Nothing like police blotters for playing it straight. Take this item from the Montana Kaimin, the University of Montana, Missuola student paper:
April 10, 8:52 p.m.
During rush hour on Friday morning, a bike patrol officer spotted a package in the middle of the road that cars were driving around. After retrieving the parcel, the officer found a MacBook and a bag of marijuana inside. Public Safety is currently trying to return the computer to its rightful owner, but not the pot. “We’ll probably have to destroy the marijuana,” Lemcke said.
In Arthur Phillips’ latest novel, the iPod “plays a role as pivotal as Puck’s in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
In “The Song is You,” Julian Donahue, a director of TV commercials in his mid-40s, former philanderer separated from his wife and man adrift in a state he thinks of as “divorcistan, a coolly celibate land.” Music is the center of his sole surviving desire. This appetite is, yes, partly nostalgic because Julian has been curating a “soundtrack to his days” since the debut of the Walkman when he was 15.
A quick check of the Amazon “search inside the book feature” revealed some 41 name drops for the iPod, which wouldn’t particularly inspire me to read it but I loved Phillips’ “Prague,” about a bunch of self-absorbed 20-something expats set in Budapest haunted by the feeling they should really be somewhere more happening, namely, Prague. iPods in this novel sound like more just product placement…
What it was: Zenji was released by Activision in 1984, tasking you, as a rolling face, with turning each level’s maze green. This was done by rotating maze sections and avoiding the patrolling flames. The simple gameplay was engrossing, and, like many puzzle games, it’s stood the test of time.
What we’d like to see: Retro games are steadily making their way on to iPhone, and it’s a perfect platform for classic ‘pick up and play’ titles. Zenji’s simplicity and immediacy could make it a hit on the platform, and the simple controls could easily be replicated on iPhone via various means (swipe or tilt to move, twist or virtual button presses to rotate).
Though we’re still about two months from the WWDC keynote and new iPhone hardware, that hasn’t stopped the most audacious maker of iPhone knock-offs, HiPhone, from creating a rip-off of the still unannounced iPhone nano. Yes, meet the HiPhone nano. On the outside, it looks like an ancient iPod mini, if only Apple had no taste in colors. And then it flips open and has both a touchscreen and a keypad — an ungainly keypad with tiny buttons, at that.
I don’t know what the iPhone nano will look like, when and if it ever arrives. I don know that Apple would never in a million years ship anything like this. Thank goodness.
Most of us only need computers that work on desks, cafe tables or on trains but a production crew filming a Mount Everest climbing expedition has a few other considerations.
In this mountaintop dispatch, the producer talks about how they’re putting together video segments from on high. Although they have a number of computers, the “main workhorses” are Mac Book Pros, with solid state drives that allow them to be used at extreme altitudes.
Eddie Bauer is footing the bill for the perilous hike to promote an extreme-outdoor clothing brand called First Ascent, which you can follow online.
Well, not us specifically, but people like us (and people like you) were the target of online sitcom “Life From the Inside.”
LFTI, about an agoraphobic jingle writer Mason and his pals, has a certain homemade charm most non-irony impaired Mac fans will probably find entertaining.
“We wanted to do an episode about cults,” says Robb Padgett, a producer, writer and actor on the show. “I have an original Mac and ImageWriter and I thought it’d be fun if the cult we were creating wouldn’t allow their members to use any technology created after 1984. That’s perfect for showing off the original Mac, and for having characters dress up in ridiculous ’80s garb.”
So Cult of Mac it was. In episode eight, Mason’s best friend and sidekick Guy “awesomizes” Mason’s Mac Pro by replacing it with the Mac 128K. Mason tries to lure Guy away from the cult with an iPhone 3G and rescue a friend from “Neo-Amish” cult where members use vintage cell phones, as in the above screen shot. In the all-goes-awry escalation, both Mason and Guy end up getting sucked into an even larger cult, involving black mock turtle necks and New Balance sneakers.
The program, made on a Mac Pro by a three-person team, two of whom describe themselves as “huge Apple geeks,” has also been Zune featured podcast.
What it is: A fast-paced arcade puzzler based around the concept of ‘blendable’ planets. Planets of different colors appear, and multi-touch controls enable you to pull them apart or merge them, in order to match their sizes with ‘squeesars’, which cause an inserted planet to vanish in a puff of stardust. Further complication is added by infrequent visits from vortexes and various bonus items.
