Wiredglitz

 

The video below will explain how you can convert iTunes music into ringtones for iPhone on a PC.

Click here for the Mac guide.

The two videos below will explain how you can convert iTunes music into ringtones for iPhone on a Mac. Hope they help!!

Click here for the windows guide.

Flash an exotic prototype, then—Presto!—get people to buy your more boring stuff. That kind of thinking still rules at most electronics companies. Apple under Steve Jobs only shows off actual products. The difference? Apple’s arcane secret to success.

A specter harrows the consumer electronics industry: malaise. Like washed-up Catskill magicians unable to let go of old routines while a brash upstart steals their audience, nearly every maker of consumer electronics in the world clings to a quaint song-and-dance about prototypes.

“Here is your possible future,” they bark, flourishing the latest conceptual product from the lab. “Now watch us make it disappear!”

Apple’s chief magician knows better, pulling solid objects out of the aether; products you can actually buy.

If this sounds like a minor complaint about most of the industry’s lack of imagination in marketing, you’re misunderstanding the whole act. The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry. It evokes a feeling of trust between Apple and consumers—that when Apple actually reveals a product, it’s something that they’re confident enough to support for years to come.

For the better part of the last century—starting arbitrarily with the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair and its stark, Randian slogan: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”—the producers of consumer goods have stuck to a basic formula: Show off a prototype; gauge public response; then release a commercial product that is less ambitious, if released at all.

It worked in part because it told a compelling story. “Here is what the future looks like; and here’s an intermediate step towards that future that you can buy today.” Electronics’ sister industries followed the same tack. Car shows were populated with prismatic concept cars hewn with non-Euclidean angles rotating on raised daises. Videogame tech demos showed graphics too impossible to believe, but entrancing enough to betray our better judgment.

But in Jobs’ encore performance, Apple has changed the routine.

Outwardly Apple’s showmanship is competent, workmanlike. Jobs-as-performer wears an understated uniform that does not distract from the act. His humor, when it exists, is subtle. The closest an Apple keynote gets to pomp are pie charts that look like wooden logs.

Yet when Jobs reveals the company’s next product, there’s a critical difference: It exists. When possible, it is available for retail purchase the same day. There are few maybes or eventuallys tempering the presentation: “Here is the tiny miracle we’ve created. We want to sell it to you today.”

As a counter-example, let me pick on Lenovo for a moment: At CES this year, they showed off the Ideapad U1 prototype, a netbook with a screen that could be decoupled from the keyboard to operate as a multitouch tablet. Clever idea, seemingly well considered and brain-bendingly not available for purchase today.

Do you see the story that Lenovo is spoiling for themselves? First, they’ve deprecated the imagined utility of every other laptop they sell without the flashy removable tablet screen. Yet they’ve also whispered a nervous apology to potential customers: “We could make something this cool, but we’re not so confident in our plans to fully commit to them. Maybe you could tell us if you think you’d like this trick?”

Lenovo might make the U1. They might sell a few units. But simply by revealing it before it was a living, breathing SKU on retail shelves, they’ve relegated it to a quirky sideshow.

See also: The Chevy Volt, announced so long ago that GM has gone through a bankruptcy and shotgun CEO transition without actually being available for sale. Bet those will be flying off the lots.

Some of Apple’s peers understand the need to manage expectations. Have you ever seen RIM show off a BlackBerry prototype? What about Nintendo? They don’t pull a Microsoft-like move of showing very early-stage products to reporters and potential customers. They simply pull out a Wii or a DS and say, “This is it. Give it a try.”

Everybody loves a prototype. Engineers get a chance to strut their stuff. If you’ve got a 40-inch OLED TV in a lab somewhere, bring it to your trade show. Executives take pride in their company’s technical prowess. Marketers get an excuse to throw an even fancier party. And customers and press get idyll fodder for a daydream.

None of those things equal units sold. None of those things turn a customer into an ardent fan.

That an industry exists around rumors and leaks for unreleased products may be useful to Apple, but it is a side-effect of their product strategy, not the basis of their marketing. Consider that when Apple finally does release a product, the marketing tends to showcase the device itself in clear, comprehensible ways. Apple isn’t shy to make claims about the grandiose, epiphanal nature of its products because—whether they pull it off or not—they have built a culture in which every product they make is designed to be world class.

Instead of prototypes, Apple makes patents. Although I’m certain Apple would keep these patents behind the curtain if they legally could, their existence proves something amazingly pedestrian: Behind the scenes, Apple is essentially the same sort of company as every other electronics star in the world.

They’re developing prototypes. They’re trying new tricks, seeing what works. They know experimentation is the lifeblood of innovation.

But like the consummate showmen they are, they temper the wooly process of building the future with something missing from nearly every other technology company: restraint. Apple may come off at times as a bit soulless, but at least they’ve got class. And when that class allows them to sell more products that make happier customers, I’ll take class over flash every time.

That the Consumer Electronics Show is held in Vegas is no accident. It’s a derelict spectacle meant to cater to mid-level buyers, gilt with the threadbare trappings of Innovation and Progress, but sending most of its audience home with nothing but a hangover and a t-shirt.

When Apple pulls a tablet out of its hat next week, it’s likely that we won’t be able to purchase it for a couple of months, but rest assured that’s only because of regulatory pitfalls. And besides, there will be no doubt that when Jobs shows us his vision of the future, Apple will be doing everything they can do to get them into our hands.

That’s the trick of it. Consumer audiences have grown wary of nearly a century of predictable sleight-of-hand. We’ve seen too many companies promise us the future, then fail to deliver it.

I believe that there are dozens of companies out there with the talent to pull the future toward us along some retail tesseract. But until they conquer their stage fright, leave aside the vaudevillian antics that savvy, jaded audiences no longer find compelling, and embrace a more honest and practical sort of conjuration, Apple will continue to be the defining technology performance of our age.

Marin Soljacic couldn’t sleep. The problem was his wife’s Nokia cell phone. The tyrannical device beeped on the bedside table when it needed to be plugged in. It could not be disabled.

Instead of taking a hammer to the phone, Soljacic marveled at the fact that this device, and billions of others like it, was sitting a few feet away from all the electricity it could ever need. Why couldn’t it receive power wirelessly, just as laptops get Wi-Fi?

Being a physics professor, not an electrical engineer, Soljacic didn’t know the history of failed attempts to produce wireless electricity. (Thomas Edison and his rival Nikola Tesla were among the first to envision long-distance power-beaming.) Soljacic also didn’t pause to consider conduction, the kind of close-range charging used in electric toothbrushes, which is about as far as wireless electricity got before him.

Soljacic learned that if you could get two magnetic fields to resonate — to sing the same note, in effect — they could transfer an electric current. With two large magnetic coils, he found in an experiment described in Science magazine in 2007, you can throw 60 watts across a room, powering a lightbulb. (Keeping the two resonators in perfect harmony over a distance is not simple; Soljacic spent several years running lab experiments before he built a system that worked reliably.)

MIT, his employer, quickly patented the technology (Soljacic’s name is on the patent) and encouraged Soljacic to start a company. He would sit on the board but find executives to run it full time. The result can be found on the second floor of a brick building in Cambridge, Mass. leased to the company by the big-and-tall tailor on the ground level.

WiTricity’s 15 employees are hard at work proving that Soljacic’s magnetic coils can power almost any electrical device. David Schatz, director of business development, shows me a TV, a DVD player and a computer, all of them wireless.

“This was our No. 1 request from business users,” Schatz says, switching on a projector. “Look: no batteries, no wires, nothing up my sleeve.” The coil sending out the power is hidden behind an abstract painting that the CEO’s wife rescued from their basement.

Schatz is the first to admit that the housing they’ve hurriedly built for the receiving coils is too bulky. “No one would want to buy this,” he says, pointing to the pack that juts out from the back of the laptop, a pregnant plastic bulge that’s about a third as large as the device itself.

Given sufficient cooperation from equipment manufacturers, WiTricity is confident that it can incorporate its coil into the guts of any device. (Think of how computermakers like Apple (AAPL,Fortune 500) turned bulky Webcams into fingernail-size lenses that fit in a thin laptop case.) CEO Eric Giler, a veteran tech executive who ran a telecom company for 22 years, understands the importance of letting potential partners play with patented technology.

