software - page 32

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql0V4SNt-c4&feature=player_embedded

With yesterday’s release-then-nearly-instantaneous-pull of the Nescaline NES emulator, the message should be clear: jailbreaking is the only real option for iPhone emulation enthusiasts. Good news, then, for jailbreakers: ZodTTD has has released the Nintendo 64 emulator N64iPhone through Cydia just in time for Christmas, with one killer little feature… Wiimote support through Bluetooth pairing.

Emulation tends to be slow on less beefy hardware, and it doesn’t look as though N64iPhone manages to defy expectations in that regard: even when using the Wiimote, the emulator appears tricky to control, with notable slowdowns. Still, at least it’s working. Heck, at least it’s real, unlike the last N64 emulator we wrote about, which turned out to just be a clever video.

If you can deal with slowdowns and convoluted controls in your quest for mobile Metroid Prime, you can download N64iPhone through Cydia for just $2.50.

One of the features I loved from the first moment I saw it in Windows 7 was Snap, the one that lets you instantly resize any document window by dragging it to one side of your screen.

Irradiated Software makes a Mac utility that does a similar job. It’s called Sizeup, and I find it pretty useful. But it’s keyboard-controlled, not mouse-controlled, and you have to remember some new shortcuts to get the most from it. How about a mouse-controlled alternative?

Enter Cinch, a new app from the Sizeup developers.

Apple’s 27 inch iMac is the sexiest machines in Apple’s already sexed-out line of computers, but it’s been worth waiting to buy one: the first batch had numerous problems, including cracked screens, flickering displays and a yellow, nicotine-like graphical patina.

Rumor had it that Apple was scrambling to replace faulty ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 GPUs on their iMacs, which strongly implied the problem was hardware, not software. Nevertheless, Software Update has just pumped out a Graphics Firmware Update for the 27-inch iMac that “address[es] issues that may cause image corruption or display flickering.”

Jury’s still out on whether or not this solves the widescale problems people are having with their iMacs. Any cultists out there with a 27-incher who can tell us how their baby is handling its new medicine?

I’ve never been such a big fan of using voice search on my phone. Take Google’s own voice search app for the iPhone. As far as translating my own search terms, it does pretty well, but it has an issue with ambient noise. For example, I may need Google’s help to spell the longest town name in Scotland, but I’m pretty sure the correct spelling isn’t “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogery BEEP HONK SCREECH CRASH chwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.”

Still, voice search enthusiasts who own iPhones now have another program to loudly and emphatically yell at. Following up on last week’s Dragon Diction app, Nuance has released Dragon Search

It works very similarly to the Google Mobile app: you simply tap a button, clearly say your search term, and then beam your search query up to Nuance’s servers, which promptly spits back the applicable results. Where Dragon Search differs from Google’s efforts is it can easily extend its search beyond just Google results: it will also search iTunes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube, Yahoo and Bing.

If you’re interested, the app is free for now, although you should move soon on that free download: the free introductory offer ends soon.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZWC0kk77GI

Six iPhones daisy-chained together to simulacrum the full ivory-and-ebony array of a piano’s 88 keys, progressing upwards through five octaves from a low C. Upon them, Mario Raimondi of the El Desafio foundation turns in a note-perfect rendition of Yann Tiersen’s “Comptine D’un Autre Été: L’après Midi,” which you might recognize from the Amelie soundtrack. A beautiful song, and we can only marvel at the dexterity required to tickle such small keys without relying on any haptic feedback whatsoever.

The only question is: what app is Raimondi using? It looks a bit like Mini Piano. Anyone know for sure?

[via TUAW]

It’s that time of year again folks.

Last December, we asked you to nominate your favorite new desktop apps of 2008. Popular choices back then included Evernote, Dropbox, 1Password and Things.

But what new stuff has grabbed your attention during 2009?

Macupdate, the other big name in Mac software bundling after MacHeist, have just released their latest Holiday Bundle, comprising over eleven full-featured applications for just a tenth of their usual combined retail price.

The App Store approval process might be editorially cryptic, but it is, at least, pretty straightforward: you submit your app to Apple, wait a few weeks, and then get back your yea or nay. Apparently, though, this timely process does not accurately reflect the pressing urgency of millions of translucent-skinned and lanugo-haired Scandinavians, waiting for Apple to approve SVT Play, an app that would allow them to stream Swedish public television to their iPhones and iPod Touches.

