Apple has been experimenting with how it calculates chart rankings in the App Store, according to a new report from Fiksu. In the past, where an app sat on the top charts was related to its sheer amount of downloads and the daily velocity of those downloads. Now Apple is incorporating user ratings to determine rankings.
The obvious question to ask: why?
Apple’s iTunes Radio service doesn’t launch in the U.S. for a few more weeks, but Rdio’s been pumping some awesome updates into its iOS app to get ready. The latest Rdio update for iOS today added the much needed Station Tuning that’s been available on desktop since the launch of You FM earlier this month.
The Rdio 2.3.1 update also comes with a redesigned view for Collection that features a new album art view. Some UI tweaks and bug fixes were also tossed in for good measure along with improved search.
Here are the full notes:
Launched in April 2010, the iPad took an idea Jobs had heard about from computer pioneer Alan Kay and turned it into the kind of mass-market product no one else had been able to.
Photo: Karl Mondon/Contra Costa Times/MCT
When last we left the Department of Justice’s e-book antitrust case with Apple, things weren’t looking good. After Apple was found guilty of price fixing, the DoJ dismissed Apple’s rebuttal. Apple is on track to lose the ability to sell e-books in the iBookstore for several years. Third-parties like Amazon are also to be given back the ability to sell their e-books directly to iOS users within their apps. The outcome of this case will likely be a blow to Apple’s business and an even bigger blow to its pride.
Today the DoJ filed a revised remedy proposal for Apple. Besides reducing the amount of time Apple has to stay out of the e-book market from ten years to five, there are no other major changes. The most interesting tidbit is an email between Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller from 2010.
What the hell is wrong with wireless SD card makers? They manage to cram an entire Wi-Fi router into an SD card, along with the memory that’s already in there, and yet the software looks like they got their idiot cousin to write it in a weekend for like $100.
Toshiba’s FlashAir is a great example. The hardware is sound, and has some really great features. But the software is awful. Truly, breathtakingly terrible.
Rovio just released two new videos on YouTube. Above is the actual teaser trailer for the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II, itself revealed last month.
In the trailer, the dark side Emperor pig is seen making a recruiting video of sorts for all the young piggies who need new weaponry to fight those upstart Jedi birds. It doesn’t go as well as planned, of course; this is Rovio in the director’s chair, not George Lucas.
The cool thing here is that the Emperor is voiced by none other than Ian McDiarmid himself, the actor who plays the Emperor in the real Star Wars films.
1Password has been one of the most essential Mac apps for years, but it hasn’t seen a major upgrade since November 2009. Agile Bits is hard at work on the redesign of 1Password 4 for Mac, but they sent us a sneak peek of the reengineered password management app that’s been in the making for over a year.
Here’s what’s new:
We’re big fans of Loop Attachment here at Cult of Mac — they make some really awesome accessories for iOS devices. And this week they’ve made their terrific Mummy case available to pre-order for the full-size iPad. We reviewed the iPad mini model back in April and found it to be one of the best silicone cases available for the device.
The iWork for iCloud beta, which allows you to use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote inside your web browser, is now available to all at iCloud.com. You do not need to be an existing iWork customer to take advantage of the apps, but if you are, you can now access all of the iWork documents you’ve stored in iCloud from absolutely anywhere.
In all likelihood, the iPhone 5S and 5C will be released in the United States on Friday, September 20th. What about Apple’s second most important market, though, China?
Well, if you’re a Chinese Apple fan, we’ve got bad news for you. You’re going to probably have to wait a lot longer for Apple’s new smartphones than the rest of us. A new report says the iPhone 5S and 5C won’t be released in China until November 28th.
One of the key patents in Samsung and Apple’s neverending patent dispute was ‘381, the so-called “bounce back” patent. As you might recall, the patent describes the way in which an iPhone, when inertially scrolling a document, will bounce back when it reaches the top. It’s a little detail, but it’s one of the few patent infringement verdicts Samsung hasn’t been able to weasel its way out of.
Not that that has stopped Samsung from trying, but it looks like the dispute over the famous bounce back patent is finally over. On late Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh denied Samsung a motion for a new trial regarding the ‘381 patent. Finally.
Gearing up for the school year, Apple has just launched a newly redesigned “Apple and Education” page on its website, featuring a simplified design and fresh categories showing how iPhones, iPads and Macs can make a difference in the classroom.
A couple months back, Apple updated the MacBook Air line with Intel’s new, power-sipping Haswell processors, leading to a doubling of battery life across their lineup of ultraportables. No joke, Haswell’s like a miracle: my MacBook Air gets better battery life than my iPad these days.
Despite the fact that Haswell’s such an incredible boon to battery life, Apple still hasn’t rolled it out to the MacBook Pro line. A new report suggests that will change in September.
Got goals? Me too: Get up before 10 a.m. at least once a week; increase the number of cheeses I eat; and learn how to use semicolons. If you too have such pressing, life-altering plans in mind, you might like the keep track of them with Full, an iPhone app which not only tracks pretty much anything, but looks amazing while it does it.
DJing (or is that deejaying?) on the iPad is pretty rad, but what do you do about cueing up the next track? If you’ve got $20 to spend, you can buy the Traktor DJ cable, a splitter that lets you cue a track with your headphones and play another through the speakers.
