I suppose it had to happen.
If you’ve been online since forever, you’ll remember the Hot or Not meme that was briefly that year’s Lolcats, until something more interesting came along.
But Hot or Not has continued to be hot (or not) ever since. And now you can download the Hot or Not app to your iPhone.
Or you could not.
A new Trojan Horse is currently hidden in pirated copies of Apple’s iWork ’09 available via various BitTorrent tracker sites, according to a marketing pitch, uh, report from security software manufacturer Intego.
While the pirated software is complete and functional, the installer contains a “bonus” called iWorkServices.pkg. This software is installed as a startup item where it has read-write-execute permissions for root: in other words, it has all the powers of a system administrator. This malicious software connects to a remote server over the internet, alerts its maker that it has been installed and gives this person the ability to connect to the affected Mac remotely.
Given this alert came from Intego, it is no surprise their software, VirusBarrier X4 and X5, protects you against this Trojan horse as long as your virus definitions are dated January 22, 2009 or later.
Meanwhile, SecureMac, has made a free and handy iWorkServices Trojan Removal Tool that does what its name says it will do.
Of course the very best defense of all against this kind of evilware is to get copies of your software legitimately.
Via MacMerc
Apple interim CEO Tim Cook spoke plainly during Wednesday’s earnings call about the company’s being “ready to suit up and go against anyone” who might try to gain a competitive advantage in the mobile device arena by “ripping off” the iPhone’s IP.
General consensus holds the Palm Pre poses the best competition for iPhone thus far, with some analysts drawing close connections between Apple and Palm around the Pre’s touch interface.
Mike Abramsky, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets put the question directly to Cook on Wednesday’s call, asking, “the Palm device particularly seems to almost directly emulate the kind of touch interfaces that [Apple] innovated…Is that to what you’re referring with regarding to ripping off IP?”
Cook declined to talk about any specific company and reiterated his and Apple’s position that “competition is good [and] makes us all better.” However, he also drew analysts on the call a clear picture of Apple’s belief that the “magic” of the iPhone has little to do with hardware and everything to do with software.”
“We’ve said since the beginning software is the key ingredient and we believe that we’re still years ahead on software,” Cook said, adding “we approach [this business] fundamentally different than people that are approaching it only from a hardware point of view.
It’s obviously way early in the game, and in the event Palm’s Pre never manages to gain significant acceptance in the marketplace, Apple is likely to keep its attention and resources focused on other things.
Should the Pre come on like gangbusters and should there be a lot of “hey, this thing works just like an iPhone” talk, it’s not too difficult to imagine Apple calling on its competitive advantage in cash and legal muscle to put the squeeze on a company that, not long ago, was being written off by many as headed for the dustbin of history.
This is Trunk, and it’s possibly the most interesting and enticing iPhone app I’ve seen for weeks.
I really enjoy doing design work, but the weighty programs I’m using to do it make fighting the risk of losing my work a major battle. My latest project is laying out my resume on a grid to squeeze three pages of text into one. With all that fiddling, and switching back and forth between applications as I try to multitask, the software I’m using is prone to crashes. It was ugly, but thanks to years of practice back in the day, I managed to avoid a few serious issues thanks to a regimen of Command-S kung-fu training.
Then I found out about EverSave. EverSave is another quiet little freeware menu bar item you don’t know how you lived without. It’s got two key settings: time increment saving and application switch saving.
Time increment saving is pretty self explanatory, and I’m a little hesitant to use it for fear of losing my Command-S embouchure. Application switching saving just saves your current work every time you switch to another application. It’s a great time to save, since processing-intense programs seem likely to crash when you switch back to them, and it doesn’t interrupt your work flow.
EverSave also lets you choose which applications you want to automatically save, so you can keep it from accidentally pushing out new web code or overwriting your programs with new errors. You can also turn EverSave on and off through the menubar or through a customizable hotkey.
Remember the Talking Moose?
If you don’t, this post will make no sense to you whatsoever.
But if you DO: Hey! Woo! Yay! Talking Moose is back as a Twitter superstar and can provide just as much entertainment from there as it used to back in the day. Probably more.
I had the Moose running on my Lime Green iMac. Annoying as hell. But fabulous none the less.
(You can still get the Moose for OS X, did you know that? Not that you need to now. Twitter! Superstar! Twitter is the new Hotmail, did you hear? Or was it the new Geocities? I forget. Us old timers do that. Often.)
(Via TidBITS.)
Have you ever designed and ordered a book using Apple’s iPhoto book publishing tool? I have, and they are nice. The quality is quite good and the pricing seems fair value – they make great commemorative gifts and keepsakes. But Apple’s not really in the publishing business. Through iPhoto your options are somewhat limited and somewhat photo-centric, all of which is as it should be.
