Stock in the internet phone company Vonage jumped a whopping 36 percent on news it will likely soon have an iPhone app.
Vonage’s stock saw its biggest three-day rally since the ailing company went public in 2006, Bloomberg reports. The rally is tied to news that Vonage has submitted an app to Apple. The app will likely be approved after a minor technical glitch is fixed.
What the app does, no one is saying, but it’ll likely rival Skype, offering low-cost VOIP calls over Wi-Fi. Vonage also offers visual voicemail.
The company is in deep trouble and is danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. It has lost about 100,000 customers in the last year as customers opt for cheap digital-phone service by cable companies.
Parallels, regarded by many as the premier virtual Windows solution for the Mac, announced Tuesday a special Switch to Mac Edition, extending a welcome lifeline to computer users who are choosing to embrace the elegance, power and simplicity of Apple’s Mac OS in increasing numbers every day.
Cult of Mac received an extensive tour of the new “Switch to Mac” features recently and it’s a good bet Parallels will deliver on its promise to have former Windows users working comfortably in the Mac UI within hours instead of the more usual learning curve that can often take weeks.
“For years I have worked with switchers coming into Apple stores with questions about how to use their new Mac,” says Saied Ghaffari, Switch to Mac Advocate, who gave us the tutorial demo.
“Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition thoroughly addresses the concerns switchers have,” Ghaffari said, adding, “the product is designed to make moving to Mac as fast and simple as possible, regardless of the level of technical knowledge of the switcher.
Featuring a set of easy-to-use tools and interactive tutorials such as Click to Learn, Watch Saied, and You Try incorporated with Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac, the Switch to Mac edition promises to help “Switchers” understand how to operate Mac OS X, transfer all PC data and applications, and seamlessly run their Windows applications on their new Macs.
“It’s like a friend teaching you the Mac at your own pace,” according to Ghaffari.
Parallels Desktop 4.0 Switch to Mac Edition is available from today at Apple stores, at Apple.com and through other preferred retail partners in English, German and French. The suggested retail price (SRP) of the product is $99.99.
Hit the jump for more information and detailed explanation of the Switch to Mac edition’s features.
It’s easy to take for granted how rapidly Apple upgrades Mac OS X with meaningful new features. After all, with Friday’s Snow Leopard release, the world’s best desktop OS will have seen its fifth major leap forward in the same time it’s taken Microsoft to add only Vista and the promise of Windows 7 (I know it’s coming soon, I’m just impressed Apple’s beaten Microsoft again).
Three days from the next great version of the best great thing, here are 10 reasons why you should upgrade to Snow Leopard.
10. It’s Leopard Done Right The release of Mac OS X Leopard was fraught with peril. It was late, it ran a bit slow, and it offered amazing new features — some of which weren’t fully ready for prime time. Snow Leopard is all about performance, optimizing features to deliver a great experience. It takes what you know today and makes it perfect.
We now know that Snow Leopard will be released on Friday for just $29. Even better, that already low price can drop to $10 if you’ve bought a new Mac since June 9 through the Mac OS X Up-to-Date program. Not sure if you qualify? Head here to find out.
The most important thing about getting a new bike is making sure it fits right. It’s all the difference between pleasure and pain — and very possibly a pair of blown knees.
The Test Rides iPhone app is a specialized but handy “virtual bike fitting room” that measures you up for a new bike. It looks handy for figuring out whether that beautiful bike on Craigslist will actually fit you.
First you take a picture of yourself from the side — you’ll probably need help. You then mark your joints on the picture: knees, elbows and ankles. The App calculates your body size.
Then you input the dimensions of the bike you want to buy – the top tube, bottom bracket, crank length, etc — and the App tells you whether the bike is a good fit or not. This part is a bit of work. Many used bike listings do not include all the measurments, and even the amount of info online about new bikes is inconsistent. While a lot of manufacturers have all the data, some do not.
