Cult of Mac

We start the day off with an assortment of bargains. first up is a new batch of price cuts from the iPhone App Store, including “Drake’s Tower,” an action game. Also under the spotlight is a deal on Apple’s touch-sensitive Magic TrackPad. Finally, were you one of the many who received the new iPod nano for a holiday present? If so, there is a wristband case to keep your tiny tunes close.

Along the way, we also check out a deal on Xserve servers, a 70 percent off deal on iPad cases, and software to control your Mac’s WebCam. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

A vendor of iPad cases usually wouldn’t create a ripple in the tidal wave of products announced daily from the CES floor. However, Dexim is making headlines by displaying a case reportedly designed for the unreleased iPad 2. The case looks similar to one for the original iPad, with some subtle differences.

Along with a magnetic bluetooth keyboard that attaches to one of the case’s flaps, the product reportedly features a thinner design (matching rumors), openings for a front and rear camera supposedly for the expected Facetime support, and a large opening in the back.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Now you can monitor your blood pressure on your iPhone or iPad, thanks to a new health-oriented accessory from Withings.

Withings’ Smart Blood Pressure Monitor is a $129 arm cuff that makes it easy to monitor your blood pressure every day, away from the doctor’s office.

“It’s much more accurate to test at home,” said Withings spokeswoman Carole Lavault.

“Twenty five percent of the worldwide population has hypertension,” she added.

On show here at CES, the system looks dead easy to use. Just wrap the sleeve around your arm and plug it into your iPhone/iPad’s dock. Hit the onscreen button, and the sleeve inflates/deflates to measure your blood pressure. That’s it; nothing to give you a heart attack.

Combined with a free app, the sleeve can record months of blood pressure data, which can be shared electronically with health care professionals.

Withings also makes the WiFi Body Scale, a net-connected scale, which can also send weight data to the blood pressure app.

Here’s a picture of the iPad app in action:

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Joby released two new iPad stands yesterday. One borrowed from their line of bendable camera tripods, the other was more unusual, and took a page from the Japanese art of origami.

The GorillaMobile Ori ($80)  for iPad is made from a material called Hylite — a blend of aluminum and polypropylene — which felt pretty light and is supposedly super-tough. The origami-inspired design gives the case an intricate look (so many cutouts) and allows for a continuous hinge that can adjust the viewing angle to practically any position within its range. it’s also equipped with a swivel hinge that allows the iPad to be easily switched between portrait and landscape positions — or even turn the iPad into a steering wheel for racing games. Pretty cool.

Apple announced Wednesday it will open the Mac App Store Thursday, Jan. 6, the latest addition to stores already available for the iPod, iPhone and the iPad.

“Enter the same iTunes password you use to buy apps on iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. And within seconds, your new app flies to your Dock, ready to go,” the Cupertino, Calif. company noted.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Still a day to go before CES is officially at full steam, we found a few nuggets at a Tuesday night press event.

First up is a pair of solar-powered goodies from Eton. The Soulra 2 is the pumped-up version of the original Soulra dock (which was featured in our 2010 Holiday Gift Guide). It’s got eight speakers, a massive flip-up, high-capacity solar-panel providing eight hours of tunes on just five hours of charge, and a facelift — we think it looks much more refined than its predeceessor.

The free video transcoding tool HandBrake was recently updated to version 0.9.5. HandBrake is one of my favorite Mac OS X apps that works with another app called VLC to rip and convert videos for your personal use. The application hasn’t been updated in a long time. However, the update was worth the wait since the application has improvements that include library updates, improved subtitles, AC3 encoding support, enhanced presets, and  universal audio downmix support. A complete list of improvements can be found here.

One interesting milestone was the addition of BluRay disc structure support, but unfortunately decryption isn’t supported yet.

The Mac OS X version of HandBrake saw several good GUI improvements: a new Audio Panel that supports more than four audio tracks, VLC is automatically detected, and you can run multiple instances of HandBrake at the same time. However, Mac users lost PowerPC (PPC) support — this version of HandBrake only supports Macs with Intel processors.

Finally, the developers via a standard Apple-like statement declared that “Many Bug Fixes and other small improvements” were included in this update.

Get your copy of HandBrake for Mac OS X on Intel Macs in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The 64-bit version of HandBrake requires the 64-bit version of VLC. If you are still using a Mac with a PPC you can still get version .094 here.

Tablet sales are expected to more than double in 2011, not so much due to first-time buyers, but from upgrades. The iPad could follow the trail broken by Apple’s iPod, creating a brand-loyalty that lasts for years, one analyst reasons.

Of the 24 million tablet sales projected this year, growing to 44 million by 2015, “the lion’s share will be iPads, despite many would-be competitors that will be released at CES, we see Apple commanding the vast majority of the tablet market through 2012,” Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said.

Apple has been granted its first patent related to Liquidmetal, a space-age metal alloy. But the patent isn’t for a new iPad enclosure or iPhone antenna, as experts have predicted. Instead Apple’s Liquidmetal patent is for an internal component of a fuel cell.

