/ Apple

My Favorite Mac Apps: Erica's Take

Filed under: Software

So Victor comes to us and says, "Quick, what are your favorite apps?" Without pausing to breathe or think, the words "OfficeCreativeSuiteQuickeys" tumble out of my mouth. That's because these are the three software packages for Mac that I cannot live without. These three apps are where I spend 80-odd percent of my working life.

By the time I can pause and reflect, I realize that I have picked three apps that provide the least Mac-like user experience. With all the rich and beautiful OS X software landscape out there, I've picked the plain but reliable dinosaurs. They're ugly. They're ported (at least Photoshop and Office are). They work.

This isn't to say that I'd change my list upon further thought. Between Word, Excel, Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop, and Quickey's Macros (so I rarely have to actually touch a mouse, eek), these packages get the job done. Throw in the equally ugly Eudora mail program (the original, not the almost unusable open source update that's floating around) plus Apple's cadre of less beautiful utilities, namely Terminal, Safari and TextEdit, and we're talking maybe 90% of my work time.

Sure, I've used Apple's Mail, Preview, iPhoto, iWork, Pages and so forth but I always end up going back to the more capable name-brand power-houses. The user experience might not match the slick Apple software but my efficiency goes way way up.

As for the built-in Keyboard prefs or QuickSilver, QuicKeys gives me all the programming control I need for creating and executing my macros. If I'm going to do a job more than once, I'm probably going to write a macro, whether it's sorting my mail or writing my TUAW posts.

In the end, I'm really happy with my paleo-software. One of the big reasons that I'm still (still!) using my 733 G4 Mac as my primary computing machine is that I know I'll have to re-buy these programs should I switch fully to Intel-based computing.

Instead, I'll hang with my favorite dinosaurs and keep getting the job done.

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iPods, Notebooks, and... iMacs before the Holidays?

AppleInsider recaps many of the circulating rumors which expect both iPod and Mac notebook updates in September. Some rumors have pegged September 9th as the possible day for at least some of the updates.

The iPod Nano and iPod touch...

Bursting the iPhone bubble

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Apple, Developer, iPhone, App Store, SDK

John Casasanta has written up a pretty damning condemnation of the vulture venture capitalists (VCs) hovering around the iPhone's App Store lately. While many developers are smelling a lot of potential in the iPhone and its SDK, VCs are smelling lots of money, and unfortunately, as was apparently the case between Mike Lee and Tapulous recently, sometimes those smells lead the two in different directions.

It's not that there isn't money to be made in the App Store -- there are some great programs coming out of there, and those programs are certainly worth paying for (even if a lot of them are offered for free anyway). But Casasanta describes a situation where venture capitalists are willing to pay out in spades even for shovelware, and in that kind of environment, no one profits. Not the VCs and developers who lose their money because no one wants their crappy programs, not the consumers who have to sort through a flood of terrible apps, and not the platform -- the Mac, as Casasanta says, is thriving because of the quality of the software, and the iPhone (though it will likely always be a popular phone) will thrive as a platform for the same reasons.

Casasanta's solution is for the developers to do things on their own, and that's a possibility everyone has to consider for themselves. Even well-funded developers can create valuable pieces of software. Whether you receive funding from a VC or from your own bank account, the focus while developing should always be on quality. And any developer pushing out 100 apps by the end of the year (as Casasanta's VC asked) lacks that focus.

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Psystar to Countersue Apple for Anticompetitive Practices

As previously reported, Psystar is planning on countersuing Apple for anticompetitive business practices, as reported by CNet. Psystar is a small company that made headlines when it started selling Mac-compatible PCs in April. Apple filed a lawsuit...

Favorite iPhone apps: Robert's take

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPhone, App Store

Now that Steve, Victor, and Mike have all made their opinions clear, I get to tell you what apps I use most on my iPod touch.

My first favorite is Exposure, an app that lets you browse Flickr photos. Personally, my favorite thing to do in a boring phone meeting is to browse Flickr's "Featured" category, and find new wallpaper for my iPod. Which leads me to my only feature request: it doesn't let you save images to the local "Saved Photos" album. (What you can do, however, is open the image in Safari, and save it from there.) Exposure does much more than this, too -- browsing photos taken nearby, or searching for photos by keyword. Exposure is a great image browser all around, and it's free, but ad-supported. A premium version (sans ads) is $9.99.