Still, if you’re about to buy a new bike and have most of the measurements, spending $5 on this app seems like a good precaution to make sure it fits right.
Have you heard of Posterous yet? It’s a free hosted blogging service, where the aim is to making the act of posting content as simple as possible.
Which means that posting-by-email is the primary interface. Send Posterous anything in a mail message – text, pictures, video, other files – and it tries to do The Right Thing with whatever it is, to make it work as a post.
And on the whole it works very well. I’ve been playing around with it recently and I’m impressed. I like the simplicity and the immediacy of it.
You have to see this to believe it. Above is a demo video of Paris 3D, a tourist guide to France’s beautiful capital city in photo-realistic 3D.
It looks absolutely stunning. The detail is unbelievable. Here’s a massive virtual city on your iPhone — right down to the gargoyles. There’s even people and vehicles — plus their shadows! — for added realism.
You can zoom in to particular streets or buildings, or zoom out to get a global view of the city’s layout. Tap on a building to get a data sheet on the structure, which includes the building’s history, photos, and where appropriate, phone numbers or opening times (like a museum).
Type a destination, and you zoom across the 3D city to see it.
You can to highlight particular categories of buildings — hotels and restaurants, for example, which show up color coded on the 3D map, making them easy to spot in a global view. The app is GPS-enabled, so you just tap a button to get directions. Street names are overlaid.
Performance looks fantastic. It renders better than Google maps. The demo looks like it was filmed on a iPhone emulator running on a developer computer. But if performance is as good on a real iPhone, it’ll be killer.
The app has just been submitted to the iTunes App store and should be available soon pending Apple’s approval.
The developer, Newscape Technology, claims it took twenty man-years of R&D over a four year period to develop, and is the first in a series of city guides.
If you’ve never published a photo book using iPhoto’s built-in book publishing system, you should. They’re gorgeous. It’s amazing how your digital pictures take on new life when printed on the glossy pages of a bound book.
There’s now the option to print a larger hard-cover book measuring 10 inches by 13 inches, thanks to an iPhoto 8.1 software update. Until now, the largest book option was standard 11 inches by 8.5 inches.
The iPhoto ’09 update also adds new holiday cards and three new travel-oriented book themes.
Be warned: the update weighs 161MB. It is available to iPhoto ’09 users via Software Update.
Another screencast for your information and entertainment. If you want to know more, you can grab a copy of Radio Gaga from here.
And that station playing French pop from the 50s and 60s is Radio Oh-la-la, and if you couldn’t listen to it for free on the web, it’d almost be worth buying Radio Gaga for that alone. Maybe.
Bare Bones, the veteran Mac software company and producer of Yojimbo and BBEdit, has announced some changes to its product roster.
File utility Super Get Info is to be discontinued. There will be no further development, and support for the final release (1.3.1) will cease at the end of this year.
And Mailsmith, the plain-text mail client first released in 1998, is to be made freeware and will no longer be a Bare Bones official product.
Mailsmith’s new home will be at Stickshift software, owned and run by Bare Bones boss Rich Siegel. Who is, we should point out, remaining in charge at Bare Bones; the software remains the same, it’s just the details of who owns it that changes. Rich will now have two hats to distribute software under. (We’ve emailed him some supplementary questions for a little more detail; this post will be updated when we get a reply.) (See after the jump for additional comment.)
What does this mean for Bare Bones’ premium products, BBEdit and Yojimbo? More frequent updates, perhaps? One or two new apps, maybe? We’ll have to wait and see. I’m rather hoping for both.
Never use your iPhone for incriminating or embarrassing emails you might not want others to see.
CoM reader Matt Janssen has just found a bug in the iPhone’s 3.x software that allows deleted email to be retrieved.
In other words, the iPhone and iPod Touch’s Mail app doesn’t properly delete email. Erased email messages can be easily retrieved using a simple search with the iPhone’s built-in search tool.
