Cult of Mac

One of the more, um, INTERESTING, design choices in Snow Leopard is the option to show icons in the new Cocoa-based Finder at an insane 512×512 pixels. Here’s how big that is: on a unibody 13.3″ MacBook Pro, you can display exactly two of them without either overlapping or running off the screen. The 30″ Cinema HD Display can only display 15 of them, and it’s significantly higher resolution than a 1080p television. The original Mac, at 512X342 pixels, could only display the width in full.

They’re enormous, and only possibly practical if you want to read documents without opening them, in which case Quick Look is a way better option anyway. Regardless, the new high-definition icons are fascinating viewed at full size. I’ve put in just the Folder icon, which is now big enough to have discernable flecks of dark blue in the grain. Amazing. Totally obsessive. And totally Apple.

The Register has more. Check them out.

After a long wait, the new Facebook 3.0 App for the iPhone is finally live on the App Store. It offers several new features, including the ability to upload video from the iPhone 3GS, like posts and photos, and RSVP to upcoming events.

If the App Store still says version 2.5, ignore it — version 3.0 will download says developer Joe Hewitt.

Download Facebook 3.0 here.

New features include:

– See your upcoming Events and RSVP
– See Pages and post updates and photos to Pages you administer
– Write Notes and read your friends’ Notes
– Upload videos from an iPhone 3GS
– Complete photo management (create albums, delete albums, delete photos, delete photo tags)
– Change your Profile Picture
– Like posts and photos
– See the same News Feed as the Facebook website
– Visit links in a built-in web browser
– Quickly call or text your friends

Starting in September, Zipcar users will be able to reserve wheels via an iPhone app.

Zipcar founder Scott Griffin takes the app for a test drive for CNN:

Griffith enters the parking lot outside his office in Cambridge, Mass., pulls out his iPhone, and taps a button on the screen. Suddenly a yellow Mini Cooper starts honking like a crazed goose.
Griffith approaches the vehicle and taps the screen again. The doors magically unlock, and under the steering wheel the key dangles from a cord. He starts up the car — nicknamed “Meneus” — and drives away at a rate of $11.25 an hour.

The Zipcar app gets works as a wireless key, getting drivers into cars, letting them lock them — and helps find the closest available garage.

The car sharing program I get around with in Milan uses an RFID card to lock and unlock doors (kind of nice if you don’t have an iPhone). Reservations over the Internet work decently, as long as you realize you need a car while sitting at your computer.
Alternatively, you can call them to see what’s available but half the time the operators don’t have key info — like the garage is closed for lunch.

The Zipcar app sounds well thought through, it’ll be interesting to see what it’s like on the ground.

Via CNN Money

Spotify’s app for the iPhone has been approved by Apple and should be available to premium customers shortly. But alas, not in the U.S. — at least, not yet.

“The current status as of right now is it’s been approved and we hope to add the app to the more than 65,000 apps on the app store very soon,” an Apple spokesperson told PaidContent. “We’ve been in constant communication working with the developer and have already notified Spotify that the app will be in the app store very soon.”

This is fantastic news for music lovers, and a big surprise from Apple. If there’s a real threat to iTunes, it’s Spotify.

Spotify’s streaming music service has taken the world by storm with a library that rivals iTunes — about 6 million tracks — and an interface to match. It’s dead easy to search, build playlists, and find new artists. It’s basically iTunes in the cloud — but free.

The $20-a-month premium service dispenses with the occasional ads, which aren’t intrusive. A premium account will be required to use the iPhone app.

So magnificent is the service, it already has 2 million subscribers in Europe and is adding 50,000 new users every day. It is set to come to the U.S. some time later this year, or maybe next, pending licensing agreements with the record labels.

The only downside is that it’s tied to the computer. But Spotify’s iPhone app promises to change that. The app can cache full playlists to be played offline — thousand of songs can be stored on the iPhone and played at any time. You can store up to 3,333 songs — that’s 10 days constant listening — and the songs will sync over WiFi, no USB cable needed, according to Wired.com. Bye, bye iTunes. This is the future of music. Why would you buy songs any longer?

