Cult of Mac

There’s been a lot of press lately about Time Warner Cable’s foray into portability by offering its subscribers access to their programming via their iPads.

With iPhones and other devices replacing watches as personal timepieces for most people, analog craftsmen of yore are looking for other ways to ply their trades. Juxtaposing timekeeping technology across the centuries, luxury watchmaker De Bethune has introduced a new iPhone case that incorporates their DB 1024 pocket watch mechanism directly into the back panel of an alligator leather sleeve. It’s rather… unique. For those who can’t decide whether you prefer analog or digital, now you won’t have to make the choice.

I’m not sure the watch would provide good impact protection during a fall, however – for itself or the iPhone’s rear glass. Would that require another case to protect the first one?

[via Born Rich] [Gentleman’s Gadgets]

Everybody’s favorite jumping-as-high-as-possible iOS game, Doodle Jump, has just been updated with something cool: two player mode.

You can now challenge other Doodle Jumpers via Game Center, using your iDevice’s wifi connection. In two-player mode there’s a finish line, first player to reach it is the winner.

To spice things up, power-ups are shared between the two players. He who jumps higher, faster, gets to use them first.

“What a shame there’s no Doodle Jump for iPad,” you might whisper sadly. Whisper not: makers Lima Sky say Doodle Jump for iPad is on its way to us right now.

Signs are everywhere that Apple’s iDevices are gaining business cred. Apperian, a development firm making software that allows business to create and manage their own apps, just won $9.5 million in venture capital funding, according to a press release.

Apperian’s star iOS product is a cloud-based platform called EASE they claim is the first to allow large-scale creation and management of apps in a business environment — pretty key if you’ve got, say, 150 salespeople all needing access to the same sales app and whining for support every 15 minutes.

That Apperian managed to net the funding means that investors think EASE will increasingly allow iPads and iPhone’s to elbow their way into the enterprise world — traditionally the domain of RIM and the Blackberry. Apperian is also working on an Android-based version of EASE.

Daily coupon upstarts like Groupon and Living Social have become so massively popular that it’s gotta be increasingly difficult for older and more fogey-ish coupon flingers like Valpak to keep up.

So what Valpak has done is team up with the Junaio augmented reality app to provide an AR channel for Valpak deals in the area. Which is cool, because since Junaio is location based, rather than flip through Valpak’s iPhone app (yeah, they have an iPhone app now too) any potential coupon would just pop up on the screen when standing right outside the store.

Unfortunately, Valpak still seems to have retained its stodgy image; a pity, because the deals are actually pretty good. The Junaio channel’s a start though.

We start the day with three hardware deals. First is a number of MacBook Air laptops from the Apple Store, starting at $849 for a 1.4GHz 64GB SSD unit. Next is a MacBook Pro powered by a 2.53GHz Core i5 processor. The Expercom bundle also includes three years of AppleCare – all for $2,387. Finally, we’ve offered many iPod touch devices, but this is the first in memory that includes the Insignia GPS navigation system with 4.3-inch screen.

Along the way, we’ll also check out cases for your iPad, docks for your iPhone and LED Cinema Displays for your Mac. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

First, Amazon beat Apple and Google to the punch, announcing a cloud-based music locker. Now the Internet retailer says owners of its Kindle e-reader – which competes against the iPad – can avoid the New York Times’ newly-erected Paywall.

Subscribers to the Kindle version of the NYT will get free access to the newspaper’s online articles, avoiding paying a subscription requirement that went into effect Tuesday. Web users are able to read up to 20 articles each month free, afterwards paying either $15, $25 or $35 every four weeks.

It’s true: sometimes Macs do crash. More often than not, though, crashes will be limited to a single application, rather than the entire system.

You’ll know an app has crashed because it simply stops doing anything. Clicking on controls has no effect, scrolling gets you nowhere; the app simply doesn’t respond to your usual commands. So what do you do next?

First, don’t panic. OS X is designed to keep crashes under control. Even if an application has crashed, in most cases you’ll still be able to carry on just fine with work you’re doing in other applications. All you have to worry about is the one that’s crashed, and any unsaved work you had inside it.

