Cult of Mac

A major update of the Apple TV may be in the works.

Apple has slashed the price of the 160GB Apple TV to $229 (from $329) and discontinued the 40GB model. Meanwhile, it looks like Apple’s new iTunes LP — a new format for multimedia music bundles — is designed for high-resolution output on the AppleTV.

The iTunes LP content is output at 1,280-by-720, the native resolution of an Apple TV when hooked to a high-definition TV. Apple’s new iTunes Extras (bonus movie material usually included on bonus DVDs and now available for download on iTunes) is also designed to be output at the same high resolution. While this is natural for movie content, it’s a curious choice for music content, albeit multimedia music content, which might naturally be formatted for playing on computers and laptops.

Which all points to a major update for the Apple TV in the near future. The AppleTV hardware has remained essentially unchanged since its introduction, although it has received a couple of software upgrades.

The 160GB model is the only configuration of the Apple TV now on offer. The 40GB Apple TV was previously priced at $229.

Steve Jobs usually refers to the AppleTV as a “hobby,” and not a real business. The choice of movies for the device on the iTunes store remains relatively limited.

Apple TV on Amazon.

We start the week with Apple’s $100 drop on the price of its 160GB Apple TV units to $229. Next we have the $20 Gigaware dual dock charger for iPods, plus a new round of freebies from the App Store.

For details on these and other bargains (such as the ProStockMaster software), check out CoM’s Daily Deals page.

What is it? It’s Notational Velocity, one of the best and yet most overlooked note apps for OS X. You should download it immediately.

Why it’s cool Because if you want to store text notes, many hundreds or thousands of them, and then be able to search through them at lighting speed, there is no faster or simpler way of doing it.

In the mid-1990s, gaming on the Mac was an incredibly sad affair. Very few titles were available outside of Myst and the various Sim titles, and the performance was quite poor. Games were regularly, and correctly, cited as a legit reason to prefer PCs.

But there was one exception that made the whole thing work: Snood, a tiny puzzle game from a geology professor at a liberal arts college in North Carolina. You shot little colored creatures (Snoods) from a cannon, attempting to match colors and clear the board. Yes, it was a whole lot like Bust-a-Move. That’s not the point. It had the ability to make shots through tiny cracks and suddenly clear the whole board with one click. It was fun, exciting, and, most of all, addictive as hell.

And it was a phenomenon. Basically, if you were college-age or younger and owned a Mac, you owned Snood, and you played it all the time. I still remember trying it for the first time in the Fall of 1996 when my older brother returned from his first semester at the University of Michigan and introduced me to my new gaming crack. I later became Johnny Snood-Seed, installing it on Macs at my high school that weren’t locked down (I disguised them as Internet settings panels so administrators wouldn’t delete them) and had my entire high school paper staff blowing deadlines because of it.

The game eventually got ported to pretty much everything, including Windows and TI-84 calculators, but its real roots are with Apple. And that’s why it’s such good news to learn that the iPhone version (App Store link) is out now. I’ve only spent a little time with it, but the developers have captured some of the feel of the Mac original. Now I’ll be able to procrastinate my professional work the way I once did my homework — in the palm of my hand! It’s even got Facebook connectivity so you can play against my high school friends, too. Quite a set-up. Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool, isn’t it?

Steve Jobs made a welcome return to the public eye last week at a special music event to introduce Apple’s 2009 holiday iPods.

“The September music event was classic Apple. It marked the return of the world’s greatest corporate storyteller,” says communications coach, Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.

Gallo’s book will be published later this month by McGraw-Hill and can be pre-ordered now from Amazon. Gallo’s written some insightful analyses of Steve’s presentations in the past, so we asked him to take a look at last week’s event. After the jump, Gallo breaks down his top ten presentation tips from Jobs’ latest speech.

An astute MacRumors reader compared the pictures from iFixit’s teardown of the latest iPod touch with earlier leaked pictures of a prototype equipped with a camera — and the internal details are the same.

Look at the pictures after the jump. The internal circuit boards are indentical — and both are completely different to the second-generation touch.

Unfortunately, Audio-Technica’s $220, noise-cancelling beauties have turned me into a complete twit. They’ve caused me to belt out John Legend’s “If You’re Out There” while in line at the local Starbucks; and they make make me look like Lando Calrissian’s crony in The Empire Strikes Back

I don’t care. They’re so good, I’m probably never taking them off.