The second is time:calc. It may seem a little strange, but I've always wanted a calculator that figures time instead of decimal numbers. As a freelancer, some of my contracts are retainer-based, so I have to calculate how much time I have left for a particular task after work has been done. time:calc does this effortlessly: just enter hours, minutes and seconds, and use mathematical operators as you would a normal calculator. For video editing, it also includes support for time code in a wide variety of frame rates. time:calc is $1.99, and well worth it.

Last but not least is my new favorite timewaster: Trism. Mike wrote about Trism in February, and I remember wanting it really bad when I first saw the video. It's an extremely fun Tetris-like game using three-sided tiles, and uses the device's accelerometer to determine which way is "down." It's not unlike Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab, for those that remember that game. Trism has three game modes, and a training mode. It's $4.99.

App Store Links:

• Exposure (free)
• Exposure Premium
• time:calc
• Trism

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Control pads for gaming on the iPhone

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Hardware, Developer, iPhone

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Favorite iPhone apps: Schramm's take

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Freeware, iPhone, App Store

As you might imagine, my iPhone is more littered with games than useful stuff like Steve's or Victor's. Sure, I've got Twitterific and NetNewsWire, but my most-used apps are of the video game variety.

The game that's most grabbed me so far is Aurora Feint. When it was first released, I didn't get much out of it, but since it's been updated a few times, Aurora Feint has turned into a pretty deep puzzle/RPG. There have been some security scares, unfortunately, and the game's "MMO" promises haven't yet come to fruition. But for sheer matching puzzle gameplay (it's similar to the great Poker Smash on Xbox Live), it's probably the most addictive game on the App Store.

My second favorite is Characters (I originally wrote about it on WoW Insider). If you play World of Warcraft and have an iPhone, this is the closest thing you'll find to an official Blizzard app. It lets you see every bit of information on the Armory in a very nice-looking iPhone app format. We're still waiting on Blizzard to provide us with an iPhone version of the in-game Auction House or mailbox, but until then, this is a great way to look up the WoW characters of folks you meet.

And finally, I've been really impressed with Midomi (and also the similar Shazam), a music recognition app. Hit the app, let it listen to a song you're hearing (or even you singing the song or saying the lyrics), and it'll tell you exactly what that song is. And once you've find it, you can listen to it, find it in iTunes or on Youtube, or see band pictures and reviews. Midomi is the kind of app I've never had on any other devices I've owned, and yet I've put it to great use a few times.

Honorable mentions go to Freeverse's (renamed) Moto Chaser, which is consistently the game that most impresses people playing with my iPhone; Trism, which turned out to be an excellent game, and Frotz and Sketches, both of which I've written about here before.

And I'm still waiting for two things: some great persistent pet gameplay (Wil Shipley, what happened to all of those ideas?), and some great location-based MMO gameplay as well. There's good stuff out there, but we're still just getting started in the App Store.

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Curio Back to School special

Filed under: Software

If you're looking for a creative application to collect and organize notes, ideas and more, check out Curio. Curio provides a free-form interface for collecting pages which can contain notes, images, links to files, mind maps, sketches -- just about anything you'd need to get ideas and notes out of your head and into your computer.

Zengobi, the makers of Curio, are celebrating the "Back to School" season with TUAW and offering 20% off the academic price of the software. The Pro version retails at $149USD, but it's only $69USD in the academic store. With the discount, students can pick up a great app for about $55USD. Enter TUAWBTS at the academic store to take advantage of the offer, and hurry, it's only good for today (August 27th).

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iPhone Hacks: refocusing your camera

Filed under: Cool tools, Hacks, Mods, iPhone

Like most phone cameras, the iPhone's lens is focused for the most general possible use, i.e. nearly at infinity. TUAW reader Daniel Forsythe modded his iPhone to focus a bit closer up so he could use it to read bar codes that he shoots from magazines and equipment labels.

The mod involves breaking the glue that holds in the camera module and rotating the lens to bring the focus closer to the camera. With this hack, he can snap photos of close-in subjects. Check out his Flickr photo set for samples and discussion.

He writes that he plans to make a full mod guide should readers express interest in it. The photo seen here is focused to 0.25".

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iPhone Passcode Flaw Already Addressed for Future Firmware Update? [Update]

Gizmodo publicizes an iPhone security flaw that was publicly posted last night to MacRumors' Discussion Forum. The vulnerability allows individuals to easily bypass the built-in passcode protection offered by Apple to lock your iPhone.
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iPhone 3Gs now outnumber originals

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple Financial, iPhone

Blogger Michael Arrington at TechCrunch pointed out an amazing, yet somewhat obvious, thing yesterday -- at some point next week, the number of iPhone 3Gs in use around the world will exceed the number of first-generation iPhones.

