With the addition of the Xbox-Live-like Game Center to iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has finally made a serious commitment to gamers and game developers after nearly a decade of ignoring them on the OS X platform.
Expect that commitment to continue to deepen: Nintendo games expert and journalist Matt Casmassina of IGN has just been hired by Apple as their new Global Editorial Games Manager.
“Anybody who has read my work through the years will know that I’ve long been a huge Nintendo fan, but if there is one company that could entice me away from covering Mario and Zelda it’s the one owned by Steve Jobs. Beginning early May, I will join Apple as global editorial games manager, App Store,” Casamassina wrote on his blog.
In an age when voice and video from half a world away can be sucked up from the soup of electromagnetic radiation invisibly swirling around us, plugging in my iPhone to sync with iTunes makes me feel like a caveman. I’ve been waiting for an app that would allow me to wirelessly sync my iDevices for awhile, and now, it looks like it might be here: Wi-Fi Sync by Greg Hughes allows you to pair your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to your computer through WiFi, no wires required.
Geeze, one week we’re giving away app codes and the next week $120 Headphones and $17 Screen Cleaner courtesy of the guys over at Monster.
Monster’s Jamz In-Ear Headphones look to be rugged. There’s a video below with some guy going to town on them with various weaponry. I like that Monster goes for “accurate and clear audio.” None of this tweaked out bass bottomed garbage kids are listening to nowadays.
Monster’s ScreenClean just does what it says and keeps multiple Apple screens looking clean. Also posted a video below if you want to watch a guy clean his stuff.
In Part 6 of his memoirs, Macworld founder David Bunnell recalls the magazine’s first cover shoot featuring Steve Jobs, who has a sudden, unexpected change of heart.
“Take a picture of this,” Steve said, holding up his middle finger. We stared in disbelief.
Kyle Conroy, a computer science student at UC Berkeley has just released a project that asks a provocative question: Should you buy Apple’s products or Apple’s stock. Using a large data set combining Apple’s stock price over time and the prices of nearly every Apple product introduced since 1997, he calculates how much your AAPL holdings would be worth if you had spent the price of a contemporary Apple product on investing instead.
For Mac lovers, it isn’t a pretty picture. In some cases, stock valuation has increased as much as 5800 percent. So, for example, a top-of-the-line Powerbook G3 from 1997 cost $5,700 at introduction. If you spent that on stock, you would have $330,563 bucks today. If you bought the laptop instead, it’s currently available for $10 on Ebay.
As a very small holder of AAPL, this makes me cry. Though I have invested a bit more than a 13″ MacBook Pro in stock over the past few years, I also bought that same computer, an iPhone, an iPod nano, a shuffle, and an iPod in the same period. I love them all, but it’s pretty eye-opening to see what might have been. How about you? Any products you wish you’d spent on stock?
Here’s a interesting story about secrecy and making mistakes at Apple. The story is told by Woz, Apple employee number one (check out his hilarious shirt).
While Woz was waiting in line to buy the iPad last month, an Apple test engineer showed him a prototype iPad. It was just a few hours before the device went on sale. Woz, who is still an Apple employee, fired up the Numbers app. Little did he know, the unit was 3G test prototype, and was not to be shown or used outside of secure areas at the company HQ. Unfortunately, Woz’s playing with it must have somehow sent up a warning flag at Apple.
“… I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for 2 minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired. I opted to spend 2 minutes with Numbers on this iPad, trying some stunts I’d seen on Apple’s website demo video. I was not told that it was a 3G model and I had no way to know that. I was told that this engineer had to wait until midnight to show it outside of Apple’s secure area. And I’m an Apple employee who he was showing it to. My guess is that he was allowed to take the iPad outside of the secure area but still not supposed to show it.”
The test engineer was fired for betraying Apple’s ironclad rules on secrecy. The device was not to be shown to anybody — not even Woz. (And worse, Woz told Steve Jobs about seeing the iPad that night. Jobs himself said it was “no big deal.”)
On the other hand, Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who lost an iPhone 4G prototype at a bar, is still employed at Apple.
