Category: I-phone

Apple is known for its attention to detail. The layout of its stores, the design of its icons and the colors used in its promotional materials are all carefully planned. This attention to the littlest of things even appears in the iPhone 4. As pointed out by David Goldman of Edible Apple, the placement of the iPhone speakers is almost perfect.

Unlike its competitors which place the speakers on the back of the phone, Apple places the speakers on the bottom face. This bottom location gives you a loud, clear sound when the phone is laying on the table. Competitor’s handsets with a rear-facing speaker will be muffled when they are placed in the same position. This might not seem like a big deal until you miss a meeting because your handset is laying on your nightstand and the muffled alarm is too quiet to wake you up.

You can also see this attention to detail in Apple’s design of copy and paste. Other mobile platforms include copy and paste, but their implementation is awkward. Selecting the correct text is hit or miss because your fat fingers block the text that you are highlighting. Apple’s version of copy and paste, though, lets you zoom in with a magnifying glass that appears above your finger. This simple magnifier makes it easy to select the first and last letter of the text. It’s this attention to detail that makes Apple products a pleasure to use.

Apple design and the little things originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Making Macs into full network citizens has been the business of GroupLogic for quite a while; the 23-year old ISV has been selling its flagship ExtremeZ-IP server extension tool since 1999, giving Windows server administrators a solid and dependable way to extend their services to Mac clients. Back in May of this year, the company took a leap onto iOS with MobilEcho, which delivered Windows fileserver access to iPads while helping enterprise IT admins keep a grip on files and user rights.

Now the new 3.0 version of MobilEcho is arriving in the App Store, and it’s adding access for another population of iOS devices: iPhones. Along with support for the smaller screens, the new version includes in-app PDF preview and annotation (avoiding the need to round-trip files to other tools), AD home directory access, better device management and password controls, and one-way push sync from the server to the device for versioning. GroupLogic is also partnering with device admin vendor MobileIron to bundle mobile device management (MDM) services.

I spoke to GroupLogic CEO Chris Broderick and product manager Brian Ulmer last week, and both are very excited about the potential new audience for the company’s products. For years, GroupLogic’s customer base has largely drawn from the Mac’s traditional vertical markets: publishing, advertising, education. Within 36 hours of announcing MobilEcho at TechCrunch Disrupt, the first licensee was signed up — and it was a client that GL had never talked to before, who found them via Twitter (of course).

They’re now talking to new customers across many industries and vertical markets, from small companies all the way up to major Fortune 500 enterprises. The iPad’s momentum in the business market is improving the outlook for all sorts of companies that help it work better with existing systems.

As you might expect for an enterprise platform, MobilEcho isn’t cheap. The server software starts at US$795 and goes up from there, but there is a 21-day free trial to let you test it out in your environment.

MobilEcho 3.0 gives iPhone users access to Windows servers originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 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 24, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seahaven GT ($0.99) offers a simple iPad adaptation of Free Cell solitaire. I first encountered Seahaven GT a few years back and thought it was a terrific implementation of a basic card game. It is fun to play and has really satisfying interaction elements.

Then a few months ago, I noticed it had disappeared from the App Store. So I pinged Dave Hardin, its developer to see what had happened to it. Turns out that life had interfered with his iOS work and he had pulled the app for the time being.

It wasn’t until mid-October that crises cleared up and Hardin was able to re-introduce the app back to the store. Now that it’s returned, here’s your opportunity to pick up the game. It only costs a buck and offers a good value for the money.

Seahaven GT is not a particularly shiny adaptation. It doesn’t have tons of bells and whistles or any special effects. What it does have is solid game play. I have played this game a lot and it just…works.

When you drag cards around, they do what you expect them to. When you double-tap them, they make sensible hops up to the free cells. When you reach the end of a game, the app knows it and provides a pleasing animation / sound effects.

There is a lot to be said for apps that are unspectacular, whose joy comes through the actual game play rather than the ornamentation around them.

If you’re a card game enthusiast, give Seahaven GT a try. I’d love to see Hardin given the opportunity to develop more card games (hint *Spider* hint) if this re-launch takes off.

Daily iPad App: Seahaven GT originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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My personal address book has no shame. I have contacts for people I haven’t spoken to in years, contacts for people who I met at tech conferences, contacts for schools, for local stores, for repairmen, and so forth. It’s one big old happy jumbled mess.

I’m cool with that.

When I want Siri and Reminders to be able to trigger a location-based event, I just throw it into my address book where it joins the hundreds of other often sad and neglected entries.

I believe this makes makes me a type “N” on Myers Brigg or something like that.

