Have you ever seen a great YouTube video that you wanted to download but didn’t know how?
The browser extension FastestTube solves that. The free extension works with Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and even Interent Explorer!
This video will show you where and how to get FastestTube, as well as download a video and save it to your hard drive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph97RbPIh_U
Earlier today, we reported that the iPad 2 might be delayed until June because of production bottlenecks, but noted our skepticism of the report, saying Apple wouldn’t release the iPad 2 and the iPhone 5 in the same month.
A mere hour later, Business Insider is now reporting that the iPhone 5 might not launch until September, citing a note from FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger.
Berger writes, “”For the iPhone 5, we continue to hear that a July launch is unlikely, with various casing suppliers and touch suppliers still ramping up, with some chip vendors not having yet received firm iPhone 5 orders, and with other sockets like the image sensor (most likely going to Omnivision exclusively, but with some potential for Sony to split that socket) still in flux. Given these factors, we think a September launch is more likely, off from Apple’s traditional iPhone launch schedule, but giving the firm more time to enhance its next-generation instant communications on the phone.”
If true, this would allow the iPad 2 to occupy the iPhone’s previous launch spot of September, possibly pushing the iPod Touch back into November or December… as well as give early Verizon iPhone 4 adopters three months less reason to kick themselves when their hot new phone is made obsolete.
In the wake of Apple’s new in-app subscription rules, we’ve already seen revolt from the makers of Readability and TinyGrab, who sent out blistering open letters yesterday explaining how Apple’s new rules effectively barred them from the App Store.
TinyGrab’s take was particularly interesting: the new in-app subscription rules prevent software-as-a-service apps (like Evernote, Dropbox, TinyGrab and more) from coming to the App Store at all. But in a recent email from Steve, the on-leave Apple CEO says that that’s not the intention at all…
Nine months in, Apple still hasn’t managed to ship the elusive white iPhone 4. A problem with the painting process on the white glass plate causes light to leak onto the camera sensor, washing out images. At this point, you’d think Apple would just give up and move on, but the white iPhone 5 is the Moby Dick to Steve Jobs’ cantankerous, turtlenecked Ahab. We’re in the realm of obsession here.
None the less, a brief note over at Digitimes says that Apple is already looking towards the future of pastiness, and have just signed Wintek to be the sole touch panel supply for all white iPhone 5s.
I suppose the comfort in all this is that, given what a debacle the white iPhone 4 has been, you can bet on the fact that Apple will have the white iPhone 5 perfected as a point of pride at launch.
Given Apple’s history fulfilling a yearly iOS device refresh cycle, we’ve been taking the iPad 2’s debut in late March or early April as read, but if a recent analyst report is to be believed, Cupertino might very well miss that day… delaying the iPad 2 into June.
According to a report by Yuanta analysts Vincent and Alison Chen, the iPad 2 may be delayed until June because of “production bottlenecks” at manufacturer Hon Hai Precision.
“Our checks suggest new issues are being encountered with the new production and it is taking time to resolve them,” said Chen in the report. “As a number of Android 3.0 tablets are being launched in April and May, the delay in iPad 2 shipments may give the Android camp a brief window of opportunity.”
Apple is helping finance a major remodel of Stanford Hospital (where Jobs was photographed by the sleazy National Enquirer). But is Apple also helping design the $2 billion facility, perhaps based on the design of its retail stores?
Check out the rendering of the atrium above. Look familiar? Note the massive skylight, the marble floors. Is that a Genius Bar on the right?
Most important, the brains behind Apple’s stores — Ron Johnson — is intimately involved.
Volcano Escape – ($1.99) iPhone – Games
One of my favorite games to hit the iPhone recently is Volcano Escape – a brilliant new action platformer that takes you on a fun-filled mission to escape a scorching hot volcano, while a hoard of tribal minions attempt to ruin your progress and barbecue your bones. Wield a selection of impressive weaponry that includes grenade launchers, jet packs, and shotguns, and take out the evil tribe on your route to safety through a rich 3D environment with beautifully bright visuals.
Volcano Escape is a terrific platformer that provides level after level of action-packed entertainment, which, together with its crazy characters and explosive weaponry, makes it one of the greatest games in its genre.
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The broad application of Apple’s new App Store subscription guidelines to everything from magazines (sensible) to Kindle books (questionable) to Readability (delusional) to Tiny Grab and possibly DropBox (downright silly) could end up being the single-worst business decision the Cupertino Colossus has made in the last decade, for one very simple reason: it seeks to maximize App Store revenue at the expense of making iPhones and iPads the most attractive hardware platforms on the market. Getting 30% of Readability’s revenue cannot possibly justify the risk of making the iPad sell a few hundred thousand fewer units.
