Apple News

TUAW Talkcast live tonight at 10pm Eastern

February 28th, 2010 at 10:00pm Under Hot Apple News

Filed under: Podcasting, TUAW Business

Sunday night means it’s time once again for a TUAW talkcast, in which your favorite TUAW bloggers and readers all get together over on Talkshoe and chat out the biggest Apple happenings of the past week. This week, we’ll be talking about that mystery key on the iPad keyboard and what it might be for, Apple’s “sex apps” issues, tips for switchers (and why they’re so popular), and that file that could very well be the first list of books on the iPad.

We’ll also be chatting live with you — you can call up during the show, and while you’re listening on your phone, you can hit *-8 to chat live with us on the air (which is why we call it a “talkcast” rather than a podcast, don’tcha know). So if you find yourself coming down a little hard after the Olympics this evening, jump on in to our chat and we’ll cheer you right back up.

To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the “TalkShoe Web” button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (take advantage of your free cellphone weekend minutes if you like): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 — during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you’ve got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free Gizmo or X-Lite SIP clients; basic instructions are here. Talk with you then!

TUAWTUAW Talkcast live tonight at 10pm Eastern originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By Mike Schramm Continue Reading TUAW Talkcast live tonight at 10pm EasternAdd comment

The iPad as a Peripheral Display

February 28th, 2010 at 09:47pm Under Hot Apple News

I was thrilled to hear that current apps will be compatible with the iPad, but I’m more excited for apps that haven’t been written yet. Apps for the iPhone and iPod touch are designed for use while being held. There’s an exciting new use case that comes with the iPad — when it’s sitting in [...]

By David Klein Continue Reading The iPad as a Peripheral DisplayAdd comment

Sunday Fun Photoshops: If iPad is a Big iPhone, What’s a Big iPad?

February 28th, 2010 at 09:32pm Under Hot Apple News+ Iphone

A little Photoshop fun with the idea that if the iPhone grew into the iPad, then the iPad is just waiting to grow into… Well, see above.

[BeGeek.fr via Gizmodo, thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
Sunday Fun Photoshops: If iPad is a Big iPhone, What’s a Big iPad? is a story by TiPb. This [...]

Sunday Fun Photoshops: If iPad is a Big iPhone, What’s a Big iPad? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

By Rene Ritchie Continue Reading Sunday Fun Photoshops: If iPad is a Big iPhone, What’s a Big iPad?Add comment

TiPb Gear — Pogo Sketch for iPhone (Macworld 2010)

February 28th, 2010 at 09:14pm Under Hot Apple News+ Iphone

Live from Macworld 2010, Rene and Leanna talk with Peter Skinner of Ten One Designs about their Pogo Sketch stylus for the iPhone… and iPad!

Watch along after the break and let us know what you think! (Especially if you came from PalmOS or Windows Mobile!)

TiPb Gear — Pogo Sketch for iPhone (Macworld 2010) is a [...]

TiPb Gear — Pogo Sketch for iPhone (Macworld 2010) is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

By Rene Ritchie Continue Reading TiPb Gear — Pogo Sketch for iPhone (Macworld 2010)Add comment

My on-again, off-again Apple relationship

February 28th, 2010 at 08:00pm Under Hot Apple News

Filed under: Cult of Mac, Apple

With TUAW’s Your First Apple series, we let you get a glimpse of our own histories with the Mac. My own history with Apple’s computers has been a bit convoluted. The first Apple computer, in fact the first computer of any kind I remember using, was an Apple II+. I was in kindergarten in Saudi Arabia at the time, so I don’t really remember much about those early experiences. Like many people of my generation, when I returned to the US I went to schools that had computer labs crammed full of Apple IIe computers. Of course, the only programs that were ever run on my elementary school’s Apples were marginally “educational” games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Odell Lake, and the massively popular Oregon Trail. Meanwhile, my family had a KayPro PC at home, which meant my dad had to teach an eight-year-old kid how to navigate through the amber-lettered jungles of DOS — something I’m glad I’ll never have to do with my own kids.

