Saturday, February 23, 2008

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (10 сообщений)

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The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)  RSS  The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
http://www.tuaw.com
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  • BusinessWeek: iPhone SDK to arrive late

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    In a recent BusinessWeek blog post, writer Arik Hesseldahl says he has information from one of his sources that the long awaited iPhone SDK might well be delayed. According to the source, the delay could be anywhere from one to three weeks; with February drawing to a close and no announcement yet of an Apple event, this could very well be true.

    The post goes on to say that last minute preparations are being made, and that the SDK release is a complex process (which tracks with our reporting as well). BusinessWeek has generally been respectable when it comes to sussing out Apple rumors (they did, in fact, break the rumor about the iPhone SDK a day before Steve Jobs announced it back in October). However, like with most rumors, there are always a wide variety of opinions.
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  • Pingdom brings Apple Store downtime hysteria to your website

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    Every time the Apple Store has some downtime, magic seems to happen, especially if it happens to be a Tuesday. Not surprisingly, we get a flood of emails from excited readers a few minutes after the yellow sticky note goes up, letting us know that we better be on our toes when the store comes back up. Follow that with some obsessive site-checking and collectively, that's a lot of manual labor. It's about time we started automating the process.

    Pingdom, purveyors of website monitoring services, have produced a badge that puts the status of the Apple Store on your web page, blog, and maybe your dashboard with a web clipping. Pingdom does the work of pinging the Apple Store once per minute to determine its current state, and provides you with an image indicating up or down which is embedded in an iFrame. Simple, but effective.

    So, save the wear and tear on your mouse and grab the badge rather than hitting refresh all morning this Tuesday. Pingdom also has a downtime history going, and an analysis of Apple's "marketing by downtime." After all, it is quite a well-planned marketing scheme, if not a growing national pastime for Apple fans.

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  • Xbox Live Friends list on your iPhone

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    There are quite a few ways online to see what your friends are up to in Xbox Live -- the most fun way is probably the 360 Voice site (that lets your Xbox blog about what you've been playing lately), but there are also Facebook applications, Dashboard widgets, and all kinds of other ways to keep tabs on gamertags. And now, 1337pwn.com has released a browser widget for MobileSafari on the iPhone and iPod touch, so you can track any gamertags you like on the go.

    It doesn't actually nab tags from your friends list, so you have to type them all in separately (of course, that also means you can ninja-monitor folks), but once you get it set up, you get a URL that you can bookmark (or Webclip -- there is a default Webclip icon as well) with each person's GT, Gamerscore, last game played, and their icon and motto. So there aren't too many stats there to deal with, but if you want to quickly see what your friends are up to on your favorite portable device, it works pretty well.

    [Thanks, Det!]
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  • ColorWare does the Air

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    Macs, in general, have always been works of art compared to their rivals, and the MacBook Air is a pinnacle achievement in the line of lust-worthy Apple computers. There's just never been a lot of color choice in the Apple's lineup. For the audacious souls who choose to express their personality through their hardware, ColorWare has been making Macs (et al) into vibrant articulations of individuality for 8 years. And now they'll deck out your Air, too.

    ColorWare recently announced the inclusion of the MacBook Air in its line of color-modded machines. Starting with a sleek black, the pigmentation possibilities branch out exponentially when you consider there are 34 other colors that can be mixed and matched in whatever combination best describes your individual taste. You can choose a metallic or solid type of color for the high-gloss, scratch-resistant, polymer-based coating.

    For a lot of us - well, me anyway - I'm pretty happy with titanium and white as I've never needed my computer to be a distraction in and of itself. I have enough applications designed for that purpose. But I know there are more than a few people excited about a black MacBook Air, probably even a few tickled about the pink option and many more in the spectrum between.

    You can send in your current machine ($500+) or buy one ready to go ($2568+). You can even play with the possibilities before you make the leap.

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    Комментарии к сообщению:
    http://www.tuaw.com/2008/02/22/colorware-does-the-air/#comments



  • iBand crafting canorous concoctions

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    Quite possibly a first: iBand is a group of innovative musicians taking iPhone music applications to the next level. Using a combination of iAno, PocketGuitar, iPhoneSynth and BeatPhone, they've created a sound (Mike Oldfield meets Mario Bros.?) that is certain to spawn some creative offshoots amongst musically inclined iPhone owners. There are already several video responses to their YouTube presentation.

    If nothing else, they get due credit for a great execution of the idea. I'm sure that, with the presence of multiple music synthesis apps for the iPhone, there is a lot of musical innovation taking place. We'd be curious to hear about other mellifluous iPhone adventures. Maybe some of our own readers have already explored the pocket-sized music frontier in ways we haven't considered yet!

