Cult of Mac

UPDATE: iMussolini Developer Luigi Marino told Cult of Mac that he discovered the lawsuit for copyright infringement by reading our story yesterday. Marino contacted the Italian state film archives, Istituto Luce, for clarifications about the video material he used from Mussolini’s speeches and they asked him to remove the app from the store to avoid a legal battle. Marino tells us he requested to pull the app and expects it to be gone from the iTunes store by 1 p.m. (CET).

UPDATE 2: iMussolini is gone. The competing Mussolini app — Mussolini’s historical speeches– — is, however, still available.

An iPhone app of Benito Mussolini’s speeches is the second-highest paid app in the Italian iTunes store a week after launching despite criticism for giving voice to Il Duce’s diehard fans and claims over copyright violations.

iMussolini, a mobile compendium of fascism, features 100 complete speeches,  plus 20 audio and video clips for €0.79 (it’s also available in the US iTunes store for $0.99, in Italian only) — without any kind of political commentary.

At about 1,000 downloads a day, iMussolini is more popular in Italy than Shazam and games like Ice Age and Dracula: the Path of the Dragon.

Comments by readers on iPhoneitalia, which broke the story, included enough pro-Mussolini sentiment  “Duce! Duce! Duce!”  and slogans (“Boia chi molla!”) to prompt complaints to the iTunes store that the app violates Italy’s 1952 Scelba law, which formally abolished fascism. The New York-based American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants  also slammed Apple over the app.

Today, the Italian state film archives, Istituto Luce, announced it will sue the developer for using archival clips and asked Apple to remove the application. At this writing, the app is still available.

iMussolini is the handiwork of 25-year-old Luigi Marino, who picked up an iPhone for the first time about six months ago and made the app in his spare time.

Cult of Mac spoke to Marino about why iMussolini is an excercise in free enterprise, getting the app approved and why his next app may feature Gandhi.

CoM: How did you start programming for iPhones?

Luigi Marino: I’ve been programming Java and C++ since high school, in July 2009 I bought my first iPhone and  in November 2009 in my first MacBook.  Programming for it is more of a passion than anything else. (NDR: Marino owns and runs an unrelated company).   In my free time, I also blog for an iPhone website called dev app.

Ok, so the groundhogs in the U.S. predict six more weeks of winter. Will some deals make up for the bad news? The Apple Store is selling a 16GB iPod nano for $119 with free shipping. Here’s a misnomer: an iPhone puzzle named “Hand of Greed” that’s free. Maybe you’d like to write a letter on your iPhone or iPod touch but don’t have a keyboard? Logitech’s Touch Mouse is available.

Along the way, we’ll look at a boombox for your iPod, a bargain on MouseWizard 6 and the price-slashers have been at it again with iPhone apps. As always, for details on these and many more bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Everyone knows your iPhone can control many items, including your TV, aerial drones – even a Mazda RX8. The iPod touch is great for your tunes, even suggesting music based on your preferences. But can your iPhone or iPod touch give you an invigorating massage? The makers of a robotic massage chair announced HT-Connect, a free iPhone app able to provide 16 auto-programmed massages.

Available in May, the HT-Connect interfaces with the AcuTouch 9500 massage chair from Human Touch. The app will “deliver a user experience that offers the same personalized and professional massage that one would receive at a spa or from a real, professional massage therapist,” said David Wood, CEO of Human Touch LLC.

Support for a bifurcation of computer sales has come from recent comments by an NPD analyst. Apple sold 90 percent of computers costing more than $1,000 during the fourth quarter of 2009 while the average Windows PC price is $475. The data illustrates Apple practically owns the “premium” U.S. computer market.

“The data is a startling confirmation — at least for the United States — about Apple’s success establishing the Mac as a premium brand,” said Betanews.

Although that $499 entry-level iPad is pretty much affordably by everyone, Apple will still be making a rather sizable profit on each one, if a bill-of-materials (BOM) breakdown conducted by BroadPoint AmTech analyst Marshall is to be trusted.

