Licensing songs for commercials is a major stream of revenue for musicians these days. Moby likely wouldn’t be a household name if it weren’t for his gleeful whoring of his 1999 album Play. Inevitably, however, rampant licensing can get a little out of hand. For example, right now, The Shins are basically endorsing both the iPhone and Zune. The band’s song “Sleeping Lesson” accompanies the above the Zune ad (message: using Zune is exactly like doing acid!), while the cover of the album it comes from, Chutes Too Narrow, appears in an iPhone commercial.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a rock band has two-timed the iPhone. John Mayer, who played at MacWorld during the lunch of the device went on to endorse the BlackBerry Curve in advance. I guess a paycheck is just a paycheck, some times.

Via GigaOM

Celebrating the growing Hackintosh community, the small but prominent group of closeted Mac-lovers finding ways to put unauthorized installs of OS X onto garden-variety PCs, Willowhaven, a user at Insanely Mac, has created a set of logos to print out and slap on the side of your beige box to show your true heart.

They all look pretty good, except for that horrifying Apple + Dell logo. Some things simply can’t get redeemed.

Via Begley

I’m losing my mind. I’ve spent the last two evenings trying to get a 300-page document written in Apple’s Pages ’08 word processor to export properly to Word format.

The bulk of the document exports OK, but it screws up hundreds of endnotes: the markers jump to the wrong endnotes. I’ve tried everything I can think of — exporting to PDF (which can’t track changes) or RTF (which strips the endnote markers).

Anyone got any ideas?

UPDATE: Many thanks for all the suggestions. I eventually found a solution. There were several problems with the endnote markers in the Pages document. The most serious was a missing endnote marker right at the beginning of the 300-page document, which caused all the subsequent endnotes markers to point to the wrong records. Trouble is, the problem only manifested itself when I exported to Word. The missing marker wasn’t apparent in the Pages document — it only showed up after exporting to Word! And no matter what I tried, I could not get rid of that screwy marker. So here’s what I did:

1. Convert all the endnotes to footnotes.

2. Cut and paste the document, one chapter at a time, to separate Pages documents.

3. Export each Pages document to Word, one at a time, carefully checking that all the endnote markers work.

4. Reassemble from the separate chapters in Word.

Miraculously, it worked. Why? No idea. Note: Exporting the Pages as a PDF works better than exporting to Word for preserving endnotes. All the endnotes are present and correct, but you can no longer track changes.

Again, many thanks for the suggestions.

A Guy Named Joe wants to kill us all. Slideshow after the jump.

Via Digg.

Mark Richardson of Ragus Media has created the cheery, oddly sentient iMac choir commercial concept that Apple hasn’t bothered to. It’s fun, but man, do I ever hate the music. Think Apple will buy it and put it in production like the CSS ad?

Via Gizmodo

Though I still don’t have an iPhone (waiting on 3G), I’m drooling for one even more after seeing a demo of wPhone, a fantastic WordPress plug-in that allows really intuitive, full-featured blogging on the iPhone (and even some crappier ones, like my old school Blackberry). Essentially, instead of trying to render the full-bandwidth version of WP, this server-side plug-in changes the interface to optimize for iPhone or other mobile, and then uses GZip compression to enable speedy connections over EDGE and GPRS.

If all of that is gibberish, it basically means that blogging from your phone has rarely been so easy. It looks NICE.

Intomobile via Digg and PMPToday

Video and lyrics by Anthony Sigalos. I have to say, voice synthesis program Alex doesn’t really deliver much emotion, does he?

Via Fake Steve

Not content to chronicle the fake life of Fake Steve Jobs, author Daniel Lyons has expanded his scope a bit this week by introducing guest blogger Fake Bono of U2, who showed up to present the totally non-existent White Beatles and Product (RED) U2 iPhones. The Beatles model comes with the complete Beatles catalog, plus the band’s solo work, and the U2 model comes with all of Rock and Roll. Read for yourself:

Edge and I hate to be left behind, so we’ve come up with an even bigger idea we’re going to pitch right here where Steve has to read it. Why just buy the Beatles? What you really want is to buy rock and roll. All of it. Presenting the U2 Rock and Roll iPhone. 64 gigabytes of Product (RED) iPhone packed with all of rock and roll. Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Sabbath, U2 of course, plus Nirvana and Pearl Jam all the way up to the complete Arcade Fire and Mike Doughty. If it rocks, it’s in here.

