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 stories of the day in three to five minutes, perfect 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 listening through iTunes, click here.

Daily Update for August 15, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you have multiple network drives in multiple locations, repeatedly finding and mounting them manually gets old, fast. Drive Mounter takes the tedium out of mounting drives by automating the process.

OK, mounting drives can be done at login pretty easily, especially if you’re only ever going to be in one place; you can even set up scripts to auto-mount drives here and there. But what happens when you have a portable Mac that you take with you and need different drives mounted in different locations on different networks?

Drive Mounter makes it easy by doing all the hard work for you. It remembers which drives should be mounted on which networks and mounts them accordingly when you boot or resume you Mac.

It’s simple to use, just mount the drives you want to setup once on each network you connect to and record their details in Drive Mounter. Next time you resume from sleep Drive Mounter will mount the appropriate drives for your currently connected network, WiFi or LAN, allowing you to get on with your work. You can also manually force Drive Mounter to mount all the drives on its list, or temporarily disable Drive Mounter if you don’t need it. It’s got both a Dock icon, which can be disabled, and a menu bar icon from quick access.

Drive Mounter is available for US$5.99 and if you connect a lot of network drives, could take the headache out of your work flow. Users familiar with AppleScript will be able to create something like this for free, but for the rest of us, who just want it to work, Drive Mounter could be just the ticket.

Daily Mac App: Drive Mounter originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I like Lion. I really really do. I can forgive Apple for breaking my Network Area Storage device, but in general it’s a nice upgrade.

There is, however, that matter of the “browse versions” feature in iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), Preview and some other apps designed to work with the Versions feature in Lion. I asked several experienced Mac users if they understood how it all worked and not a one did. While some knew of the feature, and were anxious to use it, they couldn’t find it. I would have expected a function that deals with a file to be on the File menu. Nope. Apple has it in the title bar, just where you are sure to miss it. If the document is locked, there’s nothing in the File Menu either. You can lock the document from the title bar, but you have to unlock it from the drop down that appears on the word “locked”. These are GUI choices from hell.

When you finally do figure out how to browse your versions, your entire desktop changes, and you wind up in the Time Machine GUI (which Apple calls “The Star Field”), even though you never invoked Time Machine. As my colleague Erica Sadun points out, why introduce another system? Apple now offers full screen mode in several applications so you won’t be distracted, but browsing versions morphs your desktop into a purple universe with flying stars whizzing by. Talk about distractions.

There’s no doubt that you can stumble through Apple documentation and find all this information out, but hey, this is Apple. You know, “it just works.” By the way, I searched for “browse versions” in the Pages help document and came up blank.

Lion does have some great features, but it’s important that people understand them and that they are easy to use. It seems like these document functions really should be part of the File menu. If Apple wants to hide them in the title bar, that’s fine, but give users a fighting chance. Apple should not change its motto to “it just works if you can find the non-intuitive place we’ve hidden it.” If you want a good overview, our Steve Sande has done a nice job of explaining the new document control features.

How are you doing with all this? Did you figure it out, or have you been lost too? I’m sure some of our readers were just fine, but I’ll bet a lot of you are in the tall weeds.

From the boneheaded design file: Browsing Versions in Lion originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson has officially got a cover now. As first reported by All Things D, the cover is a black and white close-up of Steve Jobs (apparently pulling a stray hair from his beard). Above the image of Jobs, which fills 96% of the cover, is the title of the book, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. The rest of the cover is sparse, clean, and free of unnecessary labels and items — just like an Apple product.

The book’s publication date has also been moved up. All Things D reports that the new publication date will be November 21, 2011, although as of the time of this writing Amazon still lists the original publication date of March 6, 2012. The book is still set at 448 pages.

This is actually the book’s third title change. When first announced, the biography was called iSteve: The Book of Jobs. Then, when the March 6, 2012 publishing date was announced, the name of the book was Steve Jobs: A Biography. Now the book is simply titled Steve Jobs. However, Amazon is yet to change the listing title and the title in the description to match the new name on the cover (as of this writing).

You can pre-order the hardcover today on Amazon for $20.40. You can pre-order the iBooks version for $16.99 and, yes, a Kindle edition is available for pre-order at $14.99.