Instead, the Swedes have stormed the Apple campus at One Infinite Loop and are threatening to camp out until Steve Jobs personally approves their app.

Hands up who loves the Muppets and I’ll count, starting with me.

Disney’s just released an “Animal Drummer”, a rhythm game for people who enjoy Animal’s unique (and somewhat insane) drumming style.

If you use the MobileMe to view or share files on your iDisk — and if you use your iPhone to do it — you might want to hit the App Store and click on Updates: Apple has just bumped the app up to version 1.1.

What’s changed? The new features include:

• Tthe ability to auto-complete email addresses when choosing recipients for a shared file.

• Automatic saving of file sharing emails to your Mail account’s Sent folder

• Images can now be tapped-and-held to save it to your photo roll or copy to another app.

• The maximum cache size has now double to 500MB.

• Faster technologies, various bug fixes and numerous localizations.

The MobileMe iDisk app is free, but you’ll need an iPhone running 0S 3.0 or later and a MobileMe membership to use it. Go get it.

In January of 2009, I spent almost $2,500 on a top of the line, 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro, glutted with as much RAM and hard drive space as its belly could handle. Less than four months later, it was stolen.

Oh, it was my own fault. The whole tale involves a midnight rendezvous with a bartender I had my eye on at the time. She had the face of Natalie Portman, the eyebrows of Roger Moore and the constitution of Oliver Reed; in her presence, one drink became two, and two became twelve, and when we stumbled back to my apartment, I somehow forgot my laptop bag back at the bar… but only for five minutes! Alas, five minutes was too late, and by the time I’d rushed back, it was gone.

Since then, I’ve spent a good amount of time upbraiding myself about the loss. What has always bugged me most about the theft was that I always knew that there were countless programs available (such as Undercover) that would help you track down your Mac if it was stolen. I knew about these programs. I wrote about them, even. But I never once installed one. I just couldn’t imagine the scenario where I would have my laptop stolen. Dumb.

The news feeds bring me further fodder for my self-incrimination this morning. Over at TUAW, they are reporting that one of their readers. Jim, managed to safely recover his stolen Macbook using the MobileMe’s service, Back to My Mac, to take pictures of the perps and gather information about them gleaned from watching them surf the web.

It took Jim many months to get his laptop back: it had changed hands at least five times since it was stolen, at least once as payment in a drug deal. But when he got it back, it was in surprisingly good nick… with most of his files still intact on the disk.

That’s great news for Jim, but as another object lesson in my own amazing stupidity, it’s like a punch to the gut. Guess who also didn’t have a MobileMe account when his MacBook Pro was stolen? Yup. What a maroon.

So Apple has allowed into the Store a third-party video recording application for plain old 2G and 3G iPhones; but honestly, don’t get your hopes up too high.

iVideoCamera by Laan Labs suffers some serious limitations: it only records three frames a second, it can only record for a minute at most, and resolution is just 160×213. It’s little more than a series of stills stitched together into something vaguely resembling moving pictures.

Our own illustrious Craig Grannell might have had issues with Chrome for its willful transgression of Mac interface design principles, but he still liked it enough to make it his new default browser at the end of the day. Looks like Craig wasn’t alone: after last week’s release of the Chrome for Mac beta, Google’s Chrome browser deftly shoved Safari aside in its ascent to the third place slot in the web browser charts.

According to web analytics company Net Applications, Chrome marketshare leaped to 4.4 percent last week, based on the analysis of 160 million unique visitors to 40,000 sites. Meanwhile, Safari only held 4.37 percent of the market. A narrow victory? Sure. But a victory the nonce.

At the end of the day, though, I doubt this means much: at least on the OS X platform, Safari still reigns supreme, with Chrome only accounting for 1.3 percent of all browsers used on OS X last week. Chrome only beats Safari when you take PCs and Linux into account.

I imagine the gains Chrome for Mac has made against Safari in the last week largely come from curiosity. The question is whether or not Mac users will stick with Chrome once that curiosity fades… and once Google polishes off the last of Chrome for Mac’s missing features, they just might. Safari’s just not as good a browser as Chrome for Mac has the potential to be.

Although e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the new (and maligned) Barnes & Noble Nook are certainly tempting additions to a gadget fetishist’s armoire of doodads, I’ve never had much interest in owning one.

