Apple unveiled its beta.icloud.com website today after the portal went live briefly a couple months ago. Developers can log into the beta iCloud website now and test out Apple’s two brand new web companion apps for Notes and Reminders. The Find My iPhone web app has also been updated with a new look and slight improvements.
We’ve got a quick walkthrough (including screenshots) of the changes revealed in the iCloud beta website today.
Apple has announced a long-overdue App Store category addition today to developers. A dedicated “Food & Drink” category will be added to the iOS App Store “in the next few weeks,” according to Apple. A category for cooking apps already exists, but related apps like OpenTable will be included in this new category.
As Apple continues to enhance the App Store with new improvements and curated series like Editor’s Choice, this new “Food & Drink” section will surely be a welcome addition when it goes live.
Apple has announced to investors that it will hold its official company earnings call for the Q3 fiscal quarter of 2012 on Tuesday, July 24th. The call with Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer will take place at 2 p.m. PST, or, 5 p.m. EST. Per usual, the audio call will be streamed live via QuickTime on Apple’s Investor Relations web portal.
Cult of Mac will be providing breaking coverage during the earnings call. Apple reported $39.2 billion in revenue for Q2 2012, and the company is expected to report around $34 billion in revenue this time around. iPhone and iPad sales will likely account for a large portion of the call, and there’s a good chance we could see some early sales numbers for the new Macs Apple launched last month.
The iPhone and iPad have essentially created one more day’s worth of work for most Americans. That’s the big headline from a study by mobile security and management vendor Good Technology. The study, which involved 1,000 of Good’s customers, found that during off hours, the average American will put in seven hours worth of work each week, or, one extra workday.
Concerns about maintaining a healthy work/life balance are nothing new. The mobile devices that make knowledge workers more productive have the downside of creating a situation where most of us can be reached very easily whether we’re on the clock and in the office or we’re at home in bed. This always-connected lifestyle has even given rise to mental health issues like nomophobia – the fear of being without one’s phone.
The tendency to work well past the end of the workday is so prevalent that 80% of us do so on a regular basis.
In a strange turn of events, Mozilla, the team behind projects such as Firefox and Thunderbird, is putting a serious effort into what will be known as the Firefox Mobile OS, an HTML5-based operating system that will run on a variety of phones.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, Apple’s new “spaceship” campus is one step closer to becoming a reality, thanks to a measure taken by California’s Governor Jerry Brown, which will allow the new planned campus to qualify for an expedited environmental review.
One thing Apple has done really well over the past few years is eliminating fragmentation in its operating systems. The install base of iOS 5 is over 75%; OS X Lion is around 50%. That’s in less than a year for both operating systems.
To put those numbers in perspective, consider this. Google’s latest operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, still runs on just 1% of all Android devices after a year, and Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system hovers at around 50% after almost three years.
Apple’s secret is simple. They charge as little as possible for their operating systems, giving it away free if they can. It’s a good strategy that prevents Apple from having to endlessly support older OSes. And now, Microsoft’s finally going to take a page from Apple’s book.
We’ve gone on record saying that getting your next iPhone through Virgin Mobile is the smartest and most value-conscious decision you can make when it comes to choosing carriers. In fact, over two years, you can save well over $1000 by choosing Virgin Mobile to be your iPhone carrier-of-choice over the likes of Verizon or AT&T.
There’s just one catch: you have to pony up $649 up front for the full, unsubsidized price of an iPhone 4S. And unfortunately, that large initial expenditure seems to have been enough to keep customers away, at least on launch day.
Mac and iOS users are strangers to NAND flash storage. After all, Apple has been using flash as a storage medium for years now. iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, and some MacBooks all rely on NAND flash as a storage medium of choice. The success of those products has led Apple to be world’s biggest buyer of NAND chips and was no doubt a factor to mention the company’s purchase of Israeli flash memory firm Anobit.
Solid state storage based on NAND flash isn’t Apple-specific. Plenty of other companies offer flash storage in an array of form factors for a huge variety of uses including smartphones and mobile devices. Solid state drives (SSD) drives are available as options for a range of PCs. They’re also becoming common options for servers and network devices. For businesses looking to implement Lion or Mountain Lion, SSDs can be an attractive option. They can also be an expensive prospect, and there may be better ways to spend your business dollars.
If Italy has its way, Apple’s operations in the country may be shut down for 30 days, following a dispute with Italy’s AGCM competition and marketing authority. According to Reuters, Apple is also being faced with fines up to $377,500 unless a free two year warranty is given to all Italian customers.
With GarageBand for the Mac, Apple created something no one else had – a relatively inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right on the computer. Several iterations later, GarageBand came to the iPad, doing the same thing for mobile musicians in a big way. For $5, anyone with an iPad can create, record, and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.
The foundation of any good rock, dance, or pop song is the beat. Creating a drum track that stands out will take your music from “meh” to “wow.” With GarageBand for iPad, you can now create drum tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.
