When we think of wooden music devices, our memories go back to the hulking consoles that created mellow tones. You’d think that today’s release by iFrogz of their wooden EarPollution Timbre earbuds would be just as warm and fuzzy – and if you did, you would be wrong.
The $50 earbuds practically fell apart in the hands of Gadget Labs’ reviewer Charlie Sorrel, who told readers the earbuds produced harsh sounds and music akin to listening to your playlist over the telephone.
The video above shows why tablet computers are so exciting. Using your fingers to directly manipulate objects onscreen (as opposed to hitting radio buttons with a stylus pen) is clearly a powerful and intuitive way to interact with our machines.
The video shows a demo of BumpTop, a 3D desktop overlay for Windows 7. As you’ll see, it makes the computer desktop just like a real physical desktop. It’s pretty magical. Just look at the way photos are cropped — by chopping them with your finger!
BumpTop’s blog has more details about the specific gestures.
If this is what can be done on Windows, I can’t wait to see what Apple’s got up its sleeve.
Greenpeace has given Apple a “pat on the back” for last week’s publication of a detailed breakdown of its greenhouse gas emissions.
The environmental group also credits Apple for being ahead of the industry in removing toxins from its products. While Apple eliminated poisonous chemicals from its entire product line about a year ago, other companies are lagging.
Despite the praise, Apple got a middling score in the latest edition of Greenpeace’s quarterly Guide to Greener Electronics, which ranks tech companies according to their green initiatives, such as cutting emmissions and removing harmful materials.
Apple sits in the middle of the pack of 18 tech companies, well behind the leader, Nokia, but Greenpeace acknowledges the guide went to press before Apple published its environmental report.
“We went to press before Apple’s updated environmental information was published last week but the welcome news of their transparency about greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental disclosures will be factored in to the next edition. Apple can justly pat itself on the back for listening to their customers who asked for greener gadgets. And all you Apple users should pat yourselves on the back for asking.”
The group also praised Hewlett-Packard for attempts to eliminate toxins and releasing a computer that is virtually free of PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride, or vinyl plastic) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Earlier this year, Greenpeace launched a HP=”Hazardous Products” campaign against the company, pressuring it to match Apple.
“HP has made the first step in catching up with Apple, which eliminated these materials from its entire product line almost a year ago, and now puts pressure squarely on HP’s competitors to put more products on the market that are cleaner and safer,” the group says.
Greenpeace saved its greatest praise for consumers who pressure companies to be greener. “The big points go to activist consumers for proving once again that public pressure creates positive change.”
Greenpeace’s August 2006 Guide to Greener Electronics is here.
Publishing house Simon & Schuster just launched a new product dubbed “vook,” a dumb name for what sounds like a smart video book.
The idea? Vooks blend text and video into a reading and viewing experience, so the next time you’re not really getting a sense of place from a novel, or want to see how exercises are done you can watch a video. It’s also got all of the social media trappings, so you can discuss, rant etc. about the vook, (pronounced to ryhme with book), too.
The first four titles, available for $4.99 each on iTunes, are workout book “The 90-Second Fitness Revolution,” a book of DIY spa treatments called “Return to Beauty,” a thriller by Richard Doetsch called “Embassy” and romance novella “Promises.”
Deals on MacBook Pro laptops keep landing on our desk – and we keep passing them on to you. This week’s cage fight is between the mothership herself and ExperCom. While ExperCom’s offer has more power under the hood (2.93GHz versus Apple’s 2.66 GHz alternative), Cupertino appears to lead in variety. For discount shoppers, we have a battle between Mac Mall’s 75% off and PC Micro Store’s 50% off on iPhone accessories. Finally, we round out the top tier with a smattering of cases and assorted equipment.
For details on these and other bargains (like App Store price drops), head over to CoM’s Daily Deals page.
With over 75 gazillion apps in the iTunes App Store now having generated more than Umpteen billion downloads, it might seem a tad preposterous to try and pick the 10 with the most beautiful GUIs.