“Obviously this is could be a major security issue if you think you deleted something from your iPod but it’s not really deleted,” says Janssen. “You can still search through messages that are deleted. And this isn’t messages that are just recent. I found some messages that are over three or four months old.”
The bug could reveal embarrassing email sent or received by cheating spouses, or messages that kids don’t want their parents to see. It’s present in the software for both the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Janssen has made a video to demonstrate the bug. In the video, Janssen creates an email in a standard POP account, sends it to himself and then deletes it. The message appears to be gone from his inbox, but he’s able to retrieve it using the iPhone’s Search function. Janssen has to search for the deleted message twice. On first try, the Mail app crashes and sends him back to the Home screen. But on the second try, the message is retrieved and displayed. It even retrieves messages that are deleted from the server.
“Hopefully Apple will fix it in some later releases,” says Janssen.
The software wowed at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in June by proving the iPhone could be a platform for industrial-strength software like a turn-by-turn navigation system.
TomTom’s app offers the usual GPS features: route planning, turn-by-turn voice instructions, 6 million points of interest, and auto re-routing if a turn is missed.
But it also boasts tight integration with the iPhone, including pinching and zooming of maps, automatic rotation between portrait and landscape modes, and tight integration with the iPhone’s contact list (tap a contact and the software finds the quickest route to them).
The App also includes TomTom IQ Routes, a smart route-finding feature that recommends routes based on popular driving patterns.
Be warned: the App and it maps weigh in at a whopping 1.21GB. And at $99, the software is more expensive than rivals like CoPilot Live ($34.99), Sygic Mobile Maps ($39.99) or Google’s free Map app; but it doesn’t require a monthly service fee, like AT&T’s Navigator, which adds $10 a month on your phone bill as long as you use the app.
An optional car mount kit (pricing has not yet been announced) includes iPhone charging, a GPS-boosting antenna, a speaker for turn-by-turn instructions, and a microphone for hands-free dialing and Voice Command. The mount kit can be used in horizontal and landscape orientations.
The TomTom app is compatible with the iPhone 3G and 3GS. It is available on iTunes in four versions:
What it is:iRealBook is an iPhone and iPod Touch compatible version of the iconic Real Book, a venerable “fake book” that has been the music bible for jazz musicians and vocalists for many years. A repository of chord sheets for some 700+ Jazz standards, Jazz classics, Latin and Brazilian classics and more, the Real Book has long been an indispensable tool for professional Jazz artists and students alike.
Why it’s cool:iRealBook (iTunes link) improves on the paper copy by providing chord charts of every song in the catalogue, each of which can be easily transposed to any key. Where the physical copy of the Real Book provides only sheet music with standard notation in the originally written or recorded key, this iPhone version gives players easy-to-read, chord-based notation that fits on a single screen, in extra large fonts that make the sheets easy to read in both profile and landscape modes. It even offers a “Night View” with white text over a black background that makes charts legible on darkened bandstands. Songs in the catalogue can be browsed by style or composer when a user is stumped for ideas, and the developer, Massimo Biolcati invites requests for additions to the database.
Where to get it: iRealBook is available on the iTunes App Store for $7.99 and is worth every penny for the jazz and standards aficionado who wants to have the critical oeuvre at hand on the go.
System X, an Xserve G5 supercomputing cluster. CC-licensed pic by Christopher Bowns: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cipherswarm/2414578959/in/photostream/
Google’s Eric Schmidt “resigned” from Apple’s board because Chrome and Android were encroaching on Apple’s core business, or so Steve Jobs says.
But what if the opposite were true? What if Apple is encroaching on Google’s core business?
Later this month, Apple is expected to break ground on a massive new data center in Maiden, North Carolina.
In terms of size, Apple’s data center is as big as they come.
“Apple is planning about 500,000 square feet of data center space in a single building,” says Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge. “That would place it among the largest data centers in the world… This would qualify as a big-ass data center.”
