Iphone Updates

Heading towards the end of the month, iApp-a-Day brings us yet another fun game to keep us occupied after checking our weather and stocks. This time around iApp-a-Day released a game called Mixup that has you turn your phone sideways and drag the letters shown on the screen in the correct positions to make the correct word.

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Straight in line with all other stores on Black Friday, Macmall will be giving up to 22% off on select Apple products including Notebooks, iMacs, Mac Pro’s, Mac Mini’s, and the full range of iPod’s on Thursday the 22nd (Thanksgiving) and Friday the 23rd. There doesn’t appear to be any discounts on iPhone’s though. A sale of 22% off could mean some major savings on notebooks or other Apple computers.

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Today iApp-a-Day brings you another exciting game, this time Christmas was in the air. This is a pretty simple, yet challenging game that takes use of the iPhone and iPod touch’s accelerometer for full control over the game.

The objective of this game is to keep Santa’s sleigh away from the falling ice by tilting the phone or iPod into clear space on the screen.

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This year the Apple store is participating in the day after Thanksgiving holiday Black Friday specials. It’s a one day sale, most likely with small discounts on most of their products. Be sure to check the Apple store on Friday the 23rd to see what you can scrounge up.

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Fashion-conscious Apple-addicts may be busy squealing over their new iPhones in the UK, but The Times is naming and shaming Apple and O2 for selling “the worst contract on the market it terms of value for money”.  The contract – which lasts a minimum of 18 months and costs at least £35 ($72) a month – includes a mere 200 free text messages and 200 minutes of free calls, comparing badly to O2’s standard package which offers the same for £10 less.

“This is a very poor-value product and only makes sense if you are willing to sacrifice value for the new handset” Rob Barnes, Moneysupermarket.com

 

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Responding to criticisms of “anticompetitive” iPhone deals, primarily from the vocal mouthpiece that is Arun Sarin of rival Vodafone, T-Mobile Germany has released the first officially unlocked Apple cellphone to buyers less than keen on signing a new contract.  Before you book flights, however, and pick out a German phrasebook, you should know that they’re pricing it at €999 – a staggering $1,464 or £714 – instead of the normal €399 with a two-year contract.

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Solid-state flash memory has had a much-raised profile since Apple first adopted the skip-free format for their iPod range, and ever since new announcements in NAND development have often been followed-up with refreshes of the PMP line that take advantage of increased capacity.  Similarly, demand for Apple’s products has often seen NAND availability hit, and prices pushed up.  It looks as though, given nine new patent applications from Cupertino, Apple are seeking to remove some of their dependence on third-party suppliers.

 

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Gadget screens that double up as vanity mirrors seemed a pretty silly idea at first, but having seen numerous people – male and female – use their cellphone to check for stray mascara or spinach in teeth, I suppose it has some degree of merit.  If you’ve been disappointed at not being able to harness your iPhone to suss out whether your nose-hair needs trimming, then perhaps the Artwizz MirrorFilm screen protector will cheer you up.

 

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Earlier this week anybody with an ounce of concern for their privacy gurgled with unabated horror at the news that the iPhone might be sending its IMEI to Apple with every Weather and Stocks update.  At the time, we pointed out that packet-sniffing tests were still ongoing to ascertain exactly what the handset was transmitting; now the results are in, and thankfully (although disappointing if you’re the sort of soothsayer that enjoys predicting privacy meltdown) it appears that the codes sent are identical among all iPhones.

 

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Another day, another 3G iPhone rumor; this time it’s that Vodafone will be simultaneously launching a 3G version of Apple’s cellphone in all its European markets come next Spring.  The story, reported by Italian site Morse.IT, claims a UMTS version of the iPhone will be announced after Christmas (or possibly at the MacWorld Expo early next year) in order not to cannibalise 2.5G version sales over the holidays. 

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If you’re looking for a fun and exciting game to play with friends, download Hockey from iApp-a-Day, put your phone on a flat surface, touch the screen, and hit the puck. Hockey is a well thought out game for the iPhone and iPod touch using their multitouch capabilities for multiplayer action.

As you can see, both players need to touch the screen at once. It’s a little confusing at the start especially since you don’t put your fingers on the puck, but rather on the air hockey table and the puck will snap over under your finger.

