At least two major websites have said they will make iPad-specific versions of their pages instead of insisting on using Flash. Both National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal will automatically detect the tablet and redirect it to a simliar version that cleanly removes the Adobe plugin. While it's not mentioned if either will still have media playback, NPR also mentioned to AllThingsD plans to re-tune its iPhone app to scale properly on the larger screen of the Apple device....

Apple has filed for a patent covering a variety of technology relating to projector systems. The filing, titled "Projection Systems and Methods," describes ways to use projectors for interacting with other devices. Many of the embodiments are focused on improvements to viewing or controlling presentations remotely....

With over 18,000 titles ready and waiting, KeyBookshop is anxious for the arrival of the Apple iPad...

After the lawsuits and delays, this reader's experience—asking for a refund—truly puts JooJoo's reputation on the line. It feels written by a Nigerian scammer, rather than customer support. Here's their whole email exchange.

Continue reading »

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• JooJoo Delayed, Still Toast
• JooJoo Boss Is Amazed Apple Is Moving "Into A Category That We've Defined"
• Playing With JooJoo Just Makes Me Want An Apple Tablet

Apple on Tuesday afternoon pushed out another private beta of Mac OS X 10.6.3, asking its developer community to test font compatibility and stability alongside a handful of other components that have been in need of evaluation for the past several weeks.

Samsung is the next consumer electronics manufacturer to come out swinging against Apple’s iPad. A senior executive confirmed plans to release a “slate PC” during the second half of this year.

The key differentiating points for this tablet will address what Samsung feels are two major shortcomings of the iPad: lack of processing power and not enough connectivity options.

“I do feel that that slate-type platform has legs but I think the legs need to be far more powerful, for example an Atom-based product which has far greater flexibility, not to mention inputs and outputs,” said Director of Samsung Australia’s IT division Philip Newton at the Samsung Forum in Singapore. “This has more potential than an iPad.”

The goal is to build a device powerful enough to become the primary computing machine for many people. The ARM chip that powers Apple’s iPad was deemed not powerful enough to make the tablet form factor truly shine; hence Samsung reports that it is looking at two platforms from Intel to power the unnamed device: Atom or the Moorestown System on a Chip.

The slate will be a device “you could take to university and do a PowerPoint presentation on it, for example, or a device that could be taken home or to the office and docked,” Samsung’s Emmanuele Silanesu said .

Samsung is no stranger to the “in-between smartphone and laptop” zone, having released the Q1 ultra-mobile PC (pictured above right) back in 2006. Silanesu assures us that the forthcoming new tablet will have a much stronger focus on the consumer market than the Q1, which “was a very niche product for a vertical market… It was limited (in functionality), the price was relatively high, and it wasn’t an attractive device for consumers.”

It’s not terribly much to go on yet, but how do you think Samsung’s planned device might stack up against the other crop of iPad alternative hopefuls? Are you interested in some flavor of tablet device, and if so, what features should it have?

[via Boy Genius Report]

Tags: apple, atom, ipad, moorsetown, Q1, samsung, samsung tablet, Tablet, tablets

Dans la journée, Apple a proposé deux mises à jour des pilotes d'impression pour les imprimantes Samsung et Brother, fonctionnant avec grâce et volubilité sous Snow Leopard. Les sources et liens se trouvent plus en avant dans la niouse ;-)

We're not certain why, but apparently Apple's delaying the shipment of several iPad accessories including the keyboard dock and 10W USB power adapter until May. Oh, and you'll wait until late April for a soft case. [Apple Insider via CNN] More »

We're not certain why, but apparently Apple's delaying the shipment of several iPad accessories including the keyboard dock and 10W USB power adapter until May. Oh, and you'll wait until late April for a soft case. [Apple Insider via CNN] More »

At least two major websites have said they will make iPad-specific versions of their pages instead of insisting on using Flash. Both National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal will automatically detect the tablet and redirect it to a simliar version that cleanly removes the Adobe plugin. While it's not mentioned if either will still have media playback, NPR also mentioned to AllThingsD plans to re-tune its iPhone app to scale properly on the larger screen of the Apple device....

Delicious Library 2.4Delicious Library allows you to import, browse, and share all your books, movies, music and video games with Delicious Library.

Run your very own library from your home or office using our impossibly simple interface. Delicious Library's digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games.

