Cult of Mac

Steve Jobs’ worst-case scenario is about to come true.

From the earliest days of the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple sought to assure consumers its mobile devices would not become handheld smut emporiums, and yet the adult entertainment industry began steadily chipping away at such promises almost as soon as they were made.

Comes now Variah, with a brand new mobile “gaming” app exclusively for jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touch that lets users interactively touch, strip and stroke beautiful models to climax.

Apple’s mobile devices are soon enough going to be definitely NSFW, and we’re not talking anything near as tame as iBoobs, either, let me tell ya.

Variah’s UFookMe app not only offers interaction, it also scores players on foreplay technique, the number of erotic surprises they discover and the quality of climax achieved.

The first title, UFookTanya, features porn star Tanya James, a tall, blonde, girl-next-door who definitely reveals more than anything you’ll see in even the AppStore’s relatively risqué apps, such as iGirl or Wobble.

A brave new world is coming for iPhone and iPod Touch users and some of it will be clothing optional. Ҭ

You’re only supposed to use it to make jokey text messages from famous people or, according to the people who made it , “spook friends pretending to get texts from their parents or girlfriend/boyfriend” (it’s apparently aimed at 12-year-olds), but this iPhone app could become the cheater or slacker’s best friend.

It’s easy to imagine using Fake Text app to head out early for cocktails or a Playstation tournament knowing you have a text message from your boss or spouse as back up.

At $.99, it’s a steal.

Via Textually

Image courtesy Bearotic (probably NSFW)

In case you were wondering, Steve Wozniak (pictured is now confirmed to be a competitor on the next season of “Dancing with the Stars,” alongside Steve-O, Jewel, and many other formerly famous people. Because he couldn’t just start working for a new company, which was announced last week. He needed to make a series of embarrassing appearances on TV.

Edit: No offense intended in link; was more looking out for people on the internet who haven’t figured out what the suffix “rotic” means at this point. Have revised to reflect.

Via Zap2It

Come with me on a journey: It’s two in the morning, you’ve been working on a report for ages and you’re hitting the hard part. You’d better do something to focus on this paper right now or you’re going to wind up fiddling with iTunes playlists and blindly posting on unsavory websites.

Enter MegaZoomer. With one stroke of command-return your paper just engulfed your entire screen. The WHOLE thing. You finish your paper in record time! The day is saved! Here’s an image of Safari filling my entire screen using MegaZoomer:

MegaZoomer can take any Cocoa-based application and zoom it up to the size of the whole screen. This means you’ve got great screen use for Safari, Aperture, most text editors and lots, lots more.

It even works with Terminal for those… really important coding projects.

The only downside of MegaZoomer is that you have to have SIMBL installed. If you don’t already have SIMBL installed, I’d suggest you look into it not only for MegaZoomer, but for the myriad of other great plugins that require it.

[thanks Larry]

AP Photo/Mark Duncan

One mayor of a small town in Kentucky devastated by a killer winter storm last week ended up using his iPhone to communicate vital emergency and disaster recovery information to the citizens of his community.

“I wish I could say I had some great epiphany I was going to use this to communicate with my citizens, but I didn’t,” said Madisonville Mayor William Cox, who charged his iPhone in his car to keep his messages flowing. “I just got my phone out and started typing, and I haven’t stopped.”

Cox used the iPhone to log into his Facebook account and posted rapid-fire updates to let his constituents know what was going on:

“Will is glad to report that power in parts of the South Main and Grapevine areas is back on. Slowly but surely …,”

“Will asks people with frozen water meters to PLEASE not use a torch or build a fire inside the meter box. This WILL damage the cutoff and meter!”

“Will was just advised by the Hopkins County School System that there is NO school on Monday or Tuesday.”

At the height of the ice storm, more than 1.3 million homes and businesses were left without power in several states, and thousands still don’t have it back. The storm knocked out landline phones and forced some cell phone companies onto backup generators. In many cases, wireless Internet worked when cell phones didn’t get through.

Wonder if Mayor Cox would have reached more or fewer constituents using Twitter?

Thanks to reader JayDee for the tip

A confession: as a teenager, I got involved with amateur acting and ended up doing a great deal of improvisation. Every Sunday evening a gang of us would get together in a tiny theatre just yards from the beach, where we would play improvisation games until we fell over.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember those games, to conjure up just the right one for just the right moment.

Enter stage right: iProv, the improvisation database for iPhone. It contains over 250 improv games. They’ve been sorted using tags, you can search through the list, and create your own list of faves by just tapping a star. Feeling lucky? Open a random game idea by just shaking the iPhone.

iProv is free on the App Store, although you can make donations at the web site if you want to support ongoing development.

Even after 25 years of Mac, Apple is growing like a high-tech start-up, according to Forbes magazine.

