The folks over at Mission:Repair have noticed that their repair parts for the iPad have an existing hole in the metal frame that fits pretty much exactly the same camera unit as in the MacBook. The question is if it’ll be in there before the iPads are released, or if they were planning it to be in the next version (using the same frame), in which case will the revelation cannibalise sales of the current version (although many people have already said they’ll wait for version 2 at least anyway)?
Category: iSight
Apple now worth 4 times as much as Dell
MacDailyNews reports that Apple’s market value is now four times as big as Dell’s. Perhaps it’s time for Michael Dell to sell up and give the money back to the shareholders?
AUC announces innovation seeding grants
The Apple University Consortium has announced innovation Seeding Grants, primarily aimed at students. Participants are provided with a mentor, equipment and resources to complete the project and must share progress via a blog with the ultimate outcome being licensed via open source, creative commons or similar licensing.
iPatch – Surf naked again
Worried about the little green light on your MacBook, MacBook Pro or iMac turning on (Or rather, not turning on 🙂 at an inopportune moment? Maybe you need an iPatch.
Apple makes Leopard Guided Tour Video available
Apple have posted a Leopard Guided Tour Video available in iPod and full resolution formats.
Exceedingly cool
I was looking for the little green light that tells you you’re “on air” on the new MacBook Pro’s inbuilt iSight camera. Whilst the MacBooks and iMacs have a little black spot for the LED there’s no such LED obvious on the MacBook Pros. So I fire up iChat and sure enough, a green spot appears, apparently through the aluminium.. Sure enough, turn off the camera and there’s no sign of the LED at all, just brushed aluminium. There are photos on Nobilog. Insanely great engineering.
Mac LoJack
It started with this script to use the Mac’s inbuilt camera to grab an image when an incorrect password was used during login (presumably because someone’s stolen your Mac). But that was a bit hard for most people to install, so now there’s MacLoJack which does that, and more. Includes code for the server so you can run your own for your Mac to dial home to.
iSight programming guide
Today I stumbled across Apple’s iSight Programming guide, which has some interesting tidbits about the standalone external iSight camera (such as, it has a microphone at front and back whose signals are combined inside the Mac using “beam forming” to produce a single audio signal, and sends either audio or video packets (or neither, but not both) during each 1/8000s Firewire cycle).
Capture iSight image from the commandline
If you’d like to capture an image from an iSight to the commandline (document your working day? Discover who’s stolen your laptop?), there’s a program called isightcapture available here.
Crashing HackTV
If you’ve got a few moments and an Intel Mac with a built-in camera, you could try downloading Apple’s HackTV (some demo code for video grabbing). Then run it, Monitor menu, Video Settings… then click the Video Source tab and see if HackTV falls over, like it did for me.