To create buzz at the Seattle premiere of Mike Daisey’s excellent “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” the host theater threw a lookalike contest.
Maybe you had to be imbibing the complimentary Appletinis (har!) to appreciate it, but none of these guys, or the gal, who participated look much like Steve Jobs.
Note to self: a black turtleneck does not an icon make.
But you can still catch the play until May 22.
Via Geekwire
Car manufacturers are finally developing better ways to hook your iPhone into your car.
Check out this video demo showing how BMW is integrating the iPhone into car entertainment systems.
Patched in through BMW’s iDrive system, the iPhone can can be used to play music, web radio, or send updates and messages to Facebook and Twitter.
“This suite of technologies allows smartphone features — the things people really love on their smartphone — to be integrated in a safe, easy-to-use way in your BMW,” says BMW Technology Group senior engineer Rob Passaro in the video.
“The great thing about this is, as Apple updates new features on its iPod, we get it automatically. You don’t have to go to the dealership to get these functions in your car as soon as they are available.”
Check it out:
Steve Jobs and Larry Page have been invited to testify at the May 10 senate hearing on privacy and mobile telephones.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy extended the invitation, saying in a letter to the two that: “like many Americans, I read with deep concern recent press reports indicating that” the devices “collect, store and track user location data without the user’s consent.”
The white iPhone 4 is finally going to be released tomorrow after nearly a year of questions, speculation, and overall doubt. The real questions is, are you going to buy one? Please participate in the poll below. There are plenty of choices to choose from, so the results should be interesting!
[polldaddy poll=4980606]
Happy voting!
The touch-tablet market is still in its cradle and already Apple has won. The iPad now has a lead so vast that it will not and cannot be dislodged from its position of dominance.
Fans of competing platforms don’t want to hear this, of course.
The Google Android faction believes that — finally! — a real, shipping tablet-specific version of open-source Android exists, so a tsunami of iPad-killer Android devices will now quickly overwhelm and surpass the iPad. This is wishful thinking based on a false belief and an inadequate appreciation for the primacy of apps and the destructive power of platform fragmentation.
Read the whole story here.
Those maverick statisticians over at Retrevo have put together one of their smartphone landscape studies, finding that most consumers feel that their smartphones are either obsolete or will soon be obsolete.
That’s sort of a no-duh claim at first, but when you actually look at the numbers, smartphone makers are actually making new and better smartphones faster than consumers can possibly buy them.
Look at that chart above: during the last year alone, Samsung released over 30 new smartphones, while HTC released over 20 new smartphones. If you purchased a Samsung or HTC phone even as recently as a few months ago, there’s a good chance it’s already behind the tech curve.
The notable exception here? Apple. Ignoring the slight hardware changes of the Verizon iPhone 4 and white iPhone 4, Apple’s only released two smartphones over the course of the last two years: the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4.
Better yet, Apple historically has only radically redesigned the iPhone every two years. That means if you buy an iPhone shortly after it comes out, you can be reasonably sure it won’t be totally obsolete before your contract is up. What are the argument for buying an Android smartphone again?
Sometimes Dashboard can seem like a hassle. While it can be very handy for quick tasks, having to open a specific application to access these widgets can become cumbersome. It is also impossible to perform other tasks while using these widgets. Well, a simple command can fix all of that, and let you enjoy widgets alongside Mac OS X applications. Find out what to do in this video.
If you like to manage your photos on your iPad but prefer Lightroom’s rich feature set to iPhoto or Aperture, meet Photosmith, an app for the iPad that allows you to do all of your Lightroom organizing, rotating, sorting, metadata editing, labeling and keywording.
All you do is import your photos into Photosmith using your method of choice — Camera Connection Kit, EyeFi card, email, etc — then do all of the light editing and organizing on your iPad. When you get back to your main computer, a Photosmith plugin for Lightroom slurps the images into your library, ready for editing.
