I use arrows, or does that violate the arrow key on Apple’s keyboards?”

And the bottom line, something with which even Apple is undoubtedly familiar, is that a developer in Arment’s position is forced to resubmit, wait another 7 -14 days, hope to be accepted, and lose a few weeks of the increased sales that the new version will generate, all the while chalking it up to “another annoying cost of doing business on the App Store that [you] can’t do a thing about.”

Thinking further about the new Mac ads — and how if I were considering buying a Mac over a PC they wouldn’t sway me — I came across this post about an accidental switch & bait that turned one PC person, political-science professor Harry Farrell, into a Mac user:

“I was working in my office, when a work-study knocked on my door with a brand new MacBook Pro, which he told me had been sent over from my school’s technology program. I was nonplussed, and told him that he must be wrong, that I hadn’t ordered one etc…

So I finally acquiesced, on the grounds of gift-horses, and the wisdom of not inquiring too closely into the dental conditions thereof, and unpacked it. Two hours later, I was completely hooked –œ more rational and altogether nicer than my Windows box, while much smoother than my Ubuntu installation. I would have wanted to take it home and marry it, if I wasn’t married already. Three hours later, I discovered it had been a mistake, and that it was in fact intended for a colleague with a vaguely similar name… And I had to give it back.”

Apple is back in Fortune magazine’s elite Fortune 100 list for the first time since 1994, according to new rankings released in the magazine’s issue dated May 4 but made available this week online.

Thanks in part to the declining performance of companies previously ranked ahead of it, Apple jumped 32 spots above its 2008 ranking, to rejoin the list of the 100 largest US corporations for the first time since Steve Jobs returned to lead the company in 1997.

Among Apple’s largest U.S. competitors, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) came in at No. 9, Dell (DELL) at No. 33 and Microsoft (MSFT) at No. 35. Apple (AAPL) placed at No. 71 on revenues that grew 35.3% to $32.479 billion in 2008.

See the full Fortune 500 list here.

Image via iLounge

Apple’s iPod Touch and, to a lesser extent, the iPhone are increasingly the U.S. military’s handheld device of choice for deployment on the battlefield, according to a recent report in Newsweek.

Traditionally, the military might issue electronic handheld devices, made at great expense specially for the battlefield, with the latest software. But today’s “networked warfare” requires each soldier to be linked electronically to other troops as well as to weapons systems and intelligence sources, says the report.

Making sense of the reams of data from satellites, drones and ground sensors cries out for a handheld device that is both versatile and easy to use – a requirement Apple’s mobile devices fulfill handily.

Such acceptance of a commercial product for use by the military is nearly unprecedented. Many soldiers, however, own iPods and iPhones for personal use and it’s logical their versatility might come to the attention of military strategists seeking methods for fighting the new kinds of counterinsurgency warfare the US has confronted in the post-9/11 era.

Apple’s gadgets have proved surprisingly fit for the task, according to the report.

Software developers and the U.S. Department of Defense are now developing military software for iPods that enable soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe. Snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan now use a “ballistics calculator” called BulletFlight, made by the Florida firm Knight’s Armament for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Army researchers are developing applications to turn an iPod into a remote control for a bomb-disposal robot (tilting the iPod steers the robot). In Sudan, American military observers are using iPods to learn the appropriate etiquette for interacting with tribal leaders.

As Lt. Col. Jim Ross, director of the Army’s intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors operations in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey says, when it comes to soldiers’ battlefield communications, an iPod “may be all that they need.”

[Thanks to Jonathan Taylor for the tip]

Apple has chosen Foxconn Electronics as its main manufacturing partner for a ten inch touchscreen netbook to be released later this year, according to renewed rumors emanating from the Asian press Monday.

The Chinese language news site Commercial Times, quoting sources within the supply chain, reported Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn, secured a deal to manufacture Apple’s next portable gadget, designed to compete in the growing market for WiFi enabled devices that connect easily to the Internet.

The persistent rumors of Apple’s imminent introduction of a device to fill the gap between its popular iPhone/iPod Touch and full-fledged notebook computer lines fly in the face of previous statements from Steve Jobs vowing Apple has no interest in what its CEO considers the low-end of the computer market.

The Mac’s not exactly drowning in great Twitter clients, and especially not in multi-account ones. (EventBox kinda rocks as a social networks aggregation tool, but it supports only one Twitter account.) Oddly, the App Store has a whole bunch of such apps, the best of which is Tweetie.

