iOS - page 112

At this point, the consensus of everyone from the smallest Apple blogs to the venerable Wall Street Journal is that Apple will dump Google as its Maps provider in iOS 6 in favor of its own, in-house technology that will bring, among other enhancements, 3D mapping to the mix.

Apple’s move has caught Google not just off-guard, it’s put the search giant into a total panic. Need proof? Look no further than Google’s debacle of an emergency announcement today, in which they unveiled “the next dimension of Google Maps.”

During this announcement, Google coincidentally announced their own 3D Maps solution… coincidentally enough, just five days before Apple’s expected to unveil theirs. Oh, and they showed it working on an iPad instead of an Android tablet… and their app was so hacked together it crashed numerous times during the presentation.

Can anyone say “rushed?”

If you’re considering developing an ad-support mobile app or if you’re an advertiser looking to get the most bang from your mobile advertising buck, you’re likely to find that iOS devices deliver a significantly bigger ad return than most Android phones or tablets regardless of the screen size of the device(s) in question.

That news comes Jumptap, a company that specializes in targeted mobile advertising which uncovered some interesting and information for mobile app developers and companies looking to develop a mobile ad campaign.

At today’s Google Maps event, Google revealed a few planned features for not only Google Maps for Android (no mention of iOS), but also Google Earth for Android and iOS. The Google Maps announcement was simply offline support, and something that users have been after for years. In Google Earth news, Google announced stunning new 3D images and a new UI would be coming soon to both Android and iOS platforms.

An Apple HDTV won’t be the first Internet-enabled television on the market. The market for so-called smart televisions has actually gotten pretty crowded over the past couple of years with products based around the Smart TV concepts of Samsung and LG as well as companies that offer televisions with GoogleTV.

Apple’s edge over the existing smart and connected television options is the company’s focus on creating a seamless and intuitive user experience. Based on a recent study, if Apple can deliver an interface half as good as expected, the company will make a killing in the HDTV market.

Professional social network giant LinkedIn has acknowledged that it is looking into a massive data breach. As a result of the breach as many as 6.5 million user accounts may have been compromised. Account data including login information and passwords have been leaked and posted to a Russian hacker site. Although LinkedIn hasn’t confirmed the breach or detailed which accounts might have been impacted, the fact that the company is acknowledging the potential threat and investigating it is a big cause for concern.

At this time, it’s better to err on the side of caution.

If you use LinkedIn, you should consider that your account data has been compromised and change your password immediately.

Dell hasn’t had anything resembling success in the tablet market with either businesses or consumers, but that isn’t stopping the company from deriding the iPad and its success.

According to Dell Australia’s managing director Joe Kreme, users only buy iPads because they’re “shiny” and troubleshooting any issue with an iPad or iOS could take up to four days. As a result of these so-called facts, Kreme said that the tablet race hasn’t even started yet.

Apple is reportedly gearing up to open two new stores in China which will be positioned near the Foxconn factories that assemble the large majority of its Mac and iOS devices. There are currently only five Apple retail stores on China’s mainland — three in Shanghai and two in Beijing — but Chengdu and Shenzhen could be home to another two very soon.

Apple extended its library of iOS emoji icons in its iOS 5.1 release, and the icons have been present in every firmware build that has landed ever since. However, the Cupertino company is yet to activate the latest set, and so they remain hidden within your device’s software. Fortunately, a new jailbreak tweak called Emoji2 for iOS 5.1+ unlocks them all for you.

Whale Trail, one of my favorite iPhone and iPad games to date, just received its biggest update yet today in the App Store. Version 2.0 of the popular side-scroller includes several new features, including a new system for unlocking and upgrading power-ups in the game.

Have you ever been making a phone call and had an email notification chime in your ear? Or how bout a banner notification pop up during a game or video? Sometimes you may just want to get away from alerts and incoming messages. Instead of notification after notification endlessly causing vibrations in your pocket, why not tell your iPhone that you’re out for lunch?

It would be nice for Apple to implement a “Do Not Disturb” feature into the iOS Notification Center, but until that day comes, jailbreakers can tell Notification Center to shut up with a couple of handy Cydia tweaks.

Gameloft is at it again, teaming up with Marvel to produce yet another hit mobile game. After the success of Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, Marvel knew just who to go to for the creation of an Amazing Spider-Man mobile game that they planned on launching in conjunction with the new film. Gameloft has been working closely with Marvel and Sony Pictures to ensure the game stays as true to the film story as possible.

The iPad continued to dominate the tablet space through the first quarter of 2012. That’s the news from ABI Research, which publishes a quarterly report known as the Media Tablet Market Share Tracker. Although most companies with products in the tablet space did see year-on-year growth, none was able to come close to wresting the number one spot away from Apple.  Apple’s commanding lead translated to 10 times the number of shipments by Samsung, which returned to being the second biggest player in the tablet space.

We first looked at Mobilisafe a couple of months ago when the company’s signature mobile management suite was still in private beta. The company, which was started by former T-Mobile Android engineers, seeks to offer broad mobile device and data security without requiring the types on-device agents or profiles used by most mobile device and application management suites.

Mobilisafe executives describe their product as a mobile risk management solution rather than as a device or application management tool. The distinction being that Mobilisafe helps IT departments identify specific threats that can then be mitigated rather than simply locking specific apps and restricting access to on-device features like blocking an iPhone user’s ability to snap photos and upload them to iCloud.

