Cult of Mac

The Siri iPhone app wants to make getting dinner reservations or concert tickets as easy going to a concierge: all you have to do is open the app, tell it what you want, and it’ll arrange the rest.

For example, say you’re in New York City for an important business trip, and, after an evening of drinks with your colleagues, you all decide — as one sometimes does — that you want to go to a concert… specifically, by an industrial metal band specializing in sadomasochist leitmotifs.

All you’d do in that case is launch the Siri app and say, “Get me tickets for four to the next Genitorturers concert.” And that’s it. Siri will automatically identify your location through GOPS, then search its partners including OpenTable, MovieTickets, StubHub, CitySearch and TaxiMagic for the show.

Neat stuff, but knowing how finicky voice recognition can still be, using Siri might be less like getting your evening sorted through a concierge than screaming into the hearing horn of a shell-shocked veteran. You can grab it for free through the App Store.

Magazine and news publishers are collectively hoping that e-readers and tablet computers will save their businesses, and Apple’s eager to get them on board in developing high-quality animated versions of their publications to help get an iPad into each newspaper and magazine reader’s home, so it’s no surprise that Steve Jobs met with fifty top executives of the New York Times yesterday.

What was surprising, though, was Jobs’ attire: a magical top hat, of the sort championed by Mr. William Wonka and Miss Marlene Dietrich.

According to New York Mag, “When Apple recently booked the cellar dining room at Pranna for a talk with 50 top executives from the New York Times, even restaurant higher-ups didn’t know who their VIP guest would be. But last night, Jobs came strolling in wearing what our source calls “a very funny hat — a big top hat kind of thing.”

Like the hat, most details of the meeting are anecdotal. Jobs apparently admitted he likes to hold the Sunday edition of the New York Times in his hands, ordered a mango lassi and penne for dinner (neither of which were on the menu) and otherwise just showed off Apple’s new device to executives while answering questions.

Overall, it seems like the NYT executives present were interested in the iPad, but unwilling to lock themselves into a single delivery platform. Business as usual, in other words. Still, who knew that the man who hasn’t once been seen in the five years wearing anything besides blue jeans and a black turtleneck was such a secret dandy?

Add Hachette Book Group to the growing list of publishers using Apple’s iPad to drive a wedge between Amazon and its requirement for $9.99 pricing on ebooks. The company joins Macmillan and HarperCollins adopting Apple’s “agency model” pricing and making waves in an area Amazon once dominated.

“There are many advantages to the agency model, for our authors, retailers, consumers, and publishers,” Hachette USA CEO David Young said Thursday night. “Without this investment in our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer,” he added. The remark about a lack of diversity in ebook retailers was an obvious dig at Amazon, which until the iPad, enjoyed the lion’s share of control over pricing.

Just days after Apple asked an iPhone app developer to remove references to Google’s Android Marketplace, the Cupertino, Calif. company is advising location-aware applications can’t simply help Google’s AdMob serve location-based advertising.

“If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store,” Apple warns.

Now that we all know what the iPad is going to look like, the library of concept designs we used to illustrate the old “Apple Tablet” rumor posts look pretty silly, but they’re occasionally worth examining for ideas just not on what Apple could do with the iPad next… but what accessory makers might do.

This Yanko concept for the “MacView” tablet seemed like a pipe-dream even a few weeks ago, but what I particularly like is the iMac-like display shell it slides into in desktop mode.

Really, there’s no reason an accessory maker couldn’t make that work. Since the iPad can be paired with any Bluetooth keyboard, all this really is is a stand: design a free app that automatically pairs your keyboard with your iPad and you’ve got a pretty decent, touch-controlled iMac Mini.

A lot of people are nonplussed by the iPad because it doesn’t seem so new, or even very useful. It’s just a big iPod touch. So what?

But one of the most interesting things Apple said has about the iPad is how it improves the “experience” of doing everyday computing tasks — email, web browsing, making photo slideshows.

Again, people say so what? We’ve already got laptops for email and watching movies. But improving experiences is exactly what Apple is great at. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, but the first anybody could enjoy using. The same thing is going to propel the iPad into the mainstream. Everyday tasks like sending email and reading newspapers are going to be so much nicer on the iPad than any other device. (see for example the New York Times screenshot after the jump.)