Now that Apple has paid $60 million to end a thuggish extortion attempt on the part of China’s Proview over the iPad trademark, it looks like at least one additional Chinese trademark troll is coming out of the woodwork, looking for a payday. This time, however, it’s a dispute over a product Apple doesn’t even sell anymore: OS X Snow Leopard.
This is the Sandberg Battery Case for iPhone 4. Designed in Italy, it’s a low-cost backup power supply and case with svelte good looks. It provides a good balance between size and power storage, but isn’t without some flaws. Overall, it’s a good deal but let down by what look like lapses in manufacturing quality control.
Have you ever heard of the Rule of Threes? It’s a guideline used widely in writing and communicating that dictates your message is clearer and more effective when you can convey it in three parts.
For example, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that every American had an inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Drop any one of those, and the sentence is somehow less effective.
You know who else was a big fan of the Rule of Threes? Steve Jobs.
The makers of popular Mail.app replacement Sparrow have updated the app with Retina graphics for the 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Sparrow 1.6.2 can be downloaded as a free update for existing users.
Developers can also test Sparrow on OS X Mountain Lion, and the app will be ready for prime time when Mountain Lion becomes available to the public later this month.
The new Retina MacBook Pro is the most pixel-loaded Apple device yet, with more than five million of the little blighters spread over 220 pixels per inch. That’s a lot of tiny dots, but believe it or not, it only translates to a mere five megapixels. And since the iPhone has had a 5 megapixel camera since 2010, pictures taken on an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S should be able to take full advantage of the Retina MacBook Pro’s 2880 x 1800 resolution display.
So why is it that photos taken with an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S look so crappy on a Retina MacBook Pro? That’s what Instapaper developer Marco Arment wants to know, and so do we. We have a theory though.
Michael Jurewitz has served as the face of Apple to the third party developer community for the past seven years. Frequently seen at Tech Talks around the world and at WWDC each year meeting with developers, Jurewitz today announced that he has left Apple to become a partner at Black Pixel, the company behind apps like NetNewsWire and Kaleidoscope.
If you have any interest in shooting black and white photos with your iPhone, you probably already have Hueless, the excellent colorblind photo app. If not, now is a great time to get it, as the latest 1.1 update brings some neat new features.
The Flea 3 is a weird little camera: at first glance it appears to be a 4K webcam, which would mean the ultimate in chats with mom should your internet connections (and Skype) support it.
I reality though, it’s a dirt-cheap way to start a 4K movie rig. I’ll emphasize the “start” in that, though, as you’re going to need a lot more gear than the Flea 3 itself.
When Apple announced the terms for Newsstand and digital subscriptions, many publications felt that the company was being too hard on them. Apple’s requirement that publishers offer the same deals through the App Store that they do elsewhere while still taking its typical 30% cut of the income ruffled a lot of feathers in the publishing world. While there was a lot of angry discussion about the policy when Apple announced and implemented it, many publications decided to accept the policy – at least initially.
Since then, however, a handful of publications have decided to abandon their presence on iOS devices. Some are planning to build a web app as their only iOS or mobile presence. Others are looking to create deals with various news aggregators. Regardless of their plans, Apple’s terms are one of the key reasons that publishers are getting out of the App Store.
In the last couple of days, Apple killed off MobileMe and is now warning users its killing off another cloud service: the iWork.com Beta, a service Apple launched in 2009 to allow for online editing, downloading and collaborating on documents.
While Steve Jobs famously liked to take credit for others’ ideas, he also gave a lot of credit to the amazing people he employed at Apple who enabled the company to create all of the incredible products it has released over the years. In many interviews, Jobs praised their creativity, passion, and drive, and their determination to build the best product they could build.
Ron Avitzur is a great example of that. While working at Apple in August 1993, the graphic calculator program he and his team were working on was shelved. Avitzur declined the opportunity to transfer to another project, but he continued to turn up to work each day, sneaking into the Apple camp in Cupertino until his project was complete.
It’s been just three weeks since Apple issued refreshes to its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, and already they’re on sale at Best Buy, with up to $140 off the MSRP. That means you can pick up the base model MacBook Pro with Retina display — with a 2.3GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD — for $2,089.
Almost every major company has plans to develop a range of iOS apps (if they haven’t created some already). In fact, one of the reasons that enterprise app stores are becoming as popular as they are in business is that they fulfill two critical needs. One of those is to easily distribute internal apps to staff members. (The other is to point users to suggested or required apps from Apple’s App Store.)
One thing that every company developing an internal app needs to keep in mind is that users are becoming more tech savvy and comfortable selecting and using iOS apps. That can be a good thing for the whole enterprise app store concept. It let’s users choose and manage their selection of apps on their own without help from IT.
It also means that most iOS users are sophisticated enough to know when an app is poorly designed. That places an extra burden on anyone developing iOS apps, particularly if there are equivalent public apps that users can install as partial or complete replacements for a poorly built internal app.
You know your product is successful when somebody starts selling accessories for it. But what about when people start selling accessories for accessories, which work together with the original product? This happens: the New iPad Credit Card Dock, a perspex frame which holds both and iPad and a Square credit card reader.
