News from category ‘Other’

In this last post we'll tell you about new Drivesavers instructive app, virtual iPhone planetarium, papershow tool for making presentations, Inklet software to turn Mac multi-touch trackpad into a drawing tablet and a tool for creating your own iPhone apps.

Free DriveSavers Hard Drive Disk-aster Simulator app for the iPod Touch and iPhone is a new way to study how a hard disk works. It teaches in interactive fashion about all the things that may crash a drive, what happens during a seized motor, clicker failure, SSD failures, contamination and head crashes. Also you’ll learn how the data recovery gets done and see the inside of a hard disk. That looks pretty instructive.

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We're back on reporting about the apps and gadgets presented on the MWSF 2010. Now we'll talk about iV Plus - the solution to turn your iPhone into remote; FloTV - the service to watch TV in the USA; Square Up service to pay for everything you need only with your credit card and iPhone; and Wissair's USB DisplayDock Set will get the screen from your laptop to the HDTV-set wirelessly.

U-Socket turned to be out a very interesting solution, but FastMac was found to offer something more. The thing on the pictures below is called The iV Plus. It helps to manage a set of your home devices and consists of IR Remote, Battery Pack, Flash LED and case that wraps around the iPhone. FastMac will also provide free Universal Remote software to work with this creation. The iV Plus will be shipped expectedly in the second quarter of 2010 for $130.

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This time we talk about Algoriddin’s djay 3, new apps from Frog Design, 4iThumbs product and WebIS Pocket Informant organizer.

Algoriddin’s djay 3 is an excellent app with easy-to-use interface designed to allow you to mix and play music. The price is US 50$ in stores and on the website.

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From now on sausages are not the only substitutes for human fingers; Electrorack presented an interesting rack enclosure for Xserves; Shake allows you to listen music without earphones; U-Socket solves a problem of USB-rechargable devices.

As you remember few days ago we wrote about sausages as the best substitutes of human fingers for iPhones. Well now it is not. Two companies at once presented their capacitive capable gloves that allow you to use iPhone even when it's cold. iTouch Gloves offered high end leather gloves (start with  $99.95, on the left side) and Telefingers offered thinner, less stylish and cheaper solution (for only $15, on the right side).

That really looks like oversized Mac Pro, but indeed this is a rack enclosure for Xserves and RAID configuration presented by Electrorack. The latter also offers a variety of other server racking solutions.

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There is a handful of people who have been trying to tell the story of Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple and one of the front-rank hi-tech innovators of modern era. A number of attempts to tell about this remarkable personality have either enjoyed very modest success or were vehemently repulsed.

It looks as if only Walter Isaacson, the author of two other best-selling biographies and former editor of  Time magazine, could persuade Jobs to take part in the project. He says that the book will cover the most important stages of the Steve’s life, from his life in the notorious Silicon Valley through the years at Apple.

Though the Apple spokesmen do not comment on these rumors.

Steve Jobs’s attempts to convince publishers to provide the content in a useful digital form were not that successful and the negotiations initiated in February have "stumbled."

Some newsmakers report of "friendly" talks, but speak of Apple's business model as a crucial change for the publishing business. They aware of the impact iTunes had had on the songs industry in 2003. Then the number of downloads of single songs from Apple influenced the resulting purchases of the singers’ albums.

Apple has been conquering the e-reader market long before the new iPad was on offer. So that is not a surprise that such companies as Amazon, which previously dominated the market have to increase their prices in response to the iPad’s outbreak.

MacWorld Expo 2010 started on the Feb, 11. We'll show you how that day and the MWSF generally started.

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Designer with a nickname Luca_sx has created a new concept of what could be the iPhone 4G.

As we can see from the image this iPhone also features a front webcam, redesigned Home button, new silent mode button, a card reader and the backlit Apple logo. Not bad!

Apple is about to reach another great result: the 10 billion songs sold through iTunes. They set up a new page with a counter similar to the one for the first billion downloads in AppStore. Apple also created a contest with a prize of a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

According to the official contest rules, participants may make up to 25 entries per day either by purchasing/downloading songs from the iTunes Store or by filling out an entry form on Apple's web site.