But we’ve never let being a tad preposterous stop us before and we’re not saying these are the 10 most beautiful apps in the App Store — we’re just saying these 10 are beautiful. In almost every case, too, they have other redeeming features that make them worth checking out if you don’t have them already.
And don’t forget to let us know in comments if you’ve found something useful and beautiful that we may have missed here.
Classics is the, uh, classic reader app that lets you experience some of the greatest works of literature ever produced — in a digital format that’s so natural and so obvious, it just feels right. Meticulous care has been given to the typography and illustration of works such as Alice in Wonderland, The Art of War, Paradise Lost and many more, with sensual touches like realistic 3D page flips, a satin bookmark to remember where you left off reading and a beautiful woodgrain bookcase to store your collection.
In a sign that Apple is perhaps distancing itself from Google, the Cupertino company has bought a mapping startup.
In July, Apple bought the Los Angeles mapping startup Placebase, Seth Wientraub reports at Computerworld.
Placebase offered a sophisticated mapping application and API called Pushpin, which can create rich, detailed maps from all kinds of public and private data sets — much more than Google. See the example above, which shows gas stations and auto service shops in the L.A. area.
Steve Jobs has always said he likes to control the primary technology in his devices. Can he be preparing to move away from Google, especially its Mapping app, which is behind some of the iPhone’s primary functions and underlies new mapping features in iPhoto?
As Weintraub notes, Apple has been fighting with Google lately over the Google Voice app, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt quit Apple’s board to avoid conflicts of interest.
Is the Google/Apple rift deepening?
Entrepreneur Peter Collingridge, founder of Enhanced Editions, an experimental ebook publisher that’s just put out Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro as an iPhone app, thinks it unlikely Apple is trying to “redefine publishing” as recent reports have suggested.
“Whilst I’d love it if Apple were looking at doing exactly this, I find it unlikely,” he says.
But Collingridge does think there’s huge opportunity in reinventing the ebooks as “digital books,” and that Apple’s tablet presents some interesting UI opportunities.
The latest release into the already crowded market of iPod/iPhone holders is the StandHear Travel Stand & Headphone Splitter from Agent 18.
The compact, fold-out case allows you to support your iPod/iPhone at four different viewing angles, leaving your hands free to do whatever they might need to be doing whilst watching your favorite movie or reviewing por… er, important documents.
As Brian Lam on Gizmodo today says about Apple “redefining print” for its upcoming tablet, it’s all about the content.
If Apple has learned anything from the iPod, it’s that a modern consumer electronic device is a three-legged stool: hardware, software, and media that fills it.
Apple doesn’t want to launch a tablet without media to consume on it. This is the mistake Apple made with the Apple TV: It’s a great piece of hardware and software, but the content isn’t there yet (especially the paucity of Hollywood movies).
So Steve has set out to persuade publishing houses, magazine companies and textbook publishers to make interactive books and magazines that make sense on an interactive, multitouch device. Here’s the key paragraph from Lam’s story:
“Some I’ve talked to believe the initial content will be mere translations of text to tablet form. But while the idea of print on the Tablet is enticing, it’s nothing the Kindle or any E-Ink device couldn’t do. The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridized content that draws from audio, video and interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. And with release dates for Microsoft’s Courier set to be quite far away and Kindle stuck with relatively static E-Ink, it appears that Apple is moving towards a pole position in distribution of this next-generation print content. First, it’ll get its feet wet with more basic repurposing of the stuff found on dead trees today.”
But what might this “hybrid content” look like?
One clue comes from Enhanced Editions, a U.K. startup founded by former-book industry executives that seeks to marry technology with traditional print publishing. “We have long-since seen the destiny of the latter bound to its embrace of the former,” the company says.
One of the dumbest decisions Apple made regarding iPhone and iPod touch is devices wiping all traces of an app when it’s deleted, but providing no means for saving preferences and progress. Unless you use an uninstaller to remove an app or game from your Mac, you can usually pick up where you left off after a reinstall; savvy Mac owners can also fiddle around with preferences, moving them between Macs to ensure consistency across machines in app environments or videogame progress.
iPhone and iPod touch don’t allow such things. Spend hours making headway in Peggle and then, for whatever reason, delete and reinstall Peggle (by accident, or through having a restore go wrong), and your progress is gone—you have to start again. It’s like 1980s arcade games after the plug has been pulled, or cheap, miserly Nintendo DS games that lack a battery back-up in the cartridge, erasing progress and high scores when the device is powered down. For a platform Apple’s pushing as the best solution for handheld gaming, it’s asinine that you cannot export and import videogame progress and save states.
