Cult of Mac

I don’t often play around with advertising, but Olympus’ virtual ad for it’s new PEN E-PL1 camera is pretty fun.

Go to www.getolympus.com/PEN3d and download a paper cutout of the camera (you can get it here). Install a plugin, and when you hold the paper camera up to your iSight webcam it turns into a 3D model of the camera.

It’s quite magical and I laughed with delight when the virtual camera appeared on screen. You can remove the lens, check out different shooting modes and play with the flash. Turn the camera around and you can take pictures or shoot video of yourself, which you can share on Facebook.

The virtual camera works well on a MacBook and iMac. Even though you have to install a plugin, I think it’s worth it. This is digital marketing done well.

The PEN E-PL1 is one of a new generation of new Micro Four Thirds (M4/3) cameras that promise DSLR quality with point-and-shoot ease. It has an interchangeable lens, built-in image stabilization and can record HD video.

(The June print issues of Wired and Popular Photography contain pre-cut cameras. There’s also a competition to win the camera and some cash: Shoot a video explaining what you’d do with the PEN camera and $5,000. Details at www.youtube.com/getolympus).

Act quickly, and you can get Gameloft’s Rogue Planet for iPhone/iPt for free.

Today only until 5 pm ET, the strategy game is free as part of the company’s 10th Anniversary Happy Hour. That’s a $5 drop and the best price we’ve seen for this game.

Grab it quick; time’s nearly up.

Future iPhones may be able to flash ads for theater discounts or suggest a burrito special in the neighborhood as you head out of the office at lunch time.

Geo-tagged ads and coupons would zap themselves to iPhone users a number of ways, including RFID, Apple Insider writes.

The Cupertino company applied for a patent this week titled “System and method for providing contextual advertisements according to a dynamic pricing scheme.”

If the price (or timing) is right, users could make buys at kiosks or use coupons or discounts from their smartphones.

Here’s how they described it in the application:

“If the submitted advertisement… provides a coupon for food at a restaurant, the submitting advertiser… may include an indication that the advertisement… is directed to food sales, times of day when meals are popularly served, a GPS location of the restaurant, keywords that may relate to the restaurant in an Internet search, how weather may affect the use or non-use of the coupon in the advertisement…, etc.”

Via Apple Insider

Ayman Shamma’s iPad steel drum just might revolutionize music on street corners and subway stops.

Shamma made a pair of drum sticks out of conductive material, then wrote an iPad app that mimics the sound of a steel drum, without any heavy equipment to lug around.

You can whip up a pair of drumsticks in about half an hour following his tutorial and start annoying the neighbor’s immediately with Shamma’s preferred apps, Magic Piano or iDaft.

There have been hints of heavy iPad demand, ranging from out-of-stock reports and Apple’s own admission of trouble keeping up, but now comes some hard numbers: the iPad is outselling the Mac by nearly two-to-one. The Cupertino, Calif. company is selling more than 200,000 iPads per week in the U.S. while selling about 110,000 Macs per week nationally, an analyst said Thursday. The iPad is selling almost as fast as the iPhone 3GS during its first three months.

“Checks indicate that U.S. iPad sales remain strong post-launch, driven by rising consumer visibility to iPad’s user experience, sustained PR/word-of-mouth marketing, 3G iPad launch, and broadening iPad apps/content,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky told clients this morning.

Despite Apple’s public pronouncements of success in China, a survey finds 90 percent of consumers don’t use – and don’t like China Unicom, the No. 2 carrier the Cupertino, Calif. company picked to exclusively sell the iPhone.

Fewer than 10 percent of China residents between the age of 22 and 32 use China Unicom, and of that group, most said they disliked the service, according to China Market Research Group, which asked 2,000 mobile phone owners. More than 9 out of 10 people questioned pointed to rival China Mobile as having better coverage and service.

Apple’s iTunes has widened its lead over traditional music sellers, capturing 26.6 percent of digital music sales in 2009, up from 21.4 percent in 2008 – the year Apple became the No. 1 destination for music sales.