The prize will be awarded for the entry (either through a song download or through the non-purchase online entry) sent immediately following the download of the 9,999,999,999th song. The potential winner will be determined by the order of the entries received. In the event that more than one entrant would be a winner based on the simultaneous timing of entries, one entrant will be randomly selected from those entrants as the winner. Each entrant's chances of winning are dependent upon the number of eligible entries received.

Apple has periodically offered similar contests in the past, such as its One Billion Song contest in 2006 and a One Billion App contest last year.

If your iPhone battery is running low you can always use oranges to charge it. Unfortunately you need quite a few of them for a full battery. The video shows how many orange slices it would take to charge an iPhone. The answer is 2,380 segments or 595 oranges:

This video was found on one of the Korean sites. And its pretty hard to describe the feelings you experience when watching this movie. The first question to ask yourself is probably why he uses sausages instead of his fingers? But here is an explanation:

According to the Korean portal Hani.co.kr the sausages are the best substitutes of human fingers for iPhone. If your fingers are too sweaty for continual touchscreen use then sausages are the only solution for your problem, because neither gloves nor stylus will work on the capacitive iPhone screen.

We don't know about how many Koreans have sweaty hands, but we have an information that sausage sales in that country increased by 39% over the same period last year. Obviously, the sausages become a usual practice in Korea.

Google Buzz - is a new social communications feature that was revealed yesterday. It really looks like a mix of Google Wave and Twitter with an ability of posting media and status updates in an ongoing conversation. New service is running in almost every Gmail account and in the Mobile Safari web app. The latter has the same features as the main service and additionally includes an option to see "buzz" nearby while you're out and comment on like other people's "buzz".

The service is new, and many people discuss on how it will affect on Twitter and social networks popularity. But it is important that Google made iPhone fully compatible with Buzz in spite of a tense Google/Apple relationship.

It is known, that iPad has a restrictive DRM shackles, which makes Apple the only available supplier of software for this device. So if you buy an iPad, you will have to download software only from the Apple’s AppStore. Yes, there is a big possibility of jailbreaking the gadget within the first 48 hours after its shipping since it’s based on the already jailbroken OS iPhone, but still this is not the best way of downloading applications for most of the people.

There are people, who disagree with a DRM-based strategy of software distribution. Some of them created an Anti-DRM group named Defective by Design. They told us they created an online petition that has been signed for 8,800 times since its inception 4 days ago. DbD has already sent off their first 5,000 signatures in the form of a giant postcard, which is in the photo above.

DbD’s operations manager John Sullivan says their main target is to get Apple to remove DRM and DRM enforcement from all its media and software. This is especially valuable for the iPad designed to be widely used by non-technical people who might not be aware of DRM.

- What Apple is doing with software is quite different. This is a scary step … as Apple move towards this model in the future,

said Sullivan.

Giles Turnbull from the CultOfMac noticed one interesting thing in the video of Apple’s official iPad announcement event.

At 1:04 of the video (the picture above) Phil Schiller demonstrates the new iWork for iPad. On the picture we can see a Keynote and visible in the left corner of the screen button called “My Presentations”. When he moves on to Pages, “My Documents” can be seen clearly. And it really reminds of Windows 95!

Still it is not clear, is this just a Pages feature or maybe a system-wide folder that can be used by other apps. And eventually, “My Documents” may only be a working title with a possibility to be renamed when iWork for iPad will actually be released.

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iPad's announcement caused many people to wonder why Apple decided to use an ancient standard for video output rather than a more modern protocol, such as DisplayPort or HDMI output.

About ten years ago Apple changed Macs output from VGA to DVI standard that supported HD resolution displays and improved digital accuracy. Few years later Apple made another shift – from DVI to DisplayPort. So why Apple chose VGA output on the iPad? There are 2 main reasons:

1. Most of the video projectors support the iPad’s resolution of 1024x768 over a VGA port.
2. VGA is sufficient to handle the iPad’s resolution, and it is really cheaper and easier.

For more details – watch the video of Daniel Eran Dilger from the RoughDrafted Magazine: