Cult of Mac

If there’s one thing the British like complaining about more than the weather, it’s the transport system.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the App Store bulging with apps for people on the move. Here are just a handful of my favourites…

There’s Alistair Stuart’s Trains, giving near-as-dammit live information from UK station departure boards: essential for people five minutes walk away from the station door, and whose train ought to be leaving in four minutes.

And there’s Ian Smith’s LondonCam, a highly rated app that displays the latest image from any of more than 80 traffic cams that monitor London’s busiest roads and interchanges.

Traffic UK provides real-time traffic updates for the area around your current location, or for any place you care to name.

And TubeStatus is one of several London Underground monitoring apps, providing timely warnings of line closures and service disruptions. Which, as any Londoner will tell you, are many and varied and frustratingly frequent.

Chloe & The iTunes Babysitter from Jason Bedell on Vimeo.

OK, this one might divide the audience somewhat.

Here’s Jason explaining how the iTunes visualizer has saved his day, kept his daughter quiet, and enabled him to do some work. You can hear the relief in his voice as he says: “Steve Jobs, thank you.”

Is this the best concept in babysitting since, um, TV? Or is she a little young for Apple cult indoctrination?

Do share your opinions in the comments.

Disney star Vanessa Hudgens plays peek-a-boo with the paps from behind her iPhone on the streets of Beverly Hills. Not surprisingly, after a few steps Hudgens needed to see where she was going and dropped the stance.

The iPhone, however,  continued to protect and serve as she speed dialed her mom (or therapist?)  for solace.
Funny, it doesn’t look like she was having a bad skin day, maybe she just wants to get in on the game of match the celeb with the cell phone.

On Sept. 20, Apple opened its North County store in Escondido, a San Diego suburb. Reader Scott Bernard writes in to let us know that the event had a very special guest: a quite convincing “PC” impersonator who posed for pictures with the gathered Mac faithful as he distributed “Mac Unfair to PC” leaflets.

Not everyone got the joke. Notes Scott:

We couldn’t hear much of what he was saying, because there was one of those actual CRAZY Apple people in line behind us, yelling in the direction of PC. Crazy guy had NO IDEA that PC was an actor, and he was apparently completely unfamiliar with the “I’m a Mac” ads. Scraped from my week old memory:

Crazy guy: “W- w- w- Windows SUCKS!”

*everyone in line ignores crazy guy, who we thought was just trying (and failing) to be funny*

Crazy guy: “WINDOWS SUCKS!!!”

*we start wondering if this guy is crazy, because he actually sounds angry now*

Crazy guy: “In 1997, Jeffrey Dell said he would shut down Apple, and, and…”

*now we all KNOW he is crazy, especially since it was MICHAEL Dell who he is apparently trying to refer to*

Crazy guy: “Jeffrey Dell said-!”

PC: *walks over to Crazy guy* “Sir, sir, it’s OKAY. I’m playing a CHARACTER. I’m really a Mac guy. It’s OKAY.”

As Scott notes, he doesn’t have the exchange on video, largely because the iPhone has no video recording capability. You hear that, Apple? Think of what you’re denying your base!

Apple also recently opened a shop in nearby Carlsbad, but PC didn’t make the trip. Apparently, lovers of sensible ties and cheap hucksterism prefer Escondido. Click through for a shot of the North County T-Shirt and another pic of PC on duty.

The return of the Lightsaber application to the app store is one to be hailed with much fanfare. Star Wars fans everywhere rejoice, and in the three days that the application has been on iTunes it has received over 1,400 reviews with an average four star rating.

Our night of watching the presidential debates was put on hold to test the rereleased application. Shortly after unsheathing my saber I was viciously attacked by an insidious villain! The ensuing epic battle (I’m on the left) was caught on video by horrified onlookers:

Testing Lightsaber Unleashed from Dean Putney on Vimeo.

Ultimately, we loved the new Lightsaber Unleashed. For those every day around-the-house epic battles, there’s really nothing like a good free Lightsaber application. We loved the built-in theme music, the accelerometer was quite accurate with our strokes, the different colors were great, and it really felt like we were holding lightsabers. Our only critique is that we often met our peril to an accidentally retracted beam (if you tap the screen with your saber drawn, you’re brought back to the menu screen).

