UiRemote is like a remote… in your iPhone

Yeah, sure, name any IR-equipped phone in existence and odds good to excellent that you can find a universal remote app for it, but you probably can’t think of many for the iPhone, now, can you? They exist, yes, but they tend to carry a home-automation slant since the lack of an infrared port leaves the thing relegated to WiFi duty. Enter UiRemote, an ambitious little project undertaken by a handful of scrappy University of Toronto students that uses a fingertip-sized IR blaster connected to the headphone jack paired with a totally customizable app to get the job done. Novel? Not necessarily, but when you consider that a dedicated remote with these specs would probably run half a grand, it’s an interesting way to save money and still end up with the coolest AV controller on the block. The devs are still tweaking both the module and the app, but hopes are high that they’ll be available to all interested parties in the next couple months.

Filed under: , ,

UiRemote is like a remote… in your iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Apple Keynote Beer Goggles to Become Obligatory in 2009

This one slipped even below Jim Goldman’s rumor radar: The Apple Keynote Beer Goggles. Judging from today’s snoringfest, I won’t be surprised if they make them obligatory for every event in 2009.

Many people are bashing the Philnote because it was a bore and there were no new new NEW toys. In reality, the keynote wasn’t very different from many other that Steve Jobs did in the past. I remember some who were mostly the same: Endless software demonstrations plus a hardware update here or there. In fact, I think there were even worse keynotes, like that time when an endless parade of third-party software directors came on stage to show their support to Mac OS X. It took me several Guinness pints to get over that one.

So given what he had to present today—and I’ve to say that I love the new iPhoto and iMovie—El Schillerino did quite a good job. But even while he was good, apparently he’s not Steve Jobs and people weren’t as enthusiastic as when El Esteban is on stage. I don’t know what’s going to happen when Jobs finally retires from Apple, but maybe the key for success goes through free beer for everyone at the door. And probably free pizza too. [Image based on the original beer goggles from Urban Spectacles via Dark Roasted Blend]

Macworld ’09: a show of no-shows

With Phil doing the honors, nobody really thought Apple was planning on revolutionizing anything this morning — sure, there were plenty of rumors, like always, but most people weren’t expecting the moon. What we were expecting, however, was for Apple to come clean on a few things, so bear with us as we file this missing persons report.

Notably absent:

  • Push notifications. This was supposed to roll out in September and is sorely needed.
  • Snow Leopard. Last June Apple said the OS was due in “about a year,” so we would expect to start hearing a bit more about it — or at least notification of a delay.

Woulda been nice:

Dodged a bullet (for now):

  • iPhone nano. Our hands aren’t getting any smaller, and this SimCity isn’t gonna get plumbing all on its own.
  • iTablet. Sure, it’s been every Newton-head’s dream since forever, but that doesn’t mean the market for a UMPC-ish iPod touch-like device is there just yet.

Yeah, Apple doesn’t have to do anything — in fact, that yearly grind of expectation is probably one of the reasons the company is bowing out of Macworld altogether — but would it really be too much trouble to at least drop some verbaige on some of this stuff? Just wondering, is all. Oh, and in case you’re more of a visual type, Apple’s video of the keynote is now online, hit up the read link for all the non-action.

Filed under:

Macworld ’09: a show of no-shows originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Macworld 2009: Wozniak Demos MacBook Mod

Woz

Guess what else Steve Wozniak is doing besides playing Segway polo?

He’s endorsing a new product called the ModBook Pro. As its name implies, the device is a MacBook Pro modified into a tablet.

At Macworld Expo, Wozniak said he joined the advisory board to weigh in on development of the device. He said he felt compelled to join the mod company Axiotron because the CEO was so "friendly with approaching" him.

Moya45angle_f_large_3
Wired.com asked Wozniak if there were any other Apple products he would modify.

"I have a million ideas for Apple products I would change, but I can’t tell you what specifically, because you guys will make it sound like I’m putting Apple down," Wozniak said. "But it’s clear touchscreens are going to be big in Apple’s future. That’s my prediction at least."

