Running against personages as variegated as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, one-time would-be veep Sarah Palin, the meat-dress-wearing Lady Gaga, the abstract avatar of the Unemployed American and the vitamin B deficient Chilean Miners, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is up for Time Magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year… and there’s one person who thinks he should get it: Google’s own button-cute vice president, Marissa Mayer.
As a rule, Apple is secretive about when to expect updates to their product lines, but if you know Cupertino’s history of past releases, it’s usually pretty easy to guess when they are likely to announce a new product.
Most of the time, that’s good enough, except when it isn’t. As film postproduction consultant Dustyn Gobler notes, when Apple is secretive about future plans for its software suites — in this case, Final Cut Pro — people who are running their businesses on that software can get edgy.
Gobler decided to write Steve Jobs and see what was happening with Final Cut. As he put it, “My clients are making multi-year, hundreds of thousands of dollars decisions and we need to know what’s going on with Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Server, and Xsan. We need to know that Apple won’t abandon Final Cut Pro because selling iPads is more lucrative.”
Steve quickly got back to him with a response, assuring him that “a great release of Final Cut is coming early next year.” It was, of course, sent from his iPad.
Gobler’s full email contains a larger plea to Steve to allow the product managers of their pro apps to begin transparently blogging about what Apple is working on, which of course went unaddressed, but come on: good for customers or no, that’s just not Apple’s style.
An April 2010 Gorillaz concert, cc-licensed via Wonker on Flickr.
A project named after our hulking primate cousins may be the first ever to create an album using an iPad.
Damon Albarn of Gorillaz is hard at work on the follow up to “Plastic Beach” using Apple’s magical computer tablet.
“I’ve made it on an iPad – I hope I’ll be making the first record on an iPad,” Albarn told NME. “I fell in love with my iPad as soon as I got it, so I’ve made a completely different kind of record.”
He hopes it’ll be ready before Christmas 2010. If so, it may be the first professional album made on an iPad. No mentions of what software he’s using — details to come.
Lenovo Group plans to enter the tablet wars in 2011, with the LePad, according to the computer maker’s CEO. Lenovo joins a growing number of companies, including Dell, Research in Motion and Samsung hoping to wrest control from Apple’s iPad.
In an interview, Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said the LePad would launch first in China in early 2011 and later the same year in the United States. While many iPad rivals have announced sub-$500 prices, Lenovo has yet to announce a price for its entry. Earlier this year, Lenovo launched LePhone in China, a handset it hopes will spearhead its goal for a greater stake in mobile computing. The company would like 10 percent to 20 percent of its revenue to come from mobile Internet products. To that end, LePad will be compatible with an iTunes-like application download store operated by Lenovo.
Since unveiling the iPad, Apple has always referred to its dominating tablet device as “magical.” Now supporters of Google’s Android operating system hope to borrow the phrase to tout a rival tablet from the men and women of Mountain View, Calif.
“They’re building a magical product,” Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told financial analysts during a call to report his company’s third-quarter numbers. “I think its going to really, really surprise people and delight consumers everywhere,” he said of the Android-based phones and tablets Google is developing.
Christie’s of London just announced a special item for auction, an original Apple 1 computer shipped directly from Steve Jobs’ garage. Labeled system number 82, this kit includes the motherboard, cassette adapter, manuals, the original shipping box in good condition, and a signed letter from Steve Jobs to the original owner!
The Apple 1 was the first pre-assembled personal computer, it did not require soldering skills to get running. “This is the forerunner of the iPod, iPad and iPhone” said Julian Wilson from Christie’s, “it worked straight out of the box.”
Approximately 200 Apple 1 systems were produced, and about a quarter of those survive today. The Steves – ever the jokesters – originally priced the system at $666.66. In 2009 an Apple 1 was listed on eBay for $50,000. Christie’s estimates this one to sell for £150,000 ($240,000)! Not a bad return on your investment.
Don’t you hate it when you’re watching some streamed video in your web browser, and just when it’s getting interesting your screen dims, or the screensaver activates?
It happens because your computer doesn’t consider video playing in the browser to be “activity”. It doesn’t care what the browser is showing; if it thinks you’ve wandered off to make some coffee, it will do what you’ve told it to do in the Energy Saver preferences. Hence those mid-stream dimming moments.
Caffeine is a tiny utility that solves this problem in a single click. It sits in your Menu Bar, doing nothing until you need it. When you start watching some video and you want the screen to stay alive, you just click the Caffeine icon. Now your screen will stay bright no matter what, until you click Caffeine again to put things back to normal.
The aptly-named Caffeine gives your computer a temporary boost, keeping it alert enough so you can watch your video uninterrupted. It’s free, it’s great, and you should go get it now.
(You’re reading the 21st post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)
Artist Michael Tompert takes Apple’s products and wrecks them with blowtorches, sledgehammers, handsaws and handguns. His large-scale prints of the detritus are surprisingly colorful and beautiful.
“It’s an alternate viewpoint,” explained Tompert at a preview of his first gallery show, which opens in San Francisco today. “They’re beautiful inside. They’re beautiful when you open them up.”
At a preview last weekend, Tompert’s three kids sat on the floor playing with iPhones and iPod touches underneath their father’s artwork. The irony was lost on no one. In fact, it’s our obsession with Apple’s products that Tompert is commenting on.
Feast your eyes on this beautiful gallery of Apple products destroyed in the name of art. The work is by artist Michael Tompert, whose show opens tonight in San Francisco. But you don’t have to be in California to enjoy the pictures. We have all 12 prints — plus detail shots — in the gallery below.
The photo above, called “Breathe,” shows a 2008 MacBook Air shot with a 9mm Heckler & Koch handgun.
