The iPhone 4 brought changes in shape, function, features, and so on, but to the joy of many cell phone photographers, the device now includes a rear facing 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash and a forward facing VGA-quality camera. Apple enhanced the cameras via software improvements like FaceTime, zoom, etc. linked to the hardware changes above. These changes will probably calm the complaints about the camera that I heard about on the previous iPhone models. However, regardless of the issues users have developed exciting ways to use the camera and there are innovative third-party applications to help along the way.

One such app is Camera+, which is a joint effort between Taptaptap and Canadian photographer Lisa Bettany. I figured it was worth taking a look at it since it was on sale Sunday for $1.99 (regular price is $4.99).

Turns out everyone’s favorite Sith Lord is an iPhone 4 user, and even the Force can’t help Lord Vader avoid the Death Grip.  Russell Arch has posted an entertaining animated clip over on YouTube about the experience.  Also, the Empire keeps an old iMac around to run Classic Apps!

Thanks to RetroMacCast for the tip.

Newton Peripherals carved out a niche in the gadget-universe, guided by the simple principle that the best gadget is the one you take with you — because that’s the one you’ll use. They created the MoGo Mouse, a mouse-remote hybrid that tucks away into a laptop’s pc-card slot, then followed it with the MoGo Talk: an ultra-slim Bluetooth headset that resides in — and actually forms part of — a case which attaches to the back of the iPhone 3G/s.

But while the design concept is brilliant, engineering-wise, the Talk wasn’t quite ready for prime-time when originally released; complaints surfaced that the headset was difficult to eject from the case, and more alarmingly, that the case’s pop-up charging port was fragile and often broke, removing the only method available for charging the headset.

ID8-Mobile has since snapped up Newton Peripherals, addressed the Talk’s problems, made a few other minor improvements to the case (while leaving the headset unchanged) and re-released it as the MoGo Talk XD. So did they get it right?

I just got an email notification from Apple about my free Bumper case, which I just ordered using the iPhone 4 app.

“That was quick,” I thought. But then I saw the estimated ship date: Aug 27. And the estimated arrival? September 1st.

Did anyone get an earlier ship date?

Email and texting is so yesterday; we’re all down with Twitter and Facebook and whatnot these days, so it only makes sense that the new 2.0 update for Nuance‘s speech-recognition app for the iPhone, Dragon Dictation, now adds the ability to send messages as status updates and tweets instead of just as emails or texts.

Another, smaller improvement, is the ability to instantly paste the transcript into the body of a text message.

Finally, in addition to standard Yankee English, the app now also supports “Engish (United Kingdom),” which presumably means it’ll insert the letter “u” randomly into words throughout the message. More languages arriving soon, including German in a few weeks and Italian, French and Spanish by the year’s end.

[via Macworld]

We wrap up another week of deals with three bargains for the Mac, iPod and iPad user. First up is the continuation of Apple’s back-to-School hardware sale. Buy a MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or iMac and get an 8Gb iPod touch for free. Next, if you have an iPad, keep it’s screen safe with this mirror-screen protector for just $4. Finally, if you are looking for a bargain on a new MacBook, check out this bundle from the folks at Expercom. Along with the 17-inch MacBook with a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor, you also get three years of AppleCare for just $2, 058.

Along the way, we also check out Apple’s newly introduced iPhone 4 care program, the SquareTrade iPhone warranty, an iBook for just $300 and many more items. As usual, details on these and much more is available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Nothing like dropping a little ninja into a spoiling dish to spice things up. In this case, the dish is a game like Tap-Tap Revenge, and the ninja is…well, it’s a ninja. Sorta.

Rhythm Spirit ($2) lets you control a little rendered cartoon-ninja named Toshi as he battles through ten levels of Japanese-ish folklore after being “empowered by a spirit.” The art and soundtrack look and sound tasty, but it’s the way you control Toshi — through tapping out fight (or flight) commands to the rhythm of the soundtrack— that makes this game stand out from the crowd.

Try the free version if you’re still not sold after watching the vid.

Tanoshii’n da!

After a string of early morning burglaries at Apple stores, police are looking for links between the crimes.

The idea is simple: thieves smash Apple’s signature glass windows, then grab whatever gadget goodness they can.

The latest smash-and-grab looting hit the Apple store in Suburban Square, Pennsylvania on July 14.

At 5:18 am, crooks smashed the glass front window and harvested $22,000 of merchandise, including 11 laptops and three iPods plus iPhones, including the iPhone 4. An alarm sounded, but by the time police arrived there was no trace of the thieves.

Okay, demand for the iPad in Hong Kong may not match New York City, but for Apple, it could be an important precursor to how the device will be accepted in the all-important Chinese market. Friday was the first day the tablet device officially went on sale in Hong Kong. How’s it going? Ask a local salesperson.

