Filed under: Internet Tools, Apple, iPhoneThe one feature that most of us iPhone owners want is native instant messaging. With the upcoming SDK release, instant messaging apps will most likely not be able to run in the background (in other words, they may not receive messages when the phone is sleeping or doing other things). However, AppleInsider is reporting on an Apple patent for instant messaging on the iPhone that was filed in August of last year, but just granted in March of this year. The drawing included with the patent filing looks identical to the SMS application on the iPhone, with some key differences, one of which is word suggestions that appear as bubbles above the keyboard. AppleInsider also reports that this service could be used as a substitute for MMS (multi media messaging) which the current iPhone is lacking. You can read the full patent filing on the USPTO's website. [via AppleInsider]Thanks, James!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: RetailAccording to ifoAppleStore (we couldn't find a link at Apple.com/retail), Virginia's newest Apple Store will open this weekend. This time, Fair Oaks, Virginia will play host, joining McLean, Norfolk, Richmond and Arlington (they've got two. Lucky dogs).Doors will open on Saturday, April 26th at 10 AM. As usual, we're asking any TUAW readers who visit this store over the weekend to share their stories and pictures. The first 1,000 people to show up will receive a T-shirt, but there won't be a big giveaway this time around (sorry, Fair Oaks!).Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Internet Tools, SecurityThere's been some talk about PayPal blocking Safari from using its services, and I'm among those concerned about it... even if only from a convenience standpoint. Originally the news was gleaned from statements by PayPal Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett regarding browsers without phishing protection -- which most assumed included our beloved Webkit-based compass. But in a brief addendum to a post at the Wall Street Journal last week it was reported that -- while Paypal will be blocking older browsers (IE4-era) and older operating systems -- Safari is safe from the cut. I'm relieved, at least from the previously mentioned convenience standpoint. I prefer Safari as my surfing browser1 and I frequently use PayPal. It's too bad that there are still a good number of sites that, while not blocking Safari, just plain don't work with it yet. Add to that some of the great plugins available for Flock/Firefox and you'll almost always find me with multiple browsers open. In much the way that the iPhone is preventing Gargoylism* by consolidating peripherals, I'm hoping for a day when I open just one browser in the morning. I'm getting a little teary-eyed thinking about it. 1Since I know it will be bandied about in the comments, I'd like to offer these reasons for preferring Safari: It's faster (in general). It's more elegant (or prettier, either way it's subjective). It's AppleScriptable (which I make daily use of). And it's more elegant (redundant, but worth mentioning again).Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Gaming, SoftwareMac users who have wanted to share audio, video, and pictures with their Xbox 360s have had to depend on Connect360 from Nullriver Software. Now, however, there's a new option: Rivet from Cynical Peak Software. Frankly, it does about the same thing as Connect360, running in your menu bar and allowing you to share media to your Xbox 360, though it does add a few convenient features. According to the developer, Rivet allows you to "supply multiple search paths for your media" and display your folder media folder hierarchies properly (instead of in a long, flat list). So if you've been frustrated by those limitations, Rivet is worth a look. In my brief testing it worked just about as well as Connect360.Rivet is $18.95 and a demo is available from Cynical Peak Software.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Apple Financial, iPhoneApple's headed straight to the top with a bullet -- they went from 159 to 121 in last year's Fortune 500 ranking, and this year, they've pushed their way up to 103. On the list of the "20 most profitable tech companies," they are solidly at number eight-- Fortune says that the introduction of the iPhone and "record sales of Mac computers" have Apple on a rocket trajectory.Of course, Google's sitting upstairs at number 7, and you-know-who (not the Harry Potter villain, but close) is up at number one.But yes, there's no question that Apple has really been hitting it out of the park lately, and considering the future (the fruits of the SDK, another possible iPhone iteration, and whatever else they're brewing up in Cupertino), the trends will continue.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Macbook Pro, MacBook Air Bare Feats continues to pit Macs against each other in a no-holds-barred, up-against-the-wall benchmarking breakdown, and this time around it's the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air in the octagon together. And things go about as planned -- while the solid state drive in the MBA has its advantages, the processor and GPU (what little there is of it) in the MBA don't even really compare to the MBP. Sure, it's a small, super thin, super portable computer, but not only are you paying in cash for the portability, you're paying in performance, too.This doesn't mean the MBA is a bad computer at all -- for most tasks, it'll work just fine. But complicated 3D graphics (both Halo and Unreal Tournament 2004 were tested) will be almost unplayable in games, and there will be a substantial wait, sometimes up to minutes more, for certain processor intensive tasks. If speed is a high priority (at least higher than portability), the MBA isn't for you.I would like to see how the MacBook compares, though. It's not surprising that the MBP is a fast machine, but where does the MBA line up compared to the cheaper model?[Via IMG]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Retail, Rumors, iTunes, Apple Here's an interesting idea -- MacNN is reporting that Apple is working on new ways to improve online shopping. Apparently the biggest music seller in the US thinks that online shopping can feel "sterile and isolating." Hmm.To counteract the isolation, Apple is reportly considering showing customers where other shoppers are in the virtual stores, and maybe even letting customers interact while shopping, via chat or other interfaces. This system would also allow for storewide announcements of special events or sales going down.It's quite a concept -- online store as virtual space -- but the fact for me as a consumer is that I shop online mostly to avoid exactly those things (chatting with less knowledgeable customers and annoying store loudspeaker systems). Even if this idea makes it through the gauntlet and we see this type of thing in Apple's online shopping environments, I doubt the old methods of clicking and browsing by yourself are going away anytime soon.[via MacRumors]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Apple FinancialOver at Apple 2.0, Phillip Elmer-DeWitt has an excellent preview poston Apple's earnings report, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at the market close. We'll be liveblogging the earnings call at 2 pm PT/5pm ET if you care to join in for the fun.Despite spectactular sales and earnings growth for AAPL over the past couple of years, the Q1 earnings report (which featured extra-conservative guidance by Apple and some indications of a softening on iPod demand) triggered a selloff in the stock, with a drop in price from the lofty $200 highs at the end of 2007 (seen above) as profit-taking and recession fears drove investors to take their money and run. Will iPhone sales and Mac unit growth push profits (and the stock price) back towards the roof? Tune in Wednesday to find out.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Rumors, iPhoneEuro-iPhone purchasers note: there's something in the wind that says a 3G, revenue-sharing-absent and exclusivity-free iPhone may be on the way shortly for Italian (or iTalian) buyers. An article at La Repubblica indicates that the iPhone's arrival in Rome may be accompanied by a new sales model: no revenue kickback from subscriptions for Apple, but a higher selling price on the phone, and a very limited or nonexistent exclusivity period for the telecom partner (Telecom Italia at launch during summer 2008, with other carriers onboard probably by the holiday season).Sadly, my Italian is basically as nonexistent as the exclusivity for the iTPhone, so I'm depending on the machine translation here. If any of our readers can distill and inform based on the original, please do![via Engadget]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Freeware, Internet ToolsOne of the nice things about the Airport Extreme Base Station is the Airport Utility application used to manage it. Most other routers these days are managed with a web interface which can sometimes be a little wonky. So it was with some interest that I discovered Port Map, from the Coding Monkeys of SubEthaEdit fame.Port Map is not a full-fledged management application, but it does bring Cocoa lickability to one standard management task: port mapping, an essential task for iChat or Back to my Mac. If your router supports UPnP / NAT-PNP Port Map provides an iPhone-esque Ui for setting up specific ports, including "presets and URL templates." You can see it working above with my DD-WRT Linksys router (don't worry, I turned it off after the screenshot).Port Map is a free download from The Coding Monkeys. They've also open-sourced some of the coding goodness that makes this possible and created a framework available to other developers on a Google Code page.Thanks constantin!