software - page 36

Just one day after earning congratulations for pulling the developer’s license of a prolific producer of useless (and possibly copyright-infringing) applications, propriety demands Apple receive a major Bronx cheer for the way the company treated Matchstick software and their Ninjawords iPhone Dictionary application.

The degree of censorship and hassle Apple forced Matchstick developers to endure in order to get their nifty $2 app listed on the App Store, as reported Tuesday at Daring Fireball, is simply unconscionable.

In recent weeks, Cult of Mac has reported a number of stories showing many holes in the tattered shroud of respectability with which Apple attempts to proclaim the innocence and purity of all things that might ever appear on the iPhone. The tale behind Ninjawords’ (iTunes link) tribulations would seem to set Apple’s high-water mark for institutional hypocrisy to date.

As Daring Fireball author John Gruber put it so well: Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.

For Shame.

Ready to head-butt your Mac from the onslaught of everyday annoyances?

Use it for something better: emWave is a handy stress reducer just released in a Mac version that charts your heart rate and trains you to relax.

It’s the brainchild of Doc Childre, who founded a company called HeartMath in 1991 to create medi-gadgets for people seeking relief from stress and looking for greater mental clarity.

What is it?
Billed as a “Stress Relief System,” it promises big but comes in a small package.  You get an ear sensor for your heart rate that plugs into a USB key and a software program that monitors your heart rhythms and breathing, plus a CD training guide.  Initially unimpressed, after taking emWave through its paces for 10 days, I’m convinced nirvana may be something other than a band.

Details and full review after the jump.

What, you may be wondering, is going on over at Newsgator?

In a recent statement, the company (which owns NetNewsWire, the desktop RSS reader that pretty much defined the category on OS X) announced a fundamental change to its service: from August 31st, it will switch off the web-based RSS reader known as Newsgator Online for consumer users.

Newsgator’s existing desktop apps, including NetNewsWire, will continue to work. But if you want them to sync with other RSS readers, you’ll have to have a Google Account and do it via Google Reader, which will become your web-based viewer, replacing Newsgator Online.

And all this, of course, has consequences for users of NetNewsWire. A new public beta is out now, which supports the Google-based sync.

It also includes ads, distributed via The Deck. This last change has not been trumpeted with quite as much enthusiasm by Newsgator – advertising is not mentioned at all in the blog post that announced the changes.

Cult of Mac got in touch with NetNewsWire’s developer and mastermind, Brent Simmons, to ask him: what’s going on? And why the ads?

Here’s what he said.

Apple on Friday afternoon released a firmware patch for the iPhone to fix a dangerous SMS security hole.

The 3.0.1 firmware update is available now through iTunes. The 300MB update is available for the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. It doesn’t appear to contain any other features or bug fixes except for the SMS patch, according to Apple’s security advisory.

As previously reported, noted security experts Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner revealed a major security exploit in the iPhone’s SMS system on Thursday at the 2009 Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas.

The exploit takes advantage of memory hole in the SMS system, allowing hackers root access to the device. Programs could theoretically be sent to any iPhone, through multiple SMS messages if necessary, and take over all functions, including the camera, phone and microphone. The only indication of the hack would be a SMS message containing a single square character.

Miller and Mulliner reportedly chose to reveal the exploit, which is applicable to all mobile platforms including iPhone OS, Android and Windows Mobile, at Black Hat after Apple had been unresponsive in the wake of their showing it to company officials earlier in July.

Looks like Apple woke up fast. The patch was issued in about 24 hours.

UPDATE: Google also patched its Android system on Friday, and Microsoft says it is investigating, according to BusinessWeek. To be fair, Microsoft was just informed of the vulnerability, while Apple was warned weeks ago, which may explain the speed of its patch.

Apple took one more step toward fully integrating the iPhone platform into MobileMe Wednesday, making a free MobileMe iDisk application available for download on the iTunes App Store.

Members of Apple’s $99 per year cloud computing service will be able to use the iDisk app on their iPhone or iPod Touch to view files stored on an iDisk; access Public folders; easily share files from an iPhone using integrated email links; quickly access recently viewed files and view iPhone-supported file types-including iWork, Office, PDF, QuickTime and more. Files larger than 20MB may not be viewable.

The iPhone jailbreak community, famous for stepping into the breach when Apple’s incomprehensible App Store approval process fails to give users what they want, now offers GV Mobile on Cydia, just one day after Apple thumbed its nose at Google Voice apps for the iPhone.

