We’ve all seen the Steve Jobs, the iPhone, the iPod, and the Mac costumes, but what do you do if you want to stand out from the crowd? The motto of our beloved company has long been “Think Different,” and it’s about time we bring that to the Halloween arena, too. The day itself is tomorrow, so I’m providing some suggestions that haven’t been done to death, and that will go over especially well if you go to your local Mac club’s Halloween bash this weekend. Costume #1: John Sculley The Jobs costume, and even the Woz costume, are common enough, and Flickr is replete with examples of both. What isn’t so common is people opting to dress up like former Apple CEO John Sculley, who was Apple’s CEO when Steve Jobs was ousted from the company. To dress up as Sculley, think conventional business person. A dark suit and sensible, solid-colored tie is best. Use some flour or temporary coloring in your hair to achieve a salt-and-pepper type look. Carry a bottle of Pepsi, or, as Steve Jobs likes to call it, “sugared water.” Carry a Newton in the other hand if you can find one.

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4 Unusual Halloween Costumes for Apple Fans

Guess Geico isn’t the only company affected by a “caveman mentality.” Pepsi came under fire yesterday for releasing an iPhone app that encourages users to share the names of their sexual partners with their friends online.  The free  AMP UP Before You Score app — released to promote Pepsi’s AMP Energy drink — includes chat-up lines for 24 different kinds of women, including college girls and foreign-exchange students. Twitter lit up with howls of protest, accompanied by a #pepsifail hashtag, so it seemed appropriate for the soft-drink giant to offer a mea culpa via AMP’s own Twitter feed : “Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it’s in bad taste & appreciate your feedback. #pepsifail.” However, Pepsi has yet to actually pull the offending app, which at press time was still available as a free download from the App Store .

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The Art(lessness) Of The Pickup: You’re In The Pepsi Degeneration

Coke versus Pepsi. Mac versus PC. Canon versus Nikon. Among these great rivalries, we can only pick out one clear winner. (Here’s a hint: It’s not the colored sugar water.) In the latest Canon-versus-Nikon entry-level digital SLR (single-lens reflex) battle, both cameras score hits against the other. It’s the DSLR version of Mac vs. PC–except without as obvious a winner. But in the end, they’re much more similar than different. If you already use a film camera from either camera maker–and own a few lenses–don’t bother switching sides. If you’re not already invested in hardware that only works with one of them, your decision is much more nuanced. After much debate, we give a tiny edge to the Nikon D5000 for its impressive high-ISO performance. But you could just as easily fall in love with the Canon Rebel T1i for its slightly brighter, clearer LCD.   Canon Digital Rebel T1i The T1i is light in your palm, weighing about 1.5 pounds with the bundled lens. We felt comfortable slinging it around and shooting with just one hand in one of the auto modes.

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Canon Digital Rebel T1i vs. Nikon D5000

If you take the Basic Lessons on GarageBand ’09, your improving finger work on the guitar and piano will be thanks to a guy who introduces himself at the beginning of each segment as just “Tim.” That’s Tim Blane , a Boston singer-songwriter with a decade of live performances under his belt. Other credentials include ringtones for Pepsi, he also opened for Guster and KT Tunstall and writes his own soulful pop tunes . When Blane received an e-mail from an Apple guy last summer saying that he’d seen Blane’s clips online and wondered if he would be interested in auditioning for a job, he jumped at the chance. “I thought maybe they needed someone to show up at a trade show,” recalls Blane, who was sent a script and flown to LA for an on-camera audition. Nearly a thousand actors and musicians auditioned for the gig.  Four screen tests later Steve Jobs selected Blane, who has never taught a lesson in his life, to be GarageBand ’s music instructor. “They didn’t want a preachy vibe, but more a vibe of sitting down with your little brother. I had a great time, although I had to wear super HD makeup on my face and hands and arms. I think I ate more makeup than lunch.” Via MacDaily News ,  Boston Globe

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Meet Tim Blane, Your GarageBand Teacher

If you take the Basic Lessons on GarageBand ’09, your improving finger work on the guitar and piano will be thanks to a guy who introduces himself at the beginning of each segment as just “Tim.” That’s Tim Blane , a Boston singer-songwriter with a decade of live performances under his belt. Other credentials include ringtones for Pepsi, he also opened for Guster and KT Tunstall and writes his own soulful pop tunes . When Blane received an e-mail from an Apple guy last summer saying that he’d seen Blane’s clips online and wondered if he would be interested in auditioning for a job, he jumped at the chance. “I thought maybe they needed someone to show up at a trade show,” recalls Blane, who was sent a script and flown to LA for an on-camera audition. Nearly a thousand actors and musicians auditioned for the gig.  Four screen tests later Steve Jobs selected Blane, who has never taught a lesson in his life, to be GarageBand ’s music instructor. “They didn’t want a preachy vibe, but more a vibe of sitting down with your little brother. I had a great time, although I had to wear super HD makeup on my face and hands and arms.

