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The portrait of Steve Jobs that has been a fixture on Apple’s homepage since his passing is iconic. It tells you just about everything you need to know about the man — his intensity, determination, intelligence, the fact that this is a great man from whom great ideas spring, and the fact that he’s a man you challenge at your own peril. It’s the photo that will be on the cover of his biography, and it’s likely to be one of the main images that represents him throughout history.

According to PDN Pulse, Albert Watson took the photo back in 2006 during a shoot for Fortune. Having heard of Jobs’s reputation as a demanding man, even when it came to photo shoots, Watson did a great deal of preparation and research for his session with Jobs. Steve was bemused that Watson was shooting with film instead of digital, but he agreed when Watson said he didn’t feel digital was “quite here yet.” “We’ll get there,” was Steve’s reply. The photo session with Watson was relatively low-key compared to other Jobsian sessions; Jobs gained notoriety as a “nightmare subject” among photographers, mostly because of how much control he demanded over shoots.

As for the portrait itself, Watson told Steve to give the camera almost 100 percent eye contact and “Think about the next project you have on the table.” Watson also told Steve to think about times when people had challenged him. Much of 2006 was filled with rumors of the supposedly forthcoming iPhone; virtually every pundit in the universe expected it to be a huge flop, and that was assuming Apple even had the “guts” to challenge the mobile handset industry in the first place. It’s easy to imagine that Steve was thinking about the original iPhone when the shutter snapped, in which case the “visionary” quality of the portrait seems even more appropriate. Steve Jobs knew he was about to change the world — again — and it comes through in this photograph.

Watson says Steve told him it was his favorite photograph of him. It’s easy to see why.

On photographing Steve Jobs originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Modern Macs have pretty good battery life, but there are times when you can’t get enough juice to keep working without a power adapter. BatterySqueezer promises to help you extend your battery by throttling process that are running in the background.

The idea is that by reducing the amount of processing power demanded by applications that are not actively being used, it reduces overall CPU load. Reduced CPU load results in lower power usage, which in theory, should extend your battery life.

BatterySqueezer sits in the background ready to throttle programs when they’re not being used. Currently it supports four browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, as well as Reeder, Microsoft Office and iWork.

The throttled apps aren’t killed off entirely, but plugins such as Flash, animated adverts and any processes that are demanding are reduced to practically no load. This has another benefit other than extended battery life and that’s more free resources, which can be particularly useful on a low-powered Mac.

In anecdotal testing BatterySqueezer throttled Flash from some 30% of CPU load to about 3% with Chrome backgrounded. The result was very jerky Flash animations, but who cares when its in the background. As soon as Chrome was brought to the foreground, it was unthrottled and everything was normal. It also had the benefit of keeping my hot-running Mac cooler with noticeably reduced fan speed when multi-tasking. BatterySqueezer is one of those apps that will have different mileage for different people and setups.

If you’re trying to eek out as much out of your battery life as possible or trying to stretch out the resources of a low-power Mac, BatterySqueezer might just be the ticket and is available for US$3.99 from the Mac App Store.

Daily Mac App: BatterySqueezer originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple introduced iCloud earlier this year, and its announcement kicked off a renewed interest in the iconic cloud logo. Articles espousing the icon’s Golden Ratio-based design and Apple’s attention to detail followed shortly. Though Apple undoubtedly chose this icon for its precision design, it’s likely that Apple’s design team can’t take full credit for the look.

A post by Scott Hanselman points out the cloud icon may have its roots in the Pictos 1 icon collection. Though it’s been modified some, the basic circular cloud design has been widely used. It appears on Microsoft’s ASP.net website and in many iOS weather applications. A very similar cloud design even showed up on a BBC weather segment almost thirty years ago. You can check out his post for even more examples of this cloud configuration.

iCloud prompts a look back at “cloud” icons originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A 65-page document recently filed in Australia by Apple in the Samsung patent case says that not only does Apple own “a thicket of patents” (which I’ll guess just means “a whole lot”), but that Apple is willing to license some of its patents, while still keeping others for itself.

According to FOSS Patents’ Florian Müller, Apple does have an extensive set of patents for its mobile devices. But rather than companies like Microsoft, who will often nail down patents only to make as much money as possible licensing them out to other hardware companies, Apple prefers to hold patents in order to differentiate its devices. It would rather benefit from having original features on its devices rather than just charging something like a per-unit fee.

This of course matters in the Samsung case, because Apple is alleging that Samsung knew that patents on certain features were held by Apple, and Samsung went ahead and released phones with those features anyway. If Apple really did plan to license the patents out, then Samsung could just pay the damages, and the agreement would go down as if it were a simple licensing deal. But if Apple really didn’t want to ever share the patented technology, then the damages to the company would be more extensive.