While some outlets remain comfortable blaming AT&T for Apple’s rejection of Google Voice apps, despite the fact that it’s demonstrably wrong to do so, the jailbreak community was pleased to offer up developer Sean Kovacs’ GV Mobile app, which had been available on the App Store before being yanked in the larger decision to separate Apple from Google with respect to voice services.

Google itself has a Voice app, presently in beta and available by invitation only, but Kovacs’ GV Mobile brings the power of Google’s revolutionary voice product to the iPhone, allowing users to:

* dial numbers via the iPhone address book or typing on the keypad
* Full SMS support (view historic, reply, send new)
* retrieve and delete recent call history
* playback and delete voicemails
* take calls from different phones other than your iPhone
* enable or disable the phones that Google Voice forwards calls to
* add or delete phones that Google Voice forwards call to.

Users must already have a Google Voice account and a working wireless phone plan in order to take advantage of the app’s features, but it seems clear – with millions of numbers in reserve and broad interest in the convenience and configurability of Google’s Voice product – some may find access to GV Mobile something worth jailbreaking their phone for.

Add one more to the list of classic Mac apps making a comeback on the iPhone. MetaTools, famous for the legendary PhotoShop plug-in suite Kai’s Power Tools, has brought goofy photo manipulation back in the form of Making Faces (App Store link), an adaptation of its wacky classic Power Goo.

I haven’t tested it yet, but I used to rock Power Goo on my dad’s Performa 6115. In retrospect, it would have worked way better with multitouch than it did with a mouse. Ah, sweet memories. Like almost everything else on the App Store, it’s $2.99.

Via Techbeat

For the second time in less than a week, news has leaked that Apple has rejected a Google app for the iPhone. First was the location-awareness tool Google Latitude (which is fun but just as good in a browser), and today came word that the official app for Google Voice has been turned down. Worse, two prior client apps for Google Voice, GV Mobile and Voice Central, have both been withdrawn from the App Store (though it appears Apple hasn’t deleted them from users’ phones; yet).

All of this is incredibly puzzling. Nothing has happened suddenly today that suggests in any way that Apple suddenly discovered new information that disqualified GV Mobile (which was approved personally by Phil Schiller) and Voice Central from sale. And this antagonism toward Google in general is deeply troubling. Yes, the official Google Voice app includes a dialer, as do the other apps, which technically replicates functionality on the iPhone. But so does Skype, and it’s still on sale. Apple also cited duplicate functionality as reason to reject Latitude, but no one sophisticated enough to use Latitude could possibly confuse it with the built-in Maps program.

And it’s all fairly pointless, anyway, because all of the functionality Apple might be obstructing by holding these apps back is available through Mobile Safari right now. Latitude is currently functional through a custom web app, and the Google Voice website can place calls and send free texts from the iPhone. It could use a new interface, but the full capability of the technology is there — I called my wife with it, and it works perfectly. Screenshot’s from my phone.

No, something else is going on here. And as I see it, it’s one of two possibilities. The first is that Apple is finally starting to feel some heat from Android (I know it’s ridiculous, but hear me out) and wants to prevent Google from dominating two mobile platforms. Actually, I’ll just reject this one. If Apple wants to stay ahead of Android, there’s no better tactic than to get great Google apps on the iPhone.

So that leaves the other alternative, spelled AT&T. We know, with some certainly that Ma Bell is the reason that SlingPlayer only works over WiFi on the iPhone, and we know that it, not Apple, wanted Skype kept off of 3G. Worse, we know that AT&T’s battered 3G network is struggling to keep up with the incredible data traffic generated by iPhones. Now, Google Voice isn’t data intensive, but it does allow you to send free text messages (AT&T charges 20 cents a pop) and insanely cheap international calling (India is 7 cents a minute, a full two cents cheaper than Skype). When your network is in trouble, you might as well make sure people don’t find ways to get around your punitive fees, right?

Now, if this were AT&T’s app store, I wouldn’t have a problem with the carrier dictating which apps were approved and which weren’t. But this is supposed to be Apple’s show. Worse, other phones on the AT&T network are allowed to get Google Voice, full SlingPlayer and other functionality that is being held off the iPhone for fear of the traffic burden. If AT&T is behind this, I understand it, but I’m incredibly frustrated. If Apple’s hand is on the switch, I have serious doubts about the company’s ability to hold onto a developer community much longer.

