The iPad is now available for purchase and iPad sales figures are available for loose speculation! Microsoft phone fans find themselves in familiar territory and what’s that Braying sound?

Mis-lede-ing

After the Macalope’s romp through the worst of technology journalism last week, the iPad launch brought out some more “don’ts” this week. Take this piece, which chooses to accentuate the negative about the iPad’s apparently successful pre-order launch:

Apple iPad orders drop sharply

After the initial burst of excitement on Friday that saw iPad pre-orders coming in at the rate of 25,000 per hour, there was a dramatic fall-off over the weekend.

No way! You mean pent-up demand was actually pent-up? What’s up with that?!

On the flip side of the coin, The Wall Street Journal choose to serve up its prime real estate to undisclosed sources.

Since the iPad became available for pre-order last Friday, Apple has seen strong demand and sold hundreds of thousands of units, say people familiar with the matter. One of these people said Apple could sell more iPads in the first three months than it sold iPhones in the three months after the smart phone’s debut.

So, someone, probably from Apple or a partner, said the company could sell more iPads in the first three months than it sold iPhones. Off the record. WOW!

It would be a very positive sign for the iPad if Apple were able to do that and the supposed initial sales figures certainly make that a possibility, though it's worth noting those figures are pulled from places not precisely designed for such a purpose. But color the Macalope brown and unimpressed with off-the-record comments from people with a vested interest in pumping up the platform.

Read more…

Have you ever worried what could be learned about your Internet habits just by taking a look at the information that your browser leaves on your hard drive?

Luckily, you won't have to, thanks to Intego's Washing Machine 2. The newly-updated application that scrubs your disk clean of any leftovers—compromising or not—that could potentially give away what you're doing when you're lost among the Internet tubes.

According to a press release by Intego, Washing Machine 2 is capable of cleaning up five different types of items: bookmarks, caches, cookies, download histories, and browsing histories. It is compatible with most Web browsers and other Internet-connected applications (like QuickTime), and even supports the selective deletion of data based on whitelists that you define.

Even if paranoia is not your bag of beans, Washing Machine can still be of use—all that information sits on your hard drive, eating precious space that could otherwise be put to productive use and slowing down your backups.

Washing Machine 2 is compatible with OS X 10.5 and 10.6 and is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish for $20 from the Intego website.

Jerome York, a member of Apple's board of directors, has passed away. York had been hospitalized Wednesday after suffering a brain aneurysm.

Apple announced York's death in a statement on its Website.

York, a member of Apple's board of directors for 13 years, also served as the chairman, president, and CEO of Harwinton Capital.

“Jerry joined Apple’s Board in 1997 when most doubted the company’s future," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement released by the company. "He has been a pillar of financial and business expertise and insight on our Board for over a dozen years. It’s been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I’m going to miss him a lot.”

Born in 1938, York studied as an engineer. Early in his career, he worked for General Motors, and later for Ford. Over the course of 14 years with Chrysler, he eventually rose through the ranks to the position of CFO. After leaving the automotive industry, in 1993 York was hired by IBM as CFO and joined its Board of Directors.

According to Apple, York “is widely acknowledged for his contributions at Chrysler and IBM during their turnarounds.”

Smartphone manufacturer HTC fired back at Apple on Wednesday, saying that it “disagrees” with the legal actions Apple has taken. Earlier this month, Apple sued Taiwan-based HTC over alleged infringement of intellectual property. HTC, of course, was quick to respond that it had its own patent library and one of its chief software partners, Google, weighed in on its behalf.

In a statement on HTC’s Website, CEO Peter Chou had strong words for Apple:

HTC disagrees with Apple’s actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible.

Chou goes on to tout HTC’s history of innovation, from the 1999 release of the first 3.5-inch color touch screen smartphone in the U.S—the T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition—through the first Google Android smartphone, the T-Mobile G1, in October 2008.

