Zero1.tv has released its new VooMote Zapper (US$69.95) universal remote for iOS devices into the wild, and it's also now in your nearby Apple Store. I had an opportunity to try the new device out over the last week, and while less expensive and smaller than the VooMote One remote we mentioned at its release last last year, the Zapper still seems to have some of the same issues that many other iOS remotes have.

First, the good news. The tiny Zapper plugs into the 30-pin Universal Dock port on the bottom of your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. As such, it's able to provide the infrared transceiver on the device with more power than some of the cheap devices we've seen that plug into the headphone jack. The company boasts that the Zapper has four IR mini-blasters for range, and it really does seem to make a difference. I found that the Zapper was able to control devices easily from across a room in broad daylight, so it's definitely got the power.

The dongle comes in eight colors that match the iPad 2 Smart Covers, and it appears that there will be colored cases for iPad 2, iPhone 4/4S, and iPod touch 4th Generation. Those cases you see in the image at the top of this post? They're not available yet.

Gallery: VooMote Zapper

Now, the not-so-good news. Even after getting an update to the free VooMote Zapper app the other day, most of the devices that make up my home entertainment system were not in the library of codes. The Zapper app has one irritating habit right off the bat: it runs upside down on the iPhone so that the Zapper is always at the "top" of the screen. Want to check email? Flip your device upside-down again. The app is not universal, so if you run it on your iPad, it's either a tiny window on your device or a fuzzy 2X version of the app. VooMote is coming out with an iPad-specific TV Guide app sometime in 2012.

The way the app works is you add a room to your home, then add individual devices to that room. The list of rooms is quite extensive, but it doesn't include that staple of American homes, the "family room." I decided to use "living room" instead, although that is a completely separate room in my home that doesn't have any tech in it. Next, I started adding devices to my "living room."

Immediately I was confused. Is my Comcast / Motorola DVR considered a DVR, or is it a cable box? There are listings for both types of devices. I decided to call it a cable box. Upon choosing cable box, I found one that was named "Comcast", but the box I have wasn't listed. The Zapper app took me through a process of trying to figure out what it was by asking me if it was changing channels, bringing the volume up, etc. When it was done, I had a virtual remote on my iPhone called "Cable-Box" that looks nothing like the remote I normally use, and it has controls that make absolutely no sense for the model I'm using.

Next I added the TV. I have a Panasonic Viera 50" Plasma TV that's about five years old. The only Panasonic TVs that are listed are about fifteen units that must be quite new. Once again, I had to go through the training process to see if the app could come up with a remote that would work with my TV. Sure, it turns it on and off, changes channels, and bumps the volume up and down, but I still have to grab my old TV remote in order to change the input (HDMI1, HDMI2, etc.).

I went through the same process with everything but the Apple TV, which miraculously was already in the database. However, it didn't actually turn the Apple TV on, so my guess is that the device settings were for the first-generation device.

Sure, this is a new device and I'm sure that the code library for devices will expand in the future. But I'd bet that a lot of TUAW readers have the same opinion that I do -- when I get a "universal remote," I want it to work out of the box without needing to go through this tedious type of hit-and-miss process.

Like the Logitech Harmony One remote that I previously used, the Zapper has a way to string together commands so that you can turn on multiple devices in sequence for doing something like watching a DVD -- turn on TV, turn on DVD player, turn on audio device (home theater), etc. I didn't even try this function.

I am not going to single out just the VooMote Zapper for having this problem; just about every iOS remote control device I've tried has been lacking, and the Logitech remote described earlier was also a pain to program. I will give the VooMote Zapper a chance, and I've set up an appointment on my calendar to see if an expanded code library in a few months makes this device easier to set up and use. I certainly like the design of the little dongle.

If Apple really wants to capture the home entertainment market, it doesn't need to come to market with a new HDTV -- it just needs to figure out how to get every type of device working together seamlessly and without a lot of annoying setup. For that, I'd be willing to pay a lot of money.

