Here’s a selection of games to take you through the weekend from Mac Games and More. Games include a medieval RPG where you play a megalomaniac monarch, an addictive alien shooter, and a challenging puzzler set in Amsterdam. Click on the images to see a larger screenshot.
The iPhone Spotlight search feature has been improved yet again.
Universal Search, a jailbreak app from Efiko Software, takes searching with Spotlight to a whole new level. With this add-on installed, Spotlight can access mobile search sites and generate location-based results all from within the Spotlight search window.
Universal Search’s smart input monitoring allows the user to enter a phone number or url directly into Spotlight and options to call, text or visit the url pop up in the results. It also searches Google Maps and mobile sites directly rather than going through a search engine’s web results.
Search sites include Wikipedia, Google Maps, Twitter, CNN, ebay, IMDb, flickr, and ESPN.
Universal Search is available for $4.99 in the Cydia Store.
Multimedia Messaging Service is coming to the iPhone on September 25, AT&T just announced in a press release. The service will be available at no additional cost to iPhone customers with a text messaging plan (which start at about $20). But there’s still no word on tethering (which allows your computer to access the internet via the iPhone’s data connection).
The MMS announcement comes as AT&T draws fire for its slow, unreliable data network. MMS is likely to put more strain on the network, but AT&T claims it is ready.
“The unique capabilities and high usage of the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities required us to work on our network MMS architecture to carry the expected record volumes of MMS traffic and ensure an excellent experience from Day One. We appreciate your patience as we work toward that end.”
We’re riding the leading edge of smartphone growth that’s resulted in an explosion of traffic over the AT&T network. Wireless use on our network has grown an average of 350 percent year-over-year for the past two years, and is projected to continue at a rapid pace in 2009 and beyond. The volume of smartphone data traffic the AT&T network is handling is unmatched in the wireless industry. We want you to know that we’re working relentlessly to innovate and invest in our network to anticipate this growth in usage and to stay ahead of the anticipated growth in data demand, new devices and applications for years to come.
The MMS service will allow iPhone users to send and receive messages containing images, audio, video. MMS is widely available in other countries, and can be enabled on many iPhones with a simple hack.
Tethering is not likely to be announced for several months as AT&T builds out its network with 2,100 cell towers and 100,000 new backhaul links.
The cruel but funny People of Walmart website is looking for a developer to create an iPhone app for the website.
If you’re interested in making an iPhone app to make fun of misfits — and possibly get sued for publishing their unauthorized photographs — contact People of Walmart at info@peopleofwalmart.com.
Surely you’ve seen the viral website, which publishes candid-camera style pictures of the various meth tweakers, rednecks, and other sundry weirdos that frequent the nation’s largest retailer, along with cruelly funny captions.
Just a few weeks old, the site is often down due to server overload. The developers are also looking for a new host that can cope with the traffic.
Now you can create tilt-shift photographs on your iPhone thanks to a new app called TiltShift Generator.
Available now for 99c (the price rises to $2.99 in two weeks), the app makes those fake miniature pictures so popular on the internet.
Created by developer Takayuki Fukatsu, the app works by selectively blurring parts of the picture to simulate a very narrow depth of field, making the subject look like a miniature.
The software can be used to create other effects, like vintage-looking photos.
If you want to try it out before plunking down your hard-earned 99c, the developer also offers a free online web app, and a free Adobe Air version. More sample pictures after the jump.
Logitech today introduced two new ways to stream your DRM-free iTunes Plus and other music collections. The Squeezebox Radio is a standalone device which streams iTunes, Napster or Sirius. Using a six-button navigation system, and the unit’s color screen, you can flip through album art, track and station listings, along with visualizers, the company announced.
The 5.12-inch by 8.66-inch by 5.04-inch radio also serves as an alarm clock with a display that automatically brightens depending on lighting situations.
The Squeezebox Radio offers “clear sound with minimal distortion” Logitech claims. The company said the unit has a 3/4-inch high-definition, soft-dome tweeter, plus a 3-inch high-power woofer. A 3.5mm headphone jack is also included.
Update 2: Thanks to Cult of Mac reader Gus, who noted that certain websites were screwing up his Photoshop. I started playing around with Safari and noticed that sites with embedded Flash were causing the cursor issue. I then recalled Adobe UK PR bod Emma Wilkinson’s tweet from earlier today:
Info: Snow Leopard ships w/earlier version Flash Player, recommend all update to latest, more secure which supports SL https://bit.ly/yP2VA
Sure enough, after installing the Flash update, the problem seems to be gone.
