2010 is a great year to be a Mac gamer. Steam for Mac has already brought us a new way to play with and against our PC-gaming pals-slash-nemesis, with dozens of hot games that we never had access to before. But those games download to your Mac, and run on your Mac—so if you’re Mac isn’t up to the minimum specs, no game for you. OnLive wants to change all that. Launching today at 6pm Pacific time, the instant-play service streams live games to your Mac or PC, via a browser plug-in. You control the game as if it were running on your local machine, but in reality it’s running on a powerful server machine at an OnLive data center up to 1,000 miles away. We spoke to founder and CEO Steve Perlman about the service, plus got our hands on it at E3 just yesterday. “It’s a very different approach to gaming,” he told us, “and in fact, it’s a different approach to computing, because you don’t need a high-performance computer to run a high-performance game.” OnLive’s customized Dell GPU-powered servers and proprietary video-compression technology can stream low-latency video to you in 720p, and “it arrives so fast it’s like you’re playing the game locally,” Perlman says. And you don’t have to worry about system requirements or whether that game even has a native Mac version at all—OnLive takes care of the technical side, and you just play. “It basically works on every Mac,” Perlman says, “which is very cool. We can’t say that about PCs, because of netbooks.” OnLive does require Snow Leopard, a dual-core CPU, and a 1280×720 screen resolution, but that covers every modern Intel Mac. Only the first-generation MacBook Air has trouble, Perlman explains, because it can overheat, which slows the processor. And of course you need a good broadband Internet connection.

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First Look: OnLive for Mac

A swashbuckling hero returns to the high seas in all-new episodic adventures. After a decade at sea, the quirky pirate Guybrush Threepwood has found his way to shore in Tales of Monkey Island, the latest installment in a highly stylized point-and-click adventure series that’s much loved for its zany banter. This episodic romp begins in the middle of its story as Guybrush accidentally resurrects his arch-nemesis, loses his wife, curses his hand, and releases a malicious pox across the oceans. Fans of this long-running series, which began in 1990, are probably already smiling at these typically goofball conundrums. They continue through five chapters as players guide the famous pirate through an ever-twisting plot to restore order to the Caribbean. Even the simplest tasks are never as straightforward as they seem, and hundreds of puzzles must be solved before Guybrush sails off into the sunset. Chapter 3: Lair of the Leviathan takes place in the belly of an overfed manatee. Yes, really.

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Tales of Monkey Island

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPhone Carriers , Features , Opinions and Editorials , Originals “Rethink possible.” That is AT&T’s new slogan, part of an effort to rebrand the company not as a provider of telephone, TV, and internet service, but as a company of innovation. Innovation entails providing solutions that are not just new, but meet needs or solve problems in a better way than what came before. Here’s some news for you Ma Bell; people’s communication needs are changing. On behalf of a burgeoning generation of users who find themselves largely without need of landlines, I would like to call on AT&T to do some rethinking. Here’s the idea: Hang Up and Let it Go Many people realize one of Steve Jobs’ most brilliant accomplishments is the way he embraces change.  Change, unfortunately, often involves some destructive force, like sentencing the floppy disk drive to the dustbin of history, or letting go of the still lucrative iPod mini to usher in the flash-based iPod nano. AT&T stands to let something old pass on as well: its obsession with the telephone.  AT&T makes good money by selling a voice package to everybody with a cell phone, but what nobody seems to realize is that smartphone users (iPhone users in particular) really do not need voice packages.  I hear the clamoring now: what about the “phone” in smartphone, eh?  Here’s news; we really do not need telephone service on our smart phones.  The forthcoming iPhone OS 4.0 will allow Skype (or, hopefully, a Google Voice app) to run a VoIP manager in the background.  That means you don’t need a physical cell phone…all you need is a device capable of running a VoIP client.  Enough people have made the switch away from landlines to cell phones, but we are still tied to individual pieces of hardware. Let my phone calls go! Share the Love Dear AT&T: Sell data access plans for multiple devices.  I do not want to buy multiple data packages; let me have one account with unlimited data to share across my iPhone, iPad, and maybe even iPod touch in some Statbucks WiFi hotspots.  I doubt I will ever be using all three at once, so buying three unlimited data packages seems superfluous.  Plain and simple. Growth Opportunities Simple fact: Contract subscribers pay more than pay-as-you-go subscribers, and cell phone companies are used to the steady and lucrative revenue streams from text messaging charges, overage charges, etc.  But today’s users are about data: consuming it, creating it, and not worrying about whether or not there is enough bandwidth to move a video/picture/sms from one place to another.  Even phone calls today are treated as data, though voice calls consume a good deal more network resources than regular data packets (due to the constant connection required between the cell tower and device).  AT&T has some opportunity to maximize data flow on its network by letting iPhone users Skype their way through voice calls rather than talk.  As long as my calls can be routed to whatever device I’m currently using, I will never miss having a phone.  Realize, AT&T, that you are no longer a company providing telephone service.  You are, rather, selling data access, and currently doing rather a poor job at delivering

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AT&T – How about “Rethinking Possible” on communication needs?

