Vinyl Tap brings the golden age of music listening to your iPad. Beautifully re-imagined turntables allow you once again to experience music the way it was intended.
Remember the joy you felt when you pulled out that beautiful, black record from its sleeve and placed it gently on to your player, listened for that comforting crackle of the needle in the grooves as you lay back and closed your eyes? Vinyl Tap will enable you to enjoy reminiscing or have the vinyl experience for the first time using your iTunes library.
Depending upon whom you ask, Friday, June 1 is the best or worst thing to come to the Mac App Store since it opened its doors in 2011. As of now, new and significantly updated apps submitted to Apple’s Mac App Store must implement sandboxing.Sandboxing refers to compartmentalizing what data and features a specific app is granted access to; apps each can metaphorically play exclusively in their own sandbox, accessing only that data which Apple has granted that app entitlements to see. The plus side of sandboxing is that it means, in theory, that your apps will become safer and more trustworthy: Your Mac prevents them from accessing files they shouldn’t access.But that security comes with a price, at least in some cases.
In Facebook parlance, it was a sponsored story, a potentially lucrative tool that turns a Facebook user’s affinity for something into an ad delivered to his friends. Amazon is one of many companies that pay Facebook to generate these automated ads when a user clicks to “like” their brands or references them in some other way. Facebook users agree to participate in the ads halfway through the site’s 4,000-word terms of service, which they consent to when they sign up.
This is an interesting reminder that when you get to use a service like Facebook for free, you are, in fact, the product that’s being sold – whether you like it or not.
A carnage-soaked racing game is going to make an appearance on iOS devices soon. Stainless Games has announced that their classic game Carmageddon is headed to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad this summer. What’s more, it’ll be free, at least initially.
Taking its inspiration from cult car racing movies like Death Race 2000, Carmageddon is a 3D racing game originally released in 1997 that puts you behind the wheel of wild cars, pitting you against computer-controlled drivers in a race against the clock. Along the way you can pick up massive bonuses by performing “Cunning Stunts,” damaging your competitor’s vehicles and hitting pedestrians. The game was banned or censored in various countries for its graphic violence.
Stainless Games is wrapping up a Kickstarter fund raising campaign for Carmageddon: Reincarnation, a brand new game based on the classic franchise planned for multiple platforms including OS X. And with only a few days left to go and more than 12,000 backers already pledging money, they’ve significantly exceeded their ambitious $400,000 goal.
The company updated their Kickstarter page with a surprise note indicating that a couple of their programmers have been working on the iOS project “for just a few months.”
The game will appear as a Universal app, running in native sizes on iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. It will include several input control methods, including a gesture system to affect repair and recovery of your vehicle. An Action Replay mode will let you capture movies of your greatest feats, which you can upload to YouTube, and Game Center support will be included.
Stainless Games plans to release Carmageddon for iOS for free for the first 24 hours when it debuts this summer. An Android version is also planned.
As an aside, I spent many hours playing Carmageddon on my Bondi Blue iMac back in the day; I even outfitted the iMac with a 3Dfx-equipped graphics accelerator plugged into its mezzanine slot so I could see the game in glorious accelerated 3D. Outside of Baldur’s Gate, which is also due for an iOS resurrection this summer, I can’t think of many older game ports to iOS I’ve looked forward to more.
I can appreciate why Google is working on all kinds of new technologies like the self-driving car, but I think it’s time to fix some of the things it’s been ignoring for a long time. The big one for Web publishers is FeedBurner.
Google does offer quite a few services to assist Web publishers — Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and even search. As a publisher, I thank Google for these tools. However, that doesn’t give them a pass on ignoring one of the most important tools we have.
The problem is that there are no real alternatives 1 to FeedBurner and Google has made it clear they don’t really care about adding features or even making FeedBurner work properly. Often times FeedBurner stats are empty because it didn’t track anything that day.
That’s not acceptable. You can’t offer tools for publishers and just let them languish. Google offered real-time stats in FeedBurner for a short time, but then turned them off with no explanation.
If Google has no interest in FeedBurner, they should sell it to someone who does. At least give the millions of publishers that want to use the service 2 the opportunity to get the most out of it.
What Google is doing with FeedBurner is a disservice to the publishing community.
Yes, I am aware of FeedBlitz, but I don’t want to go through the hassle of changing all of my subscribers just because Google wants to ignore FeedBurner. ↩
I would even pay a monthly fee for an improved FeedBurner. ↩
For people with mild OCD we’re always trying to make sure the volume level is set at an even number – say 14 or 28. Some people need it to feel even “more even” at 10 or 20.
It’s amazing how many times we do this — set the volume based on a number instead of how it sounds. But what happens when your new car doesn’t show you the volume level?
Rene Ritchie wrote a very in-depth piece on some of the things Apple could improve on with iOS 6. He didn’t just look at elements of the current OS, but also what Apple could learn from Android, webOS and Windows.
Earlier today Cricket Wireless announced that it would bring pre-paid plans to the iPhone 4s and iPhone 4.
