News - page 2403

The return of the Lightsaber application to the app store is one to be hailed with much fanfare. Star Wars fans everywhere rejoice, and in the three days that the application has been on iTunes it has received over 1,400 reviews with an average four star rating.

Our night of watching the presidential debates was put on hold to test the rereleased application. Shortly after unsheathing my saber I was viciously attacked by an insidious villain! The ensuing epic battle (I’m on the left) was caught on video by horrified onlookers:

Testing Lightsaber Unleashed from Dean Putney on Vimeo.

Ultimately, we loved the new Lightsaber Unleashed. For those every day around-the-house epic battles, there’s really nothing like a good free Lightsaber application. We loved the built-in theme music, the accelerometer was quite accurate with our strokes, the different colors were great, and it really felt like we were holding lightsabers. Our only critique is that we often met our peril to an accidentally retracted beam (if you tap the screen with your saber drawn, you’re brought back to the menu screen).

If you have an iPod touch or an iPhone, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have this application installed. Let’s have some impromptu lightsaber duels!

Here’s hoping that Apple’s feverishly-anticipated “Brick” project is the world’s first all-screen laptop — like this mockup of the OLPC version 2 by designer Yves Behar.

There’s slim chance, of course, but I for one would love a computing device like this: A hybrid iPhone-meets-Macbook-Air that would put hot netbooks like the EeePC to shame.

Apple’s “Brick” would be a hybrid laptop/tablet/ebook that dispenses with a physical keyboard and trackpad in favor of a virtual, adaptive UI that blends multitouch, gestures and its own orientation to switch between different modes:

Laptop — When the Brick is held horizontally with the two screens at an angle, the bottom screen turns into a virtual keyboard and touchpad. There’s no tactile feedback for touch typists, but never mind, corrective text handily makes up for the myriad errors. The top screen acts like a regular laptop screen, except that it also is touch sensitive, and is responsive to multitouch gestures like double-tap to zoom, pinching and scrolling.

Tablet — When the two halves are opened fully they snap together in the middle to make a tablet with a continuous touch-sensitive screen. This mode is best for surfing the web, browsing and editing photos, and displaying mind-altering music visualizers.

eBook — Like laptop mode but held vertically. Each screen transforms into an electronic page for easy reading. Displays eBooks, eMags or specially laid out websites. Readers navigate by swiping the screen to turn the pages.

Tabletop — Like tablet mode but for two people. When an onscreen button is pushed, the screens are oriented for two users sitting opposite each other. Great for collaborative tasks and especially games.

And why’s it called “Brick”? Because it smashes Windows!

More pictures after the jump.

Inspired by Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan.

Sonic Lighter is slightly different to all the other iPhone virtual lighters; it checks in with the GPS and pings a remote server with the device’s location at the moment the app was started.

The result: a Google Map covered with little red flames, every one of them an instance of Sonic Lighter getting all lit up.

And the map has few surprises: big swathes of red flames across North America, Europe and Japan. But hold on, what’s that, up there? In the Arctic Ocean, hundreds of miles north of the Chukchi Sea, itself north of where Alaska and Russia kiss? It’s a single, solitary Sonic Lighter ignition. Maybe it’s a member of Sarah Palin’s crack squad of Russia-monitoring sniffer dogs. Or maybe it was just some guy on a plane. Either way, we salute you, most-northerly Sonic Lighter user. You should get a prize, or something.

(If anyone’s taken their iPhone to the north or south poles, and has some interesting iPhone pics to prove it, please contact the Cult.)

(Via Gruber)

The sharp-eyed folks at iphone savior spotted a MacBook Pro cameo on the season premiere of The Office.
In it, receptionist Pam appears in the Scranton branch from New York via iChat video.

While it’s easy to understand that Office followers — wry code monkeys and creative types alike — would appreciate the nod, Dunder Mifflin seems so much more PC than Mac.

How many places like that use MacBook Pros?

An apparent shift by iPhone 3G buyers to lower-priced 8GB models reportedly prompted Apple to trim by 4 million the number of handsets it will build for the rest of 2008. Cupertino will order 14 million to 15 million phones instead of 18 million analysts first projected.

Pacific Crest’s Apple analyst said Friday “supply-chain checks” found since mid-September Apple is not meaningfully resupplying AT&T stores that have sold down their inventory of 8GB iPhone 3Gs.

The first unlocked iPhones may be selling through Apple’s online Store in Hong Kong, according to a report this morning in at a Singapore-based blog. Techgoondu is reporting online shoppers at the Apple web site in Hong Kong are beingn told “”iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier. Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation.”

