Jul 01

Stacks for iPhone Adds Spring-Loaded Launcher

Posted in: iPhone, jailbreak, Miscellaneous, Today's Chili

Stacks is an add-on for jailbroken, or hacked, iPhones which brings a distinctly Mac-like tweak to the iPhone UI. As the video shows, Stacks lets you replace the icons in the home row (the non-moving row of icons at the bottom of the screen) with, well, stacks. Touch one with your finger and it expands to show a bendy column of extra icons. Think of it as piling up app shortcuts and then fanning them out like a pack of cards to pick one. Stacks has been around for a little while, but the video shows the soon-to-be-released v3 which adds renaming and drag’n’drop editing.

As Erica Sadun over at the Unofficial Apple Weblog notes, it’s a shame that you need a Jailbroken iPhone to run this neat and rather handy tweak. On the other hand, though, the OS 3.0 search feature all but renders this obsolete. .

Product page [Steven Troughton Smith via TUAW]


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Jun 26

Wired’s Smart Guide: Know Your Smartphones

Posted in: Miscellaneous, palm pre, Today's Chili

Not long ago the best smartphone you could buy was the iPhone. No contest. The uncanny combo of beautiful chassis, intelligent OS, super responsive touchscreen, and app store was unparalleled. There was no device on the market that came remotely close to touching the Jesus phone’s near mythical marriage of hardware and software.

Them days is over.

Now each major U.S. carrier has a device that can legitimately compete with the iPhone. To help you make sense of it, we took three major upstarts and stacked them up against the great white hype from Cupertino. Sprint with its Pre, T-Mobile with its G1, and Verizon with its Storm. So have a gander at how the specs from these four devices compare to one another. Think of it as a way to cut through a lot of the dumb hype that clouds these smartphones.

smart_guide2

* Price is with a two-year contract

** Includes voice, text and data

*** Includes price of plan and cost of phone. Does not include taxes, activation charges or overage fees

Graphic by Dennis Crothers


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Jun 24

Adobe Lightroom Updated, New DNG Spec Allows Lens Correction in Software

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Software, Today's Chili

lightroom installerWe cover a lot of new cameras here at Gadget Lab, and if you go right out and buy them, often you’ll find you can’t actually do much with the pictures (unless the camera shoots JPEG only, in which case this is not the post you’re looking for. Move along). Manufacturers’ software is almost uniformly execrable (even Nikon’s Capture NX2, which gives great results, is real pain to use).

So it falls to the third party software to update regularly to play nice with new cameras. This pretty much means Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom and Camera Raw software. It’s Lightroom’s turn today, and it adds support for a huge amount of new cameras. 31 of them, in fact, and although most of those are Hasselblads, the Canon EOS 500D and Nikon D5000 sneak in, along with the latest Sony DSLRs (A230, A330 and A380) and the Panasonic DMC-GH1.

This last is accompanied by an interesting snipe at Panasonic fix for the kind of shenanigans carried out by Panasonic with the Lumix LX3. The LX3 uses some tricksy software to fix the large amount of distortion from its wideangle lens. These algorithms are applied to the RAW file in-camera, which is a big no-no for RAW.  To address these kind of shenanigans.  This is applied to either the in-camera jpeg or, for the RAW file, on the computer. Adobe has updated to DNG spec to allow this kind of heavy processing to be done on powerful computers rather than weakling camera chips, and should mean that in future camera makers can add these corrections directly to the DNG interpretations rather than Adobe needing to work with everyone individually. The tools are called Opcode Lists:

This also allows processing steps to be specified, such as lens corrections, which ideally
should be performed on the image data after it has been demosaiced, while still retaining the
advantages of a raw mosaic data format.

Sadly, this still relies on camera makers to make these algorithms and processes open instead of squirreling them away as some kind of “intellectual property”, something that Panasonic has done, working with Adobe to make sure that Camera Raw and Lightroom users get the picture they should be getting. Hopefully this trend will continue, and allow access to these deep parts of the cameras’ hearts which remain locked away unless you use the manufacturers’ own software. Tell me. You have spent your money on a camera. Who should control what is done to the pictures by that camera. You, or Canon or Nikon?

