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TUAW Bits and Pieces: review followups
TUAW Bits and Pieces returns to items we've previously reviewed here on TUAW, offering updates about their usability over time or providing new information we've found since the original post. Antec PowerUp 6000 I've been testing the Antec PowerUp 6000 portable power supply over an extended time, to make sure that I didn't encounter any of the issues that Amazon reviewers reported in terms of battery life. I'm pleased to report that the unit is still working strong and seems to have delivered solid value for me. In my original post, Antec wrote, "We haven't seen that many returns or failures on the PowerUp line. In the case of those two customers on Amazon (and anyone who reports issues or problems) our tech support and customer service reach out to them to either return or replace the unit." Given my extended tests, I don't believe I'd have any issues recommending the unit, especially given Antec's support policy. TableTote I first wrote about the TableTote portable table several years ago, when my daughter was in the hospital for a skiing accident. At that time, numerous readers asked me where they could pick up one. At that time, it was a bit hard to track these down. Now, however, they seem to be regularly stocked on Amazon. Retailing for $30, the stand folds up to a size between a large book and a very small briefcase. It's quite light weight (under 3 pounds) and provides a great workspace for those of us trying to get work done while at the doctor's office or at an airport. As Steve Sande can attest, my learning curve for putting this table together was not the smoothest. I soon discovered that you have to hold the legs at the very end (with the plastic spacers) and insert them that way, rather than trying to push them into place and expect them to snap in. When we were sitting outside the Aspen Grove Apple Store for some product release or another, I provided him with endless hours of amusement until I figured out the trick for getting this table to go together. Now, several years later, I wouldn't live without it. It's one of my favorite accessories, perfect for placing my MacBook Air or iPad. Plants vs Zombies 2 I thought I'd add a note here to this product follow up post now that I've had a lot more time to spend with Plants vs Zombies 2. I've been learning the ropes and really getting down & dirty with the app. Although I really do quite like many of the updates (almost as much as I hate the IAP hard sell), a lot of the game play feels more like hard work than enjoyable exploration. There's a difference between fun level grinding, where you tangibly see your characters and situation improve, and a game that keeps telling you to go back and start again at the beginning: over and over again. After working through each level once, PvZ 2 challenges you to repeat those levels three more times to earn additional stars. These repeats add new challenges (limiting min or max sun, limiting the number of plants you can lose, or limiting the spaces you can plant on), it all feels a lot more like a do over than new adventures. That's a pity because some of the new plants really are adorably clever and the new strategies are intriguing. Unfortunately, those strategies (for example, bok choy with a potato in front of it) just get used over and over and over again. Will I keep playing? Yup -- at least until I find something else to play with -- but am I disappointed? Yes. As much as I loathe the evil that is Candy Crush, that game knows how to keep introducing new sadistic challenges to keep the investment of interest high. Share Bucket To my surprise, Share Bucket, which I reviewed on TUAW a short while ago, has remained on my desktop. It is getting used regularly. It wasn't an app that really shone in terms of polish or features, but it's one that's really filling in a need. Recently updated to version 1.2, Share Bucket now supports imgur and has added various drawing enhancements and bug fixes. The interface feels stronger and I'm really pleased that the devs are responding to user feedback and keeping the app in active development. Planter When I recently reviewed Post Haste, TUAW mainstay Brett Terpstra dropped me a note about a similar product he's built. His Planter app accepts simple, indented text files and uses those to define a directory tree structure, building folders of nested directories as deep as you need them to be. Like Post Haste, this helps you to establish templated folders for creative and development projects that use common tree structures.
Dollar Store Accessories: The GoJo iPhone Headphone
Of all the ridiculous tech in the world, the GoJo iPhone headset has got to be among the most ridiculous. It consists of a headband that attaches to your phone, enabling you to make literally (groan) hands-free calls. It works courtesy of a suction cup and attachment point stickers. You clean the back of your phone, add the sticker and grab that sticker with the onboard suction cup. The grip is reasonably strong. I mention that as an aside, since that grip quickly becomes immaterial. The entire point of this unit is to give you a cheek-and-ear-wedgie, physically attaching a phone to your face for untold sweaty hours at a time. The unit I tested gave me a massive headache, gripping my head with sufficient force to ensure that my phone would never be leaving my face. The phone stayed in place, but it became far more intimate with my jawline than I ever consented to. I had to peel my poor iPhone off my face to get some relief. Apparently, not everyone dislikes the "Hey, is that an iPhone Cthulhu chowing down on your face?" approach created by the GoJo. The Amazon reviews included several non-one-star write-ups. Some of them even appeared to be non-ironic. On the whole, we here at TUAW cannot recommend this unit except if you somehow suffer from iphonevoraphilia. This baby was originally released at a substantially higher price than the $1 I spent at my local Dollar Tree. All told, it probably wasn't worth that buck.