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All you US and UK iPhone owners, spare a few moments for the poor Spanish cellphone-loving populous who, if carrier Telefonica had their way, would be able to buy the coveted handset this Christmas but, thanks to Apple being supposedly unable to supply sufficient stocks, will now have to wait until May next year.  The rumour of shortages originated from Telefonica senior management, according to Spanish tech firm SevenClick, and the carrier is busily negotiating around Apple’s demand of a whopping 30-percent of subscriber revenue as their monthly tithe. 

 

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Back in July legal beavers looked at the Apple/AT&T contract you’re expected to agree to when you buy an iPhone, and came away scratching their heads and claiming it was so confusing that “most lawyers wouldn’t understand it”. One of the more suspect clauses gave Apple permission to monitor your iPhone in order to “verify compliance with the terms of this licence”; at the time we set aside most concerns that the company would be tracking your cellphone, but it seems as though Apple themselves may have been all to willing to flex their powers.  Code hidden inside the Stocks and Weather apps on the iPhone appears to automatically send your IMEI to the company every time you refresh their information, which would give Apple both knowledge of what’s being looked at and by whom.

 

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In the 2007 PC Magazine Readers’ Survey, Sascha Segan and Eric Griffith (PC Magazine) report that “iPhone owners passionately love their devices. In its first year on the survey, the Apple iPhone scored a stunning 9.1 out of 10 from our readers, beating the ratings that every other phone, from every carrier, in nearly every category, has received in the three years we’ve been including cell phones. The iPhone’s 9.6 scores in music and video playback might have been expected, but its 8.2 for call quality (a score significantly better than average), another 8.2 for coverage, and an 8.0 for earpiece volume show that it’s not just the i our readers like. They love the phone, too.”

This morning, “Purple Violets” became the first feature film to premiere exclusively on iTunes. A contemporary comedy-drama written, directed, and produced by independent filmmaker Ed Burns, the award-winning film stars Selma Blair, Debra Messing, Patrick Wilson, and Burns. “We’re thrilled Ed Burns chose to premiere ‘Purple Violets’ exclusively on the iTunes Store,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “Apple continually strives to provide the most innovative offerings to our customers and we look forward to more great independent film makers debuting their films via iTunes.” iTunes customers can purchase and download “Purple Violets” for just $12.99, play it on Apple TV, watch it in iTunes on a Mac or PC, or enjoy it “to go” on iPod or iPhone.

Here’s another brilliant tip by way of Mac OSX Hints. It turns out that you can actually put a “Recent Items” Stack in your toolbar with a couple of terminal command.

Once you execute it this stack allows you to choose between displaying Recent Applications, Recent Documents, Recent Servers, Favorite Volumes, and Favorite Items. If you click on the Stack it opens in grid view to show whichever of these you selected. As per usual with a Stack, the Dock icon is dynamic.

Incidentally, these are the same “Recent Items…” that appear in the drop-down Apple menu, which can be adjusted in the Appearances Preference Pane.

The latest release of the 1.1.2 jailbreak now includes activation (the bit that allows you to use the phone without the connect-to-iTunes screen even if you don’t have an AT&T account), YouTube support, PowerPC support and, best of all, a statically compiled readline — so you don’t need that libreadline library installed as a separate piece. You can read more about the jailbreak and download the zip file from its Conceited Software page.

Thanks to Fasone

Eric Redlinger of 10base-t dropped me a note to let me know that DropCopy for iPhone now has a stable beta release. DropCopy is a Mac-based utility that allows you to copy files from one machine to another by dropping them onto a sharing window. The iPhone beta extends that functionality to support phone-to-phone, phone-to-mac, and mac-to-phone file transfers. You can download a copy of the beta here (download link). I’m really looking forward to giving this a try. Good work, 10base-t guys!

There are dozens of little niceties in Leopard: like how Front Row now lives on my iBook (sans remote) and allows me to operate the thing as a sort of thin-client media jukebox (courtesy a Mac mini server). Or how Font Book now prints books of your fonts (especially nice for those non-techies). With the 300+ new features, I still have yet to fully explore this thing, but I’m certainly starting to believe this is the Mac OS Apple really wanted to deliver a few years back. There’s no doubt in my mind this is a big turning point for the platform, and I really believe user adoption in 2008 will be unprecedented as a result.