The Apple IIe was the only computer I used in school through 1990. I spent most of seventh grade cooking up little text-based adventure games in BASIC, and I even learned some rudimentary drawing and audio programming, all of which I forgot long ago. In mid-1990, the school revamped our computer lab with brand-new Macintosh Classics: the first Mac I ever used, the first machine I used that had a hard drive, and the first time I ever used a GUI to interact with a computer. Oddly enough, despite the huge leap in capabilities the Mac Classic had over the Apple IIe, we spent half of eighth grade using the Mac to learn how to type. I guess I should be thankful I learned to touch-type way back then, but spending several months on typing tutor software was a hard sell after spending the previous year doing actual programming.

After that first year with the Mac, my experiences with Apple’s computers went through some rollercoaster-like ups and downs. Click “read more” to find out why.

Some time in the early 90’s, my dad dumped his KayPro for a custom-built, unbranded, 386-based PC running Windows 3.11, which I inherited from him after he upgraded yet again. It was the first computer I had all to myself. After learning my way around the Mac’s interface, learning Windows 3.11 took all of five minutes. The PC also had color graphics, which was a definite improvement over the black-and-white Mac Classics at school. I didn’t get much actual work done on the PC, though, because nothing I produced on it was compatible with my high school’s Macs; I mostly used the PC for games.

My high school actually had two computer labs: one full of state-of-the-art Macs for basic computer training and programming, and one full of ancient, DOS-running IBM PCs used for business-related classes. I spent ninth and tenth grade learning how to program in HyperCard, which I used to create a couple of graphic adventure games complete with an X-Y navigation system that took quite a while to code properly. One program I developed in tenth grade on the Mac LC III was an Aliens vs. Predator adventure game, with graphics taken straight from the Dark Horse comic series and audio from both the Aliens and Predator films. I also created a HyperCard-based trojan to mess with the other kids in the lab. It was basically just a HyperCard stack that, once launched, would auto-generate new cards until the RAM filled up and the Mac crashed. High school was a high point in my experiences with Macs, but for the rest of the 90s and the first few years of the 2000s, it was all downhill.

Once I got out of high school, my long relationship with the Mac went on an extended hiatus. After joining the Navy in 1995 I hardly used computers of any kind for several years, to say nothing of Macs or the Internet. For almost four years I barely touched a PC for anything other than playing video games. Macs didn’t register on my radar at all, and the few times I came across one, I had the same reaction that a lot of today’s Mac haters still have: “For as much as they’re charging, I can’t even get any decent games for this thing?”

In late 1999 I finally started using the internet on a regular basis via a 56k dialup connection through my roommate’s ancient and thoroughly crappy Performa. I don’t know which model Performa it was or even what OS it was using — it was either OS 8 or System 7 — but I was not impressed with that machine at all. When my roommate offered to give me that Mac in exchange for me paying his part of the rent for a couple months, I turned him down, because I hated almost everything about that Performa. When I moved in with my girlfriend of the time, she had two computers: some anonymous box from HP running Windows 98, and an iMac with OS 9. Since the iMac didn’t have any games for it, wasn’t compatible with our cable modem, and had that horrible piece of garbage hockey puck mouse, I wouldn’t go near the thing. I preferentially veered toward the HP machine for everything I did.

From mid-2000 to early 2003 I once again barely even saw or used a Mac except for the handful of times I visited a Mac zealot friend of mine who lived in Seattle. I inherited yet another ancient computer from another friend of mine for my home use, one even older and less capable than the Performa: some Gateway box running Windows 95. Unable to even hook that machine up to the internet or run 3D games of any kind, the Gateway saw little use for the two years I had it.

After almost ten years of using computers solely for internet access and the occasional bit of gaming, I’d become sort of a luddite. Beyond basic word processing and web browsing, I really had no clue how to use a computer anymore. I ended up becoming a Mac switcher in early 2003, completely against my will, when I moved in with my wife. She had a dual 1GHz G4 Power Mac running OS X, and for the first couple of months using it, I had no idea what I was doing. I think my ignorance showed through enough that my wife got paranoid of letting me use her Mac at all. I eventually got the hang of it, but it was a painful process; I insisted on using Internet Explorer, stayed well clear of OS updates, and didn’t even attempt to do anything out of the ordinary with her Mac.

