News - page 2048

Wow! That’s a bombshell. We expected Lion would be available on DVD, USB stick and on the Mac App Store, but Phil Schiller says that it’s a Mac App Store exclusive… and he says it’ll be the easiest upgrade you’ve ever seen.

This should kill Hackintoshing and piracy of Lion, by the way.

“You need about 4GB in storage. And because it’s part of the Mac App Store it follows the rules… you can use it on all of your authorized devices,” says Schiller.

Price: $29.99, just like Snow Leopard.

And the developer preview? It’s available today.

As for widescale release? July.

The final Lion feature Apple wants to talk about today is the new Mail.app.

• Two or three column view, similar to iOS Mail.

• Smart new search suggestions. “It prompts you, when you select one, it becomes a search token, and you can have more than one,” says Phil Schiller.

• Conversation view, completely compatible with people who don’t have Lion.

It’s nice to finally see Lion’s default Mail.app catch up with the likes of Postbox, don’t you think? Hate the new logo though. Apple’s really embracing brushed steel again with Lion.

While WWDC is currently going on, a leaked Pastebin document is floating around the web. What’s in it? A lot of goodies. iOS 5 betas, iTunes 10.5 betas, and a whole lot more. A paid developer account is needed, but they’ll all be sure to be posted on public file sharing sites by the end of the day. While I’m currently logged in to my paid developer account, I still don’t have access to them, so they’ll most likely be live after the keynote.

Check out everything that Apple will be putting out after the break.

Next up in the Lion demo? AirDrop.

“The easiest way to share files between computers has been the old sneakernet… a flash drive,” says Phil Schiller.

Now there’s AirDrop, though, a peer-to-peer file utlility that allows you to easily send files to Mac on your network, with fully encrypted interface.

Wow. Just look how great that interface is!

Next up, Apple’s showing off its new feature in Lion, Resume.

Now when you launch an app in Lion, it brings you back to where you were when you quit. It remembers palettes, windows, etc, and works system wide.

Working in conjunction with Auto Save, this could be a game changer. OS X Lion will now automatically save your documents in the background without you having to do anything.

If you zoom in on the title bar of your document, the name of your document is now a menu that you can tap on. A menu pops up that lets you Lock, Duplicate, Revert to Last Opened, or Browser All Versions.

Autosave works in conjunction with Versioning in Lion, which means all together, you never have to worry about losing your work, or overwriting it with something inferior. Just browse the versions and you get a Time Machine like interface of all the past changes, which you can even cut and paste between.

Now Phil Schiller wants to talk about the Mac App Store.

“We launched the Mac App Store in January and users have already found it’s the best way to purchase and discover new software apps. It has become the #1 PC software channel for buying software in the last six months, and the developers who have come aboard have found some great success: four times the revenue they had before.”

What’s new in Lion? Well, Mac App Store is built right in, and not such a huge surprise, but in-app purchases will be coming. As well as push notifications, sandboxing, and Delta Updates.

This is a small detail, but a good one: with Lion, it appears that Photo Booth will now do facial tracking. Awesome!

[image via This Is My Next]

As Phil Schiller takes the stage to talk about Lion, one thing’s for sure: OS X is doing better as a platform than it ever has.

As an install base, there’s now over 54 million users around the world. In fact, it’s doing better than ever. The last quarter, the PC market actually shrank 1 percent while the Mac went up 28%

The Mac has outgrown the industry every quarter for the past half decade.

Most of those sales are notebooks. 73% of all Mac sales are MacBooks.

Why are MacBooks so popular? It’s because OS X is the heart of Mac, and it’s ten years old today, and has evolved to become refined, powerful and beautiful.

Today, OS X evolves again into a Lion, with over 250 new features. But we’re only going to talk about a few of them.

“If the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software is their soul,” says Steve Jobs. “This year, we’re here to talk about the soul across three separate products.”

Those three things? Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud.

“Let’s start with Lion,” says Jobs, making way for Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi to take the stage.

The lights have dimmed, the Aretha Franklin has been muted, and Steve Jobs has just taken the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to head up the 2011 World Wide Developer’s Conference.

We just got a screenshot of the notifications bar in iOS 5.

It could be fake of course, but it looks pretty good to us. And it fits with what former Engadget editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky is hearing.

Check it out full size:

Must be something huge! Pic by Greg Kumparak.

Here’s another shot. You can almost see underneath…

Here’s the line for this morning’s Stevenote. The video was taken at 6.15 AM; It’s as long a line I’ve see for any Apple event, including some of the massive store grand openings. The buzz for this WWDC is huge.

