Top stories - page 1014

This is my last chance to say something before the great and terrible Steve holds his tablet aloft (and even then, rumormongers might have beaten him to the punch), so let me give you a bit of a long-view perspective, something usually left out when we’re discussing whether we’ll see a 10-inch or 11-inch LCD panel on the device.

You see, I’ve been thinking a lot about Apple and its insane run of success over the last nine years. Consider this: In 2001, Apple’s revenue was about $6.5 billion. In 2009, that revenue was $42.3 billion. Essentially, the company grew by more than 550 percent in eight years.

How exactly is that possible? Was it the great products? Partly. Great leadership? Sure. Killer marketing? No question. But more than all of those combined, the secret to Apple’s success was that it defined and followed the right strategy and the right era. Steve Jobs is king of the world right now because he hit on the idea for the digital hub.

Everyone’s getting very excited by these Engadget pictures, which purport to show a prototype of Apple’s tablet. Says Engadget:

“It’s big — really big — and it’s running what clearly looks like an iPhone app, although we’ve never seen an iPhone app with that interface or at that resolution before. We also see a WiFi icon and a cell service indicator, although tragically there’s no carrier listed.”

But color us skeptical. The pictures appear to have been sent in anonymously (“Okay, we obviously can’t confirm this…” the post starts). And trying to explain the bolts around the edge, Engadget suggests it has been bolted to the table. Bolted to the table? WTF? Why would it be bolted to a table?

And what’s going on in the picture below, in the bottom left corner of the screen? It looks like the screen is transparent, and its showing a support of some kind underneath. Or is it a reflection? Perhaps it is an Apple prototype, but a tabletop system, like Microsoft’s Surface table?

In the picture below, at the bottom of the screen, is the reflection of what looks like a utility pole (with transmission wires running left to right) and the image of the photographer, who has been whited out.

So the picture was taken outside (in the U.S. Virgin Islands perhaps?), while the picture above looks like an indoor shot. The tablet seems to be sitting on a tabletop, with white wires running underneath — perhaps the AC charger and headphones. Note the Home button sitting right in the middle of the shortest edge, plus the recessed screen. It looks to be the same size and shape as a tea tray.

The bolts around the edge are reminiscent of the bolts used in the stairs at Apple’s stores, and the pivot arm of the old G4 iMac. However, it seems unlikely that Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive would leave bolts exposed in the final design.

Still, after being initially highly skeptical of these pictures, they’re now starting to look more real. What are the blacked out labels though?

Install0us is an iPhone app that is like the iPhone’s official App Store — except it’s connected to a treasure trove of pirated apps. Launched several months ago, Install0us is connected to a huge database of cracked iPhone apps, which are freely available for users to download.

Running on jailbroken iPhones and iPts, the Install0us application has so far been one of the easiest ways to install cracked applications. In a short time, it turned into a big community of pirates, and a headache for hardworking app developers.

But it is about to close, the app’s creator said on Monday, for legal reasons.

“What we do would be very hard to defend against in court,” wrote the anonymous “Admin” behind the app in a post on the Installous forums. “Call me a coward, but as I said, hiding under covers is not a life for me.”

As he explains in the post, the Install0us Admin was initially pretty confident the app was legal. “I thought we had something legal and legitimate to offer,” the Admin said. Install0us merely did what lots of other installer apps do: help users browse, download and install apps. Those apps had been cracked by other people, so Install0us was in the clear — or so the Admin thought. But he had nagging doubts, and for the last three months he’s been searching for a knowledgeable lawyer.

He found one, but their first conversation didn’t go well.

“Unfortunately our discussion left me sad and even feeling stupid to have invested so much effort into this, and involved people with me,” he wrote. “You see, after talking for more than an hour with him, I’m sorry but the conclusion is that what we do would be very hard to defend against in court.”

Duh!