VooMote Zapper universal remote for iOS: A first look and a rant originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For Mac repair shops, enterprise tech support teams, and consultants who need to wipe all data off of hard drives before selling or recycling old Macs, there's now a fast way to erase those drives without tying up a machine for a long time. WiebeTech has a new device called the Drive eRazer Ultra (US$249) that promises to make cleaning those pesky drives a fast and easy process.

WiebeTech provided a Drive eRazer Ultra to TUAW for testing and review, and the device does an amazing job of wiping all of that private or corporate information off of hard drives. In this review you'll read about what makes the Drive eRazer Ultra such a useful device.

To start off with, erasing a computer's hard drive completely usually means that you remove the drive from the computer. Sure, you can boot a computer off of an external drive and then run a utility to do the dirty work on an internal drive, but that ties up the computer for the entire time that the drive is being erased. Using a multiple-pass erase to ensure that your drive is completely unreadable can literally take days if you're using Apple's Disk Utility to do the job, and other software-based erasure methods take equally as long.

The Drive eRazer Ultra erases drives at their maximum write speed, so the job is done faster. WiebeTech says that new drives are erased at 7 GB/minute while older drives will putt along at 7 GB/minute. No computer is required -- you just remove the hard drive, then use the included cables to connect it to the Drive eRazer Ultra. The device has a rocker switch and two-line LCD display for selecting the erase mode and showing how long it will take to the erasure to complete.

Gallery: WiebeTech Drive eRazer Ultra

There are ten different erase specifications that are supported by the device: a quick erase that just does a single pass writing all zeroes on the drive, a custom erase that can run 1 to 99 passes overwriting with zeroes or a user-selected pattern, Secure Erase N or E that initiates a drive's built-in Secure Erase normal or enhanced function, US Department of Defense "Clear" or "Sanitize" standards, NIST special publication 800-88 "Clear" or "Purge" standards, the Canadian CSEC ITSG-06 data sanitization standard, Great Britain's HMGIS5 "Baseline" or "Enhanced" drive erasure standard, and the Australian government's DSD ISM 6.2.92 data sanitization standard.

If your job requires you to print out labels that describe the details of the erasure (for audit reasons, for example), there's a serial port for Zebra brand label printers. Those labels can then be attached to the drives or to a box or bag used for disposal of the drive.

The Drive eRazer Ultra supports 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives, 3.5" IDE/PATA drives, and other drives using optional adapters. If you're erasing a 3.5" drive, there's a metal protective plate included that you can screw onto the drive to protect the drive electronics and help dissipate heat.

For my testing, I grabbed a 160 GB Hitachi drive that had previously resided in a MacBook and that was loaded with about 100 GB of video backups. To use the Drive eRazer, you need to plug in a power brick that's about the same size and weight of the unit itself, grab the correct cable (SATA in this case), and make both power and data connections to the drive. Flipping the power switch on the box powers up the drive, and the display shows a command for doing a quick erase.

I chose to look at the drive information screens first, which provide data on the capacity of the drive, the number of bad sectors on it, the number of times that the drive has been powered on and off, the number of times the drive has been stopped and started, and an estimate of the time to do a Secure Erase (enhanced or normal).

The user interface is really quite simple to use, and it took very little time for me to set the default erase specification to "DOD Sanitize." The device warns the user that it will erase all data -- which I thought was silly since that's what the device is supposed to do -- and then estimates how long it will take to perform the erasure.

Sanitizing is "the removal of sensitive data from a system or storage device with the intent that the data can not be reconstructed by any known technique," according to Wikipedia. The DOD Sanitize specification (DOD 5220.22-M) recommends that you "Overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and verify" to sanitize information on writable media.

To complete this process, the Drive eRazer Ultra took about 2 hours and 16 minutes. As soon as that was done, I took the same drive and ran it through the "Most Secure" erase option in Disk Utility, which also complies with DOD 5220.22-M. That method took slightly over 8 hours to complete.

