Hearts That Die For Technology

Back to the usual review this week, after our 20 Essential Apps list last Friday. Thankfully, it's been a pretty good week in the store, with lots of actually useful apps—including a full-fledged four-track recorder and a couple of utilities that actually add some usable core features that I wish would have made it into the 2.2 software update today. Oh, and of course, something Japanese and crazy. Onward!

Four Track: Remember how Keith Richards always said he recorded the riff to Satisfaction on a hotel answering machine? Well, now, budding Keefs can multi-track their sudden inspirations for songs about not getting sufficiently laid. Four Track offers all the controls you would want for a basic deck, has no track length limit, and can sync via wi-fi to import you recordings into Garage Band or Pro Tools. Awesome. It's $10.

Save My Docs: Safari received some nice performance and UI tweaks in 2.2, but it still does one thing a mobile browser should never do—wipe out version of pages you've already loaded for no reason. Multiple times I've loaded a long Wikipedia article on something that I planned to read on the subway, only to find the page totally blank a few minutes later for no explicable reason. Save My Docs does one thing—saves any document loaded in Safari locally, complete with images, to be read at any time later. $2

CalToDo: I can't believe this isn't a native feature: CalToDo easily syncs your OS X to-do lists (found in Mail and iCal) via a lite server app that runs on your machine. Interface is nice, and so is the simplicity. $1

iMarimo: And iMarimo, what can I say? It's floating ball of algae in front of a few blurry pictures that you can spin via touch. Apparently, the Marimo algae is beloved in Japan for its freakish, perfectly spherical growth and its ultra-rarity—found only in a single lake in Hokkaido. Damn. That's about all I can say about this on a Friday, and it costs $1.

This week's app coverage on Giz:

Whether it's wishful thinking, educated guessing or true leakage is unclear, but the photo nerds are now abuzz about a Nikon D400 follow-up to the D300 we love so much, which would have D90-like video capability that could potentially rival Canon's 1080p-shootin' EOS 5D Mark II. If that was all gibberish to you, don't think on it a moment further. But if what you just read gave you a feeling down in the nether regions that you'd prefer not to discuss, go check out Photography Bay for the full rumor rundown. [Photography Bay]

I love Sonos, the super synced-up wireless music home system, but have always been a little freaked out by the price, about $750 to start, including the increasingly old-school-looking $400 scroll-wheel Controller. When I saw the Sonos iPhone Wi-Fi app—free if you've got an iPhone or iPod touch—I realized that the Controller was finally a thing of the past. Couple the app with a clearance-priced ZP80 ZonePlayer, and you can start your own Sonos rig for $300. After playing around with the latest hardware and software, I can safely say that's a hell of a deal.

I say "you can start" your rig because one of the Sonos' main selling points is its ability to wirelessly coordinate ZonePlayers all throughout the house for flawlessly synced music playback. The idea is that you spend $300 on the ZP80 (or $350 on a ZP90 if you miss out on the clearance inventory) and then later on, when times aren't so tough, you can add more ZonePlayers as you go. What's great about the one ZonePlayer is that you immediately get the AirPort Express-like ability to grab music from your Mac or PC, plus the iTunes Remote app's ability to control it from a little handheld, but that's just the beginning. The ZonePlayer comes with the ability to serve up web radio, Rhapsody, Napster, Pandora, Last.fm and Best Buy Music, all without a computer.

In my house, it all plays out rather well:

When my laptop is awake and on the network, the ZonePlayer I have connected directly to my router (via Ethernet) and a stereo system can access all of my non-DRM tracks. I can sort through all those tracks via the Sonos Desktop Controller, which works on both Macs and PCs and whose setup was ridiculously easy. But I can walk away from the laptop (leaving it on) and instead pick up an iTouch lying on the coffee table, which lets me view the same exact tracks, and just as fast.

Say I close or power down my laptop, or my wife wants to get on the Sonos while I am away, laptop in tow. There are so many sources of music available via the Sonos Controller app, she may not actually even notice that my vast library is gone. (I could, obviously, load the Sonos control on her laptop so that it would serve her music, too, but based on what I'm telling you, that has so far proven irrelevant.)

