Category: I-phone

 

It has long been reported that Sony is working on an adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, yesterday Sony announced that Aaron Sorkin, the award-winning writer who wrote the screenplay for The Social Network, has agreed to write the script for the biopic.

Sony Pictures Entertainment announced on Tuesday that Sorkin had signed on to the project, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal says:

“There is no writer working in Hollywood today who is more capable of capturing such an extraordinary life for the screen than Aaron Sorkin; in his hands, we’re confident that the film will be everything that Jobs himself was: captivating, entertaining, and polarizing.”

Readers might know that Sorkin won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on The Social Network and is well known for creating the television show The West Wing.

Isaacson’s book, “Steve Jobs,” was Amazon’s best-selling book last year, even though it was released towards the end of the year and thus only having weeks to reach the top of the charts.
The biography was released after Jobs passed away last October at the age of 56. According to rumors Sony signed a seven-figure deal for the book’s movie rights just days after the death of the Apple co-founder.

While Sony might have the official story from Isaacson, they may find themselves beat to screens by “Jobs: Get Inspired,” an independent biopic about Jobs that could arrive as early as later this year. Actor Ashton Kutcher will take the title role in “Jobs: Get Inspired”, which is currently slated for a fourth-quarter 2012 release. The actor who will take on the role of Jobs in the Sony Picture has yet to be decided.

With this Objective-C library for image filters based on Filterr.js and Core Image in iOS 5 there are a number of ways to easily process images.  There are times however when you might need a bit more speed and don’t want to try rolling your own filter.

Today I came across an image processing library that is designed for speed and provides that enhanced speed by using Apple’s vDSP API.  The library provides UIImage categories and provides allows you to easily apply sharpen, blur (box, gaussian and motion), and emboss filters.

The library is image-dsp from Mad Dog software and can be found on Github here.

You can read the original writeup about the category on the Mad Dog Software blog here.

You can read more about the vDSP Api On Apple’s site here.

A great library if you need some really fast image processing.

via @mugunthkumar, @flyosity

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Apple received a legal slap on Wednesday when U.S. District Judge Denise Cote rejected a request to dismiss a class action lawsuit against Apple and five publishers.

Cote scoffed at the idea that Apple and the publishers acted independently in coming up with what’s known as agency pricing, their defense to the charges that they were price-fixing ebooks. Not only that, she accused Steve Jobs at being at the center of it all. Parts of the opinion, as excerpted by paidContent, reads:

In short, Apple did not try to earn money off of eBooks by competing with other retailers in an open market; rather, Apple ‘accomplished this goal by [helping] the suppliers to collude, rather than to compete independently.'”

“Finally, the fact that Apple might have had different motivations for joining the conspiracy, and was involved in only a portion of it, does not undermine the existence of the conspiracy itself or Apple’s role as a participant.

Cote also cites ongoing investigations against Apple, including the antitrust suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, as other reasons to maintain the class action suit, filed in August 2011.

Judge refuses request to dismiss ebook class action suit originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 23:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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U.S. House Speaker John Boehner’s office has released a picture of Boehner meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday. While Boehner’s staff didn’t go into details about the meeting, MacRumors theorizes that Cook was lobbying for a tax holiday, allowing Apple to bring some of its offshore funds back into the U.S.

Fortune first reported in February that Apple was lobbying for a tax holiday to alleviate the 35% rate that repatriated funds are currently taxed at. Apple and other corporate entities would like the government to drop this rate to 5% for a year.

Tim Cook meets with Speaker of US House of Representatives, John Boehner originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aaron Sorkin, fresh from winning an Oscar for writing “The Social Network,” will move from covering Facebook to Apple. Sony has hired Sorkin to turn Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” biography into a feature film, Variety reports. Sony acquired the movie rights to Isaacson’s biography a couple weeks before it was released in October.

Another Jobs biopic is scheduled to begin filming this month. This film, with the working title “Jobs,” stars Ashton Kutcher and covers the years 1971-2000. “Jobs” is slated to be released in the fourth quarter of this year.

[Via Mashable]

Aaron Sorkin to pen Jobs’ biopic, Variety reports originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Inkling is an e-book publishing platform that’s currently running an app on the App Store, and while Apple has been making an official push for more textbooks in iBooks, Inkling is strengthening its own holdings. The company has made a deal with Follett to bring hundreds of Inkling titles into college bookstores, where students can buy the ebook content right there in person.

The company is selling whole textbooks, or it’s also offering a program called “Pick 3,” which allows students to grab three chapters of a book at a time, keeping costs down if teachers or students don’t need the whole book. Overall, this may not be cheaper, however — don’t forget that students who buy real books can often have a chance to resell them, or can buy them used, and with ebooks, there’s obviously no resale value.

The Follett deal should be ready by the time students head back to school in the fall.

Inkling to sell iPad textbooks in over 900 college bookstores originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You’ll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what’s happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today’s Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here.

No Flash? Click here to listen.

Subscribe via RSS

Daily Update for May 15, 2012 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 19:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ozgood is an interesting little iPhone game from a few developers who’ve worked for bigger game companies, and have recently gone independent. Most iPhone games deal with the platform’s hardware by either just going with 2D graphics or trying relatively simple 3D — it’s usually only bigger developers like Epic Games that can really use an engine like Unreal to wring really colorful graphics out of the iPhone. But RunWilder, the developers of Ozgood, took an entirely different tack: They took video of a real life puppet, and then put it together with 2D backgrounds and 3D items to make this virtual pet game.

The result is a very unique kind of wonderful. Ozgood is a crazy little guy full of personality, and the app (which is free right now) is full of content. There’s a “story” you can play through by feeding Ozgood certain things and interacting with him in certain ways, there’s a “studio mode” where you can use him to make messages to send along to friends, and there’s an ongoing metagame as well, where you can feed Ozgood a fake soda called Chugg and even share six packs of it with your friends online.

The app is silly — it’s very kid friendly, and Ozgood can sometimes be crass with his burps and various bodily functions. But even for adults, it’s wild to see how these developers used a puppet to make this app, and there’s clearly a lot of skill in how it’s all put together. Ozgood is a free universal download that’s definitely worth checking out.

Daily iPhone App: Ozgood is a lovable piece of puppet tech originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over the past few weeks, several ad networks have announced “UDID-independent” conversion tracking tools. As Apple’s UDID ban has gone into effect, mobile advertising has had to find other ways to track device users.

The problem with this is, of course, that they’re still tracking. Apple’s SDK supports lots of ways to retrieve hardware data that’s not limited to UDID, and it’s easy enough to re-build the same UDID that Apple’s APIs no longer support.

What’s uncomfortable about this transition away from UDID tracking to other forms of user identification is how hard these firms are scrambling to keep tracking users. In a nutshell, companies want to track because it’s of value to advertisers, not because it’s of value to users. iPhone owners are giving up some of their privacy, and for what? The ad companies are not creating coherent user experiences (UX) across time and device; they’re just targeting ads.

Ad networks might reply that a clear audience demographic allows for more effective (and profitable) advertising on mobile, which in turn supports a more diverse and dynamic population of ad-supported free apps. Certainly the App Store’s free lineup reflects a degree of ad-driven revenue that would be missed if it evaporated.

Of course, TUAW is an ad-supported site. We have to personally acknowledge the role of tracking cookies and other advertising technologies in supporting what we do. Mobile, however, feels different. It’s more personal, it’s location-aware, and it’s less transparent to the end user.

What we’re not seeing is transparency and explicit opt-outs. On-device tracking is done completely silently in applications. You can’t open up a device’s “cookies” to see who is tracking you, and what information is being shared. That’s fundamentally different from the desktop browser experience.

