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Recent incidents of arson in the city of Petaling Jaya, Malaysia have resulted in many businesses losing nearly everything they had. One fire this past week left a certain business owner with little left to salvage, but there was one bright spot to be found poking out from the ashes. Or rather, there were two…

A pair of iMacs survived the not only the intense heat of the blaze that night, but also the subsequent water firefighters used to extinguish the flames. According to our friend Wei who sent us this story, the iMacs were of the mid-2007, 20″ aluminum variety.

There’s no longer that clean, finished exterior, of course, but the computers miraculously still work (see photo on the right) which is certainly a testament to how well they were made to begin with.

If this story sounds familiar to you, it should. It’s not the first time we’ve featured an indestructible, fire-proof iMac here on TUAW. About one year ago, a Swedish man was also unfortunately hit by a house fire that destroyed his entire home and everything in it.

Everything except for his iMac that is, which was still functional after the ordeal.

Aluminum iMac survives fire, water originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 22 Jan 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you think back to the first year of the iPhone, when the OS was only identified as iPhone OS and Steve Jobs claimed web apps were perfectly adequate, it’s amazing that Apple just concluded their “Ten Billion App Countdown” promotion. This means a whopping 10 billion app downloads have coursed through the mighty veins of iTunes (as opposed to the Mac App Store, which could take a bit longer to reach this milestone). I can count myself responsible for over 3,000 of these downloads (yes, really) so perhaps it’s not as astonishing as it seems when you consider how many iOS devices are now out there running around.

How many apps have you downloaded?

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Ten billion apps downloaded! originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 22 Jan 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve said before that I’m a huge fan of McSweeney’s, the publishing group founded by author Dave Eggers. The company has had an iPhone app for a while, but it recently updated to a universal version, so now all of that great content (from daily posts to various blogs, books, and the eponymous quarterly) is available to read on the iPad any time you want.

The app is set up on a subscription basis, so the original purchase of $6.99 gets you access to six months of daily content from the company, plus “semi-eternal delivery” of material from the website (which is publicly available anyway). There’s also an ebook store in the new version of the app, where you can buy any books the company has published, at prices from $6 to $15. All together, that may sound like a little much compared to some other apps, but compared to actual print books, that’s still cheap, and all of McSweeney’s ebooks are manually designed and typeset for the format, which is pretty cool.

Good to see that McSweeney’s is improving its iOS presence — the App Store’s a great place for smaller publishing houses like this one to find a bigger audience, I think.

McSweeney’s revamps iOS app, now universal with a bookstore originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Area/Code’s Drop7 was one of the first big games on the App Store, and it was even recently featured in the iOS indie bundle sale over the holidays. But the developer probably can’t wear the indie label too proudly any more — the studio has been acquired by social gaming giant Zynga, and will be renamed “Zynga New York.”

In a blog post on the website, the company doesn’t really reveal what it’s working on next, but it sounds like social gaming on a large scale will be the focus (right after, we hope, Drop7 gets ported into a social browser game, though they can leave the microtransactions out of it, thanks).

This is of course the second big iOS-related acquisition (and rebranding) that Zynga has done, after it bought Words with Friends developer Newtoy earlier this year. I don’t think this is the last buy we’ll see Zynga make off of the App Store, either — the company is flush with Farmville cash, and has been on the hunt for talented developers for a while. The only question is who they’ll bring in next.

Zynga acquires Drop7 developer Area/Code originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In October, I had the pleasure of reviewing Noteshelf, a top-notch iPad app for taking handwritten notes. The app has gone through some revisions since that time, and developer Rama Krishna even took on my personal challenge of adding a baseball scorebook to the notebook pages available in Noteshelf.

The app now has a special zoom mode for making finger-writing more comfortable, iOS multitasking and printing, and a way to export your pages to an iPad photo album. One small but important addition is the ability to date-stamp individual notebook pages.