The 8GB is HK$5,400 ($695) and the 16GB is HK$6,200 ($798). Ouch. Shipping is free, and they are supposed to ship “within 24 hours”. Apple’s warranty for the iPhone 3G is local only – “Warranty service is restricted to the country where Apple or its authorized distributors originally sold the iPhone.”

Honk Kong-based carrier Three enjoyed a brief two and a half month exclusivity deal with Apple and recently sweetened its iPhone rate plane to include “free unlimited wifi.”

MacBook update fever has the Mac community in its grip, and everyone’s talking about or leaking images of possible new MacBook designs.

But what about the growing threat of so-called “netbooks”? Those tiny, cheap machines pioneered by Asus and now on offer from pretty much every PC manufacturer around.

ZDNet wonders if Apple will make something similar, or, more likely, reduce its MacBook prices to compete. (I don’t think that’s very likely, but anyway.)

The Apple Gazette declares a resounding no, saying that the netbooks are not affecting MacBook sales anyway. They are reducing sales of more expensive non-Apple Windows laptops, but not hitting Apple products that hard at all.

I’m inclined to go along with the Gazette’s view that reducing the MacBook prices by a little — getting them down to the $700-$800 range — would be sufficient to make sales soar once more. That said, I suspect it’s more likely that the machine will be much improved and stay at roughly the same price that it is now.

Personally speaking, the biggest hurdle to overcome is battery life. I still yearn for a good sized mobile machine that will last for the best part of a day without a charge, and none of the current netbooks, or the MacBook Air, will do that. And I know which of those I’d rather buy.

AC/DC guitarist Angus Young explains it very simply in his high voltage comments on a Telegraph story about the state of the music industry:

“We don’t make singles, we make albums.”

Well that’s one view, I suppose. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall during that interview. What else did he have to say?

• Jason Snell of Macworld on Apple potentially driving iPhone devs away: https://tinyurl.com/4ky4hr #

Excited Bristol Apple Store staff, preparing to let in the first customers

It’s hard to get the British excited about something, especially a new shop. But that does’t stop the staff at the shiny new Bristol Apple Store doing their level best to get the queue outside cheering and waving. A bit.

It has to be said: this store opening is unlike most others. Central Bristol ground to a halt this morning because an entire shopping mall, encompassing several surrounding streets, was opening for the first time.

The Apple Store was just one among 150 or so shops welcoming new customers. The opening ceremony for the mall included a MC on a cherry picker, shouting bad poetry and exhorting the crowd to spend and spend. And four drummers sat at four drum kits. The sound echoed around the streets and made the echos made the drummers sound out of time with each other. But nobody minded. Dancers and free runners danced and ran freely. And eventually, Mr MC man declared the Cabot Circus (warning: eye-wateringly awful web site) mall open. The masses flooded in to spend their money.

But that was only half the queuing for the Apple fans. The mall opening is over, and now they have to rush down a newly-opened street and start a fresh queue inside steel crowd barriers. And there they wait, for another 30 minutes, while Store staff do the usual whooping and cheering and getting people excited.

Just days before Apple is to present its fourth quarter numbers, another analyst is trimming its revenue estimates. BMO Capital’s Keith Bachman said Thursday “the weak economy has started to take a toll on Apple’s system’s business.”

Bachman lowered the target price for Apple shares to $180 from $190.

Read more about the target cut and how other analyst appear to agree after this jump.

The Sartorialist, aka Scott Schuman, occasionally shoots his on-the-street fashion stories using Mac stores as a backdrop.

Just in time for Milan shows, he snaps a fleeting fashionista in front of the blink-and-you missed it Apple reseller on Via Mercato.

The best thing about the otherwise unremarkable store in the city’s chic Brera neighborhood are the staff’s black T-shirts candidating Steve Jobs for mayor. Now that’s a statement.

iPod accessory retailer EasyiShop sells a range of products made by OhMiBod designed to let iPod users “feel the music” in ways they might not have previously imagined.

Designed with an audio-enabled integrated microchip that allows the OhMiBod iPod massager to vibrate to the beat and rhythm of the music the user is listening to, this new generation of vibrator is said to combine listening to and feeling music to create an “unbeatable sexual experience,” according to the manufacturer.

OhMiBod’s five different iPod/iPhone vibrators combine a 3′ “freedom cord” with an integrated splitter that connects the vibrator and headphones to any iPod, iPhone, laptop, microphone, electric guitar virtually any electronic audio output source with a 3.5mm jack — to let the massager vibrate to the beat and rhythm of the music the user is listening to.