It appears the end of MobileMe is now upon us… or the end of paid subscriptions to MobileMe at least: a number of subscribers to the $99 a year service are reporting that Apple is automatically refunding renewal fees, but why?

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that leads us to interpret a random image as somehow being informationally significant. It’s why you see Jesus in the char on the face of your morning slice of toast, and it’s why you see Kermit the Frog on Mars.

It’s also why several prominent Apple blogs think they see an S (if they squint) in Apple’s WWDC invite, heralding the arrival, perhaps, of an iPhone 4S. Or it could be a 5, proclaiming the announcement of iOS 5. If you really squint, it even looks a little like an ampersand!

Hey, this is fun. What do you see? As a little bit of pre-WWDC frivolity, tell us in the comments the wackiest thing you see in the pareidolia of the WWDC invite.

[via Razorian Fly]

Is this a leaked photograph of the new iOS 5 home screen complete with a swanky new notification bar and a revamped camera icon, or simply the work of a talented Photoshopper?

With just under 10 hours still to go before Steve Jobs kicks off this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, some eager attendees are already forming lines outside San Francisco’s Moscone West. A famous face among the bunch is Jay Freeman (better known as Saurik), the creator of Cydia.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAhP-yLJJ9s

When Steve takes the stage tomorrow morning, it’s pretty much a sure bet that he will use the words, magical, amazing, beautiful, and extraordinary a few dozen times each as he introduces the new iOS 5, iCloud and OS X Lion. We’re sure that iOS 5 is going to be great, but the iOSMagic Team has dreamed up something more amazing than even Steve Jobs can deliver.

Check out these thoughtful mockups of iOS 5, the next version of the iPhone and iPad OS, which Steve Jobs is due to preview at WWDC on Monday morning.

They were created by Federico Bianco, a graphic designer from Rome, Italy. It’s a “wishlist” of all the things he wants to see in iOS 5, and includes some interesting ideas about notifications, widgets, Home Screen organization and bringing iPhoto to iOS.

Check it out:

Here’s a fascinating description of the iCloud/Time Capsule remote computing system Apple may reveal on Monday described by Steve Jobs himself — back in 1997.

“I have computers at Apple, at NeXT, at Pixar and at home. I walk up to any of them and log in as myself, it goes over the network and finds my home directory on the server and… I’ve got my stuff wherever I am…”

“…we were able to take all of our personal data, our home directories we call them, off of our local machines and put them on a server, and the software made that completely transparent…”

“…so in the last seven years, do you know how many times I have lost any personal data? Zero. Do you know how many times I have backed up my computer? Zero.”

Via MyService and MacRumors.

In an unprecedented move, last Tuesday Apple outlined what they would be announcing at next week’s WWDC keynote. This, in combination with plenty of plausible rumors floating round the blogosphere, leaves little left to speculate about. But I’m going to have a go anyway. I think the main theme for iOS5 will be independence from iTunes and the Mac/PC, and the big surprise for iCloud will be Facebook-style apps.

Read on after the break.

Apple has already revealed that Steve Jobs will talk about iCloud, iOS 5 and OS X Lion during his WWDC keynote on Monday morning.

In addition, it’s rumored that Apple’s wireless Time Capsule backup/router will get a big update.

Here’s how iCloud and the new Time Capsule will work, according to a source close to the company who asked not be identified. It’s pretty surprising:

Here’s a little reminder: check your iPhone 4 thoroughly for issues before your warranty expires. At this point in time, most iPhone 4s are still under their One-Year Limited Warranty — but not for long.

Here’s a partial list of some of the issues that may warrant a replacement:

Amazon.com has listed for pre-order Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs, iSteve: The Book of Jobs. The 448-page book is being published by Simon & Schuster on March 6, 2012.

The official description reads:

When Apple reveals iCloud at WWDC on Monday, it’ll have the kind of impact the iPod has had, predicts Kevin Fox, a Silicon Valley software veteran who’s worked at Apple, Yahoo and Google.

“The rumblings are huge,” says Fox, lead designer at Mozilla. Fox worked on Newton software before designing Yahoo’s chat service and then software for Google (including Gmail 1.0, Google Calendar 1.0, and Google Reader 2.0). He continues:

… given the complete failure of MobileMe over the last decade there’s no way Apple would introduce [iCloud] on such a pedestal unless it’s incredible. My guess is that iCloud is to MobileMe as iPhone was to Newton: a complete, deep, polished solution after an underwhelming market failure.