This isn't a device that most Mac owners are going to rush out and buy, but for those who are constantly erasing drives, the Drive eRazer Ultra can pay for itself quickly in terms of sheer convenience and time saved wiping data. For those teams and individuals, this is an indispensable device.

WiebeTech Drive eRazer Ultra provides super-secure drive wiping originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That didn't take long. Only a few weeks after Apple's iBooks Author app debuted, template publisher Jumsoft began shipping Book Palette (US$2.99), a collection of ten professionally designed templates for iBooks Author.

I had an opportunity to try Book Palette, which is packaged as a Mac app. Once installed from the Mac App Store and launched, the app displays ten textbook templates. To start using a template, you can either select it and click the Open in iBooks Author button, or just double-click the template. In either case, iBooks Author launches and the template opens right up.

If you've modified your own iBooks Author templates before, they're saved in the /Application Support/iBooks Author/Templates/My Templates folder. You can choose to save the templates into that folder so that they appear with all of the rest of the standard templates in the template chooser.

Like the other templates that are included with iBooks Author, Jumsoft provides layouts for textbooks only -- remember, that's the focus for iBooks Author at this point at this point in time. The templates include Biology, Cookery, Decision Making, Dental Hygiene, Environmental Design, Interior Design, IT Strategy, Managing Change, Psychology, and Team Building.

All of the templates include the standard iBooks Author attributes, including a title page, a place for introductory media, a table of contents, and a glossary. The templates also follows the Chapter / Section format of the Apple-provided templates, and pages in a variety of layouts (one, two or three columns, and blank).

Gallery: Jumsoft Book Palette

Of all the templates, I thought that Cookery was probably the most unique and least like a textbook template, but I now fear of a future of poorly written and self-published cookbooks that all look identical.

On the other hand, the Biology and Dental Hygiene templates uses the Chalkduster font for call-outs, an unfortunate design decision that can be fixed by simply changing the font in those areas where it shows up. I also found the use of Didot Italic as the standard text font in the Interior Design template to be a nightmare, as it's hard to read a lot of text in such a flowery font. Most of the other templates were well-designed and very readable, and wouldn't require much (if any) change to create good-looking electronic texts.

Jumsoft plans to release additional templates as app upgrades in the future, so book designers will have plenty of base templates to start with. For those who are currently beginning to work with iBooks Author, Book Palette is an inexpensive way to add to the paltry selection of six templates provided by Apple.

Daily Mac App: Book Palette adds ten new templates to iBooks Author originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you're looking for coverage of working conditions at Foxconn and other Apple manufacturing partners, there's plenty to go around. The drumbeat of sharply critical stories continued today with CNN's interview of a Foxconn worker; this follows a scathing New York Times story from late January that explores the gulf between electronics companies' best intentions regarding working conditions at contract facilities, and the incessant pressure to innovate and squeeze costs out of the process.

Fairness, though, requires a few reminders. There's social and political argument over the ultimate value of sweatshop labor conditions in developing countries, with the pro-sweatshop side citing enormous economic benefits for countries that can capitalize on an inexpensive and inexhaustible labor force. Even if you buy the hypothesis that cheap labor isn't necessarily good for China, it's true that Apple isn't the only Foxconn client by a long shot, and the electronics manufacturing sector may actually be one of the brighter lights for worker's rights in China. Nevertheless, the company's high-profile and highly profitable products combined with its longstanding penchant for product secrecy have made it a lightning rod for "Applerousing" activism and anger.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, the man most responsible for assembling Apple's supply chain into a strategic advantage for the company, reportedly sent a very strongly worded email to all Apple hands, noting that "any suggestion that we don't care [about the welfare of workers in our supply chain] is patently false and offensive to us.... accusations like these are contrary to our values. It's not who we are." In addition to the company's annual Supplier Responsibility Reports and auditing programs, Apple has recently taken another couple of steps that put it out in front of other consumer electronics firms; it released its supplier list for the first time, and it's the first sector company to join the Fair Labor Association. These changes should, in theory, make it easier for third parties to look into workplace issues within the Apple supplier universe.

You can get a very different take on the relative impact of Apple's policies, and the human cost of making insanely great products for entirely sane prices, by spending an evening at the Public Theater in New York City with monologuist Mike Daisey watching The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Be warned, however, that it is not so easy to leave the show with the same nonchalance about Apple's products and their origins as you might have when you arrive.

The first thing that audience members will notice as they take their seats before the start of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is the cubical and spare set. With rectangular frames in a back LED wall and a glass/chrome desk atop a glass platform, there's a definite echo of a familiar retail aesthetic; it's as if the designer was instructed "Make it look a little like an Apple Store, but don't spend much."

The mood is also evoked, carefully, with sound. The music playing before the show includes both the OS X Leopard post-installation track "Exodus Honey" and Jonathan Coulton's geek anthem "Skullcrusher Mountain." Coulton's song even gets a nod during the monologue itself, when Daisey refers to Apple as a company full of "mad geniuses" who, after Steve's involuntary departure in the 1980s, could finally realize their plans to combine a monkey with a pony.

The next thought, as the show begins: Mike Daisey is a large, loud, sweaty dude who sits in a chair and talks at you for two hours. Although this may sound like a rough session of detention with an angry phys ed teacher, or an afternoon with your conspiracy theory-obsessed uncle, the performance Daisey delivers is heartfelt, intelligent and ultimately completely watchable. His show, which was excerpted on the January 6 episode of the public radio program This American Life, recounts both his decades-long fascination with Apple, including the unforgettable arc of the late co-founder Jobs, and also Daisey's half-cocked but surprisingly effective gonzo investigation of labor conditions at Foxconn and other electronics manufacturing contractors in the Chinese city of Shenzhen.

Referring to his handwritten notes as he goes -- the performance is extemporaneous, so there is no canonical scripted text and the narrative has evolved over the 18 months that the show has been touring -- Daisey wants to make one thing abundantly clear. If you cut him, he would bleed six colors. To establish his bona fides as a true member of the Apple faithful for a civilian audience, he claims that sometimes after a show he relaxes by "field-stripping my MacBook Pro into its 43 component parts," cleaning each one before reassembling the laptop. "It soothes me," he purrs, stroking his chest with his fingers.

While I don't know that many Mac geeks who relax by taking apart their MBPs, it's evident from Daisey's frequent, coherent technical asides that he isn't putting on airs (or Airs). His heartfelt memories of his family's first computer (an Apple IIc, considered so pricey that it merited its own "computer room") will resonate for plenty of TUAW readers of a certain age. I may have been the only audience member who involuntarily nodded and muttered "yes, of course" when Daisey shared his favorite Mac of all time, but that was only because his choice, the compact yet powerful (for its day) SE/30, was so obviously right.

It's Daisey's love for all things Apple that makes his perception of the company's fall from grace all the more stinging. Starting with the inadvertent leak of several testing photos taken on the iPhone assembly line, Daisey's curiosity about the process and the people behind Apple's products drove him to research the circumstances of where all our stuff comes from.

In 2010, Daisey traveled to southern China and literally drove up to the gates of the massive Foxconn plant in an effort to talk to production line workers; he was in country shortly after the cluster of Foxconn employee suicides and during the incident when a Foxconn employee died of exhaustion after a multi-day workshift. He posed as an American industrialist to gain access to other companies' facilities (including dormitories with beds crammed to the ceiling), and also met with labor rights activists and workers who, despite enormous legal and personal risks, have tried to form labor unions in Chinese factories.

Daisey's recounting of his conversations with these workers is sometimes poignant and often shocking. He met laborers exposed to the neurotoxic solvent n-hexane (now banned from Apple's supply chain, but originally used as an iPhone screen cleaner) who now shake so badly they cannot hold a teacup. He spoke with underage workers outside the plant gates, although follow-up investigations by This American Life indicated that the hiring of minors is far less prevalent than it once was and that Foxconn is relatively well-positioned on that score (some independent organizations dispute this, noting that audits are easy to deceive). Daisey's own translator wonders if all these people can possibly have been through what they say, expressing shock that so many tell the same stories of mistreatment, forced/unpaid overtime and bad working conditions.

As Daisey has performed this piece around the country over the past two years, he might have been considered a lonely voice in the wilderness. (TUAW interviewed Daisey at Macworld Expo 2011, while he was performing the show in Berkeley, CA.) Circumstances have changed quite a bit since he began, however. The radio broadcast was a turning point in the show's reception, according to a flyer handed out by ushers after the performance; it was the most downloaded episode in TAL's history and, Daisey's flyer claims, was heard by many Apple employees and their families. This created what Daisey's sources call "a morale situation" within the company, and he asserts that this internal circumstance was a factor in Apple's subsequent decision to join the FLA and open its supply chain to additional scrutiny.

It may not be as simple as Daisey wishes for Apple to effectively address the condition of a massive Chinese labor force that, in the final analysis, does not actually work for the Cupertino company. His suggestion of a 'dividend for change,' where Apple would directly invest five billion dollars of its cash reserves into the supply chain, would certainly be worthy of a company founded by a Zen-loving college dropout who urged customers to think different -- but it's surpassingly unlikely. Still, public awareness and action on the question of humane labor overseas (whether contracted by Apple, HP, Asus, Sony or any other company) will make a difference in the months and years to come. As Daisey says in his online response to Apple's recent moves toward further supply chain glasnost:

If Apple would spend less energy finessing its public image, and instead apply its efforts to real transparency and accountability, it could be a true leader for the electronics industry. Apple today is still saying what it said yesterday: trust us, we know best, there's nothing to worry about. They have not earned the trust they are asking for."

Mike Daisey's monologue The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs continues through March 4, 2012 at New York City's Public Theater. The show runs approximately two hours and is performed without an intermission. Tickets and information: http://www.publictheater.org

Mike Daisey's "The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" is funny, forceful agitprop originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear Aunt TUAW,

I would like to run Mac OS X 10.6.7 off a RAM disk, for better performance/security while browsing the World Wide Web (I don't want to save the image with all those gnarly cookie crumbs to disk).

I understand that a family living down the street from me is able to run Linux from a RAM disk -- can you help me out?

Your loving niece,

Emily

Dear Emily,

Auntie immediately consulted with Unkie Mike after receiving your letter. He responded as follows:

Running OS X off a RAM disk isn't supported (and hasn't been on the Mac for a long, long time -- since Mac OS 9, in fact). Linux is a different beast.

You can run a browser in private or 'incognito' mode if you're concerned about security, or use a virtualization tool like Parallels or VMware to run a virtual Mac on your Mac. However, to run 10.6.7 virtualized you'd need the server version (expensive).

You can get most of the performance benefits of a RAM disk with an SSD boot drive, which we've covered on the site.

Further, Unkie uncovered the following information from a post on the MacRumors forum. Attributed to a "former Apple Employee," this seems to describe why RAM disks are a poor match to OS X.

That thing is snake oil, as are the vast majority of ramdisk products on OS X. Designing a ramdisk that works well on OS X is remarkably difficult because backing a block device into wired memory causes the contents to be double buffered above it in the Unified Buffer Cache.

For transient data on systems with no VM pressure, what will happen is the file is created, the object backing it sits in the UBC, it might get synched to disk, but unless you are running low on ram it stays in ram as well. That is why you see no speed increases, all you are doing is eliminating the background asynch writeout, and you are wasting a lot of ram to do it. More importantly, if you are actually creating a wired ram disk you are eating a ton of kernel address space which can be an issue if you have a lot of memory (large page tables) or several video cards.

