9to5 Staff

I don’t agree with all of them (MobileMe is for when you have to do serious work on someone else’s computer, Palm is a serious Apple competitor? for instance) but an overall enlightening hour of talking on Apple, its competitors and its future by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. (via Macworld)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbrfsXYoyCI&w=640&h=505]

A better quality version of the video here.

Also, “Mr. Apple Computer”…WTF?

Adobe might be launching a new product at a print production conference later this month:

Listed as an ‘Adobe Technology Preview’ by Noha Edell, business development manager for cross media publishing solutions at Adobe, the site for the Emerge conference in San Antonio on April 21-22 says that “Adobe will unveil a brand new application as part of its signature suite [CS5] of services. Be among the first to see why this is sure to surprise even the most

I have to admit, once I leave San Fancisco or New York, my iPhone magically becomes usable.  Calls go through and last more than a few minutes before getting cut off.  At my parent’s house in Ohio, I have the best wireless data network in the world.  Maps data is instant and there is never even a little bit of a lag.  Youtube movies load almost instantly over 3G as well.

I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people at Macworld who had the exact opposite experience.  They’d come from such places as Philadelphia (see #2), San Diego, and even Chicago where their iPhones actually behaved like … phones. 

Trying to make a call at Macworld expo was comical.  There was no shortage of attendees screaming into their phones, repeating themselves over and over and pausing to look at their screens to see if the call was still connected.  Welcome to my world.

So today, PC World came up with a study that puts AT&T out in front where they had been lagging previously.  That’s great for the 95% of the US that gets great service from AT&T.  I can attest that AT&T still is laughable in New York and San Francisco.  I’d love to hear from anyone else who thinks otherwise. 

This chart, which puts SF at 55% reliability speaks the truth, but one must wonder what cell phone tower they climbed to get their NY results.

I was just talking about this with friends the other day.  Traveling has totally changed since I got an iPhone and with more and more carriers getting Gogo wireless, even the flights are much easier to deal with. 

It doesn’t stop with interesting apps either.  With sites like Flightaware, you don’t’ have to believe the gate people when they say they don’t know when a flight is going to arrive or take off or if you’ll be late or not.  Update: OF COURSE I knew Flightaware had a free app!

Anyway, Apple has a new ad called Family Travel, below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq6o_mc0tx4&w=700&h=420]

Here’s a presentation we can get behind from Stanford’s class CS193P – Designing for iPad (sorry it is Flash)

via Gizmodo

Just a quick note to update you on our feeds and Twitter.  During the update last month we changed how feeds were broadcast.  We had been getting complaints that our large, media heavy feeds were causing issues with feedreaders so we cut them off at around 600 characters and skipped over media.

Clearly, this wasn’t a universally loved idea.  So now we’ve brought back the full feed as the default which you can access here.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/9To5Mac-MacAllDay

However, if you like short feeds without ads, we’ve created a special feed for you.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/9to5mac/feed

These feeds will also include my Computerworld posts (like today’s).

Also, if you are like us, you are doing a lot more of your feed viewing with Twitter. With that in mind, you can pull 9to5mac’s Twitter feed from here.  We have been doing some app giveaways and other fun stuff there as well, so if you use Twitter,

http://twitter.com/9to5mac

Lastly, the 9to5Mac Toys Section has its own feed and Twitter account.  Grab them if you are so inclined.

As always, thanks for stopping by!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxRyMeFcZEw&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The very popular and well acclaimed first-person shooter which helped pioneer console gaming on the iPhone is back with a sequel. Brothers in Arms 2: Global Front brings “13 new nail-biting levels” taking place from North Africa to Sicily complete with compelling in game video clips and more interaction with your fellow virtual soldiers. The sequel also brings several new weapons such as sniper rifles and flamethrowers.

In addition, Gameloft has added their popular “Gameloft Live” service to the game play complete with 26 unlockable trophies. Perhaps the best new feature added to the game is multiplayer mode. In this mode you can play on the battle field with up to five of your friends over bluetooth or WiFi. The game is available today in several countries and is $7.99 in the United States. Click here to view in iTunes.

Wonder how Apple is doing on their new data center? Have a birds eye view of where your iTunes and mobile home directories may one day live:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDXSSi1qStA&w=700&h=520]DataCenter Knowledge Via MR Page 2

Two new iPhone ads were put up on Apple’s site last night. The first touts the iPhone’s ability to multitask while calling, including App Store purchases.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_QbJfh2nR8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]The second shows video capture, MMS and conference calling:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdTZVun1mUY&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

They can all be seen here.

…When that stair is from the 5th Ave. Apple Store.

