Cult of Mac

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LamtBiGLzI8

Apple’s latest iPhone ad “Family Travel” follows the app-heavy formula of the most recent iteration of the campaign but adds a Mom’s gushing narration mix to make its point: the App Store is pretty neat.

The premise of the app is that the iPhone works as a veritable Swiss Army Knife for traveling Moms. “It’s unbelievable how much better family trips have gotten!” Narrator Mom enthuses, as she demonstrates using the SouthWest Airlines app to check on her reservations, find a place to eat at the airport with Gate Guru, checks if she turned the lights off with the Schlage Link app and then finally hands her iPhone off to the kids so they can watch Pixar’s FInding Nemo to the flight.

It’s a pretty standard iPhone ad, interesting mostly because of how synonymous the iPhone is with the App Store at this point. Most of the iPhone “features” that Apple advertises these days are third-party software: the iPhone, as far as its advertising campaign is concerned, is pretty much defined as a product by the App Store. Apple is essentially advertising a platform instead of a product, and it’s simply amazing to me that two years ago that platform just didn’t exist.

We start the week with a deal on a MacBook Pro laptop. The MacBook Pro is powered by a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo for $1,049. Also on tap is a new crop of freebies from the App Store, including “BlaBlaBla,” a sound-sensitive application for the iPhone or iPod touch. Lastly, there is a deal on Assassin’s Creed II for the iPhone or iPod touch.

As always, details on these deals or other bargains (such as the iPod starter kit from Belkin) are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

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

The guys over at Vimov has given Touch Arcade a great first-look at their port of Hexen II a great fantasy-themed FPS built upon the venerable Quake engine in 1997.

It’s an impressive port: it runs fluidly, it has a surprisingly innovative control scheme and only the music is missing. The big problem here, though, is that there’ll just never be any way to play it on a non-jailbroken iPhone unless Vimov can ink a deal with Activision, the owners of the Hexen franchise.

The problem is that while Hexen II’s executable is open source, the game data isn’t. The Hexen II GPL license allows for non-commercial redistribution, so Vimov could potentially knock this port up to the App Store as a free product… but since Apple doesn’t officially support a method for users to transfer their own files (like Hexen II’s game data files) to the iPhone for third-party programs to use as they see fit, the app would never be improved.

Still, it’s impressive work, and there is still some hope that Vimov and Activision can work something out: Hexen II was one of my favorite games back as a LAN-going nineteen year old, and I’d happily drop a fin or two for the pleasure of playing it on my iPhone.

Even before Apple unveiled the iPad, I was curious if their tablet-device would be able to function as a small secondary display to desktop Macs. I’ve long liked the idea Mimo’s miniature displays: a ten-inch secondary display isn’t enough screen real estate to add to productivity, but they are great places to corral widgets, contact lists and the like. I would never buy one specifically for that functionality, though, which is what made the notion of the iPad doubling as one so appealing.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the iPad will functionally work as a secondary desktop display out of the box, but David Klein over at The Apple Blog still thinks that the iPad could function as a peripheral, widget-based display through App Store offerings.

Apple’s Mac mini could become the first line of general purpose computers to support high-definition video later this year, a report Monday suggests. A HDMI connector is located near a DisplayPort connector on prototype Mac mini units. The mini is often used to stream video to home theaters.

The AppleInsider report cites two unnamed “people familiar with the matter.” If true, the enhanced Mac mini would become the only Apple device besides the AppleTV product to provide HDMI compatibility.

Over at Ars Technica, Jon Stokes ponders why a company as prone to chest-thumping as Apple has been so curiously mum about the iPad’s A4 processor and ultimately comes to an interesting conclusion: Apple hasn’t talked much about the A4 CPU because it’s not really anything special.

In fact, according to Stokes’ sources, Apple’s A4 appears to be nothing fancier than a single core ARM Cortex A8 CPU clocked at 1GHz coupled with a PowerVR SGX GPU. The iPad gets its performance gains largely from stripping away the I/O hardware from the jack-of-all-trades A8 that it doesn’t need.

