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Outdoor Research Sensor Gloves Work Like Magic, Mostly [Review]

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I have a complicated relationship with gloves. On the one hand, I love that they keep my fingers from falling off in frigid weather. But then there’s the frustration at their complete lack of cooperation when I’m trying to use the touchscreen on my phone. As a result, I end up either constantly removing and re-donning my gloves in an endless cycle that freezes my delicate fingers anyway — or abandoning my phone altogether in disgust.

The problem is that most touchscreens rely on our fingers to act as conductors, and conventional gloves block that conductivity. But glove-makers have rolled with the times, and there are solutions — gloves that allow conductivity to pass through the glove’s fabric and onto the screen. One of the most buzzed about is Outdoor Research’s Sensor Gloves ($69), which use real leather that doesn’t appear or feel any different than leather used in non-conductive gloves.

The Good:

The fingers worked beautifully on a touchscreen. It was almost impossible to get either an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy Nexus to ignore my inputs. The magic here is a fabric called TouchTec, a real leather that lets a finger’s conductivity pass through unimpeded. The fingertips are squared and hardened, making for satisfyingly precise actions.

I tried a medium, and the gloves were a snug fit for my larger hands (except in the thumbs — see below). The sleek cuffs made it easy to slide on/off layers.

The Sensor’s breathed well; hardly surprising considering their lightweight, minimal-bulk approach. The temp range for these gloves is three-season-ish; I’d be fine wearing them all-year-round in Phoenix or Southern California (or San Francisco), but would find them lacking in a real winter.

There’s a bit of rubber over the knuckles, which would probably afford a little protection from rough stuff.

The Bad:

A 19-degree morning tested their ability to insulate, and the gloves didn’t block the wind as well as I’d hoped. But as noted earlier, they’re really designed as more of an aerobic glove, so nothing unexpected here.

The biggest issue was with thumb performance. I couldn’t fire off quick emails or texts because my thumbs didn’t fit all the way up the Sensor’s thumbs, making it difficult for the screen to recognize input. This could be a big issue if you’re a constant texter.

Verdict:

Remarkable touchscreen accuracy. Best for cool-weather pursuits, and situations where typing anything longer than “having fun!” would just get in the way of the action.

Rating: ;★★★★☆ ;

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Best Of Macworld/iWorld 2013 Awards


SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – Moscone West has been packed with exhibitors for the last three days as they peddle their latest wares to the Apple faithful. We combed through all the booths, and while there were a ton of underwhelming products, Macworld 2013 did feature some really cool stuff.

After some fierce debate among the Cult of Mac editors, we’ve settled on five things at Macworld 2013 that are truly deserving of a “Best of Macworld 2013″ title. Without further adieu, here are our picks for the give best things at Macworld.

Best of Show – Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500

Adapting to the the Digital Age isn’t easy for everyone. We know quite a few people who insist on keeping a paper copy of every receipt, order, business card, fax, and letter, rather than throwing them away. If you’re one of those types that wants a record of everything, Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX500 is the best scanner we’ve seen.

The ScanSnap iX500 is designed to be easy to use, implementing several innovative features. Since the scanner can handle up to 25 documents per minute, it has technology built-in to make sure that only one sheet passes through at a time, eliminating time consuming paper jams.

In addition, the ScanSnap software will automatically identify and create editable fields on documents, detecting valuable information such as contact numbers which can then be fed right into Address Book. It’s not a gadget that will make you swoon with excitement, but it’s the thing that’s most likely to make a positive impact on your work life.

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Best Gadget – Belkin Thunderstorm

The iPad’s speakers are decent, but they’re not great. If you like watching a lot of movies on your iPad you probably use headphones a lot so you can hear all the whispers of dialogue along with huge explosions.