Getting back to your actual issue, it sounds to Auntie as if you're looking for a secure browsing solution rather than a RAM disk boot solution. For that, take a look at this Macworld hints post that shows you how to store your Safari cache on a RAM drive.

Hope this helps.

Hugs,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: Can I boot from a RAM disk? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple's new AirPort Utility 6.0 for OS X was released yesterday, bringing over the slick UI from its pre-existing iOS version -- but as my colleague Chris reported, it also removes access to a number of features in the process. At the same time, Apple are still hosting downloads for the older version of the tool which still has the full feature set. Predictably, there's been some indignant fallout from this admittedly curious decision, but what sorts of features are missing, and should you care? I loaded up the old and new version of the tools side-by-side to see what I could find out.

Here's the "Wireless setup" page for my AirPort Extreme under the older AirPort Utility:

And hiding under that "Wireless Options..." button, you get more settings:

Here's the corresponding page on the newer tool:

And under the "Wireless Options..." button:

We've lost access to quite a few settings there:

• Multicast rate
• Transmit power
• WPA group key timeout
• Wide channels option

The page where you define DHCP server options is rather better laid out in the new version. Here's the older one first:

And the newer, which folds in some settings like NAT enable and port mapping which were hidden behind other tabs in the older UI:

But again, there are options missing -- you can no longer specify a DHCP message or set an LDAP server. And the tiny scrolling lists for DHCP reservations and port maps that show only two lines at once are laughably inadequate. I have eight mapped ports, and reading through them to find one I want to adjust is unnecessarily difficult in this new UI.

The Logs and Statistics section of the old tool is completely missing too, and that has helped me out of a few jams. In particular the signal strength graph is useful:

This is really handy for tracking down that one stray device on your 802.11n network that is dragging you down to 802.11g speeds, or for working out where to best position an AirPort Express to get that extra signal boost you need. You can get some information via a tooltip in the wireless clients list in the main screen, but it's not exactly obvious, and it doesn't convey how things change through time:

Also missing from the logging facility is the ability to configure a remote SNMP server to collect and collate logs from lots of AirPort devices to a single central server.

It's not all bad, though. The new UI has this really handy topography display which shows you how your network is plugged together:

For example, this is telling me that my living room AirPort Express isn't connected to the AirPort Extreme via Ethernet, like it should be -- it has a dashed line instead of a solid one. It's also telling me it's offline, presumably for the same reason.

Disk Sharing seems to have lost the ability to set a Windows workgroup and allow/disallow guest access:

The new AirPort Utility is also missing the printer sharing tab altogether, although it might just have become entirely automatic as the old screen mostly only displayed a list of connected printers anyway:

This extra "Options..." screen is also missing from the new tool:

So we can no longer set the metadata for the AirPort device's location (useful for larger-scale installations in offices, where there may be lots of access points used at once) or set the status light to blink on activity.

The old tool also offers support for RADIUS authentication of clients which is absent from the newer software:

Some people are reporting that MAC address access time control is missing. It appears to be functionally intact, just re-arranged. Old tool:

New tool:

IPv6 settings are also entirely absent from the new AirPort Utility.

So in summary, then, unless you're a systems administrator for a complex office install with multiple AirPort devices and demanding technical requirements, you're probably not going to notice the missing bits in the the new AirPort Utility. And if you are...? Almost as if it's acknowledging the missing bits and pieces, Apple is hosting downloads for the old and new versions of Airport Utility side-by-side. There's nothing stopping you from installing both on your Mac, and it's absolutely fair to say that the features I've noted above are missing are entirely advanced ones that are of little interest to normal home users.

As well as configuration features that are missing, support for older stuff has also been decreased in AirPort Utility 6.0. The 802.11g versions of the AirPort Express, which was on sale from 2004-2008, and pre-2007 AirPort base stations simply don't work with the new tool at all -- the device doesn't appear in the management UI. The new tool requires Lion, so Snow Leopard or Windows users are out of luck (yes, the old version is available for Windows, to my surprise). And one final limitation: the new version of the tool locks you out when it's upgrading firmware for any device on your network, as Chris noted yesterday. That's not exactly something you do every day, though.

