Category: I-phone

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.

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Daily Update for November 30, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We got a couple tips from our South American readers indicating that the iTunes Music Store might be heading to Brazil. Now Veja, a Brazil-based magazine, says this store will launch December 8 and will include Roberto Carlos, a popular singer who has yet to make the digital transition.

The Next Web, who provided the translation, said the December 8 launch will include all of Central and South America. Mexico already has an iTunes Music Store.

However, to start with, customers are restricted to using international credit cards and will pay in dollars. Veja stated local currency should be available within the next six months. This isn’t that unusual, as until recently China had similar restrictions with the App Store.

Apple reportedly to launch iTunes Music Store in Latin America in December originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I usually have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to talk about on TUAW TV Live every week, but while planning for this post-Cyber Monday episode I just drew a blank. That means that it’s a perfect time to open up the virtual microphones and hear what viewers have to say.

I’ve got a few topics to cover at the beginning of the show, and then I’ll open up my Skype for calls. Want to talk about the chances for an Apple-branded smart TV? Are you dreaming of what an iPad 3 could be like? It’s your chance to spout your crazy ideas and see what the rest of the chat room has to say about ’em.

As usual, I’ll be starting the show at 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT / 10 PM BST) sharp, and we’ll take a few minutes to chat before we get started. To join in on the chat and watch the live streaming video, drop by TUAW about five minutes before the start time to get your instructions on how to participate. If you’re unable to join us for the show, remember that you can always subscribe to the video podcast and watch the show at your leisure in iTunes or any other favorite podcatching app. The past shows are also available on the TUAW YouTube channel.

The chat is now available as well on IRC: join us on server chat1.ustream.tv, chat room #tuaw-tv.

TUAW TV Live at 5 PM ET: Open microphone day originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Another day, another patent skirmish with Samsung. The battles are heating up on two fronts, with news of a possible Samsung victory in Australia and Apple unleashing a legal salvo against the Korean foe in Germany.

On the Western front, an Australian federal court lifted a preliminary injunction imposed by a lower court banning sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 Down Under. Apple still has a chance to respond — the same court offered a stay until Friday afternoon so that Apple’s lawyers can figure out another legal maneuver to keep the iPad lookalike out of stores until after the critical holiday buying season.

Meanwhile, on the Eastern front, Apple filed a preliminary injunction request in Germany to ban sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1N. This model of the Galaxy Tab was a revised version of the original — which was already banned in Germany — with a slightly different bezel design and relocated speaker. The 10.1N was an attempt by Samsung to squeak around Apple’s assertion that the Galaxy Tab design is just too close to that of the iPad.

The two companies meet up in a German court in Dusseldorf on December 22nd for a hearing, which means that the Samsung tablet is still ripe for consumer plucking this holiday season.

Samsung and Apple patent skirmishes heat up originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Professional photographers know that to take the best photos with the least amount of camera shake, they need to use a tripod mount and a cable release. That combination takes the movement of your body out of the equation when you’re shooting photos. Now Cycomachead over at the Macworld Mac OS X Hints forum has figured out that every iPhone running iOS 5 comes with a cable release — the headset.

You know how Apple added the ability in iOS 5 to use the volume up button (that plus sign you see in the photo above) on your iPhone as a shutter button for the Camera app? It works with the headset as well — just plug in the headset, bring up the Camera app (or third-party Camera+ app), and when you squeeze the volume up button on the headset, you’ll take a photo.

Cycomachead also notes that he can take bursts of photos more easily with the “cable release,” and that some Bluetooth headsets can also be paired and used as wireless remotes for taking photos.

For iPhoneographers, using something like a Glif to hold the iPhone steady on a tripod and then using the headset as a cable release can result in some very steady shots. If TUAW readers are able to get their Bluetooth headsets to work for wireless shooting, please let us know what model headset you’re using in the comments.

Use your iPhone headset as a camera cable release originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bloomberg reports that Apple and Google have opted out of an app-rating system announced by the CTIA-The Wireless Association. The system, which was developed and will be run by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, will bring a rating system to apps, similar to what currently exists for video games. Ratings range from from appropriate for all ages to mature content intended for adults only.