The lines for the iPad 2 have been long and dragged on for weeks the launch. Many have lamented that they haven’t been able to get one, despite the wait .

Cult of Mac founder Leander Kahney was interviewed by NPR on the iPad 2 shortage and how he went about getting his hands on one just hours after launch.

Just days after Finnish cell phone giant Nokia was rebuffed by the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Finnish company is back with another patent-infringement complaint against Apple. Tuesday Nokia filed suit charging the Cupertino, Calif.’s devices – including the iPad, iPhone and iPad – violated seven patents.

Although not offering specific patents, Nokia claims they cover technology used for multi-tasking, data synchronization, call quality, positioning and Bluetooth. “Our latest ITC filing means we now have 46 Nokia patents in suit against Apple, many filed more than 10 years before Apple made its first iPhone,” charges Nokia’s Paul Melin, vice president of intellectual property.

Over at his official Twitter account, iPhone hacker Comex is airing some heady suspicions about Apple’s latest strategy in the cat-and-mouse jailbreak game. The talented hacker behind the Spirit and JailbreakMe 2.0 exploits is suggesting that Apple might have a spy within the iPhone Dev Team itself, allowing Cupertino to close exploits in their iOS software before the Dev Team can release a working jailbreak with them.

Yesterday, Apple opened up registrations for 2011’s WWDC, and within ten hours had already sold out of tickets. The more interesting rumor from yesterday, though, was that Apple would refrain from unveiling the iPhone 5 at this year’s WWDC, instead focusing entirely on software. That would mean that instead of the iPhone 5 shipping in June, as it has historically done, the iPhone 5’s launch would be pushed back until later in the year.

After the initial shock, the rumor sounds extremely likely. The report came from Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop, whose sources are solid. Moreover, the early year launch of the Verizon iPhone and Apple’s continued delay in shipping the white iPhone 4 (while repeatedly promising it’s still coming) all imply that Apple’s not planning the iPhone 5 in June, but will push it until later in the year, to debut before the holiday shopping season.

Over at Slashgear, Chris Davies brings up one interesting point: a late 2011 debut might give Apple more flexibility in making the iPhone 5 4G compatible. Qualcomm’s next LTE chipsets are due out at that point, and will allegedly boast improved power efficiency… the very issue that led Apple to leave LTE support out of the Verizon iPhone earlier this year.

If Apple does delay the iPhone 5 until later in the year, it’s all the more likely we’ll see a sizable update boasting 4G capability. For Verizon users, that means LTE; unfortunately, on AT&T, their HSPA+ “4G” smartphones are actually throttled to be slower than their regular 3G phones. If the iPhone does go 4G later this year, the Verizon iPhone 5 is going to be the clear winner: AT&T’s 4G network is a disgrace, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get substantially better anytime soon.

Google’s Android operating system is expected to lead a growing smartphone market, increasing its No. 1 position to just under 50 percent by 2015, according to one analysis released Tuesday. Apple is in third-place, its iOS commanding just 15.7 percent of smartphones. Potentially more troubling, the IDC report shows Apple’s growth by 2015 relatively flat, falling to 15.3 percent in four years.

As the smartphone market takes 49.2 percent of the mobile handset market, Nokia’s Symbian will suffer. The cell phone giant’s smartphone market share will fall from this year’s fourth-place 20.9 percent, to 0.2 percent by 2015, according to the researchers.

Steve Jobs was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, and Steve Jobs walked with God. According to the Jerusalem Post, this divine partnership will result in Apple building a veritable ark of an Apple Store in Jerusalem.

Measured in the go-to unit for ark building, the new Apple Store would be 185 cubits long and 185 cubits wide, or about 50,000 square feet in size. To put that in perspective, that’s absolutely gigantic: it’s the size of a football field, or about the size of a supermarket with 12-14 aisles. It would be humongous, without a doubt the largest Apple Store on Earth.

Why build such a massive Apple Store in Jerusalem of all places? “Symbolic reasons,” natch. In fact, the Jerusalem Post goes as far as to say that this Apple Store would house the world’s first “Apple Digital Library,” which would be open to the public.