According to the BOM, the low-end $499 iPad only costs $270 to make, with the 9.7-inch touch-sensitive display being the most expensive element at around $100, with the 16GB SSD and aluminum case each costing only about $25.

As the storage jumps, so do Apple’s profits: the 32GB and 64GB iPads only see their costs rise another $25.50 and $76.50, respectively, but their suggested prices go up $100 and $200.

Apple’s most profitable BOM item? The 3G radio: it only costs them $16, but Apple’s charging over $130 for it. I personally wonder if some of that mark-up might be shared with AT&T to compensate them for assumed profit losses related to the month-by-month, cancel-anytime iPad 3G deal, but either way, Apple’s charging a premium for the functionality.

It’s all an estimate, of course — no one will know the iPad’s true cost until it’s actually vivisected after launch — but Apple knows how to put together a high-quality product that is both extremely profitable and an extremely good value. I wouldn’t be surprised if these numbers were exactly right.

Apple tends to focus its energies to making news and product announcements on its websites, but they’ve been experimenting a bit lately with integrating their PR machine with social media… mostly by putting up official iPad videos on their own YouTube channel, as well as pushing word of new Quicktime trailers through Twitter.

But 9to5Mac just noticed something interesting that may hint at Apple’s future plans for the popular Twitter micro-blogging service. Over a year ago, someone took over the twitter.com/Apple username… but now, in the wake of the iPad announcement (in which the iPad out-tweeted Obama’s state of the union address), it looks like that squatter’s been evicted.

Even better? You can’t sign up as Apple. This isn’t just a case of an account name being deleted: Twitter is clearly reserving the Apple account for Cupertino.

Of course, this could just be on Twitter’s own initiative, but it makes sense: Apple surely knows that Twitter is an amazing marketing and branding tool, and they’re presence on the site can only amplify the buzz about their company.

Rumors abound that Apple has halted its production of 27-inch iMacs until they can finally get to the bottom of the yellowing, flickering display issues, but if you’ve already got a gorgeous 27-incher, Apple has just released a second firmware update which will hopefully get to the bottom of any issues you’re having.

The update notes are, as usual, sparse:

Updates the display firmware on 27-inch iMac systems to address issues that may cause intermittent display flickering.

This is following on the heels of a late December update that changed the graphics firmware on the iMac’s ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 GPU, which didn’t seem to do much to solve the widely-reported display issues plaguing Apple’s most gorgeous desktop to date.

Hopefully this one will do better: the update is only 294KB and can be downloaded now through Apple Support.

There’s little to fault the Apple iPad for, at least as far as the price is concerned. The entry level $499 price is low enough that even those with their reservations about the iPad can pretty much afford to pick one up.

Or can they? According to an analysis by CBS MoneyWatch, the true cost of an iPad over four years is much higher than Apple is claiming.

How does Apple compete with the inexpensive netbooks without a netbook? One analyst believes the answer is to call it an iPad. The Cupertino, Calif. company’s tablet device could take 4 percent of netbook sales this year and 7 percent in 2011, Deutsche Bank said.

The iPad, unveiled last week, will “compete very well” against netbooks, particularly where “surfing, reading, game playing and emailing dominate the usage model,” analyst Chris Whitmore said.

Is the iPhone, Apple’s iconic handset, growing a bit long in the tooth? Probably not. But that seems to be the message from researchers reporting the iPhone lost market share during the fourth quarter, accounting for 16.6 percent of the market, down from 18.1 percent of smartphone sales in the third quarter.

Although iPhone sales were up 18 percent in the quarter, the entire smartphone market increased 26 percent as Motorola’s Android phones and Nokia helped boost sales, according to ABI Research. Ironically, ABI believes Apple’s iPhone could be encountering the same slump as Motorola’s once very popular Razr.

