Category: I-phone

We’re pretty late in the year, but this might be one of the craziest stories of 2011 — according to sources, Angry Birds developer Rovio turned down a deal with social game company Zynga, to the tune of $2.25 billion. That’s right, billion with a B, and they turned it down. I actually believe this going both ways — Zynga has been buying up iPhone developers, and there aren’t many bigger iPhone developers out there than Rovio, with the company’s huge Angry Birds empire still generating plenty of attention and revenue. Zynga, with its own social network game empire, has this kind of money to spend, and it makes sense that it would want to claim Rovio for itself.

And from the other side, I also believe that Rovio thinks it’s worth more than $2.25 billion (or at least doesn’t necessarily need to sell, even for a pile of money that size). Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka is convinced that Angry Birds, despite its current popularity, still has a long way to go in terms of franchising, marketing, and even more games. Angry Birds is his moneymaker and his passion, and after having seen him earlier this year, I can completely understand why he’s not ready to make a sale.

But man — talk about a huge deal when it comes to the rapidly developing markets of social and mobile gaming. We’ll likely see Zynga spend that money elsewhere, and Rovio continue to do its best to exploit the already ubiquitous Angry Birds brand.

Rovio reportedly turns down $2.25 billion from Zynga originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim isn’t available on the Mac yet, but odds are that if you’re a big fan of gaming, you’re probably already playing it on consoles or the PC. Bethesda’s latest role-playing game is just a massive piece of world-building, with tons of dungeons to crawl through, a huge world full of cities and places to explore, and a collection of a couple hundred actual in-game books that you can pick up and read.

Turns out those books come straight from a plain text file in the game’s documents, so a blogger named Capaneus has kindly assembled them into an actual ebook that you can download and read on your iPad (or any other e-reader or app you happen to use). The book’s got its own cover and table of contents, and since its available in epub format, you can change the text to whatever size you want.

Good deal. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this is legal. Bethesda undoubtedly owns the copyright on these texts, and they likely didn’t authorize them being shared like this. Still, all of this text is just background lore on the game, not spoilery or anything, so maybe they’ll let it fly as a nice promotion for just how densely packed with fun content this game has.

[via Joystiq]

Read all of Skyrim’s literature on your iPad originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ever wonder how Apple employees know you need help or are there to pick up an order? Apple employees now have a way to track you in the store. On Black Friday, New York Times reporter Brian X. Chen took a closer look at a customer tracking system Apple has been using “for a few weeks.” It’s an interesting look at how Apple is using its own technology to improve and expedite the retail shopping experience.

The system is powered by an internal application running on an employee’s iPod touch. A customer walking into the store can use the Apple Store app to alert employees they have arrived to pick up their order. The customer’s iOS device uses GPS to locate them and sends the alert when they enter the store. When an employee receives an alert, their iPod touch will display the location of the customer on a map of the store.

A similar system was already being used for customers with product questions. Employees would be alerted when you asked for assistance using the iPad demo machines. The iPod-based system is meant to improve the shopping experience for customers. Says Apple employee Diego Aguirre, “We don’t want to feel like we’re hassling our customers to shop. We want them to feel at home.” It also lets employees quickly help those customers who need assistance.

Apple’s retail tech can notice shoppers when they arrive originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Many new iPad accessories are making the rounds this Christmas, but none are as hot as the new iDrive and updated iArm (both US$8.00, although there’s a Cyber Monday deal today). The iDrive is a mobile device mount that can hold an iPad, Kindle, or other tech device on the steering wheel of your car, while the innovative iArm makes it simple to hold an iPad, a steaming mug of coffee, and your iPhone all at the same time.

I’m personally looking forward to getting an iDrive, not for my car, but for my bike. I’ll run the Navigon app on the iPad and no longer have to squint to see where I am on the map. I can also see where the iDrive is going to be useful on those long car drives from Denver to Santa Fe, NM on I-25, when I can put the car on cruise control and have my iPad right in front of me for entertainment purposes.

The iDrive comes with both a wheel mount and a surface mount. Bus drivers will appreciate how the iDrive clamps securely to a steering wheel, allowing full access to the iPad’s screen while they’re sitting in heavy traffic. The surface mount is more useful for mounting an iPad on snowmobiles, personal watercraft, or church pews, and has a patented tilting head for comfortable viewing at any angle.