The company also maintains an online network called Club Vibe that allows users to share their favorite playlists via the iMix section of the iTunes music store.

Apple reaffirmed its intent to control what programs may legitimately run on its iPhone this week when the company revoked ad hoc distribution authority from a developer whose application it previously barred from distribution through the iTunes AppStore.

Last week, when Podcaster received official notice from Apple that the AppStore would not be carrying its application because the company had determined it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes, the developer decided to use Apple’s ad hoc distribution method to get the program into the hands of users who were willing to make a $10 ‘donation’ for the privilege of becoming beta-testers.

Tuesday, Apple revoked Almerica’s access to creating ad hoc licenses for the podcast downloading tool, prompting howls of protest from developers and consumers, many of whom have been skeptical of Apple’s intentions and critical of its business practices involving the AppStore from the very beginning.

Follow me after the jump to learn more about what’s behind the dispute and why Apple could be standing on shaky legal ground.

Aside from Christmas, the back-to-school market is one of the most profitable times for computer makers. Apple’s MacBook has virtually disappeared from Amazon’s top-selling notebook list during the period, according to ThinkEquity analyst Vijay Rakesh.

Instead, ‘netbooks,’ those ultra-small PCs from Asus, Acer and Dell, now dominate the list. This is an abrupt change from the past, where Apple had been a mainstay.

“While Mac desktops and 3G phone sales have been doing well, the notebook market could be impacted in the peak back-to-school season,” Rakesh wrote in Wednesday.

Apple from Colin Mader on Vimeo

Apple should not be concerned about Google’s new phone knocking its stellar iPhone sales projections off stride, Piper Jaffray’s industry analyst said Tuesday.

Using a baseball analogy, Gene Munster wrote in a research note that the T-Mobile G1 was only an incremental change in the mobile landscape.

“When Apple comes out with a product, they try to hit homeruns, but Google’s Android strategy is swinging for base hits,” Munster wrote.

The iPhone’s diddy little camera wins no photography awards, and rarely even a positive remark from fellow iPhone owners in the pub.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t come up with some interesting images when it tries hard. Or even when it doesn’t try hard at all, and just acts weird. We’ve seen iPhone cubism covered before, but how about iPhone slants?

Slanted by taiyofj.

iPhone can take a strange photo by kenic.

Llandudno beach by Fr Peter Weatherby.

All photos used with permission of their owners. Thanks to all.

Today, the finest minds from Google, HTC, and T-Mobile on hand to launch the Android platform proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the iPhone’s monomaniacal “whole widget” development model is the only way to claim genuinely new territory in a market. The T-Mobile G1 comes up tragically short in the race to launch a widespread, modern mobile OS to prevent the proliferation of Windows Mobile. As Steve Jobs has learned, if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself. In fact, the Android Troika is making the same assumptions that have ensured that Linux will always be a marginal desktop OS in developed markets. Here are the top three reasons why:

3. Presuming that Someone Else Will Fix Your Problems

Google has left a lot undone with Android: no built-in Exchange support; no desktop syncing; no video playback; a comically variable UI. But it’s OK, Google says: third-party developers will definitely come up with solutions. While that’s probably true, it also means that standards won’t get established for these features, which means that new features will always lag behind more tightly controlled platforms like the iPhone. Worse, the Exchange omission ensures that this will never play with corporate IT environments that are looking to replace a fleet of aging Treos right now. That means the only credible alternative to Windows Mobile and BlackBerry? iPhone. I never thought I would see the day when Apple was more corporate friendly than the open alternative.

Adobe announced its “biggest ever” product release on Tuesday. The Creative Suite 4 product family, a new series of media applications scheduled to ship in October, features tightly integrated workflow solutions designed to advance the creative process across print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production.

The entire product line includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design editions, Creative Suite 4 Web editions, Creative Suite 4 Production Premium and the Creative Suite 4 Master Collection.

Photoshop, the most widely used Adobe product, will take advantage of new graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware in the CS4 edition ($699) to deliver a smoother pan and zoom experience, allowing users to easily edit images at even the highest magnifications. For an additional $300, Photoshop CS4 Extended give users the ability to manipulate 3D imagery, such as painting directly on 3D models and surfaces, merging 2-D files onto 3D images, and animating 3D objects.

