Cult of Mac

We start the day with more application for your iPhone and iPod touch. First up is “Gangstar,” the third-person sandbox game from Gameloft. Usually, the application is $5, but fans can now get the game for free. Also, we have a new crop of free iPhone apps, including “0.03 Seconds Pro,” the reaction time-based game. We close out our deal spotlight with “Dora’s Christmas Carol.” This educational children’s game is usually $1.99, but the application is now available for just $0.99.

Along the way, we’ll take a look at hardware deals (like Mac Pro Xeon workstations), cases for your iPad and iPhone, along with other hardware and software bargains. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Boy those social networks are sticky: a pair of iPhone thieves were caught thanks to Facebook.

Brittany Busby, 19, and Todd Beede, 28, strolled into an AT&T store in downtown Montpelier, Vermont at around 2 p.m. and started checking out the phones.

They grabbed a $700 iPhone and ran off – but were caught because they couldn’t resist logging into Facebook on another phone in the store but forgot to sign off.

Yesterday we reported that Google’s DNS service might be to blame for AppleTV’s slow HD streaming speeds on some devices.

Here was the problem, as we summarized it at the time:

Basically, iTunes streaming content is hosted by Akamai, which uses different local servers to route downloaders to the fastest available connection. Services like Google DNS, or other generic DNS providers, are trying to route all users the same way… the equivalent of trying to cram a few thousand people through a single door at the same time.

OpenDNS has just reached out to us, though, to assure both Cult of Mac and its readers that users of their service that they can expect fast AppleTV streaming, all the time.

Laura Oppenheimer of Open DNS writes:

OpenDNS has arrangements with a number of CDNs that make this a non-issue for the vast majority of OpenDNS + Apple TV users. That said, with Akamai, especially internationally, it’s still suboptimal. It’s entirely workable, but not as optimal as it could be.

In general, North America isn’t really an issue since we have a sufficiently dense network topology. That said, we’re very open to working to improve end-user CDN routing with Akamai, just as we have with other large CDNs.

In short, if you’re having problems with your AppleTV and you live in North America, give OpenDNS a try. If you’re an international user, though, Apple’s Akamai hosting isn’t what it could be… and you might experience problems no matter what DNS provider you use.

Rare Vintage Apple items are popular these days. An Apple Lisa 1 put up for sale on eBay last week has sold for $15,000 after 11 bids! The unit, in working condition, belonged to a former member of the Lisa production team at Apple and was sold by his brother.  In an email received by Cult of Mac, the seller noted that the buyer intends to display the system in a museum in Italy.

Remember that supposed iPad Mini flaunted by famous Taiwanese racecar driver Jimmy Lin earlier today? We thought he was holding a fake, but we may have been more right than we knew: according to reader Greg Mills, it’s a Photoshop fake.

Square Enix just released a iOS port of one classic JRPG from the SNES era, Secret of Mana, and now it appears that they’re teasing another: Joystiq just sussed out a cryptic new teaser site for what appears to be a smartphone compatible (and hopefully iOS specific) port of Chrono Trigger, their famous 16-bit time travel RPG first released way back in 1995.

Chrono Trigger is still one of my favorite games. The site says “Spring 2011.” Oh please, oh please, oh please.

Need an external battery pack that doesn’t just dangle from the foot of your phone like a bulbous, electrically-charged bunion? The Octopus might be just what you’re looking for.

Taking its name from the suction cups of a cephalopod’s tentacles, the Octopus sits in your gadget bag until your iPhone runs out of juice, at which point it can be slapped onto the back of your device and connected to the Dock Connector thanks to a flexible cable.

If you allow the Octopus to fully charge your iOS device, you can expect your iPhone to comfortably juice to about half power, which should give you either ten hours of extra video or four hours of extra talk time.

Not a bad idea compared to some of the bulkier combo battery cases, and cheap to boot: the Octopus will only cost you $30

Greetings, Space Marine. You have been recruited by the StarCraft League to defend the Dominion against Zeratul and the Protoss Armada. If you’re too cheap to accept your mission, though, head on over to Blizzard‘s web site, where they’re now offering up for free download the long belated demo for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the latest iteration of their famed, Korea-rocking space warfare RTS.

Don’t feel like ordering direct from Apple? AT&T’s now ready to sell you an iPad 3G directly at the usual $629, $729 and $829 prices, with the same no contract deal as through Apple’s online store. But surely you want to give your money directly to Ma Bell out of sheer loyalty to the AT&T experience, right?

