Cult of Mac

Hold onto your seats, ladies and gentlemen. Steve Wozniak is in a dance-off against former Go-Gos lead singer Belinda Carlisle, who apparently lost the beat at some point in her routine last week. Results imminently.

9:43 p.m. Belinda Carlisle just finished her routine with the world’s most awkward headstand/look-at-my-crotch! move I’ve ever seen.

9:44 p.m. And the judges hated it, just 17 points! Woz might live to fight another day!

9:49 p.m. AANNDDD…we’re BACK!

9:50 p.m. Steve’s going for the quickstep again! This is apparently quite gutsy. And his partner is giving a dull inspirational speech.

9:51 p.m. Steve just stole her feather boa! That’s a good start!

9:51 p.m. This feels worse than last night, actually.

9:52 p.m. It does seem a lot more energetic now that we’re getting to the end. Woz is obviously really tired out now, but he had a blast doing it…

9:52 p.m. Bruno admires Steve’s sunny disposition. But “You are NOT a good dancer; but I love watching you!”

9:52 p.m. Carrie-Ann: “I liked you were better tonight. You were smoother!”

9:53 p.m. Stuffy English judge is impressed that Steve danced at all. And notes he’s the “best for fun and entertainment.” Which is pretty good praise for the creator of the world’s first dial-a-joke service.

9:53 p.m. Debrief interview. Steve: “I just loved doing it the whole time.” If eliminated: “We were lucky enough to do it twice!”

9:54 p.m. It’s another 17! That’s a tie with Belinda Carlisle. If Steve got more audience votes, he stays! I have to imagine there are more geeks than Go-Gos fans.

10:00 p.m. Good lord that was a long ad break. This stupid show goes until 10:03 p.m.

10:01 p.m. Belinda Carlisle’s going home! Woz is still in! WOZ IS STILL IN!

10:01 p.m. That’s one surprised Apple founder.

10:01 p.m. Apparently, we’ll be back next week, folks…

Image copyright Engadget

Apple took the wraps off its iPhone OS 3.0 this morning, and it was a veritable smorgasbord of features that probably should have been included upon the initial release of the iPhone. Take a look:

• Cut, copy, and paste
• Spotlight search
• Note syncing
• MMS
• Landscape keyboard support in non-Safari apps
• Undo

I mean, seeing that list all together, it almost begins to feel remarkable that Apple made such a great device that was oddly lacking in fundamentals! Can you imagine if the original Mac had shipped without half the items in the Edit menu?

As I joked earlier on Twitter, the best headline for the day would be “Apple whips America into a frenzy by fixing iPhone’s most glaring omissions.” (And our friend Rob Beschizza actually used the thing.) People are unbelievably excited about cut, copy, and paste, for example. I actually went back 1,000 tweets from the time that the feature was announced, and I couldn’t get to the first mention of it on Twitter — at least 1,000 excited yelps about it within the first minute.

For cut, copy, and paste.

Think about that. No other company on earth could make a big deal of announcing a basic feature more than two years late. And that’s what makes Apple so awesome at what they do. They care so much about excellence — not just adequacy, but excellence — that they don’t release anything until it’s ready. They didn’t want to put out cut, copy, and paste until it was the most innovative version possible of same. Amazing.

For myself, I feel great as a late adopter this morning. I’ve said all along that I won’t buy an iPhone until I can get a 32 GB model, and I fully expect it to ship alongside OS 3.0 in late June. It’s taken more patience than I can express, but I’ll get a phone I can live with for at least two years if I continue to hold out. This is why it’s so hard to be passionate about Apple — you need to ignore it for many months or even years to get the perfect product. That’s what it took to get to last year’s MacBooks, and I’m damn sure it will be true for the third-generation iPhone released this summer…

Developers: Feel free to send us your anonymous impressions!

In “Burn After Reading,” the Coen brother’s black comedy about privacy and politics, Brad Pitt plays Chad, an amiable goof who works in a gym.

Along with co-worker Frances McDormand, who thinks plastic surgery will buy her love, he tries to sell a memoir from a former CIA agent found in a diskette left behind at the gym.

Chad is almost always plugged in to an iPod (and singing out loud) even when he’s on a stake out — as shown in the movie poster. Pitt doesn’t have a big part, but gets a lot of mileage out of playing a dim bulb in a stellar cast including George Clooney,  John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxbD6IeLylw

We’ve written before about iPhone and iPod Touch apps designed by parents to keep the wee ones busy and busy parents sane.

Geek dad Darren Murtha created the Shape Builder app to keep his four-year-old amused. If the video demo is any indication — Murtha’s son puts shapes of animals and figures in place accompanied by his own merry made-up sound effects  — it’s a winner.

