Cult of Mac

One of the most impressive iOS games included in our must-haves this week is the much anticipated Dead Space from Electronic Arts. Delve into an all-new Dead Space story three years on from the destruction of Marker in the first Dead Space release, and find yourself on a mission of uncertain purpose in the Mines of Titan. Experience first-hand the events that unleash Necromorph hordes once again in the first ever Dead Space storyline devised for iOS.

Zombie Cafe is a unique cafe management sim in which you use zombies for your workers as opposed to living humans. In a town where it’s hard to find good employees, you’ve partnered up with an evil corporation to use zombies as free labor to build your cafe empire. What’s great about Zombie Cafe is that when your local competition gets too fierce, you can summon your team of zombie workers to attack your neighboring rivals and steal their secret recipes.

In Grim Joggers you have control of a group of 15 joggers and your mission it to take them as far as you can before each and every one of them faces their gruesome end. This arcade-style survival game sees casual jogging become a gory bloodsport.

Find out more about the games above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves, including Pocket Dinosaurs 2 and Aerial Assault, after the break!

I’ve been keeping my eye out for a basic, inexpensive iPhone stand for a while now. I use my iPhone as an alarm clock at night and I’ve needed something to keep it propped up. Well I’m happy to report I’ve found my solution, it’s called the Glif.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Here at Macworld, people are raving about the iStreamer, a small metal box that turns your iPhone or iPad into a high-fidelity audio source by connecting it to your home stereo.

Columnist Jeff Yang has a great piece on how Steve Jobs used his extreme focus to make Apple into the new Sony.

There’s tons of great stuff in here. It’s a very well-informed piece.

Here’s Yang talking about how Jobs’ study of Zen has influenced his approach to design, which I’ve never seen discussed before:

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Macworld 2011 is in full swing. Even without Apple, the show is packed and there’s a great vibe. The best thing is the people. Check out some of the many friendly faces and interesting products on the show floor.

Above: Three-year-old Hope Malabed takes a break with an iPad. There’s lots of kids with iDevices at Macworld.

I realize a lot of people don’t care about how nasty their iPhone or iPad screens get—but I do—and I know I’m not alone.

Well those of us who like to keep a clean screen have a nifty new tool at our disposal: it’s called the Sidekick, and from what I saw, it works great. Peep the video to see how it works.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Given the explosion of visual art inspired by mobile devices running Mac iOS and apps developed to help artists create work on them, it came as a bit of a surprise to see the way Macworld organizers chose to display digital art at the 2011 Conference and Expo.

The Expo’s art was placed in “digital art galleries” displayed on 27″ Samsung wide-screen TVs housed in unobtrusive kiosks, dispersed in the cavernous hallways of the 2nd and 3rd floors, where only a portion of the conference’s attendees — media personnel and those who purchased something other than Expo Only tickets — was likely to see it.

This is curious in the light of recent attention given to the digital creations of artists producing work on the Mac platform, which in years past could be seen framed, on brightly-lit wall space, in the middle of well-trafficked concourses.

Click on images in the gallery above to see artist and title information, as well as the curious distortion effects rendered in iPhone photographs of art (made, in many cases, ON iPhones) displayed in a digital TV slideshow.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Two years ago, when Apple announced the company would skip the Macworld Conference and Expo after 2009, some took the news like a punch to the gut — and many wondered if the twenty-five year-old event would survive.

But without Apple totally dominating the event, the show has become what it was always supposed to be — a place for the wider Apple community to meet and mingle.

Got a new MacBook Air and looking for an accessible docking solution for when you want to work on a larger monitor at your desk?

The BookArc is an attractive docking solution for the Air made from heavy gauge steel with a built-in wire management system that neatly integrates the cables that need to plug into both sides of the Air.

You’ll need to supply your own display, mouse and keyboard, but once that’s done, turning your Air into a desktop is as easy as positioning your closed Air in the BookArc cradle and plugging it in… and because your Air docks in a closed position, it should run even faster than if you just plugged your display normally, because the Air’s GeForce 320M only needs to drive a single display.

The BookArc is only $39.99, but it won’t ship until February. If you want to keep appraised of when it becomes available, you can sign up for notifications over at the official website.

If you want something more capable than an AppleTV to hook up to your television (most notably the ability to play local content), the Mac mini has the perfect form factor for a working HTPC… and now Mac accessory maker OWC is ready to supercharge it for you for that express purpose.

Called the Media Center Solution, the service works by just shipping any new Mac mini to OWC, who then go about upgrading the RAM to 4GB, installing a bundle of open source media center software like (Plex, Handbreak, MakeMKV) and then linking the Mac mini with either a 4, 8 or 12TB RAID, which will allow you to store up to 6,000 hours of DVD-quality video.

