Today’s Best Thing Ever is also my favorite new appquisition of the week, and it’s called the Accidental News Explorer, and it was built by Brendan Dawes
It’s news, but not as we know it. For a start, there’s no list of headlines. Just a search box.
Apple’s new social network for music fans, Ping, has had a rough start. People didn’t expect it to be a Facebook for music right away but they did expect more from Apple. After years of social media hype many people thought Apple would have learned from the mistakes others have made. While Ping might not be the best idea Apple has ever had, I think when will look back years from now we will wonder what took them so long! For those of you who have turned on Ping, here are some things Ping should have and a few tips to make your Ping experience a little better. Read more after the break.
This $13 skin from Petapixel makes your iPhone 4 look like a Leica camera, inspired by a DIY sticker project Joey Celis devised for his iPhone.
While it would protect your phone from scratches, as far as camouflage goes, does it make sense to cover your expensive iPhone to make like look an even more expensive, easy-to-steal gadget?
Love it or lose it?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZt0kDgNUQI
Why anyone would feel compelled to do this, I don’t know, but TUAW have found some footage on YouTube of an iPad user who has created a tutorial on how to get Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 running on your iPad.
If you really want to give it a go, you’ll need a jailbroken iPad and the open-source Bochs emulator. Check out the video above from MSComputerVideos for the step-by-step guide.
Here’s a great deal on an external hard drive that’s perfect for backups: A refurb 500GB My Book drive for $35 + $5 shipping.
newegg.com offers the factory-refurbished Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive, model no. WDH1U5000N, for $34.99 with $4.99 for shipping ($0.08/GB). That’s $10 under our February mention and $42 under the lowest total price we could find for a new one. (It’s also the least expensive 500GB external hard drive we’ve seen.) It runs at 7200 rpm and features an 8MB cache. Note that newegg lists a 1-day Western Digital warranty, possibly in error.
Model Number: WDH1U5000N
Ever since Apple CEO Steve Jobs casually mentioned the idea that Apple’s new iPod nano could be used as a wristwatch, well, I’ve wanted one. And so have a lot of people. A nano wristwatch aftermarket has quickly emerged to satisfy demand. But what about Apple?
Cnet’s Gordon Haff wrote a blog post this morning called “Why Apple will do a real iWatch” in which he predicts that Apple will get into the wristwatch business.
I say they won’t, and I’ll tell you why. But first let’s look at Haff’s reasoning.
Britain’s best-selling Sunday National Newspaper The News of the World is the latest publication to announce plans for a subscription-based iPad app.
Dates for the iPad app haven’t been announced but are expected to be in synch with the relaunch of the website in October.
iPad users will have to pay £1.19 a week (about $1.85) to view the celebrity highs and lows, that’s slightly more than the £1 newsstand cost but less than a snail-mail subscription, which currently costs £134.00 a year or £2.57 a week.
The website will also be behind a paywall, charging readers £1 for a day’s access or £1.99 per month.
The rogue tabloid — currently embroiled in the celebrity phone hacking scandal — is the third title in under six months in the News International stable to launch digital subscriptions, following the Times and Sunday Times.
“News International is leading the industry by delivering on its commitment to develop new ways of making the business of news an economically exciting proposition,” Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, told Reuters.
Case and battery manufacturer Mophie has just launched the Juice Pack Powerstation — a one stop iOS charging station.
It’s 3,600mAh capacity means it is more than capable of fully recharging either iPad or iPhone (including iPhone 4), which will bring the possibility of going days without touching a power point.
The Powerstation has a pair of USB ports, one used to charge your device and the other for charging the battery itself. At 2.86 x 4.31 x 0.65 inches, and weighing somewhere around a pound, it is not the most portable of devices. You would be hard pressed to find a pocket big enough to lug this around in, but that said it will comfortably fit in most bags.
The Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation for iOS devices is available now direct from the Mophie site for $99.95. Full review as soon as we get our hands on one.