A scan of a barcode is all Delicious Library needs to add an item to your digital shelves, downloading tons of info from the internet like the author, release date, current value, description, and even a high-resolution picture of the cover. Import your entire library using our exclusive full-speed iSight video barcode scanner, our Flicï¿Â½ Wireless Laser Bar Code Scanner, or (the slow way) entering the titles by hand. Once you have all of your items in your Mac, you can browse though your digital shelves, check stuff out to friends using Apple's built-in Address Book and calendar, and find new items to read, watch, and play using Library's recommendations.

Quickly importing your stuff into Delicious Library doesn't require a dedicated barcode scanner - you can use any QuickTimeï¿Â½-supported digital video camera, like your Apple iSight. Just hold the barcode on the back of any book, movie, CD, or video game in front of the camera and your item magically shows up on your digital shelf seconds later. Using the same technology found in $800 industrial-strength CCD barcode scanners, Delicious Library reads every single frame of digital video; seeking out, targeting, and instantly decoding any visible barcodes. This results in a seamless process of scanning that lets you import about 750 items an hour (assuming you can move your arms that fast). At that rate the staff of the new downtown Seattle Central Library could work together to import all of their 1.4 million books into Delicious Library in just over 5 hours.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 2.4:

• The video barcode scanner has been rewritten to be 700% better, so iSight scanning is much more responsive. This is the third generation barcode scanning algorithm for Delicious Library, and is being provided for free to Delicious Library 2 users.
• Apple's late 2009 iMac machines use a lens whose fixed focal distant starts at around two feet, which is very far compare to other Macs, and makes scanning barcodes very difficult. This new algorithm makes it possible to scan with these iMacs, but it can be a bit twitchy. When scanning with any Mac, if you are having problems try tilting your item up and down to remove any shines on the barcode from the screen of from nearby lights. Also, if an item isn't scanning, make sure the barcode completely fills the width of the target area--this is the width that has been determined to scan best for your model of camera.

REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.5 or later.
PRICE$40.00
DEVELOPERDelicious Monster
DOWNLOADS98522
DOWNLOAD NOW (20.4 MB)
More information

Google has confirmed that there are now 30,000 free and paid applications in the Android Market.

TechCrunch reports that the number of applications has nearly doubled from 16,000 in just three months. Other figures were provided by third-party developer AndroLib, which said it was only six months ago when Google’s Android Market had 10,000 applications.

Google’s Android Market growth has not been as fast or furious as Apple’s App Store. In fact, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) said in January that it had more than 140,000 applications, or almost twice as more as Google (NSDQ: GOOG).

Google has confirmed that there are now 30,000 free and paid applications in the Android Market.

TechCrunch reports that the number of applications has nearly doubled from 16,000 in just three months. Other figures were provided by third-party developer AndroLib, which said it was only six months ago when Google’s Android Market had 10,000 applications.

Google’s Android Market growth has not been as fast or furious as Apple’s App Store. In fact, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) said in January that it had more than 140,000 applications, or almost twice as more as Google (NSDQ: GOOG).

Today, during his keynote address at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had a big revelation: “On certain days, we’re consuming more Internet capacity than Sweden has as a country.”

Ek made the statement when asked why Spotify chose to use a P2P model, rather than centrally store all of its music in one place and stream it from there. Ek noted that if they were to stream from one UK datacenter, they’d consume all the bandwidth. So instead, they leverage the power of the Internet to get their users to help them stream to other users.

Ek also said this was primarily the reason that Spotify is a native application, rather than a web app. P2P streaming is a bit more complicated than streaming from one source on the backend of things, obviously.

When asked why Apple (which of course, runs the largest music store in the world, iTunes) doesn’t use the P2P method, Ek said that was the “million dollar question.” He then speculated that they will move more towards Spotify in terms of being in the cloud (something we’ve written about a few times), and having a subscription model.

Ek noted that Spotify is now in six countries and has over 320,000 paid subscribers. That’s up from 260,000 the last time they mentioned it. Overall, they have some 7 million users now. And yes, that’s largely without the U.S. where the service only exists in a very limited closed beta as the company negotiates with the labels for music rights.

CrunchBase InformationSpotifyInformation provided by CrunchBase

Apple's iPad will ship on April 3, but some of the accessories made for the device won't.

If, like many computer users, you're wrestling with hundreds or even thousands of digital images...

In addition to new App Store software, National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal also plan to create specific versions of their Web sites completely devoid of Adobe Flash for iPad users.