It’s a bit surprising we haven’t seen a user-facing control panel for this. Whether provided device-side or as a webpage you can visit from your device, apps and advertising networks aren’t allowing users to willingly opt-out from (or, even better, choose to opt-in to) this tracking.

As one developer shared with TUAW, “[O]ne of the differences about website tracking is that you’re actively requesting something from an external entity. If I walk into the grocery store and the guy behind the counter remembers me, there’s no surprise. App tracking is often more like if I pull my milk out of the fridge to pour a bowl of cereal and the fridge autonomously contacts the grocery store to tell them what kind of cereal I’m eating.”

Often app developers say they track only to provide a more coherent launch-to-launch experience. But Apple has long since addressed the UX question of hardware tracking. iCloud allows apps to help customers build that coherent experience. You can lay down one device and pick up whatever you were doing on another. Not all applications support this integration yet, but the tech is there and working. Applications can coordinate bookmarks, data, game progress, and more.

That’s not what these ad networks are doing and it’s not what a lot of devs are doing either. They’re tracking customers for marketing purposes. All these tools we’re seeing, and all these press releases, are essentially an end-run around Apple’s attempts to guard consumer privacy. It’s treating paying customers as the “other side” in an adversarial relationship, as if they were nothing more than commodities — and, as far as ad networks are concerned, users are the product.

Unfortunately, Apple has yet to come out with a clear statement of expectations even as it has tweaked its own ad solution to be more appealing to buyers. We have yet to see developers form a coalition saying, “Here is our pledge of professional conduct.” Over the years, Apple has demonstrated how to profit by putting the customer first. Maybe it’s time for the iOS developer community to do the same.

On the UDID ban: Tracking devices, users and advertisers originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Logitech’s Ultrathin Keyboard Cover (US$99) has been out for a while, but TUAW didn’t receive a review device until last week. After a weekend of happily pounding on the keyboard and giving this shiny new product a workout, I’m pleased to say that it’s the best iPad keyboard case I’ve reviewed so far.

Design

Logitech appears to have started with a clean sheet of paper when they came up with the design for the Ultrathin Keyboard Cover. While the rest of the teeming mass of accessory manufacturers have pretty much all chosen to take a folio case and throw a keyboard — removable in some cases — into it, Logitech took the unique idea of making the keyboard the case cover.

The thin (.31 inch) and light (11.6 ounce) keyboard has a Smart Cover-like hinged magnet on one side. Drag that magnet against the left side of an iPad and it snaps into place. The Ultrathin also has magnets on the right side to turn the iPad 2 or third-generation iPad on or off.

The back of the Ultrathin is made with aluminum that matches the material of the iPad. If you’d like to customize your Ultrathin, Logitech provides free laser engraving if you order the keyboard from its online store.

When the keyboard cover and iPad are mated together, they form a nice curvy aluminum shell about .68 inch thick. That just so happens to match the maximum thickness of a MacBook Air. The combined weight of the Ultrathin and third-generation iPad is 2.185 lb., .2 lb. (3.2 oz.) less than that of an 11″ MacBook Air.

The right side of the keyboard has a small Bluetooth button (used for re-pairing the device), an on-off switch, and a micro-USB port for recharging the battery. The port isn’t going to get much use, since Logitech manages to squeeze six months of battery life out of the keyboard based on two hours of use each day.

Once the keyboard is flat on your desk, you see a white angled slot above the top of the keys. That slot is where your iPad fits in, either in landscape or portrait orientation. If the iPad is placed in that slot with the left side down, magnets hold the iPad in securely. That keeps the iPad from sliding out if you’re holding it on an uneven surface like a lap.

The keyboard is almost identical in terms of key placement to the Apple Wireless Keyboard, which is my personal standard by which all other keyboards are measured. The only exception is the number (top) row of keys, which serves not only to provide the standard numbers and characters but also performs a variety of functions when used in conjunction with the fn key.

Those functions include home, search, virtual keyboard enable/disable, select, cut, copy, paste, and volume controls. The bottom row of the keyboard is a bit taller than the others, making the space bar almost identical in size to that on the Apple keyboard.