Much as I love Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series of tongue-in-cheek horror films, and much as I have tried to emulate my virtues after that of its protagonist Deadite slayer Ash Williams, I have never found any of the myriad efforts to translate Army of Darkness‘ appeal to the video game form to be worth anything besides a derisive snort.
So I feel a little foolish getting so excited by word coming from Backflip Studios that they will be releasing a game based on Army of Darkness to the App Store early in 2011.
There’s almost no details so far, except that it will be a tower defense game, which is a surprising but remarkably appropriate choice, and you can expect several hours of Bruce Campbell’s snarling, macho and downright hysterical catch phrases as you blow hole after hole through the medieval dead with your trusty boomstick. Don’t bone this up, Backflip!
Having for many years a George Costanza wallet wreaking all sorts of lumbar havok upon my coccyx and spine, I now favor svelteness of pocket: anything that isn’t my iPhone, a small wad of bills, a couple cards and my keys is simply too much.
I think I’m in love with this ingenious, minimalist iPhone 4 case by TRTL BOT: it seems like it was made just for me, fusing a standard attenuation-reducing iPhone 4 case with a slim pocket for up to three cards and a small fold of cash.
Speaking of small folds of cash, it only costs $30, and if you’re still on an iPhone 3G or 3GS, TRTL BOT sells a similar case for $5 less. Go get one: Jerry Seinfeld would approve.
Dan Bishop of Kara Kustoms has finished work on his incredible series of machined iPhone 4 cases. Made with an anodized finish and available in a panoply of colors, not only will these cases ruggedly reinforce your glass-backed iPhone 4 and help it survive a shattering fall, but the unique design helps you keep your hands from coming in direct contact with the antenna without actually covering up the sides. Each case costs $39, and they are now available to order with free shipping anywhere in the states.
With National Novel Writing Month coming up this November, it would already be a good a time as any to plug our third entry in our Mac Essentials list, the incredible novelist’s tool Scrivener… but the imminent arrival of version 2.0, a new blog update explaining the new version’s added features and a last chance to get Scrivener at its old, cheaper price make it a no brainer.
What to expect in Scrivener 2.0? The lengthy list of new features is too big to fully cover, but in the upcoming version, you can expect to find significant improvements to the corkboard mode, including freehand movement of note cards; a revised text editor that includes a Pages-style format ribbon and a page layout view, as well as an Ommwriter-style image background in full screen mode; multiple project notes; editable QuickReference panels; document collections; custom templates and icons; the ability to sync with Simplenote and ePub support to read your new masterpiece on the iPhone, iPad or just self-publish it.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As a major new version, Scrivener 2.0 is getting a price bump to $45. Anyone who bought Scrivener 1.0 since August 15th gets the upgrade for free, while older customers must pay a $25 upgrade free.
The good news is that until Friday, September 17th, you can still buy Scrivener at its old price of $39.95… and since you will have bought it after August 15th, that’ll make you eligible for a free upgrade to 2.0 when it lands in October, giving you an entire month to get comfortable with the new features before NaNoWriMo.
Could an App Store-like arrangement rescue newspapers seeking to use the iPad to prop up dwindling print revenue? That’s the question as a new rumor floats across the radar, suggesting Apple will provide newspapers access to demographic data in exchange for a cut of digital subscription sales.
Apple has agreed to allow subscribers share their personal data with newspapers, demographic information that can be a treasure for publications looking to lure advertisers. Previously, Apple had balked at sharing such data, wanting to provide only sales volume.
There’s an interesting change in the way iOS 4.2 handles orientation lock on the iPad… one that indicates a curious design backpedal on the part of Cupertino.
Previously, orientation lock on the iPad was handled with a physical hardware switch on the side of the device, but in iOS 4.2, it has been repurposed as a physical “Mute” button, with the orientation lock achieved the same way it is on the iPhone 4 or iPod Touch under iOS 4: through the multitasking tray.