TechCrunch: Apple is Growing Rotten to the Core

TUAW: GV Mobile and Voice Control Pulled from App Store

Apple Screws Google Over ‘Latitude’ iPhone App

Are you on an iDiet?

If you really want to move your dieting practice into the modern age, you may want to check out The Connected Scale from Withings, a WiFi-enabled scale that sports a free companion iPhone app (iTunes link) that will give you access to information about your weight and body-fat percentages over the course of time, all viewable in table and graph form – and accessible from the Internet.

Now, there’s a password you’ll want to keep secure.

UPDATE: Withings informs CoM the Connected Scale will be available to US Customers in September at a retail price $159 USD, on their website (https://www.withings.com/). And yes, it can display weight in pounds.

Apple’s iTunes – the only online music distributor that matters, according to one well-placed music lawyer – may get additional competition before year-end, if an exclusive Wired report published Monday proves accurate.

Spotify, a music service boasting over 6 million songs that can be accessed on-demand and customized into personalized, editable, downloadable playlists, is currently available only in Europe but the company is feverishly working to sign distribution agreements with copyright holders and music labels to bring both a desktop and an iPhone application to American consumers as soon as possible, according to the report.

Spotify’s potential to compete with iTunes in the US remains speculative at this point, and the company understands that despite having created a slick iPhone app to which Wired writer Eliot Van Buskirk gives rave pre-release reviews, Apple could put the kibosh on the whole thing if it determines Spotify “replicates functionality” provided by Apple’s native iTunes application. “It’s going to be very interesting to see if Apple lets this through or sees us as competition — fingers crossed,” explained Spotify communications manager Jim Butcher.

Whether or not the iPhone app is approved, when the company gets its US distribution agreements in order it seems likely that many will check out some of the interesting features the desktop service will have to offer, such as the ability to stream playlists created by other Spotify members and to access an ad-free version of the service with a premium account.

It will be interesting, too, to see how Spotify differs from and compares with Lala, another iTunes competitor with great potential already available in the US.

Cordell Ratzlaff is the man who designed OS X’s interface for Steve Jobs.

Back in 1997, just after Jobs had returned to the ailing company, he saw some mockups for a new operating system interface Ratzlaff and his designers had cooked up.

Jobs was so impressed, he said it was the “first sign of double-digit intelligence” he’d seen since returning to Apple – Jobs’s idea of a complement.

At the time, computer interfaces were dark and gloomy. They were boxy, with hard corners, square windows and gloomy, grey colors. Apple was working on the first iMac, the world’s first fruity-colored computer that had a unique teardrop shape and lots of rounded corners.

Taking the iMac as their cue, Ratzlaff and his designers cooked up an interface to complement it. The result was “Aqua,” an interface inspired by water, as its name suggests, which was bright and blue, with plenty of droplets, translucent menus and reflection effects.

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them,” said Jobs when introducing it at Macworld.

Now Ratzlaff has designed the interface for a new web-based investing tool called Kapitall.

Apple is introducing dozens of arty new desktop backgrounds in Snow Leopard, the new version of OS X due in the fall.

There are 40 new desktops  in the latest test seed delivered to developers this weekend, including reproductions of famous paintings from artists like Edward Hopper, Van Gogh and Monet.

The new desktops include:

* Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Monet’s Lilies, Hopper’s Nighthawks, Degas’ Ballet Dancers on the Stage, and Katsushika Hokusai’s Tsunami.

* Three graffiti desktops that will make your computer look like a New York subway car circa 1978.

* Several high-res shots of snow leopards, including the one above.

The art is classic, but the themes struck me at odds with Apple’s optimistic image: madness, loneliness, alienation and death. I don;t know if I want my files hanging out with Hopper’s lonely souls.

All 40 Snow Leopard desktops after the jump.

Now, if I worked in a proper office with a bunch of other people, this app would probably have pride of place on my iPhone’s dock.

It’s called Tea Round, and it’s a work of genius. You enter the names of everyone in your office, then simply give it a shake every time the decision is made that a cup of tea is called for.

Tea Round decides whose turn it is, and the named individual must go and make the tea. After all, “Tea Round’s decision is final and legally binding.”

You can even have separate tea rounds for work, home, and anywhere else there might be a need for a group of people to have a cup of tea. Right now the app is free, which makes it almost as awesome as tea itself.

