Like everyone else, I’m dying to know if Steve Jobs will be returning to work at the end of June.

Since I haven’t got a clue, and neither does anyone else, I figured I’d ask someone who might know. Not the usual blowhard pundits, but Barbara Courtney, a corporate psychic known as the “Seer of Silicon Valley.”

Personally, I’m very skeptical of psychic predictions, but Courtney has a long and storied history as Silicon Valley’s leading clairvoyant. Indeed, she’s the only person on record who correctly predicted Steve Jobs’ return to Apple back in 1997.

Speaking by phone from her home in Redwood City, Courtney said Jobs will return to Apple in June as promised — but he won’t stay long.

“My feeling is he will come back,” said Courtney. “I’m not seeing June as too soon.”

Jobs took six months medical leave in January saying his ongoing medical problems were “more complex” than suspected and he needed time off work to concentrate on his health. The company has promised several times that Jobs will return in late June as planned, but many are pessimistic.

On Tuesday, hopes were further dashed when Apple said the WWDC keynote in early June will be given by a team of executives led by head marketer Phil Schiller. The slot has traditionally been Jobs’, and many hoped (and are still hoping) he’d put in a surprise appearance.

What it is: It’s Dan Gorlin’s Choplifter. With aliens! And a flying saucer!

Why it’s good: It’s Dan Gorlin’s Choplifter. With aliens! And a flying saucer!

…

Oh, all right, then—if that’s not enough for you, here’s why Saucelifter is great. It takes a fab classic arcade game (rescue groups of hostages from the enemy, avoiding your adversary’s vehicles and projectiles), subverts videogame conventions by having you piloting a UFO and saving alien buddies from nasty humans, and dresses the entire thing in beautiful vector-style graphics. Add a dollop of humor (“squishing of captives will desist immediately!” barks the tutorial if you land on hapless aliens) and beautifully calibrated tilt/multitouch controls and you have a minor iPhone classic, updating a 27-year-old gameplay concept that still appeals today.

Where to get it: Saucelifter’s available via the App Store, and there’s more information at the Saucelifter website. At the time of writing, the game’s on sale for just 99 cents—a bargain unless brilliantly updated Apple II classics make you cry.

It could be a while before Ge Wang and the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) starts to feel the heat, but the The London Geek Community iPhone OSCestra served notice last week at the City’s Open Hack London that experimental iPhone music performance is alive and well.

Wang, of course, founded Smule, developer of the internationally popular Ocarina app, as well as the recently released Leaf Trombone (App Store link), and conducts SLOrk, the renowned ensemble of student computer scientists and musicians using 20 MacBooks to compose and perform new music.

The London-based iPhone OSCestra is a crew of eight musicians, conducted by a chap using a Wii controller, who opened their lone performance so far with an impressive (and authentically geeky) performance of the “Doctor Who” theme.

Jim Purbrick apparently conjured the idea for the venture just a few hours before the Open Hack event, a one-day symposium sponsored by Yahoo! on May 8 that brought together tech-savvy hackers for a day of coding and communicating.

Purbrick and his music mates downloaded the free app mrmr (App Store link), an app that supports customizable audio controllers and sends data wirelessly to other devices using OSC (Open Sound Control). A controller could be a piano-style keyboard, a bank of faders, or an array of knobs and buttons — essentially interactive widgets that allow users to control sound and music.

The free desktop application OSCulator caught all the data, and sent it to Ableton Live, a powerful performance and production platform.

In this instance, the orchestra performed using a bank of synthesizers running within Live. If you’re interested in going beyond Garage Band and making music on your Mac, it’s worth checking out the Live demo.

[GigaOM]

Reader Jay Floyd was cruising L.A.’s Sunset Strip on Thursday afternoon when he spotted Steve Wozniak fleeing some video paparazzi on his Segway. See the photo above — you’ll need a microscope to spot Woz, who’s behind the dark blue SUV.

Says Jay: “He was crossing Crescent Heights at Sunset Blvd, and went whizzing down the strip on the sidewalk. Some videographer paparazzi popped out to take pics.”

The video paparazzi must have been from TMZ.com, which has obsessed over Woz since he dated comedian Kathy Griffin and burned up the dancefloor on Dancing With the Stars.

But as with any great tabloid story, there’s a sex angle. Woz was either on a Segway date with a sexy blonde, or chasing afer her.

Explains Jay: “If you look ahead of him, there was some way-too-pretty blonde woman on another Seqway. Not sure who that was.”

So who is the mystery Segway bombshell? Unfortunately, Jay didn’t have a gigantic zoom lens to snap her mug.

