Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPhone , iDevice Apps , iDevice Accessories , Reviews Provides: Flexible tripod for phone support Developer: Joby Minimum Requirements: iPhone 3G or 3GS ( iPod touch and other models available) Price: $39.95 Availability: Now More and more, I find myself using my iPhone for snapping quick photos. The picture quality is not nearly as good as that of my Nikon D40 DSLR, but my iPhone is always with me, and it’s easier to port around. Trouble is, it’s nearly impossible to balance on a ledge, chair, rock or what have you if I want to be in the picture myself, or if I want to steady the shot. “Kirk, you foolish man,” I hear you say, “if you’re worried about steadying a shot, you’re already caring too much to be satisfied with your iPhone camera.” Perhaps, but that doesn’t change the fact that I sometimes find myself unable to take an unexpected photo because I have no tripod that supports the iPhone. “Tripod?!” you continue. “Read your first paragraph! You leave your Nikon at home because it’s too much to lug around, and now you want to lug around a tripod?! Your thought process is devoid of all logic!” Easy, guns. You many not understand what I mean, but Joby does. Hence, the Gorillamobile for the iPhones 3G and 3GS. This flexible tripod comes in a package nearly as small as the iPhone itself, making it convenient to have with you at all times. The beauty of the device is its three jointed legs that allow you to bend and twist them as needed

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Square-Enix recently brought its popular Final Fantasy series to the iPhone, and now another heavy-hitter, Capcom, is bringing yet another marquee title to the platform. That title is Street Fighter — and Street Fighter IV, a port of the latest installment in the series, is now available for purchase in the App Store for $9.99. But wait, that’s a fighting game. On the iPhone. Which has no physical controls. Sure, there’s been a few to date, with mixed results, but there must be a reason the genre hasn’t caught on with developers with the ferocity of, say, accelerometer-based driving games, no? That’s definitely what I thought, but I purchased and downloaded the game anyway, against my better instincts, because I love the series, notably Street Fighter IV for the PS3. And because when I was considering a purchase, it had only received five-star reviews, which is rare even in the early going for any iPhone game. Luckily, I was not disappointed

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Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPhone , iPod touch , iDevice Apps , Reviews Category: Entertainment Seller: Bite Interactive Requirements: iPhone OS 3.0 or later Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch File Size: 0.9MB Version Reviewed: 1.2 Price: $2.99 Age Rating: 4+ Do the Oscars really get you excited? It’s tne night where we finally recognize the people that entertain us on the silver screen, and don’t they deserve it? Probably not, but if you’ve seen all of the movies up for nomination from the past year, you likely want to share your opinion with the world. As the old saying goes, there’s an app for that: The Red Carpet app. This app’s main appeal is not really your ability to rate movies you’ve seen over the past year. Sure, that’s the main purpose, but probably not the reason anyone is buying this app.  It’s all about the $1,000,000 they have on the line at the Oscars.  That’s right, if you’ve seen enough movies over the past year, or maybe if you’re just lucky enough to guess all of the official Oscar winners in all categories correctly, you could win a cool million.  Actually, it’s a $1M annuity paid over 50 years, which is worth significantly less than $1M.  And just to bring it down a bit, should more than one person predict all winners successfully, the winnings are split between all correct entries. You can find all of the official rules at Bite Interactive .  I’m going to continue, because you won’t win.  Sorry, but that’s the truth in all games of chance. Beyond the “prize,” The Red Carpet is all about movie ratings.  You can choose how you’d like to sort your ratings by “Categories,” “Movies to Rate” and “All Nominated Movies.”  Categories will group the nominees based on, you guessed it, categories, like Actor in a Leading Role, Art Direction etc.  You can also choose to rate all movies at once, or just the ones you haven’t already rated.  Rating movies/nominees is simple, though it requires too many taps. First the sorting method, then the movie, then the rating button, then the rating field, then the actual rating. That’s at least 5 taps to rate your first movie

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Filed under: Retail , Cult of Mac , Odds and ends , Apple Having withdrawal from all things Mac while on a sea voyage? Here’s some future therapy. The Celebrity Cruise ship company has announced a new Internet Cafe on the new 2,850 passenger Celebrity Eclipse which sets sail in April. The iLounge, as Celebrity has named it, will include a mini Apple Store where passengers can buy MacBooks, iPods and other accessories. Passengers will also be able to sign up for courses in iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb. Two other new ships are coming on line in 2011 and 2012, and both will have the iLounge aboard. Celebrity operates ships that cruise to Alaska, The Caribbean, Europe, South America, Canada and New England. This isn’t the first time Macs have gone to sea. Back in 2008 we reported on Macs being installed on Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for passenger use.