Post updated upon receiving new information from Adobe. The original title to this post was “Adobe Lightroom Updated, New DNG Spec Takes Shot at Panasonic.”

Lightroom 2.4 and Camera Raw 5.4 Now Available [Lightroom Journal]

Digital Negative (DNG) Specification [PDF. Adobe]


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Jun 23

Review: Lenovo ThinkPad T400s

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Today's Chili

t400s_04

Usually business notebooks are snore-fests with dull chassis design and humdrum interior components. Not the ThinkPad T400s. The latest lightweight (under 4 pounds!) to come from Lenovo, the  computer also sports a Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM and a solid-state drive. Here’s a snippet from reviewer Christopher Null:

Clad in that familiar black shell, the 14.1-inch laptop (screen resolution: 1440 x 900 pixels) has a case that’s only about 4/5 of an inch thick and just under 4 pounds, a whole pound lighter than the T400. Apparently the s tacked onto the end of T400 stands for “svelte.”

Performance is simply outstanding: While graphics are a tad weak due to the lack of a video card, the high-end CPU (the newest Core 2 Duo SP9600, running at 2.53 GHz), 2 GB of RAM and 128-GB solid-state drive give the T400s plenty of juice to power through general apps, running rings around nearly all other notebooks we’ve benchmarked this year. The screen, now backlit by LEDs, is also dazzlingly bright — one of the brightest on the market, especially in this size class. Netbook and MacBook Air users, take a back seat: There’s also a DVD burner.

$2,000 as tested, lenovo.com

picture-14

Does this get your internal bongos beating? Check out the rest of the write-up of the T400s on our insanely-awesome reviews site.


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Jun 22

iPhone 3G S or 3GS? Apple Needs a Copy Editor

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, Miscellaneous, Today's Chili

iphone

(Warning: The following is a silly, intrinsically useless post about copy style.)

The space in the name of Apple’s new iPhone — “iPhone 3G S” — is the bane of a copy editor’s existence. (How do you pluralize the thing?) Here at Wired.com, our copy desk voted to eliminate it. Most amusing is that Apple appears to be fickle about how to punctuate the new iPhone, too.

At the Apple Store web site, you’ll notice the third-generation iPhone is listed as iPhone 3G S. But in Apple’s latest press release, that space is nowhere to be found.

What gives? Perhaps the copy editor of Apple’s public relations team couldn’t stand the space either. But whoever writes copy for the Apple Store web site doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.

And here we thought Apple was obsessed with consistency and quality. Personally, I think that redundant space is ugly, and I want it officially omitted!

How do you feel about the space in “iPhone 3G S”? Vote in the poll below.



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Jun 17

How to Turn on Tethering in iPhone 3.0

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Today's Chili

photoTethering doesn’t officially work in iPhone 3.0 for AT&T customers, but for Mac users there’s an easy tweak to enable the feature in seconds.

Here are the steps, courtesy of MacMegasite:

1. Download this carrier update file. Then extract it.

2. Launch the Terminal app and type the following command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE



3. Now launch iTunes. In the iPhone window,  hold the Option key while clicking Restore. Then select the ipcc file in the disk image you downloaded and click OK.

4. iTunes will update the carrier settings. Now under General settings, tap the Network tab and an internet tethering option should appear. From there on, you should be able to easily tether the iPhone via Bluetooth or USB.

We tested this trick on an original iPhone as well as an iPhone 3G, and unfortunately the technique only worked on the iPhone 3G.

We’re somewhat shocked about how easy this was, and we’re guessing it will disappear very soon: It’s highly unlikely AT&T is going to let us tether for free. But for now, enjoy it!


