Cult of Mac

The repair and teardown experts at iFixit are releasing more than 240 repair guides for every Mac mini and most iMacs produced since 2004. The company is also now selling iMac repair parts, from hard drives and RAM to power supplies and disassembly tools.

“The repair manuals include in-depth disassembly guides, model identification tips, troubleshooting techniques, and upgrade information. The 241 new repair guides use 1,452 photos to clearly communicate each step of the repair. iFixit repair guides are well known for world-class photography and clear, concise step-by-step directions.”

• iMac repair manuals — cover all 17″ and 20″ iMacs manufactured since 2004, including both G5 and Intel models.
• Mac mini repair manuals — cover all Mac minis since its inception in 2005.

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Looking at Google’s Chrome OS demos today, I noticed a giant omission that bodes ill for its future: it’s not optimized for touchscreens.

Chrome looks like a nifty version of a desktop OS, like a version of OS X or Windows, that pulls a lot of data from the cloud. Yeah, it’s slick, thoughtful and forward thinking, at least in one sense: Cloud apps are clearly the future, so why not the OS also?

But it looks like a traditional WIMP OS (window, icon, menu, pointing device). Why isn’t Chrome optimized for finger controls? The future of computing is mobile devices; and the future of mobile devices is touchscreens. As far as I can tell, Google didn’t mention touch at all, and none of the press asked about it.

Google says the Chrome OS will be launched by this time next year, by which time Apple will probably have reinvented the mobile computing experience with a multitouch tablet.

Apple’s tablet will do for netbooks what the iPhone did for cell phones — make the competition look hopelessly antiquated, whatever OS they run. Google says the UI is still under development and is subject to change; they’ll have to change it radically if they want a chance of competing with Apple, which has already adapted Snow Leopard for touchscreens.

Like Steve Jobs says, quoting hockey player Wayne Gretzky, Google needs to be aiming for where the puck’s going to be, not where it’s at now.

By this time next week, millions of American’s mouths will be watering in anticipation of turkey, stuffing and cranberry sau…oh, heck with that. What’ll really get the salivation going is anticipation of Black Friday.

So don the battle armor, lace up and get ready for the most brutal shopping day of the year. Oh, and you’ll probably want to arm yourself with the following pair of razor-sharp iPhone shopping apps.

Black Friday Wish 1.0 lets you create a shopping list, then receive details downloaded to your iPhone/iPod Touch on the best deals that the app’s human-powered research team has found for the items on your list.

Then Mall Maps will guide you to all the dazzling bargains through its mall database, listing of what stores are in each mall, mall floor plans and use of the iPhone’s GPS to tell you what malls are nearby if you suddenly find yourself mall-less.

Black Friday is a buck, Mall Maps is $3. Probably no Black Friday deals on these two, though.

We have an eclectic group of deals to head today’s list of bargains. Insignia has a clock radio alarm for your iPod priced at just $13. There is the usual clock radio alarm specs, plus a remote. The Groove Silicone Skin for your iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS will brighten your day – and at just 99 cents, it won’t lighten your wallet. We see all sorts of iPhone apps pass through here, but here’s something unique: a barcode reader for your iPhone or iPod touch. Just scan a product’s barcode and you’ll receive information from local or online merchants.

As always, details on all these items and more are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Apple’s iPod touch will play an even greater role within the Cupertino, Calif. company’s chain of retail stores. Along with dumping Pocket PC-based checkouts, the touch will now be seen more in the hands of employees working on the floor and in the stockroom, a report said Thursday.

The increased exposure comes as Apple readies distribution of three exclusive iPod touch applications designed to make life easier for Apple Store employees during the expected hectic holiday season, according to AppleInsider. One application will allow any employees to exchange iPhones or iPod while on the store floor, rather than only at a Genius Bar tech support area.

After losing an initial court request to pull Verizon’s “Map” commercials, AT&T has created its own ad and website claiming the carrier offers a better “3G experience” than its rival. The new ads and website featuring actor Luke Wilson tout “When you compare, there’s no comparison. AT&T.”

The website, TruthAbout3G.com, follows the denial by a federal judge of AT&T’s request that Verizon’s ads be yanked because they are ‘misleading.’ In Wednesday’s ruling from Atlanta, GA., U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Batten, Sr., wrote that some viewers might “misunderstand” the ads, “but that doesn’t mean they are misleading.”

There are iPhone-controlled cars and beds — now one company plans to integrate iPhones/iPods in its wheelchairs for a new kind of accessibility.

Dynamic Controls developed a system to connect an iPhone or iPod Touch to the wheelchair system via Bluetooth; it mounts on an adjustable arm and has a recharger, too.

In addition to music and all the other stuff you can do with an iPod/iPhone that might come in handy — compass reading, maps — it has an app that can be used for some controls on the chair, showing chair information in real time, including speed, and a diagnostics feature for when things go awry.

“We recognized the iPhone has revolutionized the way people communicate and saw the opportunity to develop this solution for wheelchair users, taking full advantage of Apple’s ‘Works with iPod / Made for iPhone’ developer program,” Charlotte Walshe, CEO of Dynamic Controls, said in a press release.

