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Apple granted another important mobile device patent for iOS
Patently Apple notes that among 25 Apple patents officially published by the USPTO today, one was a whopper. US patent number 8,223,134, which covers a "Portable electronic device, method, and graphical user interface for displaying electronic lists and documents," includes 30 separate claims in all. The patent was originally applied for in 2007 and the application was renewed in March of 2012. As you might imagine, that's a pretty broad patent, which means this is a significant victory for Apple in the smartphone patent field. This patent covers almost all of the UI features of modern smartphones, including the displaying of documents on a screen, UI modules for a telephone, video player, camera, and browser, and even scrolling and a multitouch interface feature. Just being granted this patent doesn't grant Apple immediate victory in all of the various current patent cases. But it does provide another plank in the platform that Apple's using to stage its defenses. Yes, the patent battles can get to be a little much after a while, but Apple did do a ton of R&D and other work to reinvent the smartphone and its market, and patents like this are designed to make sure Apple gets the credit it deserves for doing that. Maybe, by picking up an important intellectual property chit like this one, Apple can bring some of these ongoing patent battles to a quicker and easier close. [via Cult of Mac]
Minecraft Pocket Edition adds simplified, touch-based crafting
The world of Minecraft - Pocket Edition was pretty boring up to this point – just mines and mines, everywhere, as far as the eye can see. But finally, the other half of the game has been added in an update: Crafting is now available on the iOS and Android mobile versions of the popular sandbox title.The crafting system for the mobile interface is called MATTIS, as in the Minecraft Advanced Touch Technology Interface System. All you need to do is open your inventory, choose what you want to make, and as long as you have the necessary components, it's made. Other additions in this update include better AI for zombies, cows and ducks, and descriptions of items in your inventory. We're really looking forward to the next update, though: Hopefully Mojang will put Pockets or Editions in the game next.
iHome's iW2 AirPlay speaker to begin shipping this April, for $200
It's been a while since we've heard about iHome's iW2 AirPlay speaker, but that all changed Wednesday, when the company announced that its wireless system will begin shipping on April 1st. Standing at a little under six inches tall, this setup is about 25 percent smaller than its predecessor, the iW1. It's also a bit cheaper, at about $200, though it won't come with a built-in rechargeable battery. For more details and insight, check out the PR after the break.
Ford Sync clears the four million mark, aims to double that within three years
Ford's Sync in-car connectivity system enjoyed quite a prosperous little 2011. Last January, installations of the service topped the three million mark. Now, almost exactly a year later, Sync has come to a full four million vehicles, and it's looking to expand its reach even further. Ford announced the milestone at CES yesterday, projecting that the voice-activated, Microsoft-powered software will clear the nine million hurdle by as early as 2015. It may sound like a bold prediction, but considering that Sync is slated to roll out to markets in Asia and Europe this year, it certainly seems realistic. For more details and back-patting, check out the full PR after the break.
The Lawbringer: Gotta sue 'em all over the Pet Battle system?
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Remember in the last edition of Lawbringer, when I wrote that the majority of the questions post-BlizzCon 2011 were questions about panda people, whether Kung Fu Panda would sue, and how Pandaren are possible in China? Well, there was a third question: How can the Pet Battle system exist in World of Warcraft when it is so spiritually and mechanically similar to the underlying game mechanics of the Pokémon franchise? The truth is that it is and it isn't as similar as you might suspect, and the key factors in any copyright fight don't hold up a potential cause of action. From the BlizzCon presentation, we gleaned a good bit of information about the WoW Pet Battle system coming with Mists of Pandaria. Players have been collecting companion (or vanity) pets for years, little dudes and dudettes who follow your characters around looking cool, performing cute emotes, and acting as the occasional status symbol. Companion pets even became the first foray into Blizzard-accepted real-money gold buying with the Guardian Cub as an experiment in fighting gray-market gold selling. Companion pets have become their own meta-game in WoW despite the introduction of the actual meta-game Pet Battle system. Companion pets will now be at the center of a minigame of their own. After years of collecting and coveting, finally these pets will serve a purpose beyond looking adorable or annoying Dalaran with chilling screams of "NEW TOYS, FOR ME?!" Many players have noticed that the Pet Battle system bears a striking resemblance to the biggest pet battle system franchise ever created, Pokémon. Do you know what Pokémon is? I'm sure you know what Pokémon is.
