Microsoft has lost its edge to Apple and Google, becoming like IBM in the mid-1980s when the Seattle, WA. software giant unveiled its first version of the Windows operating system. “I think Microsoft today is a lot like IBM was in 1985,” ex-Microsoft employee Don Dodge told a Seattle newspaper.
Dodge, who worked with startups at Microsoft before laid off in November, was hired by Internet giant Google one week later.
The former Microsoft worker said his previous employer is now overshadowed by Apple, Google and Facebook when it comes to innovation. “Microsoft is still a powerful company – $60 billion in revenue and very profitable – but I think after 20 years they are losing the innovation edge,” Dodge told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site.
China Unicom, Apple’s first pick to break into the world’s largest cell phone market, is leaning away from the iPhone, according to new phone orders. The carrier said the iPhone will comprise just 4 percent of phones it plans to order. Instead, a mix of Symbian, Windows Mobile and BREW-based handsets are getting the majority of interest.
Phones based on the Symbian OS received 16 percent of the orders, with 8 percent going to Windows Mobile handsets, 4 percent to the iPhone and the remainder to phones using BREW or a proprietary operating system. More than half (63 percent) of the new phones are mid-priced (below $439), according to reports.
A series of patents may detail the user interface of Apple’s tablet, which could be unveiled in January. At the heart of ‘surprising‘ method for users to interact with the much-awaited device is what the Cupertino, Calif. company describes as an ‘articulated frame.’
“The articulating frame may provide key edge ridges that define the boundaries of the key regions or may provide tactile feedback mechanisms within the key regions,” according to an application entitled “Keystroke Tactility Arrangement on a Smooth Touch Surface” uncovered earlier this week.
Many of us have gumdrop iMacs sitting on our desks, too adorable to dispose of, too antiquated to be of any use. One of my New Year’s Resolutions, in fact, is to finally figure out what to do with my bondi blue iMac. My earlier thoughts tended to gravitate towards Hackintoshing the sucker into a competitive, modern machine, but tinkerer Klaus Diebel has screwed another notion into my brain: why not turn my gumdrop iMac into a coffee maker?
Of course, Diebel’s iMac CS is a lot more clever than just a coffee maker crammed into an empty iMac shell: it’s also a functional Mac, as well as a working, subwoofer-amped stereo system. It turns out that the Mac Mini’s optical disc slot lines up perfectly with the gumdrop iMac’s, with no other alteration necessary, so if you want to use the iMac CS as a desktop computer, all you need to do is hook up an external display and a mouse and keyboard. Why external? Because the iMac’s built-in screen now squirts out liquid joe. As for the JBR subwoofer, it beefs up the sound of the included Mac Mini, although if you attach an iPod to the iMac CS, it will automatically mute the Mac Mini and output your tunes through the iMac CS’s speakers, replete with sphincter-loosening bass… possibly messy funtionality, given all the coffee you’ll be drinking.
It’s a great little mod. Better yet, if you’re lazy, you can just pay Dubei to make you one, although you’d better be prepared to pony up: the raw materials of the mod cost between €300 and €400, even before you add in the price of the gumdrop iMac and the Mac Mini.
After leading his company through a year of unbridled financial success and unparalleled market share growth in both the home computer and smart phone sectors, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will finally take home his paycheck. He earned a buck this year. That’s ten thin dimes.
Of course, we’re all Apple fans here, so we know that’s Jobs’ customary salary. We also the man’s hardly hurting for money: he’s sitting on 5.5 million shares of Apple stock, which is worth a cool $1.1 billion. Additionally, he owns a 7.4 percent stake in Disney, valued at $4.5 billion. In other words, the man can afford to buy us all an iPod.
Those who know what the Apple Tablet actually is have had a circle of secrecy woven around them twice by Cupertino’s Mephistophelean lawyers, but with all the ballyhoo right now about a late January announcement, it’s still easy to forget we actually don’t really know the first thing about the forthcoming device. How big will it be? What will the hardware be like? Is it more like a Macbook without a keyboard, or is it just like a big iPod Touch? What operating system will the Apple Tablet even run?
It’s been assumed for awhile that the Apple Tablet will probably be more iPhone-like than Mac-like, since Apple wants another platform on which the App Store can shine. It now looks like that assumption is correct: Apple has reportedly told select developers to ready full screen version of their apps to demo on the Apple Tablet in January.
When it rains, it pours — and it’s pouring tablet rumors. The latest is from the NY Times, which says Steve Jobs is “extremely happy” with the upcoming tablet, and that it will have a “surprising” UI.
In a report that’s basically a rehash of tablet rumors, the Times adds a couple of tantalizing morsels.
According to the Times, a senior Apple employee said: “I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet.”