Apple seems to have a projector fetish lately. They have been filing projector-related patents left, right and center. The latest one describes ways to incorporate micro-projectors in many Apple products, from iPhone to MacBook to an Airport Express wireless router. More »

Apple seems to have a projector fetish lately. They have been filing projector-related patents left, right and center. The latest one describes ways to incorporate micro-projectors in many Apple products, from iPhone to MacBook to an Airport Express wireless router. More »

Apple ne lâche pas la pression et propose aux développeurs une nouvelle build (la 10D571) de Mac OS X 10.6.3 ! Cupertino leur demande de se concentrer en particulier sur les pilotes graphiques, iChat, QuickTime, ainsi que les polices. Les quelques correctifs apportées par cette nouvelle beta (...)

Apple's Mac business isn't growing as fast as it did last Christmas, despite weak comps, but it's still performing ahead of expectations.

In a note Monday, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said he expected Apple to report Mac year-over-year unit sales growth of 26% to 31% for the March quarter, above the Street's expected 22% year-over-year growth.

It'll be interesting to see how the iPad affects the Mac business starting in the June quarter. It may attract more people into Apple Stores, who end up buying MacBooks. But it could also cannibalize low-end MacBook sales. Apple's bet is that it won't, but will instead become a third category of device, competing mostly with PC netbooks and e-book readers.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Look At All The Companies Starting-Up Just To Build iPhone Apps
• CHART OF THE DAY: The Xbox Wins A Small Battle In Console Wars
• CHART OF THE DAY: Research In Motion Has Done A Great Job Defending Its Turf

One of the more interesting things you can do with the iPhone is use it as a remote control for other devices. Since the iPhone App Store launched almost two years ago, developers have created hundreds of remote control applications. More »

One of the more interesting things you can do with the iPhone is use it as a remote control for other devices. Since the iPhone App Store launched almost two years ago, developers have created hundreds of remote control applications. More »

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Microsoft should make Bill Buxton its front man -- the main spokesperson. Buxton,  principal researcher for Microsoft Research, has style, great enthusiasm and vision. In an alternate universe, Buxton founded  a company like Apple; only better. Buxton is more visionary than Apple CEO Steve Jobs, has better sense of good design (he is a designer, after all) and understands great design in context of the flow of history. Perhaps if Buxton had more ego, he would run a company as successful as Apple, or Microsoft. But humility is part of his appeal.

Buxton stormed the Microsoft MIX10 stage today, bringing along hearth of wisdom and loads of energy. His energy is simply intoxicating. Last year, Buxton kicked off the MIX keynotes. This year he ended them -- and not with enough stage time. The first keynote, yesterday, started with sedate Scott Guthrie, Microsoft corporate vice president, talking Windows Phone 7 Series. Today's keynote began with Internet Explorer 9 team leader Dean Hachamovitch debuting the new browser, which is available as developer preview.

Hachamovitch, like Guthrie, is a competent  speaker. By comparison, Buxton is dynamic, enthralling -- and he tells great stories about great design. Buxton roams the stage like a caged tiger, but his ferociousness is insight. Scattered grey hair and lean build give him a stereotypical mad scientist look, and he rambles like one, too. I look at Buxton and think of Uncle Monty from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. "Some of you might say I'm hysterical," Buxton joked today.

Microsoft should have made MIX10 Buxton's birthday bash. He turned 61 last week. Buxton shows that excellence knows no age -- that Baby Boomers have user interface design and user experience (UX) wisdom that tech-savvy Gen Xers and Net Gen-ers need to understand. Today's cutting-edge technologies are descendants of earlier generations' bleeding edge tech. Decades, sometimes centuries, of refinement define many established technologies' UX. Take the design of AAA batteries, for example (mine not Buxton's).

Bill Buxton is principal researcher for Microsoft Research

Buxton's personal mantra reveals something important about his design philosophy. From his Website:

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the 'things' that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.

This philosophy defines the differences between his approach to good design and UX from Apple's. Buxton sees good design as an expression of culture and history rather than the personality of a single designer or company. For Apple, good design is about "the things that we sell."

Buxton is an expert about natural user interfaces and their historical context

Good UI design is often about human usage context, and understanding longstanding design interfaces requires some understanding of historical context. Buxton used the example of buttons on a woman's shirt. He called the buttons wrong, because of their placement. But why are they that way? Buxton explained that when buttons were introduced, women didn't dress themselves. The buttons were correctly positioned for the person doing the dressing. Men dressed themselves, so the buttons are on the right, rather than the left.

"Do it naturally," Buxton commanded the MIX10 audience, referring to user interface design. While Microsoft and some other tech companies treat natural user interfaces as something new, Buxton made clear they are something very old. Natural user interfaces are varied, depending on function.

