Macgasm

I’m not sure if this is totally awesome or totally hideous, but if you’ve ever run out of power, you might find yourself considering this PowerStrap. The Orca PowerStrap is a battery pack in the form of a watchband. The wristband has a USB plug that will let you charge your devices should you need the extra power. The USB power port lets you connect it to a wide range of gadgets, and the four LED indicators let you know just how much battery capacity is left. The Orca PowerStrip costs around £40 UK Pounds (about $64).

I currently carry around a ‘Power Monkey’ charging device, but the let down with the Power Monkey is that I usually end up holding my device in one hand while I use my other hand to hold the charger. It can be pretty awkward. The PowerStrap is appealing to me because  I wouldn’t have to hold it as it charges my iPhone.

But, there’s nothing elegant about this strap. It’s clunky looking.

The Orca PowerStrap will charge more than your iOS devices.  The PowerStrap supports:

• iPod/iPhone
• Nintendo DS/DS Lite/DSi
• Sony PSP
• Nokia (mini)
• Samsung mobile phone
• Female USB devices
• Sony Ericsson mobile phone
• Nokia mobile phone
• Blackberry
• LG mobile phone
• Male USB (for charging the strap itself)

It does have an adjustable strap, so it should be one size fits all. If you can get over the bulky look of it, then this could be a great addition to your mobile arsenal.

Slight warning: I couldn’t find any information about how much power you actually have access to with the PowerStrap. My Power Monkey has a 2200mAh charge, which works out to being around 40 hours on an iPod. Hopefully the PowerStrap offers up a similar charge.

Article Via Oh Gizmo
Photo credit: Zoutedrop

Apple sent out another all hands on deck PR announcement today. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. I’m still not over The Beatles debacle. Apple announced today that iAds will begin showing up in Europe sometime in December. The UK and France will see the iAds program launched in December, while Germany will follow some time in January.

Advertisers in the big launch will include L’Oréal, Renault, Louis Vuitton, Nespresso, Perrier, Unilever, Citi, Evian, LG Display, AB InBev, Turkish Airlines and Absolute Radio.

According to Apple, they’ve managed to sign half of the top 25 leading US national advertisers to the iAds program in just under four months.

It looks like the big fish in a little pond just got a little bit smaller now that iAds are heading to Europe.

Feral Interactive has just announced that they are bringing Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition to the Mac sometime in early December.

Borderlands has eaten up most of my gaming time this year, and it’s one of the only video games, outside of NHL 2010, that I’ve returned to over the course of the year (sadly, on my Xbox 360). The first person shooter really redefined my expectations of what an FPS game could be in today’s world.

The Game of the Year Edition will include “four add-on packs, originally published separately as downloadable content,” according to Peter Cohen over at The Loop.

The gaming divide between Mac and Windows is closing up quicker than most would have expected it would over the last year. Now, if only some of these companies would start taking the Blizzard approach of releasing both a Mac and a Windows version at the same time, we would finally be on par with Windows gamers.

Getting ready to get your Borderlands fix?

According to Cohen, the game is rated M and will require “Mac OS X 10.6.4 or later, 1.8GHz Intel processor, 1.0GB RAM, 10GB hard disk space, 128MB VRAM (ATI X1600, Nvidia 7xxx and Intel GMA graphics not supported), and DVD drive.”

Hopefully they offer a downloadable version, because my DVD drive just bit the dust.

Another heavy hitting magazine is setting up shop on the App Store: The Economist will be available to the masses tomorrow. The details are still a little light, but the Economist website does mention “existing print or online subscribers will receive access to the full contents of each week’s issue.”

It looks like they may have figured out a way around the subscription conundrum that Conde Nast can’t seem to figure out. Access to full length articles will be based on current subscription to The Economist’s online and print editions.

If you already have an online account over at The Economist, getting your full length articles on the iPad will be as easy as logging into their service.

It’s that simple. Keep your eyes peeled on the App Store on Friday. It’s about to get a whole lot easier to get your Economics on with your iPad.

Today, we discuss the Skyfire debacle with Peter Cohen of The Loop.

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Monday Apple put up a teaser page about an iTunes announcement for Tuesday. As always, the crowd goes wild. Many expect Apple to finally announce a cloud-based music library, probably using the new data center in my home state. But the rumors of the Beatles library finally coming to iTunes swirled a bit more, and were finally confirmed by the WSJ before bedtime here in the US.

The crowd went wild again, but now with the vitriol that is solely reserved for politics and Apple Inc. announcements.

But to a few of us, this was a big deal.

The technology company Apple Computer/Apple Inc. and the Beatles media company Apple Corps have a long history due not just to the shared name, but also to some shared values and customers. The foundations of Apple Computers are in the counterculture movement of the 1970s and 1980s that so loved the Beatles. Steve Jobs’ recent ups and downs with AT&T over the iPhone aren’t the first time he has faced the telecom giant; some of the friendship that were forged between Jobs and Steve Wozniak was based on building “Blue Boxes” used to hack the phone system. Jobs has consistently displayed an affinity for much of the ethics and practices of that time.

So we get to the naming of the company. The Apple Museum page on this subject leaves the naming a bit ambiguous, but mentions a tribute to the Beatles record company as being a possibility. I don’t think Jobs or any of the other Apple founders have ever confirmed that the company was named in honor of the record company, but I think it’s fair to guess that it had some influence. I could drag on and on with clips and quotes that point to the Steves being Beatles fans, but I’ll just toss out a few quick ones.

When Wozniak went back to school in the early 80s he enrolled with the name “Rocky Racoon Clark” to help minimize the problems his fame would cause. John Lennon (with Yoko) were in one of the images from the “Think Different” ad campain from 1997 (right after Jobs’ return). One of John Lennon’s records was featured on the box art for the iPod Touch. And the below video from 60 minutes clearly shows the Beatles’ influence on Jobs.

Steve Jobs talks about Beatles/Teamwork

All of this is really to establish that the now bigger company, Apple Inc., was started by a couple of Beatles fans, who certainly had no intention of the name harming the record company. Now on to the legal issues.

Apple Corps started as little more than a tax shelter for the Fab Four. As the song “Taxman” makes clear, the band wasn’t a big fan of how much of their money had to be given to the UK government. It turned out that by establishing a corporation they could get a lower tax rate on their music earnings. Paul McCartney is credited for coming up with the name, a phonetic wordplay on “apple core.” In the meantime they had to have this company do something to justify its existence. They originally just planned to sell some retail merchandise, and later decided to help struggling artists. Eventually the company became a bit more serious, and handled much of the Beatles’ business (which is a lot by itself) and also functioned as a full blown record label and recording studio for a few acts.

Nine years later, Apple Computer was founded. According to the Apple Museum, Wozinak was concerned that the name would be trouble. Sure enough, Apple Corps didn’t wait long and filed suit against Apple Computer in 1978. The two settled in 1981, with Apple Computer paying Apple Corps a mere $80,000, and a condition that Apple Computer wouldn’t enter the music business, and Apple Corps wouldn’t enter the computer business. It is important to keep in mind that computing in 1981 was a far cry from the multimedia world it is today. Until the early-mid 90s the concept of computer music was heavily tied to midi bleeps and squeals.

In 1986, Apple Corps sued Apple Computer again, this time because of some significant MIDI and audio hardware and capabilities added to one of the Apple II computers, stating that this was against the 1981 agreement. Apple Computer had to cough up a much more considerable amount of money to settle with Apple Corps again in 1991 when Mac OS recieved a sound sampling system. The system was originally called Chimes but was later renamed “Sosumi” as a play on the phrase “so sue me.”

Finally, in 2003, Apple Corps sued Apple Computer for the iTunes store. The fact that the computer store was now distributing music led many (myself included) to wonder if Apple Corps might have a bit of a stronger argument in court. I’m no lawyer, but I expect the wording of the 1991 settlement had a lot to do with Apple Computer surviving this one. A CNet article from the 2003 dispute quotes the 1991 ruling:

Apple Computer was allowed to use its brand on “goods or services…used to reproduce, run, play or otherwise deliver such content,” as long as it was not on physical media such as a CD.

The concept of a portable music player that stored its content digitally on a hard disk or solid state memory was a far off thought in 1991, when portable CD players like the Discman had just started to become common. However, the above statement seems to pretty strongly allow selling music through iTunes, and playing it on a computer or iPod. Apple Computer won this battle, and Apple Corps appealed. In the meantime, Apple Computer became Apple Inc.

