Cult of Mac

IK Multimedia, makers of the highly-acclaimed tone-modeling app AmpliTube, have released new iOS software bringing legendary Fender sound to musicians playing and recording with Apple mobile devices.

Available as a standalone tone solution or as in-app add-ons to current AmpliTube users, AmpliTube Fender lets iOS mobile rockers dial up tones modeled on a roster of classic pre-CBS amplifiers including the ’59 Bassman LTD and the 1965 Deluxe Reverb and Twin Reverb, as well as the Super-Sonic, and the Pro Junior.

Players can practice using the built-in SpeedTrainer, which allows up to 50 backing tracks — importable directly from the iPod library on the iOS device or from a computer — to be slowed down to half-time or speeded up to double-time with no loss in pitch fidelity. 36 tone presets can be named, saved and called up on the fly, and each step in the tone chain — from stompbox to amp head to cabinet to mic — is individually selectable, with fully operational controls making for a tweaker’s paradise.

We wrap-up another week of deals with a new crop of iPhone App freebies, as well as reduced prices on some iPhone applications. Also in today’s spotlight is several iPads on sale, some $100 below the usual price.

Along the way, we’ll also take a look at some cases for your iPhone 4 and iPhone 3G/3GS, as well as several bargains on Mac software. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Earlier reports this month tipped a January 19th launch for The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad-only newspaper, but it looks like that launch will now be delayed thanks to problems implementing the new iOS subscription API meant to drive The Daily’s business model.

According to All Things D’s sources, Apple and News Corp have made a joint decision to push the launch back to give Cupertino’s engineers enough time to tweak the implementation of the new subscription service.

These paintbrushes by Don Lee seem like an incredible idea. Called the Nomad Brush, each brush’s bristles are made of conductive fibers, so that it’ll work for painting on the iPad with any paint tool app.

I’m not sure I entirely see the point though. The iPad’s touch display can only register ten touch points at once, with none of the granularity that would be required to capture individual bristle strokes, not just brush strokes. Consequently, a lot of the feel and look of painting with a brush will be lost, especially since the iPad’s display doesn’t register pressure: you might as well use any rubber-tipped stylus instead for roughly the same effect.

Ultimately, it seems like whether or not the Nomad Brush is worth the dosh for you is how much more comfortable you are painting than drawing. If that sounds like you, the Nomad should be out in February.

MacBook Pro owner Tommy reports that his 1.5-year-old replacement battery is swelling and that an Apple service rep told him that this is “normal.”

First, nobody seemed to know what to do with me or who I should talk to. Second, while they Apple Customer Representative could look up the age of my computer by the serial number, they had no way of tracking (and “proving the age”) of my battery by its unique serial number. Third, while nearly everybody I talked to seemed to show much concern over this safety issue, the “Senior Customer Representative” who finally spoke to me was quite apathetic about my battery problem. According to him, this issue is normal and the result of wear-and-tear on the battery and, more importantly, this was Apple’s official position.

Since the battery is too old to be covered by Apple’s one-year warranty, the rep refused to replace it. That is, unless it might cause bodily injury or fire.

Apple announced Friday it will reveal its financial report for the first fiscal quarter of 2011 Tuesday, Jan. 18 at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. The conference will likely include some gangbuster numbers, including what was behind a reported 23 percent jump in Mac yearly sales. This at a time when PC demand was off 6.6 percent.

Mac sales, boosted by the introduction of a revamped MacBook Air, is just the lead story in a series of likely wins for the Cupertino, Calif. company. Analysts also predict 2010 was a good year for the iPhone. Thursday, analyst Maynard Um of UBS Securities projected iPhone sales of 15.6 million handsets, up from previous expectations if 14.1 million units.

It may be the New Year, but sadly, it appears that the mere turning-over of the calendar isn’t enough to put a stop to the slate of Foxconn suicides: last Friday, a female engineer leaped from her brother’s 10th floor flat to her death after being insulted by a superior, ordered to quit, then sent to a psychiatric hospital on Foxconn’s orders.

The suicide is the fifteenth so far, although the first Foxconn suicide in 2011.

It’s a problem I’m sure you’ll be familiar with: whenever you want to take a picture of your cat, said cat suddenly becomes utterly disinterested in you and everything you stand for.

Will the cat humor you, and turn its face to the camera? Will it hell.

What you need in situations like this is Cat Camera, the camera app that makes a reasonable stab at meeowing like a cat, in the hope that this provocative sound will make your cat turn its head in the right direction. It’s a bit basic and rather buggy, but hey, it’s a start.

I tried it on my neighbour’s cat, it still continued to ignore the hell out of me, despite Cat Camera’s fake meeowings:

Your milage, as well as your cats, may vary.

Great news music fans: the excellent European streaming music service Spotify will be coming to the U.S. very soon.

According to the New York Post, Spotify has already signed one major music label and is about to snag Sony Music.

“Spotify is launching in the US, for sure … They’ve got the deals now,” a music industry insider told the Post.