But say you’ve got a publishing idea that doesn’t fit one of Apple’s iPhoto templates and, well, gosh darn it, also doesn’t seem to be getting much interest from any of the few publishers remaining in the business of making and distributing books. There’s always the so-called “vanity press” – but what if you could just design it and print it on your own?
Well, you can. With free software from Blurb you can write, design and print your own books and sell them online. Books can be up to 440 pages long and come in a variety of sizes in both hardback and softcover, at prices that make you wonder why it’s so hard to make money in the publishing business.
Blurb’s BookSmart software for Mac (cross-platform compatible with Windows) features a ton of professionally designed layouts or lets you create from scratch, integrates seamlessly with iPhoto, lets you import from online sources such as Flickr and Picasa, and supports all of your own fonts in a variety of sizes and text styles.
When you’re done creating, you can sell your masterpiece online in the Blurb Bookstore and keep 100% of the markup.
Blurb may not save the publishing industry the way iTunes saved the music industry, but it’s nice to know you can be a Paperback Writer for just $4.95.
Right, what have we got this week? First there’s Listen. Maybe the name iShell was already taken. So what does it do? You pick a shell and hold it up to your ear, then “close your eyes, take a deep breath, and relax. You’ll feel the weight of the world lift off your shoulders.”
I have a confession to make: despite my worldly exterior, I am a gigantic comics geek. I have a pull list, I can name everyone who has ever been a member of the Justice League, and I had a letter published in Green Arrow #101.
At this point in my life, I finally have the budget to buy a decent number of comics, but this has actually made things much more complex. After all, now I don’t have time to memorize which new books I want to read. Unless a preview makes a real impression on me, I forget I ever wanted to read it.
Thankfully, as it does for most of life’s problems, the iPhone has an answer. It’s called Comixology, and it’s a beautiful thing. Basically an app version (and companion) of Comixology.com, the program allows you to view lists of all the comics being released in a given week, preview artwork and story pages for many of them, and then “pull” interesting books so your local retailer will have everything cool waiting for you the next time you stop by.
It can also bring in podcasts, news, columns, and reviews. It’s pretty much one-stop nerd shopping.
I haven’t had time to get this synced to my actual comics pull list yet, but I’m planning to soon (my local comics impresario is an adviser to the project), and it’s awesome just as a memory-enhancing tool in the first place.
Plus, it doesn’t make farting noises. That alone sets it apart from the App Store pack.
Apple approved Ustream’s AppStore live video streaming app on iTunes Monday evening, just in time for what is likely to be the most photographed, videoed and broadcast US Presidential Inauguration ever, on Tuesday in Washington, DC.
Get Ustream’s free app on your iPhone, and if you can find yourself an open WiFi connection between 10am and 3pm (EST) Tuesday, you’ll be able to catch live footage of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th president of the US.
Ustream’s TV-in only breakthrough may seem small potatoes to legions of iPhone jailbreakers, who’ll be able to use iPhone’s TV-out capabilities to broadcast Obama’s historic inauguration from their iPhones; it’s also quite something for mainstream iPhone users to now be able to receive live video on their mobile devices.
It figures, then, with up to 5 million people in Washington DC for Tuesday’s pomp and circumstance, a few jailbroken live feeds ought to be accessible to those who know the right people.
Want the power and Windows compatibility of Firefox with the sleek look and style of Safari? Since the update to Firefox 3, it’s been difficult to find a good theme to transfer Safari’s UI experience. Luckily, takebacktheweb.org has two excellent themes that will make you feel much more at home in Firefox.
The GrApple Yummy theme is almost an exact copy of Safari, right down to the tab stylings. GrApple Delicious is slightly different, mostly in the look of the tabs. The feel of Safari is still there though, so this might be a nice middle ground. It could definitely be handy in telling the applications apart if you have both open at the same time, as I do when I’m testing web site compatibility. Both themes come in “blue” and “graphite” styles.
Having read a few of the tutorials on how to install the new Windows 7 beta on a Mac with Boot Camp, I decided to take the plunge myself today on my still sparkling-new unibody MacBook 2.4 Ghz. (This post is actually being written in Firefox on Windows 7 — eww)
And what I learned is that you had really better be prepared to spend several hours to get it working properly. The link I’ve provided above is pretty handy, but it has some tricks to it that will not be immediately apparent without some trial and error. Read on to make the essential tweaks to the tutorial needed to make it work on MacBooks, not just MacBook Pros, read on!
As a student, one of the main advantages of having a laptop is that you can study in quieter places with fewer distractions. As a photographer, you’re probably excited about using your laptop for tethered shooting on the go.
Here’s the paradox: if you try to shut the lid to focus on your term paper while you’re listening to music, or want to put your laptop in your backpack while you’re shooting, everything turns off.