You probably know of Instagram, the hipster app du jour which allows you to easily apply a number of attractive, quasi-Polaroid-esque filters that spruce up your iPhone or iPod Touch pictures to give them a more artistic and sometimes twee look.

But you probably know more than of Instagram. You probably use it. After all, they just racked up one million users.

According to Instragram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Instagram started with just 80 users, and their ultimate “audacious goal” was just to let people share media in open community. The growth they’ve seen is phenomal, though: since mid-October, they’ve lured in over a million souls.

“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”

How big is Instagram? Users are now collectively uploading three photos per second, to contribute to a library of almost ten million photos.

I may sound dismissive, but I’m not: Instagram undeniably allows users to take more interesting looking photos than the iPhone’s built-in sensor can natively produce. I guess I just wish that the iPhone and iPod Touch’s camera hardware was capable of taking interesting images without needing a filter app. It can’t, but that’s not Apple’s failure: it’s a limitation on the technology of digital sensors. Here’s hoping that changes.

Considering the depths that Apple fans will plump into a new version of iOS even before it’s released — let alone a month later — we’re amazed to hear that developers are still stumbling upon new features of iOS 4.2… especially when those features are as buzzworthy as augmented reality. Yet that’s just what Occipital has discovered lurking in the firmware of Apple’s latest iteration of its popular mobile operating system.

Apple tried but failed to control the technology behind Microsoft’s incredible gesture-recognizing Kinect controller, but if you wonder what might have been if they succeeded, keep your eyes on this January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That’s where Ellipti Labs will demonstrate what gesture recognition could look like on the iPad.

Although $400 million is nothing to sneeze at, for Apple’s expected $88 billion in revenue for fiscal 2011, the amount is “positive, but fairly immaterial,” one analyst told investors Wednesday. However, the $99 Apple TV could be a “game changer” if some tweaks are made to the box the Cupertino, Calif. company once called just a “hobby.”

Tuesday, Apple took the unprecedented step of announcing ahead of time it expects to sell 1 million Apple TV units by the end of the week. The move was widely seen as a way to steal thunder from competitors, Roku and Google.

AirPlay may have been a little bit of a disappointment upon arrival, but TUAW’s Erica Sadun just keeps on managing to make it better. Just a week after her release of AirPlayer, an app that tricks AirPlay into thinking your Mac’s an AppleTV, comes her brand new tool, called AirFlick… and it’s everything that AirPlay should have been out of the box.

What does AirFlick do? It allows you to stream video content from your Mac to your AppleTV: AVIs, MP4s, even streaming video files on the Internet. You name it! “It” being non-Flash video.

When Steve Jobs himself was queried on the possibilities inherent in the seven inch tablet form factor, he replied that they were “dead on arrival” and declared them to be “tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad.”

Despite this, rumors have persisted that 2011 will see the introduction of a 7-inch iPad Mini… and now a famous Taiwanese celebrity and race car driver is claiming to own a prototype.

A library in Australia has converted conference rooms into rumpus rooms — popular with teens who come to sing along with iPods, play games on iPads and watch pay TV.

The Campbelltown Library in Newton, a suburb of Adelaide, is hoping to attract more teens and make the library “less boring” by lifting the usual shsssh! and keeping conference rooms open to gadgets until 11 pm.

“I usually go to do research for school projects,” says Sam, 15. ” But I think it’s cool you can use technology and not be scared to make a little bit of noise.”

What if you could propel your band to the top of the iTunes sales charts while simultaneously laundering cash from stolen credit card numbers straight to your bank account?

Why, you’d go to jail, as UK teen Lamar Johnson just found out.

Amazon, long reticent about announcing sales figures of its Kindle e-reader, could sell more than 8 million of the devices this year, 60 percent higher than Wall Street analysts predicted, according to a news report. That would be a dramatic rise from the 2.4 million Kindles sold in 2009, unnamed sources within the online bookseller told a reporter.

The sales increase may stem from two trends: a growing demand for standalone e-readers even in the face of the multipurpose Apple iPad and Amazon’s decision to let its e-books be read on a wide variety of platforms, including the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, Android-based phones and the latest addition: phones using Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system. The multi-platforms are a sign Amazon does not plan to pin all of its e-reader and e-book sales on the Kindle, now offered in three versions, according to Piper Jaffray Analyst Gen Munster.

There’s a lot more happening in the Cupertino-centric world than the usual porn-unboxing videos and edible iPhones: here are the most bizarre moments involving Apple in 2010 — from severed appendages to exploded iDevices as art and spy evangelists.