    Check out the iBand website for a little explanation and, hopefully, more updates as the idea develops.

    Thanks Kacy!

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  • Shortcuts brings contextual menu items to your keyboard

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    Mice can be great, but sometimes my hands are too cozy on the keyboard to make the trip over to the aptly named pointing device. And contextual menus can be great, too, but I've got a few CM plugins creating a little maze of hierarchical menus. Some of them are used much more frequently than others and could benefit from ... a keyboard shortcut!

    In walks Shortcuts, another very useful contribution from Abracode, makers of ClipMaster and quite a few other great (free) plugins and programs. It simply allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to any contextual menu item. The interface shows you what menu items would be available for a file, folder, multiple selections and text selections in Cocoa text fields. You just select the menu item you want easy access to and assign a hotkey.

    I experimented with a "Copy Path" shortcut and a "Secure Delete" shortcut with great results. My only significant complaint is the lack of Path Finder support, which could probably be fixed fairly easily. You can edit the way it interacts with various programs using AppleScripts, so it should be possible to add some new "context providers". It will take a little more exploration on my part.

    Shortcuts is a free download.

    Thanks Michael G.
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  • Current and future gaming on the Mac

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    MacNewsWorld has a pretty good in-depth overview up about Mac gaming: where it's at and where it's headed. The basic story is that the three things that have historically held Mac gaming back behind PCs (the technology differences, the OS, and the smaller installed base) are slowly disappearing. With Apple's switch from PowerPC to Intel, the introduction of Boot Camp and increasingly easy development in OS X, and the growing popularity of the platform, gaming is actually bigger on the Mac than it's ever been.

    But there is still a huge obstacle, and that is DirectX. Though there are ways around it (Freeverse actually mentions the Unity engine in the article), many developers are stuck developing in DirectX, and that leaves the Mac platform out of the loop. And there really isn't anything comparable to it in OS X, either. Graphics hardware remains a problem, but that just harkens back to the biggest problem of getting games on the Mac: support from Apple. Some developers say that there aren't games on the Mac because Steve doesn't want them there, and until Apple shows evidence to the contrary, PC will always be the gamers' platform of choice.

    [Via IMG]
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  • Apple, Starbucks sued over iTunes promotion cards

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    AppleInsider is reporting that Apple and Starbucks are being sued because of their recent iTunes promotion cards. James and Marguerite Driessen claim to hold a patent on, what they call "RPOS" (or retail point of sale for online merchandising). The patent in question allows customers to buy a gift card from brick-and-mortar stores and then go home and redeem the card online. However, Apple has an excuse, because while the Driessens' patent was under review, Apple developed their own similar concept for redeeming the iTunes gift cards.

    Apple's gift cards allow a person to enter a code on the iTunes Store and receive a whole artist's album, along with the artwork. However, due to legal pressure from the Driessens, Apple apparently pulled the iTunes gift cards from the stores, but left them in UK Stores.

    Now, here's where this may get a little sticky. I've been wondering why this is only affecting the Apple iTunes cards. Why aren't other gift card manufacturing companies getting hit with this suit? This patent application seems to describe pretty much every gift card that I have seen; such as those credit-card-gift-cards that you can buy at most malls -- you can also use those online as a credit card. And not to mention those Zune music cards! What do you think? Should Apple be forced to remove their cards that provide convenience to customers, or should they fight back? Be sure to sound off in the comments below!


    [via AppleInsider]
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  • Pixelmator 1.1.3 updates move, crop and zoom

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    The Pixelmator folks have updated their clean and simple picture editing app once again, and there are a host of new features and improvements on board for this one. The crop tool was the first thing that caught my eye -- it's more powerful than ever, as you can crop layer masks, set a rotation point, and constrain proportions with the palette. The zoom and move tools got some usability updates as well. All in all, it's a nice little update, and there's enough stuff in here to call for another try if you weren't into the functions of Pixelmator before.

    1.1.3 is a free upgrade for current Pixelmator users. For you non-users, a trial is free from their website, or the full app is available for $60.
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  • iTunes Store adds 99 cent weekly movie rental specials

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    Along with the iTunes update we noted earlier, Apple has introduced a new weekly special movie rental for 99 cents. Macrumors reports that each Thursday Apple will make available a new movie at the special price, good until the following Monday. You'll have the standard 30 days to watch it. The first special this week is The Hours (iTunes link).

    This looks like a clever move to jump start the movie rental business. We can only hope that they'll also consider adding HD versions through Apple TV as well.

    [via Infinite Loop]
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