Vacuuming is one of those mundane chores that can’t be helped much by listening to your iPod.
The beast whirs and whines over whatever soundtrack you try to stuff into your ears while hoovering over stale cornflakes.
Recognizing this immense problem, Electrolux invented a concept vacuum called the UltraSilencer. It’s so quiet, that you can dock your iPod on the front and built-in speakers on the sides blast your fave whistle-while-you-work tunes. (Perhaps to avoid a lawyer king-of-the-hill match they’ve put some iPod-like MP3 player in the mock-up).
Forehead arteries pulsing dangerously beneath purpling and apocalyptic skin stretched taut, a Microsoft manager recently told journalists not to use or even mention Apple products at a Windows Mobile event in Germany.
Eyeballs bulging out of his skull like the enraged ocular twins of his every spitted umlaut, the manager rebuked a journalist who had dared to opine over dinner that there has never been an easier-to-use smartphone than the iPhone.
“This is a Microsoft event,” the manager shouted. “Apple products have no business being here!”
Panic Software are the makers of some of the finest Mac software out there, including the superb FTP application Transmit, the superlative Usenet program Unison, and the hyperbolically adjectived icon tool, Candybar.
When Panic isn’t applying their peculiar brand of genius to creating the best programs OS X has to offer, they are drafting up hilarious mock histories of their company’s misadventures in the burgeoning Atari 2600 market… replete with gorgeously hallucinogenic cover art for what their apps would have looked like at Atari cartridges back in 1983.
Just days after turning out the lights on its London flagship store, cell phone giant Nokia has shuttered its New York and Chicago stores. The move is described as a “realignment” of marketing and only the latest indication Apple’s retail success isn’t easily replicated.
Nokia discovered consumers used its shops for browsing, but went elsewhere to make purchases. “They would use the stores to test out devices and then go home and buy the device they wanted online through Amazon, Newegg, Dell or even the Nokia USA store,” according to Nokia Experts.
Both stores opened in 2006 with a goal to “educate consumers on the Nokia brand.”
The latest shut-downs follow Nokia’s Regent Street closure in London earlier this week. The store closings are only the most recent sign the iPhone is making greater inroads on Nokia’s territory. Apple shipped 7.04 million iPhones during the September quarter, making it the third-largest smartphone maker behind Nokia and RIM, analysts announced in November. Another blow to Nokia was the news Apple had passed the Finnish giant in profitability.
Once again, AT&T shook their corporate fist menacingly at the bandwidth hogging iPhone kiddies scampering about their 3G lawn, threatening to charge users more if they keep on taking watching streaming video and availing themselves of other high-bandwidth services on their iPhones.
Speaking to attendees at a USB investor conference in New York, AT&T Wirelss CEO Ralph de la Vega said that AT&T was working on improving service in New York and San Francisco, possibly by introducing pricing tiers that would penalize high-bandwidth users.
Needless to say, if you’re under an existing contract, AT&T can’t just move you over to a tiered data contract… but once your existing contract is up, it’s open season.
Apple is exploring moving iTunes to the Web, the latest ripple from the Cupertino, Calif. firm’s purchase of streaming music service Lala, a report said Thursday. The switch, which could come as soon as 2010, would let music fans listen to tunes from a Web browser rather than stored on a personal computer.
The new reports could buttress those suggesting Lala’s aquisition may be part of Apple embracing “cloud computing.” Apple has also made tentative steps toward a Web-based iTunes with its Preview service. iTunes Preview removes the requirement that people have the iTunes software installed in order to preview material.
Chrome could be more Mac-like when it comes to the browser's tabs and toolbar.
Google Chrome for Mac arrived yesterday in beta form. The browser is lacking important features, including bookmarks and cookie management, and the useful app mode available in the Windows version. Also, benchmarks show it’s marginally slower than Safari. But in use I’ve found it good enough to set as my default, and Chrome’s superior to Apple’s browser in important ways: it launches more quickly, and is far less taxing on my Mac regarding RAM and processor usage, even with many tabs open.
However, one thing I’m finding irritating is Chrome’s tabs. Google’s efforts elsewhere in making Chrome a Mac-like experience should be applauded—the browser supports Keychain and the Mac OS X dictionary, and there are subtle animations peppered about—but the main toolbar and tabs area is problematic. I spent a short while making a mock-up (see the full-size version on my Flickr page), which offers ideas for a more Mac-like Chrome interface.
