With only five shopping days left until Christmas you’ve probably just got enough time to take care of your last minute stocking stuffers to make the Mac or iPhone lover on your list say “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!” with a protective skin that’s also a work of art – from San Francisco-based Infectious.
Choose from 43 eye-catching, original designs like the ones above for your iPhone, or a selection of 85 from the laptop gallery, to personalize your Apple gear in style. Infectious features designs from artists all over the world and has ongoing open submissions if you are an artist who sees any blank surface as a canvas.
Infectious makes adhesive art for walls and automobiles, too, so don’t let your Apple gear limit your imagination. The skins are easy to install and easy to remove when you’re ready for a change. The iPhone skins, which include device backing as shown above as well as a complementing strip of art for the phone face around the home button, regularly sell for $15 but are on sale for the holidays at 1/3 off.
See the website for details.
That aging isn’t for sissies has been obvious for awhile, but there’s a new crop of advice manuals about how walking the walk of youngsters works as an age-defying tactic.
Sparked in part by bestselling “How Not To Look Old” (which offers life-altering observations on how young women wear lip gloss, their mothers wear lipstick or, worse, lip liner), another expert is convinced that one way to take 15 years off your age in a job interview or at work is to know your way around Apple products:
Rule #5: Peruse your local Apple store. At least learn the difference between an iPod Classic, iPod Touch, and iPod Nano and you’re on your way. And buy a set of those identifiable white headphones to keep around, even if you don’t have the iPod to go with them. It’s all about perception.
So says Steven Vicussi, author of a book with such a long-winded title it could bring on dementia: “Bulletproof Your Job: 4 Simple Strategies to Ride Out the Rough Times and Come Out on Top at Work.”
So talk about Apple and you’ll be cooler, younger, hipper.
Reminds me of a friend, in her early 30s but a bit of a proud Luddite, who says things like “the email” (as in “I was on the email the other day”) and refers to her iPhone as “thingy.”
Let me know what you think in the comments…
Photo used under Creative Commons license, thanks to Irargerich on Flickr
Samsung could join T-Mobile to offer the second Android phone in North America.
Samsung expects to launch its first Android-based touchscreen phone in the U.S. between April and June next year, reports said Friday.
An unnamed Samsung official said the company is “accelerating” development of the handset in order to meet “specific needs of local carriers,” according to South Korean ET News.
Although few details are known, the handset may include a design similar to Samsung’s Instinct and Omnia phones, according to one report.
Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and designer of the Apple I and Apple II computers, has joined the advisory board of Axiotron, maker of the Modbook Mac tablet.
Wozniak “brings a network of personal and professional contacts and offers his insight into market trends,” according to an Axiotron statement.
In 1976, Wozniak cofounded Apple with Steve Jobs, now CEO of the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer-maker.
Earlier this month, Axiotron updated the tablet-based Modbook, improving its screen and dropping to 5.3 pounds the weight of the unit priced at $2,249. MacBooks can also be converted to a Modbook, using Modbook Service for $1,299.
RIM announced Thursday it sold 6.7 million BlackBerry handsets between September and November, a figure approaching Apple’s 6.9 million iPhone 3G sales.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM referred to a “record” quarter that saw revenue climb 66 percent to $2.8 billion – despite an economic recession expected to slow handset demand.
RIM told analysts it is having trouble keeping pace with demand for the BlackBerry Storm, the company’s first touch-screen smart-phone.
These Danish-designed iPod Nano and iPod mini cases do double duty, covering your pod and giving you a notebook.
Called the iPod Pad, the leather case secures your iPod in foam and offers a 72-page note pad opposite. (It looks like the notepad might be refillable but unfortunately, google translate didn’t get me far enough to be 100% sure — though a kind Danish CoM reader had a better look and says the site doesn’t specify).
It comes in 10 different color combinations and looks like a Moleskine notebook, which might make it less attractive to thieves. Currently for third generation nanos, a 4G version will be ready by late January 2009.
They cost about $26 dollars (139DKK) from Scripta.
Apple is being sued for patent infringement after a company alleges Cupertino used confidential data to launch Apple TV and other products.
EZ4Media is asking an Illinois court to grant an injunction and fine Apple for infringing on four patents on technology to stream video from a device to a television.
The company claims three employees with “confidential and proprietary information” about the patents were hired by Apple months before the computer-maker launched Apple TV, a product that streams video to home television screens.
We want to know what the Mac community’s favorite new apps are. What software – first released during 2008 – has fired you up, made you incredibly productive, had you screaming with joy or laughing with delight, or generally just been jolly useful?
We want to know.
