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Holiday Geek Guide: For the Apple Fanatic in Your iLife
Know someone who already has everything they need from Apple? Someone so emphatically Apple-oriented that the words cult and fanboi aren’t strong enough descriptors? Then this is the gift guide for you. You may find it hard to locate one of those Steve Jobs dolls since Apple has shut them down, and you already missed your chance to get a one of a kind Apple 1 that recently auctioned off for $210K, or the equally rare glass step from the 5th Avenue Apple retail store for just $10K. This Christmas gift guide is composed of items a little more within your reach (though sometimes not by much), and all 100-percent Apple to the core:

Apple Retail Store Furniture

How well do you speak Italian? It turns out that those round bean-bagish chairs found in many of the Apple retail Stores are actually of Italian design. Cerruti Baleri’s Tato Collection is where Apple went shopping to find them. It’s a collection of products from designer Denis Santachiara. The problem seems to be how to purchase a set of your own. You may have to go through a furniture dealer or even an art gallery, as these items are not available for direct sale over the Internet.

The Apple Company Store

If you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay area sometime this holiday season, then consider making a side trip to Cupertino. That’s right; Apple’s headquarters is the only place where you can purchase official Apple merchandise. Better yet, plan a trip and take that special someone to the Apple Store on a shopping spree. The Apple Company Store is open to the public.

Other Apple-Branded Gear

A little closer to home, from the comfort of your closest internet connection, in fact, is The Missing Bite. From posters to hats to stationary and pens, This site is one of the rare places online that you can get some Apple-branded swag. They even have the classic “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” genius bio sheets. There are also alternatives like RedLightRunner and Dougintosh to consider. All of these sites seem to source their wares from official Apple promotional channels. I’ve also always liked the Apple Timeline t-shirt from Insanely Great Tees.

iPhone App Icons

As a magnet, a coaster, and even as a throw pillow, the look of the icons from the stock Apple apps on the iPhone are quite popular. ThinkGeek is selling a set of the app magnets in their online store. If you’d rather have the iPhone app icons as coasters, they sell as three separate sets of six. If it’s pillows you are looking for, then look no further than the iconpillows shop on Etsy. In fact, both ThinkGeek and Etsy have additional Apple technology related items that you may like even better. MacBook decals are always a hit, as is the Etch-a-Sketch iPad case. And who could forget the Antennaid stickers that helped resolve the iPhone 4 antenna signal loss problem?

Design Apps From Scratch

Have someone in mind this holiday season that feels they can design a better version of almost any app they install? Empower them with their own assortment of stencils and tablets so they can get to work re-designing the apps they’ve grown to love. UI Stencils has both an iPhone and an iPad version of a metal stencil that you can use to draw the app of your dreams. If the UI Stencils sketch pads aren’t to your liking, take a look at what App Sketchbook has to offer instead. If they already have an iPad, an app might better suit their needs. Endloop’s iMockups is a solid choice.

High-Style Mousemat

My old X-Track Zoom mouse pad wasn’t quite up to the same style standards as the rest of my Apple kit. I wanted my workstation to look less custom-built PC and more Mac chic. That is where the Just Mobile Alupad comes in. The look and style of this mouse pad fits right in with my current Apple desktop accessories like the Bluetooth keyboard and the Magic Mouse. If Macs are out and iPad desktops are more the in-thing, then JustMobile also has a series of different style iPad stands as well.

Korean iPhone Sausage

Earlier this year, a Korean sausage manufacture was noticing an increase in sales. It turns out these sausages emit just enough of an electrical charge that the capacitive touch screens of the iPhone can’t distinguish the sausage from a human finger. Casecrown is now selling these as an iPhone Sausage Screen Stylus. If using a sausage feels a little too odd, then perhaps this winter, try out a pair of North Face eTip Gloves.

Classic Leather Book Covers

When I first saw this, I thought it was a great design concept. There are several old school business people out there who aren’t ready to give up their Franklin Planners, their Oxford Black and Red, or their classic black-and-white-marbled composition notebooks. Perhaps they haven’t seen the Twelve South BookBook for iPads and MacBooks yet. Personally I’m more partial to their BookArc and BackPack products than the BookBook cases.

Books and Movies From Amazon

There are likely several lists on Amazon that will claim to be the definitive list of all media available on the subject of Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley and Apple Computer. Ignore them and listen to mine instead. For historical and cultural reference books, consider Apple Confidential 2.0, The Cult of Mac and Revolution in the Valley. For DVDs in the same vein, the must-haves are Pirates of Silicon Valley, Welcome to Macintosh and Macheads. If you want to go off of the beaten path a little, and get to the core of what makes things tick in Cupertino, consider purchasing the book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs as well as the DVD documentary Objectified.