Clipr: a low-fuss OS X pasting utility
Clipr (free, US$0.99 cloud sync IAP) offers a tiny, low-fuss utility that targets anyone looking for a fast, low-footprint solution for OS X clipboard management. Developer Eric Mann tells TUAW that he wrote the app in response to other clipboard utilities on the market. "My computer needs to run as fast as possible," he explained. "It needs to have nothing else bogging it down. There's a bunch of clipboard managers out there, but they do too much in the sense that every time you copy an image or video, it copies all that into RAM. After an hour or two, OS X's Activity Manager shows the clipboard apps rising to the top of the list. It's frustrating, so I wanted to re-think the clipboard manager." Even at version 2.0, Clipr remains a bit of a work in progress. It consists of three components: an OS X menu bar app, which constantly monitors clipboard changes on your behalf; a web-based server that offers clipboard-history mirroring no matter where you are; and an upcoming iOS 7 app that will passively monitor and collect clipboard saves on your phone. A useful desktop feature lets you text out your clippings by SMS. I tested a custom-built version of the app that enabled me to test it with what's normally IAP-only cloud access. The Mac-to-cloud component offers passive, encrypted sync. As you copy items, they migrate to your web-based CliprApp website account. "From our end," Mann said, "we only see an encrypted database. We can see the number of things you store with us, but not their content. It's completely encrypted just like passwords. You might copy bank account info, credit card info, and we don't see it. We didn't want that to be a question. Your plain text will never show up in a Google search. The data's completely behind a user-authentication system." The CliprApp website allows you to review your clipboard history, no matter where you are. You set the synching email address in app preferences. At this time, you do not enter a password for that account, which I think is a bit of a security risk. Someone who guesses your email address can easily spam your account. It's a send-only hole, however. No one can read that data without your full credentials. In my tests, Clipr worked fast and reliably with very little system demands. I kept Activity Monitor open to keep an eye on system memory and CPU overhead. I appreciated settings that let me control how many items to keep in memory, and whether to launch the app automatically at login. Mann is working hard on improving the product and getting the iOS 7 app ready for market.
Don't get hooked by this Apple Store phishing campaign
Apple fans beware! A new email phishing campaign dangling a bogus US$200 Apple Store gift card as bait to snag unsuspecting victims is making the rounds, according to security firm Webroot. The email that arrives (see image above) looks strikingly similar to those that are sent by Apple, using the Apple logo and similar type styles. As usual with phishing campaigns, this deal sounds too good to be true -- all you need to do is click a download link or open an attached file, and voila! A $200 gift card is yours! Well, not really -- instead, performing either task installs Java-based malware that can pull personal data from your computer. That data could be enough to make you the victim of identity theft if you fall for this deadly hook. Apple never just randomly sends out gift cards. In cases where the company has provided gift cards to customers, they're in much smaller amounts and done for some specific reason -- like a rebate on a previous purchase. Apple also never displays a link to an external site or requires the download of an attachment. Another tell -- Apple never refers to customers as "clients." So, if you get an email in the next couple of months telling you about a $200 Apple Store gift card that you've magically received, dump it immediately. Do not click the link, and most assuredly do not look at the attachment. Be sure to pass this warning along to your less tech-savvy friends who might not read TUAW. [via MacNN]
TUAW on YouTube Geek Week: Southern Stars and SkyCube
By now we hope you've watched the first two YouTube Geek Week videos from TUAW -- the Stupid WeMo Tricks. Now we're going to something equally geeky, but much more impressive. In these two videos, TUAW editor-in-chief Victor Agreda Jr. talks with Southern Stars Founder and CEO Tim DeBenedictis not only about the company's products -- astronomy and telescope control apps -- but also a project that DeBenedictis is literally trying to get off the ground. In this first video, you'll see Southern Stars' incredible SkySafari 3 Pro app (US$39.99) in action, not only giving you a view of what it would be like to be in orbit around Saturn, but also controlling a telescope using the company's SkyFi Wireless Telescope Controller. You'll also get an idea of how the company's SkySafari Plus for Mac ($19.99) works. But wait, there's more geekiness. DeBenedictis is working on a project to launch a small "CubeSat" called the SkyCube next year. It was funded through Kickstarter, and you can still buy a sponsorship of the satellite (including tweeting messages from space or having the satellite take a picture for you) on the SkyCube web page. The Southern Stars Satellite Safari app ($4.99) is what sponsors will use to command the satellite. In this video, Victor chats with DeBenedictis about the SkyCube project and you can see a mockup of the tiny satellite in action.