That’s not all. Not only will OWC send it to you back with an optional external Blu-Ray drive, you can also pick between two Elgato HDTV interfaces allowing you to use your Mac Mini as a DVR. They’ll even throw in a $15 iTunes gift card and an Apple Remote.

Monster Cable’s a pretty loathsome company, suing pretty much everyone who dares put the word “monster” in their names while selling absurdly overpriced copper under advertising claims that border on the pseudo-science employed by snake oil salesmen. I hate these guys… which is part of the reason why I’m so shocked by how neat I think their latest product is.

Ludicrously called the Monster iMotion CarPlay 3000, the cable is a car charger for your iPhone or iPod with one neat little extra: it allows you to control your music without ever touching your device just by making gestures in mid-air as you drive.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Macworld 2011 is in full swing. Even without Apple, the show is packed and there’s a great vibe. The best thing is the people. Check out some of the many friendly faces and interesting products on the show floor.

Above: Cute girls in short tube dresses. Good thing are weather here is unseasonably warm! They are promoting MacKeeper and boy did they get a lot of attention!

We close out another week of Mac deals with a MacBook Air and two iPhone bargains. First up is a number of refurbished MacBook Air laptops, starting at $849 for a 1.4GHz model with a 64GB SSD. Next is a list of free iPhone applications, including “Knight Defense.” Finally, although not free, it is pretty close: AT&T is offering a refurbished 8GB iPhone 3GS for just $9.

Along the way, we take a look at several cases for your iPad and iPhone – from leather to carbon fiber. As always, details on these items and many others can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

If a device works on a movie audience, it’ll also work as a real-world product. That’s the “meta lesson” from Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff who study how sci-fi interfaces in movies make it off the silver screen and vice versa. (Is that the coolest job ever, or what?)

Despite the unfortunate late-afternoon slot – the tide of Macworld attendees was on its way outside – about a hundred people showed up to listen to findings on their forthcoming book, “Make It So – Learning from SciFi interfaces.”

Noessel, an interaction designer and Shedroff, program chair of the MBA in Design Strategy at the California College of the arts, believes that Steve Jobs may have used the 2004 Pixar movie “The Incredibles” to test whether audiences would accept the idea of a tablet computer.

In a unique alliance, Samsung (maker of the iPad rival Android-powered Galaxy phone and tablet) will sell half of its mobile processor chip output to Apple (maker of the iPhone and iPad), according to a Friday report. Samsung makes the low-power but brawny A4 chip which Apple designed and uses in its iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Apple TV.

“Samsung has agreed with Apple to quadruple monthly shipments of its mobile AP chips to 20,000 sheets throughout this year from 5,000 last year,” reports the Korea Times, citing an industry source.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Dolly Drive, a new cloud-based storage solution specially tailored to Mac specifications, launched Thursday from the Indie Spotlight at Macworld in San Francisco and looks to be one of the smartest plays — and best values — to come out of this year’s show.

Remote storage accessible from anywhere, any time, Dolly Drive is designed to work exclusively and specifically with Apple’s Time Machine, giving Mac users an inexpensive, seamless method for creating secure, redundant (in some cases, perhaps, primary) backups that can be accessed to restore digital files from any location with an Internet connection.

With tri-level security including authentication encryption, data transmission over secure tunnel and multi-leveled, complex authentication protocols for third-party access to data at Dolly data centers, a Mac user can feel confident in the security of data stored for as little as $10 per month for 250GB. Other pricing plans prove Dolly Drive is serious about delivering value for a service that should be attractive to computer users of any sophistication level.

No other remote storage solution we’re aware of is engineered to work directly through Time Machine, nor is any so dedicated to serving Mac users.

This is definitely one of the nicest finds we’ve seen at Macworld 2011 and well worth further exploration.

In just a couple of days, Apple will be putting the venerable Xserve line of rack server Macs out to pasture in favor of the Mac mini. So if you need any, get hopping… just don’t expect Apple to do the same in shipping them out. In fact, the Apple Store is now listing both the Quad-Core and 8-Core Xserves as not shipping for another three months.

As experts attempted to gauge the potential impact of AT&T losing its exclusive iPhone arrangement to Verizon, the opinions ranged from a severe body blow to downright demolishing. However, just weeks from the Feb. 10 (Feb. 3 for pre-orders) date for Verizon sales to begin, one expert claims 90 percent of AT&T iPhone owners are locked-in to contracts with costly early-termination fees.

Indeed, Susquehanna analyst Jeffrey Fidacaro believes AT&T will lose 2 million subscribers – “at most” to rival Verizon. What’s holding them there? Apparently, there are several hundred reasons. The No. 2 carrier will charge a $325 early-termination fee. The 90 percent expected to remain with AT&T is even higher than the figure CEO Ralph de la Vega gave reporters last year. The carrier executive said in May that he wasn’t too worried about the (then potential) Verizon deal, given that 70 percent of iPhone owners used family plans with onerous restrictions and the 40 percent of iPhone users attached to corporate discount plans.

