Cult of Mac

Two new surveys released bear good news for both Apple and the beleaguered publishing industry: More than 90 percent of consumers love their iPad. The surveys by ChangeWave found demand for the tablet device is increasing after the product’s introduction and that iPad owners are three-times as likely to read newspapers and magazines compared to owners of other e-readers.

In a survey conducted this month, 7 percent of people said they would “very likely” purchase an iPad with 13 percent saying they were “somewhat likely.” What’s intriguing is that a similar survey, conducted in February prior to the iPad’s release, found 4 percent “very likely” would buy the Apple device and another 9 percent saying they were “somewhat likely” to purchase the highly-hyped gadget. The numbers indicate a positive word-of-mouth for the iPad, even after the device moved from rumor to reality.

Got an iPhone 3G and looking for a project to occupy yourself this weekend? The binaries of hacker David Wang’s Android port for the iPhone 3G has now been released.

Android on the iPhone is still more of a “because you can” proposition than recommended for day-to-day use, but follow Wang’s somewhat complicated guide and you’ll soon have an iPhone that dual-boots into Android.

There’s some drawbacks, of course: Wang has yet to implement any sort of power management into Android for iPhone, so your fully-charged handset will only last about an hour before it shuts off. Also, if you want to switch back to the iPhone OS, you need to do a reboot.

Still, if you’re interested in what the mobile space looks like from the other side, Android for iPhone looks like a worthwhile little hack.

There’s plenty of tower defense games available for the iPhone, pitting players against wave after wave of enemies as varied as robots, zombies and monsters, but Fluffylogic’s foray into the genre is sure to pique the interests of any geek who has ever watched The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars: The Battle For Hoth puts iPhone gamers in charge of repelling the Imperial advance with heavy weapon soldier, 1.4 FD P-Tower Laser Cannons and X-Wing Control Towers, while the Empire is provisioned with Viper Probe Droids, Snowtroopers, 74-Z Speeder Bikes, AT-ST Walkers, TIE Fighters, and hulking At-AT Walkers.

Brilliant. The Battle for Hoth is the scenario the tower defense genre was practically invented to simulate. There’s no explicit word on release date or price right now, but Fluffylogic says Star Wars: Battle for Hoth’s release is “imminent,” so keep refreshing the App Store.

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

At yesterday’s I/O event, Google officially unveiled their long rumored GoogleTV platform, a software platform that will be baked into new televisions and set-top boxes that merges cable and online video in a single service.

Essentially, Google TV takes advantage of Google’s search business by making it easier for you to find the television you want to watch, whether its pumped out by your cable provider or available on the Internet. Once you find the show you want to watch, you can choose what to do with it, whether that’s watch it, schedule an alarm or record it to your DVR.

Google TV also incorporates a Boxee like home screen, with some special functionality: integration with Android Apps. The service can even augment the television you’re watching: one particularly neat function demonstrated was the ability to automatically translate a television show’s closed caption subtitles into another language in real time.

It looks fantastic… and also makes Apple’s own “hobby” of a television platform look more anemic than ever. If Google can’t prod Apple into taking the home theater market seriously, we might as well just give up on AppleTV for good.

Even the iPhone isn’t powerful enough yet to run Blizzard’s fanatically popular World of Warcraft MMORPG, but thanks to the World of Warcraft Armory App has long given the mobile night elf or orc alike the ability to access their characters’ stats, check the leaderboards, browse items or calculate their talents.

A forthcoming update to the Armory App finally adds in a long-requested killer feature: the ability to use the auction house out of game. The feature is called Remote Auction House, and it allows you to browse the auction house for free out of game, or to pay an extra subscription price of $3 per month to buy, create or re-list items without ever logging into your Mac.

The subscription fee is a bold move, but Blizzard has proved time and time again that the die-hards raiders will keep ponying up. I’ve known more than a few gamers in my time who spend hours a day in the Auction House: a few bucks a month to allow them to do their auction grinding on the subway or at the park would, to them, be a small price to pay for a little more sunshine in their lives.

The updated app is now out, but the Remote Auction House functionality hasn’t yet been pushed live. Expect it soon.

User ratings on iTunes alone can be misleading when you’re trying to decide which movie to buy or rent. A perfectly execrable movie might have a four or five star rating thanks to the efforts of a small pool of fans to bump its rating up.

The latest addition to iTunes seems particularly useful, then, in avoiding buying or renting a dud film: as of now, the iTunes movie store features the reviews of Top Critics and the Tomatometer rating score from the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site to let you see, at a glance, what critics thought of the movie you’re about to buy.

I hope this is just the first step towards Apple bringing more outside review data into iTunes as a whole. Being able to see at a glance if a movie is worth my time is great, but it would be fantastic to see the same sort of aggregation happen when I want to buy a new album, or even an App Store game.

[via TUAW]

Are you ready to get vooked? You know you want to. And a little company called Vook, with offices in Alameda and New York, is more than happy to show you how.

Vook began with a mission to unite the disparate worlds of books and videos into one complete, blended story. With an innovative platform where all forms of media come together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, vooks weave together content from talented writers with professionally shot and edited video to give readers/viewers/users a whole new way of experiencing creative output.

And what better vehicle to deliver the experience of this new medium than Apple’s iPad?

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Amazing Animals: Savanna, Battle Bears: Zombies!, Creepy Caverns, Easy Checklist, Find in Page, Flaboo!, Truckers Delight, Tune Runner, and War Chess (iPad).

WiFi operates in unregulated portions of the radio spectrum.  These frequencies are shared with things like microwave ovens, cordless phones, garage door openers and an increasing plethora of other WiFi devices.  What many WiFi networks face these days is like trying to tune in to a weak radio station in a busy city market.

This week a few tips and suggestions to try when things aren’t working.

Mail Act-On is a unique plug-in for Apple’s own Mail application. It won’t appeal to everyone, but it is an excellent tool for managing lots of email and keeping it all organized.

It serves the needs of two distinct sorts of person: those who live most of their working hours inside Mail, and those who want to minimize the time they spend in it. Either way, Mail Act-On is a godsend.

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.