Remember in school when you’d waste time by trying to make funny words with your calculator (lol, “boobs”)? We’ve grown up. We’re way past the days of trying to make naughty words on our tools of arithmetic. These days, we’ve turned to our Mac OS X docks for our creative word challenges.
Check out some more words after the jump and give it a try yourself.
Oh boy. This chart is just TOO GOOD not to post. It shows how long it took Apple to roll out 50,000 applications on its App Store (about 10 months) and compares that to Palm’s turtle-esque growth. After more than ten years, the Palm OS (not to be confused with the Pre’s WebOS) had only ~29,000 apps. What does that tell you? I’ll tell you what I think: Dinosaurs are dead. Move with the trend at a blinding pace or you’re not going to be able to make the cut. I’m looking at you, Palm.
Good news for consumers who are looking for a hot cellphone that isn’t an iPhone. HTC is set to release “at least three” new Android devices in 2009. The report comes from a Merrill Lynch technology conference where CEO Peter Chou responded to a question about Android-based devices.
This is a good move by HTC. While the T-Mobile G1 is undeniably popular, its gusto is starting to wane. HTC can really spice competition up by unleashing three Android-enabled phones into the cellphone market. Couple that in with the newly re-tooled Android Market and Apple has a serious problem on its hands.
Next week, on March 17th, Apple will invite several journalists to California to show off a new version of the iPhone OS. It’s rumored to be the 3.0 update, which would bring MMS, copy-and-paste and an improved SDK. Of course, these are all rumors but it’d make sense. Apple is really behind in the game of picture messaging and the ability to copy-and-paste would turn the iPhone into a true Kindle killer.
But the big rumor is that Apple will enable Bluetooth tethering with the iPhone, allowing you to use it as a 3G dongle for your laptop. One can dream, right?
So RIM has officially announced the Blackberry App World. Stupid name, yes, but it should be considered a serious competitor to Apple’s App Store. Similar to the App Store, App World will have some free apps for you to download. But as far as paid apps go, the minimum price a developer can set an app at is $2.99. To boot, RIM has set up tiers for increases in pricing as the price of an app goes up (See above image), which will no doubt piss both developers and Blackberry owners off.
So with $2.99 as the base for paid apps, are you going to be plunking down your hard-earned cash at the Blackberry App World? We’d like to know.
The T-Mobile G1 is really enjoying its time in the limelight thanks to it being the only available Android phone at the moment. With that said, it’s taken Google quite awhile to roll out paid apps on the Android Market. This is no good considering that Apple’s App Store is the undisputed king of application shopping. It’s good to see that Google is finally catching up.
Unfortunately, as you can see in the above screenshot, there’s no real useful applications yet. This is still a huge sword in Android’s foot. For the OS to be successful, it needs strong, likable apps that people will actually want to pay money for. Makes sense, right? After all, who the fuck wants to spend $6.99 on “To Do Projects”?
You may be used to making music with apps like GarageBand, Logic Pro and Pro Tools. But did you know, that you can use the world’s most popular photo-editing software to manipulate sound? Using a program called Photosounder, John Keston was able to save a piano recording as a bitmap image file. He then loaded it into Photoshop, added some blur and filtering and saved it. The result was an ethereal, church-like sound with his piano distorted to hell and back.
Looks like a really fun way to play around with sound. I wonder if you could use this technique for live sound manipulation a la Eclectic Method. I guess we’ll see as 2009 pushes on.
I don’t know how I should feel about this. I’m very scared and feel very confused. In a move that is very unlike them, Best Buy decided to open up its entire product catalog to developers via an API. Dubbed “Remix,” the API will allow developers to earn affiliate cash by using Best Buy’s images, information and, of course, online store.
This is really neat to an extent. Best Buy could be huge dicks about what you do with the API but if they’re smart, they’ll let someone create an iPhone app and then buy it off them or cut them some revenue from it. Now that’s the beauty of sharing data.
I have to hand it to Macheist for really upping the ante this year. Normally, they’ll give away 10 or so solid applications for OS X in a bundle for around $20 to $50. This holiday season, you won’t be paying jack shit. Macheist has a Mac Giving Tree that gives out applications as presents. A few are currently available, with more on Christmas Day. If you’re a Macintosh owner, I suggest heading over and getting on top of that.
Have a Macbook or Macbook Pro and an iPhone? Great. You’re officially the ultimate Apple fanboy. Now that that’s settled, let’s review Balmuda Software’s Numberkey Connect software. Install it on your Mac then shell out $1.99 for the iPhone app and you’re done. You have a nice-looking numeric keypad you can use in conjunction with your laptop. A savior for accounting students, I’m sure.