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Jun 12

Buyer’s Remorse: 5 Gadgets We Should Never Have Bought

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Today's Chili

remorse

Buyer’s remorse. It’s been around forever and is especially rife in the gadget world, where every year there is a smaller, faster or cuter version of every device you own. But where a product’s life used to be measured in years, now it can be just months. In the cellphone market, this is particularly dangerous: You sign up for a 24 month relationship with a single gadget, but even as you pen your name on the line you know you’ll be tempted to cheat in less than a year.

Now, right or wrong, buyers are fighting back and trying to force manufacturers to give them cheap upgrades. Sometimes they have a case, but most of the time they’re just whining. Here are five of the worst examples we’ve seen this year.

iPhone 3G and 3GS

Apple seems to attract a lot of upgrade envy, possibly because of a relatively small and easy-to-understand product lineup, or possibly because the company gets publicity like no other. Right now the problem is the iPhone 3GS. Current iPhone 3G owners wanting to get their hands on the new phone will have to pay $700 for the top-of-the-line 32-GB handset, $400 more than the cost for new customers.

This isn’t the first time Apple has annoyed its customers with iPhone pricing — the original iPhone cost $600 on launch and then dropped to $400 just a couple of months later. In that case, Apple actually listened to all the whiners and issued a $100 store credit to early adopters.

The difference this time, though, is that people who signed up for a two-year contract are now complaining, even though they knew this would happen. They bought a subsidized handset in return for being a customer for the next two years, and now they want to change their minds. Our advice? Suck it up, and quit whining.

Kindle 2 and DX

Amazon certainly engaged in some questionable product-launch scheduling this year. The Kindle 2 replaced the original Kindle, and barely a month after it started shipping, along came the Kindle DX, a bigger, more expensive version of the e-book reader with PDF-compatibility and a display viewable in landscape format.

There was an outcry, and many Kindle 2 buyers tried to return their perfectly good devices so they could upgrade to the new one. “Unfair!” they cried, saying that Amazon was somehow in the wrong for announcing two products so close to each other.

But this is, again, nonsense. The Kindle and the Kindle DX are quite different products. One is a reader for novels and the like, the other is for textbooks and research papers. The DX is really too big to carry for most people, but it is still a lot smaller than a suitcase full of reference books.

Analog TV and Digital TV

You might laugh, but it’s possible that somebody, somewhere, has bought an analog-only TV this year. If the message about the big switch-off was so badly communicated that the Obama administration delayed the throwing of that switch until today, it was badly communicated enough that some hillbilly might have sprung for a new set in the last few months.

In this case, though, there really is someone to blame. Sure, the cousin-marriers might be excused for not keeping on top of the tech news, but the TV stores cannot. We imagine, though, that it is very unlikely: Most of the suppliers, and even the cable companies, are lying about the digital switch to get people to upgrade to unneeded new plans and equipment.

Personal GPS and Every Cellphone

If you have recently bought a personal GPS device, then you really shouldn’t have bothered. Many cellphones have one already, and in the next year or so we think that GPS will become as ubiquitous in phones as cameras have.

While in-car GPS units still have advantages — they’re harder to steal if they come as standard, they can hook into the car’s speakers, and they can have a big, juicy antenna to suck in the satellite signals, personal GPS devices have little to recommend them over the ones in phones.

Megapixels  and More Megapixels

Believe it or not, we’ve actually read complaints from D3 owners that they felt cheated by Nikon’s announcement of the D3x, despite the fact that the cameras have almost completely opposite purposes. The older D3 is a dream camera for many. It has a 12-megapixel sensor which can see in the dark, and it costs around $5,000. If you have bought one of these, it’s likely you know a lot about cameras and have plenty of experience.

The D3x, on the other hand, is a 24.5-megapixel monster that weighs in at $8,000 and is better suited to a brightly lit fashion studio than a dark sports stadium.

As we said, two completely different cameras in purpose, and yet even smart people, people willing to pay thousands for a camera, are seduced by megapixels. Is this buyer’s remorse … or just buyer’s stupidity?


