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Apple has released a Snow Leopard graphics update to address some graphical issues introduced in Apple’s 10.6.4 update for OS X. Specifically, the update fixes frame rate issues with Valve’s games Portal and Team Fortress 2, and it fixes a problem that may have caused Aperture 3 or StarCraft II to crash or become unresponsive. The update also resolves graphics corruption issues brought on by disconnecting and reconnecting external displays while a Mac is running.

The graphical issues with Valve’s games following the 10.6.4 update received a fair bit of publicity. Fortunately, this update should resolve those issues. Let us know in the comments how it goes for you.

Snow Leopard Graphics Update is 69 MB and is available in Software Update or via direct download here.

TUAWSnow Leopard Graphics Update available originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Apple Discussion Boards have long been a great source of help for Apple end-users and professionals looking for both Apple-supplied and community-supplied assistance. In my personal experience, though, it can sometimes be a frustrating place to visit.

Apple has announced that what has been known as “Apple Discussion Boards” will be renamed “Apple Support Communities” and sport some new functionality and design elements.

One of the biggest changes will be the concept of a user-designed homepage, where one can customize it with social sharing elements, widgets and discussion activity alerts. Another new feature will be user avatars, which is likely meant to make the site feel more social and friendly and less like a place where pros will tell the novices to get the hell off their lawn.

What’s been your experience with the Apple boards up until now? What do you hope they’ll address in the update?

[via MacFixIt]

TUAWApple Discussion Boards to receive major overhaul originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Somehow I think there’s an easier way for a FedEx employee to steal electronic goods.

Last week, a California FedEx driver was held at gunpoint by four masked men, forced to hand over his delivery truck’s shipments. Among the items in the cargo area were boxes of Apple products, though it’s not clear what they were.

As usual, the suspects bumbled the heist by allowing the license plate of their getaway vehicle to lead right to one of the suspects. One suspect, though, just so happened to be a FedEx employee who worked in the same area as the held-up driver. Apparently he saw what was being loaded in the co-worker’s truck and made his hasty plan.

So now the question is: were these robbers over-the-top Apple fans, or did they think they could get away selling these on the black market?

TUAWFedEx delivery person robbed of Apple gear by co-workers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the fast-changing world of smartphone design, often the most valuable thing that a company can own is a patent for a specific feature they’ve invented. No matter how seemingly trivial the design feature is, a company like Apple will seek patent protection in order to maintain the uniqueness of their product.

Three years ago, Apple filed for patents on two features that iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users see every day — the Slide to Unlock feature of the Lock screen and the pop-up letters that appear when you’re typing on the iPhone keyboard. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has today awarded Apple a series of two patents titled “Animated graphical user interface for a display screen or portion thereof ” that provide Apple with patent protection for the animated unlock screen and keyboard.

Even though most other smartphone manufacturers have avoided having the same design elements on their own phones, the patent protection awarded by the USPTO means that Apple can now require license fees from any company that seeks to use the same or significantly similar elements.

You can view the two patents here:
D621849
D621848

TUAWApple awarded patents for Slide to Unlock, keyboard letter pop originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FaceTime live sex chat is for real, courtesy IP4Play (link goes to an adult site, likely NSFW). It’s a natural extension of phone sex lines and chat cams, and plenty of people had the idea when Apple unveiled FaceTime. After all, the white-hot fervor around Chatroulette had just died down when the iPhone 4 was announced. Currently IP4Play has five ladies available online, although at the time I wrote this none were actually available for a call.

As Cult of Mac reported, you can buy blocks of time (5, 10, 20 or 30 minutes) starting at US$4 per minute. You’ll need a Visa or Mastercard, plus all the requisites for FaceTime (WiFi, iPhone 4) and preferably a private place to have your conversation. The service calls you back once you’ve registered and purchased your minutes, although no word on what the turnaround time is for a callback.

I think we’ll see a bunch more players in this space, IP4Play just happens to be the first. They started advertising for models on Craigslist a while ago, so I have little doubt other operators will follow suit, some of them potentially big names in the adult industry. If you think about it, a five-minute FaceTime call from a real porn star would probably cost a lot more than $4 per minute, and be insanely lucrative for the performer. Juice up those batteries, FaceTimers.

TUAWAnd here comes the FaceTime porn originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mancala. Chess. Backgammon. The number of ancient board games available in the App Store is long and somewhat predictable. A fresh new entry that deserves notice is Tafl, a pretty and interesting abstract strategy game that has existed in Northern Europe since at least 400 C.E. Exactly how the game was played has been lost to history, but the general idea was to have one player move a king pawn from the center of the board to the exits, which maybe have been simply off the side or maybe into the corners. Given the wide variety of boards and locations where the game was played – and knowing what we know about how ancient games traveled – it’s entirely likely that the games in the tafl family were all played differently. Well, now you can play it on a touch screen on your iPad or iPhone (or iPod touch). There is a great history of the board game(s) here; keep reading for the rest of our review.

TUAWApp Review: Tafl brings Norse asymmetry to your game table originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Telegraph has published a lengthy and fascinating interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Most of the interview focuses on Adobe’s deteriorated relationship with Apple, particularly Apple’s refusal to allow Adobe’s Flash Player to run on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Narayen had many things to say during the interview, but here’s the bottom line: “They’ve made their choice. We’ve made ours and we’ve moved on.”

Narayen continues to characterize Apple’s shunning of Flash as a business decision rather than one based on technical considerations: “There are companies that are choosing to provide a complete end-to-end experience and control every aspect of it and want all the business model gains from it,” he says. “There are other companies that have chosen to say that the open eco-system is the way to go and that’s how you would contrast Apple and Google’s business models. We’re on the side of the open.”