It’s a minor but significant change that, I suspect, portends the elimination of the mute/screen orientation button on the second-generation iPad. For famously minimal and streamlined Apple, a physical mute button doesn’t make a lot of sense on an iOS device that isn’t a phone.
[via MacRumors]
Avid will soon begin offering packages of its M-Audio branded audio hardware bundled with an entry-level package of its Pro Tools recording software that could well make a dent in the progress Apple has lately made with Garage Band.
Three offerings priced under $130 will make it easy for first-time Pro Tools users to easily create and record music at home using Avid’s Key, Recording and Vocal studio products with the included Pro Tools SE recording software. Whatever Pro Tools SE may lack in Garage Band’s take-you-by-the-hand user friendliness, it more than makes up for in multi-track recording capability and direct compatibility with higher-end professional grade Pro Tools installations.
Recent updates to Apple’s iLife suite of software included a revamped, juiced up version of Garage Band with well-received interactive learning features that solidified the software’s status as a highly capable tool for creating great-sounding recordings at home. But soon it will become possible to do the same things using an inexpensive version of Pro Tools — with the resulting tracks being readable and usable by the same more expensive studio versions of Pro Tools used by nearly every major recording facility in the world today.
Once Apple announced its own baked-in Game Center for iOS, OpenFeint — the previous go-to mobile social gaming network — seemed to lose a bit of its luster, but the guys Aurora Feint seem to have a plan and they’re falling through with it: starting today, OpenFeint is now available on the Android operating system.
But Aurora Feint’s strategy in dealing with Game Center isn’t to abandon iOS. Oh no: this news is very relevant to iOS gamers because now that OpenFeint is on Android, you can now take part in cross-platform multiplayer games, achievements, leaderboards and friending in Fruit Ninja, MiniSquadron, Super Slyder, The Moron Test and Tic-Tac Toe… with fifteen other titles to follow this month.
At the very least, the relevance here to iOS gamers is they now have twice as many people to play Tic Tac Toe against… I just can’t wait for iOS vs. Android OpenFeint deathmatch tournaments.
Adobe’s just released a new version of their Flash Player for Mac into the wild. Called “Square,” the latest version enables native 64-bit support on OS X, which Adobe hopes will result in a substantial speed boost for users running modern Macs.
On our end, we haven’t seen much improvement, short of a marginal (and perhaps imaginary) performance boost under 64-bit Safari. It still seems to take up just as many system resources as before.
Are any of our readers experiencing varying mileage with Adobe Flash Square? Let us know in the comments: we keep on rooting for Adobe to prove Steve Jobs wrong, but it still remains a slow and unacceptable system hog.
Although Valve released their other Source engine titles with astonishing rapidity when they finally brought Steam to Mac earlier this year, but one sad lingering hold out in the games library disgorgement was the team-based zombie-shooter series, Left 4 Dead, with the delay largely chalked up to some bugs in OS X’s graphics drivers that Valve helped Apple iron out.
We’d previously heard tell that now that those graphic issues are fixed, Valve as hard at work to bring Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 to OS X by October… and now, if a casual mention over at Macworld is anything to go by, it looks like that date might have been further locked down to October 5th, along with the latest Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 add-on pack, “The Sacrifice.”
Looks like for us Mac gamers, the Halloween season is going to be filled with even more zombie mutilating than usual. Expect Cult of Mac to organize a few games of Left 4 Dead once it finally hits our platform.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has a warning for Apple: That iAds doo-hickey? Well, that dog just isn’t going to hunt. Bartz told Reuters the ad platform launched in July will ‘fall apart’ due to Apple’s obsession with control.
“Advertisers are not going to have that type of control over them. Apple wants total control over those ads,” she said. However, iAds is “ok for experimentation,” Bartz opined.