Following is a list of features and specific “cool things” I think you can point out if you are trying to explain to a friend why they should upgrade.

For the record, I installed Leopard on a 1.24 GHz iBook G4, and it runs beautifully, which in itself is a selling point.

1. Finally, a Record button for your actions
Automator now has a UI recorder. Anyone who remembers the good old days of macro recorders before OS 8 will look at this and sigh, but I, for one, welcome my new robot overlord. Automator is finally useful for mortals with UI recording. Oh sure, it isn’t perfect, but it really beats trying to explain just the concept of Automator to the average human. Never mind the metaphors and the workflow within Automator itself — eyes will glaze over. UI recording is absolute heaven when you do a lot of drudge work, like contracts, filling, prepping photos, etc.

2. Mail gets GTD fever
If power users turn up their noses at Stationary in Mail, point out how they can now put their notes, to-do’s and RSS into Mail. I haven’t really set all this up as I’d like yet (the iBook isn’t my primary work machine), but my unfettered hatred of Mail.app is somewhat lessened now by the fact that it is starting to behave like a “real” email client. The notes and to-do’s are icing on the cake, but also very important if you like to get things done and stay organized. A few smart folders and you have a truly powerful system. Still, it is disappointing to see Apple take half a decade to figure out the whole “archive mailbox” thing, but pobody’s nerfect I guess.

3. Web clipping makes Dashboard relevant again
My wife quit using Dashboard long ago. It simply served no purpose for her. But web clipping, baked right in to Safari? That had her mildly interested. Tracking the top 3 Twitters, or whatever the top story on Perez or TMZ happens to be with a keystroke is a selling point for folks who aren’t using RSS. The only downside is that you need a pretty big screen if you want more than a couple of pages to appear.

4. Shared drives finally “just work” and Shared Screens work with other OS’es
Granted, there have been issues with networking in Leopard, but seeing shared Macs in my sidebar? That’s pretty sweet. In previous versions of OS X you had to click on Network, now it just shows up. Is a few clicks a big deal? Well, for the average user, yes, this is a big deal. The average user doesn’t like to explore. They can be timid, and frankly, don’t necessarily know (or care) what the Network thing even is. Displaying networked components directly in Finder will greatly increase the probability that users will at least see everything. It has already saved me time when trying to reconnect and move things around my home LAN. For me, the real fun was seeing how VNC “just worked” when I was able to access my Mac mini (which was already running as a VNC server) via Screen Sharing. Even though the mini runs Tiger, and despite a slightly wonky connection, overall it was super easy to set-up. Think about it another way: average users don’t want to run a third-party application like Chicken of the VNC. Average users don’t necessarily trust those apps (thank you, Bonzi Buddy) and it is a lot easier to remotely control a machine if the functionality is built into the OS. Oh, and did I mention you can share screens with Linux? I finally have a use for that old Dell laptop and my Ubuntu CD!

Continue reading Seven cool features of Leopard that might get stubborn friends to upgrade

Sick of paying $20 a month for EDGE? Want to save $240/year? TUAW reader Josh tipped us off to his iPhone News post that reveals that you can now remove it from your plan. If you rarely use EDGE and live around ubiquitous WiFi (like I do), this is a great way to save some money.

I gave this a try myself but my GoPhone account didn’t have the on-web option shown here. So I gave AT&T a call. It was, as always, an adventure and although I was told that you had to do this over their IBR IVR voice recognition system, I did find a service agent who was able to help me in person. (The IBR kept putting me in Spanish mode for some reason. Go figure.)

So as of my next billing cycle, my iPhone will now drop its EDGE/Data plan. This means I’m losing visual voicemail and EDGE access. Neither is a big deal for me. I can still check my voicemail by calling my iPhone on a landline, typing star (*) and entering my passcode. It also drops my monthly cost to $29.99/month–more than I want to be paying but not quite so much as before. I keep my AT&T account and, presumably, some level of Apple support and warranty service.

This option won’t be of interest to those of you who pull down the big megabytes over EDGE but for us WiFi folks, it’s fab.

Update: You may want to install Services.app, a program that allows you to disable EDGE while retaining calls and WiFi service.

Here’s a great how-to that I’ve been meaning to post for a while. Blogger David F. Bills posted a tutorial for adding custom CSS signatures to your iPhone email defaults. The process involves copying over your preferences file and adding the CSS code to the SignatureKey preference.

This gets very interesting when Bills shows you how to add a custom image to your signature. You actually have to encode the image directly so it arrives with your message. Otherwise, spam blockers may block the image download if you just use an HTML link.

It’s a really easy to follow method and I had very little trouble getting it set up to include the signature shown here. My biggest obstacle came from my tendency to paste everything in TextEdit. For this project, PropertyListEditor works better and more reliably due to the length of the pasted key.

The iPhone Package and eXtension Library (PXL) was the open source community’s response to Nullriver’s wildly popular Installer.app. It worked with the iBrickr tool on Windows and Breezy tool on OS X. During its heyday, it enjoyed mild success but the release of iPhone firmware 1.1.1 put the first nails in its coffin. Breezy stopped development. iBrickr has not yet been updated to support 1.1.1.

The main PXL repository has closed up shop. A note on its main page states that Extremis, the repository maintainer, will no longer be maintaining the PXL packages. Since no volunteers have stepped forward to pick up the reins, the PXL project is for all purposes dead.

Cocktail 4.0 is out and brings to this system utility a host of new features. The biggest item in Cocktail 4.0 is Leopard support. 4.0 also adds Sparkle updating, new Automator actions, better help, and lots of bug fixes.

Cocktail allows you to tweak a dizzying number of things about OS X. This is a must have tool for all you Mac geeks out there, and it is a steal at $14.95 for a single license.

The famed annoyance of the translucent Leopard menubar has finally been solved. Steve Miner has posted a tip that involves changing an environment variable by editing a plist to make Leopard think it’s running on an older Mac that doesn’t support the translucency. Once done, it will make your menubar solid white. The guys at Many Tricks (of Butler fame) take this to the next level with Menu Bar Tint, which places a pleasing tint gradient over your now blindingly white menubar, and thus returning your Leopard desktop to harmony. So there you go, if you just what an opaque menubar, run Miner’s trick; if then want it to look better, have a look at Menu Bar Tint.

Update: Gruber points out that commenters on Mac OSX Hints have discovered that Miner’s original tip includes a kind of scaling factor. Apparently a setting of 0.63 gives you a greyish menubar “like the opaque menu bar Leopard shows on systems with older video cards.” Doing it this way does not require you to have Menu Bar Tint running all the time, and yet apparently still gives a gradient (see below).

I’m going to honest with you, dear reader, I know next to nothing about stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. This blogger’s little mind just can’t wrap itself around financial matters, but our friend’s at Fidelity Investments make it their business to help fools like me. Today, Fidelity has launched the Fidelity Market Monitor for the iPhone (and your iPod touch too!).

The Market Monitor is a web app that lets you track 25 stocks or mutual funds, gives you access to charts, stories about those stocks on Fidelity.com, and the ability to click a link and call Fidelity (in case you have a hot stock tip you must act on right away).

This differs from the iPhone’s stock widget in both the source of the stock information, and the added bonus of links to related Fidelity news posts. Does that make it better than the Stock widgt? That’s up to you to decide, I’m too busy gathering some money to buy a bridge in Brooklyn from this nice guy I know.

I have a disclosure to make: I love FlickrExport – Connected Flow’s very excellent plugins that allow you export photos straight from iPhoto, or Aperture, to Flickr. It’s the reason I took to Flickr – at a time that their website uploader was somewhat basic. Fraser Speirs, the man behind Connected Flow, was kind enough to chat with TUAW about the future of the plugin, and shared a few words about his forthcoming application.

Continue reading TUAW talks Flickr with Connected Flow

Man, remember how excited we were that Guitar Hero III was coming to the Mac at a reasonable time? Yeah, well, guess what. Aspyr has no love for Mac owners. Our friends at Joystiq say that while the PC version is sitting happily on shelves, we’re still waiting on the Mac version. “Later this year,” Aspyr says. I’ll believe it when I see it.

I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but who the hell put Aspyr in charge of Mac gaming anyway? Their incompetence has reared its ugly head time and time again. They deliver late, buggy ports all the time, and yet game companies still seem to flock to them for development and publishing jobs.