Occasionally, cut-down versions of apps make their way from the desktop to mobile, but Tweetie’s taken the opposite journey, starting out on iPhone and arriving on the desktop a few hours ago.

First impressions are that the competition has just been largely obliterated in one fell swoop (or at least given a severely tweaked nose). Tweetie’s UI is mostly gorgeous, the app is utterly stable, and it’s also very usable. There are some issues relating to the interface: the inability to scroll via page up/down (although Space/Command+Space does the same job), overly large icons to the left, the too-small ‘new tweet’ button and the entire lack of a refresh button. Also, there aren’t any saved searches at present. However, despite these shortcomings (which, for me, are niggles rather than deal-breakers), it still to my mind betters the likes of Blogo and Twitterific, and is likely to take up a permanent place in my Applications folder.

Check the app out for yourself via the unlimited, ad-supported demo, available from atebits. You can also register for $14.95 until May 4, whereupon the price goes up by five bucks.

Cult of Mac Twitter feeds

For those who’d like to follow Cult of Mac and its contributors on Twitter, check out the following feeds:
– Cult of Mac updates: @cultofmac
– Leander: @lkahney
– Me (Craig): @craiggrannell and @iphonetiny (for mini iPhone app reviews)
– Lonnie: @lonnielazar
– Pete: @morepete

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-89ZYz6QK8s

The “Get a Mac” campaign has four new ads, the first out after the launch of Microsoft’s controversial “Laptop Hunter” series.

The four reasons you should get a Mac over a PC?

Fewer viruses (the PC has to wear a hazmat suit), facial recognition for iPhoto, stability (no freezing, crashing, error messages) and low maintenance (stability doesn’t depend on security patches, virus scans etc.)

Hmmm. The ads are cute, especially the future one, but I’m not sure if I were really weighing a Mac vs. PC any of these things would convince me to go Mac.

What do you think?

Via Mac Daily News

Nothing like police blotters for playing it straight. Take this item from the Montana Kaimin, the University of Montana, Missuola student paper:

April 10, 8:52 p.m.
During rush hour on Friday morning, a bike patrol officer spotted a package in the middle of the road that cars were driving around.  After retrieving the parcel, the officer found a MacBook and a bag of marijuana inside.  Public Safety is currently trying to return the computer to its rightful owner, but not the pot.  “We’ll probably have to destroy the marijuana,” Lemcke said.

Image used with a CC license, thanks to Max Braun

Via Montana Kaimin

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-NeSzIRpTY

Most of us only need computers that work on desks, cafe tables or on trains but a production crew filming a Mount Everest climbing expedition has a few other considerations.

In this mountaintop dispatch, the producer talks about how they’re putting together video segments from on high. Although they have a number of computers, the “main workhorses” are Mac Book Pros, with solid state drives that allow them to be used at extreme altitudes.

Eddie Bauer is footing the bill for the perilous hike to promote an extreme-outdoor clothing brand called First Ascent, which you can follow online.

Thanks to CoM reader Michael Brandt

Well, not us specifically, but people like us (and people like you) were the target of online sitcom “Life From the Inside.”

LFTI, about an agoraphobic jingle writer Mason and his pals, has a certain homemade charm most non-irony impaired Mac fans will probably find entertaining.

“We wanted to do an episode about cults,” says Robb Padgett, a producer, writer and actor on the show. “I have an original Mac and ImageWriter and I thought it’d be fun if the cult we were creating wouldn’t allow their members to use any technology created after 1984. That’s perfect for showing off the original Mac, and for having characters dress up in ridiculous ’80s garb.”

So Cult of Mac it was.  In episode eight, Mason’s best friend and sidekick Guy “awesomizes” Mason’s Mac Pro by replacing it with the Mac 128K. Mason tries to lure Guy away from the cult with an iPhone 3G and rescue a friend from “Neo-Amish” cult where members use vintage cell phones, as in the above screen shot. In the all-goes-awry escalation, both Mason and Guy end up getting sucked into an even larger cult, involving black mock turtle necks and New Balance sneakers.

The program, made on a Mac Pro by a three-person team, two of whom describe themselves as “huge Apple geeks,” has also been Zune featured podcast.

Best check it out on iTunes, though.

This cool carabiner-style Apple Waterdrop watch was offered several years ago by Apple to buyers who completed a survey about their Apple Macintosh purchase and sent it in to the dealer.

It measures about 3.5 inches long by 2 inches wide, is very light and comes with batteries — and this totem of a bygone era can be yours for $50. It comes with instructions in a black presentation box.