Question is, what will Apple use it for? Apple’s plans are secret, of course, and some have speculated it’s to support Apple’s growing MobileMe business and online iTunes stores.
But Miller says the size of the data center hints at something else. Companies building centers this big are getting into cloud computing. Running apps in the cloud requires massive infrastructure: Google-size infrastructure.
“The companies that are building the biggest data centers tend to also have the biggest cloud ambitions,” says Miller.
Google Chrome 4.0 Beta is the fastest webrowser on the planet, CNet claims.
In benchmark tests, the new Chrome beta smoked Safari, rendering JavaScript 34% percent faster.
“It completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in just 657ms. Only 4 per cent faster than its PC brother, sure, but 34 per cent faster than Safari 4.0.3, which scored 886ms on the same 2.0GHz Intel MacBook.”
In the same test, Firefox version 3.5.2 on OS X scored 1,508ms and Opera 10 beta 3 scored 5,958ms, CNet says.
JavaScript rendering is important because developers are using it more and more to add bells and whistles to websites. CNet cautions though that the software is alpha, and will be retested against Safari when the final version ships in several months.
And while speed is important, the browser is nowhere ready for public consumption. “Chrome for Mac is still riddled with bugs,” says CNet. “Big ones, like those spiders in Eight Legged Freaks, only even more hellacious.”
Apple is planning a special media event for the week of September 7, MediaMemo reports, citing “multiple music industry sources.”
But Apple won’t tell anyone exactly when the event is. Apple always holds keynote presentations on Tuesdays, so the likeliest date is September 8.
Apple has held a keynote event every September for the last four years to introduce its consumer-focused holiday offerings, typically new iPods and new versions of iTunes.
At this event though, Apple could be introducing several things:
* Cocktail: The presence of multiple music execs suggests a music focus. Apple’s rumored Cocktail project is a secret skunkworks rethink of the LP for the digital age. But it is rumored to be part of the secret tablet project though…
* The Tablet: Many expect the fabled Apple tablet as early as September.
* New iPods: New iPod Nano and iPod Touch with cameras. This seems the most likely.
* iTunes 9: The next version of iTunes is tipped to get Blu-ray, social software support and iPhone app organization. Also seems likely.
* Steve Jobs: Will Jobs make his first public appearance since returning from medical leave?
Outlook is coming to the Mac, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit said on Thursday. The next version of Office for Mac will replace Entourage for Mac with a new application – Outlook for Mac.
Is this good news or bad? I hate Entourage, but I hated Outlook on Windows even more when I had to use a PC. In fact, Outlook is my second-most hated program of all time, right behind Lotus Notes.
Outlook for Mac will be included in Office 2010 for Mac, which Microsoft said will be ready for the holidays next year. (Apple has promised better Exchange support in Snow Leopard. It’s likely that Microsoft announced Outlook so far in advance to discourage current Entourage users from switching to the new Exchange-compatible version of Apple Mail coming in Snow Leopard).
It will include:
* A new database and Exchange protocol. Database supports Time Machine backups and Spotlight searching — finally!!!!
* Better cross-platform collaboration and calendering.
* Built from the ground up in Cocoa to offer better performance, better OS X integration, and get this, “make Outlook beautiful,” said said Eric Wilfrid, general manager for the MacBU.
No word on whether Outlook for Mac will be compatible with PST files exported from Windows versions of Outlook, which are a bear to import into other email programs.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is reducing the number of versions of Office it offers from three to two. Alongside the Standard Edition, it is now offering Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition, which bundles Entourage Web Services Edition and Microsoft Document Connection for Mac.
It will be sold alongside the current Standard Edition for the same price: $399, or $239 to upgrade. It is available to some customers today as a download or on Sept. 15. in shrinkwrap.
Sling Media has submitted an update to its groovy SlingPlayer Mobile app for iPhone that promises, among other things, true 16:9 widescreen support and, in markets not saddled with an exclusive AT&T service provider’s agreement, TV streaming over 3G.