Steve Jobs bio gets cover, new name (again), and new publication date originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear Aunt TUAW,

I had been reading your post on TUAW since i start using my mac, your “Dear Aunt TUAW” helps alot cause i still new to this OSX. Now i had a minor problem and hope you can help me sort it out.

I had no idea the available disk space shows when i hit “space bar” (quick look window) is different from the “Get info” window.

How can i retrieve those missing disc space?

Your loving nephew,

Mua

Dear Mua,

You’re working on a laptop, aren’t you? Auntie is guessing that because Time Machine works slightly differently under Lion with portable systems.

Before Auntie gets to the answer, she wants to remind all her nieces and nephews of a few key tricks for checking space under Lion.

• In any Finder window, Command-/ will toggle hiding and showing the file size status bar, including free space availability.
• Right-Click > Get Info on any Finder item opens an Info window complete with file size information.
• Apple > About This Mac > More Info > Storage > shows Disk Usage bars, similar to the ones you’ve seen in iTunes for years.

Auntie’s main drive looks something like this.

And yours looks something like this.

The big difference? Is the purple Backups portion, between the green Apps and the yellow Other. (Don’t confuse the Backups purple with the Movies purple. Apple, you couldn’t have gone with, say, red? The items are in order, so Movies only appear between blue and orange.)

On mobile systems, Time Machine automatically creates local backups, saving hourly snapshots of newly changed files. The free space you see in About This Mac on a laptop reflects those backups, but the Finder’s Get Info free space does not.

That’s because the local snapshot material is ephemeral. Time Machine automatically removes these as needed to make space for your applications to use. What’s more, Time Machine periodically condenses these backups, to minimize disk use.

Local backups mean your computer is always watching your back, making sure your data is being looked after without having to hook up an external drive. It’s a great feature and one that hasn’t been as hyped in Lion write-ups as it deserves to be.

Hope this helps. Hugs,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me find my disk space originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s an interesting concept for a case meant to make the iPad usable for blind and visually impaired customers. The Omnifer almost covers the iPad completely, save for a small portion of the screen, and adds raised Braille buttons.

What’s really cool is that the Omnifer is more than Braille buttons slapped onto a case. Instead, gas stored inside the case raises and lowers the Braille characters, making different ones available, depending on what’s on the iPad’s screen. The gas pockets are filled with a chemical that expands when exposed to light. The portion of the screen beneath the buttons will light up as needed to raise the proper characters. In this way, a user could “stream” text for reading via Braille.

It’s very cool and, as we said, still in the concept stage. It’s also a 2011 IDEA Award entry. Good luck to the entire Omnifer team.

[Via Popgadget]

Omnifer adds Braille, makes iPad useful for the blind originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since forever, college students have done the trade-in dance at the beginning and end of semesters to exchange unwanted textbooks for cash. Usually that cash goes back to the bookstore for the next round of textbooks (or a bit of end-of-semester partying), but it’s a tried-and-true way of getting at least a few cents back on your hard-earned dollars. Amazon has just released The Amazon Student app (free) to let you do all of your textbook trading the easy way — from your iPhone.

As you’re pounding down the end-of-semester celebratory tequila shots, you can use The Amazon Student to scan the barcodes on your textbooks, games, movies, and electronics to get a trade-in offer from Amazon. If you accept the offer, it’s added to your trade-in list.

When you’re done scanning your roommate’s books and games (he’s passed out under the bed anyway), just sign into your Amazon account, tell ’em where you want to ship the books from, and submit. A few moments later, a pre-paid shipping label shows up in your email and you’re ready to roll.

Payment is through an Amazon Gift Card, suitable for buying any fun or, dare I say it, educational material from the Amazon store. By the way, I made $75 scanning some old reference and text books while testing the app for this post. Not bad!

Trade textbooks with The Amazon Student originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For many Mac and iPad users, Amazon’s Kindle Reader app (free) was the way to browse, purchase, and read electronic books. Then Apple had a change of heart about in-app purchases, basically demanding the standard App Store 30% take for any ebooks bought from within the Kindle Reader app. Amazon removed the purchase mechanism from the app, and it’s still available on the App Store — purchasing just takes one more step now. The launch of Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader web app added a new wrinkle to the Apple / Kindle story. Let’s take a quick look at the Kindle web app and see how it compares to the native app.

