Cult of Mac

Way way back in the mists of ancient history, I owned a Palm device, and I loved the little fella.

One of my favourite apps for the Palm was AvantGo (now defunct) – a huge database of free newspaper and magazine content that the device would download every time you synced the Palm with your desktop computer.

I used to spend long train journeys catching up with news from the BBC, Wired, and a bunch of other publications. Most of it was full text, there were no ads (not that I can remember, anyway – this was a long time ago now), it was fast and quick and easy. Superb.

This week I noticed Time magazine’s new app, and started poking around elsewhere in the news section of the App Store. In particular, I wanted to see what the UK media were up to.

We’re big fans of the unauthorized doc “Welcome to Macintosh” — a true love letter to the history of Apple and its community.

Now this indie film is available on iTunes.

Well, it’s also available on Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Netflix etc., but we love the idea that what is a totally handmade film (tagline: “a documentary for the rest of us”) is now worthy of being sold by Apple.

In what’s turning out to be a busy few weeks for the team at Bare Bones, their information manager app Yojimbo has just been bumped up to 2.0. The new version is a 20 dollar upgrade for owners of older versions, is Snow Leopard compatible, and has this spectacular new icon.

There are a lot of Apple-inspired confections out there, but this apple pie with a logo at the center by a photographer in Uruguay who goes by Miss Gong looks almost too yummy to eat. (Not sure if the reverse logo was intentional or just turned round in the photo).

Imagine inviting your Mac user group over and serving this apple pie for dessert…

Mobile phone gadget maker Parrot Tuesday introduced one of the few in-dash car stereos meant for iPhone users. The RKi8400 ($400 in the U.S.) was unveiled at the Frankfurt Auto Show.

“All iPhone functions — music, navigation of the music directory and playlists and Bluetooth phone capabilities — have been adapted for in-car use,” said Henri Seydoux, Parrot founder and CEO.

Today’s Apple gadget deals lead off with a bevy of aluminum iMacs, starting at $999. AT&T again offers iPhone 3Gs, featuring $49 8GB models. Finally, PC Micro has a 50%-off deal on iPod touch accessories.

Details on these and many other deals can be found on CoM’s Daily Deals page.

The more I play with Snow Leopard, the more it looks like it’s designed to run Apple’s upcoming tablet.

Look at Expose in the Dock — the new feature that reveals all an application’s open windows when you click and hold the application’s icon. It’s tailor-made for fingers. Even more convincing is Stacks in the Dock. Hit a folder icon in the dock, and up pops the folder and all its files. Each icon is a big target for your finger, and the window has a big, fat slider for scrolling up and down (no more fiddly little arrows at the top or bottom). Both of these UI tweaks scream ‘touchscreen.’

And then today I discovered an unheralded feature that the minute I saw it, I thought, “Game over! Here’s rock-solid proof that Snow Leopard is designed for touchscreens. This is a tablet operating system.”

Rockstar Games’ critically-acclaimed Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is coming to the iPhone/touch this fall, the company says.

Released last year for the Nintendo DS, the game got reave reviews and is still the highest-rated DS game on GameRankings, with an average review score of about 93%.

“Chinatown Wars is a big fat raspberry to the competition; a masterclass in not only hand-held development, but video game design as a whole, exploring exactly how to craft Liberty City around the console’s unique strengths without compromising the series’ character,” said the Daily Telegraph.

The game follows the misadventures of Huang Lee, a young Triad, as he investigates the mysterious death of his dad, kills his rivals, steals cars, deals drugs and evades the cops — all in a miniature version of the company’s infamous virtual playground, Liberty City.

Sounds fun. Here’s the trailer:

If the TV industry doesn’t invent a digital business that customers want, it risks an “iTunes moment,” when Apple took hold of the online music business, a Microsoft exec said.

“Realistically. I think the industry has about two to three years to adapt or face its iTunes moment. And it will take at least that long for media brands to build credible, truly digital brands,” Ashley Highfield, managing director of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, told the Guardian.

Highfield gave the gloom and doom prediction today as the keynote speaker at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.

Answering the inevitable question of how to make money from these new ventures, he said “media companies need to embrace controversial targeted advertising techniques, such as behavioral targeting based on users’ web viewing habits, with the ad inventory going into an auction-style model similar to the system Google operates.”

Interesting he didn’t name Apple TV — speculated “dead” as Sony and Microsoft entered the market last year — as a specific threat, but spoke of the success of iTunes.