So far about a dozen companies — including Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) and Sony (SNE) — have tried replicating Soljacic’s groundbreaking MIT experiment in their own research facilities, just to make sure it’s the real deal. That might make other CEOs nervous, but not Giler.

“Our best customers are going to be the guys who try to do this,” he says, “because it is really hard.” The company is also talking to furniture manufacturers about fitting coils into desks and cubicle walls. The first announcement of a WiTricity partner product is expected toward the end of 2010.

Most of Giler’s potential customers have one major question: safety. “There’s a real perceptual problem,” he says. “People think we’re putting electricity in the air, and that’s called lightning, and they know to stay away from that.”

In fact, the coils turn electricity into magnetic fields, then back into electricity. And as any physicist will tell you, magnetic fields interact weakly with humans; as far as the fields are concerned, we are no different from air. (The Earth itself exudes a magnetic field.)

Initially, Giler was skeptical. Magnetism from MRI machines can disable pacemakers. Wouldn’t wireless electricity pose similar risks? Soljacic replied that MRI magnetism is about 10,000 times stronger than his version. The Institute of Physics in London concurs: WiTricity’s magnetic field “has no detrimental effects on the human body.”

Giler makes a point of standing between the coils whenever he demonstrates the technology. At the Nikkei electronics conference in Tokyo in October, he was able to power a 1,000-watt klieg light from across the room — a far cry from that 60-watt lightbulb in Soljacic’s first experiment. “We’re going up the power curve,” he says.

WiTricity’s record so far is 3,000 watts — enough to fully charge an electric car, so long as it’s in the same room (or garage). How big could WiTricity get? “Every single person in the world can relate to the problem of running out of batteries or having wires everywhere,” Giler says. “The market is so potentially huge that numbers become meaningless.”

A wireless electric world could free up designers to create entirely new kinds of products, no longer hemmed in by the need for boxy batteries or power supplies. As one of Giler’s VC investors says, “I bet you that’s your bestseller in five years’ time. You don’t even know what it is yet.”

Courtesy CNN.

No one loves a hackintosh more than me. So I was very sad to read that Mac OS 10.6.2 breaks Atom-based netbooks that have been hacked to run Mac OS X. Hackintoshes, as they’re known.

Wired has confirmed the bad news: 10.6.2 drops support for the Intel Atom processor. That’s the one found in most netbooks.

Apple essentially slammed the door shut on a loophole that allowed creative users to install OS X on small, light and cheap netbooks from Dell, EEE, HP and Lenovo. Hackers using Mac OS X on up to 20 different Atom-based netbooks will have to stop at Mac OS 10.6.1.

According to Stell’s blog installing Apple’s 10.6.2 update causes netbooks to permanently hang at the gray Apple logo at boot – essentially bricking the machine. Here’s a video of a MSI Wind U100 trying to boot 10.6.2 that is stuck in a continuous reboot.

It’s a bummer, but I can’t say that Apple didn’t didn’t give us any warning. On November 2 Apple suddenly dropped support for the Atom processor in a developer build of 10.6.2 only to restore it again in build 10C535 three days later. The release version of 10.6.2 is build 10B504.

Apple’s assault on the netbook is shaping up to be a classic game of cat-and-mouse with the hackintosh community, not unlike Cupertino’s recent fued with the Palm Pre and iPhone jailbreakers. The Hymn Project is another classic example of Apple’s Spy vs. Spy tactics

If you’re a hackintosh wielding daredevil you’ll to have to stick with 10.6.1 on your Dell Mini 9, Vostro A90 or Eee 1000H until a workaround comes along.

If you’re looking for the performance of a MacBook Pro without the Pro price, then you’re going to like Apple’s newly updated MacBook.

The MacBook, unveiled with updates to the iMac and Mini lines last month, is still priced at $999 — $200 less than the 13-in. aluminum-clad MacBook Pro. But compared to the model it replaces, Apple’s latest entry-level portable delivers an updated architecture, a beefier hard drive and a higher-quality screen.

