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Apple has announced dates for this year’s iTunes Festival London. Like last year, the festival will run every night in July. Sixty artists will be performing over thirty-one days at Camden’s Roundhouse in London. Three of the confirmed bands are Linkin Park, Duran Duran and Rumer.

As in years past, tickets to the shows are only available for free via competitions. Apple will be giving away a limited number of tickets for each showing. The entry form for the competition can be found here. Participants may apply for as many of the gigs as they’d like but are limited to the three confirmed bands for now.

Those who can’t make the festival should still be able to watch highlights, read the latest news and see behind-the-scenes photos on the event’s Facebook and Twitter pages as they did in years past. Apple has also set up an official Ping page for the concert this year. All performances will also be recorded and sold on the iTunes Music Store worldwide.

Apple announces dates for iTunes Festival London 2011 originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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My colleague Chris wrote a post about the popular video playback client VLC being pulled from the App Store following objections from a developer who worked on the project that it was in breach of the GNU Public License. [The app has now been released on Cydia for jailbroken devices.]

This unpopular move had provoked strong reactions throughout the Mac blogging world, and Chris made a strong case for the prosecution in his post. However, every story always has two sides (and somewhere between them lies the truth). I’m here today to present the case for the defense: why Rémi Denis-Courmont was absolutely in the right to do what he did.

However, to do so, I’m going to have to lay out some open source history to give structure to my arguments. Please follow me on.

Continue reading The GPL, the App Store, and you

The GPL, the App Store, and you originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We mentioned the CarTrip when they announced it earlier in the week, but after seeing this thing in person at CES I really want one. Primarily because the device will allow you to clear the stupid “check engine” light in most cars made after 1996 with an ODB-II port. You see, the CarTrip features a dongle which plugs into the ODB-II port in your car, and communicates via Bluetooth with an iOS device (in your hand or dashboard).

The CarTrip can then show you certain codes from your car’s “brain” and alert you to problems or clear the check engine light. Plus, a little plant sprout on the app will show you how efficiently your car is driving and the device will track efficiency even if you don’t have your iOS device in the car. Check out the video on the next page; we had a chat with Eric Weisinger from Griffin about the CarTrip. It should be available in the second quarter of 2011 for $89.99.

Continue reading Griffin CarTrip will track efficiency and show diagnostic reports (video)

Griffin CarTrip will track efficiency and show diagnostic reports (video) originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hm, what product could make Apple cover the windows of a retail shop so soon after the holiday shopping season? Surely not the iPad 2. Maybe something that looks the same but works on a totally new network? You know, that Verizon iPhone that we’ve been hearing about for a few years now, perchance? Well, as it turns out, probably not.

The above pic and another one posted on Uneasy Silence by way of TwitPic (dated January 9, 2011) show retail employees deploying the big black shroud to cover the store windows. The poster is from the UK, but no specific location of this store is given. Calls to several US stores said they are not covering up, and honestly covering up (and closing a retail shop) for an entire day before a major announcement would be nuts. This cover-up is most likely for an already-existing product that is getting a new window display, which would be installed overnight. It happens frequently at Apple Stores, particularly after the holidays.

Despite the unrelated coverup, we’re hearing that retail employees will have a meeting next weekend for the “red zone” — a code name given to the sales area of the floor. We’re also hearing of a possible new set up area, meaning you may see a part of stores set up to accommodate new iPhone purchasers get their phones activated. This would be great for Verizon customers suddenly flocking to Apple’s warm embrace, yes? At any rate, it’s more about the service than the product, both in the retail experience and on your network when you leave the store.

Update: As 9to5Mac points out and we hear independently, starting January 11 there will be no more restocking fees. Perhaps this “test drive anything” policy is getting some big display announcement? That would seem apropos.

Update 2: We’re hearing the reason the windows are being blocked off? Retail employees are being trained on new “setup areas” that aren’t for the Verizon iPhone, but for new customers who may be unfamiliar with Macs or iOS devices and would like to get things started with the help of a friendly Apple retail employee. Doing that now involves clogging up the Genius area in many cases.

