Apple’s just seen fit to tighten up the Terms and Conditions applying to iTunes rentals… and in doing so have finally closed a loophole that allowed rented television shows to be transferred between the iPad and other iOS devices.
Here at Cult of Mac, we love the crowd-sourced, gadget-creating think tank at Quirky.com, and their latest is a fantastic answer to the tangle of USB cables snaking out of the back of your iMac.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyFL_ZKgTaQ
Need to put a spring in your step on a fall Friday?
Check out this video by Japanese break beat duo Hifana, it came out awhile back but we think it’s awesome.
The idea? For an ad campaign to showcase the flexibility of Nike Free Run+ shoes in Japan, they DJs use the footwear to make music, contorting and twisting the shoes to get different sounds, then battle it out DJ style
A MacBook Pro is at the heart of the operation that one half of Hifana, Daito Manabe, set up to make some sweet footie music. Nike gives a nod to the Apple power behind the project with a blink-and-you-missed it shot of a pair of MBPs in the beginning of the video.
During the final stretch of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a number of different media organizations set up different kinds of maps to track real-time activities at the polls. Wired.com, for example, set up a voting machine problem map where voters could use a ZeeMap we had set up to tell us what went wrong in their experience.
Fast-forward to 2010. Foursquare, the mobile social geolocation service, has teamed up with Google, Pew, a couple of get-out-the-vote groups and a couple of Washington DC-based technology and design firms to update that idea.
The coalition recently launched its “I Voted” project, which enables iPhone Foursquare users to broadcast the fact that they voted to their friends, and to report what it was like, and whether there were problems like long lines or voter intimidation.
The idea is to harness the attributes of peer pressure and political campaigns’ competitive spirit to spur more people to actually vote. Another side benefit of this project is that it could potentially uncover trending problems at polling places.
On election day itself, all the data emanating from this activity on Foursquare will stream to an online map to give people a big-picture portrait.
The project so far is an experiment. It started off as an idea being batted around between some young political technology consultants on Twitter this June.
Mindy Finn, a co-founder of EngageDC, one of the participants that set up this project, sees the application’s use this election day as a dry run for the 2012 presidential election. Political campaigns could possibly use it to ignite socially-inspired viral voting campaigns.
“We’re certainly not at critical mass right now,” Finn said. “But the potential for this type of social voting, and the use of geolocation services to encourage civic engagement, the potential is just huge.”
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6h-hpNZDFo
At last week’s Back to Mac event, Steve Jobs made a pretty compelling argument against imbuing multitouch into desktop and notebook displays. He argued — rightfully, I think — that multitouch is only workable ergonomically when a gadget can be positioned horizontally: if you have to keep leaning forward to interact with a touchscreen, you quickly develop gorilla arm.
I was pretty satisfied with that answer as to why Apple wasn’t exploring multitouch displays in their current iMacs, Mac Pros and MacBooks, but if you’re not adverse to a case of gorilla arm or two, Troll Touch is now offering a couple of options to bring multi-touch to Apple’s 27-inch LED-backlit Cinema Display.
Earlier this week, Apple finally launched a local version of its online retail store in China.. and within 10 hours managed to completely sell out of all available iPhone 4s. As 9to5Mac notes, since Apple’s attempted on cracking down on iPhone 4 scalping in its retail stores by forcing anyone looking to buy a handset from them directly online, this effectively means there’s not a single iPhone to be had in the country… unless you’re willing to pay a scalper his premium.
Apple’s latest record-breaking iPhone sales was enough to make the Cupertino, Calif. company the No. 4 mobile phone vendor worldwide, passing BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, according to research firm IDC. Although Apple has consistently scored among top smartphone vendors, this is the first time the iPhone maker has made it into the top ranks of general cell phone providers.
As a result, RIM pushed Sony Ericcson out of the top five for the first time in six years, according to IDC.
The iPhone’s been big in Japan for awhile: back in 2009, it commanded an amazing 72.2% market share of the nation’s smartphone segment. That’s a huge chunk of the pie, but because most Japanese customers were gravitating towards featurephones over smartphones back in 2009, that 72.2% market share only actually translated to 4.9% of the entire Japanese cell phone market.
