News

While the Apple Store is allowing pre-orders for a number of accessories alongside the iPad, one accessory is missing in action: the iPad Camera Connection Kit that Apple shows off on the iPad’s specs page and elsewhere.

Before a full-fledged dongle-based panic hits the streets—and yes, that’s rather about as frightening as it sounds—take a deep breath. You can still order the iPad dock, keyboard dock, VGA adapter, and case to tide yourself over in the meantime. Just relax.

iPad Camera Connection Kit missing from Pre-Order

Apple may have revealed additional details about the iPad on Friday, but perhaps a more interesting revelation came in the form of regulatory filing regarding Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook.

You may recall that CEO Steve Jobs took a six-month leave of absence in 2009 due to medical issues, and that Cook ran the day-to-day operations of Apple during that time. Apparently, Apple’s board of directors remembers that time as well.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Friday’s filing shows Cook was awarded a bonus package worth $22 million—which comes out to $3.6 million a month while filling in for Jobs.

Apple COO Tim Cook awarded $22 million Bonus

Microsoft Corp. employees are passionate users of the latest tech toys. But there is one gadget love that many at the company dare not name: the iPhone.

The iPhone is made, of course, by Microsoft's longtime rival, Apple Inc. The device's success is a nagging reminder for Microsoft executives of how the company's own efforts to compete in the mobile business have fallen short in recent years.

What is especially painful is that many of Microsoft's own employees are nuts for the device.

Forbidden Fruit: Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones

When Apple first introduced the iPad in late January, we noted with much disappointment that the device had no way to lock the screen orientation. This is apparently no longer the case, however—according to an updated iPad specs page, there is now a screen-rotation-lock switch on the right-hand side of the device, seemingly replacing the mute switch that was there when the media first played with it.

In January, Ars confirmed the lack of a screen-lock option with an Apple representative at the iPad event. At that time, the Apple rep reminded us that individual apps give users the option to lock the screen into portrait or landscape mode (which is already the case on a number of third-party iPhone apps), but that the iPad itself had no universal control like on the Kindle or Nook.

Apple apparently heard our cries. 9 to 5 Mac first pointed out the difference in specs this morning, which is now reflected on the official iPad spec page. Yep, that sure does say "screen rotation lock," and that option was definitely not there when Ars played with the iPad on January 27.

Apple plans to begin taking pre-orders and reservations for the iPad on Friday, March 12. The company hasn't said yet what time on Friday the pre-order program will kick off, and so far the iPad Web page is still providing the option to notify users when more information is available.

The Wi-Fi version of the iPad will be available on Saturday, April 3, in the United States, and the Wi-Fi plus 3G version will be available near the end of April. Customers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K. will be able to get their hands on both models in late April, and in other countries later in the year.

Customers that pre-order an iPad can choose to have their tablet delivered, or reserved for pickup at their local Apple Retail Store.

A refrigerator is not a refrigerator without magnets. And a self-respecting iPhone/iPod Touch owner is not a self-respecting iPhone/iPod Touch owner without a set of Jailbreak Toys App Magnets.

I mean, how awesome are these things! They come in sets of 18 (one for each stock iPhone app, presumably) and sell for the reasonable-to-my-cheapskate-senses price of $12.99.

Shipping will run you another $5 or so, though if you order three sets you can get free shipping by applying coupon code 3forFREE at checkout.

Consumer Reports on Wednesday published results of its latest survey on the best and worst companies for computer tech support.

In January, the survey asked 7,000 subscribers who owned a laptop or desktop computer to rate their computer manufacturer in several categories: problem solved; phone waits; phone staff; and online support. For laptop computers, Apple scored 86 out of a possible 100. That's 23 points above its nearest competitor, Lenovo, which scored a 63. In fact, Apple scored the highest in each of the Consumer Reports categories.

Rounding out the list after Apple and Lenovo are Toshiba (60), Dell (56), HP/Compaq (53), and Acer/Gateway/eMachines (39). Apple actually did better for desktops than it did for laptops, according to the data. The company scored an 87 out of a possible 100 for its desktop tech support, once again leading its competitors in every category.

Apple's nearest competitor, Dell, was 32 points behind with a score of 55 for desktop tech support.

SmileOnMyMac announced the immediate availability of TextExpander 3.0 for Mac Os X. The new version of the auto-expanding utility for abbreviations and text shortcuts added new search features for locating specific snippets along with a quick entry window for creating new snippets.

Version 3.0 includes the ability to search the snippet database for entries via a menubar search field, and can offer snippet suggestions based on what a user types. A quick entry window is now available so users can create new snippets in any application, the most recently expanded snippet can be edited through a hotkey combination, and snippets can now include multiple blank fields so users can add information on the fly when a snippet expands.

