Although I never end up using it unless I happen to browse music on my iPhone in a supine position, by most accounts, people love Cover Flow, Apple’s virtual shelf for iTunes on the Mac and iOS that displays albums by their cover art (or, in OS X, by its preview image). A nice flourish, but not particularly functional for dealing with large collections, I’ve always thought. Not really worth it.

You have to wonder if Apple isn’t wondering the same thing this morning, after an East Texas Federal Court passed down a ruling saying that Apple has infringed on patents held by Mirror Worlds, a company started by Yale computer science professor and, tragically, Unabomber victim David Gelernter… and been commanded by the court to pay $208.5 million in damages for the transgression.

Here’s a land deal almost anyone would envy: swap your one-acre North Carolina homestead for $1.7 million. That’s the price Apple reportedly paid to relocate Donnie and Kathy Fulbright’s home away from the Cupertino, Calif. company’s $1 billion data center. The real estate transaction was like the proverbial blank check. “They told us to put a price on it and we did,” Kathy Fulbright said.

To put the numbers in perspective, the Fulbright’s paid just $6,000 for the one acre 30 years ago and Apple likely paid as little as $35,000 per acre for other land needed for the data center. Apple says it plans to begin using the center by year’s end. However, as Apple’s iEmpire stretches its present resources, the arrangement may have purchased more peace-of-mind.

On Windows, you got used to the Minimize command, which sent any particular document or application window down to the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen. OS X has a similar feature, which is also called Minimize.

Nokia has released the N8, a multitouch smartphone with a 12MP camera. It runs Symbian^3, a new version of an old operating system. Nokia clearly hopes it will help carve back some of the profits that the rest of the industry has been losing to Apple, but what are initial reports like?

Are you planning on writing a book? Do you want to be the next Mark Twain? Or are you a starving author looking to cut out the middle man so you can keep all the profits from the sale of your book? It appears that your time has come — Barnes and Noble has announced PubIt! an alternative to self-publishing in the iBookstore.

PubIt! is a new self-publishing platform that will allow authors to directly upload the books they’ve written to the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. Once uploaded Barnes and Noble acts as your books distributor. The books will be sold as bona-fide ebooks and the author gets to keep a nice portion of the profits from each ebook sale. Book prices range from $1 to $200. You will earn 65% on books sold for under $10, but only 40% on books that are more than $10.

It works by accepting your book as a digital upload in HTML, RTF, TXT, or Microsoft Word. The file will be converted from one of these formats into an ePub formatted file. In less than a week your book will appear and go on sale in the Barnes and Noble eBookstore. The book will be available to Nook owners as well as Nook app users on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac.

Self-publishing is getting a lot easier as PubIt! joins Amazon and Apple by offering a competing service that gives authors another option they can choose from. Authors can keep more of their profits since there is no agent or publisher to share them with. So start your word processors people! Or just dust of your copy of Adobe Indesign and get to work!

The iPad is set to become the fastest selling consumer electronics product in history, with initial sales running at three times that of the current record holder: the DVD player.

“The iPad did not seem destined to be a runaway product success straight out of the box,” retail analyst Colin McGranahan of Bernstein Research wrote in an investors’ note. “By any account, the iPad is a runaway success of unprecedented proportion.”

Remember this video from a week or so ago? It was made by the people at London’s BERG studio for people at advertising agency Dentsu, as part of a wider project called “Making Future Magic”.

BERG hit on the idea of breaking words and pictures into slices which are displayed on an iPad screen one at a time. If you capture this display with a long exposure on your camera, you get 3D words and images extruded into thin air.

And now the rest of us can join in the fun, with a $1 app for iPhone and iPad, called Holo-Paint.

BMW will soon offer an “official” iPad integration kit to allow backseat passengers the use of Apple’s magical new device to watch movies and play games in its automobiles, according to reports from the 2010 Paris Motor Show. Of course, Engadget hates it, but some may wait until BMW announces price and availability before drawing conclusions.

Perhaps if they offered free drinks and salty snacks, too, it could become a hit.

I’m beginning to wonder about people these days. We all seem preoccupied about the various ways we can destroy our beloved electronic devices.  Devices that are not exactly cheap either.

I’ve seen three interesting ways to destroy an iPhone 4 by blending, microwaving, or shooting it. Now I’m seeing interesting ways that an iPad can be destroyed.

The first example was proof that the iPad doesn’t make a very good fly swatter, since it rates about one kill per iPad. Or is that one killed iPad per swat? Regardless it has been shown that swatting flies is one way to destroy an iPad.

Now someone has found another way to destroy an iPad — a shotgun.

