Cult of Mac

Super Monkey Ball was one of the first games that introduced us to the possibilities of gaming on the iPhone & iPod Touch when it was previewed back in March 2008, along with the announcement of the App Store. As the biggest selling game on launch day, Sega set the standard for other 3D games with superb graphics, an intuitive control system and incredibly fun gameplay. Now Super Monkey Ball 2: Sakura Edition is available on the iPad, so does this super-sized version live up to the expectations we’ve come to expect from those little monkeys?

I hope our U.S. audience had a safe and enjoyable Memorial Day weekend. For everyone else, let’s get straight to today’s deals. First up is an Apple Store deal on unibody MacBook Pros, starting at $929 for a Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz machine. Also: the latest batch of App Store price drops, including “Robin Hood – the Return of Richard.” Pretty soon, we’ll be finding iPod Shuffles in our boxes of Cracker Jacks. Until then, the next best thing: a 2nd generation 1GB Shuffle for $39.

Along the way we’ll take a look at other Apple software, such as NAVIGON’s MobileNavigator software for the iPhone and MacCleanse 2 to erase sensitive data. As always, details on these and many other items are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Panasonic just announced the addition of a new wide-angle, 5x zoom camera to their line, the slim Lumix FX75.

Somewhat notable here is the ultra-wide 24mm lens equivalent on this camera, but we like the wide-open f2.2 aperture even more — definitely on the fast side of the spectrum for a PnS, and pretty nifty for creating shots with a shallow depth-of-field. A souped-up Venus Engine HD II image processor should help keep things snappy, and the camera also shoots HD video video in AVCHD Lite at 720p and 30 fps. And of course, like the other models toward the high-end of Panasonic’s range, the FX75 is equipped with a Leica lens.

Panasonic also festively included a “Happy Mode” in the FX75, a setting that adjusts the brightness, saturation and color to ramp up an image’s cheeriness (presumably for tourists visiting London). No word yet on ship date or pricing.

On the increasingly small off chance your computer doesn’t have it’s own webcam (or you’ve blowtorched it because those aliens from Tau Ceti II were spying on you), German developer Drahtwerk has a clever solution: an app that lets you turn your iPhone into a wifi-tethered webcam.

iWebcamera ($5) includes a pause-mode, two quality options and a “send drivers by e-mail feature,” which is apparently some BS that Windows users need to deal with.

The bad news is that iWebcamera is only for Windows boxes; the good news is it’ll work with any iPhone, even the Original.

Much has been made over the last 24 hours about the fact that Apple has managed to sell two million iPads in just 60 days — a pace dramatically ahead of the original iPhone, which took 74 days just to get a million units into the hands of the public. Much less-debated, but potentially more interesting for Apple’s long-term future, is that the iPad has grossed more than $1 billion in revenue by hitting the 2 million mark. At $499 a pop and units as pricey as $829, they’ve cleared that barrier by a flying leap in record time. For context about just what a monumental achievement this is, consider the fact that when FedEx reached $1 billion in gross sales in its tenth year of operation, that was the quickest rise to a billion dollars in revenue without acquisitions in the history of American business.

Apple’s growth machine has hit a new gear with iPad, and I’d like to take this post to due some geeky quick and dirty analysis in the manner used at my day job to get a sense of Apple’s expectations for the platform and to guess as to whether its rapid take-off is a good sign or a sign of danger.

It appears many analysts couldn’t get the word out fast enough after Apple announced over the Memorial Day holiday how well the iPad is selling. Analysts increased predictions on how many tablets Apple would sell and how high the Cupertino, Calif. company’s stock would rise.

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster told investors Monday he expects Apple will sell 6.2 million iPads during calendar 2010, up from the 4.3 million he had previously projected. Despite warning investors to “keep iPad expectations in check” due to international and domestic iPad supply problems, Munster also boosted to $330 his target for Apple shares, up from $323.

Well, Apple has shuttered LaLa, its streaming music service. The sign appeared early Tuesday morning, but while the closure comes as no surprise, what is unsettling is the dead air that replaces the web-based music application. What’s more, don’t bet the farm LaLa will be reborn as some streaming version of iTunes.

“I have a hunch we’re not going to see one soon,” opines Peter Kafka at the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital. Although it could be just a teaser for Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ appearance tonight at the All Things Digital conference, Kafka notes web-based music services are on life support and the music industry’s legal eagles control the oxygen supply.

CNN paid a visit to Foxconn, the Chinese factory complex where 10 workers jumped to their deaths this year.

What did they find? A super-concentrated complex in Shenzen where sleeping quarters, restaurants, hospitals, supermarkets and swimming pools are packed into 2.3 square kilometers (about 0.9 square  miles).

It’s a factory town, they report, that feels more like a “heavily secure” university campus.

