As temperatures soar to new records here in San Francisco, quench your thirst at tonight’s Ubergizmo’s Digital Summer party, a festival of fashion, photography, tech and fun.

At 8PM, San Francisco’s glamorous people will gather for Digital Summer, an annual fashion show/tech-showcase that attracts throngs of the city’s brightest young things. Last year, there was a line around the block. (Check out the glamorpuss pictures below).

Full disclosure: We’re a media partner.

This year’s event promises a live runway fashion show, studio photo shoots, a future of fashion display from Intel and hands-on demos of Motorola’s Droid X and Verizon’s Wireless MiFi Mobile Hotspot. Verizon is also recycling old cell phones, so bring them along.

Digital Summer is at the Temple nightclub on Howard Street. It’s $5 with a RSVP (get one here), or $10 on the door. Here’s the Facebook event page, and the full itinerary after the pictures:

People who quilt are also nerdy. Or nerdy people also quilt. Either way, there’s some bitchin’ stitchin’ happening — as per this compendium of Dr. Who and Harry Potter blankets — but we especially like these Apple-related sewing projects. Quilt different!

iNerd Mini Quilt

Liz Harvatine made this for her husband as kind of an emblem for the North Hollywood Classic Mac Collectors Club of which he is one of two proud members. It’s a nice banner to be under…

Image copyright Mercury Records

So much for the web being dead. John Mellencamp, the increasingly craggy Indiana roots rocker famed for singing about “Jack and Diane,” “Pink Houses” and having the middle name “Cougar,” has clued the world into a major news story: the Internet has destroyed the music business. Apple’s bad, too. From the Globe & Mail:

“I think the Internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb,” he said. “It’s destroyed the music business. It’s going to destroy the movie business.”

Seriously, you guys. Not content to make Lars Ulrich look like a visionary, Mellencamp went on to deliver the stunning revelation that MP3 audio is technically inferior to what you would get from a CD or LP.

He recalled listening to a Beatles song on a newly re-mastered CD and then on an iPod, and “you could barely even recognize it as the same song. You could tell it was those guys singing, but the warmth and quality of what the artist intended for us to hear was so vastly different.”

Now, I’m not one to question John Mellencamp’s ability to competently rip an album to a portable digital format, but I will say that I never heard him speak up about inferior audio quality when he was selling millions of cassette tapes per year.*

The music business has changed. Apple reinvented itself by understanding how and why it was changing almost a decade ago. And lots of artists, such as the Arcade Fire and Lady Gaga, understand well how to take advantage of those changes and carve out a successful living that’s less dependent on record labels than their own businesses. And dinosaurs like John Mellencamp have no idea how to be successful in the iTunes era.

And that’s a good thing. Remember: The music business needed destroying.

*Not to mention, MP3s were successful because they were good enough sounding, which allowed them to spread like wildfire. Their inferior quality was a feature, not a bug. There’s a reason why lossless audio still hasn’t caught on for portable players.

Via TUAW and Edible Apple

And here’s Percolator, today’s Best Thing Ever for people who love their iPhone photography.

What does it do? It re-renders photos in glorious approximation, creating gorgeous mosaics out of roundels of color.

Cult of Mac is blowing minds and iDevices with some great apps for your iPhone and iPad. We’ll pick 5 random winners to win 6 great apps. If you want a chance to get your hands on some great apps this week, then follow the instructions carefully below:

1. Follow us on Twitter (you must do this, if you’re not following us, we can’t contact you if you win).
2. Tweet this: @cultofmac and @appular are making it rain with FREE iPhone and iPad apps! #cultofmac
3. Your tweet will be your entry into the giveaway, only ONE entry is allowed per person, and the giveaway will last until 11:59pm tonight. We’ll contact the winners on Tuesday or Wednesday and how to get the codes!
4. Optional step – Tell us what you think about these apps if you own them already in the comments section.

Special Thanks to Appular for helping us put together these app code giveaways! If you’ve got a mobile app that you’d like marketed effectively, contact the good folks at Appular!

Here’s a look at the apps we’re giving away:

We start off a rainy week on the East Coast with deals for the Mac and the iPhone. First up is DiskAid for the Mac, a utility that lets you use your iPhone or iPod touch as an external drive. Also, a ZAGG coupon gives you a 20 percent site-wide discount on items, including the invisibleSHIELD.

As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Two issues are pushing Apple to expand beyond its current one-carrier arrangement for the U.S. iPhone, an analyst told investors Monday. Not only is the iPhone maxxing out the AT&T network, the Cupertino, Calif. company needs to stem the tide of Android phones flowing from Verizon.