A little over two months ago, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev toured Silicon Valley, making a stop at Apple headquarters in Cupertino where Steve Jobs gave the Mac-happy leader an iPhone 4.
Some CoM readers wrote in to ask us what we thought the visit would mean for Russia and the future of tech there.
We might have an answer: on Monday, Sergei Chemezov, the head of a state- run holding company Russian Technologies State Corp. showed off a prototype of the country’s first domestically-manufactured 4G smartphone.
Chemezov and Medvedev met to discuss tech advances taking place the country, including broadband internet and digital TV and creating a Linux-based national software program.
The 4G phone is expected to launch next year under the Yota brand, which already makes a portable wi-fi “egg” that looks vaguely Apple-inspired in its design.
But from the transcript from the Kremlin translated by the Wall Street Journal, it sounds like they may need to take that iCopycat design back to the drawing board, or borrow the president’s iPhone for tips:
Medvedev (holding handset): Not even sure where to press …
Chemezov: It’s still a prototype.
Medvedev: But this is entirely our [Russian-made] product, which will be produced in our factories?
Chemezov: For the time being, unfortunately, we only make it in Taiwan. But soon we’ll completely switch over to production in Russia.
We’ll be curious to see how the final design of the phone, which reportedly has two screens, may be Apple inspired.
Look at this button in the top-right corner of a Finder window. Ever wondered what this is for?
It’s called the “toolbar control button” and you’ll see it all over the place in OS X. It lives in the top-right corner of an application or document window.
But what does it do? Simple: it hides the toolbar from view. The toolbar is that strip across the top of the window where buttons and controls live. You can choose to leave it there all the time, or you can reclaim that screen space by getting it out of sight. That’s what this button is for.
Let’s look at an example.
If you’re a DevonThink user and an iPad owner, here’s some good news: the forthcoming DevonThink To Go app will let you take entire DT databases with you.
Just as you can with the desktop application, it’s possible to add notes into each database’s inbox while you’re out and about, and sort and categorize them later. Everything gets synced to your computer over a local wifi network when it suits you.
Although intended as a companion for the desktop, there’s no reason why you can’t use DevonThink To Go as a standalone iPad notebook and document storage box.
For a better idea of what’s to come, check out the screenshots gallery.
Here’s a taster of what iOS 4 will be like on the iPad, courtesy of AppAdvice.com.
See also: iOS 4.2 Beta 1 For iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch Now Available To Developers
This new app from Epson significantly ramps up iPhone or iPad print capabilities: PrintJinni for Epson will allow users to print from an iDevice, via a web-based cloud service, to any network-connected Epson. It also comes with an impressive range of print options, even allowing the user to print attachments directly from an email — without requiring an app associated with the attachment to open it.
The range of document types the app can work with includes pdf, jpeg and most versions of Microsoft Office documents.
PrintJinni doesn’t come cheap. The app is $10 (though offered now at an intro price of $7 for an unspecified time), and continues to ding the user at what Epson says will probably be $7 each additional year for the cloud services; though they also say that these recurring fees won’t be necessary for all document types (users just wanting to print jpegs, for instance, won’t need to pop for the yearly fee), and that the yearly fee can be opted out of, should the user just wish to print on local networks not need to print MS Office documents.
Apple has today released the first beta of iOS 4.2 for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, which is now available to download for developers.
4.2 comes just a week after the public release of 4.1, and was first previewed by Steve Jobs at Apple’s media event on September 1st. The update introduces some much-anticipated new features to the iPad in particular, including; folder organization, Game Centre, and long-awaited multi-tasking. AirPlay, a new feature for streaming music to your device, is also introduced to iOS in this update, along with the wireless printing feature, AirPrint.
Devices supported in beta 1 include the iPad, the iPhone (3G and above), and the iPod Touch (2nd-gen and above).
The iOS 4.2 download weighs in at 514MB and is currently only available to registered developers through Apple’s Dev Centre. The update is scheduled for public release in November.