Of course, he was referring to when media outlets quoted him saying the iPod would one day "die out."

Wozniak’s recommendation for Axiotron was to incorporate the use of an interface called QuickScript for the device’s handwriting recognition. In addition to translating handwriting into digital text, the software enables a user to use the stylus to write the name of an app to launch it. (For example, with the launch mode selected, writing "Chess" launches the Chess app.)

Axiotron is selling the ModBook Pro for $5,000. Owners of a 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro can send their notebook to Axiotron to be modified for $3,050. (There’s a special Macworld discount — $2,600 for the mod service until Jan. 12.) Macworld has a hands-on video demonstrating the ModBook Pro.

Axiotron is a familiar company at Macworld Expo. At past Macworld events, the company showed off its ModBook (below) — a MacBook modified into a tablet.

Tablet_3

To modify the MacBook Pro into a tablet, Axiotron installed a touchscreen and slightly moved around the computer’s guts to fit in a custom enclosure. Andreas Haas, Axiotron’s CEO, said the new MacBook Pros’ unibody makes the mod process very easy.

Easy, huh? Does that mean Apple’s new unibody enclosures will open doors to all sorts of crazy MacBook mods in the near future?

We’re going to guess no: The darn things are too expensive for the average geek to mess around with, unlike netbooks.

Photos: James Merithew/Wired.com, Axiotron





Add to Reddit
Add to Facebook
Add to digg



Apple’s Big Macworld Announcement Is a Big Disappointment

Seventeen_3

The only hardware release at Macworld Expo 2009 was a predictable unibody upgrade for the 17-inch MacBook Pro, which Apple reports will have an eight-hour battery life.

Eight hours is surely impressive for such a large, powerful notebook. But this news is nonetheless underwhelming for several reasons.

Some thought Apple was strategically waiting so it could ship the 17-inch MacBook Pro with a low-cost, quad-core processor. Intel released such a chip just recently, and APC suspected this CPU would appear in Apple’s top-of-the-line notebook.

But much to our disappointment, the 17-incher is shipping with a plain ol’ dual-core (Core 2 Duo) chip. True, at 2.66 GHz it’s slightly faster than the other MacBook Pros. But there are hardly any substantial changes to justify the longer wait for this notebook.

Seventeen3

Apple was able to beef up the MacBook Pro’s battery by taking advantage of the generous amount of space available in the notebook’s enclosure. This battery is also non-removable, which Apple said was necessary to use as much space as possible.

Apple also claims the new MacBook Pro’s battery is more environmentally friendly because it lasts five years and has fewer toxins.

Looks like our Apple source, and several others in various blogs, were incorrect about the rumor of a new Mac Mini launching at Macworld. We’ll look into the reasons why and provide an update soon.


Seventeen2

Photos: James Merithew/Wired.com





Add to Reddit
Add to Facebook
Add to digg



Macworld Already a Bummer, With Or Without Apple

Keynote

By Mathew Honan

The big theme at this year’s Macworld Expo is not a product, it’s a year: 2010. Next year’s conference is touted on banners, information booklets, and even the show badges, which come with an ad for next year’s event — the first without Apple, its anchor tenant.

But if you want to see what the show will be like in 2010, sans Apple, come down to the Moscone Center right now. Actually, don’t bother. It’s a snoozer, because without Steve Jobs, or any big new product launches, Apple might as well have not showed up today.

“Worst. Macworld. Ever.” said one attendee after the Tuesday keynote. “This sucks.”

This year’s keynote was an epic yawner. No new iPhone. No new iPod.
No new iMac, and — despite lots of pre-show hype, rumor and buzz — no
new Mac Mini. The big news? It’s a battery. Apple certainly has new
hardware offerings in development, but it isn’t announcing them here.

Yet in other slow news years, Apple has shared the stage with some
of those developers, even granting Microsoft some time in the
spotlight. This year third-party developers were given exactly zero
seconds. It was almost like the company was trying to go out on a
whimper.

Indeed, Apple senior VP of product marketing Phil Schiller, who took
over keynote duties from Jobs this year, got in a little swipe at the
event itself just after the opening bell. Noting that Apple Stores now
serve more than 3.4 million customers a week, he went on to declare
“that’s 100 Macworlds each and every week going on in our Apple
Stores.”

Ouch.

The keynote also ended with a thinly-velied insult: Tony Bennett
singing “I left my heart in San Francisco” — surely a goodbye middle
finger to International Data Group, which owns Macworld Expo.

"We’ve done plenty of Macworlds without Apple in other countries,"
insisted Pat McGovern, CEO of IDG, after Tuesday’s keynote. "The Mac
community has a lot of people exploring all sorts of different
interests. Members of that community and developers will always have a
place at Macworld."

However, the 2010 theme is so pervasive that it almost seems as if
IDG s overcompensating. And perhaps it is, afraid of what attendance
will be like next year without the Apple anchor that’s normally the big
draw.

Analyst Tim Bajarin, president of market research firm creative strategies
said Apple spends about $25 million on Macworld, money better spent on
its chain of retail stores, which attract far more customers than
Macworld ever could. "It is rational for Apple to pull out of
MacWorld," Bajarin said. "Apple is right to spend its money on getting
more people into its stores."

Bajarin said he took Apple’s announcement about Jobs’ health on face
value. It sounded right, he said and if Jobs health were in serious
jeopardy, Apple’s board has a serious financial duty to disclose it, he
said. He said he expects to see Steve in the new year, possibly with a
new product line. "For the last decade, if Apple has a new product,
Steve is the one to announce it.

Yet perhaps it was just as well Jobs stayed away.  As one Twitterer put it: "The Macworld Keynote left me unimpressed. Maybe that’s why Steve Jobs didn’t present today."

Instead they got Schiller, who launched into his presentation by
declaring that the news today was going to be all about Macs, and that
he was going to announce three new things. Only one of these turned out
to be about an actual Mac computer: a new 17-inch MacBook Pro.

The other two major announcements were software suites — iLife and
iWork — Schiller proceeded to spend the bulk of his presentation
describing them in detail.

The iLife demo showcased some nifty new features in iPhoto—facial
recognition and tagging, automated export to Flickr and Facebook, and a
geotagging function. He also unveiled iMovie’s new editing features,
which look incredibly slick, and finished with GarageBand, which now
includes celebrity tutorials (from musicians like Sting!) on how to
play the piano and guitar. 

Next was iWork, where there was no big news. The product
announcements centered around new versions of Pages (documents),
Numbers (spreadsheets) and Keynote (presentations).  Apple also
announced iWork.com, essentially a cloud computing version of the
desktop software that allows for collaborative editing. Think Google
Documents, but Apple-fied.

The last of Schiller’s three talking points was a new 17-inch
MacBook Pro with an integrated non-removable battery that the company
claims will run for 8 hours and recharges 1000 times. 

Finally, after stepping over Steve Jobs’ traditional “one more
thing” line (we’d wager most in the audience barely heard Schiller
mumble it) he circled back around with a crafty “one last thing,” which
turned out to be iTunes news.

But instead of the final news being the biggest, as per tradition,
this was yet another yawner. DRM is disappearing from iTunes, bringing
Apple on par with Amazon. Also of note: songs will have a three tiered
pricing scheme with tracks going from $1.29/$.99/$.69 a pop.

Given that Apple has long resisted variable pricing, the
backtracking didn’t come across as fantastically awesome as Schiller
tried to deliver it. Topping it off was Tony Bennett who came onstage
and belted out a couple of songs nobody under 60 knows.

In short, this was the future of Macworld Expo: one without any exciting news from Apple.

Mathew Honan (mathew_honan@wired.com) is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and frequent contributor to Wired.com. Follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/mat

(Photo by Jim Merithew for Wired.com)

(Leander Kahney and Brian X. Chen contributed to this story.)