“Product secrecy is good for Apple and should be strictly enforced, but maybe 10% of niceness and 90% of strictness is OK too,” writes Woz.
It seems mistakes are forgiven, but betrayals are not.
If only we could have experienced the iPhone in all of its glory from the initial release. 3G has only recently been opened to multimedia streaming. Tethering is still not available though the iPhone is fully capable. Why are we not video chatting with our loved ones these almost perfect devices?
Jailbreaking that iPhone is currently the only way to tether your device to you Mac and get that sweet 3G data access to you 13″ Macbook. In fact, with MyWi, a jailbreak app from the Cydia Store, you can create your own WiFi hotspot similar to the Verizon MiWi. Better charge up that battery now.
Gizmodo's Jason Chen with a prototype of Apple's iPhone 4G, which the site bought for $5,000 after it was left in a bar. The cops are now investigating.
There’s another juicy wrinkle in iPhonegate. The Silicon Valley cops are investigating, reports CNet:
Silicon Valley police are investigating what appears to be a lost Apple iPhone prototype purchased by a gadget blog, a transaction that may have violated criminal laws, a law enforcement official told CNET on Friday.
Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, the source said. Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is in Santa Clara County, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.
Designer Mark Pernice took that love we all have of late-night grimaces immortalized with the Mac’s built in Photo Booth program to another level: he made a mask out of it.
Pernice took one of those gazing-up-the-nostrils, Mr. Bean-on-acid shots of himself, then got master special effects wizard Christian Hanson to whip up a mask from it.
The German airline Lufthansa is offering a free flight to Germany to Gray Powell, the unfortunate Apple employee who lost a prototype iPhone 4G.
Powell lost the prototype iPhone in a German beer garden in Redwood City. It ended up being sold to Gizmodo and became the biggest tech story in recent memory, catapulting Powell into unwelcome notoriety. To make him feel better, the airline is offering to fly Powell to Munich on Business Class, and wants him to check out their new Bavarian Beer Garden Business Lounge.
“We though you could use a break soon,” said the airline’s open letter to Gray, posted to the company’s Twitter account. “And therefore would like to offer you complimentary Business Class transportation to Munich, where you can literally pick up where you last left off.”
We close out the week with a deal on iMacs from the Apple Store. The desktops range from 21-inch to 27-inch models carrying Core 2 Duo and i7 processors. A 21.5-inch 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo iMac can be had for $999. Next up is a new deal on a 120GB iPod Classic for $189. We also have a new batch of refurbished iPhones, including an 8GB iPhone 3G for $49.
Along the way, we check out the latest App Store freebies, including “Tap Tap Ninja,” an action game. We also look at some new cases for the iPhone, as well as software.
As always, the details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
99 year old Virginia Campbell just got her first computer… and it’s the iPad.
Emphasizing Apple’s own “it just works” mantra, Virginia was quickly able to make sense of the iPad’s operating system and use Pages in landscape mode to write the following limerick:
To this technically-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad Pioneer.
My own limericks tend to be smuttier and focus on a strange Venusian improbably named Michael Hunt, but I admire Virginia’s: at the very least, it’s probably the best and sweetest advertising Apple could possibly get.
The latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta features a great new addition to iPhone Mail for GMail users: the ability to archive mail.
According to the good boys at 9to5Mac, it replaces the option to delete your GMail: just swipe on a message like usual and you now get the option to archive as opposed to delete.
I think replacing delete with archive on the iPhone makes a lot of sense. GMail, after all, has plenty of space, and the real reason to “delete” mail in Mail.app is to easily clear out the inbox. Sure, there’s going to be occasional moments when you’ll want to nuke an email from orbit in a fit of pique… but in those situations, you can still just log into GMail through Mobile Safari to carry out the vaporization. This change prevents people from accidentally deleting important mails. Well done, Apple!
One of the few real advantages Android has over iPhone OS is free turn-by-turn navigation: why spend $100 for the likes of TomTom when your smartphone already does the same thing for nothing? If you do a lot of driving, it’s pretty much Android’s killer app… except now it’s coming to the iPhone.