Designed for kids age three to six, Shape Builder provides 120 puzzles including musical instruments, fruits and vegetables, animals and the alphabet sounded out by a speech therapist.

Available on iTunes for $.99.

The new iPod Shuffle may talk, but a lot of what people have to say about it concern the placement of controls on the headphones. No third-party headphones are available yet and the rumors are flying about “authentication chips” contained in the headphones that Apple may require on those made by other companies, too.

Sean Mulvihill, who recently shared with CoM his MacBook Touch mock-up, sent in a prototype for a redesigned Shuffle, with the controls on the side of the device. The resulting Shuffle isn’t bulked up and would be easy to use on-the-go. Plus no headphone kerfluffle.

What prompted him to try a redesign?

“With the new release of the revamped iPod Shuffle me and a lot of  people were disappointed with the controls now on the headphones, therefore you cannot use your (own) headphones.  I decided to make a little mock-up of what I think the new iPod Shuffle should have looked like. ”

Though the small size and storage capacity of the actual Shuffle are interesting, I’d be hard pressed to replace my dead pod with it. Each iPod I’ve had averaged about three to five pairs of headphones (that’s a conservative estimate), if forced to replace the busted ones with Apple earbuds or pricey headsets (leaving the mystery chip issue aside for the moment)  it wouldn’t be worth it.

What do you think?

We’re apparently about 10 minutes away from Woz’s second dance here on the West Coast. Stay tuned in these parts for my coverage. But keep your eyes shut for awhile — I just had to witness Jewel’s cowboy husband quick-stepping to Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway.”

NOTE FROM WOZ: “I had my new All Star sneakers on. They put suede on the bottom so that they can slide. The first time through they slipped twice so I stepped in some goo that helps. The next time through they only slipped once and just barely.”

I need Chuck Taylors with suede soles!

8:50 p.m.: Gymnast Shawn Johnson is being profiled in the world’s blandest behind-the-scenes segment. We’re almost to Woz! (Edit: Good lord, Shawn is orange!)

8:54 p.m.: Italian judge Bruno just announced that he would have liked Shawn’s routine to be more “notey.” I think. I think that over-tanning was plenty “notey” enough.

8:56 p.m.: We’re getting a flashback to Woz’s last week. He began by putting on a pair of plastic glasses held together with nerd tape.

8:56 p.m. Woz is dancing his heart out in rehearsal, still in black socks. And this caused him to break his foot! Doctor’s quote: “You’re crushing your foot.”

8:57 p.m. Woz will defy doctor’s orders and dance the quick-step! And he just flipped his partner over his back! And he has a ridiculous fifties hair.

8:58 p.m. Um…Woz, it’s called a “quick” step. That’s more of a stately step.

8:58 p.m. He’s picking it up a bit now, although he’s not really in sync with his partner. And there go the herky-jerky knee-hand wave! And he finished lying on the ground.

8:59 p.m. Kathy Griffin is in the audience! Awkward.

9:00 p.m. The judge likes Buddy Holly. He says America loves the antics.

9:00 p.m. LeeAnn, female judge, notes “I love watching you! Even when I’m saying, ‘What is he doing, why are they so far apart?'” She’s marking him down for lack of endurance.

9:01 p.m. Bruno: “Steve, you remind me of WALL*E! A bit rusty around the edges, in need of spare parts, but very resilient and incredibly charming.”

9:01 p.m. Steve, awkwardly: “Come down and dance with me!”

9:02 p.m. Post dance interview with host: “How is your foot, should you be dancing on it?” Steve: “I’ve only had one aspirin in five days; and I didn’t feel I ran out of steam.”

9:02 p.m. Final score: 17, an improvement of four from last week’s ludicrously low 13.

9:03 p.m. And that’s it, taking us out with a “judges been drinkin’!” joke from Tom Bergeron. Remember to vote!

https://abc.go.com/primetime/dancingwiththestars/index?pn=aboutthevote

Fandango, one of the Internet’s most popular online movie information and ticket purchasing portals announced Monday a free new iPhone and iPod touch application that enables users to access movie and theater information ‘on the go’, buy tickets in seconds, watch trailers, view fan ratings and more.

With a database of more than 16,000 theaters throughout the US, the Fandango app makes buying advance movie tickets easier than ever. Utilizing the iPhone’s location-aware functionality, the app automatically displays movie theater locations and times, and when users store credit card information in a secure profile, makes purchasing tickets a matter of a few touches on the iPhone or iPod’s screen.

The app even has a cool little built-in feature that automatically plays movie trailers just by changing the device’s orientation from vertical to horizontal.

