9to5 Staff

So I promised y’all some Glass Touchpad information.  Here ya go…

Update: Thanks guys for the lovely comments.  MacBook Touch?  Might be?

Anti-DRM campaigners plan to take the fight to Apple’s international chain of retail stores, with the Free Software Foundation calling on Defective by Design supporters to book slots at Apple’s Genius Bars worldwide to ask questions about DRM.

While we can see its a fairly imaginative way to deal with a campaign on digital freedoms, we do think the campaigners may risk raising the ire of many Apple users, particularly those with real technical problems with their Macs waiting behind campaigners in the queue.

Anyway, the Defective by Design crew are campaigning against DRM. They also complain that Apple’s insistence all iPhone software be vetted blocks free software development; they are concerned at its location-sensing technologies, which they believe, "provides ways for others to track you without your knowledge. They also want Apple to widen support for different audio formats in the device.

To reinforce their point, they’re asking supporters to book one or more slots at Genius Bars in order to moan about the iPhone and DRM.

They’ve provided a ‘Fact Sheet’ as to what they feel is wrong or right in the iPhone (though, frankly, it’s pretty focused on what they feel is wrong, so…) This comment was interesting: "Apple’s marketing machine is trying to justify DRM by treating you, the user,  as a threat. They claim that one rogue application on your iPhone could possibly  bring the phone network to its knees. "

Instead, the campaigners note, "Most smartphones, including those by OpenMoko, Nokia, RIM, Palm and even Microsoft, allow applications to come from a variety of sources, including free software developers."

Ho-hum, so I guess the news is, perhaps expect queues at the Genius Bar on Friday and Saturday, and Genius Bar staff will probably get a memo offering them a few stock answers to the questions the campaigners helpfully put together.

 Well, the remote control angle for the iPhone and the iPod touch looks like another growth industry, despite introduction of the slightly flawed, but cool Apple remote software for the devices.

Latest in the increasingly busy field, Synthe FX has introduced Luminair 1.0, what’s different about this is the software should let those lighting engineers you see athletically hanging off the truss above the stage at gigs control their industry-standard DMX lighting systems using their iPhone and iPod touch. 

Luminair 1.0 uses Artistic License’s Art-Net protocol over the device’s built-in WiFi connection, and communicates with other compatible hardware and software nodes on the local network. 

You get a virtual muti-track touch-mixer and a channel layout interface. As a DMX data analyzer, data is displayed in realtime as a touch-scrollable overview of all lighting channel.

It’s cool – it means LEDs can be unchained from the mixing desk or patch-bay in a way like never before. Oh, and you get realtime color manipulation using a Color Changer channel layout effect. Both fixtures and entire projects can be saved and restored at any time using a built-in file manager, making Luminair an indispensable tool for configuring intelligent lighting networks.

Luminair is available exclusively for iPhone and iPod touch and costs $99 – we think it’s going to be popular among theatre and club lighting directors, and live band road crew.

The Quake on iPhone project is coming right along…Apparantly you can find this application on Cyndia…We are checking the Apps store daily for this one to go legit…

From "abroad"..

We have some "MacBook Touch" information to share with you this week…Until then take a look at this video showing some concepts

glass trackpad!!!!

We aren’t making any money off of this but we know a lot of you out there have Small/Home Offices and might want a hookup on an incredible deal.  We just bought ourselves a new HP Color LaserJet CM1312nfi MFP for $300 (plus $55 for tax and shipping).  It does just about everything most fullsize (and price) Color Laser Copiers do but on a smaller physical scale.   It even has SD card slot that you can scan directly to.  Snap!

Don’t believe us?  Check out the review at PC Mag.  Or Computershopper:

Photo quality was at the high end of what I expect from a laser printer. A close look shows dithering, as with graphics, but most of the photos could pass for true photo quality at arm’s length. I wouldn’t hesitate to use the CM1312 for output like client newsletters with photos or for marketing materials on glossy laser paper (although you’ll have to change the driver from its default settings to get the best-looking output).

The CM1312nfi even does a credible job of printing what HP calls business-quality photos on HP’s 4-by-6 laser photo paper. I’d call them near photo quality, despite their coming out of the printer with a significant curl on my tests. By whatever name, they’re good enough for uses like photos on postcards for business mailings, or for, say, a real estate office to print photos of houses for prospective buyers.

