News - page 2175

More and more, the publication of Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines is starting to seem like it might be a promise of the end of arbitrary app rejection. Following the surprise about course by Apple when it comes to allowing Google Voice apps on the App Store, it now appears that they’ve also rescinded their long-standing ban on App Store ringtone makers.

Pretty much since the App Store’s inception, applications that allowed users to make ringtones from the songs on their iPhone have been verboten. Exactly “why” has always been up for debate: although Apple did sell ringtones through iTunes, they clearly didn’t mind users rolling their own, as evidenced by GarageBand’s Export Ringtone feature. Whatever the reason, though, it was plenty hard to sneak a ringtone maker by Apple up until recently. Since the publication of Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines, though, no less than five ringtone makers have gone live on iTunes… seemingly ending the arbitrary blacklisting.

The iPad has made the consumption of digital media revolutionary and it is getting increasingly more useful for creating content. So today content creation took a small step forward with the release of updates to Apple’s iWork suite of apps:  Keynote, Numbers and Pages.

The apps have been updated to provide better support for Microsoft Office when exporting to Excel (.xls) or Powerpoint (.ppt)  and Apple has included a number of improvements in these app updates.

Additionally, the apps can now also directly access your MobileMe iDisk and other WebDAV servers:

With the latest Keynote, Pages and Numbers for iPad, you can now transfer your documents directly to and from your MobileMe iDisk so you can work on them anywhere you have an Internet connection. For example, create a new Pages document on your iPad and copy it directly to your iDisk. Then, when you are back at your Mac, open the document from iDisk and continue editing right where you left off.

Welcome changes to apps that I’ve found useful while on the go. If you haven’t tried them yet they are worth a look, but don’t expect them to replace their desktop counterparts. If you need to take them for a test drive stop by any Apple store for a peek, since according to the local store that I called, the iWork iPad apps are installed on all iPads on display.

Click the read link below to see Apple’s complete list of changes made to the apps.

The iPod Click Wheel’s days seem numbered at Apple.  With the iPod nano having abandoned tactile functionality for a touchscreen (and iWatch emulation), and the iPod shuffle never having earned the honor, only the iPod Classic (itself a senior citizen) now sports the versatile, groundbreaking interface.

Many a jogger, commuter or pocket-iPod user has spent countless hours twirling the Click Wheel dial and listening to music – not to mention playing Brickles!

Or sometimes, you make music with the Click Wheel.  As nostalgically shown by Matt and Keith over at Matt’s Macintosh (who clearly seems to be enjoying his Final Cut Pro workstation)!

What’s that you say? Not enough work stress in your life? We’ve got something that’ll ramp it right up, courtesy of Dutch graphic designer/cartoonist Metin Seven: a half-foot, 3D-printed bust of a glowering Steve Jobs. Try positioning it on your desk facing you, somewhere off in your peripheral vision, for maximum effect.

Steve can be ordered from cutting-edge craft-site Shapeways for $116.81 in a color option described as “white strong & flexible.” Obviously.

Fuse Box, the company behind some of the best collaboration tools on the Internet, announced this week the arrival of Fuze Meeting, the first web conferencing service that allows users to run a meeting from an iPad. Dubbed ‘meetings in a pinch,’ the Fuze Meeting app (iTunes link) supports Keynote presentations on and off the iPad, content uploads from third party apps such as Dropbox and SuharySync, and full duplex in-app VoIP so users don’t even need headphones to join a meeting.

Some of the cooler features supported by the app include support for HD video content and Fuze Box’s iPoint™ Laser Technology that transforms a user’s finger into a digital laser pointer, viewable by all meeting participants. Cloud storage enables users to pull any document or file directly from the server and also add content from the iPad straight into a meeting, then store it on the cloud for later. Both hosts and attendees can share, control, and present content from their iPad.

Chat integration with AIM, Yahoo, Google, OCS and others allows users to see who is online and bring them into a meeting from wherever they are and in-app account creation lets users meet exclusively from the iPad without ever booting up a desktop PC –- making the app a truly mobile solution.

Users who download the app before October 15 can use an upgraded version of the app free for 30 days, after which, accounts will convert to the always free lite account.

iBooks and games may be currently popular apps for the iPad, but if Apple’s latest game-changing device is going to have real legs it will one day have to be seen as a productivity tool. And productivity means business. The success of Fuze Meeting should be a good indicator of iPad’s potential value in the academic and enterprise spaces.

Adobe will only begrudgingly admit Apple’s recent decision to allow the graphics format back into the iPhone development toolbox was helpful. Talking to analysts, Adobe’s CEO said only the impact of Apple’s relaxed standards “was muted.” The comment, while mild, could be the first steps toward detente between the media tools maker and the creator of some of the most-used media platforms.