An upcoming issue of the venerable business and money magazine places Apple at #14 on its annual list of the 25 fastest growing tech companies of the past year, which is quite a feat for a company as large as the Cupterino computer maker.

To make the list, companies must have latest 12-month revenues of $25 million or more, annualized sales gains of at least 10% over the past five years and a profit over the past 12 months. In addition, a company must have a long-term consensus profit-growth forecast of at least 10%, annualized.

Surprizingly, this is the first time Apple has made the list since Forbes began publishing it in 2003, but even more remarkably, many of the other companies on it are tiny in comparison to the House that Jobs built.

With revenues of $33 billion per year, Apple is 60 times bigger than No. 1 on the list, biotech tool-maker Illumina (ILMN), and nearly 500 times bigger than No. 5, semiconductor designer Techwell. Apple has grown at an annualized rate of 40% per year over the past five years.

The only other company of Apple’s size on the list – Google, with revenues nearing $22 billion and growing at the rate of 72% a year, good enough for the #2 spot.

See the full list here.

Via Fortune

JAJAH, a leading IP telecommunications company, further blurred the lines between iPhone and iPod touch Thursday by announcing a new service aimed at businesses and other telecommunications carriers who want to provide their customers with the ability to make low-cost phone calls and send SMS text messages to any phone in the world from an iPod Touch.

The white label service, which will allow carriers and non-carriers alike to enable VoIP calling with just an iPod Touch and a WiFi connection, could soon see any number of offerings crop up in the AppStore promising Touch users the ability to turn their device into a fully functioning mobile phone.

JAJAH’s platform features a full suite of telecom management services, from termination of the calls and quality control, to billing and processing payments in 200 countries around the world.

“Millions of people around the world already have an iPod Touch in their pocket. With JAJAH’s solution, any company can turn their customers’ iPod Touch into a fully functioning mobile phone,” said Trevor Healy, CEO, JAJAH. “The device is particularly popular amongst students, who live in a world where Wi-Fi access is always available and, like everyone, they are looking to save costs, so this is a perfect solution.”

One wonders whether AT&T and iPhone’s other exclusive global cell carriers can read the writing on the wall.

Google’s Book Search Project launched mobile editions of its 1.5 million book virtual library Thursday, immediately turning iPhone and iPod Touch into compelling options for those looking for a good eReader.

Of course handy free apps for Apple’s mobile devices, such as Stanza and eReader have already established iPhone and iPod Touch as viable competitors to Amazon’s pricy Kindle and even more costly next-gen readers such as those from iRex and Plastic Logic.

Even those apps, however, are predicated on the idea of consumers buying “books” to read on their mobile devices, and offer access to something like 50 – 60 thousand titles. Google has opened the doors to a library with over a million and a half public domain books, a catalogue that’s growing as fast as Google’s scanners can scan, and the reading is free.

Free is always compelling.

Apple plans to offer all Safari users something already available to iPhone and iPod touch owners: animation. The new CSS Animation feature is part of the WebKit Apple may use to provide an alternative to Adobe’s Flash player, a report suggested Friday.

A development version of the Mac OS X Safari includes animated effects such as falling leaves and a box in motion, reports said.

For some time, programmers have used CSS Animation for the mobile version of Safari. The routines allow Web developers to present animated graphics and 3D effects, removing the need for complex JavaScript, according to MacRumors.

Check out this cool video from Stimulant, the San Francisco design house and creator of XRay, an app that takes the awesomeness of Microsoft’s Surface and the amazing abilities of the iPhone and creates something rather stunning.

From the Stimulant desciption:

What you see here is a prototype that takes advantage of Surface’s object recognition capabilities to recognize the position of one or more iPhones on the Surface, and allows those phones to “see through” the images and reveal a second layer of information.

The possibilities here are fairly extensive; what’s most interesting is the potential for adding a layer of personalized information on top of a public computing experience.

This could enable users to capture content and take it with them, or to have the system display a personalized information layer (translated text/larger-print type/private messages) for individual users of a multi-user system.

iPhone was the first mobile platform we dug in to, but we’ve also got XRay working on Android-based and Windows Mobile-based phones as well.

Via Ars Technica

Independent Mac repair shops all over the world are rejoicing this week, after Apple’s announcment the company will phase out repair support for certain G4 machines, xserve products and other “vintage” and “obsolete” gear.

After March 17th, Apple will no longer provide service parts or documentation for the products listed after the jump, and the items will not be accepted as Mail-In Repairs to AppleCare Repair Centers.

It’s mighty kind of Apple to support the Apple repair ecosystem this way, and yet gives incentive to the consumer to buy new gear at the same time.

Sheer brilliance.