Never mind what Steve Jobs tells the New York Times, the iPod Touch is getting a camera, likely sooner than later.

The new iPod Touch has an internal space for a camera, a teardown by iFixit has discovered. And there’s a couple more surprises also.

What it is: Yahoo has released a native app for iPhone that seamlessly integrates Apple’s mobile device with Yahoo’s popular photo and video sharing platform, Flickr.

Why it’s cool: With the iPhone having recently become the most popular camera among users of the Flickr service, it should be no surprise Yahoo has produced a nifty native app that makes uploading photos and videos from the iPhone to Flickr dead easy.

The first time users launch the app they are prompted to verify a Flickr account through a Safari browser, after which uploading pics and videos to Flickr servers on-the-fly become easy and intuitive. Uploads can be geotagged, tagged with keywords, and placed into sets – and a user’s entire Flickr stream can be viewed in series or by set and tag.

Maybe you don’t want to upload pics but just want to chill with some eye candy from your own stream, the streams of your Flickr contacts, or from other Flickr users worldwide. Just open the app and it will serve up a handful of images from random users as well as from your contacts and display them in a lovely little “Ken Burns”-style slide show. You can also search your contacts, view recent activity, comment and mark images as favorites.

All in all, the app brings very tight integration between the iPhone and the web service and should make the iPhone even more popular as a Flickr upload device in the coming months.

Where to get it: Flickr for iPhone is a free application, available now on the iTunes App Store.

Here’s this week’s selection of games to take you into the weekend from Mac Games and More. Games include an intense, in-depth war game, an anime style RPG where you’re in search of a soulmate, and a mind-boggling board game. Click on the images to see a larger screenshot.

The obsession over all things Mac now extends to your power cord. Yes, we’ve written about the zen of an unclutter desk and stylish storage for your iMac or MacBook. Now it’s time to tame the jungle of cords and wires with the Powercurl.

The brightly-colored PowerCurl is from the folks at Quirky, the people who make on-demand Mac products. (Earlier this week I wrote about the Scratch-n-Roll mousepad with built-in white board.)

This new product was designed to answer how to store Apple’s magsafe power adapters and the red hot power “bricks.” Used by MacBook owners to prevent laptops being yanked by someone tripping over the power cord, the adapters usually wind up under your desk — along with dozens of other cords.

While a seemingly useful idea, a war between the “winders” and the “folders” has erupted online.

The PowerCurl, which lets you wind the magsafe cord around the orange plastic housing “does more than get me a little excited,” raves Gizmodo.

On the other end of the spectrum, Gadget Lab takes a tongue-in-cheek jab at the “neat freaks” and those who “maniacally wrap” their cords versus people who “gently fold” their power lines.

Power cords rarely produce this much excitement.

The PowerCurl costs just $7.25.

[Via Gadget Lab, Gizmodo and Quirky]

You’d think the ship had sailed on any iPod dock gear making news. Aside from the cottage industry for cases, we’ve read so many dock announcements they start to blur together. However, Sharp Friday broke through the banality and the normal eye-on-the-clock mentality of Friday newswriters.

“Sharp DK-AP8P iPhone Dock’s Touch Remote Is 3X Better Than an iPod,” declares Gizmodo.

Just yesterday, Leander described a remote for Altec Lansing’s Mix Boombox for the iPhone worth “its hefty $300 price tag.”

Sure, the DK-AP8P let’s you change the music selected and the glossy-black remote acts as a cover, but three times as useful as the iPod’s own remote? Technically, Giz is correct, since Sharp’s 3 touch wheel-remote does outnumber Apple’s solo touchwheel for the iPod/iPhone.

The DK-AP8P weighs in at 1.6 pounds, lets you recharge your iPod or iPhone while in the integrated dock and costs $189.99.

[Via Gizmodo and Sharp]

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac. Except this article didn’t show up last week, due to me ending up in Belgium, so this time it’s a one-off, extra-special iPhone Fortnightly Digest!