Update: The auction has been taken down eight days early.  Buy it now price reached or perhaps Apple gave the guy a call?

We’re definitely not the target market for this type of thing, but if you’d rather spend your thousands of dollars on an iconic (broken) piece of the the most iconic Apple store, rather than, say a new MacBook Pro, head over to eBay.

From the Seller:

Hey guys!

So, this is a weird one. 

I’m moving on March 11th and I can’t keep moving with this stair. 

It’s from Apple Fifth Ave. in NYC. They have a huge spiral staircase you can see here: http://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2010/02/fifthavenue_gallery_image4.jpg

They replaced it with a new one after a customer dropped a snapple bottle on it and cracked it. I picked it up before it could be thrown out over a year ago, figuring it’s a collectible.

When these are new, they cost 10K to buy from the German glass-makers. So, since it’s cracked I figure it’s worth at least $2500, considering the steps are all custom ordered.

You could use it as a coffee table on top of some cinder blocks, or just keep it for the sake of keeping it. 

Unfortunately, I can’t deliver it. You’ll need to come pick it up in Brooklyn, NY, and I recommend you bring a car and a friend or two. It weighs about 250 lbs. It’s about 10 layers of very thick glass. 

If you’re a collector of Apple memorabilia, you’ve got to have this. I know for a fact that only three of them exist outside of the retail stores’ circulation, and this is one of them. So, needless to say, it’s rare. I doubt it if you’ll ever see something like this again.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask away.

@AACDuke writes in asking what that mystery key above the ‘6’ is on Apple’s iPad keyboard dock.  The iPad doesn’t use function keys like the Mac/PC so there isn’t a backup ‘function’ like on keyboards we’re used to.  The easiest/simplest/most likely idea is that it is just there for aesthetic reasons, like the dummy screw on earlier MacBooks.

Image lifted from..

But it seems a little silly, even for Apple, to build a key with absolutely no purpose.  From a technology perspective they’ve likely taken the same internals from their aluminum keyboards, meaning it is a live key.

Something interesting to consider: The idea of a dashboard/widgets on the iPad has been brought up on a few occasions.  Might Apple be masking the Widgets function on the iPad by blanking this key for early viewing?

I
Image via

So what do you think that key will do?  Will it be unveiled sometime later?  Will it be mappable to an app of your choice?  Comments appreciated (the home button is on the top left btw).

http://www.cnet.com/av/video/flv/universalPlayer/universalSmall.swf

At what point during Scotty’s unboxing do you realize that he might not have got a genuine Apple product?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9vnUO9wpi8&w=700&h=415]

What can we say about this?  Apple doesn’t seem to want to build in 3G to their laptops and AT&T won’t allow tethering on the iPhone or iPad (without some ‘modifications’).  So what’s a Mac user to do when they want Internet access on the road?

There are a few options out there, but I’ve been using a Verizon Mifi card for the last six months and think that this might be the way to go for Internet connectivity for all devices.  In fact, I think it was the most important new product introduced last year…David Pogue from the New York Times humbly agrees with me.

How it works: Basically it takes a 3G signal (in my case, a very reliable Verizon one but Sprint has a veeery interesting 4G Mifi-type device) and routes that into a Wifi access point that allows up to five connections.  The whole aparatus is the size of about 25 playing cards and lasts for about four hours continuously connected and about a day on standby (you can buy huge batteries or USB power adapters to make this almost infinite).  The cost is $40/month for 250MB of data or $60/month for 5GB (the device is free with a plan) –About $20 more/month than the iPad’s AT&T plans.

But, I’ll be able to connect my MacBook Pro and iPhone (for AT&T#FAIL) as well as my Wife’s/friends’/colleagues’ devices and only have to pay the carrier one time, where AT&T wants you to pay a seperate ‘unlimited’ fee for every device you use.

Now, Apple has introduced the iPad, and with it a seemingly-reasonable $15-$30 month AT&T plan.  But if you are already paying for 3G access on your MacBook and your iPhone, why would you want to pay for yet another wireless plan?

If you have a laptop and an iPad and want them both to use 3G, it is cost effective to get an Mifi…and it just got a bit better.

Novatel, who make the Wifi, have a new version coming out in a few months with GPS built-in.  This brings a few solutions to a few problems.  The iPad Wifi-only also doesn’t have a GPS unit built-in so this would make a great companion product for that, basically giving it all of the features of the iPad 3G — if Apple let’s the iPad interface with the Novatel GPS.