Here is a useful little app that’s well worth the cost of admission.

Apple has filed a patent for a wireless “remote wand” with the idea of adding it to future versions of Apple TV.  The wand would give users with control over a cursor on the Apple TV screen, sort of like a mouse controls a cursor on a computer. The wand would also give Apple TV three-dimensional controls similar to those offered by Nintendo’s Wii controller.

According to Apple Insider, unlike the current 5-button remote on the current version of Apple TV, the wand can control a number of functions and can be used to zoom, as a keyboard application, an image application, an illustration application and a media application.

Protect your iPhone with a nod to past tech with this leather iPhone, iPod Touch case designed to look like a Sony Walkman.

Available at Etsy for $25.

Twice in one week, iPod-obsessed designer Karl Lagerfeld hearted the iPod. First with iPod-ready, fur covered motorcycle helmets for his namesake label, then with this peek-a-boo briefcase for Chanel.

Probably the coolest thing about the pointless perspex carry-all is the iPod with its Chanel logo on the video screen — apparently Lagerfeld considered it more important than a cell phone.

Via Coolhunter

When Apple unleashed the App Store, I made one of the world’s worst predictions. Over a slice of pizza, I told Dev Patnaik, with whom I was writing a book, that Apple would never permit non-iTunes music programs to show up on the iPhone. Too risky, might take away attention from the iTunes Store. “Even Pandora?” he asked. “Especially Pandora,” I said.
How wrong I was — the brilliant Pandora Radio for iPhone app, sporting iTunes integration, was released the very next day, and it has come to represent the random, serendipitous musical discovery Yin to the predictable, find-what-you’re-looking-for Yang of iTunes. It’s a must-have, and it has, by itself, made the iPhone and iPod touch dramatically better music players than the iPod ever was — in addition to being phenomenal portable computers.
As some measure of apology, I interviewed Pandora Radio founder Tim Westergen over at my other blog to find out what makes the company tick — and why its musical suggestions are so much more accurate than I’d expect any computer to ever be.

Q: There’s another side of this story that I’ve heard about, which is that to maintain the connection to the musicians you help promote, you actually hire a lot of musicians to work at Pandora. A: Yeah, the foundation of Pandora is this thing called the Music Genome Project, which is an enormous musical taxonomy. The thing about it is, it’s all hand-built. We have a team of about 35 working musicians, and they listen to songs all day and analyze what’s going on with them. For 9 years now, that’s become a pretty substantial number of artists.

Q: How many songs have been classified now?
A: A little over 600,000.

Pandora Radio’s made out of people! It’s people!!!

Read the full interview!

A tiny authentication chip in the headset with on-cord control shipped with the just-released iPod shuffle is raising concerns among some that Apple will extort licensing fees from third-party headset manufacturers who wish to make headsets compatible with Apple’s new music playing devices.

First reported Friday in a review of the new shuffle at iLounge, the authentication chip was then derided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as Apple’s attempt to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act not to stop piracy, but to impede competition and innovation.

Saturday night, Boing Boing Gadgets posted pictures of the curious chip, along with a thoughtful piece pondering whether Apple’s engineering really amounts to DRM: “For all we know, it could be something the FCC made them put in so that it doesn’t interfere with whalesong.”

The EFF raises a great point, actually, wondering why more reviewers have not seized on Apple’s proliferating instances of hardware DRM: “If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft “authentication chips” in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), … reviewers would be screaming about it.”

In the final analysis, however, if Apple is in fact, as Boing Boing put it, “attempting to eat the headphone industry whole,” the company will lose. Consumers have the last vote and to the extent it may seem Apple products are stifling competition, raising prices and limiting choice, Apple’s tiny devices will go unsold.

There are already many many alternative music players on the market for consumers to choose from – some of the best even made by Apple itself – making the new shuffle a stillborn product if consumers perceive an inability to use it as they see fit.

Playfish, one of the largest and fastest growing social games developers, announced Saturday the availability of its popular title, “Who Has the Biggest Brain?” for iPhone and iPod Touch. Who Has The Biggest Brain? features Facebook Connect and enables friends to play together anytime, anywhere.

Playfish is behind 5 of the 10 most currently popular social games played on Facebook, according to the company’s marketing material, and claims more than 60 million registered players currently play its games on the Internet’s fastest growing social networking platform. The company says more than 15 million people have played Who Has The Biggest Brain? on Facebook since launching in late 2007.

“We believe iPhone and iPod touch represent the next generation of entertainment platforms,” says Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Playfish.

With 12 mini games, 27 brain types and a variety of unlockable achievements, Who Has the Biggest Brain? enables players to compete with their real-life friends and experience the more social and connected game play that Segerstrale describes as part of the company’s mission.

