Cult of Mac

The competition between Apple and Google over who will control the cloud looks less and less like a puffy summer day and more akin to an approaching storm front. After Amazon first beat the Cupertino, Calif. company to the punch. it appears now Apple’s only cloud strategy includes that very expensive iCloud.com domain. Google Music is expected to be unveiled Tuesday in limited fashion, providing free storage for already-owned tunes, as well as playlist creation.

However, Google provides a hint as to what’s holding up Apple’s cloud-based iTunes service: those persnickety publishers. In an uncharacteristically open comment, Google digital content exec Jamie Rosenberg blasts labels as “more interested in an unreasonable and unsustainable set of business terms,” according to the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital.

Pix and Stix is a new accessory duo designed for those who love to rock out with GarageBand on the iPad. It’s a set of drum sticks and a guitar pick featuring electro-conductive rubber tips that make them compatible with the iPad’s touchscreen, allowing you to drum and strum naturally without wearing out your fingertips.

The team behind Pix and Stix is currently trying to get Kickstarter-like funding, so the kit isn’t quite available just yet. If you want to get your hands on it, you can order now for $14.95 and as soon as it reaches its funding goal of $8000, the team will start making them and your order will be guaranteed. If it doesn’t reach its funding goal, you’ll get your money back.

From the Archive of Things People Hoped Were Lost, another forgotten Apple video has surfaced from 1984. Unlike the formidable 1984 TV commercial that introduced the Mac, We Are Apple (Leading the Way) was a fluffy dealer sales presentation that highlighted Apple’s growth and breadth in those halcyon days.

Apple had four product lines in 1984, the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa and Macintosh. All share the spotlight in this cheesy sales extravaganza. Sung to the tune of Irene Cara’s What a Feeling and presented in the lost art of the multi-image slide show, it’s hilarious. Who knew the Lisa was so portable – and such a babe magnet!

[via gajitz]

The Booqpad Agenda iPad 2 case from Booq is the perfect mix of past and future. It brings the futuristic technology of the iPad 2 and the old technology of pen and paper together making this the best iPad 2 case yet for note takers. It accomplishes all this in a package that is ready for the executive boardroom and beyond.

The Booqpad is a folio style case that is available in four styles. First, there are two models made from 100% recycled PET that come in Gray-Green and Sand-Plum colors that retail for $49.95. Second, one model made from a genuine Nappa leather exterior comes in Coffee-Cream and retails for $99.95. Finally, the last model the one that I am reviewing comes in black leatherette and grey and it retails for $49.95.

One of the biggest niggles with the iOS Mail application – for me – is that in order to delete multiple emails at once, you need to go through and select each individual message before you hit the delete button. I think that kind of defeats the object of having a multiple delete function; you might as well just delete them individually if you’ve got to touch them all anyway. However, a new jailbreak tweak called DeleteMail offers a solution to this problem.

Developed by Andrea Oliva, and now available in Cydia for $0.99, DeleteMail allows you to delete every single email in a particular mailbox in just two taps.

Following the sellout success of its San Francisco and Dallas events, MacTech Boot Camp is set to land in Boston in less than two weeks, and Cult of Mac readers can save $200 on registration. On May 18th, the event will be held at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, with a number of confirmed speakers who include:

• Jeff Korn
• Mike Zarin
• Leon Lincoln
• Adam Schechter
• Josh Turiel
• Max Buxton
• Andy Espo
• Al Willis
• Neil Ticktin

The Skype application for Mac has finally been updated to fix a critical vulnerability discovered last week. Version 5.1.0.935 fixes a major flaw that exposed your Mac to attacks from malicious contacts via instant messages, and meant another user could gain remote access to your system.

Interestingly, Skype actually fixed the flaw on April 14th, but didn’t bother pushing the update out to its users because there was no exploit active in the wild. Reassuring, isn’t it?

Adobe first announced its first three Photoshop Touch applications at Photoshop World back in March, and they’re now available to download from the App Store. Color Lava, Eazel and Nav are all designed for the iPad and aim to enhance your desktop Photoshop experience with the help of a touch-based device.

Here’s a little bit about each of the applications:

A digital game manual discovered on Steam for the upcoming Duke Nukem Forever release features some information regarding Apple’s App Store that suggests the title could be headed to iOS devices.

