This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

Apple Store in Grand Central To Be The Largest In The World?

Two weeks ago, The New York Observer reported Apple was planning on opening a new store in Grand Central Terminal, the popular and crowded retail hub a mile away from the existing Apple Store in Fifth Avenue. Today, according to a rumor posted by Cult Of Mac, Apple is actually aiming at a September opening for the new Store, which will be Apple’s largest retail location in the world – even bigger than the Apple Store in Covent Garden, London, which  is about 40,000 feet.

Cult of Mac reports the store already has been provided the name “Apple Store, Grand Central”, and the main purpose of this opening is to take the pressure off the Fifth Ave. one and build an impressive store to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Apple Retail.

The Observer said Apple isn’t expected to take one of the traditional retail spaces, but will locate right in the terminal.

Our source suggested that Apple may be taking walls down — but didn’t elaborate.

The terminal sees more than 700,000 visitors a day, most heading for trains or subway. But about 250,000 come to look at Vanderbilt Hall or eat at the 35 restaurants, including the historic Oyster Bar on the lower level.

Apple has also been rumored to be considering a revamp of the current Palo Alto store and a launch of a new location in the suburbs of Paris.

App Preview: Harald By Stealthy Cactus Software

We’ve been there before: you just finished a ridiculously long report on the colonization of Mars and you’re ready to toss the excess scrap work into the trash bin. In your sleep deprived daze, grouped with those pictures of space aliens and rock robots is your digital manifesto, hot of the press and steaming as it’s shredded with a click of the empty button. Come tomorrow morning, you find that file is damned near irrecoverable before the paper is due. Those bogus moments always creep up when we’re either brain dead or because of pesky Mac viruses (I guess I can’t slip that unicorn in here can I?), but you can prevent the total obliteration of your files by safeguarding them with Harald.

Don’t risk accidental deletions, Scoble’s children, or my habit of renaming your files in Dropbox with your critical documents. Harald is the knight in shining armor for files that shouldn’t ever end up in the trash can. Accidentally delete a file? Harald will block your eagerness to hit that delete button in favor of reminding you that the file is of great importance. Does it save the day? You betcha. Simply select your files, tap that menubar icon, and mark them for protection under the Harald shield. It’s pretty easy, and if you don’t believe me, you’ll want to check out the teaser video after the break. It’s coming to the Mac App Store soon, so prepare a meager $3.99 for when it launches.

Read more

iOS Game Developers - Is $0.99 Too Low?→

iOS Game Developers -  Is $0.99 Too Low?

Interesting discussion over at Pocketful of Megabytes. The author concludes:

So is $0.99 really too low? Well, yes and no. It’s not too low, because that’s where it needs to be for games in this ruthless and uncharted territory to prosper (and because consumers love cheap goods), but it is too low because it inaccurately depicts the worth of a game’s contents. Without higher profits, money cannot be spent on improving the overall quality of the content found therein. Low profits mean low budgets and low budgets mean cheaply-made apps… the price tag is low out of necessity. It’s not ideal, but we’re stuck with it.

With $0.99 apps you attract more customers, but hard work is undervalued. On the other hand it is true that you never know what app you’re going to buy (no trials), but we also have to consider Apple’s 30% cut on those .99 cents.

So here’s an idea. What if Apple discontinued the $0.99 price tag, and automatically raised all prices to $1.99 – thus making it the lowest price point? Perhaps a more feasible business model for indie developers?

Would that stop you from buying the next Angry Birds or Trainyard?

Permalink

MacStories Product Review: AViiQ Portable Laptop Stand

The big bulky laptop stands of yesteryear have gone the way of the dinosaur. Forget about fans, large plastic shells, or sometimes gimmicky USB connections. Laptop stands need to be simple and portable, rethinking what we traditionally think of as once shelf-worthy home and messenger-bag solutions. You should not be compromised by the tools you carry, and if you ask AViiQ, the solution needs to be lightweight and reconfigurable.

Read more

Apple Releases Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 3.6

A few minutes ago Apple issues a Digital Camera RAW Compatibility update, version 3.6. The update brings RAW compatibility in iPhoto ‘11 and Aperture 3 for these cameras:

  • Canon EOS Rebel T3 / 1100D / Kiss X50
  • Canon EOS Rebel T3i / 600D / Kiss X5
  • Olympus E-5
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ100
  • Pentax K-r
  • Pentax K-5

The update also fixes issues with the following cameras:

  • Nikon D7000
  • Nikon COOLPIX P7000
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2

You can download it here, or fire up Software Update.

Restaurant Chain Will Let You Design Your Own Pizza - With An iPad

Since the iPad’s release, we have seen several restaurants replacing printed menus with iPads, which provide a good solution to build an interactive experience for customers and save on the cost of paper and ink with a constantly updating menu that’s also cool to use. Digital menus, however, might become a thing of the past as soon as Stacked: Food Well Built launches its restaurant chain, heavily based on iPads to order and design meals.

As USA Today reports, the co-founders of Stacked aim at placing 100 iPads per restaurant atop every table, allowing diners to order meals using static menus or design their own burger, pizza or salad through the iPad’s intuitive multi-touch interface and a custom app built specifically for the restaurant chain. The setup:

The iPads at Stacked will be in metal frames that sit about 3 inches off the tabletops. Folks wanting to order burgers will select the type of bun, meat and toppings on the iPad by clicking and dragging icons. The burger stacks visually on the iPad screen. Ditto for pizzas and salads.

Oh, and what if you try to steal the iPad by carrying it out in your bag? An alarm will go off. This sounds like a really clever implementation (do they have custom doors with iPad recognition?) and marketing technique, although the founders claim they won’t market their chain as “the iPad restaurants”. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how the iPad will further integrate with restaurants, coffee shops and bars in the next years. iPad cash registers are already in place in New York City.

Unicode Symbols In The iOS Keyboard with Jailbreak Tweak

You know Unicode symbols, right? The ones you might find in tweets from time to time, or in links from Daring Fireball and Shawn Blanc’s website. Yes, these symbols. It turns out, they’re pretty cute. And it also appears that people love to use them to prettify their messages, tweets, Facebook walls and whatever else you can do on the Internet (suggestion: don’t use them too much on Reddit). Anyway, thanks to the efforts of the folks over at Vintendo, jailbreakers can now install a tweak that brings Unicode symbols onto the default iOS keyboard.

The tweak, called Vmoji and available in Cydia through Vintendo’s repo, can be activated the pressing the numeric keys in the keyboard. It’s kind of obtrusive, but I guess it gets its job done. So there you have it: a new way to get those cute symbols into your tweets. Just use them responsibly. [via RazorianFly]

Pixelfari: It’s Safari, In 8-bit. And It’s Totally Awesome.

Pixelfari by Neven Mrgan is the coolest Safari mod I’ve ever seen. The app, very buggy and released as an experiment by Mrgan, is basically a skin for Apple’s browser completely realized in 8-bit style. Like those old Nintendo games, or The Incident from Mrgan himself. It’s pixel art applied to a browser: toolbars, fonts, menus, preferences – everything. It’s unreadable as hell. But at the same time, my beloved geeks, it’s kind of a dream come true: Nintendo from the 80s meets Apple. Mrgan writes:

Ladies and gents, fellow humans — presenting Pixelfari, a pixely, 8-bitty version of everyone’s favorite browser. Enjoy chunky fonts, blocky graphics, and a general sense of giddy inefficiency. Spearheaded by yours truly and developed by a very clever friend.

Maybe we’re all getting excited about this because it’s a neat hack no one ever did before. Still, you can’t take the 8-bit love away from me. So go download the app here , right now. Enjoy. Read more