*It displays real time in hour, minute, second and day of the week.
*Calendar displays month, date and day of the week by pressing a button.
*24-hour stopwatch.
*60 Seconds alarm and snooze function.
*Hourly chime.
*Hi-intensity red light built in.

The watch you see here is in mint condition, in its original box. Never offered as a retail item, if you’re interested, call Dave at (1)250.354.4633 in Nelson BC.

Click here for a closer view.

[kootenay mac]

Apple never, ever expresses battery life based on the number of cells that make it up. The ThinkPad I have at work is available with a 4, 6, and 9-cell option. And I have no idea what any of it means or why I should care. Apple just tells me how long I can work without a power source, which is what I actually care about.

The PC-makers just don’t get it.

Collins America, a consumer product design, manufacturing, and sales operation headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee plans a late summer release of the first third-party LCD computer screens based on Apple’s royalty-free Mini DisplayPort spec.

Dubbed the Cinema View line of displays, Collins’ offering will include three models featuring the aluminum, black and glass design of Apple’s LED Cinema Display, as well as a single cable connection to the Mac. The company claims Cinema View is the world’s only display line made just for today’s Macs.

Priced from $299 for a 19 inch model to $499 for the 24 inch, all three sets include 3 USB 2.0 ports and 3.5mm stereo audio jack. Complete specs for all three models are available here.

Collins is taking pre-orders at the company’s website, offering free shipping to North American and EU markets with expected deliveries beginning to ship before September 1, 2009.

Sadly, there’s no mention of a matte screen option anywhere in Collins’ marketing material.

950 lucky – if that’s the right word – fans of the artist formerly christened Prince Rogers Nelson have the opportunity to get a limited edition iPod Touch bundled with their purchase of The Prince Opus, a $2,100 book of photographs produced by Kraken Opus, a British publisher whose aim is to create the “most epic, stunning, iconic publications ever seen in the world.”

One cannot tell from the promotional material how many GB the iPod Touch holds, but it comes pre-loaded with a 15 song live soundtrack from Prince’s 21 night 2007 performances at London’s O2 arena, as well as a 40 minute movie from the shows, made by the diminutive star himself.

[AllThingsD]

An  app called “Wish You Were Here” lets you use pics taken with your iPhone, personalize a greeting and caption and then send them via snail mail.

Currently available to send to US addresses, WYWH creates 4.25″ x 6″ color postcards from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

As a postcard fanatic, I love this idea. The download plus first two postcards are free, after that it costs $1.30 per card, not bad considering you don’t have to find stamps on the road or settle for dull postcards — the  pic on the other side of the stilted sample message could change its meaning entirely…

There are a number of excellent reasons to be bullish on Apple (AAPL) stock, according to Wall Street analyst Shaw Wu. Despite already having risen 45% on the year, Wu believes Apple could bake another 25% or more of profit into its share price, based on expectations around what the Kaufman Bros. high-tech analyst calls “several catalysts in the months ahead.”

“We anticipate [Apple’s] new iPhone 3.0 software to ship” in time for the 2009 WWDC in June, Wu said in a report released Monday. He’s also expecting consumer interest in Apple to remain strong with the introduction of new iPhone hardware, also in time for WWDC.

The expected launch of Snow Leopard should be a further catalyst for the Mac business, which has already seen a boost from recent desktop refreshes (iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Pro). “And last,” Wu said, “the potential for a new form factor, perhaps Apple’s answer to the netbook, with a large screen iPod touch-Mac hybrid” could end up pushing AAPL from its current $119 price to something more like $152.

Less than a month ago, on March 24, Wu removed Apple from his “Focus List” citing the appreciating stock (then up only 19%) and the fact that “many of the product catalysts we were looking for, namely the new iMac, have occurred.” But that was at a point just after the overall stock market had been tanking since January; in the last several weeks the market’s been on a tear and some in the financial analysis business believe the worst of the “recession” is behind us.

For a little more perspective on the inscrutable science of stock price analysis, recall that less than a year ago, when Apple was opening its AppStore and releasing the iPhone 3G, Wu and many other AAPL analysts expected the company’s stock to go as high as $225. AAPL had already topped out just over $200 prior to the AppStore launch and nose-dived to well below $100 by January of this year.

Apple has released new lists of the “all time” Top 20 paid and free iPhone and iPod Touch applications, as the iTunes AppStore plows on toward 1 billion total downloads.