I’ve been a quite vocal critic of Adobe of late, but I’m damn impressed with the company today—it looks like someone is listening, and that’s always a good thing.
Update: Kudos to Adobe. Shortly after this post went up, a ‘Senior Software Product Quality Specialist – Photoshop’ was in touch, and we’re now involved in a discussion to try and figure out what’s going on. Also, Nack is keeping people up to date regarding some of the reported CS3 and CS4 problems.
With any new operating system comes a certain amount of pain, but the transition to Snow Leopard has been relatively easy for me. I’ve had one incredibly nasty hard crash that locked up the Mac, painted vertical stripes down the screen and looped about a quarter-second of audio at maximum volume (it was like the iMac decided to do its own really small horror film), but nothing bad before or since.
A minor exception is Photoshop CS4, which on the face of it works well, but is becoming increasingly quirky. Two bugs I’ve so far discovered that have hampered my workflow quite significantly are: 1) Photoshop deciding to ignore drags from Finder to its Dock icon—half the time, it opens just one of multiple documents; 2) insanely useful Photoshop custom cursors vanishing when the mouse button is held down.
For the latter of those things, I made a quick video (with an exasperated tone of voice). If anyone knows what the hell causes this and how to fix the bug, please post in the comments. (Note the hardware in this case is a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZQRSMzOvKw
Now here’s something unexpected. Sophos security consultant Graham Cluley has a warning for everyone who’s just upgraded their computer to run Snow Leopard: go check your Flash plugin version as soon as possible, because you might find that your OS upgrade simultaneously downgraded your plugin. (Assuming your plugin was up-to-date to begin with; full explanation in the video above.)
You can check your plugin version at this page on Adobe’s site.
While the Vimeo Flash video player Graham’s using is not going to cause any harm to your computer, you can’t be certain that Flash content elsewhere on the web will be as safe.
How so? I called Graham this morning and asked him.
Coinciding with Steve Jobs return to the public eye next week, Penguin Portfolio is reissuing my book Inside Steve’s Brain with a new chapter about how Apple will cope without its dynamic CEO.
Published in April 2008, Inside Steve’s Brain was a New York Times best-seller and an international hit (translated into 15 languages and a best-seller in Brazil and Italy). But the book was written before Jobs’ recent liver transplant, so the publisher asked me to update it for a second edition.
Jobs will take the stage next week at Apple’s special press event to show off new holiday iPods to the press. He has to: If he doesn’t show up Sept. 9, there’ll be a media shitstorm and Apple’s stock will tank.
Jobs’ last public appearance happened exactly a year ago. Last Sept. 9, he presided over a similar iPod event at the same venue. Bloomberg had accidentally published Jobs’ obituary, and when he appeared onstage he flashed a slide with Mark Twain’s famous line: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Indeed. One liver transplant later, Jobs is still with us, thank God. But there will be a time when Apple will have to do without its supreme leader, and as I explain in the new chapter of Inside Steve’s Brain, the company will be both royally fucked and totally OK when the inevitable happens.
Duracell’s cheap and cheerful little rechargeable battery pack is “perfect,” Gizmodo says in a nice little review of the new gadget.
Just released, Duracell’s $20 Instant Charger is good for about half a charge of an iPhone, or a full charge of an iPod nano.
“Duracell’s Instant Charger is a perfectly executed little gadget,” Gizmodo says.
The site has seen plenty of pricey chargers with all the bells and whistles, which are usually superfluous. Gizmodo is charmed by the Instant Charger’s purity: it’s basically a rechargeable litium ion battery hooked to a USB port, and that’s it.
You plug in your own charging cables, so it’s good for iPhones, iPods, digital cameras, Bluetooth headsets and any other gadget that comes with a USB cable.
The Instant Charger ‘s bigger brother, the $50 Powerhouse Charger, stores enough juice to charge an iPhone 3G 1.2 times, or an iPod nano 4 times, Giz says. But it isn’t as compelling as the Instant Charger, which is perfectly simple and cheap.
Searching the iTunes app store is much easier when you’re not using the iTunes app store. Launching today, uquery.com aims to be the vehicle for the app discovery process.