Belkin debuted the Thunderstorm at Macworld this week, and it’s the perfect solution for movie aficionado. By adding an extra speaker onto your iPad, the Thunderstorm makes watching movies on the iPad a more immersive experience. The design of the case is solid and sleek, plus it comes with a neat stand that can display your iPad’s screen in three different orientations. It costs $199.99 which isn’t a bad deal when you consider a Jambox is about the same price but more of a pain to carry around in your bag.

Best Accessory – Spicebox Mauz

Mice are pretty boring, but Spicebox is putting a new spin on them with the Mauz. It’s a little dongle that connects to your iPhone and transforms it into a tiny smart mouse that you can use with your Mac. You can slide it around your desk to move the cursor on your screen. It has a virtual scrolling wheel and buttons and everything. We were surprised by how well it works.

Besides being a mouse, Mauz can do some other cool stuff too. You can use it as a remote to control your Mac with motion gestures and visual gestures, which make it great for office use when you have a presentation to give. The only problem with Mauz is that it’s a Kickstarter project that still needs $130,000 worth of funding before it becomes a reality.

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Best Mac App – CrazyTalk 7

If you’ve ever watched some late night talk shows like The Daily Show or Jimmy Kimmel, you might have wondered how they do those silly videos where they animate some picture of a celebrity to make them say whatever they want. Surely they’re using some expensive software right? Wrong.

CrazyTalk 7 is a new app for OS X that only costs $29.99 but it’s used by John Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel’s video crews to produce short, funny, animated videos. You can take any picture and turn it into a talking head within minutes. Which I learned from experience is both creepy and really cool.

The app’s facial recognition software will set all the movement points for you on a picture but you can fine tune it. The app is incredibly easy to use and comes with an array of different talking heads and voices to choose from if you don’t want to use your own. An iPad and iPhone version is also in the works that should hit the App Store this summer.

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Best iOS App- iStopMotion

Most of the stop motion video apps we’ve seen on the App Store are pretty terrible and don’t include a lot of features. iStopMotion for iPad is the exception. It’s easy to use, but gives you enough features to make some great looking stop motion or claymation movies.

With the updated version of iStopMotion you can see a live camera overlay, get instant playback, view your timeline, and upload your movies to iCloud. The quality of movies that you can make with iStopMotion is truly incredible, and it only costs five bucks.

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Can Apple Still Dent the Universe?

Apple made a “dent in the universe” with its 1984 Super Bowl ad for the upcoming Macintosh.

At least that was Steve Jobs’ intention, according to the opening scene of The Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Whether all this universe denting was just Jobs’ reality distortion field or an actual change in human culture depends on your corporate loyalties, or lack thereof.

Any debate over the cultural impact of the Macintosh really boils down to how much of the graphical user interface revolution was determined or influenced by Apple, and how much of it would have happened regardless.

Because there’s no question that the shift from command-line computing to WIMP computing (windows, icons, menus and pointing-devices) radically changed the world, leading, for example, to the web, which is the dominant WIMP interface to the formerly command-line Internet.

WIMP computing also enabled powerful new tools for software programming, design (of everything), animation and a bazillion other things.

WIMP computing, and to some extent the Macintosh itself, really did make a dent in the universe, but not in the way most people imagine. 

How the Macintosh Dented the Universe 

The Macintosh didn’t represent the invention of the WIMP computer. Apple itself had shipped the LISA years earlier and Xerox shipped the Xerox Star before that. Other companies had shipped WIMP computers, all of which were of course built on inventions developed at Stanford Research Institute, Xerox PARC and elsewhere.

Tech fans had been hearing about, reading about and even buying WIMP computers for years before the Macintosh shipped in 1984.

When you watch Steve Jobs introducing the Macintosh on stage at Macworld in 1984, you hear the crowd going nuts at the demonstration of smooth font rendering, high-resolution graphics, sounds beyond beeps and buzzes, a robotic-sounding speech engine and other features that today look rudimentary and primitive. (Jobs even gets a rise from the crowd by flashing a 3.5-inch diskette, which Jobs calls “the disk of the 80s.”)