UK supermarket giant Tesco has just announced tariffs for iPhone, which will go on sale from the company next Monday (December 14th).
The headline they’ll be using in adverts is that this iPhone is available for as little as £20 per month. Whether you go for a contract or decide to pay-as-you-go, this gets you £60 worth of calls and SMS messages (assuming PAYG customers top up at least £20 per month, which qualifies them for extras – and obviously encourages them to switch to a contract). Also consider that the free credit is applied once a month and only lasts for one month, then automatically expires.
We begged. We pleaded. We begged some more. Steve Jobs finally listened — this morning, Ustream made live streaming from the iPhone a reality (pinch me!) with their Broadcasting app.
Yes, the clouds are finally parting. In the last week or so, there’s been a flurry of activity on the streaming-iPhone front: On November 30th, Fring — a VOIP app that allows users to stream one-way video to another iPhone with Fring installed (turning the iPhone into a one-way videophone) — went live at the App Store. One day later, Knocking Live Videoallowed two-way video-iPhone-ing.
Now, Ustream Live Broadcaster lets the iPhone broadcast to a mass audience via the Ustream website — and it’s pretty damn cool. And free. It even works over a 3G connection (albeit a bit wonkily — a friend of mine likened it to a NASA broadcast from the shuttle). And because the iPhone’s camera is on the gadget’s backside, using the little guy to stream to a wide audience makes much more sense than does two-way videophoning with it.
So have the floodgates finally opened? And will the next iPhone, rumored to be in the works, bring major advancements in video conferencing (for instance, a camera that isn’t on its butt)?
IQ test: Can you tell the Apple from the apple? @Gizmodo.
Whatever reality-bending substances are being imbibed, chewed or smoked at UPS, sign me up: they tagged Adam Jackson’s iMac Core i7 as a fruit.
And now his work tool is awaiting inspection by the FDA, after UPS did the smart thing by “submitting proper documentation” for what it believed was a 40-pound shipment of possibly forbidden fruit from China.
Sounds like a funny fluke, but there’s more than one burnt bulb at UPS processing centers — MG Siegler at Techcrunch had the same problem just last week.
Note to UPS: the words “apple” “mac” and “core” do NOT necessarily mean foodstuffs.
Or are they just PC people messing with us?
UPDATE: After viewing your comments about other incidents, we asked for a comment. Here’s what UPS had to say about it.
When I was a kid, I always thought those photostrip booths dumped unceremoniously near the entrance of suburban malls were like a mini fun house and a comic-strip press rolled into one.
Now, with a service they’re calling Wink, Shutterfly brings those booths to your iPhone ( the comic-strip press part, anyway — but I’m assuming instructions for making a booth out of cardboard and gum can be found at Craft:)
Just download the free app, shoot away and upload anywhere from three to five photos; Shutterfly does the rest, combining the photos into a strip and shipping the product off to any Earthly address desired — all for $2.50, which includes shipping and tax (and Shutterfly says the photos can be uploaded from anywhere in the world). No iPhone (really?), no problem — photos can be uploaded from Facebook and Flickr too.
Bonus: Shutterfly says it’s giving away three (count ’em!) free strips to the first 50,000 strip-crazed iPhone users who download the app.
Me first. Just as soon as I head over to Craft: to figure out how many packs of Bubblicious I need to chew for booth material.
We start the day off with a deal on MacBook Pro laptops. PC Connection has a number of MacBook Pros, including a 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo and 13-inch screen, starting at $1,046. Dragon Dictation is offering free iPhone and iPod touch versions of its voice-recognition software from Apple’s App Store. If you need an external battery and case, you might check out HHI’s Apocket 1350 mAh external backup battery for the iPhone or iPod. The $20 deal also gets you a slim case, dock connector and LED flashlight.
For details on these and many other bargains (such as an iPhone 3G/3GS case for $9), take a look at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Apple is preparing to release a limited beta version of Mac OS X 10.6.3, following just a month after publicly introducing 10.6.2, according to a report.
The update — expected within 48 hours — will include an unknown list of issues and carry a “10Dxx” prefix, the report claims. (When 10.6.2 was detected, it carried a “10B” and “10C” prefix.) The previous update addressed a series of issues, including the notorious “guest account” bug that deleted data when logging into or out of a Mac running the Snow Leopard operating system.
