Mac Games and More The Blog

From Gizmodo:

Here’s a funny Steve Jobs Bobblehead app by Spiffy Tech’s Sean Haber. Every couple of moments, Jobs spits out a “Boom!” giving fanboys the comforting feeling of new Apple producs dropping at keynotes. Use jailbreakme.com to get this on your iPhone, but note some caveats…[Here]

Link

From Macworld UK:

Apple’s tablet computer rumours surfaced again this week with a report claiming the device exists and is being manufactured for Apple by Asus.

Crave reports ‘insider sources’, who claimed: “Asus is helping Apple build a tablet PC.” The magazine notes that Asus is one of the Far East vendors who build portable Macs for Apple.

The report claims the new tablet Mac will feature an all-new design. Looking to the present, it seems likely such a machine will run Mac OS X 10.5 and could potentially use the same multi-touch technology Apple employs in the iPhone and iPod touch.

The tablet Mac rumours are nothing new. Exactly 12 months ago, Australia’s Smarthouse magazine published claims that Apple had built a, “fully working prototype of a Mac tablet PC.”

That report claimed the device to have been designed to handle third-party applications, such as home automation software and security cameras.

The 2006 report stated the new tablet Mac would ship in mid-2007. While this didn’t happen, it may be of consequence that Apple had originally intended to ship Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in mid-2007.

If the purported tablet Mac required Leopard to be market-tested before it shipped, and if these rumours have substance, then this suggests the system may see the light of day early next year.

From USA Today:

The electronics maker is no longer selling iPhones for cash in its stores. It now only accepts credit or debit cards.

It’s the latest example of Apple keeping a tight rein on the iPhone, says tech analyst Chris Hazelton at researcher IDC. Apple closely manages many aspects of the popular phone, including carriers it works with and what programs it runs.

The credit-only policy announced last week is designed to discourage people from buying iPhones in hopes of quickly reselling them for profit, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris says. Credit sales may make it easier for Apple to track bulk buyers.

Resellers are doing brisk business on eBay, where about 1,000 iPhones are often up for auction. Prices vary but are often higher than the $399 Apple charges.

Apple controls iPhone usage by warning that altering the phone usually violates its warranty. Even so, owners are overriding restrictions by:

Using a cell carrier other than AT&T (T). An iPhone is designed to work only with AT&T’s network in the USA. Customers can change that by downloading widely available software from the Web to an iPhone via Wi-Fi.

Modified iPhones can usually connect to any carrier using the same underlying technology as AT&T’s, including T-Mobile and many international carriers.

Apple this month estimated that about 250,000 iPhones have been “unlocked” in this way, even though some features may not work. That might cause Apple to lose money, because the company is widely believed to have a revenue-sharing deal with AT&T. The companies have not released details.

Hazelton says some modified phones are probably being used in other countries, where the iPhone has not yet been released. (It will go on sale in the United Kingdom, France and Germany this month.)

Adding unapproved software. An iPhone is essentially a computer, but Apple makes it tough to add outside programs. That should change this spring, when Apple releases new developer tools.

But some customers aren’t willing to wait. They’re using a software override to download whatever they want. Several recent eBay auctions for unlocked phones also featured “bonus” add-on software, including video games and instant-messaging programs.

“There’s a pull from consumers,” says equity analyst Ashok Kumar at CRT Capital Holdings. IPhones with fewer restrictions “are much more appealing,” he says.

Andres Sanchez, a digital media designer in Orlando, modified his iPhone because he wanted to play games on it. He later switched to T-Mobile cellphone service because he prefers it to AT&T.

Yay. I love Fake Steve Jobs and I like Guy Kawasaki (most of the time) – anyway, make sure to catch the interview on ustream at 6pm, pacific standard time!

Go here for the interview!

Watch it

Ja and Ja wohl! Deutschland gets the iPhone on November 9th. Lucky them. Maybe the French will be next. On verra.

Germans will pay €399 ($575) for the 8GB iPhone, along with a €25 ($36) activation fee, and these prices are in effect with a two-year contract. Calling plans will start at €49 ($71) per month, and except for that higher pricing, are similar to those in the U.S. via gizmodo

Do you have an iPhone story? It could be good, bad, even ugly; Apple wants to hear them! Really, go on and recount all of the stuff you’ve been needing to get out of your system…

Go tell your story to Apple now.

Geotag photos and other documents easily, then browse them by navigating through a three-dimensional representation of the Earth. Ovolab Geophoto brings geotagging to your desktop, allowing you to instantly locate a picture taken in Yosemite National Park, or a document that refers to a specific location, just as easily. Also browse other people’s photos by location, and discover new places through their shots.

Geophoto integrates with Flickr and iPhoto, lets you share your geotagged pictures with friends and family, supports GPS information found in Exif metadata and Camera RAW files. Perfect for occasional and professional photographers, travelers, students.

Download it now

From Time:

The thing is hard to type on. It’s too slow. It’s too big. It doesn’t have instant messaging. It’s too expensive. (Or, no, wait, it’s too cheap!) It doesn’t support my work e-mail. It’s locked to AT&T. Steve Jobs secretly hates puppies. And—all together now—we’re sick of hearing about it! Yes, there’s been a lot of hype written about the iPhone, and a lot of guff too. So much so that it seems weird to add more, after Danny Fanboy and Bobby McBlogger have had their day. But when that day is over, Apple’s iPhone is still the best thing invented this year. Why? Five reasons:

1. The iPhone is pretty
Most high-tech companies don’t take design seriously. They treat it as an afterthought. Window-dressing. But one of Jobs’ basic insights about technology is that good design is actually as important as good technology. All the cool features in the world won’t do you any good unless you can figure out how to use said features, and feel smart and attractive while doing it.

