Here’s a blog after my own heart: Minimal Mac is devoted to keeping your Mac as simple as can be, something I strive to do as far as possible.
A few minutes browsing Minimal Mac shows me I’ve still got a long way to go. I thought my desktop was minimal:
…but it turns out that real purists wouldn’t care for all that junk in the Menu Bar. If you aspire to proper minimalism, you need to have a Menu Bar more like this:
Today’s deals include iMacs starting at $399, refurbished MacBook Pro laptops at $999 and wake up to your favorite iPhone/iPod tunes with the iHome Clock Radio. Details of these and plenty more can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.
Here’s a game that 3D Realms has actually shipped. Duke Nukem 3D, the classic first-person-shooter from the mid ’90s, is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
3D Realms is famous of course for not shipping games. It’s follow-up to Duke Nukem — Duke Nukem Forever – has been promised for more than a decade, earning a top slot on Wired.com’s Vaporware awards year after year.
Duke Nukem 3D is a simple port of the 13-year-old game. It’s pixely and low res — but who’d want it any different? The controls are a little difficult to master, according to reviews on iTunes, which are generally favorable. Players are reveling in gaming nostalgia.
No word on whether the hookers, sex shops and bare-breasted strippers are still in the game though.
Duke Nukem 3D currently costs $2.99, a “One Day Launch Special.” No word on how much it will cost tomorrow.
Buy from the iTunes App Store.
Good news for haters of Apple’s glossy MacBook screens: the matte display is back as an option on the 15-inch MacBook Pro, although Apple is charging an extra $50 for it.
Check Apple’s online store. The glossy widescreen display can be replaced with an optional antiglare display. The specs are the same — 1,440 x 900 pixels and a LED backlight — but the matte display has a silver bezel around it instead of a black one. Plus it costs an extra $50.
Apple’s not selling it though. Look how the website copy downplays the antiglare option:
“Choose a standard glossy display that lets you view graphics, photos, and videos with richer colors and deeper blacks, or an optional antiglare display.”
The matte screen was already an option on the top-of-the-line 17-inch MacBook Pro, but isn’t yet offered on the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s just a matter of time though. I personally like the glossy screens, which I think look great. I’ve never, ever been distracted by its much hated “mirror” effect.
Meet Tadataka Goh, a Japanese jazz bassist who is perhaps the world’s biggest collector of Apple-branded goods — you know, Apple t-shirts, pens and hats.
Over the last 15 years, Tadataka has amassed the largest collection of Apple knickknacks on the planet. He has thousands of items, including hundreds of pens, t-shirts, baseball caps, posters and buttons. He has the first issue of Macworld magazine and an Apple-branded traffic cone.
Tadataka has possibly spent more than $100,000 on them. That’s right — more than $100,000.
“Looking at his collection, he’s probably spent several hundred thousand dollars,” says Steve Naughton, co-owner of RedLightRunner.com, which sells Apple collectibles and counts Tadataka as its best customer ever.
The Japanese are well-known for being enthusiastic collectors, and the most otaku can be fanatical completionists. Even so, the scope of Tadataka’s collection boggles the mind.
He’s got so much stuff, even he doesn’t know how much he’s got. He recently posted pictures of more about 4,000 items to an online gallery, and has scores more pictures to upload.
Click on to see some of Tadataka’s collection. You have to see the photos to appreciate how big this collection is.
Because we’re all geeks these days and need bags for our laptops, the market for fashionable computer bags has mercifully grown. Gone are the days when the only laptop bag you could buy was black and rectangular.
A particularly stylish entry onto the fashion laptote market is Ibint, a company that sells a range of good-looking laptop bags called Loopbag. The Loopbags have distinctive zippers that loop around the front and back of the bags — hence the name.
We’ve been testing a pair of Loopbags in New York for the last couple of weeks, and they’ve held up exceptionally well, especially because this summer has been exceptionally wet.
Hit the jump for the rest of the review.