Lee Kwok, a wheel chair user in Christchurch, New Zealand was also quoted in the presser, saying says he thinks it will be fantastic to be able to buy an off-the-shelf product that has so many features for powered wheelchair users: “Having access to mainstream technology via a wheelchair is a huge advantage.”
The new feature is expected to launch in April, 2010.

Apple’s mythical tablet computer reportedly will be delayed because the Cupertino, Calif. company has added a second model with an OLED display, pushing an expected March 2010 launch date to later next year. The report by a Tiawan hardware news site cites anonymous Apple partners.

The company “has decided to switch some components and plans to launch a model using a 9.7-inch OLED panel from LG Display,” according to Digitimes. The OLED panel would be in addition to a 10.6-inch TFT LCD display. LG Display reportedly has a $500 million panel purchasing contract with Apple.

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.

“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite it hitting the shops a couple of months ago.

‘Tis the season: Italian magazines are chock full of ads for this sleek iPod dock and bedside lamp called “Diva.”

Designed by Dante Donegani and Giovanni Lauda for Italian firm Rotaliana, it’s an LED light and music system whose polycarbonate, anodized aluminum curves are all in the right places.

Clutter phobes will appreciate the retractable docking station and arm for the light.  The docking station, suitable for iPods and iPhones, has four 6-watt speakers, plus an FM radio and USB socket if you’d rather play music from a flash drive. The whole shebang can be commanded via an infrared remote control. She comes in black, gray or white.

At €360 euro (circa $535) one would have to offer molto proof of saintly behavior to Santa for this one.

Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-TS1 shockproof camera is designed for outdoor activities like mountain climbing and scuba diving, but for this accident-prone mom, it’s tough enough for birthday parties, school trips and Saturday soccer matches.

By now you’ve probably seen the viral clip for the Nude It app originally posted at whoisthebaldguy.com (if you haven’t, brush off that cave dust and watch it now).

The clip shows a mind-blowing iPhone app being used that employs augmented reality to de-clothe unwitting victims being viewed through the iPhone’s camera. Seems like great idea, judging by the 650,000-plus hits the clip has garnered in the five weeks it’s been up on YouTube.

Cult of Mac spoke briefly with the the clip’s creator, Michael Krivicka, a video editor living in NYC.

They’re calling it the first “iPhone reality show,” and it was likely inevitable; with TV saturated by the likes of The Apprentice and Biggest Loser, the genre of reality show had to find a new home somewhere.

So for one week, from December 6-12, Italian-based Command Guru will stream all the shenanigans that result when a bunch of iPhone app developers stop being polite and start getting real.

Contestants will assemble from all over the world with the goal of developing a free, open source social-networking iPhone app, from idea to final product at the iTunes App Store. The contest will also let developers from around the world can chime in at any time to help, which should prove interesting.

More pre-contest excitement can be found on the contest’s Twitter feed, where Command Guru says it’s giving away one iPhone 3GS per week till the contest begins.

From the press release:

“There are over 100,000 Apps and millions of users who do not have any idea of how they are developed,” said Alessio Zito Rossi, founder and CEO of Command Guru srl. “The stork doesn’t deliver iPhone Apps! We will show the world how they are really born – live and streaming!”

Gizmodo’s Brian Lam tested the new 27-inch Quad-Core i7  iMac and found it’s a beast. Geekbench benchmarks showed a 2x to 3x improvement over the Core 2 Duo model, but most impressive was a real world DVD ripping test, using Handbrake:

On the Core i7 iMac, it took 43 minutes to rip a DVD, Storm Riders, a surfing film from the ’70s featuring Gerry Lopez (my favorite) and others. On the Core 2 Duo machine, it took 147 minutes! I know this is basically a DVD read test coupled with decoding and video conversion, but the results have me excited because this is a real task that takes my computer a long time to do, performed by a program that hasn’t been revised in a year.

Benchmarked: The Quad-Core i7 iMac is Super Fast

Does your digital camera take extreme photographs? Ever wish you had a camera that could take more punishment than falling off a coffee table? Maybe Casio’s EX-G1 is the camera for you. Introduced Wednesday, the brightly-colored EX-G1 is more than just another flashy digital camera. Casio bills the EX-G1 as the world’s first waterproof and shockproof digital camera.

The EX-G1 is part of the company’s Exilim G line of “endurance” cameras aimed at athletic and adventuresome photographers. As such, the $300 EX-G1 is 0.78-inches thick and able to withstand drops from 7 feet. Casio also claims the camera can withstand being 10-feet underwater for up to a full hour.

We’ve reached mid-week and the Mac deals are arriving fast and furious. Today we have bargains for anyone looking for hardware. The Mac mini with Intel’s Core 2 Duo running at 2.53 GHz is selling for $769. A great stocking-stuffer for that up-and-coming MP3 fan on your list: an 8GB iPod nano for $110. Last on the top trio is the iPod touch. Several are selling for as low as $199.

For details on these and other Mac-related bargains (such as the Chocolate Bar Silicone iPhone case), check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page following this jump.