In 2007, a Forrester analyst said both iTunes and Apple TV were “dead ends” that would be “eclipsed by television and cable networks will quickly shift their content to free ad-supported streaming.”

Ha. I tried out Apple TV for about a week while house sitting this summer.  The interface was nice, the remote control cool. I’d still rather keep the cheapo PVR with a slightly wheezy fan a friend rigged up — because, while it’s an ugly little box and the remote control works about 40% of the time, there’s no DRM.

Via the Guardian

Apple decides to open doors in Milan — recently named more fashionable than New York — so you’d think it’d be somewhere the city’s whippet-thin Pradamatons would want to be seen sashaying into.

Instead, Apple is opening its first Milan store this Saturday in a place called Carugate. It’s 15 km away from the city center,  a place best known to locals because Ikea also calls it home.

It’ll be in a mall — note the pic above of a woman with a grocery cart — and hopefully  the inside layout is a bit more interesting than the storefront. And instead of having 24/7 access, like many Italian malls, it’s usually closed on Sundays.

Rumors were that Apple’s first Milan store would be a former Stefanel store in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, a pedestrian shopping zone favored by locals and tourists who stroll from the Cathedral to Piazza San Babila.

Next time I need anything, I’ll be heading to the  reseller in the chic Brera area — used as a fashion shoot backdrop and where staff wears “Steve Jobs for Mayor” T-shirts.

People: location, location, location.

Via Corriere della Sera

As expected, Apple is hosting a special “Rock and Roll” media event on Sept. 9 and is sending invites to members of the press.

The tag line for the event is: “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” —  a play on the Rolling Stones song “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It).”

Some had speculated the event would be tied to the reissue of the Beatles catalog on the same day: 09/09/09. The band is re-issuing its entire remastered catalog and The Beatles: Rock Band game. But using a line from Rolling Stones now makes that seem unlikely.

The event is likely to showcase Apple’s holiday lineup of iPods, which are widely expected to get cameras, and a new version of iTunes with social networking features.

Although many are hoping the event will also see the introduction of an Apple tablet, that seems unlikely. But an appearance by Steve Jobs does not. If he hosts the event, it’ll be the first public appearance by Steve Jobs since his liver transplant earlier this year.

The event is being held at 10:00 AM PST at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the venue of several previous Apple media events.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking for insider traders of Apple stock — possibly Apple staff — who made suspicious trades of the company’s stock, according to the Huffington Post.

The SEC is asking brokerage firms for the identities of clients who made suspicious trades, HuffPost financial columnist Dan Dorfman says.

The SEC is looking at suspicious stock trades during four specific time periods, which is unusual, Dorfman says; investigations are usually limited to single time periods — not multiple.

Insider trading is the buying and selling of stock by people with access to information not available to the general public, and is closely watched by the SEC. Insider trades often revolve around news that moves the company’s stock, such as good or bad revenue reports, or the announceent of new products.

The SEC would not reveal any details of its investigation, but traders contacted by Dorfman speculated that it concerned reports about Steve Jobs health and liver transplant, and/or sales of the iPod. News about either create volatility in Apples stock, which insiders can profit from.

As Dorfman notes, Apple’s stock has been great for traders: insider or not. It’s almost doubled in 8 months, jumping from $85.35 to $170.05, just below the 52-week high of $176.25.

Snow Leopard is being widely touted as a performance increase, but the OS upgrade resulted in a 10-15% performance DECREASE on both my Mac Pro as well as my MacBook Pro — at least, according to the Xbench benchmarking tool.

Now of course, that could just be things that Xbench measures, perhaps it doesn’t account or provide sufficient weight for multi-threading, and multi-tasking. But we would like to get to the bottom of this, and are asking for your help.

If you followed our handy dandy upgrade guide you ought so still have a functioning Leopard install to boot from. If so, please follow this testing protocol:

1. Power down your machine until cool.
2. Boot Leopard, and kill all running applications
3. Run XBench All tests except the drive test**
4. Upload results using the name: CoM – YOUR NAME – PRE (Uploading XBench results is part of the process. Once you’re done, it asks if you want to upload your results and what name to give it)

Use the same protocol with your Snow Leopard install, but name the result CoM – YOURNAME – POST.

Thanks in advance I’ll be releasing results in the next few days.

** Why no drive test? XBench places too much emphasis on hard drive performance, and in an era where all hard drives perform basically the same, it skews all performance tests to the center. Running the test without drives provides a better picture of the actual performance delta.