Why it’s good: With more match-three games and word-based puzzle clones on the App Store than you can shake a stick at, Eliss comes as a breath of fresh air. The concept hasn’t been smashed into iPhone with a hammer—instead, the game is clearly designed for Apple’s device. The multi-touch controls are a revelation—probably the best example we’ve seen (hint: play with your device flat on a table, and be prepared to use ‘spare’ fingers to hold planets in place while manipulating others)—and the delicate audio and vibrant retro graphics add to the mix.
Some critics claim Eliss is too tough, but perseverance is key. Eliss pays tribute to arcade games of old not just in its visuals, but also in offering a genuine challenge and varying approaches to completing its 20 levels.
Where to get it: Eliss is available on the App Store, and is at the time of writing $3.99. More information, along with a gameplay video, can be found on the Eliss website.
This cool carabiner-style Apple Waterdrop watch was offered several years ago by Apple to buyers who completed a survey about their Apple Macintosh purchase and sent it in to the dealer.
It measures about 3.5 inches long by 2 inches wide, is very light and comes with batteries — and this totem of a bygone era can be yours for $50. It comes with instructions in a black presentation box.
*It displays real time in hour, minute, second and day of the week.
*Calendar displays month, date and day of the week by pressing a button.
*24-hour stopwatch.
*60 Seconds alarm and snooze function.
*Hourly chime.
*Hi-intensity red light built in.
The watch you see here is in mint condition, in its original box. Never offered as a retail item, if you’re interested, call Dave at (1)250.354.4633 in Nelson BC.
Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s CEO, has been calling on Apple to see about extending the carrier’s deal as the exclusive US service provider for the iPhone, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Having already received a one-year extension of its original two year deal, with its current exclusivity protection set to expire sometime in 2010, AT&T is reportedly seeking to sweeten the pot somehow to keep Apple’s revolutionary mobile device out of competitors’ hands for another year.
Well, of course. AT&T added 4.3 million iPhone subscribers in the second half of 2008 alone — about 40% of whom were new customers, according to the company. In an era when landline customers are dwindling rapidly, anything that brings in new wireless subscribers is a good thing for the phone company.
But is the AT&T exclusivity deal good for anyone other than AT&T?
From Apple’s perspective it’s likely good insofar as it keeps things simple, having only one behemoth service provider to potentially screw up the tightly controlled customer experience around which much of Apple’s mystique has been been built. And to be fair, AT&T appears to have done a reasonably good job of deploying iPhones in the field. As the Apple spokeswoman in the WSJ article was quoted, “We have a great relationship with AT&T.”
But how about the consumer? Even if technical issues cannot be overcome that prevent iPhones, as they are currently manufactured, from working with Sprint and Verizon’s CDMA-based services — and surely they could be overcome in this day and age — having a choice between AT&T and T-Mobile is better than having a choice between AT&T and not using an iPhone at all.
Many people howled furiously about AT&T being the exclusive US provider when the iPhone was introduced in the summer of 2007. Looking back, it’s now easy to see how revolutionary and wildly transformative the device was; it was likely a good strategy for Apple to reduce its integration bandwidth to a single carrier in each market where it deployed the phone because it could have turned out to be more problematic a transformation than it actually was.
But now Apple has many millions of happy iPhone users the world over and it knows how its device performs in the field. It’s time for Apple to reclaim dominion over the user experience with its mobile communication device. And the single biggest change that would add to customer happiness (other than video recording capability and Flash functionality) would be to open it up up and let customers choose whatever service provider they can stand.
Apple never, ever expresses battery life based on the number of cells that make it up. The ThinkPad I have at work is available with a 4, 6, and 9-cell option. And I have no idea what any of it means or why I should care. Apple just tells me how long I can work without a power source, which is what I actually care about.
Collins America, a consumer product design, manufacturing, and sales operation headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee plans a late summer release of the first third-party LCD computer screens based on Apple’s royalty-free Mini DisplayPort spec.
Dubbed the Cinema View line of displays, Collins’ offering will include three models featuring the aluminum, black and glass design of Apple’s LED Cinema Display, as well as a single cable connection to the Mac. The company claims Cinema View is the world’s only display line made just for today’s Macs.
