Cult of Mac

It may have taken Apple three years, but iOS is finally in a state that there aren’t a lot of perceived criticisms when it comes to its feature-set. The niggling criticisms of naysayers like copy-pasted and multitasking have been addressed. What’s next for iOS 5, then?

9to5Mac has put up an interesting overview of what they think is coming in 2011 to iOS. With the operating system itself pretty robust, they believe that Apple will focus more on apps and services this year by leveraging many of their recent acquisitions in maps, voice control and cloud technology.

For some fun adventures surfing the HTML5 web as through a vintage NES, download Pixelfari and give it a spin. Built upon Safari, it’s of questionable import or usefulness, but it isneat. Twitter and Facebook are especially fun.

Our friends at Hong Kong-based M.I.C. Gadget have received a letter from Apple! It’s not a very nice one though. It concerns the Pineapple CEO action figure, which portrays our favorite technologist as a star-throwing ninja (remember the story about Jobs being stopped at airport security?).

“Mr. Jobs has not consented to the use of his name and/or image in the Product. Unauthorized use of a person’s name and/or likeness constitutes a violation of California Civil Code Section 3344, which prohibits the use of any person’s name, photograph or likeness in a product without that person’s prior consent… The figure and its stand are replications of Mr. Jobs image and Apple’s trademark. The thin attempt to “disguise” the figure in its current iteration does not impact the fact that you are plainly trading on Mr. Jobs image…”

M.I.C. Gadget says it’s sorry and will no longer sell the action figure.

Actually, we are wondering what took the law firm so long to send us an email to request us to cease the marketing and sale of the figure. We reviewed it on January 18, and we received the email on February 8. That’s almost a month time! We believe someone from Apple has bought the figure so the lawyer took so much time to look for us. So, who bought it??

M.I.C. Gadget: Apple Is Not Happy With The Pineapple CEO Action Figure

Imagine this scenario: your Mac crashes and all of your files are gone forever. Do you want this to happen to you? If not, Time Machine is the perfect solution. It automatically backs up your Mac every hour, so you can always have the peace of mind that your files are safe. The video below describes how you can set up Time Machine quickly and easily.

Apple will build a massive store in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, Cult of Mac independently confirmed.

The store will open in the fall, likely early September — and it will be Apple’s largest retail space in the world.

The store already has a name: Apple Store, Grand Central, according to a source close the company. The source said Apple will be making an internal announcement within the next month or so.

“The company will certainly pull out all the stops on this one,” said the source, who asked not to be named.

This year is the 10th anniversary of Apple retail, and Apple wants to make a big splash, our source said. Apple’s retail operation has been a spectacular success, helping fuel the company’s explosive growth and creating shops that make twice as much money as Tiffany & Co.

Rebutting the National Enquirer’s morbid rumors that he is near death, Steve Jobs will be among the attendees at President Barack Obama’s dinner with tech industry leaders in San Francisco tomorrow, an inside source tells ABC News.

At today’s White House press briefing, press secretary Jay Carney said that the focus of the event will be “innovation and job creation” with business leaders “who know a lot about private sector job growth.”

The full list of attendees has not yet been released, but it has been learned that outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Paul Otellini of Intel are also on the guest list.

Apple’s stock is taking a hit on fresh rumors that Steve Jobs has only a few weeks to live. Apple stock is currently down about three points in after-hours trading. It’s likely to take a big hit tomorrow when the markets reopen. The stock dropped a few points last week on rumors that Jobs was in hospital.

The sleazy rumors, published by the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, reportedly show photos of Jobs outside the Stanford Cancer Center in Palo Alto, his home town. The pictures don’t seem to be available online, but apparently show Jobs looking very thin and frail. The tabloid says Jobs has dropped from 175lb to just 130lb and has just six weeks to live. The topic is lighting up Twitter.

We don’t know whether the information is correct, but we certainly hope not. Best wishes Steve.

Daily Mail: Paper publishes shocking pictures of skeletal Steve Jobs claiming ‘cancer-stricken Apple boss may have just six weeks to live’

Readlines – ($0.99) Universal – News

Readlines makes great use of your iOS device while it’s sat in its dock on your desk, and turns an otherwise boring blank screen in to a big, bold stream of random headlines from your Google Reader RSS feeds. In the same way that the recent Trickle application displays tweets from your Twitter feed, Readlines cycles through your unread stories and displays a constant stream of headlines. Clicking on a headline that interests you will take you straight to Safari where you can read the whole article.