In case you haven’t heard, Instapaper quietly snuck its way into the Google Play Store today. I’m going to tell you a little bit about Instapaper, its significance to Android, and why this Android user won’t be buying it. Instapaper is a popular service for saving web pages for reading later. It not only saves pages for reading later, but also strips them down to a clean text-only format for easy reading.

It’s a nice concept, which when released back in 2008 for iOS, was original and extremely useful. But over the course of the last four years, Instapaper’s developer Marco Arment has spent most of his free time insulting Android and its fans… and now he wants us to give him money? Let’s take a brief look at the Instapaper app and its history to show just how insulting this is.

There’s an old and very accurate adage that says the second you drive a car, it begins losing value the second you drive it out of the showroom. It also immediately becomes an ongoing expense. The biggest sign of that expense is the number of trips to the gas station. Most of us tend to tend to just pay for the gas, regular maintenance, and monthly payments and not think about whether we’re getting the best gas mileage possible.

Tracking fuel economy and other car expense data can ultimately save you a fair amount of money. Tracking gas mileage and common maintenance tasks can help you optimize when to have your oil changed for maximum oil life and fuel economy, encourage you to check your tire pressure, and even plan more fuel-efficient routes for your daily commute and other regular trips. All of that can add up to real savings over the long-term.

Unlimited data plans are becoming scarce options for smartphone and tablet users. Sprint remains the only carrier to offer an unlimited data plans. Most Verizon and AT&T customers, however, need to make do with tiered data plans. Tiered data plans get more cash from customers and deter customers from overloading mobile networks with excessive data use.

As a result, a lot of us try to avoid excessive data use by limiting the types and amount of content that we access when using a device’s 3G or LTE connection. That, in turn, blocks many content companies from capturing ad or subscription revenue from mobile users. That reality is leading major content companies to complain to the carriers and which AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently said may lead to “toll free” data plans.

According to the latest data from comScore, Android might have peaked. Meanwhile, iOS is still going strong.

New smartphone users — individuals trading in their own feature phones for their first touchscreen, Android’s core constituency — are at their lowest level since 2010: just 300k new smartphone users a week in the last quarter, compared to 1.5 million in November.

It gets worse for Google. Android added the fewest number of new users than it has since 2009. It’s effectively an all-time low for Android growth, which, as Horace Dediu points out, equals four straight months of decline.

If you’ve ever wanted to build apps on the iPad, then keep reading, because we’ve searched high and low for a solid iPad development course…and we’ve finally found a great match. Cult of Mac Deals is offering an informative iPad programming video course is amped up with more than 9.5 valuable hours of iPad development training.

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Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a beautifully simple timer app for the iPhone that could mean you never need to set timers manually again. There’s also a terrific app for beaming your photographs to almost any display — without additional hardware or software. Plus lots more.

Opening this week’s must-have games roundup is a stunning first-person shooter that has you protecting planet Earth from invasion from the “Xenos,” who are on a mission to infect every civilian that gets in their way. We also have a crazy dual-stick shooter that has made the leap from Xbox LIVE to your pocket, an update to Angry Birds Space, and lots more.

Those MADFINGER guys are at it again! After their blockbuster third person shooter SHADOWGUN essentially became the poster child for console quality gaming on mobile, they’ve gone ahead and teased us with their next project: DEAD TRIGGER. MADFINGER has worked hard at optimizing their games to showcase the graphical prowess of NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor as well as supporting iOS’s new iPad, and DEAD TRIGGER is no different. Featuring:

The news that IBM bans Siri for every employee that has an iPhone 4S and participates the company’s BYOD program unleashed a lot of discussion about whether the company was being paranoid or prudent. One of the bigger questions to come out of all that discussion was a reframing of the issue itself – does Siri have a place in the business world to begin with?

Setting aside the security and privacy issues that led IBM to ban Siri, are there compelling use cases for Siri in the workplace? If there are, do they outweigh the privacy and security concerns? Could Apple do more to make Siri business-friendly?

If you’re a mobile gamer, then you already know the pangs of those on-screen controls. That’s why any serious gamer heads straight for some form of bluetooth controller to get his/her game on. Snakebyte (Sunflex), a company that makes gaming-related peripherals, has announced their plans to sell a new bluetooth gaming controller for Android and iOS. The idroid:con looks to differentiate itself from other bluetooth conrtollers by being the first to have five different functions and come with no app obligation.

Apple’s meticulous focus on design and usability is one of the hallmarks of its products. That attention to detail is evident in almost every Apple product, but iOS devices epitomize Apple minimalist approach and its goal of removing any barrier between the user and a great user experience. Unfortunately, not all iOS developers or mobile web developers get to that same level of minimal and effortless design.

There are probably hundreds of small ways that developers can miss the mark when designing iOS apps or creating content designed for mobile devices, but Gartner research director Johan Jacobs notes that most mobile app/experience design failures boil down to ten common mistakes.

Dolphin is widely regarding as one of the best third-party web browsers for the iPad, and it’s a particular favorite of mine, firmly stuck to the first page of my home screen on all of my iOS devices. With version 5.0 for the iPad, Dolphin gets even better, with the ability to save passwords; autocomplete browsing history, bookmarks, and searches; share URLs via email, and more.