“By making iPhone available on pre-paid plans through Cricket Wireless, we are making the best smartphone more accessible to an even broader market in the US,” Apple representative Natalie Harrison told The Loop.
Cricket is the first company to make pre-paid wireless plans available for the iPhone. According to Cricket, the plans cost $55 per-month and include unlimited talk, text and data plan. The data plan does contain a fair use policy of 2.3GB 1.
Personally I think it’s wrong for companies to advertise unlimited data plans, but then cap them. ↩
Steve Jobs was a frequent guest over the years at the D: All Things Digital events – six times, to be precise, from 2003 to 2010. Now they’ve assembled video and audio podcasts of his appearances in a single place for you to download, if it interests you.
I joined Gene Marques and Chris Stanton on their Geek It Up Radio podcast this week. The episode is entitled “Bloody Sock Blues.”
On it, we rant about the failure of game developer 38 Studios (founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who famously pitched with a bloody sock, hence the title). We also talk about about the return of Toonami on Cartoon Network, the pending zombie apocalypse and more.
It was a fun diversion from the usual Apple tech-centric podcasts I do – I had a great time and hope to talk with them again soon.
This month, I glanced at my historical watch. HyperCard will soon be 25, I noticed. What ever happened to it? I searched around and found venture entrepreneur and coder Tim Oren’s 2004 eulogy for the program, written the week that Apple withdrew the software from the market. HyperCard’s problem, he argued, was that Apple never quite figured out what the software was for.
HyperCard, for the uninitiated, was an early software app for the Mac created by Apple programmer Bill Atkinson that enabled users to create stacks which could contain everything from fields of data to pictures, buttons which could execute scripts and more. Part database software, part multimedia system, the software predicted hyperlinking on Web pages and many techniques that we take for granted today.
The app syncs quotes between the iPhone and iPad using iCloud, which I love. For me this app would be used just as much for capturing song ideas and lyrics as it would for quotes.
“Our customers want the best products available and we are excited to bring iPhone to our pre-paid consumers with an industry leading $55 per-month service plan,” said Doug Hutcheson, president and chief executive officer, Leap Wireless International, Inc. “Launching iPhone is a major milestone for us and we are proud to offer iPhone customers attractive nationwide coverage, a robust 3G data network and a value-packed, no-contract plan.”
Tuesday’s filing saw Apple categorically dismiss accusations from the class, which now includes 31 states, stating several times that the evidence will “speak for itself.” The response breaks down the complaint paragraph by paragraph, challenging the charges by either citing a lack of “sufficient evidence and belief” or denying them outright.
Mastered for iTunes unofficially began last year, when producer Rick Rubin was frustrated with his inability to make the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ I’m With You sound as dynamic in the AAC format as it did on a CD. Working with Apple, he tinkered with the master recording, landing on a higher-than-usual bit rate – so when he sent it to iTunes for encoding, it sounded considerably better than a typical compressed audio file. “It’s much closer to the sound of the CD and it took several weeks of additional experimentation and mastering to reach the final iTunes master,” Rubin told MTV News at the time. Some interesting nuggets in here, including news that legendary jazz label Blue Note is reissuing its entire catalog in the new format.
Jim Dalrymple offered his own thoughts on the Mastered for iTunes program back in March. If you missed it, make sure to check it out – Jim explains how the process works.
If you haven’t already checked out Mastered for iTunes albums, chances are there’s something in there for you – already 300 albums (new releases and reissues) have gotten the treatment, with more coming all the time.
Micah Lee and Peter Eckersley for the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Apple’s recent products, especially their mobile iOS devices, are like beautiful crystal prisons, with a wide range of restrictions imposed by the OS, the hardware, and Apple’s contracts with carriers as well as contracts with developers. Only users who can hack or “jailbreak” their devices can escape these limitations.
“Join us now and share the software, you’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free-ee-eee!” – Some crazy-eyed old neckbeard.
Tim Cook learned a lot from Steve Jobs, and one of the big takeaways seems to be: Don’t tip your hand. The Apple CEO was unwilling to tackle questions about any future product plans during his first appearance on the D10 stage Wednesday night.
When I redesigned this site I considered every element and asked myself why it was there and what purpose it served.
I did the same thing when I redesigned The Loop last September, but I kept the Tweet and Google+ buttons because I thought readers used them. If nobody is using the buttons on the page, I’d gladly get rid of them.
The folks at Macworld have a great story summarizing Tim Cook’s conversation at D10 last night. Cook talked about Steve Jobs, the Apple TV, Macs, iPad, and a number of other topics.
It’s no secret that branding is powerful: Fonts, shapes, colors are all part of what we associate with certain brands. Without the words, we can tell the swoosh is part of the Nike franchise, and a yellow M is a straight sign to your local McDonald’s. But can you recognize these brands and objects if you take the colors and logos away? That’s the idea behind the project Brand Spirit by Andrew Miller.Every day for 100 days, Miller has taken a random object and paint it completely white to strip it of the branding we’ve come to know like the back of our hands. By removing the visual branding, Miller says this ”reduc[es] the object to its purest form.”
Many of these are utterly generic but it’s interesting to see how many you can identify simply by their shape.
