News - page 2106

Apple’s stock is taking a hit on fresh rumors that Steve Jobs has only a few weeks to live. Apple stock is currently down about three points in after-hours trading. It’s likely to take a big hit tomorrow when the markets reopen. The stock dropped a few points last week on rumors that Jobs was in hospital.

The sleazy rumors, published by the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, reportedly show photos of Jobs outside the Stanford Cancer Center in Palo Alto, his home town. The pictures don’t seem to be available online, but apparently show Jobs looking very thin and frail. The tabloid says Jobs has dropped from 175lb to just 130lb and has just six weeks to live. The topic is lighting up Twitter.

We don’t know whether the information is correct, but we certainly hope not. Best wishes Steve.

Daily Mail: Paper publishes shocking pictures of skeletal Steve Jobs claiming ‘cancer-stricken Apple boss may have just six weeks to live’

Insane. According to Rovio’s Peter Besterbacka, gamers are now spending over two hundred million minutes every day playing their popular cross-platform title, Angry Birds, one of the most popular games on the iOS and Mac App Stores. Yeesh. Forget AAPL… it’s time to buy some Rovio stock.

Just so there’s no misunderstandings, Apple has posted a support document explaining the differences in making calls on the GSM (AT&T) and CDMA (Verizon) iPhones, as well as listing a few shortcuts available to Verizon customers for turning on things like call forwarding without opening the Settings.app. Good to know.

[via TUAW]

Omnivision, the company that makes the camera in your iPhone, have just outed their second-generation backside illuminated sensor, the OV8830, and it’s a pretty exciting product for Apple fans: it should give the iPhone 5 the ability to record 1080p video at thirty frames per second, as well as substantially improve image quality.

Yesterday, Apple revised its App Review Guidelines, and one of the provisions was that apps would no longer be accepted if they were primarily comprised of media content better sold through iTunes or the iBookstore. In other words, apps could no longer be mere wrappers around movies, albums or e-books.

That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t want movies and books on the App Store, though. They just want their apps to be more than just wrappers. Case in point, Warner Bros’ latest app: they have just released The Dark Knight as a downloadable app that contains a free five minute preview of the movie, with the full film available as an in-app purchase.

The distinction? The Dark Knight comes with a lot of extra features, just like you might find on the DVD version. Since that’s something iTunes Movies can’t do — yet! — Apple seems to be okay with Warner Bros’ releasing their movies in app form… which is good news for Warner Bros, who intend on releasing more movies as apps later in the year.

Analysts all seemed united that Verizon was going to sell a lot of iPhones the first week they were available. With breathless anticipations, these analysts rattled off predictions. Would Verizon sell 500,000 iPhones? A million? A jillion? The sky seemed to be the limit.

Well, admittedly, it’s informal, but Boy Genius Report has some exclusive numbers on how many iPhones Verizon sold through five Apple Store locations in the first five days of sale… and as you can see, while the Verizon numbers are undeniably higher than the AT&T numbers, they’re not orders of magnitude greater. Verizon and Apple are reportedly disappointed.

Increased demand for the iPad helped Apple push past HP to become No. 1 in mobile PC shipments with 17 percent of the market during the fourth quarter of 2010, according to a research report released Wednesday. Apple shipped 10.2 million notebook and tablet PCs combined, almost one million units more than the market-leading PC maker, DisplaySearch announced.

“While we anticipate increased competition in the tablet PC market later this year with the introduction of Android Honeycomb-based tablets, Apple’s iPad business is complementing a notebook line whose shipments widely exceed the industry average growth rate,” Richard Shim, senior DisplaySearch analyst, said in a statement.

Last year, Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use Liquidmetal — a high-strength metal that is light and can be processed like plastic — in their future products.

An ex Liquidmetal exec thought Apple would make iPhones out of it. A source speaking to MacTrast, though, says that Apple’s Liquidmetal investment won’t debut in the iOS line, but instead in March’s MacBook Pro refresh… which looks like a far more radical redesign than previously suspected.

The Apple Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad fit together as if they were meant to be one and the same… so why aren’t they? While there are ergonomic reasons why it might not be ideal on the desktop, a combined keyboard/trackpad would be the perfect solution for people trying to control a Mac hooked up to their television, or when lounging in an arm chair in front of your iMac.

Enter the MagicWand, a new accessory from Twelve South that connects the Apple Wireless Keyboard to the Magic Trackpad without adding any additional bulk.

