When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in September the iPod touch was “the number one portable game player in the world,” many took the comment as the executive’s usual bluster. Then Apple created its Game Center for iOS users. Now comes a survey seeming to support Apple’s words and actions: More than half of all U.S. mobile gamers battle it out on iOS devices, one survey reports.

Additionally, U.S.-based iOS gamers nearly outnumber domestic Nintendo DS and DSi players, according to a recent International Gamers survey. Apple’s platform claims 40.1 million U.S. gamers, compared to 41 million American Nintendo DS and DSi players. In fact 14 million U.S. gamers own both an iPod touch and a Nintendo DS. One good bit of news for Nintendo: the DS is still far ahead of the iOS platform in Europe.

Canon has just updated their excellent PowerShot G-Series of pro-level point and shoots, and while the new G12 doesn’t offer too much that is new over its predecessor, it’s still an easy camera to recommend to the amateur photographer looking for a bridge camera to an eventual SLR.

The G12 is now Canon’s top-of-the-line point and shoot, boasting a 10MP CCD (a wise choice given that sensor’s size: anything more than 10MP is just inviting graininess), lots of manual dials for exposure and ISO control, a swiveling 2.8-inch LCD display, image stabilization and a bright f2.8-4.5 lens capable of 5x zoom.

In these respects, the G12 is identical to the G11, but new to the feature set is the ability to record high-definition 720p video, as well as stitch together three different exposures for HDR photos, just like the iPhone 4 under iOS 4.1 can do.

Like the G11 before it, expect the G12 to cost $499 when it launches in October. If you’re a casual photographer looking to get more serious about the hobby, I can heartily recommend the G12: two generations ago, the PowerShot G10 was the camera that first awakened my own interest in more seriously pursuing photography, and I’ve loved this entire product line ever since.

We are not hearing a death rattle from cell giant Nokia, but the company certainly is making noise as Apple increasingly invades once-safe territory. A prime example of the iPhone making a more competitive landscape is Europe, where the Apple handset is helping chip-away at Nokia’s market.

According to a July survey by measurement firm comScore, Nokia’s Symbian share of smartphones in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy stands at 51.2 percent, down 14.4 percent since a year ago. However, Apple’s iOS platform grew 5.3 percent and Google’s Android smartphone platform rose 5.6 percent over the same period.

According to the most recent edition of SPA! magazine, Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t intend to revisit Japan anymore. Also, he’s a secret ninja.

As reported and translated by F’ed Gaijan, the temperamental Apple founder apparently became furious when passing through security at the Kansai Airport on his way out of the country after a quiet vacation near Kyoto with his family.

The problem? Japanese security found shuriken, or ninja throwing stars, in his carry-on luggage, and insisted upon confiscating them. Since Kansai Airport does not have any procedures in place for dealing with private jets and other VIPs, so Jobs was going through security the same as anyone else.

According to SPA!, a red-faced Job tantrumed: “I’m hardly planning to hijack my own private jet! What a country! I’m never coming back!” Then, calling upon his incredible kuji-kiri ninja abilities, Jobs melted into the shadows, never to be seen in Japan again.

Paul Devine — the former Apple global supply manager who traded insider information to accessory makers in exchange for kickbacks, $150,000 of which he stored in shoeboxes under his bed — has agreed to protect Apple’s corporate secrets in his upcoming trial, according to Bloomberg.

The protective order was composed by the San Francisco U.S. Attorney’s department, and notes that discovery in the case against Devine could bring to light material that is “intended to be kept secret and is trade secret information.”

As such, Devine has agreed to help protect any trade secrets that might be revealed during the pretrial bargaining process. However, it seems that if a plea bargain can not be reached, this information could still be presented in court, making this agreement with the prosecutor’s office more of a wheel-greasing move for a plea than a show of rediscovered loyalty and good will to Cupertino.

Somehow, Cult of Mac managed to completely miss OS X’s ten year birthday yesterday… an embarrassing lapse to be sure. Luckily, MacWorld was not going to let the anniversary pass without baking a cake, and so we’d take the time at this point, if you haven’t already seen it, to read their incredible retrospective on the first decade of OS X.

The entire article is worth a read, but this quote at the end from Avie Tevanian, the former VP of Software Engineering at both Apple and NeXT, was extremely interesting to me:

Apple had a 20 to 30 year lifespan in mind for OS X during its development, says Tevanian, but he suspects its fundamental underpinnings may last even longer.

