Cult of Mac

Osmos for iPad is a unique game for Apple’s new platform. It reminds me a little bit of Spore from Electronic Arts, but only a little. I got bored with Spore on my Mac and iPhone pretty quickly, but I cannot say the same about Osmos.

The app makes good use of the iPad’s graphic abilities, touchscreen interface, and audio hardware. The latter provides nice music and sound effects that make playing the game for long periods of time enjoyable. However, the rapidly changing game play, that made me feel immersed in a totally new gaming experience, was what really made me fall in love with this game.

I’ve been using Apple’s Magic Trackpad for just over a week, and I can confidently say it’s replaced the mouse for me.

The Magic Trackpad is easier to use, much more functional than even a multibutton mouse, and possibly less prone to causing repetitive strain injuries.

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We wrap up another week with three hardware deals. First up is an 8GB iPod touch for $149. Next is a 24-inch LED Cinema Display for $709. Our last highlighted deal for the day is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with two years of AppleCare for $1,598 from Expercomm.

Along the way, we’ll also check out new software for your iPhone and Mac. As always, details on these and many other items are available after the jump.

If you can buy it before Apple pulls the sale, you could snap up a 3G iPod prototype with camera.

You’ve still got a day to bid the 32GB iPod, at this writing there were 34 bids and a ceiling of $449. However, this isn’t the first time one has cropped up on eBay, the last one for sale in April was pulled shortly after it made news.

The iPod with camera prototype will probably be a museum piece, but you may have trouble using it — the device doesn’t come with the as-yet unreleased camera software. (duh).

If you’ve wondered why there isn’t a smaller iPod nano or a cheaper MacBook Air notebook, someone at Apple must have read your mind. The Cupertino, Calif. company may unveil those new products in September, according to a prominent analyst.

BMO Capital’s Keith Bachman expects Apple will unveil two new iPods – a new Touch and a new Nano. The Nano will be “much smaller” than previous versions and will omit the track wheel, according to the analyst. The introduction of a small Nano may mean we’ll be waving goodbye to the Shuffle.

Nearly a year after the iPhone’s introduction in China, Apple’s telecom partner in the Asian giant will begin offering a Wi-Fi version. China Unicom announced it will begin selling Monday the 8GB iPhone 3GS with Wi-Fi.

The 16- and 32-gigabyte non-Wi-Fi versions of the 3GS will also still be for sale.

Another Foxconn worker has died. While all deaths should be mourned, the death of a 22-year-old female apparently happened in a factory known to package and ship the Apple iPod touch device. Foxconn, recently dubbed the largest electronics parts maker, announced the death “was not worker related.”

Although Foxconn denies this latest death is work-related, local police are reportedly investigating the incident.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2YsSLcGJPw

If you can’t imagine facing your daily commute without an iPod, you’re in good company.

Katie Spotz set a world record for being the youngest person ever to row the Atlantic Ocean solo from Africa to South America. She credits the iPod for keeping her motivation levels up as she paddled her way across the waters.

On her 70-day 2,800-mile journey,  Katie brought along six iPods — four nanos, an iPod shuffle and an iPod touch so that she could watch a movie once a week. 

Not knowing your Mac’s password is like locking yourself out of the house; it’s inconvenient (at best) and always happens at the worst possible time.  In our efforts to shield information from others we often wind up just blocking access for ourselves.  Fortunately there are several ways to reset your Mac password when amnesia strikes or relevant information isn’t available.

Some methods of resetting your password can affect access to the keychain, however, where many of your other passwords are stored.  Nothing in life is free…

Steam for Mac is great and all, but after an impressive launch of Mac titles, the stream of new OS X games has slacked to a mere trickle.

Don’t expect that to change anytime soon. In a new interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Valve says that we probably can’t expect developers to make a concerted effort to bringing their in-progress titles to the Mac until 2011.

“People are looking at their titles for this holiday and saying ‘a Mac version would screw with my schedule, or I’d have to ship it late. Neither of those is super-desirable. But the titles that I have in Spring of 2011 or in Holiday of 2011, let’s have a discussion and let’s see those numbers and start to figure it out,” said Valve’s Doug Lombardi.

The good news is that it seems game developers do want to support the Mac. The bad news is that Steam for Mac took them a bit by surprise, and so we’re probably looking at slim pickings in native Mac ports until sometime next year.

A few times a year, some dusty old Beatle pops up out of his crypt, coughs out a centipede and tells us that they really want to bring their catalogue to iTunes and it’s coming soon, honest.