The iArm is another product that is flying off of store shelves this holiday season. This innovative product first arrived last year, but has been updated to work with the iPad 2 and new Kindle Fire. It will be my constant companion during those Wednesday live streaming sessions for TUAW TV Live, when I’ll have the iPad strapped to one arm with show notes on it and still have a free hand for drinking beverages or clicking my Magic Trackpad.

In case you’re thinking that these two products are ludicrous … you’re right. They’re actually part of the Prank Pack gift box line from 30 Watt, designed for disguising a more practical gift.

iDrive, iArm among hot holiday gifts for 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As noted by RedmondPie the Chronic Dev Team, the people behind the GreenPois0n jailbreaking tool, have released a beta of a new tool which aims to circumvent iOS crash reports being sent to Apple and instead funnels them to the Chronic Dev Team. The tool, called C-Dev Reporter, aims to notify the Chronic Dev Team instead of Apple, so they can better find exploits in iOS that could allow for easier and faster untethered jailbreaks. As the Chronic Dev blog explains it:

At this point, the program copies all the crash reports off your device (which, under normal circumstances, would be sent right back to Apple), and instead sends this data to a secure, private server hosted by your friendly Chronic Dev team. Next, our program proceeds to neuter your copy of iTunes, simply by changing your settings to prevent your computer from sending any further diagnostic information from your device to Apple.

iOS crash reports are a very important part of what allows Apple to keep making iOS more secure. It allows Apple to identify security and stability issues and fix them before shady developers can exploit your iPhone or iPad for nefarious purposes. C-Dev Reporter isn’t designed with that goal in mind. With possibly hundreds of thousands of iOS error reports being rerouted to the Chronic Dev Team and not Apple, and while Chronic Dev Team’s intentions are well-intended, their C-Dev Reporter tool could at the very least stop Apple from receiving critical error reports that help to make iOS better for people who don’t jailbreak and, at most, be hijacked to flag and use exploits for illicit purposes.

Chronic Dev team releases C-Dev Reporter tool originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Updated to reflect that the iPad version has been out for several months.

Google’s shopping-centric mobile app isn’t particularly new on the iPad — we checked in on it in August — but it’s finally made its way to the Android platform. It’s called Catalogs, and you can find it as a free download on the App Store or in the Android Market.

The big G has used its Google Books technology to scan and set up links on a number of different holiday shopping catalogs, so you can load up the app, flip through the virtual pages to find something you want, and then click away to buy it directly from your mobile tablet.

The links aren’t built in to the app — they more or less just open up an internal app browser that then lets you buy the product online. But the experience is pretty seamless otherwise; there are over 400 catalogs to browse through, and I quickly saw brands like ThinkGeek, Nike, Sonoma Williams, Sharper Image, and Pottery Barn on display.

It’s a pretty specific use of Google’s search and scanning software, but hey — it’s free, and it might help with the holiday shopping this year.

[via Engadget]

Google’s formerly-iPad-only Catalogs app now also on Android originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re keen on owning a piece of Apple history, and have a spare $100,000 lying around, check out the upcoming auction for the three-page founding contract signed by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne that created Apple Computer Co.

Bloomberg reports that the contract is a star attraction of a Sotheby’s book and manuscript auction on Dec. 13. The copy of the contract, signed April 1, 1976, was originally owned by Wayne. His subsequent withdrawal from Apple partnership on April 12, 1976, and the appropriate contract amendment also are part of the auction. The contract was sold to a manuscript dealer in the mid-90s.

Apple contract signed by Jobs in 1976 up for auction originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Did you buy anything good this weekend? It’s now Cyber Monday, and the App Store sales continue. I have to say, these aren’t quite as good as what we saw last week (though some of those are still going on), but there are still a few solid purchases here if you’re looking to load up a new iOS device.

• Halfbrick’s original Age of Zombies dual-stick shooter is down to just 99 cents.
• Double puzzle game Cohabit is on sale for the low price of free.
• Overhead racing game Tiny Cars is free today as well.
• Tom Tom USA is offering its usually very expensive software for a relatively generous price: $31.99.
• Cordy is an “exploratory platformer” that’s free to download, with an in-app price that’s been lowered to 99 cents for iPhone and $2.99 for the iPad.
• As mentioned this morning, Hothead’s Sea Stars is free for the next few days.
• And freemium puzzle title Monster Island is offering a sale on in-app purchases.

