Cult of Mac

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.

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.