Still rocking an iPod Classic? I know I am: although I love my iPod Touch, a part of me just can’t let go of the notion that the true magic of the digital music experience is the ability to carry around, on one pocketable device, more music than you could conceivably listen to in a decade. Picking and choosing which songs and albums to load? What is this, the stone age?

That’s why I still rock my 160GB iPod Classic, which is actually just a few gigs a way from being filled up entirely. Now Toshiba is doing the rounds with a new 1.8-inch drive that is just as thin as the current Classic drives — just 5mm — but goes all the way up to 220GB, while boasting better battery life and a bigger buffer for less skipping.

So: 220GB iPod Classics, coming soon? I don’t really know. I’d say that the Classic line is on its way out: Apple’s committing to flash memory and multitouch these days. But is there a possibility that Apple will continue to crank out the Classic to appeal not to everyday users but to niche listeners like me who want to hold their entire iTunes libraries in the palm of their hands? I doubt it — extreme niche really isn’t Apple’s thing — but maybe.

[via Hard Mac, 9to5Mac]

AT&T is expecting a “rocky, volatile and hard to predict” 2011 after losing iPhone exclusivity, said CEO Randall Stephenson speaking with analysts on Thursday.

However, the erstwhile sole American provider of Apple’s nifty prestige handset claims to be “fairly confident” that they will still manage to grow through the disruption.

Last quarter, AT&T gained enough subscribers to pass Verizon as the biggest domestic wireless carrier, now boasting 95.5 million wireless customers compared to Verizon’s 94.1 million.

The only problem is now Verizon’s got the iPhone, and analysts are going absolutely bonkers predicting how many people will flee AT&T, and how many CDMA iPhones Verizon will sell. Some analysts say that up to 10% of AT&T’s existing subscribers could jump ship in the coming year, while others suggest that Verizon could sell twenty five million CDMA iPhones.

Meanwhile, Verizon’s further sweetening the pot by offering unlimited data and mobile hotspot features for up to five connect devices, neither of which AT&T has officially countered yet.

“Rocky?” Seems like a bit of an understatement, don’t you think? 2011 is going to be a knuckle-whitener for AT&T.

I’d be hard pressed to identify a gadget more likely to be repeatedly dropped as much as a cell phone. The constant, frenzied fumbling into a pocket for a ringing call pretty much guarantees that your phone will go flying out of your hands on at least one occasion. So when Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 with a design that was glass both front and back, I arched my eyebrow. I suspected daftness.

As it turns out, though, the iPhone 4’s Gorilla Glass backing is pretty tough. It’s not tougher than the iPhone 3GS’s plastic, though. There was also Glassgate, where various third-party slider cases would cause particulate matter to become trapped between the rear back of the iPhone 4 and case, scratching the Gorilla Glass and even growing into larger fractures over time.

No surprise, then, to hear that the first class action lawsuit over Apple’s decision to use Gorilla Glass in the casing of the iPhone 4 has just been filed in Los Angeles. The lawsuit, filed by Donald LeBuhn, claims that the iPhone 4 is not as durable as Apple claims and that Apple continues to sell the product without warning customers of its defective glass housing.

After months of rumor, speculation and delay, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, is finally ready to say “how do you do,” judging by these very stodgy and dusty invites News Corp. just sent out.

The Daily will be officially unveiled on Wednesday, February 2nd at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City at 11am EST, headed by Rupert Murdoch and Apple VP of Internet Services Eddie Cue.

Yesterday afternoon, Apple released version 10.1.2 off iTunes through Software Update, a seemingly mysterious update to Apple’s catch-all media library / shopping / syncing / social networking software gryphon.

As is usually typical, Cupertino was terse about what was in iTunes 10.1.2, only noting that it “provides a number of important stability and performance improvements.” No new features were mentioned.

Don’t shrug off iTunes 10.1.2 though, especially if you plan on buying a Verizon iPhone in the coming weeks. In the update’s Read Before You Install iTunes document loaded in the .dmg file, it is explicitly noted that the 10.1.2 update adds support for syncing with the CDMA iPhone 4.

Best grab the 10.1.2 update now if you plan on jumping ship to Verizon. You might easily forget, then spend hours bashing your head against the wall in activation before a Genius finally explains the problem to you with such smug bemusement that you almost squinch his turtleneck shut with your hands then and there.

If you bought your copy of excellent FTP client Transmit directly from its makers at Panic Inc, then stand up and shout “YAY”, because you can go grab yourself an updated version today.

But if you bought your copy via the magical Mac App Store, turn towards Cupertino and shout “BOO”, because the exact same update was submitted to their approval system three weeks ago, and still hasn’t been approved.

Verizon may have just landed the iPhone just in time: AT&T just announced that they have passed Verizon as the number on wireless carrier in America, increasing their current subscriber numbers to 95.5 million.