Spotify is “the best desktop music player ever.”

New York Post: Spotify leaps to US. Euro music service near Sony deal

In just a little over 200 million downloads, the App Store will serve up its ten billionth app , and to celebrate the occasion, Apple’s going to give the lucky S.O.B. who downloads the 10 billionth app a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

Well, technically, Apple’s only saying that the person who downloads the ten billionth app has a chance of winning a $10,000 gift card. Note the verbiage (emphasis ours):

As of today, nearly 10 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store worldwide. Which is almost as amazing as the apps themselves. So we want to say thanks. Download the 10 billionth app, and you could win a US $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. Just visit the App Store, and download what could be your best app yet.

The explanation for Apple’s wishy-washiness are pesky American laws that require companies to give an equal chance to no-commitment entries, which is why Apple has provided an entry form that you can fill out up to twenty five times a day. These entries count as make-believe app downloads; if one of these cheapskate entries triggers the ten billionth download, they’ll walk away with $10,000, just as if it were a real download.

Either way, this is super cool. A $10,000 iTunes gift card is probably large enough that even the most addicted app fiend will never have to spend another real-world dime in the App Store again.

With dozens of possible tablets rushing to market in the wake of Apple’s iPad success, suppliers reportedly are straining under the pressure. Tablet shipments will more than triple to 57.6 million this year, with the iPad comprising 70.4 percent of that.

As a result, suppliers are “forced to gamble production capacity on the unrealistically high projections of their tablet customers,” one tablet display executive warns. The gamble means we may see either shortages or excesses in 2011.

Some of the crowds passing through Grand Central Terminal in New York will be carrying coffee drinks purchased from an iPad cash register at Joe.

ShopKeep.com is behind the point-of-sale app designed for small businesses that can also print out receipts and even makes a satisfying ka-ching when the sale rings up. The iPad register also transmits sales to its web-based BackOffice so that managers using ShopKeep’s BackOffice can track sales in real time and can manage inventory, run reports and export the data.

We’ve been seeing a lot of iPads in small businesses like restaurants, but this may be the first cash register to debut in such a high-traffic area.

It’s been commonly rumored that Verizon was the first carrier Apple approach with the iPhone, only to be rebuffed because of Cupertino’s insistence on retaining control over their phone’s branding and bundled software. Heck, we referenced it the other day.

It looks like that rumor’s not actually true, though. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg has admitted in an interview with BusinessWeek that his company was “never in the running” as US carrier partner for the original iPhone’s launch.

The iPad app being demonstrated in this video is called OMGuitar Advanced, and it looks pretty cool. It’s pretty hard to get through the video itself to appreciate the app in motion, though, between the infinite douchiness of the “American Idol” style judges dancing in their seats to the limpest acoustic rendition of Garbage’s I’m Only Happy When It Rains this side of the 2am dorm room of Evergreen State College’s sole emo student. Still, it’s really nice to see people really playing music on the iPad. And OMGuitar certainly looks like an impressive app indeed, for when you’ve just got to travel without your guitar.

 Although Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about new products in the pipeline, it’s pretty easy to predict when they’ll refresh one of their devices as long as you know when they last released an update… and this is doubly true for iOS devices, which follow a strict yearly update cycle.

Knowing this, you’d have to be addled-of-brain and swollen-of-tongue to bet against the iPad 2 shipping anytime before early April: after all, the first iPad shipped in America on April 3rd, a Saturday. If you’re interested in how Apple’s tablet has evolved since then, check out the current generation iPad to see the advancements made over the years.

MacNotes‘s “reliable sources” tipping either an Apil 2nd or April 9th U.S. release for the iPad 2 aren’t really saying anything jaw-dropping then. They suggest, like last time, that the iPad 2 will ship on a Saturday early in April, and, like last time, it’ll be a U.S. exclusive for a a couple months before launching internationally.Also like last time, they say it’ll be six months before big box retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy get to offer the tablet.

Well, yeah. Duh. My guess is the iPad 2 launch will be more or less identical in timing and specifics to the first-gen iPad launch except for one thing: just a hunch, but I’m betting Apple will have both the WiFi and 3G versions ready simultaneously this time.

A lot of the jailbreak dev scene is about waiting. Waiting for Apple to break a previous exploit with a new patch. Waiting to deploy a new exploit that Apple hasn’t even caught wind of yet.

No one’s better at this sly waiting game than the iPhone Dev Team, who have just let everyone know that yes, they’re working on a jailbreaking tool for iOS 4.2.5 (as seen on the Verizon iPhone) and iOS 4.3.

But don’t expect anything while iOS 4.3 is in beta: tipping the community’s hand about what exploits they’ve found before Apple’s finalized the update would be just stupid.

Anyway, according to Dev Team member MuscleNerd‘s Twitter account, It’s silly to release anything during Apple betas… [because] most people can’t take advantage.”

In short, yes, a jailbreak is coming, even for Verizon iPhones… but only start holding your breath once the Verizon iPhone is officially released.