Not to worry, though: smartphone sales in Japan have continued to grow over the last year, and the iPhone is still the best selling smartphone in all of Nippon.
If the back of your iPod or iPod Touch looks anything like the back of my iPod Touch, it probably looks like it’s spent a few hours in a rock tumbler on a low stuffed with diamonds… but if a new Apple patent application pans out, Cupertino may already have some plans to unleash new scratch-resistant coatings on their gadgets in the near future.
Although there are a lot of gadget makers looking to come out with their own answers to the iPad in the coming months — most notably RIM with the BlackBerry Playbook and Samsung with the Galaxy Tab — you’ve got to give them credit: the tablets they are releasing aren’t just iPad clones.
You can’t say the same for this tablet though, plucked out of a cheap electronics shop in the alleys of Shaghai: it’s an iPad clone through and through.
The iPad is synonymous with Apple, but according to Taiwan-based company Proview, Cupertino is stomping all over their trademark on the ‘IPad’ name… and they want Apple to pay up.
Thinner at its thinnest point than even the edge of an axe blade, Apple’s new MacBook Airs could conceivably be used to split a skull or two, but according to the always-paranoid Transportation Security Administration, it’s still less dangerous than a small bottle of water: if you have to go through an airport security checkpoint with your 11-inch Air, the TSA has determined that it never once has to be taken out of your bag for closer inspection.
First Apple surpassed rival Microsoft in market capitalization, now the Cupertino, Calif. company has beaten the business that Bill built in terms of flat-out revenue. The iPad maker recorded a record $20.34 billion this quarter, compared to Microsoft’s $16.20 billion.
Apple didn’t just beat the Redmond-based software giant, but stomped Microsoft’s best ever three-month period: $19 billion in revenue. The one area Microsoft still leads is profit margin. The company reported $5.41 billion compared to Apple’s $4.31 billion. Apple’s profit margin was below expectation this quarter as it dealt with keeping costs low for the iPad and the extra expense of a free bumper program in response to problems with the iPhone 4.
The Pwnage Tool by the DevTeam hacker group allows you to create custom iPhone firmwares for the purpose of jailbreaking, to get full control over your device (see why you should jailbreak here).
Currently, the Pwnage Tool version 4.1.2 allows you to jailbreak a device already on the latest firmware. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.
You can also use greenpois0n by Chronic Dev to achieve the same. There’s practically no difference between the different tools, except for the fact that they come from different dev teams.
Chronic Dev has released its Mac version of greenpois0n, his 1-click jailbreak solution (see why you should jailbreak here). However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.
It is pretty easy to use and worked perfectly with my iPhone 4. Besides the tool, there’s a ‘Loader’ application that gets automatically installed on the iPhone after jailbreak, which gives you option to install Cydia.
You can also use Pwnage Tool by DevTeam to achieve the same. There’s practically no difference between the different tools, except for the fact that they come from different dev teams.
Here’s see how it works.
Here’s Devonthink To Go for iPad and iPhone, and it has a lot to offer.
For starters, there’s two-way sync between desktop and mobile databases. Documents that have been edited in other apps can be “opened back” in Devonthink, which will update its database accordingly. And plain text files can be edited inside Devonthink To Go itself.
Halloween, with its legions of black-clad kids running around and darting out into the street, introduces its own variety of driving perils. So in addition to warning other users of speed traps and red-light cameras, Trapster users can now mark two new location types on its map this Halloween: haunted houses and trick-or-treat zones.
The free app works through crowdsourcing, which means any registered user can add markers which then become viewable to other Trapster users; and if users find a marker that’s inaccurate (say, if some user tagged their in-laws place as a haunted house), it can be removed with enough votes against it. Now if only the had a marker for houses with the best candy…
One tech-savvy 12-year-old girl spooked a would-be kidnapper by pretending to make a phone call on her iPod Touch.
Police in Delaware are still trying to track down the creep who tried to lure the girl into his van the other evening as she waited to be picked up outside Stanton Middle School.
