Category: I-phone

When Harmonix (the makers of Rock Band and Dance Central) first announced it was creating a brand new iOS app, I was looking forward to a brand new music game of some kind. But the company surprised us all with VidRhythm, now available on the App Store for US$1.99. It’s not really a game, really; it’s a casual (and fun) remixing tool and music video maker.

The game has a bunch of tracks (mostly original, though there are a few classical songs in the mix as well) that are assembled out of little hits of sound, everything from bass drums and high-hat hits to various other beats and samples. Your job as the music video maker is to replace those samples with your own audio and video. The app tells you exactly what to do (like “say Bom”), and you can then record video of you or some gullible friends doing just that. Record all the samples, choose a video style, hit Go, and voila: almost instantly you have an original music video, made up of your own video recordings and audio mix.

It’s wild to see in action. There’s no actual game to play, but it is a lot of fun to play with, and Harmonix has done a great job of hiding all of the video and audio processing that must go on behind the scenes to make something like this. You can see some examples of the videos on YouTube, but until you actually dive in and make one yourself, it’s hard to tell just how magical the app really is.

Essentially, VidRhythm is a cool toy, not to mention a fun creative tool. I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t get a full game from Harmonix, but this is nice, too, and I look forward to seeing the kind of videos people end up creating with it.

Daily iPhone App: VidRhythm originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A report from Taiwan’s Digitimes says that Foxconn is churning out the unannounced iPhone 5 hardware at an alarming rate — over 150,000 units a day. That’s crazy, and it means Foxconn is racing to get shipments up to 5-6 million units total by later on this month. All of Apple’s contractors are working around the clock as well, funneling components into Foxconn to create the new iPhones.

This may not all be for the rumored September release; reports are also saying that Pegatron Technology has been contracted for about 15 percent of Apple’s iPhone orders, though Pegatron may not start shipping those orders until sometime next year. That doesn’t mean we won’t see an iPhone 5 announced as expected, just that Apple’s setting up for some major demand, even off into the future.

Foxconn reportedly producing 150k iPhone 5s a day originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe plans to launch a new app and service for Apple devices called Carousel. The service will allow users to automatically upload, store, and sync photos from multiple devices, create galleries, and perform non-destructive editing on photos by keeping originals stored on Adobe’s servers.

With the exception of the non-destructive editing feature, Carousel sounds similar to Apple’s existing MobileMe Gallery and pending iCloud Photo Stream features. Crave reports that the service has some potentially hamstringing restrictions as well: users are limited to only five Carousels and can share each with only four other people, viewing Carousels requires downloading the app first, and the service only works on iPads, iPhone 3GS or later, the fourth-generation iPod touch, and Macs running OS X Lion. Windows and Android users need not apply, at least for now.

Since this is Adobe, the service also comes with a hefty price tag. After a 30-day free trial, the service costs US$5.99 per month or $59.99 per year. After January, however, the price will rise to $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. Granted, that is for “unlimited” photo storage, while iCloud’s free Photo Stream will store only your latest 1000 photos. However, even as someone with close to 100 GB of photos lurking on the various hard drives scattered through my house, Carousel’s limited audience and high price has put me off. Professional photographers with huge libraries might want to give Carousel a go, but beyond that it’s hard to see the service gaining much traction.

Carousel should be available in the App Store later this month. Once it’s available, we’ll take a look at it and see if it lives up to its price.

Adobe Carousel uploads, syncs photos with Apple devices originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Eric Chahi’s classic game “Another World” (also known as “Out of this World,” from its US release) is finally coming to iOS at the end of September. BulkyPix will be publishing the title, and controls will come in two flavors, either as full touchscreen controls or through a virtual D-pad. Fans of this game really love it, and will probably be happen to see it finally available on Apple’s portable devices. The title will be US $4.99, and available as a universal app.

I always found the game really hard, but that problem could be fixed (or worsened, depending on your preference): This version of the game will provide both easier and harder difficulty levels, as well as remastered sound, and full Game Center achievement support. We’ll have to see what the game is like when it comes out on September 22nd.

Another World coming to iOS this month originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bloomberg reports that HTC has filed new infringement claims against Apple. Oh well, another day, another patent lawsuit, right? Except this one has a big twist: HTC is suing Apple with Google’s patents.

