Apple has added a new wrinkle to its copyright infringement lawsuit against Florida-based Psystar. The Cupertino-based media company now claims the Mac clone-maker violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In a revised claim filed Nov. 26, Apple charged Psystar “has illegally circumvented Apple’s technological copyright-protection measures,” according to Computerworld.
Apple also named 10 new unnamed defendants, listed only as John Doe 1 through 10.
The amended allegations to the original lawsuit filed in July, charges Psystar also sold a restore disk that Apple claims allows users to install the Mac OS X operating system against the license agreement.
The thing about Apple Stores – the thing that makes them such a perfect target for the writers of The Simpsons – is the vibe they have about them. They’re not like most stores; entering the Apple Store is supposed to be an experience beyond that of simply handing over money to Steve Jobs. There’s supposed to be a wow factor. And the architecture and interior design is essential to that.
Apple is pushing for wider third-party adoption of its new Mini DisplayPort display connector by offering free licensing of the specification, Monday reports said.
In an updated designed for “systems where space is at a minimum, such as portable computers or to support multiple connectors on reduced height add-in cards.”
The news follows last week’s uproar by MacBook users who complained of problems watching videos on monitors that didn’t support the DisplayPort protocol.
This is what Cultism is all about. Not merely that you make a stop motion movie using your Mac; not merely that you make one featuring dancing Mac buttons; but that you own five of the things in the first place.
Fluid Tunes is a pretty cool free app from Majic Jungle Software that uses your computer’s camera to interpret movements of your head, hands or feet, letting you browse, play or pause your music in iTunes without touching your keyboard or mouse. It works on OS X 4.11 and higher and is a tiny (788K) universal binary.
UPDATE: With thanks to reader James of RetroMacCast, credit is due to the original creator of this and many other wonderful mosaix-technique portraits, Athens, Greece-based artist, Charis Tsevis. You can download and listen to a podcast interview with Tsevis here.
Flickr user mic.imac has a fascinating portrait up of Steve Jobs, comprised entirely of artfully arranged Apple products. The portrait echoes a theme that runs through the upcoming Welcome to Macintosh documentary my colleague Nicole Martinelli wrote about on Monday, which is that the people who work at Apple give themselves entirely to the work of designing and producing the products the company makes.
Of no one is that statement more true than Steve Jobs. As CoM founder Leander Kahney says in the documentary, “Apple is Steve Jobs.”
This prototype tactile iPhone case called Invisual allows sight-impaired users to get the most out of the smart phone. It would work in conjunction with special accessibility functions, such as text-to-speech features and moon type tactile alphabet keyboard.
Portugal-based designer Bruno Fosi crafted the silicon case with modified bas-relief buttons that correspond to the iPhone home screen. Fosi says that the iPhone thus covered keeps all its functions intact, including multi-touch and finger flick scrolling.
When Steve Jobs convened the “Let’s Rock” event to unveil the new iPod Nano in September, he made a point of whetting our appetites for premium in-ear headphones with remote and mic that were said, at the time, to be shipping in October. It’s now December and the Apple website still says “Coming Soon.”
Apple engineers were ordered to revise the design, which required Apple’s overseas contractors to retool their manufacturing process, resulting in the extended delay, according to sources cited by MacBloz on Monday.
The premium headphones, slated to retail for $79, are intended to compete with high-end audiophile headsets costing two and three times that amount from the likes of Bose and Sony, and according to the MacBlogz sources, that standard has not yet been achieved. On the other hand, it should be premature to rule out a splashy marketing deployment of the eagerly anticipated headphones just in time for last minute holiday shopping.
I got an email today from some friends who run a Bay Area IT consultancy. They deal almost exclusively in the PC trade but are Mac savvy themselves, so I was startled a bit by the subject line for their monthly Good News / Bad News newsletter: Two Very Bad Mac OSX Viruses.
Of course, I knew from chatter over the summer and from more recent conversation that the days of Macs being impervious to viruses and malware are probably numbered and sure enough, even Apple Support now officially recommends users install antivirus protection on Mac systems:
Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.
The Apple knowledge base article goes on to recommend programs from Intego, Symantec/Norton and McAfee, all of which are commercially licensed products.
My consulting friends recommended iAntivirus, which is a free program, and said, “We have never used it but reviewers say it is good for being a free program. Download and use all free software with caution!”