This is where we usually write about Verizon’s chances of obtaining the Apple handset. Although such speculation has reached the level of the Easter Bunny or BigFoot as an appealing tale lacking only facts, Kaufman Bros.’ Shaw Wu takes a different tact: if not Verizon, how about a two-for-one deal?

Someone in government must love Macs. How else to explain one analyst’s figures released Monday showing a 200 percent increase during the second-quarter of 2010 – 16 times greater than the overall PC market’s 12.1 percent growth-rate? But, as the late-night pitch-men like to say: Wait, that’s not all.

Macs in business (especially very big businesses) rose nearly 50 percent during the three-month period – three times that of the PC market’s 12.1 percent, according to Needham analyst Charlie Wolf.

Pixels At An Exhibition, an online gallery of iPhone photography,  launched a new Remix feature with a stunning series of nudes.

As per the site’s house rules, all photos are edited on an iPhone, this time other artists were invited to re-interpret a photo series.

There are two Remix galleries of the Sarah nude series in what will become an ongoing feature; the originals are by photographer Christian Peacock.

(Here in the luxurious and well-appointed Cult of Mac offices, one could get a good gander at these pics without recrimination, but we erred on the side of caution, including the ones chosen for this post.)

Remember back in June when Apple told developers the iBookstore had 22 percent of the eBook market? An author who uses both platforms to market his writing is now telling a vastly-different story. He sells 200 Kindle ebooks each day, compared to 100 a month for the iPad’s iBooks.

Despite the Kindle ebooks not currently supporting color or video, like the ebooks via Apple’s iBookstore, “according to my numbers Apple is a very small part of the ebook market,” blogs author Joe Konrath. “I sell 200 ebooks a day on Kindle. On iPad, I sell 100 a month,” he adds.

The Magic Trackpad is a fantastic addition to a desktop, but it’s insistence on being battery powered is a little strange. For most users, it’ll never leave their desk, yet there’s no USB option, unlike Apple’s own keyboards; additionally, unlike the Magic Mouse, where a cable would limit its effective range, the Magic Trackpad is designed to stay stationary.

For a lot of people, then, the Magic Trackpad’s battery guzzling represents something of a waste, and while Apple’s introduction of their own Battery Charger mitigates a lot of the environmental concerns, its still a shame there isn’t at least an option to plug it into your iMac or MacBook’s USB port directly and never worry about its juicing at all.

That’s why MacRumors modder markbog hacked his Magic Trackpad to hook straight to his Mac’s USB port by taking the batteries out of the device, stripping down an old USB cord and attaching them to a battery sized dowel.

Supposedly, it works great. Let’s not forget, though, that the Magic Trackpad is a pretty great mobile accessory as well: it easily fits into a laptop bag, and I can say from first hand experience that it makes an absolutely fantastic way to control your Mac mini driven HTPC set-up.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNhxQ0SElwE&feature=player_embedded

It’s really rare that an App Store game can sell me with just four achingly beautiful words, but Deceased Pixel’s upcoming iOS action game Super Mega Worm has done just that… and those words are “Great Death Worm Wojira.”

The trailer embedded above gives a bit more details about the game. The Great Death Worm Wojira? That’s you, a Tremors-style nematode who needs to chew into great, spattering hunks the miserable humans who have wreaked havok on the poor skin of Mother Earth… all with a fantastic soundtrack and fun, rich SNES-era pixel sprites.

And yes, oh yes: just like the MegaShark, the Great Death Worm Wojira can take out planes. Heck, you can even take out satellites.

Look, Deceased Pixel. You can charge me anything you want for this one. Just fulfill your promise and get it out to us by the end of the month.

After being caught completely unprepared for the iPad’s debut, this Christmas season is looking to be a slugfest between different electronics companies each aiming to out iPad the other.

What’s the outcome going to be? According to Acer chairman JT Wang speaking to the Chinese language paper the Economic Daily News, Wang said that by the time the tablet market “stabilizes” Apple’s share will plummet from almost 100 percent to close to 20-30 percent.

While we’re skeptical that the drop will be quite so profound, this isn’t really news that Apple fans should be discouraged by. Apple barely controls 15% of the smartphone market. Android, in comparison, controls 17%, RIM 18% and Symbian a whopping 41% of the smartphone market. But so what? That hasn’t stopped Apple from making billions off of the iPhone. It hasn’t stopped the iPhone from leading the way in the mobile arena. And even though Apple’s in fourth place, it hasn’t stopped the iPhone from being absolutely synonymous with the very definition of a smartphone. iPhone is in a class by itself.

The same thing’s going to happen here. Everyone is going to release a poorly realized tablet to compete with the iPad, and since they can’t license iOS, they’ll install Android, webOS or Windows on their devices. I have no doubt that, very quickly, those operating systems will be fatter slices on the tablet marketshare pie chart than iOS will be… but so what? There’ll still only be one iPad; all the other tablets will just be competing with each other.