Given OS X’s ten year birthday, that means that unless Apple has reconsidered its position, their Mac operating system may still be around in another decade or more. Even more striking is Tevanian’s insistence that the underpinnings of OS X will last more than 30 years: given Linux Unix is 41 years old, it’s not unheard of for the fundaments of an operating system to last that long, but it’s amazing to see just how long-sighted Apple’s vision for the best desktop operating system on Earth actually was even in its nascent years. It seems like we can expect OS X not only to last until 2020 or later, but make its way through the entire zoological gamut of jungle cats before it finally sheathes its claws.

YouTube has always been a good place to hear new music. Have you ever been watching a video and wanted just the music from a video so you could put it on your iPod or a cd? In this Tutorial we’re going to show you two super simple ways to download just the audio portion of any YouTube video for your personal use.

Over the weekend, Apple announced that they were ending their free iPhone 4 case program come September 30th, blithely quipping that “we now know that the iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than we originally thought.”

Apparently, Consumer Reports remains unconvinced, though, because they are continuing to not recommend the iPhone 4 to customers, according to a recent update on their blog.

Our tests found the Bumper successfully mitigates the iPhone 4’s reception issue, which was a weak point in the phone’s otherwise-stellar performance in our tests. And we agree with Apple that not all iPhone 4 owners will experience reception difficulties with the device.

But putting the onus on any owners of a product to obtain a remedy to a design flaw is not acceptable to us. We therefore continue not to recommend the iPhone 4, and to call on Apple to provide a permanent fix for the phone’s reception issues.

It is arguably Consumer Reports’ scathing denunciation of the iPhone 4’s antenna problems that caused “Antennagate” to become as much of a public relations disaster for Apple as it was. Will Consumer Reports’ withheld blessing continue to plague Apple and re-open the issue once the bumper case program ends, or is the fire effectively put out? While I agree the iPhone 4’s external antenna makes it more susceptible to attenuation than other phones — no matter how much finger pointing and bar-fiddling Apple does — I think the fire’s largely been put out: even dropping one call more out of a hundred than the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone you can buy. At this point, Consumer Reports just looks petulant.

iOS 4.1’s ability to take high-dynamic range photos has been a much buzzed about new feature particularly to amateur photogs looking to maximize the quality of their casual smartphone snaps, but Apple does not appear to have gone it alone: according to some excellent research done by MacRumors’ Eric Slivka, it appears that Apple acquired a small, Cambridge-based company called Imsense to bring the feature to an iPhone near you.

Before being bought by Apple, Imsense did business in a technology called “eye-fidelity” which used software algorithms to remap image tons in order to produce nearly instantaneous Dynamic Range Correction in both standard and HDR photos. While the iOS 4.1 implementation of HDR is done in the classical fashion of blending three separate exposures into a single image, Imsense’s Eye-Fidelity algorithms appear to be used in iOS 4.1 to further spruce the resulting image up and make the colors pop.

It seems surprising that Apple could make any move to buy a company and not immediately be found out, but it appears that the acquisition went down under everyone’s nose back in July, with three Cupertino officers named directors of Imsense on July 15th, 2010. Could Apple once again be getting a tight grip on the secrecy they’ve lost handle of over the past year?

If you’ve been drooling over the 27-inch iMac’s gorgeous 2560 x 1440 display and eager for Apple to make good with an updated Cinema Display at the same dimensions in order to employ it as the window into your Mac Pro’s soul, it looks like your wait might soon to be at an end.

Over on the Mac Pro customization page, additional wording suggests you supplement a newly purchased Pro with the 27-inch Cinema Display… despite the fact that the only current options for purchase are the existing 24- and 30-inch flat panels.

You can look at this in one of two ways: either this is news to be excited about as Apple prepares to officially launch the 27-inch Cinema Display, or as your last chance to order the soon-to-be-discontinued 30-inch, which boasts just a few more vertical pixels than its successor. Best get moving if you’d rather have one of those.

Currently, Apple makes it extraordinarily easy to squat on a great app name, even if you don’t have a great app to go with it. Just pay them the standard $99 developer’s fee and reserve your perfect app name for as long as you want it, with about as much ease as registering that mot juste domain through GoDaddy.