There you have it. This collection of holiday gift ideas should capture the attention of just about every true Apple enthusiast out there. You can’t go wrong with the standard iTunes gift card, of course, but the above selections are a little more personal and will show the Apple lover in your life that you’re willing to go the extra mile.

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Google Books: The Worst iOS E-reader, But Still a Winner
To say Google’s eBooks app lacks polish would be kind indeed. If Apple can be accused of sometimes favoring form over function, Google does neither with Books. Instead, Google leaves out expected features, adds a few bizarre ones, and wraps it in a barren interface. Unfortunately, as with the battle between mobile operating systems, such omissions probably won’t matter in the end.

Google Books and eBookstore iPhone

Currently available only in the U.S., Google new eBooks offerings, launched Dec. 6, allow consumers to acquire and read books on a variety of devices, from handhelds to traditional computers, the latter needing only a web browser with JavaScript enabled. This gives Google an advantage over not only Apple, which doesn’t allow reading iBookstore titles on a Mac, but Amazon, too, which requires an application for reading Kindle books on traditional computers and mobile devices. Google also has an advantage in selling books. While Apple and Amazon require you to buy your books through their respective bookstores, Google not only sells its own books, but also partners with other stores, like Powell’s. The list of current partners may be small, but it’s bound to grow.

Google says there are more than three million free and commercial titles currently available in its eBookstore catalog in PDF and ePub formats, the latter using DRM from Adobe. Google touts its model as the most “open” bookstore, allowing consumers to store books in the cloud linked to their Google account and download them onto a variety of devices. However, some titles don’t have downloadable ePub files and require dedicated reading apps. Browsing eBookstore, I found the catalog lacking compared to Amazon’s Kindle Store, but both content and prices seem to be competitive with iBooks.

What’s definitely not competitive is Google’s Books app for iOS. From the moment it launches and you’re presented with a list of titles that can’t be sorted, listed without an icon, or archived, it’s just one disappointment after another. Like the Kindle app, buying books launches Safari (only iBooks gets special in-app treatment). The web store is a pleasant experience compared to the app itself, however.

Google Books on iPhone

The “Aa” brings up reading settings, which allow you to change the font, text size, and line spacing, as well as inverting text/background colors for day and night reading. While black text on white background is fine, I found the “night” option more difficult to read than with other apps. You also have the option of viewing text as scanned pages, a feature James liked on the Android version. While this is supposed to let you see the original typography, what it really looks like, at least with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is that someone laid the book on a copier in a school library to scan it.

Google Books

There’s no handy brightness control like iBooks has, and there’s no way to bookmark a page. Nor can you highlight text, make notes, or even look up a word in the dictionary by tapping and holding. But you can magnify the screen, and it’s really annoying. Apparently, Books thought I was squinting, rather than just hovering over the screen with a finger. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a way to turn this “feature” off.

Google Books

Thankfully, you can turn off the 3-D page turning, and you’d better, otherwise “Loading…” is what you will see every time you turn a page—very frustrating. Even with the effect turned off, eBooks felt sluggish compared to iBooks and Kindle on an iPhone 4.

Google Books iPad app

The iPad version was a little better, but I was surprised to find that there is no landscape mode. While that may not be a popular feature, its lack, and those ugly blue icons, say something, like maybe Google doesn’t care about app quality (or the iOS platform).

Actually, that’s probably unfair. I believe Google does care. I believe they care about getting their product to the largest audience as quickly as possible. If it starts out a little shabby, well, so was Android 1.6, and look how that turned out. A year or so later and Android is passing iOS in terms of market share.

While iBooks is arguably the most refined and elegant e-reader and convenient in terms of buying experiences, Google Books and the eBookstore will be everywhere a year from now. By then, the Books app will be close enough to iBooks and Kindle in terms of e-reader experience. Like iOS falling behind Android, iBooks will be likely be passed by Books in terms of popularity, and that’s unfortunate because “close enough” seems to be the defining experience of Google and Android, while Apple and iOS continue to strive for excellence.

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Report: iPad 2 to Ship in February, Launch in April
A new DigiTimes report says Apple just told Foxconn to begin building a healthy launch day stockpile of the iPad 2 over the course of the next 100 days, with the explicit goal of being ready to ship by February 2011 for an April launch. 400,000 to 600,000 units of the new device are said to be slated for manufacture initially.