The best point of the piece, though, is that Apple’s never really been about the hardware: they’ve been about the total experience. As Stokes points out:

[T]he iPad is actually a lot like the Mac. The Mac combines commodity hardware with great industrial design and a superior user experience. The iPad aims to do the same, but under a new compute paradigm that replaces the venerable keyboard-and-monitor combo with a slate form factor, and the decades-old WIMP-based UI (Windows Icons Menus Pointer) with multitouch.

In other words, the iPad is no different than any other Apple product: a fusion of existing hardware, perfectly realized software and world-class design. Getting hung up on the CPU is beside the point.

Saturday Night Live spoofed cubicle-based reality show Undercover Boss — where the corner office guy or gal climbs back down the career ladder to go incognito as a menial employee — with Undercover Celebrity Boss.

Steve Jobs sticks a “mainentance” badge on his signature black turtleneck and tries to sell an unimpressed secretary on the iTrash and the iTrash Shuffle.

Jobs, likable if clueless in a Michael Scott sorta way, gets a much kinder send up — some say too kind — than the other celebs, most of whom (Sir Richard Branson, the Olsen twins) are barely undercover before they say stuff like: “Because I’m Martha f*ing Stewart. ”

(It’s a Hulu video, which means if you’re outside the U.S. to you’ll need to install something like Hotspot shield to view it. It’s a drag. We know.)

Via Geekosystem

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader could cost less than $150 after the device’s chipmaker, Freescale, said it will produce a more efficient design streamlined for the gadgets. The new chip should take about six months to reach its two largest users: Amazon and Sony, reports say Monday.

“We do see the price of e-readers coming down this year, and Freescale is trying to facilitate that. That’s a lot of what this chip is doing,” Freescale’s marketing head Glen Burchers told Bloomberg. The Kindle currently costs between $259 and $489 while Sony’s devices costs between $199.99 and $399.99. Apple’s iPad, unveiled last month, is priced at $499-$699 and use Apple’s own chip design.

Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour could be the first magazines to offer an iPad version of print publications, according to a new report. The apps will be released by publisher Conde Nast as a test to end in the fall.

In April, GQ will unveil an iPad app to accompany the existing iPhone application. In June, iPad versions of Wired and Vanity Fair should appear. The New Yorker and Glamour should introduce iPad editions sometime this summer, according to the New York Times.

The iPad’s launch could be delayed a month due to an unspecified bottleneck slowing the device’s production. The slowdown could push initial sales into April and trim the hoped 1 million units in March to just 300,000, an analyst told investors Monday.

“The upcoming iPad launch may be somewhat limited as a manufacturing bottleneck has impacted production of Apple’s newest device,” writes Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek. The problems with iPad manufacturer Hon Hai Precision, could limit initial shipments to the US.

It’s Monday and that can only mean one thing: Cult of Mac is bringing you yet another sweet Facebook giveaway.

This week we’re giving away 10 iDevice covers from iWrap.  Their covers protect everything from iPhones to Nintendo DSes so we’ll give the first 10 to tag us with “Drink the Kool-Aid, Become a Fan of Cult of Mac” in their Facebook status $19.95 in the iWrap store. Make sure your privacy settings are set to “Everyone” so that your tag shows up on our wall.

Even if you missed out on the first 10 tags, head over to our Facebook Headquarters and you can get a coupon code for 25% off any item in the store valid today only.

I’m always on the lookout for photography tools that are easy-to-use and help me turn good photos into great ones.

Nik Software’s Sharpener Pro 3 ($199.95), a plug-in for Aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop, does just that, which is probably why I find myself utilizing it pretty much any time I do a photo shoot.