The “all-time” designation is kind of interesting, given the AppStore has only been open less than a year, but some of the numbers coming out make an impressive case for yet another ding in the universe attributable to Steve Jobs and his little niche computer company.

The number two paid app, the lovely, meditative Koi Pond has been downloaded 900,000 times at 99¢ apiece, according to one report, certainly a nice year’s work for its developers, The Blimp Pilots.

But how about the number one paid app, the game Crash Bandicoot? Its total downloads are unreported, but one could assume a figure somewhat north of Koi Pond’s 900K — at $5.99 per copy, Crash Bandicoot must have Vivendi Games Mobile wondering how much richer they might have become had the world economy not suffered a total melt-down in the past year.

On the free side of the ledger Facebook and Google Earth run one-two, which is no surprise at all, given the worldwide popularity of those two web properties.

Apple has a giveaway contest going in conjunction with the countdown to one billion downloads, with winners slated to get a fully loaded MacBook Pro, a 32GB iPod Touch, a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card and a Time Capsule wireless hard drive.

Inspired by Magritte’s “The Son of Man” painting, this decal comes in  black, gray  and white for 13″, 15″ and 17″ laptops. If you’re going to add on to the already sleek design, it’s a nice take.

$9 on Etsy.

Apple sits atop BusinessWeek‘s list of “The 25 Most Innovative Companies” for the fifth year in a row, according to a statement released Thursday by the magazine and the Boston Consulting Group.

The news should come as no surprise to anyone who keeps up with trends in the computer, telecom and entertainment industries, though the report does contain undercurrents of weariness with Apple and the #2 company, Google. Both firms received more than 30% fewer votes in the 2009 survey than they got last year, with some respondents complaining about Apple and Google both “resting on past glory” and relying on “improvements [to] previous technology.”

The special report, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” will be featured in BusinessWeek’s April 20th issue, on newsstands April 10th.

BusinessWeek.com will also feature expanded content, including an interactive table of the full ranking of the top 50 most innovative companies, a slide show on 50 up-and-coming innovative companies, and a full description of the methodology used to compile the lists, at www.businessweek.com/go/09/innovative09.

The full list is after the jump.

Taiwanese company Elan Microelectronics has sued Apple for the unauthorized use of two of Elan’s patents in Apple’s MacBook, iPhone and iPod Touch products.

“We couldn’t find a common viewpoint with Apple, so we decided we had to take action,” Elan spokesman Dennis Liu told the New York Times, adding that the companies had been in licensing talks for about two years.

A statement published on Elan’s website says the patents cover innovations in touch-sensitive input devices incorporated into smartphones and computer touchpads.

“The first patent at issue, U.S. Patent 5,825,352 (“the ‘352 patent”), relates to touch-sensitive input devices with the ability to detect the simultaneous presence of two or more fingers. Multi-finger applications are becoming popular in smartphone and computer applications. The ‘352 patent is a fundamental patent to the detection of multi-fingers that allows for any subsequent multi-finger applications to be implemented. The second patent, U.S. Patent No. 7,274,353 (“the ‘353 patent”), is directed to touchpads capable of switching between keyboard and handwriting input modes.”

Elan said it won a preliminary court injunction against a U.S.-based rival, Synaptics, in a dispute over one of the patents mentioned in the Apple lawsuit, after a suit was filed in 2006 by a unit that was a subsidiary at the time. Synaptics countersued.

Both actions were dismissed last year after the two companies reached a cross-licensing agreement. That result likely emboldened the company to take legal action against Apple, an analyst who follows Elan told the NYT.

Image used with a CC license, courtesy dnorman

An idea whose time has come: a massage table with an iPod dock built in.

The Sonora Sound Spa Table with integrated Bose Speakers and an iPod Nano has a $6,195 price tag, so it’s not the kind of thing most people could have at home.

But if these became standard equipment at spas, it would be a vast improvement. You could have your kinks worked out while listening to an audio book from home or some non-annoying relaxation music. (No more pan flutes!)

Via Device

A 23-year-old iPod repairman pleaded guilty in federal court in Grand Rapids, Michigan to fraud and money laundering after acquiring more than 9,000 replacement iPod Shuffles by entering serial numbers into Apple’s Web site.

Nicholas Woodhams, who has to pay back Apple for the shuffle-and-switched iPods he re-sold for $49 each, also faces up to 30 years in prison.

As part of the plea deal, Woodhams also has to hand over a home in Portage, an Audi S4 sedan, a race car, a motorcycle, six computers and over $570,000.

Via Ap

Image used with a CC license, thanks to re-ality