Piracy rates for iPhone applications are very high, reportedly reaching 80% for some developers. Even though developers like Tapulous have devised ways of making money from pirates, many still haven’t and are suffering from significant lost revenues. With little help from Apple, the number of cracked applications have been increasing — thanks to sophisticated tools such as Install0us, which makes the whole process a breeze.

After taking advice from the lawyer, the anonymous creator of the app on Monday made the wise decision to avoid any future trouble by simply shutting down the whole thing.

The app’s forum is scheduled to be closed with all it’s repositories deleted in a few weeks. The Admin said he would be abandoning any future application releases. He was working on version 3, which promised several new features. Of course there will be other applications that will soon replace this one, but it is still somewhat relieving for the developers who put in all their hard work into the applications, just to make a living. Hopefully, Apple will soon realize the need to step in and bring these pirates down once and for all, but for now, they are not going anywhere.

Via Install0us.

Although Guy Day is, as pictured, about as far away from the har- boozing, womanizing, red-meat-eating Don Draper type as a 70s-style pompadour will get you, he was one of the country’s quintessential ad men for decades.

Everyone reading this blog knows his work: as the president of the acclaimed Chiat / Day advertising agency, Day was responsible for bringing together the team that created the hyper-Orwellian 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh ad.

Sadly, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Day on Saturday, died in his sleep of natural causes. The timing is particularly depressing: a self-described “life-long agency ad man” who revolutionized Apple’s advertising strategies, Day, of all people, would be delighted by the marketing possibilities of the forthcoming Tablet.

Rest in peace, Mr. Day. You’ll always be remembered by this Mac fan for your art and for your work.

Here’s some pictures I snapped of Apple’s preparations for the iSlablet press event.

The event starts at 10AM on Wednesday January 27th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The Yerba Buena Center is near the Moscone Center –the location for many years of the annual Macworld Expo — and is Steve Jobs’ preferred venue for major product launches.

When I went down there at about 4PM, crews were finishing hanging a large banner over the front of the Arts Center. The banner reflects the splattered paint motif of invites Apple sent out last week inviting journalists to check out the company’s “latest creation.”

The latest creation is, of course, expected to be a new multitouch tablet.

The ever vibrating Tablet hype machine has finally attained the emotional timbre of giddy, bladder-evacuating hysteria.

How else to characterize this Techcrunch post, in which Michael Arrington, citing “senior Apple execs and friends,” says that Steve Jobs is saying that the forthcoming Apple Tablet “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

Hearsay? Sure. But Techcrunch’s post has already garnered nearly 200 breathless comments from Giddy Apple fans expecting the Tablet, at the very least, to be a flawless amalgam of iPhone technology with Dr. Durand Durand’s Excessive Machine.

I think we’re officially at the point in the hype cycle that whatever Apple pulls out on stage on Wednesday is going to be a disappointment. The Apple Tablet’s OLED display could function as a Stargate-like dimensional portal to the lanugo-soft inner crevices of Elysium’s ethereal constabulary of virgin angels, and people would still be disappointed that the P.A. Semi chip inside was only sentient, and not — as anticipated — psychokinetic.

Well, it’s finally here: Tablet Week. Or, as I like to think of it, it’s time for there to be Just One More Thing. We all know how significant we expect this announcement to be. A major new advancement in computing, a killer device for a market that has failed time after time, and, just maybe, the last great breakthrough product of Steve Jobs’s amazing career.

All will be revealed on Wednesday, but since we’ve got to something in the interceding 60 hours, I’ve decided to go all in and actually make some bets on killer features for the Apple Tablet With No Name. They’re my best guess based on what we know about the existing tablet and eReader markets, soon-to-launch technologies, and past actions of Apple itself. I haven’t touched one, I haven’t talked to anyone who has, and the Apple employees I’ve seen in the last few weeks are people who know even less about the big secret project than I do.

