John Brownlee - page 151

You can’t say Lodsys weren’t warned that Apple was prepared to fight: less than two weeks after the notorious patent troll sued indie iOS developers for using Apple’s own in-app purchasing mechanism in their apps, Cupertino has asked a judge to be allowed into the ring to kick Lodsys’ ass.

Yesterday, we reported that in the first beta of iOS 5, Apple had removed gesturing functionality from first-gen iPad owners, making it impossible to navigate between apps on Apple’s breakout tablet with iOS 5’s four- and five-finger multitouch gestures.

Here’s the good news. You can get them back. The bad news? It takes a jailbreak to get it done.

Being a Chrome man, I generally don’t pay much attention to Safari, but I just noticed a really neat new feature in Safari 5.1 under the Lion Developer Preview 4: a new downloads manager.

Boring your family and friends with all your Apple talk? Come hang out with some kindred spirits… and maybe get drunk and score some free swag at the same time. Yeah, that’s right: Cult of Mac is having a party on Thursday June 9th at the Il Pirata bar in San Francisco, and you’re invited.

When UK student and programmer Greg Hughes watched Monday’s WWDC keynote, he was surprised to see Apple rip off his ideas twice in the same feature. Not only had they taken his WiFi Sync Cydia app and baked it right into iTunes… they even stole his icon design.

Without a Retina Display, your iPad 2 can’t play true high-def video natively without downsizing… but come iOS 5, it’ll be able to output it like a champ. Cool, but what we’re really excited about is what this means for the next Apple TV and iPhone 4S: 1080p.

Apple’s never been afraid to borrow great ideas and make them their own. It should be no surprise, then, that Apple’s latest great idea — a giantspaceship-like HQ — was borrowed from someone else’s design. What may surprise you is the original design was made way back in the 1940s!

Unlike iOS 4, Apple’s promised not to leave any iOS devices behind with the jump to iOS 5, but older devices might lose some features. The iPhone 3GS under iOS 5 tellingly doesn’t support many of iOS’s new photo abilities, but even last year’s iPad might get the short thrift with the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system: users are reporting that the original iPad running iOS 5 does not support the new gesturing feature.

Steve Jobs has unambiguously said that Apple does not see a place for an iMac or MacBook with a multitouch display in their line-up of Macs. Citing the problem of gorilla arm, Jobs says that touch needs to be something that can be done in your lap, not accomplished reaching across the table. Trackpads and multitouch mice are the future of Macs.

Seems pretty unambiguous, doesn’t it? Then again, this is the same guy who just a year ago said that Apple was “pretty skeptical” about the cloud, when they were already working on iCloud. So guess what? Despite what Steve Jobs says, Apple’s also working on multitouch iMacs.

Got an incriminating call from that doxy your wife told you to stop fooling around with? In iOS 5, you can just delete the record of that call, no jailbreak required.

For a few minutes today, Twitter account BWilks2001 played host to a number of images purporting to come from Apple’s forthcoming Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5 release, giving designers an intriguing glimpse into what could be the future of Apple’s professional video production suite. Then, just like that, the Twitter account was gone, brought down by Apple’s lawyers.

But don’t worry. We’ve got all the leaked screenshots, after the jump.

Want to check out what qualifies as the creme de la creme of app design in Steve Jobs’ eyes? We’ve got screenshots of every app that won an Apple Design Award at WWDC 2011 last night.

With iOS 5’s new Wireless Syncing functionality, the umbilical cord of your iPhone or iPad has finally dried up and fallen off… except when it needs power, when you have to plug it in to a wall socket.

But Apple’s serious about cutting the cord. Future iOS devices might be truly wireless, sucking in power as wirelessly as they will sync.

Patent troll Lodsys’ attacks upon indie iOS developers for using Apple’s in-app purchasing mechanism is a hot topic at WWDC 2011, so this news couldn’t be better timed: a Michigan law firm representing some unlikely companies with deep pockets has just attacked the validity of Lodsys’ patents.

Think talking on your iPhone is safe? Think again: hackers and data thieves can intercept your phone calls under iOS 4. That’s why Apple’s rolling out a new feature in iOS 5: a warning that pops up when you engage in a so-called ‘unsecured call.'”

Need a new Mac right now, but want to wait until Lion drops in July to spare yourself paying an extra $30 to upgrade from Snow Leopard. Don’t sweat it: if you buy a new Mac now, Snow Leopard will give you Lion for free when it is released next month.

With every new iOS beta, we get our first glimpse into the future of Apple’s iOS devices, and iOS 5 Beta 1 is no exception.

Want to test out iOS 5 but don’t have a developer account? No worries: a new vulnerability makes it pretty trivial to upgrade to iOS 5 on any iPhone.

Be careful, though… rolling back to iOS 4 if things go south isn’t officially supported. This is for pros only, and there’s a lot that can go wrong.

In a bout of self-congratulation as laughably misguided as that of the toothless hobo hanging outside of Albert Einstein’s office claiming that whole Theory of Relativity thing was his idea, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows Phone is now “feeling flattered” that Apple copied so many great iOS 5 ideas from Windows Phone 7. As if.

Amongst other rumors about iOS 5 that somehow just disappeared into the ether come yesterday’s WWDC 2011 keynote was the advanced Nuance-powered voice control features that has been reported extensively over the past few months. The only mention of voice recognition was a throwaway line on a slide: “Option to speak text selection.”

Is that it? What happened to the voice control that we were all promised? Don’t worry just yet: according to a couple of prominent sources, Nuance-powered voice control is still coming to iOS 5.

For those of us with snoopsome inamoratas who just can’t seem to understand that a man has needs of the flesh that simply can not be met by the conventional and must needs be profane… Mobile Safari under iOS 5 has a new Private Browsing option, which is more colloquially known as ‘Porn Mode!’

No matter how many months of rumors and insider reports precede an anticipated Apple announcement, it’s probable that, when Steve Jobs actually reveals the product on stage, it’s going to be radically different than what people are expecting… but iCloud could be the most radical deviation yet between the fancy of pre-announcement hype and the reality of Apple’s finished product.

What people expected from iCloud was a streaming cloud locker for your media collection: iCloud would scan your iTunes library and automatically mirror them on a central server, allowing you to stream any song you owned to any device you owned without being bothered with local storage.

What people got? iTunes Match. It scans and matches your iTunes library in the cloud, sure, but there is no streaming: any time you want to listen to an album that’s not on your iPhone or iPad, you’ve got to download it from the cloud onto your device.

No streaming? What was Apple thinking?

When Apple unveiled iOS 5 yesterday and debuted their mobile operating system’s new PC free capabilities, one small but important feature that was mostly overlooked in the coverage: WiFi Sync coming to iTunes. And the way it works is smart.

Here’s a video look at iOS 5’s incredible new PC-free setup. We posted some pictures yesterday, but seeing it in fluid motion… it’s just so graceful. This is the way it’s supposed to be.

As a follow-up to last week’s super guide of everything we expected at WWDC 2011, here’s everything Steve Jobs and Apple actually did announce at this year’s WWDC, from Lion’s exciting new features to the revolution of iOS 5 and iCloud.