Priced from $299 for a 19 inch model to $499 for the 24 inch, all three sets include 3 USB 2.0 ports and 3.5mm stereo audio jack. Complete specs for all three models are available here.
Collins is taking pre-orders at the company’s website, offering free shipping to North American and EU markets with expected deliveries beginning to ship before September 1, 2009.
Sadly, there’s no mention of a matte screen option anywhere in Collins’ marketing material.
What it is: A PDF manager—think iPhoto for PDF, but with superior tagging, and no weakness for mucking about with file locations.
Why it’s good: Along with being absurdly fast (our copy was ready to rock on a Mac with several thousand PDFs after about two seconds), Yep automatically creates tag keywords based on document locations, and, unlike iLife apps, doesn’t copy documents into its own database—it just leaves them wherever you’ve stored them. User-defined tags and smart collections enable you to rapidly create virtual dynamic groups of PDFs based on your own criteria, and since metadata is written to each file, searches can be performed in Spotlight. The ‘Tracking Locations’ sidebar enables you to navigate in a Finder-like way, but filters the main view to display previews of PDFs in the current folder and nested ones. Also, the succinct manual’s dead good and should get you going if you find the interface a wee bit bewildering to start with.
Where to get it: Yep is available from Ironic Software, costs $34, and requires Mac OS X 10.4.10 or later.
A hold-up victim in Iowa helped police ID the perp by giving them a copy of his playlist.
Police checked it against an iPod found on robbery suspect Donald Cook, 18. Cook was charged with second-degree robbery shortly thereafter and is being held on $10,000 bond.
Police said the 18-year old victim and two other men pulled into a Des Moines video store parking lot about 10:20 p.m. Wednesday. Two men approached them, took them out of their car and put them on the ground.
One of the robbers said, “What you got on you? I know you got something on you.”
After taking about $390 in cash, the iPod and some cell phones the robbers got back in their car and drove away, according to a police report.
Officers said the playlist given to them by the victim matched the playlist on the iPod in Cook’s possession. Officers did not mention recovering the cash or the cell phones. The other suspect remains at large.
950 lucky – if that’s the right word – fans of the artist formerly christened Prince Rogers Nelson have the opportunity to get a limited edition iPod Touch bundled with their purchase of The Prince Opus, a $2,100 book of photographs produced by Kraken Opus, a British publisher whose aim is to create the “most epic, stunning, iconic publications ever seen in the world.”
One cannot tell from the promotional material how many GB the iPod Touch holds, but it comes pre-loaded with a 15 song live soundtrack from Prince’s 21 night 2007 performances at London’s O2 arena, as well as a 40 minute movie from the shows, made by the diminutive star himself.
“People familiar with Apple’s operations say they still expect to see Mr. Jobs return in June. Some of these people also say members of Apple’s board of directors are monitoring the situation directly, communicating regularly with Mr. Jobs’s physicians.
People inside the company, business partners and others who are familiar with the situation say life at the Cupertino, Calif., company remains much the same as it did before.
Those at other corporations who deal with the company also say their interactions with Apple haven’t changed. Mr. Cook, who had already been handling most of Apple’s day-to-day operations, has kept tight control over the company, say business partners and those inside Apple.”
The article also speculates about the future of Apple management, stock prices and employee turnover.
An app called “Wish You Were Here” lets you use pics taken with your iPhone, personalize a greeting and caption and then send them via snail mail.
Currently available to send to US addresses, WYWH creates 4.25″ x 6″ color postcards from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
As a postcard fanatic, I love this idea. The download plus first two postcards are free, after that it costs $1.30 per card, not bad considering you don’t have to find stamps on the road or settle for dull postcards — the pic on the other side of the stilted sample message could change its meaning entirely…
There are a number of excellent reasons to be bullish on Apple (AAPL) stock, according to Wall Street analyst Shaw Wu. Despite already having risen 45% on the year, Wu believes Apple could bake another 25% or more of profit into its share price, based on expectations around what the Kaufman Bros. high-tech analyst calls “several catalysts in the months ahead.”
“We anticipate [Apple’s] new iPhone 3.0 software to ship” in time for the 2009 WWDC in June, Wu said in a report released Monday. He’s also expecting consumer interest in Apple to remain strong with the introduction of new iPhone hardware, also in time for WWDC.
