Cult of Mac

What it is: Skimble is a fitness-tracking iPhone app that stands out from the crowd by keeping track of rock climbing, swimming, and even yoga.

Why it’s cool: Maria Ly created Skimble because she found no good tools for tracking the sports she had become passionate about in recent years. Basically, she’s become a very good rock climber in a very short time, and didn’t have a way to really track that progress and get a clear picture of how far she had come. She also does a lot of yoga, and, unsurprisingly, Nike+ doesn’t work so well for quantifying the impact of your Downward Dogs and Sun Salutations.

Fortunately, Maria’s a talented software engineer, so she was actually able to do something about it. And, as a rock climber (though one not quite so good as Ly), I can say that Skimble is just about perfect for tracking your climbing and bouldering efforts. I put into action at my local climbing emporium Mission Cliffs yesterday, and I was easily able to click a button to select the difficulty of the climb, the fashion in which I finished it, and a note (typically the name of the route). And as a result, I have a record of where I succeeded, where I failed, and where I maybe over-did it (that would be the late 5.12a I threw in).

If you’re an Apple fanboy (or girl) and your tee shirt repertoire doesn’t include as many Apple inspired tees as it should—you’re in luck—Coty over at cotygonzales.com has come to your rescue. With much sweat and toil, he’s put together a huge list of 101 T-Shirts for Apple Fanboys and the Mac Faithful that is sure to help you get you get back on the right track.

Fanboy protocol calls for 5-6 different Apple shirts to be worn publicly per week—better stock up.

Boy Genius Report has an interesting chart of Apple’s price points. The site claims the chart shows that Apple has all the price points covered:

“From $59 to $7,000, if you want an Apple product, there’s a pretty darn good chance you’ll be able to pick something in your price range. Simply brilliant,” says the site.

But note that the chart does not show ALL Apple’s products and price points: there’a lot of products missing. But it does show that although Apple has a reputation as pricey, it does hit a lot of sub-$1,000 price points.

Here are two interesting but conflicting opinions on the iPad, pro and con.

Con: Tech author Rafe Colburn says the iPad is a scary harbringer of the closed future of consumer computing.

“General purpose computing is too complicated for most people anyway, and the iPad’s descendants along with similar competing products from other companies will offer an enticing alternative. So I see the death of the traditional, open personal computer as a likely occurrence.”

Pro: But Facebook iPhone developer Joe Hewitt is extremely positively about the iPad’s closed system. To his mind it’s a major asset:

“The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.”

I’m with Hewitt. The IPad is a cloud computer par excellence, and we will likely be able to run almost any software we want on it, but it’ll be on a server somewhere and not on the iPad. Colburn notes this too, but thinks it’s a bad thing.

Why is there no Adobe Flash on the iPad? Adobe says it’s not because it’s buggy, as an Apple source claimed this afternoon to CultofMac.com.

It’s because Apple is protecting revenue streams derived from content like movies and games. If users could watch free TV shows on Hulu, they wouldn’t buy them through iTunes.

“It’s pretty clear if you connect the dots: the issue is about revenue,” says Adrian Ludwig, an Adobe group product manager for Flash, during a telephone interview on Friday afternoon.

Well, that didn’t take long — app developers have already begun rolling out versions of their apps that’ll expand the capabilities of the iPad, still a good two months away from store shelves. One of the first is ActivePrint, from developer Pocket Watch.

Currently, ActivePrint lets iPhone users pop out things like photos, web pages, plain text and clipboard contents. But Pocket Watch says the new iPad SDK will allow printing of office-type stuff — like word processing docs, spreadsheets and presentations — to any WIndows PC.

…wait, what? You heard right — currently, ActivePrint only outputs to printers connected to a Windows machine. But not for long, the developer says: Mac compatibility should be out in March.

Just in time for your new iPad.

UPDATE: Adobe says Flash is not buggy and that Apple is protecting revenue streams from content like movies and games.

Flash will not be coming to the iPad — not now, not ever — says a source inside Apple who is part of the iPad development team.

Instead, Apple will rely on HTML 5 and CSS to play rich media, such as YouTube videos, on the web.

“Flash is too buggy and will crash the whole device,” says the Apple source. “Apple’s done no deal with Adobe.”

Adobe is so bothered by Apple excluding Flash from the iPad, it put porn up on its blog to prove the point.