It seems unlikely that you are going to care very deeply about these changes, and if you do, you can easily get the older version of the utility. Still, though, I think it's both peculiar and curious that Apple is requiring users to choose between a nicer UI and access to the full feature set of their AirPort devices. It's as if AirPort Utility 5.5 is now "AirPort Utility Pro" and AirPort Utility 6.0 is "AirPort Utility Home". It just seems so... uncharacteristically inelegant.

Have you noticed any other missing features that I've overlooked? Please leave a comment!

In pictures: AirPort Utility 6.0's missing features originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kanex is an accessories manufacturer that has traditionally built cables and connectors for Apple products. The company has recently brightened up its branding and is introducing some new products that are sure to grab some attention. I was able to take some photos of the new Kanex Sydnee iOS recharge station at Macworld | iWorld 2012 last week, and heard a fascinating story about the origins of the design of the Sydnee.

Gallery: Kanex Sydnee

First, a little bit of background about the Sydnee. It's designed to charge up to four iPads simultaneously. That means that it supplies the requisite 2.1 Amps of current to four individual USB ports. Sure, you can swap out some or all of those iPads with iPhones or iPod touches, but where the Sydnee really shines is in the area of charging multiple iPads at one time.

What's nice about the Sydnee is that it manages to be both functional and stylish at the same time. In terms of functionality, the Sydnee does an amazing job of holding three iPads at the same time while feeding power to them through included USB cables that are just the right length. The fourth iPad (or an iPhone) must sit on the table, uninvited to the party.

Now, about the style. As you can see from both the image at the top of this post and the gallery, the Sydnee uses a unique design that allows it to hold three iPads gracefully. There's a clear plastic piece in the center of the oblong "loop" that separates two of the iPads, while the third perches on the outside of the device.

If this design seems vaguely familiar, than you must be a fan of Disney Pixar's Wallo.E. The Kanex team told me that Sydnee's design was inspired by the Axiom, the huge BnL spacecraft that is inhabited by a "lost colony" from Earth. Whether that story is true or the team was pulling my leg, there is a resemblance, and the design is striking.

Sydnee's not available yet, but you can sign up for updates on availability. The recharging station is expected to retail for US$149 when it appears, and you'll be able to get it in either black or white. I just wish it had a Buy n Large logo sticker on the outside...

Kanex Sydnee recharging station traces design to an unusual source originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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During Macworld | iWorld 2012 last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Denys Zhadanov of Readdle. If you're not familiar with Readdle's products, you might be new to the iOS world. The company has been around for four years and has sold over 3.5 million iOS apps, most of them used for reading and annotating PDF files.

The company's newest entry into this market should be hitting the App Store any day now. Called Remarks, the app will sell for US$4.99 and is used to open, edit, and then save and distribute PDF files. My favorite part of the demonstration was when Denys opened a magazine file, tapped several pages, and created a new PDF file with annotations within seconds. Remarks has some unique navigation tools for precisely locating text or handwritten annotations, and it can save in either regular (layered) or flattened PDF formats.

A short video showing off the impressive feature set of Remarks is embedded below.

Readdle previews Remarks iPad app at Macworld iWorld 2012 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fast forward a few weeks: an op-ed from Paul Farhi in the Washington Post dives back into the Arieso report, recycling the charge that Siri is singlehandedly responsible for pumping up the load on America's cellular networks and degrading data service for everyone. (Farhi stopped short of blaming her for fluoride in the water and the rise of reality television.)

This time, however, some consideration of the facts in evidence led us to question his (and our) original conclusions; we know that the math around Siri's data usage just doesn't add up to a consequential amount. We also reached out to Arieso for a copy of the full report, which the company happily and promptly provided.