Functionality

When it comes to Bluetooth keyboard functionality, there’s really only one thing that I’m interested in — the feel of the keyboard. If it has a good feel, good positive feedback, and the keys are spaced properly, I can type quickly. That’s the case with the Ultrathin.

With most other keyboard folios and standalone keyboards for iPad, the spacing and placement of the keys is all wrong. Since typing is mainly all muscle memory at work, those other keyboard really throw off my typing until I have used them for a while. I had no such issues with the Ultrathin; it felt so much like my Apple Wireless Keyboard that I was able to type at full speed almost immediately. Kudos to the engineers at Logitech for creating a keyboard with such a perfect touch.

As a protective device, the Ultrathin Keyboard Cover provides just as much care for the screen on your second- or third-generation iPad as the Smart Cover; possibly more. If you would like for the back of your iPad to be protected as well, you won’t be happy. I tried using one of the many lightweight iPad shells to protect the back and found that it made the iPad too thick to use with the Ultrathin. You might be able to squeak by with a film cover like those made by Zagg. However, there’s one thing missing, and that’s the ability to prop the iPad up in several configurations. I wasn’t used to using my iPad in a “standup” mode similar to that of a laptop screen, but fortunately it didn’t take long for it to me to get used to that configuration.

Of course, the angle at which your iPad is standing cannot be changed; it’s fixed to the angle of the slot on the keyboard. I found myself occasionally grabbing the iPad to change the angle, as if it was the screen on my MacBook Air. If you can stand a little more thickness and weight, you might want to look at Logitech’s Solar Keyboard Folio ($129.99). It’s adjustable to a variety of angles and never needs to be plugged in.

Researching some other reviews of the Ultrathin showed that some bloggers have seen issues where a key will stick and/or repeat when the iPad is pumping out a lot of Wi-Fi traffic. This never happened to me personally, but it’s worth reporting as a possible issue.

We’ve had the debate about iPad + Keyboard versus MacBook Air quite a few times here at TUAW so I won’t repeat it. For some of my work, I still require Mac OS X and the MacBook Air as there just isn’t a viable solution on the iPad. However, the introduction of high-quality, lightweight keyboards like the Ultrathin is rapidly decreasing the number of situations where I need a full laptop. If the TUAW content management system provided a way for me to upload images from an iPad, I’d seriously consider using the iPad and Ultrathin Keyboard Cover as my “laptop”.

Speaking of TUAW, blogger Richard Gaywood mentioned that he uses the UK version of the Ultrathin — “Can I add a small point to your review? Mine came with a UK keyboard layout — a £ sign on shift-3, and (more importantly), a double-height (as opposed to double width) return key. This is really great for people used to UK keyboards, and it wasn’t at all obvious from Logitech.com that that would be what I got — all the press pics are a US keyboard layout. Many no-name iPad keyboards only offer US layouts so that was a welcome surprise”

Conclusion

The ultimate convergence of laptop and tablet might not be here yet, but products like the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover are making it easier to blur the lines every day. Combining the protection of Apple’s Smart Cover and the typing ease of the Apple Wireless Keyboard into a wafer-thin cover is a great idea, and Logitech’s execution of the concept is essentially perfect. Without a doubt, this is the best iPad Bluetooth keyboard on the market at this time.

Logitech’s Ultrathin Keyboard Cover: The best iPad keyboard case yet originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are more than half a million apps in Apple’s App Store. Some are stunning achievements. Others are not.

Below is a video demonstration of the app Airplane. Touch the “Take Off” button to hear the sound of an airplane engine. Shake the phone to hear a flight attended tell you to put your seatbelt on. That’s it.

We leave you with this free app from the “Entertainment” category (that’s a stretch) and a hearty “no comment.”

