Very few promising technologies have taken as long to catch on as the ebook. Everyone seems to be under the impression that electronics will one day replace printed books. But almost no one wants to actually read their books that way.

The sole users of ebooks tend to be people with PDAs — and now iPhones. A new site, TextOniPhone has sprung up to meet people’s needs to read works of literature on their revolutionary Internet Communicators. The site purports to have more than 20,000 books and novels optimized for reading on the iPhone. All the texts are public domain, and, as seems to be the norm these days, the site only works on iPhone (or a user-agent-spoofed browser). IPhone Dispatch has a nice review.
Gerry Manacsa, a senior designer at WOWIO, checked out a bunch of PDFs on an iPhone to test the platform’s viability as an ebook reader. His results were fairly good, particularly for comics, which is where I see the iPhone excelling, personally. This will be an interesting thread to watch.

Via Digg.

Despite the best efforts of folks like me, bonafide iPhones didn’t show up in the wild until a few week prior to release. As it turns out, that’s because Apple was smart enough to hide iPhones inside of other devices. This according to Richard Burns, AT&T’s President of Wireless Networks, in an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal.

So secretive was the project that he didn’t even show the phone to his wife. And when AT&T’s team of testers hit the streets to try the phone in ballparks, subways and skyscrapers, Burns said they used a contraption to cloak the device so nobody would know what the testers were holding.

Burns declined to offer a description of the cloaking device, calling it “something that looked like something else.”

That’s how you know Apple is brilliant: They made it look like “something that looked like something else.” How visionary. Or not.

My best guess is that Apple made the iPhones look like Zunes. Any other guesses?

Via Digg.
Image from Hideapod.

Columnist John Dvorak at an Apple Store. Pic by Steve Rhodes.

Columnist John Dvorak, who is perhaps the most hated pundit by Mac users because of his constant (and quote deliberate) Mac bashing, is now a Mac user himself — and he likes it.

In his latest PC Magazine Column, Dvorak confesses that he has been using an iMac at work for a couple of months, and it’s “not half bad.” After heaping on more weak praise, he says he has no plans to buy a Mac for personal use at home, but he increasingly finds himslef recommending the Mac to friends and neighbors who ask him what to buy! He writes:

“I can see why the Mac is gaining market share, because the rationale for using one is simple. Do you want to deal with the agony of antivirus, firewall, antispyware, and other touchy software subsystems, many of which do not work well? Or do you want to boot Microsoft Word and write a document and be done with it?

As someone who does recommend gear to people, I have to think to myself, “Should I recommend something that will come back to haunt me, or recommend a Mac with its higher price but lower hassle factor?” The answer is simple. I hate the idea of having to do customer service for people who cannot keep their systems clean, and that’s most people.”

Chart: MarketWatch.

Apple’s Q3 was the company’s best ever. It raked in $5.41 billion in sales, posting a $818 million in profit. Gross margins — the amount of revenue that is profit — is up to a whopping 36 percent. This surely is the highest in the industry. By contrast, Dell reported Q2 2007 margins of just 4.3 percent, earning $605 million profit on revenues of $14.1 billion.
Apple also reported 10 million iPods sold — up 21 percent on the year before; and 1.76 million Macs, up 33 percent year-on-year.

Apple’s stock is rebounding on the news: it’s up 6 percent after taking a hammering yesterday on AT&T’s iPhone numbers.

Picture by Ed Dame.

Apple sold 270,000 iPhones on the opening weekend, according to Apple’s Q3 results.

See the data PDF here.

AT&T’s quarterly results said only 146,000 were activated in the first two days — so it looks like 124,000 people either waited a few days to activate their phones, or had trouble activating them, as was widely reported.

We now have definitive proof that a business world built on the quarterly earnings report is destined for self-destruction: Apple’s stock fell almost $9 because its partner AT&T “only” managed to activate 146,000 iPhones in its first day and a half on sale. Not that the activation figure directly reflects the number of iPhones sold.

Yes, I’m serious, and I’m totally bewildered. Analysts and investors are pretending that the second quarter, which closed June 30, would be the one that reflects the impact of the iPhone. Which is nice, except that the iPhone went on sale at 6 p.m. on June 29, and AT&T had serious network issues that prevented people from activating their phones until well into the next week. Which means that anyone who couldn’t or chose not to activate their iPhone until after midnight on June 30 got left out of this report.

Which is obviously a clear sign that it’s time to sell all of your shares in AAPL. Obviously. You know how, in movies, we’ve gotten to the point where people talk about the highest opening 5.5-day gross ever by a film released on a Tuesday in a month with a full moon that falls on a Saturday? This is the opposite. This is the smallest 1.5-day activation ever for an incredibly successful product. They chopped off Sunday, for heaven’s sake!

But this is the world that exists. It’s all about the quarterlies. And maybe that means that Apple did AT&T a disservice by not launching a week sooner. It shouldn’t have any impact on the long-term health of either firm. But it’s idiotic. Especially since AT&T experienced — wait for it — 61 percent total revenue growth!

Grrrr. Anyway, don’t read too much into these numbers. Apple will release its sales numbers soon, which are a clearer indication of how well the iPhone did in its first day and a half. Not that a day and a half of sales matters. It’s stupid. Can we talk about this in October?

Image via TechDigest

Watch the video up top. It’s a pretty terrifying video of a totally compromised iPhone through a new exploit of Safari, both on iPhone and likely PCs and Macs. A fix is already in the works, but I have to say I’m not that bothered. Why? Because it, like every other really dangerous exploit of a Mac or Apple product I’ve seen is heavily reliant on social engineering. For your iPhone to freak out and possibly shoot your cats with an iLaserbeam, you first need to go to a website specifically designed to make your iPhone freak out and kill your kittens. And I’m sorry, there’s no amount of protection that can protect people who are dupes for fraud. You can only go so far. This hole needs to close, no doubt, but if people vulnerable to harm on the web don’t know to only go to links they can trust, they probably shouldn’t be using the web at large.

Now, when people can make this happen over WiFi without the use of an exploit-focused website, then I’ll panic. And probably go back to landlines.

Via NY Times.

Looking for an obsessive chronicle of Apple’s products over time? Look no further than Designed in California, a website that takes every product — and every single SKU — Apple has released since Steve Jobs resumed control of Apple in 1997. It’s a million times more detailed than the map I tried to pull together a few weeks ago.

Can you believe that Apple ever routinely released top-of-the-line computers for almost $5,000 without a monitor? Worse, can you believe that the new octocore Mac Pros are $4,000 without a monitor?

An incredible undertaking. Anyone know the story here? According to a whois look-up, the owner is Graham Parks, who also owns Fondant Fancies. I’ve dropped him a note, so stay tuned.

Scott Walker, the assistant managing editor of the Birmingham (Ala.) News, has made a hack for the ages. Taking an old newspaper vending machine, as a base, he fitted a 17″ LCD screen to the front of the box and then rigged a Mac mini running PhotoPresenter to constantly stream the front pages of newspapers from the Newseum. As well as anything from his iTunes library.

It’s a wonder to behold. And all of this on deadline, too!
Via TUAW

Being a Machead can be a disease. We spend too much on Apple stuff, we get embarrassing temporary (and not-so-temporary) tattoos, and our partners tolerate our obsessions out of love and not much more.

I think such bonds are automatically made null and void if anyone comes home with the above item, which is a 6-foot-tall neon Apple logo sign being auctioned by Huntsville, Ala. Mac store MacResource on eBay. And here’s the deal. Despite currently going for $4,350 at auction (the equivalent of more than 7 fully loaded iPhones!), the reserve has not been met.

Pull out your credit cards?!

Via Macenstein

Color customizers extraordinaire Colorware are now offering iPhone paint work. For $150, they’ll take your iPhone and remake its look in your image. They’re also selling pre-colored iPhones for the same premium over stock models. I’m always surprised that Colorware’s work looks so good — color’s such a tricky design element, especially when it’s literally an after-thought — but their work is hot.

That said, it’s not for me. I’m still scraping together the money for an iPhone, so…

Via Infinite Loop

This YouTube compilation was first posted to MacRumors as the interface we might see on a forthcoming OS X iPod. To be honest, the graphics look right, but something here isn’t right. Specifically, the aspect ratio. All of the clips are in 4:3, horizontally oriented, exactly like the existing video iPod. If Apple does roll out a new iPod with an iPhone-like interface, it should get a nice rectangular screen in place for widescreen movies. In fact, it should just look like an iPhone, but with some distinguishing design features.