Artist Michael Tompert, who’s first exhibit of Apple-inspired artwork opens today, tried to destroy an iPad by hitting it with a sledgehammer.
“I hit it with a sledgehammer about 10 times,” said Tompert at a preview of his art show, which opens today. “It did nothing. It’s incredible. It was really, really hard to destroy.”
Instead, Tompert took a blowtorch to the iPad.
“I had to blowtorch it for 15 minutes until the inside boiled and it exploded from inside,” said Tompert.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a hands-on kind of guy, but usually, that hands-on approach tends to pop up as dashed-off emails from his iPhone in response to customer queries than telephonic reach-outs.
That’s not to say the latter can’t happen, though: A Seattle-based iPad developer was recently called by His Steveness himself after his app was rejected for using private APIs.
The recent integration of iTunes’ Ping with the Twtter microblogging platform has given Apple’s social music networking service a much needed boost after Facebook pulled integration at the last minute, but man, those Ping URLs are long, ugly and ungainly… an eyesore and an inconvenience in a service that limits messages to 140 characters or less.
Maybe an official iTunes link shortener would help things? MacRumors points out that Apple has owned the iTun.es domain name since December 2006 when it was registered by them under MarkMonitor, Apple’s own domain-registering brand management firm.
One thing’s for sure: iOS 4 hasn’t been very kind to iPhone 3G owners. Not only did the major update end up slowing most iPhone 3G devices to a crawl once installed, but iOS 4.x under the iPhone 3G is missing many of the features like multitasking or GameCenter that other devices get to enjoy.
The good news for iPhone 3G users is that the soon-to-be-released iOS 4.2 update supposedly does a lot to improve the 3G’s sluggishness problems. The bad? Apple’s culling yet another promised feature from 3G owners: AirPlay isn’t coming to the iPhone 3G after all.
I hope you didn’t jump out of bed at the crack of dawn today, throw open the curtains, crack open a few eggs in the frying pan, connect your iPad to iTunes and then sit down to spend the next few hours to continuously hammer the “Check for Update” button, because we’ve got some bad news for you: it doesn’t look like iOS 4.2 is going to drop today.
Apple’s social network Ping is kind of a lonely kid. The iTunes-based network launched in September has only attracted 2,000 artists.
Twitter, on the other hand, is a big man on the social media campus. Some 95 million taunts, shout-outs, heads’ up, musings pass through it every day — and a lot of that noise is about music.
So Twitter has now “friended” Ping in the hopes that it can become more popular.
If you’re an Instapaper user on iOS — and honest to god, you really should be — there’s a sexy new update available that not only contains an impressive algorithm to automatically switch you over to black-on-white dark mode the moment the sun sets outside of your window, but also includes new sharing options, article preview on the iPhone and the ability to use an “ihttps://” prefix to launch pages.
Publicity stunt? Sure. But that still didn’t stop photographer Jesse Rosten from lighting his latest shoot with nine iPads mounted on several pieces of plywood. Now that’s an Apple-centric strobist!
As a glimpse of the possible gaming future of an iOS-capable AppleTV, this is pretty tops: for the latest update of The Incident, Big Bucket Software has added the ability to hook your iPad up to your HDTV and play the game from your couch using a Bluetooth-paired iPhone as the controller.
If Apple ever introduces an App Store for the AppleTV, this is the way they’re going to do it: in the meantime, we can count on jailbreak developers implementing this sort of functionality in jailbroken AppleTV apps. I can’t wait for someone to get an emulator working on this thing already!
We have just learned that a new patent has confirmed Cult of Mac’s earlier report that Apple is working on ambitious remote computing tech that would allow files and settings to be transferred between the Mac and iPhone through a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip.
For the first time, U.S. music fans are streaming as much music as they download — and streaming is set to overtake downloading in a matter of months.
NPD Group says 30 percent of U.S. music consumers streamed music in August; the same percentage that downloaded music to their computers.
But streaming is growing fast. In a few months, it will far outstrip downloads, NPD Group spokesman Lee Martin told Evolver.fm.
Incredibly, the new numbers also include downloads from peer-to-peer file sharing networks as well as legal downloads from iTunes and Amazon.
Apparently, the convenience of streaming services, which now offer instant access to vast libraries of music of a wide variety of devices, even beats out piracy!
Good thing Apple has a $1 billion server farm coming online soon (if not already). But when are we going to see streaming from iTunes?
Neil Ferguson, developer of Virus Strike, explains how to become a successful iPhone game developer in 10 steps.
I believe that anyone can develop an iPhone game. I recently developed a physics-based puzzler for the iPhone, Virus Strike, on a zero budget despite having zero experience developing iPhone games. It wasn’t easy, but there are very few set-up costs if you have the right skills and approach.
Admittedly, I’m an experienced programmer – I started developing on a BBC Micro at the age of 8 and now work full-time for a software start-up in London. Obviously, my experience helped me when I was developing Virus Strike, but I don’t think you necessarily need to have any programming experience to develop a successful game. Just follow these 10 steps:
Boldly joining the digital age, Danish audio systems manufacturer Bang & Olufsen has introduced the BeoSound 8 portable docking station for all iOS devices. With their usual brushed aluminum elegance, this Boombox Extraordinaire docks with iPods, iPhones and iPads, and offers a line-in AUX connector and USB port to accept audio input from your Mac or PC.
Consumer Reports infamously loathes the iPhone 4, but if their latest list of computer ratings are anything to go by, that seething distaste doesn’t extend to Apple’s notebooks: not only do they highly recommend most of Cupertino’s current laptops over the competition, but they’re absolutely gaga over the new MacBook Air.
