Macgasm

Apple’s innovating more than ever these days, and it’s an exciting time to be in the consumer electronics business. They’re pushing other companies to be better, and we’re reaping the rewards everywhere we look. Apple’s continuing the push with HTML5 today, posting a job listing for a Creative Technology Manager, who will spearhead new HTML5-based content for Apple’s website. Clearly they believe in the technology, as they’ve already been rolling out HTML5-based sections of their website.

Back in early September, Apple rolled out a new trailers page that let users narrow down the closest theatres based on zip codes, and it’s Flash free. Is this a case of Apple pulling the cart instead of putting the cart in front of the horse? If we’re going to see HTML5 rollout successfully, and more quickly, we’re going to need some major corporate backing, and Apple’s once again leading the way here, showing people just what can be done without Flash. It’s a smart move on their part, and they’re putting their money where their mouth is this time. Apple’s anti-Flash, and they’re determined to show you why.

Article Via Apple Insider

Another day, another executive crying about he cost of TV rentals on the Apple TV. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes thinks 99-cent TV show rentals from Apple and Amazon are destroying the industry.

How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents an episode…and thereby jeopardize the sale of the same shows as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free?”

He’s got a small point here, which he further bolstered by indicating that renting television shows for 99-cents might make it increasingly difficult to produce costly episodes (e.g., Lost) in the future. However, we still think that 99-cent rentals are a pretty great sweet spot.

Is it the price point that’s a problem, or is it the ability to pick and choose what shows you’re watching that’s a problem for the industry? As it stands, the studios are making money even if you aren’t watching their shows. You pay a flat fee for your cable, and some of that money goes to Modern Family whether or not you actually watch that particular show, so long as you’re subscribed to that channel. So, it’s no wonder that they’re complaining about 99-cent rentals. They’re worried about all the money they’ve invested in the crappy shows. I’d be worried too if I were them.

But, they lose their credibility immediately once we realize that we can get a lot of shows for free streaming directly from their websites. They’ll argue that it’s a value added product and that most viewers use this feature alongside of their traditional cable packages, but I have to disagree. I know a lot of people who have cancelled cable and instead get their shows from the website directly without paying a single cent. It’s how this generation is doing business, so it’d be smart if the executives could see the signs of the times and do something about it.

Here’s how I’d fix the problem if I was the studio

Screw iTunes rentals entirely. Instead I’d create an app for the iPhone and iPad, much like ABC has already done, but instead of giving it away for free, I’d charge a monthly subscription for the application. Somewhere between $5.00 and $10.00 per month for complete access. Consumers would likely flock to the service because they’d still be saving money on their cable bills, they get video on demand, and they get it in the format they want.

If they really want to stick it to Apple, they could create a web portal for the iPad and iPhone instead of a traditional iOS application, and then no money would find its way into Apple’s coffers. It’s not rocket science here.

There’s a solution to the studios’ problems. They just don’t seem to be looking for it. Instead, their executives keep waxing philosophical about the status quo and complaining about the current situation. Get over it.

Article Via Electronista

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According to UK based marketing research group CoolBrands, the iPhone is no longer the coolest thing in Britain, being ousted from the top spot this year by car maker Aston Martin. The iPhone sits at the number 2 spot, followed by the iPod. Apple itself ranks at the 13th position.

I admit, the Aston Martin brand is pretty cool. It is James Bond’s car, after all. What could be cooler than that? Among the list, which covers companies across all industries, are fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, the Nintendo Wii, and Dom Perignon.

CoolBrands takes a panel of industry experts, their so-named Expert Council, as well as a representative sample of over 2,100 of the British population to establish its list each year. The Top 20 CoolBrands for 2010/11 are:

1. Aston Martin
2. iPhone
3. iPod
4. BlackBerry
5. Bang & Olufsen
6. Harley-Davidson
7. Nintendo Wii
8. Google
9. Ferrari
10. Dom Perignon
11. BBC iPlayer
12. Vivienne Westwood
13. Apple
14. Tate Modern
15. YouTube
16. Mini
17. Chanel
18. Ray-Ban
19. Alexander McQueen
20. Jimmy Choo

How familiar does this scenario sound? It’s a bright sunny day, you’re strolling around your neighborhood and you come across a scene that inspires you to take a photo. You left your camera at home, but luckily you do have your iPhone. You point the camera at the scene and try to adjust for your best shot. But, there’s a problem.  Too much light coming from the sky is blurring the rest of the picture. You have the iPhone 3GS, so you tap your screen to focus on the sky and instantly the brightness is gone and the sky looks crystal clear. But your problems have just begun. The rest of the scene is now almost completely black. Your iPhone is making you choose between bright and dark, and neither choice is giving you a picture you can be proud of.

Enter a technology called HDR, short for high dynamic range. Included in the new iPhone 4, HDR helps deal with exposure problems, such as the one in the previous scenario, by taking multiple exposures of the same scene and stitching them together to generate a photo with the proper exposure for both the bright and dark areas. Now if you have an iPhone 4, you can stop reading. The feature is built right into your pictures and works as advertised. If you’re using an iPhone 3GS, then you may want to check out Pro HDR.

What’s MacGasmic

Pro HDR is a $1.99 camera app for the iPhone 3GS and 4 that allows you to take multiple snapshots of the same scene and automatically merge them together into a final picture. Simply launch the app, select “Auto HDR,” tap the screen and hold steady while the app analyses the lighting conditions, takes two pictures, and combines them together. The whole process takes about 10-15 seconds and produces some outstanding results (see gallery at the end of this review).

Pro HDR has a few other useful features including a manual mode for fine tuning each HDR output, and a library mode that allows you to combine previously taken pictures into a new HDR images.

What’s Not

First, while the Pro HDR apps does exactly what it claims to do, it’s still a little rough around the edges. For most iPhone photographers, some pictures require a fair bit of urgency and not being able to quickly open an app and capture the moment can be frustrating. While the standard iPhone photo app opens one click away from capturing a photo, Pro HDR requires you to launch the app, then select Auto HDR before being ready to capture a picture. Combine this with the extra delay required to analyze lighting and snap two pictures and it can be difficult to capture any time-sensitive scenes.

Second, because Pro HDR is actually snapping two separate pictures instead of two exposures in the same image, there is a 1-2 second delay between each image. While Pro HDR does a great job of adjusting the picture if you happen to move the camera a few millimeters in between shots, it can’t compensate for movement within the scene. This makes it impossible to capture any scenes with movement, and very difficult to shoot portraits unless your subject can ensure there’s no movement in between shots.

Final Thoughts

While the extra settings in Pro HDR have a few advantages over the native iPhone 4 HDR, the disadvantage of requiring two separate pictures to be taken far outweighs them.  For the iPhone 3GS, however, Pro HDR is a must have app. The app leverages HDR perfectly to produce stunning improvements on any scene with a high exposure range. Despite a few shortcoming that are inherent in this type of HDR technology, there is very little criticism that can be thrown at Pro HDR. A great concept, simple execution, and brilliant results.  What more can you ask for from an app? Pro HDR is available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 and is highly recommended.

Image #1 (High Exposure)

Image #2 (Low Exposure)

Image #3 - Combined HDR image

Pro HDR image (Lake Ontario from the Niagara-on-the-Lake Golf Club)

Pro HDR image (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada)

A bunch of bitesized nuggets about the Apple TV trickled through the echo-chamber today, and instead of bombarding you with a series of one sentence posts, we thought it would make more sense to compile them and release them all at once.

So here you go.

Lowtide: Apple TV OS cracked to run on an iPod Touch

Apple’s iOS 4.1 for Apple TV got beat down by the Dev-Team and SHAtter’d in a couple of hours, leaving behind the complete Apple TV iOS framework. What did they find? Well, a nice little application called Lowtide, and it just happens to be the main app that runs on your Apple TV.

Once it was revealed that the app existed, it didn’t take all that long for someone else to try and port it to another iOS device. DLHowett managed to get it onto his iPod Touch, and he created a YouTube video for the rest of us to marvel at.

What amazes us more than anything is just how compatible all the iOS devices are with one another. I wouldn’t doubt if a software update, down the road, brought apps to our televisions.

Get the Apple TV Manual

If you’ve unboxed your lovely new Apple TV, or you’re just as curious as we are about what’s included in the Apple TV, Apple Inc has released a manual and setup guide online. You can get it here: Apple TV Guide (pdf).

Apple TV Firmware reveals DVD and FaceTime support

For those less technically savvy, iOS is a derivative of OS X (Apple’s desktop operating system), and every single iOS based device runs similar code bases. So, the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Apple TV are all running of a similar framework, making them all siblings, kind of. So it shouldn’t really be a surprise that the operating systems have similar hooks to their siblings, and now it’s official: Apple TV has support for both FaceTime and DVD playback.

How’s that for opening up a can of worms? TVs with FaceTime could be pretty huge moving forward, but the DVD support is something we could care less about. We’re beyond the need to own physical movie discs these days, and I personally can’t wait to get rid of my DVD collection. It eats up way too much shelf space.

Article via 9 to 5 Mac and TUAW and OS X Daily

If you’re stuck in the great white north like I am, then you know full well how terrible getting “primetime” media online is these days. It pretty much doesn’t exist. Sure, you can stream from Citytv’s website, and now Netflix, but the latter is a relatively new release, and the previous is a terrible experience.

Is Citytv’s application any different? Not really.

Hey, we will take the primetime content. We’ve been starved of it for years, but if the Scotiabank advertisement pops up one more time while I’m trying to navigate their application, I’m going to toss my iPad across the room. On top of the poor advertisement interaction, users are met with terrible in-app load times, and even worse video compression. The CityV app is underwhelming at best. It has me wondering if some executive paid his geeky kid to create it for them instead of paying some professionals.

The best part of the first launch experience is seeing all the Citytv thumbnails all over the screen while the actual graphics loaded. Sadly, I wasn’t quick enough to grab a screenshot of it before it fully loaded. We’re not opposed to in video advertisements, like traditional commercials, but now on top of getting your traditional ad breaks, you also get them on every page you navigate, and trust us, they won’t stop nagging you.

How do we know that Citytv has absolutely no clue about what they’re doing? Every chance they get they’re throwing an advertisement in our faces: at a loading screen, as we scroll around the app, everywhere. It kind of makes me ashamed to be a Canadian.

The first thing it does after bombarding you with a Scotiabank advertisement is ask you to pick your region, as if it mattered for some reason—there is no difference between any of the options. Oh wait, I lied. It’s so you get accurate listings for their TV Schedule. It’s almost like they forgot what this whole exercise was about, and expect people to put down their iPad and video on demand, and turn on the television.

We’re going to end this one here, before this post turns into its own Scotiabank advertisement. Mentioning the company three times in a post is more than enough for me.

The Citytv app provides an excellent alternative to viewing TV shows on your television set, but don’t be surprised if your video is pixellated and has latency issues, because it did for us during our test run, and it got pretty annoying, pretty quickly.

If you’ve been following the very cool stuff that Valve has been doing with Steam, you’re sure to be interested in Aspyr’s GameAgent.

On it’s surface, GameAgent is just an online storefront for games Aspyr has worked on. You can view and purchase the download version or boxed version of any of their software, but that’s only part of it. If you download the GameAgent application, it will dynamically display which games are compatible with your specific hardware. This is a killer feature that I would love to see implemented by other companies. If nothing else, this seamless integration into their storefront is perfect in my eyes.

There isn’t a huge library of software, but there are some very well regarded games available for purchase. For example: Knights of the Old Republic, The Force Unleashed, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, and Modern Warfare.

If you’re interested in hearing the latest from Aspyr, you should followGameAgent on Twitter and Facebook. They also have a blog and newsletter that will tip you off to the newest titles as soon as possible. All in all, I am very impressed with the Aspyr team’s dedication to their consumers. Give them a go, and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

It’s been a few weeks of rumours in Apple land. First, it was the ninja throwing stars that Steve Jobs allegedly tried to take onto his private jet. Then it was the 7-inch iPad. Yesterday Goldman Sachs had came out saying that the iPad 2 will be lighter, have a front facing camera, and some kind of USB port (if that isn’t a dead giveaway that this is pure speculation, well I’ll be jiggered) basing their findings on supply chain checks.

Today it was the rumour that Tim Cook was leaving Apple to take over the recently vacated CEO position at HP. Apple (AAPL) stock price fell over 2 percent in the wake of the rumours, which were not commented on by either Apple or HP, and which analysts were quick to dismiss. Tim Cook is the Chief Operating Officer at Apple, and provided leadership to the company when Steve Jobs had to take a leave of absence due to health reasons. It seems highly unlikely that the number two executive at Apple would jump ship.

When asked about the potential move, BGC Partners analyst Colin Gills was doubtful. “We don’t expect that to happen. Whatever Tim would want to achieve at HP he could achieve at Apple. Steve Jobs will not be CEO forever. He’s on a short list,” Gillis said.

While it’s fun to sit on the sidelines and speculate about things that are happening with our favourite computer company, let’s remember that unfounded rumours do have real effects. With the increased speed at which news can be reported and disseminated to the masses via blogs and twitter in particular, it may be wise to take a deep breath, check around, and see if something is real before posting it or retweeting it.

Caveat emptor.

Article via Reuters.