“The nine patents originated with Palm Inc., Motorola Inc. and Openwave Systems Inc., with Google taking ownership within the past year, according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records,” Bloomberg reports. The new infringement lawsuit has been filed in Delaware, with HTC alleging Apple’s infringement of four patents originally issued to Motorola.

Many have seen Apple’s patent suits against various handset makers as a proxy war against Google and its Android operating system. This latest move by HTC certainly adds credence to that characterisation of events, and it also brings to mind a question: how long before these Cold War shenanigans move aside for the main event, Apple v. Google? Since it appears Google is taking a proactive stance in the patent suits without actually initiating lawsuits itself, that might be happening sooner rather than later.

HTC sues Apple — with Google’s patents originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let me describe a game for you: Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead descends from Heaven and acid-trips his way through a parking lot, trying to avoid getting busted by the cops as he attempts to hug electric guitars. Sound like fun? Sure. Sound like something Apple would let onto the App Store in a million years? Probably not. But it turns out Apple wasn’t always so choosy.

Ars Technica recently interviewed Jason Rainbows, developer of Garcia’s Guitars for the Apple Pippin, and the interview paints a picture of a much different (and maybe more lighthearted) mid-1990s Apple. “The Apple Pip-what?” some of you may be asking now, and you can be forgiven for that, because I never heard of it before a couple years ago, either. The Apple Pippin was Apple’s aborted attempt at entering the gaming market in the mid-90s, running a version of System 7 on PowerPC hardware.

As was typical of much of Apple’s gear during that time, the Pippin was too expensive, too slow, had too little third-party support, and almost no one bought it. It was one of the first Apple products to disintegrate under Steve Jobs’s laser gaze when he returned to Apple’s top echelons, and as such the product is now little more than the answer to obscure Apple trivia.

However, one interesting bit about the Apple Pippin is that Garcia’s Guitars was actually packaged with the device. Apple doesn’t include games with any of its iOS devices now, instead relying on users to discover them for themselves on the App Store, and it’s hard to imagine the company highlighting a game like Garcia’s Guitars today. According to Jason Rainbows, however, “Back then, if I called Apple and stayed on the phone (or bitched long enough), I’d eventually get Steve Jobs or The Woz on the line.”

In those days Apple was still fronting itself as a sort of “counterculture” alternative to the PC — best exemplified by the later “Think Different” campaign — so while Apple’s tacit support for a game like Garcia’s Guitars may seem surprising given the company’s more “uptight” modern image, it was entirely in character in the company’s earlier days.

I never owned (or even saw) a Pippin, nor did I ever play Garcia’s Guitars. But while it’s nice to see Apple enjoying its top spot on the tech heap today, I’ll admit that Ars Technica’s interview with Jason Rainbows got me feeling a bit nostalgic for the company’s earlier days. Apple had a bit more of a “devil may care” attitude back then, or at least it seems so today. Maybe it didn’t do the company any favors when it came to the balance sheets, but I kind of miss the “mellower” Apple described in Ars Technica’s article.

Publishing for Apple’s Pippin was a bit less curated than the App Store originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Saks 5th Avenue store in New York and Styelist.com have teamed up to create an interactive storefront display made up of 64 iPad 2s and 18 27″ Cinema Displays in order to celebrate Fashion’s Night Out. The three-window display was conceived and built by Gin Lane Media and uses a custom built app and a local network to get all the iPads connected to one another.

The Loop has some additional pictures of the display. But for those of you who want to do more than look, you can actually take part in what appears on the display. Besides Stylelist imagery, users can submit their own photos that will be shown on the iPads by Tweeting photos with the hashtag #StylelistatSaks.

Saks interactive storefront features 64 iPads originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to the Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian family has recently gone through not one, but two adventures related to stolen iPhones. While on holiday at a Hilton in Fiji, the family’s mother, Fiona Donohoe, had her iPhone ripped off by a hotel concierge. In a move worthy of a featured spot on Dumb Criminals, the theft was discovered and the iPhone recovered after the concierge accidentally synced all of his/her own contacts with Donohoe’s MobileMe account. After that it was presumably simple to track down the thief, who has been fired from the Fiji Hilton and jailed for six months.

