Today, Apple launched a new RSS feed for iPhone Developers, promising updates, tips and how-to information on a range of relevant topics — from development to distribution.
The idea is to keep iPhone devs on top of the ever-shifting highways and byways of getting an app on iTunes, including:
— Tips for submitting apps to the App Store
— Current turnaround time for app reviews
— Program updates
— Development and testing techniques
With complaint sites over rejections and possible scams growing along with the astronomical app sales, something needed to be done to get better info in a timely fashion to devs.
The first few headlines look promising (see below) it remains to be seen whether the RSS will be another reality distortion field emanator…
It took them eight months, but the planning commission in Cupertino granted Apple permission to rezone a nearly 8-acre property to expand the company’s campus.
Apple asked for the rezoning last year after purchasing the property back in 2006.
Check out Steve Jobs’ addressing the city council about Apple’s growing pains resulting in far-flung employees they considered leaving the town to reunite — keeping it soft until the end when he can’t help but mention that Apple is the largest local taxpayer. Council members make lots of kissy-kissy noises, but they didn’t reach a consensus.
The 7.78-acre property on Pruneridge Avenue, south of the Hewlett-Packard campus, houses two office buildings currently occupied by Apple employees.
The buildings were already on the property from the site’s industrial days. Before Apple purchased the property in 2006, the city rezoned the industrial site to residential in anticipation of a 130-unit townhouse and condominium project that previous property owners Morley Brothers had proposed.
It should be no surprise to anyone that the newest iMacs catapulted to the top of the sales charts when Apple released them in October. But just in case you have any bets going on the matter comes sweet analyst confirmation: Apple computers topped the list of the most popular machines sold at retail in October, according to the NPD Group. Gentlemen, collect your outstanding beers and pony rides.
(A meaty smack of the palm on the expanse of forehead above the pineal gland, and then the hand trails downward to shield the eyes, as if from a bright light, leaving only the grim rictus of a man self-repulsed still exposed. “Oh, jeez, thanks, Apple!” the blogger says. “Now I look like an idiot!”)
In addition to offering the new processor configuration, Apple has also expanded the hard drive space, now offering up to 8TB of storage in the Mac Pro, spread evenly between four hard drive bays. And while the quad-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro will add another $1,200.00 to the price of your machine, the 8TB of hard drive space is now standard.
While they were at it, Apple’s Xserves also got a bit of a beef-up, with the hard drive options again being expanded to 6TB across three hard drive bays. They’ve also updated their build-to-order RAM options on the Xserve, offering 4GB RAM modules which double the capacity of the quad-core Xserve to 24GB and the octuple-core Xserve to 48GB. Apple also states that the X-Serves will support up to 96GB of RAM under Snow Leopard, so 8GB RAM modules should work in these machines.
Despite the rumor of a dual Intel Core i9 Mac Pro configuration making a lot of sense (my guess is we’ll still see it at some point), Apple needed to patch the Mac Pro quick if they didn’t want the highest-end Core i7 iMacs cannibalizing sales, due to the latter machine’s superior price-to-performance ratio. A slight bump to the CPU frequency is a swift and easy patch to make while Apple looks into a more drastic refresh… although it also resets the countdown timer to the next Mac Pro refresh. My guess is we’ll see the Core i9 Mac Pros sometime early next year.
Harry McCracken at Technologizer is worried that Apple’s rumored purchase of Lala could be the best thing for iTunes – or the worst.
Harry has been testing LaLa’s as-yet-unreleased iPhone app, and it’s just like iTunes in the cloud. The app streams your iTunes music collection to wherever you are, plus you can buy new songs for a dime (well, streams of new songs).
“…all of a sudden, the iPhone’s relatively skimpy memory isn’t nearly as much of an issue, since you can stream all the music you’ve got in iTunes on a PC or Mac to your phone. You can also listen to and buy songs from Lala’s 8-million song store. It’s all surprisingly fast for a streaming service, and it even caches recent music you’ve listened to so you’re not completely out of luck if you don’t have an Internet connection.”
Harry is in love, and hopes that Apple will roll Lala’s functionality into iTunes if Apple buys the company. But he’s also worried that Apple may be buying Lala to kill it — it’s a competitive threat to iTunes.