Since it’s a web app, you really don’t install anything. Pointing a browser on either Mac or iPad to http://read.amazon.com takes you to a login page.

Clicking the bright orange sign-in button displays a standard Amazon login screen; entering your credentials takes you to a rather bleak dark gray page displaying all of the books you’ve purchased. Before you start reading for the first time, Amazon wants to make sure that you have enough storage set aside to hold your books. That’s right — even though this is a web app, it downloads and stores books for offline reading. The Kindle model of buying a book, downloading it, and reading it anywhere continues.

The instructions show that you just click and hold (or tap and hold on an iPad) a book cover and then select “Download & Pin Book” to store the books locally. To read them when you’re offline, you just tap on the “Downloaded” tab to see what’s available.

The app looks the same whether you’re on Mac (Safari and Chrome browsers are supported) or iPad. When click (or tap) and hold a book to move it offline, it automatically opens as well. As with the physical Kindle device, you see one page at a time. On either side of the page of text or graphics are arrows which, when clicked or tapped, move you to the next or previous page. At the bottom of the page is a progress bar showing how far along you are in the book, and at the top of the Mac Cloud Reader is a sparsely-populated toolbar. It’s here where you can navigate to the cover or table of contents of a book, set a bookmark, change text size, or sync your reading progress to the cloud so that the next time you pick up reading — regardless of what device you’re on — you start at the furthest read point.

The toolbar can be hidden on the iPad version of the web app, but I haven’t yet figured out if that’s possible on the Mac despite repeated prodding, poking, and clicking. I have found a bit of a bug in the iPad web app, which seems to like to crash repeatedly unless I get rid of the toolbar. Of course, this web app has only been out about a week, so there are likely to be a few bugs here and there.

From the toolbar while viewing your library of books, a click of the Kindle Store button transports you right to the online store (not available when you’re offline, duh!). Purchases are easy, fast, and the content is quickly downloaded to your Mac or iPad.

The Kindle Cloud Reader works quite well for a first release, and as soon as Amazon brings it to the iPhone and iPod touch, the web app should replace the native app. There’s really no compelling reason to continue using the native app that I can see, as the functionality has been beautifully re-created in the web app.

Have you made the switch to the Kindle Cloud Reader? What are your feelings about the app and how it works? Leave your comments below.

Kindle Cloud Reader quick look originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google sent shockwaves in the mobile world by announcing it is acquiring Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion. Patents are the presumptive focus of this acquisition, as Motorola’s cellphone business has over 17,000 patents in its portfolio and over 7,000 patents pending in the USPTO. Larry Page sums it up when he says,

“Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

Motorola may have the strongest patent portfolio among Android handset makers, but that didn’t stop Apple from challenging the US company in court.

As you may remember, Apple is engaged in a heated legal battle with Motorola Mobility. Motorola launched the first strike when it filed a complaint with the ITC and a formal patent infringement lawsuit against Apple in October 2010. Apple responded with its own lawsuit and ITC complaint a few weeks later. These legal battles are still ongoing.

Recently, Apple targeted the Motorola Xoom in a German legal filing. The complaint was referenced in a larger complaint against Samsung and focused on the design of the Xoom and its similarity to the iPhone.

Google buys Motorola Mobility, looks to protect Android from competitors originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple may be expecting a banner second half of the year for the iPhone. According to a report by Digitimes, Apple has boosted its orders for iPhone models from 50 million to 56 million units with the iPhone 5 accounting for almost half of this order. The bulk of the iPhone 5 orders will be shipped in Q4 2011 with 20 million units flying off the production line. Apple has asked for 5 million units in Q3 2011, a lower figure that points to a launch date late in that quarter. This 12% jump could push iPhone shipments to 95 million units for the year.