The new MacBook Pros expected later this week will boot off solid-state drives, claims Boy Genius Report, citing unnamed sources.
In addition:
Boy Genius Report: New MacBook Pro models imminent; we’ve got some new details
Oscar Backstage Pass – ($0.99) Universal – Entertainment
To help you make this year’s Oscars the most enjoyable, the official Oscar Backstage Pass application for iOS gives you access to live streams from exclusive cameras places throughout the red carpet, the Kodak Theatre, and the Governors Ball, so that you can go beyond the TV broadcast and experience more live action as it happens. Watch the 83rd Academy Awards with this ingenious interactive application on your iPhone or iPad and get access to more stars, more glamour, and more of everything you love about the Oscars.
Its brilliantly designed user interface makes it easy to navigate between each live camera and shows you exactly where each camera is placed at the awards – this marvellous idea ensures you won’t miss a single moment of Hollywood’s biggest event.
Watch the Oscars live this Sunday, February 27th, at 8et/5pt on ABC.
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We start off another week with a new crop of price cuts from the iPhone App Store, along with an iPad app and a bargain on a 27-inch LED Cinema Display for your Mac.
Along the way, we also check out some music accessories for your iPod, a carbon fiber skin for your iPhone 4 and software for your Mac. As always, details on these and many more items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
The makers of Readability aren’t the only small app developers openly criticizing Apple this morning for their prohibitive new in-app subscription and purchasing guidelines. The makers of Tiny Grab — a social screen grabbing service — have just posted an open letter of their own, explaining in detail how the new in-app policies would prevent them from coming to the Mac App Store.
Why? Apple’s new guidelines don’t allow them to offer goods that exist outside the app and the app store… a must for any cross-platform, digital locker app that exists by selling access to new features or more storage instead of traditional in-app content.
We’ve already seen two of the major streaming music subscription services openly revolt in response to Apple’s newly prohibitive in-app purchase guidelines, demanding a 30% cut on all subscriptions, products and services offered through any iOS app. Now smaller devs are starting to pipe up too.
Arc90 — the developers of Readability, a cross-platform Javascript plug-in that enhances online content by simplifying it down to its barest and most readable elements — were developing an iOS subscription app leveraging Instapaper’s technology that would allow them to give 70% of their income to the content producers being read through their service. It was an innovative and practically revolutionary plan to reward authors for their work while enhancing the user’s reading experience by stripping out advertisements, and you can read more about Arc90’s plans for the app in our exclusive interview.
Unfortunately, it now seems that Readability will not be coming to iOS: according to Apple’s tightened restrictions, the Readability app was rejected by Apple for utilizing a subscription system that doesn’t use Apple’s In App Purchase API.
Apple, in other words, wants their 30% cut…. and Arc90 is hopping mad about it, having posted a scathing open letter about the matter on their official blog, in which they accuse Apple of greed and turning their backs on the developers who made iOS such a rich, dynamic and innovative platform to begin with.
The Arc90 blog is being hammered right now, so we’ve posted a copy of their letter after the jump.
The incredible indie sensation Minecraft has sold over 1.3 million copies since it was first released halfway through last year, and it’s still only in beta. Expect the amount of copies sold to quickly grow as high as one of Minecraft‘s physics-defying, voxel-based fantasy structures in 2011, though, because dev Mojang has just announced that Minecraft will be coming to iOS in 2011.
This one’s for the sharps: an official pack of playing cards featuring OS 7 icons instead of faces and suits is now available on eBay. It’s a real Apple product, originally sold only to Apple employees from the Apple campus store.
Current bid is a respectable £51.00, although my guess is that before bidding ends, you’ll be out a bad Blackjack streak in Vegas’ worth of chips to acquire this lovely retro deck. I’m tempted to bid myself: this would be the perfect deck to add insult to injury to the inamorata in my ongoing, fifteen-game Cribbage winning streak.
[via MacStories]
Wireless carriers in the United Kingdom are drastically lowering their subsidized prices on the original iPad, strongly suggesting that they are clearing inventory in anticipation of the imminent launch of the iPad 2.
In November of last year, Cult of Mac reported that the iPhone 5 would gain a near-field communications chip, which would enable an ambitious remote computing scheme that would effectively allow you to take your desktop Mac’s settings and files “on the road” with you, syncing it with another Mac just by waving your iPhone in front of the screen.
Now Apple has been awarded a software patent for a new OS X feature that could be an integral part of their future remote computing plans: it describes a way for users to secure vital files in a virtual ‘safe deposit box’ which would then encrypt them and possibly even upload them to the cloud.