InDesign, Adobe’s page layout program, also comes in for some interesting upgrades, including a feature that highlights potential production problems in real-time from within the layout and directs users to the problem area to resolve the issue. Other new features make it easier to create and manage long documents such as manuals and textbooks, including a Conditional Text feature that lets users quickly produce multiple versions of a document for different uses such as multi-lingual documents or Teacher/Student materials.

Below we reproduce Adobe’s comparison chart to help give you an idea of the range of options available in the new applications and their bundles, but be sure to visit the Adobe website for detailed information and several arresting demos of the kinds of work supported by these products.

I really enjoyed Philip Michaels’ post at Macworld yesterday, in which he discussed the success of retail Apple Stores over the years: you hear a lot about Apple Stores opening, but you never hear about them closing again.

When the news first came out that Apple was going to start opening its own chain of retail stores, there were groans from far and wide. “Apple’s a computer company,” the cynics said (myself included). “They’ll never make retail work.”

Oops. On the contrary, Apple has made retail work, and Philip’s post spells out some of the reasons why: Apple has looked to the long term, taking losses in the early days with the expectation that profit will come later. And it has chosen the store locations with great care, picking out high-profile, high-traffic spots that will pull in a very large number of people, lured in by window displays of attractively priced iPods.

A new Apple store opens this Thursday, just up the road from me in Bristol, and it conforms to the rules. It will be located inside the shiny new Cabot Circus development, a vast mall erected where once there was a grimy, dismal 60s shopping area.

As usual, the store’s opening will be marked with hoopla, cheering, and free T-shirts for the first 1000 people through the door. I’m going to go along; not for the T-shirts, but to meet some of those people.

Rumors around the changes in store for Apple’s laptop line started way back in July. One of the more persistent has expectations set to ‘high’ for a MacBook with a glass, multi-touch, gesture-oriented trackpad.

We found the mockup pictured above posted by Photobucket user skylersaleh; what do you think?

An Alpha version of the long-awaited BitTorrent client for Mac has been leaked, according to a post at Pirate Bay. The application is still in development, but as expected, looks very Mac-like, and reportedly runs better than its Windows counterpart.

BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management, Simon Morris, said in response to the leak, “An internal development build of uTorrent for Mac has been leaked publicly. It [is] an “alpha” quality build. We did not intentionally release this build and would strongly recommend folks not to use it as it isn’t yet complete or stable enough to be released to the public.”

Early user reports say the application is largely functional, though search appears to be broken. The good news for P2P lovers is that BitTorrent seems serious about releasing uTorrent for Mac in the near future.

Via TorrentFreak

As Apple fans digest T-Mobile’s announcement of its G1, analysts say the handset starts with an immediate deficit: brand awareness.

“I think the most important point is that although Google is a familiar name for many consumers the brand power is not the same as Apple,” Gartner research director Carolina Milanesi told Cult of Mac Tuesday.

Milanesi said most people don’t know what Android is or G1. “You sure cannot say that about Apple,” the analyst said.

An interesting little rant at The Daily Telegraph lists the five features the Android-powered Google phone (known as the G1) needs to have to “see off” (that’s east London speak for “compete with”) the iPhone.

Those five requirements are, in a nutshell:

• “Lots of Google” — Google integration with everything
• “Entertainment” — a vague notion that the G1 needs video and music and stuff
• “Looks” — it must match the iPhone in terms of stylish design; I’d argue that this isn’t really a requirement. There are lots of people who value function over design and will gladly put up with the uglies if it means they get a cheaper smart phone
• “Online” — it must have a decent browser and push email; duh
• “Applications” — there must be an App Store

According to the pre-launch leaks and rumors flying around over the last 12 hours or so, most of that list is indeed present on the phone: Google everywhere, video player, an App Store-a-like, and so on.

So, yeah, a reasonable list of things that an iPhone competitor should be thinking about, but it misses out some other ideas. Such as:

• “Multi-touch” — one reason why people like the iPhone so much, from the moment they pick it up, is the multi-touch UI. It adds a great deal to the user experience and makes the phone more appealing. I’ve said it before: it makes people smile
• “Price” — much more than multi-touch, much more than any of the others, this is the one feature that I think G1 and its ancestors progeny (sorry, my mistake, see comments) will be able to compete on very well indeed. No matter how many smiles the iPhone generates, it remains an expensive choice. If the Android army can offer a good experience overall (not necessarily one that matches the iPhone feature-for-feature at all) but at a reasonable price, it will have customers lining up at the tills.

The official announcement comes later today. Hold on tight.