It was recently discovered that AT&T will likely charge for FaceTime over 3G when iOS 6 launches for the public this fall. Users could previously only use Apple’s FaceTime when connected to a WiFi network, but iOS 6 (now in its third developer beta) will allow for FaceTime over both WiFi and a cellular connection.
Sprint, the nation’s third largest carrier, now says that it will not charge its customers for FaceTime over 3G in iOS 6. Both AT&T and Verizon still refuse to give any details.
When Apple unveiled iOS 6 and released the first beta at WWDC back in June, it quickly became apparent that a number of new features wouldn’t be supported on older devices like the iPhone 3GS, and Apple mentioned these restrictions in the fine print of its iOS 6 preview page.
In the iOS 6 beta 3 release, however, shared Photo Streams and VIP mail — two of the features that are unsupported on older devices — are now supported on the iPhone 3GS.
If you tend to stick to using the unified inbox in Apple’s built-in Mail app in iOS, then accessing your draft messages is a bit of a pain. First you have to remember which of your accounts you created the email with, then you have to hunt down the drafts folder for that account.
In iOS 6 beta 3, however, accessing all your drafts is as simple as holding down the new mail button, which takes you to the new page you see above. Isn’t that handy?
Source: Reddit
iOS 6 beta 3 has been available to registered developers for a matter of hours, and already the software has a tethered jailbreak courtesy of the iPhone Dev-Team. Like previous beta jailbreaks, however, this will not install Cydia on your device.
Mobile payment technologies have an interesting and complicated relationship with local businesses. On the one hand, local mom-and-pop restaurants, shops, and services are probably the companies that you’d expect to adopt new payment technologies the slowest – particularly if those technologies require new point of sale hardware like an NFC reader. On the other hand, mobile payment systems could be poised to deliver a new wave of business to such local companies.
Making the situation more complicated is the fact that any mobile payment system (Google Wallet, PayPal in-store purchasing, or any system that Apple may be slowly developing) can’t be considered a solid winner or option unless that system strikes it big with local businesses. A system that only applies to large chains, like the in-store purchasing the PayPal rolled out to Home Depot and other retailers, can’t be considered mainstream unless it’s adopted very widely and by a significant percentage of small businesses.
Further complicating the relationship is the fact that many players in the race to create a true digital wallet are on focusing widely varying options for small and local businesses. That means that no one company is leading and no company really seems to have a consistent strategy for tapping this immense and important market.
Apple purchasing several mapping companies over the last fews years, Apple is finally replacing Google Maps with its own solution in iOS 6. But it seems the Cupertino company may be planning to expand it beyond iOS. One developer has discovered some code within the iOS 6 beta that indicates Maps will also be coming to OS X later on.
The topic of selling access to iOS beta software has come up again as of late, and with Apple’s release of the iOS 6 beta, many eager non-developers are itching to get their hands on the upcoming OS as soon as possible. For some, the desire to try iOS 6 is so great that they will buy access to developer-only software from unofficial websites Apple does not support.
Apple has turned its attention to the underbelly of selling iOS and OS X developer software, according to a new report.
I’ve been jailbreaking my iOS devices for a couple of years now, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve thought about going back to the stock version of iOS many times. Sometimes I’ll ask myself if it’s really worth jailbreaking my iPhone. iOS 5 brought a lot of features that were only available for jailbreakers previously, and iOS 6 is adding several more.
Before the jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1 came out, I was considering abandoning Cydia, the jailbreak’s App Store equivalent, for good. I didn’t think I needed to jailbreak anymore.
And in most cases, you don’t really need to jailbreak ever. But since the iOS 5.1.1 jailbreak, I’ve fallen in love with my jailbroken iPhone 4S all over again. Here’s why.
We’ve all been waiting with bated breath for Apple to take the mobile payment industry by storm and bring it to the mass consumer market. For years, there have been whispers that Apple is working on its own approach to reinventing mobile payments, including the possibility of a NFC-equipped iPhone. When Apple unveiled Passbook in iOS 6 last month, the company announced its first real foray into mobile payments by partnering with select companies for handling virtual goods like coupons and airline tickets.