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Jun 12

WWDC Report Card: Wired.com Grades the Apple Rumor Blogs

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, Mac, macbook, Miscellaneous, os x, rumors, Today's Chili

The blogosphere went buck wild with Apple rumors prior to this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The rumors ranged from the predictable to the wacky, with publications placing bets on everything from new iPhones to a fabled touchscreen tablet.

Of course, many rumors proved to be correct while others were irrevocably wrong. Fortunately, by studying the outcomes, we can learn who to trust — and what to expect before Apple’s next big product unveiling.

Here’s our status report of all the WWDC rumors, followed by a report card grading the publications responsible for them. And, for the sake of fairness, we grade ourselves, too.

New iPhone
Source: Daring Fireball; Apple iPhone Apps; MacRumors; WeiPhone
Status: True
Anyone could have guessed Apple would announce a new iPhone at the Worldwide Developers Conference this week, given that the current iPhone 3G and its predecessor launched July 2008 and June 2007, respectively. Nonetheless, prior to the conference, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster placed an oddball bet that no new iPhones would be announced at WWDC; rather, he anticipated Apple would host a special event later this month or in July to unveil iPhone upgrades.

The tech blogs won against a supposedly informed analyst by having faith in the most obvious outcome, which is quite often a good strategy when playing the Apple guessing game. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber stood out among the crowd: He even knew the new iPhone’s name (iPhone 3GS) before anyone else in the blogosphere. That deserves extra credit.

Two New iPhones for Verizon
Source: BusinessWeek
Status: False
This was another case where banking against the obvious resulted in a miss. Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg said in April that Apple was unlikely to share the iPhone with Verizon until 2010, when the carrier begins rolling out its fourth-generation network. Also, Apple said in an April earnings call that the company had no plans to change its exclusive contract with AT&T. Nonetheless, with no mention of those two factoids, BusinessWeek reported hearing from two sources “familiar with the matter” that two new iPhone devices for Verizon could be available as soon as this summer. Clearly, it doesn’t take much for one to qualify as “familiar with the matter,” given how vague and loaded that phrase is.

To be fair, BusinessWeek does, toward the end of the story, cite Munster, who says such a deal would be unlikely due to “technology hurdles involved in building and supporting its first CDMA iPhone.” Fine point — so fine, in fact, it should’ve appeared in the first or second paragraph.

Touchscreen Tablet aka “Media Pad”
Source: BusinessWeek
Status: False
In the same story as the one above, BusinessWeek alludes to the second iPhone device for Verizon as a “media pad” enabling users listen to music, view photos, watch high-definition videos and place calls over a Wi-Fi connection. The publication’s source describes the device as smaller than the Amazon Kindle, but with a bigger touchscreen than the Kindle’s. This sounds an awful lot like Apple’s fabled touchscreen tablet that rumor blogs have been squabbling about since July 2008. We have faith that such a device will surface in the next year or so, but BusinessWeek suggested the tablet could launch this summer, meaning Apple might possibly announce the device at WWDC. Nope.

Incremental Upgrades for MacBooks
Source: 9 to 5 Mac
Status: True
Apple fan blog 9 to 5 Mac received a tip that the MacBook family would receive minor upgrades at WWDC. We agreed that this was likely to happen, because Apple’s MacBooks generally have a lifespan of seven months before they’re refreshed. The news that came out of WWDC was even better than expected: Not just upgrades, but significant price cuts that should poise Apple for significant growth in the notebook market.

iPhone-Specific Rumors

Speedier processor and additional RAM
Source: Daring Fireball; Apple iPhone Apps; MacRumors; WeiPhone
Status: True
We expected Apple to boost performance in the new iPhone: The company called the handset “the future of gaming,” and a processor and memory boost for the iPhone would help deliver on that statement. Sure enough, that happened; the S in iPhone 3GS even stands for “speed.”