Apple Store spotted covering up, but likely not for new iPhone (updated: no restocking fees, setup centers) originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As promised a while back, we got to chat with Elliptic Labs here at CES, and CEO Stian Aldrin walked us through the touchless gesture technology his 15-person Norway-based company is developing as a prototype. The whole thing is based on ultrasound, it turns out — a small speaker kicks out frequencies higher than the ear can hear, and a set of microphones listens in on the reflections, using an algorithim to calculate where your hand is at as you wave it through the air. The result is a gesture-based control system for touchscreen devices, but without the actual touch.

Aldrin told us that the system is already in use in a Norwegian hospital, where surgeons control touchscreen tablets without having to take their sanitized gloves off during surgery. Currently, the system only allows for a few simple gestures (swiping up and down, or left and right), but that’s just a limitation of the demo units Elliptic Labs has created. Potentially, such a system could not only recognize the placement and speed of your hand passing by (and indeed, one of the demos in the CES booth could monitor both proximity to the screen and speed, flipping on-screen content faster if you pushed your hand by faster), but even calculate multiple points of movement, doing things like multitouch gestures in the air.

You do have to be pretty close in to the screen to operate the device — rather than a big cone like a Kinect, the system monitors a sphere around itself, so you’ve got to have your hand enter that sphere for it to register. But Elliptic (who already plan to be back at CES with an even bigger booth next year) suggests that the system could be used for lots of things, from quick music controls to car controls, or anything else where you need to make a touch-style gesture without actually touching the screen. We’ve got exclusive video after the break of Aldrin demoing a dock version of the system, connected via Wi-Fi to an off-the-shelf iPad running a custom-made app.

Continue reading Elliptic Labs demonstrates its touchless user interface for iPad (with video)

Elliptic Labs demonstrates its touchless user interface for iPad (with video) originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It is time!

This week we have plenty to discuss, including the Mac App Store’s debut and the white Verizon iPhone confirmation. As such, this calls for a freshly-baked batch of random speculation so tonight I’ll be hosting live from my House Of Crackpot Theories. We might even have a few developers along to give us some actual insight and bring balance to the conversation.

Your calls and questions help us make the show the best it can be, otherwise I’m just talking to myself! To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in.

For the web UI, just click the “TalkShoe Web” button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (yay for free cellphone weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 — during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you’ve got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free Gizmo or X-Lite SIP clients; basic instructions are here. Talk with you then!

Talkcast tonight, 7pm PT/10pm ET: Crystal Ball Edition! originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Picture this: you’re hanging out at a friend’s house, and the familiar “doodle-dee!” of the iPhone’s Tri-tone alert sound goes off. But four people simultaneously start reaching for their iPhones, because they’re all using that sound for SMS/MMS alerts. Or how about this: you’re on a bike ride and getting audio feedback on your pace from RunKeeper Pro. As you ride along, you hear the Tri-tone alert go off half a dozen times. Is it someone sending you an important text message, or is it just Twitter spamming you with @reply notifications?

If you’re using Tri-tone for Messages alerts, there’s no way to tell the difference unless you stop pedalling and check. Now imagine that your iPhone is more than ten feet away from you, or you’re in a room where the ambient noise is above whisper level, and you get a new e-mail. How would you know? The New Mail notification sound is so unobtrusive, even with the iPhone’s volume maxed out, that it barely ever registers.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve encountered all three of these scenarios with distressing frequency. It’s well past time that Apple allows us to customize our alert tones.

Continue reading Dear Apple: It’s (past) time to let us customize our alert tones

Dear Apple: It’s (past) time to let us customize our alert tones originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve been wondering for the past day or so what the distinguishing features of the Verizon iPhone might be. Will it come in colors? Aside from VZW’s respectable network and CDMA technology, how will the iPhone experience on Big Red be different?

If the Wall Street Journal is right, there’ll be a big difference in the service plans: unlimited data. The paper cites a source familiar with Verizon’s plans saying that an unlimited data option will be available. By comparison, AT&T moved to a capped tier this summer, which angered some users who preferred the unlimited option.

[via Business Insider]

WSJ: Verizon iPhone will offer unlimited data originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already celebrated the 10th birthday of iTunes today; now it’s time to remember the birth of another member of the Apple family.