We’re prepared to be a little fuzzy with the rules. If your nomination first appeared as a beta in late 2007, that’s fine. If it’s only just appeared in the last few days, that’s fine too. But it needs to be a NEW Mac app, and it needs to have been new this year. You get the idea.
(And yes, we’re going to do one of these for iPhone apps too – maybe next week. One thing at a time.)
So, fire away. Speak your branes. Perhaps we can reach some kind of consensus. The comments box, lovely Cultists, is yours to sully.
‘Tis the season for Holiday parties and overindulgences of many kinds, not the least of which can sadly include having too much to drink. It’s fitting then, that December is National Drunk Driving Awareness Month and we wondered how our iPhone might help us avoid the embarrassment and possible tragedy of too much drinking and driving.
Cheers! is a handy app from Addison Hardy that will help you estimate your blood alcohol content (BAC) over time, as long as you remember to add each drink you consume into the program. It factors in weight, gender and the time of each drink to help you make a reasoned estimate of your BAC after you’ve had last call and are ready to head for home. An excellent feature of this $3 program is that it will use your physical location to help you call a taxi if you’ve had too much to drink and drive.
A similar app that comes at the problem from a different angle for just a buck is Drink Timer, from Simpsonics. With Drink Timer you enter your drinks and a calendar wheel tells you when you’re estimated to have zero alcohol in your system from the time you stop drinking. So if you’re out on a Friday night and being good about entering your drinks into Drink Timer, and you look down to see that calendar reading, say, Monday, you may want to throttle back a bit and have a nice warm cup of tea when it comes time for the next round. No Taxi services with Drink Timer.
r-u-drunk? is a game you can use to approximate the embarrassment and shame you’d face if a cop pulled you over driving in that condition. With 5 tests, including a balance test and a straight line test that make use of the iPhone’s accelerometer, it also has an alphabet typing test, a hand-eye coordination test and a simulated breathalyzer. Given the hit and miss nature of typing on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, you might want to start out with that one and if you can pass it, have another glass of champagne. The developers at MobilityWare market this $3 app as a companion to drinking games and it falls under the AppStore’s 17+ rating category.
Last but not least is iMeter, a 99¢ app that could actually help you save lives with its big graphic “meter” you can use to show your drunk friend that he is in fact talking too loud and that his BAC is at danger levels. Simply announce what you’re going to measure and when the meter loads on the iPhone’s screen, you control the “level” the meter will read out using a slider similar to the one used to unlock the phone. Comes complete with funny sounds and pop-out animation for maximum meter readings.
Please remember that drinking and driving is not a laughing matter and it is never fun to play games when real lives could be at stake. The Holiday Season is a time to celebrate with friends and family and to enjoy the spirit of giving and togetherness that make being part of a “cult” special. Drink responsibly and remember that Taxi feature if you use Cheers!
It’s probably a good bet Phil Schiller is not going to introduce an iPhone with a built-in video camera in a few weeks at Macworld. In the meantime, Sol Lipman and 12seconds.tv have created a 99¢ app for the iPhone that lets you take 3 photos (either on the fly or choose from your camera roll), record 12 seconds of audio, which it ties into a multimedia masterpiece “video slideshow” you can then share with your friends and an unsuspecting world.
Slideshows are automatically uploaded to servers at 12seconds.tv, where users have an account from which they can manage their body of work. Every video has its own page (sort of like Flickr) and any video can be emailed, downloaded or embedded.
One of the 12seconds dev team told us, “we tried hard to keep the app simple and straightforward and fun.” From all appearances, they have succeeded. The slideshows make effective use of the “Ken Burns effect” that will be familiar to anyone who’s made a slideshow in iPhoto, and the recording quality of the iPhone’s microphone is surprisingly good.
Another consideration behind limiting the final output to twelve seconds was that “twelve seconds is about the ideal amount of time for most user-generated content,” according to David Speiser, who consulted with Lipman on development of the app. “The goal is to keep the barrier for consumption really low – no matter how badly a video might suck, you know you’ll never waste more than twelve seconds of your life watching it.”
At long last, there’s a desktop app for UK Mac users to download digital copies of BBC TV shows.
The launch of the Mac beta comes many months after its Windows rival. It also comes with a self-congratulatory news story at news.bbc.
And it’s also a bit of a mess.
Lots of people, myself included, have spent long hapless hours this evening, trying to find any way to download the app in the first place. I hunted high and low and found nothing. I signed up as a Labs user. I clicked randomly on some stuff. Hmmm. Finally a friend sent me this link, which took me to a Download option.
It’s an Adobe Air app, so installation is fairly straightforward from that point. Even so, with the app installed, I still can’t find a single show available as a download. And that’s after trying in three different browsers. Hence the disappointingly empty screenshot above.
