Mike Daisey is making headlines with The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stirring monologue about his love of Apple and disappointment with working conditions in Apple's supplier factories. Daisey's monologue details his trip to China and his time with workers from Foxconn's Shenzhen plant. If you want to read the monologue yourself, you can now do so at Mike Daisey's website.

The well-known storyteller released the text of his performance under an open license which lets you not only download the passage, but perform the work yourself. Daisey writes that his work "may be performed by anyone, anywhere, royalty free."

The text is moving, but it doesn't compare to a live show which infuses energy and emotion into the words. Our own Mike Rose attended one of Daisey's performances, and you can read about his impressions in an earlier post. Now that the text is available to the public, I look forward to derivative works which capture a different aspect of this stirring account.

[Via The Verge]

Mike Daisey's Steve Jobs monologue available under an open license originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple started selling albums from The Beatles last year and now the company has released a set of ringtones taken from the band's most popular albums. The selections span a wide range of titles including early titles like A Hard Day's Night and later tracks like the 1970 chart-topper Let It Be.

You can buy the ringtones from the iTunes app using your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Each ringtone is US$1.29 or you can grab the 1 collection for $12.99 which has 27 ringtones from the band's twelve studio albums and 22 singles.

[Via ipodnn]

iTunes offers first Beatles ringtones originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ziggurat is a fascinating little iPhone game. It's technically a shooter, but the controls are unlike any shooter I've ever seen. The idea is that the human race is almost over, and one lone figher stands atop a pyramid, under attack from robots on all sides. Playing as this solitary fighter, you must destory the incoming robots.

The game offers two methods of firing the weapon: "Precision Mode" and "Slingshot Mode." Precision Mode has you drag a finger across the bottom of the screen to calculate the firing angle, and then tap to charge and fire. In Slingshot Mode, which is easier but less interesting, you simply drag off of the middle of the screen to both aim and charge, as if using an imaginary slingshot on top of the ziggurat.

The enemies vary in size and movement styles, keeping things interesting. Given that every game eventually ends in failure, there's a surprising amount of variety here. The graphics are in a well-done pixel style, and the chiptune music sets a post-apocalyptic mood (with a frightening 8-bit scream when the last human gives up the ghost).

Ziggurat's an interesting bite of a game on the App Store. It's worth the 99 cents just to see how it all works. I don't know that these weird controls would work on any other game for as long, but all of the polish and extra style go a long way in this case.

Daily iPad App: Ziggurat adds new controls to the shooter tradition originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The ShopBot is a sort of an electronic saw, a special setup designed to do some computer-aided cutting and carving work on big planks of board. It's quite useful for woodworking or making things like skateboards or surfboards. Odds are that you don't have one, but nevertheless, just such a device was used to make the plank above, a very basic but still elegant iPhone-powered boombox. I think this is a great idea, though it might be a little more hard to do than a lot of DIY projects.

Fortunately, you don't really need a ShopBot to make a boombox similar to this one. You could still follow these instructions, substituting a body created in some other way for the ShopBot board, and use the iPhone dock connector, speaker, and battery pack to serve as the various innards. You can buy plenty of docks that do exactly the same thing, but I like the idea of making one as a DIY project; you can probably build something that matches your own tastes and does practically everything any dock off the shelf will do for you.

Maybe this will spark some ideas out there. If you do think of (and make) something cool, definitely let us know.

DIY iPhone boombox built with a ShopBot originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Japanese Mac site Macotakara notes that the Japanese version of iTunes has been updated with a "Purchased" tab via iTunes in the Cloud, which also suggests that Apple is about to launch an official version of iTunes Match in Japan.

iCloud has been up and running in Japan for some time, but only for sharing books and information across apps. iTunes in the Cloud will allow Apple's Japanese users to access purchased songs from the iTunes Store on any of their devices, and iTunes Match will allow users to "match" their music to iTunes Store for additional functionality.

iTunes in the Cloud has reportedly already gone live in Japan, and it seems like Apple is on the brink of releasing iTunes Match in Japan. That could possibly mean that other new international markets aren't far behind.

Apple reportedly readying iTunes Match for Japan originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

We don't usually cover every single update that arrives on the App Store, simply because there are so many apps out there and so many developers working hard all the time. But a number of very popular apps have updated recently, so here's a few big apps with lots of new content to see.