I puzzled awhile trying to figure out how the MagicWand holds the two accessories together until realizing how simple it was: it’s just a half-cylinder bracket that snaps along the battery case, tightly uniting the keyboard and trackpad when placed side-by-side in either righty or lefty configuration.

Very clever, and the price isn’t bad either: it’ll only cost you $29.99. After years of using an absolutely execrable combination keyboard/trackball for my home theater Mac, I’m going to switch to the MagicWand full time.

Microsoft has finally released its first piece of software on the Mac App Store, but it’s not one of their premier software packages like Office. Instead, Microsoft is dipping their toes in the App Store water by releasing Windows Phone 7 Connector as a free download through Apple’s digital delivery system.

Windows Phone 7 Connector has been available in beta since October, but it’s now a final release. The Connector app allows owners of a Windows Phone 7 device to sync their iTunes music, videos and podcasts to their phones.

Of course, we’ve never been quite sure what sort of mad man uses a Mac but owns a Windows Phone 7 device over an iPhone, but we’re sure there’s at least a few of them out there… albeit employed exclusively in Microsoft’s Mac software division.

If you’re one of them, you can download Windows Phone 7 Connector on the Mac App Store by just clicking here. Hey, why not… it’s free.

If you think your iPhone pics are museum quality, you may have the chance to see them hanging up in an art exhibit.

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, California is gearing up for an exhibit called “Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography” from March 31 to April 30, 2011.

You have until February 27 to submit your best pics.

Apple’s prohibitive new policies in regards to in-app purchases and in-app subscriptions have been spilling all the digital ink so far, but Cupertino also took the opportunity yesterday to clarify their position on “cheating” App Store developers: zero tolerance.

In Apple’s newly revised App Review guidelines, Apple has warned all devs who try to unfairly influence iTunes ratings, steal data from users or plagiarize other works that if they keep it up, they’ll be summarily kicked from the App Store.

Although Apple designed its CDMA iPhone for the U.S. market and carrier Verizon Wireless, workers for China Telecom say they’ve ‘jailbroken’ the domestic iPhone 4.

The “CDMA iPhone 4 has made its first call in China,” a group of employees at the carrier’s Guangdong branch writes on a blog, according to the Wall Street Journal Wednesday. The blog post is accompanied by a photo of a Verizon Wireless iPhone apparently jailbroken by the Mac version of Greenpois0n.

Back in July of 2010, John Browning, Jacob Balthazar and Claudia Keller filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple claiming that the iPad shutdown when used in direct sunlight due to heating issues.

The crux of their case? Apple’s marketing for the iPad — which, as you might recall, was heavily slanted towards e-reading at the time — (debatably)said that “reading on iPad is just like reading a book.” Books don’t overheat! Books don’t shut down!

Although many see problems with Apple’s new in-app subscription policy, some Wall Street experts view the mandate handed down as a boon both for the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant and businesses looking to attract iPhone, iPad and iPod users. Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White sees the subscription rule as an “incremental positive” while increasing the value of Apple’s “ecosystem.”

Subscriptions, White writes, will “extend the reach of [the] Apple ecosystem.” The new policy, requiring publishers to provide iTunes as an in-app subscription option, “offers content providers a deep customer base and a more innovative way to transact business.”

If you’re eager to pick up a Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro, you won’t have long to wait, as a source is now telling Apple Insider that production of the latest MBPs is now underway, with volume shipments ready to begin as early as the first week in March.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple is working on a “major revamp” of MobileMe, including a “locker” that will stream movies and TV shows to iPhones and iPads.

We’ve learned that Apple is going far beyond this. The company is looking to add a ton of ambitious cloud computing features to MobileMe — possibly in anticipation of a streaming-only iPhone.

Among the many services Apple is working on are:

• A live video-streaming service like Ustream
• A location-based check-in system like Gowalla or Foursquare
• A geo-tagging system codenamed “Tokens” that tags real-world locations, like Facebook Places on steroids.

According to our source, who asked to remain anonymous, Apple is working on a lot of streaming data services and location-aware technologies. It’s not clear when or how these features will be rolled out, but they appear to complement our report that Apple is working on a streaming-only iPhone.

“A ton of ideas were hatched on what they could do, and from what I heard, a lot of their ideas were shelved for a later date in order to focus on a few of them,” said our source.

I wasn’t really surprised by the popularity of my post Apple Publishes Six Free Electronic Books for Developers since I’ve been telling everyone that developer topics would be popular and you delivered. That post was re-tweeted 253 times and shared on Facebook 92 times which isn’t to shabby for a short news blurb about books for iOS developers. So, the good news out of all this is that I’ll be covering more developer related topics on Cult of Mac in the future. Especially due to all the nice comments on the above post.