Developers get a new build of 10.7.2
As 9to5Mac reports, there's a brand new build of Lion 10.7.2 out there in the wild for developers, featuring focused work on iCloud, the Mac App Store, MobileMe, and a few other places like Mail, Spotlight, Time Machine, and even things like the AddressBook and graphics drivers. This is build 11C57, coming only a few days after the last build, 11C55. We'd like to think that the increasing frequency of releases (along with the fact that there are no known issues in this build) means that a public release is right around the corner, but of course Apple is going to take its time. At any rate, devs, go check it out and make sure it's ship shape so the rest of us can see it soon.
Dear Aunt TUAW: What are those lockfiles?
Dear Aunt TUAW, With Lion, I'm seeing a lot of plist.lockfile in my Preferences folder. I'm assuming the "lockfile" business has to do with the new autosave stuff in Lion, but why would that apply to a preference file? Is this a bug or a feature? Your loving nephew, Darren Dear Darren, Feature. Historically, lock files have restricted file access to one application at a time. Auntie has no reason to think that Lion's use of this concept differs. A lock file prevents a second edit from being applied concurrently, preserving information integrity. Access control is especially important when competing processes might want to update an application's defaults at once. Auntie went ahead and used opensnoop to watch what happened as she updated a few preferences. Sure enough, the lock file seemed to be set on application launch and reset on quit % sudo opensnoop -f ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit.plist UID PID COMM FD PATH 501 23363 mdworker 6 /Users/ericasadun/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit.plist 501 23363 mdworker 7 /Users/ericasadun/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit.plist What surprised Auntie was how if she didn't identify a specific preference to watch, that all the preferences lockfiles were refreshed whenever a new lock was applied (Try it yourself, with sudo opensnoop with no arguments). It was also fun to see how TextEdit updated its autosave information, its saved state, its shared file property list and more. Opensnoop is curiousity crack. Hope this helps! Love & snuggles, Auntie T.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: IceClean
OS X does a pretty good job of maintaining itself due to its Unix core, but there are times when you'd like to run some of its self maintenance tasks manually, and that's where IceClean comes in. Just using the built-in Unix System Tasks that underlay OS X, you can clean out system caches for both the user and root, delete temporary files and remove log files all from IceClean's menu-orientated UI. If you feel your Safari is a trudging a little, there's even an option for a Deep Safari Cleanup, which should go someway to helping speed up your experience. IceClean isn't all about cleaning though, it features a whole host of maintenance options including the usual verification and repair of your system disk, disk permissions and .plist files, as well as database optimizations including Launch Services. You can run the whole lot with one command or even schedule the maintenance tasks to be run daily, weekly or monthly at a time to suit you. IceClean can also poll the system for all sorts of information like system, disk and kernel information. Whois and network lookup tools are there too for network diagnostics. You can also force a Time Machine backup, kill Dashboard, speed up Spotlight indexing, force empty the Trash, modify screenshot settings and perform many other small tasks using the Utilities menu. IceClean is a one stop shop for most of your maintenance needs. It's not as user friendly as other options like Onyx, but for the sheer utility built into one app, IceClean is worth the free download.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Onyx
Cleaning up a Mac is something many users never do, but if you want to squeeze all the performance and disk space you can out of your Mac, you need a tool like Onyx. A free multi-purpose utility, Onyx lets you run a myriad of system tasks such as disk maintenance, cache clean-up and index rebuilding. You can use Onyx to clear away the cobwebs that collect in things like the browser cache, font caches, boot, kernel and extension caches, as well as logs from crash reporters, system diagnostics and Software Update. If that wasn't enough, you can also get Onyx to delete previous iTunes libraries, the QuickTime Content Guide, recent items lists and even Mail downloads. OK, you can do most of these things yourself manually, but Onyx makes it fast and easy to do it all from one place. Cleaning isn't the only talent Onyx has -- it's able to do quite a few maintenance and repair tasks such as verifying your startup disk, which it will do on it's first run automatically. By rebuilding the Spotlight Index or LaunchServices, you can often cure small corruption issues with your Mac. You can check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your internal disks, verify file structure and fix disk permissions without having to open Disk Utility. Onyx will also let you change some hidden preferences in Finder and other Apple programs such as iTunes and Mail, allowing you to tweak a few things here and there. Onyx is a great free system utility that we've covered many times in the past and which allows you to perform a load of different tasks all from one application. If you're interested in cleaning out OS X, download Onyx today. By the way, Onyx also works well with OS X Lion.
