News - page 2315

Forget those old tape recorders in the language lab: one school district is handing out iPods for students learning English as a second language.

Five schools in Beaufort County, South Carolina are equipping kids with limited English skills with iPod Touches to get them up to speed.

The iPods take the place of the language lab of yesteryear — students listen to stories on them as part of a fluency program designed to develop vocabulary, improve pronunciation and emphasize important words and concepts. They also watch videos on the iPod  for grammar and reading exercises.

“If you don’t understand the story, you can listen to it,” seventh-grader Alex Sanchez told the Beaufort Gazette. “When I read, if I then hear the story, it sometimes makes more sense.”

The schools paid about $200 for each device. Apple provided teacher training and docking stations that can charge and sync 20 iPods at once. The ESL iPod program launched in one middle school last year and expanded to another four schools in the district this year.

Right now, the MP3 players go to kids who need to learn English but the school district is considering using them for students of foreign languages like French and Spanish.

I love this idea. An Italian friend of mine started using her commute time to listen to ESL podcasts — of which there are a ton — and found that in a couple of months she had learned more than at a class she paid for.

Via The State

Welcome the iSteam Mac, the latest Apple device to get the Leonardo da Vinci treatment from the guys at Exploded.

Available as a poster or a tee, this inside look at Mac 128K by artist Kevin Tong follows the iSteam Phone and exploded iPhone, plus the exploded Mac (this in a non-Da Vinci code version.)

The American Apparel t-shirt costs $20, the poster $15.

Can the exploded iPod be far behind?

It’s true there is very little new under the sun. However, the way similar ideas are delivered can make all the difference. Take two very similar Nano cases introduced within days of each other. The Kickster ($14.35) from the community-design folks at Quirky is a case in point. Created for the latest generation of iPod Nano’s, the Kickster props up your iPod in either landscape or portrait orientation and can also serve as a great way to take hand-held video.

“Design by committee that actually works? Who’da thought?” mused Gadget Lab.

Now, flash back to Friday and another Nano kickstand case, but with a much different reception. Rather than being seen as useful, the kickBACK n5 from Scosche was seen a a gadget with an absurd name and design.

In order to break through the growing skepticism toward Yet Another Case, designers need to take note of Quirky, selling not only looks, but functionality.

[Via Gadget Lab]

A major update of the Apple TV may be in the works.

Apple has slashed the price of the 160GB Apple TV to $229 (from $329) and discontinued the 40GB model. Meanwhile, it looks like Apple’s new iTunes LP — a new format for multimedia music bundles — is designed for high-resolution output on the AppleTV.

The iTunes LP content is output at 1,280-by-720, the native resolution of an Apple TV when hooked to a high-definition TV. Apple’s new iTunes Extras (bonus movie material usually included on bonus DVDs and now available for download on iTunes) is also designed to be output at the same high resolution. While this is natural for movie content, it’s a curious choice for music content, albeit multimedia music content, which might naturally be formatted for playing on computers and laptops.

Which all points to a major update for the Apple TV in the near future. The AppleTV hardware has remained essentially unchanged since its introduction, although it has received a couple of software upgrades.

The 160GB model is the only configuration of the Apple TV now on offer. The 40GB Apple TV was previously priced at $229.

Steve Jobs usually refers to the AppleTV as a “hobby,” and not a real business. The choice of movies for the device on the iTunes store remains relatively limited.

Apple TV on Amazon.

What is it? It’s Notational Velocity, one of the best and yet most overlooked note apps for OS X. You should download it immediately.

Why it’s cool Because if you want to store text notes, many hundreds or thousands of them, and then be able to search through them at lighting speed, there is no faster or simpler way of doing it.

An astute MacRumors reader compared the pictures from iFixit’s teardown of the latest iPod touch with earlier leaked pictures of a prototype equipped with a camera — and the internal details are the same.

Look at the pictures after the jump. The internal circuit boards are indentical — and both are completely different to the second-generation touch.

Never mind what Steve Jobs tells the New York Times, the iPod Touch is getting a camera, likely sooner than later.

The new iPod Touch has an internal space for a camera, a teardown by iFixit has discovered. And there’s a couple more surprises also.

Here’s this week’s selection of games to take you into the weekend from Mac Games and More. Games include an intense, in-depth war game, an anime style RPG where you’re in search of a soulmate, and a mind-boggling board game. Click on the images to see a larger screenshot.

The obsession over all things Mac now extends to your power cord. Yes, we’ve written about the zen of an unclutter desk and stylish storage for your iMac or MacBook. Now it’s time to tame the jungle of cords and wires with the Powercurl.

The brightly-colored PowerCurl is from the folks at Quirky, the people who make on-demand Mac products. (Earlier this week I wrote about the Scratch-n-Roll mousepad with built-in white board.)

This new product was designed to answer how to store Apple’s magsafe power adapters and the red hot power “bricks.” Used by MacBook owners to prevent laptops being yanked by someone tripping over the power cord, the adapters usually wind up under your desk — along with dozens of other cords.

While a seemingly useful idea, a war between the “winders” and the “folders” has erupted online.

The PowerCurl, which lets you wind the magsafe cord around the orange plastic housing “does more than get me a little excited,” raves Gizmodo.

On the other end of the spectrum, Gadget Lab takes a tongue-in-cheek jab at the “neat freaks” and those who “maniacally wrap” their cords versus people who “gently fold” their power lines.

Power cords rarely produce this much excitement.

The PowerCurl costs just $7.25.

[Via Gadget Lab, Gizmodo and Quirky]

You’d think the ship had sailed on any iPod dock gear making news. Aside from the cottage industry for cases, we’ve read so many dock announcements they start to blur together. However, Sharp Friday broke through the banality and the normal eye-on-the-clock mentality of Friday newswriters.

“Sharp DK-AP8P iPhone Dock’s Touch Remote Is 3X Better Than an iPod,” declares Gizmodo.

Just yesterday, Leander described a remote for Altec Lansing’s Mix Boombox for the iPhone worth “its hefty $300 price tag.”

Sure, the DK-AP8P let’s you change the music selected and the glossy-black remote acts as a cover, but three times as useful as the iPod’s own remote? Technically, Giz is correct, since Sharp’s 3 touch wheel-remote does outnumber Apple’s solo touchwheel for the iPod/iPhone.

The DK-AP8P weighs in at 1.6 pounds, lets you recharge your iPod or iPhone while in the integrated dock and costs $189.99.

[Via Gizmodo and Sharp]

iTunes 9 and OS X for iPhone 3.1 brought a bunch of refinements, but one strikes me as odd: along with charts for paid apps and free apps, we now have one for ‘top grossing’ apps.

It’s pretty clear this an attempt to appease developers, increasingly annoyed at the rush to 99 cents on the App Store. But here’s the thing: will anyone care? I can’t see too many consumers rushing to see which apps have grossed the most and make buying decisions based on that. ‘Top grossing apps’ also sounds pretty ugly—not really what you’d expect from Apple.

That said, there’s definitely a need to push apps with slightly higher price-points more prominently. Higher-priced apps (and I’m talking maybe $5 and above, not the likes of $50+ sat-nav apps) enable longer development periods, often leading to richer end products.

I wonder whether the App Store should instead have taken a leaf out of the 1980s games industry—at least as it was in the UK. Around 1985, publishers started toying with ‘budget’ videogames, selling cheap, relatively throwaway titles at £1.99, with full-price games being four or five times more expensive. Such publishers typically advertised less, and developers of full-price games started to get antsy. (Sound familiar?)

The solution then was simple: the chart was split. So you had a ‘full price’ chart and a ‘budget’ chart. One might argue this would only serve to push people away from high-price apps, but it would also provide a mechanism for highlighting stuff that’s unlikely to be crap. And ‘full price’ or ‘premium’ certainly sounds a whole lot nicer than ‘top grossing’.

Apple has three new TV ads today.

Check them out.

A teardown of the new nano throws some light on the two big questions raised by Apple’s new iPod line: Why doesn’t the iPod touch have a camera, and why can’t the iPod nano take still pictures?

A popular tethering hack that allows your computer to access the internet via your iPhone’s cell connection is broken with the iPhone 3.1 update. The update also disables MMS messaging enabled by the same hack.

The hack is enabled by changing iPhone’s AT&T carrier file. It’s easily enabled by visiting sites like BenM.at using mobile Safari on the iPhone, and appears under the Network settings. The option is removed under 3.1.

AT&T will roll out multimedia messaging for the iPhone on Sept. 25, but hasn’t given a release date for tethering, saying only it will be available “in the future.”

Whether you were disappointed or elated with the new products and services on Tuesday’s Rock n’ Roll event, you have to admit there was a lot of stuff going on.

One small, almost overlooked new-ish item: “Mayhem”  the first standalone digital book is for sale on iTunes 9.  (Fortune’s Jon Fortt ran into singer/actor Tyrese Gibson who produced it at the event, or he says he might have missed it, too.)

Although there are plenty of comic book apps and magazines on iTunes, this one is different.
Mayhem is more like a book on steroids. For the $1.99 purchase price, you get the comic book,  an iTunes LP with an exclusive track, plus storyboards, a making-of video and two freebie comic books.

This is the first digital book that Apple had a hand in designing and it shows — reports say the interface is versatile enough to work as well on a touch-screen as it does on a full-size screen.

The Mayhem iTunes LP was designed by Sam Herz, one of Apple’s user interface engineers for  iTunes, and Barry Munsterteiger, creative director for rich media and Internet technologies.

After the event, Steve Jobs once again stated that Apple won’t be trying to encroach on Amazon’s territory any time soon — should we believe him?

Via Fortune

iTunes 9 has neat little new feature: it will automatically import any music or videos you throw into a specific folder.

That folder is called “Automatically Add to iTunes”, and after installing iTunes 9 you’ll find it tucked away inside your “~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/” folder.

Cult reader Gary Gale recently blogged about his positive experience of using an iPhone as an electronic boarding pass during a flight from Amsterdam to London.

Singer Nick Cave has a new novel out: The Death of Bunny Munro, a light, cheery, life-affirming tale of the last days of a the eponymous traveling salesman. Just kidding — it’s dark. It’s also available as an audio book and an iPhone application.

But the best part is, guess what he used to write the first chapter?

Apple has posted some nice, high–res video of today’s “Rock & Roll” special press event. The video is available here and has been added to Apple’s Keynote podcast, although it isn’t yet linked from the iTunes front page.

It’s worth watching for four reasons:

* To see Steve’s heartfelt thanks to his liver donor, to Apple’s staff, and the Apple community, whose best wishes seems to have genuinely buoyed and touched him.
* The gaming demos. The iPhone/iPod touch platform is maturing into an important and fun game platform. The demos make this very clear. It isn’t for hard-core gamers, but the rest of us — the millions of casual gamers that only Nintendo seems to know how to engage.
* To see the preview of iTunes LP, and look for clues what the format might be like on a multitouch device (which I think is what project codename Cocktail is really about).
* To see Steve, who’s magnetic and charismatic and utterly watchable even when he’s very unwell. Who knows how many more times we’ll get to see him? These opportunities are getting rarer and rarer. Here’s hoping he makes an appearance at CES in Las Vegas in January to introduce the Apple tablet. And that he puts on 30lbs eating ice cream. I know it worked for me.

Earlier today Steve Jobs told the New York Times that the iPod touch is first and foremost a gaming device, and that’s why it doesn’t have a camera. We’re not entirely convinced, but look at this chart Apple trotted out this morning’s “Rock & Roll” event.

It shows the number of game and entertainment titles for the iPhone/iPod platform. Apple has almost five times the number of titles as the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS combined.

That’s a huge number. Yes, a lot of those titles are fart apps or simple throwaway games. But that’s still a lot of titles. My kids haven’t touched their GameBoys since we got an iPod touch.

This is why the iPod touch was upgraded with beefier CPU and graphics — to make it a better gaming machine. And no wonder every game company under the sun is rushing out apps — the iPhone/iPod platform is taking over. Add another industry to Steve Jobs’ quiver: PCs, digital music, computer animation, mobile internet and now games.

Via Silicon Valley Insider.

Why doesn’t the new iPod touch have a camera? And why can’t the nano take still pictures? Steve Jobs gave David Pogue of the New York Times some answers…

Here’s a short screencast showing the basic function of iTunes 9’s new app management tool for iPhone and iPod touch.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast this with this app manager concept that we featured here on the Cult back in February.

Most iPhone owners I know have never bothered to sort their apps into any sort of meaningful screen-by-screen arrangement, simply because doing so was too much hassle. This tool will change that, I think, and encourage people to create screenfuls of apps sorted by category.

Have you tried re-arranging your apps yet? What do you make of it?

After learning of iTunes 9 becoming available by repeatedly clicking  “Check Now” on Software Update for the past couple of hours, I installed the update and immediately went for the Genius Mixes feature.

It wasn’t there.

Turns out, and yes this is an obvious tip, you have to “Update Genius” in the iTunes to activate the Genius Mix.

At this point, I’m not really impressed with mixes. It seems to be based off of the track music genre, so I have a mix called Blues Mix 4 including Sigur Rós, Explosions in the Sky and Frou Frou: definitely not Blues but that’s what I have listed in the track info. I’m still playing with the bubble wrap, so I’ll post more thoughts soon.

While some may contend the browser wars are over, Apple certainly ensured the 100,000,000 iTunes account holders Steve jobs alluded to at Wednesday’s “Rock and Roll” event in San Francisco will be downloading the latest version of Safari, whether they use Apple’s browser to surf the web or not.

They’ll download it if they want to use iTunes 9, that is.

iTunes 9 is available for download from Apple’s website, even though it isn’t yet showing up in Software Update. According to Apple, here is what’s new:

iTunes LP — song lyrics, liner notes, photos, and more.
Home Sharing — Transfer music, movies, and more between your computers at home.
New iTunes Store — The Redesigned iTunes Store. With a great new look, it’s even easier to explore.
iTunes Extras — Get an inside look at your favorite movies with new special features.
Genius Mixes — Genius makes up to twelve perfect music mixes, automatically.
Improved Syncing — Better ways to sync. And a new way manage apps on your Home screens.