Rob LeFebvre - page 105

It was time for another Apple expert witness today, who said that consumers would be willing to pay $100 for three specific, patented features that are at issue in the high-profile, high-stakes court case against Samsung. John Hauser, called by Apple as an expert due to his role as a marketing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said that in his internet survey, consumers were willing to pay this much more for features like scrolling or multitouch. The survey, Apple proposes, has relevance when calculating potential damages for Apple due to potential patent infringement. Apple is seeking over $2.5 billion from Samsung.

Several iOS device users are reporting an error message that reads, “mail service imap.gmail.com is not responding” today. They’re posting in Google’s Gmail product forum, and user SonaD, marked as a Google employee, has posted the following:

“We are aware of an issue where users are receiving an error that ‘”imap.gmail.com” is not responding’ when using IMAP on their computers, mobile devices, or tablets. We are currently working on resolving this issue.

Not all accounts are affected, so if you have multiple Gmail accounts, you may notice one works fine, while the other returns this error.

In the meantime, you can login to Gmail through your web browser (https://mail.google.com). On your phone or tablet, you can also use your device’s browser or if you’re on Android or iOS, you can download the Gmail application. I realize it’s not the way most of you want to get to your mail, but it will still allow you to get to your mail on both your computer or mobile devices.

Thank you again for your patience as we work on resolving this. We will update this post once I know all users are fixed.”

The advice above is echoed on the official Gmail support page, as well. Until it gets cleared up, use a web browser, mobile or otherwise.

Via: All Things D
Image: Tech Nutty

Don’t you hate it when you start to download a song file, or a podcast, or an app and it just sits there, mocking you? When the little progress bar just refuses to move, no matter how you scream at the front of your magical iOS device? Yeah, me, too.

One way to fix this problem with apps is to tap the icon to stop the download, and then tap it again to resume the download. If that doesn’t work (and it won’t with a media download), then you’re not out of luck. There is another way.

The new Notification Center in OS X Lion is pretty cool, you gotta admit. It really integrates the notifications from your iPhone, iPad, and various Macs you might use during the day into one place.

While on a Mac, whether desktop or laptop, you can click on the Notification icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen, causing the whole display to shift to the left, and the dark linen background of Notification Center shows up on the right. There isn’t a keyboard shortcut to make this happen, but we’ve got two different ways you can activate it, even still.

It’s fairly easy as a longtime Apple fan to dismiss the recently aired “Genius” ads as nothing more than a misstep in a rather stellar marketing history by the, well, geniuses in Cupertino. However, a new study by Brandindex Buzz shows a shift in the demographic trends for the Apple brand, which may go to explain the goofy ads as more specifically targeted advertising.

For those of us watching the trial of Apple vs Samsung this week, the fact that Judge Lucy Koh made the companies reveal confidential sales data is something of a no-brainer. The jury will need to look at the sales of the various devices from the two mobile technology giants to decide at some point what the damages should be, if any.

I use several different Macs during a given day, from a trusty Macbook Air to my Mac Mini to an iMac at my office job. I also use an iPhone and an iPad for various personal and business activities. It helps to have access to all the documents I need to deal with during a given day, regardless of what device I’m using, or what environment I’m in.

iCloud is a great idea, and OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6 will continue to take the service forward. Today, however, I’d like to show you how I use two similar products to achieve a seamless document experience on my iOS devices. For me, Dropbox and Google Drive represent the best in class iOS apps to interface with my documents for home and work.

I really liked the RSS Visualizer screensaver from OS X Lion and earlier, but for some reason, Apple’s taken it out of the install of OS X Mountain Lion. Luckily for all of us who enjoy watching an RSS feed swirl around the screen in a fun 3D style, there’s hope. The screensaver file works just fine in Mountain Lion – you just need to grab it from an earlier OS X install, like OS X Lion, and move it to your current machine. Here’s how.

