Cult of Mac

Proving that home electronics are driving that gift-laden 2010 sleigh, the iPad is credited with a sales spike this holiday season.

Comscore reports that computer hardware is the top growing category for the 2010 holiday season to date with a 25-percent increase over last year. Shoppers snapping up handheld devices (such as Apple iPads and e-readers) and laptop computers account for much of the growth.

The one-size-fits-all ease of electronic gifts were also behind the record numbers for e-spending: $27.46 billion was spent online, a 12-percent increase over the same days last year. Free Shipping Day also proved appealing, merchants throwing that in increased sales by 61-percent over the same day last year.

The other day, as I was stuffing my new 11.6-inch MacBook Air in my tote, I once again felt that bubble of warm gratitude that after twenty odd years of waiting, someone had finally come along and given me the perfect writer’s laptop that I’ve always wanted: the perfect amalgam of extreme portability married to great battery life and a sturdy, pleasant-to-use keyboard.

I’d had such pleasant reveries before, but this time, it was punctuated with a bit of sadness, as I remembered the many journals I’d carried around over the years — a rather absurd addiction of mine, given that I rarely wrote anything of worth in them — and realized that the new MacBook Air was effectively more convenient to carry around than even the composition notebooks I used to lug with me when I wanted to travel light but still be able to do some quick writing if the inspiration struck.

It’s weird that I’m sad that the MacBook Air obviated a kind of notebook that I never really used anyway, but I liked having all sorts of notebooks around, and now there’s no point in buying any new ones. I guess I’ll have to content myself in the future with the likes of this composition notebook skin for MacBook Air, which takes its attention to detail right down to the simulation of the note page’s fuzzy, blue lined rule.

If you can’t get anyone to watch your ho-hum videos, a new iPhone app can pixelate or bleep that turkey carving moment to make it look like something out of “Sh*t My Dad Says.”

It’s the latest from Darren Murtha and partner Chris Lott, who created the Shape Builder app to keep his four-year-old amused. Murtha tells us he was inspired to make this $1.99 app by a Sesame Street video that was unnecessarily censored.

“Even before the iPhone had video editing capabilities, I wanted to develop the app. After Apple released API to help code video editing, then it became a reality.”

The basic idea: even if your video recordings are strictly PG-13, you can still have some good fun (preferably at someone else’s expense) with the app.

The old saying about a rising tide lifts all boats seems pertinent even to smartphones. A dramatic rise in demand for smartphones has allowed Android to enter the market yet hasn’t caused Apple to cut its price for the iPhone, writes one analyst Monday.

With demand for smartphones growing at 90 percent per year, the question isn’t how Android will hurt Apple. “The more smartphones you build, the more price you can charge. This is regardless of platform,” according to Asymco’s Horace Dediu.

With the holidays now only days away, we are all starting to think about the true meaning of the holidays – food and drink, and copious amounts of the stuff! Whether you are in charge of the full roast on Christmas day, or just the cranberries, having a helping hand is always appreciated.

Being the lovely people we are, we have put together a list of the best apps and accessories for both iPhone and iPad that can help your holiday season be as full flavoured and stress free as possible!

The run up to the festive holiday is great news for the App Store – closing for submissions over Christmas means developers are working hard to ensure that their applications are approved and ready for purchase before Apple closes the doors. As a result, a torrent of applications have been surging in to the App Store over the past week, and to help you separate the good from the bad, here’s our list of must-have apps released over the past week.

The fascinating Guinness World Records book is now available as an interactive iPad application. Records come to life with full-screen video and full-color photography, and you can even attempt to beat exclusive world records on your device.

Friends is a new social networking application for the iPhone that lets you keep up with your friends, family, and colleagues from 4 social networks. With support for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, it’s easy to stay in touch without the need to open up different applications – it’s all here, in one place.