The expected launch of Snow Leopard should be a further catalyst for the Mac business, which has already seen a boost from recent desktop refreshes (iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Pro). “And last,” Wu said, “the potential for a new form factor, perhaps Apple’s answer to the netbook, with a large screen iPod touch-Mac hybrid” could end up pushing AAPL from its current $119 price to something more like $152.
Less than a month ago, on March 24, Wu removed Apple from his “Focus List” citing the appreciating stock (then up only 19%) and the fact that “many of the product catalysts we were looking for, namely the new iMac, have occurred.” But that was at a point just after the overall stock market had been tanking since January; in the last several weeks the market’s been on a tear and some in the financial analysis business believe the worst of the “recession” is behind us.
For a little more perspective on the inscrutable science of stock price analysis, recall that less than a year ago, when Apple was opening its AppStore and releasing the iPhone 3G, Wu and many other AAPL analysts expected the company’s stock to go as high as $225. AAPL had already topped out just over $200 prior to the AppStore launch and nose-dived to well below $100 by January of this year.
Apple has released new lists of the “all time” Top 20 paid and free iPhone and iPod Touch applications, as the iTunes AppStore plows on toward 1 billion total downloads.
The “all-time” designation is kind of interesting, given the AppStore has only been open less than a year, but some of the numbers coming out make an impressive case for yet another ding in the universe attributable to Steve Jobs and his little niche computer company.
The number two paid app, the lovely, meditative Koi Pond has been downloaded 900,000 times at 99¢ apiece, according to one report, certainly a nice year’s work for its developers, The Blimp Pilots.
But how about the number one paid app, the game Crash Bandicoot? Its total downloads are unreported, but one could assume a figure somewhat north of Koi Pond’s 900K — at $5.99 per copy, Crash Bandicoot must have Vivendi Games Mobile wondering how much richer they might have become had the world economy not suffered a total melt-down in the past year.
On the free side of the ledger Facebook and Google Earth run one-two, which is no surprise at all, given the worldwide popularity of those two web properties.
Apple has a giveaway contest going in conjunction with the countdown to one billion downloads, with winners slated to get a fully loaded MacBook Pro, a 32GB iPod Touch, a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card and a Time Capsule wireless hard drive.
Here’s just one of a number of interesting handmade iPhone and iPod cozys and cases from Vintage Coquette, a woman named Elizabeth, who describes herself as “a lover of all things cute and/or vintage.”
Check out her shop on Etsy – she is definitely channeling that special brand of cute with its roots in Hello Kitty and Japanese gadget-fu.
Watching Microsoft try to strike back at Apple with the Laptop Hunters series of commercials is almost hilariously tragic. Inevitably, the “ordinary people” (actors) who star in the spots go in “open-minded”, which means they’re looking for a very cheap laptop with a huge screen, which is a category Apple obviously doesn’t offer. The latest entry, with “Lisa” and “Jackson,” finds the hunters dismissing Macs as “cute” while making ultimate gasface, before getting really excited about a Sony VAIO with a 16.4″ screen and a Blu-Ray drive. Excuse me, “Blu-RAYYYY!” Because, as we all know, there is nothing more important than being able to watch a movie at 1080p on a plane. That’s just a fact.
Honestly, it’s a relatively smart ad campaign, but you can practically envision the ad agency pitch meeting, in which the research department notes that Apple’s cheapest 17″ laptop is almost $3,000, while Dell, HP and the rest make really cheap 17″ laptops — critical vulnerability. Here’s the thing. Very, very few people like 17″ laptops. They’re huge, heavy, and really hard to fit onto a cafe table at a coffee shop. Far more people are happier with something small, light, and thin — which is why Netbooks are all the rage right now. Not to give Microsoft free advice or anything — or to do Crispin, Porter and Bogusky’s job for them — but this would be a way more effective ad campaign if they had their shoppers walk out with four Eee PC 904HAs and had some change left over. All this ad campaign is showing is that if you want to get a big, heavy laptop with lots of stickers from Intel and Nvidia plastered on the wrist rest, you want a PC.
Meanwhile, Netbooks are actually a market phenomenon, and they offer something that Apple hasn’t delivered yet. But why play up innovation when you can play up cheapness? I suppose that’s the core difference between Apple and MS, after all these years. Apple always makes a big deal out of quality and design. Microsoft tries to hook you with a killer low price.
