Steve Jobs’ hypnotic cadence and idiosyncratic showmanship is obviously well-known enough to be channeled by international comedians looking for a laugh: over in Hong Kong, the Mass Transit Railway has just launched a new app, and they did so by hiring their own Chinese Fake Steve Jobs in the form of Law Kar-Ying to reveal it on stage. Law seems to have studied the man he was emulating quite well: he gets everything right, from the gulps of bottled water to the Levis and turtleneck. Hilarious.
Speaking of jailbreaks, check out this trailer for Unlocked, a mock biopic in the style of The Social Network incorporating footage from his various media appearances as well as a movie starring The Wire’s Ziggy that I’d be pleased if you guys would identify for me in the comments.
Coming about one month after the much heralded first release of their client for the iPad, Applidium has just announced that they will be making their popular VLC video client universal as of the next update.
Sharp has just matched the iPhone 4’s touchscreen pixel for pixel with their new IS03 Phone, but that’s not going to stop Apple from crowing about the Retina Display in their latest ad, highlighting the fact that the world’s “highest-resolution phone screen ever” will make “every freckle, every wrinkle” (and presumably every wart, every melanoma, and every port wine stain) look clearer and more beautiful than ever before.
For extra points, check out those impossibly beautiful Twitter friends the iPhone 4 hand model has. Compared to that, my Twitter friends are a sad collection of hobos.
With the new touchscreen iPod nano, Apple successfully managed to shrink their mid-level iPod down to Shuffle-sized dimensions… but not without dropping some notable capability, including video recording and playback. It’s unlikely that Apple is going to suss out the dimensional wormhole technologies required to fit a video camera back into the nano’s postage-stamp-sized casing soon, but video playback might not be out of the question in a future software update.
The revelation comes by way of TUAW’s Erica Sadun, who spotted a lot of video-related details in the new nano’s internal settings property lists, with options for captions, alternative audio, television subtitles and screen aspect all hinting at possible upcoming support.
Interesting, to be sure, but Apple left video support out of the nano for a reason: that screen is just unsuitable to movie watching, and Cupertino knows it. The new nano, despite the touchscreen, is still similar in its innards to the old nano… my guess is that this residual functionality is simply legacy code from the fifth-gen, and Apple’s not about to flip the switch anytime before next year as an incentive to upgrade.
The popular open-source media player VLC is headed to an iPad near you thanks to App Store developer Applidium… and while it’s currently waiting for approval, there’s every indication that this time, Apple will let it through.
That wouldn’t have been the case a few months ago: Apple had tended to reject media playing apps from the App Store for “duplicating functionality.” This was an extraordinary headache for individuals who wanted to watch media on their iOS devices without first undergoing the cumbersome conversion process to QuickTime compatible MP4.
Recently, though, that’s started to change, with Apple approving more universal media-playing apps like OPlayer and CineXPlayer. If the new VLC is subject to the same standards, it should have no problem getting through the approval process.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it does. VLC has long obviated QuickTime on my Mac. I’m ready to let it do the same for my iPad as well.
Valve Software’s transcendent physics and teleportation puzzler Portal already runs sublimely through Steam for Mac… as long as you have a modern MacBook Pro or iMac. But what if Portal wasn’t a modern game, but a classic Macintosh text adventure? This brilliant mock ad re-imagines Portal as a lost game rediscovered through a lost Saturday morning advertisement, complete with an appearance by a badly puppeted GlaDOS. Brilliant… although that green text really looks more at place on an Apple II, don’t you think?
Today’s Apple music event met with a decidedly chilly reception. The new iPod shuffle was an acknowledgment that its previous generation was a flop. The new AppleTV doesn’t support app development and has few advantages beyond a Roku box. New iOS updates are coming slower than anyone would hope.
And all of that discontent isn’t even factoring in that Apple has removed video from the iPod nano line.
What’s that? You didn’t notice? Join the club. Steve went out of his way to extoll the great features of the new nano (like a screen you can’t see when it’s clipped to your body) while carefully avoiding any discussion of the fact that its screen is too small to play video on.
But it’s true. Like the original iPod nano, the new model is for photos and music only. Check out the tech specs page. Lots of discussion of audio playback. No mention whatsoever of video. I hope I’m wrong. But I’m pretty sure I’m not.
Apple’s iMovie is an app designed to run exclusively on the iPhone 4, but it will actually run on an iPhone 3GS by applying a hack. The app puts a mobile video studio in your pocket and gives you another creative way to use your iPhone by offering you some nice video editing and enhancement features. You can turn otherwise boring videos into something more exciting with it. It won’t replace iMovie or Final Cut on your Mac, but as a portable alternative to those apps it can be pretty handy.
TUAW published a report today that included new video evidence supporting the belief that the iPhone 4 death grip is very real. I know you are probably rolling your eyes about this, since there have been many other videos covering this topic, but this time things are different. This video includes the demonstration of the iPhone 4 along with a customized field services app that clearly shows the iPhone 4 antenna problem isn’t the result of some software glitch as Apple claims.
