Cult of Mac

Samsung is getting into the tablet game with their own would-be iPad killer, but unlike many other Atom-based netbooks, Samsung has a secret weapon: an A4-like mobile CPU created by (now Apple owned) Intrinsity, the Hummingbird S5PC110.

A new report by the Hong Kong based advocacy group SACOM (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) says that an eleventh employee has died at Foxconn.

Unlike the last ten deaths, though, the latest reported death wasn’t a suicide. Instead, 27 year old Foxconn employee Yan Li died on May 27th after a continuous 34 hour working shift. Allegedly, Yan —who worked night shifts at Foxconn from 200 — literally worked himself to death.

Yesteday, an AT&T spokesperson put the kibosh on any possibility of using the iPhone’s new tethering abilities to drive your iPad.

“It won’t be possible to tether the iPhone to the iPad to share Internet access,” an AT&T spokesperson bluntly said.

The usual hue and cry against AT&T resulted, but now, AT&T is clarifying matters, saying they don’t have any problem with iPads and iPhones tethered together in conjoined bliss. Rather, they blame Apple.

“You’ll need to speak with Apple. There is no AT&T policy around tethering and the iPad,” a spokesperson told Gizmodo.

Well, that’s certainly good news if true. I can’t think of any reason Apple wouldn’t allow this if their network partners are onboard. Hopefully, then, iPad-to-iPhone tethering is something we’ll see in iPhone OS 4.0.

Since the days of Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther” Apple has provided a wonderful utility, Migration Assistant, to help move data between your old and new Macs. With this utility you can easily migrate your installed applications, system settings and user data from your old system to your new one.

On the whole Migration Assistant works very well, performs successfully more often than not, and has gotten better with every subsequent release of Mac OS X. However despite Apple’s best efforts there are times when Migration Assistant can’t or won’t work.

A Manual Mac System Migration is just a fancy term for copying things over. The key is knowing what needs to be moved and how to connect the two machines.

Our favorite iPhone newsreader app, the wonderfully minimal and elegant Reeder, is finally getting a long overdue iPad version.

In fact, it’s undergoing the App Store approval process as we speak… and as a first look of what to expect, Techcrunch posted some gorgeous shots of what the iPad Reeder app will look like, which merges Reeders existing muted and clean aesthetic (Instapaper for feeds is a good comparison) with functionality like pinching to quick-look at a stack of feeds:

As an indirect response to Adobe’s own We campaign, Apple has unveiled a wonderful new sandbox playground advocating HTML5, which allows users to play around and do a number of things in their browsers that they might not even know HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript can do.

It’s a lot of fun as a playground, and certainly shows what HTML5 can do. The only problem? It’s only viewable on Safari: try to run it on any other HTML5-capable browser and you get a message prompting you to download Apple’s own browser.

We’ve been hearing tell of an HDMI-equipped Mac Mini for awhile now, with past reports indicating that prototype Mac Minis spotted by Apple employees had their DVI port replaced with HDMI, thanks to the inclusion of NVIDIA’s MPC89 CPU.

Now Apple Insider is reporting that they’ve heard from four different source who claim that Apple is having Mac Mini supply shortages… usually a “tell” for when a new model is approaching.

Children are excellent arbiters of the truth, their reactions are honest and straightforward.  In the case of the iPad, those reactions include excitement and awe.

Apple has noticed.  After a group of students from Wesley Chapel, Florida was photographed trying out some iPads at their local Apple store, the images made their way to Apple.  The company just sent 13 free iPads to some very lucky students, and may use the pictures in an upcoming ad campaign.

Kudos all around – a win for everybody here!  Thanks to AppleInsider for the tip.

Paper Toss for iPhone is a brilliant pick-up-and-play game that is guaranteed to kill some time when you’re waiting for your train, when your boss is out of the office, or when you’re waiting for your little ones to give up the TV. If you’re one of the 21,000,000 paper tossers out there, you’ll be pleased to know the game is now available on the iPad, including a new level and improved visuals for the larger screen. But is it worth that $2.99 price tag?

Despite offering tethering for laptops, AT&T will not allow you to tether your iPad to your iPhone.

An AT&T spokesperson told TechFlash “it won’t be possible to tether the iPhone to the iPad to share Internet access.”

Tethering your laptop to your iPhone — an option built into the upcoming iPhone 4.0 OS — will be possible via USB or Bluetooth. But the iPad’s Bluetooth profile for tethering is not enabled.