We’ve been talking about an Apple tablet for years now, and of course, that chatter has boiled over into a frenzy that almost guarantees that Steve will walk on stage with something tablet-ish on the 27^th, if for no other reason than the fear of a near-nuclear backlash.

While we’re confident that this will be the greatest innovation in tablets since Moses brought a couple down from Mt. Sinai, that’s all we know. The Apple-Reality-Distortion-Echo-Chamber has progressed from being all a twitter with conflicting expectations to achieving some kind of pig-headed consensus that frankly has got to be totally wrong. Principal among these group-think features is the absurd notion that the Moses Tablet v2.0 will run an OS from a freekin’ Phone.

Follow us after the jump where we taunt the conventional wisdom, until they go home crying to momma.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pje8AQg8y3M

The Toronto District School Board decided to phase out Apple computers — about 8% of the 63,000 machines used by some 250,000 kids — in mid-November.

It seems board members bought in to the idea that Macs are more expensive than PCs:

“The Apple computer in a large-scale network―their capabilities for automatically managing that many machines really pales to what’s available in the PC world,” Lee Stem, general manager of Information and Technology Services for the Board, told Torontoist.

“At the end of the day, it really comes down to getting as many devices in the hands of as many people as possible,” added Stem. “Every penny that we save…all that money is going to bring more technology into the hands of kids.”

Teachers in the district are using those last Apple computers to plead with the bureaucrats to keep Macs in the mix.  (No more Apple computers will be bought for general use, though they may still be purchased for “special use” classes, like art, video editing or music composition.)

Behold! The OfficePOD!

The OfficePOD gives you just over 4 square metres of space to swivel your chair and tap on your Mac keyboard. It comes with LED lighting, secure locks, and an electrical connection to your home. All you need to do is move yourself and your Mac inside, and you’re ready to work!

But what else does it have going for it?

The latest iPhone photo app to grab my attention and that of a handful of Flickr users is Phototropedelic.

The techno-sweatshops of Beijing have never seen an Apple design they weren’t willing to ineptly rip off, but these MacBook Air knock-offs spotted by M.I.C. Gadget are the first I’ve actually liked.

Basically, what we have here is a white plastic simulacrum of the MacBook Air’s aluminum unibody chassis, crammed with the innards of your stock, last generation netbook: an Intel Atom N280 processor with up to 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive.

I love it, right down to the lid’s pulsing, multichromatic logo! If Apple ever introduces a plastic unibody Air, this is exactly what I would imagine it looking like. It’s unfortunately a Windows machine, but at around $249 I’m tempted to pick one up anyway, just to see if it’s as easily Hackintoshable as my Asus Eee PC 1000HE. What a coup one of these MacBook Air netbooks with Snow Leopard installed would be for my gadget cred next time I showed up at the blogger’s hall at CES.

More than 20% of Apple fans would buy the upcoming tablet “sight unseen,” according to a poll by 9to5Mac.

That’s a pretty big number, given that the tablet might turn out to be a Jobsian brainfart like the Cube.

But then again, Apple does have a great record of innovative products.

The majority of 9to5Mac readers say they’ll likely buy the tablet (33%), but wait until they see it before parting with their cash.

Only 6% of the 7,454 voter said they wouldn’t buy the tablet.

9to5Mac’s poll is here: Are you gonna buy one of them Apple tablets?

Leander posted yesterday about rumoured features for iPhone OS 4.0, including multi-touch gestures OS-wide, background apps, UI changes, and more.

Today, on TechRadar, Gary Marshall outlined his thoughts on 10 ways to make iPhone OS 4.0 damn near perfect, offering ideas such as disabling orientation, deleting default apps, home-screen widgets, document sync from a Mac (or PC), Mail filters, and one I’d love to see—touchable wireless icons (so you can disable Wi-Fi without accessing Settings).

I commented on that article with ideas of my own about what I want to see in iPhone OS 4.0:

Mail needs an optional unified inbox that can be set as the default view. Forcing me to go in and out of each inbox is dumb.