Unfortunately I work alone, at home, and it is always my turn to make the tea. That is both a blessing and a curse.

All this Moon landing nostalgia is wonderful and I’m enjoying every minute of it, especially We Choose The Moon and the CAPCOM and EAGLE Twitter accounts — anyway.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you could make it as an astronaut, here’s the ultimate test: Virtual AGC for Mac.

Another little screencast for you, this time about PersonalBrain, a mind-mapping tool. I recently spent some time exploring this app and found it an odd mix of the infuriating and the fascinating.

The screencast I refer to, about the guy with 100,000 items in his PersonalBrain, is here.

Like I say in the video, PersonalBrain doesn’t really appeal to me; but if you use it, I’d be interested to hear what for, and why you like using it.

Are you a Gmail person? With more than one @gmail.com account? Thought so. How many times have you thought how much you like Gmail but felt frustrated by one aspect or another of the limits (mostly time and productivity-oriented) imposed by working with email in a web browser?

Yup. Well, guess what? There’s an app for that.

Mailplane brings Gmail to your Mac desktop and unleashes power and productivity you’ve only wished for in Google’s excellent mail product.

We’re only just now checking Mailplane out, but with support for:

# Drag and drop attachments
# Multiple Gmail accounts
# New mail notifications
# Easy screenshot sending
# Gmail shortcuts
# Integration with OmniFocus,

our first impressions are that Mailplane is well worth giving a more extensive test drive. It’s got a 30 day free trial and we’ll be giving you our more extensive review in about a month.

If you check Mailplane out, be sure to let us know what you think about it in comments.

Everyone’s favorite yummy mummy and sleb chef, Nigella Lawson, has just “succumbed” (as she puts it), and bought herself an iPhone.

To store recipes, perhaps? No.

To take photos of her magnificent meals and upload them to the net? No.

To Twitter her celebrity lifestyle to fellow celeb Twitterers? No.

No, none of these. It turns out that Nigella’s fave app is White Noise, which she uses to lull herself to sleep.

Here’s a neat little iPhone app for all you typography nerds: Typography Manual is a pocket reference book for everything you could wish to remember about fonts and typefaces.

Better still, it’s more than a reference book. It’s a toolbox as well, with a font size calculator, em calculator, conversion tables for switching inches and millimetres into points and picas, and a list of HTML character codes. If none of those things mean a thing to you, don’t buy Typography Manual. But if they do, you might find it hard to resist. It’s only five bucks.

My favorite review is the last one on the testimonials page: “One of only a handful of programs I’ve seen on the iPhone that hyphenate properly.” (And yes, I know I’m using straight quote marks there. I know, I know.)

Image credit: Randy Stewart

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.
– David Bowie

One day, people may point to an article published Monday at PCMag.com (perhaps the preeminent Windows-foucused tech magazine around) by long-time Apple-baiting columnist John C. Dvorak, as a signal for the storming of Microsoft’s figurative Bastille.

“If I was going to buy a new laptop this minute, a MacBook Pro is probably what I’d get,” are words almost no tech watcher of the past 20 years would ever figure to come from Dvorak, the smart, engaging veteran columnist who has taken over the years a nearly perverse glee in stirring up the bee hive of Apple loyalists in tech journalism.

But that’s exactly what Dvorak had to say after seeing first-hand “all these whiz-bang features” of his son’s brand-new MacBook Pro that, he said, “make me realize that I have fallen behind.”

But don’t go thinking Dvorak has fully consumed the kool-aid or that his enmity for Apple will abate completely anytime soon. The real reason he’s kindly disposed to an Apple product at this point, aside from “that hard aluminum unibody that makes the thing feel like a rock,” is a piece of software his son required, DEVONthink, which organizes and sorts PDF files into manageable database blocks – and has no Windows-based counterpart. “It’s about as close to a killer Apple app as anything I’ve seen since VisiCalc in the late ’70s,” he gushed.

Of course no Dvorak piece would be complete without a pointed jab at something Apple, and he dutifully reported his son’s experience at the Apple Store as something akin to “a car dealership in the ’70s, with layers of various salespeople, each trying to screw you.”

“I actually think that the Apple Stores are barriers to sales, and people only buy Macs because the machines have clearly moved ahead in genuine usefulness,” he wrote, saying, “overall, it’s a pathetic indictment of the entire PC scene.”

Well, perhaps it’s a reach to tar the entire PC scene with the same brush, but clearly change is in the air and more and more people such as Dvorak’s kid are coming around to just how far Apple machines have moved ahead.