Origin Stories: Steve Sande
I certainly didn't start my career with plans to become a blogger and editor at one of the world's most active Apple websites. When I was a child dreaming about a future career path, computer science barely registered on the "What I want to do when I grow up" list since only corporations owned room-sized mainframes at that time and there was no such thing as a home computer. The first time I had any physical contact with a computer was in 8th grade in Aurora, Colorado in the Apollo moon landing year of 1969. The Aurora Public Schools had purchased a Data General Nova (see console photo of a similar model at top of this post) in that year for accounting and scheduling purposes, and some brilliant person came up with the idea of buying some Teletypes that could be used as dialup terminals to allow personnel at the schools to access the main computer remotely. Well, the administrators and teachers at the school weren't all that interested in computers, so guess who started using the Teletypes and Nova to learn how to program in BASIC? The students. Since they wouldn't let us save our programs to paper tape (that would come in about two or three years), any programs we ran were usually quite short out of necessity – we'd type 'em in, run them, try to figure out what the TOO MANY NESTED GOSUBS error meant, and then start all over again. It was fun, but frustrating with no real way to store the programs permanently. In 9th and 10th grade, I was only able to play rarely with the Nova or whatever computer they may have purchased as an upgrade. But when the school announced in 11th grade that the regular algebra class would also be offered in a "computer algebra" version providing access to the school system's minicomputer, I jumped on the opportunity to have a full semester of working with ... the future! Things were a little better at that point. We could save our programs out on paper tape, kind of the "floppy disk" of the era. I think part of the reason we wanted to save to paper tape was that the tape punch created some very good confetti for high school football games... About this time I became very interested in two things; transportation engineering and writing. I had a wonderful high school English teacher by the name of David Faull (still alive and kicking) who really taught me how to write, something I'd need to do in college in those pesky elective courses. I had decided to go into Civil Engineering, and was accepted at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Every engineering student at the time had to take an introductory computer class – CS 101 – in which they were introduced to two things: punch card input and FORTRAN IV. There was nothing worse than sitting down at a keypunch machine with a handwritten FORTRAN coding form, typing in several hundred cards, all of which needed to be read by a machine in order and without typos for your program to run. I can recall hearing of several computer science grad students who had nearly committed suicide after having ultra-long programs scattered to the wind when they accidentally dropped boxes of punch cards... One of my best high school buddies, Rick Brownson, was a student at CU at the same time in the Electrical Engineering department, and I recall that in 1976 he introduced me to an amazing game –- Lunar Lander –- that displayed vector graphics in real time onto a round green-screen terminal. We wasted many a weekend hour playing that game in one of the EE computer labs. Rick also introduced me to the nascent world of personal computing around that time, as he and I soldered chips into a MITS Altair 8800 kit in late 1975. I really wasn't all that impressed with the Altair, since when we finished it there was no way for us to connect it to a display (usually an old TV), and we had no keyboard for it. So we flipped switches on the front of the device to enter 8080 opcodes and then looked at the LEDs to see the results. I remember taking a weekend drive to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1976 to go to a Altair convention of some sorts; the highlight was getting a pirated copy of Bill Gates' Altair BASIC on paper tape from another attendee. At the time I graduated from engineering school in 1978, word was getting out about Apple, but at the time I really didn't see any reason to buy a computer. Even while I was working in my first job and going to grad school, I refused to buy a computer. When I was able to get a Commodore VIC-20 for about $300 I bought one, then when Commodore reduced the price on the C-64 to about $250 the next week, I returned the VIC-20, got a refund, and picked up a Commodore 64. After a short amount of time I found myself hooked. I bought an Epson printer, got the cassette tape drive, and bought the height of communications technology at the time – a 300 baud modem. I quickly found myself on some of the early bulletin board systems of the time. But the Commodore 64 wasn't a "real computer", so when IBM compatible devices started hitting the market I went out and bought a Sanyo MBC-555 PC clone complete with two floppy drives (a Sanyo MBC-550 with only one floppy is shown below)! This is where I got my first introduction to business software, with WordStar as a word processor and CalcStar as a spreadsheet. At this time, I was working for a natural gas pipeline company called WestGas. The company was a subsidiary of a larger electric and gas utility (Public Service Company of Colorado, now part of Xcel Energy), and as a subsidiary we had of control over our destiny. In the fall of 1983, the Vice President of our company came to me to see if I would perform a study of possible uses for personal computers in our company and create a five-year plan to budget the introduction of those devices, so I jumped to the task. Everything was based on costs and benefits, and a calculated rate of return on the investment in IT. In retrospect, a lot of my numbers were probably quite suspect, as they were based on estimates of time savings that most likely never occurred... The final study saw a need for no more than about 15 PCs over the next five years as well as a handful of dedicated IBM DisplayWriter word processors. About the time that my study was completed, there was a lot of speculation in the computer world about Apple's forthcoming Macintosh. I was interested in seeing one, so a few days after they were introduced my boss and I went over to a Nynex Business Center store to take a look. While the mouse, the bitmapped display, and the 3.5" floppy drive were all amazing, the lack of memory (128K) was a real turnoff. Still, I felt as if I had seen the future, and I vowed to get myself a Mac if they ever built a model with more RAM. Towards the end of the year Apple introduced the 512K "Fat Mac", and the company was doing a "Test Drive A Mac" promotion where you filled out loan paperwork, took a Mac home to use for about three days, and if you decided you wanted to keep it they processed the loan. Having the Mac at home really made me fall in love with it, so in December of 1984 I bought my first Mac. Being enthralled with the Mac, I started lugging it with me to work. By this point I was the supervisor of a group called "Special Projects", and my team was charged with a number of things: regulatory compliance, studies, project management, and now IT. Pretty quickly, my co-workers got began to turn into Mac fans, and I started tweaking the five year plan to buy fewer PCs and more Macs. I was also going to a lot of Mac User Group meetings in those days; that was the place to really try out software, as most everyone would bring boxes of floppies as well as the original disks for new applications they had purchased. Copying was rampant, but I don't remember anyone doing outright pirating; if you tried a program and liked it, you'd end up buying it. That was the case for me in 1985 when I tried out a copy of Aldus Pagemaker (the first "professional" page layout application) and then bought the application. At one point, I bragged to our financial manager that I could use the app to lay out our subsidiary's annual report at a much lower cost than sending it out to a traditional printshop; he called my bluff and for the