We’ve been hearing rumblings of an iOS-driven AppleTV rebranded as the iTV and priced at $99 for a couple months now, and now it seems that Digg founder Kevin Rose thinks that these rumors have a lot of weight.

Although it’s not clear if Rose has any inside information, he writes: “From what I hear we should expect to see the iTV launch in September.” That would certainly confirm rumors we’ve heard that the new ‘iTV’ will debut alongside a freshly rejiggered iPod Touch at Apple’s iPod event in September, and it makes a lot of sense besides: the AppleTV, after all, has always pretty much been just a big iPod you could hook up to your television.

More to the point, Apple themselves said that their plans for a media-streaming iTunes update would likely be “more limited in scope” than people were anticipating. We all know that the music industry and film industry have been being difficult when it comes to signing licensing agreements with Apple for streaming, but television’s another story… as an institution, they are already quite comfortable with digital streaming. Could that mean that the streaming iTunes rollout will be limited in scope for everything save television at first?

Pretty much every iOS game is played with fingers, but the (i)Pawn app from French studio Volumnique is trying to change that by employing a set of physical token that are each capable of being uniquely identified by the iPhone’s touchscreen. Click through for a video.

It’s a neat demonstration, but I’ll be honest with you: I’m not entirely sure how it works. Looking at the site, each token appears to be glued onto a different sized cell battery. Since the iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen works by using a layer of capacitive material to hold an electrical charge, and senses a touch when the amount of charge under your finger changes. If the bottom-loaded batteries on the tokens predictably change the amount of charge sensed by the touchscreen, this could conceivably work… but I’m not sure the iPhone’s touch software is that nuanced. Any developers out there who might be able to hand us their theories?

Either way, it’s a neat demonstration, an even if (i)Pawn looks like a pretty boring game, it could have some neat practical merits. The iPad’s a great size for a game board, after all: a Monopoly app with mail-away top hats, locomotives, irons and terrier tokens could be a pretty satisfying experience.

Déjà vu. A likeable geek whose job is largely dedicated to testing mobile phones leaves his precious new iPhone in a bar… except this time, that affable geek wasn’t Gray Powell. Instead, it was Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam… the same guy who helped okay the purchase of the lost/stolen iPhone 4 prototype months before its official debut.

According to Lam’s Twitter account, the Gizmodo chief lost his iPhone at a restaurant while having lunch, but a random bystander sitting at a nearby table held onto it for him until he returned. Seemingly without a dose of sarcasm, Lam then tagged his tweet with the Twitter #karma tag.

Perhaps it should have been tagged with #dramatic-irony instead. If anything, the whole misadventure underlines how different things could have gone for Apple and Gizmodo if someone with some scruples had found the iPhone 4 prototype and tried to return it to Powell, as they did for Lam, instead of almost immediately rushing to the highest bidder.

The most surprising detail of this story is that since the tweet, Lam has Brian Lam has locked down his Twitter account so people can’t read his tweets, presumably in response to the Twitter taunts of people on whom the irony was not lost. What a weirdly defensive move, especially from a guy like Lam, who certainly realizes that his job at the largest gadget blog on the Internet makes him a public figure.

Look, Gizmodo, at the end of the day, you landed the biggest tech scoop basically ever, but at the cost of some of your journalist’s ethics. That’s cool, but you’ve got to be ready to take your lumps when people loudly laugh at the irony.

[via Daring Fireball]

I grabbed myself the Alfred Powerpack over the weekend, and so far it’s looking very promising.

Alfred, you may remember, is a fast little app launcher, web searcher and doing-stuffer for OS X. Clearly inspired by the likes of Quicksilver, it offers basic features for free and now, with the Powerpack, adds a few extras for a fee.

Even as Apple has blazed trails in forwarding multitouch as a bonafide interface for mobile devices, they have completely abstained from installing touchscreens on their MacBooks and iMac-lines, despite the fact that numerous competitors have jumped with both feet forward into the multitouch PC arena.

According to a recently discovered patent, though, Apple’s at least thinking about bringing multitouch to their desktop and laptop lines, detailing a touchscreen MacBook boasting iPhone-(and iMac)-like IPS display technology.

No, you don’t have to use an Apple mouse on your Mac. Any standard USB will be fine. Just plug it in and go.

And that includes standard USB mice with two buttons. Yes, the right button will work. You will be able to right-click on things just as you used to do while using Windows.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcIORhb8NfQ&feature=player_embedded

iOS4’s “multitasking” isn’t really anything of the sort, although it’s a sublimely elegant illusion: a handful of API calls for the most common multitasking functionality like VoIP and background uploading married to a sophisticated, built-in app save state functionality which gives both the effortless appearance and (for most intents and purposes) practical advantages of true iPhone multitasking.