There was speculation that the app wouldn’t be approved by Apple because it is such a threat to the iTunes business model. Some feared Apple would argue that the Spotify App replicates core functions of the iPhone: IE. playing music. This was the reasoning Apple used for not approving the Google Voice app, which is still under review because it replicates the iPhone’s telephony functions — or so Apple argued to the FCC.

So big surprise that Apple’s giving the go-ahead. Of course, the app might be crippled in key ways. But perhaps the company is softening its stance in the face of ongoing controversy about the App Store? Or perhaps Apple is afraid it might become the target of an antitrust case, a la Microsoft?

Fingers crossed Spotify comes Stateside sooner than later. Here’s a cool video of the Spotify app in action. Watch the offline song caching feature at about 28 seconds in. .

Sony Thursday introduced three new digital SLRs in its Alpha family. The cameras feature a number of innovative features for both professional and value-minded photographers.

The Sony a850 is the little brother of the a900, a pro unit released last year. Like the a900, the a850 features a 24.6 megapixel Exmor CMOS sensor. Two BIONZ processors enable fast data capture and image processing, allowing you to snap photos at three frames per second.

Unlike the a900, however, the new a850 sells for $2,000 (body only).

More details and photos after the jump.

UPDATE: See Developers Call BS On $2.4B iPhone App Store Number

The iPhone App market could be worth $2.4 billion a year, reporter Om Malik of GigaOm estimates based on new numbers from the mobile advertising firm AdMob.

This is a very big number for such a new marketplace; no wonder Microsoft, Google, Palm and everyone else is trying to replicate it.

AdMob is a mobile advertising firm that serves up ads inside apps running on the iPhone, iPod touch and Google’s Android phones. In a survey of more than 1,000 users in July, Ad Mob found:

* Apple’s App Store sells $200 million worth of applications every month, a run rate of about $2.4 billion a year, according to Malik.

* Android apps are bringing in about $5 million a month, or $60 million a year.

* iPhone users download about 10 apps per month, and one in four apps is paid for.

* iPod touch users download 18 apps a month, but only two of those are paid for.

* 50% of iPhone users download at least one paid app a month.

* 40% of iPod touch users download at least one paid app a month.

* Users who download paid apps spend about $10 per month; and the average app price is under $2.00.

The upshot: Users are happy to spend money on apps, especially if they geta chance to ry them frst with a free or lite version.

Have you ever left your MacBook on the train or in a cafe, only to return and find it gone? Maybe the best bet is to hide that sleek know-it-anywhere Apple design behind something more mundane, like a newspaper. That’s the concept behind a zippered laptop case that appears to a passerby as just a discarded newspaper. The advantages of the faux newspapers may be limited to the myopic thief, as Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel notes:

“Spanish readers will note that the name of the paper is spelled wrong (it should be La Vanguardia, with an extra “i” before the final letter).” For English readers, the company also offers “Herold Tribune.” The obvious misspellings are likely due to copyright issues, but it could affect the coverup’s effectiveness. Maybe a licensing deal could be worked out to offer real newspaper front pages?

An alternative is the DIY route, using a common container to hold your valuable Mac. Sorrel puts his MacBook in a Jiffy Bag protected by a Fed Ex envelope. Could these new coverups be the backlash to a plethora of bling iPod/iPhone and MacBook coverings?

[Via Gadget Lab and BBG]

The iPod Classic is also about to get a camera, according to a new report in Taiwan’s DigiTimes newspaper.

The iPod Nano and Touch are about to get cameras – likely on September 9 when Apple is widely expected to unveil its holiday offerings, including a new version of iTunes.

But until now, the iPod Classic hasn’t been mentioned. The Classic is the last iPod based on a spinning hard drive, and is likely to be phased out as the capacities of flash memory increases and prices drop.