The one place where I wish HP hadn’t cut back is paper handling. The CM1312nfi’s capacity is limited to 150 sheets, with no duplexing and no upgrade options. If between printing, faxing, and copying, you output more than about 30 pages per day, you may find yourself adding paper often enough for it to become annoying. On the other hand, the low capacity is appropriate for the light-duty printing typical of a small office, home office, or personal AIO, so it’s not a killer flaw, by any means. And even with this economy measure, for the moment at least, the HP Color LaserJet CM1312nfi MFP delivers far more AIO for the price than any of its competitors.

Whatever… people can speculate all they want.  Steve may or may not be sick.   Apple will continue to sell lots of Macs, iPods and iPhones.  

Joe Nocera from the New York Times got a little call from El Jobso after Monday’s conference call.  A typically (not weak) Jobs laid into the reporter and told him all of the details…off the record.  No, it isn’t cancer.  No, it isn’t life threatening.  The reporter asks why he can’t tell the shareholders. 

On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter” — and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record. I tried to argue him out of it, but he said he wouldn’t talk if I insisted on an on-the-record conversation. So I agreed.

Because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me. Suffice it to say that I didn’t hear anything that contradicted the reporting that John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer. After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.

Will it set a bad precedence?  Is it embarassing?  Is it anyone’s damned business?  All good questions….

 Doom developer id Software is very interested in building and developing titles for the iPhone, legendary co-founder and programmer, John Cormack, told Forbes.

Cormack is considered one of the creators of the first-person shooter genre. He told Forbes: "We wanted to do something for the iPhone, but we just didn’t have the scheduling or the resources available…I really regret not having something at launch."

The games guru added that id Software does have a title it wants to develop solely for the iPhone. "I’m not announcing anything specifically, but it would be a graphical tour de force," he said.

It appears the game would be drawn from the companys existing range of game franchises, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, but the company ain’t saying. And Cormack is attracted by the iPhone as a platform because it can carry larger games than most other mobiles.

"The iPhone, as a device, is in the same generation power-wise as the PS2 or Xbox," he said. "The graphics are a little lower but the RAM is a lot higher. … You could easily spend $10 million on an iPhone game, but the market just can’t support that yet."

The report suggests that while the company missed the iPhone launch, it hopes to reach the platform soon.

 Installer.app developers have released info on Installer 4, which will work with jailbroken iPhones running firmware 2.0.

“Hi folks! Many of you are wondering what’s up with Installer 4. No, we haven’t slowed down the work on it, and are currently in the final stages of hooking the GUI to the back-end. We will be contacting the authors of the major repositories in a few days to invite them into the testing process and to prepare for the upcoming repository changes.”

If you don’t know about this app, it is software which makes it easier to run non-App Store third-party native applications on your iPhone, using a Mac and a GUI.

 Apple may offer the iPhone in all international markets, liberalising its distibution of the device to include all carriers, a report suggests this morning.

Bloomberg is reporting statements to this effect made by the CEO of Singapore mobile phone carrier, MobileOne. Company boss Neil Montefiore told media: "I think, before the end of the year we will be” carrying the phones in our stores. It will become available in all markets, with all operators.”

Now, this could simply mean Apple will be offering the device in all international markets by the end of the year through operators it has already reached a deal with, or could signal a newly liberal approach.

If the latter, then it’s interesting this news emerges as an earlier report explains Orange will join O2 in offering the iPhone in the UK before the end of the year. Could these two matters be connected?

Singapore Telecommunications in May it won rights to distribute iPhone in Singapore, though a release date hasn’t yet been confirmed. StarHub Ltd.,  also expects to offer the device this year.

 Maybe its the continued engagement between Yahoo and Microsott, or perhaps the looming presence of billionaire investor Carl Icahn on the Yahoo board, but the online company appears to have take a leaf from the MSN Music playbook, and is dumping its legal online music customers from a great height….

Yahoo has announced plans to close the Yahoo! Music Store, and has told its legitimate, paying music loving customers it will switch-off the authorisation servers, meaning those attempting to transfer their music collections to other computers will be sunk. "They may as well have invested in 8-Track," a website notes.

Microsoft this year tried to do the same thing, telling customers of MSN Music it would no longer supply authorization keys for songs purchased from the defunct service. 

What this means is that when your authorised set of computers stop working, so will the music you paid for. This underlines the inherent danger of DRM in general, Distorted Loop observes.

Here’s what Yahoo had to say: "The Yahoo! Music Store, along with the ability to purchase and download single songs and albums, will no longer be available as of September 30, 2008. 

Songs and albums that were purchased through the Yahoo! Music Unlimited Store are protected by a digital rights management system that requires a valid license key before they can be played on your computer. 

