A teenage girl alone in a remote farmhouse, an absent father, a boyfriend off at college... and a locked door that conceals a tragic secret. These are the creepy, chilling tropes on display in Haunting Melissa, a serialized video horror story delivered in the form of an iOS app available today on the App Store. Watching the first episode is free, and then you'll wait -- and pay -- to keep going with the narrative.

Haunting Melissa, and the underlying Hooked Digital Media content management platform that drives the serialized episode releases, is the brainchild of Hollywood producer Neal Edelstein. Edelstein has some serious scares on his resume: he produced the US versions of the scare-your-socks-off thrillers The Ring and The Ring 2.

He describes the Haunting Melissa experience as "a ghost story created to be consumed in a dark corner with headphones on and iPhone or iPad in hand." Push notifications alert viewers when the next segment is ready -- and they'll come when you least expect them. Melissa even has a Twitter account (as does the actress who plays her, Kassia Warshawski).

You might think that a spooky, atmospheric serial would suffer in the scale-down from cinematic or TV size onto the iPad or iPhone/iPod screen. In fact, watching Melissa and her friends explore her haunted house (in HD) from a first-person, Blair Witch-esque perspective is quite immersive. Adding headphones to the experience ramps up the creep factor dramatically; Edelstein and his creative team have the sound design chops to scare your ears just as much as the cinematography scares your eyes. If you do want to watch on the bigger screen, the app supports AirPlay output to the Apple TV.

Haunting Melissa is designed to be social, with viewers sharing their impressions and guesses as the mystery deepens, and calling out details and clues that may have been missed on the first viewing. (What really happened to Melissa's dead mother? Why is Brandon being so cagey about coming home from college? Is Holly's little brother just a lovesick kid, or a malicious superhacker? Why doesn't Melissa close her laptop when she goes to bed? And what's the deal with all the crucifixes?) Personally, I'm not a big consumer of thrillers or horror films, but if that is the sort of thing you enjoy, Haunting Melissa raises the bar on quality when it comes to purpose-built iOS experiences.

The basic Haunting Melissa app is free, with in-app US$0.99 purchases for individual episodes and a Season Pass option for the entire experience. Edelstein notes that he is in discussions with other directors and producers to explore bringing their creative ideas to this new storytelling platform. "The technology supports story first and foremost... [we believe] this new app technology will change distribution forever," he says.

You can watch the Haunting Melissa teaser trailer below. Keep the lights on.

Chills and thrills for your iPad with Haunting Melissa originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 May 2013 08:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Update: The new WATCH ABC app is live in the US store. As expected, streaming is available for NYC and Philadelphia residents only. After July 1, you'll have to verify that you subscribe to a TV provider to get live video, and "programming substitution may apply."

Ahead of ABC's spring upfront this coming Tuesday, May 14 ("upfronts" are the glitzy network presentations to get advertisers revved up about the coming season's programming), the New York Times' Brian Stelter found a scoop that has more to do with how we watch TV than which programs we watch.

Disney's ABC network plans to revise its iPad/iPhone app lineup by Tuesday to include free live streaming of ABC channels for viewers in two Northeast cities. The live streaming feature, which will appear as a "live" button in a new Watch ABC app (akin to ABC-owned ESPN's Watch ESPN app) set to replace the the existing ABC Player app, will be available to customers in New York and Philadelphia who can verify that they have access to ABC via a cable or satellite subscription.

GigaOm says that the service's requirement for pay TV subscription will kick in after a six-week introductory period, where it will be open to all comers. According to that post, the ABC live encoding will be powered by the same upLynk hybrid local/cloud streaming technology that's currently at work behind the company's Watch Disney app.

Stelter notes that ABC's programming currently appearing on ABC.com and Hulu Plus may be curtailed in the future, with longer delays before free-to-stream episodes appear; the most current content would be reserved for pay TV subscribers. This would undoubtedly drive cord-cutters somewhat batty.

The streaming feature will be iOS-only for now, and limited to those two markets (where the affiliate stations are owned by the parent company) while the network negotiates with affiliates in other cities. The first affiliate deal, with Hearst Television, will soon add live streaming to 13 additional cities like Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Kansas City and Honolulu. Having NYC be one of the first launch markets means that ABC must be rooting for the New York Knicks (currently down 2-1 in a playoff series with Indiana) to go deep into the NBA playoffs, which the network is carrying this year.

This isn't the first device-centric live television play, by any means. Most US cable, satellite and fiber providers offer some flavor of live channel streaming, with varying marquee features and limitations. Some, like Time Warner Cable and Xfinity, restrict all-you-can-stream access to the subscriber's home WiFi network and offer a more limited channel lineup on the move. Verizon's FiOS app streams plenty of popular pay-TV channels on your home WiFi network, but no broadcast content. In the case of ABC's live channel stream, the branding for the network can move completely out from under the program provider's umbrella; that way, there are fewer distractions to lure eyeballs away from ABC's live and library content.

Customers with Dish Anywhere and the sleek Dish Explorer programming discovery app from the satellite TV provider may have the most flexibility: the company's Sling technology actually restreams anything the Dish receiver can show, including live TV on any channel or recorded DVR programming. (Most DVR recordings can even be transferred from the Dish Hopper receiver onto the iPad for later viewing, which would require an EyeTV or other approach with most providers.) But this approach does require plenty of home bandwidth, and can tie up your receiver; ABC's stream doesn't have those drawbacks.

If over the air TV is your thing, there are several iPad options out there. EyeTV's EyeTV Mobile adapter, for $99, adds an antenna to your tablet and delivers programming via the Dyle digital broadcast system. The MCV consortium behind Dyle includes NBC, Fox and Telemundo (but not ABC), so those networks are generally represented and available on the system. The legally challenged but still eagerly expanding startup Aereo doesn't share those channel limits; anything an antenna can see in the NYC metro area, Aereo will gladly deliver to your iPad or desktop browser for a monthly $8 fee. Aereo's one-antenna-per-user model is being contested by the networks, but so far they've not been able to put together a compelling legal case to stop the company from providing its service; in fact, it's expanding to Boston this month.

In many ways, ABC's move (which the network says was shifted up from a planned 2014 rollout; "We watch how people are behaving with their devices, and we really felt that we needed to move faster," said Disney/ABC Television Group co-chair Anne Sweeney) is of a piece with these other new-world-order programming options. Consumers are getting their television content via all sorts of pathways, and fewer and fewer of them are tied to a traditional primetime lineup at the network's convenience. Even this circumscribed step away from the default delivery of TV, with its leash of a pay subscription, says a lot about ABC's willingness to ride the wave forward rather than fighting to keep a hold on the status quo.

[Although the Steven P. Jobs Trust, led by the Apple co-founder's widow Laurene Powell Jobs, owns some 7.7 percent of Disney/ABC's outstanding shares, regulatory filings noted by Bloomberg suggest that the trust has no intention to influence Disney/ABC operations. -Ed.]

ABC to add live streaming to iPad app this week, for a few and with a catch originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 12 May 2013 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It's dock o'clock, thank goodness, as Belkin's long incubation period of the Thunderbolt Express Dock closed out last month. The US$299 expansion peripheral is now shipping to customers; is it worth your attention? We've had a week to put it through its paces.

The most direct product comparison for the Express Dock is Matrox's $249 DS1, which we reviewed a few weeks ago. Like the Matrox unit, the Belkin dock requires but does not include a Thunderbolt cable -- so you should mentally add at least $30 to the price of each unit if you don't already have one. (Kanex sells Thunderbolt cables in lengths ranging from three meters down to one-half meter.)

Design

The Express Dock's industrial design went through several iterations after its original "stapler-style" preview first appeared in January of 2012. Since then the unit has gained a passthrough Thunderbolt port, lost its HDMI port, and seen an eSATA port added, then dropped, from the configuration. The unit comes with an external power brick that uses a standard three-prong plug, rather than an outlet-hogging adapter.

With the Express Dock you get all the ports you need, and more. Dual Thunderbolt ports (one in, one out) line up with three super-speed USB 3 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, analog audio in and out, and a Firewire 800 port. Compared to the Matrox DS1, Belkin has delivered quite a bit more flexibility and speed, particularly for Firewire users; being able to chain several FW800 drives off the dock means one less adapter to manage, and one less Thunderbolt port on the computer tied up.

I'd tag maxing out the USB 3 ports versus the Matrox unit "nice but not a blockbuster," as there's always the option of attaching a USB 3 hub to the DS1's single superspeed port if you need that expandability; I would expect that users with a lot of USB 3 devices have probably already invested in a hub to cover that need.

The passthrough Thunderbolt port, on the other hand, is a big deal, and good on Belkin for sticking with this design choice through the process. Yes, you're most likely going to terminate the chain with a Mini DisplayPort adapter or connecting to a Thunderbolt monitor; still, if you have other Thunderbolt devices that can sit mid-chain (like LaCie's eSATA hub) you are going to get more mileage out of Belkin's dock than you will from the DS1.

The final shipping instance of the Express Dock is low and lean, with a convenient cable passthrough that lets you run your Thunderbolt cable through the front of the device to the ports in the back. This may reduce wire clutter compared to the DS1, where the only TB connection is in the front.

The rounded, unobtrusive case design on the Express Dock would be at home on most desks. It's noticeably lower-profile than the Matrox, and quite a bit less boxy and industrial-looking. I do miss Matrox's front-facing USB port a bit, as it's convenient for plugging in flash drives and other quick-use devices.

Performance

The best thing that can be said about a Thunderbolt dock is that you don't really have to think about it once you plug it in; that's certainly true of the Express Dock. It's completely plug-and-play, with no device issues that I could see. File transfer performance on Firewire, USB 3 and Thunderbolt was pretty much indistinguishable from directly-connected devices; I tested with a Buffalo TB/USB3 drive, an Elgato SSD and a LaCie Firewire 800 drive and didn't see any substantive differences between docked and directly-connected performance. Macworld's lab testing showed similar performance parity on file transfers.

Display performance was also remarkably unremarkable, with the dock immediately syncing up to my external display via my mDP to DVI adapter. Although the Matrox DS1 dock has shown some rare loss-of-sync issues where external displays needed to be reset or reconnected to show up, I haven't seen that at all in a week of testing the "pure Thunderbolt" path on the Belkin.