According to DigiTimes, the Classic will feature a 3.2 megapixel cameras supplied by Taiwan’s, OmniVision.

OmniVision will supply “3.2-megapixel CIS products for the new iPod nano, iPod classic and iPod touch models which will be launched in September,”  the paper claims.

This strikes us as unlikely. The selling point of the Classic is its storage capacity, not add-ons like cameras.

Today’s daily deals are headed by AT&T’s offer on refurbished iPhone 3Gs. The carrier is selling 8GB models for $49 and $16 GB units for $99. Meanwhile, Apple is offering factory-refurbed Intel Mac minis, starting at $499 for the 2GHz Core 2 version. And if that’s not enough to rope you into the hardware tent, Apple is again promoting their back to school sale.

In other gadget deal goodness, we have an arm band face-off, plus ask the immortal question: what’s better? USB on your wrist or a mouse on your finger? For details on these and many other deals, as always check out our CoM Daily Deals page.

Now this is what I call an iPod sound system. Most iPod speakers are pretty weedy. Not the Mix Boombox IMT800, a digital ghetto blaster released on Thursday by Altec Lansing. Available now for $300, the Mix Boombox promises to be loud and heavy.

Altec Lansing also announced a stylish — and loud — 200-watt computer speaker set: the Expressionist Ultra MX6021.

More images and details after the jump.

With Uncle Walt’s confirmation, the cat’s officially out of the bag: That $30 Snow Leopard disc Apple’s making available starting Friday? It works with more than just full Leopard installs — it can upgrade any Intel Mac, including those running Tiger. In other words, unless you want to pick up iLife and iWork in the process, the only reason to buy the $169 Mac Box is if you want to live by the spirit of Apple’s marketing.

What do you think, Tiger users? Will you abide by formal ethics or just buy the cheapest upgrade path ever? And will your Leopard-buying friends hate you for it?

All Things D via Gizmodo

Stock in the internet phone company Vonage jumped a whopping 36 percent on news it will likely soon have an iPhone app.

Vonage’s stock saw its biggest three-day rally since the ailing company went public in 2006, Bloomberg reports. The rally is tied to news that Vonage has submitted an app to Apple. The app will likely be approved after a minor technical glitch is fixed.

What the app does, no one is saying, but it’ll likely rival Skype, offering low-cost VOIP calls over Wi-Fi. Vonage also offers visual voicemail.

The company is in deep trouble and is danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. It has lost about 100,000 customers in the last year as customers opt for cheap digital-phone service by cable companies.

UPDATE: Nack provides further insight, backtracks, stating “It turns out that the Photoshop team has tested Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard, and to the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard.” Hmm. This flatly contradicts what I’ve heard from jobbing designers who’ve worked with CS3 on very late Snow Leopard builds. I guess we’ll discover the real truth over the coming week or so.

Adobe’s rolling out its Snow Leopard FAQ, and John Nack’s post offers a doozy:

Apple and Adobe have worked closely together (as always with new OS releases) to test compatibility. As for CS4, everything is good with the exception of auto-updates to Flash panels (which I guarantee you’re not using*) and Adobe Drive/Version Cue (which doesn’t work at the moment on 10.6). CS3 & earlier haven’t been tested. Please see the FAQ for additional info.

(My emphasis.)

Back in the day, I used to love Adobe software. Hell, I still want to love Adobe software and I use Photoshop almost every day, but the company’s making it real hard. It seems that CS has become more about sticking to turnaround schedules than innovation, and there’s a horrible tendency to use the next release to fix major problems, rather than fix them here and now.

From what I’ve heard, both on forums and directly from professionals running 10.6 betas, there are some major problems with CS3 and Snow Leopard, such that Apple’s update simply isn’t safe in Adobe-reliant mission-critical environments. This means a whole lot of industry professionals won’t be flinging 30 bucks in Apple’s direction and won’t be upgrading their Macs to the new OS. But surely this is only temporary? Presumably, Adobe won’t leave everyone high and dry?