After the Store closes, Yahoo! will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for music purchased from Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and Yahoo! will no longer be able to authorize song playback on additional computers. 

After September 30, 2008, you will not be able to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or re-license these songs after changing operating systems."

We recall that after Microsoft made the same decision – a decision which clearly punishes legal music consumers for being honest – there was huge outcry, which eventually convinced the world’s richest company to leave a light on on its MSN Music authorisation server, at least for a while: "After careful consideration, Microsoft has decided to continue to support the authorization of new computers and devices through at least the end of 2011," the company said in June.

Apple has posted an opening for an iPhone Security Engineer, to be based at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino.

The "exceptional individual" will "validate the security architecture for the iPhone."

"As an implementer of advanced technologies in OS X, you will have the opportunity to have a major impact on Apple’s embedded operating system products." We like the use of the plural there. 

Like everyone, we’ve speculated that Apple has far bigger plans for embedded system products – its purchase of PA Semi, recent disclosures of new cutting-edge products at prices competitors can’t match, and various mutterings and job ads have suggested the company plans a major play in digital media. It’s widely believed the company want’s to widen its Apple TV franchise, and many consider devices equipped with WiMax from Apple may show their face next year, as that standard enters wider deployment.

Step away from speculation, return to the job posting:

Responsibilities

* Review and provide feedback on security mechanisms implemented in OS X

* Provide risk analysis of potential security threats to our embedded products

* Develop "proof of concept" attacks on the current security mechanisms

* Come up with new and innovative ways of increasing security while preserving ease-of-use and increasing the quality of the end-user experience.

* Work cooperatively with other parts of CoreOS on cross-functional technologies and initiatives to enhance security and security policies

Required Experience:

* A genuine passion for analyzing security technologies and developing "proof of concept" attacks

* Demonstrated creative and critical thinking capabilities and troubleshooting skills

* Industry exposure to and knowledge of OS security and UNIX internals

* A strong software development background

* Highly professional, with the ability to deliver solid work on tight schedules

Useful Experience:

* Previous experience in operating systems and security tools

* Mac OS X exposure (end user, administrator, developer)

* Involvement in reverse engineering and security communities

* BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience/skills

Take a look at the job description on Apple’s recruitment website here, if you are the one who gets the position, you can expect, "Our environment fosters product innovation, rapid product iteration, and a liberating amount of autonomy."

 Word reaches us that O2 UK’s exclusive iPhone deal with Apple times out later this year, and competing network Orange is going to step up to the plate, offering the device in the UK market.

Electric Pig claims "credible sources", who let them know the iPhone 3G would be available on Orange, "possibly as soon as October".

Orange already sells (or will sell) the iPhone in France, Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Africa.

The move could reflect Apple’s slow shift away from exclusive deals with carriers in other countries, though it has been left committed to existing exclusive deals in first-ramp iPhone countries, such as France, Germany, UK and and USA.

We’ve been curious as to just how long Apple plans to keep with its exclusive carrier deals for the iPhone, and while we have to take this report with a pinch of salt, it makes sense for the company to attempt to harmonise its international deals with operators.

Added to which, the requirement to be locked onto specific networks in order to use an iPhone has become one of the last few key criticisms causing potential iPhone customers to resist purchasing the Apple mobile.

According to Forrester Research, Windows vista is the ‘New Coke’ of Operating Systems.  After being on the market for over a year it still hasn’t captured 10% of the enterprise space according to Enterprise Trends: Vista Is Rejected; Mozilla And Apple Make Small Gains by Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.  Other fun facts for Microsoft’s flagship operating system:

• 8.8% Vista Penetration
• Microsoft says it has sold 180 million licenses (including downgraders)
• The share of Macs grew to 4.5% in June from 3.7% in January 2008
• Linux’s share of desktops, meanwhile, fell significantly, to 0.5% in June from 1.8% in January
• 19.4% of enterprise users are using Firefox, up from 16.8% at the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, Microsoft Internet Explorer’s share only slipped slightly, from 79.1% in January to 77.6% at the end of June.
• Both Flash and Java were nearly ubiquitous. Flash Player Version 9 was on 97% of desktops, while Java was on 99.9% of them. But application developers shouldn’t try too hard to jazz up their apps with Flash elements — "business users don’t want to hunt for navigation nor do they crave excitement," Mendel wrote.
• Forrester also discovered that despite ever-increasing screens and screen sizes, the largest slice — 34.1% — of business users are using screens between 15 and 17 inches in size with resolutions of 1,024-by-768 pixels; another 25.2% use screens between 17 and 19 inches in size with resolutions of 1,280-by-1,024 pixels.