All default apps should be removable, with a suitably chunky warning if you decide to do so. If Apple only hides them, I don’t care. Perhaps there should be a show/hide list in Settings.

The Springboard needs serious work, because while it was great pre-App Store, it’s now a nightmare to arrange/organise apps. One might argue you should do this in iTunes, but plenty of people only use their device, ignoring iTunes in the main.

I’d like to see an app list, available by swiping left of Spotlight to access an app launcher that lists every app on the device, but that can be filtered as per Spotlight. I did a mock-up of this for Cult of Mac back in October.

On deleting an app, you should be able to optionally store its settings, which should (again, optionally) be available when reinstalling the App via iTunes at a later date. In other words, if I’ve spent 20 hours getting 90% of the way through Myst or Peggle, but delete the app, I shouldn’t have to start from scratch on reinstalling it. As it stands, Apple’s decided iPhone and iPod touch gaming should be akin to cheapo Nintendo DS carts, as opposed to something with a battery back-up. Such a system would benefit apps, too.

Also, Apple should fire/beat to within an inch of their life whoever came up with the sync UI in iTunes and get someone with some actual talent to redesign it. I don’t appreciate ‘film’ titles being truncated after about 25 characters, forcing me to check a tiny thumbnail to see if I’m syncing the right one. And the Applications tab is a disgrace, coming across like an interactive Flash website from 1999, not a robust system for organising your apps.

So, what are your wishes for iPhone 4.0? Tell us in the comments!

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIf_09tVX5s&feature=player_embedded

In nine days, Steve Jobs will walk on stage, shout “Bam!” and unveil the Apple Tablet. That much we pretty much know. But with rumors that the Tablet will require a steep learning curve, evidence is mounting that the Tablet won’t interface with us like a mere tablet PC or an iPhone, but instead set an entirely new paradigm.

One interesting bit of speculation on what kind of new interface we might expect comes way of Roger Åberg, who points out an interesting new interface technology Apple has been pursuing over the last couple of years, eye control, which could allow Tablet users to do everything from scroll, navigate, launch apps and even type through blinks, motion and long dwelling gazes.

Since late 2008, John Kooistra has been masterminding an intergalactic war—inside your iPhone. The reds and blues have been engaged in a deadly struggle, as evidenced in twist-based shooter Blue Defense and its more involved sequel Blue Attack.

Red Conquest is John’s most advanced and innovative game yet, a complex, exciting RTS that takes full advantage of Apple’s hardware. Cult of Mac interviewed John about how he got into iPhone games development and how the latest game in the red/blue saga came to be.

Kotaku, of all places, is reporting that they have received their invitation for Apple’s January 27th event. The Loop has also received an identical invitation. Leander presumably has one rattling around in his mailbox as well.

“Come see our latest creation,” the invite reads, superimposed over a multi-chromatic palette paintgun-like spatterings.

No surprises here. From the colorful splotches of e-ink to the mention of a “latest creation,” that invite all but confirms the January 27th unveiling of the Apple Tablet. All we need to do now is wait for Steve Jobs to pull it out on stage, give it a name and spell out the details.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review ToyPlanes, GOALS! Pro, Bejeweled 2, Jungle Crash Land and Boulder Dash Vol 1.

TotalFinder is starting to cause a buzz in the Mac community. The app aims to bring something to Finder long-rumored to be coming from Apple itself: tabs. We spoke to developer Antonin Hildebrand about his project, the reasons behind it, and his plans for its future.

Please note: TotalFinder is alpha software that integrates with Finder. Run it at your own risk and ensure you back up your system before installing it.

The Copenhagen climate talks last December might have been a political disaster, but here’s another project from the same city that might make a difference for some. And yay – it’s iPhone friendly.

The Copenhagen Wheel is an ingenious hub that you can fit to almost any bike, instantly turning it into a hybrid electric bicycle and data capture device.