Walmart, which had held the title of top digital music store, fell further behind iTunes with 12.5 percent of the 2009 market, down from 14.9 percent in 2008, according to a May 22 Billboard survey. Other bricks-and-mortar music vendors, such as Best Buy and Target, also lost ground.

Borrowing their aesthetic from the super-dimensional beings who crafted 2001’s monolith, LaCie’s new line of NAS drives, the Network Space MAX, are easily configured to automatically mirror your disks so that all your data is backed up twice, courtesy of the RAID 1 Department of Redundancy Department.

This featureless slab of black plastic contains two hard drives amount to either 2TB or 4TB of data, although effective capacity is half of that, since the MAX drives automatically back your data up twice to make sure you’ve always got a secure backup on hand, no matter what calamity strikes.

Other features include built-in server and torrent downloading functions, which are pretty handy, and a USB 2.0 interface to access the MAX directly from your Mac. If you want to be surer than your Time Capsule that your Mac’s data is absolutely safe, the MAX series looks like a safe buy at prices starting at $279.99.

First revealed back in January at CES, the L5 Remote is a useful little dongle that supplements the iPhone or iPod Touch’s already incredible remote abilities by turning your iDevice into a fully functional infrared universal remotes.

All you do is slap the infrared sensor into your iPhone and load the free L5 remote app. The app comes with presets for many popular devices, but failing that, it’s easy to program your iPhone with your existing remote by bumping them nose to nose and pushing the button on your existing remote you want to program in.

Conceptually, I love the idea of using my iPhone as a truly universal remote, but if you think losing a remote is an irritatingly commonplace occurrence, imagine losing a tiny dongle between the couch cushions. Worse, the L5 remote costs $50: way too expensive when a cheap universal remote can be picked up at Best Buy for half the price.

Until iPhones and iPod Touches come with a built-in IR receiver, I don’t really see the iPhone to squeeze existing universal remotes out of the market.

Thanks to its inexplicable lack of a custom dictionary, the iPhone’s always been a frustrating filter on the gutter-mouthed obscenity enthusiast and the serial sexter alike.

It’s frustrating. More than once, the iPhone has automatically cleaned up some of my most romantic text messages to refer, time and time again, to an earnest plea for me and my girlfriend to go on a “duck hunt…” the most euphemistic description possible of the activity I was actually trying to type.

According to Gizmodo, though, it looks like our frustrations are at an end: he latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta contains a custom dictionary under keyboard settings.

It’s a bit counterintuitive to set up: you apparently need to change the network settings to see the new tethering option before the functionality is revealed. Once you do, though, you’ll be rattling off obscenity-laced Tweets, emails and Facebook status updates with the best of them. You’re welcome!

We’d like to ask you for a favor.

We’re running a survey to get a better idea of who you are and what you like to do online. Yes, we know, surveys can be a pain, but the data is essential for our sales team to represent us properly.

If you like what we do, it’d be a huge help if you could fill it out. The survey is a pop-down ‘toaster’ style. It’s conducted by Crowd Science, a well-respected name (here’s some info about Crowd Science from TechCrunch). The survey hovers over the leaderboard for a few seconds and disappears if you ignore it.

The survey isn’t too bad. We’ve kept it as painless as possible. It’s about a dozen questions, standard stuff, mostly about your usage of online social-media and some basic demographic information. It’s totally anonymous and takes a few minutes to complete.

The survey is persistent. It’ll run until we turn it off. This allows us to gather a stream of up-to-date information, rather than a snapshot that’s soon out of date. But don’t worry — only a small percentage of readers see the popdown. If you see it and ignore it, you won’t see it again for at least 3 months. And if you take the survey, it won’t pop up again.

The information is essential, otherwise we wouldn’t run it. The site needs to make revenue or we won’t be able to operate. And to make revenue, the sales team needs to give potential advertisers good readership info.

We appreciate your help — many thanks.

UPDATE: I’ve removed the static link from this post, which didn’t work. My apologies. Crowd Science doesn’t support static links.