Only two weeks later, 13-year-old Tahira Donohoe had her iPhone stolen while at school. She and her father used the Find My iPhone app on his iPad to track the thief’s progress along a bus route for a while before deciding to give up the chase and let the police deal with it. They walked into a police station, set the iPad on the counter, and reported a theft in progress.

Police caught up with the thief shortly thereafter, and when they were at first unable to find the stolen goods, they asked the Donohoes to ping the phone using Find My iPhone. Once the telltale sonar sound went off, police recovered the phone, arrested the 13-year-old thief after a brief chase, and brought everything in to the station to sort things out.

The Donohoes did not press charges against the young thief. The Herald reports that the Donohoes had already replaced the iPhone stolen in Fiji before that phone was recovered, so they now have an extra iPhone. Hopefully they can hang on to all of them from now on.

Find My iPhone is available for free from the App Store and does not require a paid MobileMe account if you have an iPhone 4, any iPad, or a fourth-generation iPod touch. Once iCloud launches, the service will presumably be free for all users on all devices. Find My iPhone is hands-down the first app that should be installed on new iOS devices and the first service you should enable.

One family, two Find My iPhone adventures originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For those of you who need more expansion than what comes on the latest iMac, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or Mac mini, you might want to check out Magma’s new ExpressBox 3T. The ExpressBox 3T is a Thunderbolt expansion chassis that allows you to connect up to three PCIe cards to any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac.

PCIe expansion cards are typically used by those that do high-end audio, graphics, or video editing. Many professionals will typically buy a MacPro for its expansion slots, but now with Magma’s ExpressBox 3T expansion chassis, user can get the same amount of expansion, and throughput, on any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac.

No word yet on what the ExpressBox 3T might cost, but Magma has set up web page with a form interested buyers can fill out to be notified of further details when they become available.

Magma announces three-slot Thunderbolt expansion chassis originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Most of the comic books released on the iPad and iPhone have been inside of special apps (many of which are run by ComiXology, actually), but here’s another option. Comic book publisher IDW is set to release some graphic novels and comic books through iBooks, meaning that you can buy them right inside Apple’s official e-reader app. 20 different graphic novels are coming out in the first round, ranging from genre stuff like Star Trek and Doctor Who, to licensed titles like Dragon Age, and older stuff like Locke & Key and Bloom County. Each should cost around $6 to $10 (which is competitive, especially compared to buying the full paper editions of these books), and should be available in the iBookstore soon, if not already.

I used to be a die-hard paper book reader, but lately I’ve seen a lot of value in iBooks, not just in terms of price, but also in the convenience of having all the books I happen to be reading stored on my iPhone. I have a feeling that ComiXology and other apps like it will probably remain the best way to pick up day-one releases of periodical comic books (at least until NewsStand comes along in iOS 5), but for library editions and collected graphic novels, iBooks could become the best and easiest way to read those.

IDW releasing comics for iBooks originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in June iCloud Communications, LLC of Arizona sued Apple for trademark infringement claiming Apple’s use of the word “iCloud” is damaging to their business. iCloud Communications offers cloud computing products and services among their various other Internet and telephony services. However, though iCloud Communications has used “iCloud” in its name since 2005, the company never actually registered it as a trademark. Matter of fact, the owner of the iCloud trademark is Apple.

That little fact put a pretty quick end to iCloud Communication’s lawsuit, or should I say, PhoenixSoft/Clear Digital Communications’ lawsuit. That’s their new name, most likely changed at the request of Apple. Furthermore, iCloud Communication’s old domain geticloud.com has been wiped clean, also most likely at the “request” of Apple. PhoenixSoft/Clear Digital Communications will continue to offer cloud-based services, they just won’t be doing it with Apple’s trademark anymore.

[via Arstechnica]

iCloud Communications to change name, drop suit against Apple originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s all about the runner-ups this week on TUAW TV Live, since Steve is currently Out Of Office (and by “office” I mean “country”), the duty of entertaining you all this afternoon falls to Kelly and Doc Rock. We’ll see how it goes.

This week we have a bit of news but mostly we are going to talk about workflow: How Doc Rock and Kelly actually do the stuff they do, and there will be naming of names (Applications on Mac OS and iOS, workflow tips, things like that.) All will be revealed a bit later today!

