Feed aggregator

Justin Long goes PC, Android may have gotten its logo inspiration from a surprising source, and Google and Apple may be going face-to-face in yet another market segment.

If you couldn't get up to Seattle this weekend to check out the Portal 2 demo at PAX, you're in luck. We got new images of Portal 2's co-op mode.

We could make a witty joke about cake or monsters. But at this point, you just want to look at the pictures. Here you go. All the photos can be embiggened by clicking on them.

 

 

Follow this article's author, Roberto Baldwin, on Twitter.

 

Google is facing an antitrust review in Texas.

This app won't match the polished experience you'd get from a dedicated Facebook or Twitter client. But it does prove to be very convenient for updating multiple social networks services at once.

A clever spammer found a glitch in Facebook's photo upload service that allowed him to spam thousands of users.

It looks like it isn’t all wine and roses for iTunes 10: Among the complaints about the new icon, colorless interface and removal of 99-cent ringtone creation, a legitimate bug has surfaced between the media player and Automator.

Macworld is reporting that iTunes 10 doesn’t want to play nice with Automator anymore, causing actions from the E-Z scripting application to no longer load. It doesn’t matter if you use an existing Automator workflow or create a new one -- iTunes 10 simply isn’t having any of it and they will fail to execute.

Although the bug doesn’t appear to affect AppleScript support within iTunes, any attempt to create a new workflow within Automator that includes an iTunes action won’t work. In fact, iTunes actions don’t even appear in the actions library when iTunes 10 is installed.

Turns out that what’s happening is that Automator’s version checking actually thinks iTunes 10 is a lower version of the software, according to TUAW. The bug appears because the version numbers are sorting alphabetically instead of numerically, which means some poor programmer is likely having a bad Friday being punished for his sins at Apple.

MacFixIt has posted a workaround for the issue which involves opening up the Info.plist files inside packages for your Automator workflows and manually editing the version numbers. Not exactly fun if you have a bunch of them, but if you depend on Automator to make iTunes 10 do what you want, there’s not much other choice for the time being.

We’re fairly confident that a real fix is probably making the rounds at Apple headquarters even as we write this -- only time will tell when it actually rears its head in Software Update to squash this issue (and probably others waiting to be discovered)…

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter

Click image to embiggen

Net Applications is reporting today that in the month of July, iOS devices (iPhone, iPod touch, and the iPad, collectively) dominated over the lower portion of the OS trends. In August, iOS shot ahead of Linux with 1.13% to 0.85% respectively. What does this mean? Well, for starters, it means that iOS is now bigger than Linux when counting by web browsing.

In a graph posted to Net Applications, it can be seen that Linux users are very loyal, as the usage percentage has remained roughly steady since October of last year. The graph, however, tells a different story about iOS. It clearly shows that iOS is on the rise, and has been rising even more steadily since the announcement and release of the iPad in April (Wi-Fi only model) and May (3G model).

What about Android? 9to5 Mac reports that the Android OS accounts for only 0.2% of web browsing.

Net Applications vice president, Vince Vizzaccaro said, "Whatever the sales are, we’re seeing iOS totally dominate the market on the Web. iOS has nearly a 6:1 advantage over Android."

With the recent Apple Music Event, Apple unveiled a new iPod touch with FaceTime integration. This may mean that iOS market share on the web could increase throughout the rest of the year.

Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.

A new iPad application offers a sophisticated approach to cloud computing

Epic Games, the brains behind popular games like Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, have decided to compete with gaming companies on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch by bringing games to iOS devices that focus on utilizing the hardware. In an interview with Gamasutra, Epic's studio president, Mike Capps goes into more detail about the expansion to iOS devices.

The Unreal Engine, the heart of most hardcore games, is making it's way to iOS devices. Capps explains in the interview that these tools will make their way into the hands of Unreal Engine Developers, which means that games that use Unreal Engine on other platforms (i.e. Xbox, Playstation, etc.) could essentially be ported to run on iOS devices.

Capps notes that some games that push the boundaries of the Xbox, PS3, and other gaming devices will most likely need to rewrite some of the game so that it will work on hardware that doesn't have as much power.

You can read the interview in its entirety on Gamasutra.

At the Apple Music Event, Epic gave a demo of their forthcoming iPhone/iPad game called Project Sword based on the Unreal Engine. While it won't be out until later this year, iOS users can download a sneak peak (called Epic Citadel) and explore the environment in amazing detail.

Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.