Remember the WALDok? It sounded like the unholy cybernetic offspring of WALL-E and Iron Man’s creepy hypercephalic floating robot head nemesis, MODOK, but the WALDok was actually a Kickstarter project for a gorgeously compact speaker dock for the iPod nano capable of outputting some truly impressive sound while simultaneously juicing you up.
The only problems with the WALDok? First, it was iPod nano only… a design decision which seemed to unnecessarily specify the WALDok into obscurity. Second, as a Kickstarter project, it hadn’t yet made enough money in $59 pledges to guarantee that it would ever be made.
Luckily, over the weekend, both problems resolved themselves. Designer Hern Kim not only redesigned the WALDok to accommodate other iPod models, but also surpassed the $30,000 pledge total thanks to some publicity from Gizmodo and Wired, meaning that the WALDok will soon be a very real product. $59 pledged at this point is as good as a pre-order. Hooray!
At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, over twenty tablets made their debut running Google’s tablet-centric flavor of Android, Honeycomb… but if early indications are anything to go by — namely, the Motorola Xoom 3G’s entry-level price of $799 — it looks like none of these tablets will be competitive with the iPad. If the so-called “Apple Tax” is real, why can’t the competition beat the iPad in price?
Wired’s Brian X. Chen has an excellent overview of the many reasons that other tablet makers are just not able to compete with the iPad’s price tag. There’s a lot of factors at play here, but essentially, what it all comes down to is that Apple doesn’t have to pay a cut of every iPad to nearly as many parties as Motorola, say, has to pay for the Xoom.
Apple’s A4 chip design is owned by them, so they don’t have to pay licensing fees. They sell the iPad primarily through their online store or their 300 retail locations, which means other retailers don’t take as much of a cut. They don’t have to license an operating system. Furthermore, Apple can subsidize each iPad in small part thanks to the cut they make on every sale made through iTunes, including the App Store, their music and video stores and the iBookstore.
All together, it looks like the reason competing manufacturers can’t make a tablet with the same features and price as the iPad is because it’s impossible for anyone but Apple to do so at this point. Apple’s the only device manufacturer out there in control of its own manifest destiny from hardware through software, from physical retail presence down to digital delivery. Forget the Apple Tax: the sub-$500 tablet is a product only Apple is in a position to make.
Light Peak is likely on its way to Apple’s 2011 Mac line up, and might debut in Thursday’s MacBook Pro refresh… but what about Apple’s iOS products? MacRumors postulates that Light Peak is also coming to the iPad 2. We seriously doubt it, though.
The new MacBook Pros are due on Thursday according to pervasive Internet scuttlebutt, and at the very least, a jump to Intel’s new Sandy Bridge architecture is a sure thing… but another state-of-the-art Intel technology might be coming to them as well, with Mactrast reporting that the February 24th MBP refresh might include the adoption of Intel’s Light Peak technology.
Apple has delayed shipping MacBook Pros on its online store for 3-5 business days… delaying the earliest day you can have a MacBook Pro shipped to you to well-ahead of the rumored Thursday launch of the next-gen MacBook Pros. Given how religious Apple’s Tim Cook is about supply, this has all the markings of an official MacBook Pro refresh.
Before the Mac, before the Apple II, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made their first product: a digital Blue Box for hacking into telephone systems. In this clip from the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, Jobs describes how the capability of this device so impressed two young teenagers that they began to realize the power of ideas and the potential of technology to control vast amounts of information.
If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.
They also realized the importance of good product packaging – nice wooden shipping case!
Apple appears to have re-introduced the full version of field test mode in iOS 4.3 Beta 3, which will allow you to quickly check the quality of your cellular signal by simply dialing: *3001#12345#* and pressing Call on your iPhone.
Under iOS 4.0 the field test vanished much to everyone’s dismay during Antennagate last year only to have a much simplified version reappear in iOS 4.1 that looked like this:
AT&T is now offering information about their 4G HSPA+ coverage in the U.S. The cities and areas that have completed the backhaul upgrades to support this are:
●Bay Area, CA
●Greater Los Angeles, CA
●Northern, CA
●Chicago, IL
●Boston, MA
●Baltimore, MD
●Charlotte, NC
●Buffalo, NY
●Providence, RI
●Houston, TX
●Dallas, TX
●Puerto Rico
If your area has HSPA+, but not the backhaul upgrade then you will not be able to experience the new 4G network speeds. However, AT&T’s network completely supports HSPA+ and they will eventually have the backhaul upgraded everywhere else.
You can check out AT&T’s coverage map that includes 4G coverage by visiting www.att.com/network and clicking on the coverage tab. Hovering your mouse over the map will reveal the 4G HSPA+ cities and locations listed above.
Have you noticed the difference? Tell us about it by leaving a comment.
[via iClarified]