An example: look at what happens when you put the iPhone into “airplane” mode (i.e., no cell service, WiFi, etc.). A tiny little orange airplane zooms into the menu bar! Cute, you might say. But cute little touches like that are part of what makes the iPhone usable in a world of useless gadgets. It speaks your language. In the world of technology, surface really is depth.

2. It’s touchy-feely
Apple didn’t invent the touchscreen. Apple didn’t even reinvent it (Apple probably acquired its much hyped multitouch technology when it snapped up a company called Fingerworks in 2005). But Apple knew what to do with it. Apple’s engineers used the touchscreen to innovate past the graphical user interface (which Apple helped pioneer with the Macintosh in the 1980s) to create a whole new kind of interface, a tactile one that gives users the illusion of actually physically manipulating data with their hands—flipping through album covers, clicking links, stretching and shrinking photographs with their fingers.

This is, as engineers say, nontrivial. It’s part of a new way of relating to computers. Look at the success of the Nintendo Wii…

Read the rest at Time

From Creative Bits:

I’m sick of anti-virus companies reporting on supposed OS X viruses and trojans.

The latest anti-virus company expressing its greed was Intego, who reported about an OS X trojan that is supposedly out in the wild redirecting unsuspecting browsers to fake sites stealing their credit card info. Woo-hoo!

This trojan is an 8 year old kid dressed in a witch costume. So fitting to Halloween!

Let’s see how you can get infected:

You have to visit an eerie link to a no-name porn site.
You have to believe that the video content on this site is so unique it requires a special codec.
You have to be convinced that this codec is so damn special it can not be downloaded from Apple or any other trusted location, but only from this shady site.
You have to conclude that the only way to get laid tonight is to download the dmg of the codec and install it on your machine.
You are confident enough to give your admin password to have the installer run.
Despite the fact that your DNS settings have now been changed and your browser takes you to random sites, you keep surfing and shopping giving your passwords and credit card details anywhere.
Right. Very likely and truly dangerous scenario. If somebody is stupid enough to do all this, he won’t even realize he’s in trouble, would he?

It’s the equivalent of going to a dark bar in the worst part of your town. Paying a random person for a certain white powder. Being surprised you got bubbles coming out of your nostrils. Realizing you’re not even hallucinating.

Now, I’m not saying that AV companies are useless or that OS X is infallible. But I do think it’s dangerous to report on false stories, because it destroys the AV company’s reputation. And, it is destructive to the Mac community, because people become immune to the announcements and won’t take them seriously when the real shit hits the fan.

From Intego:

A malicious Trojan Horse has been found on several pornography web sites, claiming to install a video codec necessary to view free pornographic videos on Macs. A great deal of spam has been posted to many Mac forums, in an attempt to lead users to these sites. When the users arrive on one of the web sites, they see still photos from reputed porn videos, and if they click on the stills, thinking they can view the videos, they arrive on a web page that says the following:

Quicktime Player is unable to play movie file.
Please click here to download new version of codec.

After the page loads, a disk image (.dmg) file automatically downloads to the user’s Mac. If the user has checked Open “Safe” Files After Downloading in Safari’s General preferences (or similar settings in other browsers), the disk image will mount, and the installer package it contains will launch Installer. If not, and the user wishes to install this codec, they double-click the disk image to mount it, then double-click the package file, named install.pkg.

If the user then proceeds with installation, the Trojan horse installs; installation requires an administrator’s password, which grants the Trojan horse full root privileges. No video codec is installed, and if the user returns to the web site, they will simply come to the same page and receive a new download.

This Trojan horse, a form of DNSChanger, uses a sophisticated method, via the scutil command, to change the Mac’s DNS server (the server that is used to look up the correspondences between domain names and IP addresses for web sites and other Internet services). When this new, malicious, DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks), or simply to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites. In the first case, users may think they are on legitimate sites and enter a user name and password, a credit card, or an account number, which will then be hijacked. In the latter case, it seems that this is being done solely to generate ad revenue.

Under Mac OS X 10.4, there is no way to see the changed DNS server in the operating system’s GUI. Under Mac OS X 10.5, this can be seen in the Advanced Network preferences; the added DNS servers are dimmed, and cannot be removed manually. (Intego is currently testing previous versions of Mac OS X; it is likely that they can be infected as well, since all versions of Mac OS X have the scutil command.)
The Trojan horse also installs a root crontab which checks every minute to ensure that its DNS server is still active. Since changing a network location could change the DNS server, this cron job ensures that, in such a case, the malicious DNS server remains the active server.

This Trojan horse also provides different versions of itself, perhaps according to the country in which the user is located to provide country-specific spoofing. Repeated downloads of the disk image show that there are several different versions.

Means of protection: The best way to protect against this exploit is to run Intego VirusBarrier X4 with its virus definitions dated October 31,2007. Intego VirusBarrier X4 eradicates the malicious code and prevents the Trojan horse from being installed. Intego recommends that users never download and install software from untrusted sources or questionable web sites.