New developer tool will port Xbox 360 games to iOS
ExEn is a brand new tool for developers that's designed to bridge the gap between XNA, Silverlight and iOS (and eventually Android). XNA stands for "Xbox New Architecture," and is the general API used by developers to create games for Microsoft's Xbox console, and ExEn purports to take those games, and bring them over to Microsoft's Silverlight platform as well as Apple's iOS. It's still a work in progress, so some features are missing (the biggest of these being, of course, that Android compatibility), but it's completely free and open source, so any developers who have XNA code that they want to try and port are welcome to go grab it and give it a shot. If it works (I'm not a developer, so I haven't actually used it), this might put an interesting wrinkle in the developer ecosystem. I had a nice chat with the creator of I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 (yes, that's really the name) a few weeks ago -- that strangely-named dual stick shooter is perhaps the most famous Xbox Live Indie game title, and he recently ported his title over to Windows Phone 7 with the blessing (if not the full support) of Microsoft. But I wonder what his options would have looked like if a tool like this could have allowed him to easily and quickly bring the game over to iOS. At any rate, we'll see if any big XNA developers try to take advantage of a system like this. If it works, hopefully we'll see great XNA games, like Cthulu Saves the World, appear on the iPad and iPhone. [via BGR]
JVC Kaboom adds a guitar input, dares you to get the band back together
New audio input capabilities are nothing new for JVC, but soon you'll be able to show off your guitar chops alongside whatever bands you choose to idolize -- so long as you're kosher with rocking a boombox atop your left shoulder, of course. The company has announced that the 2011 offering from its Kaboom line will showcase a guitar / microphone input (1/4-inch) with mixing capabilities to allow for gigs to be played from anywhere you darn well please. The RV-NB70 will have all the key ingredients of previous models, including an iPod dock (updated to be both iPod and iPhone compatible), a USB host that enables use of a mass storage device, an audio input and CD / radio playback. True to the original's design, this fellow features much of the same look while promising 40 watts of guitar soloing power. Your next box 'o fury can be had right now for $299.95, and if you're eager for an encore, the full presser (as well as a demo vid) is just past the break.
The Mog Log: Pre-reaction
So Naoki Yoshida's producer's letter came just a bit too late last week for me to rewrite my column, which focused mostly on the dungeons and rampant speculation regarding same. This week, however, I can write about all of the things that came out of both his producer's letter and Akihiko Matsui's combat revision document, both of which provide a lot of meaty information for Final Fantasy XIV players to digest. Pretty much all of it is good, with only a couple of downsides here and there. Since there's way too much to possibly digest point-by-point, I'm going to hit the parts that strike me as having the most far-reaching impact and the most concrete data. A lot of this is going to pertain specifically to the combat revisions, as well, since let's face it -- the meat of the game is in fighting things off, solo or in groups. And it's with the battle revisions that one of the biggest changes is coming to Final Fantasy XIV, namely, the removal of physical levels altogether.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Translucent
For the most part your Mac just works, but for some of us, we want a little more information on how well our Macs are working and what's doing what, when. That's where apps like the mainstay of the Mac monitors, iStat Pro and iStat Menus come in. Today we'll be taking a quick look at a small, US$2.99 Mac App Store iStat Menus alternative called Translucent. Translucent sits in your menu bar, just like iStat Menus, providing real-time information on processor utilization, memory and disk usage (including USB mass storage), as well as network activity. You can customize what's shown, the color, the number of CPU cores displayed and a disk activity indicator. The problem with Translucent, however, is that it takes up between 3 percent to 8 percent of your CPU capacity on its own. Now 3 percent isn't a lot, but if you're interested enough to monitor your computer utilization on a minute-by-minute basis, then you're unlikely to want anything taking up unnecessary resources. The other thing is that because it sits in the menu bar constantly, you're going to want it to look good. It's not that Translucent necessarily looks bad, it's just that the icons and activity monitors don't look sharp and contrast heavily with most of the other well designed icons I have sitting in my menu bar. While aesthetics come down to personal preference, other donation-ware options, such as the iStat Pro Dashboard widget or the more fully featured $16 iStat Menus, offer more options, look better and use less resources. Translucent is not bad for the price, but there are better alternatives out there.