Software developer Fraser Spiers has been digging through Apple’s iPad videos, pulling screenshots to take a closer look at the details of the iPad’s UI. His conclusion? It’s going to provide a very good experience not just for media consumption, but also media creation.

Look at what’s in here: a full stylesheet engine, multi-column page layout, a complete library of cell formulae and a full set of builds and transitions. You can create a Magic Move transition on the iPad. That’s probably the most advanced technique you can do in Keynote, and it’s there on the iPad.

The New York Times has a fascinating piece by ex-Microsoftie Dick Brass on how interdepartmental fighting is causing the company to fail. Microsoft has turned into an anti-innovation company, he says.

Internecine warfare among Microsoft’s divisions has created a “dysfunctional” corporate culture that thwarts creativity instead of nurturing it. “The company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers,” he writes.

Welcome to the “iPhone photography toy of the week” slot. Today’s toy is: InfiniteScope.

Of course Wired is prepared for Apple’s iPad, says Chris Anderson, the magazine’s editor in chief.

Responding to Tuesday’s piece that Wired‘s digital version won’t work on the iPad, Anderson says the magazine knew all along about Apple’s aversion to Flash and Air, and has a solution.

“Obviously we knew about Apple and Flash from the beginning and there were no surprises there,” he says in an email. “We have a solution and will launch on the iPad according to plan and on schedule, along with Android and Windows — it’s a full cross-platform strategy, which was the idea all along.”

Anderson wouldn’t say what the solution is, but it’s a good one, he claims.

We begin with another deal from Apple on its Mac Pro Xeon workstations, starting at $2,149 for a 2.66GHz model. Next up is Philips docking cradle for the iPod, just $19. We wrap up our top list of deals with the ever-popular streaming-radio Squeezebox radio from Logitech.

Along the way, we check out several software packages, including new App Store price drops, a physics application and Assemble, a mapping and social networking tool.

As always, for details on these and many other items, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, which starts right after the jump.

The iPad has already launched a thousand jokes, some of which you can wear some on your chest, or your privates, before you can even buy one in March.

See some examples after the jump:

Verizon getting the iPhone later this year is no longer a done deal in the mind of one financial analyst. Indeed, Credit Suisse has downgraded the carrier, expecting AT&T could retain an exclusive iPhone contract until at least mid-2011.

The financial firm downgraded its recommendation for Verizon to Neutral, down from Outperform, and shaved its target price to $30 per share, down from $32.

Although Verizon may “eventually” be awarded an iPhone contract as Apple drops its exclusivity in the U.S., “there is much greater probability that AT&T keeps exclusivity for another 12-18 months than investors realize,” Credit Suisse told investors Thursday.

Prevailing wisdom previously was that AT&T’s exclusive contract would end in June of this year and Verizon was the likely beneficiary. However “we no longer think AT&T will lose iPhone exclusivity in mid-2010,” the financial company writes. The delay could benefit Research in Motion’s RIM in the U.S., it said.

The analysis comes a day after reports Verizon and Apple were “still talking” about an iPhone deal. AT&T may have underbid Verizon and other carriers to win the iPad contract. Although the carrier would only say its iPad data plan “pricing speaks for itself,” AT&T beat out Sprint, T-Mobile and others to connect iPad users.

Apple recently came to AT&T’s defense amid questions about the carrier’s 3G network. Apple’s chief operating officer Tim Cook told reporters he had “very high confidence” AT&T can correct problems that have plagued reception.

[Via Barron’s]

In the wake of widely reported yellowing and flickering display issues on Apple’s line of 27-inch iMacs, rumors have it that Apple has halted production until they get to the bottom with the problem.

Apple’s denied the production halt, but if a UK-based Apple Authorized Service Provider speaking to Gizmodo is to be trusted, the situation’s a lot more dire than Apple is letting on.

Yesterday, we alerted you to blossoming galleries of attractive young women posing in various states of undress with their iPhones.

But, hey, iPhone fetish pics aren’t limited to the fair sex: there are a few galleries dedicated to iPhone Guys, too. Plus the NSFW user-generated Guys with iPhones website.

Amazon obviously has a lot to fear from the iPad, and they seem to know it, if their latest acquisition is anything to go by: they have just purchased Touchco, a small company that makes very cheap multitouch displays. Oh, and they are merging it into their Kindle division. Duh.