Although the iPad won’t be released internationally until tomorrow, Apple has already gotten ready for the flood of new devices by flicking the ON switch for the International iPad App Store. For right now, this will only be useful to you if you have imported an iPad from the States but want to use a local iTunes account; wait until next week, though, and you’ll be able to slurp up iPad ads as soon as your local mail constabulary delivers your iPad to your door.

Given AT&T’s almost universal bad press when it comes to the reliability of their 3G network, you’d think the prospect of a Verizon iPhone would have Ma Bell trembling at the prospect of a mass diaspora of unsatisfied users.

With typical arrogance, though, AT&T head Ralph de la Vega laughed at the idea that AT&T had anything to worry about if the iPhone comes to Verizon at the JPMorgan tech conference.

Of course, Vega’s not banking on AT&T’s excellent service to keep customers around. Instead, de la Vega cited the near impossibility of getting out of AT&T’s contracts as the reason why they had little to fear.

With their usual alacrity, the dissection fiends over at iFixIt have again donned their Kruger-like gloves tipped with T6 Torx screwdrivers and gutted a freshly speed bumped plastic unibody MacBook.

Not surprisingly, there’s not a lot of new information: since only the CPU, GPU and battery have changed since the last MacBook refresh, there’s not much new going on in the innards.

However, there was, at least, one pleasant surprise: the new plastic MacBook’s 10 hour battery is an easy swap into older unibody plastic MacBooks. While dropping a new MacBook battery into an old machine isn’t likely to get you the full 10 hours of battery life you’d expect from the newer models, it should still get you some extra oomph…. a nice bonus if you happen to get your existing MacBook’s battery replaced under warranty, and Apple efficiently drops one of the higher-capacity batteries instead.

The iPad Smart Case is the latest iPad case from Waterfield, a San Francisco-based Company. The Smart Case provides maximum protection of the iPad in the thinnest of cases. Available in six colors, the $59.00 sleeve is sleek and stylish.

The latest iPhone HD leak comes not from Vietnam, as we’ve come to expect, but good old Taiwan. Ready for a bombshell? Better pop a Lipitor: it looks like the iPhone HD may very well come in white.

We admit, snark aside, that’s not very exciting. iPhones have come in white before. What is interesting here, though, is that these are pictures of a white iPhone front panel. Traditionally, white iPhones are “white” only on the black plastic backing.

Whether these images turn out to be legitimate remains to be seen: the front panel’s a pretty easy thing to fake. Still, given the pedestrian nature of the revelation and Apple’s own history giving a white option on iPhones, don’t be surprised to see a white iPhone floating around at WWDC.

In just a few weeks of iPad ownership, I’ve all but retired my MacBook. I thought I needed a laptop for work, but really, I don’t. I have not looked back since.

I own an Apple consulting company here in Florida, Max Your Macs. As members of the Apple Consultants Network, we support a wide range of clients all over the state ranging from individual home users with basic needs right up through corporate, medical, legal and creative environments with much more demanding settings.

Before iPad was released, I had been plotting and planning how to use this amazing machine onsite. I was longing for the day when I could slim down from carrying a large Swiss Gear pack with my MacBook Pro or MacBook Air to a small, light sling pack – but I was skeptical the iPad could fill the requirements.

And it does. Here’s how I use the iPad in the field:

Can’t decide whether to get the iPad with or without 3G? It looks like AT&T will soon be adding tethering, but you can already share your iPhone’s 3G data connection using a $10 app called MyWi.

All you need to do is jailbreak your iPhone — a painless, two-minute process that unlocks the iPhone’s full potential, including turning it into a personal Wi-Fi hotspot using MyWi.

Until the iPad has wide availability outside the U.S., Apple’s taking even more paranoid precautions than typical. Notably, everyone is still limited to buying no more than two of the devices, and, until today, no one was allowed to buy an iPad with cash. That policy was allegedly in place to prevent exporting by creating a credit card trail for each device.