And another recently-departed Apple staffer added: “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”
What this surprising UI is, the Times doesn’t say, unfortunately. It doesn’t even hazard a guess. Gestures? The iPhone’s already there. Voice? Same — and it doesn’t even work that well. Handwriting recognition? Remember the Newton.
What else is there? A little rubbery red button like an old ThinkPad? A virtual scroll wheel?
The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans.
Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th.
The prospect of a three-day event is tantalizing, but why would Apple need three days to announce a new product — like the long-rumored the tablet, say? My guess is the company needs a day to set up and another to break down. The 26th is a Tuesday: Apple’s favorite day for new product announcements.
Note, neither Apple nor YBCA would comment to the FT, but the center’s online calendar says the venue is free on January 25, 26 and 27. IE. there are no artsy events scheduled for those three days on a calendar that is otherwise full.
Having pulled out of Macworld, these days the YBCA stage is Apple’s favorite venue for product announcements. With CES in January, and the Apple-less Macworld in February, a January 26 event would be sandwiched right between.
The rumor comes on the back of reports that Apple is wooing TV studios for a new online TV service, which conjures the Apple TV to mind, but perhaps a new TV service would be tablet-centric? In addition, the company is reportedly talking to magazine publishers about repurposing content for the upcoming tablet. Earlier this year, iLounge predicted the tablet would be announced in mid-January with a May or June sell date to build iPhone-like hype.
MacSpeech Dictate is dictation software for the Mac that helps you enhance your productivity by simply dictating rather than typing. It is based on Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine, which ensures highly accurate speech recognition capabilities. In fact, the company claims it to be about 95% accurate. Although the lack of a Beta version makes it hard to believe but surprisingly, it’s very true.
Recently, I had a chance to test version 1.5 of this for myself and from my experience, it works really well. It’s not just a simple application, but a full-fledged dictation solution for any Mac user, especially for a writer or a journalist.
And guess what: The $2 app trumps Playboy’s for titillation, by graphically (yet tastefully) depicting 77 illustrated positions from Cosmopolitan’s book, The Cosmo Kama Sutra. A rating system and clear-cut instructions accompany each entry, as well as the ability to rate each position based on the user’s preference. (Note: The app’s accuracy hasn’t been tested, but I’m open to suggestions from anyone attractive and female).
Even with the app’s fairly innocuous illustrations, I’m a little surprised this one made it through — perhaps the hyper-vigilant App Store guardians are relaxing their Vader-like grip ?
Are you looking for a starter Mac, or an Apple for a child? How about a $99 500Mhz G3 iBook? It may be just two days until Christmas, but the deals keep arriving, like up to $250 off items at MacMall. If you have an iMac or new Mac under the tree and you’d like the perfect display, but your budget is blown – how about a refurbished 30-inch Apple Cinema Widescreen LCD display for just $1,299?
Along with assorted iPhone cases and accessories, the App Store has something every exhausted holiday shopper wants: freebies. This batch includes MotionInk, a media painter application. Not to be missed, though, are EA games for the iPhone or iPod; just $5 for NBA Live or Rock Band.
As always, for details on these bargains and many more, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Kenji Kojima developed a music app called RGB MusicLab that transforms images into music. You can download the app gratis and do what you will with the ditty coming out of that awkward family portrait on your blog, video or work presentation.
Here’s how it works:
RGB MusicLab converts RGB (Red, Green and Blue) value of an image to chromatic scale sounds. The program reads RGB value of pixels from the top left to the bottom right of an image. One pixel makes a harmony of three note of RGB value, and the length of note is determined by brightness of the pixel. RGB value 120 or 121 is the center C, and RGB value 122 or 123 is added a half steps of the scale that is C#. Pure black that is R=0, G=0, B=0 is no sounds.
The clever folks over at Synthtopia took the app for a spin using a head shot of actress Megan Fox — currently topping lad mag FHM’s list of the sexiest woman alive.
It may be nearing the end of 2009, but there appears no end in sight to rumors Apple is soon to announce its mythical tablet device. The latest talk comes from a site claiming Apple will unveil the tablet in January.
Citing “a very connected source”, Boy Genius Report wrote Wednesday a 7-inch tablet and a 10-inch tablet are in the wings.
The camera in the iPhone is pretty crummy, even when compared to the constabulary of terrible camera sensors installed in other smartphones. When the iPhone 3G came out with a 2-megapixel camera provided by Aptina, the competition was boasting 3.2MP, and when the iPhone 3Gs matched that ante thanks to a sensor from OmniVision, other phones raised the bet to 5.
So there’s reason to believe a report from Taiwan’s Digitimes that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone will again boost its megapixels to match the likes of the Motorola DROID, which has a 5MP sensor. According to their sources, OmniVision is set to supply a 5-megapixel camera for the next-generation iPhone, due to arrive in the second half of next year.