So how it is that this tiny computer, with its 128 kilobytes of RAM, was to dent the universe, exactly?

The reason the Macintosh had such an impact, was that it was a WIMP computer that made no compromises with the past. It abandoned any notion of backward compatibility. It was the first pure WIMP computer — a true computing appliance designed to be affordable, portable, appealing, simple to use and mouse-centric.

The Macintosh felt thrilling to use compared with competitors of the time (much like the iPad did when it shipped in 2010). Actually trying a Macintosh made you realized that you had to have one, or something like it.

At the time, graphical computing was controversial — command-line loyalists believed pretty pictures and rendered fonts were a waste of RAM and slowed performance.

Here’s the most important fact that has been forgotten: When Apple’s 1984 commercial aired, there was no significant demand for WIMP computers. But Apple created a device so pure to the genre, and communicated its benefits with such clarity and excitement, that Apple created that demand. And by creating demand, they created the market.

Apple didn’t create the WIMP idea, but they created the WIMP market. And that’s how they dented the universe.

And, for that matter, the same can be said for the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

In every single case, these products had prior competition, and embodied inventions that were already floating around out there.

But Apple dented the universe with these products by making them pure representations of the future, with no compromises with the past, and in doing so created products that made you feel the need to have them, or something like them.

Apple didn’t invent the media player, the multi-touch phone, or the touch tablets, but Apple did create the markets for all those products.

Is Apple Still a Universe-Denting Company? 

Pundits debate whether the true Apple died with Steve Jobs, or whether Apple is still Apple even without its visionary founder.

In other words, can Apple still dent the universe? And by that I mean can Apple still create markets like it did with the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad?

This is the test, really. Because the world needs another dent.

The world needs a desktop multi-touch computer from Apple that affects the world like the Macintosh did in the 80s.

The mobile world has already converted to multi-touch, and now even the number of touch tablets has surpassed half the unit sales of PCs. This is a shocking fact when you remember that the touch tablet market didn’t exist three years ago when Apple created that market. Now it’s half as large as the PC market.

As was the case with the PC market in 1984, the desktop touch market has many options, and none of them are stimulating widespread demand. A smattering of all-in-one desktop PCs offer touch. Some laptops do. A variety of tables and other “furniture” devices support touch on the desktop.

All of them have one foot in the future of desktop touch screens, and the other foot firmly rooted in WIMP computing. They go both ways, and are really optimized for WIMP computing with a hesitant option to go multi-touch if you want to. They sit at the wrong angles. They’re the wrong size. There’s no ecosystem of touch-only application software.

Windows 8 is a perfect example of this industry hesitation to go all the way. The Metro UI is there if you’re using touch, or want to use a touch interface with your mouse. But if you want the old UI, that’s there too.

As a result of the limp, halting entry by the industry into the multi-touch desktop future, there is no significant demand for desktop touch computers — just as there was no significant demand for WIMP computers in 1983.

The test for Apple that will demonstrate whether the company can still dent universes is whether Apple ships a Macintosh for the new era — a no-compromises, pure multi-touch desktop tablet, with no option to WIMP out and so appealing and marketed so powerfully that they create widespread demand for the product and, in doing so, create the market.

As a columnist, I couldn’t describe to you exactly what this big-screen desktop iPad would be like any more than I could have exactly described the Macintosh in every detail well before those details were announced.

But if it’s to be universe-denting, the device would have to be a pure creature of the future without legacy baggage from the past.

The question is, will they? Can they?

Can Apple still dent the universe?