Nack again:

No one said anything about CS3 being “not supported” on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation.

Nice. A 2.5-year-old piece of shareware being mothballed to concentrate on the current version, fine. But a hugely expensive suite that people use in a pro capacity, that cost hundreds (or thousands, depending on the option you picked) of bucks in the first place?

And you’ve got to love the dangled carrot—CS3 probably won’t be fixed, due to Photoshop being ported to Cocoa. (Out of curiosity, Adobe, are you going to get rid of your broken and proprietary windowing system, or will that stay in place?) I know the world’s finances are screwed, but surely looking after your existing customers is important? I guess it doesn’t matter if you have a near-monopoly on creative apps.

Gah.

Like I said, I used to love Adobe, and I really want that feeling of excitement and passion regarding its apps to return, but this kind of thing just pisses me right off. Nack’s comments come across like people are asking for something insanely stupid—support for antiquated wares. But it’s not like people are getting all angry because some ancient piece of software has been killed—they’re annoyed because a massively expensive suite that was still on sale recently and replaced well under a year ago is going to have major problems on Apple’s new system.

Is this entirely Adobe’s fault? No. (In fact, if Nack’s “in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation” comment is indicative of Adobe’s attitude in general, ‘not at all’ is presumably the company’s thinking.) But could Adobe be doing more to help this situation, other than telling us to stop whining, open our wallets once again, cause our credit cards to cry out in pain, and eat baked beans for the coming months? You tell me.

The Shanzai.com blog has posted pictures of a butt-ugly MacBook Air knockoff. It promises to be dirt cheap but misses the point by being fatter and uglier.

The knockoff also has a smaller screen — 11″ instead of 13″ — runs a shit processor and has no RAM (1.6GHz Intel Atom and 1GB DDR2).

Amusingly, the blog claims the Air’s design has been “improved” by the addition of some missing features, namely: a removable battery, two USB ports instead of one, and an internal slot for a 3G card (the Air has no 3G support built-in).

No word on pricing, availability or whether it can be hacked to run OS X. It does have a Windows key on the keyboard though.

More pictures and the full specs after the jump.

Via Engadget.

It looks like Apple is finally getting serious about security — not!

Apple has added a very rudimentary antivirus system to Snow Leopard, which is due out in stores Friday. The system is so basic, it kinda defies belief. It’s the Fisher Price of anti-virus blockers; a system so simple and limited, it appears basically worthless. It pops up a warning if you try to install an internet nasty, and advises you to move the file to the Trash. Here’s all you need to know in three easy steps:

* It includes information about just two Trojan Horses: OSX.RSPlug.A and OSX.Iservice. Both of these Trojans are in the wild but are fairly rudimentary. OSX.Iservice has been found in pirated copies of iWork on the file sharing networks; and OSX.RSPlug is typically found on porno websites masquerading as video codecs that need to be installed by the user, who types in their system password.

* It intercepts files downloaded only using Safari, Firefox, Mail, Entourage, Thunderbird and iChat and several other applications, according to The Register. It does not check files downloaded by hundreds of other applications or files on CDs, DVDs or USB thumbdrives.

* The system was quietlycadded to the latest builds of Snow Leopard. It’s present in build 10A432, the most recent version that is widely assumed to be Gold Master. It can be found in the system files: /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/XProtect.plist

Of course, Apple may update the system in the future with more malware definitions and applications. Ironically, Apple is running a new ad touting the Mac’s invulnerability to viruses and headaches.

Are you looking for options to keep your desk sleek and uncluttered but don’t want to give up the iMac, iPod, Mac mini and associated gadgets you must have nearby? Maybe you need a makeover. Twelve South, a new All-Mac company, offers two choices: the Book Arc and Book Pack.