FreeTaxUSA posted the YouTube video above with the claim that “Paying too much for tax preparation is a lot like…throwing money away. ” The video demonstrates what happens to an iPad that has been shot with a shotgun in time lapsed and real-time video photography.

I think shooting your iPad with a shotgun is another good example of throwing money away. So, I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning on trying this one out at home.

Anyone ready to kill some zombies? At long last, Valve is finally bringing one of the last of their Source-engine games to the Mac with Left 4 Dead 2, which the Seattle-based game makers say will be released through Steam starting tomorrow, October 5th. Watch the cool trailer below.

The Left 4 Dead series of games are co-operative based zombie survival shooters, and Left 4 Dead 2 is Valve’s most recent game and based upon the most advanced version of their Source engine. As usual, if you already own it on the PC, there’s no reason to re-download it: it’ll also be slurped down to your Mac.

Usually, when Valve releases a Mac version of one of their games, they accompany it with a savings deal, and it looks like Left 4 Dead 2 will be no exception: they are offering all four add-on missions (or DLC) for free along with every purchase of Left 4 Dead 2 for Mac. We might also see a price drop.

I’ve been looking forward to this for months. Who’s in for some zombie-killing tomorrow? Join us for some gaming on the official Cult of Mac Steam group.

As for Left 4 Dead 1? That’s still forthcoming: Valve says they had a couple last minute problems getting the Mac version up to snuff. How weird to see a sequel come out on the Mac before the original.

I gave up running a long time ago, when I realized that, well, bicycles were just plain faster. But if I were to start running again, an app that figured out my pace and looked through my library for music with a beat that matched might be a pretty cool running partner.

We start off another week of deals with a blast from the past: a 1.26GHz G4 iBook with 12-inch screen and software for $250. Next is a Kensington Battery Pack and charger for your iPhone or iPod. This unit includes a dock connector and flip-out USB tip. Finally, to help keep your private personal information secure, there is a deal on “Hands Off!”, personal information security monitoring software from MacUpdate.com for just $12.50.

We’ll also take a look at other items, along the way. As always, details on these and many other gadgets can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Panasonic today proffered up what sorta looks like an iPodaphone-powered mini home theater for the bedside table, complete with Lilliputian hi-res 9-inch screen and audio whiz-bangery.

The MW-20 can display a digital clock/calendar, photos or play movies on its adjustable-angle screen from an iDevice resting in an attached cradle. Stereo sound is enhanced via a 5.6mm “super slim” semi-dome speaker that incorporates a digital-signal processor which optimizes sound for the small speaker, and hopefully makes the MW-20 sound as tantalizingly good as it looks.

No bedside table? The unit is also wall-mountable, includes a SD-card slot and generous 2-gig internal memory, and will automatically adjust the brightness of the screen to match the ambient lighting. The MW-20 hits stores in late November, priced at $250.

Finally! After years spent missing a gold opportunity as geeks everywhere scraped out the guts of their own pocket notebooks in order to protectively ensconce their iPhones or purchased knock-off simulacrums like the Dodocase, Moleskine has finally come up with its own set of iOS device cases, allowing you to officially disguise your iPhone or iPad as one of the “legendary notebooks” favored by “Picasso, Chatwin and Van Gogh.”

The only problem is that Moleskine seems to have retained the notebook functionality of their cases, making these awkwardly shaped and conceived. Open any of these cases to use your iOS device and you’re going to be dealing with an irritating sheath of pages fluttering around. It’s bulky and it’s awkward.

Look once and this 5.25 floppy drive looks exactly like the device that accompanied your old Apple IIe, but look again and you’ll see the Attenborough brand… denoting it as the creation of Chambers Judd.

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Attributed to the Attenborough Design Group, a fictional collective whose raison d’etre is to imbue natural self-defense and survival-of-the-fittest mechanisms into gadgets, the “Floppy Legs” has one major trick up its sleeve that Apple’s own disk drive didn’t: if you spill a liquid in its vicinity, it will quickly spring to its feet with an air of alarm.

I’ve got to tell you, I wish modern Apple equipment did this. The ever encroaching flood of a freshly-spilled beer has drowned not one, but two of my Apple Wireless Keyboards to date.

[via Technabob]

We admit, this table isn’t for everyone. Heck, it’s not even for me: the only thing growing out of my coffee table are several blossoming fungal pillars where slices of pizza were once let to be.

Even so, we can’t help but admit this conceptual modular table designed by Roberto Delponte of Stratodesign, which — I think — really does a lot to highlight the iPad’s almost zen minimalist gorgeousness of aesthetic.

Could Apple displace Exxon on the top of the Standard and Poor’s 500? That’s the opinion of one analyst who believes the Cupertino, Calif. company may overtake history’s largest corporation in terms of market capitalization as soon as October 18, when it reports earnings.