“Crazy — the iPad is crazy,” Kurt Lo tells the Wall Street Journal. Lo’s usual orders from Chinese and Vietnamese customers have nearly doubled – 300 to 400 orders instead of the usual 200 to 300 per week. His Chinese customers are also expected to order between 10 to 50 iPads for the gray market.

While the iPhone and iPad are incredibly useful devices for the road warrior or mobile worker aiming to live a digital lifestyle unburdened of dead tree flesh, their inability to interface directly with the likes of scanners can make getting a digital copy of a commonly-used document onto your device a little convoluted.

Doxie’s button-cute, 10.9-ounce scanner gets around this quite nicely by interacting with iTunes. Slot in a document, push a button and Doxie will scan the page at 600 dots-per-inch, convert it into a PDF an plug it right into iTunes, ready to be read on any iOS device with the latest version of iBooks.

It’s a neat little road scanner, small enough to fit into any gear bag. You can buy the Doxie now for just $129 directly from the official website.

Apple has a tiger by the tail with its iPad and suppliers are now complaining they can’t push them out the door fast enough to meet demand. The head of LG Display, a division of LG Electronics, told Reuters “Apple may have to delay launches of the iPad for some countries due to tight component supplies and strong demand.”

LG Display CEO Kwon Young-soo added that although it is considering upping production lines, “overall supply is likely to remain tight until early next year.”

To make applying for a free Bumper or case for the iPhone 4 process easier, Apple launched the Case Program app, offered gratis on iTunes in nine languages.

Once you download and install it, you’ll need to sign in with your Apple ID and select a Bumper case or iPhone prophylactic of choice.

While the Case Program states that it can take from three to five weeks for the cases to arrive, a few people have said Apple has promised that they might arrive sooner (three to five days).

Let us know in the comments what Apple told you about great bumper expectation times when you applied for the case.

Via The Apple Blog

Eating sashimi at his local sushi bar, this strange but adorable Japanese man wondered if his iPad would be as excellent a plate as a tablet computer, and promptly proceeded to smear raw fish, tofu, rice and curry across his device’s pristine IPS display.

His astute conclusion? “It’s better to eat with normal dishes… iDish is flat surface, Curry can’t be scooped. My iPad got fishy smell. You need to be careful.” Words to live by.

If you use Safari as your main web browser, you might want to open your preferences, switch to Autofill and untick the option to autofill web forms using info from your Address Book card: a serious vulnerability in Safari allows websites to steal information from your Address Book without any user input at all.

The exploit was discovered by Jeremiah Grossman. Here’s how it works:

All a malicious website would have to do to surreptitiously extract Address Book card data from Safari is dynamically create form text fields with the aforementioned names, probably invisibly, and then simulate A-Z keystroke events using JavaScript. When data is populated, that is AutoFill’ed, it can be accessed and sent to the attacker…

As shown in the proof-of-concept code… the entire process takes mere seconds and represents a major breach in online privacy. This attack could be further leveraged in multistage attacks including email spam, (spear) phishing, stalking, and even blackmail if a user is de-anonymized while visiting objectionable online material.

Grossman submitted the exploit to the attention of Apple over a month ago, but decided to publicize it after failing to receive a non-automated response about the matter.

For now, no need to panic, just shut off autofill until Apple works out a fix.

[via Cult of Mac]

If you’re tempted to pick up a new iMac sometime soon, you might just want to wait: according to Apple Insider, new iMacs may well be imminent.

According to their sources, Apple is informing distributors not to expect any further stock of the entry level, 21.5-inch, 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, while advising other retailers to sell off their existing iMac models.

Such moves generally tip a hardware refresh. In this case, we’ll probably just see a speedbump, except for the entry-level iMacs, which boast last-generation Intel Core 2 Duo chips instead of Intel’s quad-core i5 and i7 CPUs. The most obvious assumption, then, is that the low-range iMacs will get Intel’s low-end quad-core processor, the Core i3.

If true, this rumor’s worth getting excited about if you’re looking for a new iMac. Let’s just hope that the update brings something beefier than just an updated processor to the table. USB 3.0 support would be very nice indeed, Apple.

Microsoft’s had some good look with garnering interest in Office for Mac by giving away free MacBook Pros in the past, and now they’re at it again.

This time, Microsoft doesn’t want you to merely shill their warez or spread word of mouth: instead, they want you to share an interesting personal anecdote about PowerPoint with them on their official blog. Deliver one of the most interesting anecdotes and you might just win one-of-two ugly MacBook Pros repainted in the garish official colors of the Office for Mac logo.

Full rule details are here. Like most of you, I’m definitely going to enter, but also like most of you, the real challenge is trying to figure out which of the dozens (if not hundreds!) of witty, urbane and engaging personal anecdotes about my experience using PowerPoint for Mac to relay.

Continued manufacturing problems with the white iPhone 4 prompted Apple this morning to announce another delay in the model’s availability. In a statement, the Cupertino, Calif. company said the white model won’t be available until “later this year.”

