Category: I-phone

TUAW wishes its Hindu readers – Diwali ki hardik shubhkamnaye. This holiday rejoices in the Inner Light and the underlying reality of all things. In its spirit as the festival of lights, we offer you a special edition of “5 apps for…”. Here are an assortment of iOS applications to help celebrate Diwali.

• Interact with a Diwali diya (free) on your iOS device using swipes and puffs of air. The app provides musical background songs and various styles of ceremonial diya lamps.
• The $0.99 Diwali Greetings lets you create and share e-mail holiday cards with friends and family
• Desi Calendar (free) provides a yearly calendar with festival dates and listings for each month full moon (purnima) and new moon (amavasya).
• Create traditional Diwali sweets ($2.99) using this iOS recipe collection.
• Celebrate with Diwali Firecrackers ($0.99) with “5 firecrackers and 25 engaging levels” by illuminating the earth with bursting firecrackers.

TUAW reader Sunilkumar K. Meena tells us, Diwali is the festival of Laxmi, the Goddess of prosperity and wealth. It is believed that Goddess Laxmi visit everyone during Diwali and brings peace and prosperity to all

TUAW reader Raghav Sethi adds that Deepavali (Diwali) is a festival where people from all age groups participate. They light earthen ‘diyas’ (lamps), decorate the houses, light firecrackers and invite family and friends to feasts. Lighting lamps is a way of praying for health, wealth, knowledge, peace, valor and fame.

Shubh Deepavali!

Thank you Raghav Sethi and Sunilkumar K. Meena

5 apps for Diwali originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:00:00 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.

Daily Update for October 25, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gameloft is one of the standout companies on iOS. While the company has received criticism for “borrowing” some gameplay themes and ideas from more popular console titles, there’s no question that it has still worked hard on quality games, and picked up a lot of iOS sales for it.

Gameloft is based in France, but has announced that it will start trading on the US market by selling American Depositary Receipts, which are a kind of representation of a foreign stock on the American market. The company says that 30% of its sales come from North America, so bringing the chance to invest to the US is probably a good way to pull in some new assets and interest.

Not to mention that the offering brings investors a chance to catch a ride on one of the iOS’ platforms biggest success stories. Gameloft has been doing really well on the App Store, and this is just another sign that it’s headed for even better things in the future.

As always, please note that this post is not actual financial advice. Just because the company is doing well, past performance is never a guarantee of future success in any business.

Gameloft starts trading shares in the US originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last week we covered BatterySqueezer, an app designed to throttle browser processes when backgrounded. Today we’ll take a look at App Tamer, a similar non-Mac App Store app that takes things further.

App Tamer goes beyond throttling and will actually put applications into suspended animation. It also will tackle any program that you wish, not just limited to browsers. By default it will pause resource-heavy apps such as Photoshop and Chrome when not in use, saving all but a tiny percentage of their CPU usage.

Configuration options include the ability to put a shadow mask over paused programs, helping to identify them as suspended. You also can define the period of activity before App Tamer does its thing. App Tamer will wake the paused app with user-configurable time periods, which by default is every 5 minutes. This helps prevent the app from crashing out.

When you switch back to a paused application, App Tamer resuscitates the program with almost instant results — there didn’t seem much in the way of perceivable lag in my testing on a 2011 MacBook Pro. Everything then runs normally until you click away, putting the app back into suspended animation.

In my rather unscientific testing, App Tamer more or less killed all CPU demands of paused applications. This led to much more free resources without the need to kill the apps when not in use. Your milage, as they say, will vary — but a free trial is available, so you can see whether it’s going to do what you need without commitment.

So, if you’re looking for something that goes beyond just browser throttling — App Tamer will set you back $15 and should help you reclaim CPU-cycles, reduce heat and increase your multi-tasking battery life.

Hat tip to Mystakill

Daily Mac App: App Tamer originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In line with the ever-expanding impact of iOS devices and mobile technology on the userbase-formerly-known-as-the-Macintosh-market, the premiere tradeshow for all things Apple will have a new name in 2012. The 27-year-old Macworld Expo event will now be known as Macworld|iWorld: The Ultimate iFanEvent. The branding change acknowledges the reality that iOS is a huge and growing part of the Apple product ecosystem; registration for the January show/conference is open now.

Paul Kent, IDG’s maven for all things Macworld Expo — sorry, Macworld|iWorld — discussed the branding change with the expo’s corporate cousins at Macworld magazine. “We want a heavy influence of OS X developers on the show floor this year,” Kent said, but the show will be balancing the iOS impact as well as moving outward to re-emphasize the cultural connections to Apple products.

Music will play a major role this year, with showcase performances at the Music Experience and expanded evening events outside the core Moscone venue. Film and other creative pursuits will take their turn on center stage as well. IDG is projecting about a 20% growth in total exhibitor count, which is a healthy step up from last year; the 2010 and 2011 shows represented a major downscaling from 2009, which was the last time Apple exhibited at the show.

TUAW has been pleased to participate in Macworld Expo over the years, including our live video streaming interviews in 2010 and 2011. We don’t know yet if we’ll be back with a booth on the show floor for 2012 at MW|iW, but we’ll certainly have some sort of presence — and we look forward to seeing you there.

[Any similarity to the name of Apple’s short-lived online service, eWorld, is almost certainly unintentional.]

Macworld Expo rebranding as Macworld | iWorld for 2012 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Harris Interactive put together a survey asking American youth from ages 8-24 what their favorite brands were, and Apple came out on top in the computer, tablet, and phone space. That’s not too surprising, given how powerful Apple’s marketing is (not to mention how great its products are), but it is true that “the old” Apple tended to go for the slightly older audiences. Since the introduction of the iPod ten years ago, Apple’s marketing and products have skewed younger and younger.

What’s perhaps even more interesting in this report is the other brands that are popular with this age group: Oreos! Capri Sun! Nintendo? These kids are into the same things I liked as a kid! Oreos and Capri Sun especially — I believed those lunchbag standbys were old school, but apparently they’re still popular on the contemporary playground. Next you’ll tell us that kids today still dig Trapper Keepers and Ecto Cooler!

Apple, Oreo and Capri Sun top list of popular youth brands originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Web application performance company New Relic released the results of a study comparing the mobile browsing speeds of iOS 4 and iOS 5 on the same model of iPhone. What did they find? That iOS 5 / Safari 5.1 is much faster than iOS 4 / Safari 5.0.

New Relic complied their test results into the nifty infographic seen below. I love their conclusion: “Time to upgrade!” What has been your personal experience with web browsing or web app response times under iOS 5 and Safari 5.1? Leave your comments below.

iOS 5 Safari speed gains demonstrated in New Relic infographic originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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China Mobile Chairman Wang Jianzhou told Reuters that its wireless network is home to over ten million iPhones. This number is a very small part of China Mobile’s 600 million subscribers, but it’s surprisingly high for a carrier that does not currently sell any model of the iPhone. These iPhones on China Mobile are either purchased directly from China’s five Apple stores, converts from China Unicom which does carry the iPhone 4 or are iPhones obtained on the black market. It’s well known that many iPhones being sold in China are smuggled in from foreign countries and sold to customers in open air markets.

This illicit market may face some competition as China Mobile hopes to carry the iPhone when Apple manufacturers a version compatible with the carrier’s TD-LTE standard for 4G. According to Wang, China Mobile does not have a contract with Apple, but Apple has supposedly promised to support TD-LTE when it develops an LTE-enabled iPhone handset. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have reportedly visited with China Mobile executives to discuss this technology and a possible carrier agreement.

China Mobile is the world’s largest wireless carrier and an official agreement would vastly increase the number of potential iPhone owners. Though China Mobile has publicly said several times that it wants the iPhone in an offical capacity, Wang isn’t upset by the number of unauthorized iPhones on China Mobile’s network. Wang said, “The total number of iPhones in China Mobile’s network has reached 10 million — and we didn’t pay any subsidies.” That’s a nice hidden benefit.

China Mobile claims 10 million iPhone users originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lost in the hype about Siri is the fact that the iPhone 4S is the first available smartphone to support the Bluetooth 4.0 standard. Announced in early 2010, Bluetooth 4.0 focuses on low-energy, sensor-filled devices that can be powered by button cell batteries. Examples include pedometers, heart rate monitors, glucose meters, and home automation tools.

Now that the first Bluetooth 4.0 ready handset has hit the market, the Bluetooth SIG group has created a new logo and name to describe these low-power devices. Starting soon, any device with a Bluetooth 4.0 compatible radio will be branded with the name Bluetooth Smart or Bluetooth Smart Ready. A new Bluetooth logo will be emblazoned on packaging to help customers locate this category of Bluetooth products.

The iPhone 4S may be the first Bluetooth Smart compatible smartphone, but it’s not the first Bluetooth 4.0 hardware available from Apple. The Cupertino company also added Bluetooth 4.0 support to the latest Mac Mini and MacBook Air models. These Apple products will be ready to connect to Bluetooth Smart devices once they begin to hit the market in the upcoming months.

Bluetooth Smart announced, iPhone 4S is ready originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It looks like Sprint subscribers who were lucky enough to get a 4S are not happy with the download speeds they are currently getting. Because of the complaints an internal memo has been sent to Sprint reps letting them know the issue is being worked on with Apple. Not surprisingly the issue is attributed to the fact that iPhone users download a lot of data.

From the “Everything is fine” department at Sprint:

“Overall, iPhone performance on the Sprint network is consistent with our expectations and the rest of our high-end portfolio. However, we do see opportunities to optimize performance, specifically in high network capacity areas,”.

Sprint is feeling the same pain AT&T did in New York City and San Francisco, only theirs seems to be nationwide.

