Image used with a CC-license. Thanks to basykes on Flickr.
A British thief was busted in Germany after posing as broke tourist selling his iPod and electronics gear to get home.
The sorta-samaritans walked away and realized instead of MP3 players and video gear they had bought a camcorder bag full of potatoes.
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book — buy a cell phone in a parking lot, find out it’s got sand instead of hardware in it — but the thief pulled off the bait and switch at least 26 times.
His accomplice has not been caught yet — and police in Dusseldorf warn he may be armed.
Should someone approach you, remember only Zune owners would sell their devices to get home.
Klipsch's $100 in-ear headphones with Apple=friendly microphone and remote.
Are you looking for an alternative to Apple’s in-ear headphones? High-end audio gear maker Klipsch next month will begin selling a $100 headset, the Image S4i, complete with the same three-button microphone and remote as Cupertino’s $88 version.
If you’ve told the kids 100 times not to interrupt while you work in the home office, maybe it’s time to download a new app that emits a high-frequency pitch that anyone under the age of 25 finds seriously annoying.
Called Kids Be Gone, it works like a teen deterrent device first used by British police to disperse unruly underage crowds by emitting a shrill tone only they can hear, 18.000 hz. (Kids and the under-30 crowd still have sensitive hair cells in their inner ears plus full aural capabilities people gradually lose as they age — try the demo for a similar service after the jump).
Multiple reports Tuesday indicate a 25 year-old employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s OEM suppliers in China, killed himself last week after losing a 4th generation iPhone which he had been instructed to ship to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA.
Sun Danyong was a recent engineering graduate who worked in product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a city in the booming industrial corridor between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
On Thursday, July 9th, according to the first English-language report on the incident at Venture Beat, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a local Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered one of the phones was missing.
On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss. Then, that Wednesday, three Foxconn employees illegally searched his apartment. Accusations have reportedly been flying about the Chinese language Twittersphere that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated.
Shortly after 3am on Thursday July 16th, security cameras at Sun’s apartment building show him leaping to his death from a window in his apartment.
No Dock or Menu Bar was available on early versions of Mac OS for spacecraft
All this Moon landing nostalgia is wonderful and I’m enjoying every minute of it, especially We Choose The Moon and the CAPCOM and EAGLE Twitter accounts — anyway.
If you’ve ever wondered whether you could make it as an astronaut, here’s the ultimate test: Virtual AGC for Mac.
Apple is due to announce Wednesday its earnings for the quarter that ended June 27, and you know what that means: wild speculation by analysts followed by pouting and a drooping stock price when Apple out-performs expectations.
But lately, it’s gotten still more insane: now, these same analysts are trying to infer some read of the overall economic condition based on Apple’s earnings. Which, to me, is a comically fruitless exercise, because Apple operates in a different universe from most companies. It has radically differentiated offerings in all of its businesses, and its focus on innovation is such that it always comes out with a new market-defining product that the rest of the industry can’t match. Apple’s an especially bad indicator of the rest of the consumer tech sector during this recession. Apple doing well doesn’t mean that Dell’s in good shape, or vice versa.
BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl, a long-time Apple-watcher, has a very sober account of this lunacy, which suffers from the problems associated with a lot of traditional business reporting — in pursuit of balance, he can’t actually address the questionable premise that Apple, a company that was out-performing the market before it collapsed, might signify the end of the recession by continuing to out-perform the market.
I can say this much: Apple will have great earnings on Wednesday. And that means that it remains good to be an Apple stockholder, even as the rest of the world is in chaos. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back to normal anywhere else.
A CoM reader wrote in after our story on the Apple symbols pried from dead computers and transformed into jewelry to say that he’s been doing the same for years.
The reader, who goes by the handle univac, set up a gallery of what he calls “liberated logos” on Flickr –Â there’s something wonderful about seeing the evolution of them side by side.
His collection includes a ton of iconic rainbow Apple symbols (including one possibly from a 512 “Fat Mac,”) plus larger ones from laserwriters, G3s and Quadras.
Another little screencast for you, this time about PersonalBrain, a mind-mapping tool. I recently spent some time exploring this app and found it an odd mix of the infuriating and the fascinating.
The screencast I refer to, about the guy with 100,000 items in his PersonalBrain, is here.
Like I say in the video, PersonalBrain doesn’t really appeal to me; but if you use it, I’d be interested to hear what for, and why you like using it.
If your memory is a little hazy on where to find a medicinal pot supplier, there are a couple of apps for that.