If you have an iPod touch or an iPhone, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have this application installed. Let’s have some impromptu lightsaber duels!

Here’s hoping that Apple’s feverishly-anticipated “Brick” project is the world’s first all-screen laptop — like this mockup of the OLPC version 2 by designer Yves Behar.

There’s slim chance, of course, but I for one would love a computing device like this: A hybrid iPhone-meets-Macbook-Air that would put hot netbooks like the EeePC to shame.

Apple’s “Brick” would be a hybrid laptop/tablet/ebook that dispenses with a physical keyboard and trackpad in favor of a virtual, adaptive UI that blends multitouch, gestures and its own orientation to switch between different modes:

Laptop — When the Brick is held horizontally with the two screens at an angle, the bottom screen turns into a virtual keyboard and touchpad. There’s no tactile feedback for touch typists, but never mind, corrective text handily makes up for the myriad errors. The top screen acts like a regular laptop screen, except that it also is touch sensitive, and is responsive to multitouch gestures like double-tap to zoom, pinching and scrolling.

Tablet — When the two halves are opened fully they snap together in the middle to make a tablet with a continuous touch-sensitive screen. This mode is best for surfing the web, browsing and editing photos, and displaying mind-altering music visualizers.

eBook — Like laptop mode but held vertically. Each screen transforms into an electronic page for easy reading. Displays eBooks, eMags or specially laid out websites. Readers navigate by swiping the screen to turn the pages.

Tabletop — Like tablet mode but for two people. When an onscreen button is pushed, the screens are oriented for two users sitting opposite each other. Great for collaborative tasks and especially games.

And why’s it called “Brick”? Because it smashes Windows!

More pictures after the jump.

Inspired by Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan.

Sonic Lighter is slightly different to all the other iPhone virtual lighters; it checks in with the GPS and pings a remote server with the device’s location at the moment the app was started.

The result: a Google Map covered with little red flames, every one of them an instance of Sonic Lighter getting all lit up.

And the map has few surprises: big swathes of red flames across North America, Europe and Japan. But hold on, what’s that, up there? In the Arctic Ocean, hundreds of miles north of the Chukchi Sea, itself north of where Alaska and Russia kiss? It’s a single, solitary Sonic Lighter ignition. Maybe it’s a member of Sarah Palin’s crack squad of Russia-monitoring sniffer dogs. Or maybe it was just some guy on a plane. Either way, we salute you, most-northerly Sonic Lighter user. You should get a prize, or something.

(If anyone’s taken their iPhone to the north or south poles, and has some interesting iPhone pics to prove it, please contact the Cult.)

(Via Gruber)

The sharp-eyed folks at iphone savior spotted a MacBook Pro cameo on the season premiere of The Office.
In it, receptionist Pam appears in the Scranton branch from New York via iChat video.

While it’s easy to understand that Office followers — wry code monkeys and creative types alike — would appreciate the nod, Dunder Mifflin seems so much more PC than Mac.

How many places like that use MacBook Pros?

An apparent shift by iPhone 3G buyers to lower-priced 8GB models reportedly prompted Apple to trim by 4 million the number of handsets it will build for the rest of 2008. Cupertino will order 14 million to 15 million phones instead of 18 million analysts first projected.

Pacific Crest’s Apple analyst said Friday “supply-chain checks” found since mid-September Apple is not meaningfully resupplying AT&T stores that have sold down their inventory of 8GB iPhone 3Gs.

The first unlocked iPhones may be selling through Apple’s online Store in Hong Kong, according to a report this morning in at a Singapore-based blog. Techgoondu is reporting online shoppers at the Apple web site in Hong Kong are beingn told “”iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier. Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation.”

The 8GB is HK$5,400 ($695) and the 16GB is HK$6,200 ($798). Ouch. Shipping is free, and they are supposed to ship “within 24 hours”. Apple’s warranty for the iPhone 3G is local only – “Warranty service is restricted to the country where Apple or its authorized distributors originally sold the iPhone.”

