Cult of Mac

Hey, “festering dumpster biscuit,” I’m talking to you. Or at least I would be, if I’d shelled out $.99 for the Mud Slinger app.

Mud Slinger puts over a million different combos of contemptuous rudeness at your fingertips. Some are funny, none are really obscene and most would be challenging to  shout at the guy who just cut you off in traffic.

A few results from the “Unspeakably Foul Insult Generator”:
* Mutant rump worm penetrator
* Closeted dingle berry strainer
* Cretinous bubble jam
* Leaking member fondler
* Pulsating dill-knob fluid

Via TMC net

Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, used a security exploit in Safari 4 to hack into a MacBook in about 10 seconds Wednesday, winning the Pwn2own contest at the CanSecWest security conference for the second year in a row.

The security hole, which Miller said he discovered last year, allows a remote attacker to gain control of a machine by getting the computer user to click on a malicious URL, as Miller demonstrated.

“It’s not easy, but this worked with one click” from the Safari browser, he said.

The contest is sponsored by TippingPoint, which shares details on the exploit with Apple and develops a patch for it. TippingPoint offers $5,000 for each new exploit demonstrated in the major browsers and $10,000 for each successful exploit in the major smartphones.

Miller also discovered an exploit in the mobile version of Safari shortly after the iPhone was launched in 2007. In addition to the $5000 prize for his efforts Wednesday, he gets to keep the MacBook he used to win the contest.

[CNet]

Newber, the FreedomVoice Systems app that sought to bring innovative calling functionality to the iPhone, has thrown in the towel after having had its app submission ignored by Apple for five months, according to an open letter (pdf) published Wednesday by FreedomVoice CEO, Eric Thomas.

We reported in January that Apple was dragging its feet on the Newber app, which would let users route every phone call made to them though a single number (their “Newber”) and, using GPS location awareness, let them take a call on any phone that happened to be nearby.

Thomas claims Newber followed Apple’s submission guidelines, yet never received any information from the company as to why the application was not reviewed. FreedomVoice records claim to show no one at Apple ever even tried the app.

A simple rejection, although not a welcome development, would have provided an opportunity to rework the app or scrap the project before wasting money on promotions, according to Thomas, but Apple left Newber in limbo.

After spending over $500K for R&D, architectural changes, patent applications, and marketing, the company finally saw no way forward.

“I don’t think you can do that to companies and expect others to continue to invest in your platform,” Thomas said.

[MacNN]

Switcheasy has released a very cool, tiny microphone for Apple’s iPod Nano 4G and Touch 2G devices. Available in red, white and black, the little mini-mic connects to the iPod’s 3.5mm headphone jack and delivers what Switcheasy says is “outstanding” recordings from “the best quality micro-microphone in its category.”

$13 + $3 shipping and handling from the website, ThumbTacks have a gold plated, non-corrosive plug and work with third-party apps. Switcheasy recommends upgrading the iPod to latest firmware before using the ThumbTack.

AT&T is set to begin offering existing customers iPhone 3G on March 26 without requiring on-site activation or the 2 year service contract new and upgrade customers must agree to in order to buy a phone at reduced pricing, according to a report at Boy Genius.

Claiming to be based on internal AT&T training slides describing the new policies, the report indicates existing AT&T customers will be able to purchase a limit of one device per phone line at $599 (8GB) and $699 (16GB) without committing to the usual 2 year contract required of new customers wishing to purchase an iPhone.

New AT&T customers will still be required to sign a 2 year service contract in order to activate iPhones on the AT&T network and all phones activated for AT&T service will still be required to carry an iPhone data plan.

A police officer in Benton County, Washington is using his iPhone on the job as a translator.

Described in the local news story as a “crime-fighting gadget,” Deputy Doug Hollenbeck has been relying on his iPhone for the last eight months to help boost rudimentary Spanish skills while dealing with everything from roll-over accidents to routine traffic stops.

Hollenbeck says he’s admittedly at a disadvantage because he can’t speak fluent Spanish in a significantly Hispanic community.

“I’ve got some basic vocabulary skills but other than that, not so much,” he adds. That has translated to the phone being somewhat of a staple in his line-up of gear.  No mention of exactly which app he’s using.