Source: Sprint’s Singing the iPhone Blues

If you’ve ever animated a UIView – then you know how it works.

If you’ve been developing on the iOS platform awhile you may remember that early on UIView animations would take a ton of code.  You would start the sequence and write separate method calls to set the delegate and callbacks.

Support for blocks with UIView animations was introduced in iOS 4 which made for far less typing, but the syntax could still become very ugly and still requires quite a bit of typing..

This libray provides a very elegant solution by using blocks so that you can drastically reduce the total amount of code.

Here’s an example showing how readable and concise the code is with the library:

[[AnimationSequence sequenceWithSteps:
[AnimationStep for:0.25 do:^{ self.imageView.alpha = 0.0; }], 
[AnimationStep for:0.25 do:^{ self.headline.alpha = 0.0; }], 
[AnimationStep for:0.25 do:^{ self.content.alpha = 0.0; }], 
[AnimationStep after:1.0 for:0.25 do:^{ self.headline.alpha = 1.0; }], 
[AnimationStep for:0.25 do:^{ self.content.alpha = 1.0; }], nil]  
run];

Quite an improvement!

You can find more on the creator’s website and download the library in the Github repository.

Via Alex Curylo

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

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Tony Fadell, Apple’s former Senior Vice President of the iPod Division, oversaw iPod and iPhone development between 2001 and 2009. Ten years after his most iconic project first saw the light of day, the “father of the iPod” has a new product: Nest, a home thermostat that’s smarter than the average bear.

Nest is a new breed of home thermostat that Fadell has developed with partner Matt Rogers, who led an engineering team at Apple’s iPod division in 2009. “It’s a thermostat for the iPhone generation,” says Fadell. Aside from its striking looks and color-coded, digital display, the Nest thermostat boasts impressive features. For example, a motion sensor notices if there are people in a room and adjusts its temperature accordingly.

Even fine-tuned adjustments of just a few degrees can make a big difference for consumers and the environment. The New York Times notes that each degree cooler (in winter) or warmer (in summer) a house is kept translates into a 5 percent energy savings, according to experts. John E. Bowers, director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency at the University of California, Santa Barbara, likes the idea of using an smart device to monitor those adjustments. “There is a huge amount that can be gained in homes, and an intelligent thermostat could be a great opportunity,” he told the Times.

The Nest will ship sometime in November at US$250, via the company’s site and Best Buy’s website. It certainly looks cool, but what would you expect from “the father of the iPod?”

iPod designer Tony Fadell takes on thermostats with Nest Labs originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Siri is quickly becoming everyone’s favorite personal assistant. It helps you navigate, sends messages on your behalf and provides quirky answers to life’s most difficult questions like “Where do I hide a dead body?” Siri’s capacity for juvenile amusement was not lost on Conan O’Brien who used Apple’s Siri commercial as the basis for his latest Apple parody. As you would expect, his short skit pokes fun at the voice assistant’s ability to answer just about any question you ask of it. For a chuckle or two, check out the Team Coco video below.

Conan O’Brien pokes fun at Siri originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Jobs’s biography debuted ahead of schedule this week and skyrocketed to the top of the charts at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Exact sales numbers are not available, but the biography is the top seller on Amazon’s Kindle, hardcover and audiobook bestseller lists. It also tops the charts on Barnes and Noble’s hardcover, Nook and audiobook lists.

The biography, written by former Times editor Walter Isaacson, was originally scheduled for a March 2012 launch. That date was pushed up to November 21, 2011 over the summer. The biography unexpectedly became available on Sunday via the Amazon Kindle Store and Apple’s iBookstore, while the hardcover version went on sale in stores and online starting yesterday.

Now that it is officially in the hands of Apple fans worldwide, details of the book are now being publicly released. The juiciest tidbit to come from the biography is the suggestion that Jobs and Apple were possibly working on an Apple-branded television set. The book also details Jobs’s dislike of Android and his vow to go nuclear in his fight against the competing platform.

Steve Jobs bio debuts atop Amazon, Barnes & Nobles best-seller list originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whale Trail is a catchy little game that combines a few of my favorites lately into a cotton candy sweet package. Jetpack Joyride is in there, as you need to press on the screen to move upwards and avoid obstacles. Tiny Wings is in there too, as you keep a cute little whale flying using swooping patterns to stay up in the air. And Baby Monkey (going backwards on a pig) is in there too, as a goofy little song plays for you while flying along.

In short, it’s cute, fun, and pretty darn addictive. The polish on this one is excellent — the graphics are as airy and light as the sound effects, and while the story itself is nonsensical, the controls definitely aren’t. You can do some pretty precise swinging with this little whale. A frenzy mechanic will keep you chasing down the various routes available as the game goes on, and Game Center integration offers up plenty of achievements to go after as well.

Whale Trail is an excellent title — simple but fun, and perfect for the iPhone. It’s available on the App Store right now for 99 cents.

Daily iPhone App: Whale Trail originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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