It was only after buying a used PowerBook G3 off of eBay for $200 that I really started figuring the Mac out. In the process of upgrading the processor to a G4, upping the RAM, swapping out the hard drive, and hacking the thing to run OS X Panther and Tiger (the model of PowerBook I bought was supposed to max out at Jaguar), I quickly gained an appreciation for the ins and outs of OS X. In the process, I reached the point where I flat-out refused to use Windows unless I absolutely had to for some reason. Within the space of a year, I also went from being completely ignorant about computers to being free tech support for all my friends; and for the few of them still using Windows, my first bit of tech advice is almost always to stop using Windows. OS X may or may not be inherently “better” than Windows, but over the past several years I’ve figured out that I only get the urge to throw my Mac out the window once or twice a month versus once every five minutes with the average Windows box.

My wife upgraded to a MacBook in 2007, so I inherited her Power Mac — just in time, as it turned out, because even after all its upgrades, my PowerBook was definitely showing its age, particularly in the way it liked to chew through hard drives. In February of 2008 I bought the 17″ MacBook Pro I’m still using today — the first brand-new computer I’ve ever owned.

It’s been a long, weird ride — BASIC programming, typing tutors, HyperCard programming, then close to ten years of neo-Ludditism — to where I am now, in a house full of Apple-branded gadgets, most of which would have sounded like science fiction when I sat down in front of a Mac Classic for the first time twenty years ago.

TUAWMy on-again, off-again Apple relationship originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By Chris Rawson Continue Reading My on-again, off-again Apple relationshipAdd comment

Appletell reviews Stinger Table Hockey for iPhone, iPod touch

February 28th, 2010 at 05:23pm Under Hot Apple News

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, iDevice Apps, Reviews

Category: Stinger Table Hockey
Seller: Stinger Games
Requirements: iPhone OS 2.2 or later
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch
File Size: 10.6MB
Version Reviewed: 1.1
Price: $1.99
Age Rating: 4+

Before I begin this review, I should disclose that rod hockey is my favorite arcade style table game. You can keep your air hockey and foosball. Give me something that requires a little more skill, a little more finesse, but also doesn’t take up as much room as a pool or ping pong table. I’m the guy who has priced out basement finishing jobs just so I have an excuse to buy a rod hockey table and put it somewhere appropriate.

Or, maybe I can just play it on the iPhone, thanks to Stinger Table Hockey. As all of the iPhone air hockey sims were released, I kept thinking I’d love to see rod hockey, but had no idea how someone would be able to pull it off. For the most part, I think Stinger has. But first, here’s the game…

Rod hockey (also known as bubble or table hockey, obviously) places (usually) 3D plastic players on rods, which you move in their lanes by pulling the rods at the ends of the table. You can spin them by turning the rods in an attempt to shoot the puck into the net. In Stinger Table Hockey, you move the players up and down in their lanes by tapping the player (or lane) and dragging your thumb up and down. You spin them to pass the puck or shoot by swiping your thumb left and right.

It’s a fairly easy and intuitive method of control, allowing you to use two thumbs at once to control multiple players. Unfortunately, you end up with the traditional iPhone game problem in that your thumbs are often in the way of the action. You’ll be moving the puck without actually being able to see the puck.

Also, this method of control slows the game down quite a bit from its real world inspiration. Passes and shots take longer to set up and execute if you want to be accurate. As a result, I found myself having just as much fun relying on swift player movement to handle random shots. In a way, that makes it more like foosball and air hockey, but it works on the iPhone. The camera does a great job of following the puck action, and goals are followed by instant replays of the shot.

The graphics do a great job of recreating the hockey table experience; the players are a bit jagged, but the “ice” actually looks better than the real thing. Animation is pretty smooth, although it gets choppy when the action speeds up. The audio effects are a bit clunky, but they don’t harm the game at all. Special mention should be made of the soundtrack that doesn’t annoy by being overly aggressive or having too much “attitude.” They’re just good rock songs that fit quite well into the game.

Stinger Table Hockey is not licensed by the NHL, so you don’t get real teams. Rather than create fake names, however, Stinger allows you to customize the player jerseys so you can kind of set up your players with your team’s colors. Even better, 38 international team colors are already preconfigured, so you can select your nation by choosing its flag. Very cool. One historical team is included that Stinger says, is a “… MUST HAVE for all table/bubble hockey.” I’ll let you guess just who that could be.

