Taking the stage at this year’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Steve Jobs has just taken the stage, and with an “It’s great to be here,” we’re off to a running start with some WWDC specs.
This year, the WWDC sold out in 8 daysm with over 5,200 attendees from 57 countries. There will be over 120 hands on labs with over 1,000 Apple engineers.
It’s going to be a big one. What will the next two hours reveal?
Image via Ars Technica
In response to the slate of employee suicides which has rocked Foxconn over the last six months, it is now being reported that the electronics manufacturing giant is now offering a 66% performance-based pay rise to their workers… built on top of the previous thirty percent pay increase.
Of course, being a performance-based pay raise, that gives Foxconn license to skimp. To be eligible, workers must pass a three month performance review. That gives Foxconn the ability to arbitrarily hold it back from the majority of workers.
Still, if Foxconn does go through with the move, and awards the pay raise fairly, it’ll be a huge improvement that will see the salary of the average Foxconn employee jump from $132 to $292 a month.
AT&T is reportedly easing upgrade restrictions on when customers can upgrade their handset, a move reportedly in anticipation of Apple announcing a new version of its iPhone. The changes allow iPhone customers — who may not have been eligible — to upgrade without paying early termination fees.
Customers of the carrier can go to the AT&T website and click on “Check Upgrade Options.”
According to French blog Mac Generation, we can all expect Safari 5 to be unveiled at WWDC in just a handful of hours.
Rumor? Sure. But they’ve got a convincing looking changelog, boasting a 25% improvement in JavaScript performance, a new Safari RSS Reader which will probably be too simplistic for serious feed junkies, more than twelve new HTML5 features, hardware acceleration in Windows and the option to add Bing as your default Search engine. It also looks like Apple is changing Safari’s address field to function more like Firefox’s Awesome Bar.
I have been using OS 4 for a couple of months now. It’s amazing how subtle changes can affect the way the whole operating system feels. From the unified inbox to the portrait mode lock, Apple really has taken their time with improving the iPhone experience. I have been using OS 4 on my everyday iPhone 3GS (not recommended) and it’s been quite a bumpy ride (especially when I lost my camera functionality) but using OS 4 everyday has been awesome.
At today’s WWDC, the next iPhone might not be the only things we see: Engadget has photos of what looks to be an entirely new input device: a Magic Trackpad.
The Magic Trackpad is essentially a giant, Bluetooth-connected multitouch trackpad for Macs, and will not only support all of the functionality of a MacBook Pro touchpad or Magic Mouse, but apparently handwriting recognition to boot. If that’s the case, I imagine it could function pretty handily in Photoshop as well.
I’ll grab this in a heart beat if the price is reasonable. For most of my desktop work on my iMac, I find the Magic Mouse wanting compared to my MacBook Pro’s excellent trackpad, and it’s atrocious for gaming. With the Magic Trackpad, I could finally have the big trackpad I’ve always wanted for my desktop, transforming it when needed into a mousepad and supplementing it with an excellent third-party gaming mouse.
Apple retail sales in the UK jumped 31 percent to around $894 million through September 24, reports said Monday. The increase came from MacBook, iPhone add-ons and the iPod touch.
Despite operating at a net loss, Apple’s UK arm opened three retail locations during the timespan with plans to create two more, according to papers filed with the UK’s Companies House, a government registry of businesses operating in Britain. The Cupertino, Calif. firm has 27 stores operating in the UK.
Apple might have overtaken Microsoft in terms of market cap, but Windows remains the world’s most popular operating system by a long way. That means there’s a lot of Windows-friendly stuff out there on the web that won’t necessarily play nicely with your Mac.
Not unless you have Flip4Mac WMV Player installed.
On the eve of WWDC, a speculative story on mp3newswire.net suggests some interesting possibilities for Apple in the video and media space given the explosive adoption of iDevices:
In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Television was big business by the start of the 1960’s.
Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild.
