Cult of Mac

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.

With excellent timing for citation in Microsoft’s lawsuit against Apple over the latter’s App Store trademark, the American Dialect Society has just declared the word “app” their word of the year.

Beating out words like “junk” (?), “WikiLeaks”, “trend” and “nom” (thank God), app was voted the belle of the Dialect Society ball by over 69 linguists. It was a close race, though, with the Dialect Society’s executive secretary saying that while there was nothing “clearly dominant” this year, “there’s no question ‘app’ is a very powerful word.”

A few other Apple-related words also made the American Dialect Society’s list, including “fat-finger” to mean mistyping on a touchscreen and the “-pad” suffix in reference to tablet computers.

Fueled by expected increase in iPad demand and expanded distribution of the iPhone, one analyst Thursday raised to $415 per share his target price for Apple stock, up from $365. UBS Securities’ Maynard Um became the latest analyst to up Apple’s target share price ahead of next week’s report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2011.

Um foresees Apple able to weather lower prices on its popular MacBook Air for $24.57 billion in quarterly revenue, higher than the $23 billion Wall Street consensus. The Cupertino, Calif. company will also be helped by the iPad and iPhone.

If you remember, reports had it at the time that Verizon was the carrier Apple originally came to with the iPhone, only to be snubbed by Big Red because of Apple’s insistence on maintaining full control over the phone’s hardware and software: no bundled apps, no carrier branding. Laughing, Apple went to AT&T and history was made.

Speaking to BusinessWeek, Verizon president and CEO Lowell McAdam makes it clear that Verizon regretted that decision pretty much the second after Apple left their offices: he says they’ve spent the last four years trying to get the iPhone back.

Although Apple rumor-mongers can rarely agree on anything, two things that most of the supposed tipsters and leaksters have managed to agree on is that the iPad 2 will be FaceTime compatible and have a higher resolution display.

Some files in the new iOS 4.3 SDK seemingly confirm the FaceTime claims, as it includes iPad-specific graphic files for the shutter screen seen in the iPhone and iPod Touch, which implies, at the very least, a new backwards facing camera. Interesting, but a no-brainer: there’s no way Apple’s going to leave FaceTime capability out of the iPad 2.

More surprising than the FaceTime implications of those icons, though, are their resolution: 1024 x 768. In other words, the current iOS 4.3 SDK implies that the FaceTime-capable iPad 2 will have the same resolution as the current iPad.

It’s not a live feature in the recently released iOS 4.3 dev beta, but it looks as if Apple will be adding a new feature to its MobileMe service sometime soon, making it easy to see where your friends — or, at least, their iPhones and iPads — are when they’re late for dinner and drinks.

Spotted by MacRumors, several strings in the new Settings app reference a “Find My Friends” feature.

Yesterday’s dev release of iOS 4.3 revealed a myriad of new features to Apple’s already robust mobile operating system, but what’s prompting the most comment this morning is the new multitouch gesture introduced that allows you to pinch with your whole hand to return to the homescreen.

Now BGR is claiming that this new gesture is the first step to removing the physical home button from a future iPad. Nonsense, says I.

Shorter answer: hell yes.

Longer answer: there’s an application called Dictionary (you can find it in your Applications folder, or search for it with Spotlight) which has detailed entries for thousands of words and phrases.

Like a lot of Brits my age, I have grown up with the wonderful radio output of the BBC cooing softly in my ears, and now I can’t imagine life without it.

The era of AT&T iPhone exclusivity may be dismissed as a time full of dropped calls and dinosaur-like competitiveness, but the period marked dramatic change for the Cupertino, Calif. company. Once known for its Macs and iPods, Apple received nearly 40 percent of its 2010 revenue from iPhone sales, generating $45.6 billion, according to the company in September.

Analysts on average are predicting Apple will report next week selling 15.78 million handsets for the previous quarter, the last period Verizon iPhone sales won’t be included in the mix. And just which analysts are best at predicting iPhone sales? A new ranking of professional and amateur analysts was released, showing the am’s tend to score better than the pros.

Are your apps crashing? Is your beachball spinning?

Ask for guidance from the Hindu deity Ganesh, widely revered as the “remover of obstacles.”