In February 2007, Apple Inc. and Apple Corps announced that an agreement had been reached. No money for legal costs exchanged hands, but the trademarks related to “Apple” were handed over to Apple Inc., with Apple Inc. licensing use of the trademark back to Apple Corps. This led many observers to think that the Beatles would soon be on iTunes. The Beatles were one of very few popular artists not on the iTunes store, and all four of the Beatles’ solo works were on iTunes. McCartney even did an iTunes + iPod silhouette video in 2007. But it didn’t happen for almost 4 years…

The rumors came up again and again, just like the iPhone and iPad before. They heated up quite a bit in the summer of 2009 when the Beatles music was released in digital form for the first time with the Rock Band Beatles game, and the remastering and re-release of the entire catalog seemed like a perfect time to release the music on iTunes. Paul McCartney was even quoted as saying he wanted it to happen, but things were hung up on the business side (involving EMI). Additionally there were rumors and vague reports that indicated Yoko Uno wasn’t doing the best job of working with Apple Inc.

So here we are, with the Beatles finally on iTunes. As I mentioned at the beginning, much of the Apple faithful were disappointed that Apple “hyped” this event. By that they mean the front page ad that only showed up one day before the announcement. There weren’t ads or teasers or a keynote speech. To those of us that have followed this saga for years and like to show our support for music we care about, it seems like it was worth even more hype.

Header photo credit: Gabriel Alves (Creative Commons)

Much of the content of this article is sourced from Wikipedia, in particular the Apple v. Apple page.

As reported last week, Apple has removed a feature from AirPrint that would allow users to print from any iOS device running 4.2 or higher to any printer, as long as it was shared from a Mac or PC.

Since then, several people have posted possible workarounds, which included some rather questionable things — including downloading old beta builds of 10.6.5 and tinkering the command line — neither of which are super user friendly.

Collobos Software has released an $8 utility that promises to restore this function in a neat, clean fashion.

Once the app is fired up, it lists all printers the Mac is currently connected to, and gives the option to set those up as AirPrint printers. Nice and simple.

FingerPrint isn’t perfect, however. While I can print just fine to the newer HP Color LaserJet CP3525, which is shared from a 10.5.8 Mac mini, I can’t print to any printer simply on the network.

I have a new HP LaserJet P4014 and an older HP Laserjet 5200 set up on the network using DHCP and Bonjour. I can’t get my iPad (running iOS 4.2 GM2) to print to either one — I don’t get an error on my iPad or on the printer — the job simply never prints.

If I enable printer sharing for the P4014 and 5200 on a Mac on the network, however, I can print to them. In short — computer-based printer sharing is still necessary for this to work, which makes complete sense, as that was the solution Apple had in place. I wish that FingerPrint’s interface would only show shared printers, not all the printers available to the Mac itself. The app could then prompt users to enable printer sharing. As it stands now, it’s a little confusing to see FingerPrint display a green dot next to a printer and that printer show up on an iPad, without the ability to actually print to it.

If the developer could clear this issue up in the UI, this app would be just about perfect. As it is, it’s almost there. This is $8 well-spent for any hardcore iPad or iPhone user with printers not officially supported by AirPrint.

Article Via TUAW

Twitter has updated their iOS app. The biggest change is the addition of push notifications, so anyone who wasn’t using the Twitter app because of the lack of push support now has no excuse. Version 3.2.1 has push notifications for @ mentions and direct messages (which they seem to just call messages).

Will push notifications bring more people to the app? Some people are already using a third party app such as Boxcar to get those notifications.

From the Twitter blog:

“When you’re out and about, your phone probably isn’t always in front of you. It might be in your pocket or purse or on a table – perhaps with the screen off. We want to make sure you see important Tweets even when you’re not looking at Twitter at the moment. To help with that, today we’re launching push notifications for @mentions.”

Now, when you launch the iPhone app and click on the settings icon, there is an area below your username that lets you customize your push notifications on an account by account basis.

You can select if you want notifications from anyone, or just from people you follow, which may help with spam accounts sending @ replies to you.

I am hoping that they tie in Mac integration and work on an app for OS X. It would be great if we could sync our accounts across all of our devices while we use the official Twitter applications.

Article Via Twitter