The cover of the June 1, 2009 edition of the New Yorker magazine will feature art composed completely on an iPhone for the 1st time, according to multiple reports Monday.
Artist Jorge Columbo used the iPhone app Brushes to “fingerpaint” a street scene of people gathered by one of the city’s iconic hot dog & pretzel carts, elevating art on the iPhone to yet one more level of acceptance few could have imagined when Apple’s mobile device first came to market less than two years ago.
Hit the jump for a video made with the Brushes companion app Brushes Viewer showing just how Columbo used Brushes to create his work.
It’s a classic skull design, made with the keys from a pair of Apple keyboards. The white keys come from an extended white Mac keyboard; the black keys were taken from the original iMac (the one with the half sized F keys). Says Roger:
“I could say it depicts the obsolescence that all computer equipment faces, but really it’s just skulls make great tees! What Mac geek wouldn’t like to see a design featuring Mac keys, and only only closer inspection can you find the classic Apple command key.”
Hit the jump for a bigger picture of the skull — and the elusive command key.
However—and this is important—flagrant and blatant IP infringement is apparently fine, judging by Luigi Vs Pac.
And, yeah, we know Apple shouldn’t have to be the IP police when it comes to App Store content, and that some properties being ripped off are somewhat obscure. But, c’mon—Luigi and Pac-Man? In one game? Oh dear.
Apple’s Safari 4 browser is a pig. It’s a resource hog that doesn’t clean up after itself — and it remembers every site you visit, even in “porn mode.”
Safari records every site you visit, even if you turn on the “Private Browsing” feature or clear the browser history. And the files it generates can consume gigabytes of disk space.
“This is a huge privacy concern,” writes designer and musician C. Harwick, from Chapel Hill, NC, who did some snooping in Safari’s hidden system folders. “With no good way of getting rid of them except manually (clearing the history doesn’t do it, and I don’t think resetting Safari does either), these hidden files are strewn all over the user’s hard drive unbeknownst to him waiting for snooping relatives (or more pertinently, law enforcement) to dig them up. I really like Safari, but I’m going to have to seriously consider using Firefox now (ack).”
Who says Apple doesn’t listen to customers? Thanks to a public outcry, Apple has reversed course and accepted the Eucalyptus eBook reader into the iPhone App Store.
The web erupted in outrage last week when developer Jamie Montgomerie’s eBook reader was rejected by Apple because it allowed readers to download the Kama Sutra from Project Gutenberg — which Apple deemed “inappropriate sexual content.”
But on Sunday Montgomerie received a call from Apple. The Apple representative chatted with the developer about his app and invited him to resubmit it.
“We talked about the confusion surrounding its App Store rejections, which I am happy to say is now fully resolved,” Montgomerie wrote on his blog.
David Leibowitz is a veteran fine art photographer who’s lately been making some pretty amazing art using his iPhone.
Based in NYC, Leibowitz’s pictures of the city look like a French Impressionist painted the scenes (hit the jump for more pictures). There’s nothing to indicate they were made using his iPhone and about $40 worth of apps from the App Store.
Leibowitz has a long history of using digital tools to make art. He started in the ’80s with a Polaroid camera. He’d hand manipulate the emulsion to create photographs that look also look like Imrpessionist paintings. But now he’s discovered the iPhone, and the results are not your typical iPhone art.
Hit the jump for some of Leibowitz’s latest pictures and an interview explaining how he makes iPhone art.
Solar power has been an obvious answer to many of the world’s daunting energy challenges for a long time, but the expense and relative bulk of solar panels have largely kept solar out of the running when it comes to solutions for mobile power.
Suntrica, a nordic eco-tech company, seems to have found a solution, though, with a line of charging solutions that are small, light, and flexible and could be just the thing energy conscious consumers are looking for to power their gadgets to go.
Suntrica’s SolarStrap™, SolarBadge™ and SolarBadgePRO™ use a flexible, high-efficiency solar panel connected to internal, lightweight batteries for instant or later use. Battery capacities range from 3.7Wh to 7.3Wh and the output of all the chargers is 5.5V DC at 800mA, which makes them perfect for all your portable electronic gear.
Current models are compatible with Apple iPod and Nano, though the company plans to release iPhone compatible chargers in the next couple of months.
A big crowd turned out for the opening of Apple’s latest flagship store in Zurich on Friday.
There’s no official numbers, but pictures at MacPrime, a Swiss Mac magazine, suggest the line snaked several blocks.
Opened at noon, the new Bahnhofstrasse store was mobbed. Several fans camped out overnight, waiting 16 hours to be the first inside.