The Book Arc is a creative way to vertically store your MacBook. The Book Arc accommodates a closed MacBook (up to 17-inches) or MacBook Air in a 10-by-4-inch slip with silicone cushions specifically designed for these laptops.. The product creates a desktop or workstation from your laptop and display. Running your MacBook closed stops your video display from splitting its resources, causing a noticeable operating speed increase in such intensive applications as Photoshop, the maker claims.

The Book Arc costs $49.95 for individuals or $249.99 for six people. Free shipping for a limited time.

UPDATE: The MacBook stand can actually give your MacBook 13″ a speed boost, claims Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel. Using lower-end MacBooks (those without dedicated GPUs, like the new 13-incher) with the lid closed frees up the CPU from refreshing the screen, boosting the speed of whatever you’re working on.

Recording engineer and music producer Michael Jack has amassed an amazing collection of 1,100 transistor radios.

These models from the 1950s look like predecessors of the iPod, he notes on his flickr stream:

“When I fist saw the Zenith RE-10 I figured I had come upon the most obvious inspiration for the iPod… Although all these radios appear to have similar design elements to the iPod I would ALMOST bet that the RE-10 was studied (or at least observed) by the Mac design team.”

I love the still-modern look of these half-century old radios, whether Jonathan Ive used them for inspiration or not.

What do you think?

Today’s deals include more Macbook Pro laptops starting at $999, PowerPC eMacs for $200, a cradle for your iPod or iPhone with remote plus much more.

Details on these and other bargains can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.

A 23-year-old was sentenced to 13 months in prison for an iPod scam that earned him over half a million dollars before getting caught.

Through trial and error, Nicholas Woodhams of Portage, Michigan guessed serial numbers of the iPods still under warranty that were sent to him as an iPod repairman.  He then fraudulently obtained iPods from Apple and sold them online.

“Between March 2006 and October 2007, Woodhams caused Apple to ship more than 9,000 replacement units to a post office box through this deception,”  said a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “Woodhams then advertised and sold the units through a website for $49 apiece, a fraction of their retail value. In addition to this mail fraud scheme, Woodhams violated federal money laundering laws by wiring $200,000 of his criminally-derived proceeds from a financial institution in Michigan to a brokerage account in Missouri.”

In addition to the year-plus stint in jail, Woodhams will give over the fruits of his deceit including a home in Portage, Michigan, an Audi S4 sedan, an Ariel “Atom 2″ racing car, a Honda motorcycle, six computers and more than $570,000 in U.S. currency.

Woodhams pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges back in April and faced a maximum 30 year jail sentence.

Via Mlive

Image used with a CC license, thanks to re-ality

Here’s how Apple’s tablet will work and why it’ll be a paradigm shift. Using your fingers as an input device is extremely intuitive, and it’ll make the mouse and keyboard seem as antiquated as punch cards.

On the following pages is a gallery of concept designs created by Jon Doe, an anonymous grad student from Georgia who has done a LOT of thinking about how Apple’s tablet will work.

Doe has done a remarkable job of figuring it out. Over the course of a year, Doe has imagined how the device might work, what gestures it might support, and how Apple could adapt its popular iLife software to work in a multitouch environment. He’s created a blog to showcase his ideas and a series of YouTube videos. There’s so much to see, I’m publishing several posts over the next few days.

“The problem is that the current PC interface (PC as in Macs, Windows, and Linux boxes) is outdated,” says Doe. “We’re reaching the limit of what we can do with a mouse and keyboard.”

Check out the video and gallery after the jump to see why Apple’s tablet will be such an exciting device.

For just $35, a professional hardware called Reid will swap out your MacBook Pro’s optical drive for a super-speedy SSD drive.

Why would you want to do this? Because the SSD drive is an unbelievable 7x faster than a traditional hard drive, even a fast one. Use it as your boot disk, and the OS will fly. Store your movies and pron on the regular hard drive, which remains intact.