Walt Mossberg, who often borders on fanboy in his reviews on Apple’s products, gave a dreaded thumbs down to Apple’s MobileMe service.  MobileMe, which has had un-Apple-like hiccups and false starts has put a dent in Apple’s brand veneer.  Honestly, we’d like to see Apple get some help from Google in this area….it obviously isn’t Apple’s stong point.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/452319854

Google CEO and Apple board member Eric Schmidt is pretty pleased with the iPhone 3G, telling Fortune it "shows the power of a device that is a step forward".

Schmidt was speaking yesterday at the Brainstorm Tech event. He noted, "The iPhone has a fully functional browser. We can show desktop ads, not mobile ads. That’s a huge change from our perspective."

Naturally conversation soon turned to Android, Google’s own mobile phone software. Handset makers will deliver the first Android phones by the end of the year, the report claims. And the success of the iPhone is good news for Google and the Android platform.

"The iPhone’s competitors all have devices or devices coming out. It’s really simple," Schmidt added. "A phone is a GPS, a camera, a computer, and a browser,” he said. Schmidt sees more opportunities for Google as a result.

Schmidt also predicted the best social networking applications will now move to the mobile world, telling of one Android application which will tell users where they are, what’s around them and what businesses are in the local area. “The most interesting social applications will be mobile-based because people are always moving,” he said.

 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave his grimmest promise yet that he intends going to battle with Apple in a statement to company staff last night.

Ballmer confirmed a grim plan to beat Apple at its own game, saying: "In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience."

He has a plan, saying, "Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises."

It doesn’t stop there. Microsoft plans to start its photocopiers in the mobile phone segment, also, Ballmer confirmed, "We’ll do the same with phone – providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences."

Microsoft also seems set to come back with a series of ads, potentially designed to answer Apple’s successful series of ‘Get A Mac’ ads. "In the weeks ahead, we’ll launch a campaign to address any lingering doubts our customers may have about Windows Vista," he said. "And later this year, you’ll see a more comprehensive effort to redefine the meaning and value of Windows for our customers."

What are your thoughts on Microsoft ‘innovation’?

Apple Expo Paris, Remixed (Translated to Anglais) which is fighting for international relevancy is happening this year from September 17th-20.  Apple, for the first time in 25 years, decided to skip this year’s Paris event, leaving many to question whether the "international" show would remain relevant.   It was a good time last year and it is a shame that it appears to be heading south…Anyway.  Here’s the latest from Nike in Paris….in French.

Wanna have a shot at getting a 3G iphone without having to wait on line for the model you didn’t want?  Top Muffin has the "iPhone3G Store availability tracker" which updates its page based on Apple’s JSON feed.  It looks like it works pretty well but the proof is in the pudding. 

It might be worth a few extra minutes to give a call to you Apple store just to double check in case…

via DFB

The newest iPhone from "abroad" asks what is 3G….

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZOnvGAMjK0&hl=en]

 AT&T today reported solid second-quarter results, indicating strong growth in wireless and data services and huge demand for the iPhone 3G.

Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and chief executive officer said, “Earnings growth continues to be solid, our wireless momentum is strong, our major growth and cost-reduction initiatives are on track, and we continue to return substantial value to shareowners.

“As we generate sound financial results, AT&T also has taken the lead to innovate and create great solutions for customers,” Stephenson said. “Mobility, broadband connectivity and integrated services that encompass voice, data and video are driving a new world of communications. AT&T is all about deploying and enhancing premier networks and products to deliver this world to both business and consumers.

“The Apple iPhone 3G is a dramatic example of this transformation,” he added. “In the days following our exclusive US launch of this new device, powered by the nation’s fastest 3G wireless network, customer response has been everything we had anticipated and more. This strengthens our wireless business, and it reinforces our positive view of the opportunities ahead for AT&T and the industry.”

The company says it expects continued strong growth in wireless data services as more customers choose data plans and advanced wireless devices such as the new iPhone 3G.

AT&T also confirmed that sales of the iPhone 3G were "nearly double levels achieved in AT&T’s 2007 iPhone launch" across the 12 days following its US launch. And that’s despite limited availability of the device.

For the quarter ended June 30, 2008, AT&T’s consolidated revenues totaled $30.9 billion, up 4.7 per cent versus reported results in the year-earlier quarter.

More information.