I love to travel. Whether it be for work or for pleasure, nothing beats exploring the country or the world. What I don’t like about work travel is keeping up with expenses. It sucks out any fun I may be having and adds on to any frustrations I might be experiencing.
The only way to make expense reports even worse is to try and tackle them on the flight home in coach with a one-year-old behind you screaming and kicking your seat. But a free new iPhone app, Expensify, makes expense reports easier for those who travel with an iPhone.
One could be forgiven for assuming there were only two contestants in the e-reading race: Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle. However, new research appears to boost the visibility of a lesser-known entry: Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Sales of the Nook comprised more than half of e-readers shipped in the U.S. in March, according to DigiTimes.
Citing “upstream suppliers,” DigiTimes researcher Mingchi Kuo writes “the Nook accounted for 53 percent of e-book readers shipped to US vendors last month.”
Nokia’s forthcoming N8 smartphone has been touted as the beleagured Finnish handset maker’s long-coming answer to the iPhone… but judging from Mobile Review’s preview of a leaked N8 handset, Nokia’s dropped the ball yet again.
The N8 looks great on paper — it has a 12-megapixel camera, HDMI output and a huyge touchscreen with multitouch support, as well as Nokia’s new Symbian3 operating system — but in practice it’s nothing special. The camera takes decent pictures, but the 720p HD video isn’t particularly special compared to other handsets, and the HDMI port uses a non-standard connector, making it unlikely to ever be used.
Worse, the much ballyhooed Symbian3 update is apparently just a cosmetic upgrade that isn’t even fit to lick the shoes of the features that both the iPhone OS and Android OS are boasting.
It’s strange to think that a mere three years ago, Nokia was pretty much the most popular handset maker in the world, but they have failed time and time again to be competitive with the likes of Apple and Google. With the N8’s failure, it may now be too late.
Yerga Cheffe figured out how to turn his old Apple IIe into a dedicated Twitter machinee, not only displaying tweets in that gloriously pixel blurred Apple II font but blowing up the user’s profile picture into a glorious 8-bit portrait. The venerable IIe is too underpowered to actually run a networking stack or Twitter client, so it’s only the display that is being used, but even so: this is what Twitter would have looked like as an 80s door program.
Apple has introduced a new Technical Note for OS X 10.6.3 that allows third-party developers to use hardware acceleration to decode H.264 video.
Adobe’s failure to deliver acceptable performance under OS X has long been blamed by the company on the lack of this functionality. Only Apple computers boasting GPUs supporting the functionality (such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M) will be able to take advantage of it.
“We will be enabling support for hardware accelerated video decoding for Flash Player on Mac,” Adobe spokesperson Matt Rozen told Macworld. “Now that the required APIs are available, we are working on an additional Flash Player release to follow shortly after Flash Player 10.1 to include this functionality for the hardware configurations supported by the new APIs.”
Adobe’s only got themselves to blame here on out. Let’s hope they finally get Flash fixed on OS X.
The Apple gadget press is all a-twitter over news of yet another semiconductor company with ties to the Cupertino, Calif. consumer electronics giant. In a bit of Hollywood-style dishing of talk of discord, Imagination Technologies Ltd. is seen as going up against ARM to develop an iPhone-like graphic console for the home.
Apple is a 10-percent owner of Imagination, which makes the PowerVR graphics core for the iPhone. In a deal to be announced at the Embedded Systems Conference, Imagination will partner with MIPS Technologies, Inc. to display a high-definition chip meant for a home set-top box. Both Imagination and MIPS are rivals to ARM, who’s chips are the basis of an Apple design found in the iPad.
One of the secret new features of the new MacBook Pros is inertial scrolling, which causes the trackpad to function like the iPhone’s touchscreen when scrolling; in other words, your screen scrolls with momentum informed by how hard and fast you swipe your fingers down or up.
TUAW has a post up about the new feature, positing that it should be possible on “all multitouch Apple trackpads. They’re wrong: the feature should already be possible on every Apple touchpad out there, multitouch or not, as indicated by the SuperScroll software.
The big question is: if all Apple touchpads are capable of inertial scrolling, does the functionality in the new MacBook Pros indicate Apple will roll it out across all Snow Leopard machines in a forthcoming update?
How do you feel about inertial scrolling? Is it something you’d use if it was rolled out to existing Apple laptops? Let us know in the comments.
Burbling up as flotsam in the eBay Apple stream, then yanked beneath the waves just as quickly by the webbed fingers of Cupertino’s eldritch lawyer things: these two iPod Touch prototypes marked DVT-1 and DVT-2, complete with built-in cameras. One of the iPod Touches is non-functioning, while the other runs a provisional “Switchboard” operating system. They look to have been legitimate, but regrettably, they were pulled before Nick Denton could click the “Buy It Now” button.
When Apple first revealed the $30 iPad Camera Connection Kit, which contains a little dongle that allows you to use a USB 2.0 cable to transfer photos from your camera to your iPad’s iPhoto library, a lot of people wondered if it might be used to connect other USB devices as well.
As it turns out, you can: you can use the Camera Connection Kit to hook up an audio headset and a USB keyboard.
Not terribly exciting, but as the Camera Connection Kits begin to be shipped, it might hint at more exciting USB interoperability to come. A game pad certainly would be nice.
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.