(Also, in writing about Microsoft’s “comeback campaign,” BusinessWeek noted that this ad shows the family choosing a PC because it has Blu-Ray, “on which many games are printed.” Um… for PS3, maybe. Has anyone ever released a PC game on Blu-Ray as an option, let alone as an exclusive?)
BasiCMYK is a talented photographer and self-described geek who was lucky enough to get one of the 300 limited edition PodBrix Young Woz and Jobs playsets when they were issued not long after the iPhone’s debut in 2007.
He’s also apparently a big Steve Wozniak fan, allowing in the description of the accompanying photo that “every time there’s a Stevenote I secretely hope The Woz will pop up on the screen.”
Something tells me there’s no limited edition Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer Lego knock-off playsets lurking out there anywhere.
Inspired by Magritte’s “The Son of Man” painting, this decal comes in black, gray and white for 13″, 15″ and 17″ laptops. If you’re going to add on to the already sleek design, it’s a nice take.
Apple sits atop BusinessWeek‘s list of “The 25 Most Innovative Companies” for the fifth year in a row, according to a statement released Thursday by the magazine and the Boston Consulting Group.
The news should come as no surprise to anyone who keeps up with trends in the computer, telecom and entertainment industries, though the report does contain undercurrents of weariness with Apple and the #2 company, Google. Both firms received more than 30% fewer votes in the 2009 survey than they got last year, with some respondents complaining about Apple and Google both “resting on past glory” and relying on “improvements [to] previous technology.”
The special report, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” will be featured in BusinessWeek’s April 20th issue, on newsstands April 10th.
BusinessWeek.com will also feature expanded content, including an interactive table of the full ranking of the top 50 most innovative companies, a slide show on 50 up-and-coming innovative companies, and a full description of the methodology used to compile the lists, at www.businessweek.com/go/09/innovative09.
Taiwanese company Elan Microelectronics has sued Apple for the unauthorized use of two of Elan’s patents in Apple’s MacBook, iPhone and iPod Touch products.
“We couldn’t find a common viewpoint with Apple, so we decided we had to take action,” Elan spokesman Dennis Liu told the New York Times, adding that the companies had been in licensing talks for about two years.
A statement published on Elan’s website says the patents cover innovations in touch-sensitive input devices incorporated into smartphones and computer touchpads.
“The first patent at issue, U.S. Patent 5,825,352 (“the ‘352 patent”), relates to touch-sensitive input devices with the ability to detect the simultaneous presence of two or more fingers. Multi-finger applications are becoming popular in smartphone and computer applications. The ‘352 patent is a fundamental patent to the detection of multi-fingers that allows for any subsequent multi-finger applications to be implemented. The second patent, U.S. Patent No. 7,274,353 (“the ‘353 patent”), is directed to touchpads capable of switching between keyboard and handwriting input modes.”
Elan said it won a preliminary court injunction against a U.S.-based rival, Synaptics, in a dispute over one of the patents mentioned in the Apple lawsuit, after a suit was filed in 2006 by a unit that was a subsidiary at the time. Synaptics countersued.
Both actions were dismissed last year after the two companies reached a cross-licensing agreement. That result likely emboldened the company to take legal action against Apple, an analyst who follows Elan told the NYT.
Getting physical with your iPhone may cause a short circuit from sweat. At least that’s what a couple of iPhone users in Houston complained about to “Ask Amy,” a consumer advocate segment of local news station KPRC Channel 2. (Story here.)
“I never would’ve bought a phone if I knew it would ruin the first time I got it out at the gym,” Stacie Keneker complained.
“They sell all these accessories that you are supposed to be able to use at the gym to make it convenient,” Lee Pittman, described as “peeved at Apple” said.
The news story goes on to say that Keneker and Pittman use their iPhones at the gym to listen to music or use the calorie-counting fitness applications that come with the phone. They said Apple employees told them their sweaty palms are the likely culprit here. So far none of these consumers has gotten any relief from Apple — moisture is considered an accident, so not covered by warranty.
“On most cell phones, the sensors are located underneath a removable battery and enclosed by the cover that usually locked the battery into place. In comparison, Apple’s sensor (at the bottom of the iPhone) could easily be set off by sweat from your hands. You can see the sensor locations for a iPhone 3G in the photo above and a Nokia cell phone below for comparison.”
The easiest way to avoid the problem may be using a case that covers both the headphone jack and the docking/sync connector.
