Cult of Mac

Developers Phil Ryu and Andrew Kaz are about to release an iPhone eBook reader with a very cool interface. Flip the iPhone’s screen to turn the page, and the page turns as though it’s a real book! It’s very slick.

Ryu’s $2.99 “Classics” app will feature 10 to 12 books including Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

“We’ll be adding books with free updates,” says Ryu, 20, who lives in Boston.

Ryu is probably best known for his work at MacHeist, and Kaz, 18, was just 14 when he worked on delicious library. Kaz is based in New Jersey.

The pair are planning to submit the app to the app store in a few days.

Meanwhile, they have a preview available, and more details about the app here.

Partially hidden by the fantastic iPhone sales numbers Tuesday was the fact that Apple outsold RIM’s BlackBerry during the third quarter. Analysts say the information may serve as a roadmap for Apple.

Tuesday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said 6.9 million iPhones during the quarter. RIM sold 6.1 million BlackBerries during the same period, according to reports.

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“Apple sells to a much wider audience than RIM,” Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told Cult of Mac. Apple’s iPhone 3G is sold in 51 nations.

Cool your jets. That’s the advice from analysts on a flurry of conjecture about whether Apple is stealthily testing online some mix of iPhone and MacBook.

What sparked the talk was a brief mention in the New York Times that an unnamed search engine found in its logs an unannounced Apple device with a display size between an iPhone and a MacBook.

Lending further weight to the suggestion were comments by CEO Steve Jobs that the Cupertino, Calif. company “had some pretty interesting” ideas for the netbook or mini-notebook market.

It’s easy to think that software developers spend all their time furiously typing code, but that’s not the case at all.

Rory Prior, developer of nifty photo gallery app Instant Gallery, recently published a little PDF booklet showing off some of the design work he has put into his software over the years. Tucked inside it – and also revealed on this blog post of his – were some pen-and-paper sketches of software idea in progress.

The blog post shows how work is progressing on Rory’s iKanji app for the iPhone. There’s some much older work (not just sketches, but also mockups and early application designs) in the booklet.

This is a rarely seen side of software development, and one that deserves a little more limelight, I think.

Do you draw your software ideas? Let us know.

Proving yet again that it pays to shop around, at least two recently-released apps are offering broadly the same functionality. One is free; the other is free (with adverts) or costs three bucks. But which is the better option?

iPhones could be a big part of the changes coming to Washington, DC in the post-George W. Bush era if a House Chief Administrative Office (CAO) test deems them suitable for use by members of congress and their staffs.

At the request of a number of congressional representatives, the CAO has begun testing a small number of iPhones within its ranks to see if they are compatible with the working needs of lawmakers and staff, according to a report at the Hill.com.

RIM’s Blacberry handhelds have been the communicator of choice in Washington since 2001 and today nearly 8,200 rely on a dedicated Blackberry exchange server to deliver email to people affiliated with the House of Representatives. “We’re trying [iPhones] out … because we heard a lot of people wanted the option to have them,” said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the CAO.

Should the iPhone become widely adopted after congress reconvenes in January, it will require costly investments including a new email server, in addition to the handsets themselves, funds for which would be required to come from the Member’s Representational Allowance, which is a government term for “paid for by taxpayers.”

Does your member of congress deserve an iPhone?

An unannounced Apple product with a display somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook is lurking out there somewhere, according to an anonymous source at an unnamed search engine company.

Buried in an update to his post about Steve Jobs’ participation on yesterday’s Apple 4Q earnings call, New York Times technology writer John Markoff says a source to whom he promised anonymity confirmed the search engine company has spotted visits from an Apple product with a display that is neither iPhone nor MacBook.

Should we be looking for iPhone 3.0 or NetMac 1.0?

Photo credit: Suzanne Tindal/ZDNet.com.au

Senior executives from Intel yesterday called Apple’s bet on ARM chipset technology for its mobile phone platform “not very smart.”

Pankaj Kedia, director of ecosystems for Intel’s ultra-mobility group told attendees at the Intel Developers Forum in Taiwan, “I know what their roadmap is, I know where they’re going and I’m not worried.”

Kedi appeared with Shane Wall, Intel mobility group VP and director of strategic planning, who said iPhone “struggles” running any application that “requires any sort of horsepower at all.” Their comments came on a day when Apple reported 4Q earnings and, in particular, sales of the iPhone roundly acknowledged as a “home run.”