There is something rotten in the state of Mac gaming, and it is Aspyr Media. Have they ever kept a promise for release? Have they ever delivered a worthy, on-time port? Or have they continually and constantly profited off of placing junk on Apple Store shelves, forever confining Macs to the bottom of the list for gaming platforms? I won’t tell you what to buy, but I’m done seeing Aspyr’s name on Mac games. Until they show that they actually have the capacity to release a game that even slightly compares to the PC release version (or even shows up on time — I’d settle for punctuality at this point), the Aspyr name is a complete dealbreaker for me in terms of both interest and purchases. As far as I’m concerned, they’re out.

The truth is out there, so they say, and so is Mac OS X 10.5.1. There’s a 39 MB download in Software Update now (your size may vary, depending on installed components) or a 110 MB version downloadable direct from Apple.

Changes listed at Apple or after the break. Please, please check your backups before updating. Let’s be careful out there.

Thanks Aaron, Jonathan and everyone else who is sending this in.

Continue reading Mac OS X 10.5.1 released to Software Update

Okay let me start by saying that we at TUAW don’t actually condone this hack, because it does clearly break some licensing restrictions, but dang it’s pretty cool nonetheless. The interwebs have been abuzz the last couple of weeks about the Asus Eee PC. It’s a tiny 2lb Linux-based sub-notebook with a 7″ screen and 4GB of solid state storage. The initial reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, especially considering its relatively modest price tag ($399). Now Dan over at UNEASYsilence writes in to tell us that he’s successfully installed OS X on the Eee PC.

He apparently initially installed Leopard, but given the rather modest hardware of the Eee PC (900 MHz Celeron, 512MB ram) he ended up downgrading to Tiger. Nonetheless, he reports it “seems rock solid on my eeePC.” As I said above, this involves some serious hacking of dubious legality (e.g. even if you own a Tiger license, Apple does not allow you install it on a PC). Nonetheless, I think this is a very cool hack, and I can’t but admit I’d be tempted myself.

I’ve spoken before of my love for the Octiv/Plantronics Volume Logic audio optimizer plugin for iTunes, which makes your laptop speakers sound like a much bigger system, but when I fired up iTunes under 10.5, unsurprisingly, VL wouldn’t work or find its registration info. OK, no problem, surf over to volumelogic.com for an update and… agh! The plugin has been end-of-life’d and Plantronics will produce no more updates. What to do, what to do… time to check out iWOW I suppose — but what’s this?

Credited to VL’s ‘loyal Mac fans,’ an update installer and slighly funky Terminal instructions are available to make VL happy under Leopard, at least for now. Undoubtedly a future iTunes or OS upgrade will break the plugin once and for all, and on that day I will mourn for a moment the departure of VL from my Mac… and then I’ll move on.

Update: Note Zach’s comment below — this fix is unsupported and is at your own risk. Per Ronnie’s note, a more thorough review of the resolutions is here.

We already know that China Mobile’s Wang Jianzhou is looking to play hardball with Apple over revenue sharing of the iPhone (Wang is of the opinion that since China Mobile is supplying all the users, Apple shouldn’t get a slice of his monthly income) but even without their regular tithe is it still worth Steve Jobs pushing the handset to the Chinese market?  Henry Blodget certainly thinks so; he’s run through some figures and, if you’re an Apple shareholder, the prospects look damned good:

“China’s mobile market is so huge that even if Apple gets only a tiny slice of it, even if China’s wireless operators stiff Apple on the subscription-revenue share, and even if Apple has to cut the iPhone’s price, we’re still talking big dollars” Henry Blodget

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Finally, what we have all been waiting for in iRadio! With abilities to change genres, and multitask out of the program, iRadio is coming closer to being the ultimate application for the iPhone and iPod touch. I have no idea what the player and settings tabs do as they don’t change anything once you start streaming music.

The new features are great, though they took out volume control in the application, and the fact that the player is pretty slow and lags just about everything else up on the phone. Multitasking is great because now it doesn’t matter if you accidentally  hit the home button, it just goes to the home screen and keeps the music playing.

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Leopard’s tendency to modify applications with digital signatures that can cause headaches in VoIP software Skype and online game World of Warcraft hit headlines earlier this month; Apple have just released software patches in an attempt to deal with their latest OS’ errant firewall, but although the holes they fix are potentially serious as yet there doesn’t appear to be anything addressing this particular incompatibility.