SmileOnMyMac also pulled TextExpander out of System Preferences and turned it into a full application.

If you’ve followed the news of App Store rejections over the past couple years, you may have wondered what exactly is engraved upon the stone tablets that govern the terms of Apple's App Store and developing for the iPhone. The trouble is we haven’t been able to tell you, as the agreement itself contains terms that prohibit publicly discussing it. But on Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legally obtained and published a copy of the agreement for the first time.

While EFF draws attention to what it terms “troubling highlights” of the agreement, there isn’t necessarily very much that’s surprising if you’ve been following the iPhone development scene for any amount of time.

On Tuesday, Elgato announced the next generation of its EyeTV Hybrid, shrinking the device’s already diminutive size and adding support for Windows 7 users. With it, users can turn their Macs or PCs into TiVo-like devices; they can watch, record, rewind, and pause live TV, fed through cable (basic analog cable TV and unencrypted digital—Clear QAM—cable) or over-the-air signals (SD and HD) using an antenna. It also includes an FM radio tuner.

The EyeTV Hybrid comes with Elgato’s EyeTV 3 software for the Mac, which provides timed recording for shows, iTunes export for syncing recordings with your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, and a year of free TV Guide information (renewal after that is $20). EyeTV’s Smart Series Guide functionality requires the TV Guide subscription. PC users are currently limited to using the device with Windows Media Center.

The new version is currently only available for users in North America and is priced at $150, the same cost as the previous generation.

Microsoft has just released updates to the 2004 and 2008 versions of Microsoft Office. According to the company, the updates, which weigh in at 9.7 MB and 221.5 MB respectively, provide "fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code" as well as improvements to stability and performance.

As with most Mac OS X-related updates, whether from a third party app or a system update, you should consider backing up your data before proceeding. Keep in mind, as you install this update, that right around the corner is Microsoft Office for Mac 2011.

Remember iCalShare? The calendar-sharing site—once touted by Steve Jobs during a Macworld Expo keynote—seemed to have vanished for a while, but it’s now back, and even easier to use. iCalShare now provides more than 3,500 free calendars in 40 categories, with its search tool and interface both undergoing improvements in its latest incarnation.

iCalShare lets you create an account and subscribe to any of the calendars generated by its users. The events in calendars to which you’ve subscribed automatically get added to the calendar you maintain in a variety of desktop or Web apps including iCal, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Office. iCalShare takes the drudgery out of manually adding holidays, sports schedules, or academic calendars to your calendaring application.

Macs in the enterprise aren’t just cheaper to manage—they’re a lot cheaper, according to a new survey released today by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.

Keep in mind that Enterprise Desktop Alliance is a group of software developers who’ve bandied together to deploy and manage Macs in the enterprise. The group surveyed 260 IT administrators in large U.S. companies with both Macs and PCs who are involved in some degree with IT cost calculations. Enterprise Desktop Alliance members include Centrify, Absolute Software, Group Logic, Web Help Desk, and most recently IBM.

The survey found that Macs were cheaper in six of seven computer management categories: troubleshooting, help desk calls, system configuration, user training and supporting infrastructure (servers, networks and printer). Nearly half of the respondents cited software licensing fees as roughly the same for both platforms.

A whopping 65 percent of respondents said it costs less to troubleshoot Macs than PCs, 19 percent said they spent the same on both computers, and only 16 percent said they spent less to manage PCs than Macs. Even more impressive, a majority of the respondents citing the low cost of Macs in nearly all categories said Macs were more than 20 percent cheaper to manage than PCs.

FileMaker Inc. announced the release of FileMaker Pro 11, a major new release of its popular database software for Mac OS X and Windows. It’s available beginning today, along with new versions of FileMaker Pro 11 Advanced, FileMaker Server 11 and FileMaker Server 11 Advanced. It costs $299, with upgrades available for registered users of previous versions.

FileMaker Pro undergoes significant usability enhancements in this new release, enabling you to create charts. You no longer have to export data to Excel or use a third-party plug-in to create bar, pie and other kinds of charts – it’s all built right in.

FileMaker Pro 11 Advanced adds custom user interface menu enhancements and copy/paste and import functions, while FileMaker Server 11 enhances statistics view, adds backup file clones and more. FileMaker Server 11 Advanced removes limits on the number of simultaneous users.

System requirements for FileMaker Pro 11 include Mac OS X 10.5.7 or later, G4 867MHz or faster, 2GB RAM, DVD drive.

Apple ran its first iPad commercial during the Academy Awards on Sunday night. The 30-second advertisement shows the tablet computer sitting on an unidentified man's lap as he whisks through the features and functions in veteran style.