According to Foxconn’s sources, Apple originally planned to have the iPad 2 shipped by January 2011, but the device’s firmware isn’t yet ready for a wide release and needs more testing, leading to a postponed release timeline. Though devices are said to be shipping in February, the iPad 2 won’t make its way into consumer hands until April 2011, which is normal for Apple’s supply chain. An April launch would mark a one-year product upgrade cycle for the iPad, which is in keeping with Apple’s schedule for the rest of its iOS devices.

Foxconn reportedly shipped around 6 million iPads in the third quarter of 2010, leaving around 1.8 million surplus units after all channel sales for the fourth quarter according to DigiTimes. Apple will greatly reduce its ordering in January according to the blog’s sources, in order to try to divest itself of its existing iPad inventory before the launch of the iPad 2.

Taiwan-based DigiTimes has a mixed track record when it comes to predicting future products releases, but it does appear to have genuine connections to many of Apple’s suppliers. This particular report seems sound, if for no other reason than that the information it relates isn’t really a surprise to any Apple watchers. It’s basically a textbook breakdown of how Apple approaches the release of a new product iteration. We’ll see an iPad 2 in 2011, that much is certain, and April seems like a safe bet for a specific release window. This new DigiTimes report only serves to reinforce that anticipated timeline.

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Raise the Village Blurs Line Between Games, Real Life
We Farm, Tap Zoo and countless other similar apps have made tons of money by asking you to spend yours on virtual goods. A brand new iPhone app called Raise the Village wants to use the same model to benefit a charitable cause. And in an odd twist, virtual goods you purchase in Raise the Village actually end up paying for their real-world counterparts.

Raise the Village puts you in charge of managing and customizing a village, as its name implies. Unlike other virtual community management sims, however, the village in this app represents a real one in Uganda (Kapir Atiira, specifically). You purchase items in-game through Apple’s in-app purchasing iOS feature to improve the virtual village, and then the company behind the app uses those funds to purchase the same items in the real world for use in the actual Ugandan community. The relationship isn’t one-to-one, and uses a group-for-one giving model, but player choices influence real-world decisions.

Users (game players?) then get updates like photos of the items being delivered, and information about the village’s progress. Of course, the virtual village in your game changes as you build improvements and buy upgrades as well.

The freemium model is powerful, and makes a lot of money for iPhone developers. To see it being put to use for charitable purposes is refreshing in many ways, and I don’t begrudge these Ugandan communities any monetary benefit they might stand to gain from the use of the Raise the Village app. But all that said, the app strikes me as very weird, and risks crossing a line I’m not sure I’m comfortable going over just yet.

Think about it: You’re basically “playing” a real village. Unlike in the vast majority of video games to date (meaning all, really), the effects of your decisions in-game have an effect on real human beings living in a real community. It’s not at the point yet where you have as direct an effect as you might if you were playing a real-world version of The Sims, for example (you can’t control your villager’s actions), but your choices aren’t without consequence. When asked about how direct a player’s impact is on real-world infrastructure build in the Ugandan village, New Charity Era, L3C Director of American Operations Tracy Shank provided this response:

The items that we deliver are those that are purchased using our in-game currency: Florin. And those purchases directly represent what we will deliver, so it is the gamer’s choice on what he or she would like to have delivered to the villagers on his or her behalf. To go into more detail, most of the buildings within the game are free, becoming available at different levels for village points. It is the processes and items within those buildings that are purchasable. For instance, if you put a crop farm in your village, you can grow/harvest a multitude of crops needed by the villagers such as beans or maize.

So while you can’t determine whether or not a farm or building gets built, you do have a role in deciding what goes on at those facilities. According to Shank, ”[a]ll of the items were chosen based on a needs-assessment of the villagers and the game is optimized for users to make balanced giving decisions,” so it’s less of an ethical briar patch than it might be if you and other players were determining what gets built and what doesn’t. Still, users take on a degree of responsibility not often seen in the role of charitable donor, let alone that of gamer.

Gamification has been a huge trend this year, and it continues to influence all aspects of business. Seeing it appear in such a literal fashion in the not-for-profit sector isn’t surprising, but is “gaming” with a community’s future something we’re really comfortable with at this point? Isn’t this at least objectifying, and at worst, demeaning, the actual Ugandans involved? Shank doesn’t think so. Rather than playing with people, she sees it as “playing for people through a company dedicated to bringing villages (Kapir Atiira first) [...] to a sustainable level.”

Maybe I’m overreacting, but I think this has ethical implications that go well beyond those generally associated with your standard casual gaming fare, regardless of how direct an influence you have as a player. What do you think?

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