I can understand Google’s confusion here. As a company, Google’s all about making information freely available, but free turn-by-turn navigation is a big reason why someone might choose an Android handset over the iPhone. They’re torn: on one hand, they want to get their services in as many hands as possible, but on the other hand, they don’t want to eliminate one of the advantages of the Android platform by offering it on a competitor’s device. It’s a pickle alright.
The CEO of ARM seemed to dismiss a rumor that Apple was considering acquiring the UK chipmaker as unnecessary. He did not flatly denying the chatter which erupted earlier this week, however.
“Nobody has to buy the company,” Warren East told The Guardian. The London-based Standard reported Wednesday Apple was talking about buying the chipmaker for $8 billion, citing UK traders.
Apple’s ordering system automatically canceled Volosin’s purchase, informing him that he could not order more than three.
“They were limiting people form ordering too many, which I thought was interesting,” he says. “They’re used to dealing with consumers and not bulk orders.”
Apple has finally seen fit to update the design of its 85-watt MagSafe Power Adapters to use an all aluminum tip instead of a plastic one, mimicking the design of the 45-watt MacBook Air’s adapter.
Not only will this minimize the 85-Watt MagSafe’s physical footprint, but ditching the plastic should prevent the occasional melting problems we sometimes hear about. It also happens to look a hell of a lot better.
The 60-Watt MagSafe Power Adapter hasn’t been updated yet, but all things in good time. Hey, look at that! As Charli points out in the comments below, they just were.
With the iPad kinda bridging the chasm between iPhone and MacBook, it becomes increasingly likely a 70-page legal brief some lawyer’s been working on for months will be lost when junior accidentally flings the iPad into the pool while taking a turn a little too hot in Real Racing HD.
That’s where DriveSavers comes in. Located about a half hour north of San Francisco, these guys are experts at recovering data from hard drives and the NAND flash chips used in the iPhone — and the iPad. The only difference is the iPhone has one set of chips, while the iPad has two.
It’s not cheap, though — DriveSavers says the average bill for recovering data from an iPhone runs about a grand. Ouch. They will, however, provide a free evaluation on an iPad mailed to them, explaining what can be recovered and how much it’ll cost.
The lesson here? Back your stuff up. And maybe get junior a helmet; kid seems a little accident-prone.
When Jobs announced the iPad, declared the netbook to be dead and claimed that the iPad was a decent productivity machine, I was cynical. Lustful for an iPad I was, but as a blogger, the ability to type in one window while referencing a source in another is invaluable. Simply put, my netbook allowed me to do that, but the iPad didn’t… and until it did, there was little chance I’d ever do serious work on it.
I should have taken account the ingenuity of app developers though. Desktop for the iPad essentially allows you to split screen your iPad. You can specify what functionality you want each split screen panel to have, but for my purposes, I could browse a page in Safari on one side of the screen while using the “Email Composer” on the right side to type in text.
What a perfectly elegant little solution, especially for just $0.99.
The iPhone’s popularity in Japan just keeps growing. Apple’s handset has grabbed 72 percent of the smartphone market on the gadget-obsessed island nation.The Cupertino, Calif. company has doubled its shipments to Japan, hitting 2.3 million all together, according to Tokyo-based researchers.
The iPhone, which began Japanese sales in July 2008, shipped 1.69 million handsets during the fiscal year ended March 31, MM Research Institute Ltd. announced Thursday. Some 3 million smartphones could sell in Japan during the year started April 1, reports say.
Spotlight is the built-in search system in Mac OS X. You can get to it at any time by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the very top-right corner of your screen.
Welcome to MacRx, a new category dedicated to some common setups, problems and headaches of All Things Mac. As we all know, how things should work isn’t always how they do work. Sometimes a little assistance can be in order.
This week an issue I’ve seen many users struggling with, Managing Bookmarks in Safari. As a Mac consultant I frequently run into clients who can’t find the bookmarks they’ve added to their systems, or have so many bookmarks saved that the list is virtually endless and unuseable.
Getting to know the ways in which Safari stores bookmarks, and coming up with a simple organizing scheme you can follow, will go a long way in preserving your sanity – or at least help save some time occasionally.