Abobe’s official Flash Blog has a post entitled “The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?” which shows how several popular websites would look without Flash content. Right at the top is a screenshot of Bang Bros HD, a hardcore porn site.

As you can see, an iPad without Flash is going to be pretty much useless for HD porn.

“Millions of websites use Flash,” the blog post says. “Get used to the blue Legos.”

UPDATE: We checked, and there’s an MP4-based version of Bang Bros, which works fine on the iPad as is. So even Adobe’s most desperate tactic isn’t true.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Bebot, Buster Red, What’s On Reading, Amazon Mobile and Numeric Paranoia.

We close out a jam-packed week with some familiar deals for Mac fans. We have an iMac with the i5 processor (2.66GHz), a 27-inch screen, 8GB of RAM and Windows 7 – all for $2,207. The iLife ’09 home productivity suite from Apple could be a big hit for new iPad owners, or any Mac owner. Today’s deal is hard to beat: just $38. Finally, who doesn’t like free? We round out our top three deals with a new bevy of App Store freebies, including Super Slyder, a puzzle game that puts to use the iPhone’s accelerometer.

Along the way, we also look at other gadgets, including a way to keep your laptop cool, an easy way to get digital video and a colorful way to kick back and check out a screen wider than what’s in your hand.

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

Following up yesterday’s revelation that the iPad SDK contains photo capturing ability, despite the lack of onboard camera, comes this juicy little screenshot, showing the iPad displaying an iPhone-esque “Touch to return a call” bar across the top of the screen.

Since there’s no chance the iPad is going to operate as an enormous mobile phone (I wonder who the exclusive carrier of the iPad in Brobdingnag would even be?) I think this pretty much confirms what I guessed: the iPad SDK has some residual iPhone features still loitering shiftlessly about, and everything will probably be polished up before the iPad’s release. About your business then.

[via Engadget]

See that New York Times article displayed on the iPad in the official Apple demo image to the right?

It’s called 31 Places to Go in 2010: you should click on it and check it out. When you’re done, come back and tell me what’s wrong with the iPad demo image.

Yup. Exactly so. The iPad doesn’t do Flash, but yet the New York Times’ piece contains a slideshow powered by Adobe’s plugin.

This doesn’t mean the iPad secretly runs Flash: Apple’s clearly trying to move the web away from it as a standard plugin, not just because it threatens the App Store but, as Apple themselves noted on Wednesday, the Flash plugin was responsible for more crashes reported to Apple across all of OS X than any other source.

It looks like Apple just fudged the truth a little in their iPad promo images. That’s worth a scolding cluck or two, but there’s no doubt in my mind that sites like the New York Times are already hard at work making sure all of their content works on the iPad without Flash. Not so much a fib, then, as a look at the future.

[via Apple Insider]

Soon after the iPad was introduced, one of the earliest complaints was that readers don’t want apps and other accessories interfering with the words. Now comes a university study showing people need more than reading to fall in love with e-readers.

Indeed, the Univ. of Georgia study found younger consumers may prefer their phone to an e-reader. According to the research, young people view Amazon’s Kindle as “old” compared to smartphones with applications allowing them to do everything from listen to music to finding a restaurant, along with reading online.

Before you can even get your hands on one, Northern Film & Media is offering £40,000 (about $64,500) for iPad application ideas from developers in England’s North East.

Dev teams — which can include some members from out of the area —  have until February 24 to come up with revenue-generating ideas that don’t duplicate the device’s standard app functions, aren’t kissing cousins of iPhone apps and are launchable by summer, 2010.

They’re putting up the cash in the hopes that locals will make a mark on the iPad:

“The iPod changed the way we thought about music. The iPhone transformed our attitudes to mobile phones, and opened our minds to all the things they could do other than call people” Tom Harvey, Chief Executive of Northern Film & Media said in the presser.  “What does the iPad transform? You decide. Newspaper and magazine reading? Gaming? Writing and painting?”

The location requirement is fairly strict but may be skirtable: the app must “be developed by teams where at least 70% of the team’s talent have their base in and 50% of the budget is spent in the North East.”

Complete info and application download here.

Apple has often dismissed the possibility the company should compete with low-cost netbook computers, saying the popular devices are ‘junk.’ When rumors of Apple making a tablet computer appeared, focus was on ebooks and publishing. But will the iPad turn out to be Apple’s answer to those pesky netbooks? One highly-placed supplier thinks the iPad could outsell netbooks.

With a $499 starting price, the iPad could “achieve annual sales of 10 million units, which is a significant estimate considering the current tablet PC market is only about 3 million a year,” said Paul Peng, executive vice-president of AU Optronics’ global business unit. AUO makes LCD displays.

The iBooks service/feature for iPad is conspicuous in its absence from Apple iPad web pages outside of the USA, and the American site’s rather ominous “iBooks is available only in the U.S.” footnote made people ask whether Apple was going to fumble the ball. PC Pro today got confirmation from an Apple spokesperson about the subject from a British perspective, the statement being: “iBooks will be available in the UK, but the timing of that will not be announced until the iPad goes on sale”. In other words, pretty much as John Brownlee guessed here, yesterday.

Here’s hoping the timescale is ‘very soon’, rather than it taking as long to get British iBooks (and those for other non-US territories) as it did movies and other non-music media in iTunes. Here’s also hoping that PC Pro gives its headline writer a slap—titling an article ‘Book service in doubt for UK iPad’ when the Apple spokesperson confirmed the feature will be in no doubt is, to say the least, inaccurate link-bait tosh.

Since Amazon introduced its Kindle ebook reader, analysts and rivals have attempted to gauge its success via learning sales numbers. Because of that, the online bookseller has jealously guarded those figures – at least until Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Thursday let slip “millions” of people own the device. That number is actually 3 million, according to a new report.

“The total number of all types of Kindles out there in users hands hit 3 million sometime in December,” Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes, citing sources who’ve been “amazingly accurate” in the past.

Although Amazon spokespeople refuse to elaborate on Bezos’ “millions” remark, the word sent BusinessWeek to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

“Assuming that at least two million people have bought the device, and that each paid at least $259 – the cost of the least-expensive Kindle – Amazon now has a business worth more than $500 million in sales,” the publication said Thursday.

Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney also figures Amazon could sell 2 million Kindles this year. Other analysts predict Apple’s iPad may sell twice that in 2010 alone.

Why is it so important how many Kindles is sold? Not only has Barnes & Noble’s Nook attempted to challenge the ebook leader, Amazon figured prominently in Apple’s introduction of its own “Kindle killer,” the iPad. CEO Steve Jobs announced his company will “stand on their [Amazon’s] shoulders and go a bit further.” In private, however, Apple has used Amazon’s pricing as a wedge to split off some big-name publishers. Although Amazon has attempted to adopt some of Apple’s practices (raising the royalties for publishers and adding apps to its e-reader), the company is squarely in Apple’s sights. Little wonder Amazon doesn’t want to talk numbers.

[Via TechCrunch and BusinessWeek]

Guest commentary by David Barnard, owner of App Cubby, publisher of the popular Gas Cubby and Trip Cubby apps.

Much has been written about all the iPad surprises, disappointments, features, missing features, hype, expectations, future, etc. adnauseam. But not much has been written about what the iPad says about Apple. I’m excited about the iPad because of the many ways it demonstrates that Apple just gets it.

Palm almost gets it, Microsoft may be on it’s way to getting it with the Zune platform, Blackberry doesn’t have to get it, and Google just doesn’t get it.

What’s this “it” I’m referring to? Humans.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCHzgRPXRCM&feature=player_embedded

There’s some pretty good jokes is this Barely Political mash-up of President Obama’s State of the Union address and Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation.

Via Giz.

Enough of my dumb opinions. I thought it would be interesting to find out what some Mac and iPhone developers make of the iPad. What are their first impressions? What do they intend to make for the iPad platform? Do they have any concerns?

I got in touch with a whole bunch of developer contacts and asked them if they’d like to share their thoughts with you, the Cult readers.

Here are the replies I got.

Ken Case of OmniGroup revealed that the company is working on iPad versions of apps like OmniFocus and OmniGraffle:

“We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and are looking forward to updating OmniFocus to take advantage of the larger screen size. We’re also looking at creating iPad adaptations of several of our other productivity apps, such as OmniGraffle.”

Manton Reece of Riverfold Software (maker of Clipstart and Wii Transfer):

“I was so annoyed with the closed nature of the App Store that I stopped developing for the iPhone. The iPad will still have those frustrations, but the large screen opens up a whole new class of applications. It’s impossible to resist.”

Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems (maker of Tinderbox):

“The iPad announcement leaves many things unclear. Does iWork depend on private APIs, or will developers be able to write first-class applications? Will individual books be subject the the approval process — leaving 40 overworked Apple employees the additional task of approving or rejecting books an magazines?

