Cult of Mac

We start the week with deals for taking images and then storing your important data. When digital cameras appeared, we thought it could sound the death knell for single-lens reflex units that were a step up from single point-and-shoot devices. However, we now see a resurgence in SLRs, reborn for the digital age. One example is Nikon. We take a look at the Nikon D3000 which couples the ease of digital with the flexibility of the company’s famous Nikkor lenses. As digital content grows, we find even 200GB hard drives bursting at the seams. An increasingly common solution is external hard drives. Whether you just want to store your family pics or archive an avalanche of important financial documents, we check out two drives from both ends of that spectrum: the ‘disaster-proof’ 2TB ioSafe Solo and the convenient home Western Digital My Book.

For details on these and many more items, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Computing legend and former Apple Fellow Alan Kay has kindly written a detailed note explaining a comment he made at CES, facetiously reported here. Looking for a newsy nugget from Kay’s complex talk, I was trying to make a joke about something profound being revealed at the CES gadget orgy. (“We all thought it was pretty funny too,” said Kay in a separate email).

Kay’s note explains a comment he made about the logical expression NOT BOTH underlying all human thinking.

“What I said was that all human symbol/logical REPRESENTATION systems and all computers past present and future can be made from NOT BOTH,” Kay says.

Kay’s full, fascinating email after the jump.

The iTunes App Store approval process is infamous for its impenetrability, its arbitrariness and its Leviathan-like slowness to move. Yet Apple’s been remarkably good about improving the App Store approval process in recent months: sure, apps are rejected as arbitrarily as ever, but recent changes to iTunes Connect have made figuring out just how far through the process an app is to approval or rejection far more transparent. But if recent dev reports are anything to go by, Apple might have also managed to improve approval times as well.

According to some of the developers quoted by TUAW, Apple has significantly improved the turnaround time of app approval. In fact, some of the new turnaround times border on the preternatural. Consider Atomic Cactus’ anecdote:

I’m a developer behind Atomic Cactus, we have 3 games currently in the app store, and they all took approximately 2-3 weeks to get approved. Today at 4:00 am I submitted for approval our latest app, which isn’t exactly a “fart app” (it’s a pretty polished puzzle game with OpenFeint). As of 1:30 pm today, the app is in the app store.

In other words, Atomic Cactus submitted an app and had it approved in a little under ten hours. Amazing, and heartening to hear if true! Any app developers out there able to confirm or deny an improvement in App Store turnaround time? Let us know in the comments.

In a profile piece on the sudden surge of “slate-like” tablet computers that took CES by storm (which, with few exceptions, already managed to seem like also-rans compared to Apple’s still unannounced and unreleased tablet), the New York Times claims that Apple has been working on a multi-touch capable version of the iWork suite for the last few years.

That’s interesting, no doubt, but the New York Times goes on. According to the newspaper, “conversations with several former Apple engineers” who claim to have had a role in the creation of the device, the Apple Tablet’s multi-touch interface requires a “somewhat complex new vocabulary of finger gestures to control it, making use of technology it acquired in the 2007
purchase of a company called FingerWorks.” Sound familar?

Google’s Nexus One, the Internet giant’s first entry into the self-branded cell phone arena, costs $174.15 to build, making it just slightly more expensive that its rival from Apple, the iPhone, according to a Monday report. The figure from iSuppli also indicates the build price of the Google handset is just $5 under the subsidized $179 customers pay for the device when agreeing to a two-year T-Mobile contract.

The Nexus One retails for $529 if purchased unlocked and without a carrier’s contract.

Back in 2008, after looking at photographer Russ Croop’s paintings ably done using the NetSketch and Brushes apps on his iPhone, we wondered how long it would take before this form of fancy finger work hung in art galleries. (An exhibit of fellow fingerpainter Matthew Watkins took place at an Italian Apple reseller in September).

Fast forward 13 months: Croop has a one-man show of 15 works called “Painting Through a Keyhole: the iPhone as Canvas” at the The Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado until February, 12, 2010 and participated in the international offerings at “iPhone Therefore I Am” at the Chicago Art Department that also launched Jan. 8.

Cult of Mac talked to Croop about how he got from iPhone touchscreen to art gallery, the mistakes he made — that every iPhone artist should avoid —  and the misunderstandings most gallery goers have when they see his work.

