Cult of Mac

Dragon Dictation is a cool, free little app that allows you to write emails or text messages just by talking into your iPhone, because it transmogrifies your speech into text. In fact, I’m using it to write this.

Well, sorta. As documented by the above-left screenshot, even with the most pristine elocution I could muster, the results provided by Dragon Dictation still left me with errors to clean up. The above-right shot is what happened when I spoke with my everyday, habitually clipped delivery.

So, perhaps not the best solution for popping out a quick text on the road, but a good option to quickly get text down in words that you can straighten out later. Because Dragon Dictation is service-based, connection via wifi or 3G (i wasn’t able to test it using EDGE) is required. And right now Dragon Dictation is free, making it easy to take out for a test spin.

PC users (yes, PC users read Cult of Mac) might correctly identify Dragon as the same engine that powers Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the impressive speech-to-text PC app (and MacSpeech Dictate, a similar app for the rest of us).

Released over a year ago for the PC, Google’s wonderful Chrome browser has been purgatorial on the Mac for far too long, but now that’s all over: Google has finally released Chrome in beta form for OS X.

Mac users have a duty to download the beta and help Google finish it — it’s a great piece of work.

It’s a feature light release compared to the PC and Linux versions. For one, the Mac version is missing its Bookmark Manager and Bookmark Syncing; it also omits the App Mode, which allows Chrome to run web apps in their own basic browser window. Google’s Gears is also off the table for Mac users, but Gears won’t work under Snow Leopard anyway, so this isn’t a big deal: anyway, Google has announced that they will cease developing Gears because HTML5 is now suitable for the same purposes. Finally comes probably the biggest omission: the Chrome Beta for Mac totally omits Firefox-like extension support.

All together, it feels like something of a phoned-in affair, and it’s hard not to feel a bit bitter that Google delivered so little of the full Chrome user after a year of keeping Mac users waiting.

That all said, I’ve been using Chrome’s developer nightly builds for months, and its combination of extreme simplicity, the effortless amalgamation of the address bar and search engine support, and its sandboxed security mode that prevents single tabs from crashing the entire browser have quickly made Chrome my favorite browser for Mac. Despite my enthusiasm for Chrome, though, I’ll be keeping Firefox as my working browser until Chrome finally builds extensions into their Mac version… and, more importantly, some plucky developer comes up with a Chrome alternative to Tab Mix Plus.

Reports of scorching MacBooks abound, one frustrated flickr user stuffed the calescent computer in the fridge above the vegetable crisper and below the leftovers to cool down after that realizing that rendering a big chunk of video on it became an “aluminum BBQ.”

When you’ve regained your composure, you can come out of the fridge, little MacBook.

Let’s start off with a pair of dueling deals on Apple hardware. Whether you are looking for a basic MacBook or one with all the frills, this may be your day. PC Connection is offering MacBooks starting at $850. The basic computer includes a 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 13-inch screen. At the other end of the spectrum, Expercom is hawking a 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 4GB of RAM. Also part of the package: three years of AppleCare for $1,248.

If you are more in the mood for an iMac, the Apple Store has five desktop machines, including a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo desktop with a 20-inch screen for $849. Expercom has a beefier iMac running a 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo with 22-inch screen, 8GB of RAM and AppleCare for $1,403.

Also on tap is a 50-percent discount on iPod touch accessories, plus various hardware and software deals. As always, for details on these and many other bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meVQqYNGzYA

It took them eight months, but the planning commission in Cupertino granted Apple permission to rezone a nearly 8-acre property to expand the company’s campus.

Apple asked for the rezoning last year after purchasing the property back in 2006.

Check out Steve Jobs’ addressing the city council about Apple’s growing pains resulting in far-flung employees they considered leaving the town to reunite — keeping it soft until the end when he can’t help but mention that Apple is the largest local taxpayer. Council members make lots of kissy-kissy noises,  but they didn’t reach a consensus.

The 7.78-acre property on Pruneridge Avenue, south of the Hewlett-Packard campus, houses two office buildings currently occupied by Apple employees.
The buildings were already on the property from the site’s industrial days. Before Apple purchased the property in 2006, the city rezoned the industrial site to residential in anticipation of a 130-unit townhouse and condominium project that previous property owners Morley Brothers had proposed.

Via San Jose Mercury News, Mac Rumors

Almost a year to the day since Google released its first stable version for Windows, the search giant has today announced a final release of its Chrome browser for Mac. If you haven’t played with it, it’s worth a spin — I use it as my primary browser on my work PC.

And yes, before anyone else mentions it, its add-on architecture isn’t completely rolled out yet, so if you love Firefox extensions, this isn’t the browser for you, and its benefits over Mac Safari 4 are dubious generally. But you might just enjoy how it feels.

Via Silicon Alley Insider

Meet the iVictrola, the weirdest and possibly the coolest iPhone dock you’re likely to see this Christmastime.

Or should I say not likely to see, as it appears that the limited stock at Design Within Reach has already sold out. Oh well.