Indeed, the document does state that Apple was willing to license some “lower-level” patents. But all in all, it’s fairly clear that Apple was planning on keeping most of the patented technology for itself. And that means that the outlook for Samsung in this case is getting worse and worse as time goes on.

[via AppleInsider]

Apple lawyer says it owns a “thicket of patents” originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Algoriddim has updated djay for iPad ($19.99), djay for iPhone ($.99) and djay – David Guetta Edition ($7.99) to take advantage of iOS 5 and iCloud, and it’s great to see these apps already taking advantage of iCloud integration. Some of the new features for this update include:

• iCloud integration. All of a user’s per-song settings created on one version of djay are synced to other devices running iOS 5.
• Professional audio FX. A number of realtime audio effects were introduced including bit crusher, echo, high-pass and low-pass filters, flanger, gate and phaser. There’s several control panes that allow for instant sound effects and customization.
• Audio copy/paste. Allows sounds created in other music apps to be utilized by djay
• Enhanced AirPlay, sorting and other features.

If you haven’t tried djay yet, check out TUAW’s in-depth look at the iPad version. There’s also djay for Mac, which has a demo version available through Algoriddim’s site.

djay updated to take advantage of iCloud integration originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 20:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple introduced iCloud earlier this year, and its announcement kicked off a renewed interest in the iconic cloud logo. Articles espousing the icon’s Golden Ratio-based design and Apple’s attention to detail followed shortly. Though Apple undoubtedly chose this icon for its precision design, it’s likely that Apple’s design team can’t take full credit for the look.

A post by Scott Hanselman points out the cloud icon may have its roots in the Pictos 1 icon collection. Though it’s been modified some, the basic circular cloud design has been widely used. It appears on Microsoft’s ASP.net website and in many iOS weather applications. A very similar cloud design even showed up on a BBC weather segment almost thirty years ago. You can check out his post for even more examples of this cloud configuration.

iCloud prompts a look back at “cloud” icons originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The gray market in China is amazing. No sooner does a new Apple product appear on the scene in the US and Europe than buyers snap up a lot of the devices, and they magically appear on the gray market in China. Sure enough, the iPhone 4S is already selling in China — unofficially.

Computerworld is reporting that the iPhone 4S is now selling in Beijing at prices around US$2,000. One vendor, who was selling the devices in Beijing’s Zhongguancun electronics markets, was selling the 32 GB model for 13,000 yuan (about $2,043 as of this writing) and the 16 GB edition for about $1,729. The vendor noted that the phones came from Australia and the US — the former could explain why TUAW blogger Chris Rawson still doesn’t have his iPhone 4S in hand.

The phones are sold without a contract and are unlocked. Another vendor apparently had the 16 GB version available for “only” $1,391, and expected that the prices would fall by about $100 in the next week.

Why the tendency to pay through the nose for gray market Apple products in China? Apple usually doesn’t deliver the newest products in China for months, so consumers jump at any chance to get the latest and greatest. As we reported before, almost half of the iPad 2 sales in China have come from the gray market.

iPhone 4S selling for big bucks on Chinese gray market originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AllThingsD’s Ina Fried was in Taipei over the weekend, and she took along both an iPhone 4S and an Android device with Google Translate onboard. What she found is that both of the devices and their accompanying software were very good travel companions.

Google Translate (free) is also available for iOS devices, and it’s an amazing piece of software. As Fried notes, she was able to ask an electronics dealer what the difference was between two models of Fuji cameras by speaking to the HTC Salsa running Google Translate. The response from the salesperson was a bit confusing — “Outside” — but Fried quickly noticed that he was referring to the fact that the cameras were identical except for the external case.

Fried ran into one of the unfortunate issues of Siri right now, however, which is the inability to do local searches outside of the U.S. She was able to use the iPhone 4S as her primary camera on the trip and ask Siri to set an alarm for the next morning. After Siri set the alarm, Fried thanked Siri, “feeling like it was the right thing to do.”

Siri’s response? “I live to serve.”

Siri, Google Translate act as travel companions for AllThingsD blogger originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The gray market in China is amazing. No sooner does a new Apple product appear on the scene in the US and Europe than buyers snap up a lot of the devices, and they magically appear on the gray market in China. Sure enough, the iPhone 4S is already selling in China — unofficially.

Computerworld is reporting that the iPhone 4S is now selling in Beijing at prices around US$2,000. One vendor, who was selling the devices in Beijing’s Zhongguancun electronics markets, was selling the 32 GB model for 13,000 yuan (about $2,043 as of this writing) and the 16 GB edition for about $1,729. The vendor noted that the phones came from Australia and the US — the former could explain why TUAW blogger Chris Rawson still doesn’t have his iPhone 4S in hand.

The phones are sold without a contract and are unlocked. Another vendor apparently had the 16 GB version available for “only” $1,391, and expected that the prices would fall by about $100 in the next week.