At issue in the legal action, which takes the form of both a U.S. District Court case and an investigation by the U.S. International Trade Commission, are 20 patents related to both software and hardware. HTC, however, only manufactures hardware for smartphones, which run either the Windows Mobile or Android operating systems.

As HTC manufactures a large number of Android phones, including Google’s own Nexus One handset, many believe that Apple’s true aim is disrupting Google, with whom it’s had an increasing rivalry. However, to all outward appearances, the two remain allies.

After months of anticipation, Amazon on Wednesday night released a beta of Kindle for Mac, software that lets you read Kindle e-books without the need for any special hardware (say, a Kindle). The free app for OS X 10.5 or later is available now in more than 100 countries, and joins the ranks of Kindle for iPhone, Kindle for PC, and Kindle for Blackberry.

As with other Kindle products, the Kindle for Mac app uses Amazon’s Whispersync technology to synchronize your bookmarks and current place in your book across all supported devices. However, Kindle for Mac is in beta, and at the moment it doesn’t support full text search, highlighting, or creating and editing notes (though it will display notes and highlighting you’ve already made in your e-book elsewhere). Amazon promises these features in a future update.

Interestingly, in the official press release, Amazon says people will soon be able to read Kindle books on iPads. Of course Kindle for iPhone should be able to run on the iPad, but it sounds like Amazon’s hinting that an optimized Kindle for iPad is in the works.

Fancy a bundle? MacUpdate has announced the release of its Promo Spring Bundle 2010, which includes 10 different Mac apps for the low, low price of $50.

The star attraction of this offering, clearly, is the popular virtualization software Parallels Desktop 5 ($80; ), which by itself retails for almost twice the cost of the entire bundle. You could put the money you save towards buying a copy of Windows to run alongside OS X.

Even if virtualization is not your thing, however, there is plenty left to like in the bundle; Bee Docs’ Timeline 3D ($65) lets you create cool-looking 3D timelines, while Hydra ($80) helps manage HDR pictures with ease and Mac DVDRipper Pro ($10), as its name subtly implies, can help you copy DVDs to your hard drive for easy viewing.

In the productivity category, the bundle includes Rainmaker Research’s all-in-one spelling solution Spell Catcher X ($40) and file versioning software Forever Save ($15), as well as Back In Time ($30) and Hyperspaces ($13), which augment the built-in functionality of Time Machine and Spaces respectively. Web page screenshot generator Web Snapper ($15) and security scanner MacScan ($30) round up the package, bringing its total value to more than $400.

As a bonus, the first 10,000 buyers also get a copy of Metakine’s $49 DVDRemaster Pro thrown in.

The bundle is available directly from the MacUpdate Website, but only until March 31st. The company is also offering a six-month subscription to its MacUpdate Desktop application, which monitors software installed on a computer for updates, as an add-on to the bundle for $4.

The MacUpdate bundle joins recent bundles from MacHeist, The Mac Sale, and The MacBundles.

Remember Apple’s iWork.com? The free service, which debuted in beta form at last year’s Macworld Expo, let users share their iWork files for viewing, commentary, and downloading by others. Of course, it didn’t actually let you edit those hosted files and the service as a whole hasn't really caught on. But after a year of little movement on the project, the company released several new features on Tuesday.

The features are again designed primarily for sharing and displaying documents—there’s still no option to edit someone else’s files—but it opens up more possibilities. Previously, to share a document, you had to either select a specific e-mail address (or set of addresses) to send them a custom password to access iWork.com. If you wanted to send an “open” document, you had to know to leave the e-mail field blank. Now, you can select Apple’s new “public link” feature to send a document to your entire office or elsewhere (to Twitter, for example) and you no longer need to go through the invitation process. However, if you want someone’s feedback on the piece, you’re going to want to stick with the password option, as people who follow a public link cannot add comments or notes.