next month I worked with the very buggy 1.0 software to create the report. In the end, I was successful and the finance department decided to get Macs for everyone. In a few more years, the engineering role ended for me and I was a full-time IT manager. Starting in 1987 and through 1994, I attended Macworld Expo in San Francisco. From about 1990 to 1994, I also went to the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference, which was held in San Jose at that point. These were the years of trying to get a new Mac OS off the ground, the intro of the Newton MessagePad, the MPW vs. CodeWarrior battles, and extremely boring keynotes by such luminaries as Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio. I also spent a lot of time using Pagemaker to create printed newsletters for WestGas and for a number of groups I was a member of. While that was a bit of work that I never really ended up getting paid for, it taught me a lot about design, layout, printing, and writing. From 1986 to 1994, I also ran a Mac bulletin board system known as MAGIC (Mac And [Apple II] GS Information Center). This started off on my original Mac 512, and by the time I quit running the BBS and moved to a website, it was a three-phone-line setup running on two networked Macs Including my favorite Mac of all time, a Mac IIcx. The BBS was the "official site" for the MacinTech Users Group, a MUG that's still going strong to this day. My first website was PDAntic.com, a play on John Sculley's acronym for the Newton – Personal Digital Assistant – and the fact that my wife often refers to me as being pedantic. I chose to run the site with news posts written in a reverse chronological order, which means that I was essentially doing blogging in 1994! I was doing some half-hearted development for the Newton at the time, and still have a working MessagePad 2100. 1995 was the start of a bad period for me personally – our pipeline company was swallowed back into our parent company, and then all of us who had any dealings in information technology were outsourced to IBM's ISSC services group (later IBM Global Services). While I won't go into details, it was the worst part of my career, with incompetent and occasionally unethical managers, a strategy that consisted of trying to do more and more work with fewer employees (with predictable bad results), and the most demoralized staff I've ever seen. I survived for nine years, after which I chose to go out on my own. At the beginning of my time with IBM our client (the company I worked for) had a total of over 1,200 Macs company-wide; by the time I left we were down to a handful in the corporate communications department. One of my first IBM projects in 1996 was to move all of the Mac users to Windows 95 –- I should have quit when I was ordered to do that. One bright spot during the years 1999 through 2006 was my participation in a number of Microsoft's Mobius conferences. These were meetings of those of us who ran mobile-oriented websites, with Microsoft showing off concepts and picking our brains for ideas about UI, built-in applications, and the direction of the mobile world. I also met a number of the top bloggers in the mobile space, including Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, who were both instrumental in starting up Engadget. Peter was one of the co-founders of Weblogs, Inc., the blog network that TUAW was a part of before being purchased by our current owner -- AOL. In 2005 I started my own consulting firm, Raven Solutions, to do Mac consulting and support. I became a member of the Apple Consultant Network (ACN), which helped my business to grow quite quickly. I also started writing books at about this time, creating a book called "Take Control of your iPod: Beyond the Music" that is still for sale from Adam and Tonya Engst's Take Control Books. One top moment about this time was seeing Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone at the 2007 Macworld Expo. That was something I'll never forget, and I have a Nitrozac painting of the event within my field of view in my office. In late 2007 I was on a weekend trip to Vegas with my wife when a friend pointed out that one of my favorite Apple sites –- TUAW –- was accepting applications for freelance writers. I turned in my requisite three sample articles, but didn't hear anything ... until April of 2008. I was on a business trip when I received a call from former TUAWite Scott McNulty, who wondered if I was still interested in being a TUAW blogger. He gave me a test that I remember quite well; I had one hour (sitting in an airport waiting for a flight) to write a news post about a new and completely hypothetical Apple product. I zapped it to him via email with time to spare and was offered the job. Since that time I've become a full-time employee of TUAW parent company AOL, I've met thousands of TUAW readers at Macworld/iWorld and other events, written a number of books (many with fellow TUAW blogger Erica Sadun), and published almost 1.8 million words of blog posts. I love sharing time with TUAW fans every Wednesday afternoon on TUAW TV Live, as well as delivering the daily Apple news on the Daily Update podcast. And when I get to join with my teammates for one of the Sunday night Talkcasts, that's like getting together with family. The only way to describe my life right now is as "blessed." I work with a great team of professionals doing what I love to do the most, writing about a company that has had such a huge effect on the course of my career and my life. I don't know how long this ride will last, but I sincerely hope it's for a long, long time.
Feedly Pro available with search, Evernote support, more
Several of us around the TUAW newsroom love Feedly -- it's a free, cloud-based RSS aggregation tool that stepped into the void that the loss of Google Reader created. In order to finance further development of this powerful tool, Feedly today announced an early lifetime edition version of Feedly Pro. While general availability of Feedly Pro won't occur until "this fall," the Feedly team is making a lifetime edition available for US$99 starting today. That $99 provides early access to the app, and you will never have to pay the $5 monthly ($45 annual) subscription for the Pro version. Access to the lifetime edition is limited to the first 5,000 respondents. So what does Feedly Pro have that the existing version doesn't? Article search, so that you can search within your feeds. Security, thanks to https. One-click save of any Feedly Pro article to your Evernote account. Most importantly, if you need support and you're a Feedly Pro subscriber, you'll be bumped to the front of the line. For those who use Feedly and need a bit more power, Feedly Pro looks like a good solution and the lifetime edition is a real bargain.
BlackBerry pushes BBM beta invites
Back in May, TUAW reported that BlackBerry Messenger would be arriving for iOS by the end of the summer. In June, T-Mobile UK accidentally tweeted that BBM would arrive on June 27, but that turned out to be a false alarm. Finally, it appears that with the launch window for the app rapidly shrinking, BlackBerry is finally beginning to send out beta invitations for BBM. Well, at least they're sending them out for a few Android users who are running 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and later. There's still no word on whether any iOS beta users have been contacted about the beta -- if you happen to be one of those beta candidates, please let TUAW know via the "Tip Us" button in the upper-right corner of this page. As blogger Chris Velazco at our sister site TechCrunch notes, It's still a little confusing to me that BlackBerry is taking this approach in the first place. I mean, for a long while there, BlackBerrys were the smartphones to own and at least part of its appeal hinged on its curiously hardy (well, mostly hardy) messaging system. Of course, making the leap to alternative platforms presents its own set of issues, not least of which is the fact that iOS and Android are already saturated with free or freemium messaging apps. Whether bringing BBM to iOS and Android can revive the fortunes of the company from Waterloo, Ontario is something that only time will tell.
Daily Update for July 31, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Why Chromecast may be cool after all
Today, in the TUAW backchannels, we've been discussing Chromecast, Google's sub-$40 streaming dongle for television sets. I like the idea and will probably buy one. If I'm understanding the early publicity correctly, Google has two really strong use cases, but I don't think it's any kind of "competitor" to Apple TV. It's another thing entirely. The real draw for Apple TV isn't mirroring. Sure it mirrors, and sure you can stream data out to it, but you do so with a lot of DRM issues -- with the motion picture and recording industries hovering over your shoulder and making sure you behave. (That's probably a big reason why Google isn't open-sourcing their SDK.) No, the reason people use Apple TV is the content. The draw is Netflix. The draw is Apple special events. The draw is music and slideshows. The draw is any of the other subscription services that let people like Dave Caolo watch baseball. You don't have to bring your phone to ship over compelling material, you just sit on your couch and watch. The Chromecast supports a few services pushed from mobile devices now, like Netflix (although the free ride is over already). Over time, more apps will appear, and one thing they'll all have in common is the device-to-dongle WiFi transmission. Chromecast does not provide a native interface the way the Apple TV does. While content streaming makes sense for some things -- presentations, sharing photos, etc. -- it's not always the best for high bandwidth TV shows and movies. That's why Apple TV comes with an Ethernet port and onboard services that let you catch up without having to mess around with your cell phone or tablet. Admittedly, some of the best things about AirPlay involve game playing, but in my experience -- and that of the devs I consulted with -- it's an extremely minor part of the marketplace, at least at this time. (Ask me again in the fall, when we start to see some of those custom controllers working with phones and iPads.) So where do I expect Chromecast to succeed? For travel -- both business and personal. First, I think it's just dandy for anyone who has business meetings. It is a small, inexpensive dongle without a lot of cords or overheads -- besides the power cords never shown in the promo photos. Still, it will be a mostly trivial affair to pull out your Android or iOS phone and get to presenting, especially with business-supplied Wi-Fi (or, in a pinch, with your own pocket router). I think that's a ridiculously strong and appropriate use of the system. [Note that not all business or enterprise WiFi networks are particularly Apple TV-friendly, depending on their security and routing configurations. It's yet to be seen if Chromecast will be subject to the same networking hurdles, but in the meantime bringing your own router or a 4G hotspot when working with either technology is a good safety net, as is an old-fashioned VGA or HDMI adapter. –Ed.] Second, for low-bandwidth (!) movies and TV shows and music, say when visiting a hotel and watching content from your phone or tablet? I can't see how that's going to be a bad thing at all. (Assuming the hotel offers an HDMI input on its TVs, of course.) I know I'm going way out on a limb here, but I could really see Apple following suit on this, offering an Apple TV 2 Go dongle. The idea of extending AirPlay to a dongle? I just really love that concept. I'm not sure how good or bad Chromecast will be, but I get why Google wants to go there.
Origin Stories: Dave Caolo
I didn't see an Apple computer until I was in college. My family had a series of beater computers when I was young, and my first Internet experiences were with Prodigy. I thought it was fun, even when the Internet was little more than posting conversations on bulletin boards. I wish I could say that using a computer back then was a magical experience complete with descending doves and ethereal music, but it really wasn't. Our home computers, such as they were, held my attention for short bursts here and there, and that was that. Before that we had a Commodore Vic 20, and before that I can remember playing Pong on my grandmother's enormous, console RCA TV. You may remember those huge sets with the faux wood casing and super-cool speaker grille off to the right. I don't remember seeing a computer during high school outside of those that were in my house. But that changed when I started attending college. The library, or "Media Center," at Marywood University had several huge, beige Macs. I can't remember what they were, but I started at Marywood in 1991, so I let you try and figure it out. I used them for little more than writing papers, unfortunately, but after four years I was very comfortable and familiar with the Macintosh operating system. I also sent and received my first email as a freshman at Marywood, as one of my professors insisted we communicate that way. Today I recall a blinking orange cursor and lots of text commands. I also remember thinking email was a preposterous waste of time, because I could walk to my professor's office in the time it took me to send a short message. After graduation I took at job teaching at a residential school in Massachusetts. Lo and behold, I showed up to find Macs everywhere. There was an aging SE/30 on my desk (this was 1994) and a few Color Classics here and there plus several Apple laser printers, each the size of a Honda Civic. I was immediately comfortable with those machines, a fact that later paid off. The IT director at the time had written a data analysis system with Excel 6 and HyperCard. It was really cool, and I remember that if we wanted to work in the system, to enter data collected while working with the students, we had to boot from a certain floppy disk. There were two staff computer labs in addition to the machines on our desks, where we'd sit and beg each other for a disk so we could get some work done. As time went on I noticed my interests were shifting from education to the Macs. I started doing little projects with the school's IT department and, several years later, became the IT director for the school. Those were fun times, as my appointment coincided with Steve Jobs' return and the introduction of those beautiful blue iMacs. We ordered lots of them, and I got to set them up and service them. I had a great time. The design on those machines went through several revisions, which was good. Initially, there was a handle that slid everything out, save the display, in one big, heavy and unwieldy chunk of Apple hardware. Swapping a hard drive, RAM, optical drive or PRAM battery was an unpleasant battle with gravity. I can also remember installing an AirPort Base Station with my colleague as well as the big, dumb grins on our faces when we were standing outside with a G3 iBook while connected to the Internet. Now that was magical. Time went on and I got to work on iBooks, MacBooks, an Xserve and more. I started reading TUAW at that time, back in the Weblogs, Inc. days. A call went out for writers one day. I applied, and C.K. Sample, III hired me. I shudder to think of all the grey hairs I caused him with my typing errors and soul-crushing grammar. I still remember the day I recorded a podcast with C.K...or, I thought I did. Oops. Then one horrible day in 2009, we were told that the school would close in six months. It actually took eight weeks. 