TechFlash: AT&T: No iPhone-iPad tethering

We start off the day with yet more deals on MacBook Pros. This one comes from Expercom: a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 13.3-inch screen for $1,098. Next, we have some free iPad applications, including “Bumper Boats HD Premium,” a puzzle game. Another crop of iPhone app price-cuts have arrived, including TomTom USA.

Along the way, we also check out new iPhone cases, speakers and Mac software. As always, details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

The iPad has already gone beyond kid-appeaser — a recent study reported that the most downloaded apps are for adults using the device at work.

So if you want to give the iPad a permanent place in your office, you might want something to prop it up with that doesn’t involve pencils and rubber bands.

While in some office environments, funky DIY stands (including a cat) might be conversation starters, in others, they just look, well, funky.

Here are our top five picks for iPad stands that deserve a place next to that sleek perpetual calendar and won’t look like some random piece of junk when your iPad is elsewhere.

1. Old Time Computers Marble finish stand. For that banker desk look, try this handcrafted stand in hardwood with a marble finish. It comes with a USB cable and audio jack,  available for $59.00 on Etsy. The same artisan has some terrific wooden stands in the same vein — including a combo iPad/iPhone dock charger —  as well as antique-looking external keyboards with a steampunk aesthetic.

Apps that use GPS to peg a user’s location on a map are nothing new — but an app that works with the user’s own maps — of say a college campus, airport terminals or the sprawling San Diego Zoo — now that’s a pretty neat trick.

Snap + Map by FogTechnologies is a $2 app that lets you does exactly that, by superimposing your GPS location onto a user-defined map — either downloaded in the form of a pdf or from a picture taken with the iPhone’s camera. The app calibrates the iPhone’s GPS receiver with the map by asking you to enter your current location, then move a short distance and enter it again. Of course, much of this app’s usefulness depends on the iPhone’s somewhat spotty GPS capabilities.

Brilliant idea though — especially for ephemeral locations like Burning Man, where I can totally envision this app saving my life during my next visit; possibly quite literally.

Take Smule’s Glee or I Am T-Pain popstar-forging apps, strip away the Auto-Tune (and some of the polish), stir in a little Simon Cowell and bam — you’ve got Music Idol, a dollar-app that creates a virtual American Idol community on the iPhone, complete with the ability to rate other would-be star’s performances.

The app — which has also been formatted for the iPad —  gives users the ability to upload 20-second performance, then show off their talents through the app’s searchable database or post clips to the user’s Facebook page. The developer claims a 2000-member user-base (culled partly from an earlier version of the app called Riff Raters).

While the Smule apps are collaborative in nature, this one seems like more of a way to introduce the world to your unique talents — or perhaps invite a hailstorm of abuse. Either way. to prod talent in the app’s direction, the developer is giving away $10 iTunes gift cards every week.

You can now search for iPhone apps when using Google’s mobile search page. The feature, announced earlier this week, displays matches at the top of search results on the Google site.

Selecting an app takes users to Apple’s App Store, permitting users to view that application’s listing, along with the name of the app’s creator and user reviews. The searches can be conducted either from an iPhone or Android handset.

The feature, which the Mountain View, Calif. company plans to roll out for other phones and more countries, is currently available only in the U.S. for the iPhone and Android-based phones.

Although my affinity for Apple’s iDevices has long made switching an impossibility, I’ve long loved DVD Jon’s DoubleTwist application, a wonderful and streamlined iTunes-replacing program that allows you to sync your music or video library to pretty much any device under the sun.

Today, DoubleTwist got even better. Although the program has long synced to Android phones, the DoubleTwist Player, which finally gives Android what its been sorely lacking: a killer media player app. Even better, it offers some degree of interoperability with iTunes, and allow you to import your iTunes playlist, ratings and playcounts.

It’s free for a limited time, and finally brings an Apple-like media experience to Android phones. The only limitation is the lack of a widget allowing you to control your media playback from the homescreen, although it’s promised soon.

[via Gadget Lab]

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Maker of diabolically intricate pixel-art extrordinaire, the phenomenal eBoy has just released his first iPhone App. Called FixPix, it’s a simple, slightly nauseating but completely addictive puzzle game: you use your iPhone’s accelerometer to tilt cut-out portions of an image back and forth until they perfectly line up, bringing you to the next stage. You can grab it now for only $2.

Every few months, Mac security firm Intego pops up, waves their arms hysterically around and screams that the OS X sky is falling, having identified new malware in the wild. Rinse, repeat.

Their latest report is no different: Intego has identified 30 screensavers developed by a company called 7art and one app called Mishinc FLV to MP3 that are infected with a spyware program called OSX/OpinionSpy.

