Cult of Mac

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Here’s a sneak peek at Boxee’s upcoming iPad app from the show floor of CES.

Boxee is the super-slick video software that makes online video easy and social. It’s the single best reason to own an older Apple TV: you hack it to run Boxee, and suddenly it’s useful because it can play local video files, no matter what the encoding format.

The iPad app is just like Boxee on a Mac or Apple TV: it makes it easy to find and share online video on your iPad. You can even stream video from your iPad to your TV (a la AirPlay). Best of all, the app will come with a media server (Mac and PC) that will transcode video files on the fly and stream them to the iPad app.

Should be available before the end of the quarter. Free, of course.

Update – Andrew from Boxee wanted us to know that the expected arrival date is actually Q2, not Q1 as Avner says.

I’ve been exploring the Mac App Store and discovered another little tidbit that might pose a problem for some frugally minded people – like me. I was looking for apps that I already owned that might be in the App Store and I found one called RapidWeaver.

I was about to purchase it in the Mac App Store until I found out it would cost more to do so. Why did it cost more? The answer is simple – sales taxes and that is what led me to halt one Mac App Store application purchase this evening.

Apple has opened the Mac App Store today ushering a new era for Mac software distribution. It is an interesting new way to get software for your Mac in a way many of you are already used to using for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

It’s not perfect, but neither was the iTunes App Store for iOS. I’m sure that it will improve with time. I took a look through the Mac App Store today and I want to share some things about the new Mac App Store that you may have missed.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — What’s one of the biggest problems preventing big companies from adopting the iPad in massive numbers?

The ability to stop employees from stealing them, says Absolute Software. Plus remotely locking and wiping lost devices.

I just tried a quick Mac App Store experiment.

One of the more tempting offerings on offer there is TextWrangler, the excellent all-purpose text editor from Bare Bones software. It’s been free on the web for years, and now it’s free on the store.

I already had a copy installed, but on closer inspection, my existing version was 3.1, and the one in the App Store was 3.5. What would happen, I wondered, if I clicked the “Install” button? Would the App Store version be installed separately? Would there be some kind of conflict? Or would it Just Work?

AT&T announced Thursday it will begin selling 8GB iPhone 3GS phones to new and upgrade-eligible customers for $49 starting Friday, January 7. The third generation Apple smartphones continue to be priced at $99 when purchased directly from Apple, while AT&T’s discounted offer will be available online and at its more than 2000 US retail stores.

The price drop has predictably led to much speculation among mobile phone watchers as to both AT&T’s motivation (given there’s no indication Apple has cut its prices to the carrier) and Apple’s plans to announce new phones and possibly new carrier agreements in the coming year.

An obvious key to the unknowns is that new and upgrade-eligible AT&T customers will be required to sign on for new two year contracts with the carrier in order to get the 3GS discounted price. AT&T has been widely derided among iPhone users in the past couple of years for its spotty service, which has in turn led to rampant speculation that Apple could make its phones available to other mobile carriers as early as the 1st quarter of 2011.

AT&T’s pricing move is a strong signal that iPhones are coming soon to another carrier — Verizon appears the odds-on favorite among many with an opinion on the matter — and it’s clearly an aggressive attempt to head off a flood of defectors from its network should such an opening occur.

We start the day with deals on applications for the iPad and iPhone. First up is a new crop of price cuts on select iPad apps, including “Spider-Man HD.” Next is a group of free iPhone apps from the App Store, including “Text Nanny,” a text-scheduling service. We wrap up our deal spotlight with a bargain on 8GB iPhone 3GS handsets. AT&T Friday begins offering the devices for $49 plus a two-year plan.

Along the way, we also take a look at an eMac G4 for just $150, plus a number of software packages for the Mac. As usual, details on these and many more items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

The ever-lovable China-based MICgadget blog waved a red flag at everyone drooling over new and possibly never-to-be-released gadgetry on the CES showfloor in Las Vegas Thursday, teasing web surfers with a headline about leaked photos of the much-anticipated iPad2.

These are pretty clearly mock-ups but with CES in full swing and an Apple vacation black-out in place, they signal a revving of the hype machine and ramping of new-gadget lust that ought to be at a near fever pitch by the time Apple announces a “special event” sometime in late January/early February.

What do you think Apple has in store for us in 1Q11?

I’ve just spent some time poking around the shiny new Mac App Store and there’s only one feature I expected to see, but can’t: an official way to uninstall what you’ve installed.

The traditional way of removing apps does still work. Go to the Applications folder, select the app, and move it to the Trash.

With any other application, that’s it, job done. But with apps installed via the App Store, you are asked for your system password before the trashing can commence.

I’m not complaining, and I don’t think this is a particularly big deal. But I did expect to see some kind of Uninstall control available somewhere (perhaps on the page that lists all your purchases), and as far as I can see, there isn’t one. Not yet, anyway. I suspect this is something that will be fixed in a future update.