Why the tendency to pay through the nose for gray market Apple products in China? Apple usually doesn’t deliver the newest products in China for months, so consumers jump at any chance to get the latest and greatest. As we reported before, almost half of the iPad 2 sales in China have come from the gray market.

iPhone 4S selling for big bucks on Chinese gray market originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Like to read? Got an iPhone or iPad? You really ought to have Marco Arment’s US$4.99 Instapaper, which just got an upgrade to version 4.0. Instapaper’s free web service allows you to flag stories to ‘Read Later’ with a single click, and you can always get your complete reading list via the site. For reading on the go, however, the cached stories in the app are ideal.

The Instapaper app now features an iPad-specific article list interface; it swaps out the simple headline-by-headline scroll for a more spacious grid arrangement, complete with the first few lines of the story. The iPhone version has been streamlined too, with story excerpts, bylines and site information clearly visible. iOS 5 users get true hardware brightness control, making it easier to read under varying lighting conditions.

Instapaper wants to let you know what your friends are reading, so now in addition to the stories flagged by your Instapaper-specific social connections, you can also browse all the linked stories posted by your Twitter and Facebook friends or by the Tumblr microblogs you follow (Arment is a founder and former CTO of Tumblr). For Instapaper subscribers who choose to fork over $1 a month to support the service, the app now includes full-text search of all the articles you’ve ever saved to Instapaper — downright handy. You can see the full list of new features at Arment’s blog.

If you’re only using Instapaper via the website, you’re not getting the full-on experience. There are very few apps that have made themselves a home on the front screens of both my iPhone and iPad, and even fewer that rate a spot in the app Dock for both devices. Instapaper has been firmly lodged there since version 1, and I don’t anticipate pulling it out anytime soon.

Daily iPad App: Instapaper 4 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 20:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re having trouble getting Lion to let you enable Find My Mac, you’re not the only one. It seems at least a few people are running into a problem where they see the above message in the iCloud preference pane, but clicking the update button (or running System Update manually) yields no updates to install. If this describes your situation, the good news is that there is a solution — the bad news is that it might require a little bit of patience.

Before getting too worked up over the problem, though, it’s a good idea to try the simplest methods first. Go to System Preferences, go to the Security and Privacy preference pane, and click on the Privacy tab. Check to make sure that Location Services are enabled:

If that didn’t do the trick, head on over to Apple’s support site and download the Lion Recovery Update package manually, and install it. It’s approximately 832 MB, so it may take a while to download if you’re on a slower Internet connection. Once installed, reboot your Mac and go back in to the iCloud preferences (under the Internet category in System Preferences) to see if you can enable Find My Mac now. If you can check the box, you’re all set!

If Find My Mac is still greyed out, however, then the problem is likely that your Mac is in need of a couple of housekeeping tasks to get things in order. This next step works best if you close any apps you have open. Open your Applications folder, then open the Utilities folder and select Disk Utility. You should be presented with a screen similar to the following:

From here, select the volume that Lion is installed on from the list on the left side of the menu as shown above. Then click the Verify Disk button on the bottom right of the window, and Disk Utility will scan the volume for any problems. The process usually takes about five minutes, but might take longer depending on the size of your hard drive.

If you’re still with me at this point, I’m betting that you will probably receive a message similar to the following:

What this means is that somewhere along the line, the part of the system that keeps track of where files are stored on the hard drive recorded some information incorrectly. My guess is that this probably happened during the upgrade to Lion, and affects a specific part of the disk that is used by the recovery system. Luckily, it’s not necessarily anything bad, and it’s relatively easy to fix, though the process might be a bit complicated if you’re unfamiliar with it, so I’ve outlined it below.

1. Power off your Mac completely. Use the Shut Down command from the Apple menu.
2. Power on your Mac, and immediately press and hold the Option key on your keyboard.
3. Once you see the boot menu appear, you can release the key.
4. In the boot menu, select the Recovery HD item with your mouse, or the arrow keys on your keyboard. You may need to press the Enter key to confirm the option if clicking with your mouse does not seem to work.

After a few moments, you will be presented with a screen labeled Mac OS X Utilities. This menu allows you to perform tasks like restoring a Time Machine backup or reinstalling Lion on your Mac. The option we want, however, should be the last item in the list — Disk Utility. This will open the same screen we saw before, but this time you might notice that the Repair Disk button (in the bottom right, under the Verify Disk button we clicked last time) is now enabled. Go ahead and click the repair button, and Disk Utility will automatically find and fix any problems that are found.

Once the repair has finished, close Disk Utility, then restart your Mac by selecting Quit from the OS X Utilities menu. When your Mac is finished restarting, you’ll need to head back over to the Apple support site to download the 10.7.2 Update (or download 10.7.2 Server Update if you’re running Lion Server). When the download finishes, go ahead and install the update, which will require a restart when the installation has finished. Finally, you’ll want to go to your Downloads folder and install the Lion Recovery HD update that we downloaded earlier.