It can be confusing: three years ago, Paul McCartney said that an iTunes deal was “virtually settled”, but just three months ago, he said a deal was just a far away as ever, claiming those boneheads at EMI were the ones gumming up the works.

Now John Lennon’s infamous wife has emerged from her Black Pyramid and recited the incantation that transforms her into Yoko-Ono The Ever-Living. She doesn’t blame EMI: she basically just says Steve Jobs is messing things up by not paying them enough money.

“Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy. There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out,” Yoko said.

“Don’t hold your breath… for anything,” she then ominously added, punctuating the implied threat with a maniacal cackle before returning to her mausoleum to plot the attainment of the fabled Sword of Omens.

Sure, everyone’s grateful that Apple got around to divorcing their gorgeous 2560×1440 display panel from the 27-inch iMac and selling it on its own, but it came at a cost: they discontinued their 30-inch Cinema Display in the same stroke.

It’s a bummer, and we know this will be small comfort, but if you miss the 30-inch Cinema Display, Dell will soon be shipping a monster of a 30-inch display of their own christened the U3011, containing a 10-bit IPS panel boasting the old Cinema Display’s 2560 x 1600 resolution and mustering a 10,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio and a 270cd/m2 brightness rating, with ports including VGA, two DVI ins, one component, two HDMIs and DisplayPort.

Dell’s actually responsible for some of the better monitor buys out there, and the U3011 looks like it might be a good successor to the classic 30-inch Cinema Display… if you can stomach the usual gross Dell design aesthetic on your desktop. It should be out in October for an unknown price.

At first, I didn’t quite understand WaterField’s press release, announcing a new line of attractive cases specifically designed to ensconce your new Magic Trackpad.

Hey, there’s no denying it: these cases are nice. The $12 Socket is a simple padded pouch that will protect your Magic Trackpad’s glass surface from key scratches and the like, while the $25 Slip is a ballistic nylon case with a lightly padded liner and multiple trim options. Like I said, nice…. but who is taking their Magic Trackpad on the road with them? It’s a desktop device: your MacBook already has a Magic Trackpad built into it.

I was ready to delegate this conundrum to the Department of Redundancy Department, but then I actually opened my MacBook for the first time in a couple of weeks and realized how luxurious that 80% larger Magic Trackpad really is. It’s pretty hard to go back…and don’t even get me started about the postage stamp sized trackpad of my Hackintosh netbook. So maybe I do want to take my Magic Trackpad out on the road. I guess that means I need a case.

Canny, WaterField! Canny!

Wish Jonny Ive’s aesthetic sense was more like an old flea-market VCR? A mere $25 will get you one of Karvt’s wood-panel iPhone 4 skins, coming in flavors of dead tree flesh ranging from bamboo to cherry and from walnut to pine.

Now if only someone would just come up with a musty orange shag bumper and my iPhone 4 would be the spitting image of my creepier grandma’s basement.

Remember this case from China that allows you to use a regular SIM to make phone calls and SMS messages from your jailbroken iPod Touch? It’s been reviewed.

Not so surprisingly, it works, but it’s buggy. You can’t adjust the call volume, the SMS delivery shorts out occasionally, etc. The Peel 520 was a neat idea, but if you want to use your iPod Touch as a smartphone, Sprint’s forthcoming 3G hotspot case combined with a good set of headphones and a SkypeOut account seems like your best bet… no jailbreak required.

Digicams, like Darwinism, tend to exhibit certain mutations that define their species from the rest of the genus. In other words, it’s common for digicams to have a gimmick.

The Samsung PL90 point-and-shoot’s gimmick is pretty neat, though: a built-in USB connector eliminating the need for an external cable to sync and charge. That makes this an excellent choice for an entry-level camera for laptop users.

Quality-wise, the Samsung PL90 packs 12 megapixels onto its tiny sensor, which means you can expect a good deal of noise in your snaps. On the positive side, though, the lens here is great for an entry-level, with a 29-116mm equivalent zoom and a ƒ2.8-6.5 aperture range, which is surprisingly bright.

At $150, this actually looks like a really good camera to give an amateur in need of a new casual snapper. It even has some pretty great self-organizational software features, including the ability to sort pictures according to criteria ranging from their date, time and even dominant color. Pretty neat.

Inundated with a deluge of iPhone 4 jailbreaks at their retail locations, Apple has finally locked down access to JailbreakMe from inside the Apple Store. If you try to go to jailbreakme.com from within an Apple Store now, a DNS forward will just route you back to Apple.com.

Good move, Apple… but what’s taken so long? JailbreakMe.com has been around since 2007, and even back then offered an instant jailbreak to anyone visiting the site in Mobile Safari running iOS 1.1.1. You’d think they would have shut jailbreakme.com access off at their retail stores three years ago.