Another free Mac virus checker (though the developer gratefully accepts all donations) is ClamXav, an updated version of which was released on Monday; the program gets 4.25 stars at Mac Update.
So, is that it? Are we all going to opt for the flu shot from now on? If you’ve installed antivirus software on your Mac, tell us how it’s going and what you like. If you haven’t, or don’t plan to, tell us why in comments.
A video blog entry by Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am shows just how much fun you can have in a recording studio with an iPhone at hand.
At about 1:40 seconds, the club-ready tune on youtube (or under “video blog” on his site) is catchy enough to have some fans wondering whether it’ll be part of his next album. It might not win over new converts to his Blackberry social network or much love at Nokia where he was a featured guest for the Remix party…
Apple wrestled more computer users from the grasp of Microsoft, according to a November survey of Web users released Monday. Macs comprise nearly 9 percent of computers online, Net Applications announced.
The November marketshare of 8.82 percent is an increase over Cupertino’s 8.21 percent share NA reported in October.
Conversely, Microsoft’s share of Internet usage fell in November. Windows fell to 89.69 percent of online users, slipping below the nine-out-of-10 marketshare Redmond has enjoyed for years.
Disney animation movie “Bolt,” where John Travolta lends his voice to the dog-hero in the title, has a brief, fleeting moment of Apple product placement.
Pixar blogger and CoM reader Guido Rogall explains: in Bolt “there’s a chase scene on a train. For a few seconds you see a young woman with a laptop, either a MacBook or iBook, but what is funny about it is that the Apple logo is not lit.”
As another one of our sharp-eyed readers pointed out, this Apple turn-off scenario happens every so often in movies.
Wonder if it’s a mistake or makes it product placement more memorable to clued-in viewers…
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now: the iPhone camera is technically rubbish, but I’m endlessly impressed by the ingenuity and creativity people show with it.
This morning I browsed around Flickr for images of gigs and concerts taken with iPhones; there are some really atmospheric shots to be found.
This Lego-look speaker will pump some sound for the iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Touch and iPod Mini. The USB-charged speaker blocks come in red, blue, green, white, black yellow and pink.
No details on how powerful it is, but probably enough to annoy someone in the next cubicle over.
At around $20, it’s an idea for the random people on your list.
it’s short. Too many podcasts are so full of themselves that they insist on waffling on and on and on about rubbish. James and Louis don’t do any mucking about, they say what they want to say and then STOP. This is good
In spite of the general economic downturn, ‘Black Friday’ sales of Apple computers were “better than expected,” analysts told investors Monday.
Like past Black Friday sales, Apple offered discounts on seven products with an 8 percent discount.
However, Mac sales we more than six times what they were in November, according to Piper Jaffray. Analyst Gene Munster said an average of 13 Macs per hour were sold Friday compared to two computers per hour in November. Munster based his numbers on 10 hours of monitoring five Apple retail stores.
Planning a banquet? Got royals coming to dinner? Or just hosting your daughter’s wedding? TablePlan is the app you had no idea even existed, and turns the nightmare that is making-sure-Aunt-Clara-doesn’t-sit-next-to-any-vegetarians into a delight!
Drag-and-drop re-seating on the fly. Built-in RSVP management. Faster than Excel. (Let’s face it, almost anything on Earth is faster than Excel.) And only 20 bucks.
When I got married, we didn’t bother with a table plan. We just stood up and said: “Sit wherever you like!” It was almost not a total disaster.
“Welcome to Macintosh” (subtitle: the documentary for the rest of us) features a mix of history and cult with interviews from ex-Apple employees, engineers and community members, shedding light on the company’s innovations, failures, cultural impact and what the future holds post co-founder Steve Jobs.
As we noted, it was announced out on DVD this fall, but the delay makes this a good bet for the Mac fanatic on your Christmas list. (Word to the wise: pre-order, since it won’t ship until mid-December).
On sale from the official site, the DVD, which costs about $20, offers three hours of extra content including extended interviews, a “making of” feature, trailers and photo journal.
The doc features a number of Macsperts including CoM’s Leander Kahney. In the trailer he speaks on design: “That’s what makes these products so beautiful, that level of comittment and dedication to the thing. To make it the best thing possible.”
Just in case you don’t have such a great photographic eye, or perhaps are not completely satisfied with the images produced by your iPhone’s distinctive optics, there is help available.
More than 30,000 people have downloaded French photographer Eric Lafforgue’s free iPhone app Hervé Péroteau. He released version 2.1 on Sunday with more than 800 pictures available for use as screensavers for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Lafforgue’s work has been published in prestegious magazines worldwide, including Geo, National Geographic, CNN Traveler, The Times, Stampa and UNESCO magazine. His app will fill 25MB of space on your device, but it automatically lets you know when there are photo updates available and includes professional tips from one of the world’s most successful freelance photographers.
Check out some of his images in the gallery below and be sure also to visit his stunning website.
Blogger Charles Teague has done some comprehensive analysis of emerging trends based on the AppStore’s first 5 months of business and there’s no denying Apple’s online distribution model has exploded out of the gate.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the proposition that the AppStore could be Apple’s most revolutionary development of all, which Teague’s research would appear to confirm in many respects.
The chart below shows the number of applications being released per day, with momentum clearly trending upward and sitting currently at more than 140 new apps per day. There are more than 9000 apps available on the AppStore, with the ratio of paid to free apps at about 7:2.
Stainless is a multi-purpose browser for OS X inspired (according to its developers) by Google Chrome. The early beta version (0.4) available for download works only with 10.5 (Leopard) and appears to be a fun side project for the engineers at Mesa Dynamics, who developed Stainless to leverage multi-processing technologies they developed for one of their other products, Hypercube.
Blogger Jackson Chung has taken Stainless for a spin and writes that it has potential. “It is a fair bit more stable, quicker and simpler to use [than other Mac browsers] – and that appeals to most people who are stuck with the productivity-driven mindset of Do more with less time.” He applauds Stainless’ simple UI and the fact that every browser tab runs under a separate process.
Unlike Safari, for instance, which runs tabs under a collective process, Stainless ‘feels’ lighter, according to Chung, and the whole surfing experience seems quicker and more responsive.
Google is working on a Mac version of Chrome and Media Dynamics gives the impression that Stainless may well be no more than a demonstration of the possibilities we could see when Chrome for the Mac is finally released. Until then, however, Stainless looks to be a taste of things to come.
We came across some very groovy Mac and iGear sleeves and covers from a shop in Australia that could have just the thing for the Apple nut on your holiday gift list.
Foofshop offers ‘foofbag’ Apple laptop sleeves for the MacBook line of notebook computers and soft ‘foofpod’ iPod covers for use with iPod, Touch & iPhone.
Sampled in the gallery below are some of the colors and case designs, all of which are snug fitting and soft padded in sherpa fleece, protecting your stuff from scratches and things that go bump.
Both the bags and pods are slot loading, with an opening at one end; designed for easy removal with no silcone, neoprene, straps, velcro, buttons or clips.
All their products are handmade locally in Australia and the company is certified “carbon managed” by Carbon Planet; 100% of their greenhouse gas emissions have been offset since 2006.
The iPhone DevTeam took another brick out of Apple’s walled garden on Friday, successfully booting the Linux operating system on the iPhone, iPhone 3g and the original iPod Touch, according to a report at AppleInsider.
The “draft version” of the first alternative OS to run on Apple’s mobile devices includes the main Linux 2.6 kernel as well as “rudimentary graphics, serial, and other functional drivers that are enough to get a command line running when input is sent over the USB interface; the accelerometer, audio, networking and even the touchscreen have yet to receive any kind of software support,” according to the report.
Having led the way from the very beginning with efforts to jailbreak and unlock the iPhone, the Dev Team is working to enable Google’s equally Linux-based but more complete Android mobile operating system on the iPhone and is searching for programmers to help with the project.
I followed a link to this CrankyGeeks url because it tempted me with information on “how to get out of your Sprint contract to buy an iPhone.”
I should have known.
The video is pretty good evidence that some FCC regs regarding broadcast standards are there for a reason. Of course, the Internet remains a bit of a final frontier and so you never know (or, as I mentioned, you should know) what you’re getting.
The best advice three guys sitting around drinking can come up with for getting out of your cell phone contract? Complain.
I’ll remember not to ping CGs with a real problem.
