News - page 2138

A new update for Tweetie-esque GMail client Sparrow has just hit the Internet in time for the Holiday, adding some important new refinements including the addition of:

• Progress Bar
• Gmail shortcuts
• Quick labeling
• Quick Labeling and Archiving
• Smart recipient auto-complete
• ‘Download message on demand’ option
• Auto-restart on Menu Bar/Dock settings
• Quicklook in the compose window
• Horizontal scrollbar
• Plain text option

Sparrow’s developers also intend to bring the app to the Mac App Store, and so they’re now forking Sparrow into two different apps: one that is free and ad-supported, the other a paid version without ads.

I’m downloading it to give it a try — I’ve loved the idea about Sparrow, but the first betas were just too buggy and feature-poor to deal with. I can’t wait to see if my niggling issues have been fixed.

Smurfs’ Village, the iPhone/iPad game a lot of parents point the finger at for accidental in-app purchases, has now added a few warnings.

The first sentence of the game description now reads:

“Smurf Village is free to play, but charges real money for additional in-app content. You may lock out the ability to purchase in-app content by adjusting your device’s settings.”

Yesterday, I packed up almost all of my earthly possessions and allowed a surly, sausage-lipped German and a pleasant Scottish lad to take them all away, to cram them in a shipping container and sail off across the sea.

In that shipment was my 27-inch iMac, my main work machine, and so for the next few months I will be using my 11.6-inch iMac for all of my work and productivity needs. It’s a fine machine for that, but I’m already twitching over the USB port situations… the MacBook Air simply is not a good hub to try to sync three device simultaneously.

I love the look, then, of the Green Wall Charger from VogDuo, a pocketable four-way USB charger that has one awesome perk that competing devices don’t: a timer that ticks down in two hour increments. Once it reaches zero, it cuts the circuit and no further juice is drawn… a cute trick that isn’t just fantastic for maximizing your iPhone’s battery life, but also to maintain a clean eco conscious.

The Green Wall Charger only pumps out five watts per USB port, so a single port isn’t enough to charge an iPad, but VogDuo thought ahead: a Y-connector is provided in the package so you can hook your iPad up to two sockets simultaneously.

Pretty rad. I’d buy this today, if not for the fact it’s not available yet: it won’t make an official debut until CES next month.

If you’re as addicted to Chair and Epic’s Infinity Blade, as I am, today’s a banner day: an update to the elegiac swordfight action game has just dropped, and it adds a slew of new content.

Although Adobe itself is hardly on the ropes, having just scored their first billion dollar year in revenue, Apple continues to pummel Flash into the ground, like a berserker rabbit punching the occipital lobe of a downed enemy.

The latest blow? Apple has just launched iAd Producer, a new tool for online advertisers that allows them to create interactive iAd content in an easy, streamlined manner that would have previously required Adobe’s Flash developer tools.

A couple weeks ago, one of my friends brought me a new MacBook Air from the States, and as he delivered it to me, he — a die-hard Windows user — eloquently endorsed Apple’s sexy new, razor thin ultraportable by noting that as far as was concerned, “using this laptop is what living in the future feels like” and that “I’ll definitely buy one, because this computer will get you laid.”

He’s not an exception: I’ve turned more Windows-loving heads with the new MacBook Air than any other laptop I’ve ever owned. It looks like makers of Windows PCs have noticed the same thing, because Acer, Asus and Lenovo are all set to ape the MacBook Air’s incredible design.

There’s already a few hacks out there to allow you to extend the admittedly rather limited AirPlay functionality of iOS 4.2 to run on non-iOS devices: last week, for example, TUAW’s Erica Sadun released AirPlayer, an app that tricks AirPlayer into think your Mac’s an AppleTV.

Now, though, plucky and ingenious hackers are figuring out how to do the same thing on non-Apple hardware, and the first fruit of those labors has now been released for Linux.

An Apple press release has observers scratching their head. The usually tight-lipped Cupertino, Calif. company projected it will sell more than 1 million Apple TV units by the end of the week. Normally, the company run by Steve Jobs only speaks about milestones it has already passed. However, the announcement could be more a way to stick a finger in Google’s eye than pre-tooting any corporate horns.

The backstory: Monday, Roku said it will sell its millionth TV set-top box in the next two weeks. Also, the curious announcement likely has a tie-in with Google’s TV.

Google TV reportedly is having trouble, warning partners of a possible delay in supplying the software for televisions. In its announcement, Apple pointedly noted it is selling 400,000 television episodes and 150,000 movies every day.

[Silicon Alley Insider, Barron’s]

Behold! An iPhone fit for a Brobdingnagian! This is the world’s biggest iPhone, located in the heart of London’s famous St. Pancras International Train Station. But while it is impressively enormous, a Bunyan-sized handset for the on-the-go colossus, it’s something of a cheat: it’s made up of 56 interconnected iPads.