Apple has just unveiled iTunes Rewind 2009, a feature on the iTunes Store that lists all of the year’s best selling content, across music, video and apps. For some, the feature will be confirmation of the intractable cretinism of that mouth-breathing biomass, mankind. For others, it will be a handy primer on popular media they might have missed this year. Let’s dive in!

It’s a small update, but it’s an important one: Apple has just quietly upgraded iTunes to allow buyers the ability to preview whole albums at a time.

iTunes has always allowed buyers to preview tracks before they buy: thirty second snippets that allow users to confirm that the 99 cents they are about to pluck down for “You Shook Me All Night Long” is, in fact, the AC/DC version, and not the migraine-inducing caterwaul of Miss Celine Dion dueting with Anastasia.

If you wanted to buy an entire album, though, you had to click the preview button in iTunes for every single song. No longer: now, a handy “Preview All” button is available on each album page in the iTunes Store.

Some nice functionality, to be sure, but long, long overdue. Amazon’s MP3 store has allowed users to preview full albums for over two years, and it’s hardly difficult functionality to ape. But better late than never.

[via TUAW]

Apple likes Intel’s desktop line of Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs well enough to put them in their iMacs, so it makes sense that they would want to avail themselves of Intel’s three new Core i5 and i7 mobile CPUs (codenamed Arrandale) for any forthcoming refresh of the MacBook line. But things may not be that simple.

One way the Arrandale line of processors differs from previous Intel mobile CPUs is that the chips include mandatory integrated graphics. According to the Bright Side of News, Apple’s not interested in that: even the most inexpensive Macs now contain NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPUs, which offer far superior performance to integrated graphics solutions.

Apple paid $17 million for Lala, the streaming music site, according to reports Tuesday. The final purchase price was even lower – $3 million – due to $14 million already in the Palo Alto, Calif. company’s coffers, said TechCrunch.

“Lala had plenty of cash in the bank, but they were burning $500k/month,” according to sources with indirect knowledge sited by the blog. The purchase price is similar to similar media buys, such as MySpace’s $10 million deal for social-music site iLike or the $1 million paid for music site iMeem.

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

Without dedicated analog controls, playing emulated console games on an iPhone or iPod Touch is always going to be a maddeningly imprecise experience, but even so, it’s can be nice to see the graphic capabilities of Apple’s touchscreen line explored.

The latest emulator to hit the iPhone is the 3G4, a Nintendo 64 emulator developed by fourteen year old programmer, “Doogie.” That’s a regrettable internet handle for a precocious teenager smack dab in the voice cracking throes of pubertal hormone imbalance, but it is apropos: the 3G4 is an impressive display, not only of the iPhone’s capabilities, but the programmer’s as well.

It’s not perfect by any means. The graphics have had to be heavily rendered down to work smoothly on the iPhone, and Doogie is still struggling with some elements of the interface: namely duplicate button registers, delayed button presses and a few mysterious crashes. He’s also yet to implement the L, R, and Z keys… and, in truth, it’s hard to see just where he’d cram them on 3G4’s already cramped display. But Doogie’s working on it, and anticipates a release sometime next year… although obviously not through the App Store.

AT&T have released a free tool to the App Store to allow iPhone users experiencing sub-standard service to help AT&T’s technicians improve the network.

By downloading the free Marks the Spot App to your iPhone, you can easily report any service failures you might experience. Dropped a call? No coverage? Data failure? Poor voice quality? Simply load up the app, allow it to pinpoint your position using GPS, select how often the problem happens to you in that area, then fire off your complaint to AT&T’s crackerjack network engineers, who will presumably slap up a new carrier tower in the blink of an eye. Or, at least, roll their eyes, theatrically yawn and go back to sleep.

Right now, of course, it’s impossible to know if the Mark the Spot app is just a placebo public relations tool to mollify their customers, or if AT&T will actually prioritize improving their network by identifying the holes in their cell tower web and patching them up.

Either way, though, it’s a fantastic idea: so fantastic, I wonder how long it is before tools like the Mark the Spot app ship on all smartphones across all networks. In fact, given the fact that the iPhone can already detect when a phone experiences network service problems like dropped calls, I wonder why the iPhone OS doesn’t automatically cough up a tool just like Mark the Spot when it detects an outage.

[via 9to5Mac]

In an unusual move, Apple has removed 1,000 applications sold by Chinese developer Molinker from its App Store. The mass purge follows questions whether the developer had ‘gamed’ the popular iPhone online store. Along with the apps – which amounted to one percent of those sold through the App Store, ratings were also deleted.

“This developer’s apps have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either,” Apple marketing head Phil Schiller confirmed to iPhoneography, a blog that originally asked whether a scam might have been afoot.

As Christmas approaches, you might be thinking of buying a pocket sized video recorder for your loved one. But which one should you get? A Flip? An iPod Nano?

How about none of the above? When I asked my Twitter followers the same question, they were unanimous: “Get a Kodak Zi8“, they said.

So what’s so good about it?