“I only had my iPhone so I couldn’t zoom,” he says. “A bit ironic, I suppose.”

Full pic after jump. Plus useless fuzzy pic of mystery blond.

YouTube user LeopardOctober has posted videos, screenshots and information about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on YouTube since mid-March or so, and in the last few days has put up some interesting clips of a few things we can expect to see when the new OS debuts June 8 at WWDC.

The first video above shows that users will be able to set the default behavior of Spotlight so that performing a search can ‘search this Mac’, search the current folder or use the previous search scope.

In the video below, we see users can assign an application to a space or all spaces, quickly from within the Dock.

LeopardOctober has several additional clips on the YouTube channel with embedding disabled, so you’ll need to head over there to check ’em out.

The videos posted are from fairly late builds of the Beta (10A261 and 10A286), which has reportedly been ‘frozen’ at 10A354 for the final release software.

[Thanks Rafael!]

Image credit: MobileGuerilla

It must be a measure of how divorced from reality the US financial establishment has become when one of its most venerable voices discounts $20 – $45 million as ‘not a lot of revenue.’

That’s the figure range Jeremy Liew, an analyst at Lightspeed Venture Partners, estimates would be Apple’s take from sales on the first 1 billion iPhone and iPod Touch applications downloaded through the iTunes App Store.

Leaving aside for a moment the 15:1 – 40:1 ratio range of free to paid apps Liew pulled out of thin air to arrive at his estimates, it should be noted that the Barron’s writer reporting on Liew’s analysis allowed that the App Store “is significantly changing the way way people think about mobile devices, and has triggered a response from Research In Motion (RIMM), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Nokia (NOK) and Palm (PALM).

If true, Liew’s figures would mean Apple is seeing a revenue boost of roughly 0.1% from the App Store, but the mere numbers do not account for the intangible benefits to Apple’s public awareness or the number of hardware sales being driven by the venture. The company, and Steve Jobs in particular, always said the App Store was never intended to be a big profit generator, that it was rather a vehicle for helping the iPhone change the way people think about mobile computing.

By that measure, Apple’s take from the App Store is incalculable.

For now, it’s only the head in a custom-made R2-D2, but soon the whole astromech will obey the orders of an iPhone, including the possibility of firing sounds and sending text to its head displays.

The controls use either the iPhone’s accelerometer or the multitouch screen, and if rumors of a magnetrometer in the next gen iPhones are true, we could be looking at some very interesting robot applications both in the App Store and in the jailbroken universe soon.

[Thanks Lance]

Image credit: Mike Seigafuse. Used with permission.

Microsoft was slammed this week by PC industry security experts for releasing security patches to fix vulnerabilities in Windows versions of PowerPoint, while announcing that Mac users would remain at risk until patches for OS X are completed in June.

“Microsoft is the one big company screaming loudest over ‘responsible disclosure,'” said Swa Frantzen, a security analyst at SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center (ISC) in a post to the ISC blog late Tuesday, adding, “[But the] policy cuts both ways: You need to obey the rules yourself just as well as demand it from all others involved.”

The Windows manufacturer, claimed Frantzen, ignored its well-known best practices for responsible disclosure Wednesday by revealing that Office for Mac 2004 and Office for Mac 2008 contain three unpatched vulnerabilities, and by releasing information about the same bugs in Windows. The combination, he said, could be used by hackers to craft exploits targeting Macs.

Analysts from Gartner and nCircle took varying poistions on the debate, according to an article in Computerworld, and Microsoft itself had no comment further than the statement the company released along with the Windows patch.

The larger question in some minds would be why any Mac user would use PowerPoint over Keynote, but that’s a different debate.

CC-licensed picture by Ben Stanfield.

A hacker claims to have broken into Steve Jobs’ private Amazon.com account.

The hacker is trying to sell details of Jobs’ Amazon.com account to journalists, including Jobs’ purchase history for several years and his credit card number.

According to the hacker, who identifies himself as “orin0co,” Jobs is an avid online shopper. Jobs has purchased 20,000 items from Amazon.com in the last 10 years, the hacker says. That’s 2,000 items a year, or more than 5 items a day, every day.

“I got myself a hold of this information,” the hacker wrote in an email sent from a secure Hushmail account. “No one else has it. I didn’t misuse it, otherwise Mr. Jobs would long ago change his login detail, wouldn’t he?”

Remember the fantastic portrait of Steve Jobs using Apple’s classic typefaces from last week? Here’s a step-by-step guide showing exactly how designer Dylan Roscover created it in Illustrator and Photoshop. It was 24-hours of work, he says, with no sleep.