But the policy’s silliness was revealed rather dramatically when Diane Campbell, a disabled woman living in Silicon Valley on a fixed income, attempted to use $600 cash to buy herself an iPad. She was turned down at the Palo Alto Apple Store, and went home, dejected, ultimately writing Steve Jobs a rather delightfully pointed e-mail.

“Come on Mr. Jobs, give a sister a break, okay. I’m not going to go sell my iPad.”

That message quickly hit, and earlier this evening, Apple reversed the policy, and Diane went home as a proud iPad owner. She intends to fill it with guitar song instructions. One thing that’s unclear is if the policy reversal also applies to iPhones, which similarly require a credit or debit card to purchase. I would assume not, as they require two-year service contracts, and a line of credit is usually required to secure that.

Nice to see Apple step up on what’s just a ridiculously common sense decision. And this makes me want to roll up to the Apple Store in the middle of next week with a big bag of penny rolls. Who’s with me?

Via ABC 7 On Your Side

We start with a walk down memory lane with a deal on used Macs, including a PowerMac G4/450Mhz for $99. Next is the latest batch of App Store freebies, including “Crossword Pro.” Wrapping up our top deals is a wood grain case for your iPhone 3G or 3Gs.

As always, details on these and many more items (such as a silicon case for your iPad) are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Ever since the master strategists in Cupertino bought and (predictably) killed off the only genuine competitor to ever rise against iTunes, the question has hung like a pall over the online digital music marketplace: what will replace Lala?

Perhaps Jobsian worker bees are buzzing about as we speak, crafting an iTunes portal to allow users access to their digital music libraries from anywhere on the Internet, one which will sell them web-only versions of their favorite music for as little as one thin dime per cut.

Until that happy day dawns, or until some other independent outfit comes along to offer something as interesting and valuable as Lala was, one might consider checking out a newish Facebook mashup called Friends and Music.

Just days after crowing about giving people “Freedom from porn,” Steve Jobs must be cursing the gods of prurience with the news that YouPorn (NSFW) is busily encoding its entire library of films into HTML5 format.

Soon iPad owners the world over will be able to view vids of hairless young things in flagrante delicto to their hearts’ content.

And while YouPorn may be leading the pack, who can doubt the rest of the Adult Entertainment industry can be far behind in adopting HTML5’s video codec? In many things web-related, purveyors of porn have long been in the vanguard of trends that eventually go mainstream.

Steve Jobs may be wrong about Apple’s ability to “give” people freedom from porn, but it looks like he may be backing the right horse in the Flash vs. HTML5 showdown.

If you’re interested in keeping abreast of Steve Job’s new hobby of personally answering customer emails (though some of us here at Cult of Mac still maintain it’s a Robin-type assistant or robo-prototype), check out sent by Steve.

It’s a growing, searchable collection of emails Steve sends with just the copy of the exchange, plus links to the source.

Hat tip: Johnny Makkar

The next time you try to explain how your invention is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you may want to use the iPhone as comparison, instead. Turns out the iPhone ranks No. 8 in a UK consumer survey of the 100 most important inventions, far outdistancing sliced bread at No. 70.

The iPhone, which has been around just since 2007, beat out even everyday conveniences as the flushing toilet, painkillers and cars. Penicillin slipped in just ahead of Apple’s handset with the wheel, the airplane and the light bulb deemed the three best inventions. The Cupertino, Calif. company should take comfort that the Android cell phone operating system didn’t make the list and Internet giant Google ranks No. 25, behind toilet paper, vacuum cleaners and trains.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kY46zm98Ng

The iPod is a multi-function device and using it to rap your order at McDonalds is not a crime.

A Salt Lake City judge cleared Spenser Dauwalder, 18, of disorderly conduct for ordering at a McDonald’s by singing along to a rap song playing on his iPod. Dauwalder and his three 17-year-old friends in the car faced $750 fines.

The teen was imitating the Mickey D rap in the YouTube video above, which, translated into lay speak asks for fries, a double cheeseburger, a 10-piece chicken dinner and two Dr Peppers.