Following a decision earlier this month to resume working on its Flash CS5 Compiler for the iOS platform, “a number of people who had created products using our tool submitted that to the Apple Store and were approved,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said.

[xrr rating=80%]

More signs appear every day that Apple is prepping a CDMA version of its popular iPhone for early 2011. The Cupertino, Calif. company reportedly has told suppliers it wants the first 3 million CDMA-only handsets ready for December 2010. The addition of a CDMA version alongside the current GSM-only iPhone should push fourth-quarter iPhone production to between 21 million and 22 million Apple handsets, one analyst told investors.

Citing overseas suppliers, Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Jeffrey Fidarco said shipments of GSM-only iPhones will be betweem 18.2 million and 18.4 million for the September quarter, a figure he described as “well above investor expectations.” Additionally, the analyst forecasts Apple will sell 11.6 million iPhones for the fourth-quarter of fiscal 2010, a 39 percent jump from the 8.4 million Apple sold in the third quarter. The recent launch of iPhone sales in China, along with Apple’s goal to launch the iPhone 4 in 88 countries by the end of September will aid results in in the fourth-quarter, the analyst told investors.

The highly rated Springpad “remember anything” service is rolling out several nifty new features — starting with mobile notifications that will alert users to events, news and special offers.

Springpad is a free lifestyle service that makes it easy to save digital content — everything from news stories to recipes, email, wine labels, restaurant reviews, travel tips and so on.

It rivals similar services such as Evernote and Backpack, but value adds by analyzing saved content and layering it with metadata like special deals, nearby retailers, and useful links. If you save recipes, for example, it can automatically generate shopping lists of ingredients. Scan the barcode from a bottle of wine, and it’ll give you info and also find a local retailer.

“Anytime, anywhere, anyhow — it makes it drop dead simple to capture stuff you want to remember,” said Springpad CEO Jeff Janer in a phone interview last week.

Saved content is synchronized across iPhone, iPad, Android and Web apps. The service was recently named one of Time magazine’s 50 Best Websites and favorably reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

On Wednesday, the service is adding alerts to its mobile app — event reminders, news alerts, to-dos, price drops, coupons, and special offers, etc. If you show an interest in Apple’s iOS, for example, it will alert you if Apple issues a software update.

The company is also releasing an extension for Google’s Chrome, which will make it easy to add content without leaving the browser. An extension for Safari will follow in about 30 days, Janer said. It is also adding push notifications to Android (available today) and iOS, which will available in about a month pending Apple’s approval.

Here’s a video of the new features in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REssNBbtmjc&hd=1

Google Earth has long been one of the most impressive apps on iOS, but the software just got an entirely new and subaqueous dimension: in Google Earth 3.1 for iOS, you can now explore underwater landscapes (or, as Google calls it, “ocean bathymetry and ocean layer content.”

Dive below the ocean’s surface to explore underwater canyons, or travel to the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench. Once underwater, simply swipe the screen with two fingers to “look around.” You can always reset your view by clicking on the north arrow on the iPad, or on the compass on the iPhone and iPod.

First person out there to spot R’lyeh, please let me know the coordinates: it seems like I’ve spent all morning searching the Pacific depths for the non-Euclidean city in which dead Cthulhu “wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Google Earth is a free download on the App Store.

In the past, Blackberry makers Research In Motion have had questionable success in updating their handsets to be competitive in a post-iPhone world, but that’s not about to stop them from challenging Apple’s iPad: the company is expected to debut their own 7-inch tablet at next week’s RIM Developer Conference.

Rumored to be named the BlackPad, RIM’s iPad-clone is expected to run some variation of the the QNX operating system instead of their own Blackberry OS 6. At 7 inches, the BlackPad would be closer to the (still untested at market) form factor of the Samsung Galaxy Tab than the iPad’s 9.7-inch display, and would likely be similar to the Galaxy Tab in other key specs as well, such as dual camera capability.

Interestingly, sources speaking to the WallStreet Journal say that RIM is going a curious direction when it comes to 3G: the only way you will be able to access cellular networks on a BlackPad is by tethering it to a BlackBerry smartphone.

With AT&T’s exclusive hold on the iPhone due to end soon by many accounts, many are wondering if Verizon will get their own version of the iPhone early next year… and how much that will hurt AT&T. According to analysts, a Verizon iPhone wouldn’t hurt AT&T very much, and now AT&T is echoing the sentiment themselves: we’re not worried.