110 of us lost our jobs, and suddenly my part-time gig at TUAW was my only income. I applied for work everywhere and was unsuccessful. I skip the gory details by saying that 2009 is a year I'd love to forget. I honestly don't know how we didn't lose the house, the car, everything. A terrible, unpleasant time. Fortunately, my hard work at TUAW paid off and Victor offered me a full-time position with AOL. I gladly accepted and have been chugging along ever since. Today I say "yay" or "nay" to the news you do (or don't) see on TUAW during the week. The people I've worked with here are –- and I'm not just saying this –- top notch in every single sense. We laugh and have fun but we also work hard. You should see this crew swing into action during an Apple event. It's amazing. I've been at it for a while and I hope to do it a while longer. Thanks for reading TUAW and for supporting us for all these years.
DevJuice: Recovering your UUID after upgrading
Some of our TUAW staff got really excited this week when the iPad beta of iOS 7 finally debuted. So excited, in fact, that they forgot to check if their device was properly registered with their dev account. They installed the beta -- and, as you probably guessed, got stuck. Fortunately, for those in such a situation, Apple provides an enterprise tool that enables you to retrieve UUIDs from unactivated devices. Website HighTechDad has a great post about exactly this situation. The iPhone Configuration Utility for Enterprise allows you to plug in your device and fetch all the information you need. So why not register directly through Xcode's organizer? The answer is that not everyone is familiar or comfortable in the IDE, especially those who play support roles on development teams -- such as designers, managers and others who aren't quite hands-on.
Plants vs. Zombies 2 gets delayed, now coming later this summer
I got to see Plants vs. Zombies 2 running at E3, and the game looked essentially done. That's why this news is so surprising. PopCap has tweeted that the title has been delayed from its July 18 launch to "sometime later on this summer." Note that it will still premiere on iOS. There could be several reasons for this. PopCap is part of EA, so perhaps the title must go through extra quality reviews, or maybe July 18 conflicts with something else in EA's lineup. It's also possible that PopCap wants to leverage other additions to the Plants vs. Zombies empire (the company is working on a cheeky third-person shooter based on the popular franchise). There are also some concerns from E3 about the game's freemium elements. Unlike the original game, Plants vs. Zombies 2 is free to play, but dependent on in-app purchases for revenue. So it's possible that PopCap is reconsidering, or at least tweaking, those elements. We won't know for sure until we see the game again, which will hopefully be soon. Plants vs. Zombies 2 (which is somewhat ironically titled "It's About Time") is now set to arrive later this summer.
AOL for iPad now in the App Store
AOL, the parent company of TUAW, Engadget, TechCrunch and Huffington Post, today announced the availability of AOL for iPad (free). While for many longtime internet users the AOL acronym may bring back nightmares of receiving daily CD-ROMs in the mail, the company is quickly turning into a very nimble content provider around the world. The app was designed from the ground up for the iPad, featuring a tiled UI with stories that can be tapped to dive in deeper. While the app opens with a window onto general featured news, users can select their area of interest to focus only on stories in that area: entertainment, food, health, money, sports, style, tech, travel and world. %Gallery-192537% For those who use AOL for free email, there's a small envelope button on the top toolbar that provides access to your inbox. Another button provides a list of AOL On Network top videos -- a tap on a video icon expands the thumbnail to a fullscreen player for a quick view of the short blurbs. Want to save content for later reading or viewing? Every story sports a pair of buttons that provide instant access to sharing (via Facebook, Twitter and email), as well as giving readers a way to mark that content as a favorite. A tap on the "heart" button starts a cute animation in which a red heart flies up to the favorites list. It's an amusing way to reinforce the message that the article has been saved for future use. If you're looking for an all-in-one source for more than just tech news, the new AOL for iPad app is definitely worth a look. And hey, it's free (ad-supported).
FX Photo Studio for iPhone reaches 10 million downloads; special deal for Mac version
We're used to hearing about the huge numbers of downloads that are produced by the App Store, but it's rare when TUAW gets news about a specific app. MacPhun, the company that develops FX Photo Studio and a host of other iOS and Mac apps, recently decided to make FX Photo Studio for iPhone a free download after selling the app for US$1.99 for four years. The goal? To see if they could reach 10,000,000 downloads of the app. They were able to do so in 45 days, an incredible feat for any app, but surprising for an app that has been around since May of 2009. To celebrate, MacPhun came up with a unique deal: Every third person who sends a confirmation that they own FX Photo Studio for iPhone and iPad (two separate apps) gets the $19.99 FX Photo Studio Pro for Mac absolutely free. Send screenshots showing your proof of ownership of those two apps to gift@macphun.com, and you've got a one in three chance of picking up a Mac app for free. Congratulations to MacPhun on achieving the download goal!