Ever since the Wikileaks dumped hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables up on their site for everyone to see, traditional companies have been trying to disassociate themselves from the whistle-blowing wiki. In rapid order, Wikileaks lost the support of its host, Amazon, their DNS provider, PayPal, and MasterCard.

Now Apple’s App Store Review Team has . But is it censorship?

Although the second generation AppleTV is certainly sexy, it’s not quite as “magical” a device as we’ve come to expect from the wizards at Cupertino. Not only are the media offerings a bit limited compared to the competition, but the new AppleTV is prone to some technical problems… most notably reports of bog slow downloads.

It looks like a potential cause for those tortoising downloads on the Apple TV has been identified, though, and it’s not Apple’s fault: it’s Google’s.

An increasing number of families love their iPad so much, they buy a second Apple tablet, rather than share. That’s the conclusion of a survey finding 17 percent of iPad owners have more than one of the popular Apple tablets in their home.

“The main reason for owning more than one tablet in the household is due to other family members using the tablet,” according to YouGov. While more than a third (37 percent) of tablet owners responding to the survey say their partner uses an iPad, 14 percent say they purchased another iPad because their kids are using one.

Trying to thumb type a search query into your iPhone on the run sucks, and it’s sow to boot. Google knows it, which is why they have the Google Search app, allowing you to just dictate your search query when typing is otherwise inconvenient.

But it looks like Apple might have noticed it too. New job postings indicate Apple is looking to improve the native voice recognition capabilities of iOS.

One of the reasons why modern Mac laptops are able to attain such great graphics performance while maintaining excellent battery life is because Apple switched over to NVIDIA chipsets that marry their own superior mobile GPUs with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors.

Unfortunately, Apple’s reliance on NVIDIA chipsets is also the reason why Mac laptops didn’t jump to the new Core i series of Intel CPUs last year, as Intel has been fighting it out with NVIDIA in court, trying to push the graphics maker out of the Intel-compatible chipset business.

Looks like they were successful. NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says that his company will be permanently exiting the chipset business to focus on SoCs (or systems on a chip).

Proving that home electronics are driving that gift-laden 2010 sleigh, the iPad is credited with a sales spike this holiday season.

Comscore reports that computer hardware is the top growing category for the 2010 holiday season to date with a 25-percent increase over last year. Shoppers snapping up handheld devices (such as Apple iPads and e-readers) and laptop computers account for much of the growth.

The one-size-fits-all ease of electronic gifts were also behind the record numbers for e-spending: $27.46 billion was spent online, a 12-percent increase over the same days last year. Free Shipping Day also proved appealing, merchants throwing that in increased sales by 61-percent over the same day last year.

The other day, as I was stuffing my new 11.6-inch MacBook Air in my tote, I once again felt that bubble of warm gratitude that after twenty odd years of waiting, someone had finally come along and given me the perfect writer’s laptop that I’ve always wanted: the perfect amalgam of extreme portability married to great battery life and a sturdy, pleasant-to-use keyboard.

I’d had such pleasant reveries before, but this time, it was punctuated with a bit of sadness, as I remembered the many journals I’d carried around over the years — a rather absurd addiction of mine, given that I rarely wrote anything of worth in them — and realized that the new MacBook Air was effectively more convenient to carry around than even the composition notebooks I used to lug with me when I wanted to travel light but still be able to do some quick writing if the inspiration struck.

It’s weird that I’m sad that the MacBook Air obviated a kind of notebook that I never really used anyway, but I liked having all sorts of notebooks around, and now there’s no point in buying any new ones. I guess I’ll have to content myself in the future with the likes of this composition notebook skin for MacBook Air, which takes its attention to detail right down to the simulation of the note page’s fuzzy, blue lined rule.

The old saying about a rising tide lifts all boats seems pertinent even to smartphones. A dramatic rise in demand for smartphones has allowed Android to enter the market yet hasn’t caused Apple to cut its price for the iPhone, writes one analyst Monday.

With demand for smartphones growing at 90 percent per year, the question isn’t how Android will hurt Apple. “The more smartphones you build, the more price you can charge. This is regardless of platform,” according to Asymco’s Horace Dediu.

The run up to the festive holiday is great news for the App Store – closing for submissions over Christmas means developers are working hard to ensure that their applications are approved and ready for purchase before Apple closes the doors. As a result, a torrent of applications have been surging in to the App Store over the past week, and to help you separate the good from the bad, here’s our list of must-have apps released over the past week.

The fascinating Guinness World Records book is now available as an interactive iPad application. Records come to life with full-screen video and full-color photography, and you can even attempt to beat exclusive world records on your device.

Friends is a new social networking application for the iPhone that lets you keep up with your friends, family, and colleagues from 4 social networks. With support for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, it’s easy to stay in touch without the need to open up different applications – it’s all here, in one place.

Screens is a VNC client for all of your iOS devices that makes accessing your computer from anywhere incredibly easy. It’s simple to set up and is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux computers, through both Wi-Fi and 3G.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS apps – including Type It!, Puffin, and more – after the break!

