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TUAW readers, last year was a huge one for Apple, application developers and anyone making peripherals for iOS devices or Mac computers. The days of “this doesn’t work on a Mac” appear to be all but gone, the iPad was introduced and the number of apps in the store and downloaded to devices completely blew up. Now we want to know what are YOUR choices for the best of 2010?

Remember that there was no Mac App Store last year. Way back in 2010 (less than three weeks ago) we had to download applications on our Macs the “old fashioned way,” with installers and DMGs, oh my! Upscaled iPad apps were called “HD” before we saw the Retina Display, ushering in a whole new world of visually fantastic games and other apps. We also got a taste of some new hardware toys with the Apple TV and AirPlay (although AirPlay-enabled docks and speakers are just now rolling out). With AirPrint coming to a range of HP printers, we’re hopeful the technology will make it even easier for everyone to send documents to those dead-tree printers when needed.

Now it’s time for you to choose your favorites using some nifty voting widgets from Voices Heard Media. Just pick the category you want (Mac app, iOS app or hardware for Macs or iOS devices) and enter the name of your choice in the panel. The system will bubble up the best, and we’ll report the winners live during Macworld Expo, January 27-29.

Nominate your picks for:
Best iOS app of 2010
Best Mac app of 2010
Best Hardware (Mac or iOS) of 2010

TUAW readers: Pick the best of 2010’s apps and hardware originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Green Hornet movie was number one at the box office last weekend (despite some less-than-stellar reviews), so if you saw it and want to read up on the hero, iVerse Media sends a note that the books are now available on your iPhone. The Green Hornet comics app is completely free, and separate issues are US$2 each, via in-app purchase. You can read some of Kevin Smith’s own work on the series, or check out Matt Wagner’s Green Hornet: Year One. I haven’t read that one, but I am a big fan of Matt Wagner for sure.

Of course, there are lots of other ways to read comics on your iPad or other iOS device, including the official comic company apps, or finding your own comic book reader files. But if you’re looking for some Green Hornet action after seeing the movie, you can give iVerse’s app a look.

Green Hornet comics now available on iOS originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When I think of RAID, I usually envision a large box full of whirring drives installed in a rack, not a quiet little box that I can connect to a MacBook. Thanks to Other World Computing, the way I visualize RAID will have to change.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the term RAID, it stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives. In this review, I’ll talk about RAID 0, which stores information on two or more drives that are linked together. RAID 0 is usually a much faster storage solution than just a single hard drive. RAID 1, on the other hand, just mirrors data written to one of the drives onto a second drive. It’s great for creating a fairly bulletproof storage solution.

The Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini (referred to as the Pro Dual mini from here on out) is a new product from OWC that is a fast, redundant quad-interface (USB/FW400/FW800/eSATA) dual SSD array (that’s two solid state hard drives networked up together). When the Pro Dual mini is connected to a Mac through FireWire, no external AC adapter is required, making this drive an excellent portable RAID solution. The USB interface requires an optional AC adapter, adding both cost ($10) and weight to the equation. For use with eSATA, either a FW800 to 12-volt power cable (included) or the AC adapter is required to power the drive.

Physically, the Pro Dual mini fits two 2.5″ SATA SSD drives into a tough 5.6 x 6.1 x 1.1 inch aluminum enclosure. The drives are OWC’s Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSDs, which are rated at up to 263.6 MB/sec write speeds and 271.5 MB/sec reads. What would you use a small, fast RAID array for? A/V, digital photography, professional music or graphics are the use cases that come to mind.

Continue reading Hands-on with the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini SSD

Hands-on with the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini SSD originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While one may think it’s a little late in the season to update an app, these last three matches are a very important group of games. We’ll be sure to have more coverage here of football apps just in time for the Super Bowl, but in the meantime, maybe football fanatics can pass some time with a little Madden 2011 for the iPad and iPhone?

Football fans can download the free app from the Apple App Store but remember — if you are at someone else’s house for the remaining games, please be sure to wash the Doritos off your fingers before bogarting their iPad. Don’t own an iPad? No need to fret, as CBS Sports also has an iPhone/iPod touch version of the app that you can download as well.

[via 148Apps]

CBS Sports updates pro football iPad app for playoffs originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s some speculation that definitely came from the House of Crackpot Theories, but since it’s kind of a slow day with the holiday today, feel free to let your imagination run wild. This video suggests that the next iPod touch could use its internal gyroscope and the FaceTime camera for a sort of pseudo glasses-free 3D. Icons on the home screen could tilt and shift according to how you’re looking at the phone, and games could bend and shift around as you move the phone and your own head in the camera.

It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever see this in the official iOS, however. Nintendo is set to release its glasses-free 3DS system in Japan this week, but Apple has never really shown an interest in the technology, outside of various random patents and some compatibility features for OS X.

Still, it’s definitely possible to create this kind of visual with an iOS device, and while I’ve never seen an app use the FaceTime camera for head-tracking, it certainly seems like it wouldn’t be a tough thing for a talented developer to do. Maybe as the 3DS gains some popularity, we’ll see some developers try more of this on Apple’s iOS platform.

Video: Glasses-free 3D using iOS accelerometer and camera originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reuters is reporting that, at an initial cost of S$135,000 (about US$100,000), a pilot program handing out iPads to 140 students and 10 teachers at Nanyang Girls High School, Tampines Secondary School, Nanhua Primary School and Dunman Secondary School in Singapore aims to replace textbooks and increase interactivity in the classroom.

Students can connect to the internet, download books and notes, share workbooks and access course materials all from their iPads. In talking to Reuters, 14-year-old student Chloe Chen said, “It’s much more convenient. Teachers can just tell us to go a website, and we can immediately go and do our work.”

While the iPad has been used to help feed the hungry and by doctors in surgery, the education world seems to be where it is destined to have the biggest impact. So far, we have seen examples of colleges in the US handing out iPads to students and of textbook publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt testing a full year Algebra course app, so one can imagine just how many places tablet computers will show up once they become even more popular than they already are.

I have heard from two teacher friends that they would love to have an iPad in their classroom, saying that it would help them stay up-to-date and organized, but neither one of them said they would want the students to have them because it would just be a distraction. However, if for no other reason, iPads in the classroom would help them facilitate paperless courses for students, and that alone could save them a lot of headaches.

[via MacStories and 9to5 Mac]

Schools in Singapore issuing iPads to teachers and students originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, you may have already picked up your Steve Jobs mosaic print made from Apple products, but do you have a font made entirely from 540 iPhone apps? I didn’t think so! Tumblr We Love Apple posted about this font made by Oriol Fernandez Tur, a catalan art director from Barcelona with “too much free time” — his own words. Organizing iPhone apps by color, Tur invented his own typeface font, with each page of apps being a different letter of the alphabet.

While some Apple fans may just want to change the note-taking font on their iPad to Helvetica or make their own custom signature in the Mail.app, truly dedicated fanboys and fangirls everywhere might want to check out Tur’s custom iPhone app font and try to make it their own. The font is a little tough to read, but at the very least, it could be used to leave secret messages on friends’ iPhones or iPads.

Click Read More to check out video of the font in action.

Continue reading Font made out of 540 iPhone apps

Font made out of 540 iPhone apps originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bump, the folks behind that iPhone app that allows you to quickly and easily exchange contacts, released a set of stats about its users that says almost 90% of iOS device owners are already running some version of iOS 4.0 or above. Bump reportedly has over 25 million downloads, so we are talking about a decent sample of the iOS user population (though I’d argue that it’s not quite as widespread as the stats might be on an app like Angry Birds — still, we’ll take what we can get). According to their figures, over 89% of users are running iOS 4.0, a number that’s a little higher than what I’ve heard from developers in the past.

Bump says that 10% of its users are still running some form of iOS 3.0, and just 2% of users are stuck back on iOS 2.0. Within the 4.0 crowd, 52.89% are running the latest version of 4.2.1, with 27.5% still running 4.1.

Why’s everybody so caught up? In addition to the press around each update, I’d suggest that the holidays were probably a big equalizer, with new iPhones and iPod touches smoothing out the playing field (since they come updated with the latest version automatically). With so many people all caught up to iOS 4.0 on the same hardware, Apple has a nice solid platform to build on, something that Android phones have been struggling with on both the hardware and software fronts.

[via 9to5Mac]

Bump study: 90% of iOS users run 4.X originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Independent financial bloggers have traditionally been closer to the mark in predicting AAPL revenue and earnings than professional analysts, and one day away from the Apple earnings call, the differences are quite large — about $2 billion dollars large. The professional analyst word on the street expects Apple to report earnings of US$5.38 per share for the first fiscal quarter of 2011, up from $3.67 per share for the same quarter last year. Revenue is expected to increase by a whopping 55 percent to $24.3 billion, with an increase in growth across the board on all Apple products except the iPod.

This time the gap is the largest difference on record according to Fortune’s Apple 2.0. In a survey of 10 amateurs and 44 professional analysts, the difference is quite dramatic. The consensus of the amateurs prognosticates that Apple will come in with revenues of $26.4 billion, a gap of $2.1 billion dollars or 8.6 percent. The difference in earnings per share (EPS) is even larger; it’s forecasted by the bloggers as $1, or a full 18 percent higher than street estimates.

