The New York Times has posted about a new project that our own Mr. Jobs has taken on: he's now helping out Disney Stores with their retail business. You have to hand it to Disney, no matter what you think of the Mouse House -- when they have a problem with part of the business, they bring in the experts. First they have Pixar's John Lasseter come in and take over animation (and they're about to release what looks like the best 2D movie in ages), and now they've got Steve Jobs himself sprucing up their retail spaces. Sounds like they're making the store more interactive (walking by some displays with certain products will create an audiovisual reaction), and taking some of the tech as well (employees will be able to check out items on mobile units, and control certain displays in the store with iPhones).

They also borrowed another page from Jobs' playbook: they've apparently created a prototype store (just like Apple did way back when), not only to test out what everything might look like, but to give a charge to executives and investors who get a tour. Sounds interesting, but then again, it makes sense. What else is an Apple Store, but a toy shop for big kids?

[via MacUser]

I reviewed the Village Tronic ViDock a while back, and I was happy to have the opportunity to take a look at one of their more entry-level solutions for adding additional monitors to machines without an additional video port. This one, the ViBook, is a USB-to-DVI solution.

As was the case with my previous experience with Village Tronic products, I was duly impressed by their classy packaging. But I won't dwell on the shell here (no more rhyming, I mean it!). The device itself is compact, well-engineered and, yes, shiny. It connects to your computer via a standard USB cable plugged into any powered USB 2.0 slot.

It's designed to connect in one of several ways to the monitor: directly attached to the monitor's video port via a compact male-to-male adapter, via a cable directly connected to its embedded female adapter, or -- in a related manner -- via a short cable with the body of the device semi-permanently mounted on the back of the monitor with the included cradle and 3M adhesive pads. It's designed well enough that no matter where you put it, it will fit nicely and stay put (it has a studded rubber base, too). It is, by the way, both Mac and PC compatible. Read on for the rest of the review ...

I love screen space. At the same time, my primary machine is a 2nd Gen, 17" MacBook Pro, which offers only one external DVI port. In my greedy quest to add more external monitors to my home workstation, I've tried a smorgasbord of products. I quickly gave up on USB to DVI solutions due to poor refresh rates and unmanageable color, and the closest I'd been able to come to a workable solution was Matrox's TripleHead2Go. The biggest drawback to that solution (and it ended up being big enough that my TripleHead2Go is gathering dust in a corner) is that the 2 or 3 monitors you hook up to it end up being treated as one large monitor. This means that you have fewer options in positioning your displays, and -- at least with 2 monitors connected -- things like menubars, the application switcher and even newly created windows and dialogs all pop up in the split between monitors. It works, but not well enough.

We'd heard tell of a product from Village Tronic called the ViDock Gfx, but after several disappointing experiences with other products in the same vein, I hadn't been ready to shell out for another try. Then, we got a review unit and it became clear that there was, in fact, a usable solution to the MacBook Pro's multi-monitor dilemma. Read on for my impressions after a week with this unique product.

LG has won a five-year contract to provide LCDs for Apple, Inc. According to Softpedia, Apple wanted LG's LCD and next-generation OLED displays for not only notebooks and Cinema Displays, but for iPhones and iPods as well.

LG will receive a deposit of US$500 million to begin work under the contract.

OLED displays use organic material to emit light. According to the same article, OLED displays outperform LCD displays in terms of refresh rate, color, and energy efficiency.

LG already provides over 70 percent of Apple's notebook and Cinema Display LCDs, according to Reuters. Before that, Apple had partnered with Samsung about 10 years ago to help the company boost its TFT LCD production.

[Via Macworld.]

Last night, some eagle-eyed readers noticed that Apple has changed the shipping status for the LED Cinema Displays. Previously, the status said "Coming Soon," but as of last night it says "Ships in 7-10 Business Days." However, the option to buy is still not available on the Apple Store page.

I talked with an Apple Store representative and they told me that there is still no set release date, but when you are able to purchase the displays, there will be an initial 7-10 day wait for shipping. These new Cinema Displays are the first Apple has shipped with LED backlighting and glossy LCD screens. The displays are marketed towards new MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro buyers who want a desktop experience, but notebook portability. In fact, these laptop users are the only ones able to take advantage of the new DisplayPort-enabled Cinema Displays -- older DVI-equipped machines can't drive them until a DVI-DisplayPort adapter comes along.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

MacRumors speculates on the possibility of Apple releasing updated Cinema displays at next year's Macworld Expo. According to the post, the new displays could incorporate the LED backlight technology that Apple has started building into their 15" MacBook Pros.

MacRumors notes that LED backlit displays going into the 30" range tend to be more expensive than Apple's current 30" Cinema display. However, if this is true, it would be a nice change from Apple's 2004 design of the current Cinema displays. There is no word yet on if the new displays would include the iSight camera.

More Mac 101, tips for the Mac beginner in you. Lucky dual-monitor users, rejoice -- with that second display on your desk, you're bound to be the productivity envy of the entire office. Just one little problem, though: sometimes your Mac has trouble recognizing that extra real estate, and rebooting every time your resolutions get munged is beginning to get old.

Relax, and check out your mini-menu for monitors over there in the menu bar. See "Detect Displays?" That's your buddy, right there -- it will tell your Mac to recheck the connected monitors and adjust resolutions as needed. Note the model number of the external display shown; if everything's connected as it should be, your Mac should autosense the type and capabilities of the display without any intervention.

For an even quicker trigger on display detection, try Cmd-F2 (brightness up) on your built-in laptop keyboard. Cmd-F1 will toggle display mirroring, also handy in a pinch.

There are several ways other ways to get external displays to behave; the oldest, for laptop users, is to sleep the machine and wake it back up -- this usually triggers a display detection when all else fails. There's also a Detect Displays button in the Displays preference pane.

Also, to answer a reader question from the comments: it's easy to specify which display acts as the primary monitor in a dual-display setup: just drag the teensy proxy menubar from one display to the other, and your menus, drive icons etc. will follow.

Mac Mini users have been waiting a long time for a true dual-monitor solution. Sure there are a bunch of work-arounds out there that let you run more than one screen at a time but a real multi-screen solution hasn't yet been available as far as I know. (Honestly, I haven't been looking all that hard--so if there's one I missed let me know in the comments.)

Display Link has finally decided to let the mini come to the multi-display party. TUAW reader Nick tipped us off to these new beta drivers for Mac OS X.

The DisplayLink hardware supports up to 4 USB-based monitors. You're limited to Intel Macs but minis and MacBook Airs are supported. The beta does not support OpenGL acceleration so Keynote and iPhoto slide shows will not properly function.

From what I could tell from the site, Display Link seems to be sold with third party branding. The Kensington USB docking station (model 33415) for $140 is apparently the product in question.

Imagine the scary, Sarkian voice of David Warner intoning "You will be subject to immediate de-resolution" and you'll know how a cluster of Leopard-using laptop owners (including yours truly) are feeling after getting bitten by a problem in the Leopard Graphics Update. You can see the rundown over at MacFixIt; the symptom is that after a restart or crash, the previously-happy external display is registered by the OS as a replica of the internal LCD, limited to the same 1400x900 resolution (in the case of the MacBook Pro 15" I'm using) as the built-in display. Custom calibrations and other display-specific tweaks are also nowhere to be found.

The usual first steps to troubleshooting display issues -- unplug/replug, "Detect Displays," sleep and wake the laptop -- were fruitless. For me, even the heroic measures of a PRAM reset and deleting the com.apple.displays plist from the ByHost preferences folder didn't make a dent. Switching from a DVI to VGA cable left me with only a secondary screen on the laptop, sans menu bar, and the usual Cmd-F2 to trigger a display detect did nothing at all. How aggravating!

Still, one of the reasons I heart MacFixIt is because there's usually an offbeat (not to say wacky) workaround in the mix when a problem comes on the radar. In this case, the suggestion that made me go "Wha? Nah!" was to power on the laptop, immediately close the lid (with external display still attached) and wait for the machine to boot completely. I tried it; lo and behold, the external display is now recognized correctly, and when the machine is slept and awakened or "Detect Displays" is triggered, everything behaves as expected.

Sometimes, when the weirdest possible fix is the one that works, you just have to put the laptop down and slowly back away.

For today's Mac 101 I thought I'd draw your attention to a feature of the Displays tab of the System Preferences that only appears on external monitors: Rotate. If you plug in an external monitor to your Mac you should see that you have the option to rotate the display by 90 degree increments (clockwise). Now why would you want to do this? Well, if like me you have an external widescreen display, sometimes it's actually more handy to use it vertically instead of horizontally. I do this because I work entirely on the main (24") display and use the external (20") for showing my email, iTunes, etc. On my desk, I feel like this is a more efficient allocation of pixels. You can see a picture of my setup after the jump.

Still wondering what was lurking under that mysteriously wrapped object, wonder no more. Over at Flickr, user Saminman has posted an entire set of snapshots showing off the new iPhone window displays. This appears to be a slightly different installation from the AT&T display. For one thing, it seems to be run off a Mac and not a Dell.

According to MacDailyNews who relays information gleaned from ThinkSecret, the 17-inch iMac will soon be no more. Let's have a quick moment of silence to say goodbye.

Right then. Enough of the moment.

Industry insiders, those anonymous sources of all the most fabulous and occasionally reliable Apple news, suggest that starting at the end of June a refreshed iMac line will consist of 20- and 24-inch models. As display prices continue to drop, the cost difference between a 17-inch and 20-inch iMac has apparently shrunk as well, making this jump in screen size possible. More screen, same $$s. Excellent.

One could allow Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley some latitude for extreme frustration. Both Mac-toting photographers found themselves, along with other MacBook and MacBook Pro owners, dealing with 'sparkly' and 'grainy' color on their laptop screens; as color-sensitive professionals, this rankled. Being told by Apple support that they were hypersensitive and they should get over themselves? Not good. Seeing discussion threads on the issue squelched on Apple's support boards? Infuriating. So, the two men decided to avail themselves of the last tech support refuge of the American consumer: the class-action lawsuit.

At the heart of Greaves and Gatley's action is the belief that Apple deceptively promoted its laptop screens as having superior color performance, when in fact the displays are only capable of displaying 18-bit color (6 bit * 3 channels, about 262,000 colors; contrast with 24-bit color, 8 bits per channel for 16.7 million colors). While almost all laptop panels are 6-bit models, and other laptop manufacturers use similar dithering methods (Frame Rate Control) to achieve the perceived wider gamut of millions of colors, this seems fishy to G&G. Additionally, the subjective experience of some MBP owners indicates that the banding/sparkling issues are nonexistent when the machines are booted into Windows; hence, a software or firmware issue on the Mac side would seem to be degrading the display/adapter performance.

I'm no stranger to the hardware problem that's oddly OS-specific, and I sympathize with those who expected Pro color on Pro laptops. The 6-bit vs. 8-bit issue aside -- it's industry-standard, and some Apple tech notes even acknowledge the distinction -- and as frustrating as the color conundrum must be for those affected, I can't imagine that this lawsuit is going to allow anyone to see green (aside from plaintiff's attorneys, that is).

[via Ars Technica]

Mac Daily News reports that AT&T Mobility (the former Cingular) stores across the US will soon be getting their enormous iPhone displays. They link to this Boy Genius Report, which relies on information from industry insiders and says the displays will require their own power supplies and network cables in order to show off the iPhone. The display itself should be 3 feet wide and 7 feet tall, which does not sound particularly "enormous" to me in terms of retail merchandising.

I just recently plunked down some of my sweet, sweet blogging money for a 24 inch Dell monitor (check out my setup) which I am loving. Setting it up with my MacBook running OS X 10.4.8 was very easy (as long as you have one of these). There are a few things that did get me, which I thought I would point out for you readers out there.

Above you see the Arrangement section from the Display preference pane in System Preferences (note that each display will popup its own Display pref pane, but only the main display will have the Arrangement option). This is where you can do a few things:

1. Arrange the displays by dragging the boxes that represent them around
2. Move the Dock and the menu bar to whichever monitor you want to use as you main monitor (as you can see I'm using the 24 incher as my main display)
3. Mirror the output on each display

This is where you should first go when you have multiple monitors, however, the fun doesn't end there.