We may be getting closer to a hardware version of hands-free navigation for iPhone users. The FCC has released several documents plus photos of a planned TomTom Car Kit for the iPhone.

The kit (pictured above) includes a mount enabling the iPhone to be positioned either vertically or in landscape mode. Engadget also writes the kit includes Bluetooth and a dedicated SiRFstar GPS chipset.

The announcement may be welcome news to iPhone navigators who hoped an actual TomTom product would follow an iPhone app released earlier this month. The app, priced at $99.99 for U.S. and Canadian iPhone owners, competes with the likes of CoPilot Live ($34.99), Sygic Mobile Maps ($39.99), AT&T’s Navigator ($10 monthly fee) and Google Maps.

[Via iClarified and Engadget]

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.

APP OF THE WEEK

Birdhouse: Notepad for Twitter. Drafts can be rated, backed-up, published/’unpublished’. Fantastic UI. 5/5 $3.99 https://is.gd/2A56C

Shoot-Em-Up: Competent but easy, unexciting vertical shooter with annoying ship inertia. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2wmWJ

Bloons Lite: 12-level dart-throw action puzzler. Iffy controls, poor graphics. Mildly compulsive but annoying. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2wn5L

Spaceballs: Mediocre Puzz Loop clone. Dull graphics and slowdown take edge off fun core gameplay of original. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2wnoq

Minigore: Characterful Robotron-style shooter. Fun, but lacks depth & environment doesn’t affect protagonist. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2xWGi

PapiJump+: Cute vertical platformer with varied modes, but bettered in every way by Doodle Jump. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2C0uN

Mevo: Rhythm action game. OK graphics, but dullish gameplay and problematic response lag & slowdown. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2Eeys

In amongst lots of iffy games, a fun vertical platformer (PapiJump+) and Chillingo’s bloody (and furry) dual-thumb shooter (Minigore), Birdhouse appealed this week. Birdhouse is a good example of how a really odd idea can be great. The app is a drafting app for Twitter. You might wonder why you need to draft 140-character tweets, but if you’re serious about the service, it often pays to think about things and mull them over. Birdhouse is like a sounding board for your thoughts, and the interface is absolutely fantastic. The ability to rate drafts and back them up to email is also welcome.

Follow iPhoneTiny on Twitter, or visit iPhoneTiny.com

Apple denied claims that faulty iPhones overheat and explode, saying the shattered, spattering phones that launched a government investigation in the EU are few and not due to a systematic problem.

“To date, there are no confirmed battery overheating incidents for iPhone 3GS and the number of reports we are investigating is in the single digits,” Apple said in a statement to AFP.
“The iPhones with broken glass that we have analyzed to date show that in all cases the glass cracked due to an external force that was applied to the iPhone,” the company added.

So far, 11 cases of snap, crackle and pop iPhones have been reported in France, plus one of an iPod in Britain. Another case surfaced today, with a Belgian teen’s iPhone which reportedly went flambé causing him severe headaches afterwards.

This is the first statement Apple has made since the EU launched a safety investigation Aug. 18.

Herve Novelli, secretary of state for trade and consumer affairs, said he would question Apple’s Michel Coulomb about the “causes of the implosion of these devices and eventual measures they could take,” according to AP.

Back in July, Apple issued a support guide about how to keep the iPhone and iPhone 3GS running cool.

Every Friday, the Mac Games and More website will highlight five different casual Mac games you might not have heard of, to take you into the weekend. I hope you will find something fun here. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Extra-large Apple tablets with screen sizes measuring 13-inches and 15-inches have been spotted in China, and one was running OS X, according to Gizmodo.

Citing a “100% reliable” source, two prototype tablets were seen in a factory in Shenzuen, China. The touchscreen prototypes were made of aluminum and shaped like big iPhones, the source said.

One of them “was running Mac OS X 10.5.” When I asked, the source didn’t know if these were built for demonstration purposes, or if they were preproduction units. The company has a tight relation with Apple but “it’s not FoxConn.”

Many of the rumors surrounding the tablet have focused on a 10-inch model running the iPhone OS. But as we’ve noted before, Apple has made Snow Leopard a very touch-centric operating aystem, with scores of UI touches designed for fingers.

Of course, Apple is famous for its rigorous prototyping process and always makes hundreds of variations of upcoming products before deciding on the final form factor. But many observers think it’s only natural that Apple will eventually offer tablets with several different sizes, just like it offers different sized MacBooks, though possibly not at launch.