I wouldn’t be shocked if this clip is legit. I also wouldn’t be stunned to learn it’s a fake.

Via DAPReview

Just a week after claiming that Apple’s iPhone had caused wireless network disruptions on its campus, Duke University’s IT organization now blames the trouble on a Cisco network problem.

Oops. CIO Tracey Futhey’s statement:

Cisco worked closely with Duke and Apple to identify the source of this problem, which was caused by a Cisco-based network issue. Cisco has provided a fix that has been applied to Duke’s network and there have been no recurrences of the problem since. We are working diligently to fully characterize the issue and will have additional information as soon as possible. Earlier reports that this was a problem with the iPhone in particular have proved to be inaccurate.

It’s remarkable how rapidly bad news can spread. This story made headlines in the largest publications in the U.S. without any verification — in large part because the investigation hadn’t been completed. Apple tends to attract such negative stories, in part because the company is riding so high these days. Nothing sexier than the iPhone wreaking havoc.

Because, let’s be honest: Network routers having problems isn’t actually news.

Via Apple 2.0.

We’ve all seen Apple use the New York Times website to demonstrate the iPhone’s tremendous facility on the Internet. But the Times site works so well in part because the newspaper’s web page somewhat mimics the look of a real newspaper front page. What about the hundreds of terrible newspaper web pages that we read for local content?

Enter PressDisplay. The company takes the original layouts of newspapers and turns them into browseable web objects. And it’s now compatible with iPhone.

As you might expect, it’s optimized for crazy zooms, rotations and all of the other interactions that just make iPhone special. It is a commercial service, but it’s free through the end of August, so there’s really no better way to read the Washington Post or the San Francisco Chronicle on the train to work until then!

San Francisco’s Chinatown provides a wealth of cheap goods. While shopping for ridiculous San Francisco mementos for a friend who’s moving away, I spotted this display of clearly fake MANNDigital Mp3 players that mimic exactly the look, size and even packaging of Apple’s clippable iPod shuffles.

I could easily see the casual shopper getting confused here, but a few distinctions stand out to me: 1) The volume and skip track buttons have switched places. 2) This device comes in a few colors Apple shuffles don’t, including black. 3) These have a dedicated mini-USB port, instead of Apple’s remarkable headphone/power/USB port.

All told, an excellent knock-off, and one worthy of a cease & desist letter. So get ’em while they’re hot.

Andy Hargadon, the director of the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship, related a funny Apple story from his past at his talk on Thursday night. He came to Apple as a product designer in the early 1990s, and his first big project was the Powerbook Duo… power supply. Seriously. And his budget was $1 million.

As he tells the story now, Apple in those days was so opposed to using off-the-shelf solutions that they would over-invest in areas that people didn’t care much about. After all, though the Duo power adapter was pretty great, did the internals need to be developed in-house? Could an existing solution have been integrated into the case, which did incorporate the still-innovative gull wings for cord management?

It’s a great example of the trouble with creating a culture where everything a company does has to be the best, most exciting and most advanced. You end up investing in areas that don’t matter and spend too little time making sure that people actually care about the changes coming.

Apple’s much healthier these days, and appears to be committed to using the best solutions, no matter who creates them, and then spending the rest of their energy on increasing the difference between the off-the-shelf answer and the Apple-branded experience. That’s why the iPod was entirely non-Apple in every regard except the ones that counted: The logo, the user interface and the integration with iLife.

Anyone else have tales of past Apple development excess? I really don’t know if I can think of a crazier one than the million-dollar power supply.

Picture via eBay

BusinessWeek recently put together an interesting run-down of prominent Apple Design alumni and what they’re up to these days. It’s a good list, but far from comprehensive, as is required in any such piece. I did want to highlight a couple of people who didn’t make the cut.

It’s literally two. I promise.

German site Fudder got a lot of attention today for posting a set of concepts that frog design created for Apple in the early 1980s for the Snow White project, including the above “PhoneMac” concept that incorporated communication into a flat-panel Mac – before the first Mac ever shipped.

To augment the fun over at Fudder I’ve pulled all of Apple’s phone-related concepts from the wonderful coffee table book Apple Design. They’re all after the jump, and some of them are more compelling than others, to put it mildly.