Slim pickings on new sales today, but some of those older sales are still on. And don’t worry — the biggest sales of the year on the App Store tend to show up around Christmas, which is when all of those new iPhones and iPads purchased this past weekend actually show up in consumers’ hands, and start filling up with all of these apps. Stay tuned.

Cyber Monday app sales: Tom Tom USA, Age of Zombies, a few more originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to The Daily, Microsoft is reportedly working on a version of its popular Office suite for the iPad. The Daily’s sources claim that the apps would likely work with Microsoft’s new…

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Edovia has released an update to TouchPad, a popular remote iOS app. TouchPad 4.0 update brings many more features to what was already one of the best trackpad and remote keyboard apps available in…

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ASIHttpRequest was an extremely popular framework that made basic communications, and interacting with REST based web services dead simple.

Unfortunately updates of ASIHttpRequest have been discontinued and I’ve previously mentioned the lightweight communications library AFNetworking as an alternative.

Mugunth Kumar has released a new library known as MKNetworkKit which marries the feature set of both ASIHttpRequest, and adds a few new interesting features.

Some of the features added according to the Github page are:

– Single queue for the whole app
– Auto queue sizing
– Auto caching and restoring
– Performs exactly one operation for similar requests
– Background completion
– Full ARC
– cURLable debug lines

It definitely looks like Mugunth has put in a lot of work here to make sure that the library optimizes properly for the different types of network a user is going to use.

You can find the Github page here and Mugunth has a writeup with some examples on his site that you can find here.

Mugunth Kumar has put out some excellent libraries that I have previously mentioned such as this easy store kit library, and a library that allows you to automatically save NSUserDefaults to iCloud that I mentioned just last week.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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In this application we will see how to implement Segmented Control programmatically in iPhone. So let see how it will
worked.

Step 1: Open the Xcode, Create a new project using View Base application. Give the application
“ProgrammaticallySegmentedControl”.

Step 2: Xcode automatically creates the directory structure and adds essential frameworks to it. You can explore the
directory structure to check out the content of the directory.

Step 3: Expand classes and notice Interface Builder created the FirstViewController and SecondViewController class
for you. Expand Resources and notice the template generated a separate nib,
ProgrammaticallySegmentedControlViewController.xib for the ProgrammaticallySegmentedControl application.

Step 4: Open the ProgrammaticallySegmentedControlViewController.m file and make the following changes:

Step 5: Now Compile and run the application on the Simulator.

You can Download SourceCode from here

In this application we will see how to implement Segmented Control programmatically in iPhone. So let see how it will
worked.

Step 1: Open the Xcode, Create a new project using View Base application. Give the application
“ProgrammaticallySegmentedControl”.

Step 2: Xcode automatically creates the directory structure and adds essential frameworks to it. You can explore the
directory structure to check out the content of the directory.

Step 3: Expand classes and notice Interface Builder created the FirstViewController and SecondViewController class
for you. Expand Resources and notice the template generated a separate nib,
ProgrammaticallySegmentedControlViewController.xib for the ProgrammaticallySegmentedControl application.

Step 4: Open the ProgrammaticallySegmentedControlViewController.m file and make the following changes:

Step 5: Now Compile and run the application on the Simulator.

You can Download SourceCode from here

read more

TED’s free iPad app has offered up quality videos and audio of the conference’s famous guest speakers for a while, but the company recently updated the app to be universal. Now even while out and about on your iPhone, you can access some of the knowledge and wisdom being shared within the TED app.

There’s a new feature called TEDradio, too, which offers one-touch access to a continuous stream of TED talks. Just like the iPad version, you can either watch videos online or download them to watch offline (if, for example, you’re headed for a long plane trip or something like that). There’s even a feature called “Inspire Me” where you can set certain criteria for a talk (like the amount of time you’ve got or various subjects you want to hear about), then hit go to listen in.

TED makes a solid app, and having it available for free on both iPhone and iPad with this update is just icing on the cake.

[via Razorian Fly]

TED app goes universal, on iPhone now for free originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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