News - page 2113

Given how wildly popular the Photo Booth software that ships on every new Mac is amongst trout-lipped, mall-loitering teenagers from sea to shining sea, it’s amazing to me that Apple’s gone four years without bringing Photo Booth to iOS. Recent plist references in iOS 4.3 beta firmware suggest, however, that Apple is soon to remedy that omission as soon as the iPad 2 drops… implying that Apple’s simply been waiting for the whole family of iOS devices to have a front-facing webcam. In addition to Photo Booth, iPhone users can also take advantage of various iPhone photo edit settings formula to enhance their selfies and images. Learn more about editing selfies like TikTok on iPhone.

Now a new patent has been found by Jack Purcher over at Patently Apple, not only confirming that Cupertino’s engineers have been working on bringing Photo Booth to iPhones, but also suggesting that it might be a more radical revision than first expected, taking advantage of the gamut of iOS hardware, including mic, GPS and accelerometer.

Panic, the makers of popular Mac FTP client Transmit, quip about Dell’s outright theft of their official logo: “If only Dell charged the Apple Tax, they could afford to draw their own truck.”

But at least the Dell Tax was enough to cover Photoshopping in one of their monitors!

Although the public is used to seeing Steve Jobs as the face of Apple, a growing number of consumers are comfortable purchasing products from the Cupertino, Calif. company even if the iconic iPod salesman is not at the helm. That’s the finding of a recent survey comparing consumer reactions to questions surrounding Jobs’ health.

Some 93 percent of people questioned in a RBC Capital Markets and ChangeWave survey said a change of Apple leadership would either have no impact or would not alter their buying choices. This compares to a June 2008 survey finding 18 percent of people would be less likely to purchase Apple products if Jobs left the CEO position.

Beloved teen detective Nancy Drew is racing her blue roadster into the digital age with a new interactive iPad game.

Called “Nancy Drew Mobile Mysteries: Shadow Ranch,” it’s a game/story hybrid. Aimed at girls age 9-14, the interactive gamebook app lets players decide how the story unfolds as they play games and solve mysteries, both big and small.

Despite Apple’s recent 6.8 percent drop in share prices, the Cupertino, Calif. iPhone and iPad maker has a bright future, one bullish analyst told investors Wednesday. “We believe a sustainable 25-30 percent growth rate in earnings could be achievable through 2015,” writes Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster.

Why? He believes the iPhone will grow at 35 percent a year, selling 200 million handsets in 2015 – with the iPad expanding at an even faster pace. Backing up his claim, the analyst offers the iPhone’s dramatic audience increase since bursting onto the smartphone scene in 2007.

You won’t find a Mac sitting on the desk of 30 percent of Americans, or an iPhone in the pockets of 30 percent of movie-goers, but in the world of Hollywoodland, Apple products rule the roost, appearing in almost thirty percent of all top movies at the YU.S. box office in 2010.

Apple products popped up in a surprising number of movies last year, including Iron Man 2,Toy Story 3, The Other Guys and the utterly execrable Kick Ass. All together, Apple soundly managed to beat out Chevrolet, Ford and Nike on the list of top product-placing companies.

Heralded as a revolution in the way companies advertised their products in-app, iAds has instead ended up being a bit of a dud, with Apple struggling to fill advertising spaces even as developers clamor to embrace the service.

To rectify the situation, Apple’s just rolled out an uncharacteristic drop in asking price: they’ve cut the minimum required spending for iAds from a heady $1 million to a more reasonable $500,000.

The move is meant to attract smaller business to iAds who couldn’t otherwise afford it. It should be a good thing, although once Apple starts allowing business to spend smaller, I wonder if iAd’s perfect 100% ad renewal rate will hold up.

What does this mean to you as an end user? Not a thing, except maybe you’ll be seeing an influx of new iAds to replace the tired old ones you’ve already seen to death.

“Stay tuned and buckled up.” According to sources speaking to Techcrunch, Apple has far from abandoned their premier Final Cut Pro software after more than a year without updates. It’s coming, and is supposedly slated to be the “biggest overhaul to Final Cut Pro since the original version was created over 10 years ago.” Yowza.

Although details are scant on what will be new, one of Techcrunch’s sources say that Final Cut Pro has been built back up from its marrow, with the changes encompassing everything from low-level architecture to a complete redesign of the user interface (a resdesign which will hopefully go over better than Apple’s redesign of iMovie’s interface a few years back).

The changes are reportedly “dramatic and ambitious,” and will answer all concerns that Apple’s abandoned the pros in their grab for consumers. If Techcrunch is right, Final Cut Pro will be hitting in Spring 2011, possibly to coincide with the National Association of Broadcasters conference on April 9th through 14th.

Fscklog has just posted a photo of what they believe are the specs to the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, which should be due out any day now.