Apple's latest computing innovation will hit store shelves on April 3, but the commercial offered a closer look at what Apple CEO Steve Jobs calls "something completely new" and "magical" and "revolutionary." The iPad will start at $499 and lets users browse the web, read and send e-mail, view and share photos, watch videos, listen to music, play games, read books, and more.

While Apple's Mac ads choose one particular feature and fire away at the competition, and iPhone ads are basically 30-second tutorials that demonstrate a scenario consumers may experience and show how the product helps, the iPad commercial took a different approach.

Apple on Friday announced that its iPad Wi-Fi model will be available on April 3 in the U.S.

The iPad 3G model will be available in the U.S. in late April, which fits the timeframe Apple set out at its launch in January. The company said all models of the iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Beginning March 12, Apple will take pre-orders for both versions of the iPad. If you choose the Wi-Fi-only version, you can pick it up on April 3 at an Apple retail store.

If you're an unabashed science fiction fan it's probably worth taking a look at 100 SciFi Stories for your iPhone or iPod touch. The app is US$0.99. All the stories are in the public domain, and many are true classics. Other selections are less well-known, but worth a read.

You can adjust the text size, and when you relaunch the app, it picks up where you left off. Books you've already started are also marked on the contents page.

The developer claims future updates will include more books at no additional cost. You can scroll the pages continuously, or page by page. The app includes authors like H.G. Wells (of course) and S.P. Meek, George Griffith, Ray Cummings, Edgar Rice Burroughs and many others.

Steve Jobs does it again: Apple is keeping its Most Admired crown for the third year in a row.

With 250 million iPods, 43 million iPhones, and 32 million iPod touches sold to date, plus the promise of a game-changing iPad, Apple won this year's vote by the highest margin ever for a No. 1. Two more years as champ and Apple will match GE for most appearances in the top spot.

What makes Apple so admired? Product, product, product.

Police say a crew of thieves staged a real-life version of a Hollywood-style burglary, ala "Mission Impossible,'' when they lowered themselves into a Best Buy store to steal $26,000 worth of laptop computers all without touching the floor, triggering the alarm or being captured by surveillance cameras.

Sgt. James Ryan said the elaborate break-in began some time after closing at 11 p.m., when more than one burglar climbed up a 3-inch gas pipe on the side of the Route 1 store. The crew then used a hacksaw to cut through a roughly 5-inch layer of rubber and insulation, and then cut a 3-foot-by-3-foot hole in the roof, he said. They apparently used some type of suction to pull the roof upward, rather than let it fall into the store.

Next, the thieves lowered themselves some 16 feet to the metal racks inside the store, remaining about 10 feet off the ground throughout the break-in, Ryan said. From there they reached a caged area in which the laptops were stored.

Ryan said the burglars used banners in the store to block themselves from security cameras, and somehow got about two dozen Apple laptops and their tools up to the ceiling without triggering an alarm.

Join Rob Griffiths and various Macworld experts in this hand-picked cornucopia of tips for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. You'll find basic tips for any Mac user as well as power-user tweaks that use incantations in Terminal—and sometimes AppleScript—to go way beyond the basics. Along with an excellent collection of navigation tips—with interesting ideas for using Spaces, the Dock, Exposé, and more—you'll find tips on system-wide features like keyboard shortcuts and Snow Leopard's new text expansion option, and printing and networking.

Wi-Fi hotspot detecting applications are the latest on Apple's list of verboten apps, and even developers are being left in the dark as to why.

Wi-Fi detection is something of a niche: there were never more than a handful of such applications in iTunes. But now even those have vanished as Apple decided they were using a "private framework", and has pulled them off the shelves without explanation or apology.

Only applications that actively scan have been pulled: those that use a database of hotspots combined with GPS data garnered from the handset are still available. Users can manually search for nearby hotspots in the usual way, but applications that do the same thing are no longer allowed.

"We received a very unfortunate email today from Apple stating that WiFi Where has been removed from sale on the App Store for using private frameworks to access wireless information," explains one developer, though Apple has apparently declined to explain exactly what rule the scanning applications are breaking.

In a report released Monday, market research firm Gartner said that Apple’s iPad is one of the new devices that “will change the entire PC ecosystem.”

The iPad is also recognized as one of the products that will overlap with the traditional mobile phone industry. Having the size of a small computer and the mobility of a smartphone, many people are looking at the iPad as the device to simplify their computing needs.

“Apple’s announcement of its upcoming iPad has created much discussion in the marketplace regarding market opportunities for traditional tablet PCs and next-generation tablet devices, such as the iPad,” said Gartner in its report. “Gartner’s initialthinking is that vendors could ship up to 10.5 million traditional tablets and next-generation tablet devices worldwide in 2010.”