So you've been Sherlocked: AirParrot developers respond to new Mavericks features
On Monday, Apple introduced OS X Mavericks, their next-generation operating system for Macs. One feature Apple demoed on stage enables users to use an HDTV as an extra monitor, courtesy of Apple TV and AirPlay connectivity. If that feature sounds familiar, you may already be an AirParrot customer. The US$9.99 app allows you to stream your screen or individual windows to Apple TV and it also offers extra screen support. The app's popular extended desktop features have been around for a while. After Monday's announcement, we contacted Sidney Keith of Squirrels to get his reaction to the Mavericks feature. Today, he provided the following, thoughtful response. We're continuing to innovate and develop at our own pace. Just because Apple released one of our features as its own doesn't mean we quit. We're still striving for quality applications that solve our customers and users needs. Honestly, we're glad Apple finally caught up. It gives us that much more motivation to innovate and create cooler applications that users want and need. Software is about progress, and that's what this is going to give us. Not only do we have the motivation to keep innovating, we now have the opportunity and obligation to help those that can't or won't upgrade to 10.9. We have a large and loyal customer base that we'll continue supporting. We don't plan on dropping support for 10.6, even though we've now seen three major releases since then, and not everyone is as loyal to Apple as we may think. Upgrades can be costly for institutions and businesses that have hundreds of systems that need to be upgraded. We're here for those users, and we're here for the ones that don't trust the first iterations of Apple products. Whatever the reason for not upgrading, we have their back. Apple has a global audience to attend to, and while we also have users all around the globe, our feature set is much more focused. We're able to focus solely on one group of features instead of an entire operating system. While Apple might add a feature, it's likely they'll not change that feature significantly in any future releases. We saw the addition of AirPlay desktop mirroring in OS X 10.8, but that feature hasn't changed since its initial release-roughly a year since the beta. We've got the ability to focus our entire teams attention on that one specific feature if we need to. That's something you'll be seeing over the next few months. We'll be doing a lot of innovation and creation in this area, and while we hope Apple doesn't steal our new features, we know it's inevitable. It's almost an honor. If you want to see what Apple's going to to include AirPlay-wise at WWDC 14, you can probably bet our next few releases will be a preview. Squirrels is also the developer of the Reflector app, which nearly all of us at TUAW have purchased. It allows you to stream AirPlay to your Mac or PC. Note: in case you're wondering what "Sherlocked" refers to, here's a definition. Looking for other examples? Here's another for your delectation. No downeys, millers, cumberbatches, lauries, bretts, etc. were hurt in the preparation of this article.
Button TrackR extends Indiegogo campaign: never leave your coat or keys behind again
Way back in November, TUAW first covered the Wallet TrackR campaign on Indiegogo. That initial campaign offered a device that could be slipped into your wallet or jacket, and that used Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to ensure long battery life and easy iOS integration. Originally scheduled to ship in April, units are just now getting ready for delivery. CEO Chris Herbert tells TUAW that the delay was unavoidable and frustrating. The first samples Phone Halo received from the manufacturer did not pass their quality assurance standards, so the company had to go a few more rounds before they could begin their mass production run. The units are currently in shipment from China and should be sent out to the original purchasers by the end of the month. Even as they were working to fulfill their initial crowd funding effort, their second foray into personal item tracking was well underway. Their new product Button TrackR streamlines Bluetooth Low Energy tracking even further. Units are smaller, use just one battery, and are (frankly) better looking and more portable. Button TrackR was built using the same technology that powered Wallet TrackR but this second generation uses miniaturized circuitry that enabled Phone Halo to fit it into a much smaller form factor. Customer feedback helped drive a fundamental redesign that makes it easier to stick the unit onto things -- such as remote controls. It ships with 3M double-sided semi-permanent sticky tape in the package. A new attachment hole enables you to attach a loop (also provided in the package) to connect the TrackR to your keychain or even to bracelets to put on your kids and pets. When I first tested the Wallet version of the device back in November, my family fell in love with it. Its beep-to-locate feature means you can find your keys even if they fall into cracks in the couch (and yes, my kids pushed items down there just to make sure during testing). Even better than that, you can set up the software to alert you if you walk away from items that have been left behind -- this was a godsend for items like coats at restaurants, specifically items you don't normally hold in your pocket or backpack. The Bluetooth LE feature means this functionality works even if the Phone Halo app is running directly in the foreground, and best of all, it's super energy efficient, so you won't kill your batteries if you use this tech. Now with Button TrackR, a new crowd-sourcing recovery system plays an even bigger role. Although your phone remembers the last-tracked location of your lost item, many customers want to find items that have gone out of range from their phones. The challenge is getting the lost item in touch with devices that could help send its location back to you. "So we thought, what if other people could help you find your lost stuff for you," Chris Herbert explained. "What we did is update the software so that a lost device starts broadcasting a pre-registered unique ID stored in a cloud database. When other people with our app move near the tracker, the Bluetooth LE on their device can pick up that broadcast and will send those GPS coordinates to our company." The Phone Halo system associates that device ID and coordinates with your account, and sends the location data to you. "This provides an almost live GPS tracking stream for all your lost items without a subscription like other device providers might charge," said Herbert. Worried about privacy? The "call home" signal never activates so long as the device stays in contact with its primary phone. It only starts broadcasting after an hour. What's more, the Wallet TrackR owners who are helping you out will never know anything about your details, your device, or any location. That information is sent invisibly and encrypted for privacy. Want to pick up a device or ten for yourself? Head on over to Indiegogo and place your order. Originally established with a $15,000 goal, Button TrackR has now raised almost a quarter of a million dollars. The developers kindly extended the campaign to the end of the month specifically at TUAW's request. You can pick up a single tracker for $25, two for $40 or if you want to go crazy, the best value for most consumers is going to be 10 devices for $95. The units should ship in August, but given the company's insistence on high quality controls please allow a little extra time for them to get things exactly right.