A group of four magazine publishers and media conglomerate News Corp are expected to announce Tuesday a joint venture aimed at developing new standards for digital magazines, according to a report. The move is seen as preventing Apple or other e-reader developers dictating a new age of digital publishing.

The new company — as yet unnamed — will be jointly owned by Hearst, Time Inc., News Corp., Condé Nast Publications and Meredith Corp., according to The Wall Street Journal.

Who wouldn’t buy a car from a “pretty good dancer”? It’s a 10. Not quite “It. Is. AWESOME.” as taglines go. Hit the jump to view the original classic.

Via Fake Steve

We start the week with a grab-bag of gadgets, including more refurbished MacBook Pros from Apple. The computers, starting at $1,299, a 2.53 GHz processors and 13-inch screens. Next up is a Star Trek Internet Communicator that works with your iChat, Skype, MSN or AIM account. Finally, if you get chilly while using your MacBook and the mothership hasn’t beamed you up to somewhere warmer, slip on a pair of stylish gloves heated by the USB connection. Along the way, we also check out new iPhone software, earphones and iPod accessories.

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

Cult of Mac reader Tiago Piccini from Brazil wrote in with yet another idea — following our posts on cat beds and hackintosh holders —  for recycling the shell of a dear, departed iMac.

He spent under an hour gutting his non-working iMac, then adding a lamp socket and switch device, powering it with a 40w bulb and adding a piece of fabric under the screen to soften the light.

Piccini, who by day works at an Apple Solution Expert, calls his creation the iAbat-jour…It’s an easy DIY project that gives off a nice glow, no?

Remember when Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook described netbooks as ‘junky’ at a time PC makers were flooding the market with the low-cost computers? A new reliability survey seems to defend Apple’s decision to avoid entering the netbook arms race. Apple has earned the top spot as most reliable computer maker, dethroning ASUS, creator of the Eee PC netbook.

Apple’s score of 374 reverses the lead ASUS had in late 2008 and earlier 2009, according to computer repair firm RESCUECOM. “Now that many of the netbooks by ASUS have been out for a while, there is obviously a higher need for service,” said the repair company’s CEO David Millman.

Now, if you’re in the middle of a pub crawl, your reality is already pretty augmented. But if you’re just starting out, or aren’t yet wasted to the point where dropping the iPhone down a street grating is a real possibility, then finding the closest watering hole has never been easier — thanks to Belgian beer-maker Stella Artois’ just-released, free, augmented-reality bar-finder app.

Although officially tight-lipped on details, Apple may use recently-acquired music streaming company Lala to upgrade its iTunes service and potentially other applications, reports suggest Monday.

“Lala gives Apple browser/Web-based technology to access music anywhere,” financial analyst Maynard Um told UBS Investment Research clients. Um believes Apple will combine the Palo Alto, Calif. company with a planned $1 billion server farm to “provide seamless access & mobility of digital content across all of its products, including media-focused content of iTunes and user-generated content of MobileMe.”

The iPod touch, Apple’s game machine, is becoming Cupertino’s way to introduce younger users to the iPhone. The phone-less iPod represented more than 40 percent of the devices running the iPhone OS software sold through September, according to researchers.

The iPod touch is “quietly building a loyal base among the next generation of iPhone users,” announced mobile analysis software firm Flurry. The study also suggested young iPod touch owners are using the device for games and social-networking. Flurry found 42 percent of the iPod touch sessions include social-media while gaming is 49 percent of the device’s sessions.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHV-6lU8lM8

AT&T’s latest advertisement to tackle Verizon’s “There’s A Map For That” ads uses Luke Wilson, his twin and a decapitated doppelganger to make its point: AT&T’s 3G network is faster than Verizon’s.

As an ad, it’s certainly funny to watch Luke Wilson stumbling around, noggin-less. Guillotined by Verizon’s slower 3G service, Wilson’s body becomes a random engine of nerve endings chaotically firing, like a chicken with its head chopped off. The ad ends as Wilson’s headless body collapses to the floor, deftly cutting away just before his bowels loosen. The intact Wilsons then wander off for a snuggle.

The argument the ad is making, however, seems poorly thought out. AT&T certainly does have a faster network than Verizon… in fact, Verizon’s never contested that fact. What AT&T doesn’t have is anything even approaching Verizon’s coverage.

If you break this ad down to what it’s saying beyond the quirky charm, AT&T is making the following argument: if you are in an area with AT&T’s fastest 3G coverage, you can download a JPEG of Luke Wilson 20% faster than you can download it anywhere on Verizon’s network. That’s great, but most people would take reliability over a 20% boost in speed. AT&T would do better taking the money they are spending countering arguments Verizon has never made into their infrastructure, countering arguments Verizon has made.

It should be no surprise to anyone that the newest iMacs catapulted to the top of the sales charts when Apple released them in October. But just in case you have any bets going on the matter comes sweet analyst confirmation: Apple computers topped the list of the most popular machines sold at retail in October, according to the NPD Group. Gentlemen, collect your outstanding beers and pony rides.