Clip your iPhone or A.N.Other smartphone on to the handlebars, and it can talk to the wheel over Bluetooth.

The iPhone app Busted! Real Mugshots serves up police pics from around the US with full names, birth date, age, arrest date/time plus the offending crime.

Dubbed “Facebook for criminals” by a pithy CoM reader, the app, offered gratis on iTunes, launched January 11, generating controversy faster than an ACLU lawyer can say “FOIA.”

Cult of Mac talked to Jeff Jolley, president of the app’s maker Fountain Dew.

He told us about getting the app approved (easier than you’d think), the “bad karma” aspect, and more importantly, how to get your mugshot removed after that artsy late-night prank ended in tears.

CoM: How did you get the idea?

Jeff Jolley: We read an article on the popularity of mugshot pages on newspaper websites
and thought that could be extended, in a more interesting, mobile and viral manner, to the iPhone.

CoM: How do you get the photos?

JJ: We search the Internet for publicly available (and regularly updated) mugshots, and then make them available for use in the app.  We continue to look for new sources to expand the available repository of mugshots.

CoM: Are the mugshots storeable and searchable?

JJ: Not at this point.  You always stream the photos and you always start with the most recent mugshot available.  This could be a good future feature.

Ever have that feeling that you’ve had a rotten night’s sleep, and the last thing you want to do is get up out of bed?

Yeah, me too.

Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that says it might be able to help.

Creating an iPhone app is one thing, but making something that stands out in an increasingly deep, expansive crowd is something else entirely. And yet Tapbots have managed just that. Describing their trio of apps as “robots for your iPhone and iPod touch,” Tapbots has managed to infuse the most utilitarian of concepts with genuine personality, and this is largely down to playful and innovative interfaces. We caught up with Paul Haddad (“the programmer”) and Mark Jardine (“the designer”) to find out more about how Tapbots was born, the thinking behind its apps, and what their newest creation, Pastebot, can do for your Apple device.

When Shawn Ahmed travels to places such as Bangladesh to fight poverty he counts on iPhones and Macs to help him do battle.

Ahmed is the founder of a one-man global relief effort he calls the Uncultured Project and is using technology and social media in inventive ways to engage people across the globe in their common humanity.

In partnership with the Save the Children Foundation and USAID, Ahmed went last summer to a cyclone devastated village in Galachipa, Bangladesh to distribute non-food relief items to victims of the disaster. He provided individual donors to Uncultured Project real-time receipts for their generosity using his iPhone and TwitPic.

As seen in the clip above, Ahmed used his iPhone to show villagers in another Bangladeshi community videos made by the people in the west who helped bring safe, clean drinking water to their lives. “This is not a charity,” Ahmed said, “it’s an experiment in community.”

The 28 year-old native of Toronto, Canada quit his scholarship graduate studies at Notre Dame University after being inspired by Dr. Jeffery Sachs (author of The End of Poverty) to try and make the world a better place — one meaningful difference at a time.

“I’ve also been using the iPhone to report real-time in the field,” Ahmed said in an email. He makes extensive use of Twitter and YouTube to break down the distance between his supporters and the communities they support. Connecting to them with his iPhone, Ahmed said, “I hold votes on how I should help people in Bangladesh. Voting has led [to] school supply distributions to orphans and much more. And, of course, all my videos are edited on a MacBook.”

The Uncultured Project’s YouTube channel just went over 10,000 subscribers and Ahmed is hopeful for the prospects of his unpaid, unemployed, uncultured journey to help the poorest of the poor: “It’s about inspiring others to believe that we can be the generation that ends extreme poverty.”

Stéphane Richard, the CEO Delegate of Orange.fr has seemingly confirmed the forthcoming announcement of the much anticipated Apple Tablet in response to questions posed to him by journalist Jean Pierre Elkabbach of Radio Europe 1… but the whole interview could just as easily be the mindless corporate boasting of a mouthpiece not really listening to the question.