Reid already has this two-drive setup running on his new MacBook Pro. Reid took out the optical drive, which opened up a spare SATA interface. Apple doesn’t use standard SATA connectors, so Reid had to make his own by chaining together a couple of adapters from Fry’s and Amazon. It’s not pretty, but it works.

Reid is using the SSD as his boot disk and discovered that it runs an incredible 7x faster than his already fast 7200 rpm hard drive (which he’d upgraded also).

It cost about $300. “So, FOR LESS THAN APPLE CHARGES for the single 128GB SSD upgrade (which really is a POS, if you ask me), I got 280GB of reliable hard disk space. FmyWarranty!” he writes on his blog.

He’s now offering to sell the adapter for $30 apiece (plus free shipping). Or he will perform the upgrade himself for $35 (he’s a pr0). The customer supplies the parts. An 80GB SSD runs about $200.

“Just send me a heads up, a check, a second sata drive*, and your MacBook Pro (with a tracking #, PLEASE) and I’ll return the computer to you a day after it arrives (UPS $14.00).”

Email Reid at: [email protected]

Via Gadget Lab.

Designers continue to be inspired by Mac icons as home decor.

The choice for these handmade fleece pillows is a bit random — iCal, the start button and an devilish version of Finder — but cool nonetheless.

$14.99 each at Etsy.

A week after EU regulators launched an investigation into safety issues of overheating iPods and iPhones, another French user found himself with an iPhone flambé in hand.

This time it happened to Yassine Bouhadi (above), a 26-year-old supermarket security guard in Villevieille, near Nîmes. He was texting his girlfriend (giving new meaning to the term “sexting?) when the device overheated and the screen shattered.

“The phone made a noise like ‘schplok’. A little bit of screen hit me in the eye and I had to remove it with a tweezer,” said Bouhadi.

The incident — similar to the teen in Aix-en-Provence whose iPhone screen shattered sending splinters into his eyes — made the front page of local paper Midi Libre.

Whether this is a copycat incident or evidence of an uptick in defective devices remains to be seen.

The EU commission is examining reports of problems with iPhones in France and an iPod in Britain.
Apple maintains these overheating issues are isolated incidents and not evidence of a general problem but is cooperating with EU investigations.

Via Charles Bremner

Today’s deals lead-off with hardware. Imacs starting at $99. MacBook Air laptops starting at $1,099 and MacBook Pro Core 2s for $1,898 – plus much more.

Details on these and other great deals can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.

Parallels, regarded by many as the premier virtual Windows solution for the Mac, announced Tuesday a special Switch to Mac Edition, extending a welcome lifeline to computer users who are choosing to embrace the elegance, power and simplicity of Apple’s Mac OS in increasing numbers every day.

Cult of Mac received an extensive tour of the new “Switch to Mac” features recently and it’s a good bet Parallels will deliver on its promise to have former Windows users working comfortably in the Mac UI within hours instead of the more usual learning curve that can often take weeks.

“For years I have worked with switchers coming into Apple stores with questions about how to use their new Mac,” says Saied Ghaffari, Switch to Mac Advocate, who gave us the tutorial demo.

“Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition thoroughly addresses the concerns switchers have,” Ghaffari said, adding, “the product is designed to make moving to Mac as fast and simple as possible, regardless of the level of technical knowledge of the switcher.

Featuring a set of easy-to-use tools and interactive tutorials such as Click to Learn, Watch Saied, and You Try incorporated with Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac, the Switch to Mac edition promises to help “Switchers” understand how to operate Mac OS X, transfer all PC data and applications, and seamlessly run their Windows applications on their new Macs.

“It’s like a friend teaching you the Mac at your own pace,” according to Ghaffari.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 Switch to Mac Edition is available from today at Apple stores, at Apple.com and through other preferred retail partners in English, German and French. The suggested retail price (SRP) of the product is $99.99.

Hit the jump for more information and detailed explanation of the Switch to Mac edition’s features.