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Meet Tim Blane, Your GarageBand Teacher

I’m a big hockey fan — cheering on the Colorado Avalanche and playing whenever I get the chance. So when HockeyGPS (free) came out for the iPhone and iPod touch, I had to give it a try. The basic idea behind the app is that it will locate nearby hockey facilities of any kind, or in the words of Hockey Science & Technology  – the developers of the app: Easily find and navigate to locations such as hockey arenas, skill development or training centres and retail locations selling hockey equipment, skate sharpening services, hockey memorabilia and so much more. This sounds great, and even offers the ability for you to add local resources that may not be included in the database yet. The concept has some merit, but unfortunately, HockeyGPS is pretty rough around the edges out of the gate. The user interface, always a hot topic for Apple folks, is horrendous. (To be fair, the icon is actually decent.) There’s a text entry box for searching which you leave empty in order to get all results. I’d have opted for a button that just said something like, “Hockey Nearby” but that’s probably just me. The best looking part is the results listing screen, but once you touch a result to see the details, it degrades awful quickly. The result details page looks like an HTML iframe, and moves around if you touch and drag. You can call the facility, open Safari for the website, or have it mapped in the iPhone Google Maps application. The screen for entering your own spots for inclusion in the database is equally sparse and unappealing. To top it all off, the screens are sluggish to respond to your touch! So the look and feel aren’t there, but could be saved by good content

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HockeyGPS Aims to Locate Cool Spots Nearby

1984 was around the time that Steve Jobs recruited John Scully from Pepsi (maker of Mountain Dew) by saying: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Domination is the condition of having control or power over animals or things.

Now in 2009, Apple’s message is to give the people “a little video for everyone”. It’s the age of YouTube, the democratization of broadcast. Yet, Apple — instead of inventing Flickr, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, or other empowering technologies — just promotes the revolution as movies & TV shows:

Craftster.org member DogGrrl posted pictures of their excellent room, painstakingly painted and decorated to look like a diner . Just the murals are impressive enough to warrant it a second look, but buried on the fourth page of the thread is a link to DogGrrl’s office : A vintage Coke machine on the outside… and an impressive iMac house on the inside! DogGrrl says: “ To compliment my new dining room mural I bought an old unworking coke machine, gutted it and then sent it to a friend to weld some shelves onto it. Tada! Here is my new new computer cabinet! The Pepsi and Coke picnic coolers I am using to house my files/office stuff. ” Well done indeed. There’s a nice keyboard tray in there, a shelf for the printer, space for files and a phone, and the inside of the door is neatly multi-purposed as a magnetic calendar and note holder!

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Vintage Coke Machine Office

Section: Apple NPR recently ran a 30 minute segment with brand expert Martin Lindstrom. Martin conducted a 3 year, 7 million dollar study on marketing and its affect on the brain using an FMRI or “functional” magnetic resonance imaging machine. The results from the scans of more than 2,000 volunteers were very interesting—and astounding, in some cases. Martin explains that when we are thinking of buying a big ticket item such as a computer or television, we are loyal to a brand until they sell us three bad products. For example, the majority of people will buy cars from GM until they get the third bad one. At that point, most of the people scanned would try a different brand (in this case, Toyota) until they are disappointed in the same fashion. Using the same methods, it was discovered that the warning labels on cigarette packs actually cause people to smoke 13% more than packs that do not have the label. How ridiculous is that? Being an ex-smoker myself I can understand the warning being a “don’t tell me what to do” kind of thing, but nonetheless, don’t smoke! Now that I am off my high horse, I would like to share the simplest test he conducted, and its results. He did the simple Pepsi versus Coke taste test.

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Brand expert Martin Lindstrom calls Apple a religion