UPDATE: Just got word that Gruber is NOT cool with the site, and is demanding it be taken down. This about 20 mins after this post was published. Guess the “reasonably parodic period” is up. That was quick.

I’ve just been IM-ing with John Casasanta, the brains behind DaringFireballWithComments.net – a website that mirrors Apple pundit John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog — with the addition of reader comments on posts.

Casasanta says he’s received a short note from Gruber, who says he’s cool with the site. Gruber even gave Casasanta permission to keep the site up for a “reasonably parodic period” of time.

“This absolves me of any lawsuit,” says Casasanta, who runs the super-popular MacHeist software marketing operation.

As reported yesterday, DaringFireballWithComments.net mirrors everything on Daring Fireball — posts, ads and all — but allows anonymous commenting on posts. Gruber’s blog is famous for not having comments, an ethos at odds with most other web publishers (except Engadget, which has temporarily shut down its “out-of-control” comments system). Casasanta is mirroring Gruber’s site as a “social experiment.”

Meanwhile, most of the comments on DaringFireballWithComments.net so far have been exceptionally moronic, partly proving Gruber’s point that comments are a distraction.

Casasanta says he is unconcerned by the stupidity (which appears to be mostly purposeful. People are being deliberately dumb) and is willing to give it time. “It’s kinda what I would’ve expected so far,” he says.

One option is moderating the comments, but Cassanta says it hasn’t been discussed yet.

Gruber hasn’t responded to a couple of notes I sent him asking for comment, and hasn’t yet mentioned the mirror on his site or Twitter stream. As some have noted, with about 40,00 followers, Gruber’s Twitter stream acts as Daring Fireball’s behind-the-scenes comments system.

Comic book publishers are super eager to get their strips in full living color on the iPad, if a round up by Publisher’s Weekly is anything to go by.

“I can’t remember seeing something that I so urgently wanted since I saw the first G.I. Joe with Life-Like Hair commercials in the early seventies,” enthused Gonzalo Ferreyra, sales and marketing VP at Viz Media, “as it relates to digital publishing of illustrated books, the iPad opens up tremendous possibilities. This appears to be the device that will allow users to carry a library of manga around with them any where and every where.”

Abrams’ ComicsArts executive editor Charles Kochman called the iPad the future of e-reading, adding that “The Kindle always felt limited: a lack of color and a standardized typeface seems antithetical to my ideal reading experience and counter intuitive to the careful consideration our designers give to the books we publish. The iPad seems to satisfy all of those concerns and offers the best of what I love about my iPhone and my Mac.”

Only one graphic novel exec, Filip Sablik of Top Cow,  was “cautiously optimistic” that the iPad would be a “game changer” for digital comics. “What Apple has done incredibly well in the last decade is take existing technology–laptop, mp3 player, smart phone–and made it really sexy and really easy to use. Right now it looks like the iPad might follow those to pillars of Apple’s success.”

The publishers seemed to be in agreement that while the iPad will be great for reading on the commute, lots of different readers — from small kids to serious  collectors — will still want paper editions.

Will you be flipping through comics on your iPad?

Via Publisher’s Weekly

My old friends at Wired tell me that the magazine’s designers scrambled to finished their gorgeous digital version of the publication just in time for Apple’s big iPad launch last week.

Trouble is, the interactive prototype was built using Adobe’s Air — which means it won’t work on the very device it was built for. Like Flash, Apple isn’t supporting Air on the iPad.

“The magazine industry was hoping to finally get over the pay wall with a fancy, shmancy iPad version of their precious slick glossy (but) gets caught with their pants down and their wee wees out,” said one insider.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that major publishers have approached ScrollMotion to adapt their textbooks for use on the Apple iPad.

You may have seen ScrollMotion’s existing e-books in the App Store: the company takes existing books provided by publishers and adapts them so they look good on the iPhone or iPod Touch’s smaller screen, then enhances them with built-in search, indexes, dictionaries and interactive flourishes.

Not very surprising that a company devoted to translating e-books to a format that takes advantage of the iPhone’s innate capabilities would be looking to do the same thing for the iPad. But according to the Journal, ScrollMotion has a long list of big-name textbook publishers already lined up,including McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Perason Education and Kaplan.

This development makes apparent the huge advantage the iPad has over the likes of the Kindle DX in the college textbook market: not only is the iPad a fantastic student tool in its own right for things like note taking and playing around with study-specific apps, but its textbooks can be truly interactive in a way Amazon’s currently can not.

That’s a revolutionary leap forward in the way students learnt… and the iPad is priced cheap enough that almost any student can afford to own one.