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Audio, Software, ReviewsWe here at TUAW have expressed our love of VisualHub, Techspansion's great video encoding app, time and again. But what if those crazy folks at Techspansion decided to take the video part out of VisualHub? The resulting app would be very much like AudialHub, an audio converter that takes many UI and functionality cues from VisualHub. Read on for our full review.Continue reading AudialHub 1.0Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: iLife, DealsIf you've been looking to get the perfect Mother's Day gift, Apple says to look no further than iPhoto or Aperture. It's that special time of year when we celebrate our mothers (of course, if you ask Mom every day is Mother's Day), and Apple is cutting us a break! You can now get 20% off of iPhoto books when you use the promo code LoveMom at checkout. This promo code is valid for iPhoto or Aperture users in the US and Canada and is good until May 11, 2008. Apple recommends that you order by April 30 for standard delivery and May 4 for express delivery so that you get your book in time for Mother's Day. You can read more about this promotion on Apple's website.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Gaming, TUAW Business, PodcastsYes, the world famous TUAW Talkcast is back on the virtual air this evening kicking off at 10pm EST over on the Talkshoe site. Mike Rose is out of the hosting chair this week, but worry not -- I, Mike Schramm will be sitting in said chair running hosting duties as well as I can. And since I'm in charge this week, we'll of course be talking about server virtualization and security options for large scale enterprises. No, I'm kidding -- we'll be talking about games, and gaming on the Mac and iPhone.Brian Akaka of Mac gaming giants and all-around good guys Freeverse will be on the show to chat not only about gaming on the Mac (and why it's not as big as it could be), but also what it's like to design games for the iPhone, and what kinds of things we might see coming out of Freeverse and other developer come June and the App Store. Dave Caolo and some other friendly voices from TUAW should be on as well. And of course we'll have the cast of thousands hundreds whoever joins us on the conference call, and they're very nice folks, too.Be there at 10pm EST this evening for a talkcast to remember. Pertinent technical and sign-in info after the break. We'll see you there!Continue reading TUAW Talkcast tonight: Mac and iPhone gamingRead | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAWIn time around in Ask TUAW we'll be looking at several questions about Time Machine as well as VNC, how to remotely access files on your Mac, batch converting images to CMYK, cloning dual-boot Macs and more.As always your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of OS X, as certain answers will vary between different Macs and Tiger vs. Leopard, etc. (we'll assume you're running Leopard if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!Continue reading Ask TUAW: Remote file access, converting images to CMYK, VNC on OS X, Time Machine and moreRead | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Terminal Tips If you're looking to automate the sending of emails with attachments quickly and easily (and aren't too concerned with having some glamorous stationery), Terminal is once again your friend. It's possible with Mail.app and AppleScript, but there are a few pitfalls and, for most purposes, a simple shell command will do the trick: (echo "This is the message body";uuencode Desktop/yourDoc.doc yourDoc.doc)|mail -s "Test attachment" someone@adomain.com The magical command in this one is uuencode, which is used to encode and decode binary files and can be used on just about any file type. The two arguments in the command above define the name and location of the source file and the name the file should have when it's received. The parenthetical statement at the beginning combines the results of the echo and uuencode commands which are then piped (|) to the mail command. The mail command, having received the body text and attachment, is told to append a subject (-s "Subject") and send it to the address specified. If you wanted to send a longer text file - with line breaks, perhaps - as the body, you could save the text in an external file and replace the echo statement with cat myfile.txt. By adding a little complexity you could make a shell script that takes arguments, making the automation a little more flexible. But TUAW reader Adam was wondering how to send a photo he'd taken automatically using AppleScript (triggered by a Mail Rule). So here's an AppleScript implementation that doesn't require opening Terminal or dealing with Mail.app scripting: set msgBody to "This is the body of the message" set msgSubj to "Message subject" set mailDest to "someone@adomain.com" do shell script "(echo '" & msgBody & "'; uuencode /Users/you/Desktop/pictosend.jpg pictosend.jpg) | mail -s '" & msgSubj & "' " & mailDest Make sure you remove any line breaks from that last line. This obviously requires a predetermined image name, but that could be made a variable as well and used as part of a larger script. We hope this helps, Adam!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments