Weirdly Indestructible, Impact-Absorbing iPad/2 G-Form Cases Now Shipping

Ok, we’re a little baffled why this dude is pulling out an iPad in this sitch. Last-minute conditions-check? Confused about the term “surf the web”?

What’s pretty clear though, is that the blindingly yellow G-Form iPad Extreme Sleeve case ($60) he’s peeling off his iPad is now shipping. We love talking about this case; partly because we’re fascinated with the extreme-sport-derived protective material it’s made from, and partly because we’re mesmerized by the crazy videos G-Form keeps releasing to demonstrate the Extreme Sleeve’s protective ability — which seems formidable.

Right now, it’s only available (thankfully, also in black) from G-Form directly.

Maximize Your Desktop With GeekTool [Video How-To]

 
GeekTool is a neat little System Preferences add-on that  lets you expand the usability of your desktop. Whether it be adding the time, date, weather, or even your Twitter feed, GeekTool can change your desktop from a boring backdrop to a useful information center. This video will show you how to setup GeekTool to fit your needs, as well as where to find many useful add-ons for it.
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Maximize Your Desktop With GeekTool [Video How-To]

This Week’s Must-Have iOS Games: First Touch Soccer, Spider Jack, Frisbee Forever & More!

Kicking off this week’s selection of must-have iOS games is a brand new soccer game from X2 Games – the team behind the award-winning X2 Soccer titles. First Touch Soccer promises to be the true next-generation of soccer on iOS, offering the “most complete, realistic and addictive soccer sim available.”

Spider Jack is the latest puzzle release from Chillingo and I’m betting this game will be the next iOS game craze. Inspired by Cut the Rope, this game features a similar gameplay mechanic and all the ingredients needed to be a fantastic iOS puzzler.

Frisbee Forever is a whole new way to play frisbee and the only official frisbee game for iOS. It boasts super crisp 3D graphics and a frisbee experience like no other!

Find out more about the games above and check out Pulse: Volume One – this week’s final must-have – after the break!

First Touch Soccer – ($0.99) iPhone – Games

First Touch Soccer claims to be the most complete soccer sim available for the iPhone, and with its impressive list of features, it could be spot on. To complete with the big boys like FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer, you need something pretty special – and this game is just that. It features an intelligent AI engine that provides smart defensive and attacking play with a challenging and addictive experience. Boasting intuitive controls, excellent visuals and multiple game modes. It really shines with ‘Dream Team’ mode, which allows you to create your own team from players all over the world – past and present. You can even design your own kit! With over 250 clubs, 30 competitions, and 7 game modes, First Touch Soccer is a must-have for soccer fans, and currently on sale to celebrate its release at an incredible $0.99!

Spider Jack – ($0.99) iPhone / ($1.99) iPad – Games

Spider Jack bears an uncanny resemblance to Cut the Rope and offers a similar style of play mechanic, but instead features an adorable green arachnid called Jack, whose mission is to return to his web to get his fill of flies. It features 75 levels skilfully designed levels that promise to test your reflexes and foresight. Using pieces of web (not rope) you must carefully avoid electrical beams and guide Jack safely home to his web. Use hairdryers to you advantage and try to collect as many stars as you can along the way. Each level features multiple solutions, and the impressive visuals have been hand-drawn and optimized for the iPhone 4′s Retina display. Realistic physics attempt to give you a taste of “what real web-slinging is like,” and offer a puzzler that’s suitable for players of all ages and abilities.

Frisbee Forever – (Free) Universal – Games

www.youtube.com/watch?v=213OQ4nDVzA

Get ready for blast off with Frisbee Forever on your iPhone and iPad, offering 100 crazy tracks which you must fly through at breathtaking speeds. Twist and turn in the California Theme Park, climb the majestic mountains in the Wild West or send the waves blazing in the pirate-filled Caribbean oceans. Play with classic Wham-O Frisbees or brand new discs exclusive to the game. Collect more than 100 frisbees as well as plenty of trophies and secret bonuses.

Pulse: Volume One – ($4.99) iPad – Games

Enter an absorbing world where players become part conductor, part note-captor and part multitouch master. Pulse is a brand new music game in which you must tap speeding notes as they cross the radiant pulse in an attempt to conduct beautiful melodies. There are 8 cores levels featuring original music with eclectic soundtracks of varying genres. It features unique and intuitive multitouch gameplay which is easy to pick up, but hard to master. Pulse is one of the most original iOS games I’ve seen for a while a truly magical idea that is executed perfectly on the iPad.

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This Week’s Must-Have iOS Games: First Touch Soccer, Spider Jack, Frisbee Forever & More!

Steve Jobs Believes Apple Will be OK Without Him

One of the most interesting revelations of the Fortune piece “Inside Apple” that’s making headlines this weekend is how Steve Jobs thinks Apple will be OK without him.

Fortune reporter Adam Lashinsky writes:

“Jobs himself believes he has set Apple on a course to survive in his absence. He has created a culture that, while not particularly jolly, has internalized his ways.”

Lashinsky says Jobs has been busy codifying the way he runs Apple — an argument I’ve been making for years.

“… these days, he’s especially focused on institutionalizing his ways of doing business. His mission: to turn the traits that people most closely associate with Jobs–the attention to detail, the secrecy, the constant feedback–into processes that can ensure Apple’s excellence far into the future.”

And here’s me writing for CNN in January:

In the last decade, Jobs has thoroughly remade Apple in his image. His personality traits have become encoded as the way the company does things. His perfectionism, attention to detail, even his design taste, have become part and parcel of Apple’s processes, from product development to advertising.

One of the most interesting revelations in Lashinky’s piece concerns the “case studies” that are being written about Apple’s most important decisions, such as consolidating iPhone manufacturing around a single factory in China. Jobs hired Joel Podolny, former dean of Yale School of management, as Apple head of HR. He’s been busy with a team of “eggheads” writing studies about Apple’s business decisions.

“It runs out Podolny has been busy working on a project that speaks directly to the delicate topic of life at Apple after Jobs. At Jobs’ instruction, Podolny hired a team of business professors, including the renowned Harvard veteran and Andy Grove biographer Richard Tedlow. This band of eggheads is writing a series of internal case studies about significant decisions in Apple’s recent history. It’s exactly the sort of thing the major business schools do, except Apple’s case studies are for an Apple-only audience… The goal is to expose the next layer of management to the executive team’s thought process… Jobs even is ensuring that his teachings are being collected, curated and preserved so that future generations of Apple’s leaders can consult and interpret them.”

Lashinsky’s piece isn’t yet online but is available on the iPad. MacStories has a pretty good summary.

This Week’s Must-Have iOS Apps: Comic Life, Notificant, Planetary & More!

At the top of this week’s list of must-have iOS apps is the awesome comic creation tool that previously came bundled with Intel Macs. Comic Life from plasq allows you to use the photos in your iPad’s camera roll to create your own comic masterpieces.

Notificant is a brilliant new productivity app that makes is fast and simple to create reminders for the things you’d usually forget. Choose to have notifications alert you on your iPhone, as well as any of your other iOS or Mac devices.

Exploring your music collection has never been as stunning as it is with Planetary – a free iPad app that has climbed rapidly to the top of the free app charts. Fly through a 3D universe dynamically created by information about the recording artists you love.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves – including Cadence.fm and 4oD Catch Up – after the break!

Comic Life – ($7.99) iPad – Lifestyle

Comic Life once came free with new Intel Macs, and is a great piece of software for creating your own comic books. The iPad app takes the latest functionality from the desktop application and wraps it up into an easy to use touch interface. Create comics out of the photos in your device’s photo library, then add balloons, captions, lettering and templates to tell your story; while the smart text layout and image filtering functions ensure your projects always look fantastic. Use the integrated e-reader to view your creations in fullscreen, and when they’re ready for the big time, share them with your friends via Facebook and email. You can also print your comics via AirPrint and share them between other iPads with the intuitive ‘drag & drop’ feature.