Filed under: Apple The USPTO published a whole slew of new patent applications from Apple today, covering everything from iChat to some CoverFlow animation. Patently Apple has the whole writeup as usual. Probably the most interesting thing among them is a “virtual keyboard for media players” that uses a modified QWERTY keyboard, with more than one letter on each key. That doesn’t seem like an idea that Apple will ever use, but maybe that was one of the prototypes that was originally being worked on for the iPhone. There are also some more technical patents for iChat video encoding and error adjustments on touchscreens, as well as overall patents for the MacBook Air SuperDrive and iDVD. It seems like the USPTO is just cleaning out Apple’s old patents — most of these were filed back in 2007. Now, maybe they can set the legal patent team up on newer accomplishments . Sixteen new Apple patents, from CoverFlow to iDVD originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Sixteen new Apple patents, from CoverFlow to iDVD originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

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Sixteen new Apple patents, from CoverFlow to iDVD

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPad , iPhone , iPod touch , iDevice Apps , iDevice Accessories , Mac Software Macintosh and iPhone/iPod/iPad product updates and announcements for March 18, 2010: Macintosh iPod Macintosh app4mac today released CheckUp 2.6 , a major update to the innovative tool that allows you to check the health and monitor the behavior of a Mac computer. CheckUp is now able to detect the most common issues of a Mac and display details about how to fix them. CheckUp works with any Mac with a PowerPC G4, G5 or Intel Processor. With its use of the latest Mac OS X technologies, breakthrough ease-of-use and innovation, all Mac users will find CheckUp very useful and even fun. PocketMac has announced PocketMac for BlackBerry 5.0 , the latest version of the groundbreaking sync solution. PocketMac for BlackBerry comes complete with a synchronization engine redesigned from the ground up for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The new engine accounts for the new quicker synchronization speeds.

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Mac, iPhone, iPod and iPad product news – March 18, 2010

Steve Jobs calls the iPad Apple’s “most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device” and I’m certainly not one to disagree. The iPad boasts significant advances over the iPhone in terms of hardware and software which makes me wonder, how much of that advanced technology could make it’s way into a future Apple TV? Hardware While the current Apple TV boasts an Intel Pentium M 1.0GHz processor, Apple’s advances in its own chip design could pave the way for a custom processor fine tuned for the device. Apple’s reason for custom chips in the mobile arena is to provide them with what they need while giving them more control over other aspects, such as battery life. While this isn’t a concern with the Apple TV, certainly a more powerful chip while still being power efficient is desirable. A custom chip would give Apple more flexibility over performance as well. Consider the video formats the iPad can play. Many were shocked to see support for full 720p at 30 frames per second and support for .avi files up to 35Mbps

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The Next Apple TV? Drawing Inspiration From the iPad

Filed under: Hardware , Multimedia , Software , Apple , Developer We met them while they were shooting on the Apple Campus, and now the creators of the Dutch site onemorething.nl have posted their interview with Apple sound designer Jim Reekes (who also appears in Welcome To Macintosh ). They met up with Reekes while at Macworld in San Francisco a little while back — he’s the guy that programmed most of the sound in the early days, including the famous Mac startup chime and the legendary “sosumi” chime. What’s most interesting to me is all of the math behind it — while making music is traditionally seen as an art, there’s a lot of technical know how and information that actually went into the sound’s creation. Essentially, you’re creating a beep that has to represent a brand, and that mix of technical data with artistic representation is fascinating. Plus, Reekes definitely seems like a guy who’s been around both the technical and musical blocks a few times before, and it’s cool to hear him pontificate on all of the hard work he did back in the day. It’s also interesting to see someone who has such a personal tie to a sound that is so ubiquitous and means so much to so many people — an “ear-con,” he calls it. Very nice interview. Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

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Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound