In this highly-entertaining final installment of his series about Steve Jobs, Macworld founder David Bunnell is taken by Jobs to his favorite lunch spot (you’ll never guess where it is). And for once, Jobs changes his parking habits.
Update: the original version of this piece failed to identify Clintprints.com as the website for poster artist Clint Wilson. We regret any confusion the omission may have caused.
Rock Show, the music poster marketplace developed especially for Apple’s iPad by Neutrinos, received an update in the iTunes App Store Wednesday that should help the Portland-based startup gain recognition for its innovative business model as well as for the creative designers behind the posters in its inventory.
Rock Show leverages the iPad’s screen real estate to deliver high resolution views of limited edition fine art print concert posters from artists and designers such as Darren Grealish (The Killers, Stevie Wonder, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Lee Scratch Perry) and Lil Tuffy (Dead Weather, Sonic Youth), which makes it a nice vehicle for showing off the iPad’s graphics chops.
Users can also buy posters from within the app, a model Neutrinos founder Rob Banagale hopes will make Rock Show the best digital marketplace for art prints in history.
“Nailing this idea has meant discussions with designers and careful design for users,” Banagale said. On the designer side those discussions led to the creation of a dealer backend for the app that allows designers to upload and maintain which of their posters are made available while also tracking their sales and inventory. “The posters are made by individual artists and design studios from the United States, Canada and the UK,” Banagale explained, saying, “Some of these folks do their own printing and many of them handle shipping posters personally.”
I am all for the Federal government funding and deploying a robust and relentless antitrust division. I don’t wish to go into detail or name examples here and now, but I believe the emasculation of antitrust and restraint of trade investigation and prosecution over the past 30 years has meant a great disservice to the public and to the economy. If that arm of the Justice Department gets revived under Obama it will be a good thing for the country and for the world.
With respect to antitrust claims against Apple related to either the iPhone Developer’s Agreement or the iAds program I don’t think Apple has a thing to worry about.
Federal antritrust regulators are taking a keen interest in changes Apple made to its iPhone developers agreement, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCU0RcoxKxE&feature=player_embedded#!
Italy’s Justice Minister used an iPhone to cite a wiretapping law during a prime-time talk show.
Minister Angelino Alfano, best known outside Italy for a controversial immunity law meant to save the bacon of beleaguered Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, pulled out a patriotic iPhone to consult an app called Laws and Codices (Codici and Leggi).
The €19.99 euro app promises to guide users through Italy’s notoriously complicated legal system, which often makes the old quip true that “in Italy, under the law, everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited.”
Alfano used it on the show to quote verbatim a much-debated law on wiretapping, the talk show was about the “war over wiretaps,” which has again exploded recently.
While there’s no shortage of politicians who use Apple products — of late iPad aficionados Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Russian premier Dimitri Medvedev — this may be the first time one relies on an app to get it right in public.
Via iPhoner, hat tip to Andrea Nepori
It’s not new that international data plans are pecuniary disembowleings, so it’s natural that AT&T’s official pricing for the iPad would be for the sadomasochistic only. Expect to spend as much as $200 a month for a slice of bandwidth exceeded by many App Store video games, or just a couple of downloaded iTunes albums.
Happy Sex with Maryline, a sexuality coaching and education guide for adults from La Roche Communication hit the iTunes App Store Tuesday, intimating a new, more comfortable, perhaps an even more mature approach to Apple’s understanding of the relationship between the iPhone and Sex.
After nearly two years of sophomoric inconsistency regulating which kinds of sexually charged material could legally be powered by its iPhone OS, Apple seems prepared to grow beyond the “Whose Boobs” era into one in which iPhone users might legitimately ask, “is that a sex coach in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”
At a posh dinner party, Steve Jobs eats a plate of raw vegetables with a blonde bombshell sitting on his knee. Instead of going to Macworld and plugging the Mac, he’s too busy partying with Tina the nymphette.
Part 13 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s personal history of the first Mac: “My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs.”
If you are looking for a way to check your hair surreptitiously at the upcoming WWDC, behold the “MocBook” pocket mirror and card holder.
It comes from Japan, where locals love mignon tech, and is available in versions that mimic the MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
Spirit by comex allows you to jailbreak your device, to get complete control over it (see why you should jailbreak here). Currently, spirit allows you to jailbreak any device that has already been upgraded to firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or even an iPad on version 3.2. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.
The “Spirit” iPad/iPhone jailbreak is available for download from the Dev Team. You can download Spirit here.
The free, untethered jailbreak is available for Mac and Windows, and works with any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch on firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3, or 3.2. It’s a quick, easy, one-click process, according to QuickPwn, although the Cydia app is buggy. Just download the jailbreak software, plug in your device, and your iPad or iPhone is instantly recognized. Hit the “Jailbreak” button and you’re done.
Note: Before performing a jailbreaking make absolutely sure you’ve got a backup of your SHSH blobs so that if anything goes wrong you can restore to 3.1.2. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.