Notificant – ($2.99) iPhone – Productivity

Notificant claims to be the “simplest, fastest and most elegant way to send reminders to yourself on the iPhone, Mac, and email inbox,” and we quite agree. The incredibly simple UI makes it easy to create notifications within seconds which help you remember the things you’d normally forget. Notifications can be sent to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, as well as to your Macs or to an email inbox. You can sync with the Notificant web app to ensure you have access to your notifications all the time, and use it to remotely create new notifications to send to your other devices. There are 9 alert sounds to choose from, and a companion Mac application available in the Mac App Store. Notificant makes it virtually impossible for you to forget.

Planetary – (Free) iPad – Entertainment

Planetary has rocketed up the App Store’s free chart since its release thanks to the stunning and unique way in which it presents your music collection. As you fly through a 3D universe, you can visit planets that represent your favorite albums and control the playback of your music on the iPad by browsing and selecting astronomical objects. Hook it up to your HDTV using the iPad’s AV adapter and experience Planetary’s beauty on the big screen. This is a new type of “visual discovery” app from Bloom Studio and we highly recommend you try it out!

Cadence.fm – ($1.99) iPhone – Health & Fitness

Cadence.fm is a clever fitness application for your iPhone that provides you with a music engine and ensures you have a consistent beat that matches the pace of your workout. It’s designed to enable you to perform exercises – such as jogging, running, cycling or dancing – while listening to a steady stream of songs that match the tempo of your movements. The app provides an on-demand personal DJ and you don’t need to provide your own music – the tunes are all streamed from the SoundCloud music community from a collection of popular trance, house, and club remixes. Choose a channel and select the BPM and matching music will be streamed straight to your device. Cadence.fm supports Apple’s headphone controls so there’s no need to get your device out to control the application during your workout.

4oD Catch Up – (Free) iPad – Entertainment

Unfortunately this one’s just for the U.K. bunch – Channel 4 now has their own catch up service for the iPad. Much like BBC’s iPlayer, 4oD Catch Up provides free and unlimited access to a wide selection of programmes from Channel 4, E4, and More4 for up to 30 days after transmission.

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This Week’s Must-Have iOS Apps: Comic Life, Notificant, Planetary & More!

MacBook Pro review (early 2011)

Apple might say we’re in the post-PC era, but hey — turns out they still make Macs in Cupertino, and the new MacBook Pro is actually one of the more aggressive refreshes in the machine’s history. Not only has it been less than a year since the last MacBook Pro spec bump, but our 15-inch review unit is actually the first Sandy Bridge system we’ve received from any manufacturer. And it’s not just the CPU that’s new: Apple’s also launching the new Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect, and there’s been a big switch to an AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU paired with Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 3000, an arrangement that should offer both solid graphics performance and great battery life. That’s a lot of new parts in a familiar case — but do they add up to something more than just a speed bump? Read on for our full review!

Continue reading MacBook Pro review (early 2011)

MacBook Pro review (early 2011) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:00:00 EDT.

Mac OS X Lion hands-on preview

Apple announced Mac OS X Lion with considerable fanfare at its Back to the Mac event last October, and now it’s dropped the first developer preview on the world — giving us a chance to sample some of the big cat’s new features and UI concepts. We installed the dev build on one of our MacBook Pros and used it over the weekend, and while we won’t be able to see any huge changes in day-to-day workflow until our favorite apps are updated to take advantage of Lion, we did see plenty of interesting system-level features and additions — and yes, iOS’s influence is all over the place. Read on for a full breakdown of what’s new!

Continue reading Mac OS X Lion hands-on preview

Mac OS X Lion hands-on preview originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 19:00:00 EDT.

MacBook Pro (early 2011) with ThunderBolt hands-on

We just got our new 15-inch MacBook Pro review unit, and although it looks almost exactly the same as the previous MBP, it has that fancy new ThunderBolt icon on the side, which ought to make I/O nerd hearts flutter the world over. Unfortunately, there aren’t any ThunderBolt peripherals on the market yet, so we can’t really test the new connection yet, but we can report that backwards compatibility with Mini DisplayPort performs as advertised and that all of our display adapters worked without issue — the first time we can ever remember Apple switching a standard and not requiring all new dongles.

