President Obama may be running the most Mac-friendly White House to date — including launching the health care reform program from a MacBook Pro — and even though he famously quipped he was too clumsy to work an iPod, he has now opened his iPod playlist for Rolling Stone — at the tail end of an exhaustive interview — to reveal what music gets him moving.
Like a lot of people, the 2,000-tracks on Obama’s Apple MP3 player skew towards old favorites:
“I am probably still more heavily weighted toward the music of my childhood than I am the new stuff. There’s still a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Those are the old standards.”
To infuse some new life into his old school tastes, he gets suggestions from his personal aide, Reggie Love.
Is Apple Chief Operating Officer Headed for HP CEO Chair?
Apple’s hard-charging COO TIm Cook has denied rumors he’s leaving Apple to be the CEO of HP.
Cook denied the rumors this morning while speaking to analyst Brian Marshall of Gleacher & Co., Barrons reports:
Tim Cook will not be going to HP, he loves Apple, Marshall tells me Cook told him.
Apple’s stock took a pounding this morning on the rumor. Cook is credited with turning Apple into a paragon of operational efficiency and is pegged to be Steve Jobs’s successor.
Plans for Steve Jobs’ new house have been dug up. They show a fairly modest 5,000-square-foot house with five bedrooms and a private vegetable garden.
If anything, the conceptual plans submitted to the Woodside Town Council depict more of a small, private retreat than any towering glass-and-steel tech chapel or totem of wealth. According to these initial designs, Jobs intends to populate the 6 acres with an assortment of indigenous flora; a simple three-car garage; a modest 5 bedroom home with plenty of windows and decks; a network of lighted stone walkways; and even a private vegetable garden. Everything is neat, tight, pragmatic, and in its place.
I type over one hundred words per minute, and by and large, they are the words zombies taught me to type thanks to the fantastic 1999 title, Typing of the Dead, in which wave after wave of flesh eating zombies are splattered into gibs not by the rapid fire staccato of a machine gun, but by quickly typing words like ‘daffodil’ and ‘snapdragon.’
For years, I’ve been waiting for Sega to port Typing of the Dead to iOS to help me do for my texting what I once did for my typing… to no avail. But Screw Attack’s tribute title Texting of the Bread might fill the same void with twice as much cuteness: it takes the central gameplay of Typing of the Dead, adjusts it to fit the iPhone’s soft keyboard and changes the villains to bloodthirsty ginger bread men.
If you’re interested in knowing more, Touch Arcade has posted a thorough review of the game here. Texting of the Bread can be downloaded now on iTunes for just $1.99.
We start off with three hardware deals. MacConnection.com has a bargain on a 13-inch 2.4GHz MacBook for just $850. Next is a 20-inch iMac desktop running at 2.66GHz for $930. For the more demanding users, there is also a deal on a Mac Pro 4-Core 2.66GHz Xeon desktop for $1,175.
Along the way, we’ll also check out new iPhone cases, more software and many other items. As usual, details on these and more bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
As the AppleTV slides through mail slots throughout the country, enterprising hackers are already hard at work plumbing the secrets of the firmware. They’ve already confirmed that the new AppleTV runs on iOS, and even spotted secret reference to two previously unseen iPhone models, and now we have two more tidbits to ponder.
The first is reference within the AppleTV’s IPSW to the future possibility of Facetime support.
Is Apple Chief Operating Officer Headed for HP CEO Chair?
Although heir-apparent to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, the Cupertino, Calif. company’s Chief Operating Officer is rumored to be on the short list to run troubled PC maker HP. The rumor, first floated by investor gossip site Fly On The Wall, is making the rounds of tech news sites. Although carrying a bold “rumor” stamp and issued with a black box warning, the speculation effected the stock market.
Apple stock dropped 20 points Tuesday morning, before regaining ground. The news is likely to bolster Cook’s position when he negotiates his salary or hints its time for Jobs to go.
Well, it looks like Apple finally saw fit to let that one engineer responsible for it get back to work: after months of ignoring the iPad and iPhone 4’s increased resolution, the official Remote.app for iOS has finally been updated.
It’s a hell of an update, too. Obviously, Remote now runs in native resolution on the iPad and on Retina Display devices like the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch… but it looks particularly good on the iPad, where the larger display is taken advantage of to deliver an aesthetic remarkably similar to iTunes in portrait mode.
Other new additions include a new more iTunes 10 like icon, compatibility with AirPlay, support for Shared Libraries on iTunes and the new Apple TV and numerous bug and compatibility fixes. As always, you can download Remote for free on the App Store.