Steve Jobs doesn’t follow a presentation template but as outlined in my new book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, he does consistently follow the same principles that have turned Apple product launches into an art form. The iPad announcement on Wednesday, January 27th was no exception: classic Steve Jobs.

Photos courtesy of Gizmodo.

The formidable Economist magazine has blessed Steve Jobs with a rare cover story examining the potential impact of the Jesus tablet.

Even rarer, the iPad story is mostly positive, even if the religious imagery is over the top.

The Economist fancies Jobs’ chances of shaking up not just one industry, but three — especially media:

Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.

Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation, for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. Piracy, free content and the dispersal of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not much keener on the Kindle, an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wielding a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking market, or no market at all.

Read more: Tablet computing — The book of Jobs.

Via 9to5Mac. Thanks Seth.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball is the most influential Apple pundit on the web, but readers often complain about the lack of comments on his website.

In fact, Gruber’s site is famous for not having comments. In an age when every website falls over itself to accommodate reader interactivity, Gruber stands alone. He has stubbornly resisted adding comments to his site for years.

Gruber has explained that he dislikes comments because they distract from his all-important voice. This is exactly the kind of egotistical statement that makes him unpopular with many people, especially other writers, but a must-read pundit.

But Gruber is about to get comments, whether he likes it or not.

The team behind MacHeist has just launched DaringFireballWithComments.net— a website that mirrors Gruber’s site with, you guessed it, comments.

“It’s good timing since he was gloating over his lack of comments today,” said John Casasanta, the brains behind the project, “and we’re gonna allow anonymous comments. It should be a shitstorm.”

UPDATE: iMussolini Developer Luigi Marino told Cult of Mac that he discovered the lawsuit for copyright infringement by reading our story yesterday. Marino contacted the Italian state film archives, Istituto Luce, for clarifications about the video material he used from Mussolini’s speeches and they asked him to remove the app from the store to avoid a legal battle. Marino tells us he requested to pull the app and expects it to be gone from the iTunes store by 1 p.m. (CET).

UPDATE 2: iMussolini is gone. The competing Mussolini app — Mussolini’s historical speeches– — is, however, still available.

An iPhone app of Benito Mussolini’s speeches is the second-highest paid app in the Italian iTunes store a week after launching despite criticism for giving voice to Il Duce’s diehard fans and claims over copyright violations.

iMussolini, a mobile compendium of fascism, features 100 complete speeches,  plus 20 audio and video clips for €0.79 (it’s also available in the US iTunes store for $0.99, in Italian only) — without any kind of political commentary.

At about 1,000 downloads a day, iMussolini is more popular in Italy than Shazam and games like Ice Age and Dracula: the Path of the Dragon.

Comments by readers on iPhoneitalia, which broke the story, included enough pro-Mussolini sentiment  “Duce! Duce! Duce!”  and slogans (“Boia chi molla!”) to prompt complaints to the iTunes store that the app violates Italy’s 1952 Scelba law, which formally abolished fascism. The New York-based American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants  also slammed Apple over the app.

Today, the Italian state film archives, Istituto Luce, announced it will sue the developer for using archival clips and asked Apple to remove the application. At this writing, the app is still available.

iMussolini is the handiwork of 25-year-old Luigi Marino, who picked up an iPhone for the first time about six months ago and made the app in his spare time.

Cult of Mac spoke to Marino about why iMussolini is an excercise in free enterprise, getting the app approved and why his next app may feature Gandhi.

CoM: How did you start programming for iPhones?

Luigi Marino: I’ve been programming Java and C++ since high school, in July 2009 I bought my first iPhone and  in November 2009 in my first MacBook.  Programming for it is more of a passion than anything else. (NDR: Marino owns and runs an unrelated company).   In my free time, I also blog for an iPhone website called dev app.

Ok, so the groundhogs in the U.S. predict six more weeks of winter. Will some deals make up for the bad news? The Apple Store is selling a 16GB iPod nano for $119 with free shipping. Here’s a misnomer: an iPhone puzzle named “Hand of Greed” that’s free. Maybe you’d like to write a letter on your iPhone or iPod touch but don’t have a keyboard? Logitech’s Touch Mouse is available.

Along the way, we’ll look at a boombox for your iPod, a bargain on MouseWizard 6 and the price-slashers have been at it again with iPhone apps. As always, for details on these and many more bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

There’s little to fault the Apple iPad for, at least as far as the price is concerned. The entry level $499 price is low enough that even those with their reservations about the iPad can pretty much afford to pick one up.

Or can they? According to an analysis by CBS MoneyWatch, the true cost of an iPad over four years is much higher than Apple is claiming.