Now there's another voice weighing in, and it belongs to someone who's in a position to know what's what: former Siri board member Gary Morgenthaler. He wrote a guest post for Forbes's web site that thoroughly debunks the notion of Siri as a bandwidth bandit. Siri actually uses only small bites of wireless data, as tested by Ars Technica and backed up by Morgenthaler's inside info.

What does Morgenthaler suspect might be at play in the 4S bandwidth numbers? He's careful to couch it as speculation rather than assert it as fact, but the addition of iCloud to the iOS service mix is a likely culprit (especially since buyers of new phones are more likely to set up Apple's cloud service than users of older models, who may be slower to update to iOS 5). Other possibilities include iTunes Match, Photo Stream, or simply the wider chunk of image data captured by the iPhone 4S's improved camera. As Mel noted earlier, the 4S also supports faster 3G downloads than the earlier models.

There's only one issue I saw in Morgenthaler's response, but it's an important one. Morgenthaler suggests that Arieso committed a logical error in citing Siri as the cause of the 4S results:

Arieso presents no data to support their claim that Siri causes the increase in iPhone 4S data usage. Most likely, Arieso committed a logical fallacy which, in grammar school, was called "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" - that is, "after the fact, therefore, because of the fact." In other words, Siri is new and associated with the iPhone 4S; therefore, it must be the cause of this increased traffic. It's an appealing argument, but it doesn't hold water.

That's also an appealing argument, but he may be pinning the propter hoc on the wrong donkey. Even a cursory review of the Arieso report is sufficient to discover that it does not mention Siri at all. When it comes to the cause of the iPhone 4S's download hunger, in fact, the report makes it very clear that it's too soon to draw any specific conclusions (emphasis mine):

The iPhone 4S showed an increase of 176% in downlink data volumes over the iPhone 3G. Since the downlink-to-uplink data volume ratio was almost 7-to-1 on average for the devices under study, this downlink increase of 176% corresponds to a larger total volume of data than a 220% uplink increase (discussed in the last section). As noted earlier regarding the increases in total numbers of data calls, it remains a topic for further study to characterise the root cause of this downlink data volume increase.

Arieso's research never said Siri was completely to blame, at least not in so many words; it's not clear whether a company representative said something to Reuters to encourage this conclusion in CTO Michael Flanagan's interviews he does say that Siri is part of the issue, but that conclusion is clearly not backed up by the report itself. Did the firm make an effort to correct the record, or was there a calculation that the Siri-related media attention would be more valuable than getting the accurate information out? We don't know, but we've reached out to Arieso's PR folk for comment. It begins to look less like an error of logic and more like a calculus of publicity.

Meanwhile, we're left with the unavoidable conclusion: The Washington Post and Paul Farhi picked a fight with Siri for something she does not do, picking up the "Siri is a data guzzler" concept from the original coverage -- but not from the actual data. Hanging the 4S bandwidth bulge on an innocent intelligent assistant may be great for headlines, but it looks to be wrong on the facts.

Siri VC Morgenthaler weighs in on iPhone 4S bandwidth badmouthing (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday while I was on the show floor at Macworld | iWorld 2012, I came upon a 7-foot-tall scanner walking around. After I figured out that my cold medicine wasn't making me hallucinate, I knew that I was in the right place -- the Doxie booth. There I was able to interview Paul Scandariato of Doxie about their new DoxieGo + Wi-Fi mobile scanner and grab some video.

The new scanner communicates with your Mac or iOS device over Wi-Fi, and allowing you to scan straight to the cloud if you wish. Paul noted that many users scan their documents straight to Dropbox, then open them for viewing or annotation on the iPad.

The DoxieGo + Wi-Fi is priced at US$249, while the DoxieGo previously reviewed by TUAW remains at $199. For Macworld show-goers, you can the Doxie scanners for $50 off of list price through Saturday.

Here's the DoxieGo + Wi-Fi in action:

Doxie's new DoxieGo + Wi-Fi: Demo video at Macworld iWorld 2012 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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