CoM: How did the show come about?

Russ Croop:

The Dairy Center for the Arts has three galleries and hosts different art shows almost every month…It’s supposed to be a pretty exacting juried selection process with several judges from different disciplines.  They use a high-tech projector system that times each image so every picture gets equal billing.  I submited my iPhone paintings last April 2009 and didn’t find out that I was selected until October 2009.

CoM: How did you decide on the title and theme?

RC: I often compare creating art on the iPhone to painting through a keyhole because when you zoom in to add detail, you can only see a small portion of the “canvas.”  This is especially true when using NetSketch.

For Apple fans abroad, the price discrepancy between between the cost of an Apple computer locally and what it would cost in the States is often enough to justify a flight to the States. In first class. On a chartered Gulfstream jet. Loaded as cargo in the belly of an Anatov An-225.

Fine. I’ll cop to the slightest of exaggerations. But as an American living abroad, paid in dollars but doing business in Euros, the 40% premium on the cost of a new MacBook Pro or iMac is enough, sometimes, to make me want to weep. Apple’s not alone in this: across the board, gadget makers releasing their products in the EU set a MSRP assuming a dollar-to-euro exchange rate of 1 to 1…. even when, in reality, the actual exchange rate is 1 to 1.45. There’s optimistic ways to look at it, of course — commit to buying that new MacBook Pro I have my heart set on for its euro price but in the States, and I get a trip home “for free.” But this is meager comfort: in reality, it often feels like the low prices of gadgets in America and Japan are subsidized by the exorbitant markups people pay for their technology in the rest of the world.

Don’t believe me? Check out this helpful infographic over at CMYPlay, which colorfully and informatively breaks down the price discrepancies between the same model of MacBook Pro over a handful of countries. At the end of the day, the average Brazilian spends enough in local currency for one MacBook Pro that he could pick up two of the same model if he bought it in the States. It’s almost enough to make a native Brazilian woe the day he was born in that bright, sunny paradise of plump, bethonged bikini bottoms.

Click through for the full infographic.

As equally tenuous a confirmation of last week’s Wall Street Journal report that the Apple Tablet’s enclosure would be made of a very Mac-conventional material indeed, this Reuters report, which says that the Apple Tablet will be a brushed aluminum unibody affair, and ship in Q2 of 2010.

Apple owns a not-unsubstantial chunk of graphics chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies, which makes their newly announced mobile GPU, the PowerVR SGX545, of interest to me and you, my fellow iPhone droogies. After all, this could be the graphics chip that will pump out the polygons come June’s iPhone 4G.

And what a nice chip it is. The HD-capable PowerVR SGX545 adds full support for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0, and is specced to deliver real-world performance of 40 million polygons per second at 200MHz.

The iPhone is currently at a disadvantage to handsets like the Motorola Droid or the HTC Nexus One, at least as far as screen resolution is concerned. It stands to reason that Apple will attempt to improve the iPhone’s current maximum resolution of 320×480 by incorporating a HD-capable GPU. In fact, given Apple’s tendency to distinguish each new iPhone model with a short acronym, it wouldn’t be surprising if the next iPhone was christened the iPhone HD. A chip as the PowerVR SGX545 would be a perfect fit for such a phone.

In fact, outside of the obvious Apple ownership connection, there’s plenty of reason to believe that upcoming iPhone and iPod Touch hardware refreshes will contain the PowerVR SGX545, given the PowerVR SGX536 chip firing all synapses inside the black plastic brainpan of the iPhone 3Gs.

Then again, Imagination Technologies is doing a lot of boasting about the SGX545’s DirectX 10.1 support, so perhaps, horror of horrors, what we’re really looking at here is a Windows Mobile GPU.

A France Telecom executive Monday suggested Apple’s tablet would be released “in days.” Stephane Richard told also told a radio interviewer the device would include a Webcam.

Richard, deputy CEO of France Telecom, owner of mobile carrier Orange, made the comments in response to questions from journalist Jean-Pierre Elkabbach. When the interviewer asked Richard about a report in the French weekly Le Point that Apple would launch the tablet in a “couple days”, the executive replied “oui,” or yes.

LAS VEGAS — OK, you got your iPhone 3GS. You record your video. It shakes and wobbles and wibbles all over the place, but no-one minds because that’s what they expect from hand-held video recording.