Honk Kong-based carrier Three enjoyed a brief two and a half month exclusivity deal with Apple and recently sweetened its iPhone rate plane to include “free unlimited wifi.”

MacBook update fever has the Mac community in its grip, and everyone’s talking about or leaking images of possible new MacBook designs.

But what about the growing threat of so-called “netbooks”? Those tiny, cheap machines pioneered by Asus and now on offer from pretty much every PC manufacturer around.

ZDNet wonders if Apple will make something similar, or, more likely, reduce its MacBook prices to compete. (I don’t think that’s very likely, but anyway.)

The Apple Gazette declares a resounding no, saying that the netbooks are not affecting MacBook sales anyway. They are reducing sales of more expensive non-Apple Windows laptops, but not hitting Apple products that hard at all.

I’m inclined to go along with the Gazette’s view that reducing the MacBook prices by a little — getting them down to the $700-$800 range — would be sufficient to make sales soar once more. That said, I suspect it’s more likely that the machine will be much improved and stay at roughly the same price that it is now.

Personally speaking, the biggest hurdle to overcome is battery life. I still yearn for a good sized mobile machine that will last for the best part of a day without a charge, and none of the current netbooks, or the MacBook Air, will do that. And I know which of those I’d rather buy.

AC/DC guitarist Angus Young explains it very simply in his high voltage comments on a Telegraph story about the state of the music industry:

“We don’t make singles, we make albums.”

Well that’s one view, I suppose. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall during that interview. What else did he have to say?

• Jason Snell of Macworld on Apple potentially driving iPhone devs away: https://tinyurl.com/4ky4hr #

It’s… it’s like looking into the Eye of Sauron. If each application were a different Eye.

More at Gizmodo.

Excited Bristol Apple Store staff, preparing to let in the first customers

It’s hard to get the British excited about something, especially a new shop. But that does’t stop the staff at the shiny new Bristol Apple Store doing their level best to get the queue outside cheering and waving. A bit.

It has to be said: this store opening is unlike most others. Central Bristol ground to a halt this morning because an entire shopping mall, encompassing several surrounding streets, was opening for the first time.

The Apple Store was just one among 150 or so shops welcoming new customers. The opening ceremony for the mall included a MC on a cherry picker, shouting bad poetry and exhorting the crowd to spend and spend. And four drummers sat at four drum kits. The sound echoed around the streets and made the echos made the drummers sound out of time with each other. But nobody minded. Dancers and free runners danced and ran freely. And eventually, Mr MC man declared the Cabot Circus (warning: eye-wateringly awful web site) mall open. The masses flooded in to spend their money.

But that was only half the queuing for the Apple fans. The mall opening is over, and now they have to rush down a newly-opened street and start a fresh queue inside steel crowd barriers. And there they wait, for another 30 minutes, while Store staff do the usual whooping and cheering and getting people excited.

Just days before Apple is to present its fourth quarter numbers, another analyst is trimming its revenue estimates. BMO Capital’s Keith Bachman said Thursday “the weak economy has started to take a toll on Apple’s system’s business.”

Bachman lowered the target price for Apple shares to $180 from $190.

Read more about the target cut and how other analyst appear to agree after this jump.

The Sartorialist, aka Scott Schuman, occasionally shoots his on-the-street fashion stories using Mac stores as a backdrop.

Just in time for Milan shows, he snaps a fleeting fashionista in front of the blink-and-you missed it Apple reseller on Via Mercato.

The best thing about the otherwise unremarkable store in the city’s chic Brera neighborhood are the staff’s black T-shirts candidating Steve Jobs for mayor. Now that’s a statement.

People who claim to have seen production-ready versions of next-gen MacBooks and MacBook Pros in the US say new Apple notebooks will look more alike than ever before, according to a report in AppleInsider. While clear that its information should be viewed as rumor, the report cites sources with “a lengthy track record” and who have “been privy to early glimpses of some of [Apple’s] other hardware offerings.”

Both the new 13-inch MacBooks and 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros will share aluminum enclosures, with the new 13-inch MacBooks for the first time matching their higher-priced cousins as if they were members of the same product family, according to the report.