If you use your Google Reader account like I do, you’ll get hundreds of news stories every day that you’ll have to sift through to get to the good stuff that you want to know about. With Readlines you can simply get on with your work while your headlines are streamed to your desk, and it makes picking out only those that interest you incredibly simple.

Insane. According to Rovio’s Peter Besterbacka, gamers are now spending over two hundred million minutes every day playing their popular cross-platform title, Angry Birds, one of the most popular games on the iOS and Mac App Stores. Yeesh. Forget AAPL… it’s time to buy some Rovio stock.

Just so there’s no misunderstandings, Apple has posted a support document explaining the differences in making calls on the GSM (AT&T) and CDMA (Verizon) iPhones, as well as listing a few shortcuts available to Verizon customers for turning on things like call forwarding without opening the Settings.app. Good to know.

[via TUAW]

Omnivision, the company that makes the camera in your iPhone, have just outed their second-generation backside illuminated sensor, the OV8830, and it’s a pretty exciting product for Apple fans: it should give the iPhone 5 the ability to record 1080p video at thirty frames per second, as well as substantially improve image quality.

Yesterday, Apple revised its App Review Guidelines, and one of the provisions was that apps would no longer be accepted if they were primarily comprised of media content better sold through iTunes or the iBookstore. In other words, apps could no longer be mere wrappers around movies, albums or e-books.

That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t want movies and books on the App Store, though. They just want their apps to be more than just wrappers. Case in point, Warner Bros’ latest app: they have just released The Dark Knight as a downloadable app that contains a free five minute preview of the movie, with the full film available as an in-app purchase.

The distinction? The Dark Knight comes with a lot of extra features, just like you might find on the DVD version. Since that’s something iTunes Movies can’t do — yet! — Apple seems to be okay with Warner Bros’ releasing their movies in app form… which is good news for Warner Bros, who intend on releasing more movies as apps later in the year.

Analysts all seemed united that Verizon was going to sell a lot of iPhones the first week they were available. With breathless anticipations, these analysts rattled off predictions. Would Verizon sell 500,000 iPhones? A million? A jillion? The sky seemed to be the limit.

Well, admittedly, it’s informal, but Boy Genius Report has some exclusive numbers on how many iPhones Verizon sold through five Apple Store locations in the first five days of sale… and as you can see, while the Verizon numbers are undeniably higher than the AT&T numbers, they’re not orders of magnitude greater. Verizon and Apple are reportedly disappointed.

Mahjongg Dimensions – ($0.99) Universal – Games

Just like classic Mahjong, the main aim of this game is to use your creativity, speed, and memory by matching and removing all of the tiles before the times runs out, but Mahjongg Dimensions offers a whole new way to play. Rather than a set of 2D tiles, Mahjongg Dimensions is a rotatable 3D cube that requires you to explore each side in order to find your matches. The faster you match, the more points you’ll earn, and the points multipliers and bonus rewards ensure there’s plenty of excitement and intensity to keep you hooked.

For puzzle lovers, today’s must-have game is certainly worth its dollar price tag! I think it’s a great new way to play the classic game of Mahjong and offers a highly addictive challenge to those who are looking for something a little bit different.

We start the day with a new crop of App Store deals. First up are several applications marked down to $0, including “Piggy Woogy,” a puzzle game for your iPhone or iPod touch. Next are several iPhone apps which have been marked down in price, such as “Camera+”, a photo-taking utility. We wrap up the spotlight with an iMac bundle which includes a 27-inch i7-based desktop machine running at 2.93GHz, together with 16GB of RAM for $2,449.

Along the way, we check out another iMac (2GHz and 17-inch screen), along with more iPhone apps and assorted accessories and software for your iPhone, iPod and Mac. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Increased demand for the iPad helped Apple push past HP to become No. 1 in mobile PC shipments with 17 percent of the market during the fourth quarter of 2010, according to a research report released Wednesday. Apple shipped 10.2 million notebook and tablet PCs combined, almost one million units more than the market-leading PC maker, DisplaySearch announced.

“While we anticipate increased competition in the tablet PC market later this year with the introduction of Android Honeycomb-based tablets, Apple’s iPad business is complementing a notebook line whose shipments widely exceed the industry average growth rate,” Richard Shim, senior DisplaySearch analyst, said in a statement.

Last year, Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use Liquidmetal — a high-strength metal that is light and can be processed like plastic — in their future products.