On January 9, 2007, I was one of the lucky folks who was sitting in the chairs at Moscone West in San Francisco, waiting for the Steve Jobs keynote address for Macworld Expo to kick off. The assembled crowd all knew that some sort of Apple phone was going to be announced, and when Jobs finally waved the phone to the crowd, the place went wild. To me, it was one of the most exciting Macworld Expo moments ever, and I actually have a painting by Nitrozac on my wall that commemorates that announcement.

For the rest of the show, people flocked around a single rotating cylindrical case containing a prototype iPhone, and on June 29, 2007 a lot of us stood in lines at our local Apple Stores to actually get one in hand. We’re now in the fourth generation of the device, which has redefined how a “smart phone” should look and act. The App Store opened about a year later (July 10, 2008) and has not only spawned a crowd of lookalikes, but was the impetus for the Mac App Store launched this week.

The youngster has had a few stumbles along the way, but the iPhone is still the phone that everyone else emulates. As of the end of September, 2010, over 73.5 million iPhones had been sold — that number may be well over 100 million by this point.

Check out video of that historic moment we first saw the iPhone four years ago, after the break.

Continue reading Happy Fourth Birthday, iPhone!

Happy Fourth Birthday, iPhone! originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ve come a long way, baby. Back on your birthday on January 9, 2001 at Macworld Expo, you were just a music player and manager — the Apple-ized offspring of SoundJam MP, given a fresh face. Soon enough, though, you would become the conduit for iPod synchronization, the platform for music and video purchases, and now the landing zone for the iOS App Store.

Not bad for a ten-year-old. Even though we may tease you for your vanities and complain about your sluggish, do-everything approach, we still couldn’t do without you. Happy 10th birthday, iTunes!

Commenter Kevlar points to our rundown of the iTunes user interface from 1.0 to 7.0, here, and Twitter buddy MightyKenny points to a YouTube clip of the actual 2001 introduction; it’s embedded in the second half of this post.

Continue reading Happy 10th Birthday, iTunes!

Happy 10th Birthday, iTunes! originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Redsn0w 0.9.7b6, the untethered iOS 4.2.1 jailbreak is now available for download. Redsn0w 0.9.7b6 fixes Skype issues on iOS device. The beta 6 of RedSn0w 0.9.7 is available for Mac OS X and requires iOS 4.2 beta 3 SHSH blobs.

The next release of RedSn0w 0.9.7 will add “iOS 4.1 Monte” to avoid iOS 4.2 beta 3 piracy. For now, RedSn0w is in beta testing phase.

From iPhone Dev Team blog,

The sixth beta is now available (testers ONLY please!). This version fixes Skype. Please do not pirate the 4.2b3 IPSW! Only those enrolled in the iPhone Developer program have legitimate access to that IPSW using these links (http://pastie.org/1403214) (the links won’t work unless you’re a legit developer currently logged in).

Unlike the last few betas, you can freely run beta6 over beta5 without a problem (but for testing purposes, we’d really like people to try both ways….from stock, and from already jailbroken).

Now that the sandbox, Bluetooth, and Skype issues are fixed, our next priority is porting Monte back to 4.1. We’ll also try to make the Windows version less painfully slow.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.7b6

Download Redsn0w 0.9.7b6 for Mac

Follow the guide linked below to untethered jailbreak iOS 4.2.1 with RedSn0w 0.9.7b6 (Skip Step 3):

Jailbreak iOS 4.2 untethered with RedSn0w 0.9.7b

Download iTunes 10.1.1

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It’s no secret that games such as the wildly popular Flight Control that allow a user to define a path, and then have an object follow that path have done well in the iOS app store.  Rightly so as these games allow users to interact with the game in a way that just wasn’t possible before the iPhone arrived.

I’ve mentioned Core Animation in the past, and recently came across an excellent tutorial displaying how to create a path with core animation, and create graphical objects that follow along that path.

Here’s a video of that tutorial in action:

The trick is to define a UIBezierPath, and use a CAKeyFrameAnimation which allows your layer to follow that path.  Full details can be found on the Mike Nachbaur’s site along with downloadable code:
Animating Interfaces With Core Animation Part 4

Definitely worth checking out if you were looking for a relatively easy way to do this.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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