Political caricaturist Mark Fiore was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning to ever be awarded to a web-only cartoonist, so obviously he’s got some artistic and editorial merit… but not in Apple’s eyes.
Word from the Nieman Journalism Lab reports that Fiore submitted his iPhone app, NewsToons, back in December, but was rejected for “ridiculing public figures.”
We like our Steve Jobs slightly grumpy, so after his humorous prosaic experiment with Californian surfer lingo yesterday, it’s nice to see him get back to keeping it real: namely, by calling a potential customers nuts.
While the iPad can’t print out-of-the-box, there’s a veritable plethora (and I swear to never use that word again) of iPad printing options up at your local App Store, and what follows is an in-exhaustive sampling. We haven’t tried any of these yet, but we’re hoping at least one of them will allow us to print a simple shopping list so we don’t have to whip out the iPad at Safeway.
Rally Up, the newish location based social networking app, released an update for iPad Thursday that immediately puts the upstart application ahead of the game for people who want to keep track of and interact with their friends on the iPad.
Taking full advantage of the iPad’s increased real estate, Rally Up’s unique map-based canvas gives the app a level of functionality and makes it interesting in ways that market leaders Foursquare and Gowalla have yet to achieve. By designing the app to take advantage of iPad’s support for popping info out and overlaying things on the same screen, Rally Up manages to let its users interact with the app in fewer taps and screen changes, allowing for more time to browse and interact with the content being constantly generated by users’ friends.
Because iPad usage patterns are likely to skew towards more time spent lingering over applications than the quick, get-in-and-get-out experience many desire from the iPhone, Rally Up’s focus on content — and the way it presents all of a user’s friends and their feeds in a single, map-based global view — makes using it a decidedly more immersive experience than other social networking apps can so far provide.
“The iPad really changes the experience of a [location based social app],” said Rally Up founder Sol Lipman. “It becomes less of a push app and more of a pull app, in my opinion. You want to sit and explore, not just wait until your friend tells you what they’re up to.”
The 3G version of the iPad will be released internationally in May, according to emails purported to come from Steve Jobs, CEO of the Cupertino, Calif. company.
In response to one developer’s email about whether both U.S. and International 3G iPads would be delayed until the end of April, Jobs succinctly answered “yes.” In another email, Jobs actually apologized to an international user about the delay for shipping both the WiFi and 3G versions of the tablet device.: “Both models will be released at the end of May. Sorry for the delay,” Jobs reportedly replied.
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There’s no shortage of ways to kill zombies on the iPhone. Blast them in the head with a shotgun, gobble them up with a venus flytrap, or hit them with a car. Even so, Meridian Digital Entertainment’s Smash TV like, Alive 4-Ever, was one of the more satisfying ways to blow apart fetid corpse flesh around… and the upcoming sequel, Alive 4-Ever Returns, while out-stupiding the naming paradigm of its predecessor, looks even better with its new graphics engine, zombies, skills, power-ups, weapons and environmental effects. It should be available later this month.
One of the major improvements of the latest MacBook Pros is in battery life: the 13-inch MacBook Pro is now boasting an impressive ten hour battery life, while even the more power hungry 15 and 17 inchers are promising eight to nine hours of mobile performance.
How’s Apple doing it? Dynamic graphics switching between the workhorse NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M and the low-power Intel HD GPUs. MacBook Pros have had the ability to switch between GPUs since last year, but it was a user preference that required a reboot. Now, the MacBook Pro handles the graphics switching automatically, without the user ever having to worry about it.
The tweet-world is in a tizzy after news last week that Twitter snapped up both the Tweetie desktop client and iPhone app, as a first step to re-releasing the $3 app as Twitter’s free, official iPhone client.
While iPhone twittaholics might be pretty pumped about the move — the Cult’s Pete Mortensen has said Tweetie 2 is not just the best Twitter app, but “the best iPhone app, period” — Twitter app developers are less jazzed.
In fact, Mashable says there seemed to be a lot of nervousness and uncertainty at an investment panel Wednesday during day one of Chirp, the first Twitter developers conference, in San Francisco — the problem being that Twitter has apparently been leaving developers in the dark with regard to its plans, as last week’s sudden and unexpected acquisition illustrates.
[via Mashable]
Just a day after Apple approved it, the Opera Mini Web Browser app is topping free downloads on iTunes stores around the world. At this writing, it is number one of the top ten free iTunes downloads in all 22 iTunes stores — from Japan to Sweden, Australia to Austria.
In the 20 days it took to get a thumbs up from Apple, expectations were high, and as our reviewer Giles Turnbull discovered, mostly met: it’s a fast workhorse that plows through downloads even with spotty connections. On the downside, Giles found the zoom controls a little stiff and the overview display somewhat basic.
So, users of the Opera mini-browser: does it warrant the first-place spot or are the massive downloads just a fad?
We’ve reached midweek and we start with two deals on MacBook Pros, plus a peak inside the latest batch of freebies from the App Store. First up, is a MacBook Pro bundle that includes three-year AppleCare service, starting at $1,358. Next a some refurbished unibody MacBook Pros, starting at $929 for a 2.26GHz model. Finally, with the weather so changing and you’re not sure if it is going to rain, snow or haul off and shake the ground, a mobile weather station might come in handy. The App Store has something close — iWeather Lookup — and it is free.
Along the way, we’ll check out a new deal on iPhone 3Gs, the latest freebie from iTunes and some software to keep your PDF files safe. As always, details on these and many other bargains are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