Apple has sold more than two million of its iPads in under 60 days, a sign demand for the tablet device is not slowing. The Cupertino, Calif. company also acknowledged it was having difficulty keeping up with the fast-moving sales amid reports of short supplies.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” CEO Steve Jobs announced Monday. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

At this week’s Computex expo in Taipei, Hitachi-LG unveiled their new HyDrive: an amalgamation of a Blu-Ray DVD drive and solid state drive that could afford us a look at the direction future MacBook hardware will take to slim down chassis design.

The HyDrive is interesting: the current models offers 64GB of NAND flash memory with a read/write speed of 175MB/60MB per second, although capacities should increase. The SSD and Blu-Ray drive are then connected through SATA II. The end result is two drives — one optical, one solid state — that take up half the room as their separate counterparts in a laptop.

We all know how much Cupertino likes efficiency. If Apple chose to use a combined solution like this in their next MacBooks, they’d significantly cut down on the size of their internal components, leading to slimmer, lighter notebooks that have Blu-Ray functionality to boot.

The HyDrive will launch in August 2010, and while there’s no official price yet, they’re still definitely priced for luxury laptops: it’s been hinted that a HyDrive could add $200 to the price of a standard notebook.

For scuba-diving iMovie users looking to edit together some gorgeously lurid undersea footage, Sanyo’s gorgeous new Xacti DMX-CA100 promises to be the world’s first completely waterproof camcorder capable of shooting 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second nat up to 10 subaqueous feet. Even better: the resulting footage is captured in iPhone-friendly H.264 format, although a word of caution: your iPad isn’t nearly this submersible.

Additionally, the Xacti DMX-CA100 can capture still shots at up to 14 megapixels, and supports 6X optical zoom and high-speed sequential zooming that allows you to capture up to 22 photos per second at a 2MP resolution.

Sanyo’s latest Xacti will be released this June in colors of black, yellow or pink for a still unrevealed price.

Even if the iPad did have weight sensors, this would still be a self-evidently bad app idea…. and grow exponentially worse in direct correlation to user weight density.

[via Slashgear]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATpSPNIuj3M&feature=player_embedded#!

Steve Jobs himself said the iPad is “magical” but this may be the first we’ve seen it used as a prop in a magic trick, thanks to Japanese YouTube illusionist “Salary Magician.”

His tricks are all standard sleight-of-hand affairs that take advantage of the iPad as a prop behind which birds, books and envelopes can be hidden “in plain sight” but the real beauty of this act is the way Salary Magician has conjured himself up a home-made app to give his tricks that extra bit of shazam.

End note: is “Salary Magician” the best name for a Japanese magician ever, or what?

[via Gizmodo]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw5jH8GN12U&feature=player_embedded#!

Created by Stanford alums Ashkay Kothari and Ankit Gupta as part of the Launch Pad class at the Stanford Institute of Design, Pulse is an absolutely gorgeous iPad newsreader that makes RSS and Atom feeds as easy as Google search, and even more gorgeous than Google Reader Play.

Whether in line with the national average or not, the recent slate of suicides at Foxconn has been a public relations nightmare not just for the Chinese electronics manufacturer, but for their partners as well.

Now, a report from Chinese site Zol.com.cn suggests that Cupertino might be taking the well-being of their subcontracted workers into their own hands: they claim that Apple will subsidize the wages of Foxconn employees working on their products with a profit-sharing scheme.

According to the article, Apple believes the main reason for the suicide jumps is low wages, and so they are prepared to offer roughly 1 to 2% of the profits of Foxconn-produced Apple products to the employees who have worked on them.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Google is so fed up with Windows 7’s woeful security issues that they are now taking Redmond’s operating system by the pants seat and unceremoniously hurtling it from the building.

What machines are employees getting instead? Linux rigs… and Macs.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJeGt5fe7e8&feature=player_embedded

It was a rude dose of unexpected knowledge in the intricacies of USB when starry-eyed iPad owners first came home with their new devices, plugged it into their computer’s port and instead of juicing saw… nothing.

The culprit, they soon found out, was the iPad’s USB requirements: it simply hates the low-powered USB ports so ubiquitous in most PCs, and will accept nothing less than a full 10 watts of energy output if you want it to charge. This forced some users to divorce syncing from charging, plugging their iPads into their computers only when they wanted to slurp up some content from iTunes, and charging it via the wall plug.

Not exactly ideal. Luckily, in the months since the iPad’s debut, some of the biggest names in motherboards (namely Gigabyte, MSI and Asus) have all come out with software that juices up their motherboards to be able to power the iPad.

Better yet, Asus’ software seems to work on pretty much any computer, as illustrated by the above YouTube video. If you’re still grinding your teeth about USB charging issues with your iPad, you might give it a shot.