The one drawback to real life rod hockey is that you absolutely need another player in order to have any fun with it, preferably someone at your skill level. On the iPhone, you can play the CPU. But Stinger knows the joy of the came comes from beating a human opponent, so you also get WiFi and Bluetooth multiplayer. OpenFeint is supported for achievement tracking. A tournament mode is also included, along with three skill games to help you ramp up your skills.

I absolutely love Stinger Table Hockey (Stinger…I wonder if the developer is a Blue Jackets fan). You could say I was bound to, considering how much I enjoy the real thing, but I actually thought it’d go the other way; I was nervous my expectations would be too high, setting up the iPhone version to fail. That’s not the case. Stinger Table Hockey is exactly what fans of the game will want it to be, and it’s a game that’ll remain on their iPhone or iPod touch for quite some time.

Full Story » | Written by Kirk Hiner for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »

By Kirk Hiner Continue Reading Appletell reviews Stinger Table Hockey for iPhone, iPod touchAdd comment

Popular technology industry news for the week of 2-21-2010

February 28th, 2010 at 12:42pm Under Hot Apple News

Section:

You know what’s going on in the wonderful world of Apple, but what’s going on throughout the technology industry?  Gadgetell‘s got you covered.  Here a list of their top stories from this week…

• Google ditches Google Gears in favor of HTML5 development
• NYTimes execs confident pay wall on NYTimes.com and iPhone app will increase revenues
• AT&T or iPhone: who’s to blame for network woes?
• Princeton’s Kindle experiement generates mixed results
• Socialscope, the best (or worst) BlackBerry app ever

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »

By NEWS Continue Reading Popular technology industry news for the week of 2-21-2010Add comment

Top 10 Gamertell posts for the week of February 21, 2010

February 28th, 2010 at 03:02am Under Hot Apple News

FROM GAMERTELL – Haven’t caught all of the Gamertell news this week?  Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles…
MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »

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The Reader’s View: Best of your feedback, comments and opinions

February 28th, 2010 at 03:00am Under Hot Apple News

Filed under: Odds and ends, TUAW Business

The Reader’s View is our weekly roundup of some of the most upbeat, thoughtful, or just plain good comments that have been published by TUAW readers. This week, we still have some post-Macworld Expo 2010 comments coming in, as well as discussion of several posts that attracted positive comments this week.

The first comment, from Ed P, was added to David Winograd’s coverage of his interview with Roland Saekow of BearExtender. It appears that Ed was actually at Macworld watching the interview being done: “Hey, I was watching this while ya’ll were broadcasting! Macworld was Haute! Really looking forward to next year!”

We are too, Ed! Next, David’s interview of Mitch Waite, developer of iBird Pro for iPhone, generated some very positive words about the app from aptly-named reader nature: “iBird is one of the best apps I have ever found. The comments about the illustrations not being correct is obviously from a perfectionist who does not appreciate what a leap forward this app is. The average person does not need perfect drawings, they need great functionality and good photos and illustrations. iBird has those and a lot more. Like its amazing search engine that has taught me how to identify birds so that my life list is now at 222 in less than 3 months. It’s amazing to me how the critics come out and jump all over good products rather than appreciate what has been done.”

Erica Sadun’s insight is always technically on target and sometimes controversial. Her recent post “TUAW redux: The future of iPhone OS and Mac OS,” created its fair share of comments. One, from reader frank l, seemed to capture the essence of what what a future OS should be: “Extrapolation into the future improves with more data points. We may have further insights after the iPad and its successors are more familiar to us.

The OS will have a core with modules being added and jettisoned as circumstances change. The Adaptive OS.”

TUAW’s Michael Jones has a wonderful way of explaining things to Mac users. In his post “Mac 101: Navigating OS X with your keyboard,” he spoke to Mac owners new and old about how to use your Mac without a mouse. Reader Robert gave us a tip on two useful keyboard shortcuts he uses: “I’ve had to work with ‘mouseless Macs’ every so often at the university computer labs. Here’s some useful ones:

Note that if your keyboard has an fn key, you’ll need to use that in conjunction with the above key commands, or else they won’t work. Then you can use the arrow keys and the return key or space bar to navigate and select menu and dock items.”