It’s fitting, one might say, that the San Francisco Giants provide home fans at AT&T Park the most sophisticated digital amenities in all of professional sports. After all, San Francisco is the nominal home of Silcon Valley (with apologies to San Jose) and the headquarters of many of the cutting-edge internet and social media companies in the world today.

Free Wi-Fi has been a staple of the game experience at AT&T (formerly Pac Bell) Park for years, with the Giants having been one of the first professional sports teams to offer the service to fans and working journalists alike.

Things really began to change at the ballpark in the past two years, however, after the introduction of Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, Bill Schlough, the team’s CIO, said in an interview with technology journalists this week.

Since the iPhone’s introduction around the same time the Giants hosted 2007’s All Star Game, usage of the park’s Wi-Fi network has gone up 537 percent. Users of the Wi-Fi network at the park are now able to use an innovative and exclusive system called the Giants Digital Dugout, which offers fans two unique benefits.

The first is a “food finder,” which can direct fans to the closest concession location for the exact kind of food or beverage they want, and the second is a collection of video replay highlights that includes, within three minutes after it happens, any controversial call by an umpire. Replays of such calls are banned from being shown on the ballpark’s in-house video systems, so that feature in itself could be worth bringing your iPhone to the game – even if it’s not ever likely to get the upms to reverse a bad call.

[ZDNet]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI0Gie7Jn_8

This isn’t the first Apple ad out after Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” campaign, but this one responds directly to the ads where pseudo-everyday consumers shop around and pick PCs over Macs.

Here Megan stands between hip the Mac guy and a line of brown-suited PCs — like a dating game show? —   while she talks about her (computer) needs.

The PCs who don’t fit the bill file out but some are still lining up to win her affection until she says, “I just want something that works, without a lot of viruses or a ton of headaches.”

Leaving her alone with  Mac Man. Cute couple.

Is the promise of long-term stability with little drama enough to combat the price claim made by the Microsoft ads?

Via Silicon Valley Insider

A chandelier inside Steve Jobs’ abandoned mansion. Photo by Jonathan Haeber, Bearings.

On Tuesday night, Woodside town council granted Steve Jobs a controversial demolition permit to tear down his rotting mansion in Woodside, California — one of Silicon Valley’s nicest and poshest towns.

Jobs bought the mansion in 1984, the year the Mac was released, and lived there with no furniture for almost a decade. But he hasn’t lived there for nearly 10 years, and he now wants to raze the house and build a smaller, greener dwelling on the land.

The mansion is locked up, but urban adventurer and photographer Jonathan Haeber sneaked into the house and took some rare and unbelievably beautiful pictures.

Explains Jonathan: “As far as how I obtained access, I can’t really say much, other than the fact that it was back in 2006. I found the gate open (I believe there was some landscaping work being done at the time) and the font door slightly ajar. I had my camera on me, and being substantially curious found myself inside of the mansion. I came back soon afterward for a night trip, explicitly to photograph the architecture.  It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life and I don’t regret doing it.”

Haeber’s photographs show Jobs’ mansion in all its faded glory. Haeber’s haunting pictures include dusty copies of The Godfather videotapes; vines creeping across interior ceilings; and the front of the boarded-up mansion with its immaculately-maintained front lawn.

The pictures are poignant and lovely, and are possibly the last that will be taken of the mansion. On Tuesday, the Woodside town council approved a demolition permit.

Jonathan is an architecture buff who is working to catalog abandoned historical buildings on the West Coast.

He lives in Richmond, California, across the Bay from Woodside, and documents his adventures at his Bearings website. There’s a video explaining his project on the TBug website.

Jon has also photographed Michael Jackson’s empty Neverland Ranch and a flooded Six Flags amusement park in New Orleans.

All Photos used with kind persmission of Jonathan Haeber.

The Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update is one of the biggest Apple has ever released — but there appears to be no major new features, just a bunch of bug and security fixes.

It looks like Apple is putting the finishing touches to OS 10.5 before releasing Snow Leopard in the fall, which will have major code changes under the hood.

The Mac OS X 10.5.7 delta update, which updates 10.5.6 to 10.5.7, weighs in at 442MB; while the combo update, which transforms any version of 10.5 into 10.5.7, is a whopping 729MB.

According to an Apple support document, the update fixes bugs and security issues in the core OS, iCal, Mail and printer controls. Possibly the biggest change is adding RAW support for several new cameras, and improved video playback on recent Macs with Nvidia graphics cards.

But according to Macworld Rob Griffiths, who examined installer log files, the update tweaks a long list of applications, from Address Book to Terminal.

