Author: Dan Nosowitz

The White House released a pretty nice iPhone app last week, but it was lacking one thing: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs riffing on iPhone ads in a video. Well, not anymore! [Whitehouse.gov via Wonkette]

The Newton, like the forthcoming tablet, was introduced with expectations that it would revolutionize personal computing. Apple’s then-chairman noted, “It has been said that Apple either walks on water or it sinks.” That was after the Newton, well, sank.

This vintage NYTimes review, dated September 23, 1993, is remarkable for how forward-thinking it was—except it’s clear now, more than 16 years later, that the Newton isn’t the ancestor of a tablet as we currently conceive of it. The Newton was the pre-iPhone.

The operating system is “communication enabled,” which means, in theory, that all data can be faxed, e-mailed, beamed via infrared or sent to a desktop computer or printer. It is also ready for voice, video and other advanced technologies if or when they become available.

The possibilities are grand. For example, one can imagine cellular phone circuitry being shrunk to fit in the Message Pad’s credit-card-sized PCMCIA slot, or a Newton being shrunk to fit in a cellular phone.

“One can imagine” indeed. It only took 14 years for the Newton to be “shrunk into a cellular phone.”

The one-pound Message Pad, which is about the size of a slim video cassette, is unlike any other Apple computer, and indeed is unlike most personal computers. It has a radically new operating system, a new microprocessor and a new mission: to become the first “anytime, anywhere” pocket computer and communicator for business executives.

On the Newton’s meager app selection:

There are only a few simple software applications available for Newton, including one that makes it easy to split the tab at a restaurant and calculate the tip, among other common executive arithmetic chores. To be fair, this makes the Newton slightly more useful than the Tandy Corporation’s rival P.D.A., called Zoomer, which contains a data base of birth stones and state flowers.

But the overwhelming message of this review is a measured “wait and see.”

The bottom line on the Newton Message Pad is that Apple promised too much and failed to deliver a useful device for everyday executive chores. On the other hand, the Message Pad practically hums with untapped potential, and six months (or moths) to a year from now it is likely to be a popular executive tool.

Will the tablet be a sinker or a walker-on-water? Or, like some have predicted, neither of the above? We’ll see on Wednesday. [NYTimes]

The BBC plans to premiere The Chimpcam Project, a documentary shot by actual chimpanzees, this week. Get ready for the inevitable Avatar comparisons, and check out this video preview below.

Basically, some researchers encased a camera in a chimp-proof box and gave it to both wild and zoo-bred chimps. Enraptured with the viewfinder, they began tossing it around, taking pictures of whatever shiny object or unexpected movement interested their lemon-sized brains. As a side note, this is also how Michael Bay directs his movies.

It probably won’t be that interesting (also like a Michael Bay movie!), especially since the majority of the footage was shot in a zoo enclosure in Edinburgh, but I’ll still probably watch it when it premieres this Wednesday. I mean, what else is going on that day, besides the Holy Grail of Tech announcement and the State of the Union? Bring on the monkey-movie! [DiscoBlog via GeekSystem – Video Courtesy Animals Don’t Think]

It could have been worse. He could have been an unlicensed plumber caught with hallucinogenic mushrooms while playing…well, you know.

Down old mangrove way in Florida, our new favorite criminal allegedly stole a 1998 Dodge Durango (for reasons that escape us—a ’98 Durango? Really?), which was then found outside a house, miles away. Inside, the suspect was sitting on his couch, playing Grand Theft Auto. He was then, appropriately, charged with grand theft auto (and a few other things, to be fair). You are now encouraged to chuckle. [CNET]

The duaLink cable is essentially a specialized USB hub: It splits from one USB connector into two iPod/iPhone cables. Great for incredibly rich people with two iPhones, or upper-middle-class folk with two iPods. Available now for $26. [Engadget]

Instapaper, a program that lets you mark articles to be sent to your Kindle for later reading, just got a substantial update—and there isn’t even a Kindle app store yet!

The update totally changes the formatting of articles to be more, well, Kindle-like, which is a very good thing. Your saved articles now look like the periodicals that are already formatted for Kindle. It also brings a welcome UI update: Navigating through articles used to be a chore of fighting through menus, but now can be done with simple clicks of the joystick.

Instapaper isn’t a revolutionary app, but if you’re into periodicals, it’s a really nice way to get them onto your Kindle for off-line (of sorts) reading—and could be a taste of what’s to come in the Kindle app store. [TechCrunch]

This beautiful photo of a wolf jumping over a fence elicited the usual rabble of “fake!” claims when it won a prestigious wildlife photography competition. The photographer denies the claims, but he’s just been stripped of the award.

Unusually, nobody doubts that it’s a real wolf (as opposed to some sort of photo manipulation)—the controversy is that the wolf pictured may in fact be a tame wolf by the name of Ossian. The evidence: It’s an exceedingly rare species, hardly ever seen in the wild; a wild wolf would be more likely to squeeze through the fence than leap over it; and, um, it looks like Ossian (I guess there are people out there who can tell wolves apart; I can barely tell that it’s not my neighbor’s dog). Jesus termed it “the ultimate FAKE internet whining.”

The judges for the Natural History Museum have decided after awarding this photo the top prize that the wolf pictured is in fact a tame specimen, which breaks the rules of the competition.

Jim Brandenburg, a judge and a wildlife photographer with 45 years experience of taking pictures of wolves, marvelled at the image of the animal, captured so clearly and apparently hunting a farmer’s livestock. He declared it “a masterfully executed moment”, but having studied pictures of Ossian and Rodriguez’s image, he is now “99.9%” sure it is a tame wolf, according to Carwardine.

So, internet, you win this round. Sort of. [The Guardian, thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

In this totally unscientific but reasonably fair test, one man writes a long paragraph on several different devices (including pen and paper) to test speed. The results may surprise and anger you.

The contestants: MacBook (unibody), pen and paper, iPhone (portrait), Apple Newton, Palm Treo 650 (hardware QWERTY), and Palm VX (Graffiti handwriting recognition software). There are some details that are a little troubling, of course; with handheld keyboards, speed greatly depends on how often you use then, and the tester has been using an iPhone as his main handheld for 18 months. A dedicated BlackBerry (or Pre) user would almost certainly do better with a hardware QWERTY than the tester did. That being said, it’s pretty much impossible to have a perfectly fair test of this sort, and the tester clearly did what he could to eke out the best time possible for each device, so just take his results with a grain of salt.

The results: The laptop keyboard came out in front, which is no surprise, with the iPhone, Treo and pen and paper coming out essentially even, about 50% longer than the laptop. The two handwriting recognition devices finished way behind the pack.

I was a bit surprised, as was the tester, that the laptop keyboard didn’t absolutely destroy the handhelds—just goes to show how good those little things really are. But you don’t really care about that. It’s Apple Tablet week, and what you care about is how this affects our predictions for the Tablet. And I’m not going to disappoint you.

I predict that the Tablet will not be made of ink and paper. You can quote me on that. [Gyford.com]

I could never capture the essence of this incredible timewaster better than its URL already has. I will add that it also features a “party” button, which you will click, and sparkly fonts, which you will enjoy. [2YTVaaMFCF.com, thanks Max!]

Plastic polymers are efficient, cheap and easy to make—but not very environmentally friendly. Hydrogels had previously not been really considered a viable alternative, because they’re, well, gels. But by attaching them to clay, that’s all changed.

Turns out the water-based (duh) hydrogels had a great affinity for attaching to glass, so researchers tested out its relationship with something fairly similar: Clay. And lo and behold, it sticks! That gives it a bunch of properties that make it a possible alternative to plastics:

This notably improved mechanical properties over other hydrogels, as it could be molded into shapes that are free-standing and relatively robust and would undergo self-healing when cut. Less than 0.4 percent of it is petroleum-derived, so improved versions may provide an appealing green alternative to polymers. The best aspect, however, may be its simplicity: all you need are three ingredients, a beaker of water, and something to stir with.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these new hydrogels actually take off as a plastic replacement, but it looks like now they might have a fighting chance. [Ars Technica]

HTML5 is a major part of Google’s plans for the future, including Chrome OS—check out this interview for more on that—and one step towards that is getting YouTube to work without a Flash plugin, which they’ve now achieved. It’s not perfect yet (no ads or annotations) and it only works on certain supported browsers (Chrome and Safari, at the moment) but it’s still a taste of what’s to come. You can hit up TestTube to check it out. [YouTube]

There’s been some great classic gaming on the iPhone already—Monkey Island comes to mind—but now the platform is getting a huge injection of gaming cred with Final Fantasy 1 and 2. Try to control your squealing.

We don’t know the big details of the release, namely date and price, but it has been officially confirmed by Square Enix on their Twitter and Facebook. The iPhone just got a whole lot more respectable on the gaming front. [RedmondPie via Kotaku]

Amazon just announced that the Kindle will have its own app store, with partners ranging from publishers like Zagat to, believe it or not, game makers like EA. E-ink gaming? What?

Says Amazon’s vice president for Kindle:

We knew from the earliest days of the Kindle that invention was not all going to take place within the walls of Amazon. We wanted to open this up to a wide range of creative people, from developers to publishers to authors, to build whatever they like.

In that spirit, they’ve opened up development to selected partners (not everyone, yet—a wider release will come later this month) to create apps for the Kindle platform. There’ll be three kinds of apps: Free, one-time payment, and monthly payment. Interestingly, because the Kindle is sold without a monthly fee for the wireless connection, these developers will have to pay 15 cents per megabyte for content delivery. They’ll keep 70% of the revenue after those expenses are recouped by Amazon—more info on that stuff here.

There are also some basic limits on both bandwidth and app size. Free apps must be smaller than 1MB and use less than 100KB of data per user per month. One-time purchase apps and monthly apps both have the same data usage limit as free apps, but have a size limit of 100MB (although any app larger than 10MB can’t be downloaded wirelessly—gotta do it via USB).

Amazon expects to start adding apps “sometime later this year,” which is a nice vague thing to say in January. They’ll also retain control over the types of apps added, restricting offensive apps, VoIP apps, viruses, that kind of thing. Now: What kind of things are we likely to see in a Kindle app store?

The Kindle is extremely limited by its hardware, most importantly its e-ink screen. The kind of glacial refreshes that are acceptable while reading a book make it totally useless for pretty much any game. The only ones that can deal with the limited screen are essentially pen-and-paper games, like Sudoku, word games (crossword puzzles, Scrabble) and, um, hangman. Scrabble is a fair bet to make an early appearance, since it’s owned by EA, one of the two partners specifically named in the NYTimes announcement.

Other apps mentioned include searchable travel books, like a Zagat app that could find, say, local restaurants with specific criteria. But apps like that are really better suited for smartphones, which is an argument you could make about the entire idea of a Kindle app store. We’ll have to wait until the plan actually launches before we see if it was a good decision—and who knows, by then the Apple Tablet will probably have revolutionized the publishing industry, solved the economic recession and rescued the world’s kittens from the world’s trees. [Amazon and NYTimes 1 and 2]

Amazon Announces Kindle Development Kit—Software Developers Can Now Build Active Content for Kindle
Travel books that suggest activities based on real-time weather and current events, cookbooks that recommend menus based on size of party and allergies, and word games and puzzles—just some of the possibilities with the new Kindle Development Kit

SEATTLE, Jan 21, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — (NASDAQ: AMZN)—For the past two years, Amazon has welcomed authors and publishers to directly upload and sell content in the Kindle Store through the self-service Kindle publishing platform. Today, Amazon announced that it is inviting software developers to build and upload active content that will be available in the Kindle Store later this year. The new Kindle Development Kit gives developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content for Kindle—the #1 bestselling, most wished for, and most gifted product across all categories on Amazon. Developers can learn more about the Kindle Development Kit today at http://www.amazon.com/kdk/ and sign up to be notified when the limited beta starts next month.

“We’ve heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle,” said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “The Kindle Development Kit opens many possibilities—we look forward to being surprised by what developers invent.”

The Kindle Development Kit enables developers to build active content that leverages Kindle’s unique combination of seamless and invisible 3G wireless delivery over Amazon Whispernet, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, and long battery life of seven days with wireless activated. For example, Handmark is building an active Zagat guide featuring their trusted ratings, reviews and more for restaurants in cities around the world, and Sonic Boom is building word games and puzzles.

“As the leading worldwide publisher of mobile games, EA Mobile has had the privilege of collaborating with many dynamic and innovative companies in bringing exciting gaming experiences to new platforms,” says Adam Sussman, Vice President of Worldwide Publishing, EA Mobile. “Working with Amazon, we look forward to bringing some of the world’s most popular and fun games to Kindle and their users.”

Starting next month, participants in the limited beta will be able to download the Kindle Development Kit, access developer support, test content on Kindle, and submit finished content. Those wait-listed will be invited to participate as space becomes available. The Kindle Development Kit includes sample code, documentation, and the Kindle Simulator, which helps developers build and test their content by simulating the 6-inch Kindle and 9.7-inch Kindle DX on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops.

An American filmmaker trapped in the Haitian earthquake used his iPhone in some pretty ingenious ways to survive until he could be rescued 65 hours later. It’s like a digital multitool!

Dan Woolley was caught under a pile of rubble when the earthquake hit, injuring both his leg and his head. A first-aid app instructed him on the best way to create a tourniquet for his leg and a bandage for his head, and even warned him against falling asleep after head trauma—so he set his iPhone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes as a precaution.

Evidently the strategies worked, because he survived long enough to be rescued 65 hours later and reunited with his family. I can’t figure out exactly which app he used, which is mildly inconvenient since now I’ll have to download every first-aid app I can find. [MSNBC via Wired]

At the bottom of the WSJ story about the Apple tablet family sharing feature we posted earlier today, we find out that an iTunes streaming service at itunes.com could be launched as early as June. Unconfirmed, but very interesting.

Android’s stock homescreen is fine; usable, not thrilling. SlideScreen, a homescreen replacement, is a wild departure that totally changes how you use your phone. It’s a mix between Zune, MotoBlur and HTC’s Sense. And I just made it my default.

Instead of the standard grid of icons and widgets we’ve seen in handhelds since Palm OS, SlideScreen integrates information from various sources—Google Reader, Twitter, email, text messages, calendar appointments, and stocks—right onto the homescreen. It’s sort of like Blur, the social-networking-focused Motorola skin seen on the Cliq, taken to an extreme. Each of these information sources is given a color-coded section and shows new information as it comes in.

In the middle of that is the app’s namesake, a slider (itself displaying date, time, weather, battery, and signal strength) that can be moved up and down to reveal and highlight each of the other sections in full. Tapping the menu button takes you to a traditional list of apps, with space for eight favorites at the top. It’s pretty confusing to explain, but it’s really easy to use. Check out this video for a nice walkthrough.

I love how the app frees you from the standard homescreen. No longer does your home button lead you to a portal for opening other apps; SlideScreen gives you access to the information within the apps that you want. Tapping on any individual update, like a tweet or an email, takes you into the corresponding app (in this case, it might be Twidroid and Gmail), but you can just look at the homescreen and get the gist of what’s happening in your phone.

It’s also incredibly fast—even on my Droid, which is a pretty swift little bugger, the stock app launcher and notification shade both have a tendency to stutter, but SlideScreen is perfectly smooth. That’s not to say that it’s perfect, however.

SlideScreen is not very customizable—I’d love to be able to move or add some sections (right now, you can only remove them). I want to add Facebook/AIM/Gtalk, or put my email in the top position instead of phone calls, but no such luck. Also, it doesn’t work with Google Apps (only normal Gmail accounts work), so my Gizmodo email account doesn’t show up on the homescreen—a serious problem. Luckily the SlideScreen team says they’re working hard on releasing a fix for that issue. The built-in Twitter reader is very barebones, and displays only an excerpt on the homescreen (an excerpt of a tweet? Is 140 characters really too long?). But it’s got a ton of potential, and it’s interesting to look at, which stock Android is not, particularly.

SlideScreen isn’t just one of the most polished Android apps I’ve ever seen, it’s also in itself an argument for how great Android can be. Not everyone will like it, but it’s pretty amazing to have the option to totally transform one of the most basic parts of your phone. Not in a million years will you see SlideScreen in the iPhone App Store. I just hope Larva Labs, the makers of the app, keeps developing so it can achieve its potential. It’s available now in the Market as either a free version (with an ad) or a $7 pro version. [SlideScreen, video from MobileCrunch—Thanks Justin Dove!]

The Japanese have finally done it. They’ve created a real jetpack. Everyone’s futuristic fantasy, the gadget we’ve all been promised in countless sci-fi movies—it’s here. And it’s human powered.

Don’t act like you didn’t laugh. [Geekologie via Crunchgear]

Pretty cool idea: This Mandometer plate has a scale underneath which measures how fast weight (food) is disappearing, and compares it to a pre-set rate of consumption. If you eat too fast, it’ll actually speak up to admonish you.

As embarrassing as it’d be to actually own this thing, its heart is in the right place: If you slow down your chomping, your body will register as “full” and you’ll eat less. I’m not going to buy one—I don’t need some uppity plate telling me that no human being should eat an entire San Francisco burrito in seven minutes—but I appreciate the effort. [My Digital Life via Boing Boing]

Qik’s VideoCamera app isn’t the first to give older iPhones video recording capabilities, but it could be the first to do it well enough for non-gimmick use. It’ll record at 15fps with various real-time effects, including a Na’vi-inspired blue tint.

Other features include landscape mode, zoom, brightness and audio controls, and effects like black and white, red (?), Na’vi blue, and mirror. It’s available now for a buck (link opens iTunes). [Qik]