Slingbox owners with DISH Network will also be able to navigate using a touch-supported native browser, instead of pushing through the TV-standard browsing screen being streamed in by the current version of the app.
Of course, the upgrade must first be approved by the App Store review overlords, and by now it’s well known what a capricious bet that can be. Sling Media has submitted a version for use outside of the US that would allow for streaming over a 3G connection, according to reports, and it’s no certainty Apple will approve such functionality for its customers abroad, either.
What is certain is that, regardless what Apple may feel about streaming TV over 3G, the specter of AT&T’s exclusive service agreement in the iPhone’s largest market effectively prevents US consumers from realizing the full potential of Apple’s inventiveness.
I am a sad panda today. As you may or may not have noticed, three quarters of my big post on Apple vanished when I fixed a typo.
Why? Because I was using Blogpress, an iPhone blogging app that I had been enjoying. Here’s the thing: Blogpress has a show-stopping bug. It doesn’t correctly interpret the tags we use for jumps.
Which is pretty inexcusable. But rather than talk about how Blogpress is deeply frustrating and ruined my morning, I thought I’d make this a positive thing. Tell us what the best iPhone blog apps are. Whichever we like best will get some positive coverage, and we might even document the whole bake-off process. Developers with promo codes, bring it on.
Here are the requirements for the app:
— WordPress compatible
— Landscape keyboard
— Can edit in HTML and WYSIWYG
— Recognizes tags
— Handles categories and post management
Here’s a blog after my own heart: Minimal Mac is devoted to keeping your Mac as simple as can be, something I strive to do as far as possible.
A few minutes browsing Minimal Mac shows me I’ve still got a long way to go. I thought my desktop was minimal:
…but it turns out that real purists wouldn’t care for all that junk in the Menu Bar. If you aspire to proper minimalism, you need to have a Menu Bar more like this:
By kind permission of Harry Vangberg, harry.vangberg.name
Here’s a game that 3D Realms has actually shipped. Duke Nukem 3D, the classic first-person-shooter from the mid ’90s, is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
3D Realms is famous of course for not shipping games. It’s follow-up to Duke Nukem — Duke Nukem Forever – has been promised for more than a decade, earning a top slot on Wired.com’s Vaporware awards year after year.
Duke Nukem 3D is a simple port of the 13-year-old game. It’s pixely and low res — but who’d want it any different? The controls are a little difficult to master, according to reviews on iTunes, which are generally favorable. Players are reveling in gaming nostalgia.
The Internet has lately played host to a near-infinite amount of fol-de-rol regarding a rather silly post from Weblogs, Inc. and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis in which he railed against Apple’s recent paranoia. There’s plenty wrong with the gist of his argument (as Leander points out in this rather nice post), as well as a few things that are right on.
But I’m not here to dwell on that. I just want to make one thing very clear: what makes Apple great is not what it puts into its products. It’s what gets left out. As exciting as visions of flying iPhones with 8 sim slots, a Zip disk slot, and dual head-mounted displays might seem, the original iPhone (and iPod, for that matter) became iconic because of its limitations — not in spite of them. Innovation, contrary to Calacanis, is often more about editing than possibility. Apple, more than most companies, is defined by its unwillingness to do too much. The greatest design impact is in what we can’t see.
Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller took the time to craft a lengthy, detailed statement of the company’s position with respect to criticism leveled Wednesday by this site and others, over the App Store review process Matchstick Software’s Ninjawords application endured on its way to appearing as a 17+ rated selection on the iTunes App Store in mid-July.
As it had been initially reported on Tuesday evening at Daring Fireball, Apple “required” Ninjawords — an iPhone dictionary app that delivers Wiktionary.org content to iPhone and iPod Touch users — to censor certain vulgar content in order to gain approval as a title in the App Store, and yet the company still gave the app a 17+ rating, which requires purchasers to provide proof of age before they can purchase apps so rated.