Sharp-eyed observers have noticed what looks to be an iSight camera in the iPad Steve Jobs used in last week’s keynote.

Even though Jobs didn’t talk about a camera, and it’s not mentioned in Apple’s official tech specs, something that looks like an iSight camera can be seen when Jobs first holds the iPad up for everyone to see.

As he holds it up, the light catches the iPad’s surface, illuminating something underneath. That something looks like an iSight camera, similar to the ones built into MacBooks, under the screens.

In the official iPad podcast, it can be seen around the 1:23:40 mark.

It’s not conclusive, of course, but corroborates the prototype images published by Engadget in the run up to the event, which clearly show an iSight camera in the same position. And references to a camera have been found in both the iPad’s Address Book software and the iPad firmware.

The absence of a camera on the iPad has been one of the device’s most puzzling omissions. Although, as our own John Brownlee first noted, a camera in a tablet that’s sitting in your lap, staring up at you, doesn’t produce the most flattering camera angles.

UPDATE: A repair company called Mission Repair says the iPad’s frame clearly shows an empty spot for an iSight camera, and it is exactly the same size and shape as the iSight slot in a MacBook’s screen frame. (Mission Repair received a shipment of iPad parts on Monday, the company blog says).

Thanks NyxoLyno.

Apple has just released iTunes 9.0.3, which looks like mostly bug fixes a big upgrade with a new look, among other things. Full details of the big, fat 100MB upgrade after the jump.

And now for something completely different.

I’ll admit, the first alarming thought that shot through my head when I stumbled across this vidclip on YouTube of Cult jefe Leander Kahney, was that he’d created it as fun-yet-terror-inducing way of emphasizing the “dead” part of the word “deadline” to Cult staff.

Turns out it was actually created by app developer Toga Pit — btw, cute marketing there, guys — to promote their new, maniacal-laughter-inducing iTouchMyFriends app, which turns images of your friends into manipulatable puppets. Just the evilness of the name ran shivers of anticipatory pleasure down my spine as I secured a copy to explore. I wasn’t disappointed.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZS8HqOGTbA

Here is Steve Jobs’ iPad keynote in less than 180 seconds. It’s wonderful! Amazing! Incredible!

The video sums up “all the important words,” says its creator, Neil Curtis.

“I assure you that no scene is repeated and everything was said on this keynote!” he adds. “Oh, and please don’t take it personal: it’s meant to be humor!”

We kick-off another week of deals with the Philips iPod docking speakers system. The system includes an FM presets, two 2-watt speakers, USB connection and an aux input. We also feature a new batch of free apps from Apple’s App Store, including Zenflation, a balloon flying game. We wrap up our top three offers with Process 3 for Mac, an idea and project organization tool.

As always, for details on these and many more bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Engadget has confirmed the reports of “extremely trusted sources” that the iPad’s iPhone OS 3.2 contains support for a host of long anticipated features, including video calling, file downloads and even SMS messaging.
According to their sources, the current beta of iPhone OS 3.2 includes hooks to accept and decline video conferencing, as well as flip a video-feed (for a front-mounted camera) and run the video call in either full screen mode or in a small window.

More than that, iPhone OS 3.2 currently hints at file downloads and local storage in the browser, which means you can finally slurp down a link to, say, an MP3 or eBook and use it in iTunes or iBooks. It also has hooks for iPad-specific SMS messaging.

This is preliminary code, and none of this functionality works right now, but at the very least, it implies some future developments in both the iPad and iPhone. It’s the video conferencing stuff that’s really interesting though: the iPad contains no camera, so either Apple’s already programming video conferencing support for the iPad 2G, the next iPhone is finally going to get a secondary forward mounted camera… or both.

Of all the criticism being leveled at the iPad — no multitasking, poor text input, lack of 23rd century Federation replicator technology — I’ve yet to hear anyone complain about the attractive $499 entry-level price. But just in case you aren’t convinced that the iPad is ridiculously, absurdly cheap for its feature set, behold, the inevitable infographic, put together by Darren Beckett.