DevJuice: Reveal enables you to inspect, modify and debug iOS apps
Reveal, now in public beta, was originally created to enable its developers to debug client applications. Over time, they found that the tool became so useful on its own that it deserved to be productized. Developer Sean Woodhouse tells TUAW, "We built Reveal to help us debug applications for our clients. The applications we build, particularly for iPad, can have extremely complicated view structures, and Reveal's ability to isolate and focus on a subset of the view hierarchy has been critical to manage that complexity. The ability to change view properties also lets us test simple visual changes without recompiling." If you're thinking that Reveal sounds a lot like Spark Inspector, which I recently wrote about, you're right. Reveal covers much of the same ground in terms of application inspection, tweaking and exploration. It does so, however, with its own flair and interface strengths. I am very impressed by this product. The app provides a handy "tl;dr" jumpstart for anyone testing it out. Choose Help > Integration Guide. All you need to do to get started is link in a few frameworks, set a build flag and run your app in the simulator. Reveal automatically detects and integrates with any app running its custom framework. Even better, the app stores that framework in its own bundle, so there's no other material to incorporate. From the app download to up and running, it took me maybe a minute to get going. Once running, select your running app. You can tweak items in the View inspector (the third of the four inspector panes) and your changes are automatically injected into the application. You can see the simulator update live. For the app I was testing, I messed around with frames and content modes, and found the app to perfectly adjust those items. Elements in the other three panes appeared to be inspect-only in my testing. Reveal is not targeted at Auto Layout at this time, and some of my tweaks put Auto Layout's nose out of joint a bit, such as when I attempted to set a view's affine transform to non-rectangular results. This app will be best for anyone still working in the frames and bounds world, who wants to be able to adjust their interfaces in real time. It's perfect for developers who prefer not to rely entirely on Interface Builder and who use extensively use code. With Reveal, you'll be able to update interfaces without endlessly performing the tweak-build-test cycle. Instead, you explore in a live playground until you've found the interface you're looking for. Like Spark Inspector, I would have liked to have had a product output of some kind, whether it was PaintCode-like code generation, bookmarks of saved interfaces (for later review and comparison) or just settings charts. Unfortunately, neither product offers these options at this time. I'd also love if Reveal integrated with constraints. I almost never deal directly with frames and bounds any more now that Auto Layout has debuted, and I think I would find a tool that let me create, inspect and validate those rules a lot more valuable. That said, Reveal is a lovely app even if it's one I wish I had had about two years ago before Auto Layout premiered. Its interface is top-notch, it's easy to use and I really enjoyed exploring it. Because it's in open beta, I highly recommend that you download a copy and poke around. You may discover that it's exactly the dev tool you've been missing.
DevJuice: 10.8.4 and the iOS Simulator
TUAW reader Peter Johnson of Soluble Apps writes, "I, and a few other developers on my Facebook group, have noticed that, since yesterday's OSX update, every other run on the simulator is crashing on start. It appears to work fine when compiling and running on hardware. I thought it could be useful for your to warn other developers to hold off from performing the update if they want to work on the simulator." I've experienced the same issue, but found that switching from LLDB to GDB (on the advice of Tony Arnold from Apple's Dev Forums) seems to fix the problem for the moment. Update your scheme by selecting Product > Scheme > Edit Scheme, and choose the GDB debugger for your debug scheme. Update: Apple says no more radars are needed. The issue occurs to a process race condition for debugserver. Instead of using GDB, you can alternatively kill your execution, wait a few seconds for the app to wrap up, and then run the next iteration.
DevJuice: A real-world lesson in why you must test on-device
Dave Caolo's daughter has been working hard on a school report regarding the Everglades National Park. So he downloaded a nice-looking iPad app on the subject for her. Swiping around it looked great. And then he tapped on a video. This is what happened. In the TUAW back channel, we scratched our heads, trying to brainstorm any reason for an app to directly link to a YouTube video that didn't support mobile. The best we could come up with was this: we figure that the developer never tested the video on an actual iOS device. But then we tested this theory by trying out the video URL on the iPhone simulator. It didn't work there either. So probably the developer never tested the video at all. That said, although the simulator looks like an iPhone, it never provides a perfect representation of the physical and computation abilities of device deployment. Sometimes, it may reflect a Mac reality over an iOS one. So if you specifically provide a video as part of your app, you should really make sure that it plays back within that app, and not just on the simulator. We'd also recommend that you control the rights and distribution of any material that's fundamental and essential to the app in question. That addresses the problem of another video used within the app. It said: "YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated due to copyright violations." Oh, excellent.