It’s nice to think of an official Apple Store in Jerusalem, but I think we can all agree that a Home Depot sized Apple Store smack dab in the middle of one of the oldest cities on Earth sounds more than a little bit like wishful thinking. Some reporter annoyed with not being able to get an iPad 2 through Apple’s official Israeli reseller, iDigital, perhaps?

What can we expect when Apple previews iOS 5 at this year’s WWDC starting on June 6th? More robust integration with MobileMe’s forthcoming digital locker feature, that’s for sure, but what else?

For a hint, look at Cupertino’s acquisitions over the last year, says TechCrunch’s MG Siegler. He points to Apple’s 2010 acquisition of Siri, a startup branding its services as those of a virtual personal assistant.

Siri released a cool iPhone app that allowed you to ask your phone real world questions and have it cough up and map answers to you. For example, ask “Where is the nearest Starbucks?” and Siri would draw you a map, complete with walking instructions, as well as allow you to call them with just the click of a button. Ask “What’s playing at the local drive-in?” might pull up showtimes.

Very swift stuff, and now it’s being reported that Apple has deep baked Siri functionality right into iOS 5. That’s always been the rumor, but the idea of iOS doing this sort of stuff natively is just so sweet it’s liable to make one a little nauseous if they think too long on it.

Late tonight, Amazon took the wraps off of Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, free services for network storage and playback of MP3s and DRM-free iTunes audio files. Just as Ed predicted. Anyone with an Amazon account can sign up for 5 GB of space, and then you just upload your music library for access through any Flash-based browser or a brand-new Android app. From now forward, any Amazon MP3 store purchase will automatically be added to your Cloud Drive and won’t count against your storage quota. Larger capacities are available at $1 per GB per year starting at 20 GB.

In almost every regard, it’s exactly like Lala, the totally amazing cloud music service that Apple bought almost a year and a half ago and then promptly shut down. The only difference is that Lala also offered 10-cent song purchases for cloud-only use (as opposed to downloaded for offline use). This makes it all the more ridiculous that Apple still doesn’t have a cloud music service released. We’ve been hearing for some time that the iTunes Locker will arrive any day to offer something comparable, but Amazon’s move shows just how much Apple has slow-played its move toward streaming.

It would actually be fascinating to see Amazon release an iOS client for Cloud Player to really hold Apple’s feet to the fire. My over-riding concern with what I’ve heard about iTunes Locker is that Apple wouldn’t even match Lala’s old ability to offer songs from your entire music library and would instead offer access only to iTunes purchases. With Amazon offering something this simple and successful, Apple will have to go all out. This is why real competition is a very good thing for Apple users — it forces the company to leap over its own bar, not just hit it. Moreover, it will mean pushing ahead even if terms with record labels aren’t perfectly favorable.

— Sent in by everyone in my Twitter feed.

UPDATE: I’ve just discovered that if you visit your Cloud Drive through Mobile Safari, it is possible to play back audio on an iPhone, but only one track at a time through downloads. Hardly a useable solution, but an interesting trick nonetheless.

Now, far more useful is that you can also play back video loaded into the Cloud Drive on an iPhone, so long as it’s in a format Safari supports (preferably H.264). Amazon isn’t making a big deal out of video yet, but there is definite potential here. Especially if the geniuses at VLC or Plex figure out how to pull down a stream from your Cloud Drive…

That didn’t take long: Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is already sold out — less than 12 hours after $1599 tickets went on sale.

This looks like a record. Last year, it took 8 days for WWDC to sell out.

Apple’s annual developers conference takes place June 6-10 in San Francisco. The conference will focus on iOS 5and Mac OS Lion — and Apple seems to be setting expectations that there’ll be no iPhone 5 at the show. In past years, Steve Jobs has used to the WWDC stage to introduce new iPhone hardware.

A group representing thousands of independent software developers on Monday sent a letter objecting to four Democratic senators’ request last week to smartphone companies to remove applications that alert drivers to DUI checkpoints.

The folks at Digifit seem to have been working feverishly on evolving their iPhone-linked fitness-monitoring system since the last time we covered them, a few months ago.