So, there’s a new app out there for the iPhone that will let you create a temproary number that routes to your real phone number, and can be set to stop working, or “burn,” after a set amount of time. Basically, the free Burner app comes with enough credits to create a temporary phone number called a mini-burner that expires after 20 minutes of talk time and/or 60 text messages, or after 7 days. Or you can burn it sooner.

Inbound and outbound calls use up your actual phone plan minutes and/or texts, but the actual identity of the caller and callee are kept private. You can then buy more credits, in various tiers starting at 3 for $1.99. These can be used to buy burner numbers of different lengths, or to extend burners you’re currently using.

Yeah, we all want to think we’re James Bond, but the reality is probably more mundane. Or, you know, way to hook up anonymously (possible NSFW link). As the iTunes description says, “** What will you use Burner for? **”

A new iPhone app campaign tool released by the Obama for President Campaign last week is raising privacy concerns among activists who worry about the potential for misuse. The iOS app, to be released for Android tomorrow, allows users to see already public information about registered voters, including their first name, last initial, age, gender, and street address.

The app is freely available to the public, even though it was created for use by campaign workers to help locate, register and ask local Democratic voters for money. It also allows users to find nearby political events, and send out announcements to Twitter and Facebook.

The NPD Group announced a report today that confirms what many other analysts and data firms have been saying for a while now: Apple and Samsung are the top smartphone brands in terms of growth. Samsung and Apple’s combined unit sales rose 43 percent in the last year, from the second quarter of 2011 to the just finished second quarter of 2012. Other smartphone makers’s unit sales fell 16 percent.

There are plenty of reasons to want to encrypt the data on a hard drive. Before OS X Mountain Lion, Apple provided tools to do this with the startup drive, via FileVault. Starting right now, however, with OS X 10.8, you can encrypt almost any external drive you like, including flash drives (also known as thumb drives in my neck of the woods). Here’s how.

Ah, thank Apple for iCloud, Find My iPhone, and open water swimming. Wait, scratch that last bit.

Redditor and triathlon competitor pnine yesterday was out for a training swim in the ocean. He left his pants on the shore when diving into the water in his wetsuit, his keys in his shoes, his wallet and iPhone in his pants.

A bit of the way out, he had a premonition that some of his stuff had been taken. Upon returning to shore, he found out that his hunch was right. His keys, shoes, and towel were still there, but no pants. Which, of course, meant no wallet and no iPhone.

Instead of panicking like many of us would, he remembered he had his laptop and a handy mobile Wi-Fi hotspot in his car. No word on whether the laptop was a Mac or not, but that’s how we’re envisioning it.

In a funny sneak preview clip, embedded below, Conan O’Brien plays a video from a “Samsung VP,” Nick Wood, who appears in the video to tell us all how innovative and completely different Samsung’s products are from Apple’s.

“And what about our Galaxy Tablet?” says the fake VP, while an image of the iPad next to a very similar Galaxy Tab is shown. “Not even close.”

Yesterday, we reported on Apple’s response to Mat Honan’s “epic” AppleID, Amazon, and Twitter account hack. Basically, the company released a statement to Wired saying that the company would investigate the issue fully, as well as noting that its “own internal policies were not followed completely.”

Today, according to Wired, Apple ordered support staff to stop processing AppleID password changes over the phone. Wired claims that an Apple worker with knowledge of the situation, who required anonymity, told them that the freeze was planned for at least 24 hours. This same worker speculated that Apple put the hold in place to give Apple time to figure out what to change and how to do so.

iOS has a lot of great features, some of which are focused on preserving as much battery life as possible. One of them is the Auto-Lock feature, which defaults to dimming the screen of your iOS device after a really short period of time.

This obviously helps preserve battery life, as the less the screen is on at full brightness, the longer you’ll be able to use it on a single charge. If you’d like to control this, though, and even turn it off fully, it’s a simple trip into the Settings App.

Have you tried to get rid of an application or document from the Dock after an upgrade to Mountain Lion? Before now, it was a simple drag and release: click on the offending icon, drag it away from the Dock, and let go. The little “poof” cloud would appear and the icon would be gone from the Dock. New OS X users would freak out, crying, “You got rid of my app!” and I would laugh. Also, I would show them where the actual app was, and how to put the icon back in the Dock, as the icon is simply a pointer to the real app. But I digress.