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Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell on Steve Jobs at Atari and Finding the Next Jobs [Mac Blog]

The Next Web has dug up a video of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell's keynote presentation at Campus Party Brasil, where he spent time remembering Steve Jobs' work at Atari as well as talking about segments of his upcoming book "Finding the Next Steve Jobs."
What is one of the characteristics that made Steve Jobs successful? He was creative, but you know what else was really important? He was a very, very, very hard worker. How many of my employees did I find sleeping under their desks when I came in early on a Monday morning? Not many. Did he kinda smell bad? Yeah. That's cause we didn't have showers, and if you didn't go home for two or three days you could get gamey.
Bushnell goes on to mention that the most important messages he gave Jobs was that if 99 percent of people thought something was crazy, and the one percent that created the idea thought it was cool then the idea's creator should "pursue it with all vigor." This message has been echoed by Apple and Jobs multiple times, including in Apple's "Here's to The Crazy One's" commercial and "Think Different" slogan.


He packs his hour-long talk -- the Jobs portion starts at the 13:00 minute mark -- with additional anecdotes about Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, like how Jobs offered Bushnell a third of Apple for $50,000, which Bushnell passed on.

Macworld/iWorld 2013: Kanex DualRole Hub Features Gigabit Ethernet and Three USB 3.0 Ports [Mac Blog]

Kanex’s DualRole is an Ethernet hub that comes equipped with three USB 3.0 ports, a useful accessory for newer MacBooks which require an adapter to connect to a wired network.



The DualRole is USB bus powered with an included 3-inch cable, but it also supports an additional 5V power adapter (not included) to provide extra power for intensive tasks like charging the iPad and the iPhone or powering hard drives.

While DualRole supports plug and play for its USB 3.0 ports, it does require drivers to access the Gigabit Ethernet port.

Kanex’s DualRole is available immediately for $69 from the Kanex website.

Oracle Releases Java 7 Update 13 to Address Security Issues, Reenable Web Plug-in on OS X

Less than two days after Apple once again blocked Java 7 web plug-ins on OS X, Oracle has released an updated version of Java 7 to address certain security vulnerabilities.

The new Java 7 arrives as Update 13 and carries a version number of 1.7.0_13-b20, meeting Apple's requirement for a minimum of 1.7.0_11-b22. Oracle has also released an updated version of Java 6, although Apple was not blocking the previous version of the plug-in.

Oracle notes that the new update contains fixes for over 50 issues and that the launch was accelerated by several weeks in order to address a vulnerability that was being exploited in the wild.
The original Critical Patch Update for Java SE – February 2013 was scheduled to be released on February 19th, but Oracle decided to accelerate the release of this Critical Patch Update because active exploitation “in the wild” of one of the vulnerabilities affecting the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in desktop browsers, was addressed with this Critical Patch Update. [...]

Due to the threat posed by a successful attack, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply CPU fixes as soon as possible. This Critical Patch Update contains 50 new security fixes across Java SE products.
The latest versions of all Java SE packages are available through Oracle's support site.

(Thanks, Flemming!)

Best Buy and Amazon Offer Special Pricing on MacBook Pro Models [Mac Blog]

Best Buy is offering special two-day pricing on MacBook Pro models as part of its Winter Doorbuster sale, following on its $200 promotion earlier this week on MacBook Air models.

Amazon has reduced pricing to compete with Best Buy, though purchasers should take sales tax and convenience into account when making a purchase decision. Best Buy is also offering $20 off for buyers who buy online and pick up in-store.

MacBook Pro 13" 2.5GHz / 4GB / 500GB - MD101LL/A
Apple: $1,199
Amazon: $1,099.97
Best Buy: $1,049.99

MacBook Pro 13" 2.9GHz / 8GB / 750GB - MD102LL/A
Apple: $1,499
Amazon: $1,419.98
Best Buy: $1,349.99