The Internet has lately played host to a near-infinite amount of fol-de-rol regarding a rather silly post from Weblogs, Inc. and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis in which he railed against Apple’s recent paranoia. There’s plenty wrong with the gist of his argument (as Leander points out in this rather nice post), as well as a few things that are right on.
But I’m not here to dwell on that. I just want to make one thing very clear: what makes Apple great is not what it puts into its products. It’s what gets left out. As exciting as visions of flying iPhones with 8 sim slots, a Zip disk slot, and dual head-mounted displays might seem, the original iPhone (and iPod, for that matter) became iconic because of its limitations — not in spite of them. Innovation, contrary to Calacanis, is often more about editing than possibility. Apple, more than most companies, is defined by its unwillingness to do too much. The greatest design impact is in what we can’t see.
Hey, look what I found: iPhone Photography, a lovely little gallery of artistic, interesting photos made with iPhones.
I asked the site’s creator, Caleb Kimbrough, to explain what it was all about.
Here’s what he said.
Apple is developing a new media file format to deliver digital music along with collateral material such as artwork, lyrics, liner notes, songs, videos, and images all from a centralized album launch page, according to a report Monday at The AppleBlog.
Citing “various whispers and rumbling around the web,” the report said the new file format is code-named “Cocktail” for the variety of ingredients it will bring to the user experience.
Apparently, major music labels including Sony, Warner, Universal, and EMI are also spearheading their own version of an enhanced file format in the hope of not being outdone by what amounts to a significant potential upgrade for iTunes.
Apple is considered by many to have effectively “saved” the music industry by inventing the iPod and iTunes, with the major labels having resented the company’s pricing power and ability to dictate distribution terms ever since.
If true, the rumored new file format could make for nice end-user eye candy while providing entertainment for those amused by the ongoing struggle for world domination among Apple and the major media distributors.
Corporate IT support for the iPhone is on the rise, according to a report Monday at Tech Republic, though many CIOs and IT directors remain wary of the Apple smartphone’s security vulnerabilities.
Using an interesting (if not altogether scientific) polling strategy pioneered by Silicon.com, Tech Republic finds 42% of corporate IT departments are now willing to support the iPhone in its 3rd iteration, which is quite a swing from the near-universal skepticism with which corporate IT greeted the device upon its initial launch two years ago.
Results of the poll ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as the numbers themselves are based on the responses of just 12 individuals, but the comments included with the report are interesting nonetheless, and say as much about the way some corporations think as they do about Apple’s gadget itself.
Some corporate leaders, such as Mike Wagner, CIO of Stone & Youngberg in San Francisco seem to just get it. “The iPhone is one of the most innovative and revolutionary end-user products developed in the last 5 years,” Wagner said, adding “The support and training requirements for the iPhone are orders of magnitude less than the mobile OSes offered by competing vendors.” Wagner also noted “the general excitement and enthusiasm from the end users” in his company with iPhones, linking it directly to “a corresponding decrease in the perception that IT is a wet blanket that is an impediment to the use of consumer-friendly products.”
Still, the majority of corporate IT geeks don’t consider supporting the iPhone because, as Lisa Moorehead, Director of IT for MA Dept of Public Utilities put it, ““iPhones are not supported because they are considered personal gadgets.”
It’s interesting to note that among the CIOs and IT directors who report not supporting the iPhone, several quoted in the report placed the point of failure at service problems and bad coverage from AT&T.
Perhaps the most telling comment of all, however, came from Chuck Elliott, IT Director for Emory University School of Medicine, who reported “we are finding more and more of our users are buying and using the device without assistance from IT.”
An elementary school in Sarasota, Florida is sending several hundred working Macs to the trash heap — in keeping with the school district’s “PC-only” policy.
Piled up in the cafeteria of the Emma Booker school, 140 G3 and G4 laptops and over 50 iMac and eMac machines await the scrap heap.
An account in the local paper takes on dramatic overtones:
Sarasota County Public School system employees who alerted the Pelican Press to the salvage effort asked not to be identified because they feared retribution. “All of the machines are still working,” said one. “The teachers asked if they could buy them or give them to the kids. We were told, ‘No.’”