The sources say Apple has made changes to the notebooks’ I/O ports in an effort to reduce their overall footprint. In particular, the FireWire 400 port appears to have been removed from the new MacBook Pro, leaving a backwards compatible FireWire 800 port. In addition, the new MacBook Pro is reported to be missing the 28-pin DVI-I (Dual Link) port, which has been replaced with what appears to be a mini-DVI port like the one found on the existing 13-inch MacBook line and iMac line.

If true, these emerging details would indicate Cult of Mac’s Craig Grannell was not so wide of the mark in his recent piece on Apple’s notebook roadmap.

Expectations for a mid-October product announcement remain high.

iPod accessory retailer EasyiShop sells a range of products made by OhMiBod designed to let iPod users “feel the music” in ways they might not have previously imagined.

Designed with an audio-enabled integrated microchip that allows the OhMiBod iPod massager to vibrate to the beat and rhythm of the music the user is listening to, this new generation of vibrator is said to combine listening to and feeling music to create an “unbeatable sexual experience,” according to the manufacturer.

OhMiBod’s five different iPod/iPhone vibrators combine a 3′ “freedom cord” with an integrated splitter that connects the vibrator and headphones to any iPod, iPhone, laptop, microphone, electric guitar virtually any electronic audio output source with a 3.5mm jack — to let the massager vibrate to the beat and rhythm of the music the user is listening to.

The company also maintains an online network called Club Vibe that allows users to share their favorite playlists via the iMix section of the iTunes music store.

I got absurdly excited when the new Apple keyboard was demonstrated, and immediately put in my order blind. I’d been looking for a decent laptop-like keyboard, and this seemed to fit the bill. In use, I haven’t been disappointed with it.

However, my glee was initially two-fold, partly driven by what was actually printed on the keys, and this is the area that’s led to some disappointment. Find out why after the jump.

Apple reaffirmed its intent to control what programs may legitimately run on its iPhone this week when the company revoked ad hoc distribution authority from a developer whose application it previously barred from distribution through the iTunes AppStore.

Last week, when Podcaster received official notice from Apple that the AppStore would not be carrying its application because the company had determined it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes, the developer decided to use Apple’s ad hoc distribution method to get the program into the hands of users who were willing to make a $10 ‘donation’ for the privilege of becoming beta-testers.

Tuesday, Apple revoked Almerica’s access to creating ad hoc licenses for the podcast downloading tool, prompting howls of protest from developers and consumers, many of whom have been skeptical of Apple’s intentions and critical of its business practices involving the AppStore from the very beginning.

Follow me after the jump to learn more about what’s behind the dispute and why Apple could be standing on shaky legal ground.

So, hello.

My name is Giles, and I am one of the new contributors here at Cult of Mac.

I’ve been given the job of covering the “Mac community and culture”. It’s the real “Cult of Mac” beat, and it came with a friendly warning from the boss, Leander Kahney: “It’s not an easy beat, because there are no press releases.”

And he’s right. The real Mac cultists do not tend to proclaim their Cult membership by issuing press releases; they are far more likely to post an image on Flickr, a video on Vimeo or YouTube, or a post on an obscure blog somewhere. My job here is to seek them out and share them with you lot.

Aside from Christmas, the back-to-school market is one of the most profitable times for computer makers. Apple’s MacBook has virtually disappeared from Amazon’s top-selling notebook list during the period, according to ThinkEquity analyst Vijay Rakesh.

Instead, ‘netbooks,’ those ultra-small PCs from Asus, Acer and Dell, now dominate the list. This is an abrupt change from the past, where Apple had been a mainstay.

“While Mac desktops and 3G phone sales have been doing well, the notebook market could be impacted in the peak back-to-school season,” Rakesh wrote in Wednesday.

Apple from Colin Mader on Vimeo

Apple should not be concerned about Google’s new phone knocking its stellar iPhone sales projections off stride, Piper Jaffray’s industry analyst said Tuesday.

Using a baseball analogy, Gene Munster wrote in a research note that the T-Mobile G1 was only an incremental change in the mobile landscape.

“When Apple comes out with a product, they try to hit homeruns, but Google’s Android strategy is swinging for base hits,” Munster wrote.