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Section: Apple News , Apple Online and Retail Store , iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iDevice Apps , Features , Opinions and Editorials In the last 24 hours, Apple has declared war on sex. Kinda sorta. Makers of apps that feature sexual content (that is to say, revealing but not nude) have gotten notifications that their apps are being removed from the App store. And only the App store. But if you want to buy films that feature nudity from the iTunes store, that’s A-Okay! Where to begin? Techcrunch has the story from the makers of Wobble iBoobs ( reviewed by yours truly and found to be juvenile but not particularly obscene) that Apple has unilaterally decided to remove it: We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application. Also removed: Yoga4Dudes which features clothed women doing Yoga poses, and Hooters Calendar Girls Crazy Eights. But what can you buy from Apple? The Hangover (Unrated) , The 40 Year Old Virgin (Unrated) , and Black Dynamite which not only features nudity, but actual porn stars . So clearly, Apple doesn’t hate nudity, it hates cleavage . Let’s check…oh, hey, guess what? The Benny Hill show is not available on the iTunes store. I’ve tried to avoid profanity in my criticism of the App store, but seriously. Who. The

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Filed under: iTS , Software , Internet Tools , iTunes , Apple , App Store Apple has apparently taken another step towards bringing iTunes to the browser, as you can now browse actual categories of the iTunes store right in regular HTML rather than having to click over into iTunes. There’s still no support for television or movies, but you can dive in from categories to artists and then even explore and preview songs , right in your browser of choice. Assuming, of course, that your browser of choice is Firefox or Safari — while Chrome or IE will probably work, we haven’t tested them extensively yet. All we need now is for iTunes to cut it out with the automatic jump into iTunes — even though your browser will load up a real page in the background, the browser store still tries to throw an external link request out to iTunes. Our own Brett Terpstra found that when you copy or type a browser link directly into your browser, the store won’t try to open, but if you click in from an external link (like those here on TUAW), iTunes will try to open. Apple may not want us just browsing iTunes outside of the official app, but it would be nice for those of us who are pointing out iTunes content to folks who may not actually have iTunes installed to have a link to share. App Store categories get browser pages originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . App Store categories get browser pages originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

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First Apple used higher prices to get book publishers to consider the company’s iPad. Now comes word the Cupertino, Calif. electronics firm will offer FairPlay DRM to make them feel safe from e-book pirates. The move seems to extend Apple’s use of DRM for movies and television episodes to its latest consumer tablet device. However, unlike

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Section: Mac Software , Home and Personal , Web Applications / Development Back in October when Mac users first saw Google’s Chrome browser on their platform, there was plenty of excitement. However, not long after, it sunk in that Chrome for Mac was missing many of the features that the Windows users loved about it. In the most recent update from Google for the beta version of the browser, many of these features are now available. Perhaps the best of these updates is that support for extensions has now been added. With a large library of third-party add-ons, this not only makes Chrome much more powerful, it also allows it to compete more with Firefox on the Mac side. Despite having a much shorter existence than Firefox, Chrome already has many of the favorite plugins that people use everyday. Another update the new version of Google Chrome brought was bookmark sync. Users will now be able to sync their browsers with Google’s cloud-based method for doing so. On top of these, increased stability and more features were added to the bookmark manager, making keeping track of them easier. Although it took a while for these to make their way from the developer release to the beta release, I’m glad they’re here now. As I use Chrome for Mac as my everyday browser, I hope to see this progress continue. Via [ Ars Technica ] Full Story » | Written by Josh Holat for Appletell .

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Filed under: Apple So my folks were here this weekend, and as you’d expect my Dad is really curious about the upcoming iPad, or as he likes to put it “his new 3G iPad”. I convinced him that he should wait for April so he could get the new postpaid-data-ready iPad, which he could use anywhere, not just with WiFi hotspots. As we were talking, I began to realize that he didn’t really have a clear idea of exactly what this gadget is — and lots of you probably have parents in similar situations. So I put together this Q&A using actual questions my Dad asked throughout the course of the weekend. “So I can use it instead of my normal computer, right?” The iPad isn’t going to replace your home computer. In fact, it’s supposed to be like an iPod — a mobile device you bring along but not a primary system. You manage your music and movies and everything over on your main machine (a Windows unit in my Dad’s case) and then synchronize that data to your iPad using iTunes. “But what about Microsoft Works? Can I load that on?” Afraid not. The iPad is more like a mobile phone than it is like a computer.

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Filed under: Gaming , Hardware , Apple Kirk McElhearn over at Macworld has attempted to answer the very first question I’ve had since I first heard that the iPad wasn’t going to be in a widescreen format : Why 4:3? The answer: because for the majority of things you’ll be using your iPad for, that’s the right resolution you’ll want. Magazines, books, the web, productivity, and so on, McElhearn argues that 4:3 is the right way to go. Of course, taste plays a factor in there — I prefer to browse the Internet on a widescreen monitor, actually, and I think games, which I’ll be playing a lot of on my iPad when I eventually get one, tend to work better with a wider field of view. And let’s be honest, the 4:3 ratio only allows Apple to start small and go with an “iPad XL” or an “iPad HD” in the future, widening the screen and perhaps even upping the resolution. But McElhearn makes a good point that the 4:3 ratio has been Apple’s home until only just recently, and for most objects that you hold in your hands and read like the iPad, from magazines to newspapers, the 4:3 ratio still fits. The ratio likely won’t affect sales at all, but we’ll have to see if movie watchers hold out for a better format for their media. Why 4:3? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST

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