But hey, let’s not moan. It’s great to have the app at all, and UK Mac users will be delighted to have it around. Thank you lovely Auntie Nerds!
Only Google treats us as well as this. Other software developers insist on adding functionality to their updates; only Google gives us the benefit of enhanced version numbers. These people really care about us. It brings a tear to my eye, it really does.
Philippe Starck, one of the most famous and prolific designers alive, has made these monumental iPod speakers.
Called Zikmu and designed for Parrot, these sleek, wireless “couture” speakers stand 2.5 feet tall with a docking station for an iPod or iPhone on top. Audio can also be streamed from a PC or Mac via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and the speakers emit sound from both sides.
They’ll be in available in spring 2009 and cost $1,500.
If British tab The Sun is to be believed, 18-year-old Gavin Brooke stayed awake listening to an iPod as surgeons removed a brain tumor.
The teen had a tumor in a tricky place that surgeons didn’t want to damage, so the boy had to stay awake during surgery.
Brooke was given an anesthetic to numb the pain, but the head surgeon let him hook up his iPod Touch to give him something to do.
What was on the playlist?
The first tune Brook played on his iPod was “Apologize” by Timbaland Featuring One Republic, the rest were garage and R’n’B tracks that kept him occupied during the six-hour surgery. The iPod was plugged into the operating theater’s sound system and the volume was low enough so that Brooke could carry on conversation with the surgeons.
The tumor was removed and Brooke has since recovered.
Photo: Cishore/FlickrApple’s withdraw from Macworld Expo marks “the beginning of a shift in leadership roles,” Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster told investors Wednesday.
The decision by CEO Steve Jobs to bypass a keynote speech in favor of marketing head Phil Schiller, sends “a clear message that a leadership shift is underway,” Munster wrote in a note.
This isn’t the first time onlookers have attempted to read Apple’s intentions through trade show speaker selection. In October, the inclusion of Schiller and Tim Cook prompted questions of a potential exit by Jobs.
The Apple Expo in Paris became the latest victim of Cupertino’s decision to scale back its participation in industry trade shows. The French show announced Wednesday next year’s show was cancelled.
Attendance at the 25 year-old Paris event had dwindled to 30,000 this year from a high of 90,000. Apple CEO Steve Jobs had skipped the event since 2004, when he underwent surgery for Pancreatic cancer. The trade show suffered another black eye in 2007, when Apple was unable to show the iPhone.
Tuesday Apple announced San Francisco-based Macworld Expo 2009 would be its last and that Jobs would not be keynote speaker. The company explained the move, saying trade shows had become ‘a very minor part’ of customer outreach.
Recent weeks have seen renewed discussion about the security vulnerabilities of Macs and the OS X operating system, though, as usual, it is primarily PC interests who say, “your day of reckoning is gonna come” and Mac interests who say, “Apple computers are the safest computers under the sun.”
Meanwhile, Apple released a security update on Tuesday that quashed 21 security bugs, news of which was taken by those on both sides of the debate as evidence their argument is right.
What better time, then, for Norton/Symantec to release Internet Security 4 for Mac and Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection, designed for those running Boot Camp or other Windows virtualization software on the Mac. Both products integrate all-new firewall and antivirus protection with tools to help protect against the increasing instance of identity theft.
I spent some time this week going over the UI and program features with Symantec’s Mac Product Manager, Mike Romo, and I was impressed with the granularity built in to the software’s control features and pleased to see Symantec has paid attention to creating a UI that says the designers have seen and used Macs themselves.
While automatically blocking attempted exploits using different protocols, Norton Internet Security for Mac’s firewall now also offers application control, which allows users to manage the applications that are connecting to the Internet, protecting Macs from spyware. New location awareness controls let users specify different connection settings for different networks to which a computer may be connected. The software is also integrated with Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Management System, an evolving database of known bad actors. Firewall rules are automatically updated at least once a day to protect against the latest attacking IP addresses.
This is powerful software that should appeal to rabidly security-conscious Mac users – especially the growing cadre of multiple-user businesses, schools and enterprise customers who have adopted the OS X platform – who will be happy with its degree of configurability as well as the extensive live monitoring and event logging it makes possible. Those who want to “set it and forget it” can also feel secure from phishing, malware or hacking threats they believe are lurking out there for the Mac.
Available now for the US from the Symantec online store and through various retail outlets, Norton Internet Security 4 for Mac is US$79.99, which includes a one-year subscription to Symantec protection updates. The suggested retail price for Norton Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection is US$89.99, which also includes a one-year subscription to Symantec protection updates.