With the announcement of the leaked next-generation iPhone coming tomorrow morning at WWDC, the rumor mill is in even higher overdrive than usual. The photo above, from Pursuitist, is an alleged photo taken “inside” the Moscone West center in San Francisco that purports to reveal the all-new iPhone HD. It’s also a transparent fake, as the colored iPhones are an amateur mock-up that 9to5mac posted almost a month ago. I find it hard to believe that Apple would conclude that a fan’s creative would be the ideal way to launch their latest and greatest phone.
Also notable: The word “iPhone” and the 64GB capacity aren’t well-centered on the back of the device, another dead giveaway. You can head over to Pursuitist to see more fake photos if you wish, or wait until about 11 a.m. Pacific tomorrow to see the real thing.
via TUAW
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review 10 Pin Shuffle Lite, Air Video, Air Video Free, Cliffed, Dubble, Escape Board (iPad), Giana Sisters, Instapaper Pro, Iron Horse, Racecar (iPad), Sky Force, and Sky Force Reloaded.
Confused by which combination of keypresses triggers your favorite shortcut? What about trying to remember which arcane spell of glyphs describes that shortcut in Mac terminology?
There’s a site for that… or, at least, there will be, when its owner gets finished with it. Keyonary is an online directory of keyboard shortcuts . Using the search bar, you simply type in the shortcut you’d like to find and Keyonary will return it to you.
To be honest, the site’s pretty rough right now, and while the presentation is slick, the owner’s entering all these shortcuts in by hand… which means that while Photoshop and OS X are fairly well covered by Keyonary, there’s a lot of shortcuts for other popular Mac apps still to be filled.
Still, we wanted to point Keyonary out… not because of what it is now, but what we hope a little encouragement will allow it to become: an I Use This for user-submitted shortcuts to all your favorite Mac applications.
We close out a Memorial Day-shortened week with more hardware deals. First up is a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro for $1,098 from Expercom. Next is a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini for $799 from the Apple Store. (Apple may introduce a refreshed model of the desktop machine during next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif.) We round out or top bargains with a MacBook Core 2 Duo running at 2.4GHz for $999 from the Apple Store.
Along the way, we also check out speakers from Macally and Sony, a clock radio for your iPhone or iPod, and the latest batch of App Store freebies, including “Word Droppings,” a word-base action game.
As always, details on these and many other bargains are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
An upscale Manhattan tailor has designed a $600 suit jacket with an iPad pocket.
Mohan’s custom tailors, founded in the 70s before men needed gadget pockets, said the somewhat gimmicky-looking iPad suit is the result of customer requests.
You don’t have to be very sartorially savvy to wonder how the jacket — pictured either flat or with the model holding it — could stand carrying a 1.5 pound device on one side without deforming the fabric or giving you a lopsided look. Mohan’s says it has “several dozen” appointments scheduled for fittings.
As invites roll in for extracurricular activities for WWDC next week, only one so far offers something besides drinks and the same folks you’ve seen all day: a museum-style look at working Apple technology dating back to 1976 — including an original Apple I.
The aptly-named iNSpired tour is sponsored by BoxTone, Mobile Service Management software provider and you’ll get to ogle 25 years of Apple’s insanely great tech as you hobnob with community members over drinks and food. (They promise a “hands-on” experience but keep your potato-chip grease off the keyboards, thanks.)
Apple employee #16, Wendell Sander, aka father of the Apple III, is coming to the party, he’s bringing the Apple I.
Entrance is free for WWDC attendees, spaces are limited, tell them you’re with us (promo code: CultofMacFan) when you register and you’ll be entered in a drawing to win an iPad and a VIP pass.
See you there?
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzWa9gDoQUg&feature=player_embedded
The classic German board game Carcassone has finally come to the iPhone with an official port including original artwork, eight different AI players, a cool looking solitaire mode and Internet multiplayer with push notifications.
From the App Store description: “Build a medieval landscape, tile by tile, claim landmarks with your followers and score points. As a winner of the prestigious “Spiel des Jahres” award in 2001, the game allows for a plethora of play styles and strategies.”
The game’s iPhone-only for now, but a universal iPad version is imminent.
I’ve never played Carcassone but it is a game much beloved by my board-gaming friends. I’ve been eager to get my teeth into this one.