Apple and Google already have review guidelines in place. Apple’s can be seen through the Developer’s site and Google’s developer site holds guidelines for the Google Apps Marketplace. In early 2010, TUAW took a look at a report weighing if the ESRB should be in the App Store, and I agree with fellow blogger Mike Schramm’s opinion that Apple’s current vetting system is more than adequate.

Apple, Google opt out of app-rating system originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Kindle Fire is proving it’s a hot seller, having knocked the 16 GB iPad from its perch as the best-selling tablet — at least on Best Buy’s website.

There are several factors playing into this: The iPad 2‘s been around for more than half a year while the Kindle Fire is still new. Unlike other Android-based tablets, the Fire is intricately linked to Amazon’s media content, making it attractive to Amazon users. Toss in a price point that’s less than half the price of the iPad 2 and the fact that it’s the holiday-shopping season, and it’s no surprise that the Fire is a hot seller. As reflected through our own experiences at TUAW, some of these new Fire owners also are iPad owners.

What these numbers do show is that the Kindle Fire is living up to its potential as a legitimate competitor for the iPad, and Apple and Amazon will most likely run neck and neck to see who has the hottest tablet for the holiday season. The gauntlet’s been thrown, and it’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top.

Update: To put things in perspective, however, this is a single tablet against 18 configurations of the iPad, which are coming in at #2, 3, 5, 6 and 8th spots on Best Buy’s website respectively.

Kindle Fire outsells 16 GB iPad at Best Buy (updated) originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Black Friday was a successful day for online retailers. Customers spent more than US$816 million, a 26 percent increase over Black Friday 2010. Apple was one of the beneficiaries of this rise in online sales. The Cupertino company climbed its way into the top 5 and became the fifth most-visited retail website on Black Friday, says a report from Comscore. The company trailed only Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Amazon.

Analysts’s reports on Apple’s Black Friday sales were also favourable. Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore said Apple stores overseas had a hard time keeping the iPhone 4S in stock. Over 75 percent of stores he polled had sold their entire inventory of iPhone 4S handsets on Black Friday. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s research suggests the surveyed Apple store(s) were selling iPads at a rate of 14.8 per hour. Macs also were popular and left the store(s) at a rate of 10.1 per hour.

Apple.com fifth most-visited retail site on Black Friday originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve written about quite a few note-taking apps in my pursuit of the best one. Most shy away from the Post-It note paradigm because OS X comes with Stickies, a pretty decent representation of the repositionable note, but Memo takes it head-on.

Memo is basically Stickies with iCloud and password support. Create a new little yellow note, write yourself a reminder, text snippet or love-letter to your Mac, and move it to where you need it. Like many other programs, the note sits behind the active window and can be easily resized to accommodate more text.

The notes can be password protected by clicking the little padlock icon, which keeps prying eyes out of your business if you’re letting someone else use your Mac. You can change the font used, size of text and all the standard paragraph formatting you might expect. Unfortunately you can’t change the colour of the note itself — it’s yellow for offline memos, blue for cloud memos and green for private memos, which are secured with a password.

The blue “Cloud Memos” sync with iCloud to any Mac or iDevice with your iCloud ID and the free Memo app for the iPhone or iPad. If you’re looking for a Stickies replacement for just text, Memo has a couple of advantages that might make it worth looking at. It’s free, available in the Mac App Store and has free companion apps for the iPhone and iPad.

Daily Mac App: Memo originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Extraction: Project Outbreak is a recent title from Chillingo that’s an interesting mix of shooter and what’s essentially real-time strategy. You control one soldier as you fight through a series of missions, and the control scheme is pretty interesting. You touch on the screen to move around from point to point, and then you drag across the screen to line up shots on your zombie enemies.

The game is a real balance of movement and gunplay, as you try to move and position yourself to keep from getting hurt even when you’re surrounded by the bad guys. Action ranges from tactical to frenetic, and lots of upgrades mean that as you go along, you can make both your soldier and his weapons better. There’s a full singleplayer campaign to play through, and a few different modes to check out and mess around with.

Extraction is fun. The action is simple but entertaining, and the graphics range from above average to really great. It’s a great title for just sitting back and murdering some zombies with, and while it runs fine on the latest iPhones, it looks and plays better on the iPad. The game’s available on the App Store right now for 99 cents, with in-app purchases available for extra in-game XP or money.