An ex Liquidmetal exec thought Apple would make iPhones out of it. A source speaking to MacTrast, though, says that Apple’s Liquidmetal investment won’t debut in the iOS line, but instead in March’s MacBook Pro refresh… which looks like a far more radical redesign than previously suspected.

The Apple Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad fit together as if they were meant to be one and the same… so why aren’t they? While there are ergonomic reasons why it might not be ideal on the desktop, a combined keyboard/trackpad would be the perfect solution for people trying to control a Mac hooked up to their television, or when lounging in an arm chair in front of your iMac.

Enter the MagicWand, a new accessory from Twelve South that connects the Apple Wireless Keyboard to the Magic Trackpad without adding any additional bulk.

I puzzled awhile trying to figure out how the MagicWand holds the two accessories together until realizing how simple it was: it’s just a half-cylinder bracket that snaps along the battery case, tightly uniting the keyboard and trackpad when placed side-by-side in either righty or lefty configuration.

Very clever, and the price isn’t bad either: it’ll only cost you $29.99. After years of using an absolutely execrable combination keyboard/trackball for my home theater Mac, I’m going to switch to the MagicWand full time.

Microsoft has finally released its first piece of software on the Mac App Store, but it’s not one of their premier software packages like Office. Instead, Microsoft is dipping their toes in the App Store water by releasing Windows Phone 7 Connector as a free download through Apple’s digital delivery system.

Windows Phone 7 Connector has been available in beta since October, but it’s now a final release. The Connector app allows owners of a Windows Phone 7 device to sync their iTunes music, videos and podcasts to their phones.

Of course, we’ve never been quite sure what sort of mad man uses a Mac but owns a Windows Phone 7 device over an iPhone, but we’re sure there’s at least a few of them out there… albeit employed exclusively in Microsoft’s Mac software division.

If you’re one of them, you can download Windows Phone 7 Connector on the Mac App Store by just clicking here. Hey, why not… it’s free.

If you think your iPhone pics are museum quality, you may have the chance to see them hanging up in an art exhibit.

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, California is gearing up for an exhibit called “Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography” from March 31 to April 30, 2011.

You have until February 27 to submit your best pics.

Apple’s prohibitive new policies in regards to in-app purchases and in-app subscriptions have been spilling all the digital ink so far, but Cupertino also took the opportunity yesterday to clarify their position on “cheating” App Store developers: zero tolerance.

In Apple’s newly revised App Review guidelines, Apple has warned all devs who try to unfairly influence iTunes ratings, steal data from users or plagiarize other works that if they keep it up, they’ll be summarily kicked from the App Store.

Although Apple designed its CDMA iPhone for the U.S. market and carrier Verizon Wireless, workers for China Telecom say they’ve ‘jailbroken’ the domestic iPhone 4.

The “CDMA iPhone 4 has made its first call in China,” a group of employees at the carrier’s Guangdong branch writes on a blog, according to the Wall Street Journal Wednesday. The blog post is accompanied by a photo of a Verizon Wireless iPhone apparently jailbroken by the Mac version of Greenpois0n.

Back in July of 2010, John Browning, Jacob Balthazar and Claudia Keller filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple claiming that the iPad shutdown when used in direct sunlight due to heating issues.

The crux of their case? Apple’s marketing for the iPad — which, as you might recall, was heavily slanted towards e-reading at the time — (debatably)said that “reading on iPad is just like reading a book.” Books don’t overheat! Books don’t shut down!

Although many see problems with Apple’s new in-app subscription policy, some Wall Street experts view the mandate handed down as a boon both for the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant and businesses looking to attract iPhone, iPad and iPod users. Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White sees the subscription rule as an “incremental positive” while increasing the value of Apple’s “ecosystem.”

Subscriptions, White writes, will “extend the reach of [the] Apple ecosystem.” The new policy, requiring publishers to provide iTunes as an in-app subscription option, “offers content providers a deep customer base and a more innovative way to transact business.”

The next time you buy a couch, a car or a caffelatte, you can tell management what you think of the service with a stroke of your iPhone.

The Tello app lets you give a quick thumbs up or thumbs down and add comments on the fly as well as share your service woes or whoahs via Twitter and Facebook.

It runs on the iPhone, iPad and there’s a mobile version, too. Tello’s interface is clean, simple and has a database of 14 million businesses and if it can’t find your bodega, you can easily add it.