Unless Exxon shares rise, Apple will likely gain 12 percent to make up the $60 billion difference, according to Brian Marshall, analyst with Gleacher & Company. The move will mark only the second time a tech company takes first place on the S&P 500. Microsoft, which briefly held the top spot in the 1990s before falling to second place on the S&P, was overtaken by Apple in May.

Place that laptop on your lap for too long and you may get burned, doctors say. Though computer manufacturers warn against placing portable computers on skin (see Apple’s MacBook Pro manual excerpt above), people do it — and toast their skin.

Medical researchers recently reported on cases of skin blotches caused by hot laptops on legs. In one, Swiss researchers found a 12-year-old boy developed a criss cross blotch on his left thigh after playing computer games a few hours every day over a period of several months.

‘He recognized that the laptop got hot on the left side; however, regardless of that, he did not change its position,’ Swiss researchers wrote in the respected medical journal Pediatrics. This is the youngest of 10 reported patients with what is known as laptop- induced dermatosis, nicknamed “toasted skin syndrome,” since its first description in 2004.

Here’s a bit of fun for any would-be street magicians among you. Card2Phone lets you do tricks with playing cards and common American, British, European and Australian coins.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZGskdaJww0&feature=player_embedded

Back in the days before the iPad, there was the ModBook, a MacBook-to-tablet conversion that could be expensively undertaken by those willing to send off their laptops to the plucky boys over at Axiotron along with a check for $900 bucks. I imagine the iPad has killed off a good chunk of their business, but there are always going to be some people disappointed that Apple’s tablet took the approach of a “big iPhone” when what they really wanted was a convertible OS X tablet / notebook.

If you’re one of those individuals, great news: instead of giving Axiotron your $900 bucks to convert your MacBook into a tablet, a hacker over at Enigma Penguin has come up with a DIY approach that costs just $50.

For years, Colorware has made a business by taking the prized gadgets of individuals with — perhaps — more money than taste and slathering them in multi-chromatic hues as if they were color-blind hussies. It’s strange, then, to see them entering the iPad case market, but so they are with their latest product: Grip for iPad.

Another sign that Kindle should beware: iBooks is the most popular free application for the iPad and iPhone.

According to Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, iBooks has made the top ten list of free apps available on iTunes from July to September. This constant hovering in the most popular category is a ranking Distimo believes may be “influenced by the fact that Apple pushes this application to iPad users.”

Games are still less popular on the iPad than the iPhone, Distimo notes. In the Q2 version of the report, half of the top ten paid iPad apps were “productivity tools” like note taker app Penultimate and presentation app Keynote. In the Q3 report, the trend continues:  there is still just one game — old school classic RealSolitaire —  among the ten most popular free applications  for iPad, compared to four in the Apple App Store for iPhone.

While Target may be the latest brick-and-mortar retailer to begin selling the iPad, now comes word giant online retailer Amazon is also stocking the popular tablet device. Amazon, which also makes the rival Kindle e-reader, until recently offered customers Apple’s latest product via third-parties.

According to the Seattle-based company’s website, Amazon directly ships and sells the 32GB and 64GB Wi-Fi versions. The move was made unannounced, except for various online news sites, such as 9 to 5 Mac, which picked-up on the change.

How much can being a control freak cost Apple’s iAd program? In the case of Adidas, the price reportedly was $10 million. That’s the figure one publication this weekend reported the Cupertino, Calif. company lost because “Apple CEO Steve Jobs was being too much of a control freak.”

According to Silicon Alley Insider, Apple rejected three advertising concepts proposed by the sporting goods maker, causing the iAds campaign to hit the showers. “Advertisers complain about the lack of control over visibility into where their ads appear, lack of third-party ad serving tools, and other issues,” the report said. Although Apple plans to open up the process in the future, “some advertisers have lost their patience.”

Meet Paolo Tosolini. He’s a blogger and podcaster in Italy.

And this? Well, this is Paolo’s idea for a “video jacket”.

Stuck for inspiration for something different to do with his iPad, Paolo thought of a way of wearing it at special events, for what he calls “guerilla marketing promotion activities”.

Which sounds to me like the modern equivalent of the sandwich man, wearing someone else’s advertisement while prowling the streets.

I predict that the iPad sandwich man will soon be a common sight in our cities, walking the streets with animated ads playing at front and rear.

Anyway, that gives me another idea.

My idea depends on the next iPad having a user-facing camera. You could set up two iPads just like Paolo has done: one on your back, and one your front. Send the image captured by the front camera to the rear iPad; and send the image captured by the rear camera to the front iPad: behold! You’ll have an iPad-shaped hole right through your body!