“What’s most surprising about the number of modified applications is that very few of those are mentioned on Apple’s 10.5.7 notes page–only Dashboard, Time Machine, iCal and Mail are directly called out, but none of the rest,” writes Griffiths. “(The log) reveals a total of 16,915 changed files on my MacBook Pro. Despite that, things seem to be running very smoothly here after the update.”

Jobs’ Woodside mansion in its glory days. Photo by Friends Of The Jackling House.

After a long legal battle, Steve Jobs has been granted permission to tear down his crumbling mansion in the posh Silicon Valley town of Woodside, California.

At a hearing of the Woodside town council on Tuesday night, councilors voted 6 to 1 to approve a demolition permit allowing Jobs to tear down his neglected, 14-bedroom Jackling mansion.

“It’s an unfortunate thing that Mr. Jobs doesn’t like the house,” Woodside’s Mayor Peter Mason told the Palo Alto Daily News. “It’s really sad that we’re going to continue to tear down historic resources in this town because they’re old.”

The mayor, who is also an architect, cast the sole dissenting vote.  

Jobs bought the mansion in 1984 and lived there for a decade with barely any furniture until he got married and started raising a family. He currently lives with his wife and children in Palo Alto. The 17,000-square-foot mansion has remained empty and neglected since.

In 2004, the Woodside town council granted a demolition permit, but it was blocked by a local preservationist group called Friends Of The Jackling House, which claimed the mansion is a national treasure. The mansion was built in 1925 for copper millionaire Daniel C. Jackling by architect George Washington Smith.

At one point, Jobs offered to give the mansion for free to anyone who would haul it away.

CC-licensed photo by Dario Melpignano.

Steve Jobs will not headline Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June as many fans had hoped.

Instead, a team of executives led by Phil Schiller will deliver the keynote, according to an Apple press release issued Wednesday morning.

The news is a big blow to Apple fans, who were hoping Jobs would mark his return to Apple with a big splashy appearance at the conference.

Jobs took six months medical leave in January to focus on his health, which had appeared to be in serious decline during 2008. In public appearances, Jobs appeared alarmingly gaunt and thin. Jobs said he would return to work at the end of June, but many hoped he might make an earlier appearance at the week-long programmers conference, which will start on Monday, June 8.

The full press release after the jump.

Via Gizmodo.

A thief who stalked Apple customers telling them “don’t do nothing stupid” to induce them to hand over just-purchased products didn’t follow his own advice.

After robbing at least three people by stalking them from Apple’s SoHo store in New York,  Dwayne Stewart got caught by using his real name to pawn the products nearby.

“Don’t do nothing stupid,” Dwayne Stewart  snarled to one victim before grabbing his computer a few blocks from the Apple Store and running off, police told the NY Post.

Stewart was arrested after a person who  bought one of the hot computers took it in for service at an Apple Store.

A worker there looked up its registration number and discovered it had been reported stolen.

Police traced the stolen computer back to Stewart because he used his real name at the pawn shop.

Doh!

Image of the SoHo store used with a CC license, thanks genzo

Via NY Post

Eric Lawrence crafted a chandelier from the molded Styrofoam packing material Apple used to use for shipping laptops. What once cradled MacBooks now lights up with 16 bulbs (5W  compact fluorescents) that generate  little heat but produce the same light as 20W incandescents.

His creation, called Styrolight, won the Sustainable prize in Design Within Reach Austin’s M+D+F competition.

Wonder if I’d hoarded the packaging over the years whether I’d have enough to do something with  it…
Via Make

What it is: A full-screen text editor.

Why it’s good: It’s easy to get distracted while writing, especially when a dozen other apps are fighting for attention. WriteRoom enables you to block out the clutter and just get on with the process of writing.

Although other apps offer a full-screen mode (such as the latest Pages and the impressive Scrivener), WriteRoom’s take remains the best, largely due to its configuration options. It starts out resembling a primitive green-text-on-black-background terminal, but you can amend colors for text, page, background and scroller, adjust fonts, and toggle statistics (such as live word count).

WriteRoom isn’t Word, but it’s not meant to be. It’s a tool for writers, to enable them to get on with writing. And, as such, WriteRoom comes highly recommended if you’re an author, writer or journalist.

Where to get it: WriteRoom costs $24.95 and is available from Hog Bay Software.

UPDATED: It seems that David Hockney doesn’t like what he reads on Cultomac.com. We received an aggressive letter from Hockney’s lawyers demanding we remove the pictures posted here (which were copyright the Annely Juda Fine Art gallery); and correct an error: Hockney didn’t create the paintings on his iPhone, but on his desktop computer. David – we apologise for the error and are usually very careful and respectful of copyrights, but we were just trying to draw attention to the exhibition, not rip off your art. No need to sic the lawyers on us. We’re fans. I have a Pearblossom Highway print hanging in my house (which I paid for, btw). — Leander Kahney.