Yeah. Seven posts in all, and now Fake Steve has posted an elaborate tale of account hackery to explain how Bono seized control in the first place. All in good fun. Nice Thanksgiving prank.

Via iPhone Savior 

Being in an extended turkey coma this morning, I didn’t quite get out of bed early enough to hit the brand-new Apple Store in San Francisco’s Marina, but fortunately the amazing SFist (t-shirt picture) and IFO Apple Store (all else) were all over the opening. Based on the reportage, it sounds pretty stunning. And hey, 1000 free t-shirts!

Gary Allen of IFO Apple Store had a lot of nice things to say:

The store is definitely unique, combining individual features from various stores–or no stores at all. The facade lacks the usual stainless steel and uses white masonry like the Lincoln Road store. The ceiling is about 15 feet tall, unlike any other store. There are no window displays, which would obscure the view of the store interior. And the suspended Apple logo duplicates the Fifth Avenue store. It definitely establishes a presence for Apple in another neighborhood of San Francisco.

Nice. You have to love Apple’s commitment to not stand still with their Apple Store recipe. Each store has its own unique qualities. Fabulous.

Is there anything more re-assuring in life than knowing that Fake Steve keeps being funny even after the disclosure of his true identity? He’s now featuring simply hysterical Zune 2 parodies with custom backs poking fun at Microsoft and a certain dancing CEO…

Well, Apple legal has cleared another hurdle for the stock option back-dating scandal that rocked the computer industry last year. A judge in San Jose dismissed a major lawsuit against the company because the suit was not brought within a three-year window of the incidents. Of course, since the back-dating was only disclosed last year but stopped in 2002, it would have been pretty hard to do that in the first place. Actually, it’s absurd that our laws are written in such a way that they need to be prosecuted very quickly after commission. I understand the purpose of a statute of limitations, but why wouldn’t it be within three years of discovery? Only seems fair.

Picture via Fake Steve

I was talking with a friend awhile ago about the current state of hardware piracy in China. Basically, if it’s available in the US, there’s a nearly identical knock-off on the streets of Beijing and, by correlation, in the back alleys of San Francisco and New York. I found an absurdly faithful iPod shuffle copy a few months ago, and now “ECNokia” (very original name) is offering an iPod nano fatty rip that they’re advertising as identical in industrial design, but throwing in a bigger screen, a digital camera, SD cards, video recording and an FM tuner.

Granted, we don’t know that this picture is in any way accurate, but the interesting thing is that it could be. After all, Chinese companies do all of the manufacturing for iPods at this point. If you were Foxconn or whomever, it would be pretty darn easy to just leave the molds for your Apple project on the line as you make a few knock-offs. This is the bizarre situation of our present era of outsourcing: Companies can copy a market-leading project without reverse-engineering it, because many of the copiers are the actual engineers.

Via Gizmodo

Just in case you don’t already have plans to get trampled at Best Buy or Target this Friday, Apple announced that it will open its third San Francisco store at the end of this week. Though it’s highly unlikely that the shop will offer any $25 BluRay players from Taiwan, Apple usually provides goodie bags to the first bunch of customers at its newest stores, even when it doesn’t tie into the scariest shopping day of the year. Anyone going to be in line? Anyone already in line? Get in touch if you want to share the experience. The madness starts at 9 a.m.

Via AppleInsider
Picture from Fireside Camera’s Flickrstream

Apple’s biggest embarrassment in recent months has finally been taken care of. The notorious iMac Freeze that has affected this summer’s revision is nipped in the bud with the iMac Graphics Firmware 1.0 Update.

Prior to this fix, iMac screens flickered and froze constantly. A lot of people were unhappy. Most readers now report that it’s taken care of. Problems solved.

The update caps two weeks of updates from Apple:

• iTunes 7.5
• Quicktime 7.3
• Mac OS X 10.4.11
• Mac OS X Server 10.4.11
• iPhoto 7.1.1
• Pro Applications Update 2007-02
• Mac OS X 10.5.1
• Mac OS X Server 10.5.1

Via MacRumors

A lot of people, like me, had the misfortune of buying a 3G iPod, loving it, and absolutely hating its terrible battery life. Apple eventually provided a product recall following a class-action suit, but the replacements weren’t that much better. At this point, my factory installed battery literally averaged just 45 minutes of life each charge. Less if I tried to skip a song or change playlists.

To really get this lovely vintage gear in top shape, an upgrade with longer life is called for. Lots of companies are now offering service to install new batteries, but that’s for wimps!