Here’s our 2010 Year in Review of the best 10 hardware peripherals for your iPhone or iPad that we’ve come across in the last twelve months.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — all of them are still available and worth a look.

10. AR Drone Parrot

It’s going to be one lucky kid who gets this iDevice-controllable wonder

The AR Drone Parrot is a quadricopter that’s controlled by the iPhone, iPod touch or the iPad. It can be flown indoors or outside and features many sensors, including a front camera ,vertical camera and an ultrasound altimeter. High-tech sensors make it simple for kids to pilot. The AR Drone can also be used in video games, such as AR FlyingAce, a dogfight between two AR Drones.

The AR Drone Parrot is available from Amazon for $299.99

Hyundai has gone high-tech for their luxury Equus sedan, releasing the 2011 owner’s manual as a free interactive iPad app.  Now you can view a multimedia reference guide, locate Hyundai dealers, schedule service appointments, read (and ignore) safety warnings, and – according to the App Store description – “experience Equus rear-passenger massage and relaxation therapy.”

Wow. That’s some owner’s manual.

Even better, an iPad comes with the car! Nice perk. Vehicle cost: $58,900. iPhone and iPod touch versions of the app are scheduled for release shortly.

The Clamcase an iPad case that promised to turn your iPad into a laptop earlier this year is finally shipping. The company, Clamcase LLC, missed their Fall deadline for shipment by one day, but hey that isn’t a big deal. Right?

The keyboard portion of the case connects to the iPad via Bluetooth. It looks pretty awesome and I’ve asked the company to send me more information about it. It will be interesting to see if the product lives up to the hype you’ll see in the company’s product demonstration YouTube video.

The video presented a great proof-of-concept, but it left me wondering what reality will be like since the high-resolution press images weren’t available for download on the company’s press resources web page and most of the Clamcase images looked rendered versus photographed.

You can get the Clamcase, which retails for $149, for as low as $99 direct from the manufacturer for a limited time. If you order one of these let us know what you think about it after you receive it.

Check out the video after the read more link below.

Here’s our 2010 Year in Review of the best 10 hardware peripherals for your Mac that we’ve come across in the last twelve months.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — all of them are still available and worth a look.

10. Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard Drive 2TB

Leander Kahney: Iomega’s new Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard Drive packs a whopping 2-Terabytes in a compact, stylish package.

The Mac Edition eGo drive is a good-looking complement to Apple’s new glass-and-aluminum Macs. It’s styled to match Apple’s Mac Pro with a sleek, silver case and a grill front.

It’s available in 1TB and 2TB configurations ($159.99 and $249, respectively), and offers several connectivity options: there are two FireWire 800 ports and one USB 2.0 port. It ships with a FireWire 400-to-800 conversion cable, which makes it compatible with Macs without a FireWire 800 port.

Apple has joined the shameful list of companies that have denied support for WikiLeaks.

Apple confirmed that it removed a WikiLeaks App from the online App Store, as reported earlier, and did so because it “violated our developer guidelines.”

“Apps must comply with all local laws and may not put an individual or group in harm’s way,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told the New York Times.

However, exactly how or why the app doesn’t comply with the law, or puts people in harm’s way, Muller didn’t explain. She also didn’t discuss the First Amendment or the freedom of the press.

The $1.99 WikiLeaks App let users view the WikiLeaks site and its Twitter account.

The app was taken down on Monday after being available for only three days. Apple joins Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, Bank of America and others in denying services or support for the WikiLeaks organization.

I for one am pissed. I support WikiLeaks and believe strongly that it is conducting the most important journalism of the last several years, and in a stunning, ballsy fashion. I’d love to see Steve Jobs, who has nurtured an image of a revolutionary, speak up in support. Little chance of that though.

We’re just days from Christmas and with this deal spotlight, you’d better watch out for falling prices. Yes, that’s a pretty corny opening, but you’ll find the savings nothing to laugh at. First up is a new crop of iPad apps with lower prices, including the “Splinter Cell” game. Next is another harvest of iPhone apps, including the musical game “Justin Bieber Revenge.” If that’s not enough, we also have another round of price drops on SEGA games, including “Super Monkey Ball.”

If hardware is more your style, we have an iMac powered by a 2.8GHz Core i7 processor with 27-inch screen for $1,649. For MacBook Air fans, we have a 2.13GHz MBA with 13-inch screen for $1,100.

There are plenty of other deals, including GPS software for your iPhone, free city guides and an iPhone warranty. As always, details on these and many other bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.