AT&T Chief Randall Stephenson recently spoke at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York City, Stephenson stated that while the iPhone was a major success for AT&T, two-thirds of iPhone purchases came from previous AT&T customers and were not likely to switch to another network just because the iPhone opened up over there as an option.

More to the point, Stephenson says that the iPhone 4 was such a huge success that they’ve locked in a huge chunk of their existing customers into new two year contracts. Added together, Stephenson thinks it’s unlikely that a Verizon iPhone would lead to a mass defection of users.

He’s probably right, at least immediately… but this isn’t about a cataclysmic migration of users that occurs the second AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity ends. This is about the long tail defection of individual users over a period of a couple of years who are so fed up with AT&T’s clumsy service and incompetence that the only thing keeping them there is the best phone on Earth. Unless AT&T takes the quality of their service more seriously without the iPhone exclusivity than they did with, there still may very well be trouble for Ma Bell down the road.

Are you wondering how a company like Nokia can, on the one hand, claim that it is selling more smartphones every day than the iPhone, and yet be kicking its CEOout the door like a mangy dog? These pie charts ought to make everything crystal clear.

Advisory firm Canaccord Genuity told investors to buy, buy, buy Apple stock on Tuesday, targeting Apple’s price at $356 per share… and to give investors an idea on why they were so excited about Apple’s prospects, they accompanied their note with the following observation: even though Apple only sold 17 million handsets in the first half of 2010, Apple has pulled in 39% of the mobile sector’s profit.

Meanwhile, Nokia, Samsung and LG sold 400 million phones last year — over twenty times as many handsets as Apple sold iPhones — and yet their profit was dwarfed by Apple’s in the same period.

As Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley notes, “[W]where most handset OEMs struggle to post a profit or even 10% operating margins… we estimate Apple boasts roughly 50% gross margin and 30%+ operating margin for its iPhone products.”

No wonder the boards of companies like Nokia are lopping off their key executives’ heads and bowling them out the door.

Police in Los Angeles are reporting higher numbers of thefts involving victims distracted by iPods or cell phones.

“People are walking around the street in public with their head down texting and thinking about a conversation, rather than up looking around them, and it’s given criminals an opportunity to snatch these cell phones and iPods out of people’s hands in broad daylight,”  Lt. Paul Vernon of the Los Angeles Police Department told local news station ABC 7.

While we’ve reported frequently on iPhone snatch-n-grabs involving people on the phone, this is the second US city authority recently to warn against using mobile devices while, uh, mobile in public.

Chicago’s transport authority reported an uptick in e-thefts warned riders that using iDevices on public transport makes them easy pickings for thieves who want those gadgets. The CTA is developing a poster to warn riders that electronic devices are often targeted by thieves, who single out people sitting or standing near the door so they can snatch an iPod or other device, then make a quick escape. The CTA  won’t be the first to launch the iWarning: in 2007, authorities in Brixton, South London launched an awareness campaign with posters declaring, “They want your iPod!”

The LAPD’s Vernon estimates that there are almost 400 robberies and grand thefts in downtown LA, 70 of them related to cell phones and iPods. While that’s only about 18 percent, it’s still high enough that police want to warn against the dangers of digital distractions.

It does seem a drag that you can’t use your devices as they were intended — when you’re mobile. That said, I’m pretty careful about making mobile calls on the street and which neighborhoods are “safe” enough to shut out with music from an iPod.

Cervantes Mobile’s latest iPhone accessory, the Jorno, is basically technology that’s been floating around for nearly a decade: a folding keyboard for serious writing on a handheld device. I had something just like this for my old Dell Axim PDA back in 2002, and while the Jorno docks with the iPhone through Bluetooth instead of a physical connection, otherwise it’s pretty much identical.

I can’t make any bones about the Jorno’s price: at $79, I’d say it’s too expensive by half for such old tech. That said, I will say that the Transformers-like process of folding one of these keyboards was such a clickety-clacketing delight that I still count my old fold-up Axim keyboard as one of the best gadgets I ever owned, and this is pretty much the same thing. If you want to have an easily pocketable yet full-sized physical keyboard to do serious writing on your iPhone or iPad, then, you could do worse than giving this cute like keyboard a shot.

In case you doubted that smartphone choice is the party game for the aughts, another survey has outlined what makes iPhone owners different from Android and Blackberry users.

This one won’t tell you what kind of meat they prefer, or whether they get more girls, but Retrevo polled some 7,500 smartphone owners to uncover preferences in other kinds of consumption.

iPhone owners tend to buy more Mac products and households that run a Mac OS as their primary computer purchase three times as many iPhones and almost six times as many iPads as other households.

iPhone owners are more likely to be younger than other smartphone owners, make purchases with their phones and watch TV online.