Today, Apple launched a new RSS feed for iPhone Developers, promising updates, tips and how-to information on a range of relevant topics — from development to distribution.
The idea is to keep iPhone devs on top of the ever-shifting highways and byways of getting an app on iTunes, including:
— Tips for submitting apps to the App Store
— Current turnaround time for app reviews
— Program updates
— Development and testing techniques
With complaint sites over rejections and possible scams growing along with the astronomical app sales, something needed to be done to get better info in a timely fashion to devs.
The first few headlines look promising (see below) it remains to be seen whether the RSS will be another reality distortion field emanator…
Motorola’s Droid, Verizon’s answer to the iPhone, was ranked the No. 1 gadget of 2009 by Time Magazine Wednesday. Apple’s iconic cell phone finished in fourth place, behind Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader and Dyson’s $300 Air Multiplier fan. Is the Droid winning the buzz war for the hippest handset?
“The Droid is a hefty beast, a metal behemoth without the gloss and finish of the iPhone, but you don’t miss it,” according to the magazine. The entry is praised for its “phenomenally sharp and vivid” touchscreen and its connection to AT&T rival Verizon Wireless. “Best of all, the Droid is on Verizon’s best-of-breed 3G network. It’s Android’s first credible challenge to the iPhone,” said the writers.
Apple’s long-rumored and much-discussed tablet will appear in March or April 2010 with a 10.1-inch screen and a $1,000 price tag, according to an analyst. In what has become a cottage industry, Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner told investors production will begin in February.
“The manufacturing cogs for the tablet are creaking into action and should begin to hit a mass market stride in February,” noted Yair, citing “supply chain” checks. Such a timetable would put a product launch in March or April.
To date, Dragon’s Lair — that “classic” quarter sucker of inexplicable and catastrophic player death animated by Don Bluth and first released to arcades in 1983 — is available for over 59 different platforms. Now you can make it sixty: Dragon’s Lair has officially been released for the iPhone.
If you’re set to automatically grab new updates, you’re likely to notice Apple’s Software Update burbling insistently in your dock for your attention, after Apple released a couple of updates of both their Airport software and the MacBook / MacBook Pro’s EFI.
The Airport Client Update 2009-002 is a routine update, fixing a few routine issues. The update solves the inability to turn the AirPort on or off in some cases after upgrading from Leopard, as well as an occasional loss of network connectivity when using Wake on Demand and the inability to create computer-to-computer networks or share Internet connections on some MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers.
The MacBook and MacBook Pro EFI Update is more interesting, in that with the installation of SuperDrive Firmware Update 3.0, the optical drive of these machines should no longer sound like Cookie Monster trying to chew his way through a sheet of plate glass when waking from sleep or start-up.
As usual, you can either load up Software Update to automatically suck them down and install them (restart required), or you can grab the latest updates from Apple’s support page.
With Time Capsules epidemically failing after an average of 18 months and 22 days, it might be time to start thinking about an alternative use for your pristinely albino, Apple-branded router once its body squirts out its last breath of 802.11-n ectoplasm.
Why not turn it into a lovely gift box? Over at Instructables, there’s a handy little tutorial on how to convert a Time Capsule into an ornamental box worthy of display, simply by prying it open, gutting it, then adding hinges and a silk cushion.
Not the most revolutionary use for an old Time Capsule’s casing, certainly, but this would be great presentation for, say, an iPod Touch gifted to a loved one later this month, and it can even be reused as a jewelry box or even a humidor (for cigars or the disembodied fingers of people who owed you money, you decide).
The AppleTV was a bizarre misstep for Cupertino, and judging by how they’ve consistently ignored the device since it launched, Apple damn well seems to know it. Popular AppleTV media software suite Boxee seem to too: they have just announced their own competing set-top media player for release in 2010.
Cyclists ride down San Francisco's Folsom Street during one of the city's legendary Critical Mass rides.
First Boston launched its CitizensConnect app in June, giving its citizens the ability use the iPhone to tag locations and upload photos of potholes and other urban hazards; now San Francisco is using the iPhone to build a better city too — through tracking cyclists with its CycleTracks app.
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.