Don’t want to wait to get home to share? No problem. You can export your photos using Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox or e-mail.
This is a pretty cool program for the die-hard photographer working within Lightroom. On your next vacation, you can leave the laptop at home and just bring along your iPad for most of your on-the-go needs. $18. [via Gadget Lab]
We start the day with two MacBooks in the spotlight, along with several cases for the iPad. First up is a number of MacBook Air laptops from the Apple Store, starting at $849 for a 64GB SSD model. Next is a crystal silicone case for the iPad, just one of many listed today. We wrap up the spotlight with a number of MacBook Pro units, starting at $929 for a 2.4GHz model from the Apple Store.
Along the way, we check out a deal on an 8Gn iPod nano, as well as software for your Mac. As always, details on these and many other bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
The white iPhone 4 will be here shortly, and given Apple’s difficulty getting it to market, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is in some way unique compared to the regular iPhone 4 besides chromatically. But nope, it’s basically just an albino iPhone 4, albeit with a different proximity sensor design… and it’s just as prone (or not prone, depending on your personal feelings on the extent of the problem) to the fabled iPhone 4 “death grip” as its predecessor, as this video from Italian Apple blog iSpazio makes clear.
End result? White iPhone 4 drops a bar, but signal isn’t otherwise compromised. Someone alert Consumer Reports: they haven’t had a tizzy about the iPhone 4 lately.
Stuck on an ancient PPC Mac? That’s cool: they’re still great machines, and I have an old Powerbook I keep around as a guest laptop myself. The problem, unfortunately, is that while these machines are still quite excellent at lighter computing tasks, the thing they have primarily been good for — doing some light browsing and emailing — has become more and more difficult, thanks to the heady advances of HTML5 and CSS3, and the decision of browser makers to leave the PPC architecture behind.
Mozilla’s excellent Firefox browser decided with version 4 to drop support for the PPC architecture, but thankfully, there’s TenFourFox, which takes Firefox 4 and gets it up and running under OS X 10.4 and 10.5, with precisely tuned builds for each PPC processor.
What does this mean? Firefox 4’s advanced Javascript engine, WebM video support, HTML5 and CSS3 on your old Mac. That old Mac just might have some Facebooking in it left yet.
[via TUAW]
Gameloft is famous for using hugely popular games as the inspiration for some of its iOS releases. For example, Modern Combat 2 is not too dissimilar to Modern Warfare 2; N.O.V.A. bears some resemblance to Halo, and Starfront’s similarities to Starcraft are uncanny. As a keen iOS gamer, I like this. Though some game developers are beginning to offer iOS versions of their most popular releases, some still aren’t, and I admire how Gameloft offers a substitute to some of my favorite console and PC games.
Gameloft’s latest release is called Order & Chaos Online – and is their iOS answer to World of Warcraft (WoW). It just hit the App Store and comes with a $6.99 (universal) price tag. That’s not too bad for an iOS game, but you’ll also need to pay a subscription fee. You get three months free when you first login, and to continue playing after that you’ll have to pay $0.99 per month, $1.99 for three months, or $2.99 for six months.
Order & Chaos Online is a true real-time, full 3D massively multiplayer online role playing game, or ‘MMORPG’. It features a vast fantasy world for your to explore with thousands of other players from around the world. When you begin the game, you use the character creation system to cuztomize your hero.
Trying to answer the perilous question why they were storing cell phone tower data to begin with in their response to the iPhone tracking furor earlier today, Apple has disclosed a future product: a crowd-sourced database, using iPhone users as a way to determine arterial congestion… of the traffic variety, not circulatory.
Tina Fey must have thought she was just going to Google to promote her biography “Bossypants,” but she was in for some evangelism from Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and a little hostility from the crowd.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Mkufm3ncc&feature=player_embedded#at=78
The “fireside chat” first turns to gadgets about 25 minutes into the conversation. When asked about her five-year-old daughter, Fey says she uses her phone with “4,000 pictures on it” makes the unmistakeable iPhone scrolling motion with her finger and says “the phone is a good way to see what you’re actually doing in your life.”
