The seizure of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s computers is illegal, says Gawker Media, the parent company of the blog.

As a journalist, Chen is legally protected from divulging his sources of a story: in this case, details of Apple’s 4G iPhone, which Gizmodo purchased after an Apple engineer left a prototype in a bar. Gawker says the authorities are not allowed to search his computers in pursuit of a suspect, presumably the person who sold Gizmodo the iPhone.

Gawker cites section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code protecting journalists’ sources. It further cites O’Grady v. Superior Court, which extends the protections to online journalists. The O’Grady case is another Apple case, but one that the company lost. Apple tried to force Jason O’Grady to divulge his sources after his PowerPage website published details of another product Apple was working on.

Tomorrow on Cult of Mac, we’re starting a new series: the Top 50 Mac Essentials.

Inspired by our ongoing 100 Tips series, we wanted to put together a list of the desktop applications that newcomers to OS X ought to know about.

Each app has been chosen because it’s great value for money, or the best in its class, or does something useful that no other application does, or is too good to miss, or some combination of all of the above.

We’re still fine-tuning our list of 50, and of course your opinions matter too.

If there’s a desktop application you think should be included – something you’d recommend in a heartbeat to a friend who was just making the switch to OS X – please let us know in the comments.

We’re NOT including software that comes pre-installed with a Mac. But anything else, whether it’s made by Apple or a third party, whether it’s a full-featured suite or a simple one-task Menu Bar widget, is fair game.

(And yes, I know there aren’t 50 icons in the illustration above. That’s just there to, um, illustrate; it’s not intended to be a preview.)

(To see the entire list of 50 Essential Mac Applications: click here.)

Wow. Silicon Valley police have seized several computers belonging to Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor who detailed Apple’s iPhone 4G prototype for the site.

California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen’s home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

The technology site has just posted some of the details and paperwork, including Gawker Media’s response.

Gawker says the seizure of Chen’s computers is illegal. As a journalist, he is legally protected from divulging his sources, and authorities are not allowed to search his computers in pursuit of a suspect (presumably they’re after the identity of the person who sold Gizmodo the iPhone).

Scott Adams, the evil henchman behind the Dilbert Comic Strip, posted two comics about the drunken misplacement of the iPhone Prototype today on his blog. What’s cool is that these strips will never reach the funny pages and are exclusive to Adams’ blog. Thanks for sharing, Scott.

I’m never one to lol when reading print material, but the third frame of the top comic is priceless. Definitely loled.

A couple of Reuters reporters scoured electronics shops in Shanghai for an iPad clone until someone led them to a dark backroom on a fifth floor of one of the city’s many clone marts.

You can’t see a whole lot from the blurry pic, but they report that the counterfeit iPad sports three USB ports in what looks like a heavy-set, pumped-up iPhone. This isn’t the first iPad copycat to come out of the area, but this one looks more like the Apple device.

The price for the faux iPad is just slightly lower than the real deal 2,800 yuan ($410), compared to the iPad’s $499-$699 price. It runs a Windows OS.

Denver police arrested a 20-year-old man in connection with an iPad theft that also cost the victim part of his pinky.

20-year-old Brandon Darnell Smith was arrested early Saturday at a traffic stop.

“It’s bittersweet,” the victim, 59-year-old Bill Jordan, told local ABC affiliate 7NEWS. “The bitter part of it is there is nothing anybody can do to replace this. It is what it is.”

Rhapsody has released an update to its iPhone/iPod Touch music app that does what Spotify in Europe has done for ever: you can download any song you want to your iPhone for a flat $10 monthly fee.

Rhapsody’s music subscription offers virtually limitless musical selections from a library of about 9 millions songs available. And you don’t have to be online to use it. You can create downloadable playlists that play whether you have an Internet connection or not.

“This is the first time Apple has approved this capability for a music app — at least in the U.S.” said Rhapsody spokesman Matt Graves. “While Apple has previously approved apps from many streaming music services, including Rhapsody’s, until now it has never okayed downloading subscription music to its devices.”

Graves noted that Steve Jobs was famously dismissive of the music subscription model, calling these services “bankrupt” in a 2003 interview with Rolling Stone. Of course, subscription models compete with the per-song download model of iTunes.

You don’t even need to pay their reasonable $10-a-month fee to try it out. Rhapsody offers a free trial of their service.

I recommend signing up with your computer: it seems that if you register using a non-mobile device, you get a 14-day free trial. I signed up on my iPhone and only got a 7-day trial period free. Weird.

Jon Maples, Rhapsody Product Lead, brags about his experience using Rhapsody’s Downloadable Playlist feature on the Rhapsody blog and it makes for an interesting read.

My main beef with Rhapsody is the audio quality. I wasn’t able to use Google to divine a solid source for audio quality, but I can tell you it’s not 192-256 kbps which is what it should be.

We start off another week with a trio of deals for Apple fans. First up is the latest batch of free applications from the App for your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, including “Catch the Egg”, an accelerometer-based game. Next we have Montage for the Mac, software enabling you to potentially write the next killer screenplay. Finally, no one can have enough storage. One option might be the Fantom G-Force 1TB eSATA/USB 2.0 hard drive.

Details on these and many other bargains are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

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.

Read on for the full review:

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.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM

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.

[via Make

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.

The question, of course, is where did they come from? Well, we know there’s at least one pissed off ex-Apple engineer with access to prototypes running around as an indignant free agent these days…

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.

Wanna win some swag?

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.

Gizmodo: Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray Powell

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.

In Part 5 of My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs, Macworld founder David Bunnell describes seeing the 1984 Macintosh ad for the first time.