Here a marble sculpture of the elephant god is shown troubleshooting with an Apple computer in a shop in Mahabalipuram, a locale known for its sculpture workshops Southern India.

Surely by now you’ve heard, the iPhone 4 is coming to Verizon. Now, I’m not planning on leaving AT&T, but I was still very happy to hear that bit of news. Why? Because sending millions of iPhone users to Verizon may be the only way to get the AT&T network working better.

AT&T has had over 3 years to fix their network problems, but for whatever reason, they’re still having major issues. If fact in seems things have gotten so bad, anytime a lot of iPhone users gather in one place, the network starts to buckle (were you able to use 3G at CES for anything this year?).

But now, my hope is renewed. Instead of one over-burdened network dropping carrying all the iPhone data, we have two. The iPhone will now have access to twice the towers, twice the switches, twice the trucks—twice the everything that makes the data flow. Users will now have a choice to test the Verizon waters, and I hope they go in masses.

Here’s what I’m thinking: if enough users (millions?) head to Verizon, maybe the reduction in traffic will ease the strain on AT&T’s network. Maybe then, those of us who stay behind will be able to use our iPhones the way Steve Jobs probably always imagined—with nary a dropped call or lost byte. Hey, it could happen.

So tell your friends. Tell them all the great things you’ve ever heard about Verizon. Make a few things up if you have to. And make a lot of eye contact, it’ll make you more believable. It’ll all be worth it. If enough people defect to Verizon, AT&T could become the always-ready always-reliable network we’ve been waiting for.

Audyssey have already built a strong reputation in the field of high-end audio calibration. This is their first self released product. In a world of crappy plastic housings and terrible sound quality, finding a good quality iPhone/iPod dock is a rare occurrence. Audyssey’s South of the Market dock is a breath of fresh air in this over saturated, low quality arena.

Though not perfect, this dock is hands down the best I have reviewed and outdoes similar offerings on both build quality and sound by far. Read on to find out why.

Details may remain sketchy on the special event T-Mobile has scheduled for sometime in the coming weeks but the #4 carrier in the US wasted no time cranking up a new ad that riffs on the old “upstarts are cool – Big Guys are stodgy” meme that Apple has used for years to poke fun at Microsoft.

The ad should start running on US television networks next week, according to a report at TechCrunch.

Apple made big gains in Q4 2010, increasing Mac shipments by a whopping 23.7 percent — the highest gains of any PC maker in the U.S.

And if you factor in the iPad, the gains would have been even bigger.

Meanwhile, the overall PC industry grew only 3.1 percent during the holiday quarter, according to the latest estimated numbers from the market research firm Gartner.

High-end a/v makers Denon and Marantz have just issued a firmware update providing AirPlay music streaming capability to nine of their network capable decks.

For Denon, that includes the the AVR-4311CI ($1,999), AVR-3311CI ($1,199) AVR-991 ($999), and the AVR-A100 ($2,499), as well as the RCD-N7 Networked CD Receiver ($599). On the Marantz side of things, there’s the SR7005 A/V Receiver ($1,599), AV7005 A/V Preamplifier ($1,499), NA7004 Network Audio Player ($799) and M-CR603 Networked CD Receiver ($699)

Amazingly, though, the firmware updates are $50 apiece. Ballsy! If that’s worth it to you, though, you can grab the firmware upgrades at both the Denon and Marantz websites.

Got a PlayStation 3? Sony has just released their official PlayStation app for the whole world — or, at least, America, France, UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands — to download.

Don’t expect to use your iPhone as a thin client to play some PlayStation 3 games, though. Instead, the app lets you log into the PlayStation Network, follow your friends, check out the games they own, read their status updates, monitor trophies you’ve earned and check out the official PlayStation blog.

The PlayStation app is a free download. You can get it here

Feeling pinched for space in your new MacBook Air? I know I certainly am, even (or, perhaps, especially) with a 500GB USB hard drive perpetually tethered to my 11-incher.

I’m interested, then, in OWC’s recently unveiled Mercury Auro Pro Express Kits, which are compatible with both the late 2010 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pros. They are available in three sizes: a $499.99 180GB dSSD, a $579.99 240GB SSD, and a $1,179.99 360GB SSD… all of which are not only bigger than Apple’s in-house drives, but faster as well.

