Patent troll Lodsys’ attacks upon indie iOS developers for using Apple’s in-app purchasing mechanism is a hot topic at WWDC 2011, so this news couldn’t be better timed: a Michigan law firm representing some unlikely companies with deep pockets has just attacked the validity of Lodsys’ patents.
Think talking on your iPhone is safe? Think again: hackers and data thieves can intercept your phone calls under iOS 4. That’s why Apple’s rolling out a new feature in iOS 5: a warning that pops up when you engage in a so-called ‘unsecured call.'”
In iOS 5, there’s a new “Music” app that combines the functions of the iTunes and iPod apps. Instead of separate apps for shopping and playback, Music is a one-stop shop for tunes. That’s the app’s icon above.
Here’s a screenshot tour showing it in action — including the new ability to download Purchased music from the online iTunes store.
It took the iPhone Dev-Team less than 24 hours to successfully perform a tethered jailbreak of the first iOS 5 beta, but hopes that an untethered jailbreak would be developed before iOS 5 goes public later this year have now been crushed.
Steve Jobs has been keeping extremely busy this week. One day after delivering his WWDC Keynote address, Steve headed back to Cupertino to appear before the city council to discuss Apple’s new plans for their campus. While pitching the construction and design of the mega-structure, Jobs commented that the building will look ‘a little like a spaceship.’
Apple’s new iMessage app was one of the biggest surprises at WWDC yesterday. Once I got iOS 5 and Lion installed on my devices, I asked our Twitter followers what they wanted to know about the new OSes and we got a lot of questions about iMessage and how it works. There seems to have been a bit of confusion regarding the new service, so let me help explain how iMessage works on iOS 5.
Feeling lucky? You can win a bunch of gear at the first CultofMac.com WWDC meet & greet during this Thursday June 9th, at Il Pirata bar and restaurant in San Francisco.
No matter how many months of rumors and insider reports precede an anticipated Apple announcement, it’s probable that, when Steve Jobs actually reveals the product on stage, it’s going to be radically different than what people are expecting… but iCloud could be the most radical deviation yet between the fancy of pre-announcement hype and the reality of Apple’s finished product.
What people expected from iCloud was a streaming cloud locker for your media collection: iCloud would scan your iTunes library and automatically mirror them on a central server, allowing you to stream any song you owned to any device you owned without being bothered with local storage.
What people got? iTunes Match. It scans and matches your iTunes library in the cloud, sure, but there is no streaming: any time you want to listen to an album that’s not on your iPhone or iPad, you’ve got to download it from the cloud onto your device.