Apple leads all technology companies by a wide margin when mainstream tech writers try to figure out which stories to file, according to a new study released by the Pew Reasearch Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the year between June 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010, Apple was the the subject of 15.1% of all stories in the mainstream technology press, with the bulk of the coverage being positive, according to the study. Google came in 2nd, with 11.4%, with Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft rounding out the Top 5.
While over 40% of the stories filed about Apple suggested the company’s products are innovative and superior in quality, just 17% suggested the products are overhyped, and less than half that, 7%, portrayed Apple as too controlling with its products. Stories about Google, on the other hand, portrayed its products as innovative and superior in just 20% of cases, slightly ahead of the 19% in which the thread was the idea that the company has too much information and too much power.
Clearly Apple PR does a great job and on the whole, the company turns out some pretty nifty products. But there may come a day soon when Apple, too, has faded from the headlines: “After being arguably the most important technology company, even as recently as five years ago, run by the richest man in the world and the world’s most powerful monopoly, Microsoft has…fallen off the mainstream media’s radar. It received just one-fifth the coverage of Apple, less than a third the coverage of Google and less than half the attention of Twitter.” Other technology giants such as Amazon, Best Buy, Yahoo and RIM all garnered less than 1% of the mainstream media’s attention.
If you bought your Mac Pro from between August 2006 and January 2008 and if you’ve noticed your video acting wonky, good news: Apple has heard your plaintive cries and posted a support document acknowledging an issue with that computer’s ATI X1900 XT graphics card.
The iPhone 4 is pretty indisputably the coolest phone you can own, but how cool is it objectively? Not as cool as Aston Martin, apparently: the British luxury sports car manufacturer just smashed its grill into the iPhone and knocked it out of the number one spot as the coolest product around.
Ever since Apple finally published their long-requested App Store Review Guidelines, we’ve been seeing a lot of reversals in previously unbendable policies, with no example of that phenomena being more striking than Apple’s decision to let third-party Google Voice apps back on the App Store.
So far, though, Google’s own official Voice client has yet to be republished to the App Store. Things are looking good, though, that Google Voice for iOS may once again be on its way, with sources telling Techcrunch that Google has already submitted the application to Cupertino.
Wall Street analysts have been at it again attempting to prognosticate upcoming Apple products. It’s Goldman Sachs’ turn at the crystal ball – with a little help from those chatty “supply chain” folks. Goldman believes the Cupertino, Calif. company will launch a second version of its popular iPad with a 9.7-inch screen, a camera and mini USB connection.
This report shares some of the same qualities of a DigiTimes post published Sept. 17. Both agree the new iPad will advance Apple’s plans to offer Facetime videochat on every iOS family-member. Oh, that 7-inch iPhone 4 look-alike version one Chinese publication claimed was “finished” has “yet to be finalized,” according to Goldman analysts Henry King and Kevin Lu.
One of the biggest problems with physical media is that it breaks. As soon as your DVD gets a couple scratches it’s rendered un-usable and worthless. Copying a DVD with encryption isn’t as easy as it should be. The good news is that with this walkthrough Cult of Mac will show you how to do it.
Jesse, as many of you will know, is the genius behind several other apps for iOS and the desktop, including WriteRoom and TaskPaper.
PlainText is very similar to, but not exactly the same as, another of his apps called SimpleText. Where SimpleText was built to sync with a home-made service called simpletext.ws, PlainText has been built from scratch to sync with Dropbox.
PlainText is a simple text writing tool for iPhone and iPad. It will sync with Dropbox, and includes support for TextExpander snippets if you use them. It’s free, supported by adverts. If you want to switch them off, you can for a one-off payment of $4.99.
Amazon announced Tuesday morning the first chapter of Kindle books can now be embedded and viewed on web sites. “Kindle for the Web” also allows the initial chapter to be shared on Twitter, Facebook and e-mail.
“With Kindle for the Web, it’s easier than ever for customers to sample Kindle books — there’s no downloading or installation required,” Amazon Kindle Director Dorothy Nicholls said. Along with allowing authors to provide a sample of their books, the new Web application permits bloggers and website owners to earn money when visitors purchase a Kindle title on their websites.
Are you an overactive iPhone user? Addicted to Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail? Is your iPhone battery not lasting as long as you would like it to? If you answer yes to any of these questions you might need emergency backup power. It doesn’t matter about your circumstances, you need a battery pack.
Just Mobile’s Gum Plus, which I tested this week, gives an iPhone over two additional full charges. I don’t have any major complaints about it and I’ll never leave home without it.