Putting the Macs out to pasture is the result of a decision by Superintendent Gary Norris, who headed the school system from 2004-2008, who declared the school system would be PC-only, the paper said.
Even the county school district’s program that donates computers to needy kids, called Texcellence, is a Mac-free zone.
“We’ve never used Macs,” foundation spokeswoman Laura Breeze told Pelican Press. The group recently received 1,100 used PC computers and is refurbishing them and adding software before giving them out.
At a time when budgets are tight, you have to wonder why a school district would send working computers to the scrap heap.
Who hasn’t splashed coffee on their keyboard or sprinkled water or their candybar phone? After skipping a heart beat or two, you find the gadget seems no worse the wear. But not so for the iPhone – and its great timing for a waterproof life vest for your iconic handset. The vest is inflatable, and protects your screen with a clear plastic cover.
The waterproof cover comes with earphones with a waterproof connection and a lanyard. (Although Wired’s Gadget Lab suggests an arm band would be a better choice.)
While iPhone cases are common, they usually stress the bling or cool factor. This Japanese entry ($34), while not high on anyone’s list for style, actually saves you some money.
The case comes too late for Brian X. Chen, who lost his iPhone earlier this year from water invading the phone’s dock port.
[Via Gadget Lab]
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b58MqoW2ziw
Getting a step closer to completely paperless banking, some customers of USAA will be able to deposit checks using their iPhones.
An updated version of the bank’s mobile app out this week accepts checks that have been photographed with the iPhone.
In the demo above, a bank exec first enters the amount of the check, then lines it up on a desk to take a picture, flips it over to take a shot of the signature. After checking that the images lined up properly and hitting “submit,” the check is in the bank’s system.
“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president, told the New York Times.
The check doesn’t have to be mailed or deposited afterward, customers are advised to void or file it. To avoid fraud trouble, only customers with credit and some kind of insurance are eligible — an estimated 60 percent of the bank’s customers. Since USAA‘s customer base is largely military personnel, for those overseas it might just be the ticket.
The last time I deposited a check, the ATM scanned it directly, but as long as you don’t need to get cash out or do something else this is a nice time saver, especially if you’re a straight shooter.
Just weeks after getting permission to tear down his historic mansion, Steve Jobs is embroiled in more wrecking ball controversy.
Preservationists in Melbourne, Australia, are up in arms about the imminent destruction of a historic art deco building in favor of a new Apple store.
Developers have just received permission to rip down Lonsdale House — described as one of the city’s finest examples of art deco architecture.
In its place they’re building a new shopping center called “Emporium Melbourne,” and are angling for Apple to be the anchor tenant. See the artist’s impression above.
Apple already has four stores in Australia, most notably the huge landmark store on Sydney’s George Street, which drew a huge crowd when it opened last year.
The Save Lonsdale House campaign say there’s no reason the building should be demolished, except to make more room for delivery trucks. In the past Apple has been sensitive to historic buildings. The Apple Store in New York’s Soho district, for example, is housed in a historic post office.
Last month, Jobs reached a deal to save his historic Jackling House mansion in Woodside California, which he’d been trying to demolish for years. Jobs will pay $600K to angel investor Gordon Smythe to have the mansion dismantled and moved.
More on the Lonsdale House controversy in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Today’s deals include half-a-dozen new App Store freebies, refurbished MacBooks for under $600, and Apple’s ongoing Back to School hardware sale, which throws in a fee iPod Touch with a computer purchase. Plus many more.
Details of these and other Daily Deals can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.
UPDATE: Rogers denies there’s an 8GB iPhone 3GS. It’s a formatting error, a spokesman told Gizmodo and Electronista. “There is no 8GB 3G s iPhone,” the spokesman emailed. “There is a formatting error on our website. It is being corrected asap.” Too bad. There was the Boy Genius memo though, which hasn’t yet been strenuously denied by Rogers.
The existence of an 8GB model of Apple’s hot iPhone 3GS looks more likely if you take a gander at this webpage from Rogers Wireless of Canada.
