Cult of Mac

Psst. We’re not going to tell you where to get it, but if you happen to have some seedier connections, we can tell you that yesterday’s Gold Master Build of iOS 4 works on any iPhone or iPod Touch, whether or not its UDID has already been reported to the dev center. That means, if you know where you’re looking, you can install iOS 4 on your device right now… provided your device is a 3G, 3GS or second or third gen iPod Touch. Make sure to grab the right IPSW for your device.

Better? If you’ve got a 3Gs, you can already jailbreak it, although we recommend being cautious and if you don’t know what you’re doing, wait until the Dev Team releases the new 4.0 compatible PwnageTool… which they swear should be available within the month.

With the launch of Apple’s own iAd network imminent, Cupertino has chosen to clarify its position in regards to third-party advertisers: app developers are still allowed to pass on certain non-device data to ad companies besides iAd, but you need Apple’s explicit permission to do so… and you definitely can’t do it if the ad company in question is owned by Google.

As found in the developer terms’ revised section 3.3.9, Apple says that developers can pass on certain kinds of data like user location or UDID to Apple-approved third-party companies. They then explicitly say that the companies receiving the data will never be approved if they are owned or affiliated with developers or distributors of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or “development environments other than Apple.”

In other words? A big cock block to Google-owned AdMob. The big question is this: can Apple really avoid an advertising anti-trust case by only excluding advertising megaliths like Google from collecting the same data as the smaller advertising companies allowed to freely play in the iOS walled garden?

This antique iBook has been hollowed out and transformed into a working iPad keyboard dock, with a new Apple aluminum keyboard replacing the iBook’s and the iPad itself nuzzled into the iBook’s LCD display hollow, connected together through the umbilical of the official iPad Camera Connection Kit.

This user hack is a bit of a kludge, but we don’t care: we love it anyway. Sure, it can’t close without scratching the iPad’s display, and it would be even cooler if the iPad charged when the iBook was plugged into the wall socket. It reminds us of Lenovo’s now-cancelled Ideapad U1 hybrid tablet/notebook, and makes us wistful for the day Cupertino itself will try to merge the iPad with the MacBook into a single iBook-like device. We can dream!

ColorSplash for iPad by Hendrick Kueck (iTunes Link), who now operates under the name Pocket Pixels, Inc., is an app that allows you to make some very dramatic changes to your photos for its meager $1.99 price tag. The software uses a process called desaturation to convert your photos to black and white while letting you leave behind color within areas you select. The results are astounding.

Step 1: Open Safari 5’s preferences, and go to the Advanced tab.

Step 2: Click “Show Develop menu in menu bar”

Step 3: In the Develop menu, select “Enable Extensions”

There’s no shortage of wisecracking about the iPad; its introduction left us wading through a glut of humor (both insipid and genuinely funny). Wisecracking from the iPad, however, is much rarer.

That’s Adam Kontras — also known as the guy with the longest-running vlog, now plugging along for ten years — in the clip above, arguing with his iPad about which one of them is the “iPad comedian,” not coincidentally also the name of his new project.

After watching the back-and-forth, we’re still not clear which of the two can claim the title — but we’re pretty certain the whole thing is hilarious.

Update: Some of you may have noticed the name of Adam’s gig is actually “The iPad Comic,” and not the “iPad Comdedian” as claimed above; laughter can be disorienting.

Coming off Monday’s big announcement, we have the iPhone 4 as our top deal. The 16GB model is $199 and the 32GB is $299 with a two-year AT&T contract. We also have a number of unibody MacBook Pros, starting at $929 for a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo version. Also, if your internal SuperDrive is dead, you might want to check out this deal on the USB External Drive designed for the MacBook Air for just $50.

Along the way, we’ll also check out more iPhone software and other Mac-related gadgets. As always, details on these and many more items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, starting after the jump.

Despite the leaks and purported advance photos of Apple’s new iPhone 4, analysts found enough in Monday’s presentation to tell investors the new handset likely means greater profits for the Cupertino, Calif. firm. High profile analyst Gene Munster Tuesday declared the iPhone 4 “significantly more advanced than the next best alternative.”