[via Engadget]

My iPhone has become more than just a cell phone — it is really useful and frankly indispensable. It wouldn’t be without the plethora of apps available, but not just any app will do so when I find a good one I like to write about it. Minibooks for Freshbooks is one of those apps. It is a full-featured iPhone invoicing app that makes invoicing my clients fast and easy. If you are a freelancer or contractor – and in these days of unemployment, who isn’t – Minibooks takes the pain out of asking your clients for money.

I’m fairly well-known for being a detractor of the convoluted mess that iTunes has become in the video and apps iPhone era. I might have even labeled it Apple’s own IE 6 at some point. That’s actually not true — it’s more Lotus Notes, trying to fit every possible feature into a single application rather than writing a bunch of specialized programs that excel at their task. From a desktop experience perspective, at least, I know I would be way happier with discrete applications for a slimmed-down music player, video player, and store/file manager.

Well, I might have found the first of that set. It’s called Instinctiv, and it’s a gorgeous, free, Mac OS X exclusive music player that actually makes listening to music on a computer intuitive again. It has some shortcomings, which I’ll address, but on most levels, it’s a superior music solution to iTunes.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbHF63b7g50&feature=player_embedded

Although the joke in this Star Wars iPad Briefing video —in which footage from A New Hope is overlaid with Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation — is fairly straightforward, it’s really the skeptical coughs and embarrassed shuffling of the Rebel Pilots that really makes it work…. not to mention Han Solo’s exasperated eye-roll.

If you’re dreaming of Netflix for your iPhone, good news: you’re just a jailbreak away. Hacker Knisitruck says that the existing Netflix iPad app is secretly a universal binary and can be easily ported to the iPhone with a few simple steps.

Steve Jobs’ “hobby” device might not be a hobby for long: Engadget reports that sources close to Apple claim that the Apple TV is currently getting a massive overhaul as an iPhone OS, streaming video device.

The old Apple TV was like a big iPod that connected to your set, so it’s not really a surprise that Apple’s re-imagining of Apple TV is essentially as a big iPhone connected to an HDTV. According to Engadget, the new Apple TV will have an A4 CPU, run iPhone OS and only ship with 16GB of flash storage.

Why so little room? Because Apple’s trying to do away with local storage in favor of their cloud iTunes service. The new Apple TV will be capable of streaming your media at 1080p through a web connection (or a Time Capsule, if you still want to store your media locally, but it’s all still streaming).

The biggest reveal? The price. Engadget says the new Apple TV will costs only $99. Wow.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yO2KQHkt4A&feature=player_embedded

If you’re looking for a little project to pursue this Memorial Day, word comes down the pipeline that installing Android on your iPhone 2G or 3G is now easier than ever, thanks to the automated iPhodroid application.

Earlier methods of installing Android on the iPhone were rather complicated, but this new method only requires a jailbroken iPhone running firmware 3.1.2 (in other words, jailbroken using PwnageTool, RedSn0W or Blackra1n and not Spirit), OpenSSH installed with the “alpine” password, MacFuse and the iPhodroid software. Connect your iPhone, run iPhodroid and five minutes later, you’ll have a dual-boot iPhone running the two best mobile operating systems on the market. Shiny.\

[via 9to5Mac]

When Gizmodo got their hands on the first leaked fourth-generation iPhone prototype, they weren’t able to give a resolution for the display. It was a frustrating omission which caused many of us to wish they’d taken a microscope to the display and confirmed resolution through the tedious process of pixel counting.

Someone else has now done just that and seems to have confirmed what we all suspected: the next-gen iPhone display is a 960×640 IPS, quadruple the resolution of the current iPhone.

That’s really impressive: imagine how fantastic games are going to look on the iPhone, or video for that matter… the new iPhone is going to be just shy of native 720p HD. This is turning out to be an iPhone well worth having waited for. WWDC just can’t come soon enough.

Uh oh. The Department of Justice just keeps on moving their anti-trust magnifying glass farther and farther away from Apple’s competition with Amazon, blowing up the pores on the whole iTunes apple skin. The DoJ is now reaching out to Hollywood as they investigate their anti-trust case against Cupertino.

According to the New York Post:

“The [Justice Dept.] is doing outreach,” said one Hollywood industry source. “You can’t dictate terms to the industry. The Adobe thing is just inviting the wrath of everybody.”

Added a senior source at a media company: “If Apple thinks it’s going to increase its monopoly with the iPad, it should look at the history of other walled gardens.”

While the DoJ is just “investigating” right now, an anti-trust case — scurrilous or not — is pretty much inevitable at this point: Apple is now the biggest tech company in the world, and since so many big, powerful companies are now smaller than them, they’re going to lobby to knock Apple down a few notches in whatever way they can.