Remember those adapters that let you permanently flush-mount a microSD card in your MacBook Air’s SD card slot, adding welcome (if slow) extra storage to your SSD portable? I certainly do: I mixed up the two main brands when I wrote a review and never heard the last of it.
Now you can skip that extra step, because PNY now makes a sawed-off SD card that does the same job – without an adapter.
I saw a kid at the airport the other day, carrying a Fujifilm Instax camera, and I wondered what the hell kind of cruel trick her parents were playing on her. That thing is hideous.
But if she’d been carrying the new retro-style Instax Mini 90, I’d have been all “WTF?”
At this point, 2K Games is the most hotly anticipated iOS game publisher in existence. They’ve done huge things on the iPad, like bringing a full-on console game to the iPad with XCOM: Enemy Unknown and helping develop legend Sid Meier’s latest strategy game, Ace Patrol — which just happens to be iPad-only. Now it looks like they’re set to take the whole iPad auto-racing genre and blow it out of the water with their latest project, 2K Drive, developed by Lucid Games.
Take a look at the latest developer’s diary teaser clip (above), with its crazy soccer ball-dribbling driving, Bonneville Salt Flats land-speed record car and a Mazda Miata driving on what looks like a wooden roller-coaster platform, and you’ll see what I mean.
I remember the crushing fetish we all had for Titanium back when I entered the cycling fraternity. (It’s fallen out of vogue now, of course — most likely thanks in part to the rise of carbon fiber, or perhaps something to do with the economics of materials I don’t fully understand.)
It’s an exotic material, with accompanying exotic pricing, thanks to the difficulty and expense of processing it. Still, we’ll pay an exorbitant surcharge for things made out of the magic metal because it’s so near-unbreakable, corrosion-resistant — and just plain wicked.
Which brings me to Tuls. David Laituri — you may or may not remember him as the man behind Vers and their super-green, handcrafted audio toys — has laser-cut tools, iPhone stands and other thoughtful solutions out of slivers of Titanium.
Today Pandora announced that it will be removing its 40-hour-per-month listening cap come September 1st. Now free users will be able to listen for as long as they like and ads will play every 30 minutes.
The decision to remove the cap is an obvious reaction to the impending launch of Apple’s iTunes Radio, a radio streaming service that will be shipped to the public in iOS 7 after September 10th. Since more than two thirds of Pandora’s revenue comes from its mobile apps, iTunes Radio is very much a threat.
Apple highlights a new iOS app each week: the iTunes App Store App of the Week. Last week, it was a frustratingly compelling puzzle game, Doodle Fit 2, that Apple chose to spotlight.
This week, it’s another game, this time a beautiful dogfighting flight sim called Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders from Atypical Games. It’s the first of the two games Atypical has developed for the Sky Gamblers series, with the follow up, Cold War, recently released on the App Store as well.
Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders is free for a limited time to celebrate the honor.
Seven schools in the Netherlands are teaching kids using only iPads. These “Steve Jobs Schools” are part of the O4NT program (Education for a new Era).
Apple has been launched a full court press on Maps ever since its disappointing launch last fall. The company has already gobbled up a few mapping companies but it’s not ready to stop quite yet, as it just purchased the map app Embark.
Embark, Inc. focuses on building free transit apps to help navigate public transportation. According to a report from Jessica Lessin, Apple acquired the small team very recently and plans to directly integrate Embark’s tech into Apple Maps.
Using Facebook is usually one of the quickest ways to log in to apps and other services without creating an account, but there’s nothing more annoying on Facebook than giving an app access to your account only to have them post spam on your wall without permission.
Facebook announced today that it has finally come up with a solution by updating Facebook Login for mobile so that apps have to ask you separately for permission to post on your behalf.
The update should result in 31% faster load up times, too. And if you decide later that you really want to share all your progress from Kitchen Scramble, or any other apps, you can do that too.
Source: Facebook
Via: The Verge
Spoke to Tim. Planning dinner in September. Tim believes in buyback and is doing one. What will be discussed is magnitude.
— Carl Icahn (@Carl_C_Icahn) August 22, 2013
Famous billionaire investor Carl Icahn took to Twitter this afternoon to announce that he and his new buddy Tim Cook are going to be meeting up for dinner in September to talk about Apple’s stock buyback program.
According to Icahn, Tim believes in doing the buyback, but the two giants are going to talk about the “magnitude” of it later to see just how much cash can be wrung out of AAPL.
Icahn made a lot of noise last week with claims that AAPL stock is extremely undervalued. AAPL shares shot up quickly after Icahn’s tweet last week, but his tweet this afternoon seems to have less of an effect on the stock. AAPL is down -3.83 and trading at 498.53 a share today but NASDAQ has been down part of the day, so maybe we’ll see a jump when things get back to normal.
Source: Twitter
It seems like every time you turn around lately, there’s some new photo leak of what sources promise to be a true look at Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5S or 5C casing, LED flash, or colors.
It’s with that caveat that we cast a skeptical eye, then, on this latest reveal, sent to us by Twitter user @leakschina, of what a Chinese language website claims to be a photo of the back of the box of the new iPhone 5S, showing a capacity of 128GB.