It’s interesting that Adobe, purveyor of some of the most ubiquitous proprietary software out there, keeps using that word, “open,” without any sense of irony. But regardless of whether Flash can rightly be characterized as “open” or not, this latest word from Adobe’s top executive proves one thing for certain: Flash is not coming to iOS devices. Not now, not in the near future, and probably not ever.

Adobe is working with “19 out of 20” handset companies to get Flash working on their devices, with Apple as the lone holdout. Will Apple’s continued anti-Flash stance hurt its iOS device sales in the long run? Probably not. Many pundits predicted the iPad would be a market failure because it lacked support for Flash video, and yet its sales have taken even Apple by surprise. The iPhone 4 continues to sell out worldwide nearly two months after its debut, and it doesn’t run Flash, either. Following an expected refresh of the iPod touch’s hardware next month, Apple will sell millions of them over the holiday quarter, and not one of them will support Flash. Adobe needs Flash to run in iOS far more than Apple does, and if sales are anything to go by, more than most iOS users do, too.

Narayen says Adobe’s “doors are open” if Apple decides to change its stance on Flash. However, it’s highly unlikely that Apple will ever open its doors to Flash, so as far as this debate goes, it really is time to move on.

[Via Mac Rumors]

TUAWAdobe on Flash in iOS: ‘We’ve moved on’ originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve been a member of Best Buy’s rewards program for a little while now — as long as I’m spending way too much of my hard-earned money at the big box retailer, I figure I might as well try to get some of it back. And I was pretty impressed with what they’ve done on their website with the program — you can track your status and check out whatever deals are available to you whenever you sign in.

And now, Best Buy has partnered up with an iPhone app called Shopkick, set to go live later this week. Shopkick is an app designed to automatically “check-in” with partnered retailers, so you can earn rewards bucks or other loyalty currencies whenever you stop by a specific retail location. Instead of using GPS, the app uses the smartphone’s speaker to pick up a certain audio signal being played in-store, so “checking-in” at a Best Buy with the signal running will apparently grant rewards or discounts to customers.

I don’t know if the process actually appeals to me, even as a loyal Best Buy customer — I haven’t been interested in the whole “check-in” fad, and Shopkick sounds more like adware than anything else. But we’ve heard already that Apple themselves are interested in location-based networking, and this seems like exactly the kind of system that retailers and app creators alike are trying to build, enticing customers to visit and interact with brands and products in their stores. Shopkick goes live later this week and has already partnered with 25 malls in cities across the US, so we’ll see how customers react to it.

TUAWShopkick, Best Buy team up to use location-based app for loyalty program originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Soundrop isn’t really a game — it’s more of a musical instrument, although you can play with it for quite a while. The app presents a small hole that constantly drops balls out at a certain rate, while you draw lines on the screen with your finger. Where the balls hit the lines, a tone is sounded, and by positioning the lines in the right places, you can make an interesting sort of music. The app itself calls it “musical geometry,” and it is surprisingly fun, even if you aren’t a musician. With headphones, you can actually hear the whole thing in stereo, which makes for another fun factor of the experience.

The app is a free download, although you only get a demo for free, with the ability to just draw white lines anywhere. Paying US $1.99 opens up the full functionality, and you can change physics, add more spouts, or change the colors of the lines that are drawn, creating different musical noises with each color.

It’s a good time — play with the free version to see if it hits you right, and then if you’re interested, you can buy in for the two bucks and have the whole app.

TUAWTUAW’s Daily App: Soundrop originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve been a Verizon FiOS subscriber since the day it rolled out in my neighborhood, and I couldn’t be happier (my bank account’s demeanor is another story). Actually, I take that back, because I got a tad bit happier when the cable company released an official iPhone app that allows for DVR scheduling and management. Joy!

If you’re a Comcast subscriber, there’s a similar app available. And, coming soon, Time Warner Cable will be rolling out their own answer to the iOS app scheduling game. Just as with the Verizon and Comcast apps, you’ll reportedly be able to manage your DVR recordings, view TV schedules and setup recordings from afar.

What the Verizon and Comcast apps do not have is the ability to view your recordings on your device, which, reportedly, could be a possibility with the TWC app. Imagine watching part of a recorded program on your iPad, then pick up later where you left off at home.

Check out the YouTube video after the jump, which shows off a glimpse of a prototype of the app.

TUAWTime Warner Cable entering the iPhone app game originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You Can’t Always Get What You Want (US$4.99 until the end of August, to celebrate Jerry Garcia’s birthday), is one of the best Rock and Roll books I’ve ever read. It is written and read by Sam Cutler, the tour manager of the Rolling Stones and later the Grateful Dead in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The centerpiece of the book is the free concert at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California that took place on December 6, 1969, which was made into a gripping documentary film titled Gimme Shelter by Albert and David Maysles.

The line up included: Santana, the Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, who later decided not to play since it was too dangerous. What most people remember about the concert is that during the Stones performance, quite near the stage, Alan Passaro, a Hells Angels member, stabbed and killed Meredith Hunter after Hunter pulled out a gun. Although horrible and headline grabbing the full story is much more gripping and is only one part of the book.

Sam Cutler, is a gregarious guy who was smack in the middle of the rock scene at the time. He’s a great story teller, and has the perfect voice to tell his story. He reads his book in a grizzled and sometimes tired English accent that gives instant credibility to his words. He knew everyone and remembers everything in amazing detail. Naming the cast of characters would go on for pages, but Sam was there at the start of arguably every English rock and roll band at the time and later knew just about everyone in the San Francisco music scene.

TUAWYou Can’t Always Get What You Want: Great book, lousy app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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