The Bahnhofstrasse store is the second in Zurich.
It has an unusual design, accoring to Gary Allen of IFOApplestore. It’s only the second Apple store (after 5th Ave.) to have an underground space. A glass staircase leads down to a large Genius Bar for service and training at the “Pro Labs.” More details about the Bahnhofstrasse store at Allen’s site.
Swiss insurance company Mobiliar gave knockoff iPods to guests at the Swiss Economic Forum. Pic: Berner Zeitung.
The head of Apple Switzerland has threatened legal action after a Swiss Insurance company gave 1,200 iPods to bigwigs at the tony Swiss Economic Forum. Trouble is, the iPods were cheap Chinese knockoffs.
At the Swiss Economic Forum last week, the insurance company Mobiliar surprised guests with an MP3 player that looked very much like a second-generation iPod shuffle.
But when Adrian Schmucki, the head of Apple Switzerland, received his, he threatened legal action against Mobiliar.
Add insult to injury, several of the guests asked Schmucki if the knockoffs would work with iTunes.
The Swiss Economic Forum is a two-day gathering of Switzerland’s leading companies, politicians and academics.
With WWDC09 now just weeks away, rumors and predictions regarding what Apple may reveal at the highly-anticipated, sold-out developers conference in San Francisco are sure to spread like a California wildfire.
Anyone interested in being on the right side of such talk would do well to consider the logic and analysis out Thursday from John Gruber, the well-placed author of the blog Daring Fireball, who isn’t prone to talking about things he doesn’t know a little something about.
Citing “information from informed sources,” Gruber believes the processor in the next-generation iPhone is going to be the kind of upgrade to make people crowd around and go, “ooooh!” He looks for Apple’s processing secret-sauce to better the speed of current iPhones by 1.5 times, similar to the bump in performance experienced when Mac users got hands on machines with the first batch of PowerPCs, or PC users moved from 486 to Pentium machines.
Follow after the jump for more of what Gruber expects and how likely his expectations are to be met.
My friend Jeffy picked up this pack of stickers at a Macworld past. Do Mac users have a sense of humor ? Should they be printed up as stickers for MacBooks?
What it is: An iTunes add-on for cleaning mislabeled tracks, downloading art and finding music videos, concert info and artist bios.
Why it’s good: After years of downloading weird crap off the internet, my iTunes library is a swamp of mislabeled and unidentified tracks, and I’m sick of it. So I downloaded TuneUp — and I’m in love. TuneUp handily cleaned up a bunch of mislabeled tracks using the Gracenote database (which uses the track’s “audio fingerprint” to identify it). Cleaning takes a few seconds per track and was about 70-80 percent effective on my odd library (British punk, post-punk and lots of electronica). Previous track cleaners I’ve tried have been useless. But it’s the extra artist info via the Net that I’m really digging. TuneUp sits to the side of the iTunes window and displays all kinds of artist info: Wikipedia bios, Google News stories, music recommendations, upcoming concerts and YouTube videos, which I’ve wasted hours watching. The information is truly useful, fascinating, appropriate and timely. Apple thinks so too. TuneUp was added to the shelves of Apple’s retail stores this week — a rare honor granted only to tip top software.
Where to get it:TuneUp is available as a free download with 100 cleans and 50 album covers. Full version costs $29.95 (or $19.95 for an annual subscription),
NOTE: Use CULTOFMAC activation code to get a 15% discount.
The Mounties in British Columbia just busted their biggest counterfeiting operation ever — and the brains of the operation were a very sinister and criminal-looking iMac and MacBook.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia raided a counterfeit “currency lab” in Surrey, B.C. last week, seizing more than $220,000 in American and Canadian notes and arresting four people.
They also seized a new iMac, a MacBook, and what look like a pair of inket printers and a laser printer. HP is the ink of choice for funny money, looks like.
(I’ve always suspect Macs were the machine of choice for counterfeiters, given their graphics history. I’ll look into it).
Gnh! That’s pretty much the sound we made, surprisingly loudly, on reading Gruber’s ‘Regarding Eucalyptus’ post. The gist? App Store idiocy strikes again! The specifics…
It seems Apple, not content with plumbing the depths by rejecting Tweetie for a rude word being in the day’s Twitter trends, has now rejected an e-book reader, because you can potentially read ‘objectionable’ content on it. Gruber sums things up nicely, calling this the “shittiest and most outrageous App Store rejection to date, and that’s saying something”, and we agree wholeheartedly.