“Since 1982, Eastgate’s been publishing original hypertext fiction and nonfiction. These works — many of which are now studied in universities throughout the world — can’t be printed and can’t be simulated in ePub. But, if we bring them to iPad, would that be vetoed as duplicating the built-in book functionality?

“In short, the app store is a source of grave concern for software developers. That said, the iPad is the most exciting personal computing development for a decade. It will transform our notion of computing and redefine the idea of the information appliance.”

Steve Jobs will never pitch a product more effectively than he did at the announcement of the iPhone. He said he was introducing three products: “A revolutionary phone, a widescreen iPod, and a break-through internet device. And they’re all one product: The iPhone.”

I thought back to that legendary pitch when I saw Steve affix one of his weakest lines ever to the iPad, a device I think actually has remarkable potential:

Image via Gizmodo

That’s right, the selling point is that it’s “Our most advanced technology in a magical & revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.” Really? Your selling points are advancement, magic, revolution, and cheapness? The best thing that line has going for is that device and price rhyme. First of all, almost no one buys magic. More importantly, Apple should never make price a central selling point; other companies can make cheaper knock-offs and then Apple has to re-convince people that that higher prices are justified. Once you try to become the price leader, you can’t really try to go premium again.

But the tagline was also a summation of the one problem that kept coming up for me as I watched the iPad announcement: the device simply does not have a killer app. A killer app, is the use that shows why a new technology is worth buying. For example, microwaves didn’t start selling until microwaveable popcorn was introduced and PCs didn’t sell until spreadsheet software was launched. The iPhone’s killer app, quite honestly, was Safari; the iPhone could certainly do a lot more than browse the web, but for many people, seeing the New York Times home page in multitouch made the sale.

The iPad? Well, I’ll say that the most impressive thing I saw today was the New York Times home page all over again. It’s even better than mobile web browsing than the iPhone. So what? That’s not enough to get me to spend $500. But not to worry. I believe the killer app for iPad is on the way, and possibly by launch. It’s called iLife.

“Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

— For What It’s Worth, Stephen Stills

That sound, the one emanating Wednesday from the stage at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and reverberating throughout the blogosphere and interwebs, the one heard in literally millions of conversations at lunch counters and water coolers and dinner tables across the globe, was the sound of another ding in the universe.

Once all the snickering about feminine hygiene finally dies down, once Apple finally puts the iPad into the retail chain that saw 50,000,000 people walk through the doors in the most recent fiscal quarter, once people — aside from jaded technology journalists and geekazoids — get the iPad in their hands, Apple’s description of it as a “magical and revolutionary” product will begin to come into focus.

Why?

Just a day after Apple’s announcement, we have the iPad topping our list of deals for Mac fans. The 16GB version of the thin, lightweight device is $499 and the 32GB version is $599. Next on tap is a number of MacBooks, starting at $599 for a 2GB model with 80GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM. Finally, if you’d like a MacBook Pro, there is a $799 price on a 2.16GHz version with a 15-inch screen.

Along the way, we also look at more hardware, speakers, software and apps for your iPhone or iPod. As always, the details are waiting for you on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

With every new Apple product announcement, the press releases for third party accessories inevitably start rolling in. Here’s one of them, courtesy of bag maker Tom Bihn: a couple of iPad bags!

Neither’s particularly radical. The Cache costs 30 bucks is basically just a laptop sleeve rezised to fit the iPad’s dimensions.

The other is the Ristretto, a vertical messenger bag, which costs $120, and comes in olive, plum, black and cocoa.

Nothing too exciting here: these are just quickly redesigned iPad-specific versions of existing products. But, hey! At least you can get them shipped to you now in as little as one business day… unlike the iPad itself.

Yesterday, I speculated that the reason Apple didn’t put a camera in the iPad was to help you look thin, but as many commenters mentioned, another possibility is that Apple had another supply chain breakdown, like the one that robbed the iPod Touch of its camera in June.

Maybe that’s right. Techcrunch spotted that the iPad SDK has reference in the Contacts app to taking photos with a built-in camera.

There’s a few interpretations here. This could just be a legacy feature, having to do with the fact that the iPad runs on the iPhone OS. It could also have to do with the iPad’s ability to connect to external cameras through an accessory. Or maybe the camera was pulled at the last minute, just like the iPod Touch’s.

My guess is it’s a legacy goof. What do you think?