There’s criticisms to be leveled at the Infographic — it ignores, for example, comparisons to various Android and Intel Atom based tablets in favor of attacking e-readers — but it still gets the point across: the iPad beats the competition, spec for spec, at the cost of a very slight price premium. In fact, in direct comparison, only the Barnes & Noble Nook seems to be appropriately priced in comparison.

For what it does, the iPad is simply the cheapest tablet out there. Don’t expect a mere infographic to finally put to rest the inexorably critical mutterings of the so-called “Apple Tax,” though.

A lot of commentators on the iPad noticed the similarity between Delicious Library and the iBooks virtual bookshelves for the display of e-book titles. So did Delicious Monsters Wil Shipley.

Talking to the Washington Post, Shipley seemed upset… but also seemed to understand.

But the thing about iBooks is, it’s a book-reader. So, of course they looked around, found the best interface for displaying books (Delicious Library’s shelves), and said: yup, this is what we’re doing…

Shipley then notes that he actually understands why Apple couldn’t write him a check: it would have been taken as a legal admission that Apple copied his design, and since Delicious Library’s UI isn’t copyrighted or patented, it actually would open up culpability, not close it.

As inevitable as the dawn follows the night, a LEGO simulacrum will follow the announcement of the latest Apple product announcement. Here, then, in dimpled, rainbow colored blocks, the necessary LEGO iPad, courtesy of Flickr user Brickjournal and his plastic brick ingenuity.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs did some trash-talking about the company’s growing rivalry with Google. In one case, Jobs is alleged to have said Google’s famous ‘Don’t Be Evil’ standard of conduct “is a load of crap.”

Due to Apple’s infamous distaste for publicity and unauthorized leaks, a series of anonymous sources talked to the tech press about last week’s internal “town hall” style company meeting. The comments show two companies once quite close competing on several fronts.

Although it’s hardly as killer a feature as carrier unlock, one of the main reasons I still jailbreak my iPhone is so I can cram five icons into the dock… so when the iPad was first demonstrated, and showed only four available icons in the dock, I actually winced.

No need to fear, though, because this time, Apple has us all covered: a reader wrote into TUAW and pointed out that the iPad SDK allows up to six icons in the dock.

You might assume the iPad supports this behavior because of the larger screen, but the iPhone crams five icons into the dock just fine. I’ve always assumed, in fact, that the iPhone only allows four icons so that each dock’s icons is symmetrical with the columns of icons above.

I wonder two things: will the iPad, then, allow up to six icons per row, to make everything symmetrical with the dock? Finally, will the next iPhone update expand the dock similarly? Fingers crossed on both accounts.

How do you get more attention for a largely unknown netbook at a time when the tech press has the vapors for Apple’s iPad? You sue Apple and claim its new device is just a clone of your netbook, thus grabbing some headlines for a day or two. China’s Shenzhen Great Loong Brothers said it might sue Apple, claiming the iPad looks like its P88.

The Chinese company’s president Xiaolong Wu, in an interview with Spain’s El Mundo, said if Apple tries to sell the iPad in China he “won’t have any choice but to report them [Apple],” noting the device would hurt his sales.

Amazon has raised the white flag in the first skirmish over ebook pricing. The victors in this first round could be publisher Macmillan and rival ebook-reader maker Apple. After temporarily stopping selling Macmillan titles over a pricing dispute, the online book-seller said it was capitulating to the publisher’s demands.

“We will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books,” Amazon announced on its Kindle Community forums.

You can tell Jay-Z is disappointed he doesn’t have one. And then he remembers he has his own brand of vodka and millions of dollars.

Via Engadget

Though the announcement of Apple’s iPad has met with the typical mixture of hyperbolic praise and hyperbolic criticism (no one can talk sensibly about it), there has been one consistent complaint that most would agree is valid: a device this powerful should be capable of some form of multitasking. But I think I have the answer.