Via AppleInsider, via MacMerc

The guys at Rapid Repair report success modifying an iPod Video 5G with a Toshiba MK2431GAH drive, creating the world’s first 240GB iPod.

“The mod is actually very simple to do on a 5th gen iPod. And with a 240GB iPod you can finally carry your entire $57,667.50 iTunes library” Rapid Repair CEO Ben Levy said in an email.

The Toshiba drive is only compatible with the iPod Video 5G and original iPod Video (30GB, 60GB and 80GB ONLY). Rapid Repair hopes to add the iPod Classic and Zune 2G to the compatible list very soon.

Ready to take the plunge? Looks like it will cost you just slightly more than a buck a gig.

Via methodshop

A teen landed in the hospital with cuts, a black eye and broken vertebrae after being attacked by a trio of girls for her iPod.

In Salem, Oregon at about 6:30 pm in a neighborhood described as “quiet,” police said the victim was walking home from school, listening to her iPod when three girls confronted her and demanded she hand over her MP3 player.

She refused, then the trio attacked her and ran, police said. She was taken to a local hospital where doctors found that she had a fractured vertebra.

Police are still trying to find attackers they described as a white girl with shoulder-length brown hair and two Hispanic girls with dark brown hair.

Via KPTV

Lim Ding Wen, a nine-year-old from Singapore, has written a free art application for iPhone, called Doodle Kids. The app has been downloaded more than 4000 times since its release on Feb. 1.

While many kids his age are content to simply play games on the iPhone or PSP, Ding Wen is all about programming in ActionScript and JavaScript. He also understands five other programming languages and is already hard at work on his next app, a game called “Invader Wars.”

Ding Wen’s efforts stem from his father’s devotion to the Apple IIGS, which he calls “one of the best computers Apple had ever produced.” His dad maintains a website “to bring back the fun and excitement of Apple IIGS programming for all the young children,” with sample codes and a Virtual GS disk available for download.

Kids today. Kind of gives one hope for tomorrow.

Via Engadget

If Apple TV supported cable television, as well as iTunes, the move could generate $1 billion for the media box long considered a “hobby” by Cupertino, one analyst recently suggested.

Providing cable box support could also boost Apple TV ownership six times over, potentially creating 6.5 million sales of the media unit, according to Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

Sacconaghi suggested Apple TV could become an alternative to the cable DVR or TiVo with the help of additional software. Firms, such as Tru2Way allows cable customers to avoid renting a box in order to receive pay-per-view or other services.

The percent of people that intend to buy a Mac within the next three months declined to its lowest point since 2007, a consumer research firm said Wednesday.

ChangWave Research said of those people it contact planning to purchase a desktop or laptop computer within the next 90 days, 27 percent of that group expect to buy a Mac. The figure reflects a six percent drop from January 2008 and the lowest since 2007’s 29 percent demand, researchers said.

The new results found new MacBooks introduced by Apple in October “didn’t explode out of the box,” according to ChangeWave research director Paul Carton.

Demand for Mac laptops continues to outpace desktops. The research found of computer buyers, 22 percent said they purchased a Mac laptop versus 17 percent that chose a desktop.

Along with the poor economy, Apple may suffer from its decision not to offer a low-cost netbook to compete with PC makers.

Dell and HP are among PC manufacturers helped by what Carton called a “long-term secular transformation in how the U.S. consumer spends.” That shift is reflected in nearly 20 percent of laptop buyers reporting they had bought a netbook in the previous three months.

If there is a silver lining in the survey for Apple, it may be that the Cupertino, Calif.-based company is doing better than the overall PC industry.

ChangeWave said only 11 percent of respondents reported plans to buy a computer within the next 90 days. Just five percent of those purchases will be desktops with six percent picking laptops. The figures represent “record lows,” researchers said.

Norway, which had threatened to take Apple to court over its copy-protection of songs purchased through iTunes, announced Wednesday it was dropping its complaint.

“We have no reason to pursue them anymore,” Norway mediator Bjorn Erik Thon told AFP.

Norway had threatened to haul Cupertino into court over restrictions that blocked songs purchased through iTunes being copied to portable music devices other than Apple’s iPod.

Apple’s upcoming OS X software, codenamed Snow Leopard, will include support for multi-touch technology heavily used by Cupertino’s popular iPhone handset, according to a report Thursday.

Location technology is also part of Apple’s new operating system, Apple Insider reported, citing “people familiar” with a test version of Leopard. Developers just received the latest “build” of 10.6, according to MacRumors.

The new version of Apple’s operating system makes use of the iPhone software developers kit to integrate multi-touch features already available to new MacBook and MacBook Pro owners.

It’s the app that’s launched, whatever, a lot of downloads. iFart Mobile lead developer Joel Comm elaborated about the beginnings of the talked-about app in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel.