My ambivalence isn’t simply due to the fact that I think books conveyed as mere digital information is less sensual and vibrant than books as a medium: there is that, but I have still enjoyed reading e-books (thanks to Gutenberg.org) for most of the last decade. It’s mostly because I only enjoy reading e-books in certain circumstances: for example, when waiting for a subway, or in bed with the lights off. The e-ink panels of the Kindle and the Nook don’t work in the dark, which means my fleeting interest in e-books can only be satisfied with backlit devices. A few years ago, that was through my Pocket PC and the fantastic e-book program, uBook ; these days, it’s through my iPhone and the Stanza e-reader app.

Stanza is fantastic, of course, but with the release of the Kindle for iPhone app earlier this year, I’d been interested in supplementing my iPhone e-reading with Kindle books for awhile, only to be stymied by the fact that Amazon’s app was for US audiences only. But today, that’s changed: Apple has finally introduced its Kindle for iPhone App to international users.

It’s the same app as before, allowing you to purchase, download and read hundreds of thousands of books through the Kindle Store while syncing your notes and bookmarks across devices… the only difference is it now works on iPhones and iPod Touches in over sixty different countries.

I tend to doubt Kindle for iPhone will replace Stanza as my default e-reader on the iPhone — it’s hard to beat Stanza’s vast library of free classics — but I’m at least looking forward to finally being able to supplement it.

The iTunes App Store saw a mass overhaul over the weekend in a move to more vibrantly showcase apps on their individual pages while simultaneously presenting more relevant information to potential buyers.

If you like to game on your Mac, you’ve probably played something released by Aspyr Media. After all, what choice did you have? Aspyr has long been one of the pillars of the wobbly Mac gaming scene, porting over seventy games to OS X, including The Sims, Call of Duty 4, Civilization 4 and Quake 4. Short of restarting into Boot Camp, Aspyr has been the only way for Apple gamers to actually play most of the AAA game releases on their machines.

Sad news for Mac gamers, then. According to gaming site Big Download, Aspyr Media has laid off over fifty percent of its staff, with only a handful of team members now remaining in the office. The layoffs apparently happened weeks ago, but the news has only just gotten out.

Aspyr Media’s business is more than just Mac porting of course: they also port games from consoles to the PC, and recently ported the original Call of Duty to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, it looks unlikely that their core Mac team members got away unscathed. The Mac gaming scene just got even sparser.

Eastgate Systems has just announced Tinderbox 5, a major update to its venerable note-taking application.

“Note-taking” hardly covers it, though. Tinderbox is uniquely flexible and adaptable, in a league of its own when compared with all the other OS X notebooks.

Google Chrome for Mac arrived yesterday in beta form. The browser is lacking important features, including bookmarks and cookie management, and the useful app mode available in the Windows version. Also, benchmarks show it’s marginally slower than Safari. But in use I’ve found it good enough to set as my default, and Chrome’s superior to Apple’s browser in important ways: it launches more quickly, and is far less taxing on my Mac regarding RAM and processor usage, even with many tabs open.

However, one thing I’m finding irritating is Chrome’s tabs. Google’s efforts elsewhere in making Chrome a Mac-like experience should be applauded—the browser supports Keychain and the Mac OS X dictionary, and there are subtle animations peppered about—but the main toolbar and tabs area is problematic. I spent a short while making a mock-up (see the full-size version on my Flickr page), which offers ideas for a more Mac-like Chrome interface.

If you’re set to automatically grab new updates, you’re likely to notice Apple’s Software Update burbling insistently in your dock for your attention, after Apple released a couple of updates of both their Airport software and the MacBook / MacBook Pro’s EFI.

The Airport Client Update 2009-002 is a routine update, fixing a few routine issues. The update solves the inability to turn the AirPort on or off in some cases after upgrading from Leopard, as well as an occasional loss of network connectivity when using Wake on Demand and the inability to create computer-to-computer networks or share Internet connections on some MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers.

The MacBook and MacBook Pro EFI Update is more interesting, in that with the installation of SuperDrive Firmware Update 3.0, the optical drive of these machines should no longer sound like Cookie Monster trying to chew his way through a sheet of plate glass when waking from sleep or start-up.

As usual, you can either load up Software Update to automatically suck them down and install them (restart required), or you can grab the latest updates from Apple’s support page.