If all went well, you should be able to go into your iCloud preferences now and enable the Find My Mac option:

Find My Mac not working for you? You’re not alone originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Those with a new iPhone 4S who want to install Google’s Voice app are out of luck for a while. Google was forced to pull the app after complaints about its stability arose. According to Google Voice Product Manager Vincent Paquet, there is a bug in the sign-in code that causes the app to crash immediately on opening. The bug only affects this most recent release and earlier versions of the app reportedly still work without error.

Google is fixing the error and will have a new version of the app available as soon as possible. As of the writing of this post, a Google search will pull up the information for the old version of the app. If you try to download this broken version via iTunes, you will receive an “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the US store.” error.

Google has not provided a time frame for when its revised app will reappear. Hopefully, it can get a fast track through the approval process and return to the App Store very soon.

Google pulls Voice app from App Store to address stability originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Those with a new iPhone 4S who want to install Google’s Voice app are out of luck for a while. Google was forced to pull the app after complaints about its stability arose. According to Google Voice Product Manager Vincent Paquet, there is a bug in the sign-in code that causes the app to crash immediately on opening. The bug only affects this most recent release and earlier versions of the app reportedly still work without error.

Google is fixing the error and will have a new version of the app available as soon as possible. As of the writing of this post, a Google search will pull up the information for the old version of the app. If you try to download this broken version via iTunes, you will receive an “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the US store.” error.

Google has not provided a time frame for when its revised app will reappear. Hopefully, it can get a fast track through the approval process and return to the App Store very soon.

Google pulls Voice app from App Store to address stability originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Modern Macs have pretty good battery life, but there are times when you can’t get enough juice to keep working without a power adapter. BatterySqueezer promises to help you extend your battery by throttling process that are running in the background.

The idea is that by reducing the amount of processing power demanded by applications that are not actively being used, it reduces overall CPU load. Reduced CPU load results in lower power usage, which in theory, should extend your battery life.

BatterySqueezer sits in the background ready to throttle programs when they’re not being used. Currently it supports four browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, as well as Reeder, Microsoft Office and iWork.

The throttled apps aren’t killed off entirely, but plugins such as Flash, animated adverts and any processes that are demanding are reduced to practically no load. This has another benefit other than extended battery life and that’s more free resources, which can be particularly useful on a low-powered Mac.

In anecdotal testing BatterySqueezer throttled Flash from some 30% of CPU load to about 3% with Chrome backgrounded. The result was very jerky Flash animations, but who cares when its in the background. As soon as Chrome was brought to the foreground, it was unthrottled and everything was normal. It also had the benefit of keeping my hot-running Mac cooler with noticeably reduced fan speed when multi-tasking. BatterySqueezer is one of those apps that will have different mileage for different people and setups.

If you’re trying to eek out as much out of your battery life as possible or trying to stretch out the resources of a low-power Mac, BatterySqueezer might just be the ticket and is available for US$3.99 from the Mac App Store.

Daily Mac App: BatterySqueezer originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For budding moviemakers who want to shoot cinema-quality 1080p video, the Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR camera is a favorite. It’s a lot less expensive (starting at around US$2,400 for the body alone) than a Red Epic-M (rock-bottom price of about $43,000). Now Robino Films is showing that the 1080p, 30-frame-per-second video capabilities of the iPhone 4S might be a new and really inexpensive low-end video camera for the next Stanley Kubrick.

The filmmakers took a Canon 5D Mark II and an iPhone 4S, mounted them on a rig for simultaneous shooting and then put the resulting video side by side for your viewing pleasure. They made sure that they were matching the exposure, shutter speed, frame rate (30 fps) and picture style as much as possible.

The results are spectacular, at least for the iPhone 4S. The image is a bit warmer than what you see with the Canon footage, and of course you have no way to change lenses on the iPhone 4S (well, you do have those fun lenses from Photojojo…), but it’s a remarkable example of just how good the video capabilities of the 4S really are.

Bumping the video up to full-screen on a 27″ iMac, I could see the difference between the 21.1 Megapixel sensor on the Canon versus the 8 Megapixel sensor on the iPhone 4S — some details seemed a bit fuzzy on the iPhone footage. Also, the rolling shutter of the iPhone 4S causes the digital billboards in the Los Angeles footage to have scrolling black lines on it. For those of us who just want to shoot some amazing vacation footage without carrying around a bag full of equipment, the iPhone 4S can’t be beat.

iPhone 4S / Canon 5d MKII Side by Side Comparison from Robino Films on Vimeo.

iPhone 4S video compared to Canon 5D MK II originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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