Screens is a VNC client for all of your iOS devices that makes accessing your computer from anywhere incredibly easy. It’s simple to set up and is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux computers, through both Wi-Fi and 3G.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS apps – including Type It!, Puffin, and more – after the break!

The run up to the festive holiday is great news for iOS gamers – with the App Store closed for submissions over Christmas, developers are working hard to ensure that their applications are approved and ready for purchase before Apple closes the doors. This means that a torrent of games have been surging in to the App Store over the past week, and to help you separate the good from the bad, here’s our list of must-have games released over the past week.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has been a huge hit on games consoles for many months now, and thanks to EA, first-person shooter fans can now enjoy this awesome title on their iPhones. It features classic Battlefield warfare with intense single-player missions and online multiplayer that’s guaranteed to keep you entertained this Christmas.

Teaser trailers and screenshots for Real Racing 2 have been popping up all over the place in the past few weeks, and Real Racing fans have been very much looking forward to the game’s release. Firemint’s second Real Racing title features officially licensed cars for the first time, multiple exciting game modes, and claims to be the most exhilarating racing experience on a handheld device.

N.O.V.A. 2 is the highly anticipated sequel to one of Gameloft’s most exciting games for iOS. The ultimate sci-fi first-person shooter returns, boasting improved A.I., better online multiplayer, a larger range of weapons, and a whole lot more. If you’re a fan of the first N.O.V.A., you won’t be disappointed.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS games – including Sega’s Altered Beast and EA’s Ultimate Mortal Kombat – after the break!

Apple’s passing out Christmas gifts early for Mac and iOS developers. The company is offering six development books covering Mac OS X and iOS development — for free.

The new eBooks aren’t really new, but they haven’t been available in the iBookstore until today. Previously developers could either read them online or download PDF versions to read later via developer.apple.com.

The six titles include: Cocoa Fundamental’s Guide, The Objective-C Programming Language, iOS Application Programming Guide, Object Oriented Programming With Objective-C, iOS Technology Overview, and iOS Human Interface Guidelines.

You can download these books to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad from the iBookstore.

Another rare item from Cupertino, an Apple Lisa 1, hit the auction block this week.  The successor to the Apple II and the predecessor to the Macintosh, the Lisa originally shipped back in 1983.  Born of the pioneering work done at Xerox PARC and refined by Apple, it was the world’s first commercially available computer with a Graphical User Interface.

The first Lisa used two proprietary 5.25″ floppy disk drives known as “Twiggy” drives.  These were problematic and unreliable, and were replaced in 1984 with the Lisa 2 and a 400k 3.5″ floppy drive.  Most original Lisas were updated to the 3.5″ disk package, so very few Lisa 1 systems survive today.

As of this writing, current price on eBay is $15,000 after 4 bids, with 4 days left to go.  Check back late next Tuesday for the results. Following the recent Apple 1 sale, looks like another possible record in the making!

[via MacNN] [9to5mac]

We wrap up another week with a variety of both hardware and software deals. First up is a 13-inch MacBook Air, powered by the Core 2 Duo running at 2.13GHz for $1,125. (We have a number of other hardware deals for other MacBooks, as well as iMacs.) Also on tap are a number of apps for your iPhone and iPad. EA has various well-known games, such as “Scrabble” for the Apple tablet. The iPhone App Store releases a new crop of freebies, including “Battle Bears -1.”

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

We all love Dropbox, right? For two years, it’s allowed us to keep our most important files synced across multiple computers and devices, complete with a generous 2GB freebie limit (easily expandable by recommendations and promotions).

It’s hard to believe that such an awesome service wasn’t even version 1.0, but apparently not: last night, Dropbox rolled out their first whole point release, bringing along a huge slew of improvements including — most importantly — selective folder sync.

Selective Sync allows you to select which folders and files within your Dropbox get shot down to your other computers, which can be determined in each computer’s control panel. This allows you, for example, to save some of your poor MacBook Air’s paltry 64GBs from the sheer bloat of your Dropboxed media collection. Lovely.

There’s more improvements than that, naturally. The 1.0 updates includes hundreds of bug fixes, reduced resource usage (50 percent in memory alone) and some user-friendly interface tweaks.

You can grab the 1.0 update here.

In the immortal spirit of Nigel Tufnel, our 2010 Year in Review of the best in Audio gear and apps for Mac and iOS devices goes to 11.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — they each should be around to help you discover dulcet tones and make sound memories for a long time to come.

11. iDJ – iPad Music App ($9.99)

iDJ’s music management system is a simple, streamlined way to quickly build club-quality playlists using the music in your iTunes library. With patented BPM detection technology, iDJ fuses your music together with the finesse of a professional mixmaster. As you add songs, iDJ analyzes their sonic-waveforms, calculates tempos, and then automatically performs optimal transitions throughout the playlist. Playlists can contain an unlimited number of songs and iDJ supports audio in WAV, MP3, and AAC formats. Plus, your iDJ library can be managed through iTunes. iDJ is the first true music-mixing application for iPad that both beginners and professionals can enjoy.

Sure, this is a pretty big gimmick, but we’re impressed none the less: behold an 11-inch MacBook Air driving four displays at once. From right to left, the MacBook Air is driving a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display through the Mini DisplayPort a 7-inch Mimo 720-S display through USB, its own internal display and an Apple IIc running a terminal session through a serial cable, presumably through another USB adapter. This, my friends, is the most lurid Mac porn you’ll see all day,

Not to continue to pimp our own Infinity Bladeelegiac masterpiece.

Interestingly, though, it turns out that Infinity Blade — a game that seems like it would be impossible to pull off on any other console — was not designed for iOS to begin with.

In fact, as Chair co-founder Donald Mustard makes clear in a recent interview, it wasn’t designed for an iPhone or iPad… it was designed for the great gaming device that Apple missed out on: Kinect.

Here’s how a subsidy on your smartphone is supposed to work: in exchange for a shorter upfront price, you agree to a two year contract for cellular services. Baked into your mobile bill is a certain amount of surcharge that helps pay off the full price of your phone, but after twenty four months, you own that phone entirely, and should be able to bring it to any network you care to, because after 24 months, you’ve paid it off.

As you probably know, though, this is not a position on mobile phone subsidies that is likely to get you a lot of sympathy at AT&T. In fact, there’s no official way to unlock an AT&T iPhone once your 24 month contract is over: even though you now own that smartphone, it’s still locked to AT&T’s service.

Honestly, that’s crap, and has driven a lot of American iPhone owners down the road to jailbreak. Canadians, though, seem to have it a lot easier: if you’ve gotten your iPhone from Rogers, a $50 fee at the end of your contract is enough to have the network unlock your phone to work on a competitors’ network.

Thursday was a big day in insider trading busts, as four new arrests were made by the Securities and Exchange Commission cracking down on insider trading.

One of those arrests, though, is particularly interesting to Apple enthusiasts: Walter Shimoon, an executive for Flextronics (an Apple supplier), was one of those busted on Thursday, and as it turns out, one of his violations was to pass on information about both an iPhone update and the iPad before they were official.

Way out, man. That might encapsulate the Thursday remarks by a Research In Motion executive on whether the Waterloo, Ontario-based company’s upcoming PlayBook can compete with Apple’s iPad. “I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do,” RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said in what some members of the media termed “a several minute rant”.

The tablet market will move away from “a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps,” Balsillie said in response to a question from JP Morgan analyst Rod Hall. The comment, aimed at Apple, was RIM’s latest attack on the Cupertino, Calif. company’s grip on the nascent tablet market.

Apple’s iTunes continues to dominate digital music sales, gaining three percent compared to last year and comprising 66 percent of the market, according to news reports. Amazon, Apple’s closest competitor, with just 13 percent of digital music purchases, tied Walmart, which relinquished first place to the Cupertino, Calif. firm in 2008.