Apple is also touting support for Safari on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch—which, considering prominent featuring of iWork for the iPad, isn't exactly a shock—and an improved Shared Documents page. To take advantage of some of these features, Apple does recommend you be running the latest version of iWork.

And if you decide to try out this newest iteration, don’t forget to tell Apple what you thought. After all, if the company wants feedback, it can’t hurt to drop a hint or two about online document-editing along the way.

The distinctive nature of Apple CEO Steve Jobs has always made him a ripe target for satire. Over the years, he’s been lampooned blatantly on sketch shows Saturday Night Live and MADtv as well as more subtly on shows like 30 Rock and Chuck. Now cable channel Epix is taking Jobs-inspired entertainment to a whole new level: the sitcom.

The New York Times reports that Epix and Media Rights Capital have teamed up to produce the half-hour show, billed as a satire about “a fictional Silicon Valley CEO whose ego is a study in power and greed.” Before you object that such a vague premise could be based on any number of executives in the tech industry, you might want to consider two things: first, the series will be written by Newsweek contributor Dan Lyons—better known as Fake Steve Jobs—and second, it's titled iCon.

I know: totally about Larry Ellison, right?

Overseeing the show is Larry Charles, a writer and producer on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm as well as director of Sacha Baron Cohen vehicles Borat and Brüno. Charles described the show as “nothing less than a modern Citizen Kane” showing that, if nothing else, he’s already mastered a Jobs-like talent for hyperbole.

Jobs is notoriously prickly about how he’s portrayed in the media. At one extreme, Apple infamously pulled all titles by publisher Wiley from its store shelves after the company released a book called iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (no relation to the TV show). On the flipside, after Noah Wyle portrayed the Apple co-founder in the 1999 TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, Jobs invited the actor to reprise his role at that year’s Macworld Expo keynote.

Which path will iCon take? Since Epix isn’t currently airing any original shows (its first is due out this year), it can at least take solace in the fact that there’s nothing for Apple to pull from the iTunes Store.

I was on an airplane Monday afternoon, so I missed what is doubtlessly the talk of elite Mac users this week—a pair of printer driver updates released by Apple.

You mean printer driver updates aren’t the talk among the elite Mac users you hang out with? Man, I’ve got to start hanging out with a livelier group.

Nevertheless, printer drivers are necessary, if not exactly spine-tingling, so owners of Samsung and Brother printers will doubtlessly want to download Samsung Printer Drivers for Mac OS X v10.6 and Brother Printer Drivers for Mac OS X v10.6, respectively. The former is a 23.25MB download that includes Samsung printing software that shipped with Snow Leopard, while the latter is a 100.02MB file with the latest Brother printing and scanning software for OS X 10.6.1 and later.

How to tell if your printer model is supported by this pair of updates? Follow Apple’s handy links to see a list of supported Samsung and Brother hardware.

The MacBundles has put a new spin on the now well established software bundling promotion. In addition to offering the usual “batch of a dozen software titles for $50,” the MacBundles has created a BYOB (Build Your Own Bundle) option that lets you customize the package.

The standard March bundle includes Cashculator (a personal finance app), CrossOver Games (a game-oriented virtualization platform), DVDpedia (a movie cataloger), PrintMagic (a printer manager), HoudahGeo (a geotagging tool for photos), HoudahSpot (a file searching assistant), Image Framer (an image framing design app), MainMenu (an OS performance and maintenance tool), Punakea (a file manager), Berokyo (a desktop organizer), Brush Pilot (a brush-preview tool for Adobe applications), and Master Key (a typing tutorial).

The BYOB option lets you pick from these twelve titles, plus a few others. You must select a minimum of ten at a price of $5 a piece. That means you can skip the software you already own.

The MacBundles touts the fact that it offers a 30-day guarantee. So if you suffer from buyers’ remorse, you can get your money back. Both the standard bundle and customized version are available until April 12. Be aware that some of the apps require an Intel Mac and OS X 10.5 or higher.