Thanks for that information, Robert! Michael will be publishing a followup to that post some time soon. Next, a number of TUAW regulars made comments on my post “TUAW review: Smoother iPhone browsing with VanillaSurf.” Many readers liked VanillaSurf, but couldn’t get it to import bookmarks. Reader Jim figured out how to activate this feature in the app: “I finally got it to work the bookmark importing to work. I removed the profile in Firefox [v3.6] and then relaunched it so that it lets me import my Safari bookmarks [Safari is my default browser and has the latest bookmarks] Then exported the bookmarks from Firefox and tried the sync again and it worked! yay!”

Finally, it’s always fun when a reader like doelcm can give the TUAW bloggers a good laugh. He responded to our post “Rumor: UK iPad pricing” with this: “Dear TUAW. Could you please put the word “rumor” (or “rumour” in this case) in the title when you’re posting unsubstantiated information.

Oh, wait….never mind.”

We’ll be back with another edition of The Reader’s View next Saturday here on TUAW. Until then, keep those cards and letters coming, folks!

Original post photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sabine01/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

TUAWThe Reader’s View: Best of your feedback, comments and opinions originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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No Apple stock split…for now.

February 28th, 2010 at 02:00am Under Hot Apple News

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple Financial

Thursday, Briefings.com, CNBC and a passel of other market analysts predicted that a 4 for 1 stock split would be announced at the Apple Shareholder Meeting. This rumor moved the market, but there are conflicting opinions to why. First, for the uninitiated, a stock split is a zero sum game. One interpretation is that a firm considers its stock too highly priced for the average consumer and decides to split. For example, let’s say that Apple is trading for $200 and you have one share. If a 4 for 1 stock split takes place, you will wind up 4 shares, instead of 1, but each share will be valued at $50. Did you gain or lose any money? No. It’s all on paper. However, to those not familiar with the Buttonwood tree, and that’s a lot of us, it sounds like ‘quick buy Apple and you’ll be getting 4 times as much‘. The case for this sort of stupidity is well made by Barrons.

Stock splits are nothing new to AAPL. They’ve split 2 for 1 three time in the past, in June 1987, June 2000 and February 2005.

There are two general schools of thought on the reason behind stock splits, and they are total opposites. The first theory is that a company will split a stock if it is in trouble to allow lower dollar investors to buy their shares at half the price and thus incur less risk. The other school of thought is that a good company realizes their stock is just too expensive for the small trader who has some cash on the sidelines. It is meant to give the small guy an easier way to buy some stock without needing to commit the $200 for a share. Both sides have their points and, to an extent, both points are based on smoke and mirrors since they do not effect the worth of the company or the aggregate value of the stock by one penny.
Unless I read the word ‘drop’ wrong, it seems to me that the stock was down, and then the rumor came in and the stock shot up. There was no word of a split at the shareholder meeting, but as a long term AAPL watcher, I wouldn’t count out a split happening in the near future. However that’s just me.

Another story that seems to be gaining traction, for no good reason that I can surmise, is that Apple will declare a dividend of $33.00 per share, returning 16.66% to investors. Doing so would mean relinquishing 75% of its moneybags this year while taxes on dividends and passive income are low. It would also take Apple’s walking around money from from $40 billion to $10 billion. I really wonder where this one got started since Apple hasn’t declared a dividend since 1995, and playing Scrooge McDuck seems to keep Steve happy. Although Apple isn’t known for buying a lot of companies scatter-shot, it’s quite nice to be able to buy what you want when the right opportunity presents itself without worrying about nasty things like financing. And I haven’t heard much, if any, grousing directed at Apple not forking over the dividends. Tell me if I’m wrong, but this seems like a non-story.

With all these stories whirling about, Apple went up $5.97 to close at $202.86 on Thursday. What do you make of this? Reading all the interpretations of Thurday’s action makes my brain hurt.

The bottom line is: nothing happened.

Disclaimer: I own some Apple stock and all the opinions are my own.

TUAWNo Apple stock split…for now. originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple Corporate – Unofficial Apple Weblog – Apple – Stock – Dividend

By David Winograd Continue Reading No Apple stock split…for now.Add comment