My wife loves Fresh Air with Terry Gross. By searching for the show in the Radio section, she can not only find out when it's on next, but can listen to recent shows in full, at a much better sound quality than those damn Audible downloads, for zero money. She can also search for different radio stations and add them to favorites—we have both our favorite NYC and Seattle radio side by side. You can't yet bookmark actual radio shows, a la Fresh Air, in Favorites, but I'm hoping that's something that will be worked out soon.You probably now that Sonos offers free 30-day no-credit-card-required trials of Rhapsody, Napster and Sirius—the key, I think, is to try all three in a row, giving you basically 60 days of free on-demand music sampling, and a month of decent satellite radio, before you choose one, if any.

Controlling the system over Wi-Fi is easy, too. You kinda have to get used to the queue concept that goes back to desktop music jukeboxes of olde—once you add songs to the queue, they're there until you clear them, even after they've played. But you can add many songs and radio shows of differing sources to the same queue, making for a highly programmable audio experience: I can listen to the new-ish Coldplay, followed by Terry Gross's interview with Seth Meyers, followed by a classic mix playlist I devised in iTunes (automatically recognized by Sonos), all queued up in just a few minutes. The volume control is funny—on the iTouch, you have to tap to the left or right of the slider to make it go up or down, but once I figured that out, it was smooth sailing.After the super-syncability and the multiple sources of music, the third best thing about Sonos is the fact that it is constantly being upgraded. So even though there are some technical advantages to the newer hardware (wireless-N is the big one), the basic functionality is the same, meaning buying at clearance shouldn't be a problem.

What don't I like? I feel like this new setup has answered my biggest historical gripes with the system; though it would be nice for it to play iTunes DRM tracks, and it would be convenient for the first ZonePlayer to connect wirelessly and not via hard Ethernet (it does this so that it can create its own super-stable Wi-Fi network), the thing is getting better and cheaper at the same time—$300 for clearance ZP80s, potentially even less on eBay. If that isn't good news in these troubled times, I don't know what is. [Sonos]

We just got a tip that Best Buy was selling MacBooks and MacBook Pros for $100 each off the list price, and in at least one case $150 off (as Lizard King points out). This is an unusual phenomenon in the MSRP-only world of Apple products. We don't know how the deal came through, but the sale prices are for real—at least for now. If you see any other Apple stuff for sale over there at Best Buy, send us a tip or let us know in the comments below. Update: A tipster named Jack just told me that Apple Stores will be matching the deal "for the next few days." Anyone care to corroborate? [Best Buy - Thanks, Matt & Ian!]

If you're bored and want something new to play today, but it's not dark out yet so you can't load up Left 4 Dead, consider checking out some excellent independently developed games (free and otherwise). Although World of Goo made headlines due to its high piracy rate, it's only one of hundreds of great indie games that get released every year. TIGSource's database of games is fantastic, providing screenshots, download links, and powerful sorting tools: here are free Windows games from 2008, for instance.

Two other great resources: Shoot the Core for shoot-em-ups of every stripe, and Abandonia for abandonware (Classic DOS Games is great too). Now stop wasting your saturday reading blogs and get your Lemmings on!

Update: If you like Lovecraft, check this one out.

If you were betting on the iPhone 2.2 firmware gettin' the jailbreak treatment within a day, it's time to go collect. If you were betting against it, you obviously need to spend more time reading MobileCrunch. Yep - the iPhone dev team has done it again.

This jailbreak carries a few more precautions than normal - 2.2 fixes an issue in the baseband, blocking off an exploit the iPhone dev team was working on utilizing to unlock the device. They've figured out how to get you the goods from 2.2 without modifying the baseband, but tread lightly to make sure you're picking the right options.

For the download links, head over here.

Ah, yes. Another factoid to put under the "wipes the smile off an iPhone user's face" category. See, I don't have anything against iPhones, but I sure have trouble with people talking as if they're in some secret, privileged club. As it turns out, the 2G iPod Touch has an advantage of almost 100MHz over the rest of Apple's touchables, and that makes a major difference when you're talking games and almost certainly other apps.

The developer in this interview notes that they could put 500 more polygons on each player in their tennis game when coding for the Touch 2G, which also suggests that the graphics hardware has been clocked up as well. Of course, the Touch doubtless has less stuff taking up its RAM and cache due to not functioning as a phone and internet device as well. Makes me want one even more.
[via MacRumors]

Microsoft will relaunch Windows Live Search under a new brand sometime early next year, says a source within the company. What we don't know is what that new brand will be, although a few names have been thrown around. According to our source, a "final" decision has been made, but very few people inside of Microsoft are aware of it, and it could change.

Now LiveSide is saying there's evidence the new search brand will be Kumo, which means "cloud" or "spider" in Japanese.

Why would Microsoft go through yet another rebranding effort? Live.com has a lot of different services under its umbrella (some server software, some client software) in addition to search. It's also a burgeoning social network.

Over time, we've heard, Live.com will become a pure social network and personal productivity portal. You'll go there to access email, calendar, photos, activity streams, etc. But search belongs somewhere else, and it definitely needs a fresh start.

Microsoft won't comment on the name change, or even if there is a name change. But our sources caution us that nothing has been finalized, and the fate of Yahoo could swing this one way or another as well. So Kumo may very well be the name Microsoft is planning to use, but that decision may change.

Cheers were heard across the Internet earlier today when Google's new SearchWiki search interface inexplicably vanished. Perhaps, just maybe, it was gone for good. Or at least when it returned it would have an opt out feature.

Nope. Neither. It's back and it's still impossible to get out of it short of logging out of Google entirely. Lovely comments like the one above now scar Google's once pristine search results page.

Here's how you can get rid of SearchWiki for good if you were unfortunate enough to accept it in the first place: use a Greasemonkey script created by Austrian developer Franz Enzenhofer and just click a button to turn it off. Instructions are here.

This should hold you over until Google adds an opt-out button.

IBM wants to corner the market on cloud computing, from providing the physical servers that make up a cloud to offering services for those unwilling to build out their own. Today it announced plans to move further into the fog by creating a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for cloud computing. IBM calls it the Resilient Cloud Validation program. Big Blue hopes to work with cloud providers to offer a program that reassures businesses that a cloud doesn't go down often as well as helping answer other questions that keep businesses from trusting in the cloud model.

Coincidentally (yeah, right) companies hoping to gain that seal of approval will need to work with IBM's cloud consulting practice. IBM is also announcing as part of that practice that it can help answer a question I've long bothered cloud providers with — When is it most cost effective to outsource your application to a cloud and when should you build your own, or at least buy your own, servers?

IBM has been pretty quiet about its cloud efforts. In part because it didn't want to hack off large customers buying a ton of IBM servers by competing with them. The computing giant hasn't been pushing its own cloud business until a half-hearted announcement at the end of July, about a month and half after a company exec had told me IBM didn't really want to advertise its cloud services.

While I may have doubted if IBM really "got" cloud computing in the past, a project it detailed in a press release today about a research project in China has me convinced that IBM knows exactly what the cloud is, and plans to capitalize on its name and experience to compete with Amazon for enterprise business. Check it out:

IBM's China Research Lab is piloting a newly developed cloud computing platform, codenamed Project Yun which is Chinese for "cloud," for companies to access business services, designed to make the selection and implementation of new cloud services as easy as selecting an item from a drop-down menu. With no need for back-end provisioning, the IBM platform stands to cut the time required to deliver new services dramatically. The Yun platform allocates storage, server and network resources for the customer application with zero human input, achieving top performance, availability and power utilization.

Instant provisioning with no human intervention. Right now it sounds like vaporware, but if IBM pulls it off, its cloud offerings will move from so much vapor to a competitive business.