Over at Silicon Alley Insider, the same notion is implicit in a quote from an industry insider who says LaLa’s licenses are non-transferable:
One industry source with years of experience in the digital music business is very surprised by the apparent deal. “I would be completely shocked,” he says. “None of the licenses are transferrable (not that Apple has a hard time getting licenses). Why would they buy it? Again, I’d be shocked.”
Thing is, as far as I know, Apple has no history of buying companies to shut them down. Anyone know any examples? And as Elliot Van Buskirk at Wired points out, Apple does have a history of buying companies to kickstart new products. Apple’s iTunes was based on SoundJam.
In addition, as we reported in August, Apple is building a one of the world’s largest data centers in North Carolina. Given it’s enormous size, the new data center is likely to focus on cloud computing, perhaps hosting services like Lala’s for Apple’s giant iTunes customer base.
Spot the difference between photographer James Duncan Davidson ‘s iconic photo of the of the first iPhone — snapped at Macwolrd Expo in 2007 — and Verizon’s new ad for the Droid smartphone. Says the snapper:
“I’m kinda speechless right now and I’m not quite sure what to think of it. Whoa.”
Steve Jobs quietly advised the One Laptop per Child project, founder Nicholas Negroponte said at the University of Pennsylvania yesterday.
Said Negroponte:
“I got an email from Steve Jobs (the night the laptop was revealed) he said you can’t build it for a hundred dollars, and my answer was oh yes I can. He was actually a very good critic, and each time we got to a point, I did talk to him.”
Of course, Jobs was right (Gizmodo reviewed the OLPC and concluded it was “a piece of shit”) but at least he tried to help, unlike Microsoft. Negraponte said Microsoft tried to “thwart” the project at several turns.
Jobs has a reputation as a bastard. And there’s no public record of philanthropic efforts (if any) but this shows he at least has a little bit of heart.
First Verizon snubbed AT&T’s 3G coverage in a snarky “There’s A Map for That” advertisement. Then they called the iPhone a Misfit Toy thanks to AT&T’s spotty 3G network. AT&T got hysterical about it, going to court to get the “false and misleading” ads removed from the air. Verizon’s breezy response: “The Truth Hurts.”
Now it looks like the little purse fight between the nation’s two largest cell providers is at an end: both Verizon and AT&T filed for an official dismissal of the case in an Atlanta federal court yesterday. Verizon also asked for their counter-suit against AT&T to be dismissed.
It’s hard to think of a more forward thinking bunch of visionaries than the true pioneers of the fastly changing frontiers of technology: hard core pornographers.
Time after time — Betamax, VHS, Laser Discs, DVD, Blu-Ray and the Internet — pornographers are the first to embrace new technology, hoping to add yet another sales channel to their already rich smut peddling arrays. Compare pornographers to industries like the RIAA or MPAA, who are hopeless to embrace new technology that might threaten their old, stagnating business models, and it’s really hard not to think pornographers are one of the few media entities out there who really get tech.
Needless to say, porn would like a piece of the App Store, but Apple’s prudish policies aren’t having any of that. But pornographers are nothing if not ingenious, and a group of them have now launched the Sex App Shop, which the press release heralds as “the world’s first legal alternative to [the App Store],” featuring a wide range of adult content from major labels like Playboy, Vivid, VCA, Wicked Pictures and New Sensation. Apps costs $0.99, and yearly memberships with unlimited downloads is available for $99.
Magazine publishers are drooling at the upcoming Apple tablet because it will allow them to repurpose their content for the digital age with minimal changes — and possibly charge for it.
Wired magazine, for example, has for a long time been trying to find a way to republish the mag digitally — but preserve the layout, especially the splashy ad spreads for advertisers. So the tablet is perfect for them. It’s the mag — on a screen.
Sports Illustrated is the latest magazine to join the fray with a slick-looking demo you can watch above.
It actually looks pretty cool. It’s an interactive magazine that preserves the best of the format — the big pictures, the slick ads — with digital-age multimedia and interactivity. Maybe the tablet will save the mag industry after all?