Kedia tarred the entire smartphone market with the same brush, saying reliance on ARM technology makes “”the smartphone of today … not very smart.”

Of course Intel has a dog in this fight, as the chipmaker is known to be working on a mobility chipset of its own, known as Moorestown, and is likely feeling left out of Apple’s earnings party, having been rebuffed by the company’s purchase of P.A. Semi and its decision to develop iPhone ARM chips in-house.

Wall brushed off the success of the iPhone as a phenomenon combining clever UI and Steve Jobs’ knack for hype.

Claiming Intel processors achieve two to three times the performance of ARM equivalents, Wall said “”If you want to run full internet [on a mobile platform], you’re going to have to run an Intel-based architecture.”

For his part, Jobs joined an Apple earnings call yesterday for the first time since 2000 to celebrate the company’s success with the iPhone, telling those who wonder when Apple will start selling a less-expensive “netbook” computer that the iPhone is already leading that nascent market segment. He also said his company “had some pretty interesting” ideas if the category continues to evolve.

And so, the gauntlet in the mobile platform war appears to have been thrown. Let the chips fall where they may.

Via ZDNet

Citi Wednesday cut its target price for Apple to $153 from $170, joining several other analyst firms reducing Apple share price while advising investors the Cupertino company remains a good buy.

“We believe this is an attractive opportunity to buy a leading technology innovator on sale,” analyst Richard Gardner told clients Wednesday.

Although the financial firm reduced estimates for fiscal 2009 through fiscal 2010, Citi maintained a “Buy” rating for Apple shares.

If you’ve not heard of James Thomson, he’s the chap behind advanced launcher DragThing and high-powered Mac calculator app PCalc. Seeing as iPhone’s calculator is a bit lacking, Thomson created PCalc for iPhone (which you can buy by clicking here), pictured above, and sales were swift.

However, on his blog, Thomson reported yesterday that PCalc 1.1 almost vanished without a trace. The reason? Apple had changed the way applications were displayed on the App Store, listing them by original release date rather than the date of the most recent update. Consequently, PCalc 1.1 languished on the last page of the Utilities section, since it was released very early on in the App Store’s history. Sales of the update, unsurprisingly, weren’t exactly speedy.

At the time of writing, PCalc now sits on page 4 of the Utilities section, with Thomson having manually changed the ‘Availability Date’ in iTunes Connect. “So, is this behaviour a bug, a loophole, or how it’s actually supposed to work?,” asks Thomson, noting that those who aren’t aware of this undocumented ‘trick’ are effectively being penalized in the listings.

This episode raises obvious questions. Is there a general misunderstanding regarding how application updates should be dated for their position in the ‘release date’ sort order? Or is Apple already sick of developers trying to regularly bump their apps to the top of the pile via tiny incremental updates, and therefore made changes that caught the likes of PCalc in the blast?

We very much hope the former is the case. It would be terrible if the ‘Availability Date’ fix is a loophole that Apple’s going to close. After all, if you’ve spent lots of time working on an application, what incentive do you have to fix bugs and add features if your creation will forever sit abandoned and forgotten, dozens of clicks away from the front door?

Apple blew past analyst expectations, reporting Tuesday it sold 6.9 million iPhones for the quarter ended Sept. 30. Despite outselling RIM, the stock target price was cut Wednesday by one financial expert.

In a long-awaited pronouncement of Apple’s financial health, the company announced a 35 percent jump in revenue, posting $7.9 billion for the quarter, up from $6.2 billion for the same quarter in 2007.

A nice article by Mark Hachman at PCMag.com looks at Steve Jobs’ comments during the quarterly earnings conference call, and comes up with a promising line of thought.

Jobs, as we suspected and made plain here at the Cult a few days ago, doesn’t have anything against a netbook style Mac per se; he simply cannot see how Apple could produce one that wouldn’t suck. Or to put it another way:

“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.”

Jobs is waiting patiently to see what happens next to netbooks. I postulated last week that the Air would morph into a cheaper device (which I’ve no doubt it will), but perhaps I missed something more obvious: the iPhone will morph into a more flexible device. It’s already cheap (well, affordable at any rate).