Much as I’d like a bigger SSD in my MacBook Air, at those prices, I’m tempted to wait until they come down a bit… but that might not be an option. Apple has already shut down one company selling MacBook Air SSD upgrade kits, and it’s likely they’ll do the same here, so if you’re going to get one, better scrape that $500 together fast.

[via iSource]

iOS 4.3 Beta Build 8F5148B has just been seeded to developers, and there’s some big changes across all devices to get your head around:

• iOS 4.3 officially drops support for the iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod Touch. iOS 4 never ran particularly well on these devices anyway, and it looks like Apple knows it: they’ve now left all support for less-than-third-gen devices at iOS 4.2.1.

• As predicted, iOS 4.3 brings the Verizon iPhone’s “Personal Hotspot” feature allowing WiFi tethering for up to five devices to all iPhones… or, at least, all iPhones that are blessed with their carrier’s approval.

• A new software option to choose what your iPad’s side switch does: lock rotation or mute. This is a pretty big change: Steve Jobs himself basically said the change in iOS 4.2 from a lock switch to mute was permanent, but it seems user complaints eventually made Apple see sense. Mute just doesn’t make any sense on a non-phone device.

• A new FaceTime icon and full-screen iAds.

• New multitouch gestures for iPad users. You can use four or five fingers to pinch to the Home Screen; swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar; and swipe left or right between apps.

Anything we missed? Let us know in the comments.

Sprint and T-Mobile each announced Wednesday special media events set to take place in New York in coming weeks. Neither carrier is expected to announce anything related to Apple or its mobile devices, though the Sprint invitation sent to some tech industry journalists did allude to an “industry first” up its sleeve.

Sprint’s event is scheduled for February 7, while details on the T-Mobile announcement were unavailable at press time.

With the same uncanny knack for odd timing that led to the launch of the much-ballyhooed “iPhone killer” Palm Pre being completely overshadowed by Apple’s release of iPhone 3G in June 2009, Sprint’s event comes both well in the wake of Tuesday’s big Verizon iPhone announcement and just days before its widely-anticipated launch on the #1 carrier in the US.

Speculation as to which bright and shiny things Sprint might use to draw attention away from iPhone and its two largest competitors seems centered on potential new webOS devices such as the Pixi 2 or Topaz tablet, but which “industry first” either of those devices would bring to the table is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the star of Sprint’s show, illusionist David Blaine will transform the company’s stock chart into something that hasn’t flat-lined after doing a Dive of Death.

It’s not the first of its kind, but LCARS Reader could be the iPad app of every Star Trek fan’s dreams.

We’ll all be videoconferencing like crazy in 2012, predicts Barclay’s analyst Ben Reitzes.

By the end of 2012, Apple’s installed base of FaceTime devices will exceed 200 million, Reitzes predicts.

That’s based on more than 85 million FaceTime-enabled devices by the end of 2011:

• 50 million FaceTime iPhones
• 15 million FaceTime iPods
• 12 million FaceTime Macs
• 10 million FaceTime iPads

In 2012, Apple’s video conferencing platform will only gather momentum, driven by what he’s calling the “FaceTime networking effect.”

“While Android and competitive devices either have or are working toward incorporating a similar feature, we believe this particular feature benefits from Apple’s vertically integrated model,” Reitzes said. “Experiences across disparate hardware platforms tend to vary–with Apple’s one of the most reliable in our trials. Also, this feature allows Apple to mine the millions of iTunes users who have Apple ID’s–and provide an attractive feature across devices that can be put into use immediately. We believe the ‘FaceTime networking effect’ could enhance a halo effect on Macs and iPads as the feature becomes available.”

AllThingsD: 200 Million FaceTime-Enabled Devices in 2012?

Even if you haven’t heard of Michael Göbel before, perhaps you’ve encountered his software. A prolific worker, Michael’s been building an impressive portfolio of applications over the last few years.

Like all developers, he now faces the new challenges of selling via the Mac App Store, and today sent out an email to customers explaining his plans for the future.

Play around with this cool online iPad simulator, courtesy of developer Alex Wolkov.

Not everything works, but it’s made with JS & CSS3. Impressive!

Via MacStories.