In fact, the system seems to be evolving very closely along the lines of Wahoo’s Fisica system — so closely that their new $50 Digifit Connect 2 dongle (that’s it pictured below) looks the spitting image of Wahoo’s version. No surprise then that the $15 Digifit app is now also compatible with the Wahoo dongle. In addition, there’s a new $120, water-resistant, iPhone 3/4-compatible Digifit Connect Case for mounting on bicycle handlebars.

Apple Insider is reporting that a bomb threat has been made against Apple’s Elk Grove, California distribution center, with three builds evacuated as the threat is assessed.

We start off another week with another deal on the MacBook Air from Apple. This offer lasts until 4:30pm ET today and includes a 1.4GHz MacBook Air with a 12-inch screen for $850. Next is a way to convert all of that vinyl sitting around into digital tunes for your iPod. The Ion ISB Vinyl Turntable is just $59. We round out our spotlight deals with a small USB hard drive with hefty storage – 1TB.

Along the way, we check out FM transmitters for your iPhone, along with storage and other gadgets of interest to the iPod, iPad or iPhone owner. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Y’know how you’ll be chugging along on a game and get to a point where, for hours, the gameplay is just sod-awful boring? And you want to get up and watch TV, but don’t want to leave the game for fear something actually exciting — like crashing into a mountain — might happen? Well, there’s an app for that. In some instances, anyway.

In this case, clever app FSXFollow saves countless faux pilots from the numbing monotony of piloting their faux Cessnas over the Midwest, by shunting all the data to their iDevice, so the pilot can walk off and get a latte or watch TV. Definitely limited appeal to this app (and frankly, if the simulation or pilot is too hardcore to employ a simple time-lapse feature, I’m not sure getting up to watch TV or do laundry in the middle of a flight is any better; but then I’m not down with all the current FAA rules), but the concept is cool — using a handheld as an integral part of a much larger experience on the desktop.

FSXFollow works with apps like the superb X-Plane and Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X and costs $6. There’re more examples of this kind of mobile/desktop symbiosis, of course; anyone got a favorite?

Apple’s official Camera Connection Kit for iPad is pretty accommodating when it comes to sucking photos out of your digicam and into your iPad. Using the array of dongles, you can either suck content in through USB or just slap your SD card.

What about users stuck with that old stalwart standard, Compact Flash? Sure, you can slurp your pictures in by connecting your DSLR or video cam to your iPad 2 via USB, but what’s the fun in that when you can do it directly, thanks to this Compact Flash Card Reader for iPad.

The price is $30, which is the same as Apple’s official Camera Connection Kit costs, and comes with a built-in USB reader that can also suck in video and photographs from any thumb drive. If you’re looking to supplement your iPad with another photography-minded dongle, this looks like a good buy.

When Microsoft’s own answer to the iPod debuted back in November of 2006, one neat little feature it boasted that the iPod didn’t was the ability to share a song on your Zune with a friend for up to five plays by squirting it through WiFi to them when both your Zunes were in range. It was a really neat idea that, like many mechanisms allowing a user to lend digital content, ended up being crippled by chintzy, overly protective publishers.

Perhaps for just those reasons, Apple never did come up with their own way to share songs between iPods, but now, there’s an app for just that: Eavesdrop, which allows you to broadcast your iPod’s music library to any iOS device within range over WiFi and Bluetooth.

It’s a really neat idea. Unfortunately, since the functionality isn’t baked into iOS, both you and your friend will have to pay $1.99 for the Eavesdrop app to listen to each other’s music… and I can’t help but wonder how long it’ll be before Apple pulls the app due to recording industry complaints. So get it while it’s hot.

Apple’s tagline for this year’s WWDC is “Join us for a preview of the future of iOS and Mac OS X.” Jim Dalrymple over at the Loop says that tagline is worded very carefully, and that according to his sources, Apple will not announce any new hardware at the event… pushing the release of the iPhone 5 back indefinitely.

Traditionally, Apple unveils the newest iPhone every June at WWDC, along with iPod Touches in September and new iPads in March, but according to Dalrymple, Apple’s going to mix this up this year. Why?

“You get caught up in patterns, and it holds true, until it doesn’t,” Gartenberg told The Loop. “There is no reason for Apple to follow a predictable yearly pattern, and it keeps their competition off guard a little bit.”