Here are the specs, translated from German

• 2.3Ghz Sandy Bridge Dual-Core Intel Core i5 Processor with a 3MB L3 Cache

• 4GB of DDR3 RAM clocked at 1333MHz

• A 320GB hard drive

• a 13.3-inch diagonal LED backlit display with a 1280×800 pixel resolution.

• Intel HD Graphics 3000 with 384MB of DDR3 RAM.

• An integrated FaceTime-HD camera

• An 8x Superdrive

• Two USB 2 ports, an SD card reader, FireWire 800, a MiniDisplay Port, Ethernet and, most interestingly, Thunderbolt port (this is very possibly the Apple-branded implementation of Light Peak we’ve been hearing about).

Overall? It seems the 13-inch model is not the radical re-imagining we’ve been hearing about for the last few days. It’s not made of Liquid Metal, there’s no SSD and the new MBP has an identical chassis design to the old model. Short of the new Thunderbolt port and the leap to Sandy Bridge, these aren’t markedly different than the last generation of 13-inch MBPs. That said, the 13-incher is the entry-level MBP model. Perhaps Apple has something more radical afoot for the 15- and 17-inch models.

After the jump, a look at the new MacBook Pro’s marketing materials and a close-up view of the Thunderbolt port.

We all know that Steve Jobs is obsessed with crafting top-notch customer experiences. Of course, he’s famous for being dismissive of focus groups, but did you know he spies on customers at his local Apple Store?

If you’re wondering were all the comments went, they’re currently being imposted into Disqus. We’ve switched to Disqus, a commenting platform with all kinds of great features, including great social integration, notifications and multimedia.

When it’s up and running, it promises to be a great system. However, importing the old comments can sometimes take a while: maybe even two or three days.

That’s for existing comments. New comments should post immediately. Fingers crossed it’s up and running quickly. In the meantime, please leave any questions, comments or complaints in — you guessed it — the new comments system.

And thanks for your patience — Leander.

FireCore LLC has announced the release of an update to the Mac OS X version of Seas0nPass. The new release allows you to perform an untethered jailbreak on Apple’s latest AppleTV running 4.1.1 (the equivalent of iOS 4.2.1). The Windows version of the untethered jailbreak isn’t currently available, but will be at a later date.

According to FireCore, the new version of Seas0nPass is based on the jailbreak created by the Chronic Dev Team and the latest Beta3 version of aTV Flash (black) is compatible with Seas0nPass, GreenPois0n and Pwnage Tool jailbreaks.

You can read more about this on FireCore’s blog and you can download Seas0nPass now for free.

Raoul-Gabriel Urma writes:

We are computing students from Imperial College London and created a website dedicated to Steve Jobs allowing members of the public to leave their birthday comments and this way to support him while he is currently dealing with serious health issues.

Our aim is to allow as many people to wish him a happy birthday this way letting him know he has a back-up of so many.

Leave your best wishes here: Happy Birthday Steve Jobs.

That secret Apple Store retail meeting on Sunday we reported this morning? It looks like our instinct was right, as Kara Swisher at All Things D is now reporting that Apple will be holding a special media event on March 2nd to unveil the second-generation iPad.

Citing multiple sources, All Things D says that the date is firm, and that it will take place in San Francisco… likely at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. If true, that means we should see invitations sent out to the press today or tomorrow.

The iPad 2 is likely to ship in late March or early April, and will feature a thinner design, better sound, and FaceTime capabilities, as well as a faster dual-core A5 CPU and double ram. It’s also rumored to run on both Verizon and AT&T.

Just as Wintek has scored the contract to make touchscreens for the white iPhone 5, Chinese workers at the Taiwanese company’s Suzhou plant have urged Apple to look into the slate of chemical poisonings at the plant which they said could still hurt their health.

The issue is hexyl hydride, a chemical used by Wintek between May 2008 and August 2009 instead of alcohol to speed up production of Apple touchscreens. In an open letter published in a local Chinese newspaper, workers referred to hexyl hydride as “a killer that strikes invisibly.”

Symptoms of hexyl hydride poisoning include sudden numbness in hands, swelling and pain in the feet, tiredness and faintness. Long-term exposure can lead to permanent nerve and eye damage. 137 Wintek workers had been hospitalized because of the poisonings.

A German man tired of relying on public services to ferry him around in his wheelchair has developed a crowdsourced iPhone app with info on access to public places.

Though Raul Krauthausen doesn’t lament the services available for the physically handicapped in Germany – special taxis and grocery delivery, etc. – he wanted more flexibility.

“Sometimes I feel I’m treated like a child who isn’t allowed to decide specific things by myself,” said the 30-year-old who suffers from a genetic disorder that makes his bones brittle. “I want to remain flexible and not be dependent on when a driving service has time to pick me up.”

Over at The Loop, Jim Dalrymple is contradicting today’s reports that both the iPhone 5 and iPad 2 might be delayed by three months each, saying that both products are “on schedule” according to his own sources.