“White models of Apple’s new iPhone 4 have proven more challenging to manufacture than expected,” Apple added. The company emphasized the delay will not affect the availability of the black iPhone 4, however.

If you believe the moral crusaders in Apple’s App Review Team, the face you see to the right is an avatar of carnality and smut. Her name is Lyudmila Bouzinova, ad she’s a contestant on America’s Top Model.

According to Techradar, the guys at DLP Mobile were contacted by Apple after submitting an update to Mirror App, accompanied by in-app screenshots of Bouzinova.

Okay, maybe you could make an argument that she looks a little bit trampy, but Apple’s response seems overblown. They claimed that the images could be considered “obscene, pornographic or defamatory,” and while the app wasn’t pulled, DLP was asked to resubmit their application with updated images.

It’s not a big deal, but seriously: did Apple have to invent a time-machine to recruit App Review Team employees prudish enough to get the vapors at the mere site of an exposed clavicle? Do they have to wear burqas to work? Or is the guideline just that something is deemed risque if there’s merely a chance someone out there is going to get aroused looking at it? Because Rule 34, my friends.

We can describe the idea in one sentence: an iPod patent that switches output to mono when a pair of earbuds are split between two people.

But how, by gum, to describe the pencil-line freaks of the patent illustration, except through wordless screaming? Befreckled, sloe-eyed moppets struckwith lionitis, then decapitated, their horror-induced rictuses still face-frozen? GAH!

Good lord, Apple. If this is the best you can come up with, no wonder you prefer your iPod models to be well silhouetted.

Archetype, the instantly popular online FPS by Villain that impressed many of us upon its release earlier this month has been pulled from the App Store.

The game’s recent update to version 1.2.1 brought with it several bugs that caused issues when loading on certain devices, and in turn a large number of unhappy customers.

Archetype’s Twitter page confirms that Villain are currently working with Apple to resolve the issue and get Archetype back in to the App Store. One tweet suggests that users with a backup of version 1.05 can continue to use that for the time being:

We’re working with Apple to resolve the problem. 1.05 should work if you have a backup (assuming you downloaded 1.2.1). 

Let us know if you’ve had problems with Archetype and what device you’re using in the comments. We’ll keep you updated on the game’s return.

Where would the Macintosh (and Computing) World be without Bill Atkinson?  MacPaint, QuickDraw, HyperCard – Atkinson stands with the Giants.  In homage of his recent donation of the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum, flickr artist anoved offers this portrait of Bill Atkinson created entirely in MacPaint.  With tools like these, who needs Photoshop?  Well done!

Thanks Bill, for Everything!

Clues to the causes of Mac startup problems can be found by analyzing when in the boot process the system fails.  Problems may be related to the power supply, battery, hard drive, logic board, OS corruption or an issue with a user account.  Macs are reliable machines, but like many of us they get cranky from time to time.

Isolating where the problem is occurring is key to finding the solution.  Unplug any external peripherals (disk drives, printer, etc.) to help narrow down the cause.

Even though Apple recorded record revenues earlier this week, it is still trailing Microsoft, which just reported its own record revenues.

There had been some speculation earlier this week that Apple might surpass Microsoft in revenues for the first time.

However, Microsoft is still one jump ahead: It just had its best Q4 ever with $16.04 billion in revenue.

Apple recorded $15.7 billion in revenue.

Microsoft made the haul on sales of its old stalwarts, the Windows and Office software lines. It’s online and entertainment divisions, which include its mobile efforts, lost $696 million and $172 million respectively.

It’s only a matter of time before Apple passes Microsoft in revenues, and will likely come next quarter. Apple is estimating $18 billion but may hit $20 billion: it routinely lowballs Wall St. Apple already passed Microsoft’s market capitalization in May.

To see how big Apple could get, check out this Macworld story: Think Apple is big now? You ain’t seen nothing yet, which argues that Apple’s iPad, iPhone and overseas businesses are just getting started, while the Mac goes from strength to strength.

There were a few of our readers (but not many) who thought Steve Jobs’ attitude at the iPhone 4 “End of Antennagate” press conference was a little arrogant, defensive or condescending.

Here’s a video translation in plain words (a few mildly NSFW) of what he was “really” saying for everyone else, starting with “We’re not perfect. We’re better than you, but not perfect.”

I got a few guffaws out of it, especially the translation of his attitude towards the press (“Gizmodo, how’s your signal now?”).

Via lindenitzan

Apple has started issuing $30 refunds to iPhone 4 customers who bought a Bumper, report members of MacRumors’ forums.

For customers who bought a Bumper with a credit card, the refunds are automatic; no need to do anything. One forum member reports:

Just got off the phone with Apple to ask if I could get Bumper purchase refunded and he informed me that Apple has begun crediting back credit cards today and will be doing them in batches throughout the week.

Via 9to5Mac.