The Cannabis app, available on iTunes for $2.99, helps users locate the nearest medical marijuana collectives, co-ops, doctors, clinics, attorneys, organizations and other patient services in the thirteen states where pot is legal for medicinal purposes.
Cannabis is the work of a Devin Calloway — web engineer and medical cannabis patient and self-described “digital activist” — and software engineer Julian Cain. The pair will donate $0.50 of every app sold to found a cannabis non-profit reform fund.
Cannabis isn’t the only app on iTunes for pot-seeking people. The other cannabis finder is called California Herbal Caregivers and, for $0.99, offers a list of the state’s 700 dispensaries on-the-go.
Despite Apple’s ongoing policing for “inappropriate” apps, both pot apps are rated 12+, or suitable for anyone over the age of 12, for “infrequent/mild alcohol, tobacco or drug use references.”
What it is: Yet another puzzle game. This time, you drop numbered discs into a grid. If the number matches the amount of discs in its row or column, the disc vanishes. If it’s next to gray blocks, it smashes them. Clear chains for bonuses.
Why it’s good: The evil people behind Drop7 describe it as “Tetris meets Sudoku”, which is kind of right. However, we’d prefer to describe it as “hardcore drugs meets videogaming”, since Drop7 just won’t let go. We find ourselves sneaking quick goes on ‘hardcore’ mode, because they only take a few minutes each, but then an hour flies by and deadlines are standing in front of us, with a concerned, slightly angry expression.
We fully believe that Area/Code actually plans to get everyone hooked on Drop7, shortly before taking over the world and going “mwahahahahahaha!” a lot. Put it this way: we’re now playing this more than Flight Control.
Where to get it: Drop7’s available via the App Store, and there’s more information at the Drop7 website. At the time of writing, the game cost three bucks. Don’t leave home without it—or you’ll get the shakes.
Complaining he hasn’t received Visual Voicemail on his iPhone for weeks, Siegler joins a growing chorus of pundits dissatisfied with AT&T, including Gizmodo, Wired and GigaOm.
But as some Techcrunch commenters point out, Visual Voicemail is bolloxed by a popular tethering hack, which allows the iPhone to share its internet connection with a tethered computer.
“I enabled the tethering hack weeks ago when it came out,” says one commenter. “It broke visual voicemail, so I reverted it. One heck of a coincidence if everyone’s voicemail spontaneously broke the same week that a tethering hack came out that breaks visual voicemail.”
Siegler didn’t respond to a query asking if he had tried the tethering hack, and he makes no mention of it in the comments to his post, where he engages in some back and forth with TC readers.
Either way, here’s a very simple fix to get Visual Voicemail back, while still enabling the tethering hack.
The days when you plugged your tiny thumb drive into your Mac may be over; memory maker Kingston Monday unveiled the 256GB DataTraveler 300 — more hard drive space than many desktop or laptop computers.
This thumb drive isn’t meant to transfer a few MP3s or an occasional Word or Excel file. No, the European branch of Kingston reports the DataTraveler has bigger tasks in mind, like 51,000 images or 365 CDs.
“This demonstrates how far flash technology has developed,” Antoine Harb, business development manager for Kingston Technology in the Middle East is quoted. Could this signal Apple a flash memory iMac or MacBook is possible?
Future perfect? Dave Lawrence's mock-up of Apple's homepage circa 1983
Dave Lawrence over at Newton Poetry had some fun with Photoshop making this retro-future homepage for Apple products. He picked a critical year in Apple history, 1983, when the company faced competition from IBM and the flop of the $10,000 Lisa.
Inspired by “how Apple’s web site has changed over the years,” Dave “thought it’d be cool to use it as a time-traveling template to take a peek into the past… It’s not accurate, of course, because I took some embellishments on the iPhone prototype and the fact that some sort of World Wide Web existed during the Reagan administration.”
Still, it’s an interesting take on web design—as well as what’s gone right and wrong with Apple products over the years.
Dave also mentions he’d like to see what would happen “if someone took a snapshot of Apple.com as it would appear throughout the years before its actual launch in 1996. For instance, I’d love to see what the homepage would’ve looked like on the Newton’s launch day, or the first PowerBook, or System 7.”
Anyone game? Send us your what-may-have been mock-ups.
If you’re looking for sturdy earphones with good sound isolation, the Shure SE110 may be a good swap for your Apple earbuds — if you don’t mind the bulky, three-foot cord.
First the good:
The Shure SE110 headphones come with a two-year warranty for materials and workmanship, the first thing you’ll notice after unboxing is that are built to withstand a lot of wear.