It’s at least a bright sign that someone like Dvorak has finally noticed.

Here’s a quick follow-up to my last Camino screencast. In this short video, I’ll show you how to get a little more control over your windows and tabs while using Camino.

More screencasts are forthcoming. Got a topic you’d like to see covered? If I know something about them, I’ll be happy to explore your suggested topics. Give me a shout in the comments.

If you’re looking for an interesting portal into the iTunes App Store’s 65,000+ titles with as little risk as possible, www.appgiveaway.com may be a resource worth checking out.

The website, which launched this spring and is gaining traffic steadily, posts descriptions of 5 – 8 apps per day in different categories (games, entertainment, utilities, business, etc.) and gives promo codes away randomly to users who register and indicate their interest in particular apps.

The site was originally conceived as a marketing vehicle for app developers, with the enticement for iPhone and iPod Touch users who like the idea of possibly getting a paid app for free.

“We seek out developers and they also find us,” said Al Lijee, an AppGiveAway spokesman, adding, “Developers have been kind and posted us in forums and are linking back to us from their websites.”

Posted apps currently get between 40 – 70 people registering for promo giveaways, Lijee told Cult of Mac, and the site gives away around 30 codes for each app it features.

What it is: Daisy Disk is Mac utility software that, sadly works only on machines running OS 10.5 and later, because it’s the kind of thing that could make you want to investigate your hard disk daily.

Why it’s cool: The interface is just plain awesome. Daisy Disk scans any mounted disk and displays it on a beautiful sunburst map, where segments mean files and folders, and are displayed proportionally to their sizes.

The map is easy to read and navigate and lets you quickly preview any file and reveal it in Finder to delete.

It’s essentially like running the Mac’s built-in disk utility on your volume, but where’s the fun in that?

Where to get it: Download a free 15 day trial version or buy it outright for $19.95 from the secure online Daisy Disk store.

Screenshots after the jump.

[Thanks mustardhamsters]

Download the free Barnes and Noble App (iTunes link) for iPhone or iPod Touch and for a limited time you can get a free Tall iced or hot coffee at any Barnes and Noble cafe, just by showing your device running the app to a cafe server.

Limit one coffee per device.

[Thanks, iphonespaz]

Ocado is one of the UK’s classier supermarkets. It’s online-only (although closely linked to meatspace retailer Waitrose) and most people would probably say it appeals to the better-off kind of shopper.

It’s also, as of this week, a pioneer of iPhone shopping. The free Ocado app does a few clever things that the other big retailers might want to keep a close eye on when they finally get round to building apps of their own.

What it is: Pix Remix is a new iPhone app from Bay Area-based Jump Associates and Originate Labs that lets you turn photos – taken with or stored on your iPhone – into slideshows, collages, and interesting pan & zoom presentations — and makes it incredibly easy and intuitive to share them in email or post them to Twitter and Facebook from right within the app.

Why it’s cool: Impressive for an initial release, Pix Remix is loaded with effective tools for personalizing your photo shows, with built-in transitions including fade/dissolve, push, drop and spin out; and the collage function makes it easy to drag, resize and bring photos to the front or back. The pan and zoom function lets you become an instant documentarian, guiding your viewers’ eyes from one spot to another on individual pictures, zooming in to a special detail area. Text can be added to give photos captions or tell a story about your show.

Once you’ve got your photo show together, Pix Remix makes it easy to share in email or to post to your Twitter page or your Facebook profile. Email recipients have the option of viewing your work on a web page or within the Pix Remix app on their iPhone; updates to your Twitter status automatically append a bit.ly url that sends viewers to the Pix Remix web page for your show; shows can be posted directly to your Facebook profile, where your contacts can view your creations right within Facebook, without ever having to leave the site.

Pix Remix is so intuitive and easy to use, I made my first collage and sent it to myself in email while I sat on the porcelain throne in my office during my morning constitutional today!

Where to get it: Pix Remix is available now on the iTunes App Store; it sells for $2.99.

Important Disclosure: Cult of Mac contributor Pete Mortensen is the communications lead at Jump Associates and works in the firm’s growth strategy consulting business. He was involved in the original brainstorming sessions that led to the development of Pix Remix but was in no way affiliated with the writing of this product review, nor did his association with Cult of Mac influence the author’s use of the application or his conclusions regarding its quality or value.