Microsoft Wednesday introduced discounts for the Mac version of its flagship Office 2008. The offer reduces the price of the Home and Student Edition, Business Edition and Business Edition Upgrade between $20-$50.

The discounts are available through Jan. 5, 2010.

South Korea regulators have given iPhone sales a green light in this gadget-hungry Asian nation. The move by the Korea Communications Commission clears the way for the country’s second-largest carrier to offer service plans for the popular handset.

While recent interest has been focused on China, Apple has long wanted into the South Korean market, where young tech-saavy consumers might flock to the iconic cell phone. South Korea’s government, however, has had long-standing barriers to foreign competition with home-grown handset makers, such as Samsung and LG Electronics, the world’s second and third-largest cell phone makers. Reports say 93 percent of South Koreans subscribe to cell phone services.

A man appealing his conviction for murdering a British student in Italy testified Wednesday that he heard the victim arguing with an American defendant in the case minutes before she was slain — while in the bathroom listening to his iPod.

In November 2007, British student Meredith Kercher was murdered in Italy, during a study abroad program in hill town Perugia.

In October 2008, Rudy Guede was sentenced to 30 years for his part in the killing, for which Kercher’s roommate, American student Amanda “Foxy Knoxy” Knox and her boyfriend, Italian IT grad, Raffaele Sollecito, are now on trial.

During what has been hypothesized was some sort of late-night Halloween sex game where the 21-year-old Kercher was an unwilling participant, Guede maintains he was out of commission during the murder while in the bathroom of the young women’s apartment.

Just months after releasing its latest Mac OS X 10.6 operating system, Apple began work on its successor, 10.7, according to reports. Indications of a new build number in an OS component and a new error message lead some to believe the Cupertino, Calif. company has begun development.

A database for Mac OS X’s boot software “launchd” mentions “11A47,” causing some to feel the Cupertino, Calif. company is at work on a new version of its operating system. MacRumors, which first reported on the hints, suggested the “11A” portion means Apple is working on an early version of the OS. The “47” portion indicates the company has been working on the new version “for at least the last month or two.”

Russell Davies does lots of things that are interesting, including, um, Interesting and Newspaper Club and a bunch of other stuff, but the other week he did a talk at the Playful event in London, culminating in this fabulous mock-up of an augmented reality game using an iPhone.

The idea is genius: you start playing the game with one tap, and after that you don’t have to look at the device at all. You walk around with your earphones in, and it alerts you with sounds when there’s stuff to interact with. This video explains it better:

SAP from russelldavies on Vimeo.

For those of you reading this on a Mac IIvi, I have excellent news for you: Twitter is finally available for Macintosh System 6. And 7. And 8. And even 9, for those of you mad cats who have installed a PowerPC upgrade card.

It’s called Grackle68k, and it’s awesome. First, it allows you to post things to Twitter. Second, it allows you to learn that your post has gone through successfully. Genius.

Grackle68k via Gizmodo

Uh, oh. Looks like there’s trouble in Android land. The rapid growth of Google’s smartphone OS is causing developers conniptions as they struggle to support multiple versions of the OS and different hardware configurations. With more than a dozen Android phones on the market, all the different configurations are leading to serious platform fragmentation, Wired.com reports:

“A slew of problems have made managing Android apps a “nightmare,” they say, including three versions of the OS (Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0), custom firmware on many phones, and hardware differences between different models.”

For users, it means buggy apps that sometimes won’t work on their hardware at all. One developer tells Wired.com that instead of concentrating on adding new features, he spends all his time making sure his apps work on all the different hardware and software configurations.

Looks like Google might be wandering into Microsoft territory. Microsoft had exactly the same problem with it’s now-discontinued “Plays For Sure” music-player platform, which became known as “Plays For Shit” because of the difficulty supporting multiple hardware and software configurations.

Just goes to show that there’s distinct advantages over owning both the hardware and the software, like Apple. Apple has released just three different hardware versions of the iPhone, and does a pretty good job of making sure most iPhone owners are running the latest software. In addition, the tightly-controlled App Store ensures a high-level of software compatibility. Even Android developers say its a good idea, according to Wired.com:

For developers, Apple’s autocratic ways may be frustrating, but they can pay off.

“Apple maintains an iron grip on what they do and there’s an advantage to that,” says Kelly Schrock, owner of Fognl, which has three apps on the Android market. “IPhone developers don’t have to worry about fragmentation and creating apps for the iPhone is much easier.”

Magellan today introduced its first GPS app for the iPhone.

The app looks as if it has the bells and whistles of its standalone Roadmate brethren, like turn-by-turn directions, highway lane guidance and voice guidance with spoken street names.

In fact, its siblings might be a little jealous as the iPhone version adds a pedestrian mode, in-app music control and direct navigation to contacts on your address book.

The icing on the cake is an iPhone car kit Magellan is releasing in December with a GPS receiver that improves accuracy over the iPhone’s, an amped speaker and Bluetooth capability

The app costs $79.99 and the car kit will set you back a further $129.99