Instead, Apple has had to rephrase their firewall description, which originally boasted that Leopard could “block all incoming connections”; in the process, they had to admit that they had perhaps been misleading:

“The ‘Block all incoming connections’ setting for the Application Firewall allows any process running as user “root” (UID 0) to receive incoming connections, and also allows mDNSResponder to receive connections. This could result in the unexpected exposure of network services” Apple

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Conceited Software has just released a new version of the firmware version 1.1.2 jailbreak. Now including Activation and YouTube for iPhones, PPC support, and an automatic fix for SpringBoard crash problem on touches.

To perform the jailbreak, run the batch file on Windows which will bring up a java program giving you choices to install SSH, the administrator password, and then finally jailbreak. Full instructions for different firmware versions and updating to 1.1.2 the correct way for jailbreaking 1.1.2 are included in the readme file.

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Ever since the concept of a Google Phone or gPhone was suggested, pundits and analysts alike have theorised about the battle between it and the iPhone.  Since Google’s announcement of Android and the Open Handset Alliance, the side-taking has reached even headier heights; although there have been a few voices of relative reason – ARM’s Warren East, for instance – the temptation of a headline grabbing story featuring two emotive companies has lured in many.  Thankfully, as theorised for a while now over at Google-Phone, more people are waking up to the idea that actually, Apple really isn’t Android’s main target; in fact, they may have a common (though undiscussed) goal of disrupting the market status-quo.

 

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Straight out of Cupertino, an Apple spokesperson says that they are indeed working on new features for the iPhone upcoming in new firmware releases. After a long time with a non-jailbroken iPhone, people will finally be able to use new features.

Some new sleek things being rumored around are things such as a video recorder, stereo bluetooth playback, and ability send picture messages. Apple is releasing updates of new features slowly to keep users interested in the iPhone.

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When Otterbox releases a product, it’s known to be built like a tank. All of Otterbox’s products are built to provide maximum protection to your device, and or cigars. Today Otterbox released 2 new cases for the iPhone, both of which weren’t really designed to look good, but provide absolute full protection for your iPhone.

Coming in two styles, one of the cases is a sleek yellow and black, while the other case is fully black. Protection of the phone is definitely emphasized with 3 layers of protection, full surface protection of the phone while still leaving full access to the proximity sensor, speaker, volume buttons, and the sync/charge port.

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Would it surprise you to know that the iPhone possibly isn’t the best handset if you spend most waking hours tapping out messages?  No, I didn’t think so, but fresh from the “stating the obvious” research file comes the third and final part of User Centric’s examination of just how finger-friendly an on-screen keyboard can be compared to traditional thumbboards and T9 predictive text.  In their last conclusion they decided that new users of the cellphone would experience trouble transferring from hardware keys; now they’re saying that the Apple handset ”may not be suitable for heavy text use“.

 

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There are still many people with iPhones and iPods who don’t use their PMP in the car because they lack the necessary hardware to link it up to the installed sound system; they’re the market Alpine is going after with their latest iPod/iPhone/Bluetooth combination device.  Consisting of an installation-free 2.4-inch colour TFT, remote control and iPod/iPhone interface for dragging out your music, the eX-10 can be connected to your ICE either via a built-in FM transmitter or install-friendly stereo cable.

 

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After a slow start, MMS multimedia messages have become increasingly popular in the UK, but of course they’re still unsupported by the iPhone.  Clever coder Ross McKillop has done some lateral thinking, however, and put together an app that can work around the handset’s limitations and give access to MMS content.  Called MMS Inbox, it relies on the fact that O2 sends an SMS message to non-MMS compatible handsets when it receives a picture message, containing a link to the MMS content viewable on their website.  What Ross’ app does is streamline the way that site is accessed in Safari.

 

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Esther J. Cepeda (Chicago Sun-Times) has discovered the “voluminous” selection of sports entertainment podcasts available at the iTunes Store, proclaiming, “iPod can be sport geek’s all-encompassing radio and TV.” She also notes that the iTunes Store features podcasts about “every imaginable subject.”