[via TUAW]

Released over a year ago for the PC, Google’s wonderful Chrome browser has been purgatorial on the Mac for far too long, but now that’s all over: Google has finally released Chrome in beta form for OS X.

Mac users have a duty to download the beta and help Google finish it — it’s a great piece of work.

It’s a feature light release compared to the PC and Linux versions. For one, the Mac version is missing its Bookmark Manager and Bookmark Syncing; it also omits the App Mode, which allows Chrome to run web apps in their own basic browser window. Google’s Gears is also off the table for Mac users, but Gears won’t work under Snow Leopard anyway, so this isn’t a big deal: anyway, Google has announced that they will cease developing Gears because HTML5 is now suitable for the same purposes. Finally comes probably the biggest omission: the Chrome Beta for Mac totally omits Firefox-like extension support.

All together, it feels like something of a phoned-in affair, and it’s hard not to feel a bit bitter that Google delivered so little of the full Chrome user after a year of keeping Mac users waiting.

That all said, I’ve been using Chrome’s developer nightly builds for months, and its combination of extreme simplicity, the effortless amalgamation of the address bar and search engine support, and its sandboxed security mode that prevents single tabs from crashing the entire browser have quickly made Chrome my favorite browser for Mac. Despite my enthusiasm for Chrome, though, I’ll be keeping Firefox as my working browser until Chrome finally builds extensions into their Mac version… and, more importantly, some plucky developer comes up with a Chrome alternative to Tab Mix Plus.

Almost a year to the day since Google released its first stable version for Windows, the search giant has today announced a final release of its Chrome browser for Mac. If you haven’t played with it, it’s worth a spin — I use it as my primary browser on my work PC.

And yes, before anyone else mentions it, its add-on architecture isn’t completely rolled out yet, so if you love Firefox extensions, this isn’t the browser for you, and its benefits over Mac Safari 4 are dubious generally. But you might just enjoy how it feels.

Via Silicon Alley Insider

It’s hard to think of a more forward thinking bunch of visionaries than the true pioneers of the fastly changing frontiers of technology: hard core pornographers.

Time after time — Betamax, VHS, Laser Discs, DVD, Blu-Ray and the Internet — pornographers are the first to embrace new technology, hoping to add yet another sales channel to their already rich smut peddling arrays. Compare pornographers to industries like the RIAA or MPAA, who are hopeless to embrace new technology that might threaten their old, stagnating business models, and it’s really hard not to think pornographers are one of the few media entities out there who really get tech.

Needless to say, porn would like a piece of the App Store, but Apple’s prudish policies aren’t having any of that. But pornographers are nothing if not ingenious, and a group of them have now launched the Sex App Shop, which the press release heralds as “the world’s first legal alternative to [the App Store],” featuring a wide range of adult content from major labels like Playboy, Vivid, VCA, Wicked Pictures and New Sensation. Apps costs $0.99, and yearly memberships with unlimited downloads is available for $99.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjymDGnt3Lw

If you’ve ever wanted to transform yourself into a hydrocephalic Italian plumber sucked into a strange toilet dimension in order to battle a legion of evil, anthropomorphic mushrooms… well, amazingly, there’s an app for that.

Cleverly named after the phonetic transcription of one of the character’s hallmark stereotypical ejaculations, iRwego is more than just a sound board of noises plucked from the games of Super Mario Bros.… although it’s that too. What’s really cool about the app is that it uses the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer to automatically accompany your life with appropriate Mario sound effects.

The festive season is so close you can almost taste it. The kids are pestering to put up Christmas decorations; so why not give them something fun to do this year?

SymmetriSketch is a great free vector drawing application (also available for Windows and Linux users) that lets you play around with symmetry across a 2D plane.

In many ways, Pointy Head’s Knocking Live Video is exactly the sort of app Apple likes to march out in parade. The app allows any iPhone user to rap with figurative knuckles on the iPhone of anyone else with the app installed. Once notified via push that someone’s knocking on their handset, Knocking Live Video opens up, streaming live video between both iPhones.

It’s a neat idea: exactly the sort of simple, social and fun communication tool Apple and AT&T like to highlight in their “There’s an app for that” ads… whether or not — in practice — it is just likely to be used as a spontaneous pornographic transmission tool amongst frat bros out birddogging as to transmit video of your kids at the pool to a traveling spouse.

The only problem? Knocking Live Video uses Apple’s private APIs to achieve its live video streaming.