Thanks to InsomniaX, you can get complete control over the system’s sleep cycle in a neat little menu item. To get this functionality on my old iBook I completely disassembled it and removed the bits that detect when the lid is closed. You don’t want to do that!
Download InsomniaX! Go ahead and listen to your music! Fill your hard drive with photos direct from your camera! The world is your oyster.
Ustream is bringing streaming webcam video to the iPhone, perhaps in time for you to watch the historic inuaguration of President Barack Obama from the nation’s capital next Tuesday, if Tim Cook can make a little rain in Cupertino over the weekend.
Via Gizmodo, via TechCrunch
Proving it really is the coolest company on the web, Google unveiled this week the Prado layer in Google Earth, an amazing bit of functionality that lets users zoom into almost any spot on the planet for a detailed view of what’s to be found there using the company’s earth mapping product.
The Google Earth Prado layer also includes 3D models which allow you to fly around the Prado buildings to experience the museum as if you were actually there. The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels).
The iPhone version of Google Earth is not yet updated to support this feature, so you’ll have to use your desktop earth to get there.
Proving itself to be The Little Engine That Could of an otherwise dismal economy, Apple’s iTunes AppStore has reached an inventory of over 15,000 applications (some of which do not exist to reproduce the sound of flatulence) and has entertained more than 500 million downloads since its debut six months ago.
It took just 5 weeks for the AppStore to deliver more than 200 million downloads, whereas it took 6 weeks to go from 200 million to 300 million. So, the volume of interest in applications for iPhone and iPod Touch is increasing impressively, although the most recent bump is likely a result of Apple’s mobile gadgets having been popular gifts this past holiday season.
Via Mashable!
From the Get It While It Lasts department: ImageToys: iJiggles is an app whose developers somehow figured out what Apple’s AppStore gatekeepers didn’t like about the iBoobs app they rejected a while back.
Perhaps by marketing the application as image-reality-distortion magic they confused the AppStore police into thinking people would use it for anything but playing Hooray for Boobies!
Via Macenstein
You’ve got to love Japanese developer Yuki Yasoshima, whose free stopwatch app hit the iTunes AppStore this week. The version of the app on sale in the US store is “English,” but nowhere in the AppStore description is a word of it actually in English, just the same Japanese character information found on Yasoshima’s website, which is also in, yes, Japanese.
Now, that’s confidence in your product!
Fortunately, Big StopWatch is dead intuitive. Not to mention elegant, graphically boss and accurate to the 100th of a second.
If any of our Japanese-savvy readers want to take a shot at Yasoshima’s app description, it’s appended after the jump. Please let us know what we’re missing in comments.
Apple has begun approving the first wave of browser products to compete with Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch, signaling the company may not be the great curmudgeon of handheld computing after all.
The apparent shift in Apple’s previous policy of denying AppStore certification to software products that “duplicate the functionality” of its own applications that ship with the devices, a handful of browser apps have begun showing up in recent days on the iTunes store.
Incognito, from developer Dan Park, promises completely anonymous browsing, with all history cleared simply by closing the application.
Edge Browser is a free app that opens up valuable screen real estate, but forces the address and navigation tools into the Settings menu, which doesn’t seem too promising a design feature to me.
WebMate is a 99¢ solution to tabbed browsing on the iPhone, that works by queuing up all the links you click on, then allowing you to view them one by one when you’re ready.
Ian Betteridge is a brave man. Not only is he a Mac user who has switched to Ubuntu running on Dell hardware, he’s also decided to say so in public.
Some of you may recognize his name: for some years, he was a writer for, and then editor of, the UK version of MacUser magazine.
Why did he do it? Partly because of price, partly because he cares about open software running on open platforms. Apple, he says, is a long way from open and seems to be closing things ever tighter as time goes on. (See also his follow-up post detailing the apps he’s chosen to use on Linux.)
What really caught my eye, though, was one of Ian’s asides. Half way through his post, he predicts that “sooner or later”, the “development ecosystem will increasingly come to resemble that of the iPhone, and for much the same reasons”.
In other words, there will be an App Store for OS X software. An App Store that Apple will keep just as tight control over. Only apps that met with Apple’s approval would be cleared for distribution, and only apps distributed in that manner would actually run.
A bold prediction indeed. A fair one, though? And does the Better World of free software tempt you to switch to Ubuntu (or any other *nix variant)? What do you think?
(Disclaimers: I sometimes contribute articles to MacUser UK; and I know Ian Betteridge personally, have enjoyed a chat and a pint with him, and consider him a lovely chap.)
Apple sweetened the pot a bit on its new productivity suite Tuesday, with a “Try it Free for 30 days” offer on iWork ’09. The enhanced spreadsheet, desktop publishing and presentation software package must not be flying off the shelves since its introduction last week at Macworld.