Still “hooked” after all these months, Mike Wendland (Detroit Free Press) remains smitten with his iPhone. “Every week, I’ve been getting the latest and greatest of the mobile phones being introduced for holiday sales. And while some are promising, none can come close to the iPhone in ease, elegance and excellence of design. Almost five months now since it was introduced in the United States, it remains not just the best cell phone I’ve ever used but the most revolutionary piece of personal technology I’ve ever used.”

“With Logic Studio,” reports Peter Kirn (Macworld), “Apple has transformed Logic from a deep but difficult program into one of the most streamlined and elegant music environments of its kind.” Kirn gives Logic Studio a 4.5-mouse rating (out of five), concluding that its “ streamlined, fewer clicks-to-music philosophy throughout, combined with more precise tools for audio editing and surround, make this a landmark release.”

At the University of Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music, “electronic media” majors use MacBook Pro computers and the iLife suite of digital authoring tools to hone the skills they need for careers in audio and video production, radio, broadcast journalism, and new media. “The MacBook Pro allows us to leverage the iLife software suite,” explains Assistant Professor Richard Cawood. “This gives students an entire tapestry of tools for video, audio, web, and photographic work.”

Go to a concert, and you’re likely to see a tightly choreographed program on stage and an even more elaborately choreographed multimedia extravaganza playing out on the huge, multi-million-pixel displays backing up the on-stage performance by your favorite artists. Like the dazzling video shows created by XL Video. Specialists in huge-format video, XL Video uses “Macs throughout the whole process, from concept drawings to content creation to final playback. And Final Cut is the linking piece of the chain,” says Richard Burford, head of XL Video.

Farhad Manjoo (Salon) makes a compelling case. “If we’re going just by what’s better—the ages-old Mac-vs.-PC debate is over. Long over. Yell it from the rooftops; The Mac has won.” Now’s the right time “to buy an Apple computer,” proclaims Manjoo. “Indeed, it’s been that time for the past five years.” After all, “its Macintosh business is now in league with that of the biggest PC companies in the world.” And “everyone who’s used it agrees that Leopard, the operating system that Apple released late last month, is to its chief rival, Microsoft’s Windows Vista, roughly as Richard Wagner is to Richard Marx.” Manjoo even takes the opportunity to “put to rest the myth that an Apple computer will set you back more than a Windows PC. In fact,” he says, “it’ll cost you less.”

Whether you’re in the market for tropical fish, sporting goods, cold remedies, or guitar lessons, iPhone can help you quickly locate a nearby vendor. Just tap on the Safari icon and pay a visit to yellowpages.com. It’s just one of the more than 350 web apps available for iPhone and iPod touch on our web apps page. Like information about designing, coding, optimizing, and submitting your own web application? Then visit our iPhone Dev Center.

Thanks to Leopard Server—the most advanced Mac OS X Server ever—you don’t need a dedicated IT department to deploy and operate a server. Leopard Server lets you set up and manage servers quickly and efficiently; collaborate effectively on wiki-powered intranet websites; share calendars, schedule meetings, and coordinate events; encode, publish, and distribute high-quality podcasts; and much more. Beginning on November 27, you can learn how your organization can take advantage of the power and versatility of Leopard Server by signing up for a free seminar.

Calling it a “sexy beast,” Joe Hernick (networkcomputing.com) considers Mac OS X Server 10.5 “a substantial upgrade to Apple’s server offering, and we recommend shops running 10.4 to investigate.” In fact, Hernick find it “ready for work. The e-mail platform connects to Active Directory and bundles AV and anti-spam software without pesky client access licenses. A spiffed-up calendar application can serve as a group scheduler. VPN services can host 500 users per Intel Xserve. In a first for Apple, IP failover provides high availability, and TimeMachine enables easily deployed server-based client backup. Leopard Server can even mimic an NT domain controller.”

Apple’s Leopard Server offers numerous advantages over Microsoft’s Windows Server, concludes Computerworld’s Ryan Faas. The unlimited client version of Mac OS X Xerver “provides organizations with significantly more room to grow. There is no limit to the number of users or for replication to additional servers. “ And “more importantly, Apple has designed Leopard Server specifically for smaller organizations that have little or no IT staffers.” “Given the added possibilities that Mac OS X Server offers beyond simple client management,” Faas concludes it “worth consideration in many organizations, ranging from small businesses to enterprise networks.”