The site uses its own system of algorithms called “AppRank” to make it easy and fast to find the right app for certain tasks. Search results appear in a easy-to-navigate center column along with options to refine your search.
Unlike the iTunes App Store, you can use your browser’s “find in page” command to pinpoint your search term in the search results. It’s the little things.
At the moment, uquery.com appears to generate search results from the full text app descriptions. As the site gains visitors, search queries and tweets, the “AppRank” system will improve its ability to make the app discovery process more intuitive.
RadTech today doubled the usefulness of its AutoPower on-the-go iPhone and iPod charger, offering two USB ports. The new device also nearly halved the price, to $10 from $17 for the single-port version. The single-port option does include a 30-pin retractable cable.
The 3.3-inch by 1.3 inch AutoPower includes fuseless recharging with a sensor to avoid hardware damage. RadTech says the 5V 500mA recharger is “not for 1st -3rd Generation iPod.”
The camera world is all aflutter over Panasonic’s Lumix GF1 digital camera. Along with questions about how the device measures up to the rival Olympus E-P1, the question on everyone’s lips is the GF1 a DSLR wannabe?
It seems the question has some substance. The “R” in DSLR requires a mirror. However, the GF1, the latest in Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds standard, is “mirror-free,” according to the company.
The British security firm Intego has published a security memo that provides a clear and detailed view of Apple’s new XProtect anti-virus system in Snow Leopard.
There are several interesting tidbits: Apple’s new XProtect system cannot recognize all the variants of the Trojans it is supposed to protect against, for example.
Also, the XProtect system does not spot Trojans hidden inside .mpkg files downloaded from the internet, a major weakness, according to Intego. (Apple’s installer recognizes two types of files — .pkg files for simple packages, and .mpkg files that contain multiple packages to be installed.)
The memo is patently self-serving — Intego sells several anti-virus and privacy packages for the Mac — but nonetheless provides a clear and detailed view of what Apple’s new XProtect system does — and doesn’t do.
The full memo after the jump.
Vonage’s App has been approved for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the company is looking for volunteers to help beta test the app.
“Interested in Vonage app beta? Few spots left. Follow me & send your email address via DM. Lots of interest..cannot guarantee spot.” says the official Vonage Twitter feed.
The offer was posted at about 7.40 AM PST and should still be good — for a little while at least.
The Vonage app will allow customers to make cheap VOIP calls on the iPhone — but over Wi-Fi only, like the similar Skype app. AT&T bans VOIP on its 3G cellular network.
We’re big fans of the unauthorized doc “Welcome to Macintosh” — a true love letter to the history of Apple and its community.
Now this indie film is available on iTunes.
Well, it’s also available on Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Netflix etc., but we love the idea that what is a totally handmade film (tagline: “a documentary for the rest of us”) is now worthy of being sold by Apple.
In what’s turning out to be a busy few weeks for the team at Bare Bones, their information manager app Yojimbo has just been bumped up to 2.0. The new version is a 20 dollar upgrade for owners of older versions, is Snow Leopard compatible, and has this spectacular new icon.
There are a lot of Apple-inspired confections out there, but this apple pie with a logo at the center by a photographer in Uruguay who goes by Miss Gong looks almost too yummy to eat. (Not sure if the reverse logo was intentional or just turned round in the photo).
Imagine inviting your Mac user group over and serving this apple pie for dessert…
Mobile phone gadget maker Parrot Tuesday introduced one of the few in-dash car stereos meant for iPhone users. The RKi8400 ($400 in the U.S.) was unveiled at the Frankfurt Auto Show.
“All iPhone functions — music, navigation of the music directory and playlists and Bluetooth phone capabilities — have been adapted for in-car use,” said Henri Seydoux, Parrot founder and CEO.
The more I play with Snow Leopard, the more it looks like it’s designed to run Apple’s upcoming tablet.
Look at Expose in the Dock — the new feature that reveals all an application’s open windows when you click and hold the application’s icon. It’s tailor-made for fingers. Even more convincing is Stacks in the Dock. Hit a folder icon in the dock, and up pops the folder and all its files. Each icon is a big target for your finger, and the window has a big, fat slider for scrolling up and down (no more fiddly little arrows at the top or bottom). Both of these UI tweaks scream ‘touchscreen.’
And then today I discovered an unheralded feature that the minute I saw it, I thought, “Game over! Here’s rock-solid proof that Snow Leopard is designed for touchscreens. This is a tablet operating system.”
Rockstar Games’ critically-acclaimed Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is coming to the iPhone/touch this fall, the company says.
Released last year for the Nintendo DS, the game got reave reviews and is still the highest-rated DS game on GameRankings, with an average review score of about 93%.
“Chinatown Wars is a big fat raspberry to the competition; a masterclass in not only hand-held development, but video game design as a whole, exploring exactly how to craft Liberty City around the console’s unique strengths without compromising the series’ character,” said the Daily Telegraph.
The game follows the misadventures of Huang Lee, a young Triad, as he investigates the mysterious death of his dad, kills his rivals, steals cars, deals drugs and evades the cops — all in a miniature version of the company’s infamous virtual playground, Liberty City.
Sounds fun. Here’s the trailer:
As expected, Apple is hosting a special “Rock and Roll” media event on Sept. 9 and is sending invites to members of the press.
The tag line for the event is: “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” — a play on the Rolling Stones song “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It).”
Some had speculated the event would be tied to the reissue of the Beatles catalog on the same day: 09/09/09. The band is re-issuing its entire remastered catalog and The Beatles: Rock Band game. But using a line from Rolling Stones now makes that seem unlikely.
The event is likely to showcase Apple’s holiday lineup of iPods, which are widely expected to get cameras, and a new version of iTunes with social networking features.
Although many are hoping the event will also see the introduction of an Apple tablet, that seems unlikely. But an appearance by Steve Jobs does not. If he hosts the event, it’ll be the first public appearance by Steve Jobs since his liver transplant earlier this year.
The event is being held at 10:00 AM PST at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the venue of several previous Apple media events.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking for insider traders of Apple stock — possibly Apple staff — who made suspicious trades of the company’s stock, according to the Huffington Post.
The SEC is asking brokerage firms for the identities of clients who made suspicious trades, HuffPost financial columnist Dan Dorfman says.
The SEC is looking at suspicious stock trades during four specific time periods, which is unusual, Dorfman says; investigations are usually limited to single time periods — not multiple.
Insider trading is the buying and selling of stock by people with access to information not available to the general public, and is closely watched by the SEC. Insider trades often revolve around news that moves the company’s stock, such as good or bad revenue reports, or the announceent of new products.
The SEC would not reveal any details of its investigation, but traders contacted by Dorfman speculated that it concerned reports about Steve Jobs health and liver transplant, and/or sales of the iPod. News about either create volatility in Apples stock, which insiders can profit from.
As Dorfman notes, Apple’s stock has been great for traders: insider or not. It’s almost doubled in 8 months, jumping from $85.35 to $170.05, just below the 52-week high of $176.25.
Snow Leopard is being widely touted as a performance increase, but the OS upgrade resulted in a 10-15% performance DECREASE on both my Mac Pro as well as my MacBook Pro — at least, according to the Xbench benchmarking tool.
Now of course, that could just be things that Xbench measures, perhaps it doesn’t account or provide sufficient weight for multi-threading, and multi-tasking. But we would like to get to the bottom of this, and are asking for your help.
If you followed our handy dandy upgrade guide you ought so still have a functioning Leopard install to boot from. If so, please follow this testing protocol:
Use the same protocol with your Snow Leopard install, but name the result CoM – YOURNAME – POST.
Thanks in advance I’ll be releasing results in the next few days.
** Why no drive test? XBench places too much emphasis on hard drive performance, and in an era where all hard drives perform basically the same, it skews all performance tests to the center. Running the test without drives provides a better picture of the actual performance delta.
We may be getting closer to a hardware version of hands-free navigation for iPhone users. The FCC has released several documents plus photos of a planned TomTom Car Kit for the iPhone.
The kit (pictured above) includes a mount enabling the iPhone to be positioned either vertically or in landscape mode. Engadget also writes the kit includes Bluetooth and a dedicated SiRFstar GPS chipset.
The announcement may be welcome news to iPhone navigators who hoped an actual TomTom product would follow an iPhone app released earlier this month. The app, priced at $99.99 for U.S. and Canadian iPhone owners, competes with the likes of CoPilot Live ($34.99), Sygic Mobile Maps ($39.99), AT&T’s Navigator ($10 monthly fee) and Google Maps.
[Via iClarified and Engadget]