Photo by Seth Dillingham

The Sitening blog claims to have unearthed the identity of Fake Steve Jobs — it’s veteran Mac columnist Andy Ihnatko — but the evidence is flimsy at best.

The “proof” is that FSJ’s computer has an IP address in Boston — and Ihnatko lives in Beantown. Ergo sum.

The Sitening blog obtained FSJ’s IP address by sending him a special URL in email. When FSJ visited the special URL, it revealed his IP address: 68.160.21.224, which comes from the Boston area.

But I’m skeptical. Andy’s a humorous writer, but the styles are different. And FSJ is obviously a reporter or editor with a Silicon Valley business publication — Forbes or Fortune, or such like — not a specialist Mac writer. The subject matter on FSJ’s blog ranges too far from Apple — he’s obsessed with Sun and Google as he is with Steve Jobs.

When Wired News first contacted FSJ earlier this year to set up a sponsorship deal, my colleague Kevin Poulsen, the ace hacker, used the headers of FSJ’s emails to track him to a hotel in New York, then a public park or cafe in New York (he was probably using free WiFi), and finally suburban Boston.

We assumed Fake Steve was traveling that day. Maybe he took a business trip to New York to his home in Boston. But who knows? Maybe he works in Boston, or that’s where his girlfriend lives?

The only one who knows FSJ’s identity for sure is my boss, Wired News EIC Evan Hansen, who’s keeping mum.

Apple will bring multitouch technology from the iPhone to the mainstream Mac OS X. That much is a foregone conclusion. The technology is too powerful to restrict to just mobile platforms. The only question becomes what multitouch might look like on a full-size computer compared to on an iPhone.

One initial possibility is shown in a patent filing uncovered yesterday for a backlit trackpad that would light up differently based on how many fingers the user applies to the device. In a lot of ways, this is no more than an enhancement to current MacBook and MB Pro trackpads, which are capable of two-finger scrolling, but by highlighting this functionality, Apple could start to drive adoption of the technology. The more people get used to the idea that they should be ready to deliver a variety of interactions, the more ready they’ll be for a wholesale replacement of the mouse or traditional trackpads.

This is an interesting concept, but I would guess this won’t actually come to market exactly as depicted. Patents usually trail implementation a bit these days, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a product based directly on one of these patents ship after the patent approval. Typically, it’s at best a good way to learn about the thinking behind a technology after it ships.

Either way, hope for true multitouch on a laptop is keeping me from upgrading right now. This just sustains my hopes.

Via MacRumors.

We’re past the initial shock of the new with the iPhone, as we have the second hardware hack in two days to customize the look of Apple’s already iconic new device. Dan at Uneasy Silence worked with Philip Torrone to laser-etch his new iPhone with some flying toasters. The video above resulted.

Via Digg.

I think we have a new usability standard. The above YouTube clip shows a 2-year-old girl named Anna very fluently flipping through modes on the iPhone before heading to the YouTube tab to watch a favored Coldplay video. Apple’s current ad campaign is working just fine for the time-being, but when they want to go for the jugular, they should call this family up.

Anyone else still have goosebumps?

Via Digg.

Find of the weekend? That would be Hideapod.com, a site devoted to an amazing anti-theft device for iPods: the brown Zune. It’s actually a t-shirt sales, website, but you should poke around. It’s well-executed, and the error code when you make an order is pretty amazing. Also: It’s iPhone-ready!

Stunning.

Via Digg.

The iPhone is beautiful. We all know that. But some have wondered about Apple’s decision to include just a little bit of iPod-esque chrome amid all that gorgeous brushed aluminum and black plastic. Rather than whine. Flickr user D.Ballance broke out the Brillo pads and masking tape and started buffing away at those edges. The result? The all-brushed aluminum iPhone you see before you. It’s an update before Apple releases an update! A sure collector’s item for the whole family.
iPhone Brushed on Flickr
Via Digg.

I’m kind of at a loss for words. Apple obviously didn’t invent the Yin Yang symbol, but Microsoft just flipped the Apple Universal logo horizontally and adjusted the highlights. Maybe the metaphors involved in marketing software are all the same, but this is ridiculous.

Image on Flickr.
Via Digg.