Touchco’s touchscreen technology is pretty cool: not only is it cheap, but it’s sensitive to pressure, and can detect an infinite number of simultaneous touches. It’s also totally transparent, which means it won’t mute the full color LCD screens for which it is designed like other touchscreens solution.

It’s pretty clear Amazon’s planning a truly impressive, full-color, multitouch update to the Kindle… but they need it sooner rather than later. The iPad’s not even out yet, and it looks like Apple’s won the battle. Better crack the whips on those Touchco engineers, Amazon.

It is pretty clear Apple has declared a silent war on Google. CEO Steve Jobs allegedly has mocked the Mountain View, Calif. company’s well-known “Do No Evil” mantra and even blames the Internet giant for trying to “kill” Cupertino’s iconic iPhone. However, that animosity appears to have spilled over into Apple’s iPhone App Store approval process. Apple asked a developer to delete mention Google’s Android in an application’s description.

In an email to the developer of “Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab” developer Tim Novikoff, Apple wrote “it would be appropriate to remove ‘Finalist in Google’s Android Developer’s Challenge!’ from the application’s description.

Apple wrote that the edit was required to “avoid an interruption in the availability” of the flash card application.

The note from Apple said the app’s description, which also includes other usual promotional material, “contains inappropriate or irrelevant information.” However, the company is likely not objecting to the developer mentioning inclusions in Newsday or various iPhone design books.

In November, Apple was kind enough to make it simpler for people checking out music through links on the web to view that album or artist’s information without actually launching iTunes.

Called iTunes Preview, the feature allowed users to click on an iTunes music link and be taken to that song, artist or album’s preview page, where you could read reviews, see the album cover, check out the user rating and listen to little song snippets. You only needed to leave your browser if you wanted to download the album.

iTunes Preview was a feature I loved: simple though it may be, it made it a lot easier to check out an artist or album when people mentioned it on the web.

Now Apple has just rolled out the same functionality for apps in the App Store, and it works the same way. Now, if you want to see an app, the only reason you need to load up iTunes is to actually download it.

I don’t want to use iTunes in any capacity as a web browser: I want to open it only when I want to suck some app or video or album down. iTunes Preview’s continuing slow rollout is a welcome improvement on the way iTunes links work.

H.264 is a very cool compression standard indeed, and intimately familiar to most Mac users as Apple’s own codec of choice for iTunes, Quicktime and the iPod. It’s also the codec driving YouTube and Vimeo, and the one used for streaming HTML5 video by both Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

The only problem? H.264 is neither free nor open-source. If you’re Apple and you want to use H.264 to serve HTML5 video in your browser, you need to pay MPEG LA, the owners of the codec, a $5 million licensing free. This has raised some eyebrows by the likes of Mozilla Firefox, who want HTML5’s video compression standard to be the free, open-source Ogg Theora. Their argument, summarized, is it’s foolish to build the next decade’s internet video standards upon the back of a licensed codec when there’s a free alternative that works nearly as well.

Today, MPEG LA confused the debate a bit by announcing that H.264 will stay royalty-free for free Internet Video until 2016…. but while it probably ends the Internet Video codec battle, it’s not a development that ends the debate.

There seems to be a slight crack in the rather monolithic analyst pronouncements of support for the iPad. Needham has scaled back its endorsement of the new Apple device, telling investors it forecasts 2 million tablets sold in the year after the iPad launches, down from a previous 4 million.

The reversal came in a note entitled “Seeing is Believing” and follows its previous “Apple has Another Winner” analysis. Although the firm still believes “sales of the iPad will be substantial even in its first iteration,” the thumbs-up is labelled “cautiously optimistic.”

As a toddler of a Mac switcher, I still have the stray folder or two of legacy files from my days mucking through the morass of the PC experience. One of the files I’ve guarded most carefully was my old Trillian IM chat log files: four years later, and I’m still anticipating migrating in the legacy chats, spam, files and cybers of my nascent instant message years.

Looks like I now finally have the opportunity: Trillian, the popular Windows multi-protocol instant message client — is now available for the Mac in an open alpha.

And it’s ghastly. Basic IM support works well enough, but there’s a load of issues. The contact lists don’t automatically slurp in your friends’ pictures. Audio and video chat don’t work. You can’t view your logs. You can’t have group conversations. There’s no e-mail integration. The preference and customization options are slim. &c.

