Macgasm

On Saturday Apple reduced its shipping time estimates for new orders of its extremely popular iPad to 24 hours, down from 7 to 10 days. Since launching the magical device in April, heavy demand had prevented Apple from “magically” getting the iPad into its customers hands. As of now, you can order an iPad today and it will ship by tomorrow.

Product shortages don’t always hurt a company, as evidenced by the continued popularity of the Nintendo Wii even after major shortages during holiday seasons for two years in a row. Apple has been able to ramp up production to meet demand in just 4 months, during which time it has sold in excess of 3.2 million iPads.

Apple announced the iPad would begin initial shipments in April, and since that time has struggled to meet demand. During a recent earnings report on July 20, 2010 COO Tim Cook admitted they were taken by surprise at the strong consumer demand for the iPad. “The demand has just been amazing and this is off to an incredible start,” CFO Peter Oppeneheimer said. Market research firm iSuppli increased their sales estimates for the iPad to 12.9 million this year, up from previous estimates of 7.1 million units. With Apple now able to increase supply of the iPad, look for that estimate to be met or even exceeded by year’s end.

Quote via AppleInsider.
Article via CNNFortune.

It’s not like we have to tell you how sexy Twelve South products are any more. Everyone drools over them, non-stop. Case in point, busting out my iPad in an Apple Store recently had a couple of their staff drooling over my BookBook iPad case. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t love what they do over there.

If there was ever a company that embraced the concept of giving people a Macgasm, it would be Twelve South. Last week, Susan reviewed their Compass, and pretty much came to the same conclusion I did. These guys keep out doing themselves—they’re the Apple of the gadget accessories world. The BookBook for iPad doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story, but it’s certainly a great way to take your first step into Twelve South’s world.

For a long time now, and most of you frequent readers can attest to this, I’ve been looking for an iPad case that’s either a Moleskin knock off, or looks like a book. I’ve waffled and wavered from one case to another and couldn’t even begin to settle on one, but I’ve settled now. I might even be in love with this case, if that’s possible.

The Innards

In my opinion, the best way to determine the value of a case is by inspecting the inside of it. Your device is going to be spending the most amount of time in contact with the inside of an iPad case, and if there’s anything remotely suspect about it, you’re best to walk away. The BookBook case has a micro-suede lining on the inside. It’s soft, so you’re not going to be worrying about scratches to your device at all. The iPad slides into two leather feet straps, and then has an elastic that slides over the top to secure it into place. Your iPad is in there tight, and I’ve yet to feel like I’m going to lose it, or have it slip out. Zero worries on that front.

One of the neat features of the BookBook is the system that they employ to turn the case into a stand for your iPad. You have a leather button, and a string. Invert the case and tie the string to the button by wrapping it at the appropriate viewing angle for the device and you have a stand. It’s probably the most innovative way that we’ve seen a company incorporate multiple viewing angles for a stand, and it’s probably one of those things that really sets Twelve South apart from their competition. Attention to detail is everywhere.

You can stand it in a multitude of viewing angles — you can stand it in portrait mode, or landscape mode. You have all your bases covered with the BookBook for the iPad.

The Outside

It looks, and feels like a leather bound book. The title of the book is Book Book, and the author is T.South, pretty funny if you ask us. The case comes in a traditional brown case, and a vibrant red option. Our review model is vibrant red, and it looks absolutely stunning.

Another major perk of this case is that it’s completely enclosed. A zipper slides completely around your iPad to protect it from external forces that might be out to damage your iPad. It’s a perk, but it can also be a bit of a determent—there’s no way to plug in the device, adjust the volume, or lock your screen without having to open it up first. I don’t mind the trade off, but we can see how some people might find it a tad bit annoying. I prefer the safety of not having a beverage spill on my iPad, and the zipper gives me that much more protection against the elements, especially important with winter approaching quickly up here in Canuckistan.

A Suggestion for all case makers

On thing I’ve noticed about all the book-like cases I’ve reviewed is that when holding the case like a traditional book, it feels lopsided to the right, kind of like the moment you open a new mammoth book and delve right into page one. I’m not sure how practical it would be, but levelling out the weight between the left and right side of the case may alleviate the tilt to the right and the awkward feeling while holding the case open. Again, not a deal breaker by far, but certainly something to think about moving forward.

Price and Purchase info

The case falls in line with other “designer” iPad cases, and at $69.99 I’d even go as far as saying that the it provides more bang for your buck. You can get the BookBook directly from Twelve South’s website.

The App Store has kicked every single member of the competition’s butt so hard that they’re still staggering to catch up. To date, no one’s even come close to matching the numbers that Apple can lay claim to in their App Store. As of right now, they’re sitting at a staggering 252,227 applications available in the store, and another 49,696 applications sitting inactive, collecting dust. This month, there’s been 17,424 applications approved at the rate of 622 applications per day.

That’s a lot of code. The numbers are already up from 225,000 active applications last month. Apple’s not kidding when they say there’s an app for everything. If you can think of it, you can probably already find an application. But, finding the excellent applications in a saturated market are a little bit more difficult, and we’re doing our best to help highlight our favourites in our review section.

Oh, and if you’re looking to add some more fuel to the fire, some other news out today is that there’s a lot more for pay applications in the App Store than there are in the Android marketplace, so if you’re looking to start developing for a mobile operating system you might want to keep that in mind.

Article Via Electonista

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is going on a suing spree, suing 11 internet search and e-commerce companies.

Apple, Google, and 9 other internet companies are named in a lawsuit. Paul Allen says that all of the companies are using a technology that his now-obsolete company, Interval Research Corp., developed over ten years ago.

Allen claims that his defunct company developed the “online recommendations” technology, which all of these 11 companies that are involved in the suit, are using on their websites. The online recommendation feature includes recommend products similar to the one which the customer is looking at, as well as providing related search terms on search engines.

The companies which were named in the suit are Apple, Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Office Depot, Office Max, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube. What’s interesting about this is that Paul Allen is not suing any companies that are located in the Seattle (Allen’s hometown) area, such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Article via AppleInsider.

Lucky us, the final chapter of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse will be released at the end of the month. If you’ve been following this very surreal season of the popular episodic gaming series, you’ll know that there are some pretty big questions left to be answered. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the questions are answered with stranger, more bizarre questions. That, my friends, is just how our favorite furry duo roll.

If you’ve already purchased this season, just keep refreshing your purchases page from now until August 30th. If you haven’t dropped the cash yet, go take advantage of a pretty big sale from Telltale Games. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed. This season has by far been the most intricate and fascinating episodic season ever released.

You might have heard that Telltale will be releasing games for the Back to the Future and Jurassic Park franchises. If you’re looking forward to those, I suggest you try out The Devil’s Playhouse to see what you’re in for in the near future. This really is a talented development house.

Image Credit: Telltale Games
Article Via Telltale Games

Less is more, and any time Jobs and Co. can cut down on irrelevant holes in a device, they’re going to do it. Firewire went away in the MacBook, and Light Peak is just around the corner, so clearly Apple has a vested interest in making their products as clean as possible. This patent says a lot about the culture at Apple. Instead of having two microphones on an iPhone, one of which cancels noise, Apple’s planning a way to put one of them into the headphone jack of your device, hidden out of sight.

It’s amazing how simple some of these things are, but it’s probably even more amazing that no one else has thought of it yet. For Apple, out of sight is out of mind, and any time they can give you something out of sight, they’re going to do it.

Hopefully this will let them clear up the microphone spot on the bottom of the device and actually give us a stereo speaker on our phones. Mono just doesn’t cut it for me.

Article Via Slashgear

It’s not completely an industry standard, but when Valve releases their usage information to the public, a lot of people listen to what they’re saying. This time around, there’s some interesting insights into gaming on an Apple platform.

First, Macbook Pros and MacBooks easily kick the heck out of all the other machines in the Apple lineup when it comes to representation on the Valve’s steam network. It’s not really surprising considering more people buy laptops than desktops these days. It also looks like 4GBs of RAM is the standard for Apple gamers—61.6 percent have 4GB of RAM or more in their systems.

On top of the Mac demographic, it’s being reported that overall Mac usage on the Steam network is down 3 percent overall, from 8 percent in June to 5 percent last month. Again, it should have been expected. With everyone being excited about the potential of Steam on the Mac, a lot of curious users would have checked out the service, but a couple would have moved on as well.

So what do you think? Is there a future for hardcore gaming on the Mac? Or does the closed hardware practices of Apple make it difficult for Mac users to keep up with cutting edge games? We’re still on the fence, but we’d love to hear your thoughts on it all.

Article Via Joystiq

On Thursday, MPEG LA announced that its AVC Patent Portfolio License, the license that allows for usage of the AVC/H.264 video encoding standard, would remain royalty free for the entire life of the license. In a move meant to reassure users, content creators, and providers, MPEG LA stated that they would not charge royalties on Internet Video that is free to end users. This covers videos on sites such as Vimeo, YouTube, and others, so long as the videos are free. Previously it had announced that it would not charge royalties through December 31, 2015, but has now extended the date indefinitely.

This is great news for Apple and others who back the HTML5 and H.264 standards as open alternatives to Adobe Flash. Detractors have argued that because MPEG LA controls the license, they could someday begin to charge royalty fees on all the videos that have been encoded with H.264. Now that this will no longer be the case, the announcement also negates some of the benefits of the newest proposed standard by Mozilla, Google and Adobe, WebM. Built around the VP8 video codec that Google released in May 2010, it was touted as a royalty free, open-source media format for the internet.

However, without the threat of royalty fees hanging over its head, H.264 is poised to become the de facto web video standard, as it has already been adopted by YouTube, the most dominant company in this space. With momentum and critical mass, it’s difficult to see how a new proposal such as WebM can gain a foothold.

Article via InformationWeek