Not any more, though.

I don’t even know where to begin on this one. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple hardware SVP who oversaw the creation of the iMac and generations worth of iPods (and, it goes without saying, dozens of early prototypes of the iPhone, given that he left Apple only a year before its release), claimed during an interview at CES that he has “never even used an iPhone.”

Now, whether or not this was a true statement (interviewer Kara Swisher didn’t believe him, and I’m mostly in her camp), it’s certainly not a terribly smart one. If he’s telling the truth, it means he’s never used the top-selling phone in the U.S. market, a device that has turned the global mobile market on its head and dramatically threatened traditional powers like Motorola and Nokia and, well, Palm. It’s kind of hard to beat what you’ve never tried.

If Rubinstein is lying, it’s almost worse, a passive-aggressive attempt at point-scoring that belies a grudge with his former employer that could get in the way of beating them. All in all, it’s just one of those moments that really makes you appreciate how effortlessly Steve Jobs belittles competitor products — he can actually make you believe he would never use anything but Apple because they’re that much better. When Rubinstein tries to be as dismissive in the other direction, he just sounds bitter.

LAS VEGAS — The audio fanatics over at Blue Microphones have popped out the second-gen Mikey, a major overhaul to their plug-n-play iPod microphone.

The original Mikey was a plug-n-play, $80 microphone with on-board software that turned any iPod into a recording device. But it had several drawbacks: It didn’t play well with the iPhone unless you switched on airplane mode and it was only adjustable in one direction (it didn’t swivel). The second-gen Mikey is now $100, swivels, has a USB pass-through and works seamlessly with the iPhone; and like the original, it’s equipped with a three-way sensitivity switch. It’s also even lighter than its predecessor.

As a bonus, Blue Microphones has introduced Blue Fire, a free, feature-rich recording app available from the App Store that can be paired with Mikey to maximize performance.

LAS VEGAS — Finally, someone is going to turn iPhones everywhere into tiny, portable TV receivers. I found this little guy tucked away in a corner at a booth manned by Cydle, a young South Korean company better known for their car gadgetry. It’s a receiver/tuner that plugs neatly into an iPhone and pulls in digital ATSC broadcasts.

Why not sooner? A few months back, in October to be exact, the way was finally cleared (according to Macworld) for mobile devices to receive broadcasts from the new digital ATSC standard. South Korea is one of only two countries — the other being Taiwan — outside North America using the ATSC system.

I wasn’t able to use the system, but Cydle says it’s ready to go and will be priced at $150 — just don’t break out the mini-kegs quite yet in anticipation of watching the Saints claim their first Superbowl victory (yes, I just stamped my prediction here in this post) on the iPhone’s glorious 3.5-inch screen — the little tuner won’t ship until March.

LAS VEGAS — Most video camera makers concentrate on the video, then poke one (or if you’re really lucky, two) tiny pinholes in it to record sound through. Yeah, like that’s enough.

So Zoom’s approach is to take a honking great, smurf-colored stereo microphone and stick a vidcam, screen and controls on it.

While sound from the mic seemed pretty darn impressive, the $250 Q3’s video capability is bare-bones, recording in 640×480 at 30 fps (but in a Mac-friendly Quicktime format) with only a 2x digital zoom.

But that’s the idea — to put sound first. The guys at the Zoom booth said the idea behind the Q3 was to give sound recordings a little video accompaniment, like say as a way to record what guitar chords sound like for a music student, along with accompanying video of technique.

LAS VEGAS — More on the noise-cancelling front: Sony has taken the trick tech of their award-winning, $400, MDR-NC500D digital noise-cancelling headphones and dropped them into these tiny new buds.

Like its big brother, the MDR-NC300D uses artificial intelligence to sense then adapt to the type of background noise occurring in the user’s environment; Sony claims an impressive 98.7 98.4 percent noise-reduction. Tne control unit also has a switch that adjusts the sound to one of three settings (anyone remember the bright yellow Sony MEGABASS swicthes?): Movie, Bass, or Normal.

While my rather limited experiences with the NC300D’s bigger brother never fails to amaze me whenever I try them on, the jury’s still on the little guys. The noise-cancelling feature didn’t seem as impressive; plus, you have to deal with the unit’s control dongle — which is bigger than some mp3 players out there.