The biggest change from the old model is the redesigned plastic housing, which is created using Apple’s “unibody” manufacturing process. While still encased in the shiny white plastic that has been the hallmark of the line for years, Apple’s latest MacBook forgoes the boxy look in favor of flowing lines, swooping angles and a precision fit.

The end result is a solid laptop that feels sculpted instead of assembled and has the processing power users need.

New curves, updated hardware

Not only is it curvier, but the MacBook now weighs in at 4.7 pounds — 0.2 pounds lighter than before. It’s still just over an inch thick when closed.

The screen size is the same, 13.3 inches, with a native resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. But the new model features an LED backlight, improving the picture dramatically. It’s brighter and offers a better viewing angle from side to side than its predecessor, minimizing color. The contrast ratio is the same as the pricier MacBook Pro, although the Pro screens have a 60% greater color gamut and a glass display.

Speaking of glass, the redesigned MacBook now features the larger glass-coated multi-touch trackpad found in the MacBook Pro and Air models. This trackpad offers support for the two-, three- and four-finger gestures Apple has popularized in its other laptops, and they work just as well here.

Internally, the MacBook has much in common with the low-end MacBook Pro. Both feature a 64-bit 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3MB of on-chip shared L2 cache running at the same speed as the processor, 2GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM, and a 1066MHz frontside bus. (You can double the RAM to 4GB for $100.)

Video is provided by the Nvidia 9400M graphics processor, which borrows 256MB from main memory for video RAM but still supports OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch. Those two technologies in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard allow the GPU to be used in concert with the main processor

For users planning video chats, the MacBook has the now-common iSight camera built into the bezel above the display. And, as in the previous model, the MacBook’s ports are all located on the left side, with the optical drive on the right.

In addition to the Magsafe power adapter (which looks more like the Air’s magnetic plug than those that come with Pro models), the MacBook offers gigabit Ethernet, a Mini DisplayPort, two USB 2.0 ports, a single port for audio in/out, and a slot for a hardware lock. Apple has now consolidated the audio in and out ports, and the MacBook will work with an iPhone headset that has a built-in microphone.

With this version, however, Apple dropped the FireWire port. For most people, USB 2.0 is fine for connecting external drives and digital cameras. But if you have a FireWire 800 peripheral that you absolutely have to use, you might have to step up to the MacBook Pro.

The stock hard drive holds 250GB of data and spins at 5,400 rpm. It represents a nice bump from the 160GB drive on the previous model, but if you need even more room for your files, you can upgrade to a 320GB model (for $50 more) or a 500GB drive (for an extra $150). Too bad none of those is a 7,200-rpm drive or a solid-state drive. Either would offer a speed boost, but likely conflicts with Apple’s effort to keep prices down.

Rounding out the feature list are 802.11n-based Wi-Fi networking, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and the now-standard, slot-loading SuperDrive that reads and writes to both CDs and DVDs.

A new report from OTR Global says Apple plans to release a UMTS/CDMA hybrid iPhone in the third quarter of 2010. If true, the new iPhone will play nice with Verizon’s network and spell an end to AT&T’s exclusivity contract in the U.S. — which is already slated to end sometime next year.

The report also notes the new phone has a 2.8-inch screen and smaller body, which is consistent with photos that surfaced on iLounge last June. The device would be manufactured by Taiwan-based Asustek subsidiary Pegatron.

A “worldmode” iPhone would be a colossal win for Apple. The device could support any major carrier worldwide. Apple wouldn’t need to sell different versions of the iPhone to support different networks, and would most likely see a huge increase in sales.

This news could be bad for AT&T, which has been snubbed by Apple and users alike for poor coverage, dropped calls, delayed MMS support, and lack of tethering.

The OTR report says Verizon and Apple have already reached an agreement to sell the new iPhone next year, despite Verizon’s recent advertising attacks on the iPhone.

Of course, switching to Verizon might solve some issues with poor coverage and dropped calls, but users might have to fork out an additional $30 a month for a 5GB monthly “unlimited” tethering plan and $15 a month for exchange service.