Spirit is not a carrier unlock (which allows you to use unauthorized wireless carriers like T-Mobile).
The Dev Team highly recommend syncing with iTunes before trying this jailbreak. If anything goes wrong, you will have to restore the device. It’s especially iffy on the iPad.
Note: On iPad, all this is still sort of beta. Some packages in Cydia, not designed for iPad, might screw up your system and require you to restore. Be careful. (And no, Cydia’s appearance is not final.)
Dev Team: Spirit Freed.
I just noticed something about surfing the web on an iPad. Here’s a hint: look at the red circle in the New York Times screenshot above.
It was hard to spot because it’s actually noticing something that’s not there: the blue Legos where the Flash plugin should be.
In January, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he wasn’t able to load the NYT‘s front-page videos (remember the Lego bricks visible during his debut event?) The absence of Flash seemed like a major problem. Video, games, rich-media — none of these would work, pundits said, and the iPad would be a crippled device.
But that hasn’t proven to be the case. Not at all. During the past month I’ve been using the iPad, I’ve rarely encountered problems with the lack of Flash. All the sites I visit regularly – the BBC, NYT and Wall Street Journal — all of them have quickly made video and rich-media available in iPad-friendly formats.
YouTube is especially iPad-friendly. I’ve yet to encounter a YouTube video the iPad wouldn’t play. And because so many sites use YouTube to embed video, it seems like a lot of the web is iPad-friendly.
The only problems is streaming music from MixRiot (which I use a lot but isn’t exactly mainstream) and playing Farmville and thousands of other Flash games. But given how much time I waste fertilizing my kids’ crops and sending them gifts, that’s actually a blessing.
And it’s only going to get worse for Flash. Look at the chart below from Encoding.com, which does a lot of video encoding for sites like MTV and MySpace. In the last four quarters, Flash video (represented by FLV and Flash VP6) dropped from 69 percent to only 26 percent of all videos. Meanwhile, the H.264 format went from 31 percent to 66 percent, and is now the most popular format by a long shot.
Here’s a couple of screenshots from the iPad’s YouTube app showing the dramatic difference in quality between Wi-Fi and 3G.
The screenshot above is from video streaming over WiFi. And below is the same YouTube video playing over 3G.
I paused the video before taking the screenshots and tried to take them at about the same point.
The difference is clear. Over Wi-Fi, video quality is near high-def. Over 3G, it looks like a bad QuickTime movie from the mid-1990s.
Of course, this isn’t new — it’s just much more noticeable on the iPad’s big beautiful screen. This has been the case on the iPhone for some time, but on the smaller screen, the difference in quality isn’t as dramatic.
Meanwhile, our readers are reporting that Verizon’s MiFi delivers: there’s no difference in quality between Wi-Fi and 3G on Verizon’s network.
UPDATE: As our friend Chris Foresman of Ars Technica fame points out in the comments, 3G tops out at a paltry 64Kbps. ” It looks like crap on the iPhone,” says Chris, “so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it looks like crap 4x as big?”
Foresman says the 64Kbps number isn’t generally known, but is reported in Apple’s developer docs. AT&T had said there would be a limit, but didn’t say what it was.
64Kbps is pathetic for 3G. According to the International Telecommunication Union standards body, 3G specifies a minimum data rate of 144Kbps in high-mobility (vehicular) applications, 384Kbps for pedestrian applications, and 2Mbps (that megabits per second) for indoor (stationary) applications.
And here are the screenshots full size:
The iPad 3G is the iPad everyone’s been waiting for. Let’s face it: the 3G data connection and GPS makes this the iPad you don’t want to to leave at home.
Here is what the iPad looks like close up:
As expected, the iPad 3G has already been jailbroken — only a few hours after its launch.
MuscleNerd of iPhone Dev Team posted pictures and a video to YouTube showing a jailbroken iPad 3G running Cydia.
MuscleNerd used the “Spirit” jailbreak, an software tool that promises untethered unlocking of Apple’s recent devices (iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 3G, and iPads). The Dev Team has promised to release Spirit to the public soon. In preparation, be sure to backup your SHSH Blobs. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.
Here is MuscleNerd’s video showing Cydia running on an iPad 3G.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFmy1rolqpw&feature=player_embedded
Via Redmond Pie. Thanks Taimur.
The first thing you’ll want to do on your brand new iPad 3G is sign up for a data plan. It’s pretty easy, and you can do it right on the iPad. It’s basically half-a-dozen finger taps (except for typing in your credit card number of course).
Here are step-by-step by instructions, courtesy of this knowledge base article from Apple.
Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch posted a brief reply about the break-up with Apple over Flash.
His post follows Steve Jobs’ lengthy public letter “Thoughts on Flash” where Apple’s CEO said that despite a “golden era” the companies had “grown apart.”