Therefore let’s get started by taking the six free books and adding some good books that are worth purchasing to your reading list. If you are interested in iOS development then you should not overlook these books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU5e-IHOC1c

Making cheese look all retro is pretty easy — just leave it out in the sun for a couple of days. Making photos look retro? More difficult. Which is why Lo-Fi, which emerged from beta today, and apps like it, are so cool: they let us play around with photos and create all sorts of weird effects without having to fiddle around with actual film (which can be annoying — trust me).

Lo-Fi in particular focuses (lame pun alert) on retro, toy-camera effects like graininess, light leaks and lens blur; anyone who’s ever used a Holga or a Lomo will get the idea. For added cool-factor, the app’s interface mimics the back of a camera.

Lo-Fi is $29 and is available for a free seven-day trial. Or, you might snag one of 12 free copies the developer is giving away by jumping through a few hoops: following their Twitter feed, liking them on Facebook or signing up for their email newsletters — links to which can found at the app’s website. The hoop-jumping deadline is tomorrow though, so get moving if you want a crack at it.

Earlier today, when mulling over Amazon’s options in making their Kindle app comply with Apple’s new in-app purchase rules, I suggested that the simplest way for Amazon to preserve its existing business model without fleeing the App Store might be to pursue a good old fashioned lawsuit.

Amazon hasn’t filed one yet, but music subscription service Rhapsody is already threatening one, having already issued a statement saying “We will be colaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development.”

If you’ve ever heard a snatch of a catchy song on television or in a bar and wondered what it was enough to pull out your iPhone, you’re probably familiar with music-identifying services like Shazam which record a snippet of music and then try to identify the artist, album and title against the information in its database.

Ever wonder, though, how Shazam gets all of its data? Intriguingly, it doesn’t all just get pumped in from the labels. Instead, Shazam employs a constabulary of music detectives who not only track down on-the-rise tracks and artists, but also actively search out new tracks to index, implement and program into their data frames.

A fantastic piece explaining how one of iOS’s most casually impressive apps is driven by the invisible magic of human ingenuity.

Well, that didn’t take long: mere hours after Apple officially dropped their new App Store subscriptions service, the first magazine apps using the new billing system are hitting the App Store, courtesy of Popular Science and Elle Magazine.

I’m old enough that I’ve stopped giggling at Chinglish in most of its forms, but I hold a still hold a pecial place in my heart for the way the knock-off shops of Shenzhen will mutate and mutilate the iPhone’s branding when slapping a name upon their crappiest phones. Perhaps why I love it so much is that, unlike Chinglish, these guys know exactly what they are doing.

Consider, for example, the iPhoue, found at the notorious Shanzhai Market by our friends over at M.I.C. Gadget. Instead of going through all the hard work of releasing a competent phone, these guys just contented themselves with turning the “n” in “iPhone” upside down, slapped an Apple logo on the handset, dusted their hands and called it a day, without even considering the hysterical pronunciation of the resulting “brand.” Gentlemen… meet the iFoo.

The latest update to PwnageTool from the iPhone Dev-Team is now available to download, and version 4.2 brings with it untethered jailbreaking for devices running iOS 4.2.1 and fixes the recently discovered iBooks issue that prevents a user opening an iBookstore purchase on their jailbroken device.

PwnageTool uses the “feedface” untether developed by the Chronic Dev Team to allow for untethered jailbreaking in the latest release, and supports all 4.2.1 devices other than the iPod touch 2G. Another issue fixed in this version is the Wi-Fi problem that some users had with the second-generation AppleTV.

If you’ve already jailbroken your device and you’re desperate to gain access to your iBookstore purchases, don’t think you need to restore and jailbreak again with the latest version of PwnageTool. On their blog, the iPhone Dev-Team have stated that fixes for both the iBooks issue, and the Wi-Fi issue for AppleTV, will be available in an upcoming Cydia package that you’ll simply be able to download and install on your device.

Once again that’s iOS jailbreakers 1, Apple nil.

It can be hard to find a condom when you need it… or so I keep trying to convince my girlfriend. Needless to say, she’s unconvinced, and as proof has called my attention to the New York City Health Department’s new condom locator app for iOS.

New York City is one of the most progressive countries in the nation, and it’s easy enough to find free condoms at many locations spread throughout the city. Thanks to the new app, though, there’s simply no excuse to not have your pockets perpetually stuffed with prophylactics: just type in your address and it’ll automatically find the five nearest spots to pick up some free sheaths.