There is a workaround, however, using the shareware app MobileSyncBrowser, but it’s not for the faint-hearted…
iHome combines the common iPhone doc and the ubiquitous iPod alarm clock into the iP88, a dual dock for both the iPhone and iPod that also serves as a customized alarm clock. The $150 simultaneous charging unit is the result of iHome’s understanding that “many households have multiple iPhones, iPods and docking stations,” the company said upon announcing the start of shipping.
There is a parallel with the cell phone. Initially, mobile phones were not that common, so one family could do with a single charging station. Eventually, multiple cell phones with accompanying chargers resembled a tangled snakes nest of cords and plugs. The result: companies created charging stations where multiple phones could reside.
But multiple docking is not all the iP88 offers. Along with convenient charging, you can customize how you awake: either with a selection from your iPod’s playlist, a tune from the AM/FM radio, or a buzzer. Along with the Reson8 stereo speakers, the unit comes with a remote control.
The alarm clock portion of the iP88 is what makes it stand out from the crowd of other dual docking station, such as the Gigaware model we featured earlier this week.
[Via iHome]
This an ad mock-up from Moscow agency Doberman Studio has me plenty confused. Sure, the sleek, round lines of the Mac Mighty Mouse might induce one to think it feminine.
Or is it some kind of commentary on gay marriage — i.e. did Mickey fall for the cartoon Mighty Mouse?
In the second version, cartoon mouse Jerry also falls prey to the seductive powers of the Mighty Mouse.
If you have a yen for MacBooks, we have two offers competing for attention. Both are 13-inch Core 2 machines. If you’re all set for hardware, Apple is pushing its Apps and iTunes wares. Finally, there are price cuts on cases – as much as 85 percent off.
For details on these and other items, check on CoM’s Daily Deals page.
Europe’s Alpine glaciers are going fast — some reports have them washed away by 2050.
To stop them, some Alpine regions have tried gimmicks like heat-reflecting blankets, but the Swiss region of Jungfrau is banking on an iPhone app to raise awareness.
Developed by the University of Berne’s Institute for Climate Change, the Jungfrau Climate Guide app, also available on iTunes, shows hikers where the effects of climate change are already visible and what scientists know about the subject.
For years, people used to bash Macs by noting the absence of what was viewed to be an absolute essential application. Though there’s still a hold-out or two (we’re still waiting for AutoCAD for Mac, despite hints to the contrary), things are much better these days.
No application, perhaps, embodies this change more than Intuit’s QuickBooks. The company abandoned support for business accounting software package on the Mac in 1997, then pushed out a superficial and generally disappointing port for OS X in 2003. But things started to look up three years ago with QuickBooks 2007 for Mac, the first Mac-like QuickBooks release in almost a decade.
Intuit’s newfound commitment to the platform continues with this morning’s announcement of QuickBooks 2010 for Mac (out in late October for $200), which uses signature OS X UI elements to create a more intuitive accounting experience.I had the chance to observe the software in action yesterday, and there’s a lot to be impressed by. Read on to learn more.
Finally, the team at Dropbox have released a native iPhone app. And it’s pretty awesome.
When the installer contains two spelling mistakes, it’s a sign you’re installing quality software.
From Adobe UI Gripes, a site that describes itself as: “Me moaning about shoddy UI inconsistencies and mistakes in Adobe products and how they get shittier with every release.”
Twenty five years after Apple aired its famous 1984 commercial, it’s Steve Jobs that is being portrayed as Big Brother.
In a remake of Apple’s famous 1984 ad, which famously portrayed IBM as a force of oppression, startup doubleTwist has Apple pegged as the oppressor.
Microsoft’s Courier tablet isn’t just a concept.