Obviously, it’s not an ideal system, in that it practically encourages squatters to sit on great names that other app developers with real software to show for their ideas can use. Luckily, it seems like Apple is now ready to crack down on App Store squatters with a new set of rules aimed at discouraging the practice.

Here’s what the new policy looks like: you can still stake a claim to an App Name, but you need to produce a binary to show for it within 90 days. Otherwise, Apple will send you a nastygram, and give you another month to get cracking on your app: if those thirty days pass without any software to show, your claim will be deleted.

It’s a better system than the one currently in place, sure, but it’s still pretty easy to get around: any old fart, flashlight or soundboard app can be submitted as the binary, with no actual pressure on the developer to actually publish it to iTunes. Still, at least that makes remedial iOS programming chops a prerequisite for App Store squatting, which is surely a higher barrier to entry than $99.

OmmWriter, the curious word processor that we first mentioned here back in November 2009, has just been updated with a new version, OmmWriter Dana.

OmmWriter is different from other writing apps. It sees writing as a completely immersive activity, and tries to provide the writer with an environment worth getting immersed in. Not just full screen text, but also attractive background images, and soothing ambient sounds.

You either love it or you hate it. Some Cult readers loved it so much they voted it as one of the best new applications of last year.

You don’t.

There’s no need to. The OS X filesystem is designed to look after files properly in the first place, so that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – you might hear your computer’s hard disk whirring for no apparent reason. Among other things, that could be the system looking after itself – moving stuff around on the disk so that there’s no need for you to actually sit down and click a button marked “defrag.”

If you want to know more about the technical ins-and-outs behind this, go read this Apple support document. As it points out, there’s no need to defrag your disk, and even if you download a third party defragging application and run it, you probably won’t notice any difference.

Save yourself the trouble, and spend your not-defragging time doing something fun on your computer instead.

(You’re reading the 28th post in our series, 100 Essential Mac Tips And Tricks For Windows Switchers. These posts explain to OS X beginners some of the most basic and fundamental concepts of using a Mac. Find out more.)

First-year medical students at Stanford University are finding a bunch of ways to use the iPad to help them learn.

The 91-first-year students who started three weeks ago were the first crop of pre-meds to be handed iPads.

Here’s how they’re using it:

• to look closer

A slide presentation or textbook may offer a tiny diagram of a molecular structure that students need to memorize.  “You can’t even see that,” noted student Steven Sloan. “But on the iPad, you can just touch the screen to enlarge it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGmRKSds9OY

Proving a thing or two about making the most of what you have – unlike Microsoft – Amazon has come out with a cute ad poking fun at using the iPad in bright sunlight, and its premium price to boot.

I’m an iPad fan, but I will admit the little Never-Say-Die eReader does win on these fronts…

[via Digg]

If you work with multiple monitors, the following scenario might strike a chord: you’re busy working on a document in a secondary monitor, and you need to apply some software widget to the stuff you’ve just selected. You struggle to remember the keyboard shortcut but can’t; so you have to use the Menu Bar.

Problem is, the Menu Bar is back where your computer left it, on your primary monitor. Once in a while this might not be a problem, but if it’s a common occurrence in your workflow, it’s going to start getting irritating.

Binary Bakery’s MenuEverywhere is an application designed to solve this problem.

Here’s Sony’s latest attempt to get you to part with some dollars in exchange for something to plug your iPod into.

The RDP-X50iP is a speaker dock for iPod & iPhone that boasts 20W + 20W RMS, or what Sony likes to call “room-filling power.”

Weirdly, the press release we got sent makes specific mention of it supporting iPhone 3G and 3GS, but goes out of its way to not mention the iPhone 4. So we’re not betting that it’s officially supported; your milage may etc etc.

It weighs just under 4lbs and is about 14 inches from end to end. Amazon is selling it for $166, which strikes me as quite a lot for a speaker dock. At that price, the sound had better fill a room, and really well.

We start out the week with a hardware deal, some classic reading for your iPhone and some just-plain fun for your Apple handset. First u is a MacConnection deal on a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini Server for $750. The desktop machine includes two 500GB drives. Next is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an audiobook of the Mark Twain classic for your iPhone, iPad or iPod. We wrap up our highlighted deals with “Gravity Runner,” a scrolling, gravity-altering game for your iPhone from the iTunes App Store.