Additionally, I see this as a boon for camera enthusiasts who like tagging their photos with GPS coordinates and seeing them in iLife.  Camera manufacturers have been slow to adapt to GPS tagging but many have found the solution in the Eye-Fi SD card product.  This, along with automatically uploading pictures to many online services, tags photos with sometimes accurate GPS coordinates based on Wifi locations it detects when the shots are taken.  EyeFi is working with Novatel to allow the two products to work in concert to give accurate GPS tags and instant uploading of pictures (and video).  A very cool concept –especially for those who want to geotag professional shots on cameras with SD Cards like the Canon Rebel Ti1.

The Verizon Mifi also works with VoIP products like Skype and Google’s upcoming Google Voice with Gizmo5 integration, so technically I can finally dump my all-but-useless AT&T voice plan and go VoIP all over on a network with higher reliability.

So, before you plunk down for that 3G iPad, you might want to consider going Mifi instead (and getting your iPad a month earlier).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5wSgWFh2ug&w=700&h=400]

Update: As is usually is the case, there is another side to the story where the kid actually took the picture of himself doing something improper and administrators were just perusing his hard drive…

What’s wrong with some school administrators?  Clearly they don’t have a sense for right and wrong when something insane like this happens.

Short Version: Kids get free laptops for one-to-one education program.  Administration loads crazy spy cam software that can be activated remotely and snaps pictures of kids at home doing “improper stuff”.  To prove it, they show a web camera snap of whatever he was doing (hopefully this is “pre-puberty improper”).  

Administration never mentioned that they could randomly watch students in their homes via the webcams.  Parents sue. Tax dollars are going to get wasted settling this and idiots will hopefully get fired.

Apple’s excellent One-to-One laptop program tarnished by few bad administrators.  Kids tape over their school laptop webcams.

Though he has never come out against it publicly, Steve Jobs seems to be championing a move away from Adobe’s Flash technology, the latest action being revealed by Gawker today.  According to their sources, Jobs told the Wall Street Journal executives meeting on the third floor of the News Corp building:

Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash, people familiar with the meeting tell us. He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy. But he also called Flash a “CPU hog,” a source of “security holes” and, in perhaps the most grievous insult an famous innovator can utter, a dying technology. Jobs said of Flash, “We don’t spend a lot of energy on old technology.” He then compared Flash to other obsolete systems Apple got people to ditch….

… like the floppy drive, famously absent in iMac,
…. old data ports, including even Apple’s own FireWire 400, gone from iPods and now all Macbooks,
….LCD screens, now entirely replaced in Apple’s lineup by LEDs (except for 30-inch Cinema Displays),
…and even the CD, with Jobs apparently crediting Apple’s iPod, iTunes Store, CD-ripping software and “Rip, Mix, Burn” campaign with doing in the old music medium (sort of: though CD sales are in free fall, around 300 million were sold last year in the U.S. alone, 80 percent of all albums).

Jobs even claimed the iPad’s battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash, we’re told.

Jobs supposedly told an Apple Town Hall meeting that Adobe was lazy and Flash was an inferior product last month.  Apple has also kept Adobe’s Flash technology out of any of its iPhoneOS software.

Image via TiPb.com

Glow is a free iPhone app that allows you to find out how people around you or in a specific geographic location are feeling. Imagine you are at a concert and you want to know the mood of the audience right this instant. You open up Glow on your iPhone and submit your feeling. Five stars for “awesome” and one star for, well…”not so awesome”. Each of these stars represents a color. One star is red and five stars is blue and everything in between is the combination of these two colors. Once you submit your feeling, Glow takes you to the Map View and shows you the general sentiment for a given location based on these colors and the mixing of them.

The point is being able to share emotion with the cloud; to quantify happiness. Glow’s purpose is to show you right now how people are feeling around the world. With your participation through sharing your feeling/color with the people around you, you add to this evolving painting of the world. Imagine witnessing a wave of blue over Vancouver as the US wins the gold medal. That is what Glow is about; quantifying happiness in a visual way.

Glow provides multiple ways to view these feelings. For example, the Street View uses augmented reality to look at the feelings around you. Looking through the iPhone camera, you are given a view into the the real world, with an additional head’s up display showing nearby feelings as you move with your phone.

Glow integrates with popular social networks including Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to share your feelings with your friends and contacts. When you send your feeling to Glow, it will be shared as a status update, including a link that your friends can click to be taken to a custom webpage, showing them where you are and how you are feeling.
   
All in all, Glow is about bring emotions into the “cloud” and sharing. The more users that Glow has the more useful it becomes. Being able to see in real-time how people are feeling is what gets us excited. Hopefully it will get all of you out there excited too.