We wondered whether iPhone art was gallery ready, perhaps it took grandad of Pop art 71-year-old David Hockney to convince those who put art on the walls for a living that the output was more than random doodling.

The Annely Juda Fine Art gallery in London  recently launched a show of Hockney’s entitled “Drawing In a Printing Machine” featuring iPhone works — created over the last four months — plus other drawings made with Photoshop and Graphics Tablet. All are displayed as inkjet printouts on paper.

For all the chatter generated by what may be the first major iPhone art gallery show, no one seems to mention what program he used, though it looks like Brushes.

Hockney’s  technique, according to the Times, is to “stroke the screen very softly.” He reportedly sends fresh flower sketches to friends every morning, and says  that he never could have imagined that the telephone would usher a renaissance in drawing.

You can see some more of his handiwork at the gallery here, if you’re in London, the show’s on until July 11.

Are his iPhone works in the gallery because it’s Hockney or because it’s  art?

An App Store gatekeeper, whose name may or may not be Peter, officially positioned Apple as a ‘Holier Than Thou’ company recently, by rejecting the whimsical photobooth application Me So Holy.

The app would have allowed users to place photographs of themselves or others inside pre-set figure avatars that could let cousin Jim appear to be the face of Jesus, or Joe Bob to be Mohammed, or Mary Jane to be a bodhisattva, or, you get the picture.

Apple rejected the app, saying it “contains objectionable material,” according to Me So Holy developer Benjamin Kahle.

Someone at Apple must have not gotten the Jesus phone memo.

With less than a month to go before the anticipated launch of iPhone 3.0 firmware and a widely expected upgrade to the hardware, widely reported claims by a poster on a Chinese Apple fan site suggest the next version of Apple’s revolutionary smartphone will sport a faster processor, more disk storage and a much improved camera, among other upgrades.

The next gen device will have a 600MHz processor (up from the current 400MHz unit), 256MB of RAM (up from the current 128MB), up to 32GB of storage, a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, as well as a digital compass and FM radio, all while retaining the same battery, basic shape, and screen size, according to the poster, who claims to have a connection at Foxconn, Apple’s China-based OEM for the iPhone.

Could it be? If you’ve got your ticket to the sold-out WWDC ’09 coming up in San Francisco, you’ll likely be among the first to know.

[The iPhone Blog]

If you haven’t make it yet as an iPhone developer, Sam Kaplan and Louie Harboe, a couple of seventh graders from Chicago, may make you rethink your career choice.

The pair’s iPhone development company, Tapware, recently released its first iPhone application called “The Mathmaster” and has a second app in the hopper. Based in Hyde Park and supported by seed funding from a business school professor at the University of Chicago, Kaplan and Harboe have been plotting their success trajectory for years.

“Since the fifth grade, we’ve had this idea of working together and becoming successful,” said Harboe, a professional designer with a portfolio of images and icons at www.graphicpeel.com.

The Mathmaster is a simple tool designed to interest kids in things like square roots and multiplication tables. The pair developed the app in about a month and it was approved by Apple’s App Store within a week.

They hope to launch a second, quirkier advertising-based application around their site sipthatdrink.com in the coming months.

“Our goal was to get approved by the app store, sell a bunch of copies and make more apps,” said Kaplan, who has already completed an advanced placement computer science course and served as a keynote speaker at the National American Council for Online Learning.

Makes paper routes and lemonade stands look very 20th century, doesn’t it?

[EdibleApple, Chicago Suntimes]

MICROSOFT SPOKESMAN: Hi — you look dumb. Would you like me to advance the dumbest possible argument for Zune ownership? See, it’s like this: iPods, though they’re really cool, cost money to get music on them! So you should pay a $15 monthly subscription for Zune music, which is basically free! You can trust me — I’m a financial planner. People in finance have never misled anyone!

APPLE BLOGGER: I had a music collection long before the iPod existed, dumbass. And who on earth owns an iPod classic these days?

YouTube via Ars via Engadget via Giz

Picture via Engadget

Following the trend that allows devoted folks to wear the innards of their favorite devices outwards, here’s an exploded  Mac 128K T-shirt.

After the exploded iPhone (steampunk and regular versions), the 25-year-old computer’s insides hark back to another era.

The work of artist Garry Booth, the nostalgic tee costs $18, find it online here.