Along the way, we’ll also check out other iPhone software and Mac-related hardware. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

What’s more important to you? Your iPod… or your wedding ring? Your iPhone… or your dog? A new survey conducted by a company called Protect Your Bubble has found that, in the UK at least, most people would be less willing to give up their Apple products than any other possession.

By a significant margin, the iPod beat out other objects as Facebook respondents’ favorite things, with 12% of respondents reporting it as their most cherished possession. 11.5% valued their Blackberry over all other wares, while Apple’s iPhone crept in at 10%.

Comparatively, only 9% of respondents chose their laptop, another 9% dog, 5% their cat, 4% their car and a mere 1% their wedding ring. It appears that more people in the UK these days are married to Apple than they are to their spouse.

Here’s another way of looking at the design of Apple’s new iPods: they didn’t redesign the Shuffle or Nano at all. They just cut the last Nano in half.

[via Reddit]

Much to the chagrin of consumers who want a cheaper alternative, Apple is notoriously protective of its MagSafe patent… so much so that they have a rich history of suing the third-party builders of MagSafe knock-offs.

Now it appears that Cupertino is going after another one, having filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the Sanho Corporation in the California Northern District Court. Details are still sketchy, with the actual complaint part of the lawsuit as yet unrevealed, but Patently Apple speculates
that this is all about the MagSafe connector baked into Sanho’s third-party HyperMac batteries.

Sanho seemed to think they’d dodged Apple’s MagSafe patents with the HyperMac line, since their products are actually made of recycled official MagSafe products… but Apple may well see things another way… a shame, given the amazing charging capacity and stellar quality of the HyperMac line, which can juice up a MacBook Pro for up to 34 hours.

If you’re looking to buy a HyperMac, then, best get one now. If previous MagSafe lawsuits are anything to go by, they’ll be C&Ded into extinction soon enough.

Apple Monday announced it will begin selling the Wi-Fi iPad in China on September 17, just a little over a month after that country’s government granted the Cupertino, Calif. company permission to sell its tablet device. The quick turn-around suggests Apple wants to prevent a tide of gray marketeers which hurt earlier sales of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 in the Asian country.

The iPad will be available in China through Apple Retail Stores and authorized resellers, starting at 10 a.m., Friday September 17, the company announced. The 16GB version will sell for 3988 Chinese Yuan or $590.78. The 32GB iPad will sell for 4788 CNY or $709, while the 64GB tablet will sell for 5588 CNY or $827, Apple said.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY-uRRCARJw&feature=player_embedded

This video purports itself to be real footage of iOS 4.0 running on an HTC smartphone, but it’s almost certainly just a skinjob: not only would hacking iOS to run on another device be nearly impossible without access to the source code, but there’s some tell tale signs (like missing folder animation, wallpaper that moves along with pages and the ability to delete the iTunes and App Store icons from the homescreen) that this isn’t what it appears to be.

Nonetheless, we’re impressed, if just by the fact someone went to so much trouble to make Android look so much like iOS. Of course, if you’re going to put in those kind of man hours, one wonders why you would bother buying the inferior phone to begin with…

[via HardMac]

The days of two competing jailbreak app stores is over: like two rogue gas giants, Cydia and Rock are smashing together and fusing into one bright star.

According to Modyi, Cydia founder Jay Freeman, also known as Saurik, and Rock’s Mario Ciabarra have agreed to an acquisition deal, in which Saurik’s company will acquire Rock Your iPhone, Inc. Over the next ten days, Rock apps will transition over to Cydia, and after those ten days are up, Rock will be no more, with existing Rock customers needing a Cydia login to continue to buy apps.

Ciabarra will be employed by Cydia and focus on app development, his true love. As such, expect his Intelliborn line of jailbreak apps, including MyWi, MyProfiles, My3G and Intelliscreen to continue to be updated, albeit under the Cydia umbrella. Sounds like a win for everybody involved.

Stuck on an iPhone 3G or 3GS and jealous of the iPhone 4’s sexy ability to stitch three photos together for a beautifully optimized high-dynamic range snapshot of what it sees out of its tiny oculus? A Cydia tweak is on its way just as soon as the Dev Team releases their iOS 4.1 jailbreak, bringing HDR capability to legacy devices. Of course, the iOS 4.1 jailbreak is still an unknown amount of time away, so we could be waiting on this for sometime… but at least there’s some hope in sight.