Buxton demonstrates a natural user interface

Buxton asked: "What the heck does natural mean?" One of his answers: "It's the ability to acquire skills." Good natural user interfaces affect the skills that the users have acquired. He answered with another question: "How well does it [the user interface] reflect me, the end user?"

Ultimately, a good natural user interface must address four human skill sets:

• Motor sensory skills
• Cognitive skills
• Social skills
• Emotional skills

Stated differently, good natural user interfaces answer question: "How do people function?" He emphasized that it's not technology that is changing but people. Good user interface design isn't about technology. It's about people. The message is particularly important for MIX's developer audience.

Demonstration of what Buxton calls a "pen and touch" user interface

Sadly, Buxton could only briefly touch on one of the most important natural user interface challenges facing Microsoft and many other technology developers: Mobile devices. Development of applications for mobile must have a "sense of place," understanding changing contexts, he said. Mobile devices are all about usage context.

Buxton joined Microsoft about four years ago, after running his own Toronto-based design firm (Yes, he ran a company in this universe). Before Microsoft, Buxton was perhaps better known for being chief scientist of Alias/Wavefront -- from 1994 to 2002. He is one of Microsoft's best hires in years.

While Buxton talks about putting user interface design in context of human use, its his ability to put UIs in cultural and historical context that makes him so unique among technologists. Microsoft should set up a mentorship program under Buxton and his research team for all product managers. To Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer I ask: Do you get it?

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Deux magazines allemands à très grand tirage se sont fait confirmer, de façon plutôt cavalière, qu'Apple n'apprécie pas du tout les images montrant des individus en petite tenue. Leur application iPhone s'est fait retirer sans préavis de l'App Store, parce...

The printer driver updates, released this week, containing the latest printing software for Snow Leopard users with hardware from Samsung and Brother, respectively.

Today at the South By South West festival in Austin, three finalists competed in the Microsoft BizSpark Accellerator finals in the "Innovative Web Technologies" category.

The companies, RecycleMatch, Siri and Skimble argued their positions on stage in front of three judges and tonight the winner will be announced at 6pm CST.

Sponsor

The Accelerator competition is in its second year and started out with a list of 32 finalist companies in three categories. While all three categories have some strong entries, we wanted to check out the innovative technologies to see what was, well, innovative.

RecycleMatch First, Chad Farrell, co-founder of RecycleMatch, showed off the web solution that we hope takes off solely so it can help save the world. RecycleMatch, the only of the three that is not an iPhone app, is an online marketplace that helps match up waste materials with recyclers and manufacturers that need those materials.

"There's really no place to do this now," said Farrell. "Let's say I've got this piece of polyester fiber waste but I don't know anyone around who can use it. It's the perfect use of the internet - to connect people like that."

We can see this not only having a great impact on the world, but certainly stepping into the ever popular "green" genre and sticking around.

Siri Up next was Dag Kittlaus with the digital, voice-activated personal assistant software Siri. We think Kittlaus' introduction says it best:

"For decades, Hollywood has been paintinh this picture of machine assistants with Hal 9000 - what Siri is doing is taking some steps to make that a reality," Kittlaus said.

As our own Frederic Lardinois has written before about the iPhone app, Siri is "one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years."

You simply hold the phone up, hit a button, and tell it what you need and it translates your speech into text, uses natural language processing algorithms to determine what you need and then launches the appropriate services. Whether you want to schedule a taxi pick-up, make a dinner reservation or remind yourself of that Monday morning appointment, just ask Siri and it will do it.

"What if you could make it easy to ask your phone to do something?" asked Kittlaus. "It's all about simplification."

While the app looks to simplify your life, the technology behind it is anything but simple and it makes us feel a little bit like we've finally arrived in the future.

Skimble The final contestant to take the stage was Skimble and if there's one thing we can say, it's that co-founder Maria Ly did it with style, back-flipping and dancing to the 'Mission Impossible' theme song before putting both legs behind her head and doing push-ups.

Yes, you heard that right - she did push-ups with both legs behind her head. This woman is living what she's preaching, that we can attest to.

"We would like to inspire active lifestyles across the board," she started off in her explanation.

Skimble is a hybrid social network, physical fitness tracking app, that lets you track your physical activities, whether running, doing yoga, or playing kickball and compete with your friends. As you keep track of your activities, you can compare with your friends on a leaderboard and even compete to win real-world prizes. As with Siri, Skimble is primarily an iPhone app, although it has an accompanying website with additional features.