According to a new report on The Wall Street Journal, Apple’s Passbook is only a shadow of things to come. The company is “deliberately” working on its own mobile payment system, and while the rest of its competitors scramble to test the waters, Apple is sitting back and developing the right strategy.
Navigon has added Google Street View to its iOS navigation app, as well as a few other enhancements — including the dangerous sounding “cockpit” mode. This probably won’t be the last independent app to include Google’s essential service after Apple kicked it out of iOS6, but it does at least mean we can keep using it when the new iOS ships this fall.
Apple unveiled its beta.icloud.com website today after the portal went live briefly a couple months ago. Developers can log into the beta iCloud website now and test out Apple’s two brand new web companion apps for Notes and Reminders. The Find My iPhone web app has also been updated with a new look and slight improvements.
We’ve got a quick walkthrough (including screenshots) of the changes revealed in the iCloud beta website today.
The iPhone and iPad have essentially created one more day’s worth of work for most Americans. That’s the big headline from a study by mobile security and management vendor Good Technology. The study, which involved 1,000 of Good’s customers, found that during off hours, the average American will put in seven hours worth of work each week, or, one extra workday.
Concerns about maintaining a healthy work/life balance are nothing new. The mobile devices that make knowledge workers more productive have the downside of creating a situation where most of us can be reached very easily whether we’re on the clock and in the office or we’re at home in bed. This always-connected lifestyle has even given rise to mental health issues like nomophobia – the fear of being without one’s phone.
The tendency to work well past the end of the workday is so prevalent that 80% of us do so on a regular basis.
Read enough articles about NFC and its potential for mobile payments and you’ll find yourself thinking the technology is the inevitable mobile payment platform. Every major mobile platform except iOS already includes or will include support for NFC-enabled devices. There are lots of partnerships being announced between key players like device manufacturers, carriers, and banking or credit card companies. It also just seems to make sense that this is the future.
Until you look up from all the stories about what NFC and look at what’s really happening in the world. You don’t see much evidence of NFC payment systems in everyday life. NFC isn’t yet emerging into mainstream commerce, but there is ample evidence that mobile payments are taking off without it. Those options becoming mainstream are decidedly low tech by comparison, but that’s precisely why they’re succeeding.
Since the early days of Apple, an emphasis has been put on realistic user interfaces, starting with the Apple Lisa’s GUI in 1983. This drive for skeuomorphism in design is more present in iOS than ever before. Having a touch screen allows applications to feel more natural, simulating actual real-world buttons and objects. If speculation is to be believed, future versions of iOS may take this trend even farther by placing user interface shadows based on the actual position of the light source in the room.
With iOS 6, Apple is finally ditching Google as a maps partner and releasing their own custom maps solution, built upon partnerships with companies like TomTom and using their own technology acquired from companies like C3.
How costly would it be for Apple to compete with Google Maps head-on, though, by building their own mapping system from the ground-up without any outside deals? More than you might think: in fact, Apple might have to increases its global workforce by 50%.
Hey, lookie hear: in the new iOS 6 Beta, you can rearrange the interface app icons on an Apple TV. A small but nice little customability update, but is there more to this than meets the eye: say, some groundwork being laid for an Apple TV app store coming to iOS 6 later this year? After all, why worry about rearranging apps unless you’re going to suddenly need to manage more than one screen’s worth of them.
Rumor had it that Apple was going to announce an official Apple TV SDK at WWDC 2012, but that didn’t pan out. Could we see a similar announcement at the September event instead?
Via: MagMagazine
With the release of Apple’s own dedicated Podcasts app today, it’s clear that Apple is finally taking Podcasts seriously. When podcasts were first brought to iTunes in 2005, Apple made a strong push to promote what they felt was the future of broadcasting. Apple’s own Eddy Cue even said at the time: “We really think podcasting is the next generation of radio.”
Unfortunately, as time marched on, podcasts were pushed to the side and left pretty much unattended. iOS has always had minimal support for podcasts, and even iTunes itself offers no real compelling way to manage your subscriptions. What makes today’s announcement big is that it marks a new, renewed effort on Apple’s part to make podcasts a key part of their iTunes ecosystem.
Apple released its second iOS 6 beta to registered developers yesterday, and it included a number of new changes. The Cupertino company’s new Passbook app remains inactive, however… unless you know about the workaround.
Although nothing you can do within the Passbook app itself will get it working, there is a little trick you can perform in mobile Safari. Here’s what you need to do.
With every iteration of iOS, Apple provides more and more accessibility features to its users to make iOS devices open to more people than ever before. iOS 6 includes something big. Guided Access is essentially a tool that allows you to restrict certain areas of your screen and physical buttons in order to make the device easier to use for someone with a disability, or for younger children.
Guided access can even be used in the classroom, to stop children from exiting the current app while taking a test. It’s a really neat feature, and in my opinion, one of the most overlooked. With iOS 6 beta 2, the feature is finally functional, so in this video I’ll show you how it can work.
Cloud storage accounts for just 7% of our digital content according to Gartner the industry research firm. Given the ubiquity of cloud services and their ability to sync personal data, photos, documents, and just about everything else with our iPhone, iPads, Mac, PCs, and other devices, that number may sound a bit small. After all, the range of content that iCloud is capable of syncing in Lion and iOS 5 isn’t exactly minor.
Gartner also predicts that the percentage of the average user’s digital property will grow to more than five times that by 2016. At that point, the firm sees most users store more that a third (36%) of their digital content in various clouds. That news isn’t exactly surprising for Apple customers. Apple is making a major push for seamless iCloud integration in Mountain Lion and iOS 6. That said, the firm’s report digital storage does have a few surprises in it. In some ways the report shows that Apple is leading rather than following the personal cloud industry.
It’s hardly religious, but Apple tends to drop new developer betas of iOS every two weeks when a major new version is coming up. Today, Apple has started pushing out iOS 6 beta 2 over-the-air to registered developers.
We’ll be digging through iOS 6 Beta 2 today to find out what’s new, but there’s at least one change so far: when you install a new OTA update of iOS 6, the Settings icon apparently animates.
Via: 9to5Mac
Although iOS 6 looks a lot like iOS 5 on the surface, a number of Apple’s built-in apps and services have received some big changes. The biggest overhaul comes to the Maps app, which has done away with Google Maps in favor of Apple’s own 3D mapping service. Another feature you can look forward to in Maps, according to an Apple document sent out to developers, is Yelp check-ins.
Rumors suggesting a new Apple retail store is coming to Sydney, Australia, have been circulating for some time now, but the Cupertino company has been keeping any plans close to its chest. It seems, however, that someone forgot to tell Siri to keep quiet.
The voice-controlled assistant has revealed Apple’s plans for a new store in the Broadway shopping center.
Watching the new WWDC 2012 developer video “Introducing Passbook, Part 1,” we couldn’t help but notice that about three minutes in, one of the example passes Apple uses to show off Passbook’s functionality is for a ticket on Oceanic Flight 815 from Sydney to Los Angeles.
If that fictional airline sounds familiar, it should: that’s the same airline and flight as the one which kicks off the events in the hit ABC television series, Lost.
Using that ticket in real life would see you stranded on a mysterious, time-shifting tropical island in the middle of nowhere, where you would have to wrestle with rampaging polar bears, sexy ladies, malevolent insect swarms and an enragingly stupid sixth season that basically boils all of the mysteries down to “a wizard did it.”
Source: developer.apple.com (Developer account required)
Thanks: Alex M!
Following several security concerns over the way in which iOS apps access and record our data — with the recent Path scandal being the most notable — Apple decided to implement some new privacy settings in iOS 6, which allow you to fine-tune how much of your personal data each of your apps has access to.
Every time you open up a new app that wants access to your contacts, calendars, or any other data, you have to give that app your permission. However, one security director believes this approach will annoy iOS users more than it helps them, and that the new privacy settings are designed to protect Apple from lawsuits rather than its users from data theft.