Apple Wednesday said it will release a free update to its iOS software which the Cupertino, Calif. company claims will secure location data stored on the iPhone and iPad. The update will “reduce the size of the database file, encrypt the file, and ensure it is deleted if users disable location services on their iPhone or 3G-connected iPad,” Apple announced in a press release.
Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported the tracking feature continues even when users disable location services. The growing concerns, which now goes by “Locationgate,” has prompted class-action lawsuits and government investigations.
Apple is certainly rather talkative today; as well as confirming the release of the white iPhone 4 tomorrow, it has also issued a press release announcing that the iPad 2 will launch in another 12 countries this week.
Tomorrow, April 28th, the second-generation tablet will hit Japan; while Hong Kong, India, Israel, Korea, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and UAE will get the device on Friday, April 28th. China will also get the device on May 6th.
Customers can purchase the device at Apple retails stores from 9 a.m. local time, select Apple authorized resellers, and from Apple’s online store beginning at 1 a.m.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the iPad 2 I ordered in the U.K. on April 1st. What gives?
Embattled cell phone giant Nokia Wednesday announced it will cut 7,000 jobs as a result of its Microsoft Windows Phone agreement and outsourcing its Symbian handset software. The cuts represent 12 percent of the company’s handset employees and could save Nokia $1.46 billion.
“The competitive environment has changed rapidly,” explained Nokia CEO Stephen Elop. The cuts including 4,000 layoffs and 3,000 jobs shifted to Accenture are just the latest move by Nokia. It recently inked a deal supporting Microsoft’s Windows Phone software instead of Symbian. Additionally, Apple recently was pegged as the largest mobile phone company, in terms of revenue, causing Nokia to be the largest handset maker in only volume. The former Microsoft executive Elop was hired about a year ago in a bid to make the Finnish company more competitive with Apple’s iPhone.
In 2009, Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics (Blue) released the Yeti, a wonderfully talented little microphone that many, especially many podcasters, took notice of then proceeded to fall in love with. The Yeti was beautiful, dead-simple to use, and very Mac friendly. Yeti was also the first USB mic to allow users to record in any one of four different polar patterns (four I say!) making it incredibly versatile. And now, with the Yeti Pro, Blue is making their hit mic even better.
Apple has today issued a press release and finally confirmed the launch date of the white iPhone 4. It will be available beginning tomorrow, April 28th, from Apple’s online store, its retail stores, AT&T and Verizon stores, and select Apple authorized resellers.
It was also be available from various carriers in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, and the U.K.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president – who confirmed in a tweet that the device would launch this spring – said in the press release:
The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it’s beautiful. We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we’ve worked to get every detail right.
The device launches 10 months after it was first announced, with various manufacturing issues rumored to be the cause of the delay. Apple’s official statement will finally spell the end of white iPhone 4 rumors. Oh, Lord, what a wonderful day.
Crucial has just launched its new M4 lineup of 2.5-inch solid-state drives, which are the successors to the RealSSD C300 range, and boast faster read and write speeds. The M4 uses 25nm technology NAND flash created by its parent company Micron, and is available in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB models.
Crucial claim the new M4 SSDs reach read speeds of up to 415MBps – a 17% increase over its predecessor – while write speeds are up 20% with speeds of up to 260MBps.
As with all SSDs, however, this technology doesn’t come cheap. The 64GB M4 will cost you $130, which rises to $250 for the 128GB, $500 for the 256GB and $1000 for the 512GB. All can be purchased directly from Crucial and include a three-year warranty.
While the M4s are pretty pricey, solid-state drives are a great way of improving the speed of your Mac. Traditional hard drives are famous for being the bottleneck in modern-day Macs, and since the release of the incredibly nippy second-generation MacBook Air, many users have realized the difference an SSD can make and have adopted the new technology. Recent tests have proven that MacBook Pros equipped with SSD drives are significantly faster than those with traditional HDDs.