If you have not downloaded the app and have been wondering exactly why anyone would pay $.99 for a souped-up electronic Whoopee cushion, here’s what it does:

Q: What is the iFart Mobile iPhone application that you created?

Answer: It’s an electronic entertainment or sound machine. It produces flatulence noises. There are a number you can select from. Each has their own name and you push the button to fart now and it makes the sound. We built in a few other interesting features like the sneak attack which you can set to go off after a certain number of seconds or minutes. And the security fart, which when you put the phone down after five seconds, it goes into alarm mode and if anybody picks the phone up, and it detects motion, then it lets off the designated sound. We also included fart a friend, which lets you e-mail a selected sound to another e-mail address. And then there is the ‘record a fart,’ which lets you add a custom sound to the selection wheel.

Q: Why did you make it?

This isn’t your gran’s sideboard: a sleek, minimalist iBoard provides a dock for your iPod or iPhone, functioning as a de facto stereo with a sound range of up to 100 meters.

From Swiss company Schubinger Möbel, the iBoard (plexiglass case not included, though if you want to keep sticky mitts off the device, it’s not a horrible idea) sends 2.4 GHz radio signal to a loudspeaker system that can handle a full audio range including an 8-inch subwoofer and four loudspeakers, and a 100-watt digital amplifier for  quality sound.

Price not listed, for more info Schubinger Möbel

Via Born Rich

The Reuters news organization brings news of 9-year-old Lim Deng Wen of Singapore, quite possibly the world’s youngest iPhone developer. His signature program is Doodle Kids (app store link), a rather abstract drawing game that he developed for his little sisters. It’s been downloaded 4,000 times so far, and it’s free.

What the article fails to mention is that Lim’s programs were initially written for an Apple IIGS emulator before porting to iPhone, which might just be the most interesting transition between Apple platforms this millennium. Does anyone have an Apple /// program that runs on the AppleTV?

Via Digg

When the comfortably semi-retired co-founder of one of the hottest high-tech entrerprises of the past ten years goes back to work, it’s news – whether he’s called by opportunity, need, or just plain desire.

Steve Wozniak is going back to work – at a storage start-up he says he’s joining because ” I like the people and the product, and … I would like some greater involvement.”

Fusion-io is backed with investment from Dell, and has distribution agreements in place with the Texas hardware maker as well as with HP and IBM, according to a report in the NY Times.

It’s said in times of greatest crisis there is greatest opportunity, so I’m inclined to take Woz at his word when he says, “I think I have a better place at smaller companies looking at new ideas.”

via [gizmodo]

Cult reader James moves to the head of the pack in the incredible contest to see how many apps can be running on your Mac and displayed on your desktop in all their juicy, chaotic goodness by Exposé.

James’ machine is Mac Pro 8 core, with 10GB RAM, 30″ NEC 3090 monitor, and 2 1TB Samsung drives raided together. He has a lot of high end apps running, including all of Final Cut Studio, all of Adobe Creative Suite CS 3 Design Premium, all of Office 2008, all of iWork 08, Google Earth, Windows XP and Crunch Bang Linux in virtual box , Sling Player, Filemaker xcode and mmaannyyy more.

“I got to the point where it started giving an error code and would not launch any more apps,” he told us. “When I tried to screen shot it refused, so I had to quit an app before I could make a screen shot.”

Click on the image to see the original size and find he’s also got Open Office, Think Free Office, Eclipse IDE, a 22 mega pixel image from a Canon 5K Mark II (the ship), Proxi, Sketch Up, Sketch Book education, Skype, Gizmo, Gridiron Flow beta, eBay desktop, Acquisition, Adium, Firefox, Safari, iPhone Simulator…

He thinks there are about 240 apps running in all, but says, “I reckon the Pro could take another 100 if the OS would allow it — maybe snow leopard.”

Follow afer the jump for screen shots of James’ Activity Monitor.

The much-maligned iPhone camera keeps getting more awesome software written to enhance the things you can do with it.

Last week I wrote about Light, something to give your pics a pro touch, there’s another one I’ve been playing with coming out of embargo shortly and the latest is an app called TimeLapse, which lets you time a photo to be snapped as infrequently as every 24 hours, or as often as every 10 seconds, which is about as fast as the phone can snap and store a image in the camera roll.

Once you’ve collected your pics, you can easily dump them into iMovie or QuickTime Pro and make a simple time lapse movie.

You can also set a delay to allow the photographer to get in the frame for a group photo. And TimeLapse works as a rudimentary surveillance camera, too. While it’s running, a display lists when it started, the time of the last picture taken and the approximate time of when it will stop.

A happy early adopter has a handy tutorial here.

Now you can go make a movie and get famous like that guy Matt. Well, not exactly, but what do you want from a camera phone?

Via TUAW