Canonical christens Ubuntu 11.10 'Oneiric Ocelot' (update)
Canonical's still one month away from letting Natty Narwhal (also known as Ubuntu 11.04) out of the cage, but it's already teasing us with another OS flaunting an alliterative mammalian monicker. Like the Narwhal before it, Oneiric Ocelot (or Ubuntu 11.10), due out this October, will offer a 2D OpenGL-based Unity interface to support older computers, as well as Qt -- you know, the framework Nokia loved and left hanging. You can also expect Ubuntu to scale back on the number of cloud services with the Ocelot, as it gears up for the release of the as-of-yet unnamed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (long term support). For now, that's all she wrote, but if you're dying to find out how they come up with those adorable Animalia appellatives, check out the source link below. Update: Oneiric Ocelot has also apparently devoured Ubuntu Netbook Edition whole -- starting with Ubuntu 11.04, the products will be completely unified and (according to Canonical) work equally well no matter the form factor.
Making custom alert sounds for your Mac
When you're fed up with your Mac telling you it's not about to open the pod bay doors and wondering if, Dave, you really want to do that, you may want to think about making some custom sounds for it yourself. And as luck would have it, there's a great tutorial on how to do just that over at Macworld. The article looks at both recording your own sounds and using GarageBand to convert your sound files, and how to add the resulting sounds to your system. The article walks you through capturing your own sounds using a microphone and QuickTime Player in Snow Leopard, including how to get rid of initial pauses and the sound of you clicking your mouse at the end of the recording. It goes on to discuss how to convert your recordings to the AIFF format needed for system sounds in OS X using iTunes or GarageBand, and then it explains how to insert the sounds into your system and attach them to specific events. Again, it's a nice tutorial that we recommend you check out. Have fun.
Macworld Expo 2011: Smart Technologies' interactive whiteboards
One of the most interesting booths at last week's Macworld Expo was that of Smart Technologies, who were showing off their interactive touch surface systems. These aren't necessarily Mac-related, unfortunately -- the equipment Smart sells is just an interface, or rather a series of interfaces designed to work with touch-based software. But Smart has supported the Mac platform for over 15 years, we were told, and the demo units on the floor were running OS X. There were a few different concepts up and running (including a table-style touchscreen that used a camera in the table looking up at the touch canvas to optically detect where you were touching), but the most interesting was probably the interactive whiteboard system -- it's a traditional whiteboard with four cameras mounted on each corner facing the board itself, tracking optically on where and when the user is touching the board. The technology works great -- it can tell the difference between a finger, a paintbrush or a full hand swipe, and while Smart's drivers do work with the normal OS X system, they're also building hooks for their technology into various apps -- ArtRage is one that works well with the tech -- and Smart Technologies has their own app called Notebook as well. Again, all of these things run on almost any platform, but Smart says they're committed to "the Mac customer base." Not only has Apple brought touch interfaces to the forefront with the iPhone and the iPad, but Smart told me that Apple is "now bringing the concept of touch into the [desktop] operating system" as well. Smart's solutions for touch will likely live outside of Apple's own definitions, but it was interesting to see what's possible these days in terms of these interfaces. We've got a video demo from the show floor, embedded in the rest of this post.