There it is in full public view in a comparison chart — the iPhone 3GS is available in 32GB, 16GB and — now — 8GB.
The lower-capacity 3GS was rumored last week when photos of a Rogers’ internal memo were published by Boy Genius Report. The memo said the company would sell through all of its older iPhone 3G stock before offering the new 8GB 3GS.
Whether the new phone will be offered outside Canada isn’t clear, but seems likely. It’s also likely to be lower-priced, perhaps replacing the current 8GB iPhone 3G, which is sold by AT&T for $99 with a contract.
Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, the dog loving, Tesla driving, indefatigable self-promoter, is forsaking Apple products in his fury at some of the company’s recent actions, like banning the Google Voice app — The Case Against Apple-in Five Parts.
While he has a couple of points, he’s wrong about the rest. In fact, the things that Calacanis rags on are the things that make Apple and the iPhone great, and he’s misguided not to embrace them. Here’s why:
New rumors this weekend suggest that Blu-Ray may finally be coming to the Mac. But while Blu-Ray is high on many people’s wish list, the rumors just don’t make sense.
Citing a “pretty reliable source,” Boy Genius Report says Blu-Ray is coming to iTunes 9, maybe as soon as September. The rumor jibes with a particularly vague story on AppleInsider suggesting that new iMacs will get new features (yeah, it’s almost sounds like self-parody), possibly Blu-Ray.
But although Blu-Ray format is gaining popularity, it’s unlikely to come to the Mac, ever. Here’s why:
Displaying an impressive level of tech savvy, Ice-T took a claw hammer to an old PowerBook he’s getting rid of.
In this 4-minute video, you can watch Ice-T smash his old PowerBook to bits. At first, it seems the former rapper is getting revenge on a glitchy machine.
“This Mac gave me a lot of hell,” he says. “It’s kinda like payback.”
But as the video goes on, it’s clear Ice-T is trying to remove and destroy the hard drive, which he’s afraid might fall into the wrong hands.
“I’m gonna get this hard drive out of here, make sure none of my secrets are in here, if somebody should find this computer,” he says.
In the comments, Ice-T takes a lot of flak for destroying the machine (and a bunch of racist garbage). The geniuses on YouTube rip him for not taking the machine to an eWaste facility and releasing toxins into the environment.
While the toxins criticism might be on target, Ice-T was right to destroy the hard drive first. Data is incredibly easy to pull off old hard drives, whether the drive has been erased or not, even in multiple passes. There are plenty of cases of identity theft from old machines. And just weeks ago, journalism students were able to buy a drive full of government secrets from a dump in Ghana.
As the actor knows, the one sure-fire way to destroy all data on a hard drive is to destroy the hard drive. “There’s probably a better way to do it, but i just said, ‘fuck it,'” the Law & Order actor says.
In fact, if recycling an old laptop, it’s a good idea to drill several holes into the case and right through the hard drive before taking it to an eWaste facility (Only if the drive can’t be easily removed obviously, which is the case with many older PowerBooks and iBooks).
Pay no attention to the glitches and errors! We’re moving to a new host.
I’m in New York with my family on a work vacation (I work, they vacation), and have just spent a miserable week sweating in my skivvies in a hot, humid Harlem apartment trying to move this site to a new host.
You may have suffered from a few database errors this week and last. It was so bad on Thursday, a couple of readers on Twitter suspected we were under DDoS attack, like Twitter itself that day. We weren’t, but we were being hit by spam bots — and still are. There was a big spike in spam traffic last week and a huge one this week. See the chart below.
Whether the spam is causing the database errors or not, I don’t know. I suspect it’s a combination of the spam, the growing traffic and the crumminess of the current host. As we’ve grown, we’ve attracted hack attacks that infected the site with spam and Windows viruses. The support has been hopeless, which is what you get with the cheapest hosting plan on the planet. It’s time to move up to a bigger, better host.
We’re moving to Laughing Squid of San Francisco. It’s a local, independently owned firm, run with quiet competence by the redoubtable Scott Beale (Here’s Scott’s great Laughing Squad blog). Laughing Squid is home to a lot of companies and people I like and admire. It’s plugged into the tech and arts community, and renowned for its support and reliability.
I did most of the moving work myself, so fully expect it to melt down. In fact, I’ll flip out if it works. If you’re reading this, it must have worked. So fingers crossed, and please let us know if you spot anything that needs fixing. Thanks for your patience.
— Leander.
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
CrunchFu: Effective and surprisingly fun fitness aid. Kind of like Nike+ for crunches. 4/5 $2.99 https://tr.im/vUFR
Doodle Jump: Infectious (if somewhat irritating) and simple tile-based ‘jump survival’ game. Updated often. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/20Dko
Flyloop: Sweet and surprisingly frantic high-score game. Draw lines & loops to ‘snare’/combine butterflies. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/22g9j
CameraBag: Trendy camera effects (Lomo, Holga, 1970s, 1960s, etc.) and 1200px per edge output. Good quality. 4/5 $1.99 https://tr.im/vCb5
Electrogravitron: Excellent multitouch/accelerometer game where you shepherd blue dots into defined zones. 4/5 $0.99 https://tr.im/vLsv
Lots of decent apps this week, including the infuriatingly addictive Doodle Jump, the hippyesque Flyloop (catch those butterflies, man), Electrogravitron—only second to Eliss in multitouch gaming terms—and CameraBag, which remains one of my favorite iPhone image-manipulation apps.
App of the week is CrunchFu, though, for providing a means for cheapskate iPhone owners to get fit and have some fun at the same time. It takes the same basic principle as Nike+, turning exercise into an online videogame. League tables and online battles ensure you stay engrossed rather than giving up. And if you’re no fan of crunches, GymFu offers similar apps for squats, pull-ups and push-ups.
Follow iPhoneTiny on Twitter, or visit iPhoneTiny.com
Apple’s upcoming iTablet will be a hit and run the iPhone operating system, according to new report out of Wall Street.
Analysts at Piper Jaffray say the upcoming iTablet will be released in 2010, will cost about $600, and will shift about 2 million units in its first year.
“Last week we spoke with an Asian component supplier that has received orders from Apple for a touch-screen device to be fulfilled by late CY09,” the report says. “This data point underscores our thesis that a tablet will likely launch in early CY10.”
The tablet will also run the iPhone/iPod Touch OS — not OS X, the report predicts. CoM believes the tablet will run OS X, which will be the “killer app” that cements the tablet’s success. Apple appears to be prepping Snow Leopard, the next version of OS X, for touchscreen devices.
“Apple could choose to simply run the current App Store apps on the larger device, with enough usable space for multiple apps to run (multi-tasking),” says the investment firm.
The report continues: “Key apps, like Safari and Mail, could be made larger to make use of the larger screen resolution, making Apple’s tablet appealing for more extended use, and the company could continue to leverage its primary asset in mobile computing, the App Store, in this scenario. We believe this is the most likely scenario given the success of the multi-touch platform and the App Store ecosystem, which could be accelerated with a tablet device.”
The analysis says Apple will reap extra revenue from the tablet that hasn’t been included in most forecast models.
“While at first glance this may appear to address a niche market, we believe the addressable market is larger than that of the Apple TV, of which Apple sold about 1.2m in its first year,” the report says.
Today’s deals include Mac Pro Xeon Workstations, PowerBook G4s, new App Store price drops and many more.
Details of these and other Daily Deals can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.
Have you ever gotten to a party and forgotten your camera? We’ve all witnessed a great moment and thought: ‘I wish I had my camera ready.’ Well, worry no more because now Sony has the perfect party camera that automatically takes pictures. The Party-shot camera dock uses a face-detection BIONZ image processor to find your friends and snap away.
A nice DIY effort from Denmark, this logo end table is the latest in Apple-inspired furniture we at CoM go nutty over.
This table comes to us from ilove code, not new to Apple-related decor projects, who put it together with help from his mom. The table top is made from medium-density fiberboard (MDF), the logo stands on an old bar-stool.
Especially like how the apple bite might facilitate use as a computer table, depending on the height.