The Apple Store offers the factory-refurbished Apple Mac mini Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz Desktop, model no. MB463LL/A, for $429 with free shipping. That’s a $70 drop since our October mention and one of the best deals we’ve ever seen for a Mac mini. It features an Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive, two video interfaces (Mini DisplayPort and mini-DVI), five USB 2.0 ports, FireWire 800, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, AirPort Extreme wireless and Bluetooth, and dual layer SuperDrive. A 1-year Apple warranty applies.
At least it’s now quantifiable: AT&T provides the worst cellphone service in the country, according to a recent customer satisfaction poll.
Consumer Reports hit the streets and asked 50,000 readers across 26 cities to rank cell phone service according to voice service, messaging, internet access and customer support. Verizon came out on top, achieving the top two ranks in customer satisfaction in every category. Then came T-Mobile and Sprint.
AT&T? Dead last. Their highest average rating in any service category was total ambivalence, with most categories rated as poor or terrible.
We posted yesterday that Apple and Psystar had reached a partial settlement in their age-old legal conflict over Psystar’s manufacturing and marketing of PCs with OS X pre-installed. The only thing up in the air was exactly how much those Hackintoshing upstarts from Florida would end up having to pay.
Now the number’s out, and it’s not pretty: Psystar has agreed to pay Apple $2.67 million dollars in damages.
They don’t do it often, but when they do, Apple doesn’t like to mess around when it comes to suing other electronics companies for infringing upon their patents and intellectual properties. No, Apple lawsuits tend to end like a round of Mortal Kombat, at least figuratively. Close your eyes and you can mentally transpose Steve Jobs for Sub-Zero; as the judgment comes down, he holds aloft the fluid-spurting spinal column of a defeated opponent while screaming and staring into the sun. The internet then provides the commentary: FATALITY.
Bad news indeed, then, for Media Solutions Holdings, who must already be feeling the twinge of legal lumbar pain. Last week, Apple filed a patent infringement lawsuit against them, claiming that the company is using a host of different websites (such as laptopsforless.com, laptopacadapter.com and ereplacements.com) to sell knock-off MacBook and MacBook Pro MagSafe power adapters.
Even if Leander can’t quite figure out how to use it, the multi-touch capable Magic Mouse is quite a stride forward for Mac owners… especially given Apple’s execrable history of making decent mice. Still, no new piece of gear is without its technological problems. No surprise, then, that the Apple support forums have become the petri dish in which isolated Magic Mouse troubleshooting complaints have been allowed to multiply into a wider culture sample of product failure.
Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington has written a nice essay giving thanks this Thanksgiving — to Steve Jobs.
Arrington rightly points out that our world would be very different if Jobs hadn’t returned to Apple 12 years ago. Mobile phones would still be horrible, computers would still be ugly and the music industry would have collapsed.
“… What would our world look like without him? We’d likely still be in mobile phone hell. Chances are we still wouldn’t have a decent browsing experience on the phone, and we certainly wouldn’t be enjoying third party apps like Pandora or Skype on whatever clunker the carriers handed us. Even if you use an Android, Palm Pre or newer Blackberry today, you must thank Apple for pushing open the doors to mobile freedom. Think back to the phone you had in 2006, and then tell me you don’t love Apple for the iPhone alone (yes, I’ve moved on, but the iPhone was the genesis).”
I’m with Arrington. Let’s give thanks for Steve Jobs.
An iPhone application developer has upped the ante on criticism of Apple’s App Store approval policies with apprejections.com, a website devoted to collating “all the known examples of rejected Apps.”
Adam Martin, CEO of UK-based Red Glasses, makers of three iPhone apps (and a software development start-up with a curiously thin web presence), created the site earlier this month to document and share all known examples of “what is actually rejected” from the App Store — and he pulls no punches in his critique of Apple’s process for deciding which apps and updates make it onto the iTunes App Store.
“Apple has a secret, undocumented, unquestionable, random process for deciding which applications to “allow” onto the deck,” claims Martin on the site. Ironically, his own BrainGame Summation (iTunes link) app had an update rejected this week for using a common workaround to bugs in the official Apple APIs; the worrkaround previously appeared to pose no approval problems but has apprently been the basis for several recent rejections.
“Apple point-blank refuses to document the criteria – or even to discuss the matter on anything except a case-by-case basis,” Martin writes, though he does allow that “in most cases, rejections [are] perfectly reasonable, and/or Apple had officially warned developers “don’t do this; we won’t allow it”.