As Gruber notes, Apple’s got a bug up its ass regarding the fact that you can read Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana on Eucalyptus. (Won’t somebody think of the children?) However, you can read this on a few other apps, too—you know, apps like Kindle and Stanza and, er, Safari. So Apple had best get ready to kick those off the iPhone for warping our fragile little minds.
But there’s more! What makes matters even worse is on reading the developer’s blog, it’s pretty clear the approvals process is even more broken than we all thought. Had Apple made a mistake and rectified it (see: Tweetie), fine… Dumb, but fine. Here, though, it’s pretty clear Apple keeps rejecting the app again and again for precisely the same utterly asinine reason. When the developer argues his case, it’s like shouting at a brick wall— a particularly dumb brick wall.
Far be it for us to say that perhaps ‘reversals’ for Tweetie and the NIN app actually came from Apple caving to dreadful publicity. But, hell, if the way to get a perfectly good app into the App Store is for a whole bunch of blogs to kick up a fuss and show, yet again, how the App Store approvals people seemingly have the combined intellect of a drunk, lobotimized woodlouse, we’re happy to do our bit.
Labor protestors outside Apple’s Taiwan Office on Thursday. The Apple laptop says “Responsibility.” Images: Global Post.
Apple’s office in Taiwan drew protesters on Thursday complaining about layoffs and unfair working conditions at one of Apple’s main contractors.
A group of 30 to 45 workers complained of exploitation at Wintek, one of Apple’s major suppliers of LCD panels. The company is rumored to be supplying screens for the long-awaited Apple tablet. The workers chanted slogans and held signs saying “black-heart business” and “responsibility” outside Apple’s office in Taipei.
iPhone game developers must contend with an arguably small but extremely dedicated and fast-moving population of app pirates on the voyage to the Land of iPhone App riches, according to iCombat developer Miguel Sanchez-Grice, who suggests giving away free “lite” versions of an app could be the most effective strategy for the smaller developer.
Sanchez-Grice ‘s shooting tank game was immediately popular on the App Store thanks to coverage in gaming and gadgetry venues, which came about because of its resemblance to Combat for Atari and Wii Tanks games. The developer said he considered the nature of the pirate challenge prior to launching his 99¢ app. and while he chose a path very civilly inviting pirates to support his work by buying a legit copy of the app after reaching level 5 of the 20 level game, he understood he could only hope to “maybe convert a tiny fraction of those users into sales.”
His experience with the pirate community showed hacked versions of his game in use at an astounding ratio of more than 5:1 over paid apps in the first week of release, with cracked apps being posted to Twitter within 30 minutes of the official game going live on the App Store.
“The goal behind launching an app isn’t thwarting pirates, it is getting users and generating sales,” Sanchez-Grice wrote, suggesting game developers “leave the ‘making a point’ anti-piracy measures to the big guys.” With competition so fierce for getting noticed in the App store, he concluded “any attention is good attention.”
In the end, the first-time developer concluded the best strategy for dealing with pirates may be creating a free “Lite” version to give away alongside a more fully functional and fulfilling paid version.
“I think the best solution is to create a version akin to a lite version of the app for pirates. It is no good to shut off access to your app completely, but it also doesn’t get you very far to give away the core value you are offering to the paying user.”
… along with Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates, of course, as part of a stained glass piece spotted on a Chelsea gallery tour recently by tefjr77. I have to say, I find it incredibly funny that Steve holds an iPhone, while Bill Gates is being buzzed by a Steve Ballmer cherub. Charming.
The 3D NYC iPhone App from UpNext is unbelievably cool. It renders Manhattan in 3D, allowing you to zoom up and down the city streets, in-between buildings, finding places to eat and things to do. The rendering is amazing — see the video above.
It overlays the subway map and crowdsources popular destinations. All this for only $2.99 from the iTunes App Store. Worth buying even if you don’t live in NYC.
Apple will launch a $700 touchscreen tablet with a new operating system and optimized apps in 2010, new research claims.
Apple’s response to the fast-growing netbook market will a touchscreen tablet like an outsized iPod touch. It will have a touchscreen measuring 7- and 10-inches; will cost between $500 to $700; and may have built-in 3G wireless, claims Wall Street analyst Gene Munster of investment bank Piper Jaffrey.
But thanks to the complexity of the tablet’s hardware and, more importantly, the new version of OS X and the apps it will run — it will not be ready until early 2010, Munster said i.
In a long and detailed research note to clients, Munster cited “mounting evidence” for his claims:
Apple is indeed working on a version of OS X to power a tablet device more robust than an iPod Touch yet still more limited than the operating system that powers the company’s line of notebook and desktop computer systems, according to Gene Munster, the widely followed Piper Jaffray analyst.