Apple to boost iPhone orders to 56 million for second half of 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is Angry Birds, no doubt about it: In Siege Hero, you’re throwing rocks at fortresses built precariously out of surprisingly breakable materials, and trying to crush a series of pigs soldiers for points and ratings. Odds are that you know this gameplay works already — just one glance at the picture above should tell you what you need to do. But wait, the twist here is that rather than a sideways view of the action, you’re shooting at the fortress from head on.

And honestly, that’s enough to bring you back to this style of gameplay, even if you’ve already beaten the crap out of Angry Birds (or, like me, get you to take another look at it, if the unhappy avians didn’t sell you on it the last time around). Coming from a first-person angle means you’ve got a little more precision to your hits, which means it’s more about dismantling the structure rather than just hitting that arc right.

Consequently, Siege Hero is a lot of fun, with tons of levels to play through, different characters to play with, and of course full Game Center integration for achievements and leaderboards. It’s US 99 cents on the App Store now, $3.99 for an HD iPad version, or you can try it out for free.

Daily iPhone App: Siege Hero originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It is being reported that the iPhone 5 or 4S, whatever they are going to call it, is now going to be released on October 7th. Previously it was reported that the next generation iPhone would be out on September 7th.

Apple’s next generation iPhone, be it an iterative “iPhone 4S” or a completely revamped “iPhone 5” could go on sale October 7 in the US. That’s a Friday, which isn’t uncommon for iPhone launches. Originally it sounded more like a second week of October launch, more like October 14, but now it sounds like the first week. We’re still hearing that an “iPhone 4S”-style device, with improved processors and optics, is more likely than an all new design, but given the many and varied rumors, it’s impossible to tell for sure. It could even be that the “iPhone 4S” is the budget iPhone Apple supposedly completed work on just before WWDC 2011 (the iPhone nano, so to speak), and the “iPhone 5? is the new high-end model. That could explain the supposedly conflicting rumors.

Source: New iPhone on October 7, no new iPad until spring 2012

If you’ve been working with UITableView’s then you’ve likely run into a situation where you had multiple groups of cells that the user has to scroll an excessively long way down the screen to use.

I came across a library today that is very handy for this situation, it allows you to make each section of the tableview collapsible with ease, and each segments collapses and expands with a very smooth and natural animation.  The library is very easy to use, and comes with a detailed step by step tutorial so that you can implement it quickly.

You can find the library along with the tutorial on Codeproject here:
Reusable collapsable table view for iOS

Very handy if you have a grouped table view that has gotten too long.

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

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Some time ago I mentioned the excellent open source Leaves library that enables creation of a reader with iBooks style page transitions from a text, image or PDF file, and more recently the FlipView library which provides an open source example of a Flipboard style magazine reader app.  I’ve received some feedback asking for more of the same – specifically in the way of cool 3D transitions.

Recently I came across an open source library that enables a collection of 3D transitions by using OpenGL ES. Here’s a video demonstrating the transitions currently in the library:

The library is HMGLTransitions from Hyperbolic Magnetism.

You can find the Github with source code for the project here:
https://github.com/Split82/HMGLTransitions

Very cool stuff if you’ve been looking for custom 3D transitions – and the code itself makes a great example on how to create these transitions yourself – just have a look in the transitions folder.

[via John Muchow]

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

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I read the official quotes from Android handset manufacturers about Google’s acquisition of Motorola with considerable glee. They’re… somewhat formulaic, shall we say.

For example, here’s Peter Chou, CEO of HTC:

“We welcome the news of today‘s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply committed to defending Android, its partners, and the entire ecosystem.”

Feels edited somewhat. Like, say, Google gave them a spec quote and told them not to deviate too far from it, or there would be (further) consequences. Here’s a possible (and entirely hypothetical, oh goodness yes) original version:

“We would welcome a coherent statement of intent from Google regarding its future plans for Android licensing.

Instead, we received the news of today’s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply ambivalent towards its existing hardware partners on whom Android’s success has heretofore rested.

We feel that Google has betrayed us, even though we have long been committed to defending Android as a viable smartphone platform despite the immediate, falling-chandelier-like fragmentation of the user experience, the nonexistence of a hardware baseline, and a bizarre lottery on future software updates.

Once again, Google demonstrates a combination of cluelessness and contempt for its partners, and the entire ecosystem.

On a personal note, Larry: fuck you.”