She told police that a man in a white van pulled into the school driveway and told her to “get in the van.”
There are some people who simply don’t care what their computer is doing in the background; and there are others who can’t live without that kind of information.
For that second group of people, iStat Menus is a no-brainer.
There’s been a lot of hoopla about magazine apps from the likes of Popular Science and Wired, which we reviewed favorably. But these standalone apps are doomed to failure, argues Web designer Khoi Vinh.
Stand-alone magazine apps appeal to publishers and their advertisers, but are totally at odds with the way users are interacting with their iPads, argues Vinh, who is famous for the celebrated redesign of the New York Times‘ site.
Take the recent release of the iPad app version of The New Yorker. Please. I downloaded an issue a few weeks ago and greatly enjoyed every single word of every article that I read (whatever the product experience, the journalism remains a notch above). But I hated everything else about it: it took way too long to download, cost me US$4.99 over and above the annual subscription fee that I already payfor the print edition and, as a content experience, was an impediment to my normal content consumption habits. I couldn’t email, blog, tweet or quote from the app, to say nothing of linking away to other sources — for magazine apps like these, the world outside is just a rumor to be denied. And when I plugged my iPad back into my Mac, the enormous digital heft of these magazines brought the synching process to a crawl.
Instead, Vinh said publishers should be looking to good, entertaining apps like EW’s Must List or Gourmet Live. “Neither of those are perfect,” writes Vinh. “But both actively understand that they must translate their print editions into a utilitarian complement to their users’ content consumption habits.”
What magazine apps have you guys seen that translate well to the iPad? Leave your suggestions in the comments.
Khoi Vinh: My iPad Magazine Stand.
When iOS 4.2 for iPad is released in November, jailbreakers won’t need to wait before they can have their way with their iPads.
iOS jailbreak expert, iH8sn0w, released some images today of a jailbroken iPad running the iOS 4.2 firmware. The image above shows an iPad running the MobileTerminal jailbreak application, that gives users access to the command line.
This is great news for those that like to jailbreak their devices, but it comes as little surprise to many who have expected the jailbreak release for several weeks since its announcement.
If you’ll be jailbreaking your iPad as soon as you’ve updated to the iOS 4.2 firmware, let us know what your reasons for jailbreaking are in the comments.
[via AppAdvice]
[Think Halloween graphic by ~Zefhar]
This Sunday, October 31st is Halloween and if you aren’t thinking about Halloween yet you should be. Since it is almost here.
Do you know what your costume will be this year? Need to add a little zip to your scary get up? Here is a collection of iOS apps that are bound to add some fun to the scariest holiday of the year.
If you download them and get scared don’t blame me about things you hear that go bump in the night afterwards.
We’ve mentioned the IDAPT charging station before, but it has just been updated in a variety of colors in time for the Christmas season.
If, like a lot of us here at the Cult, you have more devices than you know what to do with and not enough time (or power outlets) to charge them all, a single charging station might come in useful.
And if it’s going to be so prominent in your home, you might as well get one that fits in with your decor.
The IDAPT i4 claims to charge over 4000 different gadgets, either via adaptors for the base unit or via USB connection to it. It will charge your iPods, iPhones and iPads quite happily – and all at once. It costs $59.99 including a pack of six mixed adaptors, or you can choose to pick your own selection of four adaptors that precisely match your devices.
We start off with two frightfully good deals for your iPhone. First is the latest crop of free iPhone applications, including “A Scary Prank.” Next is the Cyclops Case for your iPhone 4. A bit more on the ‘treat’ side is a stylish mini stand for your iPad that’s just $2.
Along the way, we’ll also check out some cases for your iPod touch, as well as some refurbished second-generation iPods, and a 27-inch LED Cinema Display bundled with Apple’s Magic Trackpad. As usual, details on these and many other bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
As we wrote a couple days ago, the guys over at TechRestore will be happy to take your new MacBook Air and give it a matte display for just $250… but doing the dry run on the operating, they uncovered some of the MacBook Air’s secrets, and according to their CEO, the panels Apple is using in the new Airs are paper thin and absolutely breathtaking.
