Ably beating Apple for a change, Google has just joined Amazon in unveiling their cloud-based music service at this year’s Google I/O conference… but it’s still hard to believe that Cupertino won’t be able to clobber Google Music once iTunes joins the cloud, especially given the new service’s reliance upon Adobe Flash.
It is quickly becoming clear that the end of the PC-era is approaching as consumers rapidly adopt mobile alternatives, such as the Apple iPhone and iPad. Intel, which powered many PCs, could be left in the dust, warns a former Apple executive. “Now that the PC market is in its twilight, with mobile devices proliferating and stealing growth from the PC, surely Intel has got to get into the race,” writes Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive now with venture-capital firm Allegis Capital.
Gassée, who headed Apple Macintosh development in the 1980s under then-CEO John Sculley, writing in his blog “Monday Note”, slammed the chip giant for its “complete absence from the mobile scene. Not a single smartphone contains an x86 processor.”
Karelia Software announced a major upgrade to the company’s flagship Sandvox product Tuesday, making it possible even for CEOs to quickly and easily build a website.
Far simpler than Dreamweaver yet more flexible and robust than iWeb, Sandvox 2.0 is designed for Mac and brings fully competent web design within the realm of possibility for those with nothing more than a desire for presence on the Internet and a vague idea of what it should look like.
Its palette of stock site designs aren’t especially cutting-edge but what Sandvox does offer is clean and uncluttered, with a range of inoffensive color themes that should appeal to the wide audience of individuals and small business owners who may be flummoxed by an infinite variety of web-publishing platforms — and don’t want to pay an actual web designer to build an attractive, functional website.
Touting it as the first app-as-schoolwork project in the U.S., the kids at North Heights Alternative School in Amarillo, Texas are at work on an app called Amarillo 365.
Priced at $2.99 (with $1 going to a scholarship funds for the students), the app will provide visitors and locals alike with information on local attractions and events.
“We go out and we do all the research we meet with the business leaders, community leaders the kids basically are writing on their entries, they’re doing four to five entries of about 150 words,” said Mark Williams, North Heights English Teacher and project supervisor. “They’re having to do some intense research.”
Onyx is a free system maintenance tool for Mac OS X.
One of the nice things about Onyx is that it covers everything you can think of. It’s packed with tools that you might want to use often, plus some you might use only once in a blue moon. But they’re all there, in one place.
A 20-year-old died in a drug deal where the currency was an iPad for heroin.
Malachi Urbini, a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, was reportedly shot in the face by 19-year-old Taivon Cunningham. According to police, Urbini had previously handed over his iPod in trade four stamp bags of heroin earlier that night.
It’s a safe bet that most Cult of Mac readers – and certainly all the Cult of Mac writers – are broadly in favour of almost everything Apple creates.
Almost everything.
If there’s one feature of OS X (Snow) Leopard that drives me and every other Mac user I’ve ever known mad with fury, it’s the Help Viewer, and its obstinate insistence on floating on top of every other window in sight.
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:
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.