The statistics are astounding:

• 6 million original iPhones were sold in about one year
• It took 74 days for the first million first-generation iPhones to sell
• A million iPhone 3Gs were sold the first weekend they were on sale
• Sources estimate anywhere from 750,000 - 800,000 iPhones are being made each week
• Apple is on track to sell more than 40 million iPhones in the next year

This is all happening despite concerns about iPhone 3G network connectivity and battery life. If you're not an iPhone App developer now, you might want to consider signing up to join the gold rush!

[Via MacDailyNews]

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Back to School: An Apple for the teacher

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Education

TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September.

Going back to school isn't all about the students; the educators are often just as excited or stressed out as the kids about the beginning of a new school year. What can make life easier on the poor teacher? Great Mac software! Read on for information on a grab bag of Mac and web apps to help out your favorite educator.

Continue reading Back to School: An Apple for the teacher

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iPhone 2.0.2 security flaw makes private data accessible

Filed under: Security, iPhone

While we make great hay about the security built in to OS X, there is apparently a tiny hole in the iPhone that allows someone to access your data and certain apps -- even when you have passcode protection turned on.

Here's how it works:
1. You'll have to have some contacts set up with Favorites. If you don't have any favorites, looks like you'll be OK (I went in and added only one favorite, and that's all that appeared when replicating the issue).
2. Each contact setup as a Favorite would likely have an address, phone, email and possibly a link to their website, right? Those are the vectors of entry to the corresponding apps. So, when you get access (described next) using those features will launch those apps completely bypassing the passcode.
3. So you open the phone, and on the passcode screen you click "Emergency Call"
4. Now double-tap the Home button
5. Hey look, your Favorites! Clicking the blue arrow will take you to the contact info. Depending on what that contact has (email, website, etc.) you can access the corresponding applications, free of the concerns of passcode protections.

Gizmodo has a video if you can't stand to read about it.

UPDATE: Commenters are noting that if you set your Home button to access something else (like iPod functions) you won't be able to get to anything else. So it's a kludge, but better than the alternative, I guess.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

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Preview: Astraware Golden Skull for iPhone

Filed under: Gaming, Software, iPhone, App Store

A few weeks ago we took a first look at Astraware's GTS World Racing for iPhone; now they're back with another title -- Golden Skull. Golden Skull was developed by Deluxeware and published by Astraware.

If you're familiar with the Bejeweled 2 genre of jewel-matching games, then you're well on your way to understanding Golden Skull. In this game, you're introduced to a character who has gotten into debt and needs money, so he takes on the job of finding the Golden Skull. In each stop along the way, you tap groups of jewels of the same color to make them disappear, which accumulates points -- more points for more jewels eliminated. When you get to a certain point level, you get a gold coin. Five gold coins gets you to the next village on your journey.

As the game progresses, more types of jewels are added to the screen, making it even more difficult to match them. When you get to the last village, accumulating a certain number of points reveals your goal -- the Golden Skull. There are four different skill levels, and you can either listen to the built-in soundtrack or your own music. To see a video of Golden Skull in action, click here.

Golden Skull should be available in the App Store today (August 27th) for US$2.99. Check the gallery below for screenshots!

Note: We'll update this post with an App Store link when it becomes available.

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Favorite iPhone apps: Steve's take

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPhone, App Store

Well, Victor took away part of my thunder with his pick of Texas Hold 'Em, but I have three other frequently-used iPhone apps in mind.

Twitterific is my first choice. I love Twitter and formerly used the awe-inspiring Hahlo web app on my iPhone, but there's no native Hahlo app...yet. So for the time being, Twitterific is what I use to blast my tweets out to the world. If native Hahlo ever appears, Twitterific gets nixed immediately. So much for loyalty, eh?

My second fave is DataCase. Yeah, I've tried a bunch of the others, but DataCase is still (in my opinion) the best little app for shooting files to my iPhone and then sucking them down to another Mac. I've even had it work with Windows. The interface is not my favorite, but I can put up with a lot for functionality.

Numero trés is NetNewsWire. This is the iPhone companion to NewsGator (Mac) and Feed Demon (Windows). Although NetNewsWire received low reviews in the iTunes App Store, I've found it to be very useful for my RSS needs and have no complaints. And the price is right - FREE!

App Store Links --
Twitterific (free, US$9.99 for an ad-free version)
DataCase (US$6.99)
NetNewsWire (free)

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