Got your App Store installed yet? What do you make of it? Is this the future?

Research in Motion’s answer to the 3G Apple iPad tablet now has a release date and carrier: this summer and Sprint. At “under $500 a pop, the PlayBook 4G already has potentially “tens of thousands” of corporate customers, according to a RIM senior vice president.

The tablet was demonstrated Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show. The device “performed smoothly as it went through its paces,” according to one report. RIM took the time to denounced as “absurd generalizations” talk that Adobe Flash cutting battery lifetime. The retort follows reports RIM may need to delay the PlayBook after an analyst claimed the tablet had only “a few hours” of battery life.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — The very next time I hear the term “iPhone-killer,”  I will go absolutely Looney-Tunes nuts. I will tear up telephone books, gargle with raw eggs and Marmite, the whole bit. Seriously.

On the other hand, Samsung really does seem to be taking precise aim at the iPhone 4 with their new Infuse 4G Android smartphone announced yesterday. They’re claiming that, when (if) released, it’ll be the lightest, thinnest phone on the market, and it’ll be equipped with oodles of goodies: a 4.5-inch, “next-generation” Super AMOLED screen (which they say will have better readability in bright sunlight) and a snappy 1.2 ghz processor. And get this — it’ll sit exclusively in the AT&T stable.

If you are looking for Apple to introduce a new product, a good time period may be between the last week of January and the first half of February. The Cupertino, Calif. company reportedly has cancelled vacations for its retail employees during that period, a possible signal a new product launch is imminent.

Apple has ordered the so-called vacation “black-out” period of three weeks after retail managers began expressing “reluctance” to grant employee requests for days off for January, according to a blog citing “people familiar” with the firm’s retail plans.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — The TRYX could have been designed by Jonny Ive’s evil twin brother: It’s charismatic and completely striking — but in a dark, angular way.  I really couldn’t believe my jaw was dropping over a camera’s looks when I first saw it up close, but that’s exactly what happened. The TRYX’s form factor also has one really cool trick up it’s sleeve: the rim of the case swivels around and turns the whole thing into a sort-of tripod. It’s very slick, and it feels and looks satisfyingly well-designed.

Casio has made sure to back up the good looks with substance, and absolutely stuffed the 12-megapixel point-n-shoot with equally stunning performance too: Ultra-wide angle 21mm lens; HDR; touch-screen controls; the ability to capture seamless, 360-degree panoramic images with a single sweep; some sort of high-speed zoom system (which we didn’t get to try out); even a self-timer that’s motion-activated; and arguably the most impressive function: the ability to capture slow-motion video at 240 frames per second.

It’s coming in April, and it’s yours for $250. Press release with full specs here.

Samsung’s latest SH100 digicam is a new point-and-shoot with some well thought out WiFi functionality that not only makes it easy to offload fresh shots and videos to your computer, but also to wirelessly pipe content up to your HDTV.

Spec-wise, the SH100 is fairly typical, boasting a 14.2 megapixel CCD sensor, an f4.7 lens capable of 5x optical zoom, 720p HD video support and the usual gaggle of easy-to-use photo filters.

It’s probably the built in 802.11 b/g/n WiFi that helps distinguish the SH100 from the competition the most. Leveraging the WiFi connection with DLNA, you should not only be able to wirelessly slurp down your videos and stills, but even directly connect your camera to your HDTV or even your smartphone (although Samsung, backing Android heavily right now, only calls out the Galaxy S by name).

The SH100 should be available in March for the price of a song: it’ll cost just $199.

In a move that might well have Fake Steve quaking in his boots, Apple has just struck down the Twitter account of one of the growing number of tech parodists poking fun at Cupertino and its products.

A few hours before popular rumor indicated it would launch, Apple pumped Mac OS X 10.6.6 down through Software Update … most notably including support for the new Mac App Store, which is launching with more than a thousand apps, including a very sexy new Twitter for Mac client.

iWork ’11 is, surprisingly, not debuting on the Mac App Store, but you can find Aperture, at least, as well as iLife ’11. Check out the press release after the jump, and check in later for more of our impressions.

CoM got invited to the PepCom Digital Experience special press event Wednesday evening, so I took the opportunity to spend some time with Motorola’s new “iPad killer.” Video and photos after the jump.

Short of an official announcement from Apple, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not Apple’s next-generation desktops and notebooks will use Intel’s recently unveiled Sandy Bridge architecture… but even if Cupertino defies expectations and sits this CPU gen out, don’t sweat it: you’ll at least be able to put yourself together a Sandy Bridge Hackintosh.

With remarkable alacrity, hackers with early access to Sandy Bridge wasted little time upon the lapse of Intel’s non-disclosure agreement to install Mac OS X on a Sandy Bridge processor, pushing Snow Leopard onto a machine running the new Intel Core i5-2500K CPU running at 3.30GHz.