“We expect the development of such an OS to be underway currently, but its complexity, along with our conversations with a key company in the mobile space, leads us to believe it will not launch until CY10,” Munster said (meaning 2010) in a note released to clients Thursday.
Many in the Apple universe have long predicted a tablet device to compete in the growing market for netbooks, smaller, less-powerful – and less expensive – mobile devices designed for surfing the Internet, watching movies, reading and composing email and other “computer-lite” activities.
Not a few people will be disappointed if Apple fails to launch such an offering in the current year, but Munster implies that such a market, while growing fast, remains relatively small and believes Apple has plenty of time to get its entry right before joining the fray.
Parents with children aged 8 – 12 and relatively easy access to an Apple Retail Store might consider enrolling in Apple’s free summer camp workshops during July.
Beginning the week of July 13, Apple stores will offer a series of 3 hour workshops where kids will be introduced to Macs and Apple software and learn how to make a movie, create a photo slideshow, write and record a song or craft a presentation.
Space in each workshop is limited and kids are limited to no more than two workshop sessions each for the summer, but it is a free opportunity to kill six hours out of what can be a long, boring summer break for some – and a chance to get hands-on instruction with some of the hardware and software many kids are likely to encounter in school during the coming years.
The workshops break down into two weekly sessions in movie making, music, photography and presentation arts, where Apple instructional staff will teach kids the ins and outs of iMovie, GarageBand, iPhoto and Keynote.
A quick check of some of the session availability shows all sessions in New York City’s Apple stores are already full, though the rest of the country – even in populous California cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco – have spots still open.
Apple also offers similar youth programs year-round to help cultivate the next generation of evangelists.
This handmade set of two cotton applique pillows inspired by Mac keys is a nice way to put some fandom in your living room or office lounge without going overboard. Specify your initial on the letter key pillow to personalize.
Location based software applications in Blackberry’s new App World store are four times more expensive than similar titles in Apple’s App Store, according to a Skyhook Wireless report released Wednesday.
The company’s Location Aware App Report (PDF), a monthly survey of titles available in the online stores of mobile handset manufacturers Apple, Blackberry and Android, found the App Store offers a greater percentage of paid to free apps across a wider variety of title categories than either Blackberry or Android.
With over 35,000 apps in the App Store at the time of the survey (around 10,000 having been added since), and 2,300 of them location aware, Apple’s average price for a paid location aware app was $3.60. In contrast, the average price for a location aware app from Blackberry’s App World store was $13.60, while bargain-basment titles could be had from Android’s Market at an average price of just 84¢
The survey results are skewed in that Apple’s App Store has been open nearly a year, while Blackberry’s App World is only in its second month of operation. On the other hand, in its first six months of operation, the App Store saw more than 800 location aware apps released, while Android’s Marketplace produced fewer than 200 in its first two quarters.
For now, location aware software developers have shown a clear preference for Apple’s iPhone platform, even if some seem to believe the Blackberry platform might support quite a bit more revenue per title.
“With the success of the iPhone, the touch panel market has entered a dramatic new growth phase.,” the DisplaySearch report said.
The report predicted big growth in projected capacitive touchscreens — the technology used in the iPhone and iPod touch.
“Projected capacitive touch screens have increased substantially and become the second biggest touch technology following closely behind resistive touch,” the report said. “About 27 touch screen suppliers manufacture it. Not only have more resistive touch screen manufacturers moved to produce projected capacitive, but projected capacitive technology has evolved to single layer or film type, and can serve sizes larger than 100-inches.”
Whoa — a 100-inch iPhone in 2015.
Mobile phones and smartphones will be the most popular application of touchscreens, but they will also be the primary interface for media players, navigation devices, and games. More than 40 percent of mobile phones will have touchscreen interfaces by 2015, the report predicts, up from 16 percent now.
Touchscreens will also become popular in applications like retail, ticketing, information kiosks, and education and training terminals, the report said.
One million potential iPhone developers downloaded Stanford’s dev course since it started in April. The 10-week course from the Palo Alto university’s school of engineering is offered gratis on iTunes.
Steve Demeter, the founder of Demiforce and maker of the popular Trism iPhone game, spoke to the class Monday, the SF Chronicle reported, and touched on the opportunities and growing challenges of developing for the iPhone.
Demeter earned $250,000 in the first two months of Trism but acknowledged his good luck in breaking through early and having the support of Apple, two things that most developers now can’t count on.
You can still catch the video lectures of about an hour long each are available here.
Screenshot from Steve Marmon’s May 8 lecture, courtesy Stanford, iTunes.