MacBook Pro 15" - 2.3GHz / 4GB / 500GB - MD103LL/A

Apple: $1,799
Amazon: $1,709.98
Best Buy: $1,649.99

MacBook Pro 15" - 2.6GHz / 8GB / 750GB - MD104LL/A

Apple: $2,199
Amazon: $1,999.99
Best Buy: $1,999.99

MacBook Pro 13" with Retina display - 2.5GHz / 8GB / 128SSD - MD212LL/A

Apple: $1,699
Amazon: $1,515.59
Best Buy: $1,549.99

MacBook Pro 13" with Retina display - 2.5GHz / 8GB / 256SSD - MD213LL/A

Apple: $1,999
Amazon: $1,899.97
Best Buy: $1,799.99

MacBook Pro 15" with Retina display - 2.3GHz / 8GB / 256SSD - MC975LL/A

Apple: $2,199
Amazon: $1,999.99
Best Buy: $1,999.99

MacBook Pro 15" with Retina display - 2.6GHz / 8GB / 512SSD - MC976LL/A

Apple: $2,799
Amazon: $2,599.99
Best Buy: $2,599.99

NPD Group: iPhone 5 Was the Top Selling Phone in Q4 2012 [iOS Blog]

According to a report from The NPD Group, Apple's iPhone 5 was the top selling phone during the final quarter of 2012, comprising 43 percent of all iPhone sales and accounting for nearly two thirds of all post-paid smartphone sales above $199.


Samsung's Galaxy S III was the second most popular smartphone in Q4 2012, while Apple's iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 also sold well, taking the third and fourth spots on NPD's list of top-selling mobile phones in the U.S. The SIII's predecessor, the SII, was the fifth best selling phone during the holiday quarter.

A report earlier today from Strategy Analytics ranked Apple as the largest mobile phone vendor in the U.S. during Q4 2012, which is in accordance with NPD's data, which places Apple with 39 percent of overall smartphone sales, compared to Samsung's 30 percent.


Combined, Apple and Samsung accounted for almost 70 percent of smartphone sales, with Motorola, HTC, and LG lagging behind.

Second Week of Apple’s ‘Get Stuff Done’ Promotion Features Organizational Apps [Mac Blog]

The second week of Apple's 'Get Stuff Done' Mac App Store promotion began today, dropping the prices on a new set of productivity apps. Last week, task management apps like Clear and Things were discounted as part of the three week long promotion.


This week's category is Organize, featuring organizing and cataloging apps like Gemini, which removes duplicate files and Compartments, which is used for home inventory. Here's a full list of this week's sale apps along with pricing information:

-Gemini: The Duplicate Finder: $4.99 down from $9.99 [Direct Link]
-Unclutter: $1.99 down from $2.99 [Direct Link]
-Delicious Library 2: $17.99 down from $34.99 [Direct Link]
-Together: $19.99 down from $39.99 [Direct Link]
-Tree: $6.99 down from $14.99 [Direct Link]
-Mindnode Pro: $9.99 down from $19.99 [Direct Link]
-Compartments - Home Inventory: $6.99 down from $14.99 [Direct Link]
-DaisyDisk: $4.99 down from $9.99 [Direct Link]
-Home Inventory: $9.99 down from $19.99 [Direct Link]

The sale on these apps will last from February 1 to February 7. Next week, Apple will feature a new set of apps for sale.

Developer Sees iOS 6.1 Adoption Pass 25% in First Four Days of Availability [iOS Blog]

Earlier this week, TechCrunch shared data from touch-based website developer Onswipe showing that, based on its user base of over 13 million monthly active users, over 21% of iPhone and iPad users had updated to iOS 6.1 in the first two days of availability.


We've since followed up with Onswipe to see how the share of users on iOS 6.1 has moved over the past several days, and the firm tells us that it is now seeing over 26% of users running iOS 6.1 just four days after its debut.

Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste noted earlier this week that the rapid rate of adoption for iOS 6.1, which appears to be the fastest in history for Apple, is likely due to user comfort with the company's over-the-air updates, introduced with iOS 5 in October 2011.

The rapid uptake of iOS updates contrasts strongly with Android devices, where mobile networks are responsible for updates and just 10% of users are on the latest Jelly Bean versions, first introduced last July. The majority of Android users are still using Gingerbread, which dates to December 2010, or earlier versions of the operating system.