APPS OF THE WEEK

TonePad Pro: Addictive grid-based musical toy. Many editing/sharing options. Ringtone exports a tad distorted. 5/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/36AZt

FlipTime: Cute clock/calendar akin to old-style airport/train station boards. Lsc. & portrait modes. No alarm. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2NJnC

Terminator: Death Valley 1: So-so ‘humanoid killer robots’ vs contemporary ‘human cannon fodder’ comic. Nice UI. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2JTvQ

Remix David Bowie – Space Oddity: Simple but limited multitrack ‘mixing’ of a famous Bowie track. 3/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/2LtRo

Adrenaline: 32 basic, quickfire ‘blitz’ games. Sometimes fun but would benefit from much shorter level times. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2Qryw

Leaves: Tranquil leaves-based toy. Slightly iffy 3D and physics, but calming, and fun for a short time. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/30cmL

Score-Em: Virtual scorecard app with varied graphics and relevant audio. Works fine, but throwaway in nature. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/32bBx

Gem Ninja: Mindless prod-based tile-match game. OK for a free time-waster, but not worth paying for. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/32cQy

Looptastic Electro Edition Lite: Loop remix tool. Fantastic UI, varied audio stems, and ten loops to play with. 4/5 Free https://is.gd/34Hp2

StarTime: Vibrant, bold Star Trek-like clock. Optional random sounds & can run iPod music in background. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/39xOi

Since this column didn’t happen last week, it’s only fair to highlight FlipTime, which would have been ‘app of the week’ last week. It’s one of those apps that shows you don’t need something that’s all-singing and all-dancing to make an impression. Instead, charm sometimes goes a long way. All FlipTime does is show the time and date, sporting a visual appearance like those old-fashioned flip boards you’d see at railway stations and airports. Sounds are optional and the numerals are bold enough to see at a distance. Aesthetically, it’s also the nicest iPhone clock I’ve seen.

TonePad Pro is this week’s favourite. It’s been described as iPhone musical crack elsewhere, and it does have a certain addictive quality about it. Again, it’s a simple app—this time, you toggle grid spaces to play notes in an ever-repeating loop. However, this time it’s the attention to detail that wins through, the developer having provided plenty of options for editing, saving and sharing your creations. The Pro version is ad-free and enables you to email ringtones that can then be dropped into iTunes and synchronised with your iPhone. But if you don’t care about ringtones and ads, the free version of TonePad is just as good.

Follow iPhoneTiny on Twitter, or visit iPhoneTiny.com

iTunes 9 and OS X for iPhone 3.1 brought a bunch of refinements, but one strikes me as odd: along with charts for paid apps and free apps, we now have one for ‘top grossing’ apps.

It’s pretty clear this an attempt to appease developers, increasingly annoyed at the rush to 99 cents on the App Store. But here’s the thing: will anyone care? I can’t see too many consumers rushing to see which apps have grossed the most and make buying decisions based on that. ‘Top grossing apps’ also sounds pretty ugly—not really what you’d expect from Apple.

That said, there’s definitely a need to push apps with slightly higher price-points more prominently. Higher-priced apps (and I’m talking maybe $5 and above, not the likes of $50+ sat-nav apps) enable longer development periods, often leading to richer end products.

I wonder whether the App Store should instead have taken a leaf out of the 1980s games industry—at least as it was in the UK. Around 1985, publishers started toying with ‘budget’ videogames, selling cheap, relatively throwaway titles at £1.99, with full-price games being four or five times more expensive. Such publishers typically advertised less, and developers of full-price games started to get antsy. (Sound familiar?)

The solution then was simple: the chart was split. So you had a ‘full price’ chart and a ‘budget’ chart. One might argue this would only serve to push people away from high-price apps, but it would also provide a mechanism for highlighting stuff that’s unlikely to be crap. And ‘full price’ or ‘premium’ certainly sounds a whole lot nicer than ‘top grossing’.

Apple has three new TV ads today.

Check them out.

A teardown of the new nano throws some light on the two big questions raised by Apple’s new iPod line: Why doesn’t the iPod touch have a camera, and why can’t the iPod nano take still pictures?

A popular tethering hack that allows your computer to access the internet via your iPhone’s cell connection is broken with the iPhone 3.1 update. The update also disables MMS messaging enabled by the same hack.

The hack is enabled by changing iPhone’s AT&T carrier file. It’s easily enabled by visiting sites like BenM.at using mobile Safari on the iPhone, and appears under the Network settings. The option is removed under 3.1.