Carcassone can be purchased on the App Store now for just $4.99
Samsung is getting into the tablet game with their own would-be iPad killer, but unlike many other Atom-based netbooks, Samsung has a secret weapon: an A4-like mobile CPU created by (now Apple owned) Intrinsity, the Hummingbird S5PC110.
A new report by the Hong Kong based advocacy group SACOM (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) says that an eleventh employee has died at Foxconn.
Unlike the last ten deaths, though, the latest reported death wasn’t a suicide. Instead, 27 year old Foxconn employee Yan Li died on May 27th after a continuous 34 hour working shift. Allegedly, Yan —who worked night shifts at Foxconn from 200 — literally worked himself to death.
Yesteday, an AT&T spokesperson put the kibosh on any possibility of using the iPhone’s new tethering abilities to drive your iPad.
“It won’t be possible to tether the iPhone to the iPad to share Internet access,” an AT&T spokesperson bluntly said.
The usual hue and cry against AT&T resulted, but now, AT&T is clarifying matters, saying they don’t have any problem with iPads and iPhones tethered together in conjoined bliss. Rather, they blame Apple.
“You’ll need to speak with Apple. There is no AT&T policy around tethering and the iPad,” a spokesperson told Gizmodo.
Well, that’s certainly good news if true. I can’t think of any reason Apple wouldn’t allow this if their network partners are onboard. Hopefully, then, iPad-to-iPhone tethering is something we’ll see in iPhone OS 4.0.
Since the days of Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther” Apple has provided a wonderful utility, Migration Assistant, to help move data between your old and new Macs. With this utility you can easily migrate your installed applications, system settings and user data from your old system to your new one.
On the whole Migration Assistant works very well, performs successfully more often than not, and has gotten better with every subsequent release of Mac OS X. However despite Apple’s best efforts there are times when Migration Assistant can’t or won’t work.
A Manual Mac System Migration is just a fancy term for copying things over. The key is knowing what needs to be moved and how to connect the two machines.
Our favorite iPhone newsreader app, the wonderfully minimal and elegant Reeder, is finally getting a long overdue iPad version.
In fact, it’s undergoing the App Store approval process as we speak… and as a first look of what to expect, Techcrunch posted some gorgeous shots of what the iPad Reeder app will look like, which merges Reeders existing muted and clean aesthetic (Instapaper for feeds is a good comparison) with functionality like pinching to quick-look at a stack of feeds:
As an indirect response to Adobe’s own We campaign, Apple has unveiled a wonderful new sandbox playground advocating HTML5, which allows users to play around and do a number of things in their browsers that they might not even know HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript can do.
It’s a lot of fun as a playground, and certainly shows what HTML5 can do. The only problem? It’s only viewable on Safari: try to run it on any other HTML5-capable browser and you get a message prompting you to download Apple’s own browser.
We’ve been hearing tell of an HDMI-equipped Mac Mini for awhile now, with past reports indicating that prototype Mac Minis spotted by Apple employees had their DVI port replaced with HDMI, thanks to the inclusion of NVIDIA’s MPC89 CPU.
Now Apple Insider is reporting that they’ve heard from four different source who claim that Apple is having Mac Mini supply shortages… usually a “tell” for when a new model is approaching.
Children are excellent arbiters of the truth, their reactions are honest and straightforward. In the case of the iPad, those reactions include excitement and awe.
Apple has noticed. After a group of students from Wesley Chapel, Florida was photographed trying out some iPads at their local Apple store, the images made their way to Apple. The company just sent 13 free iPads to some very lucky students, and may use the pictures in an upcoming ad campaign.
Kudos all around – a win for everybody here! Thanks to AppleInsider for the tip.
Paper Toss for iPhone is a brilliant pick-up-and-play game that is guaranteed to kill some time when you’re waiting for your train, when your boss is out of the office, or when you’re waiting for your little ones to give up the TV. If you’re one of the 21,000,000 paper tossers out there, you’ll be pleased to know the game is now available on the iPad, including a new level and improved visuals for the larger screen. But is it worth that $2.99 price tag?