Magnetometer
Source: The Boy Genius Report; Daring Fireball; WeiPhone
Status: True
Various blogs did some clever investigation to dig up this detail about the new iPhone before Apple could even introduce it — the addition of a magnetometer (i.e., digital compass), which will enhance the handset’s GPS capabilities among other changes. A job well done.

Same Industrial Design as 3G
Source: WeiPhone; Daring Fireball
Status: True
This was a smart bet, because when added together, all the probable rumors suggested most of the new iPhone’s changes were occuring inside, leaving the outside unchanged. Sure enough, the iPhone 3GS looks exactly the same as the iPhone 3G, even in the same colors.

Improved camera with auto-focus lens, video recording and video editing
Source: Engadget; MacRumors; BusinessWeek
Status: True
The iPhone 3GS’s camera sports a 3.0-megapixel camera (up from the 2-megapixel cams in its predecessors) with auto-focus and video-recording capabilities. The video recorder also includes an editing interface. Woohoo!

$200 and $300 price points to be maintained
Source: Daring Fireball; Apple iPhone Apps
Status: True
It was a wise guess that Apple would maintain the same price points: Apple’s iPhone 3G was a tremendous success, selling more than 10 million units in 2008, so why not keep the same price points? Later, Daring Fireball went the extra mile and predicted Apple would keep the 8-GB iPhone 3G alive, selling that model for $100 to attract even more consumers. That turned out to be right, too.

Storage options increased: 16 GB and 32 GB
Source: Daring Fireball; Apple iPhone Apps
Status: True
The iPhone 3G came in two models, an 8 GB and 16 GB, so 16 GB and 32 GB was the logical next step. Sure enough, that happened.

Sleeker design
Source: Apple iPhone Apps
Status: False
We thought there a possibility the new iPhone 3GS would get a tiny bit sleeker while maintaining the same overall design, but this turned out to be wrong. The rumor originated from Apple iPhone Apps, a rather obscure blog, so our hopes weren’t very high for this.

1.5 times the battery life of the current models
Source: Apple iPhone Apps
Status: True
Though Apple iPhone Apps’ rumor report was mostly wrong, it was correct about battery life. Apple claims the iPhone 3GS offers 1.5 times the battery life than its predecessor.

OLED screen
Source: Apple iPhone Apps
Status: False
We didn’t believe this for a second: OLEDs are expensive and would likely drive the iPhone’s price points higher — not a great idea in this economy.

Glowing Apple logo on the back
Source: Apple iPhone Apps
Status: False
Unnecessary feature, and sure enough, a false rumor.

Discontinuation of the metal band surrounding the edge of the device
Source: Apple iPhone Apps
Status: False
We doubted this, because we saw no evidence of it. Also, a reader intelligently pointed out that the metal band is the basis of the structural integrity of the device.

Rubber-tread backing
Source: Apple iPhone Apps
Status: False
We didn’t think this would happen, either, soley based on the fact this would be ugly, and Apple doesn’t like ugly stuff.

Built-in FM transmitter
Source: Apple iPhone Apps
Status: False
Nope. Not a feature users are demanding, and other iPods don’t have it, so why would Apple introduce it in the iPhone?

Grading the Blogs

Without further ado, our report card:

Daring Fireball: A+
Gruber appears to have some pretty damn trustworthy sources: Prior to WWDC, he knew everything from the name of the new iPhone to the fact that it would remain the same colors. Who is his mole?

BusinessWeek: C
Major minus points for drumming up a rumor that was clearly and utterly improbable. Plus points for being right about video editing in the new iPhone.

9 to 5 Mac: B
Kudos for guessing the MacBook upgrades would come, though there weren’t many details about what would be included in those upgrades.

The Boy Genius Report, Engadget and Mac Rumors: A-
Smart investigation led these publications to dig up details about the new iPhone’s camera. Thanks for spoiling the surprise, guys!

WeiPhone: A
A commenter at Chinese Apple fan blog WeiPhone was the first to suggest the new iPhones’ improvements would be internal, leaving the outside unchanged. The tipster said the new iPhone would include a faster 600-MHz processor (up from 400 MHz in the current iPhone), 256-MB RAM (up from 128 MB), and a larger storage capacity of up to 32 GB (up from a maximum of 16 GB). Spot on!