There’s no hurry, at least not from Apple’s perspective. It is already making plenty of money from the products it has on offer right now, especially iPhones. And as John Gruber points out today, might soon be putting more focus on its phones than on any other part of the business – simply because that’s where the money is, and will continue to be for some time yet.

Which means Apple has time to watch how netbooks evolve, particularly how they evolve with regard to connectivity options, and this is an important factor, I think.

The first gen netbooks appeared with simple wifi connectivity, which is fine for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances. But the old fashioned “road warrior” (yuk, what a horrible phrase) needs connectivity from anywhere, and cannot depend on the availability of wifi networks. They need to be able to open their computer at a moment’s notice, and just get their online stuff done.

Right now, the only feasible way of managing that is via the telephony data network, 3G or otherwise.

So we’re now seeing new generation netbooks with 3G cards, and what’s interesting isn’t the tech inside, but the shop windows they’re appearing in. These netbooks are being sold from phone stores.

As the phone companies start selling contracts (and with them, heavily subsidised netbook computers), Apple will be watching to see just how much the whole arrangement sucks. Some people will end up with two contracts – one for their existing phone, one for their netbook. Some will have one contract, but still be using two devices, carrying around a separate phone handset.

So when Steve says: “We’ll wait and see how that nascent market evolves, and we have some pretty good ideas if it does,” – what ideas does he have in mind? Something that makes ownership of a tiny portable computer easier. The iPhone’s got the connectivity and the computing power to do what’s needed. All that it needs to get it competing with the netbooks is a keyboard, or something that makes the keyboard redundant.

Might Apple let us use normal Bluetooth keyboard with the iPhone? Possibly. Personally, I’d love that, but Apple doesn’t care about me. It wants to me products that really sing with cool, and I think that Steve Jobs would consider an iPhone propped up on a tabletop and controlled with a Bluetooth keyboard to be uncool.

If there’s one thing you can admire in software developers who rip off other people’s ideas, it’s honesty about what they’re doing.

In building WrongRoom, Joseph Lyman has created something modeled on the longstanding best-in-class full screen editor, WriteRoom. It’s his first OS X app, so we should be gentle: but at least he’s up front about why he made something that’s been made before:

“WrongRoom: A shoddy freeware clone of a perfectly good program”

He even encourages anyone who downloads WrongRoom to go and buy a license for WriteRoom. And he’s right. WriteRoom is a much better app with many more features. WrongRoom offers vaguely similar functionality, but it’s just … well, wrong. Even the icon’s a little wonky.

Top marks to Joseph for being so upfront about it, though.

A while back, I compared BBEdit 9 and Coda 1.5, testing the old warhorse against its young competition. However, while quick overviews are all very well, the only way to find out whether applications are any good is under real-world conditions, so I spent 30 days working with BBEdit, to see if it still doesn’t suck. Find out more after the break…

Paramount Digital Entertainment has revived the School of Rock brand with an application that teaches you principles of music education on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

The 2003 movie starring Jack Black tells the story of a struggling musician who scams a job teaching at an upper-crust private high school and ends up teaching the kids how to form a band and play rock music. The app gives users the opportunity to experiment with a variety of authentic virtual instruments ranging from guitar and bass to piano and drums. Users can also learn to play tracks from legendary artists including Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Scorpions and Royal.

The $6.99 app is organized as a game that incorporates features allowing players to explore the history and diversity of music and instruments through a series of quizzes and challenges. Players are challenged to identify brand-name guitars and keyboards using “axes” from well known musicians, receive instruction in the areas of melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo and beats, and have the ability to record and play back jam sessions.

As the game progresses, the songs and variations become more challenging, allowing players to master instruments, advance to different levels and accumulate points that eventually result in graduation from The School of Rock. Groupies and backup singers not included.

This is one of those ideas that hits you like a bucket of wallpaper paste, and you think “Why on earth did no-one think of that before?”

Choosy is a utility for anyone who uses multiple browsers and wants to open certain links in certain browsers under certain circumstances. Web developers will know what I mean, but there’s something in this for normal people, too.

For example, if you’ve created any stand-alone webapps using Fluid, you might want to open some links in one or more of those apps. Say you’ve got a Fluid app for your Google Docs. When an email arrives with a link to a shared document, Choosy will let you open it in the right Fluid-created app, not in your default browser.

I suspect developer George Brocklehurst might be a name to keep an eye on in future. What’s the next smart idea up his sleeve? Watch out for more bucket-of-wallpaper-paste moments.