In a response published Thursday to Daring Fireball author John Gruber, Schiller clarified certain facts and the chain of events that led up to Ninjawords finally appearing on the App Store after having first been rejected by Apple review staff. As Gruber acknowledged Thursday, in actuality, Apple reviewers merely suggested that Matchstick Software developers wait to re-submit their application until Apple had in place Parental Controls (ie: 17+ ratings) on the App Store and in no way suggested that content on the app had to be censored in order to gain Apple’s approval for sale.
Because Parental Controls were not yet available at the time Matchstick wanted to take its product to market, the developers acted of their own accord to censor the app’s content, hoping it would thereby pass Apple’s review process.
As Gruber wrote, “it really came down to bad timing around the launch of parental controls.”
Matchstick spokesman Phil Crosby told Gruber via email, “17+ ratings were not available when we launched, which means at that time, it was simply not possible for our dictionary to be on the App Store without being censored. Given the options of censoring or sitting on the side lines while our competitors ate our lunch, we chose to launch.”
All in all, one can take it as a good sign that Apple cares enough about public perception of the App Store and its often-criticized review policies for Schiller to explain the company’s position so clearly as he did to Gruber.
It’s even better to know that Apple finds — as Schiller put it — “Wiktionary.org is an open, ever-changing resource and filtering the content does not seem reasonable or necessary.”
If you’re running Leopard, hit Command + Shift + 4 and then the space bar, and you’ll see an icon of a camera that harks back to Steve Jobs’s days at NeXT.
The decades-old icon is one of the last visible vestiges of NeXTStep, the old operating system that laid the foundation for OS X in the late ’90s.
The camera icon looks dated, but it’s pretty good by today’s standards. Look at some of the Windows icons from the same period.
The NeXTStep camera can be found in the Resources of the Grab tool (in the Utilities folder) and comes in several different versions with eyes, stopwatches and camera flashes.
Other holdovers from NeXT in Leopard include various system sounds, including Basso, Frog, Funk, Ping, Pop, and Tink, as one commenter notes at Robojamie.net, which first pointed out the camera icon.
And as another commenter says, there’s another old icon in: /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/NSMultipleFiles.tiff
It doesn’t seem to be used anywhere though.
Steve Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 after he was booted from Apple. He had the company build advanced workstations, hoping to drive Apple out of business. But its black magnesium NeXT Cubes were too expensive except for select clients in academia and the CIA. NeXT eventualy dropped the hardware to concentrate on the its state-of-the-art software and operating system, which Apple bought in 1996 as the foundation for the Mac OS.
Apple got a lot from NeXT: Jobs came on as an adviser, and eventually took on the CEO role. A lot of Apple’s top executives came from NeXT and so did lot of its technology. As well as basing OS X on NeXTStep, Apple has built a lot of its online offerings on NeXT’s WebObjects, including its first online store, the iTunes Music Store, its DotMac website and the iPhone App Store.
I’d sent a follow-up question, asking Newsgator’s VP of Marketing about the expected pricing structure; here’s the answer, directly from Brent Simmons himself.
“The switch to in-app ads for NetNewsWire is not to make up for lost revenue from NewsGator Online nor is it about the economy.
“It’s common for consumer products to feature free, ad-supported versions and paid, ad-free versions. For example, Tweetie and Twitterrific — two very popular Twitter clients, as you know — offer free and paid versions. And FeedDemon, our RSS reader for Windows, has had ads for some time.
“This strategy gives people the chance to still use the app for free — while still giving a company a way to make money, which is a good thing. We felt the time was right to do follow this strategy with NetNewsWire. So there will be a free ad-supported version, and soon we will release a paid, ad-free version. (The two will have the same features: the only difference will be the ads.)
“We haven’t finalized pricing yet, but we’re looking at a range of $15 to $20, with special introductory pricing at first.”
So there you have it. Will you pay 15 to 20 bucks to remove ads from NetNewsWire? Your thoughts, as always, are welcomed.