“Apple is sending a message to the entire community–professionals, hobbyists, media, Mac User Groups, and even IDG themselves–that they care nothing for the community who supported them through thick and thin,” she declares.
And so: “If you’re attending the Macworld Expo keynote on Tuesday, Jan. 6, you can send a message to Apple by remaining silent during the 2009 keynote. While Phil Schiller is on the stage, let there be no applause, no whistling… just utter and complete silence.”
What do you think of Lesa’s plan? Will you join her in silent protest? If you do, and Apple DOES finally unveil that updated Newton-Pippin-Tablet-iPhone crossover that everyone’s been going on about for so long, how will you manage to contain yourself?
I can’t help thinking that Lesa’s just shooting herself in the foot here. By announcing that it will quit Macworld, Apple has already made clear that it doesn’t care what Macworld attendees think. It’s going to do its own thing, regardless.
(Photo used under Creative Commons license: thanks kradlum.)
You yourself might not be an actual superhero, but with Earthcomber, a free GPS-leveraging search/mapping/social networking app for iPhone and iPod Touch, you can have “superhuman awareness,” according to developer Jim Brady.
Preloaded with a comprehensive database of restaurants, movie listings, events, historical sites, local information and more, the app lets users tag their interests – for example, Greek cuisine, historic buildings, hot chai tea, or free WiFi access. They can also add their own items, and invite friends so they can find them as well.
Earthcomber then scans an area for any matches, using the iPhone’s GPS. Any place that has anything of interest is announced by an optional chime.
Earthcomber is different, according to Brady, because it utilizes multiple technologies so the user doesn’t have to jump from one application to the next to accomplish related tasks. “That’s the whole point,” Brady said. “We don’t have to turn off our eyes to start up our ears, and we sure don’t have to fill out a search box for our brains to work. Earthcomber uses mobile technology as a powerful extension of our natural abilities, so that we can be constantly aware of what’s right around us.”
Earthcomber won Nokia’s 2008 Mobile Rules! competition for “Best Infotainment” application. The company provides USA service today and plans international coverage with a coming update.
Retina-X released the unsubtly named Mobile Spy software for iPhone on Wednesday, a product the company says “will reveal the truth for any company or family using Apple smartphones.”
Mobile Spy operates in stealth mode, invisible to the iPhone user, but permits parents or employers who install it to silently monitor incoming and outgoing text messages (SMS) and call information of children or employees – even if activity logs are erased. The software starts when the phone is booted up, records all call and SMS activity and uploads the data in real time to Retina-X servers, which may be accessed from anywhere on the Internet.
The company says it is working on adding spy awareness to email activity in a future release.
Because the software runs in the background, sending and receiving data across the network while other software is in use, Mobile Spy violates Apple’s iPhone SDK, so you won’t find it on the app store, but it is available on the Retina-X website.
Priced at $100 annually, $70 semi-annually or $50 quarterly, it is compatible with iPhone 3G only.
This holiday season you may want to beware of parents, bosses and spouses bearing iPhone gifts.
One of the most depressing scenes in the already depressing “Sex and the City” movie is the one where Carrie Bradshaw gets left at the altar.
The groom, aka Big, hasn’t shown up. In a scene where all the stars especially look like they need a good night’s sleep and more calming carbs in their diets, Samantha holds an iPhone, set off against a fire-engine red dress.
Ahh, remember back when? When rumor sites didn’t exist? Where second-guessing the next Stevenote meant walking in the rain to your nearest User Group meeting, and having a heated discussion with your friends Gary, Bob and Bob about what future Macs might be like?
(And how you and Bob would disagree, and at the end of the evening neither of you had given way on the argument, so you said to Bob: “I’ll write you a letter to spell out exactly what I mean,” and Bob said: “Hey even better, you can send me a message on my new FAX MACHINE!”, and you felt completely out-manouvered?)
Ballistickcoffeeboy has a Flickr photostream stuffed to the brim with vintage Mac stuff. Adverts, screenshots, product pics, photos of his own kit, you name it. Go dive in and wallow for a bit.
(Photo of “Start a personal relationship at the office” used under Creative Commons license, thanks to ballistikcoffeeboy.)
A little bit old school, a little bit new school: the Record 001 app lets you work the image of a vinyl record with your fingers in a shout out to turntable days.
Digital DJs can backspin, pause and scratch like they would on a real record on an iPhone or iPod touch screen.
Record 001 has mixed reviews so far — the first release comes with just two oddball tracks “World Peace” and “The Fashion Song” — calling it a quirky demo app but not regretting the $1.99 price tag.
See if you don’t get a smile out of the video, though.
A similar app that comes at the problem from a different angle for just a buck is 
Last but not least is 