Apple began shipping the new Apple TV this week and the new gadget isn’t in anyone’s hands yet as far as we know. So it came as a surprise when an iPhone developer, chpwn via Twitter, found a firmware update for it and posted a download link for it. The new firmware, “AppleTV2,1_4.1_8M89_Restore.ipsw,” a 242 MB download can be downloaded from Apple’s servers now.
Apple TV is running iOS, something people were only guessing about after it was announced, and now hackers are claiming that it can be jailbroken.
The Dev-Team has posted an entry on their blog stating that they had already successfully used SHAtter, an in development iOS 4.1 exploit, to jail break the new Apple TV firmware:
It’s looking like SHAtter is going to be the gift that keeps on giving. Even though the new AppleTV isn’t yet in people’s homes, the firmware is available on Apple’s normal public distribution servers and SHAtter has been used to decrypt its keys!
The Apple TV being released this week isn’t setup to run third-party apps, but it is possible that an Apple TV Store could happen in the near future. Hypothetically that new store could allow content creators to sell their content directly to you via Apple TV. If this ever comes to pass I might be able to finally tell cable good-bye.
Long time readers of Cult of Mac may remember a series we carried a year or so ago, under the title WTF App Of The Week.
We’ve not had any of those apps for a while now, but I saw something today that made me reach for the old WTF-ometer, because this most certainly qualifies.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Poo Log HD. Readers of a squeamish disposition may wish to stop reading right here.
Secrets is a preference pane rather than an app, so once you’ve installed it, you’ll find it inside System Preferences, not in your Applications folder.
What is it? Think of it as “System Preferences Plus”. Secrets gives you point-and-click access to hundreds of hidden preferences in OS X and many applications. Without Secrets, the only way of changing these settings is by using a Terminal window and typing stuff like “defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE” (which is the secret setting for hiding the Ping drop-down menu in iTunes.)
So if you’d rather avoid having to mess around with geekery like that, Secrets is your friend. You can browse through all the hidden preferences on your system, or filter them by application. So if you want Mail to always display messages in plain text, or if you want Safari’s tab bar to stay in view even when there’s only one tab open, or if you want to change how often Time Machine does its backups – well, you can change all of those, and loads more, inside Secrets.
It’s free to download, and frequently updated with new items as and when Apple and third party developers push out updates to software packages.
So much for the laughable idea, spouted just months ago by some, that the iPad is just an iFad. Today, heavy-hitter Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry smartphones, unveiled the PlayBook, a 7″-screen tablet at its annual developer’s conference in San Francisco.
“RIM set out to engineer the best professional-grade tablet in the industry'” said RIM President Mike Lazardis in a press release today about the tablet.
The new iPod nano’s diminutive size keeps inspiring geeks worldwide to a variety of hacks. News today from Japan of the iSpeck’s ability to fit nicely inside the display slot on an old Sega Dreamcast VMU.
The Sega buttons do not control the iPod (yet?) but it’s safe to say this case offers good drop protection, and the headphone cord coming out the side doesn’t look as dorky as with an iWatch.
More photos and videos of the making on the vendor’s original Japanese website. [via TUAW]
Proof that politicos are just like the rest of us: David Axelrod, senior advisor to President Barack Obama, keeps himself entertained during meetings by playing video games.
Axelrod confessed to logging in some quality time with old-school favorite Pac Man on his iPad.
Site Real Clear Politics asked Axelrod what does with the iPad he’s been “known to sneak into meetings with.” His answer: “It depends on whether my Cubs are playing…(but) it’s really actually very useful to keep track of what’s going on….I google things all the time.”
There are a few Essential Apps that handle themselves so well on the iPhone they quickly eclipse the website they evolved from; apps that, once installed on the iPhone, completely replace their browser-based ancestors.
We’re giving away a very sophisticated bundle of apps this week. We’ll start out in the study, browsing through and listening to the Classics. Then we might dabble in a little alchemy with the flaming Professor Helsing! We’ll pick 5 random winners to win 4 great apps and if you want a chance to get your hands on some these iPhone apps this week, then follow the instructions carefully below:
Tag us both in your status : “Cult of Mac and Appular are throwing one classy iPhone App Giveaway!”
Your status tag will be your entry into the giveaway, only ONE entry is allowed per person, and the giveaway will last until 11:59pm tonight. We’ll contact the winners on Tuesday or Wednesday about how to get the codes!
Optional step – Tell us what you think about these apps if you own them already in the comments section.
Special Thanks to Appular for helping us put together these app code giveaways! If you’ve got a mobile app that you’d like marketed effectively, contact the good folks at Appular!