For the most part, I’m pleased, even if I yearn for the ability to update apps like Instapaper and Reeder in the background… but one thing I’ve never really cared for is the new multitasking menu, brought up with a double click and stretched across the home row. For me, that’s where the illusion breaks down: instead of a list of truly running apps, it largely functions as a “most recently used” app list. It also makes accessing the media player controls one swipe further away than they once were.

So I really like MultiFl0w, a new interface for iOS multitasking that represents open apps with fluid, Expose-like elegance. Working in coordination with the free Cydia backgrounder app, MultiFl0w not only allows apps to truly run in the background, instead of simply access a few API calls, but it gives a beautiful and effortlessly Apple-like way of navigating between and closing those apps as well.

Unfortunately, Apple is right at the end of the day: if you have a jailbroken iPhone and run backgrounded apps, your battery life will suffer dramatically. But I can’t help but hope that someday, Apple will figure out a way around this, and something like MultiFl0w will be baked into iOS on the system level.

[via 9to5Mac]

Looking for something to keep you entertained this weekend? Let Cult of Mac’s weekly must-have apps & games feature help you out.

After some feedback on last week’s post, we’ve decided that this week we’re going to split up apps & games and give you a dedicated post for each.

So here’s are a few of our favorite games; check them out after the break!

Looking for something to keep you entertained this weekend? Let Cult of Mac’s weekly must-have apps & games feature help you out.

After some feedback on last week’s post, we’ve decided that this week we’re going to split up apps & games and give you a dedicated post for each.

So here’s a few of our favorite apps from the last week; check them out after the break!

Another glimmer of hope for iPhone 3G owners running (or crawling with) iOS4; MacRumors reports today on another Steve Jobs email, this one sent to a disgruntled iPhone 3G user:

I’ve waited patiently through 4.0.1 and 4.0.2, looking for a fix that will make my phone work again. I’ve read the forums that advise me to jailbreak my phone or use some other method so I can downgrade back to a version of iPhone 3, however I’m not prepared to use a method that is not supported by Apple.

Jobs’ response is typically succinct:

Software update coming soon.

Sent from my iPhone

Presumably this means iOS4.1.  Apple acknowledged last month that it was aware of the performance problems with iOS4 on the iPhone 3G and was “looking into” the issues, which include very sluggish performance and poor battery life.

As an 3G owner myself this fix can’t come soon enough; I’m doing the double hard reset every other week and have disabled spotlight indexing, but this only makes things tolerable at best.  Is this ordeal finally going to end soon?

Take it from me: Germans love their iPods, and they love their hard-boiled eggs. The eiPott, then, is a cute little example of German kitsch: it’s an egg holder shaped like an abstraction of an iPod.

You’d think it’d be hard to get upset about such an innocuous little piece of dishware, but Apple apparently did, bringing a lawsuit against koizol, the manufacturer… and now a German high court says that koizol needs to redesign and rename the product, citing potential confusion.

This is ridiculous. While we certainly understand Apple needs to protect their trademarks and brands, the eiPott only shares the most abstract similarity in form to the iPod, and — needless to say — none of the iPod’s functionality. They’re not trying to confuse consumers: they’re trying to entertain them with a tongue-in-cheek homage to one of the most popular brands on Earth.

[via TUAW]

We’ve all seen what id software has in mind as far as bringing their upcoming Rage to iOS as a 60 frames-per-second FPS, but what about id’s classic games? They’ve already released incredible ports of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D to the App Store, and id’s engine-building maestro John Carmack had promised to bring Quake to iOS devices too, as well as the mobile specific title, Orcs and Elves. What’s the hold up?

TouchArcade got a chance to talk to Carmack, and it doesn’t sound good:

Currently, id is completely focused on Rage, and John isn’t sure when they will get back to the classic games “even though it makes a lot of sense.” He also explained that while both Doom II RPG [$3.99] and Wolfenstein RPG [$1.99] have done well on mobile phones, their performance on the App Store has been less than ideal, leading to the decision to not bring the Orcs & Elves games over to iOS.

That’s disappointing news, because both Doom II RPG and Wolfenstein RPG are great titles. Moreover, when Doom Classic was released, Carmack promised that it would soon be updated to allow in-app purchases of the sequels, Doom 2 and Final Doom. That update still isn’t out.

Rage for iPhone looks incredible, but id’s doing the best FPS ports on the App Store, and their classic library of games is non-pareil. Let’s hope id software figures out a way to get back to the App Store in earnest.