Filed under: iPod Family, Odds and ends, Apple

As Apple fans, we've loved Apple's "Get a Mac" ad campaign. With Justin Long as the cool, laid-back Mac and John Hodgman starring as the stodgy, uptight PC, the ads have managed to make us laugh since they first appeared in 2006. The campaign has spawned the "I'm a PC" response ads from Microsoft, which aren't nearly as fun or effective as the original (if we do say so ourselves).

The ads have been incredibly effective at getting Apple's message across -- Macs just work, with no bloatware, few viruses and little malware, and Mac users can do a lot with the provided iLife software.

AdweekMedia has paid tribute to the campaign in its Best of the 2000s awards, giving the Campaign of the Decade plaudits to Apple and TBWA / Media Arts Lab for the memorable ads.

That's not the only Apple campaign that received an award -- the iPod "Silhouettes" campaign won the Out of Home Ad of the Decade prize. Out of Home ads (AKA outdoor advertising) consist of those advertisements that are shown on billboards, buses, and kiosks rather than on television or in print. The awards were voted upon by the editors of AdweekMedia, and reader's choice awards were also listed. The "Get a Mac" campaign was third place in reader voting, while "Silhouettes" picked up the number one spot from readers in its category.

TUAWAdweek Media's Campaign of the Decade: Apple's Get a Mac ads originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Enterprise, Developer, iPhone

Developers are learning that iPhone users want sophistication and features in their apps, not watered-down functionality. A report in GigaOM shows that not only are companies finding that slimmer isn't better when it comes to apps, but that one company is actually changing their business model based on what they found out about how iPhone users were using their app.

Travel search service Kayak based its first iPhone offering on the assumption that a mobile user would most likely use the app if her flight had been canceled and she needed a replacement reservation. As a result, the initial app didn't have features like flexible date search.

While the Kayak app [free, iTunes link] was very successful for the company, with over 600,000 downloads since February now accounting for 5% of Kayak's search volume, users demanded the full functionality that they found on the company's website.

Kayak went back to the drawing board and recently released version 2.0 of the app, with some major improvements. However, since Kayak is a search engine, iPhone users still end up being pushed to other travel websites, which means that they have to put up with tiny renditions of full pages and non-loading Flash sites. This "concierge" model obviously needed some work for the iPhone client.

The growing movement towards iPhones and other handheld devices becoming laptop replacements has forced a change in Kayak's business model. In 2010, Kayak will introduce an iPhone-friendly wallet system that will give users the chance to book travel from their devices. That wallet will save credit card, frequent flier, and flight preference information. Kayak will use the wallet to enter data into travel provider sites, and then send the users an alert when the booking has been completed. This change, forced by the growing use of iPhones, will most likely be reflected on the main Kayak website as well.

Do you know of any other companies that have had to change their business model because of the success of the iPhone? We'd like to know -- please leave a comment below.

TUAWKayak's business model upended by iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: App Store, First Look

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a huge fan of iPhone photography apps. I've written about Best Camera, played with ColorSplash, and taken panoramic photos with Pano. When I noticed the $1.99US Lo-Mob [iTunes Link] while doing my weekly pass through the photo apps, I decided to buy it and give it a try.

Part of my fascination with iPhone photo apps is that the flexibility of the software combines with the camera that is always at your fingertips, and you can do things with your photos with a few taps that would have taken hours in a darkroom. Lo-Mob provides 33 different effects that give your iPhone pics the look of taking photos with old film, instant film, 35 mm film in a medium-format camera, and more. With many of the effects, changes with saturation, focus, and tint are mixed with artifacts (dust on the frame, for example), vignetting, and frames.

As soon as you either take a new photo or select an existing one in Lo-Mob, the app takes about 10 - 12 seconds to pre-process all of the images. The result is that when you go to choose your effect, you see exactly how it's going to look in a small thumbnail image located next to information about the effect. After you've selected your effect, you see a full size image that can then be saved in the original photo resolution and then shared with others through email, Facebook, or Twitter.

Now for some fun! We have three Lo-Mob promo codes to give away to three lucky TUAW readers. Here's the scoop:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment telling us what you would take a photo of and then "retro-ize" with Lo-Mob.
• The comment must be left before Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Three winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prizes: Promo Code for one copy of Lo-Mob (Value: US$1.99)
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Check out the gallery below for an idea of some of the cool effects you can slap on those iPhone photos.

TUAWFirst look and reader giveaway: Lo-Mob, for that retro photo look originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iTS, App Store

Our eagle-eyed blogger David Winograd sent out a breaking news post Friday night to let all of you know that there were changes afoot in the iTunes App Store. Sure enough, those changes appear to have migrated through most, if not all, apps by now.

In my opinion, the new design makes more sense in the overall iTunes 9.0.2 layout than the "old" design did. The app icon is now very large (blue highlight in above screenshot), so apps with poorly designed icons will need to be retooled by developers in order to create something that grabs potential purchasers with one glance.