Supermodel and celebrity Mac spokesperson Gisele tools around Paris with an iPod for company. She stays in touch with her current flame, Tom Brady, however, via Blackberry.

What, no iPhone?

Via Popsugar

Last Friday we issued the call for our designer savvy readers to create Sheppard Fairey-style posters of your favorite Apple luminaries.

unravel stepped up. A graphic designer from the San Fernando Valley, unravel told us, “I admire [Ive’s] work. Besides, I figured people would be doing Jobs first, so why not create one for somebody who deserves recognition too.”

Who’s Next?

AppLoop released a program today that turns any web content into a native iPhone app in under two minutes.

Because many websites are produced by people with few to no developers’ skills and because the iPhone does not store web content locally on the device, developers at AppLoop sensed the need for a way to let content providers do a better job of extending their material to mobile platform users.

Enter the Mobile Application Generator, which converts any RSS feed into a brandable mobile application in less than two minutes. It requires no programming, software downloads, or code maintenance – AppLoop does the nerdy stuff. For free.

Along with generating a fully brandable native app for you – you customize the appearance of the application and include your own logos and color schemes in the set-up process – AppLoop provides an end-to-end analytics library so you can track real-time usage, popular content, and application engagement across various platforms.

Native applications will eventually be deployed across multiple mobile platforms, though Apple’s is the only one operational at present. The company expects to be distributing to Android soon.

Creating a native app allows users to access content regardless of internet connection availability. Images, text, and other data are stored locally for access at any time. Users can also share and promote content on a variety of social services, including Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and Email, as well as mark items as favorites for later access to read and share with friends. The company envisions support for multiple feeds within the same application in the near future, so larger websites can have different categories and a more customizable user experience.

Via Read Write Web

Designers at FullSIX have a handy little website where you can post your recommended fixes to the iPhone, a resource the company created as “a technological ode to our favorite phone.”

At this writing, 99 total wishes have garnered almost 5000 votes and 1 wish has been granted by the Firmware Update gods.

You can add your own wish(es) to the list, at the top of which resides (not surprisingly) “cut and paste,” or simply add your vote to one of the wishes listed.

Boxee announced product upgrades today giving users of its Mac-Ubuntu-AppleTV media center application seamless integration with Hulu and CBS.com offerings through the Boxee interface.

Making a bid for wider recognition of its product at CEA i-Stage in Las Vegas, Boxee is preparing to move from the invitation-only Alpha stage into beta release of a service that aims “to bring all your entertainment into one place.” The company plans to send out 10,000 invitations to its final Alpha release today.

Be sure to watch the video embedded above for a good overview of what Boxee is all about, and check out the Techzilla Boxee Review we posted a few weeks ago.

On the eve of the release of Apple’s fourth quarter results, one analyst firm suggests the number to watch is how many Macs were sold during the period ended Sept. 30.

Piper Jaffray offered clients predictions that were slightly more optimistic than the Wall Street consensus. Mac sales are “key” to Cupertino’s financial picture, according to the analysts.

In a note to investors, the financial firm predicted 2.8 million Macs were sold during the fourth quarter. The estimate expands on a 2.7 million Wall Street projection.

Will Motorola’s Android handset pose a greater threat to the iPhone, improving on the G1, the first Google phone from HTC and T-Mobile? That’s the question on many minds as details of Moto’s open-source phone appeared Monday.

Motorola’s Android unit, not expected until late 2009, reportedly sports many features missing from the G1, offering improved specs, according to Monday’s BusinessWeek.

Citing information distributed to carriers, the financial news source said the Motorola device appears to be “a higher-end version” of the G1, produced by Taiwan’s HTC.

Given the title, there had to be some Apple action in this teen flick revolving around mix-CDs, break-up mix-ups and all-night quest in Manhattan for a band called Where’s Fluffy?

Norah (Kat Dennings) discovers something in common with Nick (Michael Cera) by scrolling through his iPod.

She declares: “You’re, literally, like, my musical soulmate.”

The line has sparked off a debate about whether personality is really defined by playlist.

The trouble with iBone, a plush squeaky toy for dogs modeled on the iPhone, just slightly larger than the real thing, is that it’s unlikely to discourage Fido from playing around with your iPhone, should it get within paw reach.

Via Nerd Approved