No comment: Unimpressive iPhone app, Airplane originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you repeatedly have a problem receiving iMessages on your iPhone, then you should try this fix from Brian X. Chen of the New York Times. In a recent Gadgetwise column, Chen explains how he missed appointments because his iMessages were often delayed. He complained on Twitter and was counseled to uninstall Messages Beta for the Mac. Apple hasn’t said anything about a potential problem with iMessages for iOS and Messages beta for the Mac, but it’s an easy thing to try if you’re having trouble with iOS Messaging service.

Misbehaving iMessage and a potential fix originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When it comes to evaluating the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today’s topic is Mountain Lion.

During the Q2 financials, Apple told us it would debut “late summer,” but some sites insist we may see it earlier. Sure, everyone wants to get started using OS X 10.8 as soon as possible, but when do you really see it launching?

You tell us. Place your vote in this poll and then join in the comments with all your analysis.

View Poll

You’re the Pundit: When will Mountain Lion launch? originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve been using Due for iOS for quite a while now (our review) It’s exciting that there’s finally a Mac version of Due available. It’s just as useful as its mobile counterpart an offers wireless sync, rapid reminder creation and great looks. Plus, it’s still a nag, which is exactly what I need. Here’s a look at Due for Mac.

UI

Due for Mac is quite good-looking, as you’d expect. The main window is small and unobtrusive by default, though you can resize it. Four icons line the top of the main window: view reminders, view timers, view logged reminders and create a new reminder. The pinstriped window is tidy and resembles Due for iPhone. When you create a new reminder or edit a timer, a pop-up window appears which also looks very nice.

Use

Creating a reminder is simple. Click the new reminder button (or hit Command-N) to open the creation window. You can use natural language here, which is great. “April 10” works as well as “tomorrow” or “in four days.” Also, “10:00 AM” works as well as “10am.”

Also, you needn’t tab into each field. You can simply type “Pick up mail at 2pm tomorrow” and everything will be filled in properly. The reminder is set as soon as you finish typing, so there’s no “confirm” button to click.

Keyboard support is extensive. You can create reminders, hide the app, pull it up front again, reschedule things, mark them as done and so on without touching a mouse.

The snooze feature that I like on my iPhone has made it to Due for Mac. When a reminder’s due date passes without being marked as done, the app will repeatedly remind you that it’s still outstanding.

Of course, the cool new feature is cloud sync between Due for Mac and iOS. All of your reminders and timers can be synchronized via iCloud or Dropbox. In my testing, this works flawlessly. Reminders created on either device showed up on the other almost instantly. Also, marking a reminder as completed did the same thing. It’s really nice to create errand-based tasks on my Mac and have them ready to go on my iPhone when I leave the house.

Finally, the customizable alert sounds are pretty cool. You can assign a longer or louder alert to an especially important task. That’s also useful if you know you’re going to be in a noisy setting when the reminder will sound.

Conclusion

At US$9.99 it’s not a throw-away app. I think it’s worth it for the cloud sync alone. Due for iOS has kept me on track many times, and now I’m glad to have my Mac in on the fun. I recommend checking it out.

Due for Mac now available with cloud sync, much more originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 12:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear Aunt TUAW,

I want to buy “A Dance with Dragons” as an eBook and I am hesitating between buying it for Kindle or iBooks, the reason being the Kindle version will be available on my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad. Is it possible to do the same if I buy it for iBooks or will I be “stuck” with reading on my iPhone and iPad?

Your loving nephew,

Andre

Dear Andre,

Although Auntie is looking forward to iBooks for Mountain Lion, she’s not holding her breath either. Apple hasn’t announced it.

The practical answer is that Kindle books can be read anywhere: from Macs to Windows, Linux to Android, iOS to webOS. Plus, Kindle books can be loaned. iBooks is iOS-only.

So yes, if you buy it for iBooks, you’ll be “stuck” reading on your iPhone or iPad, which isn’t a horrible thing for most people but keeps you from reading it on your Mac.

Hugs,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: Where should I buy my George R. R. Martin fix? originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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