CoM reader Paul sent us these pics of his office where the IT department shoots hoops on a backboard with an Apple logo.
After the cardboard backboard from the Nerf caved in under one too many slam dunks, Paul had a brainwave:
“As we were scrapping an old PowerMac G5 for parts, I realized that we could recycle the door to become our new heavy backboard. Two short screws were used to attach the plastic bracket to the door and another two longer ones to go into the concrete pillar in the office wall.”
Sometimes, you can just punch and punch and punch a guy until he’s squirting gray matter out of his tear ducts and he just won’t stay down. Psystar’s that guy. Though meatily pounded into a puddle of pulsating goo by Apple’s lawyers, the Florida-based Hackintosh makers have officially filed a notice of appeal in order to revoke the injunction made against them, prohibiting them from selling hardware with Apple’s operating system pre-installed.
TotalFinder is starting to cause a buzz in the Mac community. The app aims to bring something to Finder long-rumored to be coming from Apple itself: tabs. We spoke to developer Antonin Hildebrand about his project, the reasons behind it, and his plans for its future.
Please note: TotalFinder is alpha software that integrates with Finder. Run it at your own risk and ensure you back up your system before installing it.
I know we keep harping on about this, but there’s only 10 days left to vote for Cultofmac.com in the Golden Retrevo Awards.
Help Cultofmac win the “All Things Apple” division by voting here. Please vote often (one vote per reader, per day). Voting ends on Monday, January 25, 2010.
You may think we’re a**holes for promoting ourselves again but this is our first nomination ever. We are super jazzed and want to win this — but we need your help.
The award honors the best and brightest independent bloggers of the gadget blogosphere. Nominations and voting comes from gadget enthusiasts.
We start off with several MacBook Air laptops from the Apple Store, including a 1.6GHz 13-inch model for $1,099. Also on the price-chopping block: a $30 saving on a 64GB solid-state drive from Super Talent, plus BlueAction’s BAE Bluetooth headsets.
Along the way, we also look at DVDRemaster Pro 6 for the Mac, the Genius EasyPen tablet and assorted other gadgets. As always, for details on these and many other bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Why spring for a Wacom tablet when you can transform your existing unibody Macbook trackpad into a graphics tablet? For $24.95, Ten One Design will do just through their impressive Inklet OS X application.
The demo is both swank and intuitive. When not in use, the application sits in your menu bar, but Control+Option+i overlays the screen with a bright translucent box, showing you where, exactly, your penstrokes will be inputed. Draw on your trackpad with a finger or stylus and it converts the input into digital ink; hit the Inklet hotkey again and you can use your trackpad as normal. Simple, elegant and efficient.
Of course, there’s some caveats: the Apple trackpad won’t register stylus pressure like a real graphics pad, so Ten One Design recommends buying a Pogo Stylus from them for $14.99 to recreate that functionality. Needless to say, the trackpad also doesn’t have the surface area of a Wacom tablet. Still, for the idle doodler, occasional Photoshop artist or even the professional designer who wants to work portably without dragging a tablet around, this seems like a great little app.
A celebrity gossip blog squarely targeting the lives of Silicon Valley eggheads, anti-socials and mouthbreathers has always been one of Gawker founder Nick Denton’s stranger and least accessible publication ideas, and it’s not so surprising that the once prolific Valleywag has gone from its own website to a mere tag over at Gawker over the last year or two. Odd to see Valleywag, then, announce a bounty of up to $100,000 for information about the forthcoming Apple Tablet… a bold play at relevancy, to be sure.
Back in November, our own personal Aleister Crowley of Cult of Mac, Leander, sat down and interviewed Ken Segall, the originator of the iMac name. According to Segall, Steve Jobs recognized he was “betting the company on the machine and so it needed a great name.” The only problem: the name Jobs had his heart set on was so bad it would “curdle your blood.” The original product name? MacMan, says Gizmodo.
Luckily, at the end of the day, iMac won out… but it wasn’t because Jobs let himself be swayed, according to Gizmodo’s sources, but rather because the name was already trademarked by a company called MidiMan, who had released a serial-to-MIDI adapter under that brand name. Apple made an offer; Midiman declined; Steve Jobs fumed and Segall got his way.
As everyone prepares to hear how Apple did financially during the first fiscal quarter of 2010, analysts are releasing numbers on the Cupertino, Calif. company’s success during the fourth quarter of 2009. IDC said Apple’s U.S. sales rose 31 percent for the quarter, a day after Gartner researchers announced a 24 percent jump.
Apple’s 31 percent growth rate was higher the most computer makers, who saw a 24 percent jump during that three-month period, according to IDC. The Mac maker is in fifth plan, selling 5.6 million Macs for 8 percent of the market, according to IDC.