Was AT&T’s recent decision to drop its unlimited data plan for iPhone customers a signal the carrier prefers RIM’s BlackBerry over Apple’s handset? The move could turn the tide against the iPhone and in favor of BlackBerry customers comfortable with operating using fewer network resources, one analyst said Wednesday.

“In Canada and Europe, price-sensitive smartphone customers already do more on BlackBerry under data caps,” RBC Capital Markets’ Mike Abramsky told investors. At just 50MB per month, BlackBerry users require one-tenth of the resources of iPhone owners, who can consume between 250-500 MB per month, Abramsky said.

According to Apple Insider, Apple has started to cull programs on the App Store that offer Dashboard-like widgets to the user.

The most tangible evidence of the purge comes from Developer Russell Ivanovic, whose MyFrame app was removed by Apple for including widget support.

Going straight to Steve Jobs, Ivanovic received this reply: “”We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.”

Apple Insider speculates that this might be preparation work for Apple to introduce their own widgets in iPhone OS 4.0, although surely we’d have seen some evidence of that in beta form by now.

An equally valid reason Apple may be shutting dashboard apps down is because of their strict ban against interpretive code, which is essentially what a widget is.

When you write an email to Steve Jobs, he’ll sometimes write you back a letter with the answers to your questions. “>Write a letter to AT&T CEO Randall L. Stephenson, though, and what do you get? A threat of a cease-and-desist, as Girogio Galante found out.

The exchange was prompted by a slightly miffed but non-threatening email to Stephenson in regards to AT&T’s new data rates, in which Galante threatened to leave AT&T for Sprint. His email closed with the line: “Please don’t have one of your $12/hour “Executive Relations” college students call me – I’ve found them to be generally poorly informed… and they have little  authority to do anything sensible.”

Yet it was one of those very same “$12/Hour ‘Executive Relations’ college students” who called Giorgio. His name was Brent, and after calling Giorgio to “thank him” for the feedback, but while this “college student” may not have been authorized to do anything “sensible,” he was apparently authorized to threaten Galante with legal action if he ever dared to email AT&T’s CEO again.

Could anything better exemplify AT&T’s total contempt for their customers? If you write Steve Jobs, you might have a heated exchange with him, but at least he’s listening. Just attempting to communicate with AT&T, though, is enough to get you potentially sued. What dicks.

In one of the more mysterious statements of the day, HP chief Mark Hurd claims that his company didn’t buy Palm and its webOS operating system to enter the smartphone business, but rather to drive “small form factor web-connected devices.” You know. Tablets and MIDs.

Hurd claimed that HP had no interest in spending “billions of dolllars” trying to get into the smartphone business. “That doesn’t in any way make any sense.”

Uh, really? As Apple has amply proven with the iPhone and iPad, the future of computing is mobile. Whoever controls most of the operating system space in the mobile arena is going to profit big time: this is exactly the reason why Google is licensing their Android operating system for free.

But in actuality, the reason mobile computing is the future isn’t because you can make telephone calls or text messages on mobile devices: that’s just the reason that gets them initially into people’s pockets. It’s mobile internet that’s the future, and someday, our smartphones are probably going to be just tiny, 3G-capable tablets with VoIP capabilities that we keep in our pockets.

While Apple and Google battle it out in the smartphone arena, perhaps HP is playing it smart after all, and trying to position itself to be ready to pounce in the post-smartphone future which iPhone and Android create.

Artist johannes-p-osterhoff pwned the squeaky clean iPad advert in a Berlin subway station by putting porn in right before the device launched in Germany.

The attention gained from his protest over the “porn-free device” crashed his server, so osterhoff (who prefers to go all lowercase) got back to us just now on how he did it, sending Cult of Mac exclusive photos of his guerilla art operation at the Rosenthaler Platz stop in Berlin’s subway.

A few of our especially astute readers thought the osterhoff’s Photoshop skills could use work, but as you can see in the above pic, his protest over the allegedly porn-free iPad was an old school cut-and-paste operation.

Less than a week after its long overdue update allowing VoIP calls over the iPhone’s 3G connection, nearly five million people have already downloaded the latest update to the popular Skype App from iTunes.

Of course, that’s five million people who are going to go absolutely bonkers when Skype starts inexplicably charging for 3G calls at the beginning of next year.

According to Skype, they are charging to make sure they can maintain quality on Skype-to-Skype calls, but I can’t help but wonder if the long delay in bringing 3G calls to Skype was a roadblock placed by AT&T, who — rightly — see a 3G capable Skype as a threat ti their minutes business… especially once iPhone OS 4.0 comes around and enables VoIP multi-trasking.