Below, you’ll find a Ustream livestream viewer and a chat tool. The chat tool allows you to participate by asking questions or making comments.

If you’re driving somewhere and would like to watch TUAW TV Live while you’re stuck in traffic, please don’t — keep your eyes on the road! However, if someone else is doing the driving, you can watch the show on your iPhone and join the chat by downloading the free Ustream App. It’s a universal app and is wonderful on an iPad, both for viewing and participating in the chat.

We’ll start at about 5 PM ET, so if you’re seeing a prerecorded show, be sure to refresh your browser until you see the live stream. For those of you who are not able to join us for the live edition, you’ll be able to view it later this evening on our TUAW Video YouTube channel and as part of the TUAW TV Live podcast viewable in iTunes or on any of your Apple devices.

No Flash? Check out the YouTube channel or podcast listed above or click here.

TUAW TV Live at 5pm EDT: Substitute host edition, video style originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So yesterday, the TUAW backchannel got into a heated discussion about USB thumb drives. We had just posted about why Lion Version support was not available on non-HFS+ file systems. Our debate wasn’t over whether they were good or not, but rather why they were a poor choice for day-to-day work.

All of us had a number of drives around, but for the most part they are used for storing system installers, not for old-fashioned sneakernet-style file transfers. Nearly all of TUAW has moved on to some kind of cloud solution, be it Dropbox or Pogoplug or iCloud. These are all solutions that bypass any “HFS+ vs FAT, versions-support vs Windows-interoperability” issues, plus they don’t have the “running apps from dmg”-like squicky feel to them.

The fact that some people still use thumb drives for live-saving work files (update: saving live to the drive instead of to disk as described here) came as a bit of a surprise to us. We were determined to come up with a list of reasons not to do this. In the end, we brainstormed a bit and turned to Twitter for further inspiration.

Our first knee-jerk reactions were the least motivational. Although several of us (and people on Twitter as well) mentioned “Aren’t those drives always a bit failure-prone?”, our googling indicated that the mean time between failures was relatively low high, and the number of supported read/write and insertion/ejection cycles surprisingly high, particularly for modern units.

So “they’re not reliable” turned out to be a bit apocryphal, even for relatively cheap drives. That being said, USB thumb drives don’t appear to use load leveling of any kind, and are not designed for constant read/write cycles. As one of our Twitter buddies pointed out, they are designed for file storage above all.

Instead, we focused on practical use, why thumb drives fail in the daily work process. Without further ado, here is our list of the top reasons you shouldn’t be using thumb drives for directly saving your work.

Thumb drives don’t integrate well into backups. Although HFS+-formatted USB sticks can and will use Lion versions and metadata, if your workflow involves saving directly to the drive and skipping your primary hard drive, you’re missing out on a lot of what Time Machine can offer, especially when you go mobile. Consider updating your workflow to save to disk (in a normal work folder) and then copying to a thumb drive for transport. This way, you ensure that all file data is not just versioned but also passively brought into the normal Time Machine backup schemes.

Thumb drives don’t integrate well with pockets, bags, dogs, and small children. Portable USB sticks are small. They are tremendously easy to lose or misplace. What’s more, thumb drives can be inadvertently swallowed, flushed, put through the laundry, and more. If you’re saving your only file copy to a thumb drive, you’re putting that data at unnecessary risk — especially if your two-year-old just learned how to flush, or you’re figuring on giving your dog enough laxative to poop out the data he just licked off your desk. That’s not to mention the “good friend” scenario, pointed out by one of our Twitter buddies, who reformats your stick for “some linux install tests” without your permission.

Thumb drives are physically flimsy. It’s a lot easier to break the connector port by accident, losing access to all the data stored on the drive, than you might think. Their relative fragility make them a risk for anyone who relies on them for primary storage.

Thumb drives are subject to corruption. When you unplug a drive without unmounting it — a common thoughtless mistake that many of us make — your data could get corrupted. Combine this with a natural exclusion from backups, and a corrupted USB drive could cost you that data.

Thumb drives have low read-write speed. If you tend to engage in edit-save-edit-save cycles, writing directly to a USB stick can slow down your work a lot, especially when working with large data files like images.

Thumb drives aren’t ubiquitous. Unless you’re prepared to walk your drive to another location, their data doesn’t naturally integrate with net-based cloud storage. And if you do use net storage, why are you using a thumb drive as a primary storage solution?

