The latest rumour reads like it’s August all over again, but it does have one particularly disappointing aspect. According to the source, the iPod touch camera will match the not-so-hot quality of the nano’s.

Here’s to hoping the engineers can somehow stuff the iPhone’s camera into an iPod Touch. Sure, there’s not much space to work with in the Touch, but we can believe. [The Examiner via 9 to 5 Mac]

According to separate reports from different parts of the country, Apple denied coverage for two users in 2008 based on the fact that OSHA lists cigarette smoke as a biohazard. Both techs refused service to the computers not because the smoke damaged them, but because it’s considered hazardous to a tech’s health to work on a contaminated unit.

Both owners tried to appeal their cases, even going all the way up to Steve Jobs. Unlike this guy, they weren’t as lucky.

These are just two isolated incidents though, and in the comments at Consumerist some smokers are reporting having no trouble getting their computers serviced by Apple. It appears to be on a case-by-case basis, not a hard-set policy. Any smokers out there ever run into trouble getting Apple to repair hardware? [Consumerist via Slashdot]

We still don’t know what the fabled Apple Tablet actually looks like, or if it even exists, really, but this concept magazine reader from Condé Nast gives us a glimpse at what to expect from tablet apps.

Turn down your volume before hitting play, loud techno music awaits. Down? OK, good. Now let’s look at what we’ve got here. It’s about what you would expect from a tablet magazine reader. The big screen lets you soak in the magazine layout without zooming, and the graphics are big and interactive. In a nutshell, it looks like a hi-res iPhone app.

According to the source, Condé Nast doesn’t want to take any chances, and the app is a precautionary measure to make sure they’re ready if/when the device comes out. So don’t take this to mean that launch is imminent. Take it as a sign that even if the tablet doesn’t exist, it should, because a lot of huge publishing companies are more than willing to throw their weight behind it. [Wired]

In 2007 I whined and whined asking for an iPhone Software Developer’s Kit. Back then I asked for five apps. It took two years, but today I’ve got them all. The last one just came in yesterday.

It’s not Voice Candy, but Voices looks as good, if not better: Retro tape recorder and microphone, cute icons, simple touch interface, and sharing via Twitter, Facebook and email, so you can spook everyone with that infernal Reverse Voice effect. For $1.19, it’s impossible to resist.

[iTunes App Store — Thanks Juanlu ]

Are you still missing a favourite?

Veronica Belmont, of Tekzilla/Mahalo/BOL fame/general video on the internet fame, sees Apple finally going ahead with that Courier concept Microsoft keeps dragging their feet on. Or Apple subsumes Microsoft entirely. What do you know, Belmont?

BoingBoing’s/MAKE’s Mark Frauenfelder goes as DIY-y as is humanly possible and projects a future in which Apple is just a bunch of dudes with Arduinos and a pair of pliers. You see, we’ll just buy Apple’s designs, and your iMake object printer will print them out.

Brian Lam, Man With Hat, just wants his iPhone to get reception in San Francisco, for once. Hence, bunny hears.

There are a couple more, and they’re all in the same whimsical, not-quite-serious vein. Check them out at: [Maclife]

There’s certainly always opportunities for improvement. There is a group of people with whom our market share is less. You take any country, including this one, and you say, how are we doing? The truth of the matter is, we do quite well. Even among college students, we do quite well. Do we have an opportunity for improvement? We do. Some of that is marketing some of that is phase of life.

It is important to remember that 96 times out of 100 worldwide, people choose a PC with Windows, that’s a good thing. Even in the toughest market, which would be the high end of the consumer market here in the US, 83 times out of 100 people choose a Windows PC over a Mac.

Ballmer also remarked that Apple has gained a few “couple of tenths of a per cent of market share”, but when the audience chuckled, he was prompted to correct them:

Every couple of tenths matter. They matter when we’re increasing our Bing market share, too.

Ooooooh, you are good, Mr Ballmer, you are good. There were many other piercing questions about the iPhone, Android. Check them out at: [Techflash]

They promised it last week, and now they’ve delivered: Atom support is back, although apparently implementing the fix isn’t the easiest project. Still, the ball’s in Apple’s court now. Is this going to turn into a Palm Pre-iTunes thing, or will Apple just let it lie? [Yahoo]

Here’s the letter he sent:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

My name is John Devor and I’m the co-owner of a small Mac shareware company named The Little App Factory and a long-term Apple customer and shareholder. I doubt you’re aware but we recently received a letter from a law firm working on Apple’s behalf instructing us that we had violated several of Apple’s trademarks in our application iPodRip and asking us to cease using the name and Apple trademarks in our icons.

We have been distributing iPodRip since 2003 with the aim of providing a method to recover music, movies and photos from iPods and iPhones in the event of a serious hardware failure on their Mac which leads to data loss. Our goal has been to provide the highest quality product coupled with the highest quality service in a bid to resolve some of the angst that is generated by such an ordeal; service befitting of an Apple product. In this department we think we have succeeded as we have approximately 6 million customers, many Apple employees, music artists and other notable people in society. In fact I’d argue that our customer service is the best of all competing applications in our niche as many of them are scams and frauds that leave Apple customers with a terrible taste in their collective mouths. We fear very much that tens of thousands of Apple customers looking to recover their own music and having heard of our product via word-of-mouth or otherwise, will instead find a product produced by one of our competitors, and will wind up the victim of a scam (one closely-named competitor charges a hidden monthly fee, for instance).

It is quite obvious that we mean Apple no harm with the use of the name iPodRip, or of the inclusion of trademarked items in our icons, and in fact I believe that we have been providing an excellent secondary service to Apple customers that has potentially caused you many repeat clients. In fact, we are quite aware that Apple support and store staff have recommended our software on numerous occasions as far back as 2004 so we have felt that we were doing something right!

With this in mind, we are in desperate need of some assistance and we beseech you to help us to protect our product and our shareware company, both of which we have put thousands upon thousands of hours of work into. Our company goal is to create Mac software of the highest quality with the best user experience possible. I myself dropped out of school recently to pursue a path in the Mac software industry, and you yourself have been a consistent inspiration for me.

If there is anything at all you can do with regards to this matter, we would be most grateful.

Best,

John Devor

And Steve replied:

Change your apps [sic] name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

So they changed the name of their app to iRip. Fair enough! [CrunchGear]

The Japanese maple in Jeff Dauber’s San Francisco backyard is not at the centre of a carbon-sucking vortex. Sorry, sci-fi fans, but the Berkeley-based architect Thom Faulders’s perfectly flat deck only looks like its far corner has its own warped gravity. Ever since Francesco Borromini’s Gallery Spada, in Rome, forced perspectives and architectural patronage have gone hand in hand, but whereas the Renaissance architect employed a mathematician to make that arcade seem longer through foreshortening, Faulders used 3-D–modelling software to achieve Deformscape’s dipping effect.

“I wanted someone to barf when they look at it,” says Dauber

So Dauber serves guests burgers on the built-in grill only to get a perverse satisfaction when they puke it up later on. Nice. But the weirdness doesn’t end there. Faulders also designed much of the interior space of the home, turning it into a bachelor pad/art gallery with crazy walls and ceilings that appear to undulate. Needless to say, if you suffer from motion sickness don’t hang out with this man. [Metropolis via Fast Company]