The company’s Research Lab built a remarkably similar device in 2008 called Codex. And in the real world, the Microsoft tablet is not quite as slick as the demos make it look.
ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley is reporting that Courier is more than a concept: it’s an “incubation project” slated for a possible mid-2010 release. Also, Microsoft is “leaning toward” building the hardware itself, like the Xbox, to speed the device to market, and presumably offer competition to Apple’s rumored tablet.
Check the video and pictures after the jump to see what it actually might look like in real life.
When people talk about classic gaming, they usually rattle on about really simple, playable games that are challenging but that a five-year-old could conceivably master. Such people were clearly traumatised by text adventures (now referred to using the rather loftier term ‘interactive fiction’) and have therefore removed them from memory.
These games were primarily text-based, with you solving puzzles via verb-noun parsers. As time went on, adventures gradually became increasingly complex and elaborate, with Infocom arguably leading the genre to its height.
Sadly and perhaps predictably, text adventures eventually got a thorough kicking. In the words of Richard Harris: “Graphics came along and the computer-using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together—the point ’n’ click game,” which, he argues, signalled the arrival of the post-literate society.
But via the magic of the internet, interactive fiction clings on, and apps for playing the Z-machine format are commonplace. Frotz is one of the best, and it now exists as a free iPod app. I interviewed its developer, Craig Smith, to find out what he thinks of interactive fiction and why he brought Frotz to Apple handhelds.
Classic rockers Queen Tuesday helped boost the profile of Logitech’s Squeezebox Radio. To promote the $200 Squeezebox, the group’s “Queen Absolute Greatest” album, device owners will get exclusive access to songs, lyrics and photographs prior to the November release.
Introduced in September, the Squeezebox Radio streams music via Wi-Fi. Napster, iTunes and Sirius selections are supported.
[Via Logitech]
What do you get when you mix the old-style pedometer with the Wii and our modern obsession with health? The answer: the fitbit, a tiny wearable motion-detector providing you with a window into just how healthy (or not) are your days and nights. The $99 wireless gadget begins shipping today a year after its unveiling.
Borrowing some of the technology of the Wii, which tracks players’ body movement, the fitbit senses when you walk, run, bike – even sleep. The fitbit can either clip on your clothing or on a wristband. Data gathered by the device is then wirelessly transmitted to a base station. You can then either check the fitbit’s LED screen (which displays a flower that grows as you exercise more) or through fitbit’s “dashboard.”
Gizmodo has another mockup video of Microsoft’s Courier tablet concept showing how the device might be used for creative work.
The heart of the system is an “infinite journal,” an interactive work area that’s used to store and work on photos, handwritten notes and messages from colleagues.
But in four minutes of video, there’s just the pen. Fingers are used for navigation, but all the input is via pen and handwriting recognition. There’s no virtual keyboard to be seen.
It’s a pretty compelling vision of how a touchscreen device might be used in real life. I’m half convinced, but I can’t help feeling it won’t work. A tablet device has to be multitouch, not pen-based, otherwise it’s going to be mainstream flop. History has shown, pen-based systems are niche products. The future is fingers.
The Apple tablet is 10.7-inch device that runs the iPhone OS and is ready to go, subject to Steve Jobs’ final approval, iLounge reports.
Citing a rock solid source with a proven track record, iLounge says the “iPad” looks like a jumbo iPhone with a curved back and an approx. 720p touchscreen. The device will be announced on January 19 and ship in May or June — the delay is designed to build iPhone-like hype.
It will come in two configurations: One with built-in 3G networking and another without. “Think of the 3G version as a bigscreen iPhone 3GS, and the non-3G version as a bigscreen iPod touch,” iLounge says.
The device is not designed for a work or productivity. It’s for media consumption.
“It’s a slate-like replacement for books and magazines, plus all of the media, gaming, app, and web functionality of the iPhone and iPod touch,” iLounge says. “It is not meant to compete with netbooks. It’s an iPhone OS media player and light communication device.”
And Steve Jobs is 80 percent likely to give the green light for a January 19 launch.
Why January 19? That’s the big question.