By creating games for people to play together using social networks and platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Yahoo!, iPhone and iPod touch, Playfish aims to transform video game play from an isolated, solitary obsession to one in which people enjoy greater social and connected experiences.

Who Has the Biggest Brain? is available now for $4.99 in the iTunes AppStore.

Apple may launch as soon as next week a “Premium” AppStore focused on games and other “sophisticated” apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, according to a report at Wired.

The premium section would largely be focused on apps priced at $20 and more, giving game makers a channel to offer more in-depth (and pricier) titles without getting lost in the clutter of free and $1 apps. The Wired report also speculates that creating a “velvet rope” within the AppStore ecosystem could make Apple’s mobile platform more attractive to enterprise software companies such as SAP, that would otherwise prefer to focus on the more business-user targeted BlackBerry phones.

Should the rumors of a new AppStore section for “serious” software prove true, look for the announcement to come at Apple’s media event scheduled to launch a new SDK and iPhone 3.0 software on March 17.

The key to success for some of the best young filmmakers in America may be the unique partnership their school district has with Apple.

Students from Birdville (TX) ISD’s Media Technology program have distinguished themselves by having 5 films chosen for the student showcase at The South by Southwest Film Festival, which began Friday in Austin, TX.

Five films from students in a single school district is a record for the nation’s preeminent art, film and music festival and the program’s director credits the district’s relationship with Apple for her students’ success.

“Apple has made it possible for our students to be certified in Final Cut Studio while still in high school,” says Karen Seimears, the program’s director. “The University of Texas offers this to their students, and it costs almost $2000. Our students can earn it for free! What’s amazing is that we’re giving kids the tools they need while they’re still in high school to be absolutely employable. And not just that, but when they go into college, to be at the head of their class.”

Apple began providing individual laptops for each student in the Birdville program two years ago and the district is home to the nation’s only Apple Authorized Training Center for high school students.

[Art&Seek] Thanks to Julie for the tip!

Click for larger image view.

Perhaps you know about Steampunk, the geek sub-culture movement that marries devotion to the aesthetics of Victorian romance with a commitment to the use of modern technology.

The vast majority of Steampunk practitioners work in the PC realm, though there are impressive examples of Apple gear transformed.

None moreso, perhaps, than the eye-Pod Victrola from Doctor Grymm. A custom mod of an Apple iPod Nano 1st Gen, the design is inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The “eye-Pod” can be worn on the wrist via the leather cuff, or placed on it’s custom Victrola base.

Full functionality of the iPod remains intact and a hidden USB cord retracts from the base to either a wall charger or a computer. Hidden pressure plates send a strobing “static charge” into the quartz crystals on either side of the magnified veiwing portal, and music plays through the Victrola horn or though a portable personal hearing apparatus (in progress).

[SteamGearLab, via BoingBoing]

Here’s an iPhone app you might find coming in handy someday. Best of all, Have2P is a free iPhone app that finds restrooms in your area thanks to your device’s nifty GPS locator.

Useful features include info on whether the restroom is for customers only, if it has a changing table and even reviews on how clean it is. Users can edit restroom info, submit restroom reviews and add restrooms to the database.

The latest update to Have2P even claims to have an “urgency detector” that senses when you and the phone are shaking and automatically starts a new search for nearby relief.

[GeekSugar]

The folks over at iFixit got their hands on the new iPod Shuffle and instead of talking to it, they took it apart.

Turns  out the Shuffle is easy to open and contains a single IC, a battery and some user interface components.

“Amazingly, at least on our scale, both halves weighed five grams. That means the entire functional half of the iPod weighs only about 10% more than a single sheet of letter size paper.”
They also discovered that normal headphones work just fine with the new MP3 player, but, unsurprisingly,  without the proprietary ones there’s no volume adjustment or changing the song order…

Via Make

A couple of Target employees were caught after recently after stealing a number of iPods and some Zunes — 25 Apple devices compared to just four Zunes.

Is the iPod six times more appealing for a five finger discount? Device did a candid camera video with some cubicle inhabitants, leaving an iPod and a Zune side by side in settings like an office kitchen and on top of the water cooler.

You’d think the fact that two MP3 players “left” out together would make them suspicious, but not so.

CBS and MobilTV announced a grand experiment in WiFi broadcasting this week with the release of March Madness on Demand (link opens iTunes), a $5 application for iPhone and iPod Touch that will theoretically allow users with a good WiFi connection to see live streamed TV broadcasts of the NCAA Basketball Tournament begining March 19th.

