Following word that Apple’s iAd team is being restructured to allow for tighter integration with iOS 7’s new streaming music feature, iRadio, a new report talks just about how the ads on iRadio are going to work, how Apple’s going to make money on iRadio, and how much Apple’s paying the labels to make it happen.
Amazon’s Kindle app for iPhone and iPad got a great update today, which adds a couple of much needed features.
First, you can now set line spacing for your ebooks between three options: loose, normal and tight. Kindle has allowed you change the margins on e-books for a while, but this new option makes it even easier to change the settings for optimum readability.
A smaller change, but a welcome one, is that you can now highlight long passages that span multiple pages. I rarely use this functionality, but that’s still a level up.
You can download Kindle for iOS here.
We told you about Ulysses III when it first hit the Mac App Store back in April, and we called it “the best text editor ever” in our review. And it’s even better with its latest update, which brings a whopping 117 changes based on user feedback.
Apple has been using ideas that originated in the jailbreak community for years. A jailbreak tweak called MobileNotifier enhanced push notifications in iOS 4, and Apple hired the guy who made it and released Notification Center in iOS 5. Jailbreakers were doing multitasking and tethering before Apple too.
Looking ahead at iOS 7, I honestly have no idea what to expect from Apple. Jony Ive has never really been a big fan of skeuomorphism, so flatter and more minimalist graphics wouldn’t surprise me. Some truly innovate ideas for enhancing the iOS experience have arisen in the past year, and I think it would be foolish for Apple to not at least draw inspiration from these three.
Analog for Mac from Realmac Software has today received all of the pretty filters that were introduced with Analog Camera for iPhone last week. It has also been reduced to just $4.99 until Sunday evening.
Thunderbolt really hasn’t taken off yet, even though Apple’s included the the tech in Macs since 2011. Intel is still plowing through with new updates for Thunderbolt though, and the company revealed some new details about the next generation of Thunderbolt.
Intel has officially named its next-gen high-speed data port ‘Thunderbolt 2’ and it will double the speed of first-gen Thunderbolt by supporting 20Gbps directionally on one connection. On a company blog post, Intel posted the following info on Thunderbolt 2:
Every year thousands of Apple developers flock to San Francisco to attend Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to be educated in all things Apple. Over the past decade the conference has undergone some big changes as Apple has introduced products like the iPhone, Mac Pro, Intel Processors, Mac OS X operating systems, and much more.
An event that used to be lightly attended has now become the most popular developers conference in the world and sold out within 2 hours this years
Here’s a look at the many banners that have decorated the halls of WWDC over the past 11 years:
The term “patent troll” tends to be thrown around a lot when talking about Apple, Samsung, et al.’s endless patent litigation, but there’s a big difference between companies trying to protect their patent profiles in court and the sort of trolls who exist for no other reason than to sue other companies for violations on overly broad patents that they aren’t using, stifling innovation (for example, notorious in-app patent troll Lodsys).
Reforms to the patent system to neuter patent trolls is something that have been called for for years, but it seems like President Obama is finally doing something. The White House has just announced that they are taking on the patent troll problem with seven new legislative proposal. But even if Congress won’t budge? Obama says he’s going to take five executive actions to thwart patent trolls, which he can do even without congressional approval.
Following Gmail’s snazzy addition of categories for easily filtering your inbox mail, the Gmail iOS app has also been updated to support the functionality.
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is just a week away and although it’s highly unlikely we’ll see any new iOS devices, we will get our first glimpse at iOS 7.
iOS 7 could be one of the biggest iOS updates to date, with many rumors claiming it will be completely overhauled with a new look and new features as Jony Ive makes his mark as the head of software design. A report that was published earlier this month claims that Apple has had to pull engineers away from OS X 10.9 to help complete it.
Personally, I couldn’t be more excited about iOS 7. I made the switch to Android just before Christmas because I found Jelly Bean on the Nexus 4 to be better than iOS 6 on the iPhone 5 at a lot of things, which I wrote about back in February.
Having used Android for four months, I’ve compiled a list of things iOS 7 should learn from its biggest rival. If Apple adds these things to its own platform — or variations of them that provide the same experience — then I think iOS 7 could be fantastic.
Check out the list below and see if you agree.