Add to Reddit
Add to Facebook
Add to digg



iMovie ’09: Video Tour

In this shakey cam tour (sorry) we go over the three most interesting functions in iMovie 09: The globetrotting map animations, an automatic shake stabilizer, and the zoomed in precision editor.

Maps:
• There are 4 versions of maps, each also in a flat mode (along with the original globe). One is a photorealistic map, one is a school map, one has beige continents and one has green continents.
• If you’re adding map animations from scratch, they take a bit of time to render. You have to select a starting and end point (Madrid or Disneyland), and the program will map it.
• Putting two animations back to back, using the same destination and departure city, makes the animation a seamless multi city tour.
• You can update the type of map by dragging the style onto the existing thumbnail in the project line.

Shake Stabilizer:
• It analyzes the entire picture and steadies the motion very, very well.
• If a scene cannot be corrected, because of an overage of movement, iMovie marks the section with a squiggly red line.
• The rendering for this correction has to be done on a case by case or project basis; all the rendering must be done ahead of time and Apple says, “it takes awhile but is worth it”.

Precision Editor:
• Basically, precision editor zooms into the transition between two clips.
• It’s laid out as follows: the upper segment is the first clip, and the bottom segment is the second clip.
• The left side highlights the first and upper clip, because that’s active, and the lower right hand quadrant is also active (as the second clip). Moving the slider inbetween them (the y axis) shifts the transition point. Very easy.

And at long last, slow motion is back.

iMovie 08 was criticized for having a brilliant UI but lacking power, and so many people still use 06 which accepts plug ins. Perhaps 09 is a step in the right direction.

WD pumps out My Passport for Mac / My Book Mac Edition

We’ll wager you didn’t know Macworld was going on today, did you? Pathetic jokes aside, Western Digital has lined up a pair of launches today in San Francisco to coincide with Apple’s final Macworld keynote, as we’re treated to the My Passport for Mac portable HDD and the My Book Mac Edition. Truthfully, the only real difference between these drives and their vanilla counterparts is the pre-format process; with these, they both come “pre-formatted for Mac,” saving you the tiresome task of converting ’em to HFS+ Journaled yourself. Additionally, these USB 2.0 drives are made to work “seamlessly” with Apple’s Time Machine backup software, and they’ll arrive in capacities including 320GB and 500GB (My Passport) / 1TB (My Book). Both units should be available now for between $129.99 and $179.99.

Filed under:

WD pumps out My Passport for Mac / My Book Mac Edition originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Verbatim trots out OS X-friendly 8GB Store ‘n’ Go retractable USB drive

Verbatim doesn’t really make a lot of racket during the year, but come Macworld / CES, it pulls out all of the stops. Alongside a new family of delectable ExpressCard SSDs, the company is also introducing an 8GB Store ‘n’ Go Retractable USB Drive (Windows version shown) that caters to the OS X crowd. Verbatim’s pushing two main selling points here: for starters, the capless, retractable design means that your USB socket will always be covered, and secondly, the password controlled access to the drive’s private zone plays nice within an OS X environment. The half-ounce device is expected to land on store shelves in just a few weeks, though it’ll cost you a stiff $59.99 if you’re looking to pay MSRP.

Filed under:

Verbatim trots out OS X-friendly 8GB Store ‘n’ Go retractable USB drive originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

iPhoto ’09 Video Tour

Here are a few best features of iPhoto ’09, including Faces and Places, which recognizes people in your albums and the locations you took those photos in.

Cool stuff: separating your photos by people, which you can then scrub (move your mouse) over and see all the images of them you have. iPhoto is smart enough to try and recognize which people are which with semi-decent accuracy, and you’ll have to confirm each one as you go. Once you’re done, you have a corkboard full of Polaroids of the people you know.

Geolocation is great for travelers, and if you go to a lot of different countries, your “Places” section will have a rich map made up of all the pins you’ve been to. You can fill in location data yourself, or if you have an iPhone or other GPS-enabled camera, it’s automatically filled in for you.

Other cool stuff is Facebook and Flickr integration (includes tagging as well), plus themed slideshows. [iPhoto]