Our Pick We have to say, Siri takes the cake in this category and we're going to have to call it early. If the digital personal assistant doesn't take the prize, then it's only because it's too good and just doesn't need the start-up funding to continue. That almost seemed to be the line of questioning from the judges - why would something as impressive as Siri need to win this competition, with the funding and functionality it's already showing? All Siri needs to do, in reality, is start a bidding war between Google and Apple and it has it made, the judges half-jokingly but half-seriously said during the on-stage interview.

For the final word on what company will take the top prize, watch live tonight at 6 pm CST or check out the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator page.

Discuss

Apple Brother Print Drivers 2.3Brother Printer Drivers for Mac OS X v10.6... This download includes the latest Brother printing and scanning software for Snow Leopard.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 2.3: Release notes were unavailable when this listing was updated.
REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.6.1 or later.
PRICEFree
DEVELOPERApple
DOWNLOADS6716
DOWNLOAD NOW (100 MB)
More information

San Francisco - Google's (NASD: GOOG) Nexus One smartphone has sold just 135,000 units in its first 74 days on sale, a time period during which Apple (NASD: AAPL) sold 1 million of its first-generation iPhone and Motorola (NYSE: MOT) 1.05 million of its Droid handsets, according to a report from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

read more

TechTool Pro 5.0.7TechTool Pro is a full-featured utility program containing options for testing and repair, maintenance (including disk defragmentation), and data recovery. All it takes is one click of the mouse to perform a comprehensive suite of tests on your computer's hardware and attached drives. TechTool Pro does it all. There is no need to purchase additional software to keep your computer performing at its best. In fact, it's so good that Apple includes a copy of its sibling, TechTool Deluxe, in its AppleCare Protection Plan.

Diagnostics and Repair Use the Check Computer feature to perform a complete diagnostics check of the computer and the Macintosh formatted hard drives with one click of the mouse. This includes a SMART test of the computer's built-in hard drive to check for impending drive failure, a test of the computer's available RAM, a check of the disk directories, and much more. If problems are found, advice is provided on how to proceed to repair the problem. Use Check Computer regularly as a part of a preventive maintenance program.

Volume Rebuild In addition to testing the disk directories of hard drives, TechTool Pro can also perform a complete rebuild of them. This optimizes these critical data structures and, on a corrupted drive, repair any problems. Use volume rebuild to keep your hard drives operating at their peak performance.

Optimization TechTool Pro performs both file and volume optimization. File optimization consolidates each individual file into a contiguous area of the hard drive. Volume optimization consolidates the free space on a hard drive. Optimizing enhances the overall performance of your drives and simplifies the file storage layout.

Data Recovery TechTool Pro includes several methods of data recovery. Use them to recover data from corrupted drives that don't mount on the desktop and save the data to another location. Use the Trash History feature to track the location of deleted files and increase the chance of their recovery in the case of an accidental deletion.

eDrive One of the unique features of TechTool Pro is the eDrive. This is a bootable Mac OS X partition containing TechTool Pro and a small copy of your system that you can use when performing regular maintenance or in the case of an emergency. It is created on one of your hard drives without the need to reformat it.

Protection TechTool Pro includes the option to install the TechTool Protection system preference. This is where you configure automatic functions that operate in the background. In particular, you can configure Protection to track deleted files, monitor the free space on your hard drives, save backups of critical directory data to help with recovery in the event of drive corruption, and to monitor the SMART routines of your hard drives. If problems are found, Protection provides an onscreen alert and can even be configured to send an email alert.

WHAT'S NEWVersion 5.0.7:

• Added 64-bit support to the TechTool Protection system preference.
• Major improvements and fixes to the File Structures test.
• Fixed issues with TechTool Protection on non-administrator user accounts.
• Additional support for SSD (solid state drives) in SMART Check test.
• Fixed Cache size for Intel i5 and i7 processors.
• Fixed SMART Check reporting issue.
• Addressed support for SD cards in Tests category.
• Fixed low memory issue with Volume Rebuild tool and eDrive creation.
• Updated dynamic volume mount/unmount for Surface Scan and File Structures tests.
• Addressed FileVault when creating an eDrive volume.
• Updated and fixed localization issues for French, Italian, German, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified).
• Included additional machine identification models to Check Computer.

REQUIREMENTS

• PowerPC G4, G5, or Intel Mac
• Mac OS X 10.4.9 or newer
• DVD-ROM drive

PRICE$98.00
DEVELOPERMicromat, Inc.
DOWNLOADS652877
BUY NOW ($98)
More information