Cult of Mac

Over at his site The Brooks Review (which has been publishing a lot of good stuff recently), Ben Brooks wrote up his thoughts on a variety of writing applications for Mac OS X.

No way would I ever plug in my Gibson SG Les Paul Custom into my iPhone 3G. Just no way. Now that I have the iPhone 4 and its increased processor speed, crystal clear pictures, and hardcore stage presence, I’ll reconsider.

Seriously though, playing an instrument through an iDevice is more of just a hobby or gimmick if you’re going to try and use it for modeling amps and effect pedals. What really convinced me to hook up a quarter inch jack to my phone was the Moog Filtatron App. Synthesizers are most certainly perfect for and acceptable to use in your music even if they’re coming from you Macbook or iPad. If they have the Moog name attatched to it then you’re just that much more legit.

If you have a box full of cables tucked away somewhere, you may have all that you need to construct your very own iRig. Even if you purchased all the cables from The Shack, you’ll probably come away with a cheaper version, and you’ll feel like MacGyver.

Here’s how I put together my own audio interface:

After we published the Men’s section to our 2010 Holiday Gift Guide earlier this week, a few of our readers — not realizing that we were parceling out the guide in sections (Teens are up next) — wondered why we hadn’t made any suggestions for women. Fear not, dear readers: There’s no way we’d miss out on confessing all our favorite gadget, case and app gift ideas for women. We’ve even got pillows in there!

The Modern Mom wears many hats. Weekends are devoted to soccer games and parties; weekdays are spent getting the kids off to school, planning meals and PTA meetings. How she manages to keep on top of it all is a miracle! Here are some worthy gifts for the Modern Mom.

The Fashionista loves her fashion — she LOVES to shop and keeps up on all the latest styles and trends, and the most important thing to her is that it looks pretty. Here are some Fashionista-worthy gifts.

The Athlete takes excellent care of herself. Her body is her temple; keeping fit and firm is a priority. Here are some gifts worthy of the Athlete.

The Professional Woman is extremely busy; she works hard yet remains calm, focused and organized — not an easy task! Here are some gifts worthy of the powerful Professional Woman.

On the one hand, I love the idea behind Time Flies, a to-do app from Absent Design which allows you to record the things you do, then tells you how long it’s been since you last did them.

It’s a great idea, right? Time Flies keeps you honest. “No, you didn’t go to the gym ‘the other day’… it was three weeks ago. No, you didn’t buy your girlfriend flowers last month… it was three months ago. No, you didn’t move the stash a week ago… it’s been a month.” And so on.

My only problem here is that while I’d love to use this app myself, I definitely don’t want my girlfriend getting wind of it and using it against me. Claiming that it’s her turn to do the dishes or grout the tiles is going to be a lot harder if she’s got an app specifically devoted to catch me in my lies.

Apple’s decided not to bundle OS X with Flash anymore, and could this chart make the reasons for that any clearer? 42% of the security updates in Mac OS X 10.6.5 were dedicated to fixing problems with Flash. Add in the fact that on the new MacBook Air, merely stripping Flash from the default OS X install adds two hours to the battery life, and the message is clear: Flash is a product of garish incompetence and staggering ineptitude, and the quicker it dies, the better.

We personally love it, but not everyone thinks the new AppleTV is much of an improvement over the old model, which featured local storage, legacy outputs, was fairly easily upgradeable and was easily hackable with great media center software like the Boxee Box.

If you’re one of those nostalgists and think the AppleTV took a step back when it became a streaming media only affair, good news: Apple’s dropped the price of the 160GB first-gen AppleTV from just $50 more than the new model.

Of course, buy that and you’ll miss out on the inevitable fun that everyone is going to start having once jailbreak developers start really mastering the capabilities of the new iOS-driven AppleTV, but heck, there’s always room for both in your entertainment center.

We already know that if a couple of overly restrictive NDAs hadn’t gotten in the way, Apple could have ended up owning the technology behind Microsoft’s new motion-control accessory for the Xbox 360 game console, but if you’ve already bought a Kinect and would like to see what a Mac with Kinect-like abilities could have been like, the hacker community’s already starting to put the software together, starting with hacker Theo Watson getting the Kinect’s cameras to output under OS X.

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.

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.

Via NME

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!

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.

[via Daily Mail]

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.

Don’t be fooled by the iPad’s thin case and fragile-looking glass screen. It may look vulnerable, but the iPad is nearly indestructible, says an artist who specializes in destroying Apple’s products.

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.

Here’s a secret: OS X has a password generator built-in, but many people will never even see it. Here’s how to make it easier to get to.

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.