After Apple released their latest 21.5" and 27" iMac upgrades, Wil Shipley discovered that the iSight camera built in to each iMac had been changed. Wil pays attention to such changes because he is the developer of Delicious Library, a program that uses the camera as a barcode reader.

From the perspective of the average user, the camera change is a minor one. The iSight now has a minimal focus point of about 2 feet from the camera lens instead of the previous 1 foot. Apple told Wil that the change was made so as to support better low light performance. Unfortunately for Wil, the change also made it more difficult for the camera to read barcodes in Delicious Library.

So Wil went back to the virtual drawing board and rewrote the camera algorithm for Delicious Library. The result can be found in Delicious Library version 2.4 (currently available as a beta). In a pleasant surprise, Wil discovered that, not only does version 2.4 address the problems with barcode reading for the latest iMacs, it improved the barcode sensitivity for all iSight cameras — the ones in older iMacs, MacBooks and Cinema Displays. Wil claims that the new algorithm is as much as 700% more sensitive in detecting barcodes.

Apple has released an updated set of system resources that are shared by 10 of its applications, including the troublesome Aperture 3.

The company does not specify which issues are addressed for each of the applications affected, but it does say that it has resolved memory leaks, the very problem that has afflicted Aperture 3.

Otherwise, ProKit 5.1 addresses an issue with improper scrolling behaviour and alters the layout of interface elements in certain application alert windows. It is recommended for all users of Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Aperture, Final Cut Express, Soundtrack, Logic Pro and Logic Express.

As the smack down between Apple and Adobe continues, Virgin America has dumped Flash from its website because of the lack of iPhone support. Virgin's new website, which launched Monday, replaces Flash with HTML to give users the ability to check in via their iPhones in the future. Virgin plans on moving their new site to HTML 5, once it's cleared standards ratification at the World Wide Web Consortium.

Virgin's Chief information officer Ravi Simhambhatla told The Register: "I don't want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin]."

While Apple has left Flash out of the iPhone since it debuted in 2007, things stayed relatively civil between Apple and Adobe. That all changed when Apple unveiled the iPad and decided to leave Flash off that as well.

Apple on Tuesday asked the U.S. International Trade Commission to block the importation into the country of HTC's Google Android-based mobile phones, including the Google-branded Nexus One.

Apple asked the court for "a permanent exclusion order" that would bar from entry "all mobile communications devices and components" made by HTC that carry the offending technologies, according to court documents. Apple on Tuesday sued HTC for alleged, multiple patent violations, claiming the Taiwan-based manufacturer's products infringe on its iPhone technology. Apple filed the actions with the ITC and the U.S. District Court for Delaware.

In the ITC filing, Apple says 11 HTC phones violate its patents, including the Nexus One, Touch Pro, Touch Diamond, Pure, Imagio, and myTouch 3G. Apple claims HTC infringed on a total of 20 patents governing a range of technologies. Apple wants the ITC to block HTC and its partners from "importing, marketing, advertising, demonstrating, warehousing inventory for distribution, distributing, offering for sale" any of the listed phones.

Apple is also seeking unspecified monetary damages in the Delaware court.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in a statement. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

A small, but interesting note: Apple's published an "App Store Tip" for developers that it'll reject apps which "use location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location." It's not to protect you.

Instead, what Mac and iPhone developer Craig Hockenberry almost certainly correctly surmises, "Looks like Apple is going to keep location-based advertising to themselves."

Let's step back for a second. Apple, as you might know, spent $275 million on the mobile ad company Quattro, after previously trying to acquire AdMob (before it was snatched by Google). The CEO of Quattro is now VP of Mobile Advertising at Apple. Apple has now openly declared itself a mobile devices company. And according to BusinessWeek, Apple's working on "ways to overhaul mobile advertising in the same way they had revolutionized music players and phones."

Suspicions confirmed: The iPhone is habit-forming.

A survey of about 200 Stanford University undergraduates revealed that almost a third worry about becoming addicted to their iPhones, think they may be using them too much and dread becoming "one of those iPhone people."

More than a third said that they'd heard complaints they were using their iPhone too much. But nearly three-quarters reported that their iPhones made them happier, and more than half agreed with the statement "I love it."

Twenty-five percent agreed that their iPhones seemed like an extension of their brain or their being.

Wacom has introduced a new version of its Cintiq 21UX, a redesigned update of its interactive pen display. It features enhanced pen performance and improved ergonomics for professional photographers, designers, artists, and animators. The new product carries the same name and nearly the same specifications as the previous version, but it offers a number of updated features.

The new Cintiq 21UX, which is now black in color, will cost $1,999 and will begin shipping in the United States, Canada, and Mexico by early April.