Qualcomm, maker of most CDMA chips in cell phones, may gain $12 million annually from Apple’s recent announcement of an iPhone for the Verizon Wireless network. Earlier this week, the carrier said it will begin selling the handset Feb. 10.

The San Diego, Calif.-based chipmaker likely supplanted Intel’s Infineon chip used by iPhones available through AT&T, according to UBM TechInsights, a firm that “tears-down” handsets for analysis. For Qualcomm, its inclusion in the iconic handset is a “pretty big and important foot in the door,” a company executive told the Wall Street Journal.

Mac OS X has a system of user accounts, similar to that found on Windows machines. Setting up user accounts on your computer is a good idea for all sorts of reasons.

Each account is a separate, ring-fenced section of the computer’s system. Stuff that User A does won’t affect stuff belonging to User B. So at their simplest level, accounts are a useful way of keeping every person’s work or activity separate. They are a good idea on family computers for that reason.

Willy Wonka would soil his britches! Chocolateer Timothy Childs controls his entire chocolate factory with his iPhone!

Childs in the co-founder of Tcho along with Wired’s Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf.

Tcho (“technology” and “chocolate”) has a 30,000-square-foot factory on San Francisco’s waterfront.

It includes a chocolate “lab” where Childs cooks up new flavors. It’s all controlled by a custom iPhone app. “Using iPhone, I can actually log into each of the machines and control the times and the temperatures, turn them on and off,” he says.

Check it out in the video above.

Via Apple: Chocolatology meets technology and Gizmodo.

The next iPhone and iPad — both coming soon — will have no Home button on the front. “Multitasking gestures” on the screen will replace the button.

The next iPhone will have a “friend finder” feature or app similar to Google’s Latitude service. It will have built-in support for Wi-Fi hotspots (where the phone is the hotspot that supports up to five other devices). And it will have several other refinements and tweaks.

The next iPad will have a screen that’s the same resolution, but it will gain a camera.

How do I know all this? Well, I don’t. These are educated guesses. That education comes courtesy of a new beta version of the software that powers these devices.

Go here to read the story.

Looking for the thinnest portable hard drive around to augment your MacBook Air’s paltry SSD storage? Here you go: Freecom’s new Mobile Drive Mg isn’t just the thinnest hard drive around at 10mm thick, the high-end $199.95 750GB model not only boasts a USB 2.0 port (forwards compatible to USB 3.0, whenever Apple gets around to embracing it) but also Firewire 800. If you can live without Firewire, the $69.95 320GB model or $109.95 750GB model are probably more your speed.

Early registration discounts expire Monday for MacTech Boot Camp, the one day immersive event for Mac consultants and uber-geeks held at the start of the MacWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco on January 26.

With seminars covering topics such as:

• Marketing in a Community
• Client Documentation, Passwords and Records
• Troubleshooting Hardware
• Networking Basics and Troubleshooting
• Printing Setup and Troubleshooting (Wifi, USB, Bluetooth, and Wired)
• iOS Support
• Windows on the Mac Options
• Viruses and Security

and more, MacTech Boot Camp offers a rich vein of resources designed to enhance the credentials of any Mac IT consultant offering services to the home, SOHO (small office home office) and SMB markets.

Those looking to obtain Apple certification may also sign up for a study session and exam prior to the Boot Camp on January 25.

For additional details and a full program listing see the Boot Camp website and use the phrase “pre-registration” to take advantage of the $100 registration discount.

You can’t see bare-chested women in the iTunes store, but a big fat nude male torso that makes music is perfectly acceptable.

Enter the Belly Jam app, wiggly musical goodness offered gratis on iTunes. OK, musical goodness is pushing it, but the idea is you touch the tummy or chest to make 16 different sounds.

The mechanism — slap that fat to make a soundtrack – is similar to apps like iBoobs, where users shook the iPhone to jiggle a pair of breasts.

What does Capcom’s new App Store game MaXplosion and the Twisted Pixel Xbox Live Arcade game ‘Splosion Man have in common? Everything, much to Twisted Pixel’s dismay.

First tipped in November 2011, Scosche’s iClops accessory for iPad was a tiny, swivel-able camera that would connect to the top of your iPad and allow you to take 2.1 megapixel stills or VGA-quality video on Apple’s tablet slated for release in March of this year.

Sounds like a pretty good accessory for iPad owners happy enough with their current tablet that they don’t want to upgrade to the iPad 2 in April, but wouldn’t mind spending a few bucks on an accessory to bring some of the latter tablet’s video and photo functionality to them. It also did the same for camera-less iPod Touches.

Unfortunately, it now looks like the iClops has been axed by Scosche, and according to one source, it was axed because of “legal issues” with Apple that prevented Scosche from releasing the iClops in time for its forecast March release.

If there were such an issue, it would presumably be due to the way the iClops interacted with the iPod Dock Connector port. Either way, it’s a disappointing development: for now, at least, it seems that current iPad or iPod Touch owners who want to take photos or videos on their camera-less devices will have no choice but to upgrade.