In Mac OS X Mountain Lion, this doesn’t work in quite the same way anymore. Try to click, drag, and release just ends up with the icon speeding back to its previous place in the Dock. You want to get rid of it? You have to learn a new, subtly different behavior.

Last week, Wired columnist Mat Honan’s digital life was destroyed by hackers who were able to connect to his Apple ID and remotely erase all of the data on his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

Apple responded today to Honan via a spokesperson, Natalie Kerris. In a statement to Wired, where Honan posted an account of his experiences, Apple promised to look into how users can protect their data and security better when they need to reset their account passwords.

An internal Samsung email was submitted today into evidence in the Apple vs. Samsung case being heard in Northern California. In the correspondance, head of mobile communications for Samsung JK Shin praises the iPhone, and describes the difference between his own company’s user experience and that of the iPhone as “the difference between heaven and earth.”

It’s fairly rough evidence for the Korean electronics maker, who had tried to keep the document out of the trial until a misstep today by Samsung legal counsel John Quinn, who mentioned the phrase “crisis of design” from the email, allowed it to be admitted.

While Apple and Samsung duke it out in Northern California this week, it makes sense to take a little time comparing the two on sales numbers, units shipped, and profit made. And while many folks these days like to bring up the fact that more Samsung devices are sold than iOS devices, those same folks are missing the boat.

According to a report from Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt, via website AllThingsD, Apple’s iOS devices are making its company a ton more profit than Samsung’s devices are. Let’s take a look at the numbers.

The reason the software keyboard works so well in iOS has a lot to do with Autocorrect and its pretty spot-on ability to figure out what the heck we’re typing. Most of the time, anyway, as various parody sites on the internet will attest to.

Autocorrect also learns the words you use more frequently, and adds them to a list in the background, letting you use oddly spelled terminology more easily. Sometimes, though, this functionality can backfire, as you end up adding words and phrases you really don’t want to have things autocorrect to.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this one.

While traveling, it’s helpful to be able to find a strong WiFi signal, whether you need to check your email, review your latest notifications on Facebook, or actually get some work done. You can click the little WiFi rainbow icon in the menu bar obsessively, waiting for the “Searching for networks” message to end, of course, but it’s nice to have an app running that will just scan your environment and tell you what WiFi networks are available.

I used to do this with a third-party app, like MacStumbler or iStumbler. Not anymore, though, as there’s a built-in WiFi scanner right in Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

Apple went after Samsung today in the most direct and perhaps damaging interchange, yet, using Samsung’s own internal documents to prove Apple’s claim that Samsung’s practices go beyond mere competition and are truly copyright infringement.

Apple called Justin Denison, Samsung’s chief strategy officer, to the stand today. Attorney for Apple Bill Lee, after some preliminary questioning, went right for the jugular, directly calling out Samsung, and asking Denison point blank if Samsung had copied Apple products. Denison denied the claim, and then Lee pulled out a set of internal documents from Samsung. Some of the titles of these reports were pretty incriminating.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) released preliminary data yesterday from its Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet Tracker. The study shows that total worldwide tablet shipments for the second quarter of 2012 are estimated at 25 million units, which is up from 18.7 last quarter. That’s a quarter-over-quarter increase of 33.6 percent, says the data analysis company, reflecting the total year-over-year growth rate of 66.2 percent of retail tablets in the US.

Guess which tablet is the largest part of those numbers?

For the most part, clicking on a youtube video in mobile Safari or Chrome will bring up the YouTube app on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. There are a few reasons why you might not want that to happen, one being that the YouTube app isn’t quite as full featured as the current mobile YouTube site itself, another being the waste of time of switching back and forth between the YouTube app and whatever mobile app you found the link in.

Forcing your iPhone to stay in the app you clicked the YouTube link in is as easy as it is non-intuitive. Here’s how to make it happen.