Not everyone will be happy with this kind of unstructured approach and an overflowing address book, or this kind of lack of organization.

If you want to be able to to set location reminders without messing up your address book, TUAW reader Will Herbert has a solution. On your Mac, launch the Address Book application and create two new groups. Call one Contacts and the other Locations.

Drag all your normal contacts into the Contacts group and create a set of location-only contacts in the other. Add stores, offices, dry cleaners, supermarkets, and so forth. These are all places that you don’t necessarily want in your day-to-day contacts list.

Each of these is still available in the address book and therefore still available to Siri and Reminders. At the same time, they won’t clutter up your standard contacts.

Score one for the Felixes of the world. The rest of us Oscars will trudge on as we were.

Tidying up location contacts for Siri and Reminders originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen quite a few holidays this year get bookended by app sales, and it appears that Halloween will be no different. Sega has kicked off the spooky season by putting all of its iOS apps on sale, dropping prices down to as low as 99 cents.

Apps on sale (starting tomorrow, and going through the weekend) include the recently released Brick People, the iPad version of Chu Chu Rocket, the classic Virtua Fighter 2, and perhaps most exciting, the iOS port of the great Gunstar Heroes 2D shooter.

There may be even more titles on sale — the company asks you to go just search “Sega” in the App Store for more. Or just stay tuned; I doubt these will be the last titles we’ll see drop in price over the upcoming holiday weekend.

Sega kicks off the Halloween app sales originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Apple TV has updated to 4.4.2, barely a week after releasing (then pulling and releasing again) the 4.4.1 update. That update contained a number of bug fixes, and we’re assuming this one will have the same.

However, TUAW editor Victor Agreda reported that updating his Apple TV to 4.4.2 has lost all of his information and is setting up the device as if it was brand new, then showed it was still on 4.4 instead of 4.4.2 and required another “update” round before the 4.4.2 update stuck, so you might want to make this update with a bit of caution.

Update: Apple has released a support document saying that settings on the Apple TV must be reset before updating to 4.4.2; if you neglect to reset them, the update will thoughtfully do it for you.

The update is available now through the Apple TV’s software update feature, but you’ll have to restore your settings (App Store, Netflix, etc.) after applying the update. You can usually do those settings quite a bit faster if you use your iPhone or iPad and the Remote app, rather than trying to type in passwords and user IDs with the regular remote.

Apple TV updates to 4.4.2 (updated) originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PadInTheCity is a company offering up an intriguing proposition: Rent a 3G iPad while you happen to be touring around the city of Madrid, Spain. I do happen to be traveling to Europe next year, and while I just bought an iPad for myself, I can see the benefit of not only being able to carry an iPad around, but also a 3G iPad already configured to work with the local wireless networks. PadInTheCity charges 25 Euros, or about $35, a day to rent the iPad, and they’ll even deliver it to your hotel and pay for all the data you use in the same period.

The company is also targeting hotels and events, perhaps renting iPads to conference attendees, or setting them up for hotel guests when they buy certain packages. Each iPad is equipped with a certain number of apps set up for feeding users information about the area, but it’s not clear if users can add their own on if needed.

It’s quite an idea, and apparently business is going great in Madrid so far. Apple has even forwarded a few customers on to the company, and in one or two years, PadInTheCity plans to have outlets in places like London and New York, and hopes to “talk about profits.” I don’t know yet what my plans are in Europe next year, but if I make my way down to Madrid, maybe I’ll check the service out.

iPad rental business is booming in Madrid, Spain originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has picked up the former head of Yahoo’s Global Data Center Infrastructure, Scott Noteboom, according to his LinkedIn profile. Noteboom’s been with Yahoo since back in 2005, but now lists his job as working at Apple as a “Distinguished Gentleman” (a well-earned title, obviously, though probably unofficial). Noteboom was instrumental in managing multiple data centers while at Yahoo, and he’ll likely be doing the same type of work at the Cupertino campus, as Apple moves further up into the iCloud over the next few years.

Noteboom’s hire is likely a long time coming — Apple’s been steadily building up its resources for these data centers, including the big installation in North Carolina, and bringing on experienced directors like this one will only help as the operation gets even bigger and more important.

Yahoo data center head Scott Noteboom joins Apple originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What is Untethered, Tethered and Semi-Tethered jailbreak? what’s the difference between Untethered jailbreak, Tethered jailbreak, and Semi-Tethered jailbreak? Why is an untethered jailbreak…

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Reuters reports that China Mobile, the largest mobile company by subscriptions, has 10 million subscribers with iPhones. The only issue is that they lack an agreement with Apple, though they did meet with Steve Jobs many times to discuss such an arrangement.