With yesterday’s release-then-nearly-instantaneous-pull of the Nescaline NES emulator, the message should be clear: jailbreaking is the only real option for iPhone emulation enthusiasts. Good news, then, for jailbreakers: ZodTTD has has released the Nintendo 64 emulator N64iPhone through Cydia just in time for Christmas, with one killer little feature… Wiimote support through Bluetooth pairing.
Emulation tends to be slow on less beefy hardware, and it doesn’t look as though N64iPhone manages to defy expectations in that regard: even when using the Wiimote, the emulator appears tricky to control, with notable slowdowns. Still, at least it’s working. Heck, at least it’s real, unlike the last N64 emulator we wrote about, which turned out to just be a clever video.
If you can deal with slowdowns and convoluted controls in your quest for mobile Metroid Prime, you can download N64iPhone through Cydia for just $2.50.
Has evidence of an iPhone 3GS successor been found?
Apple’s iPhone 3G garnered 4 percent of U.S. cell phone subscribers in 2009, ranking No. 1 in single handset models, according to an Internet research firm. The iPhone beat the RIM BlackBerry and Motorola RAZR, which placed 2nd and 3rd.
Apple may be preparing to sell up to 45 million iPhones in 2010, according to suppliers. The orders for an upgraded iPhone camera would double those expected for 2009. The news appears to coincide with other reports that Apple may introduce a new iPhone in mid-2010.
“OmniVision Technologies is expected to see CMOS image sensor orders for Apple’s iPhone devices grow to 40-45 million units in 2010,” according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes. The orders for a 5-megapixel sensor may be a response to Verizon’s Droid and Google’s Nexus One handsets which both have more sensitive cameras than the iPhone 3GS’ 3.2 megapixel camera. OmniVision supplied the iPhone 3GS 3.2 megapixel image sensor.
At this point, it’s not really surprising that the iPhone 3Gs’ graphics are capable of pumping out the polygons needed to bring a sophisticated 3D engine to the handset, but it’s still wonderful to watch Epic Games’ Mark Rein play Unreal Tournament deathmatch on his third generation iPod Touch. You can see a video of it in action after the jump.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4IjeO7g6kA
If you’re not sold on the freshmen augmented reality apps available for the iPhone, this one probably won’t change your mind.
With it, you launch a simulated iPhone on your iPhone screen. Then you can zoom your virtual iPhone or spin it around and run other apps on it. The virtual “apps” aren’t real applications but the effect is suitably trippy nonetheless.
Developed by Ogmento for Orange Telecom Israel to generate interest for the iPhone launch there, it’s not available to the general public.
Useless? Pretty much. But sort of an Escher for the digital age.
An iPhone price war currently underway in France may be our first glimpse of what we can expect if, as rumored, AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple runs out next year, and the iPhone comes to other carriers.
Tis the holiday season and we want to give your iPhone a present. Star Walk, my childhood dream of an iPhone app, has given us 5 codes to give away to Cult of Mac Twitter followers.
Send us a tweet on Twitter with your favorite night sky memory by December 23rd at 2 p.m. PST and we’ll pick a winner at random. You must include @cultofmac in your tweet to be counted in the contest.
Here’s an example: “I remember driving through West Texas at night and softly weeping at the vastness of space @cultofmac”
Get creative even though we’re selecting at random. You can pick up Star Walk, the iPhone astronomy app, from iTunes for $2.99.
With just days before Christmas, we highlight three Mac deals for the harried, last-minute holiday shopper. If you have an iPod on your list, but you don’t want to cross that mystical $100 barrier, Apple still has 8GB iPod nanos for just $99. Not often does shipping make it into the headlines, but as retailers pull out all the stops to attract online sales, Apple still has free next-day delivery. But hurry – 1pm EST Wednesday is the deadline. Last on our top trio seems perfect for all those iPhone owners out there: 80 percent off select cases for the Apple handset. (We also have a 50% off deal for iPod touch owners.)
Along the way, we have deals on a skin for the Nike+ iPod running sensor, the latest batch of App Store price drops and more software for your iPhone or iPod touch. For details on these and many more bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the break.
Cinch in action - note the visual feedback as a dotted outline of where the window will be moved to
One of the features I loved from the first moment I saw it in Windows 7 was Snap, the one that lets you instantly resize any document window by dragging it to one side of your screen.
Irradiated Software makes a Mac utility that does a similar job. It’s called Sizeup, and I find it pretty useful. But it’s keyboard-controlled, not mouse-controlled, and you have to remember some new shortcuts to get the most from it. How about a mouse-controlled alternative?
Enter Cinch, a new app from the Sizeup developers.