The week-to-week struggle for digital music domination is even more cut-throat, according to the Wall Street Journal. Record label insiders told the newspaper Amazon holds on to just six to 10 percent of digital sales each week with Apple cruising along at near 90 percent of the market.

Word Lens is the app making jaws drop all over the internet this morning, thanks to this appropriately jaw-dropping demo video:

The video says it all, but you might be left wondering: is it a hoax? Can it really be as good as that?

Etch-a-Sketch, our childhood friend, returns again (in spirit) with this adorable case for the iPhone 4. Joining existing models available for the iPad and older iPhones, the slide-on hard case has cutouts for home button, cameras and microphone. $25 from Headcase.

Now you can relive those moments playing in front of the living room TV – or waiting in the dentist office…

[via iPhoneSavior]

Let’s face it, fanboys and girls love getting Apple related gifts for the holidays. But if you are lucky enough to have an Apple nerd in your family, you have by now realized that most Apple inspired gifts are usually boring or total crap. Fear not, though, friends, I present to thee 10 gifts that are guaranteed to make your Apple obsessed loved one squeal in glee.

Most Apple gifts out there have been made in this decade. But for the diehard Apple fan, vintage gifts are sure to please. This genuine Apple projector pen hides a special power—an Apple logo projector! I’m not quite sure what if any utility this might have, but I think we can all agree it’s a surefire way to impress the ladies.

FaceTime. Email. Text Messaging. Twitter.  Your iPhone is your personal communicator, allowing you to keep in contact with friends, family and your social network.  The web, the internet – gateways to information and productivity.

But technology has a downside, and anyone who’s battled internet addiction or just taken a weekend off from being plugged-in understands the need for balance.  My colleague Professor Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying this phenomenon for decades and researched how relentless connection can lead to a new solitude:

Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for? Now, the question is what don’t we use them for? Technology promises to let us do anything from anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to do everything everywhere.

With the CultofMac so chock full of bike geeks, it’s no wonder we pretty excited to see the arrival a few months back of one of the first gadgets that fall into the app-enhanced category — a gadget/app mashup that manufacturer New Potato Tech cleverly calls an “appcessory.” In this case, the $99 LiveRider combo of an iPhone bicycle mount and sensor/receiver package with its own dedicated app turns the iPhone into a flexible, jumbo-screened bike computer.

It’s not the only sensor/app combo on the market; Enki Sports offers a more complete and expensive solution, and newcomer Wahoo Fitness recently arrived with a flexible, modular approach (with sensors that look remarkably similar to Enki’s). But we figured New Potato’s kit would provide a simple, relatively inexpensive setup for intermediate-ish cyclists wanting their data fix. We were mistaken.

According to a recent Houston Chronicle story an iPhone has once again saved the day and solved a crime. This particular iPhone was stolen from a female jogger, who was jogging with a friend, during an armed robbery that occurred in the 700 block of Brittmore on the west side of Houston, Texas.

The alleged robbers exited a pickup truck and confronted the two women according to Houston Police Department (HPD) spokesman John Cannon.  An Apple iPhone was turned over to the robbers by one of the women and fortunately neither of them was hurt.

The kitchen computer is a wonderful, wonderful prospect — recipes to be references, emails to be responded to over cooking — except for the prospects of smoke and steam and spatters of hot grease. Doubly so the prospect of cooking with an iPad, which is simply too beautiful, too pure a device to put near an open flame.

Enter various rack solutions, none of which have caught our eye for their permanence, but this is pretty ingenious: The Original Kitchen iPad Rack, an acrylic rack that temporarily hooks into an installed mount on the underside of your hood or cabinet for when you need it. Otherwise, you just slot it off and take it away.

Works for iPad quite well, natch, but it also works on other recipe-accessing tablets, including the Kindle and Galaxy Tab. For only $29.99, this may well make a good last minute stocking stuffer.