Daily iPhone App: Extraction Project Outbreak originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to TUAW’s 2011 Holiday Gift Guide! We’re here to help you choose the best gifts this holiday season, and once you’ve received your gifts we’ll tell you what apps and accessories we think are best for your new Apple gear. Stay tuned every weekday from now until the end of the year for our picks and helpful guides and check our Gift Guide hub to see our guides as they become available. For even more holiday fun, check out sister site Engadget’s gift guide.

One of the most popular accessories for any Mac is an external disk drive. Whether you’re using a Mac Pro to edit video professionally or a MacBook Air as an email and web-browsing tool, an external drive is useful for backups or providing additional storage for files that would overwhelm the internal drive in your Mac. In this edition of the Holiday Gift Guide, I’ll describe some of the choices you may wish to consider when thinking about purchasing an external drive.

Sizing An External Drive

If you’re using an external drive for Time Machine backups, you need at least 1.2 times the maximum amount of space on your primary drive for Time Machine to work. As a rule of thumb, I’ve always recommended buying a drive at least twice the size of your primary drive. If your primary disk drive can provide up to 1 TB of storage, get a 2 TB external disk drive. That will be large enough to store a bootable clone of your drive plus a good number of Time Machine backups.

My personal rule of thumb is to get us as much hard drive as you can afford, and the recent bump in drive prices due to the Thai floods means that you’re going to pay more for the capacity you need. What this means is that a 2 TB drive that was available for about US$60 back in the summer of 2011 is now pushing $170. Be sure to check the prices for any drive before you make your purchase, as pricing is very volatile at this time.

Portable Drives

Owners of MacBooks — Airs, Pros, and the regular old garden variety MacBook — are probably more in need of external drives than desktop owners. Laptops have a higher probability of being dropped or stolen, so keeping them backed up is important. If you happen to buy the low-end MacBook Air with a built-in SSD, you only have 64 GB of storage, so an external drive might be a necessity to store media files.

Portable drives should be light, durable, and bus-powered to be truly useful to the MacBook owner. The last thing you want to have to do is carry around an AC power adapter for your hard disk drive; you should be able to just plug it in and use it. Fortunately, most of these drives are bus-powered USB 2.0 or FireWire 400/800 models, so you’re in luck.

Some of my personal favorites at this time include the Iomega eGo Helium Portable Hard Drive ($149.99 for 1 TB, $99.99 for 500 GB), the OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini ($265 for 1.5 TB, $119.99 for 320 GB), and the LaCie Rugged Hard Disk ($159.99 for 500 GB).

Desktop Drives

Have an iMac or a Mac mini? A desktop disk drive is the answer for your storage and external backup needs. Desktop drives are characterized by larger physical size, external power requirements, and generally lower prices than portable drives.

The least-expensive desktop drives are connected to your Mac through a USB 2.0 cable, while more expensive drives will also include a FireWire 400 or 800 port. You can also purchase Thunderbolt-equipped desktop drives, which are included in the next section of this gift guide and work with most new Macs.

For iMacs, one of the best-looking and relatively fast drives is the Iomega Mac Companion ($239.99 for 2 TB, $369.99 for 3 TB). Western Digital’s MyBook Studio is another large-capacity drive at a bargain price — the drives originally retailed for $249.99 for 3 TB of storage, although the hard disk shortage at this time is driving prices much higher.

Performance Desktop Drives and RAID

For those who are using their Macs for video editing or who need mass amounts of storage, performance desktop drives and RAID arrays are a good idea. When I’m referring to performance desktop drives, I’m talking about those that are generally fast drives with a fast interface. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are in this category, as are Thunderbolt drives. RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) uses two or more drives to provide either speed or redundant mass storage that can withstand the loss of a drive.

Solid State Drives are getting bigger and faster, and for many newer Macs, they’re a built-in feature or configure-to-order option. External SSDs are silent and fast, making them popular with a growing number of Mac users. OWC’s Mercury Elite Pro mini drive can be configured with a 480 GB for $899.99 — expensive, but very fast.

Drives using the fast new Thunderbolt interface are still rare, but are starting to appear from many mainstream drive manufacturers. LaCie’s Little Big Disk Thunderbolt series comes in 1 TB ($449.95), 2 TB ($549.95) and 240 GB SSD ($899.95) editions to fill your need for speed.