With two sharpening modes, RAW and Output, NSP3 is built to handle all your photo sharpening needs. If you’d like to handle all your image sharpening from start to finish with NSP3, you can turn off your camera’s sharpening features and use NSP3’s RAW mode. Or, if you’re like me and your camera generally does a good job at handling sharpening tasks, NSP3’s Output mode works wonderfully to enhance photos that have already been pre-sharpened by a camera.

If you’re like me, the last fortnight has seen little activity other than watching Olympic skiing, skating, curling, hockey, luge, bobsled, Nordic Combined, curling, complaints about NBC, curling, aerials, and curling. With the Closing Ceremonies now a rapidly fading memory of Shatner songs and giant inflatable beavers, there’s never been a better time to start slowly weaning yourself off the XXIst Winter Olympiad. And there really isn’t a better option than the deceptively simple “Vancouver 2010,” the well-made official iPhone game of the recently departed Winter Games.

The iPhone 3GS is like a Formula One car: fast, sleek and a thrill to drive. And then, every hour or so, it has to hit the pits to refuel (only, unlike refueling an F1 car, it takes hours, not seconds). Now, imagine if every F1 car had button on the steering wheel that the driver could punch, and a fuel cell would drop from some kind of team drone-copter and refuel the car while it was rocketing around the track. Pretty cool, right? Well, that’s what using the TruePower iV Pro is like.

Nuance, the company behind Dragon Mobile for iPhone and the Naturally Speaking range of software products, has bought MacSpeech, makers of the jaw-droppingly amazing MacSpeech Dictate and its recent new sibling, MacSpeech Scribe.

We close the week with three high-profile hardware deals. First up is a deal on used 15-inch 2GHz MacBook Pro laptops, starting at $849. Next, we check out 22-inch iMacs running a 3.06GHz processor for $999. We round out the top trio with some Mac Pro Xeon desktop workstations, starting at $2,149 for a quad-core 2.66GHz machine.

Along the way, we’ll check out more iMac deals, two offers on 32GB and 8GB iPod touches and a variety of software. As always, details on these and many more items are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Although relatively few insiders have touched an iPad, accessory makers – the people that make the cases, skins and add-ons for iPhones and iPods – are chomping at the bit to start selling iPad products one Apple starts shipping in March. Why are the companies so anxious? In 2009, $3.7 billion worth of iPod and iPhone accessories were sold, according to one estimate. Makers of add-ons say the iPad could be an even more lucrative market.

According to new data from Gartner, Apple’s iPhone operating system is the third most dominant smartphone platform in the world, with a 14.4% market share.

The iPhone still trails Nokia’s Symbian operating system and RIM’s BlackBerry OS. The discrepancy between RIM and Apple is only by five percent… but RIM has only grown their market share by about 13% in the last year, where as Apple has nearly doubled theirs.

On the other hand, there’s still a wide, wide discrepancy between Symbian and iPhone OS. Nokia’s smartphones account for 46.9% of the global 2009 smartphone market, but that’s down from 54.2% the year before… and more and more users continue to abandon the platform in favor of other OSes, like the iPhone’s.

In fact, looking at Gartner’s numbers, it’s easy to spot a trend: the only smartphone OSes that are growing in market share are the iPhone OS, Android and the BlackBerry OS… and the iPhone is outgrowing all of them.

Give it another couple of years: by 2011, the iPhone OS will be the most widely used smartphone OS in the world.

[via Apple Insider]

iTunes finally sold its ten billionth song, and as promised, Apple has given the lucky downloader a $10,000 iTunes gift card (or one ten thousandth of a cent for every iTunes song ever sold).

But sorry, guys! It wasn’t you… well, unless your name is Mr. Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia, in which case, congratulations. Sulcer’s magic download was “Guess That’s The Way Things Happen” as sung by Johnny Cash.

I guess that is the way that happens. That lucky bastard!

[via TUAW]

Apple could unveil a lower-cost iPhone in June, a handset designed to address the two major barriers to adoption: cost of hardware and cost of the service plan, one analyst said Friday. The cost of iPhone hardware stops 85 percent of people, while the service plan is a barrier for 66 percent.