In part two of our clever coverup series (yesterday’s installment: MacBooks disguised as newspapers), we offer you the faux shopping bag from Japan. The item is actually a 30-watt speaker for your iPod or other MP3 player. But there are some strings attached – literally.

Defeating the ‘shopping bag’ motif is the need for the device to be plugged in. This not only blows your cover, but puts your iPod on a leash. Then there is the price – $335 US – and that the speaker is not stereo. Maybe it’s all about style. Boing Boing reports the bentwood ‘shopping bag’ was created by artist Yoshihiko Satoh. A $335 non-stereo wired iPod speaker? Reminds me of the $300 tea kettle from Bugatti.

I’m waiting for the wireless version to appear – maybe disguised as a Walmart or Whole Earth bag.

[Via Gadget Lab and Boing Boing]

We end the week with an Apple Store deal on factory-refurbished MacBook notebooks, including a 2GHz aluminum 13-inch model for $899. Also on the gadget deal list is the sleek iLuv 5.1-channel slim desktop iPod DVD player and more price drops on iPhone/iPod touch applications from the App Store.

For details on these and other great finds, read CoM’s Daily Deals page after the break.

A lot of people will be upgrading to Snow Leopard this weekend. There’s the right way to do it, and there’s the wrong way.

Here’s how to do it right.

God help us if Mac OS X ever has a system like the App Store policy. This time, Convertbot by Tapbots (a Cult of Mac favorite a while ago) was rejected. Its crime, as the image above shows, was using an icon for Time that Apple considers too similar to the one it uses for Recents.

Thing is, Tapbots just used a generic and insanely simple clock icon. Clearly, Apple—a company that bases a lot of its advertising on the fact smart people use Macs and Apple kit—thinks iPhone and iPod touch users are a bunch of f——ing morons, with no understanding of context. Perhaps they’re right and Cupertino has been inundated with frustrated iPhone users, repeatedly stabbing the Convertbot clock icon and yet not being able to access a recent calls list.

Somehow, we doubt it. Also, this icon’s the same one Convertbot’s had since the start—and this is the third point update to the app, and therefore the fourth time it’s been submitted. There were no problems at all the first three times.

With Philip Schiller’s email to John Gruber (regarding Ninjawords) and a similar communication to Panic’s Steven Frank, along with positive noises regarding C64 app finally being approved, we’re for once going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt on this (in that the decision is an isolated error). But here’s hoping things really are improving—that the Convertbot rejection is the blip, rather than the blip being Apple getting things right.

UPDATE: The Yankee Group also says the numbers are way high, and AdMob defends its estimates, kinda, sorta. See below.

Estimates that the iPhone App Store is worth $2.4 billion a year are utterly ridiculous, iPhone developers say.

Mobile advertising firm AdMob on Thursday got a ton of press for estimating that the iPhone App Store earns billions. The number was extrapolated from a survey of about 1,000 users — and is massively overstated, iPhone developers say.

“Do the math and that’s a ridiculous claim,” wrote developer Layton Duncan of Polar Bear Farm, an iPhone developer based in New Zealand.

Duncan did the math: $2.4 billion divided by the 65,000 apps in the App Store is $37,000 per app, per year. And while some developers earn that, many do not. Long Tail anyone?

David Barnard of App Cubby, a developer based in Austin, Texas, says AdMob’s number is at least 5x too big. The iPhone App Store is worth $250 and $500 million per year, estimates Barnard, who keeps a close, professional eye on App Store sales.

Earlier this week we took a look at how Apple’s upcoming tablet will be a paradigm shift by introducing a different kind of computing. Here in more detail is how Apple’s tablet will be great for gaming.

Renowned blogger, FriendFeeder, and all-around social web socialite Robert Scoble has pointed out something really interesting about the latest updated to the new revision of the Yelp iPhone app (iTunes link): it has a secret augmented reality mode dubbed “Monocle.” It is, of course, for iPhone 3GS only.

To activate, simply shake your iPhone a bunch (I’ve heard three times, but it took me like 10) until a blue box lets you know Monocle has been activated. Then just tap the Monocle button, which sticks around for good, and the app uses your camera, GPS location, and compass to put up signs and reviews for nearby restaurants and bars.

I just tried it out in my living room (that’s the view from my window circa 9 p.m.), and it’s seriously amazing. That list is pretty much exactly the full complement of cheap eats south from my window.

I don’t know how useful Monocle is (using the standard map mode is probably faster and definitely less battery draining), but it is a great way to feel like you live in the future.

Nicely done, Yelp.