Our old friend Gene Munster, senior analyst for Piper Jaffray, comes in on the low end, predicting that revenue will be reported to be $23.3 billion with an EPS of $5.06. It’s not inconsequential to note: in light of Steve Jobs’ medical leave of absence (get well soon, Steve), none of this has anything to do with Apple stock price tomorrow since I would expect the price to jump all over the place. This is despite German AAPL trading down 6 percent on the unfortunate news. A down opening of AAPL is expected by all, but by how much is anyone’s guess.

Please join us tomorrow at 5 PM Eastern for our live blog of the earnings call.

Note: The author is an Apple shareholder, and this post should not be construed as financial advice.

Bloggers and analysts predict Apple’s Q1 2011 performance originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last night on the TUAW talkcast, Kelly asked me to speculate about what the mythical upcoming iPad 2 might look like. This was, of course, before preliminary details from Engadget apparently rolled in. In response, I ended up going on a little more in depth than I initially expected. Turns out that while I am completely unspoiled for the next iPad and have no inside information, I did have quite a bunch of strong opinions about what I’d like to see.

After the leak today, I decided to revisit what I had discussed on the talkcast last night. I put together this compilation of my iPad wishlist, matching my wishes to the rumored feature list. Now, we don’t know for sure that what we posted about earlier today are the true specs, but they are a terrific jumping off point for discussing what features the iPad 2 should be introducing.

Continue reading Dreaming of the iPad 2: One geek’s wishlist

Dreaming of the iPad 2: One geek’s wishlist originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AppleInsider is reporting that both the iPad 2 and the next generation of the iPhone, both rumored to be released later on this year, will feature the next generation of chips designed by Apple. The A5 (named after the A4, the current chip in most iOS devices) is rumored to have two cores, making for faster graphics performance, and enabling things like the iPad 2’s rumored Retina Display and HDTV out of the next version of the Apple TV.

There’s a lot of technical information out about the new chip (it will likely include the new SGX543 graphics core, an upgrade from the current model used by Apple), but with two cores running, the new chip model is supposed to offer around four times the processing power of the current generation. That allows for both the mentioned graphics upgrades, as well as faster computing tasks straight off of the processor with OpenCL.

Apple’s Intrinsity and P.A. Semi are likely to be the companies behind development, while Samsung is likely working on actual production. We can look for faster, better, stronger Apple chips later on this year.

[via Engadget]

Apple’s A5 chip rumored to have 4X the power of A4 originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The University of Michigan’s Project HiJack harnesses power by using bandwidth from the iPhone’s headphone port. There are actually some peripherals that do this already — think Square’s credit card reader — but Project HiJack sees this expanding to produce sensors for blood pressure, glucose, carbon monoxide and more. Right now, their work is very basic, but they are producing data transfer results through the headphone jack.

Check out Project HiJack’s work in action after the cut.

[via Engadget]

Continue reading University team is perfecting the art of hijacking power from the iPhone’s headphone jack

University team is perfecting the art of hijacking power from the iPhone’s headphone jack originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reuters is reporting that brisk holiday sales of Apple’s iPhone 4 and Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphone may have pushed the two manufacturers to become the only two major phone makers to increase their market share during the season. All other manufacturers, including industry giants Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson and Nokia are expected to lose ground in the market share race.

None of the manufacturers have reported the results of holiday sales yet; Apple will announce its first-quarter (Oct – Dec) results tomorrow, and Samsung won’t be announcing until January 28, with the other manufacturers reporting in between these two dates.

CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber was quoted by Reuters as saying that 2010 saw a gulf emerge between the winners and losers in the smartphone wars that will only widen in 2011. One of the losers over the holiday season could be BlackBerry manufacturer RIM, not due to lower sales, but because sales of their devices may not have grown as quickly as those from Apple and Samsung.

Apple and Samsung won’t have it easy in 2011. LG will be pushing out the Optimus 2X and Revolution, Motorola seeks to grab users at AT&T with the Atrix 4G and Droid Bionic, and the Xperia Arc from Sony Ericsson will be released.

[via Electronista]

Apple, Samsung holiday phone sales bring cheer to the new year originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MacNN cites two tips they received noting changes made to Boot Camp in Mac OS X 10.6.6. The first suggests that Apple has dropped support for Windows XP. When setting up a Windows partition, Boot Camp requests an “…authentic installation disc of Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate.” XP isn’t mentioned.

Also, users are discouraged from using software from a Mac OS X install disc or another computer in an attempt to find drivers and the like. Instead, Boot Camp will prompt you to download “additional software designed specifically for each Mac” to get your keyboards, etc. working. Just as MacNN speculates, we agree that this measure is meant to ensure that users have the latest software, helping to eliminate future troubleshooting.

Mac OS X 10.6.6 introduces subtle changes to Boot Camp originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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