But the site does take App Store gatekeepers to task for being, among other things, “unskilled staff [who] are given a technical tool (the secret static-analyer) [sic] which they don’t understand – but trust 100%, [causing them to] reject apps that haven’t done anything wrong, but which the tool (incorrectly) flags.”
Martin acknowledges that the fledgling site has only just gotten started, but writes that he’s “been following reports on app-rejection for over a year,” and aims to catalog everything unusual and unfair about the mysterious process for joining the 100,000 (and growing) iPhone apps available now on iTunes.
It’s now gone from “easy” to “tricky” to avoid having your App rejected by Apple, according to Martin.
Here’s the Top 5 Secrets for making a killer website to showcase your iPhone app, courtesy of the WebDesignerWall blog.
“To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd.”
Here’s the list:
One Page — Your app’s site should be one page. No more, no less.
iPhone Image — Use an image of an iPhone running the app as the main design element. Drop shadow or reflection optional.
Apple App Store Badge — The download button should be Apple’s App Store badge. Easy to spot and instantly recognizable.
Animated Screenshots — All sites show screenshots of their app, but animated screens show it in action.
Display Pricing — It’s frustrating for prospective customers to not know the price up front.
Objectified, the documentary about industrial design, is airing on PBS tonight. The critically-acclaimed documentary features Apple’s Jonny Ive, among others, geeking out about design.
Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB iPod Touch + $30 Gift Card for $295.00 at Target; and a Sony Speaker Dock Clock Radio For iPod/iPhone for $79.99 at Office Depot.
We’ll continue to update this guide as more retailers announce their Black Friday offerings in the run up to the big day.
The repair and teardown experts at iFixit are releasing more than 240 repair guides for every Mac mini and most iMacs produced since 2004. The company is also now selling iMac repair parts, from hard drives and RAM to power supplies and disassembly tools.
“The repair manuals include in-depth disassembly guides, model identification tips, troubleshooting techniques, and upgrade information. The 241 new repair guides use 1,452 photos to clearly communicate each step of the repair. iFixit repair guides are well known for world-class photography and clear, concise step-by-step directions.”
iMac repair manuals — cover all 17″ and 20″ iMacs manufactured since 2004, including both G5 and Intel models.
Mac mini repair manuals — cover all Mac minis since its inception in 2005.
Looking at Google’s Chrome OS demos today, I noticed a giant omission that bodes ill for its future: it’s not optimized for touchscreens.
Chrome looks like a nifty version of a desktop OS, like a version of OS X or Windows, that pulls a lot of data from the cloud. Yeah, it’s slick, thoughtful and forward thinking, at least in one sense: Cloud apps are clearly the future, so why not the OS also?
But it looks like a traditional WIMP OS (window, icon, menu, pointing device). Why isn’t Chrome optimized for finger controls? The future of computing is mobile devices; and the future of mobile devices is touchscreens. As far as I can tell, Google didn’t mention touch at all, and none of the press asked about it.
Google says the Chrome OS will be launched by this time next year, by which time Apple will probably have reinvented the mobile computing experience with a multitouch tablet.
Apple’s tablet will do for netbooks what the iPhone did for cell phones — make the competition look hopelessly antiquated, whatever OS they run. Google says the UI is still under development and is subject to change; they’ll have to change it radically if they want a chance of competing with Apple, which has already adapted Snow Leopard for touchscreens.
Like Steve Jobs says, quoting hockey player Wayne Gretzky, Google needs to be aiming for where the puck’s going to be, not where it’s at now.
Gizmodo’s Brian Lam tested the new 27-inch Quad-Core i7 iMac and found it’s a beast. Geekbench benchmarks showed a 2x to 3x improvement over the Core 2 Duo model, but most impressive was a real world DVD ripping test, using Handbrake:
On the Core i7 iMac, it took 43 minutes to rip a DVD, Storm Riders, a surfing film from the ’70s featuring Gerry Lopez (my favorite) and others. On the Core 2 Duo machine, it took 147 minutes! I know this is basically a DVD read test coupled with decoding and video conversion, but the results have me excited because this is a real task that takes my computer a long time to do, performed by a program that hasn’t been revised in a year.