The cord and jack are thicker and more solid than regular Apple earbuds and, even after a short trial, I’d be willing to wager they last the warranty. If they do, at $79 per pair, the price is decent for the overall quality.
I like to think I’m a lover not a fighter, but the beating my iPod earbuds take indicates otherwise: a pair lasts about six-to-nine months, if that, in the cycle of gym bag to computer bag to handbag. (My old Apple pair in the pics below have been glued back together, note the sad fray around the buds).
So sturdy is a big selling point for me. Over the years, I’ve waffled between getting Apple replacements or versions that cost about half of the $30 Apple price, since they seem to last about as long anyway.
Some perverted unfiltered online content. No wait, it's the Apple website! And in an app that enables access to unfiltered content, but doesn't have to worry about review copies and 17+ ratings: Safari. Because Apple's hypocritical like that.
Apple recently announced that 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store. With the dodgy approvals process alienating developers, you’d sometimes think Apple reckons it got where it did alone, without the people actually making the apps. Now, the company’s gone one step further, cleverly shooting itself in the foot (and developers in the face), thereby trying everything it can think of to screw up its lead and give the competition a sporting chance.
After all, surely Apple wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to ban all promo codes for 17+ rated apps? But that’s the story on TUAW, punching in the gut an already broken system (given that Apple has yet to provide non-US App Store account holders with an official means of redeeming promo codes). (See also: Q & A: How Sex Game Apps Get Approved By Apple)
You might think “so what?”, since, clearly, the only things rated 17+ would be dodgy ‘porn’ apps, right? Well, no. As we reported, Eucalyptus—an eReader for Project Gutenberg content—was saddled with a 17+ rating recently, due to it supposedly allowing ‘unfiltered internet content’. (In practise, Apple was seemingly miffed at the app enabling access to the text from Kamasutra, despite, say, Safari enabling access to hard-core pornography websites.) This means the 17+ rating is likely to affect some or all updates for all web-oriented software—Twitter clients, web browsers, IM clients, Flickr clients, eBook readers, RSS readers and so on.
Promo codes don’t generally affect the public. Although they’re sometimes given away by developers, they’re usually used by writers and journalists as review copies. Without promo codes, 17+ apps run the risk of not getting mainstream coverage, meaning they’re far less likely to ‘break through’ and become a sales success. (Contrary to what you might think, most publications don’t in fact have a ‘budget’ for writers to buy software, and many outlets enforce a policy of strictly not paying for review copies. When you’re reviewing hundreds of apps, those dollarpoundeuros stack up pretty fast.)
Here’s hoping Apple has a change of heart, because the App Store already has enough problems, without Apple making things worse, not only for developers and reviewers, but for users (who won’t find out about great new 17+ apps) and themselves (since sales will be lower).
Are you a Gmail person? With more than one @gmail.com account? Thought so. How many times have you thought how much you like Gmail but felt frustrated by one aspect or another of the limits (mostly time and productivity-oriented) imposed by working with email in a web browser?
Yup. Well, guess what? There’s an app for that.
Mailplane brings Gmail to your Mac desktop and unleashes power and productivity you’ve only wished for in Google’s excellent mail product.
We’re only just now checking Mailplane out, but with support for:
# Drag and drop attachments
# Multiple Gmail accounts
# New mail notifications
# Easy screenshot sending
# Gmail shortcuts
# Integration with OmniFocus,
our first impressions are that Mailplane is well worth giving a more extensive test drive. It’s got a 30 day free trial and we’ll be giving you our more extensive review in about a month.
If you check Mailplane out, be sure to let us know what you think about it in comments.
Let the Good Times Roll? The Love Dice App on iTunes
After our story on peek-a-boo apps, sexy content OK’d by Apple despite the smut ban, a reader wrote in to say we missed a whole genre: sex game apps.
(You can read a Q&A about how sex games get approved with James Miller of Trichotomy Media about their Naughty Loaded Dice app here).
Sexy dice are full-contact party games that — much like the real-world equivalent — are intended to boost lagging passion or tease friendships beyond platonic lines.
While the premise is as old as spin-the-bottle, the apps are feather caress away from violating Apple’s policy about “no inappropriate content” apps for sale on iTunes.
Surprisingly, of the half-dozen sexy dice apps available, some are deemed suitable for ages 9 and above for “infrequent/mild/mature/suggestive themes,” others are rated 17+ for “frequent/intense/mature suggestive themes.”
Naughty LOADED Dice is a sex dice game, one of the “foreplay” apps that nudged past Apple censors (see our round-up here). There are half a dozen similar sex games available on iTunes, but Naughty LOADED Dice may be the only one to exploit iPhone technology for sexual content — allowing users to secretly control the roll of the dice.
The game (whose title excludes the word “loaded” after download) has a secret menu that allows him or her to select their preferred combination. When playtime comes, the user can play normally with his partner, or press a secret hidden “button” to activate a fixed roll of the dice. The ruse makes use of the iPhone touchscreen, which allows developers to create buttons on screen that are invisible.
Despite rumors that Apple censors would nix the app — in part for its menu trickery — it was approved for sale in the iTunes store July 3.
Cult of Mac spoke to James Miller, Director of Marketing for Trichotomy Media, about the murky process of getting the app approved, Apple’s ambiguous stance on promo codes for +17 apps and why his company’s next apps won’t be for adult audiences.
CoM: What was your experience in getting your app approved? JM: Getting Naughty LOADED Dice approved wasn’t the trial by fire that it seems other apps with “racy” material had, but it sure seemed to have something fishy to it. I read that other developers who submit apps with very simple functionality get their apps approved in a few business days, a week at most.
Ours has very simple, self-contained functionality and it took more than a month (to get approval). I had already talked to my PR contacts about how we submitted our application, expecting it either to have taken only a week or just get rejected outright for the content.
Full interview and pic of the app’s secret screen after the jump.
UPDATE 2: Edge Lite’s now also gone. Some stores report Edge still available, but it’s certainly not on the US or UK stores. I guess Killer Edge Racing had better watch out, given that Langdell’s website has a Flash movie for the game Racers (which we suspect will never see the light of day).
UPDATE: At the time of writing, Edge Lite remains on the App Store, carrying an irony stick. So either someone missed the lite version or it really is all about the money. Which would be a huge shock, obviously.
We yesterday reported on the feud between Mobigame, makers of excellent iPhone game Edge, and EDGE Games, a company owned by Tim Langdell, who seemingly claims ownership over the word ‘edge’ in relation to any kind of gaming.
Edge by Mobigame - now no longer available from your local App Store
As stated yesterday, this ongoing battle has raged since April, and although compromises have apparently been suggested by both sides (indeed, Mobigames offered to rename their game Edgy, but Langdell then almost immediately registered that trademark himself), no agreement has been reached. More absurdly, Langdell contests that Edge wilfully ripped off ancient EDGE 8-bit videogame Bobby Bearing (and named it Edge to suggest the name of Langdell’s ‘famous’ trademark!), despite that game being a clone of Marble Madness and Edge playing almost nothing like Bobby Bearing.
Sadly, Edge is now again gone from the App Store, seemingly removed without warning (unlike the first time round, when Mobigame temporarily pulled the game voluntarily, in the hope of coming to a satisfactory agreement with Langdell).
Mobigame’s David Papazian told Cult of Mac: “We did not pull it. We don’t know exactly why it has been pulled [and] we don’t know if the game will come back. Maybe it will in some territories, but it does not depend on us. We are as surprised as many people, I think.”
“Making Edge took nearly two years of our lives, We hope the happy few who played it had a great time. We don’t know what to do now, and we cannot believe this is really happening. But we will probably have to fight since we strongly believe the law is on our side.”
Pre users will have to stay with version 8.2 to sync with iTunes
UPDATE: the original headline and a reference to “wireless” syncing in this article have been changed to correct a misunderstanding on the author’s part.
Apple has confirmed that Palm Pre will no longer be able to sync with iTunes versions beginning with the latest update, killing a sales feature that Palm had long relied upon in billing its phone as a major competitor to the iPhone.
“iTunes 8.2.1 is a free software update that provides a number of important bug fixes,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris, in a BusinessWeek report Wednesday. “It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre,” she continued, adding, “As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”
For a device roundly touted as iPhone’s most worthy competition in the smartphone market, Palm’s Pre has not made many waves since being released on June 6 by Sprint, and remains hampered by an online app store with very little product.
There is some disagreement among analysts about how well the Pre has been received so far by the market, with some crowing that expectations have been more than met, while others say not so fast.
While the news of iTunes’ Pre lockout is no surprise, and Palm could still easily craft workaround allowing Pre users to sync with newer versions of iTunes, including using third party solutions to do the job, the lockout news is further evidence that Apple is not about to let up the pressure on a company now run by some of its former employees.