Starjimstar from the Touch Arcade forums found that at the bottom of all the legal text in the game’s documentation, there’s some “Apple App Store Additional License Terms.”

A new jailbreak tweak that’s just hit Cydia allows users to upload photos to Facebook directly from the photo library on their iOS device without having to use a dedicated application. Native FB Upload allows you to select your photo and send it to Facebook just as easily as you can to MobileMe.

While the App Store is full of Facebook applications that allow you to upload photos, this $1.99 tweak from Tyler Nettleton (@InfectionX) cuts out the middle man. Once installed you can select a photo in your camera roll, or any other photo album, and tap the ‘export’ button in the bottom left that you’d usually use to send an image via MMS, email, or to MobileMe. You’ll have a new option to upload to Facebook.

UPDATE: Gladwell debunks the old story that Jobs “stole” the Mac from Xerox PARC. See below.

In the latest edition of The New Yorker, preeminent business writer Malcolm Gladwell takes on Steve Jobs and the creation of the mouse.

The piece is called “Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.”

Apple’s giant datacenter in North Carolina may bring advanced voice controls to the iPhone and iPad, reports Techcrunch.

The function of Apple’s massive datacenter — one of the biggest in the world — has been kept firmly under wraps. The North Carolina facility is like Area 51: everyone knows it exists, but few know its true purpose. Observers believe it is primarily for iTunes in the cloud, but Techcrunch suggests it is already set up to bring voice recognition to iOS 5.

According to Techcrunch reporter MG Siegler, Apple is already running advanced voice-recognition software from Nuance Communications – the company behind the Dragon Dictation applications for the iPhone and iPad — at the massive datacenter. The two companies will announce a deal at WWDC in early June.

And that likely means that iOS 5 will feature a plethora of advanced voice controls when it also is unveiled at the programmers’ conference.

There was a time when proudly declaring yourself a Mac gamer would earn you laughs at best, and a smear of sputum streaking down your face at worst. These days, though, the Mac’s a great place to be, thanks to Steam for Mac and the Mac App Store, and it’s just gotten a little better: IGN’s Direct2Drive has just launched their own Mac games section.

iGotYa’s a very neat and cheap way to figure out who stole your phone, and where they’re located. Available for $4.99 in Cydia (there’s a free trial as well), iGotYa is able to take a picture of whoever’s using your phone thanks to the iPhone 4’s front-facing camera. It can then email that photo to you. Not only that, but iGotYa will also obtain their location and send that to you as well. Continue reading for more information!

Seems practically everyone has cottoned on to the idea that the iPhone makes for a stellar cycling computer — because hardware that turns the iPhone into a feature-packed riding companion keeps popping up. The latest is Velocomp’s iBike Dash series of app-enhanced hardware stashed inside their waterproof Phone Booth case that work with its free iBike app.

The unit starts out at $200 for the waterproof case with built-in ANT+ receiver and a speed sensor for your bike; $329 will bag you the Deluxe kit that adds a heart-rate strap, cadence sensor and supplemental battery for the iPhone. Velocomp also sells the Phone Booth case only — without the ANT+ electronics in it — for $50.

The waterproof case looks pretty rugged, but pricing strikes us as a tad steep compared with other kits out there from Wahoo, Digifit and New Potato Technologies (even though we were less-than-enthusiastic about the latter).

See that green line? That’s Blackberry-maker Research in Motion, tanking hard and giving up the position of biggest U.S. Smartphone platform to Android. Meanwhile, guess which Cupertino-based company has regularly commanded a 25% share of all U.S. smartphones for over a year?

I think of Steve Jobs as more of an expert businessman, management genius and incubator of innovation and ingenuity than an engineer, but 900 engineering undergraduates in the UK surveyed by General Electric are ready to claim him as one of their own: the Apple CEO has ranked third in a list of Engineering Heroes behind Isambard Kingdom Brunel (creator of the first major British railway) and James Dyson (who makes the world’s best vacuum cleaners bathroom hand dryers).

Jobs beat out Bill Gates, who came in at the number four spot. He also ranked higher than Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Rolls, Henry Royce and Thomas Edison.