The Ethernet port on the dock requires no additional software or driver install to be recognized; it just shows up, as you'd expect. Since it's recognized as a new network adapter, if you want your Mac to use it as the primary connection rather than WiFi or USB Ethernet you should make sure to move it to the top of the network connection priority list. The dock does require OS X 10.8.3, so if you don't get every port behaving properly at first you might check your system version.

Wrap-up

Thunderbolt docks may not be the sexiest peripheral sector, but Belkin's done a solid job delivering the Express Dock to the market with enough standout features to make it worth a look. With Firewire, plenty of USB 3 ports and the flexibility of passthrough Thunderbolt, it's packing plenty of value to cover that $50 premium versus the competition.

Pros

• Plug and play performance
• Thunderbolt passthrough port for flexibility
• Firewire 800, 3x USB 3

Cons

• Not inexpensive
• No front-facing convenience USB port

Who is it for?

• Thunderbolt Mac owners starved for expansion ports, especially those with investments in Firewire or USB 3 devices.

Here's a quick promo video from the Belkin team:

Belkin's Thunderbolt dock delivers plug-and-play flexibility originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 May 2013 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It may rank closer to the "inconvenience" end on the post-disaster scale of challenges, but a lack of power for mobile devices certainly didn't help matters in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy last year. Innovative devices like the BioLite camp stove made appearances on the streets of New York as residents scoured darkened neighborhoods for a chance to plug in.

For accessory manufacturer Etón, which partners with the American Red Cross to co-brand emergency-use chargers, radios and flashlights, flexible charging is a key component of the company's product line. Many Etón products include a handcrank option for quick charging when you're off the grid.

The latest member of the Etón family draws its joules from a new, old source: the sun. The $US99.99 BoostSolar charger includes both a conventional, replaceable 5000mAh lithium battery and a solar panel for walkabout charging. You can plug the battery in to any USB port to charge the night before your hike (7 hours to full charge) and then march on with solar charging to top off during the day (16 hours from zero to full on solar alone).

With a nod towards outdoor and camping use, the BoostSolar includes corner fastening loops for a carabiner or backpack strap. It's also rated IPX-4 for splash and rain resistance -- it might not survive being dropped in a puddle, but short of that it should be good to go.

The BoostSolar can charge both 1A and 2.1A USB devices, so the iPad will fast-charge when connected. A micro-USB input port allows the use of most non-iPhone device chargers to top off the battery, or you can connect a micro-USB cable to almost any iOS device charger and be good to go.

If you're shopping for the BoostSolar, it's available -- in black or green -- starting today from Amazon, buygreen.com and REI. Additional lithium battery packs will be available separately.

Mobile device power shines with Etón's new BoostSolar originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 May 2013 10:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Among the startups competing for attention (and funding) at Monday's opening round of the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, one unusual social app for iPhone stood out. SharePractice, from physician Andrew Brandeis and his team, aims to connect physicians to each other and give them access to the best professional advice regarding conditions, treatments and symptoms.

Although he's a full-time practitioner at San Francisco's Care Practice community clinic, this isn't Dr. Brandeis's first go-round with mobile technology; he worked with iHealth on the rollout of the company's iOS-powered blood pressure cuff in 2011. In his career, he's formed the opinion that the difference between a good doctor and a great one isn't access to medical information; it's access to experience, the implicit knowledge of thousands of patients and hours of work that helps inform better treatment decisions.

Given that most doctors don't have quick, "send a text" or "catch up in the hallway" access to the top experts in every therapeutic area, the question is how to get the power of that experience out to a larger community of physicians? The SharePractice app is one approach to solving that problem. It allows Yelp-style commenting and voting, but instead of restaurants and retail establishments, the topic of conversation is drug dosage, standards of care and best practices when dealing with a specific symptom or disease.

There's certainly no shortage of medical research and information out there, but SharePractice's premise is that much of that textbook-style data is out of date or poorly aligned with the actual standard of care in the field. With SharePractice, doctors who participate will be able to pose questions, vote up answers, comment and converse around the suggested approaches and more.

The SharePractice app is in invite-only beta right now, and interested parties can sign up at the company's website. You can see Brandeis's presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt below.

SharePractice wants your doctor to have the best advice on the iPhone originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It's a big 1-0 for everyone's "favorite" music store, which has evolved far beyond its humble Rip, Mix, Burn origins to become the digital hub for a new generation of digital devices. Happy birthday, iTunes Music Store, and here's hoping that you make it out of your adolescence wiser and more mature.

Also this week: The results of Apple's most recently concluded fiscal quarter are in the books, and while the company continued to make money hand over fist there are some troublesome signs for analysts: eroding margins and the possibility of the high-end smartphone market (where the iPhone owns the roost) starting to squeeze.

Apple's response, in part, is to return more cash to its shareholders (via dividends) and repurchase outstanding shares. Apple's even getting into the debt markets to finance these programs, rather than repatriating overseas profits and facing a hefty tax bill.

We'll talk iTunes' 10th birthday, the quarterly reports and the rest of the week's news (including a look ahead to this week's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York) tonight at 10 pm ET on the Talkcast. Join us!

To participate live during the show, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, the best way to have your voice heard is to call in.

For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite or other SIP clients (aside from Skype or Google Voice), basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!

Talkcast tonight, 7pm PT/10 pm ET: iTunes store turns 10, quarterly results originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Talk about magical and revolutionary: the manual and unpredictable task of hailing a taxi is being completely overturned by mobile devices. In many American cities, app vendors like Uber are disrupting the livery and taxi business by providing quick and predictable service at the tap of a button.

The roster of cities with e-hailing service is missing a major entry, however; the Big Apple. With the largest US fleet of yellow taxis plus some arcane service regulations, New York's market is a huge prize for the app vendor that establishes early dominance. Several rounds of testing and potential rule changes later, the city is ready to start piloting e-hail services at last.

Valleywag reports that the legal challenges to NYC e-hails have been cleared, and Uber is the first out of the gate. The popular service is now approved to provide e-hail service during the 12-month pilot program on New York streets. Unlike some other cities where Uber provides coverage, payment to taxi drivers is not yet included in the service; you have to pay the driver directly. (Uber's other classes of service, covering livery cars, "black cars" and SUVs, all include integrated payment.)

Of course, Uber's not the only app vendor aiming at the country's biggest taxi fleet. Competitors like iTaxi, Taxi Magic and Hailo all would like a piece of the pie. Competing service Hailo actually sent out a beta e-hail announcement to potential users of its service in New York, but there's a slight hitch: the TLC's pilot has no provision for beta or soft launches. Either you're approved or you're not, and right now Uber is; Hailo is not.

Uber gets go-ahead for New York City e-hail service originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you're old enough to remember the Polaroid SX-70, celebrating its 41st birthday this week, you may remember how it felt to instantly, miraculously see the images you captured appear right before your eyes with one of Polaroid's cameras. Now that we all have superpowered cameras in our pockets, we may not be as tuned in to how photography, especially instant or digital photography, changes the way we see the world around us.

Apple's still tuned in, though. That sense of wonder in photography is fully on display in the newest ad for the iPhone, which highlights the remarkable claim that every day "more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera."

That stat may be based on the long-standing No. 1 rank of the iPhone among cameras used to post photos to Flickr; in fact, that ranking is probably underweighted, since it may not capture the camera types from world-beating image apps like Facebook's Instagram.

The iPhone currently holds the top three spots for individual cameras on Flickr's list (the 4S, 5 and 4), although the iPhone 4 is just about tied with Canon's $3000 EOS 5D Mark II. As PetaPixel and Bloomberg point out, the Japanese camera maker's profits have suffered as the compact photography market erodes versus phone cameras.

You can see the ad embedded below. I particularly enjoy the brief run of panorama shooters at about the 0:38 mark.

New iPhone ad focuses on wonder of photography originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Putting words in other people's mouths: more of a hobby than a vocation for most people, I'd say. If your work or play involves facial animation, however, you know how much work goes into making fake speech look convincingly real.

Although there are impressive pro animation tools for this task, they might run you hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat. That's why the Mac version of Reallusion's US$29.99 Crazy Talk 7 Standard is such an intriguing product. For a modest cost, this app delivers impressive character animation power -- with a learning curve that's not too steep for amateurs.

Crazy Talk lets you work with libraries of preconfigured characters, where mouth movements and other motions are already pinned to specific features on the character's image. You can also pull in your own images for the face animation treatment; political or corporate portraits seem to work particularly well, as do pet snapshots.

For the DIY images, the app walks you through preparing them with essential feature points -- corners of the eyes, point of the chin and so forth. The idea is to make a model of the character's face that will react appropriately to the audio using Crazy Talk's Auto Motion feature.

Once the base character "puppet" is ready, Crazy Talk really gets to work. Import or record your dialogue audio (or use the built-in text to speech feature) and the Auto Motion animation tools will analyze sounds and phonemes, trying to match mouth and face motions to the soundtrack. You can tweak emotions, attitudes or the overall character energy with a few clicks.

The results range from decidedly comical to eerily realistic. In the example here, I've taken Tim Cook and put some of his comments from the recent earnings call in his virtual mouth. The whole process -- including defining the animation "bones" and grabbing the audio from the earnings call podcast feed -- took less than 15 minutes for this clip, and even though the results are kind of rough (sorry about the hair, Mr. Cook) it would not take too much refinement to get them looking really sharp. Of course, now that "Tim" is prepped, future animations using his character will take a lot less time.

Aside from the fun factor (which is decidedly present), training pros or web content authors may be able to leverage Crazy Talk to produce quick and hi-quality animated narrations or instructional vignettes. Putting a face with the voice, even an animated one, can help improve engagement and attention versus a voiceover-only approach. Game developers and other animation users may find Crazy Talk or its sister app, iClone (for 3D character animation) useful entries in the utility belt.

Crazy Talk's look and feel certainly carries some of its PC heritage in its flat UI and sometimes-confusing controls, and it has a few annoying quirks (no app should ever hijack focus when it's done with a lengthy task like a video export; that's what bouncing the dock icon is for!) but with a little bit of time and effort you can get something really interesting out of it. Crazy Talk 7 Standard is $29.99 via the Mac App Store; the Pro version ($149.95) delivers much more manual control, higher-end animation options and keyframe editing for projects.