The app screenshots in the old version of iTunes were apparently confusing to a surprising number of users. The new design now shows two or three full screenshots of each app in action (see yellow highlight above), with a visible scroll bar at the bottom of the screenshots indicating whether the user can scroll to the side to see more. The old version simply showed one screenshot and required clicking on the picture to move to the next screen image.

For developers, there is now a very good reason to write a "killer description." The App description now shows only the first two lines (see red highlight above), and although there's a "More..." button that will display the full description, many users may not choose to click that button. Developers who have a herd of apps in their stables can now show a list of those apps on the left side of the App Store display.

I like the fact that the links for the developer and support websites are at the top of the page now; bloggers need to find those links for use in reviews, and they're no longer hard to find (in the red highlighted area). Attached to the Buy App button is a small pop-up menu (yellow highlight) that enables potential buyers to put an app on their wish list, send a link to a friend, or copy the link to the page. In addition, you can now send info about an app to Facebook and Twitter.

Many iPhone devs seemed to be happy with the changes on Friday night, although a lot of them seemed unprepared for the changes and were scrambling to update their descriptions as quickly as possible. For the average iPhone user, however, the new layout of the App Store in iTunes should be a welcome change.

TUAWAll about the new, improved App Store in iTunes 9.0.2 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, iPhone

In a report that is sure to bring cheer to legions of Verizon Droid owners, Strand Consult is saying that all of us who have purchased iPhones are delusional liars.

CNET's Chris Matyszczyk reported in his Technically Incorrect column that the Danish marketing consultants posted an article titled "How will psychologists describe the iPhone syndrome in the future?" Among other things, the article describes the similarity between iPhone users defending their (according to Strand) deficient smartphones and the psychological condition known as the Stockholm Syndrome. The latter has been used to describe how hostages often begin believing and defending their captors. Unswitchable Microsoft fans have also been accused of Stockholm Syndrome.

Yep, we're all delusional, and Strand Consult offers "proof" of how we've all been taken in by Apple by listing 20 deficiencies of the iPhone platform (most of which, by the way, are no longer valid). The company even goes so far as to say:

In reality the iPhone is surrounded by a multitude of people, media and companies that are happy to bend the truth to defend the product they have purchased from Apple.

Not only are we all delusional wackos, but we're also liars! Strand wittily created a name for our disease -- The iPhone Syndrome -- and is glad to share this with everyone in a free report. Of course, you have to register to get the report, which most likely puts you on a marketing email list. The following quote may provide some insight into the potential customers they're hoping to reach with this report.

if you are one of the many other phone manufacturers: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, HTC etc., you will most probably be very envious of the euphoria that Apple has invoked in their customers.

I'm glad to be part of the Crazy Ones that Apple celebrated in the Think Different ad campaign. How about you? Do you think that we're all unable to see that the Emperor has no clothes, or is this report an insult? Do we completely disregard the mobile industry's rush to imitate various elements of the iPhone, including the App Store? State your opinion in the comments.

[via CNET]

TUAWStrand Consult to iPhone users: You're delusional and a big, fat liar too originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks, Snow Leopard

One of the lesser-known changes in Snow Leopard is the update to the Image Capture application. This little gem of the Mac has always been available to grab photos from devices such as digital cameras and scanners, but with Mac OS X 10.6, Image Capture has turned into my personal hero.

In 2007 and 2008, my in-laws both passed away and in the process of closing out their estate, we inherited many family photos. When I mean many, I'm talking about boxes and albums filled with them, enough to fill a spare bedroom in our house! Rather than just tossing the photos, we wanted to keep them because many of them were cherished family pictures, and others (taken by my father-in-law) were spectacularly good travel photographs.

I've had an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner for a few years, and the software that came with it was adequate. However, I just didn't feel like I wanted to spend the time and effort to scan a bunch of photo prints, and was considering sending them off to be digitized professionally. Then, in a fortuitous experiment, I tried Image Capture 6.0.

This latest version has made it possible for me to slap down a bunch of photos on my scanner without regard for orientation, and have the scanner digitize them individually for placement in a folder. All it takes is making sure to check the Detect Separate Items checkbox, and Image Capture analyzes the overview scan to pick out the individual photos, straighten them out, and save them to a folder, auto-numbering them in the process. Once I've digitized a large batch, I drop them into a folder on my wife's MacBook Pro, where they're dragged into iPhoto, tagged, edited, and organized. The originals? They go into the trash.

Image Capture is faster than the Epson software that came with the scanner, it allows me to scan a lot of photos very quickly while working on other things on my Mac (like writing TUAW posts), and it's making it possible for me to burn through digitizing thousands of prints without spending thousands of dollars using commercial scanning services. The best part of this entire project is that in the process of converting atoms to bits, we're going to recapture some space in our home. Your mileage may vary depending on the scanner model you're using, but if you haven't given the Snow Leopard edition of Image Capture a try, check it out.

TUAWUsing Snow Leopard's Image Capture app, or how to clean up a room originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Tips and tricks, TUAW Tips, iPhone

As a seasoned world traveler and Apple geek, I'm always fascinated to see how others in the Mac and iPhone community make lemonade from lemons when they encounter difficulties on the road. The Mac Observer's Jeff Gamet was recently in Italy (and may still be there) and from the sound of a recent post, he must have arrived well before part of his luggage did. The result? He had a lot of photos on his iPhone that needed to be moved to his Mac, and didn't have a USB cable to link the two.

His solution? Use Dropbox and the hotel's Wi-Fi connection instead of emailing photos and then saving the attached photos to a folder on your Mac. The simple answer involves making sure that you have a Dropbox account (doesn't everybody?), the Dropbox iPhone app [Free, iTunes Link], and access to a Wi-Fi network.

Within the Dropbox app, tap on the Camera button, then tap Existing Photo or Video. From the iPhone's photo albums, you can send your photos to any one of the folders in your Dropbox. As Jeff points out in his post, this has the added benefit of making sure that your vacation photos are backed up online.

Once you've moved the photos to your Dropbox, it's a simple matter of moving or copying them over to your Mac's photo library by literally clicking and dragging them (or option-clicking and dragging if you want to make a copy and keep the originals in the Dropbox) to the iPhone app icon in the dock.

There's only one issue; you have to move one photo or video at a time with the current version of the Dropbox app. Let's hope that Dropbox can address that in an upcoming version of the app.

[Tip of the travelin' hat to Jeff Gamet, The Mac Observer]

TUAWYet another use for Dropbox: USB cable originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Odds and ends, iTunes

The 350 million users of popular social networking site Facebook now have another application they can benefit from -- the ability to purchase iTunes gift cards for other Facebook users.

This timely functionality, reports The Loop, will let Facebook fans use the familiar interface to purchase and send iTunes gift cards in US$5, $10, $15, $25, and $50 denominations. The interface allows users to select a date on which the gift card will be delivered, meaning that you could theoretically do all of your birthday shopping for the next few years in one Facebook session, and then let Facebook do all the hard work of remembering birthdays and hoildays.

There are six different card designs available at this time, including two holiday cards, two birthday cards, and two generic "any occasion" cards. As with other Facebook apps, you must approve the app and let it have access to your profile information. Unfortunately for international Facebook users, the app is only valid for the U.S. iTunes store at this time.

TUAWFacebook gains iTunes gift card feature just in time for Christmas originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Hardware, Apple History, This Old Apple

With our zippy Intel Macs able to eagerly boot up Windows 7 in Boot Camp, VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox, it's difficult to fathom that it was ever a problem to run Microsoft operating systems on our Apple boxes.

The situation wasn't that good just a scant 15 or so years ago. Back in the bleak days before the triumphant return of Steve Jobs to 1 Infinite Loop, Apple had a broad and confusing product line. Since DOS and Windows 3.1 were already entrenched in business worldwide, Apple knew that they had to have a way for Macs to run Microsoft operating systems in order to gain any sort of traction in the corporate world.

Edible Apple ran a wonderful retrospective yesterday that looked at Apple's DOS Compatibility Cards. These were basically PCs on a NuBus or PCI cards that were inserted into a slot in the Mac, using the Mac's power supply, floppy and hard drives, and keyboard and mouse. Sporting such amazing CPUs as the Intel 486SX running at a whopping 25 MHz clock speed, the original cards worked with the Centris 610 and Quadra 610 and were released in 1994. By the next year a second edition was released with an Intel 486DX/66, and was targeted at the PowerMac 6100 and Performa 6100.

Further research shows that there were several subsequent cards that included even faster Pentium and Cyrix 6x86 processors, were called "PC Compatibility Cards," and were designed for use in other PowerMac models. I can recall acquiring one of the Pentium-based cards and using it to try to entice our one DOS holdout department to move to Macs (they didn't).

Today's Windows compatibility is the best it has ever been on the Mac platform, and usually the only "hardware upgrade" required is to add some inexpensive RAM to the host Mac. Things might sometimes change slowly, but at least in the world of technology, the change is usually for the best.

TUAWBefore there was Boot Camp, there were DOS Compatibility Cards originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Video, Odds and ends, Developer, iPhone, App Store

We were all a bit surprised when Ustream's free Live Broadcasting iPhone app [iTunes Link] was approved by Apple and tossed into the App Store yesterday. After all, it wasn't that long ago that it seemed that no streaming video apps would ever be approved for the iPhone platform due to AT&T's reluctance to have their network overwhelmed by self-produced live vidcasts of emo guitar players "broadcasting" from their unheated rent-controlled flats.

No sooner had the Ustream app magically appeared than we began to receive emails from Qik stating that they were submitting their streaming video app for approval. Qik currently has Qik for 3GS [Free, iTunes Link] in the app store, which allows recording and eventual uploading of video to their site, but not live video streaming. According to a blog post on the Qik site, the app has been resubmitted and the wait is on.

Having a choice of legal video streaming apps that don't require jailbroken iPhones will certainly open up a new chapter in the iPhone story.

TUAWThat was Qik! After Ustream's debut in App Store, Qik submits streaming app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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