Fluid Tech would like to give 10 TUAW readers the chance to get a copy of this cool US$4.99 iPad app. Here are the rules for the giveaway:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.
• To enter, leave a comment telling us what you’ll use Noteshelf for.
• The comment must be left before Sunday, January 24, 2011 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time.
• You may enter only once.
• One winner will be selected and will receive a promo code good for one copy of Noteshelf, valued at $4.99.
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Best of luck, and I can’t wait to see what kind of comments we’ll get as entries.

Noteshelf wants to give 10 TUAW readers a free license originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Evernote‘s Phil Libin has posted an article over at our fellow AOL site TechCrunch talking about the app’s first week on the Mac App Store and how it all stacked up (he also did a quick hit in the first few days over on the Evernote blog). He says he’s learned some pretty astounding things from Evernote’s experience so far in the Mac App Store, and probably first among these is a conclusion that I expect a lot of developers to come to in the next few months. While many devs have believed, due to their success on the iOS App Store, that mobile apps were the wave of the future, Libin boils it down: “It isn’t mobile that’s overwhelmingly important, it’s the app store.”

That’s quite a conclusion right there, but sure enough, as you can see in the chart above, the stats stack up. Evernote saw 320,000 downloads through the Mac App Store last week, 120,000 of which were brand new users. That’s half of the new accounts created last week, and it’s enough to push the Mac OS to the biggest platform on the service. Again, Libin puts it strikingly powerfully: “The presence of a well-formed app store is the single most important factor for the viability of a platform for third party developers.”

Libin provided additional detail in a recent email to TUAW, saying that he forecasts 95% of all downloads of the Mac client to be straight from the App Store, eventually. According to him, “desktop is viable again,” all thanks to the Mac App Store (and hopefully, he muses, a similar platform for Windows someday). He noted that there was quite a bit of effort involved: “Getting into the store for launch day was non-trivial. We declared that this was the most important priority for our Mac team about six weeks [prior to launch] and pulled a few all-nighters between then and now, but it was clearly worth it. Many of the under-the-hood changes that we had to make to get approved were good code hygiene anyway, and we’re better off for having made them.”

That doesn’t mean the direct-download version is going away, Libin explains: “primarily because the App Store doesn’t let us have an automatic beta track, which has become pretty important to our release engineering,” they will be keeping the conventional version available.

The whole article is well worth reading, and if indeed Evernote’s experience on the Mac App Store becomes representative of many featured independent developers, the opportunities offered there in terms of discovery and ease-of-use will have an enormous impact on how desktop software is bought and sold.

Lessons from early days on the Mac App Store with Evernote originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here at TUAW, we see an endless parade of iPad and iPhone cases. I mean, seriously — if I see another carbon copy plastic or silicone case for an iPad, I may toss my breakfast. So when someone sends me something a bit out of the ordinary, I’ll usually take notice.

That was the situation when I received an email a few weeks ago from a gentleman who pointed me to the website for his company, Vintcase. In his email, he said that they made “the most beautiful, awesome, gorgeous, amazing, classy and wonderful iPad case made on Earth (and beyond).” All hyperbole aside, a look at the website revealed a very beautiful leather case that reminded me of one of those satchels that Indiana Jones might carry his travel papers in.

Vintcase shipped a case from Ubrique, Spain, one of the pueblos blancos (white towns) in Andalusia where leatherwork is an art. The case came in a nicely wrapped box (check it out in the gallery below) and when I opened it, my senses were overloaded.

The fragrance and soft touch of the leather are amazing, so much so that it’s hard to believe that this is an iPad case and not a fashion statement. It does work quite well as an iPad case, and it’s something that will age beautifully as it picks up scuffs, stains, and other marks of character.

The best thing about the Vintcase? It’s relatively inexpensive, at US$99, when you consider the quality of the product. A case like this will last for years, and hopefully the next generations of iPads will slip right into it. If you’re looking for a well-made iPad case with character, something that isn’t just another piece of plastic stamped out of a machine, look no further than the Vintcase.

Vintcase: An iPad case Indiana Jones would want to own originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Falling into the “no, duh” category, Business Insider, citing a 9to5 Mac article, says that the main reason the forthcoming iPad 2 will undercut the emerging plethora of Android-powered tablets is because Apple has already cornered the market on manufacturers and has enlisted more to produce the tablet. The number of PCB suppliers, according to reports, has risen from three to seven. Business Insider points out that Apple did the same thing with the iPod just a few years ago, making it harder for competitors to get their hands on supplies.

Apple does learn its lesson when it comes to supply and demand. It doesn’t want to face a chronic shortage of iPad 2 when they do come out — not only will they have the early adopters wanting to trade up to a version with a camera, but they also have the first-generation holdouts waiting for the rumored features. I’m sure that Steve Jobs was not happy with the length of time it took new users to even get their hands on an iPad after the initial run, not to mention a basic case and the iPad Camera Connection Kit. As with the iPod and iPhone, the company has learned to anticipate demand.

There will also be companies out there willing to produce parts for Android-powered tablets, and have probably anticipated the growing demand as well. Just as Apple has learned from itself, its competitors are learning from Apple, too.

Apple’s iPad strategy: Cutting off competitors, or just learning their lesson? originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ben Harvell is a freelance writer and former editor of iCreate magazine. He now writes for a wide range of international technology magazines and websites including Macworld and Mac Format. He has written several books on consumer technology and blogs at www.benharvell.com. Ben covered the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and has been closely associated with the device and it’s rivals ever since. He has commissioned his own apps and reviews App Store content on a regular basis. He’s also rather obsessed with Twitter.

Given the current state of the market it seems increasingly obvious to me that a good CEO is becoming unnecessary in the mobile world. The figureheads of two of the biggest players in the game, Google and Apple, are currently taking a break from the limelight and then there’s Microsoft’s screaming CEO Steve Ballmer who will never be Bill Gates but has somehow pulled off a satisfactory launch of Windows Phone 7. While Steve Jobs takes his medical leave of absence he has turned to COO Tim Cook for the third time, proving the ranks of able leaders waiting in the wings at Apple. Schmidt’s sidestep was inevitable given the presence of two Google founders below him but, nevertheless, Larry Page feels he has learned enough (and achieved a big enough head start) to take on Google’s full time CEO role. Ballmer made a natural progression to his position and is just now seeing success after cries for Gates’ return last year.

With three tech greats merely overseeing rather than leading for the time being, it continues the trend of providing a suitable puppet who can also act as a fall guy when needed. Ballmer is the only substitute to feel the sting of a backlash so far and that comes more as a result of the length of time he has held the position by comparison to replacement pitcher Cook and relative newbie Page. That and the fact that he may be ever so slightly insane and put his faith in Windows Vista.

Yet, at least when it comes to mobile platforms, all three companies are doing very well. The iPhone and iPad continue to dominate, Android mobile and tablet devices are blossoming and, for the rest there’s WF7 (shouldn’t there be a T in there?). With only Page as yet untested, it seems the replacements are more than capable of holding their own while the old hands offer advice from the bench. Should Google’s CEO switch follow the same pattern, maybe RIM should consider ushering Lazaridis and Balsillie to the sidelines…

Creating artwork can be the most painstaking part in creating a game.  So when I see someone talking about how they were able to successfully outsource the artwork in one of their games I take notice.

In previous articles I mentioned a great resource on how to communicate with an artist so you could get your iOS graphic design done.  Today I found a good article on outsourcing your art using freelance sites where you can hopefully get things done right and at a good price.

The article is Alfred Baudisch and can be found on the Karnak Games website here:
How To Outsource Art For Your Game Using Freelancing Sites

In the article Alfred covers several sites that you can look at, and one other site that is not mentioned that I know can provide quality outsourcers that you may want to check out is Guru.com.  In my opinion the quality of the people on there is typically a bit above other sites like Odesk.com.

Something that I can’t emphasize enough, which Alfred touches on in his article  is that you don’t mention that the art  is for an iOS app.  When talking to some artists it just seemed that when I mentioned that it was for an iPhone app that they wanted more money.  That may just have been my paranoia, but if it’s not necessary to do so I wouldn’t mention the app store.

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