Here's another video sample from the app, featuring Sarcastic Cat.

Crazy Talk 7 puts character animation power on your Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you like TV, and you like the Internet, you've got some really good options for getting those two crazy kids to play nicely together. PLAiR, newly arrived on the market, adds a platform-independent and compact device to the menu of connected television solutions that stream web video to your living room.

To be clear, there's not a shortage of players here. Even without a Smart TV in your house, you can use an HDMI cable to connect your Mac or iPad directly to your big-screen HDTV (although that's a bit of a mobility buzzkill). It's easier to put something in the middle to handle that conversation, at least until Tim Cook and Jony Ive make all our big-screen dreams come true.

For most Apple-centric households, the natural middleman is the $99 Apple TV. Apple's "experiment" delivers 1080p content direct from iTunes, subscription goodies from Netflix or Hulu, sports from the NBA, MLB and NHL, free video from Vimeo and YouTube, and of course your photos, music and videos from household Macs. The relatively recent debut of AirPlay mirroring for Macs in OS X 10.8 means that your computer can screen-mirror to an Apple TV just as smoothly as your iPhone or iPad can. If you're inclined toward non-Apple boxes with more subscription and channel support, the Roku or Boxee hardware might be more up your alley.

One thing the Apple TV can't do easily -- at least not without the intervention of a mirrored AirPlay device or a jailbreak -- is stream web videos from sources outside the approved/supported list. Even if you do use a mirrored device, it's tied up for the duration of the stream; how are you supposed to chat with your vintage movie club while you're watching? And what if you have friends with non-Apple gear who'd like to stream some videos your way?

There ought to be another path to video Nirvana, and the folks behind the PLAiR HDMI dongle think they have it figured out. The new $99 wireless video-streaming gadget is arriving in some customers' hands today. I saw it demonstrated at the Engadget Expand conference, and while the company's description of it as "AirPlay for everybody" may be a bit off-target with no true mirroring support, it's still quite impressive.

The PLAiR device -- one assumes that the lowercase "i" is not coincidental -- is a smart adapter that connects to three things: power, your TV's HDMI port, and your home WiFi network. Once it's set up, PLAiR links to a Chrome plugin on your Mac or PC to let you hand off streaming video to it with a couple of clicks. iOS and Android devices can play too; both platforms have streamer apps available.

In the case of the desktop controls for PLAiR, you simply browse to the website for the video you want to see (scores of broadcast and Web video networks play nicely with the PLAiR, although big kahunas Hulu and Netflix sadly do not). A small overlay icon reminds you that you can stream to your TV; click it and the video hops over to the wider arena. Behind the scenes, the PLAiR unit is actually running its own streaming client via Flash or HTML5 and handling the video independently; your laptop is no longer needed, and in fact you can close the window and do something else -- even sleep it or shut it down.

That's not the case if you choose to stream videos or photos stored on your computer or iOS device, of course. In that situation, you can create a playlist of clips that you want to see, and PLAiR will play them all in order, but your device needs to stay online and awake to push the video to PLAiR.

iPhone and iPad users can jump into the fun via the free PLAiR iOS app. With the app, the same channels and sources should be accessible, and you can kick off a stream in similar fashion. Local content will play as well, although anything purchased from the iTunes Store will not play (the PLAiR doesn't know how to deal with Apple's FairPlay encryption for video). You also cannot mirror iOS apps to the PLAiR, but at least one common-use case for that is handled by a second companion app aimed at business users: the $0.99 OmniPresent will load and display PowerPoint or PDF decks via your PLAiR stick onto a projector or TV.

If your video needs don't depend heavily on iTunes-purchased content or the premium offerings of Hulu or Netflix, you might get your money's worth out of the PLAiR. It's certainly a more graceful option for free-to-stream network content than rigging up an HDMI cable across the living room. Customers who pre-ordered the PLAiR hardware are getting theirs this week, but current orders are out of stock for the moment; if you order today you might see your unit by June.

Here's a brief video intro to PLAiR. I'm afraid I will have to deduct points for continuity, as the Acer laptop pictured in the video appears to be running the OS X version of Chrome.

'

And here's a video preview of PLAiR in action from Engadget Expand:

PLAiR streams web video to TV with your devices for 99 bucks originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The wait is over, assuming you were waiting; now that T-Mobile has joined AT&T, Verizon and Sprint in the roster of US carriers selling the iPhone, there are more choices for customers. T-Mobile's new-look approach to plans, contracts and subsidies is making a splash; is it enough to overcome the LTE deployment lead of the other three?

We'll talk T-Mo and the rest of the week's news (including everyone's new favorite iPad app, Panic's Status Board) tonight at 10 pm ET on the Talkcast. Join us!

To participate live during the show, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, the best way to have your voice heard is to call in.

For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite or other SIP clients (aside from Skype or Google Voice), basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!

Talkcast tonight: T-Mobile iPhone & news of the week originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If your widescreen ambitions can't be contained by a mere 1920x1080 HD screenscape, the fine folks at Matrox have a solution for you. The DualHead2Go Digital Mac Edition display adapter, priced around US$160, is built and marketed specifically for the Thunderbolt and DisplayPort-enabled Mac models.

It pairs up with Matrox's PowerDesk software to enable spanned displays, rather than defining each external monitor as its own real estate. If you have the required two matching-resolution monitors, you can achieve some truly breathtaking resolutions.

Design

Like the rest of Matrox's line, the DualHead's pro-style design would be perfectly at home in a video editing workstation or studio. The unit, about the size of a pack of cards, sports two DVI-D ports on the back to connect your two displays for pairing. The aluminum case features cheesegrater-style ventilation holes that match nicely with the look of the aging Mac Pro desktop.

I hooked up the DualHead to a Retina MacBook Pro via the provided mini DisplayPort to full-size DisplayPort adapter. This larger connector may be unfamiliar to most Mac users, but it's frequently seen on recent-model Windows laptops; it looks like a slightly cockeyed HDMI plug. The other necessary connection on the front of the unit is USB, which provides power for the adapter.

Considering the number of cables going into and out of this small device, a bit of onboard cable management wouldn't be amiss. You could velcro or cable-tie your cables to the DualHead, since it doesn't get particularly hot during usage.

Users who need even more space to spread out have the option of stepping up to the TripleHead2go unit, which teams three monitors instead of two -- for about 2x the price.

Performance

Unlike the dual-DVI connection that enables full resolution on Apple's 30" Cinema Display, the DualHead creates a virtual spanned display across both of the connected external monitors. In my testing, with two smaller Cinema Displays, the combined resolution got up to the supported maximum of 3840x1200 -- more than enough real estate for almost anyone.

Given that this "one big monitor" is actually two displays with a hefty border in between, window management becomes more important than in a simplex setup. Matrox's PowerDesk software lets you define target cells for your apps, quickly moving windows around the screen and swapping content from your LCD to the wide external duplex display. It took me a few passes through the documentation to get a handle on the best way to manage the display cells; Matrox's instructions and the utility interface are aimed more at a video professional audience than at consumers.

The responsiveness of the big screen was surprisingly good. Matrox's hardware doesn't do any hefty graphics processing of its own; rather, it presents the large virtual display resolution to the onboard GPU and lets the graphics chip in the Mac do the heavy lifting of drawing on that big canvas. On the Retina MBP, I didn't notice any dragging or slow performance onscreen, even with several QuickTime movies playing at once. Older Mac hardware might not fare quite as well -- Matrox's compatibility guide for adapters is a good place to start if you're considering options.

Wrap-up

With its base requirement of two resolution-matched external displays plus a solid GPU-equipped Mac, the DualHead2go is fairly described as a specialty item. If your needs demand extreme widescreen, however, and you'd rather repurpose older DVI monitors than shell out $999 for a 27" Thunderbolt display, Matrox is there to help you out.

Pros

• Unique widescreen capability
• Small and unobtrusive
• Impressive performance

Cons

• Software is a bit confusing
• Requires identical resolution monitors
• Limited consumer appeal

Who is it for?

• Graphics and video pros who believe wider is better.

Matrox DualHead2go adapter broadens your monitor horizons originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ready to think pink? Scrappy fourth-place US cell carrier T-Mobile is eager to serve; the company's pre-order run for the iPhone 5 has launched today. Phones will ship to customers on April 12.

Last week, Engadget confirmed that the T-Mobile model of the iPhone 5 -- which will be available unlocked from Apple -- carries the same A1428 model number as the current AT&T / GSM domestic model.

There is a critical tweak, however, for the new carrier: the iPhone 5 now will support the 1700 MHz HSPA+/AWS uplink band, which will enable higher performance on T-Mobile's UMTS Band IV network. Older GSM iPhone 5 units cannot get this fix via software; it's a chip change.

While this means that iPhone 5 and 4S handsets unlocked and moved from AT&T to T-Mobile can never get the highest performance on the UMTS bands, there's hope; the iPhone 5 LTE support for AWS will work just fine on T-Mobile. Now there's just the little question of building out that LTE network (see below).

In contrast to the other three US cellphone carriers, T-Mobile has moved to overhaul the most-despised feature of a phone plan: the contract. New subscribers have the option of buying the iPhone outright (starting at US$579 for a 16 GB model) or a $99 / $199 / $299 immediate charge, just like the other carriers, followed by a payment plan of $20 a month for 24 months.

At the end of that payback window, however, that $20 comes right off the top of your bill -- the phone is yours, so you don't have to keep paying for it. (Try asking for that deal with Verizon.) Of course, if you do decide to leave T-Mobile with the iPhone before the two-year window is up, you still owe the remaining balance of the purchase cost -- but you don't pay a separate early termination fee (ETF).

Regarding 4G and LTE, T-Mobile's US network uses UMTS / HSPA+ "3.5 G" to achieve download speeds ranging up towards the 10 Mbit/sec threshold -- real-world performance may vary. That doesn't really compete with the observed or best-possible LTE performance on Verizon, AT&T or Sprint (yes, there are spots in NYC where you can get 40+ Mbit/sec download speeds).

If you're in the mood for crazy-fast LTE wireless on T-Mobile, you have to wait. T-Mobile's LTE buildout is covering only seven cities so far, with more coming this summer and fall. Interestingly, the specs page for the iPhone 5 on T-Mobile's site only mentions GSM and UMTS (in the I and IV bands), with no discussion of LTE. That isn't a reflection of the actual hardware capabilities, but more likely a marketing consideration -- poor form to push LTE capability as a feature only available to a few customers.

If you're considering a T-Mobile phone, check your coverage before you buy and let us know about your shopping experience! Theoretically, you can buy a T-Mobile iPhone 5 and use it with LTE on almost any carrier in the world, which should make globetrotters very happy.

Updated to clarify that the phone purchase plans do carry an initial charge.

[hat tip TechCrunch & Engadget]

T-Mobile preorders for iPhone 5 kick off today originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

For decades, programmers have hidden secret features and surprises inside the software they write. Such tidbits are known as Easter eggs, after the annual holiday hunt. (Note that undiscovered hard-boiled eggs may eventually create less pleasant surprises if left to mature in warm places.) As you're enjoying the Easter holiday, we've got a few links for Apple's Easter eggs.

For OS X Easter eggs, the Easter Egg Archive has a fairly comprehensive list that includes some classics; the BSOD Windows icon and the "here's to the crazy ones" copy on TextEdit's icon are particular favorites.

The classic Mac OS was populated with plenty of Easter eggs -- even inside the hardware itself -- but did you know that there was even an Easter egg in Inside Macintosh, the developer documentation for the Mac? Folklore.org has the story.

As OS X is built atop the BSD flavor of UNIX, it carried forward some truly ancient Easter eggs from the older operating system. The command-line calendar program's data files include some mythological/fictional anniversaries, including a disputed birthday list from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Apple's newest (and most portable) OS is no stranger to the Easter egg tradition, but the new hidden items have a speakable twist. Siri's subtle movie reviews and silly answers to simple questions have taken over for some of the spontaneous/secret items you might find on the Mac.

Mac 101: Easter eggs originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

At last weekend's Engadget Expand conference, three Apple-centric brains put on their thinking caps to forecast the company's next big product move.

Although analyst Gene Munster, blogger/investor MG Siegler and our own fearless leader Victor Agreda, Jr. may not have found consensus on the prospects for an Apple-branded TV set, they all did agree that there's a wearable device (presumably worn on the wrist) coming in the not too distant future.

Now's your opportunity to chime in, tonight at 10 pm ET. The Talkcast is about watches: making them smart, making them useful and making them Apple-style. Is the hypothetical iWatch a product you could use, or just an expensive and unneeded luxury? Call in, we'll talk.

To participate live during the show, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, the best way to have your voice heard is to call in.

For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite or other SIP clients (aside from Skype or Google Voice), basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!

Talkcast tonight, 10 pm ET: Watching the detectives originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In a reported $20 million acquisition deal, Apple has bought the "indoor GPS" company WiFiSLAM, according to the Wall Street Journal Digits blog.

The startup, founded by Stanford CS grad & former Google coding intern Joseph Huang, offered a way to let smartphones find their location indoors to an accuracy of less than 10 feet (2.5 m) using the ambient WiFi signals in the environment.

This isn't Apple's first foray with WiFi localization; the original, GPS-less iPhone used Skyhook's technology to provide more granular location info than could be gleaned from cellphone towers. But it is a big step towards interior location info for Apple's apps and OS, which is competitively important; Google Maps already includes interior floorplans for thousands of buildings, and allows crowdsourced contributions of public spaces.

The "SLAM" in WiFiSLAM refers to simultaneous location and mapping, a technique that autonomous robots use to build an environmental map while also keeping track of their location in space; in this case, rather than a robot, it's a phone doing the mapping. You can see Huang's own description of the tech in the (long) video below; the description of how SLAM works is at about the 30 minute mark.

Investors in WiFiSLAM included Google developer advocate Don Dodge (seen here in a TechCrunch interview) and Earthlink founder Sky Dayton. The company was offering an SDK for mobile developers to incorporate indoor location into their apps, but at this point the main site and the secondary footprint.io site are both offline.

It's safe to assume that the third party SDK is going to go away, and we'll see the WiFiSLAM technology appearing either in Apple's iOS apps or in the operating system itself. In one of Apple's previous high-profile mobile tech acquisitions, Siri took 18 months to go from independent product to part of iOS.

WSJ: Apple acquires WiFiSLAM indoor location tech startup originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

So, you've got your iPhone with you, but you're stuck in the middle of the Indian Ocean or on top of Everest? [Turns out that you can make iPhone calls from Everest. -Ed.]

Fear no more -- the SatSleeve from Thuraya will magically transform your iPhone into a satellite phone. The sleeve, with an expected price of US$499, piggybacks on an iPhone 4, 4S or 5 to expand calling capabilities far beyond the normal reach of cell service.

Thuraya has years of experience developing and providing satellite phone service, which covers most of the places a conventional/terrestrial phone signal doesn't go (ships, wilderness, mountaintops, disaster areas). The company's two satellites are in geosynchronous orbit within transmission range of its headquarters/downlink site in Dubai, and its satellite coverage footprint encompasses Europe, Asia and much of Africa and the Pacific (but not the Western Hemisphere). Like the company's XT satphone, the SatSleeve is manufactured by another OEM but sold by Thuraya to cell carriers.

With satellite phone service, normally you'd get a standalone satellite phone (or maritime satphone) with its own phone number. For the SatSleeve, however, Thuraya has negotiated GSM roaming agreements with scores of carriers including both AT&T and T-Mobile for the US market. That provides two key advantages: roaming using GSM wherever Thuraya has an agreement, and keeping your own phone number ringing via satellite when you're off in the wilderness.

The SatSleeve was launched in Washington, DC yesterday and in a followup press event in NYC today, where sheepish company execs apologized for leaving their demo prototypes in Washington the night before. Even without hands-on hardware, the concept is simple: imagine a Mophie battery pack with a giant extensible antenna on the back, and you've got the picture. The SatSleeve includes a few features not usually found in satellite phones: high penetration alerts (meaning your phone will ring even if the antenna is down) and full walk-and-talk capability (meaning you don't have to stand in one place with your head at an odd angle to avoid disconnecting your call).

The SatSleeve separates into several parts. The satphone hardware pack contains the satellite radio, GPS, the antenna, a battery pack, a Bluetooth chip to pair with the phone, and an SOS button (complete with its own mic and speaker) to make emergency calls if the mated iPhone is lost or damaged. The phone caddy protects and covers the iPhone, and the dock/Lightning connector base (the iPhone 5 version will be shipping next month) allows the phone to charge from the sleeve's battery or via a USB micro connector. The phone pairs with the sleeve via a configuration app and Bluetooth.

The first edition of the SatSleeve doesn't work with satellite data services -- you can, however, make phone calls or send and receive SMS text messages ("Help, I'm being swallowed by a wh..."). A subsequent voice + data edition is coming later this year, and will offer "satellite broadband" of about 500 Kbps for data. Future plans include a developer kit to allow application authors to access the SatSleeve's connectivity features; you could replicate the "where's Waldo" feature of the Spot Messenger hardware, for instance.

Thuraya's representatives told TUAW that the entire first batch of SatSleeves has been sold through to its carrier partners, who will in turn sell them to customers; half of the preliminary stock was snatched up by Japan's Softbank, which intends to offer them to its customers as part of an earthquake/disaster preparedness kit. (Some Softbank subscribers were without GSM coverage for as much as a year after the 2011 quake and tsunami.)

The service is definitely not cheap -- expect to pay $1.00 to $1.50 per minute for voice service, either prepaid or postpaid. If you do roaming on a GSM network or you're calling another SatSleeve user in the middle of nowhere, your pricing may jump up to $8.00 per minute. Thuraya's satellite coverage is also not available in most of the Western Hemisphere, which makes the SatSleeve a poor option for US/Atlantic operations but a great idea for Americans who primarily need satellite coverage in EMEA like energy company employees, military folk and so forth. Of course, those with a SatSleeve in the US could take advantage of GSM roaming via the service.

Even those rates could be a bargain for people who want the security of knowing that just about anywhere they are, help -- or just a dramatic last farewell after you're bitten by a black mamba -- is just a call away.

Steven Sande contributed reporting on this story.

Turn your iPhone into a satellite phone with SatSleeve originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Persistent critters, those little analog cardboard rectangles. Even with the option to scan QR Codes, email vCards or bump phones to swap contact information, the venerable business card keeps on trucking -- and keeps on making it challenging to leap from analog to digital information.

If your career or avocation takes you to meetings, trade shows or conferences, chances are you too have a pile of to-be-dealt-with business cards that could stand a good digital shakedown. Here's our five apps rundown of a few good choices for handling business card scanning on the go.

SHAPE's Business Card Reader: Last year, we noted that the US$4.99 Business Card Reader expanded its offerings with an iPad version of the app. BCR delivers capable scanning and OCR (using libraries licensed from high-end scanning developer ABBYY, which has its own app suite as well), with a good verification step to make sure that the recognition is matching the actual card data.

BCR can quickly export scanned data to your device address book, match LinkedIn connections, and in the latest version it hooks directly into the CRM tools of Salesforce.com for marketing and sales pros.

Evernote Hello: I wasn't all that taken with the first version of Evernote's free meet-and-manage contact app; it was buggy, and it seemed awkward to ask a new acquaintance "Mind if I take your picture so I remember you?" Things have definitely changed for the better with January's version 2 release. In addition to manual entry and Hello-to-Hello audio contact sharing (very cool, I recommend giving it a try), the beautifully designed app now supports business card scanning -- temporarily free for both regular and premium Evernote users, although at some point down the road the regular user scan allowance may be curtailed or changed to IAP.

Evernote's expertise with text recognition and knowledge of the iPhone's camera capabilities seems to have paid off, as Hello is now delivering some of the best and quickest scan results I've seen. My favorite feature is the heads-up display that automatically detects the card and gives you instant feedback on getting the best image ("use a shallower angle," "center the card," "hold the phone steady," etc.); as soon as Hello thinks it's got the shot, it captures the scan automatically. If it can't auto-detect, it falls back to manual mode, but most of the time with a light card on a dark background it nails it in one try. Within a few seconds, the data is detected, and if you're signed into LinkedIn via Hello, the card will be matched with that contact immediately. Hello also links a "meeting" note to give context to the encounter, rather than leaving a bare contact without metadata.