Apple’s new patent describes “amorphous alloy” collector plates for fuel cells, an electrochemical battery that uses hydrogen to generate electricity. Although the patent doesn’t reference the Liquidmetal trademark, the material is an amorphous alloy or “metallic glass.”

Last year, Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use the Liquidmetal Technologies’ IP in consumer electronic products. But of course, the ever-secretive company hasn’t hinted at its plans for the material. The possibilites are endless. Liquidmetal is a super lightweight, high-strength, scratch-proof metal that NASA says is “poised to redefine materials science as we know it in the 21st century.”

Scientists who helped develop Liquidmetal have previously predicted that Apple will use it to build the next iPhone. So why is Apple interested in fuel cells?

Proving that news embargoes and electronics trade shows attended by tens of thousands of people do not play well together, word of Blue Microphones’ new Yeti Pro USB microphone leaked from the desert Tuesday night as the giant Consumer Electronics Show began picking up steam in Las Vegas.

The highly anticipated successor to Blue’s successful, top-of-the line USB microphone, Yeti Pro is the first USB mic to combine 24 bit/192 kHz digital recording resolution with analog XLR output, making it potentially one of the finest, most versatile recording tools on the market.

Like its predecessor, the plain old Yeti, Yeti Pro features premium condenser capsules set in Blue Microphones’ proprietary triple capsule array, which supports four different recording patterns for capturing a wide range of recording situations.

Yeti Pro looks quite promising from here, an assessment shared by CES judges, who made Yeti Pro a 2011 CES Innovations Winner in High Performance Audio. The mic is set to retail for $249 and should be available at authorized Blue Microphone distributors later this month.

LAS VEGAS — Griffin revealed something really cool today: a sensor that hooks up to your car’s diagnostic computer and feeds all kinds of info to your iPhone. Griffin calls it the CarTrip, and it attaches to your car’s OBD-II sensor (the thing car mechanics uses to diagnose problems), collects and stores the data, then sends it to your iPhone (we’re not sure how, because the press release doesn’t say), which then displays the data in realtime with the help its free partner app, CleanDrive.

The app/hardware package will reveal all kinds of information, like fuel consumption rates, acceleration, and it’ll interpret diagnostic codes. It’ll also display a “Carbon Score,” so you can figure out how much you’re befouling the planet by driving around.

CarTrip should be available in early 2011 for $90.

Update: CarTrip is equipped with Bluetooth for relaying the data to an iPhone. Thanks Levi!

LAS VEGAS — After hours of driving through the cow-infested flatness of California’s Central Valley, CultofMac Editor Leander Kahney and I have finally arrived in Vegas, primed to report from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The doors only officially open on Thursday, but here’s some of the sparkly new stuff we saw released today that we’re mega-pumped to get our hands on at this year’s show:

Here’s more evidence that the iPad is a day-to-day computing device, not just a media consumption toy.

Silicon Valley supergeek Jack Dorsey says he’s using his iPad for most of his computing needs.

“90% of my computing is now on the iPad (with a keyboard dock),” Dorsey said on Twitter. “And I love it.”

Dorsey is the creator of Twitter, and serves as the company’s chairman. He’s also the CEO of Square, a startup that turns the iPhone into a personal credit card terminal.

It’s not all roses though. There are a coupe of things Dorsey says he can’t do:

“Only thing I can’t do are big presentations & code,” he says.

We start with free and discounted iPhone applications, led by dueling weather apps. In the free corner is “The WeatherApp,” which provides weather alerts and updates. This is just one of the entries in the latest crop of freebies from the iPhone App Store. In the “discount” corner is “WeatherNow,” a weather and clock combo once sold for $4, but now yours for just $0.99. This is just one of several iPhone apps being offered at discounted prices.

Also on tap is a deal on Apple’s AppleTV. The 160GB model is going for $120. Along the way, we also check out various ways to keep your iPhone powered-up, as well as insured from spills and drops. There is also a deal on an OEM version of a Mac OSX update and other Mac software.

Like always, details on these and many other bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Android reportedly may soon not be the monolithic threat it once was. The operating system codenamed “Honeycomb” from Google reportedly will be optimized for tablets, creating two tiers for products. The first tier will be using the first-gen Android, originally designed to compete with Apple’s iPhone. The second tier will use Android 3.0, require more powerful chips, and be aimed at the iPad 2.

As a result, some earlier Android-powered devices, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, may soon be obsolete. But does it really matter? Surveys find most iPad owners use their tablet for checking email, surfing web sites, and keeping up with their social media contacts.

A company called Ten One Design has announced a $25 joystick for iPad called Fling that attaches to the screen with suction cups.

The Fling goes on top of the on-screen controls, and replaces your direct finger or thumb. The joystick is mostly clear plastic, so you can see through it.

Does this defeat the whole purpose of using an iPad for gaming, which is direct touch on an elegant surface? Or is this just cool?

Fling is available for pre-order Jan. 6.

We all may have started 2011 with a New Year’s resolution, but Apple seems to have found the best way to get started on the right foot. The Cupertino, Calif. company gained $6 billion in value on the first business day of 2011, pushing the iPhone maker to a market capitalization of $302.32 billion.

Monday, investors rewarded Apple for its long string of popular electronic gadgets with a 2 percent jump in the stock’s price at $329.57 per share. If breathing down the neck of Exxon, history’s most profitable company isn’t enough, there’s even better ahead for Apple, if you believe Wall Street analysts.

2010 was the year of the hot Apple auctions, with an Apple 1 fetching its highest price ever, $213,000 to an Italian collector.

What’s next?

Cult of Mac’s own Adam Rosen, a Mac consultant whose vintage mac museum collection counts some 36 different models and about 75 total computers, was asked to opine for AntiqueWeek on the going prices for some popular Apple collectibles.

New features have quietly been introduced to iTunes movies that allow users to search for specific words within a film’s script, and select their favorite clips to share with their friends through social networking sites. The features are being “quietly tested” in recent movies released by Sony Entertainment Pictures, as noted by PaidContent.org.

The movies that are known to include the new features at present are “The Other Guys,” which provides users with a search button enabling them to enter words to be found within the film’s script; and both “Salt” and “Resident Evil: Afterlife,” which include the “clip & share” function that allows users to select their favorite scenes and then share them with their friends through social networking sites. Users also have access to a playlist of songs from the movie and an opportunity to purchase them from iTunes.

The introduction of these new, iTunes-only features gives movie fans an incentive to purchase the latest films through Apple’s iTunes Store, rather than on DVD or Blu-ray. According to PaidContent.org, the capabilities found in the latest Sony movies are unique to iTunes, and not just a repackaging of additional content available on the Blu-ray or DVD counterparts:

“Mind-blowing add-ons? No, but they do represent the intent of studios like Sony, which declined comment, to offer differentiating value on digital platforms from that on DVD, where extras are often nothing more than a collection of additional short videos.”

These new features are only accessible to users who choose to purchase movies from iTunes, rather than rent them.

About a week after the first successful modification to the new iPod Nano’s .plist file was made — whisking away one of the pre-installed icons from the home screen — dev Steven Troughton-Smith has brought the nano one step closer to jailbreaking: he’s figured out how to put his iPod nano into the equivalent of the iPhone or iPod Touch’s DFU recovery mode.

The feat is accomplished by holding down the restart buttons across two separate reboots, at which point iTunes will see the device and alert the user. Once accomplished, Troughton-Smith is apparently able to push firmware files to the device and execute them.

Pretty exciting stuff. For more information on what this means for the possibility of iPod Nano hacking, check out Erica Sadun’s informative post over at TUAW.

Google’s new Cr-48 laptop is supposed to usher in the future of cloud-based operating systems thanks to the search giant’s own Chrome OS, but surprise surprise: a computer made for early developers to hack to their hearts content ends up being Hackintoshable. It’s apparently a lot of work, but honestly, it seems appropriate in a way: the Cr-48 always channeled a lot of the elegance of the old black plastic MacBook, and it’s nice to see a doppelganger of the old girl live again.

According to popular theory, we should either have the Verizon iPhone confirmed at CES later this week, or not hear anything and keep on scuttlebutting about it amongst ourselves until it eventually does come out.

The latest fodder for Verizon iPhone rumor mongering? Verizon’s Trademark services department has just snatched up iphoneforverizon.com and iphoneonverizon.com… a couple of two year old domains purchased from the previous owner (and alleged link farmer) Jim Benton.

Honestly, this is probably just business as usual, in which a company protects its trademark and brand by snatching up domains. Still, the very fact that this news hit during the week the Verizon iPhone is rumored (almost definitely wrongly) to debut was pretty choice timing.

We start the first week of 2011 with a number of deals for your iPhone, iPad or Mac. First up is the year’s latest crop of price cuts on iPhone applications, including “WeatherNow.” Next is several refurbished iPhone 4 handsets from AT&T, starting at $79 for a slightly-blemished 16GB model that was $129.

Along the way, we also check out a leather case for the iPad, sharply-reduced prices on iPod touch cases and VPN software for the Mac. As usual, details on these and many other bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

With the release of AirPrint late last year, Apple finally gave iDevice users what they’d been clamoring for (and quite loudly, since the iPad’s debut): the easy ability to print from a wifi connected printer. Hurrah! Problem is, it only works with printers made by HP — owners of Epsons, Canons and the rest were left out in the cold.

However, for Epson owners willing to shell out $10, Thinxtream‘s PrintJinni app already provided a means to print to select Epson wifi-connected printers. In late December PrintJinni became a free download to put itself on even footing with AirPrint, pricewise  — question is, how good of a solution is it?

All good things come to those who wait. That could be the motto for Apple fans anxiously awaiting what new goodies emerge from the folks in Cupertino.

If you are looking for Apple to introduce the long-awaited CDMA iPhone for Verizon customers, you will likely need to cool your heels until the March financial quarter of 2011, according to a prominent analyst out with his predictions for the upcoming year. Additionally, if you have your eye on an iPad 2, Apple’s second-generation tablet, you may need to wait until the flowers of Spring.