An uncanny resemblance, don’t you think?

On the left, an in-app screenshot of Where To?, an iOS app nudging travelers along a GPS trail to local points of interest. “Where To? makes it incredibly easy to locate the closest steakhouse, bank branch, billiard club or anything else you may be looking for, at the drop of a hat!” That in-app homescreen has not changed since version 1.0, which was a Day 1 download on the App Store.

On the right, Where To’s eerie doppelnganger, plucked from the Aha-like inner mindscape of an Apple patent attorney. The patent is dated December 18, 2009 and describes “systems and methods for integrating travel services in a single application available to a portable electronic device,” allowing users to easily be directed to local restaurants, banks or nightspots. Sound familiar?

In other words, Apple seems to have patented the functionality of another company’s app, right on down to that app’s physical design and title.

Either Steve Jobs is so ticked off with the media, he’s spending his off-hours fiendishly drilling fake holes into forthcoming iPod Touch parts and leaking them (which is…well, who knows) — or we really are about to get a FaceTime-capable iPt when iPod unveiling-time rolls around, traditionally in early September.

MacRumors is brandishing these photos, leaked to them by an iDevice repair service, as further proof of earlier whispers that the imminent next-gen iPt will have a forward-facing camera. In the photo of the bezel above, the small hole on the right would likely be where the forward-facing camera would sit.

We know what you’re asking: How the heck did a repair service get ahold of future iPt bezels, and why does their website look so sketchy ? We don’t know. We’re just giddy that the new iPt is going to have FaceTime. Probably.

We start the day with two hardware deals. Expercom has a deal on a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo 27-inch iMac, bundled with three years of AppleCare for $1,599. The Apple Store has a number of unibody MacBook Pros, starting at $929 for a 2.26GHz model. We round out our featured deals with the latest crop of App Store freebies, including “Made in USSR: Merry Cook,” a game and watch-style LCD game.

We’ll also check out a couple iPhone protectors, an alarm clock that also serves as a dock, and software for your Mac. As always, details on these items and many others can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

In yet another example of art imitating life — or imitating an iPhone app, or whatever — nefariously addictive app Pocket God is now a digital comic book, available at the App Store.

But developer Bolt Creative says the comic will also materialize as an honest-to-goodness printed comic, with a feature in the app helping users find comic-book stores stocking the title. Digital issues are a buck, and future issues will be available as in-app purchases; no details on the printed version yet.

And just in case you missed it, the comic’s first issue is accompanied by Pocket God’s — wow — 33rd  episode, which has our little half-pint islanders evading a massive gorilla in the jungle and performing rituals. Sound familiar?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqlhzve4BOw

Electric Pig editor and lucky duck James Holland gives us a walk through Apple’s store in Covent Garden before it opens on Saturday, August 7.

Some of us at Cult of Mac weren’t too convinced of the store’s aesthetic appeal from the pics we posted yesterday — but on further inspection this new retail outlet is, well, stunning.

The store has two, count ’em two, of Apple’s signature glass staircases, one spiral and one square,  nicely offset by the exposed brick.

We also especially like London’s “largest pigeon magnet!”

Via Electric Pig

Sometimes analysts release numbers and information speculators take them and turn them into headlines, such as those we saw when Canalys released figures suggesting Android was outselling the iPhone. Often, the real story is buried in the details – or comments, as the case was today.

Aside from headlines declaring Google’s Android sales were beating Apple about the head and shoulders, Canalys analyst Horace Dediu put the figures in perspective. “Android is mostly competing with non-consumption and not iPhone. Android buyers are not choosing between it and an iPhone but between it and a dumb phone,” he writes on the asymco.com blog.

Serious>PC heavy, but if you game under Boot Camp, that shouldn’t be a problem, and there are numerous Mac titles like World of Warcraft, Civilization IV and Unreal Tournament 2004.

Other features of the G510 include custom-color backlighting, allowing you to truly tart up your keyboard according to your own chromatic specification, integrated USB audio for headset support, 18 programmable keys and simultaneous key input for up to five keys at once, allowing you to deploy some truly polydactyl shortcuts.

The G510 costs $119.99, and although it’s temporarily sold out, you can sign up to be notified when the keyboard’s next available over on the official Logitech website.

Independent app developer Tim Sears has just released his latest creation for iPhone, and if you are a Foursquare user, this is one for you.

Future Checkin utilizes the new background location features available with iOS 4 and allows you to check-in to your favorite, recent or nearby venues without even getting your phone out of your pocket.