Thumb drives take up extra slots. Who amongst us have enough USB slots on their system? Every thumb drive occupies a space that could otherwise be used for external Time Machine storage or any number of other peripherals.

So that’s our list of crowd-sourced reasons, beyond our instinctive knee-jerk “don’t do that” response. If you want to gawk at a dizzying array of USB drives, check out the list on Engadget. Got more suggestions? Add them to the comments!

Thanks to everyone who tweeted suggestions, including (but not limited to) Arepty, Redbits Apps (for 2-year-olds learning to flush), Ed_h, Mark_Coker, Jecoffey, Biosblob, Niels_K, Dddat, DannoWatts, Endareth, Yittsv, Yboy403, JayFuerstenberg, TB10 (for load leveling), Cranies, Ech0riginal, Innoying, ChunkyGuy, JohnSea66, LMahesa, JasperJanssen, GoJohnnyBoi, GianLovesSurf, PaulRysz, Frank2Oh, StoreClock, David_Dre (for Linux friends), Savobien, Bosh (inconsistent mount points), JTokash, DanUdey, AEberbach, MikePuchol, RJALPHAdog, Hack3rsInc, iMacDan, JohnNelm9r, WiseQuark, Zad0xsis, McElhearn, AbrahamVegh,WeatherAngel, MBrit, and everyone else!

Reasons why USB thumb drives are the wrong choice originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s all about the runner-ups this week on TUAW TV Live, since Steve is currently Out Of Office (and by “office” I mean “country”), the duty of entertaining you all this afternoon falls to Kelly and Doc Rock. We’ll see how it goes.

This week we have a bit of news but mostly we are going to talk about workflow: How Doc Rock and Kelly actually do the stuff they do, and there will be naming of names (Applications on Mac OS and iOS, workflow tips, things like that.) All will be revealed a bit later today!

As usual, it all kicks off at 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT / 10 PM BST) sharp, and we’ll take a few minutes to chat before the demos start. To join in on the chat and watch the live streaming video, drop by TUAW about five minutes before the start time to get your instructions on how to participate. If you’re unable to join us for the show, remember that you can always subscribe to the video podcast and watch the show at your leisure in iTunes or any other favorite podcatching app. The past shows are also available on the TUAW YouTube channel.

If you don’t want to use the Flash Ustream chat tool, remember that you can always connect through IRC. The default chat server is chat1.ustream.tv (port 6667), the chat room is #tuaw-tv. You’ll need to set up a Ustream account first with a username and password, and then log into IRC with that.

TUAW TV Live at 5PM EDT: Substitute host edition! originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Do you have a need to start an app on your Mac at a particular time, or easily get it to restart after a crash or power outage? If so, Lingon 3 may be for you. It’s US $2.99 at the Mac app store.

Lingon 3 can not only start an app, but it can run a script automatically at a time you specify, or if something happens on your Mac and you want something triggered as a result. An example might be to trigger an event when an external drive is connected. Here’s a video that gives an example of the app being set up.

I tried the app and used it to start up a suite of things I use after I get up in the morning. It worked as expected, and the GUI allows you to specify a particular day and time for the action to occur. You can also specify that an app keep running, so it comes back up after a crash.

Some of these things can be done by writing a script, but that’s not for a Mac novice. OS X also supports login items, so if you just want things to be there when you start the Mac, you don’t have to buy an app to accomplish it.

There have been some complaints about this latest version of Lingon, including some from one of our TUAW staffers, that the new version has been simplified and in the process lost some good features, including the ability to create jobs for multiple users on a single Mac. Author Peter Borg says now that he is selling this new version of the app through the Mac App Store there are some restrictions about how the app has to operate.

For many users, this won’t really matter, but more sophisticated users will want more. I found that Lingon 3 worked well, but didn’t take me significantly beyond what I can do with login items built into Lion, other than starting apps at a given time, and crash recovery for apps. On the other hand, if you were trying to keep, for example, a kiosk running, this app would be really helpful. If those are features you need, Lingon 3 is reasonably priced, but requires Lion. If you are interested in more features, but don’t care about running the app on Lion, version 2 is still available in the Mac App Store.

Daily Mac App: Lingon 3 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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