Android owners are more likely than iPhone or Blackberry owners to ditch landlines — 31 percent compared to 23 percent for the other two. Some  45 percent are netbook owners, 31 percent use their phones for GPS navigation, some of them don’t read books (15 percent) and about 10 percent don’t recycle.

Researchers conclude with a sweeping, but powerful, statement: “Apple is not just a company but a way of life and a commitment to a line of electronics, Android owners with their choice of carriers could make them more confident cell phone users and BlackBerry owners might agree with the motto slow and steady wins the race. “

It is natural to be confused by the image above, but before I explain what exactly is going on here, I’d like to give you a moment to come up with your own possible narrative. It’s clear that the Japanese man on the right is doing something with the iPad on the left through the wires hooked up directly to his brain, but what, exactly?

I look forward to hearing your first thoughts in the comments, but my immediate guess was that the Japanese man was using his iPad as some sort of extreme constipation-relieving device, during the usage of which he spontaneously had a quadruple heart attack that simultaneously struck each and every chamber of his heart. What other explanation could explain that man’s facial contortions?

The true explanation is just about as weird, though. As you can see in the video below, this is an iPad game that was demonstrated at last week’s Tokyo Game Show.

Apple’s Find My iPad feature strikes again, this time a cross-country escapade with a happy ending.  It begins when Southwest traveler Curtis Cogdill left his iPad on the airplane when traveling from Sacramento, Calif., to Portland, Ore:

After some discussion as to whose fault it was, Cogdill used his iPod Touch and Apple’s Find My iPhone MobileMe app to locate the iPad. While the family was in Oregon, the iPad had taken a cross-country trip to Orlando, Fla.

“You could zoom all the way in,” Cogdill said. “You could tell it was sitting where an airplane would be sitting at the terminal.” [CNET]

But the story doesn’t end there.  The wayward iPad soon took another journey.  While tracking his iPad, Cogdill watched as his beloved iSlate left the airport and traveled to a nearby home.

Lost, then found, then stolen – what a day.

Fortunately the story has a happy ending.  A Southwest supervisor, along with the police, recovered the iPad soon after the rightful owner contacted the airline.  The family is happy with the outcome, and MobileMe likely has another lifetime subscriber.

[via CNET]

After scratching his head for awhile and wondering what to do with a Macintosh Classic II , Maker Matteo from Ithaca, New York repurposed his old faithful Mac into a shelf-top clock.

From appearances, it looks like the clock — which Matteo rather laughably calls “steampunk” in style — only came into being after its creator accidentally doused his Mac Classic in acid then shot with a bazooka, but the innards of the admittedly ugly timepiece work well enough: a 16MHz CPU, 4MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive running MacOS 7 and a dozen different shareware and freeware clock programs, including one that counts down the seconds to Matteo’s death.

Yeah, it’s hideous, but we love it: this is just the kind of bizarro clock I can imagine discovering thirty years from now in the basement of an elderly and now quite eccentric Steve Wozniak. Great work, Matteo!

Earlier this month, a member of the Chronic Development Team announced that he had discovered an exploit that would allow any iOS device currently on the market to be jailbroken forever, no matter how Apple patched it through software. Christened “SHAtter,” the exploit is widely anticipated, not only because it will allow versions of iOS 4.0.2 and above to be jailbroken, but because the only way Apple can fix it is through hardware. Once SHAtter is released, all current iOS devices will essentially be jailbreakable forever.

Here’s a warning, though. The SHAtter jailbreak still isn’t out, which means that any website or program claiming to be capable of jailbreaking a device running iOS 4.0.2 or above is likely a scam unless it was released by the Dev Team themselves… and chances are, it’s something much worse.

According to security researcher Costin Raiu at the Kapersey Labs, there is a new exploit in the wild that is being circulated as greenpois0n, a purported iOS 4.0.2 or above jailbreaking tool. Instead of actually jailbreaking iOS devices, though, it instead steals your passwords.

It’s easy to forget after the remarkable ease of August’s JailbreakMe exploit that jailbreaking your iOS device is actually a complicated process and not one that should be conducted by amateurs. As always, remember that the only real source to trust when it comes to jailbreaking your iPhone is the iPhone Dev Team… and unless they have released a tool directly to jailbreak your device, you should stay far, far away.

Adobe has announced the release of new video and photo editing packages.

Photoshop Elements is upgraded to version 9, and its video editing cousin Premiere Elements 9 is released as an OS X application for the first time.