Jeez.  Some more horror stories from Apple’s Chinese partners out of China:

As he stood on the public road taking photos of the front gate and security checkpoint, a guard shouted. The reporter continued snapping photos before jumping into a waiting taxi. The guard blocked the vehicle and ordered the driver to stop, threatening to strip him of his taxi license. The correspondent got out and insisted he was within his rights as he was on the main road. The guard grabbed his arm. A second guard ran over, and with a crowd of Foxconn workers watching, they tried dragging him into the factory.

“You’re free to do what you want,” the policeman explained, “But this is Foxconn and they have a special status here. Please understand.”

Apple is walking a fine line here.  Sure they would like to keep their trade secrets from slipping into public or their competitors’ hands but they certainly go beyond what would seem rational.  In the US, they can only get away with suing bloggers.

In a high-profile case in China in 2006, Hon Hai sued two Chinese reporters and asked for 30 million yuan ($4.4 million) in damages for exposing alleged subpar employment practices.  The amount was later reduced to a symbolic 1 yuan, after stinging public criticism was directed at Apple. Various groups including Reporters Without Borders wrote to Apple chief Jobs asking him to intercede in the case. 

The reports were true.  Hon Hai was abusing their employees and intimidating reporters.

Reporters get off relatively easy.  For workers in China, it gets really scary.  The most obvious case of secrecy run amok is the Foxxcon worker who “jumped” to his death (Blood money paid in MacBooks) last year following accusations that boxes he sent to the US didn’t contain the stated number of iPhone 4Gs.  Clearly from the above tale, Foxxcon is more powerful than the local authorities investigating that matter, so we’ll never know what really happened.  But it isn’t hard to guess.

Apple obviously isn’t pushing the buttons on all of this, but by creating a competition to see who can control leaks “by any means necessary”, they are complicit in this behavior.  Apple still works with Foxxcon. 

But it bothers me that the people who make my shiny Apple equipment and give Apple huge margins on those earnings calls aren’t afforded basic human rights. 

Kara Swisher got Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch to talk about all things Flash and Apple.  Among other things he does mention that Flash will run faster and more reliably on the Mac in the future.  Check out the Flash video below:

http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/microPlayer.swf

Even though Apple had no plans to attend the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona (though I’m sure they sent a few spies), they’ve been making waves at the event.  The latest bit?  Steve Jobs pulled the “Mobile Personality of the Year” award. 

The special award was created to mark the 15th anniversary of the Global Mobile Awards and “reflects the contributions of individuals, established names, new thinkers, and rising starts, across the global industry and leaders of other industries that have contributed to the growth and convergence of mobile during the last year”.

Stephen Fry accepted the award on Jobs’ behalf.  He referred to Apple as “the elephant in the room” and that he admired “Apple’s success insomuch as it inspires others. It causes the whole ecosphere to adapt, adopt, and excel.”

Others in the running (all at the event):

Eric Schmidt
Chairman of the Board and CEO, Google Inc.

Mike Lazaridis
Co-CEO, Research In Motion

Pete Chou
CEO, HTC

Wired today offers an update on their tablet work from their earlier concepts.  While they say that they are designing for the iPad and iPhone, they’ve created this product on Adobe Air from the same Adobe InDesign files they use to create their award-winning magazine.   If it isn’t obvious by now, Apple isn’t going to allow Adobe Air or Flash on the iPad.  They say:

Although the Wired Reader starts as an AIR app, Adobe has created tools that allow us to easily convert it for major tablet and mobile platforms. In Barcelona this week, Adobe announced that AIR would run on Android, and Adobe has already announced its Packager for iPhone tool that will allow Flash apps (including AIR) to run on Apple mobile platforms. And AIR already runs natively on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.

So is Adobe offering some magical Adobe Air to iPad conversion tool?  It isn’t out of the realm of possibility, since they’ve got a Flash CS5-> iPhone app exporter already in production.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/56328629001?isVid=1&isUI=1&publisherID=1564549380

Apple has finally addressed an Seagate hard drive issue dating back to 2006-2007 Black or White MacBooks which would fail with a question mark icon on startup.  Apple will repair these drives until August 15th of 2010 or three years beyond purchase – whichever is longer.

Problems with the Seagate drives were first reported in 2007.  We’re not sure what took so long for the acknowledgment. 

Apple/Seagate also offered to reimburse users who may have taken the drives to be repaired themselves previously.  This would include both parts and labor.Apple has determined that a very small percentage of hard drives that were used in MacBook systems, sold between approximately May 2006 and December 2007, may fail under certain conditions.

Note: Image above not example of bad drive.

Hardmac via Macrumors