CBS will stream every game of the tournament up to and including the Finals on April 6th, in addition to providing video highlights on demand. Users without WiFi access will be able to access live audio of games in progress over AT&Ts 3G and Edge networks.

Every year at this time, it becomes a popular sport to estimate the supposed billions of dollars in lost productivity American businesses suffer as a result of workers’ preoccupation with what some call the most exciting spectacle in sports.

How about you, dear Cult readers? Are you willing to throw $5 on the table to see if CBS can follow through on its promise to live stream the excitement?

Let us know how you think this is going to play out in comments below.

Dennis Liu shot The Apple Mac Music Video last year that went pretty viral on the internet.

Liu says he got interest pretty high up the Apple corporate ladder from that video, but “Microsoft actually took my music video video very seriously, and we decided to collaborate on a viral video for Microsoft Office for Mac.

The video was supposed to debut at Macworld this year, but delays intervened and it is finally being released today.

Liu told Cult of Mac he had hundreds of windows open at times in PPT, Excel, and Word during the making of the video. “Honestly, it didn’t crash, and didn’t slow down. Not like anyone else in the world would try and animate ASCII in MSWord, but … ”

He explained his motivation for the project, saying, “I think Apple users should know that MSOffice doesn’t have to be “un-fun” like ILife ’09 makes it out to be.”

“I’m a huge Mac fanatic, and I wanted to make Microsoft seem less corporate-y with this ad campaign. Microsoft gets thrown under the boss (sic) a lot.”

For what it’s worth, Liu said he was bored and curious, and he tried doing this with iWork ’09 but it wasn’t holding up as well. “I do have to hand it to MSFT for making a pretty stable program, with good creative features (if you know how to use them).”

Steve Wozniak has a slight fracture in his foot but has vowed to press on with the Dancing With the Stars competition.

“I didn’t want to worry anyone unduly.” Wozniak mentioned on his blog this morning. He had been feeling pain in his foot and after having an X-Ray and an MRI it was revealed that he has a foot fracture.

Karina Smirnoff, his professional dance partner accompanied “The Woz” to Cedars-Sinai hospital, worried that she had lost her partner, but Wozniak was given a removable cast and the okay to dance as long as he is very careful and wears the cast faithfully when not rehearsing or performing.

In an e-mail to his Facebook Support Group, Wozniak said he told his doctors he is determined to continue with Dancing With The Stars because he “loves being part of such a good and important thing.”

[Reality TV Magazine]

A  program providing MacBooks for students in Maine plans to increase its scope by leasing 100,000 computers from Apple at a cost of about $25 million per year.

Maine started its first-in-the-nation program by distributing more than 30,000 computers to each seventh- and eighth-grader in all of the state’s state public schools in 2002 and 2003.

Now, all 120 of Maine’s high schools, along with 241 middle schools, will have new laptops under the same program. The cost runs about $242 per computer per year.

Maine governor John Baldacci believes the laptop computer program can go beyond the classroom,  becoming ” a powerful tool for the entire family.”

“Every night when students in seventh through 12th grade bring those computers home, they’ll connect the whole family to new opportunities and new resources,” Baldacci said. The computers would come with software to connect to the state’s CareerCenters, he added.

In 2007,  a study released by the Maine Education Policy Research Institute (.pdf)  indicated that student writing scores improved after laptops were introduced.

Image used with a CC license, thanks to torres21.
The AP via Bangor Daily News

Apple is indeed having a special event, as widely rumored, March 17. But it won’t be hardware, it will be a preview of the next iteration of iPhone software. The company distributed invitations to select press outlets Thursday, saying the event at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters will also feature a new version of the iPhone SDK.

Presumably, the new software will get into general release by June/July, which is becoming the time of year we can expect new iPhone hardware as well.

Stay tuned for more as news and rumors and mock-ups and spy shots develop.

[VentureBeat] [Cnet]

The app designed to provide alerts on kidnapped kids in the US is now available, gratis, on iTunes.

As we reported last month, Jonathan Zdziarski, creator of the first iPhone forensics toolkit,  developed the AMBER alert. These alerts are issued when missing child cases are granted Amber status –œ  kidnappings of children under age 17 who police believe to be in danger of  bodily harm or death.
The iPhone Amber app provides a real-time feed of recent alerts including victim photos, suspect photos and descriptions, vehicle photos and descriptions and a reporting mechanism allowing users to report sightings.

The Amber Alert program was created in 1996 after the kidnapping and killing of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman.

The application was approved just two days after Zdziarski emailed Steve Jobs pleading for him to help expedite the app’s approval after waiting over a month, though Apple has not said if his letter had any effect on the approval.

Via ars technica