AT&T will roll out multimedia messaging for the iPhone on Sept. 25, but hasn’t given a release date for tethering, saying only it will be available “in the future.”

We end the week with a continuing flood (alright, two) of iPods. Today it is the touch’s turn, with 8GB and 32GB models on sale. We all knew love was on life support, but Apple’s iTunes Store gives us the bad news: Love is Dead – and free. Finally, there are the Digital Performance Glasses from Metropole. They may not give you x-ray vision, but they are way cool.

Details on these and many other bargains are as close as clicking to the next page of CoM’s Daily Deals.

Whether you were disappointed or elated with the new products and services on Tuesday’s Rock n’ Roll event, you have to admit there was a lot of stuff going on.

One small, almost overlooked new-ish item: “Mayhem”  the first standalone digital book is for sale on iTunes 9.  (Fortune’s Jon Fortt ran into singer/actor Tyrese Gibson who produced it at the event, or he says he might have missed it, too.)

Although there are plenty of comic book apps and magazines on iTunes, this one is different.
Mayhem is more like a book on steroids. For the $1.99 purchase price, you get the comic book,  an iTunes LP with an exclusive track, plus storyboards, a making-of video and two freebie comic books.

This is the first digital book that Apple had a hand in designing and it shows — reports say the interface is versatile enough to work as well on a touch-screen as it does on a full-size screen.

The Mayhem iTunes LP was designed by Sam Herz, one of Apple’s user interface engineers for  iTunes, and Barry Munsterteiger, creative director for rich media and Internet technologies.

After the event, Steve Jobs once again stated that Apple won’t be trying to encroach on Amazon’s territory any time soon — should we believe him?

Via Fortune

Apple’s new fifth-generation iPod nano, now with a video camera, is a perfect pearl of 21st-century technology. It’s a lovely piece of electronic jewelry that does almost everything except dispense pints of beer.

It can record video, play movies, store weeks’ worth of music, wake you in the morning, remind you of a dental appointment, record how many steps you walked to work, and how long it took you. It remembers all your contacts, records voice memos, stores your shopping lists and plays a bunch of games that are controlled by tipping and tilting the beautiful little device.

It’s easy to get complacent about Apple’s iPods, new ones come out so often. They’ve got to be 3D holographic auto-mastubators to get anyone’s attention. But take a step back, and it’s pretty astonishing how much advanced technology is stuffed into such a tiny device, and how beautifully it’s done.

iTunes 9 has neat little new feature: it will automatically import any music or videos you throw into a specific folder.

That folder is called “Automatically Add to iTunes”, and after installing iTunes 9 you’ll find it tucked away inside your “~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/” folder.

I’ve been a gamer since the very early 1980s, and have owned more systems than you can shake a stick at. A year ago, I happily penned an article for this very site, suggesting iPod gaming was a crock of shit. And you know what? I was dead wrong… absolutely, painfully, utterly, astonishingly wrong. The fact is, iPod is the most exciting platform for gaming we’ve seen in years.

On the day after Apple announced new iPod features, retailers roll out their sales on shuffles, nanos, the touch and even the classic. Speaking of classics, you can still get CRT versions of the iMac used for just $40. For something newer, you can grab a just-announced iPod nano with video camera for $149 or an 8GB iPod touch for $199.

Details on these and many other bargains (like MacMall’s 75% blowout on Apple gear) can be found at CoM’s Daily Deals page.

Cult reader Gary Gale recently blogged about his positive experience of using an iPhone as an electronic boarding pass during a flight from Amsterdam to London.

I’ve been poking around iTunes 9 since yesterday evening (UK time), and there’s some good (app management), some bad (stability issues) and some “beaten repeatedly with an ugly stick until unconscious” ugly (most of the UI, the hideous column nav). But one thing with the App Store refresh within iTunes 9 just baffles me: the lack of wish-lists for apps.

As shown in the pic, access a song’s menu and you get to add the item to a wish-list. With an app, you can merely ‘tell a friend’. I’m sure owners of the many websites that provide wish-list functionality for the App Store are breathing a collective sigh of relief, but it strikes me a strange and inconsistent that Apple’s not enabling users to store a list of interesting apps for later purchase.