As for performance, we were given the $2,199 configuration with a 2.2GHz quad-core Sandy Bridge Core i7, discrete AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics, 4GB of RAM and a 750GB HD, which clocked a preliminary GeekBench score of 9647. We’ll have tons more testing in our full review, including detailed comparisons of the discrete chip with Intel’s new integrated HD Graphics 3000.

Apple did give us a quick demo on the new system with a prototype Promise RAID unit and a stock Cinema Display connected over ThunderBolt — remember, ThunderBolt just uses a Mini DisplayPort connector, so displays can be daisy-chained right in. Apple’s demo was a variation of the same thing Intel’s been doing for a while — they played four uncompressed HD video streams off the RAID simultaneously, which pegged the ThunderBolt throughput meter at 600-700MBps. We also watched a 5GB file transfer in just a few seconds — all very impressive, but we’re definitely anxious to try some of this stuff ourselves once ThunderBolt devices start shipping sometime in the spring.

Apple also told us that ThunderBolt is running on copper and not optical cables (like the Light Peak protoypes) so that it can support bus-powered devices — there’s 10 watts of power available on the bus, up slightly from FireWire’s 8 watts. Up to six devices can be daisy-chained from one port, and since ThunderBolt is based on PCI Express, it can even support FireWire and USB adapters. That’s great news for the future of the interface, but the MacBook Pro still has two USB 2.0 and one FireWire 800 port, so it’s not of critical importance right this second.

We’ll have much, much more in our full review — check back in a few days!

MacBook Pro (early 2011) with ThunderBolt hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 11:30:00 EDT.

Apple and Intel unveil Thunderbolt I/O technology

So it’s perhaps not the most original moniker that Apple and Intel could have chosen, but it’s here just the same. After years of waiting Apple has launched its implementation of Intel’s Light Peak standard and it’s called Thunderbolt. It’s making its appearance on new MacBook Pro models and it’s promising 10Gb/second transfer rates. That’s dual-channel, too so you’ll get 10Gb/sec both to and from your devices. Apple suggests this will be useful for external RAID arrays, Gigabit Ethernet adapters, and also mentions support for “FireWire and USB consumer devices” along with HDMI, DVI, and VGA over DisplayPort. Apple expects that Thunderbolt will be “widely adopted as a new standard for high performance I/O,” but we think the USB 3.0 crew might have a thing or two to say about that. Full PR is embedded below.

Update: Intel has thrown up its page on the technology, and it looks like the Light Peak name is officially no more. Intel indicates this speed will be enough to transfer a full-length HD movie (roughly 10 – 20GB in size) in less than 30 seconds. Intel also reinforces that this is compatible with existing DisplayPort devices and it also uses the PCI Express protocol for enhanced compatibility. Daisy-chaining will be possible, along with bus-powered devices, and cables can be made using either optical or electrical construction.

Continue reading Apple and Intel unveil Thunderbolt I/O technology

Apple and Intel unveil Thunderbolt I/O technology originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:01:00 EDT.

Apple refreshes MacBook Pros with Sandy Bridge processors, AMD graphics, Thunderbolt I/O tech, and HD cameras

Come on, you knew this was coming! Oh yes, Apple’s pulling the curtain off its new MacBook Pro family, and compared to the last refresh cycle, there are a serious amount of updates. Just as we had heard, all three will be getting new Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 processors, AMD Radeon HD 6000M graphics (bye bye, NVIDIA!), FaceTime HD cameras, and some super fast Thunderbolt I/O transfer speeds. There are two new 13-inchers, two 15.4-inch versions, and one lone 17-inch model. How much will they cost you and what are the exact specs? You’ll want to hit the jump for all of that and the official press release.

Continue reading Apple refreshes MacBook Pros with Sandy Bridge processors, AMD graphics, Thunderbolt I/O tech, and HD cameras

Apple refreshes MacBook Pros with Sandy Bridge processors, AMD graphics, Thunderbolt I/O tech, and HD cameras originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:02:00 EDT.