It’s strange to see Trillian for Mac after all these years waiting for it… and realizing that, thanks to Adium, I’ve totally moved on. Still, if you have fond memories of Trillian from back in your Windows 98 days, the somewhat unstable alpha build is a free download. But then again, so is Adium.

UPDATE: Just got word that Gruber is NOT cool with the site, and is demanding it be taken down. This about 20 mins after this post was published. Guess the “reasonably parodic period” is up. That was quick.

I’ve just been IM-ing with John Casasanta, the brains behind DaringFireballWithComments.net – a website that mirrors Apple pundit John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog — with the addition of reader comments on posts.

Casasanta says he’s received a short note from Gruber, who says he’s cool with the site. Gruber even gave Casasanta permission to keep the site up for a “reasonably parodic period” of time.

“This absolves me of any lawsuit,” says Casasanta, who runs the super-popular MacHeist software marketing operation.

As reported yesterday, DaringFireballWithComments.net mirrors everything on Daring Fireball — posts, ads and all — but allows anonymous commenting on posts. Gruber’s blog is famous for not having comments, an ethos at odds with most other web publishers (except Engadget, which has temporarily shut down its “out-of-control” comments system). Casasanta is mirroring Gruber’s site as a “social experiment.”

Meanwhile, most of the comments on DaringFireballWithComments.net so far have been exceptionally moronic, partly proving Gruber’s point that comments are a distraction.

Casasanta says he is unconcerned by the stupidity (which appears to be mostly purposeful. People are being deliberately dumb) and is willing to give it time. “It’s kinda what I would’ve expected so far,” he says.

One option is moderating the comments, but Cassanta says it hasn’t been discussed yet.

Gruber hasn’t responded to a couple of notes I sent him asking for comment, and hasn’t yet mentioned the mirror on his site or Twitter stream. As some have noted, with about 40,00 followers, Gruber’s Twitter stream acts as Daring Fireball’s behind-the-scenes comments system.

Adobe’s chief technology officer has finally weighed in on the great Flash debate, and is taking potshots at Apple for not supporting Flash on the iPad. Adobe’s head software honcho Kevin Lynch says Flash on the iPad is essential to the “open” internet. Except Flash isn’t open.

What happens when you try to style your camera after a rival? The result may be the Pen E-PL1 from Olympus. The Micro Four Thirds camera has become ungainly as it attempts to keep abreast with Panasonic’s GF1, reviewers say.

The remade Pen EP-1 has gained some new features in its updated E-PL1 form. Along with the requisite HD support, the camera has added a pop-up flash and image stabilization. Also piquing interest is a system of Live Guides which allow you correct the image on-screen before snapping the photo.

However, as Wired puts it, the upgrade has “created a Frankenstein’s monster.”

The Olympus E-PL1, with a Zuiko 14-42mm f3.5/5.6 lens will cost $600 in March.

[Via Gadget Lab and Olympus]

Nikon has unveiled its Coolpix P100, a digital SLR with many firsts. First in line is the P100 is Nikon’s first HD video camera, supporting 1080p. Secondly, it is the first member of Nikon’s well-known Coolpix family to adopt a 10MP CMOS sensor. The new sensor, relocates wiring to enable better low-light photos, an area in which Nikon is increasingly becoming known.

The chunky camera also has a 26x optical zoom and is able to zoom while shooting video.

The Nikon Coolpix P1 will cost $400 when it goes on sale in March.

[Via Gadget Lab and Gizmodo]

If you are looking for a deal on an iPod speaker system, this could be your lucky day. We start off with the Gigaware docking speaker system with remote control and audio input for $60. There is also a deal on Logitech’s Pure-Fi Anytime iPod speaker system, complete with motion-activated sensors, backlit controls, motion-sensing snooze (I guess no more hitting the ‘snooze; bar and rolling over for 15 minutes), digital AM/FM and a remote – $42. Lastly, if you wallet is feeling a bit light, you might want to investigate an iPhone video poker app we found. “Real Deals Slots Second Volume” includes more than 300 variations of the game of chance.

Along the way, we’ll also check out a new batch of App Store freebies, including iZombie: Death Match, and the free V.V. Brown single at iTunes.

As always, details on these and many more bargains can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.