Trying to keep up with all the changes to Apple's iPod lineup? We outline what's new, what's improved, and what's missing while tackling all your questions about the latest iPods.

Looking for a case for that new pre-ordered iPod? Macworld has painstakingly collected the first few available cases for Apple's sixth-generation iPod nano and fourth-generation iPod touch.

Many of us shorten URLs all the time these days, to make them easier to share (particularly on Twitter and other social networks). Here's an easy way to shorten any URL in any application.

Ping is designed to let you follow artists and friends, share what music you're buying and are into, and discover what others enjoy. So is it worth the Apple-generated hype?

A critical bug in QuickTime was reported to Apple two months before a second researcher independently revealed the vulnerability this week, according to the director of a bug bounty program who argues that companies must patch their bugs faster.

Facebook's desktop Website doesn't work quite right on the iPad, and the company has yet to announce an official client for the device. Social is the latest third-party attempt at filling this gap, offering a native Facebook experience and a number of perks.

Ah, another day, another-to-the-point, one-line email response from the desk of Steve Jobs. This time around, Apple's founder and CEO has rallied the full fury of his typing skills to speak out against the evil-doers that would dare to protest the hotness of the new iTunes 10 icon--you know, the one that just about everyone seems to hate.

According to the omniscient folks at Wired, Joshua Kopac of advertising firm Valueleads, dropped El Jobso a line shortly after the conclusion of this week's music event:

Enjoyed the presentation today. But…this new iTunes logo really sucks. You’re taking 10+ years of instant product recognition and replacing it with an unknown. Let’s both cross our fingers on this…"

Jobs' response?

"We disagree."

BOOM! An epic bolt from the blue dispatched via iPhone! Take that advertising expert whose insight in this case is right on the money! For those of you who agree with Kopac's critique of the new iTunes icon, or alternatively, are having trouble locating the program on their Mac's dock after close to a decade of reliance on said icon, MacLife's Roberto Baldwin got his geek on after-hours last night to show you how to reclaim that sweet, sweet old school iTunes icon we all have come to know and love.

Mobee's Magic Charger is an inductive charging mini-USB base station and battery pack that lets you keep your Magic Mouse charged without ever needing to remove its batteries.

Anyone in the tech world will tell you that the iPad is selling like hotcakes, which through an interesting bit of happenstance, has helped hotcake scientists to determine exactly how quickly the much-loved breakfast food end up in the bellies of consumers. OK, not really, but it's safe to say that with Apple building two million iPads per month and no sign of the device's sales diminishing, the iPad is pretty darned popular--so much so, that despite the massive numbers of the tablet being produced, up until recently there was still up to a five business day wait time between when an iPad is purchased from Apple's online store to when consumers could expect it to ship. Apple did away with that issue by increasing the number of tablets it produced per month to two million. According to All Things D, Apple could be on the cusp of upping the number of tablets it demands from it suppliers per month once again.

The site also reports that Financial Analyst Katy Huberty of Morgan Stanley has stated that “Apple recently indicated to its suppliers a desire to move to 3 million per month in C4Q10." Will that expedite shipping? Perhaps, but it's pretty hard to improve upon a 24-hour ship time. More likely than not, Apple is expecting that the demand for their tablet, which is already great will be go entirely off the hook once the world's thoughts turn towards hardcore gifting in the next few months. No doubt, news like that should be a welcome relief to folks with an Apple fanatic on their shopping list.

 

Consumer Watchdog, a group that has been a sharp critic of Google's privacy practices in the past, is at it once again.

The Wave is not over--er, the Google Wave that is. Sure, Google announced a while ago that development on Google Wave is no longer, but that was just for the standalone product. Actually, Google is thinking it will expand up to 200,000 lines of code they've already open sourced on the Wave and offer it up in "Wave in a Box." Yep.

So, developers, what does this all entail? The box will have an application bundle with a server and a web client that supports real-time collaboration (like that in Google Wave), a full-featured wave panel with support for threaded conversations, client-server protocols, support for importing wave data from wave.google.com, and gadget, robot and data API support. Oh, there's more than that, too.

The project will not be the Google Wave that users have all come to, well, ignore. Instead, it will give developers a way to run wave servers and host "waves" on their own hardware. And here we can't help but imagine a bunch of developers riding a surfboard across a sea of binary and Ajax code.

Anyway, if this is your sort of thing, check out more in the Wave Protocol Forum. As Google says in their blog, "Wave on."


Ride the wave with Florence Ion, on Twitter.