Lynch titles his 200-word reply “Moving Forward,” and while he does say that if the companies had managed to work it out, Adobe could have provided a “terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch,” they’re not down with the legal terms Apple imposed on developers.
These days many people do some or most of their music listening on the computer, and much of that is managed with iTunes. It’s very nice to have such quick and easy access to your music library, podcasts and internet radio in one place, but by default these only play in the room where the computer is located.
Wouldn’t it be nice to listen throughout your whole house or office, and without breaking the bank?
About 30 years ago, Monster began to carve out a name for itself selling cables-on-steroids to musicians. Recently, they’ve decided to take on the likes of Bose and Audio-Technica with a line of hip-hop inspired headphones called Beats by Dr. Dre.
In between the series of massive, battery-operated over-ear models and in-ear buds sits the Solos, a folding, on-ear set that seems to hit all the key points for a stylish set of traveller’s headphones: Fly looks? Check. Portability? Yeah. Sublime, bass-infused sound? In spades. It even has a microphone. In fact, the only thing missing here — except for in one component — is Monster’s legendary build quality.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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John Stewart on The Daily Show rips Apple a new one for going Big Brother on Gizmodo:
“Apple – you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming the man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man! …It wasn’t supposed to be this way – Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one! But you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes! What the fuck is going on?!
…I know that it is slightly agitating that a blog dedicated to technology published all that stuff about your new phone. And you didn’t order the police to bust down the doors, right? I’d be pissed too, but you didn’t have to go all Minority Report on his ass! I mean, if you wanna break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone! I mean, seriously! How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway! There’re no buildings around! What, does the open space confuse AT&T’s signal?!
…Come on, Steve. Chill out with the paranoid corporate genius stuff. Don’t go all Howard Hughes on us.”
A 15-year old teen is pointing the finger at social networking iPhone app Grindr for being assaulted by a 54-year-old man.
The incident happened in Vancouver, where Brent Tynan is being charged with sexual interference, invitation to sexual touching and sexual assault following an incident that took place last August. Tynan, who was arrested April 13, is expected back in court today.
Tynan met the teen through free app Grindr, which uses GPS in order to connect users to nearby gay and bisexual men.
Police have identified and interviewed the person who found Apple’s iPhone 4G at a bar, the San Jose Business Journal reports.
Also, it looks like Gray Powell, the engineer who lost the iPhone at the bar, and an Apple lawyer reported it as a theft. However, the District Attorney still hasn’t determined whether the case is a crime.
Investigators said they have identified and interviewed the person who took the phone from the Gourmet Haus Staudt on March 18 after it was left there by Apple engineer Gray Powell following a birthday celebration. Officials were unable to tell the Business Journal whether that person, whose name has not been released, was the same person who eventually sold the phone to tech Web site Gizmodo.com. […]
Wagstaffe said that an outside counsel for Apple, along with Apple engineer Powell, called the District Attorney’s office on Wednesday or Thursday of last week to report a theft had occurred and they wanted it investigated.
San Jose Business Journal: Apple asked for ‘lost’ iPhone criminal probe
Popstress Rihanna poses for the Italian edition of Vanity Fair wearing just a raincoat and an overdose of bling.
Her trusty iPhone is to help avoid pesky wardrobe malfunctions. There must be an app for that.
Via iPhone Savior
Another piece of the iPhonegate puzzle has fallen into place. It’s been officially revealed for the first time that Apple reported it’s iPhone 4G protoype as “stolen,” not lost, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Stephen Wagstaffe, the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, said Apple contacted authorities and “advised us there had been a theft,” which led to the search warrant and an investigation.
Until now, it’s been rumored that Apple considered the iPhone stolen — but hasn’t been officially confirmed. The distinction, of course, is crucial. If authorities conclude the iPhone was stolen, Gizmodo may be on the hook for buying stolen property. If the iPhone was lost, Gizmodo may be in the clear. However, under California law, a lost item that isn’t properly returned to its owner may also sometimes be considered stolen.
The authorities themselves don’t seem to have reached a conclusion yet. It is still unclear if they are investigating Gizmodo or the person who sold Gizmodo the phone. CNet spoke to the San Mateo District Attorney , reporting that it “has not been able to confirm whether the felony investigation is targeting Gizmodo staff, the iPhone seller, or someone else.”
If the authorities conclude that Gizmodo bought stolen property, staff may face up to a year in prison. But if police and the District Attorney are pursuing the seller, the raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home may not have been warranted. Gizmodo may be protected under California shield laws, which prohibit judges from issuing search warrants against editorial publications, including online news sites. Techcrunch reports that the investigation has been “paused” while authorities decide whether Gizmodo is shielded or not.
In part 7 of Macworld‘s founder David Bunnell’s memoirs of the Mac, it’s clear that the machine isn’t ready for prime-time. Macworld‘s editor Andrew Fluegalman tells this to Steve Jobs, who reacts in a surprising way.