“We expect Apple to launch new iPhones in June that offer both a lower total cost of ownership and new functionality, potentially including gesture-based technology,” Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty told investors.

Police and fire officials were called when an iPod spontaneously exploded on the desk of a high school student in West Newbury, Massachusetts.

The iPod was sitting on the girl’s desk in science class when it exploded. No one was hurt and fire chief Scott Berkenbush said the situation proved to be minor.

“iPod is the new Toyota,” Berkenbush remarked to the Daily News Online. “I think the problem is with the battery itself. If any moisture gets on it or it falls in a puddle, it can spark.”

Unfortunately, the report doesn’t mention what iPod model — one of the older iPod nanos that have had battery problems — was or whether it was a school-issued iPod Touch that more and more schools are adopting for classroom work.

Via Daily News Online

It’s been years since I’ve used the Opera browser, but the latest beta version offers at least one tempting reason to switch: it’s fast. Really fast. So fast that it just smokes every other browser on the OS X platform.

It’s all thanks to Opera’s new JavaScript rendering engine, Carkan, and a new vector graphics library called Vega that handles all the graphics rendering. Seth Weintraub runs the math over at Computerworld, but the bottom line is that Opera 10.5 beta is about 10 percent faster at rendering pages than the previous champ, Safari 4.

After January 27th’s unveiling of the iPad, it became abundantly clear that Apple has meaningful plans for iPhone OS outside of the smartphone arena. In fact, given the App Store’s runaway success, it’s just good business sense for Apple to try to get iPhone apps on as many devices as possible: not just phones, portable media players and tablets, but more traditional laptop and desktop machines as well.

The question is, then, when will OS X and iPhone OS begin to converge? When will OS X become compatible with iPhone OS?

In a recent New York Times blog post, Nick Bilton examines this very question, and talks to a former senior Apple Engineer to get to the bottom of whether or not iPhone apps could run natively on OS X one day.

I’m a long-time fan of territory games. Civilization sucked me in on the Amiga and its sequel appealed on the Mac. For quicker games in a similar vein, various Risk clones for the Mac (such as iConquer) once took up numerous tiny chunks of my day. But when I discovered Galcon for iPhone, the others vanished. Here was a crazy real-time Risk/stripped-down Civ, with brutally fast gameplay and land-grabbing. In single-player mode, it was compelling, and against online opposition, a joy.

Creator Phil Hassey announced this week Galcon Fusion for desktop platforms. A semi-sequel to Classic Galcon and incorporating modes and ideas from Galcon Labs for iPhone, Galcon Fusion is available for $9.99 from galcon.com.

I caught up with Phil to find out more about his game, cross-platform development, and why iPhone Galcon fans should take a risk on the desktop game.

Humorously pitting herbology against zombology, Popcap’s superb tower defense game Plants vs. Zombies was a long time coming to the iPhone… but once it the excellent port finally hit, it was destined to be a success.

I doubt even Popcap, though, realized exactly how much of a runaway hit they had on their hands, though. They’ve just issued a press release, announcing (with just a hint of stupefaction) that Plants vs. Zombies sold over 300,000 copies in its first nine days.

Costing just $2.99 on the App Store, that means that they’ve brought in just a little under a million dollars on the game since its release. Popcap’s a big name in casual indie gaming, sure, but even so: that’s real walking around money.

They deserve the success. Plants vs. Zombies for the iPhone is such an excellent port that it’s actually easy to forget it hits desktop machines first: playing it on an iPhone just feels like how it was always meant to be played.

I only hope the success of Plants vs. Zombies galvanizes Popcap to continue to add some of the desktop version’s excellent minigames, puzzles and survival modes to the iPhone version, perhaps as in-app purchases. Once you hit a certain skill level in Plants vs. Zombies, Endless Survival is just the only way to play, and I’d easily drop another $5 on PvZ if Popcap gave me the option to do so.