“We have not yet got agreement with Apple,” Wang said on the fringes of the ITU World telecoms fair in Geneva. “Apple promised to provide, when they develop the iPhone for LTE, that it will include TD-LTE. We are discussing the details.”

Some time ago I posted the Objective-C 2.0 cheat sheet (and posted this list contaning other iOS developer cheat sheets).

I originally wrote that sheet sheet (nearly 3 years ago now!) to help out some developers who were new to Objective-C, but familiar with Objective-C. On that cheat sheet you’ll find some basic syntax examples, and it was meant to help one quickly get through the more basic iOS examples provided by Apple.

This new cheat sheet has a lot more to it providing more a complete listing of @ compiler directives.  It might be a bit too wordy for purists to call it a cheat sheet, but it fits on 1 page!

The cheat sheet is built from Steffen Itterheim’s excellent post listing Objective-C 2.0 @compiler directives with short direct explanations, and straightforward examples that you can find here.

It’s a complete listing including a couple of keywords from the iOS 5 developer SDK.

I’ve taken Steffen’s large post which filled up close to two pages of text, and put it all into one page reworked each description making it fit on one page, keeping the examples in tact, and keeping the font a readable size.

Download 

You can download it here: Objective-C 2.0 @ Compiler Directives Cheat Sheet

Hopefully this will help you get started with Objective-C quicker or pass that Objective-C exam

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

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The huge new Apple Store that’s going into the NYC Grand Central Terminal is set to be open before “Black Friday”, November 25th. That’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, marking the official beginning of the holiday gift-purchasing season. The Grand Central Apple Store is being built in the former location of the Metrazur restaurant and covers a 15,230 square foot expanse of very expensive retail space.

Employees for the new location have been hired and are currently receiving training at a “hotel in Times Square,” according to PhoneArena. That training will continue until November 11th, at which time the new employees will most likely be involved in stocking and prepping the new store for the crush — not only of Black Friday, but also the craziness that accompanies any new Apple Store opening.

In related news, 9to5Mac has posted a photo from an MTA employee (see above) that shows that there is still a considerable amount of construction work to be completed before the flagship store is opened to the public.

NYC Grand Central Apple Store to be ready for “Black Friday” originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been ten days since Siri hit the scene and the virtual assistant is in the process of being torn apart by the hacking community. Siri, as it exists on the iPhone 4S, has been ported to the iPhone 4 and now the iPad 1. Developer Steven Troughton-Smith, who worked on the iPhone 4 port, has shared his progress with @jackoplane who has successfully ported the app to the iPad 1. Several images of Siri running on the tablet device document this achievement.

Unfortunately, neither the iPhone 4 nor the iPad port is fully functional at this point. Siri still needs to connect to Apple’s servers to work and the servers are configured to accept requests only from the iPhone 4S. Potentially, these devices could be spoofed to look like an iPhone 4S which could open this functionality to jailbroken devices.

Jailbreaking and porting may be the only solution for owners of older hardware who want Siri on their iOS devices. It’s doubtful that Apple will bring Siri to the iPad 1 or the iPhone 3GS. Apple may not want to support this older hardware and these models may also lack the processing power required for the voice assistant. But as some of you pointed out in one of our latest “You’re The Pundit” posts, Apple could decide to bring Siri to the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2 once it comes out of beta.

[Via Jailbreakstory]

Siri being tested in jailbroken iPad 1 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ve got a shiny new SSD-equipped machine, but you’re wondering just how fast that SSD really is. Disk Speed Test from Blackmagic will give you a quick, straightforward answer.

It’s incredibly to use. Disk Speed Test writes large chunks of data to your chosen disk and then reads that data, giving you a real-world read/write speed in MB/s. The program then tells you what kind of uncompressed video that drive will be able to handle and allows you to save the results as a screenshot.

As you can see from the image above, my magnetic hard drive-equipped MacBook Pro isn’t going to win any speed awards. It also couldn’t handle anything above uncompressed SD video according to the app — but then again that’s not the sort of thing I would even dream of trying. If you’re looking to capture uncompressed video direct to a disk, Disk Speed Test will give you an indication of whether it’s going to be up to the job.

So, if you’re curious about your hard disk speed, regardless of whether it’s just a simple magnetic hard drive, an internal SSD, a network mounted disk array, or even a beast of a Thunderbolt SSD drive — Disk Speed Test will quickly and easily answer that for you with just one click.

Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test is available for free from the Mac App Store.

Daily Mac App: Disk Speed Test originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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