I was aiming to get around to it at some point because I’ve come to really like Pages, especially since I got used to its decidedly-different-than-Word workflow.
I’m also interested in checking out Numbers, Apple’s spreadsheet software that was not part of the copy of iWork ’06 I’ve been hobbling along with. I hope not to be involved again too soon in any venture that requires a lot of work with spreadsheets, but if Numbers is a reasonably robust solution it will be nice to know it’s in the file system.
Of course – and I hate to keep going on about this – Keynote is, to me, the star of the iWork show, a truly full-featured, sophisticated piece of presentation software that puts Powerpoint to shame. I’m looking forward to playing with its new bells and whistles and this little free teaser may be just the thing to get me off my duff to check it out.
Thanks, Apple!
Image © 2009 Robert Lachman
OK, the AppStore has over 10,000 apps for iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s a nice round number, impressive even. But it’s kind of like saying there are over 10,000 medicinal plants in the rainforests of the Amazon.
That’s great, but how do I find them and which ones are good for me?
I’m not paid enough, nor am I interested in wading through all 10,000 iPhone apps to cull pearls from the sea of fart and ringtone gems on offer, but I am happy to pass on a bit of wisdom published by the editors of Mashable, who’ve gone to the trouble of picking out 70+ free social media apps. Since the iPhone is essentially a mobile communication device, it seems to me social media is at least a good place to start.
Follow me after the jump for my picks of the best from Mashable’s list.
If you can’t afford to enroll in the iPhone application programing course at Stanford, you may want to take a look at a couple of new 4 day iPhone development courses being offered by Saratoga, CA-based Edison Labs University.
I ran into Edison’s Chief Scientist, Owen Rubin, at Macworld last week, where he was very excited about the prospects for future app developers learning to work with both iPhone and Android, for which his school also offers courses. “This is an exploding field of software development,” Rubin told me, “and I think there’s a great opportunity to help people who want to pursue the path get a strong foundation in the knowledge they’ll need to be successful.”
Edison’s introduction to iPhone app development is focused on enabling a developer to build applications using the iPhone SDK, the iPhone simulator, and to download, test and debug applications on an iPhone and iPod touch device. The school plans to offer soon classes for novice developers who need to get a foundation in Objective-C and object-oriented programming as well.
Each 4 day training costs approximately $2000, which, when you consider the potential riches of a runaway AppStore success, seems like a pretty decent investment.
It’s not surprising that iPhone app training is beginning to spring up in the Bay Area, given our proximity to Apple and Silicon Valley. We’d be curious to know about any iPhone developer courses available in readers’ areas, how much they cost and how they are structured. If you’ve seen any, be sure to let us know about it in comments.
Viximo, creators of a Cambridge, MA based platform for creating and distributing virtual “goods” and art for social networks and mobile applications, has released a development platform called VixML that the company hopes may soon become an important tool for novice iPhone developers.
Lack of Objective-C knowledge and unfamiliarity with the mysteries of the iPhone SDK have kept many designers from reaching for the brass ring available to the likes of some fart app developers and ring tone merchants. Viximo seeks to remedy such an imbalance in the force with a programming language using a number of pre-designated tags, the VixML WYSIWYG SDK and emulator. Designers can use these tools to create in a matter of days rich, multimedia mini-apps that would have previously taken weeks or months of programing.
The catch is that Viximo is positioning itself as a pre-gatekeeper, initially requiring any app developed using VixML to be part of the company’s True Flirt application on the AppStore.
Viximo is currently not releasing details about its revenue sharing arrangement with potential developers, a wall that will likely have to come down if app developers are to adopt VixML in any significant numbers.
Via TechCrunch
There are several “serenity” apps on the AppStore, though none may have the cache of Buddha Machine, an iPhone/iPod Touch version of the cultural icon brainchild of Beijing-based musicians Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian.
Calling themselves FM3, the two pioneers of electronic music in China have brought the idea of their simple, palm-sized box to iPhone and iPod Touch with a $4 app that offers 9 different ambient loops and a zen-like 3D depiction of the real-life Buddha Machine in 7 different colors activated in sequence by simple swipes of the touchscreen or randomly by shaking the device.
Virant was kind enough to offer me a promo code to check out the app and as with many things related to Buddha nature, its simplicity is both disarming and fascinating. The nine ambient loops, ranging in length from five to forty seconds, amazingly synced with the natural rhythm of my breathing, perfectly complementing a meditative mood or providing welcome refuge from modern urban distractions.
FM3 released the first corporeal Buddha Machines, each of which is said to contain a little Buddha, in 2005. Recently released 2.0 versions sell for around $20 and feature 9 new loops and a pitch control. Virant says he is working on an app version for the Buddha 2.0 with new sounds as well as pitch-shifting and a few other functions. It should be released in a month or two.