[via Macworld]
Apple pushed out the 9.1.2 update to iPhoto ’11 yesterday, introducing some new card themes and improving the application’s stability with several bug fixes.
Improvements to the application include fixes for the zoom slider in magnify view, an issue which prevented the toolbar from auto-hiding in full screen view, and minor issues with formatting with book, card and calendar themes.
The full release notes for the 9.1.2 release are as follows:
This update adds new card themes to iPhoto ’11. It also improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues, including the following:
• Addresses an issue that prevented the Zoom slider from being accessible in Magnify (1-Up) view
• Fixes an issue where Toolbars were not auto-hiding in Full Screen view
• Search field now correctly performs an “includes” search when searching by text string
• Fixes minor formatting issues with book, card and calendar themes
• Message Size of emails now correctly updates when changes are made using the Photo Size menu
• Addresses an issue that prevented some iPhoto 5 libraries from upgrading correctly
• Multiple book pages can now be drag-selected when in All Pages view
• Design tools in print project panels are now accessible via separate Layout and Options buttons
• Photo backgrounds applied to a book are now preserved when book type is changed
• Tab key can now be used to navigate through all text fields in a book projectThe update is recommended for all users of iPhoto ’11.
iPhoto ’11 users can get the update via Software Update, Apple’s website, or through the Mac App Store.
A new report from Nikkei Shimbun – the Japanese newspaper behind the iPhone 6 LCD rumors – claims the iPad 2 will finally launch in Japan on Thursday, April 28th. The second-generation tablet was delayed for over a month due to the earthquake and tsunami that recently devastated vast parts of the country.
Apple announced that it would be delaying the launch of the iPad 2 in Japan in the middle of March – stating its teams were focusing on recovering from the recent disaster – and the company is yet to release an update on the delay.
The iPad 2 was scheduled to launch in Japan on March 25th – the same day it hit 25 other countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Norway and the U.K.
If Nikkei’s claims are accurate, the iPad 2 will launch in Japan just a day after the white iPhone 4 is released worldwide; a busy week for Apple, it seems.
[via MacRumors]
Here’s TweetDeck v2, not just an update but a complete “re-imagining” of the original, say its makers.
To create v2 they stripped everything out and started again from scratch. The result is a Twitter client that’s faster and easier to use.
ipswDownloader is a great new tool that makes the process of finding and downloading iOS firmware releases incredibly simple. Developed by Vitaly Parovishnik, and available for both Mac and Windows, the app supports every iOS device there is – including AppleTV – and features iOS firmware from version 1.0.1.
What’s great about ipswDownloader is that once you’ve selected your device and the firmware version you want to download, it provides additional details on the release that jailbreakers in particular will find incredibly valuable; such as the baseband version, whether the firmware can be jailbroken and unlocked, and the size of the download.
ipswDownloader is completely free to download and use. The full list of supported devices can be found after the break.
Remember that really cool transparent rear panel for the iPhone 4 we posted about a while ago? It was allegedly achievable by removing your device’s rear panel and eliminating its black paint with some paint thinner – allowing you to look in on the iPhone’s internal beauty. Now you can have your own transparent iPhone without ruining your device’s housing with paint thinner.
iFixit have just released their new transparent iPhone 4 rear panel for just $29.95. The panel includes the flash diffuser and camera lens, so you require nothing more to acheive this ultra cool mod.
Installing the panel is easy: you simply remove the two screws at the base of your device and the rear panel slides off. Recent iPhone 4s will require a pentalobe screwdriver, whereas earlier models will require a Phillips #00 screwdriver.
The panel is currently only compatible with GSM models of the iPhone – apparently Apple has modified the rear panel layout for the CDMA iPhone, so Verizon customers are out of luck.