Some minor quibbles aside (you can't edit the Hello notes in either the desktop or iOS versions of the regular Evernote app, for one), Hello is a winner. Without a firm date or pricing for the end of the free scan trial for non-premium Evernote users, my recommendation is to use it while you can.

LinkedIn's CardMunch: With more than 2 million cards processed already, the free scanning app from your friendly neighborhood social network for professional use has simplicity and volume on its side. Assuming you already use LinkedIn's connection ecosystem, CardMunch's scanning speed and off-device processing make it great for dealing with a lot of cards in batch mode, and you can make notes on each scan before it's recognized on the back end.

Of course, the trade-off of the cloud processing step is that you can't easily OCR cards on the plane on the way home without forking over for some WiFi. Also, checking for errors is a two-step process since the scan and the data return are a few minutes apart -- but CardMunch tends to make fewer mistakes than other apps, so that's not a big drawback.

WorldCard Mobile: When I last checked out the $6.99 WCM app a year ago, it stood up well against competitors like CardMunch and BCR. Since then, the app has added QR Code scanning with support for both vCard and meCard formats, iOS 6 compatibility, support for double-sided cards, batch scanning, duplicate search and direct synchronization with Google contacts.

WCM's interface is still in need of some redesign TLC, but for rapid and accurate scanning, it's a good choice. Note that WCM also requires you to tap a small button on the screen to take a card photo, while other apps let you tap the whole screen or auto-detect the card (Evernote Hello).

NeatCloud and NeatMobile: If you're in the habit of keeping all your print-to-digital documents in the Neat ecosystem driven by one of the company's desktop scanners, you're already comfortable with the OCR and filing capabilities of the platform. What's new is that Neat is extending your scanned repository into the cloud and onto your iPhone, with the NeatMobile / NeatCloud combination app and service.

NeatCloud gives you on-the-road access to your scanned docs, and in turn the NeatMobile app allows you to scan back to that pile of data from wherever you happen to be. This sync isn't a free service, however; monthly plans start at $5.99 for individual users. As such, the mobile app doesn't worry much about handling address book sync or other standalone features; the workflow is that you'll do that processing back on your Mac or PC with the downloaded scans.

Neat's app does a solid job of scanning business cards in standalone mode, but for true accuracy with a human touch the optional NeatVerify pass submits your scan for a once-over by a person to make sure everything is in the right place. NeatVerify credits are linked to your NeatCloud account.

Five apps for business card scanning originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I wish we could make it happen, I truly do -- but all our hosts are traveling, about to be traveling or otherwise indisposed. (No, we do not have over-celebration disorder, but we do wish everyone a happy St. Patrick's Day!)

No show this week, but enjoy our past shows on the feed and we'll catch you all next week at 10 pm ET!

Sorry: No Talkcast this week, folks originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 17 Mar 2013 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If ever an email should have arrived with a Minnie Riperton song as its soundtrack, this is the one. On Saturday afternoon, Apple sent a blast message to customers pointing out how awesome the iPhone 5 is, in so many different ways. The email points to a new "Why iPhone" page on Apple's site, which is also linked directly off the Apple home page. (Riperton, like the iPhone 5, found acclaim for her remarkable range.)

The web page emphasizes customer satisfaction (eight consecutive J.D. Power awards for iPhone), precision manufacturing, the great Retina display, processing power (the A6) without compromising battery life, the camera, the App Store & iTunes store, iCloud, iOS 6, LTE wireless and the support infrastructure of AppleCare and the retail Genius Bar. All great points, and all valid, but why the full-court press now?

The first-blush answer would seem to be the Android market pressure, and specifically the Samsung Galaxy S IV launch this week (see Engadget's liveblog here). Apple SVP Phil Schiller did a little bit of media this week, touching on many of the same themes while reminding WSJ readers that the churn rate of Android-to-iPhone switchers is much higher than the inverse. Schiller, and the Why iPhone page, also point out the popularity and quality of Apple's 8MP camera combined with great software, in a bit of specification judo against the S IV's 13 MP module.

Putting aside the head-shaking spectacle of Samsung's launch event, the S IV's feature list includes a few items that might make would-be iPhone buyers think twice: simultaneous front and back camera video recording, 802.11ac WiFi, a 1080p 5" screen -- all marquee items that Apple's hardware won't offer until the next iPhone release, if ever. Given the fact that the S IV isn't shipping for six weeks, it certainly behooves Apple to remind the consumer about what they all loved about the iPhone 5 in the first place, and why they might consider signing up for another two-year contract hitch to upgrade those aging 3GS, 4 and 4S handhelds.

[hat tip 9to5Mac]

Apple's new "Why iPhone" page reminds customers of key features originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This week's Caturday featured feline comes to us all the way from Belgium. Reader Sam Algoet sends along his picture of Keiko, who loves to nap on the Mac mini stashed behind the TV and next to the phone & Time Capsule.

If you've got a Caturday nominee to share, let us know via our feedback page. For security reasons we can't accept inbound attachments, so you should host the photo (Dropbox, Flickr, iPhoto Journals, etc.) and send us the link.

Thanks Sam!

Caturday: Phone a furry friend originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 16 Mar 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Users of Android's recent editions have been exposed to Google Now, the "before you know you need it" search tool.

Google Now tries to look ahead at your schedule and physical location to let you quickly access the most relevant results -- traffic for your commute, flight schedules for your trips, local restaurant recommendations and the like. G-Now uses a card metaphor to pop the necessary info right onto your device screen with minimal intervention.

While Siri can handle quite a few of those search chores on iOS, she's not exactly the anticipatory type. SRI's recent Tempo calendar app gives you some of the same halo of savvy around your schedule, but you have to get cleared first (Tempo still has a waiting list several thousand users long). Google's own Field Trip app delivers location-based tidbits (local art, attractions, restaurants and more) as you move around, but it's not integrated into the main search tool.

There may be changes afoot. Engadget unearthed a promotional animated clip that seems to preview a version of Google Now for iOS; the original video appeared on YouTube and has since been removed. In style, content and narration the clip is entirely in line with Google's original promo for the Android launch of Google Now, which lends quite a bit of weight on the authentic side of the scale.

If this clip is legitimate -- and doesn't represent a development dead end, but a real product -- then it appears that Now will integrate into the existing Google search app, rather than sitting standalone. Some of Field Trip's functionality (the nearby attractions, movies and restaurants bit) may be duplicated in Now, but it doesn't seem likely that Field Trip would be folded back into the main search tool so rapidly after being launched.

Looking forward to the new Now? Think this is all spindrift and moonbeams? The comments await.

Google Now for iOS? Promo video appears, removed originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

You've got questions, we've got answers (or at least plausible facsimiles of answers). Tonight, as the tech world's heavy hitters are congregated in Austin for SxSW, we'll have our own version of a tech panel right here on the Talkcast -- but this one's dedicated to your computing challenges.

Got a Mac, iOS or other general technology puzzler that needs some attention? Call in, comment or tweet to let us know and we'll see if we can't get you some satisfaction, tonight at 10 pm ET.

To participate live during the show, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, the best way to have your voice heard is to call in.

For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite or other SIP clients (aside from Skype or Google Voice), basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!

Talkcast tonight, 10 pm ET: The help desk is open originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 10 Mar 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last time we tried to run a picture of reader Craig Syverson's household conqueror, Genghis Khat, we ran a picture of the wrong feline! Now we have the correct cat, who seems to have found his perfect snoozing spot in this Caturday classic.

Syverson, who works as a UX designer in the Bay Area, says "I'm sharing a photo of my cat, Genghis Khat, who regularly falls asleep when I'm in the middle of working. Since I use a Wacom tablet full-time, my arm provides a convenient support for his napping requirements."

If you've got a Caturday nominee to share, let us know via our feedback page. For security reasons we can't accept inbound attachments, so you should host the photo (Dropbox, Flickr, iPhoto Journals, etc.) and send us the link.

Thanks Craig!

Caturday: Genghis Khat gets his rightful tribute originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 09 Mar 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

During my perambulations on the Macworld/iWorld show floor in February, I chatted face-to-face with a Belkin representative who bravely asserted that the company's $299.99 Thunderbolt Express Dock would be shipping "this month." This would be the same Express Dock that was originally seen in an Intel booth in September of 2011, announced in January of 2012, "upgraded" with an eSATA port in June 2012, and opened for pre-orders with a "shipping next week!" alert (minus its eSATA port) in mid-February 2013.

If you've got a calendar nearby, you may have noticed that it's March now -- and the Belkin dock product page still sports a "sign up to be notified when the Express Dock is shipping." So it goes.

Meanwhile, the graphics-centric peripheral vendor Matrox has quietly been shipping its Thunderbolt dock block, the DS1, in two flavors (for HDMI or DVI video-out) since the end of 2012. With a sticker price of $249, $50 lower than the vapory Belkin dock -- and with some key feature differences -- it's a worthwhile port expander that you can order today and use with your Thunderbolt-equipped Mac.

Design

Matrox's expansion kit is a bit boxier and taller than the Belkin design, but keeps the brushed metal look that helps it seem at home alongside a MacBook Air or a Cinema Display. The unit has a sturdy feel, and I wouldn't be concerned about perching a monitor on top of it (a flatscreen monitor, to be sure -- no CRTs, please). The single Thunderbolt port is easily accessible on the front of the device, next to the sole USB 3.0 SuperSpeed port.

On the back of the unit, the DS1 is all business. Both models connect to power on the right side, with gigabit Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports and convenient audio in & out 1/8" plugs lined up as well. The only difference between the two DS1 models is on the left side of the back panel: you'll get an HDMI port on the HDMI model, and a single-link DVI-D port on the DVI model.

The DS1, like most Thunderbolt peripherals, does not ship with a Thunderbolt cable; it works well with Apple's 1.5' (0.5m) $29 jumper.

Functionality

The DS1 is a fine example of true "plug and play" hardware; no drivers, no configuration and no hassles. My DVI Cinema Display connected cleanly and immediately, with the Mac laptop recognizing its native resolution as though it was connected directly.

The front-facing USB 3 port is fully capable of supporting and powering fast USB 3 peripherals, although it's easy to forget that you've got an external drive plugged in when you pull the Thunderbolt cable out of your laptop to hit the road. The Ethernet port shows up just as expected in the Network preference pane, and both audio ports work great with headsets that normally would use a Plantronics USB to audio adapter. The back USB 2 ports also serve their intended function with a minimum of fuss. Build quality was excellent on my review unit, with no rattles or sharp edges.

Comparing the Matrox to the Belkin unit, the biggest difference is in the number and variety of ports. Belkin's dock is intended to ship with SuperSpeed 3.0 on all three of its USB ports, compared to the Matrox's lineup of one 3.0 and two older 2.0 ports. The Belkin dock adds a single Firewire 800 port to its bag of tricks as well.

Most importantly, Belkin has chosen to make its dock a dual-port Thunderbolt device, allowing passthrough to additional peripherals; Matrox's dock must be the final Thunderbolt device in the chain. This is not as big a disadvantage as it appears, however; the Belkin dock has no video-out option to compare with the Matrox DVI or HDMI port, so a pass-thru is a must for anyone wanting to connect a monitor on the same Thunderbolt chain. On the Matrox side, it's assumed that you'll connect your display to the DS1, which would normally be the terminal Thunderbolt or DisplayPort device anyway.

Conclusion

If you're already stocking up on USB 3 devices or still have a stock of Firewire drives hanging around, then perhaps the Belkin dock's additional flexibility will merit the higher cost for you. If not, the Matrox DS1 has a solid port lineup and a trouble-free connection story to tell.

Pros

• True plug-and-play
• Offers most used port lineup
• Includes video out DVI or HDMI
• Single front-facing USB 3 port for high-speed peripherals
• Slightly more affordable

Cons

• No Firewire port
• No Thunderbolt pass-through
• Slower USB 2 ports for remaining connections
• Front-facing Thunderbolt port may cause cable clutter

Who is it for

Anyone who has been frustrated by cable clutter with Thunderbolt adapters, or who wants the simplicity of plugging in a single connection when docking a MacBook Air or Pro for use at a workstation.

Matrox DS1 is a practical, powerful Thunderbolt dock originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 03 Mar 2013 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

You can have near-perfect digital security -- a FileVault-protected computer, onsite and offsite backups, a team of angry vultures flapping around your ISP connection 24/7 -- and still be undone by breaches outside your control. Evernote is the latest service to acknowledge porous borders around its user information.

Let's pessimistically assume that at some point each of your online service accounts will be attacked, either by malware on your machine or by hackers at the home office. The unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of these breaches is that you have to work extra-hard to isolate those services, so a problem in one corner won't break down the rest of the fortress.

Unique passwords, a throwaway reset email account and false security answers: we'll talk about those techniques and more tonight on the security-conscious Talkcast. Bring your questions and your answers, and we'll see where the line between reasonable security and outright paranoia might be.

To participate live during the show, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, the best way to have your voice heard is to call in.

For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite or other SIP clients (aside from Skype or Google Voice), basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!

Talkcast tonight, 10pm ET/7pm PT: Scattered passwords, like the corners of my cloud originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The drumbeat of corporate security issues pounds on, with hybrid cloud/local notekeeping service Evernote reporting this weekend that its internal security team "discovered and blocked suspicious activity" aimed at sensitive areas of Evernote's service. Although neither billing information nor actual client notes were exposed in this breach, Evernote does acknowledge that some user account information -- usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords -- was accessed.

While none of the user passwords were stored in the clear, the fact that they may be in the hands of hackers (along with the corresponding user credentials) led Evernote to force a password reset for all its millions of users. If you've gotten a password reset notice from Evernote, it's almost certainly legitimate, but in the interest of proper procedure you should not click the login link in the email. Open a trusted browser (these days, that means one with Java applets disabled) and type in "www.evernote.com" directly to reset your login credentials. If you need help generating and storing a strong password, our guide to password creation is here for you.

As more and more cloud services are subject to attacks that target user login details, it's become overwhelmingly clear that just having a strong password isn't enough; if you reused your Evernote password on any other service (especially your email account), you have a potentially serious problem. Managing unique passwords for scores or hundreds of accounts is no picnic, but utilities like 1Password or LastPass can make it easier to find and change your re-used passwords.

Evernote forces password reset after "suspicious activity" originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

You know you do it. Walk through any big-box retailer and look around at your fellow consumers, or at yourself in the mirror: now and again you're checking out a product in person, sizing it up and making a decision -- then jumping online with your iPhone to price (and probably buy) that same item online. The practice is called showrooming, and it's hitting traditional retailers right where it hurts.

Although the showrooming trend is likely to hit housewares giant Bed Bath & Beyond the worst, says survey company Placed -- BB&B's products tend toward the bulky and infrequently purchased, but require "hands-on" shopping -- consumer electronics shops are also on the ropes. Best Buy's plan to combat showrooming is simple: if you see a price online from one of the electronics chain's storefront-free competitors, it gets matched on the spot. The new deal, announced in mid-February, goes into effect this Sunday, and Apple's online store is one of the matched sites.

The Consumerist has the full list of matchable websites, and aside from Apple and Amazon there are plenty of heavy hitters: Newegg, Target, Amazon, TigerDirect, HP and Dell's sites are all among the price match contenders. Note that Best Buy will not match mobile phone plan pricing, refurb pricing or bundled offers. Of course, Best Buy is matching the pre-tax retail price; if you're in a state where Amazon doesn't charge sales tax, you're still going to come out ahead with the online deal -- except for shipping cost and having to wait to get your goodies.

Does Best Buy's move make you more likely to shop, and buy, from Big Yellow? Or is it too late for the electronics retailer to clutch back your dollars? Let us know in the comments.

Best Buy's anti-showrooming price match starts Sunday 3/3 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Visiting the annual Toy Fair trade show at New York's Javits Center earlier this month was an exercise in sensory overload. Hundreds of vendors, from tiny single-product companies to former garage startups grown massive to legitimate industry giants, staff booths and pitch passersby with their fun, family-friendly offerings.

While technological toys make headlines and grab attention, most of the products seen on display don't use anything more technologically advanced than a few AA batteries or some brightly colored surgical tubing. If you can throw it, build it, paint it, read it or stick it to a wall, it's represented at Toy Fair.

Most exhibitors were showing products that won't make it to store shelves until this summer if not later, but the buyers and retailers who need to plan ahead for the busy shopping seasons were happy to have an up-front look.

Among the toys with Apple tech tie-ins, quite a few used iOS device cameras to deliver augmented-reality content triggered by the design of the physical product. Ravensburger's line of AR-enabled puzzles can quiz you or plant your pictures in the middle of Times Square, and the Popar Toys books and games with AR features allow your eager reader to take pop-up books to the next level with 3D, animated storytelling matched to each page. Here's a quick video demo of Popar's technology in action.

Along with AR, the venerable QRCode showed up in a number of toy and game tie-ins. As Megan posted last week, the upcoming America's Funniest Home Videos game will be powered by QRCode scanning, with video clips embedded in the app for data-plan-free playtime. The US$14.99 Codigo Cube also uses QRCodes on a special die, with each code triggering a different trivia category in the corresponding quiz app. Given the level of frustration usually associated with real-world scanning of QRCodes, I don't know how effective this will be in the games market, but we'll see.

It's not shipping until late this spring, but the Verzis four-way family game controller looks intriguing. The flat gamepad-style controller set sits underneath your iPad, giving everyone on the table their individual controls. The real question there will be the number (and quality) of apps that end up supporting the controller; several are planned for release with the gamepad set.

Pretty much every manufacturer of remote-controlled toy vehicles has a selection of iOS-linked flyers, drivers or none-of-the-aboves. Model helicopter and car maker FunkyPlanet showed several 'copters compatible with its AppRC Fly iPhone controller (you have to add the $19.99 IR dongle yourself), and there are forthcoming Mini Cooper and Porsche models that work with the AppRC Drive app. Chinese OEM Woddon Toys has a whole line of iCon app-controlled models on the way, including the dramatic iConEyes quadcopter: camera equipped, app-piloted and looking like an angry baby Batmobile with rotors.

For pure RC cute, however, you would have to search hard to find anything more adorable than the DeskPets line of teensy RC tanks, cars and battling, maze-walking vehicles. DeskPets's TankBot models are $29.95 each, putting them on the less expensive end of the app/RC spectrum. Honorable cuteness mention gets a split decision, with both the Romo iPhone-powered tank robot and the Sphero rolling, swimming robot ghost ball drawing oohs and ahhs from passersby. Romo's going to have some competition with the Robo Me robot coming this spring. (We covered both Romo and Sphero at CES earlier this year.)

The iPhone also found itself playing a tactical role as an augmented-reality gunsight in quite a few toys, most of which won't hit stores until later this year. Tech4Kids upcoming TekRecon rubber-band shooters, due in the fall, use the iPhone as the sight while you try to tag your buddies. Metal Compass's Xappr AR gun bypasses the physical ammo altogether and links with more than 10 iPhone apps for virtual battles; it also works with a handful of Android apps as well. Unfortunately, despite an orange frontpiece the Xappr looks a little bit too realistic for comfort. Here's a quick video of the device.

Even if actual iOS games weren't overwhelming the show floor, the consequences of those games were clearly in evidence: scores of licensed products from Cut The Rope and Angry Birds. Cases, games, snacks, accessories and more -- check out the gallery for some examples. I lost count of how many Angry Birds tie-ins I saw across the exhibit space.

Gallery: Toy Fair 2013

Honorable mention to our pals at ThinkGeek, holding down a comparatively staid and distinguished booth filled with Minecraft and Star Trek gadgets, and to the impressive breadth of Mac and iPhone-themed items at the Thumbs Up! booth. I definitely want a Padintosh iPad cover.

There were a few legitimately inventive ideas on the show floor, which we'll get to in detail in subsequent posts. Tiggly Shapes looks like a very promising iPad toy for preschoolers, and the Apptivators line of iPad toppers definitely garnered some attention.

Our former Engadget colleague Joanna Stern, now covering the tech beat for ABC News, found some of the higher-profile iOS tie-ins at the show, including the clever Nerf Cyberhoop basketball hoop/app combo (the app does automatic scoring, listening for the audio of a made basket) and the technologically impressive, deeply creepy Barbie Makeover Mirror. This particular product, which I did not get in to see (Mattel's full-floor solo exhibit space at Toy Fair was by appointment only, and fully booked up when I inquired) uses the iPad's front-facing camera in mirror mode, then allows the player to apply virtual eye shadow, blush and lipstick via a Bluetooth-linked palette of plastic makeup. The applied color then tracks her (or his) facial features. We've got until August to get used to this idea.

We'll be sharing a few more of our impressions from Toy Fair over the next few days.

iPad, iPhone toys represented at Toy Fair 2013 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Got Macs? Got Office? For support personnel who want to show the world that they know which end of a pivot table goes into a stylesheet and how to upgrade PowerPoint for full compatibility with Exchange Server 2013*, your opportunity has arrived.

MacTech's upcoming seven-city BootCamp II tour, which provides a full day of seminars for people supporting the Mac in small to medium size business and other contexts, now has a frontloaded (and free) certification option for Microsoft's new Office for Mac Accredited Support Professional credential. For a half-day ahead of the BootCamp, attendees can learn all about Office installation, deployment, troubleshooting and much more.

While the Office credential program, including the final evaluation and certificate, is free, MacTech BootCamp II itself is $299 for early-bird registrants, $499 for regular registration. The tour kicks off in Seattle in early March, so check to see when it's coming to your neck of the woods. If you do sign up, be sure to use our TUAW reader affinity link to make sure you get your special benefit!

*Yes, those are nonsensical support challenges. Congratulations, you passed the first quiz.

MacTech, Microsoft team up to offer Office for Mac support credential originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Fans of taxi-finder apps like Uber, Hailo and FlyWheel may have to wait a bit longer before they can raise their iThumbs to flag down yellow cabs in the US' busiest urban area. Per the WSJ, a lawsuit by livery cab drivers may block a rule change that would allow app-based hailing in NYC.

While iPhone apps to summon a taxi or "black car" ride are popular in other cities, New York's slightly Byzantine rules governing for-hire cars have made it challenging for these apps to make inroads in the Big Apple. The city's iconic yellow cabs can respond to street hails, but for many years have not been allowed to take phone reservations or centralized dispatch. The lawsuit contends that an e-hail is equivalent to dispatching, and that these apps will encroach upon the for-hire car market.

The chairman of the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission, former city council member David Yassky, didn't mince words in his statement responding to the legal maneuverings. "This suit seeks to keep the taxi industry and New Yorkers in the dark ages... Next thing, they'll be suing restaurants to go back to wood-burning stoves. Our rules allow for e-hail now, and the only question is, do we embrace these new services and ensure that consumer protections are in place, or listen to obstructionists and watch e-hail apps proliferate without any regulatory input."

Back in December, the TLC approved a year-long pilot test of app-based hailing for yellow taxis. The earliest possible start date for that test was February 15, but now it's possible it may take even longer for the service to kick off. An earlier test by Uber had to be canceled due to too few participating cabs and too much demand, not to mention that the TLC hadn't yet figured out how e-hailing was going to work in the city.

Meanwhile, livery cabs, car services and corporate cars can indeed be dispatched by phone and by app -- Uber's app already covers most of NYC's business district -- but they aren't allowed to pick up arbitrary passengers on the street (although many flout the rules).

On recent trips to Chicago and San Francisco, I was pleasantly surprised by how effective Uber's cab service was, with a ride showing up promptly in almost all cases (one attempt at rush hour in SF's downtown financial district didn't pan out). I would certainly take advantage of an e-hail tool in NYC, assuming the interested parties ever sort out their disputes.

[via Transportation Nation and Crain's New York]

NYC taxis may have to wait longer for app hails originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 18 Feb 2013 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The latest iPad ads appeared this evening, both on TV and on Apple's YouTube channel. Both new ads are embedded below.

The ads feature a rapid text scroll, presumably listing the attributes of the magical and revolutionary tablets. Each "landing" word is then given life with quick demo moments of iPad apps like TED, iBooks, Vimeo, Garage Band and plenty more. How many apps can you identify?

[hat tip AppAdvice]

Two new iPad ads hit the airwaves originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Making a good iOS app isn't easy (just ask our own Mike Schramm), and frankly most non-programmer professionals don't have the time or energy to learn their way through XCode and take control of their own "face" on the App Store. That's too bad, really; more and more, a brand's first impression is formed not by its advertising or its website but by the mobile experience it delivers. Getting a truly "pro" result can cost thousands of dollars and countless hours of work.

While there are rapid development platforms for iOS -- some very capable, and some that want to take their own slice of the sales revenue -- most RSS-driven tools are not so capable and the results are not so attractive. (I really can't think of a more unfortunate name for an authoring platform, but what do I know.) There's definitely room for a sophisticated, web-based tool that provides simplicity on the back end for novice app authors while delivering a slick, fully native experience on the App Store.

Kleverbeast, which launches into a public beta today, may just be the standard bearer for app creation 2.0. The service, which starts at US$29/month for core features, lets authors work in a web-based CMS as they build out their apps. Once every bit of content is ready, navigation is set and all is approved, the Kleverbeast servers compile a full .ipa iOS package that's ready for the App Store.

Gallery: Kleverbeast iPad authoring

With a $99 Apple developer account, you can publish under your own shingle; if you don't have or don't want ADC access, Kleverbeast will do the uploading for you. You can also target Android tablets via Google Play, but not iPhones or Android phones, yet.

Granted, if you build a Kleverbeast app you're working in a template, but the templates are gorgeous and flexible (think Squarespace, not PowerPoint). During the beta, there are several "looks" available, with more on the way; the initial set focuses on creative professionals like artists or photographers, galleries or small retail, and a few other verticals. Alpha users like photographer Lawrence Schiller have already begun pushing the Kleverbeast platform to the max; you can see the results on the App Store now in his Marilyn and America in the '60s app, and in Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi's gallery app.

Here's a quick overview of the authoring process:

The service includes a free KB Viewer app, which allows you to preview your app on a live iPad before pushing the Publish button. Kleverbeast is providing a seven-day free trial during the beta period, with full access to all the platform tools.

Subscription plans are $29/month or $199/month depending on your desired feature mix, and enterprise plans are available. Even if your subscription expires, your app is yours and remains in the store; you would have to re-up your subscription to add or change elements in your app, however.

App authoring made WordPress-easy with Kleverbeast originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Nothing says "analog" like a shoebox full of old videotapes, Super 8 movies and slides. Even if you wanted to watch them (or subject friends / kids to them), digging out the old projector or VCR is a dicey proposition. Converting film to video or digital storage is possible to achieve DIY, but can be daunting and/or expensive -- although with an HDSLR, the results can be pretty cool.

If you'd rather pay than tinker, there are scores of shops and services, ranging from LargeCos to small local shops, that will happily tackle the task of digitizing your old media. One of the biggest in the space -- more than 10 million home videos made into bits already, $50 million in 2012 retail revenue -- is YesVideo.

YesVideo offers convenient drop-off locations at thousands of drugstores, megamarts and shopping clubs, and it provides hosted Web access to your converted movies in addition to the traditional DVD delivery. Submitted movies and other materials are processed domestically in either the eastern (Norcross, GA) or western (Santa Clara, Calif.) YesVideo facility.

Although the Web library at YesVideo is HTML5 savvy and works with iOS and Android, the company is taking the next step today and launching an iPhone app. Users can watch all their digitized content in the app, chapter by chapter or a full movie at a time. Clips are shareable over Facebook and via email, and of course the app is AirPlay-friendly for inflicting your memories on a roomful of people at once via your Apple TV. You can also track the progress of an open digitizing order in the app.

Do you have one of those aforementioned shoeboxes hanging around? As a special treat for TUAW readers, YesVideo is offering a 30 percent discount on conversion orders until April 1. Prepare your order at direct.yesvideo.com, then enter "TUAW" in the coupon field. You can request an EasyShip Kit from YesVideo, or just ship your movies to the conversion facility in the box you're currently using to hold them (assuming it's not disintegrating from age and neglect).

Connect with your 8mm memories using YesVideo's app and a TUAW discount originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Not to bother you with a study from the University of the Obvious, but if you think about the history of technologically facilitated intelligent agents, the goal always seems to be to sub in for a clever, always-on human personal assistant. There's a reason that hyper-busy, well-compensated folk have such staffers on the payroll: they make things easier.

Need a file for that meeting, or background on the attendees? Running late and need to tell them? Want to know which flights are delayed before you head to the airport, or where to park near the place you're having lunch? With a personal assistant, one call or text and you've got it handled.

We can't all have personal aides, but a lot of us have smartphones. Siri tackles the question of accessing your data or contacting people without putting your hands and / or eyes on the iPhone; Android's Google Now feature aims at the information supply side, parceling out the tidbits you need (or at least the ones it thinks you need) just when you're likely to want them. Even the oversubscribed launch of Mailbox this week speaks to the desire we have to start getting a streamlined, secure handle on the ebb and flow of our critical information.

Another option for getting the smart back into your smartphone launches today, and it's aimed at both your calendar and all the collateral information that surrounds it. Tempo Smart Calendar, incubated in Siri's birthplace at SRI International, derives situational awareness by analyzing your meetings alongside other data sinks like your email, LinkedIn contacts, attachments, location and more. The app is iPhone-only for now, with other platforms to come along later.

Tempo may look like other calendar apps on the App Store -- to my eyes, it pays some UI tribute to the revamped Gmail native app -- but its power lies in context as well as content. Rather than overwhelm you with every tidbit and factoid about your events, Tempo's design is intended to "reduce the noise that's often associated with virtual assistants that push information to users out of context or intent," says founder and CEO Raj Singh. The app will even find context that you didn't explicitly associate with the event, by looking for frequently emailed people connected to meeting hosts or attachments to messages with contextually relevant subjects.

Wherever possible, the calendar app distills actions down to a single tap: send an "I'm running late" alert, get directions, pull up attachments for the next appointment, check LinkedIn profiles or join a conference call (it even auto-dials conference codes for you, which I currently do with a $1.99 singletasker). As Tempo learns your modus operandi, it adjusts to provide the most-frequently needed information more promptly. I may not be busy enough to take full advantage of Tempo's savvy, but if your day involves hopping from call to meeting to meal to evening, you may indeed benefit from the added clarity and context that the app provides.

Of course, Tempo's AI has to learn about you and what your day looks like, so using it means giving it access to a lot of your personal data, including your email (and letting it mull for a while on initial setup). If that makes you uncomfortable, be forewarned. You should check the Tempo site for privacy assurances and make sure that if you do try it and don't like it, you can fully erase yourself from the service. Tempo's privacy statement is here; the important note for anyone who intends to do a short-term trial and possibly cancel later on is that if you delete your Tempo account, your third-party service info might remain on their system for several weeks until it's aged out. If you want to get your mail and other data off more quickly, be sure to remove those subaccounts within the Tempo app before deleting your master Tempo account.

Tempo is launching as a free app, with possible premium features down the road for paid users. In contrast to Mailbox's Gmail-only limitation, Tempo is calendar- and email-agnostic. To provide a sense of what's possible inside the app, Tempo's produced this adorable promo video featuring a busy architect dad and his preternaturally articulate daughter. Robert Scoble also has a 30-minute interview with founder Singh in his enthusiastic writeup.

Smart calendar app Tempo speeds up your day originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 13 Feb 2013 11:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The annual flurry of chocolate, flowers and crowded restaurants is only a few days away! Valentine's Day is this coming Thursday, so tonight we'll talk Apple-themed romance. How can you charm and celebrate the beloved geek in your life? Then again, if you are the Mac geek in your relationship, how can you amp up the love factor this week?

Bring your ideas, destinations, apps and gifts to the show tonight. We'll also preview a bit of our Toy Fair coverage, rolling out the rest of this week. And, as usual, we'll review the news of the day and take your questions as we go.

To participate live during the show, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, the best way to have your voice heard is to call in. (We're holding off on rolling in the Google+ Hangout experiment until we file off a few of the rough edges.)

For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite or other SIP clients (aside from Skype or Google Voice), basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!

Talkcast tonight, 10 pm ET/7 pm PT: Pre-Valentine's potpourri edition originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 10 Feb 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

With so many ways to share calendars and schedules, sometimes it's nice to go a little bit old-school with a blank sheet of paper, a Magic Marker and a little bit of time. Mobile Simplified's $0.99 Weekly Schedule app, just released to the US App Store for iPad, delivers some of that hands-on feeling as it lets you create sharable weekly agendas, monthly calendars and task lists.

Weekly Schedule inherits most of its features from the $1.99 iTeach Pad, which also includes student management and lesson plan options; both apps share a UI aesthetic with a more "classroom" feel than most iOS offerings.

The core schedule features are simple: on a time grid for the week, you add your event blocks and build out your schedule. If you want a specific event to repeat all week long (a morning meeting, for instance) just tap and hold to duplicate it.

Blocks get a specific duration, color and name when you create them, and they hold onto that indefinitely. (You can also edit the names of the days, and it's easy to accidentally edit Friday when trying to tap the "add event" button.) The quick drag-and-drop rearrangement of the blocks -- almost as if you had paper cutouts on a cardboard schedule -- makes it easy to fit all the necessary schedule elements into your week, and know that you're not skipping anything.

In the monthly calendar mode, you're actually getting an alternate view of your iPad calendar data one month at a time. It's not as flexible as dedicated apps like Agenda or Readdle's Calendars, but it's a nice overview. The Lists view gives you a basic task manager, with folders to group lists of individual to-dos. Each task can be checked off with a single tap.

Sharing and exporting is an interesting -- and very constrained -- feature in Weekly Schedule. Nothing is cloud synced, dynamic or remotely editable (except events in the Calendar view, if your native calendars are shared); it's all local data, all on your iPad. For the weekly view and the calendar view, there's one way to get your work out to your colleagues -- you email an image of the schedule or calendar. Yep, that's it. For task lists, the email is text instead of an image, which is appropriate for that data type.

I'd love to see some next-gen features (AirPrint, flexible export options) make it into Weekly Schedule down the road. In the meantime, though, if you have a weekly planner to make and only your iPad handy, it's a solid tool.

Quickly sketch out class or meeting schedules with Weekly Schedule for iPad originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 09 Feb 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Feeling oppressed by your inbox? Struggling under the weight of unread messages? You're not alone. With half a billion results for "manage my/your email" there's obviously a need for help. Now add in the new wrinkle: many of us are interacting with email primarily or exclusively via our mobile devices, something that the legacy POP and IMAP protocols were never truly built to handle.

Big problems need smart solutions: enter Mailbox, a free app and matching cloud pre-processor for mobile email. The team behind the iOS and web to-do app Orchestra decided to bring its savvy to the email challenge after the experience of trying to manage tasks without integrating the inbox proved frustrating. "In hindsight, it was obvious," said CEO Gentry Underwood. Even with the power of Orchestra in hand, "people kept sending us tasks by email."

Underwood doesn't mince words about the effectiveness of email for task management: "Email is a broken to-do list," he says, and "the way we live our lives on email is ridiculous... marking messages unread, sending things to ourselves" -- all symptoms of a round peg in a square hole. For a fuller rundown of what's not right about email, read Underwood's manifesto on TechCrunch and his interview with AllThingsD.

Mailbox's approach to dealing with the onslaught is to optimize the heck out of your inbox, specifically tuning it to the mobile experience. The company's cloud servers download and compress your messages from Gmail; the app gives you tools for quickly reading, replying, snoozing ("I want to see this tomorrow morning") and sorting your email. Mailbox tries to keep your attention on critical items while allowing you to do email triage, catching opportunities to deal with messages where and when you can in short bursts of engagement.

The app's previews to a selected few testers have garnered some raves, and today's launch of the app is bound to excite many more... if they can use it.

Gallery: Mailbox for iPhone screenshots

Aside from the Gmail-only support in the initial release, users of Mailbox may need to wait in line. The company is scaling out its middleman servers to match demand as it builds, and in order to avoid overloading new users will be added to the system by reservation only. Mailbox has been accepting reservation requests since late January, and now that the app is available for download it's going to start to fulfill them -- queued users will get a text message with a signup link and activation code, and away they go. The app will even tell you where you are in the queue until you get your magic stamp of approval. (I requested a reservation on January 27, and there are only 228,431 people in front of me. Shouldn't be long now!)

The pace of reservation fulfillment may seem slow at first, but the company says it should accelerate as the shakedown period for the infrastructure continues. This tiered access may be somewhat atypical for an App Store release, but Underwood says it's the only way to fairly and reliably bootstrap the service. When it comes to the scaling process, Orchestra has done all it can, but "we don't know what we don't know," he says, and "email just has to work." Rather than opening the floodgates and seeing what breaks, the plan is to "add users as fast as we can, but no faster." Mailbox is free at launch and intended to remain so, with premium buy-up features planned down the line.

If the app UI sounds confusing, check out this demo video. It's swipe, swipe and hold, and act upon -- all very easy once you get the hang of it. If you're already on the reservation list and ready to start Mailboxing, let us know your impressions in the comments.

Mailbox for iPhone targets the "broken to-do list" of email originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Late in December we told you about the upcoming Rabbit video chat and screensharing service, aimed specifically at Mac users in the near term. Rabbit's team has been cranking away since then, and today the service begins welcoming invited testers to the closed beta.

Rabbit's aim is to transform the current one-to-one or one-to-many experience of video chat into a massively social experience. Chat rooms in Rabbit have no specific participant limit, and the service adapts your incoming audio to deliver the conversations "near" you without overwhelming your ears or your bandwidth.

Sharing content with your chat or Facebook buddies is also a core part of the Rabbit experience. Whether it's screenshared items from your Mac, a song on Spotify or hosted video content on YouTube or Hulu, you should all see and hear it together.

Beta invitations are rolling out to the service this month, so if you're interested, sign up and check it out.

Rabbit video chat beta kicks off originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Is an iPad a portable media device? A tablet computer? Something entirely "post-PC"? The answer, of course, is "it depends who you ask."

Let's go ahead and define the parent category for iPads (and other tablets like the Kindle Fire, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Google Nexus) as "mobile screens that run a touch-centric OS, don't ship with a hardware keyboard, are larger than a mainstream smartphone and don't offer telephony as a core feature." Call that a tablet, or a "pad" if you must to distinguish it from legacy tablet PCs and the potential fridge toasters of Microsoft's Surface devices.

If that's the bucket we're talking about, some reasonable sales comparisons are available. The fourth quarter of 2012 saw Samsung ship 7.6 million pads, and Amazon shipped 4.6 million, according to a report released today by research firm Canalys. With Apple's reported sales of 22.9 million iPads, it's pretty clear who's leading the category.

Canalys's report doesn't leave it at that, however. With a wave of the marketshare wand, the report combines 22.9 million iPads with Apple's reported sales of 4.1 million Macs in the quarter. Accordingly, the firm puts Apple's total PC sales at 27 million for the quarter, handily crushing second-place HP's 15 million units shipped.

In fact, if you admit the iPad to the PC club, Apple's quarter put it above 20 percent of the global PC share for the first time. From October 1 to December 31, in that 13-week quarter -- given the looser, flatter, touchable definition of a PC that Canalys is proposing -- one out of every six PCs sold worldwide was actually an iPad.

I wish to take nothing away from Apple's achievements with the iPad. Selling 23 million of anything is really rather tough, and a jar of salsa's a far cry from a device with an average selling price $150 higher than a ticket from New York to LA. But just because consumers may be choosing the iPad as an alternative to buying a laptop or a computer doesn't necessarily mean they should be counted as members of the same taxon.

Both by form and function, the iPad and its fellow "pad" products should really be considered post-PC devices distinct from PCs and also from smartphones -- they don't require a keyboard or mouse, they don't run legacy Win32 or Mac apps, they don't usually make phone calls. And they surely don't sell the way PCs do.

[via NYT Bits]

If an iPad's a computer, then Apple is the world's PC shipment leader originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 06 Feb 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.