We start out another week with some deals on desktops and portable power. First up is an iMac powered by an Intel Core i3 processor running at 3.06GHz. The machine included a 22-inch screen for $979. Next is a number of MacBook Pro laptops, starting at $899 for a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo-powered machine. We wrap up the day’s spotlight with the JumpStart battery pack from Philips. The gadget attaches to an iPod or iPhone via a sync cable.

Along the way, we also check out several cases for the iPad 2, as well as a video iPod and software for your Mac. As usual, details on these and many other bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

While Apple is unlikely to release a 4G iPad until 2012 or even 2013, due to their issues with the power hungriness of current LTE modems chipsets, never underestimate Cupertino’s competitors — or their desperation to beat the iPad — to adopt an underdeveloped new technology before its time.

Meet, then, the HTC Puccini, a 10-inch LTE tablet set to debut in June. Not much is known about it, although it’s likely to be a Honeycomb tablet and support HTC’s Scribe capacitive stylus.

Otherwise, the most interesting aspect about the Puccini is that it is one of the first devices that will support AT&T’s forthcoming “true 4G” LTE network. That’s interesting not because of the Puccini, but because of what it means for Apple. When AT&T’s LTE network debuts, Apple will finally be able to support the two largest mobile providers in the country in their 4G pursuits using the same chipset.

Who wants to sift through all this text crap when you could just watch a video? If your answer to that question sounds something along the lines of “not me,” you should probably download Showyou onto your iDevice during your next coffee break — just don’t blame us if your boss fires you because you spend the next five hours watching clips on it.

The app elegantly aggregates all the videos that your contacts on Facebook or Twitter have posted, and also from its own Showyou network that can be joined via the app. Sharing clips looks just as elegant and effortless.

Showyou looks good on the iPhone, but gets drool-worthy on an iPad with videos from feeds laid out in a seamlessly swipeable checkerboard. Bonus: It plays nice with an Apple TV.

Should Apple bailout Intel? That’s the thinking of one analyst who suggests the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant help the chip giant leap from aging PCs to the future of smartphones and tablets. Apple, which already uses Intel Core 2 Duo, i5 and i7 cores in laptops and desktops, could adopt Intel’s Atom core.

“In our view, Intel would pick up Apple’s volume, driving revenue growth at good (not great) gross margin,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard tells investors Monday morning. Meanwhile, “Intel would also benefit from becoming a key supplier in smartphones and tablets and drive growth,” he adds. But what’s in it for Apple, which reportedly is looking for an alternative to the Intel chips in its laptop and desktops?

A new resource called ‘Cydia Search’ lets you browse the Cydia’s huge collection of jailbreak tweaks and applications from the convenience of your desktop. Finding the packages you’re looking for in Cydia can sometimes be a slow and unpleasant process, but thanks to Planet-iPhones, you can now find them from your web browser.

Cydia Search checks all of Cydia’s default repositories – as well as 7 others – for new and updated packages once every hour. You can browse packages by repository and category; by top rated, newest, and updated packages; or you can search the collection for a range of things like package names, descriptions, and authors. You can also subscribe to the newest and updated packages RSS feeds so that you never miss a Cydia release.

We’ve seen our fair share of sleeves and cases in the past meant to graft new functionality onto an existing iDevice, the most obvious example being the Peel 520, which transformed any iPod Touch into a 2G iPhone 4.

It was only a matter of time, then, before we could expect accessory makers to make a go of transforming the iPhone 4 into the iPhone 4G. Now they’d made a go of it, but sadly, it’s South Korea only right now… but expect it in the United States soon.

The Sun, that last bastion of journalistic excellence, reports that Queen Elizabeth II has shuttled off one of her liveried manservants to the Regent Street Apple Store to buy her an iPad 2. Explanation, please!

Everyone who owns an Apple TV loves AirPlay – it’s a fantastic way of streaming your moves and music straight to your TV that was previously a luxury only iOS and iTunes users could enjoy. However, thanks to the doubleTwist software, users can now send content to the Apple TV from their Android smartphones.

The doubleTwist software for Mac & PC advertises itself as “the iTunes for Android” and allows you to wirelessly sync your iTunes playlists, photos and videos to your Android phone with the accompanying Android application. Its most recent update introduced the ability to stream all of this content to the Apple TV over AirPlay.