Ready to take on the challenge, I ordered a DIY kit for iPod battery replacement last week, and tonight I got the process down. It’s easy, and it’s fun. So click through for a complete step-by-step photo guide to installing a third-party battery.

Despite videos that claim fast iPhone typing is easy, a recent study by a usability group concludes that iPhone users make lots of typos when writing on the device. According to User Centric, iPhone text messages average 5.1 errors, or more than twice the average of mistakes made by people using full keyboard or keypad phones.

Every bit as fast, but slightly more error-prone. It’s the iPhone way.

Via Slashdot

I’ve been pretty hard on NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker lately for his dramatic unwillingness to pursue a digital media strategy makes any sense. As reader Imajoebob pointed out yesterday, not every big media CEO is so clueless. Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman, speaking that the Mobile Asia Congress, is a revelation. Consider the following:

“We used to fool ourselves,’ he said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

Or this:

“For years now, Warner Music has been offering a choice to consumers at Apple’s iTunes store the option to purchase something more than just single tracks, which constitute the mainstay of that store’s sales,” he explained. “By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variation we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We’ve sold tons of them. And with Apple’s co-operation to make discovering, accessing and purchasing these products even more seamless and intuitive, we’ll be offering many, many more of these products going forward.”

Incredible. It’s not a Zucker world after all.

Via MacUser UK

Though anecdotal evidence suggests that the iPhone’s launch in Europe has met with less-than sizzling reception, the picture is actually nowhere near so clear.

Colleagues at Wired, for example, cite self-reports from O2 and T-Mobile of Germany that claim that the iPhone launch exceeded their expectations dramatically with sales in the “tens of thousands.” On the other hand, BusinessWeek notes with distress that it’s actually impossible to get a business contract for the iPhone in the UK at the moment — it’s only available on consumer service plans.

Jake, a Cult of Mac reader from the UK, however, seems to sum the general vibe up nicely (he practically duplicates the exact frustrated phrases my friends in the UK have):

I live in the UK and I agree that there was several stores across the country that were empty. There is one reason for this. Price. Whilst the cheapest contract in the states is $59 per month the cheapest contract here is £35 per month. Because of the exchange rate it works out that were paying $78 for the same contract as you. although this is not much more it is still quite alot for what you get. Also the price of the 8GB iPhone here is £269 and in dollars it is $566 where as you guys are paying $400.

These issues are common, of course. Everything from the Xbox to the PS3 is dramatically more expensive in the UK and Europe. However, when there are lots of phones (some of them REALLY good), it’s harder for the iPhone to make the same sort of premium play. In the UK, everyone is used to free phones with long service plans or paid-for phones with no contract. Apple’s not coming correct, especially since the iPhone has no 3G data, a nigh-unforgivable sin in ultra-connected Europe. Very interesting developments. Will Apple make a serious international foothold, or will they be as provincially North American as the BlackBerry?

Technorati Tags: europe, iphone, mobile

NBC and Apple had a falling-out earlier this year. Apple wanted to keep selling NBC shows like they had for more than a year, NBC wanted Apple to hand over billions in iPod sales for reasons only Jeff Zucker can fathom. In the fall-out, NBC pulled its content from iTunes, promising to roll out their own downloadable video application, offering full episodes of TV shows just as good as iTunes. They call it NBC Direct, and it came out today. So, is it an NBC-only iTunes killer? Um…no. Not even close.

But first, let’s pause for a commercial. Do you like pasta? Do you like NBC? Well, you’re in luck, because Bertolli Pasta is delicious — and all over this application. Now, back to your previously scheduled post.

First, the good news: It totally plays NBC shows. Yep, it plays the like nobody’s business. All day long, and interrupted frequently by advertisements for Bertolli Frozen Pasta Dinners. The picture quality is quite decent, at least on par with current iTunes downloads. Bertolli.

Now, the bad news. How much time do you have? There are a lot of deficiencies right now, some of which NBC claims they will fix real soon, and a lot of which are deliberate cripplings. I’ll use bullets, because there’s a lot, most after the jump.