AppleiPhoneApps: D-
This blog’s rumor report was so bogus and unlikely that it receives our lowest grade yet. An FM transmitter? C’mon.

And finally:

Wired.com: B
All of our WWDC predictions and iPhone predictions were correct, although we did miss a few things: Price cuts for the MacBooks, the inclusion of the iPhone 3G for $100 and a super low price tag ($30) for Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Also, we were slightly off with the release date of the new iPhone and iPhone 3.0: Our source said to expect late June or early July, but it turns out iPhone 3GS is hitting stores June 19. Not quite late June, but close.

Photo: Adam Jackson/Flickr


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Jun 12

Geek Art: Needlework Brings Together Programmers, Crafters

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Today's Chili
<< previous image | next image >>






Open source programmers and crafters may seem like they come from different worlds. Still, the two communities have much in common, says Ele Carpenter, the founder of Open Source Embroidery, a largely British movement.

The movement brings together knitters, embroiderers and quilters who see parallels between the way they create their crafts and how open source software creators share their ideas. At the BildMuseet University in Sweden, an exhibition — also called Open Source Embroidery — showcases artworks that use embroidery and code as a tool for participatory production and distribution.

“The idea of collaboration has been made cool by open source software,” says Carpenter, the curator of the exhibition. “But artists have been working like this for a long time.”

Even the differences between needlework crafts and open source software are alike, she says. Embroidery is largely dominated by women, while software is created mostly by men, she says. In embroidery, tiny stitches come together to create a pattern visible on the front of the fabric, while its system is revealed on the back. It’s similar to how software is created.

The arguments about open source vs. free software can also be applied to embroidery, says Carpenter, where artists struggle with questions around borrowing and modifying patterns. “The Open Source Embroidery project simply attempts to provide a social and practical way of discussing these issues and trying out the practice,” says Carpenter.

The Open Source Embroidery movement, which started in 2005, says it will hold workshops to explore the idea further. “We are not all programmers,” says Carpenter, “but we are all looking to understand the shared philosophy and methods between craft and technology.”

Programming geeks, largely from the DIY community, are slowly acknowledging these similarities, agrees Becky Stern, an American artist whose work is included in the Bild Museet exhibition.

The exhibition will open in San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Folk Art on Oct. 2.

jacquard

The Open Source embroidery exhibition also explores the history of computing as a craft. For example, the Jacquard loom is a mechanical loom invented in 1801 that used binary punch cards to design woven patterns. The loom is seen as the first programmed machine and one that inspired Charles Babbage in his design of the analytical engine.

Top Photo: Ele Carpenter

Bottom Photo: George H. Williams


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Jun 12

Gallery of The Meanest and Lamest Supercomputers

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Today's Chili

supercomputer

Going on Royal Pingdom’s latest gallery, there are two schools of supercomputer design. First, we have the kick-ass, retro-future Death Star category, which includes the The Connection Machine 5 (above), a machine so cool-looking that it actually had a minor role in the movie Jurassic Park. It wasn’t just flashing lights, though. The CM-5 had a massive two (2!) terabytes of RAM, and that was back in 1993.

The second kind of supercomputer design is what we like to call the “filing-cabinet school”, designs so dull that they fit right into even the beige-est of offices. The epitome of this was the cool-sounding Earth Simulator, the world’s fastest computer between 2002 and 2004 with a ridiculous 10 terabytes of RAM. The Earth Simulator could more accurately be called the “Locker-Room Simulator”, so closely does it resemble row upon row of metal closets.

As ever with Pingdom’s galleries, you’ll learn a lot. Did you know, for example, that between 1997 and 2000, the world’s fastest computer used Pentium chips?

Ten of the coolest and most powerful supercomputers of all time [Royal Pingdom. Thanks, Peter!]


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