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 Orbital 1.2, Commodore 64, DinoMixer, Green Fingers and Doodle Golf.

LAS VEGAS — Back in September, we reviewed Audio-Technica‘s outstanding ATH-ANC7b QuietPoint noise-cancelling headphones; had we been doling out ratings at that time (we weren’t, because — at the time — we lamely thought ratings were lame), the ANC7bs would have donned a majestic 4.5 turtlenecks.

Seems Audio-Technica thought it could do better.

I like electronic notebooks, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying out all the different ones on offer. The latest newcomer is myRichTexts and from what I’ve seen of it so far, I’m quite impressed.

Sometimes you can overdose on all of the iProducts that parade across the screen hoping to capture our attention. Like the iPhone cases made from wood, titanium and everything in between, it can be difficult to find an iProduct that’s original. We wrap up the week with a couple whimsical examples of items that struck our fancy – and maybe yours.

We’ve done iPod docks that double as alarm clocks. Pretty much, you are tempted to hit the ‘snooze’ alarm and go on to the next gadget. But Memorex at least gives its take an intriguing name. Another product that caught our attention is the iBoo Dock for the iPod. The dock and speakers are encased in something akin to a mix of ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’ and a chocolate drop.

Along the way, we look at other deals, including a 16GB iPod nano for $119 and Airport Extreme router and apps for your iPhone. As always, details on all these and many more bargains can be found after the jump.

I’m not going to use the word “iPhone killer” to describe the Nexus One, such phrasing is trite at best. Not to mention that the only thing that’s going to kill the iPhone will be Apple, and then, only when iPhone 4 or whatever comes out.

That said, of the current crop of pretenders the Nexus One seems to be something special. Follow us after the jump for our first impressions after 48 hours.

Once the most bitter opponents of Cupertino’s allegedly wasteful and polluting ways, environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has awarded Cupertino a four-star rating in their latest environmental survey.

Still, it doesn’t seem like Apple has done all that much to earn the applause. In fact, Apple only gained 0.2 points from its previous 4.9 environmental rating. That said, most of the other companies surveyed by Greenpeace, including Samsung, Sharp and Sony, fell in their rankings this month, automatically elevating Apple to the number five spot.

Greenpeace isn’t entirely happy with Apple: though they applaud Cupertino for eliminating hazardous substances in their product line while other companies make empty promises, they feel that Apple’s re-designed environmental section of their website is actually less informative than it used to be.

Still, it’s nice to see one of Apple’s most vocal and implacable critics recognize the great work Apple has done over the last couple of years in making their products as environmentally friendly as possible.

If you are one of the many iPhone owners frustrated by the camera’s inability to capture images in low-light situations, Apple may have heard your complaints. The Cupertino, Calif. company has ordered “tens of millions” of LED camera flashes, according to a Friday report.

“The electronics maker is seeking allotments of LED camera flash components in the tens of millions for delivery during the 2010 calendar year,” writes AppleInsider, citing people familiar with Apple’s intentions. Amsterdam-based Philips Lumileds Lighting is said to have won the contract.

Another day, another Apple patent… perhaps one even describing technology that could perhaps be nebulously related to the much anticipated Apple Tablet coming later this month.

Today’s? A new Apple touch display patent spotted by the usual gang of scourers over at Patently Apple. The patent describes a thinner and brighter touchscreen display that works by combining both the touch and pixel displaying elements into the same hardware.

It’s possible we’ll see just such technology in the Tablet, although it’s worth noting that this technology could be used in pretty much any touchscreen device. It feels, right now, more conceptual than technology to be thrust into our hands later this month as an integral part of the Apple Tablet, but only time will tell.

The Google Chrome Beta for Mac has a lot of holes in its feature set compared to the more mature Windows and Linux ports. The biggest omission is probably extension support, which allows Chrome’s functionality to be broadened similarly to Firefox thanks to small code plugins.

Extensions still aren’t live in the Google Chrome for Mac beta, but if you’re willing to test drive the Chrome for Mac developer channel, you can start expanding your Chrome experience now.

In my experience the developer channel has been pretty stable, and I was actually playing with Chrome for Mac for months before the beta, but if you’re not interested in the risk, the Chrome for Mac developers are insistent extensions will roll out to the beta soon.