• NBC Direct is actually a shell on top of Windows Media Player. Yep, not actually its own application. It’s built on OpenCASE, Extend Media’s super-locked down video platform. Slogan: “Automation, Ingestion, Encryption.” Yep, that’s how consumers think about video, all right.
• NBC Direct has no support for Macs — but NBC recommends Boot Camp. How thoughtful! I have a PC from work, though, so I put it through its paces.
• Bertolli pasta is just like real, homemade pasta — only frozen, and on NBC Direct! Yum-o-licious.
  Continue reading

Several handset-makers, including LG, HTC, Palm, and Nokia, have launched new “iPhone-killers” in the last couple of weeks, hoping to prove that the phone guys understand something that Apple doesn’t. And according to David Pogue, one such effort, the T-Mobile Shadow does a great job of making that point. Until you start using Windows Mobile 6, which is a blight on phone-dom. The review is a riot:

When you’re assigning a contact to one of the five “My Faves” slots, a T-Mobile calling plan that gives you unlimited calls to your five favorite numbers, three confirmation screens is two too many.

If it takes four presses on the More button just to see everything in the Start menu and you provide no direct way to get to the first page from the last you need to redesign.

And that’s the big difference, for me. Until someone comes out with an interface half as intuitive as the iPhone’s, I can’t be swayed. I guess we’ll see what Google’s got when it rolls out the Android SDK today, but it looks like Apple’s lead is insurmountable.

Technorati Tags: iphone, shadow

In case you don’t speak Geeky Acronym, the gibberish above means that someone (in this case, Ryan Block of Engadget) has dropped a 64-gigabyte solid-state drive into a MacBook Pro. The incredible drives, which are still extremely expensive compared to conventional hard drives, use flash, not platters for storage, and as a result, have no noticeably moving parts. They’re virtually silent, and they’ve been claimed to up battery life to unheard of levels (I’ve heard 11 hours on a Toshiba subnotebook). Block hasn’t provided a battery life figure yet, but I’m kind of drooling. In two years, virtually all laptops will have moved in this direction…

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: macbookpro, ssd

The narrative is pretty simple at this point: Apple launches the iPhone, screaming crowds camp out for days in advance. Right?

Not so fast, says UK phone blog Dialaphone. Based on an informal survey of outlets for the iPhone in England on Friday, he found many, many stores where no lines existed at all. Even the Apple Stores, which were busiest, didn’t have enough people to fill up its entire security section.

I especially like this photo of the forlorn-looking shop-keeper wondering when, precisely, he would be mobbed with iPhone shoppers.

When you couple this with news that T-Mobile sold 10,000 iPhones in Germany (that’s good news? Really?), the message seems to be that Europe is less comfortable with Apple’s locked-down iPhone attitude (and dinosaur data technology) than we Americans. Any Euro readers in the audience take the plunge? Anyone holding out for the next rev?

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: hype, launch, iphone

Apple just refreshed its third concurrent ad campaign today with three new “Get a Mac” ads, a few of which aired during NFL action on Sunday. Two of the ads, “Podium” (seen above) and “PR Lady” make a particular point of ripping on the fact that many people have downgraded their computers from Vista to XP because they’re so frustrated with it. I enjoy “Podium” a lot, but my favorite is still “PR Lady,” which features a PR liaison who steps in to make PC’s self-defeating comments sound positive:

PC: I hired a PR person, you know, to smooth things over that whole Vista problem.
PR Lady: By “problem,” he means, “Some early adopters have faced some MINOR challenges.”

It’s really cute.

Few ad campaigns inspired as much mockery as “Dude, You’re Getting a Dell!?!” which plagued the airwaves for years in the late ’90s and earlier part of this decade. Essentially, an annoying looking guy, played by Ben Curtis, would yell out the stupid catchphrase, and then people would pretend to be excited that they were receiving a cut-rate PC with all the classy styling of a kitchen wastebasket. But times change, and stars get fired for marijuana possession, and Curtis has now turned up as a waiter at Tortilla Flats in New York. My friends over at New York Magazine have the exclusive interview.

What’s the most extreme reaction you’ve gotten?
There was a group of women in their early forties, one of whom was bawling. I walk over and they said, “Our friend just passed away. We thought you might be able to cheer [us] up, we know who you are and you’re an incredible human and you’ve been through a lot and you’re an incredible actor. We’re all DEA agents, and we think you should smoke as much pot as you want to. And we love you.”

Well, you would have to, to get excited about about a Dell.

Via Engadget.

Technorati Tags: dell, dufus, karma

Few people, other than Michael Scott on “The Office,” like Applebee’s. Recognizing this, the company just redid its logo, and, well, it kind of looks like Apple’s logo.

Applebee’s Old Logo:

Applebee’s New Logo:


Apple’s logo. The main similarity I see is in the font. A bit too close for comfort. Thoughts, Apple legal?

Applebee’s images via BrandCurve.
Apple logo courtesy Pycomall