Elliptic Labs demonstrates its touchless user interface for iPad (with video)
As promised a while back, we got to chat with Elliptic Labs here at CES, and CEO Stian Aldrin walked us through the touchless gesture technology his 15-person Norway-based company is developing as a prototype. The whole thing is based on ultrasound, it turns out -- a small speaker kicks out frequencies higher than the ear can hear, and a set of microphones listens in on the reflections, using an algorithim to calculate where your hand is at as you wave it through the air. The result is a gesture-based control system for touchscreen devices, but without the actual touch. Aldrin told us that the system is already in use in a Norwegian hospital, where surgeons control touchscreen tablets without having to take their sanitized gloves off during surgery. Currently, the system only allows for a few simple gestures (swiping up and down, or left and right), but that's just a limitation of the demo units Elliptic Labs has created. Potentially, such a system could not only recognize the placement and speed of your hand passing by (and indeed, one of the demos in the CES booth could monitor both proximity to the screen and speed, flipping on-screen content faster if you pushed your hand by faster), but it could also calculate multiple points of movement, doing things like multi-touch gestures in the air. You do have to be pretty close in to the screen to operate the device -- rather than a big cone like a Kinect, the system monitors a sphere around itself, so you've got to have your hand enter that sphere for it to register. But Elliptic (who already plan to be back at CES with an even bigger booth next year) suggests that the system could be used for lots of things, from quick music controls to car controls, or anything else where you need to make a touch-style gesture without actually touching the screen. We've got exclusive video after the break of Aldrin demoing a dock version of the system, connected via Wi-Fi to an off-the-shelf iPad running a custom-made app.
BMW releases two apps for iOS
BMW has released two apps for iOS this week. The first one, based on the Mini brand, is called Mini Connected, and it allows you to not only track information about your car, but also access web radio and audio versions of internet feeds, hooked up directly to your car's stereo. And on cars equipped with navigation features, you can even send directions and searches back and forth from your iPhone to the car's systems, and vice-versa. The BMW Connected app does the same thing, only across the manufacturer's vehicle lineup. Interesting, not only that these apps exist (there are already a few solutions for doing all of these things out there), but that they're created and "sold" (both are free) by the car's manufacturers themselves. In essence, an Apple app is being used to market the functionality of these automobiles. I expect to see plenty more examples of branded apps like these at CES next week, and we'll be covering as many of them as we can right here on TUAW.
Elliptic Labs to show off gesture-sensing iPad dock at CES 2011
Elliptic Labs has been working on gesture-sensing technology for a while now (where you can just swipe your hand in the air instead of actually touching a screen), and rumor has it that the company will be showing off a dock at next month's CES show for the iPad -- something that enables you to control Apple's magical and revolutionary device without actually touching it. The main use is apparently in the kitchen (where your hands might be messy from cooking, keeping you from wanting to grease up that screen like a pie plate), but I can see this functionality in a kiosk somewhere, or any system where you wouldn't want people actually laying hands on a device. There's a quick video after the break featuring one of the company's other devices, but presumably the same gestures would be used to control the iPad. It'll be interesting to see, too, just what kind of functionality the controller can offer. Swiping between screens wouldn't be hard, but I'd like to know if it offers any more granular control as well. Fortunately, TUAW will be live at CES, so we'll make sure to stop by Elliptic's booth and give it a try to let you know what it's like.
Kinect running on OS X
Microsoft recently released its Kinect motion sensor system for the Xbox 360 -- it's a little camera-equipped device that plugs into the game console and lets you control game titles, Wii-style, with just your body in lieu of any actual controllers. Just a few days after release, the hardware was hacked, and now hacker Theo Watson has released an OS X port of libfreenect, a library that allows you to run Kinect's output directly into OS X. You can watch video of it all working right after the break -- he doesn't seem real excited about it (that, or he's tired after putting it together), but it is a cool little setup. It's still a work in progress (the device has only been out for a week or so), and of course this is all unofficial -- Microsoft will never be interested in wanting to hook the Kinect up to anything but one of their Xbox 360 gaming consoles. But we've certainly seen some fun things done with the Wii controllers an Apple devices, so maybe something cool will come out of this hack as well.