Separately, they will cost you $99 each, or you can buy them both together for $149.

What do you get for your money? Well in Photoshop Elements, Adobe promises some off-shoots of the Content Aware Fill feature found in Photoshop, making it easy to edit and repair photos and have the gaps filled in realistically and automatically. The Organizer feature and Auto-Analyzer are designed to make managing large image collections easy, and there’s new face recognition technology.

Elements users might like to check out the official Facebook pages where Adobe is posting lots of tips and how-tos.

In Premiere Elements, you’ll find the same Organizer alongside tools for image stabilization and color correction.

Both applications offer access to Adobe Plus, an online backup and storage service that gives you 20GB of space for $50/year.

3D is all the rage this year — seems like every electronics outfit in existence had a new 3D TV on display at this year’s CES — and now practically anyone can shoot their own 3D photos (to display on the aforementioned 3D TVs).

The $250 stereo-imaging H-FT012 lens is part of Panasonic’s micro four-thirds lineup, and is meant for bodies like Panasonic’s $900 (for the body only) LUMIX DMC-GH2, a touch-screen hybrid (still + video) camera that shoots full HD at 60 fps, also released today. Note to James Cameron wannabes, though: The H-FT012 doesn’t do video.

Focal length is fixed at a narrowish-but-useable 65mm, and at F12, the lens is daylight-use only; still, this is probably the most practical 3D-image kit currently out on the market.

If you live in the US and own an Apple computer, you’re one of the happiest computer owners in the nation.

Apple, Inc. ranks first in customer satisfaction among its PC industry peers, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s (ASCI) survey.

In general, US consumers are happier than they’ve ever been with their computers. The ASCI score for personal computers totaled 78 out of 100 for the last year — higher than it has ever been since the 1994 baseline score.

Apple owners, however, are especially satisfied.  The Cupertino company scored highest for the seventh year in a row, earning 86 out of a total 100 points. That score is two points over last year’s survey and Apple’s highest score to date.

“The company now has a 9-point lead over its nearest competitor. No other company in the ACSI has as formidable a lead within its own industry,” comments Professor Claes Fornell, a professor at the university and head of the ACSI. “Innovation and product diversification, along with strong customer service, have long been at the center of Apple’s success.”

Apple wasn’t always leading the pack: scores from the early 2000s show Apple lagging behind Acer and Dell. In 2004, the year the iMac G5 launched, saw an uptick in consumer ratings.

Despite a few snafus — real or imagined — with the launch of the iPhone 4 and the arrival of the iPad, Fornell doesn’t predict that either will have any impact on Apple’s bottom line.

“At the same time, sales of Mac computers set an all-time quarterly high, which suggests that the popularity of the iPad has not impacted Apple’s desktop computer business. The company’s net income rose 78% in the second quarter and stock price, despite recent volatility, was up about 50% compared with one year ago.”

Via redorbit

Massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs, pander to the obsessive. There’s always another dungeon to explore, another raid to launch, another auction to cash out. Unfortunately, it’s that very addictive quality of MMOs doesn’t mesh well with a mobile, connected lifestyle… given that so much of an MMO’s gameplay is unsuitable for mobile devices, how do you let obsessive players feel connected with their in-game avatars from their iPhone or iPad?

The upcoming MMO Guild Wars 2 by ArenaNet has an answer for that… and it’s an app. Their application will let players stay connected to in-game chat even when on the road, while also allowing them to help out their fellow Guild Wars 2 buddies by guiding them towards quest destinations, cities and towns.

It seems like a great step to connecting MMOs to devices that aren’t quite powerful enough to run them… yet. Of course, an approach like this is probably going to be irrelevant in a few years, when someone finally makes a mobile MMO that challenges World of Warcraft’s numbers. Until then, ArenaNet’s approach to bringing the iPhone into the MMO experience is refreshingly useful.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pCRh7gcAOs

iOS 4’s introduction of app folders is a welcome addition to the operating system in that it’s a fantastic tool to use to wrangle a large app library, but it only takes a few minutes of playing around with the functionality to discover its sad limitations… which in my case rests mostly with the folder systems’ inability to support multiple pages in folders, or folders nested matrioshka-like inside one another.

That’s why I’m so excited about FolderEnhancer, a Cydia tweak for jailbroken iOS 4.1 devices that adds a host of new tweaks to the default foldering system, including sub-folder hierarchies, pages and moving multiple icons at a time.

Sure, this isn’t for everyone, but I’m envisioning a happy future in which my multiple overflowing games folders are united and subdivided into meticulously delineated genres. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed for free: all of the best Cydia tweaks lately have had price tags attached.