Two RAID drives that I tested in 2011 were the WiebeTech RTX224-QR ($499 with no drives, $1099 with two 3 TB drives installed) and the CRU-DataPort ToughTech Duo QR ($429.99 with no drives from some retailers, price varies on size and use of HDD or SSD in the array). The latter drive is quite portable. The RAID products from Drobo remain popular despite being somewhat slower than traditional arrays, with the traditional FireWire 800 / USB 2.0 4-bay Drobo available empty (bring your own drives) for $399 and the 8-bay DroboPro for $1,499 (empty, supply your own drives as needed).

The Cloud Alternative

If your needs for backup space and storage aren’t huge, and if you have a relatively fast broadband connection, then maybe you should consider the cloud alternative. There’s no need for a physical external drive; you’re just sending bits to a drive somewhere on the Internet.

For backups, there are several very good services that work seamlessly with Mac OS X. Some of my personal favorites are Backblaze ($50 a year for unlimited storage), Dolly Drive ($96/year for 250 GB of Time Machine-compatible cloud storage), and Carbonite ($59 annually for unlimited storage).

I like to work with documents in the cloud, since it’s easy to collaborate with co-workers and also use files between devices. Apple’s iCloud (free for 5 GB of storage, $100 a year for 50 GB), Dropbox (free for 2 GB of storage, $99 a year for 50 GB), and Box (free for 5 GB of storage, 50 GB for $19.99 per month) are all well-known and respected cloud services for Mac and iOS.

Conclusion

An external disk drive is a gift that remains useful for a long time. Although prices are a bit higher this year than before, there are still some bargains to be had if you shop around. In this gift guide, I’ve just named a few drives that I’m familiar with, but you can find many other models by perusing the websites of the manufacturers.

Holiday Gift Guide: External Disk Drives originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has released version 5.1.2 of Safari, now available in a Software Update near you. The new version, according to the notes, increases stability, fixes a few issues that could cause hangs and memory leaks, and fixes an issue that would allow web page to flash to white. No more more freaky strobes when loading up a new URL, hopefully.

The patch also allows web pages to show PDF content right inline with the rest of their web material, which is a nice option for programmers who need to show content that way. In fact, we’ll just say we’re looking at you, restaurants — can’t you just pay someone to translate that menu into CSS and HTML instead of making us read the PDF directly. Sheesh. Safari 5.1.2 is a 40.2 MB update, and does require a restart. Grab it at your leisure.

Safari 5.1.2 out now, fixes memory leaks, stability originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:05:00 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.

Daily Update for November 29, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s likely going to be another banner week of releases on the App Store, headlined by the long awaited sequel, Infinity Blade 2. Chair Entertainment has released a developer diary, which you can watch below, and holy swords of power, Batman, this game looks good. As we’ve heard before, the game is much bigger, offers all-new styles of gameplay (dual wielding can apparently let you duck lower, to replace the absence of your shield), and has more enemies, weapons, and content. It’ll be great, and it’s out Wednesday.

Elsewhere in upcoming iOS releases, EA has announced that it’s turning The Sims into a free-to-play title for iOS, with time-based elements similar to games like We Rule and Battle Nations. The Sims FreePlay will use The Sims as a backbone, so you’ll still be running a simulation of life in The Sims’ world, but there will also be things to do such as baking or gardening that will take time and earn XP, and the game will be monetized with in-app purchases that will likely speed up or add to gameplay. It should be interesting. EA’s freemium take on The Sims is due out next month sometime.

Infinity Blade 2 and The Sims FreePlay get previews originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is one of the more interesting art projects revolving around Apple’s touch devices — Phone Arts is a series of works that highlights pieces made specifically with the iPhone or the iPod touch. We’ve seen art made with iOS apps and devices before, but this is a little different. Rather than using the phone to create some version of an oil painting or a sketch, these pieces strike me as art that you can look at and know right away that it could only have been created on the iPhone’s screen.

The picture above is one example of how this is done, using the Notes app on iPad and some symbolic text, but all of the works in the iPhone Arts gallery looks like they were created with a digital surface. As the page says, these pieces “explore the boundaries of the phone to create graphic illustrations and designs.” Really interesting. I’d love to see more experimentation like this.

[via Today and Tomorrow]

Phone Arts shows off original works created only with iOS originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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