Mophie’s back with another Juice Pack, this time meant to both charge and ensconce your iPhone 4, while simultaneously protecting it from drops and guarding the antenna from finger-induced signal attenuation.
When the Mac App Store launches, it’ll have the same dichotomy that the iOS App Store has: free apps and paid apps. Don’t expect Apple to use the launching of the Mac App Store to finally introduce a new demo category, though… Apple is now telling developers that they will not accept demos, trials or betas for Mac App Store review.
According to a new posting on their Developer News Portal, Apple will only accept feature complete versions of apps, saying:
Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore. The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps.
It’s a strange move for Apple to make. Surely, insisting that developers host demo and trial versions of their apps simply means that Apple is going to risk losing out on money generated by customers who want to try before they buy. If a customer downloads a demo from the software maker’s website, surely he’ll go directly back to that website — or click a link inside the software itself going to the website — which means Apple will miss out on its 30% commission.
Moreover, in saying that developers can’t submit trial, demo or beta versions of their software, Apple’s Mac App Store Review Team is still leaving a loop hole open for developers to submit Lite versions of their apps, a la iOS, which are demos in their own right. So what’s the point?
[via MacStories]
Although rumors often cast him as an apoplectic, purple-faced tyrant stamping through his Cupertino headquarters, Apple’s Steve Jobs is the most beloved of any major tech CEO by his employees, according to a Silicon Valley Insider chart.
Ranked by his own employees, His Steveness hovers at the 95% mark as far as employee approval ratings go, relegating the naysayers as a small minority of malcontents.
Beatle mania continues on iTunes: after the Fab Four launched on Apple’s store, selling some two million downloads in the first week, a course about them on iTunes U is also soaring in popularity.
Liberal Studies class “The Beatles: Popular Music and Society” from the University of Illinois Springfield has been available on iTunes in podcast form since 2005, but just this week it came in as the second most popular course on iTunes U. (Number one? Oxford’s “Critical Reasoning for Beginners.”)
Half a million people have downloaded the 39 podcasts – a crash course in 1960s music for people not born when John Lennon was killed in 1980? — and another two million have previewed it.
A high school basketball coach used an iPhone app called PhoneAid to perform CPR on a 17-year-old who collapsed on the court.
Eric Cooper Sr. downloaded the $1.99 app just the night before, as kind of a refresher course. When Xavier Jones keeled over in the middle of the court, Cooper and the assistant coach rushed to his side.
Jones’ heart had stopped beating. Cooper used the iPhone app, which gives real-time instructions on how to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to jump start his heart.
The share of Internet-connected devices powered by Apple’s iOS platform grew 216 percent in November, compared to a year ago, researchers at NetApplications announced Friday. The iOS operating system, which powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod, accounts for 1.36 percent of Internet traffic, leading Android’s 0.31 percent.
Although more PCs are online than mobile devices, the shift to portable Internet products is noticeable in the new NetApplications numbers. Windows’ share is down 1.8 percent to 90.81 percent, compared to 92.52 percent during the same period in 2009. The portion of Macs connected to the Internet fell the same percentage (1.8), pulling Apple desktops to just 5.12 percent of the share of online devices.
If you want to get rid of the number pad on your iMac desktop, you now have no choice but to go wireless: Apple has quietly discontinued its compact wired keyboard, making either the $69 Apple Wireless Keyboard and the $49 Apple Keyboard With Numeric Keypad the only (official) keyboards in town.
The compact wired keyboard — part number MB869LL/A — was introduced in early 2009 with the new iMac revision. Neither it nor its wireless brother (which came in the same design, albeit without the compact wired keyboard’s two USB ports) have ever been my style: I’ve never been able to grow accustomed to the lack or miniaturization of some important keys, let alone the omission of the number pad.
Still, if you like keeping your desktop as compact as possible but don’t like changing batteries on your keyboard, it’s a bit of a blow. Better stock up: Amazon’s still selling the old wired keyboard for $49.
Could Apple be planning on signing a deal with legendary radio shock jock Howard Stern to exclusively host a new iTunes show? That’s the rumor amongst Sirius investors, and it’s food for thought, if not terribly likely.
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is making a bigger splash in the U.S. than even its makers initially predicted. Since its launch two months ago and the Nov. 10 U.S. start, the iPad rival has sold one million devices. Although Apple sold 2 million iPads in its first two months, the Galaxy Tab is the first real competition for the Cupertino, Calif. company.
The new number comes just two weeks after Samsung announced it had sold 600,000 Tabs amd predicted its tablet would sell 1 million units by the end of this year. However, buoyed by holiday sales, the company now is predicting it will sell 1.5 million Galaxy Tabs when 2010 comes to an end.
What it is: MediaPad Pro is fantastically well designed software for the iPad that allows creative people of all types to easily place multiple portfolios of work — including audio, video, still images and websites — onto Apple’s tablet device and present them in professional, fully customized, brand-able fashion to potential clients, agents or patrons, to virtually anyone they’d like to view their work.
iPhoto is one of Apple’s most popular applications. Bundled with every new Mac since 2002, millions of people have imported and manipulated billions of photos with this useful software. Every time you plug your iPhone or another camera into your Mac, iPhoto leaps to the assistance (whether you want it to or not).
With success come challenges. One common thing I’m asked about as an Mac consultant is how to manage iPhoto libraries that have gotten out of hand – thousands of photos, lots of duplicate items, and sometimes multiple copies of libraries. How do you get all this under control?
A small publishing company called Peter Pauper Press today announced an iPad version of a print book called The Little Black Book of Kama Sutra.
The book is part of a continuing series of “Little Black Books” and “Little Pink Books.” Other titles include The Little Black Book of Cocktails and The Little Pink Book of Etiquette.
The Kama Sutra book is very much in line with a growing trend of publishing books as interactive apps instead of as e-books. The only trouble is that the book is sexual in nature and illustrated with photographs. The publisher isn’t even going to try to get it past Apple censors, but instead intends to distribute it independently rather than through the iTunes App Store.
The Kama Sutra puts Apple in an awkward position.
We start out with the MacBook Air. MacMall is offering the 13.3-inch MBA , powered by a 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo processor with 2GB or RAM and a 120GB hard drive for just $939 – down from the usual $1,499. Also in the spotlight is the latest crop of iPad app price drops, along with some more iPhone app freebies, including “Etch-a-Sketch.”
We’ll also take a look at cases for your iPad, speakers for your iPod and software for your Mac. Like always, details on these and many other products can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Next week’s release of the Unreal 3 Engine based Infinity Blade is likely to set a new graphics milestone for iOS when it’s released next week, but it’s not likely to be the exception: Epic Games have just announced that they will soon release the Unreal Development Kit (or UDK) for iOS to developers, allowing them to use the next-gen Unreal 3 Engine in their games for free.
Apple has made their first step in providing point-of-sale, or PoS, systems to other retailers. The systems are modified iPod Touches that allow employees to ring up purchases, accept credit signatures and wirelessly print receipts to stationed printers through the store; if that sounds familiar, it’s because this is the same EasyPay system Apple uses in many of its own retail stores, albeit rebranded as “ZipCheck.”
A private pilot is using an iPad to help stay on course, in addition to the standard navigation system.
Jeff Curl has loaded up his iPad with worldwide charts and says it helps him make better decisions in the air.
“I can see the route structure and see what kind of rate I want to file, I can also pull up my radar and see I don’t want to go straight, I’ve got a huge line of thunderstorms,” he said.
Last month, Verizon’s CEO said that his network would have to “earn” the iPhone and strongly implied that their upcoming rollout of their 4G network would be what would do it.
Maybe so, but they are off to a shaky start when it comes to servicing the Apple faithful: Verizon has officially launched their 4G network by offering their first LTE modem to the public… but don’t expect it to work on your Mac.
Short of your old Friendster or Myspace accounts, Ping is probably your least-used social network. Heck, if bits and bytes could collect dust, Ping sure would have on my machine.
So my guess is that not even the biggest Apple fan will get too indignant about Business Insider listing Ping amongst their fifteen biggest flops in the tech industry in 2010.
Smoking Apples has published a lovely post extolling the virtues of an ancient iBook G4, which given a little TLC and a wipe-and-install has been reborn as a perfectly functional household computer.
Fuze Box, the company behind the groundbreaking meeting and collaboration tool Fuze Meeting, raised the bar for easy multiparty videoconferencing Thursday with the announcement of its private beta for Fuze Presence — bringing multiparty high definition (HD) video to Mac iOS and Android mobile devices.
With many video conferencing solutions tied to a desktop-only experience featuring unreliable video quality and poor latency, Fuze Presence moves the current collaboration space into the realm of H.264 codec technology promising multi-party collaboration delivered at 720P, with high fidelity sound and under 200 ms latency. The technology also supports VoIP, screen sharing, content sharing and a full suite of collaboration tools.
FireCore, makers of aTV Flash, a popular commercially available hack for the original Apple TV have announced a Mac OS X only public beta for the next generation Apple TV hack.
The new hack, aTV Flash (black), only works with Apple’s second generation Apple TV running iOS 4.0. That’s unfortunate since most of us have already updated to iOS 4.1, but an update to support that version of iOS is coming soon. This renders the beta completely useless for most of us, myself included, making the release of this public beta a bit awkward and ill-timed.
The Swiftmouse is an innovation from New Zealand that aims to offer a decent mousing experience in a very small unit.
In that, they’ve certainly succeeded. Swiftmouse is absolutely tiny. measuring just two inches from front to back, an inch and a half tall, and the same distance across.
Tiny, but sculpted. The contours of the mouse have been carefully designed to fit the tips of your curved fingers, so that it nestles in place. Despite its size, it feels comfortable to hold in the hand and is well weighted.
The guys at Evernote have just unveiled some new goodies in Evernote 2.0 Beta for Mac.
First up is sharing, and this includes some sweet new features. You can share any notebook, either with named individuals or with the entire world. These public notebooks have a URL (which you can keep to yourself, or tell the world – and search engines – about), and an RSS feed.
Software bundles are a great way to get lots of apps for cheaps, but quite often you end up paying for apps you have no need of and no interest in.
That’s where Give Good Food to Your Mac is different. In a style similar to the MacBundles we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Good Food deal is flexible.
You get to browse the list of apps on offer and pick out the ones you like the look of. The more you buy, the better the deal and the more money you save overall. Buy more than seven applications and you get 60 per cent off.
There’s a decent selection of apps on offer including lots of games. The store closes on December 10th. Happy bundle shopping.
We start off with another deal on a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad, this time from the Apple Store for just $449. Next is a new crop of price cuts from the iPhone App Store, including “Mini Squadron,” an aerial combat game for the iPhone or iPod touch. We wrap up our highlighted deals with an 8Gb iPhone 3Gs for just $19.
Along the way, we also take a look at another iPad stand, 85 percent off some HandHeld.com items and software for your iPhone and Mac. As always, details on all are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
