Engineer Saeki Yoshiyasu created a system that allows him to connect to a server with his iPod touch and draw a design on the web browser using nothing but a Graphics LCD, an Arduino, and a WebSocket server (that he wrote using Python / Tornado). The result: his movements on the iPod touch’s screen are recreated on the LCD. If you want to see his code, or try it yourself, visit his site link below. It’s very nerdy but at the same time very simple and cool!
Video after the break.
Sometimes, some people have terrible ideas. When those ideas involve Apple, trademark infringement and ripped-off logos, the story can quickly become incredibly messed up. Here’s what’s going on: there’s an iWork available on Sears’ website, but it’s not Apple’s digital productivity suite. It’s an actual toolkit Sears is marketing as “PC Toolkit” and selling at $39.99. Here’s the listing on Sears’ website.
See what they did there? They took a fancy registered and trademarked name, they took Apple’s font and even bothered adding a reflection to it. Apple doesn’t even use reflection on iWork’s logo. Sears does. Why? Two iWork logos are better than one, maybe?
Seriously, Steve is not going to approve this. Or perhaps, there’s a remote possibility he will buy hundreds of these toolkits and send them over to the folks working at the data center in North Carolina. Although I doubt Steve Jobs is capable of such jokes. [via Macenstein]
Thanks to the iTunes 12 Days of Christmas promotion, every day from December 26th to January 6th users will be able to download a “fantastic selection of songs, music videos, apps, books, TV episodes and a film” completely for free on iTunes.
The free app for iPhone and iPad that lets you receive push notifications for daily offers is available here. Today, you can download Gameloft’s Fishing Kings for free on the App Store. Apple is giving away the regular version of the game to iPhone users, and the HD one for the iPad.
Stay tuned for promotions coming every day until January 6.
iOS apps are back! Here’s some great deals for today on iOS & Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!
It’s not that I hate IR blasters, but most of the time they’re ridiculously annoying. I’m somewhat of an iHome fan, but I swear I’ve never been more frustrated with a remote than with the one for their now outdated mid-2000 iHr5 model. The unit itself is very nice, but that remote? My god, if the stars didn’t align you could not change the volume with that thing. When IR blasters go giant (like on television remotes), they’re usually okay because I stand in the kitchen and change the channel, aiming it at the ceiling if I want.
So of course Unity seems pretty bad ass right? It sits presumably on your coffee table, firing off a plasma cannon of infrared rays in hopes of triggering some benign sensor in your home theater equipment. And the best part is that it connects to your iPhone over WiFi so you can control all of your devices with a single touchscreen interface. If you’ve an iPhone this seems like a great idea, but I don’t know how many of you would settle for the $99 Unity over a good Logitech Harmony.
Last year, when the “Apple tablet” rumors started to grow louder and become more persistent on the Internet, many speculated such a device would be the savior of the digital publishing industry. Magazines and newspapers could finally find a new home on the rumored Apple device that was meant for reading. The iPad came out, the big names dropped their guns and released not-so-great magazine apps, the iPad didn’t save them from low sales numbers at all. According to data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the iPad has failed at “saving” the digital publishing industry.
To make it simple, the numbers have been a disappointment: the Wired app sold 24,000 copies in its first 24 hours in the App Store, reached 100,000 downloads in June but then fell back to 31,000 monthly downloads between July and September and 23,000 in November. That’s a rapid decline indeed. Want more numbers? Vanity Fair sold 8,700 copies in November, Glamour went down to 2,775 downloads. GQ? Only 11,000 sales in November. Men’s Health has the worst performances with 2,000 copies sold in September and October.
Sure, the iPad hasn’t saved magazines if you look at the big picture. But let me tell you one thing: magazines haven’t done anything in their power to stand out on this new platform either. Developers of these magazine apps did, at best, optimize old PDF versions of a publication for the tablet’s screen, ignoring Apple’s user interface guidelines and people’s request for easier sharing options on Facebook and Twitter. Heck, they didn’t even make sure text was selectable in their apps. And it’s not that Apple has weird policies or “too much control” on apps: people, users, actually care about well-realized software. When they see something that’s been quickly converted or squeezed into a 10-inch screen, they don’t download. Or they stop buying. That’s what happened with the Wired app.
I understand big publications would rather have a single “tablet version” to use on a variety of devices such as the iPad or other Android tablets. I also understand that the lack of monthly subscriptions gets in the way with selling updates to App Store users. But a good app? That should always be the starting point.
Synchronicity for iPhone and iPad is one of the best jailbreak tweaks released in 2010. We first reviewed it in August, and I haven’t stopped using it since then: Synchronicity allows you to keep using your device even while it’s syncing with iTunes. Typical scenario: you’re reading stuff in Instapaper but you need to install Rage HD or Infinity Blade on your iPhone. You don’t want to stop reading because iTunes will take 15 minutes to install the app on your device. Synchronicity comes in handy in these situations, when you want to update your device to the latest changes in your iTunes library but you don’t want to be forced to staring at the “Sync in Progress” screen for more than 20 seconds.
The best part of Synchronicity is that it’s lightweight and so unobtrusive you’ll quickly get addicted to it and forget about it being a Cydia hack. One day iTunes will work like this, with changes happening in the background, perhaps over-the-air. A major update to the tweak was released last night: Synchronicity 2.0 gets rid of the red tethering-like bar that appeared on top during sync and put a greek “Sigma” icon in the menubar to inform that an iTunes sync is occurring. The tweak has also been updated with performance improvements and bug fixes; it works really well both on my iPhone 4 and iPad.
Synchronicity is a $2 purchase in the Cydia Store. If you have a jailbroken device, I don’t see why you shouldn’t use this.
Following James Whelton’s discovery of the possibility to bypass the iPod Nano 6G cache comparison to install blank spaces on the device and remove apps from its Springboard, well-known developer Steven Troughton-Smith has figured out a way to put the Nano in DFU mode (which, in iTunes, will return the device to its default factory settings) and send custom firmware files to it. This is the same method of installing custom firmware on jailbroken iPhones and iPads and make those devices recognize the files as signed and valid, although the Nano method is still a concept and needs some more hacking and work before it becomes a real “jailbreak”.
Troughton-Smith, however, managed to get two encrypted files, send them to the device and have them executed on the unit’s reboot. Using a modified version of popular jailbreak utility iRecovery and the extract2g tool to get the files from Nano’s OS, he believes this will certainly inspire other devs to start tinkering with the Nano 6G and start creating proof-of-concept apps.
Check out the demo video below. I don’t know what kind of “apps” it’d be cool to have on the Nano, but a mini Instapaper would be great. I think. Or Angry Birds. [9to5 via Steven Troughton-Smith]
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Soon, we may be able to jailbreak our devices with a new tool from hacker / developer all-star George Hotz (a.k.a. Geohot) called Rubyra1n. As noted by Redmond Pie, the domain rubyra1n.com seems to be registered by George Hotz with the same credentials of blackra1n.com, another jailbreak tool Hotz released last year. The new rubyra1n, however, doesn’t share the same data with limera1n.com – an app released in October to jailbreak iOS 4.1.
Of course there is no confirmation Geohot is planning to use this domain for an upcoming jailbreak tool, but we wouldn’t be surprised at all to see him coming out with his own iOS 4.2.1 untethered jailbreak for all devices. In the meantime, check out the domain records below and let the speculation begin. Read more