Apple’s passing out Christmas gifts early for Mac and iOS developers. The company is offering six development books covering Mac OS X and iOS development — for free.

The new eBooks aren’t really new, but they haven’t been available in the iBookstore until today. Previously developers could either read them online or download PDF versions to read later via developer.apple.com.

The six titles include: Cocoa Fundamental’s Guide, The Objective-C Programming Language, iOS Application Programming Guide, Object Oriented Programming With Objective-C, iOS Technology Overview, and iOS Human Interface Guidelines.

You can download these books to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad from the iBookstore.

Another rare item from Cupertino, an Apple Lisa 1, hit the auction block this week.  The successor to the Apple II and the predecessor to the Macintosh, the Lisa originally shipped back in 1983.  Born of the pioneering work done at Xerox PARC and refined by Apple, it was the world’s first commercially available computer with a Graphical User Interface.

The first Lisa used two proprietary 5.25″ floppy disk drives known as “Twiggy” drives.  These were problematic and unreliable, and were replaced in 1984 with the Lisa 2 and a 400k 3.5″ floppy drive.  Most original Lisas were updated to the 3.5″ disk package, so very few Lisa 1 systems survive today.

As of this writing, current price on eBay is $15,000 after 4 bids, with 4 days left to go.  Check back late next Tuesday for the results. Following the recent Apple 1 sale, looks like another possible record in the making!

[via MacNN] [9to5mac]

We all love Dropbox, right? For two years, it’s allowed us to keep our most important files synced across multiple computers and devices, complete with a generous 2GB freebie limit (easily expandable by recommendations and promotions).

It’s hard to believe that such an awesome service wasn’t even version 1.0, but apparently not: last night, Dropbox rolled out their first whole point release, bringing along a huge slew of improvements including — most importantly — selective folder sync.

Selective Sync allows you to select which folders and files within your Dropbox get shot down to your other computers, which can be determined in each computer’s control panel. This allows you, for example, to save some of your poor MacBook Air’s paltry 64GBs from the sheer bloat of your Dropboxed media collection. Lovely.

There’s more improvements than that, naturally. The 1.0 updates includes hundreds of bug fixes, reduced resource usage (50 percent in memory alone) and some user-friendly interface tweaks.

You can grab the 1.0 update here.

In the immortal spirit of Nigel Tufnel, our 2010 Year in Review of the best in Audio gear and apps for Mac and iOS devices goes to 11.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — they each should be around to help you discover dulcet tones and make sound memories for a long time to come.

11. iDJ – iPad Music App ($9.99)

iDJ’s music management system is a simple, streamlined way to quickly build club-quality playlists using the music in your iTunes library. With patented BPM detection technology, iDJ fuses your music together with the finesse of a professional mixmaster. As you add songs, iDJ analyzes their sonic-waveforms, calculates tempos, and then automatically performs optimal transitions throughout the playlist. Playlists can contain an unlimited number of songs and iDJ supports audio in WAV, MP3, and AAC formats. Plus, your iDJ library can be managed through iTunes. iDJ is the first true music-mixing application for iPad that both beginners and professionals can enjoy.

Sure, this is a pretty big gimmick, but we’re impressed none the less: behold an 11-inch MacBook Air driving four displays at once. From right to left, the MacBook Air is driving a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display through the Mini DisplayPort a 7-inch Mimo 720-S display through USB, its own internal display and an Apple IIc running a terminal session through a serial cable, presumably through another USB adapter. This, my friends, is the most lurid Mac porn you’ll see all day,

Not to continue to pimp our own Infinity Bladeelegiac masterpiece.

Interestingly, though, it turns out that Infinity Blade — a game that seems like it would be impossible to pull off on any other console — was not designed for iOS to begin with.

In fact, as Chair co-founder Donald Mustard makes clear in a recent interview, it wasn’t designed for an iPhone or iPad… it was designed for the great gaming device that Apple missed out on: Kinect.

Here’s how a subsidy on your smartphone is supposed to work: in exchange for a shorter upfront price, you agree to a two year contract for cellular services. Baked into your mobile bill is a certain amount of surcharge that helps pay off the full price of your phone, but after twenty four months, you own that phone entirely, and should be able to bring it to any network you care to, because after 24 months, you’ve paid it off.

As you probably know, though, this is not a position on mobile phone subsidies that is likely to get you a lot of sympathy at AT&T. In fact, there’s no official way to unlock an AT&T iPhone once your 24 month contract is over: even though you now own that smartphone, it’s still locked to AT&T’s service.

Honestly, that’s crap, and has driven a lot of American iPhone owners down the road to jailbreak. Canadians, though, seem to have it a lot easier: if you’ve gotten your iPhone from Rogers, a $50 fee at the end of your contract is enough to have the network unlock your phone to work on a competitors’ network.