News - page 2373

Chalk up one more exhibit for the case that Apple and its ecosystem refuse to participate in the global economic meltdown.

WWDC sold out Tuesday, the earliest date on record for which the annual conference devoted to Apple’s development community has reached capacity. Tickets went on sale just a month ago, and were no bargain — even the early-bird special was well over $1,000.

Interest in this year’s event is great for a number of reasons. Developers and presumably the audience at the keynote will get the first public glimpse of OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” The new OS has been in testing with developers for a while now, but many of the expected user interface changes remain under wraps. WWDC may be the first time anyone gets a real look at those.

Even bigger than Snow Leopard, however is the possibility that Apple could unveil a new version of the iPhone, even a touchscreen netbook or tablet. The rumor mill on all of these ideas has been active for months.

And of course there is the ever present shadow of Steve Jobs. Will he make an appearance, even tough he’s not scheduled to return from his sabbatical until the end of June? Could he possibly bear – health permitting – to let someone else introduce a major OS upgrade and potentially game-changing hardware?

The Jobs factor aside, the real takeaway from WWDC’s full house next month is the clear evidence that interest in Apple’s technology remains very strong. The idea that someone could found a career or hit the jackpot on the strength of learning how to develop applications that work with Apple technology seems to be one of the few – and one of the brightest – lights of hope on the economic horizon.

Gary Go will perform with an iPhone as his backing band at Wembley Stadium.
The 24-year-old Go, born Gary Baker, will open for boy band veterans Take That in July.  He’ll stand in front of thousands (90,000 if it’s a full house) with only his device for some tracks, a live back-up band for others.

“The fact we’re going to see someone playing an iPhone at Wembley is something I don’t think even Apple thought would happen,” said Stuart Dredge, of industry site Music Ally.

“The software started out as a gimmick, but now we are seeing real musicians producing real music with it. Of course, you still need talent, but the phone means you can make and record anywhere.”

(Unfortunately, none of the stories I saw on Go mention which virtual four-track app he used to write his songs, some are lush ballads far from the brittle synth-pop of yesteryear.)

“My biggest worry is that my phone will ring mid-song,” Go said.

Via Evening Standard

Barely 19,  Muscovite Vera Uvarova landed herself in the hospital after a car crash that left her immobile, save for one arm.

Four days after the accident, a friend gave her an iPhone.  The device became Vera’s visual connection with her beaten body and the resulting pictures are showcased in an exhibition at Moscow Gallery Na Solyanke.

“This transformation was important to me…” Uvarova told the Moscow Times. “Unable to lift my head, the only way I could see my legs, for instance, was through the lens of my iPhone.”

She was restricted to hospital life for close to three months, but the exhibition focuses on the first transformative 800 hours, hence its title, “800 Hours on My Back with an iPhone in Hand. How I Was Born Again with the Help of Photography.”

You can view some of them online here.

Images courtesy, ©Vera Uvarova

Via Moscow Times

In Bridgewater New Jersey, the police blotter reports (between rock-throwing incidents and credit card theft) that someone managed to walk out of the local Best Buy with a MacBook from a display. Anyone else come across  scenes of attempted five-finger discounts?

Here’s the report:

THEFT, 5:41 p.m. March 31: An employee of Best Buy reported that someone was able to remove a MacBook computer, valued at $1,800, from a display and leave the store undetected.

Image used with a CC license, thanks jaypen_g
Via My Central Jersey

Number Seven Hundred and Thirty Six on the list of things that really torque me off are people who intentionally and knowingly mislead folks for fun and profit. And to this list of Mortgage Brokers, Right Wing Talk Radio Hosts, and Tobacco Lobbyists, we can now add Roger L. Kay president of Endpoint Technology Associates (aside — people who are ‘president’ of companies employing 50 or less people, are number 977 on the list of things that annoy the crap out of me.)

El Presidente Roger authored a white paper at the behest of Microsoft titled: “What Price Cool” which serves to illuminate us all as to how we all have been paying some imaginary “Hidden Apple Tax” all these years.

Of course, a younger man might shrug this drivel off, yet as I grow older I find my patience for such things eroding. While I’m not quite at the yelling at kids to get off my lawn stage, I am quite crotchety enough to spend my Saturday night debunking this garbage.

Follow me after the jump where we reveal the obviousness with which Le President Kay sold his credibility.

Apple lost a patent infringement lawsuit Thursday in Texas, when a jury awarded Opti Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif $19 million in damages. The plaintiffs argued Apple willfully infringed on Opti Inc.’s patent covering a computer operation that enables a “snooping” function designed to help computers more easily retrieve previously accessed data.

The jury in the courtroom of Judge Charles “Chad” Everingham IV of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall, rejected Apple’s contention that Opti Inc.’s patent should be declared invalid and awarded the verdict as fair and reasonable compensation to Opti for Apple’s willful patent violation, according to the verdict form.

No word a yet on the status of Apple’s intent to appeal the verdict in the case.

The lucky downloader of the billionth app  from iTunes (winner of a MacBook Pro, a 32GB iPod Touch, a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card and a Time Capsule wireless hard drive) is reportedly a 13-year-old who hit the jackpot with a free app called “bump.” Apple reached the billion mark with apps in just nine months.

All-time top paid downloads include:
Koi Pond
Engimo
Pocket Guitar
Touchgrind
iShoot
Monopoly

All-time top free apps include:
Facebook
Google Earth
Pandora Radio
Tap Tap Revenge
Shazam
Pac-Man Lite
Light Saber Unleashed
Virtual Zippo lighter

More on the Apple site

Call it hacking, or just common sense: getting into actress Salma Hayek’s Mobileme account was apparently as easy as knowing her birthday and her favorite starring role.

An anonymous post on imageboard 4chan.org  provided MobileMe login details for Hayek:

Go to me.com, forgot password, type [email protected]
Her //snip//
Answer to change password question is: //snip//

Voila : a peek at Hayek’s iPhone apps downloaded from iTunes — including restaurant finder Urbanspoon,  Shazam and the Say Who voice recognition dialer — plus emails from uber-magnate husband Francois-Henri Pinault and an invite to America Ferrera’s 25th birthday party.

Wonder if iPhone loving twitterer Ashton Kutcher’s next…

Via Electronic Pulp

updated to delete credentials

Were you aware there is an annual conference devoted to the Apple II computer? And that it’s been held for 20 years?

Make plans now to be at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, MO from July 21 – 26 for, yes, the 20th annual KansasFest, a computer hoedown all about Apple’s iconic Apple II computer.

The keynote speaker will be Jason Scott, webmaster of
TEXTFILES.COM, director of “BBS: The Documentary”, and caretaker of Sockington, the cat on Twitter with over 300,000 followers.

KansasFest 2009, the world’s only annual Apple II conference, invites any and all Apple II and Macintosh users, fans, and friends to attend what oganizers call the “summer camp for geeks.”  For photos, schedules, presentations from past year’s events, and inquiries, visit the event’s Web site.

It took two days of people complaining, but Apple finally yanked Baby Shaker from the App Store on Wednesday – though the screaming and crying over why it was ever approved in the first place has probably yet to reach a fever pitch.

With nearly umpty-thousand applications now in the App Store and Apple fast approaching a billion downloads, it’s not unreasonable to expect that some things might slip through the cracks.

But, seriously, Baby Shaker?

Think I could slip my Shoot the President app past ’em somehow?

Commercial artist Sam Morrison made these cute brown paper bags for taking a break in style.

$3 for five bags on Etsy.

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]