Raskin for Mac is an intuitive Finder replacement for Mac OS, and is the single best reason to go out and buy Apple’s new Magic Trackpad: it totally transforms the desktop experience.
Raskin for Mac uses a visual interface to present all your files on a single page, allowing you to view, arrange and open documents, applications, files and images without opening the Finder. It’s like a giant zoomable photo contact sheet, and makes navigating files and applications very easy and fast. It is inspired by the work of Jef Raskin — the legendary computer interface designer and father of the Mac computing experience.
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in September the iPod touch was “the number one portable game player in the world,” many took the comment as the executive’s usual bluster. Then Apple created its Game Center for iOS users. Now comes a survey seeming to support Apple’s words and actions: More than half of all U.S. mobile gamers battle it out on iOS devices, one survey reports.
Additionally, U.S.-based iOS gamers nearly outnumber domestic Nintendo DS and DSi players, according to a recent International Gamers survey. Apple’s platform claims 40.1 million U.S. gamers, compared to 41 million American Nintendo DS and DSi players. In fact 14 million U.S. gamers own both an iPod touch and a Nintendo DS. One good bit of news for Nintendo: the DS is still far ahead of the iOS platform in Europe.
According to the most recent edition of SPA! magazine, Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t intend to revisit Japan anymore. Also, he’s a secret ninja.
As reported and translated by F’ed Gaijan, the temperamental Apple founder apparently became furious when passing through security at the Kansai Airport on his way out of the country after a quiet vacation near Kyoto with his family.
The problem? Japanese security found shuriken, or ninja throwing stars, in his carry-on luggage, and insisted upon confiscating them. Since Kansai Airport does not have any procedures in place for dealing with private jets and other VIPs, so Jobs was going through security the same as anyone else.
According to SPA!, a red-faced Job tantrumed: “I’m hardly planning to hijack my own private jet! What a country! I’m never coming back!” Then, calling upon his incredible kuji-kiri ninja abilities, Jobs melted into the shadows, never to be seen in Japan again.
iOS 4.1’s ability to take high-dynamic range photos has been a much buzzed about new feature particularly to amateur photogs looking to maximize the quality of their casual smartphone snaps, but Apple does not appear to have gone it alone: according to some excellent research done by MacRumors’ Eric Slivka, it appears that Apple acquired a small, Cambridge-based company called Imsense to bring the feature to an iPhone near you.
Before being bought by Apple, Imsense did business in a technology called “eye-fidelity” which used software algorithms to remap image tons in order to produce nearly instantaneous Dynamic Range Correction in both standard and HDR photos. While the iOS 4.1 implementation of HDR is done in the classical fashion of blending three separate exposures into a single image, Imsense’s Eye-Fidelity algorithms appear to be used in iOS 4.1 to further spruce the resulting image up and make the colors pop.
It seems surprising that Apple could make any move to buy a company and not immediately be found out, but it appears that the acquisition went down under everyone’s nose back in July, with three Cupertino officers named directors of Imsense on July 15th, 2010. Could Apple once again be getting a tight grip on the secrecy they’ve lost handle of over the past year?
If you’ve been drooling over the 27-inch iMac’s gorgeous 2560 x 1440 display and eager for Apple to make good with an updated Cinema Display at the same dimensions in order to employ it as the window into your Mac Pro’s soul, it looks like your wait might soon to be at an end.
Over on the Mac Pro customization page, additional wording suggests you supplement a newly purchased Pro with the 27-inch Cinema Display… despite the fact that the only current options for purchase are the existing 24- and 30-inch flat panels.
You can look at this in one of two ways: either this is news to be excited about as Apple prepares to officially launch the 27-inch Cinema Display, or as your last chance to order the soon-to-be-discontinued 30-inch, which boasts just a few more vertical pixels than its successor. Best get moving if you’d rather have one of those.
Image by mixlass, used with thanks under CC license
You don’t.
There’s no need to. The OS X filesystem is designed to look after files properly in the first place, so that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.
Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – you might hear your computer’s hard disk whirring for no apparent reason. Among other things, that could be the system looking after itself – moving stuff around on the disk so that there’s no need for you to actually sit down and click a button marked “defrag.”
If you want to know more about the technical ins-and-outs behind this, go read this Apple support document. As it points out, there’s no need to defrag your disk, and even if you download a third party defragging application and run it, you probably won’t notice any difference.
Save yourself the trouble, and spend your not-defragging time doing something fun on your computer instead.
What’s more important to you? Your iPod… or your wedding ring? Your iPhone… or your dog? A new survey conducted by a company called Protect Your Bubble has found that, in the UK at least, most people would be less willing to give up their Apple products than any other possession.
By a significant margin, the iPod beat out other objects as Facebook respondents’ favorite things, with 12% of respondents reporting it as their most cherished possession. 11.5% valued their Blackberry over all other wares, while Apple’s iPhone crept in at 10%.
Comparatively, only 9% of respondents chose their laptop, another 9% dog, 5% their cat, 4% their car and a mere 1% their wedding ring. It appears that more people in the UK these days are married to Apple than they are to their spouse.
With few exceptions, the best way to predict what Apple is going to do is to look at what they’ve already done, which is why it’s best to take this rumor reported by Apple Insider with a grain of salt: they claim a FaceTime-equipped iPad will be coming in time for the holidays.
Apple Insider, on their part, realize that that their source — “a person with proven knowledge of Apple’s future product plans” — is giving them insider intel that defies Apple’s history of yearly generational cycles in their iPod and iOS line-up, but claim nonetheless that “there [is] an ambitious push inside Apple to verify the refresh for a possible launch ahead of this year’s holiday shopping season,” and that the testing of the FaceTime-equipped iPad has already reached the advanced testing stage.
That the next iPad will boast at least a forward facing camera for FaceTime calling is a given… but releasing it less than a year after the first iPad seems like an invitation for customer backlash.
Perhaps recognizing this, Apple Insider’s report ends up contradicting itself later, on, saying that the FaceTime-equipped iPad will arrive “no later” than the first quarter of 2011. Given that the first quarter ends in March, that’s close enough to a year after the iPad’s debut that it seems unlikely that Apple will meaningfully break their historic product cycle for a second-gen iPad, no matter how much they want FaceTime to be the de facto standard for video calling.
Okay, this one should be filed under “S” for speculation, but there is talk that Apple’s iPad may be appearing on the shelves of retailer Target in October. First the conjecture and then some context on why there many be a reason why there may be fire behind this puff of smoke.
According to a screenshot of a Target PDA obtained by tech buzz site Engadget, the Apple tablet device could appear October 3. Why? The price of the unspecified device is set at $599.99, the same as the iPad, and the device would be sold by the retailer in the “Digital Audio” section, where Apple’s iPods and iPad competitor, Amazon’s Kindle, are already available. Here is the PDA’s screen:
Let’s dispel here and now any notion that the next great guitar solo or hit record will be produced or recorded using Apple’s mobile devices or the myriad amplifier emulating and recording applications available for them today.
Will. Not. Happen.
That said, for the casual music enthusiast and app dabbler, a few interesting peripheral/app combinations continue to highlight the versatility of Apple’s mobile development platform — and point the way to a future in which talented individuals won’t have to invest thousands of dollars in equipment and studio time in order to produce professional sounding music recordings.