Of course, what “on schedule” means depends on where you’re sitting. They still might ship three months later than expected.

The rumor mills are spinning about what many expect to be a new MacBook Pro appearing this week. Now comes hints (although couched in qualifiers) that the iMac may also get a face-lift, concentrating on its screen. The all-in-one desktop unit was last updated in July 2010, when Apple unveiled the addition of Intel’s i3, i5, and i7 family of processors, along with ATI Radeon graphics for a starting price of $1,199.

Tuesday, Taiwan-based industry publication Digitimes cited “supply chain sources” that the Cupertino, Calif. company “may also launch its new iMac along with its MacBook, and the company may also make some changes over the screen size allowing panel cutting to reach its optimization.” In December, the publication reported a new iMac could be released in the first half of 2011.

Your iTunes library might get even more hi-fi soon, as CNN reports that Apple alongside other digital music retailers are in the process of trying to knock a few music publisher skulls together and upgrade the sound quality of digital music files.

Amazon has released a new series of television advertisements continuing to stress its Kindle e-reader is the future – not the Apple iPad. You may remember in our last episode, we left the pair on a beach where the Amazon device was played by a gorgeous woman and the iPad a nerdy guy. When we return, the Kindle is still the happy-go-lucky successor to the printed book and the iPad is still a bulky gadget with a screen full of glare.

Although the Kindle is a one-trick pony (albeit done very well) and the iPad can tackle a multitude of tasks, the Seattle-based Internet book-seller is taking advantage of the current tiff between Apple and publishers, as well as growing signs readers are moving towards the e-reader. In the new 30-second commercial, Amazon highlights the Kindle’s portability, its 30-day battery lifespan and its light weight.

Apple is asking its retail employees to sign non-disclosure agreements ahead of a secret, all-hands meeting to be held this Sunday, Apple Insider is reporting. It could foreshadow a major launch, a media event or both.

Earlier today, we reported that the iPad 2 might be delayed until June because of production bottlenecks, but noted our skepticism of the report, saying Apple wouldn’t release the iPad 2 and the iPhone 5 in the same month.

A mere hour later, Business Insider is now reporting that the iPhone 5 might not launch until September, citing a note from FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger.

Berger writes, “”For the iPhone 5, we continue to hear that a July launch is unlikely, with various casing suppliers and touch suppliers still ramping up, with some chip vendors not having yet received firm iPhone 5 orders, and with other sockets like the image sensor (most likely going to Omnivision exclusively, but with some potential for Sony to split that socket) still in flux. Given these factors, we think a September launch is more likely, off from Apple’s traditional iPhone launch schedule, but giving the firm more time to enhance its next-generation instant communications on the phone.”

If true, this would allow the iPad 2 to occupy the iPhone’s previous launch spot of September, possibly pushing the iPod Touch back into November or December… as well as give early Verizon iPhone 4 adopters three months less reason to kick themselves when their hot new phone is made obsolete.

In the wake of Apple’s new in-app subscription rules, we’ve already seen revolt from the makers of Readability and TinyGrab, who sent out blistering open letters yesterday explaining how Apple’s new rules effectively barred them from the App Store.

TinyGrab’s take was particularly interesting: the new in-app subscription rules prevent software-as-a-service apps (like Evernote, Dropbox, TinyGrab and more) from coming to the App Store at all. But in a recent email from Steve, the on-leave Apple CEO says that that’s not the intention at all…

Nine months in, Apple still hasn’t managed to ship the elusive white iPhone 4. A problem with the painting process on the white glass plate causes light to leak onto the camera sensor, washing out images. At this point, you’d think Apple would just give up and move on, but the white iPhone 5 is the Moby Dick to Steve Jobs’ cantankerous, turtlenecked Ahab. We’re in the realm of obsession here.

None the less, a brief note over at Digitimes says that Apple is already looking towards the future of pastiness, and have just signed Wintek to be the sole touch panel supply for all white iPhone 5s.

I suppose the comfort in all this is that, given what a debacle the white iPhone 4 has been, you can bet on the fact that Apple will have the white iPhone 5 perfected as a point of pride at launch.

Given Apple’s history fulfilling a yearly iOS device refresh cycle, we’ve been taking the iPad 2’s debut in late March or early April as read, but if a recent analyst report is to be believed, Cupertino might very well miss that day… delaying the iPad 2 into June.

According to a report by Yuanta analysts Vincent and Alison Chen, the iPad 2 may be delayed until June because of “production bottlenecks” at manufacturer Hon Hai Precision.

“Our checks suggest new issues are being encountered with the new production and it is taking time to resolve them,” said Chen in the report. “As a number of Android 3.0 tablets are being launched in April and May, the delay in iPad 2 shipments may give the Android camp a brief window of opportunity.”