The official Twitter app has been updated, specifically the iPhone version. The update allows you to use swipes to gesture around the app, copy and paste the links and text in actual tweets, and many other performance improvements and polishes. It's not a huge update, but it's worth downloading when it shows up in your iTunes or App Store update screen (though let me tell you, if you haven't experienced Tweetbot yet, you're missing out on a great alternative to the official app).

Cut the Rope Experiments has gotten its Bath Time update, with 25 new levels, a new playable character, new achievements, and a new leaderboard to play with. It's a solid and highly anticipated update.

Zach Gage's great SpellTower word game is getting a big update, which will include both a new multiplayer option and a few other game modes. Multiplayer will work across different iOS devices, too, so you can play with an iPad against players on iPhone, or vice versa.

SpellCraft: School of Magic is getting updated to version 1.1 later this week (never mind -- it's out right now). It's a big update for the freemium title that adds lots of new customization options and spells, a healing spell that players can actually grow and craft (so they don't need to use or buy potions all the time), and a new plant that translates directly into gold. There are also some performance improvements and bug fixes included as well.

That's four great apps made even better by their developers. If you've purchased them in the past, download away.

Twitter app, Cut the Rope, SpellTower, SpellCraft School of Magic all updated originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In case you haven't seen it yet, the fourth episode of Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" series went live in mid-February on Ferguson's site. As in the previous three episodes in the series, Ferguson examines modern attitudes toward "intellectual property" and how these attitudes rather counterintuitively stifle creativity rather than fostering it.

Part 4 of "Everything is a Remix" deals largely with the contentious subject of software patents, a subject we've covered many times here at TUAW. According to Ferguson, 62 percent of all patent lawsuits are now over software patents, and he estimates the total wealth "lost" (read: siphoned off from "infringing" companies and individuals towards patent holders and their lawyers) at half a trillion dollars.

Apple has found itself on both sides of the software patent trench warfare, as both target and aggressor. Ferguson makes it pretty obvious that Apple is just as guilty of hypocrisy as everyone else when it comes to software patents; he points out that Steve Jobs from 1996 proudly stated "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas," while Steve Jobs from 2010 said he was going to "destroy Android, because it's a stolen product" and was "willing to go thermonuclear war" on Google and its allegedly copycat product.

As Ferguson points out, "When we copy, we justify it. When others copy, we vilify it. Most of us have no problem with copying as long as we're the ones doing it."

The question remains, however, where to draw the line between copying as a necessary portion of innovation and copying as an admission of a failure to innovate. Some might say all Samsung has done with its many riffs on Apple's products is "remix" the iPad and iPhone, but even after viewing Ferguson's series I'm not wholly convinced of that.

On the other hand, Apple itself has long been accused of "copying" innovations at Xerox PARC for the first Mac OS -- something Ferguson himself addressed in an earlier episode of his series -- so the demarcation between "remix" and "shameless knockoff" isn't always easy to find.

Ferguson's entire series is very well put together, and is itself only possible because of the very "remixing" he discusses. If you haven't caught the earlier episodes, I'd highly recommend setting aside an hour to watch all four parts back-to-back.

'Everything is a Remix' examines software patents originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I'm always looking for apps that are on sale, but there are too many apps and too many sales for one person to reasonably browse without any help. While searching for a way to track sales, I found App Deals, an app that showcases daily deals on popular apps.

App Deals is made by Appsfire, a platform that helps users discover mobile applications. The app sorts titles into free apps, top free apps, and apps with price drops. Each group is then organized by App Store category like games, utilities, productivity, and entertainment. You can also personalize your stream if you would rather see Photo & Video apps instead of games. There's also an option to add in iPad apps as well.

The best part of App Deals is the ability to favorite apps that you spot on sale and view them later. So many times, I have seen an app that I like, but don't want to buy it right away. Then, I forget about it. The App Deals app lets you save these titles and retrieve them in the "Me" section of the app. This area also lists the recent apps you've viewed and those apps you have visited in the App Store.

App Deals is available for free from the iOS App Store. It's a universal app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Daily iPhone App: App Deals helps you score an app while it's on sale originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.