By including features such as videochat normally found elsewhere, such as computers, “the iPhone is taking unit and dollar share from other device categories,” Munster wrote. The new iPhone means Apple likely could beat Wall Street’s expectations for 8.7 million devices sold this quarter, the Piper Jaffray analyst said.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VWZrQN9MMo

A hotel chain wants you to leave your laptop at home and use a Mac mini for in-room entertainment and work. Call us dirty minded, but it sounds mainly useful as a way to watch free porn on boring business trips.

Joie de Vivre is a chain of California boutique hotels testing a program called Joie Connect at the Citizen Hotel in Sacramento.

In addition to cable, you get a Mac mini in your room hooked up to a 42-inch LCD TV and a remote control.

You can check your email, watch Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and video on demand, plus check your hotel bill, Google for local attractions and check out from the comfort of your room.

Apple has posted the full video of Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC yesterday. It’s worth watching for a few highlights.

Look out for the iPhone 4 announcement at around 30 min  (“Stop me if you’ve already seen this…”), about the retina display (“Once you’ve used a retina, you’ll never go back”) at around 38 minutes and enjoy Jobs coping with a wi-fi glitch at around 40 minutes. We also enjoyed the Guitar Hero demo and the video chat with Jonathan Ive.

What was your favorite moment of the hour-long state of the Apple nation?

Rhythm-based gaming isn’t new to the App Store – for a while now, there have been several games that offer players the ability to play along and ‘jam out’ to their favorite music. However the largest, most successful game in the genre is Guitar Hero. With huge success on pretty much every console available, the biggest music video-game franchise has finally found its way on to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and my God does it rock!

Steve Jobs rolled out Apple’s iPhone 4 Monday at the WWDC 2010 Keynote in San Francisco, calling his company’s “new baby” a device that “changes everything. Again.”

But does it?

When Apple introduced the original iPhone in 2007, it altered the entire mobile phone market by emerging into a near vacuum, creating need and desire in millions of consumers who had no idea they needed or desired what the iPhone had to offer.

Today, some believe the iPhone has become passe based solely on its relative ubiquity across the landscape it both created and has managed to dominate for three years.

Others believe competitors such as Google, Palm and Blackberry have in the meantime produced equally effective, if not superior products that will, over time, equalize the distribution of market share among Apple and its rivals.

We mentioned earlier today that the secret behind the iPhone 4’s Retina Display isn’t just the quadruple pixel density over the iPhone 3Gs, but Apple’s amazing new process that completely eliminates empty space between the LCD and touchscreen, resulting in a display that looks like the pixels have been painted directly on the glass.

Want to see what we’re talking about? The above comparison shot comes from Engadget and compares the iPhone 4’s Retina Display with one of the previously cited industry bests, the HTC Evo 4G’s display.

Granted, the HTC Evo 4G is throwing 38% less pixels at the display than Apple, but even so: look at how those app icons are basically throbbing through the iPhone’s glass, while the Evo 4G’s display looks like it has been submerged in a thin layer of dirty water.

Cupertino’s got a lot of flack for their prudish stance on adult-oriented applications on the App Store, with Steve Jobs himself famously saying that if revolutions are about freedom, than the iPad is revolutionary because of its freedom from porn.

Regardless about how you may feel about Apple censoring the content an adult can consume on a device that he owns, though, at least Apple’s not going to be alone in ridding their app marketplace of all adult content: Microsoft plans to do the same thing with their Windows Phone 7 Marketplace when it launches later in the year.

Steve Jobs himself described AT&T’s early update pricing for the iPhone 4 as “generous,” and generous it is — suspiciously so. How generous?

Well, if you qualify for an upgrade before December 31st, the 16GB iPhone 4 will cost you just $199 while the 32GB model will cost you $299. Things get a lot steeper if your upgrade is after the start of 2011, though, with prices jumping to $399 and $499, respectively. Don’t want to sign a new contract, but still want an iPhone 4? Prepare to pay $599 to $699.

If Safari 5’s new Reader feature sounds familiar, that’s because it’s not a new idea.

The Readability bookmarklet has been doing a very similar thing for a year or so now, and of course works in many different browsers, not just Safari. Incidentally, Readability’s developers are delighted about Reader.

Those who have had the luck to play with an iPhone 4 before it’s official June 24th launch have all confirmed that the new handset’s quadruple-density Pixel Display is just as gorgeous as Apple is boasting.

But over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber points out another reason the iPhone 4’s display is so bright, crisp and lurid: a new production process that eliminates the space between the LCD and the touchscreen.

It’s not the streaming iTunes we were all hoping for — that announcement makes more sense to come at Apple’s iPod-centric September event than WWDC anyway — but iTunes 9.2 is on its way, and while you won’t see anything revolutionary in this iterative point update, there is a bunch of cool new functionality allowing iPhone owners to more easily cope with the new features in iOS 4.

When Steve Jobs announced yesterday that they were finally taking the “phone” out of the iPhone OS and rebranding it “iOS,” I breathed a sigh of relief: even before the iPad, branding an operating system that runs on non-phone hardware like the iPod Touch always seemed confusing, and if rumors of a new Apple TV are correct, Apple’s plans for iOS are far bigger than the smartphone arena.

But I also met the announcement with a bit of a “Whuh?” Cisco has owned the trademark for iOS for almost two decades: it’s what their routers run on. Then again, Cisco also owned the iPhone trademark, and Apple came to a deal with them on that one back in 2007: they must have worked out a deal.

They did. According to a Cisco blog post, “Cisco has agreed to license the iOS trademark to Apple for use as the name of Apple’s operating system for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.  The license is for use of the trademark only and not for any technology.”

As of this moment, there’s no news if Apple reached a similar licensing agreement with the Greek government, who certainly could use the money right about now.

One depressing omission from yesterday’s keynote was the long-requested addition of direct printing support for iOS devices. Jobs himself has said it’s coming, but apparently not this year, leaving your only option for printing a document on your iPad as emailing it to a computer with access to your printer.

If you don’t mind upgrading your printer, though, HP’s coming to the rescue with a line of new printers that will allow you — more or less — to print directly from your iDevice. Their line of new printers will cost between $99 and $400, and they come with a unique perk: each printer has its own, unique email address.

With HP’s new printers, all you need to do is email a document to your printer from your iPhone or iPad and have it automatically printed out. You can even share that email address with friends and family members.

There’s no word on exact models yet, but HP promises the first of their email-capable printers will be out next month, with small business models hitting in September.

Until Apple gets around to offering printer capability directly from your iOS, this seems like the best solution around… as long as you’re already in the market for some new printing hardware.

There’s a lot of new stuff in Safari 5, but one of the most interesting new things isn’t a software feature at all: the Safari Developer Program.

Although Steve Jobs didn’t highlight the update on stage at yesterday’s WWDC, Apple has more or less quietly updated Safari to version 5, confirming the details of yesterday’s leak.

There’s a lot of new functionality in the change log, but the most evident new functionality is Safari Reader. Yesterday, I speculated this would be a remedial newsreader, but it’s actually not that at all: instead, it’s basically a built-in version of Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet that strips a web page down to just newspaper-style text on a blank white page, retaining only simple text formatting and in-line images.

What’s particularly awesome about Reader is that on multi-page articles, it’ll automatically appends pages together so you can read the whole article in one sitting, no navigational clicks required. Just click the “Reader” button at the left of the address field to go into Reader mode (it only works on articles of a certain length).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah5S7R-h208

Here’s the promo video Steve Jobs just showed of during his WWDC keynote.

We’re 100% chugging the Kool-Aid on the iPhone 4 upgrade. What an amazing package:

• The high-res screen looks astounding
• The gyroscope may lead to a host of fun applications, like an air mouse for the upgraded AppleTV
• 300 hours of standby battery life looks like a big kick in the teeth for Android.
• The only misstep is no 64GB version.

We’ll be upgrading for sure, especially thanks to AT&T’s new upgrade plan.

What do you guys think?

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

It’s hard to remember when one of Steve Jobs keynote speeches WWDC had a glitch, but the Demo Gods weren’t smiling on Jobs today. Thanks to network problems, Jobs had to ditch on a demo because of Wi-Fi trouble. But maybe it’s not some luckless Apple engineer’s fault: The same thing happened to Google during its developers conference last month at the same venue.