Are translator apps fast enough to be used on the job? Let me know what you’re using in the comments…

Via kndu

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTOCgkvJ03c
The teen star was trying to play nice with paps waiting for her outside a Pilates studio, taking pics of them with a camera and answering questions.

Then, as the pap was handing her drink back, she let his iPhone drop. That’ll teach ’em.

Well, it’s more of an unfortunate oversight. But the iCount logo — a numbers game for the iPhone, iPod touch —  looks like it’s all about something else thanks to the dropping of the “o”. Oh, my. Chalk up another one for the iTunes store censors.

Via the Inquirer

Apple has confirmed the existence of a proprietary chip in the on-cord controller of the company’s headsets that began shipping with the new iPod Shuffle announced last week, but the chip itself serves no “authentication” function and will not prevent third party headset manufacturers from producing headsets that work with Apple’s music player, according to company spokespersons.

The chip will be required for headsets wishing to bear the “Made for iPod” licensing certification for accessories that work with iPods, however. Apple has thus created a new revenue stream and extended “Made for iPod” certification to headphones/remotes, accessories that were not previously required to be certified as “Made for iPod”.

So while there is no DRM in the chips themselves, third-party headset manufacturers who want their products to be sold in Apple Stores and / or to be regarded as competitive, are likely to feel pressure to pay for the chips and obtain the “Made for iPod” certification.

The proprietary chips will cost manufacturers less than $1, bundled with a $2 microphone, according to one report.

Image © Hugo Lala. Used with permission.

Hugo Lala has a vision for Apple’s much rumored netbook. “Imagine…,” he says:

Dual touchscreen with multiple configurations for the bottom display:

– keyboard + “touchpad”
– multitrack audio mixer
– dj “turntable”
– accelerometer

2 X 10″ touchscreen
wifi: 802.11n
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1,86 GHz
2 Go SDRAM DDR3
128 Go SSD
SuperDrive DVD (hope it fit in this)
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
Webcam
Mini DisplayPort
Microphone
Speaker
audio output
2 X USB
1 X FireWire 800

Lala says his netbook would have at least 5 hours of useful battery life and the accelerometer in both screens to allow for reading ebooks in vertical mode with facing pages, just like a real book.

Registered iPhone developers began playing around with the beta release of iPhone 3.0 late Tuesday, and initial reaction to the enhancements announced earlier in the day are quite favorable, according to a report at AppleInsider.

The beta release includes an updated Software Development Kit (SDK) with over 1,000 new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) including In-App Purchases; Peer-to-Peer connections (tethering); an app interface for accessories; access to the iPod music library; a new Maps API and Push Notifications.

Apple also announced over 100 new features that will be hotly anticipated by iPhone and iPod touch users when the public software is released this summer, including cut, copy and paste; MMS functionality for 3G iPhones; landscape view for Mail, Text and Notes; stereo Bluetooth; syncing Notes to the Mac and PC; shake to shuffle; parental controls for TV shows, movies and apps from the App Store; and automatic login at Wi-Fi hot spots.

The iPhone OS 3.0 beta also showed off a new Voice Memo app and expanded search capability for all key iPhone apps, as well as Spotlight search across the entire device. Spotlight is said to be very responsive and functions just as you would expect having used the feature previously on a Mac. Copy & paste is also being well received, according to the report.

Any Cult readers who are also iPhone developers are invited to share your impressions in comments and let us know if you have any great screen shots we need to feature.

[AppleInsider]

Spykee is an odd little $300 robot “toy” that’s everything from a webcam to digital music player to VoIP phone and can be controlled via WiFi.

Spykee ships with software that allows it to be controlled from a Windows or Mac PC, but Televolution CEO David Beckemeyer thought it would be cool to control it from his iPhone, too, so he built an iPhone web app that permits just that.

With Beckemeyer’s iSpykee controller, now robot fans can use their iPhone or iPod Touch to send Spykee down the hall to check on the sleeping baby or set it to act as a motion detector and send an alarm or photo in email.

The iSpykee controller is an open source project that, by publishing the source code used to implement the robot’s communication protocol, Beckemeyer hopes will assist other developers in creating interesting apps to control the versatile robot.

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.