How’d it run? Not as well as it will once OS X officially supports Sandy Bridge: a Geekbench score of 8874 and an Xbench score of 282.40. As it is, the hackers needed to patch the kernel to even get Snow Leopard to boot. Still, if there was any doubt, the benchmark scores do make it pretty clear that when Snow Leopard starts supporting Sandy Bridge, we’ll all be looking at the fastest Macs yet.

In their 2011 lineup of HDTVs, Samsung is throwing a new universal remote into every box with a design you might just have seen somewhere before, since it looks almost exactly like the iPhone 4.

Amazon has announced that they will be throwing their hat into the App Marketplace ring by opening up the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal, which will allow developers of Android apps to submit apps for their upcoming Amazon Appstore for Android. It’s an interesting move, and one that might end up kicking Google’s own Android Marketplace right in the teeth.

Yesterday, a firm named GlobalDirectParts put together an extensive five minute video showcasing what they say are the components of Apple’s next-generation iPhone.

While the video could have been an elaborate fake, GlobalDirectParts’ video gave a clear look at the charging port flex cable and a new design for the external antenna design. Unfortunately, the video was quickly pulled by YouTube because of a copyright claim by Apple, gifting the video with at least some tint of posthumous veracity.

A site called Smartphone Medic is now confirming the GlobalDirectParts video with several images of a new iPhone antenna, which has four black bands separating the antennas, compared to the current iPhone 4’s three. Since antenna attenuation (aka “death grip”) happens when you bridge these antennas with your hand, four separations would presumably mitigate the issue compared to three.

What were the nigh-implausible terms that Apple agreed to in order to finally compel the Beatles to bring their catalog to iTunes? Did Steve Jobs personally agree to perform on “butt bongos” for Ringo Star’s & His All Star Band? Did Apple’s elite team of corporate espionagers steal back the sentimental leg Sir Paul once gave Heather Mills and return it to his bosom? Did they just liquor Yoko up with a cocktail comprised of a plum floating in perfume served in a man’s hat?

None of the above, sayeth Reuters. Instead, they say — surprise! — it all came down to just paying the Beatles gobs of money directly, instead of paying Sony, who controls most of the song catalog.

The double mirrored face in the blue Mac Finder icon has always been a recognizable piece of Macintosh lore. But did the concept for this graphic originate in Cupertino in the 1980s, or much earlier on another continent? Blogger Cattani Simone has noticed some similarities to a portion of Picasso’s painting Two Characters (Deux Personnages), 1934, located at MART, the Museum of Modern Art in Rovereto (TN) Italy:

The icon of the Macintosh Finder seems very similar to the face of one of the characters of the work of the Spanish artist … Initially I told myself that it wasn’t possible … I’ve never heard about that and anyway someone would know the story for sure … but on the internet there seems to be no correspondence between these things … or at least … No one has mentioned it in the network ….

Coincidence, or Great Artist Stealing?  Inquiring minds need to know…

[via MacInTouch] [Daring Fireball]

The team at Realmac Software – makers of apps like LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver, among others – have posted their thoughts about what changes the Mac App Store may bring.

Lower prices is one. Perhaps not as low as we’ve seen for iOS, but certainly lower than many developers charge right now. The old argument applies: Apple is creating a marketplace that didn’t exist before. That’s why it takes its 30% cut, and why the overall volume of sales should increase (hopefully).

Another prediction is simpler apps that do, ahem, one thing well. Complicated do-everything applications are hard to put into categories, and hard to explain to customers in the limited space available on a typical App Store page. Apps that just do a single job are easier to understand in an instant, and therefore easier to sell.

That said, it’s important to remember that the Mac App Store is, for now at least, just one way to get software installed on your Mac. Developers will be free to sell their wares via their own websites using traditional methods. There’s going to be a transition period where software is bought and sold both ways. The question everyone’s asking is: how long will that period last? Years? Months?

If you develop for OS X, do you agree with Realmac’s thoughts? Are you planning to reduce prices, and re-focus your apps for selling in the App Store? Do you think the App Store is going to completely take over, and how long will that take?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

(Via One Thing Well.)

In a pre-Christmas post, we asked Cult of Mac readers to vote for their favorite new Mac OS X app of 2010. As usual, by “new” we mean a brand new app, or a major update to an old app, that’s been released during the previous 12 months.

This years winner, by a considerable margin, was email client Postbox 2.

For those of you who’ve not tried it, Postbox is a feature-packed email client which combines some of the best ideas from web-based email and local email services. It’s an excellent tool for people who live and die by email, and who manage a large volume of messages across many different accounts.

Other apps that got a lot of mentions included Alfred, Sparrow and Reeder.

Thanks to everyone who contributed their comments. I’m already looking forward to all the new treasures we might discover during 2011 – and the new means we will have to discover them, the Mac App Store, which should be live in just a few hours from now.