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Skype for iPad is finally here. Skype has released their iPad app in the App Store. Skype app for iPad brings video calling over WiFi and 3G networks. You can download Skype for iPad and iPad 2 from…
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The long awaited iPhone 5 will start shipping in September according to Digitime:
Pegatron Technology has landed orders for 10 million units of iPhone 5 to become the second ODM of the smartphone. Shipments will start in September, according to industry sources.
Source: Pegatron to begin shipments of iPhone 5 in September
In the past I mentioned mention a couple of excellent tutorials demonstrating the basics of using the Facebook Graph API such as how to authenticate using Oauth, getting profile information, and posting to the wall. Those tutorials are still relevant, but the iOS SDK has changed considerably in the meantime so it may be difficult to follow along.
I’ve found an excellent, new tutorial covering the basics of using the API with Xcode 4. Also included is a demonstration project showing how to post a video and set the privacy settings for that video. Overall it’s a very well made step-by-step tutorial starting right at the beginning, and the project can be used as a basis for doing anything with the Facebook Graph API.
The tutorial is from Christine Abernathy from the Facebook Developer’s blog, and can be found here:
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/532/
A very useful bookmark if you need to implement the Facebook Graph API within an app.
©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.
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If you’ve run into a situation where found yourself trying to build any open source libraries designed for Unix, but not specifically for iOS devices – or doing any sort of web communication that can’t easily be done using Cocoa Touch libraries – then this project should be of great help.
The project includes some of the most useful libraries around pre-built for iOS devices, and also a build script so you can see how things are done, and tweak if necessary. On the project homepage you’ll also find tips about using the compiled binaries within your projects.
Included in the project are some of the all time great open source libraries:
©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.
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You have likely noticed the effect in many different applications where the area showing what the user has currently selected is in color, and the unselected area is black and white. It may be a small detail, but it could give your app or game an extra amount of polish.
I’ve come across tutorial demonstrating how to implement this effect using Core Graphics. The tutorial demonstrates how to render the image with separate black and white, and color sections, and how to draw a polished looking lens over the colored area. The tutorial also covers some performance optimizations that you may need to perform.
The tutorial is from Yuchen of ClingMarks, and here’s a video demonstrating the end result:
You can find the tutorial here:
Implement “Focus Area” Special Effect in iPhone Apps
A simple concept, but it can definitely add a touch of class to an interface.
©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.
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The UISwitch component has very few options that can be customized. There are some libraries out there that allow you to customize things, but often you end up having to do a lot of the redesign yourself in order to get things to look good.
I’ve come across a library that allows you to create a custom switch which can be used as an almost drop-in replacement for the UISwitch component which looks very similar – although a little bit better with rounded edges, and can easily be customized to accomodate large text strings, and scaled to different sizes.
What I really like about this component is that everything is done using Core Graphics so you don’t have to do any graphics design work yourself, and no matter what adjustments you make things still look good, even if you decide to go for a giant sized switch.
Here’s a short video of the component in action:
The component is DCRoundSwitch from Domestic Cat Software the same guys who made the previously mentioned DCIntrospect library for easy debugging of Cocoa Touch interfaces.
You can find the Github here:
https://github.com/domesticcatsoftware/DCRoundSwitch
A good component to keep in mind in case so you don’t have to ever find yourself fiddling around making custom switches.
©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.
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Here is a brief rundown of 7 neat iPhone accessories just added to the AppleiPhoneReview.com iPhone shop.
Be sure to visit the shop to check out these and other top-notch iPhone accessories.
A retro silicone iPhone case that is both stylish and affordable. Flash back to the ’80s and ’90s with this classic cassette iPhone case.
This retractable iPhone car charger prevents a mess of cables while you’re charging your iPhone in the car. Due to the tidiness factor and its low price, I’ve named this the best iPhone car charger in the shop.
This iPhone horn stand amplifies your iPhone’s built-in speaker by 13 decibels without the need for a battery or power source. Cool!
This Gameboy iPhone case is great for Nintendo-loving iPhone owners. Protect your iPhone in style with this retro and affordable silicone case.
The NUU Minikey iPhone keyboard is for those iPhone users who can’t quite get used to the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard. The NUU Minikey for iPhone is a case that doubles as a portable physical keyboard.
At 6 feet in length, this basic white iPhone USB cable lets you charge your iPhone from those hard to reach spots.
The Looxcie camcorder for iPhone is a Bluetooth headset that lets you record video of your most cherished moments without the need to take your hands or eyes off the action. This sleek wearable camcorder also takes phone calls just like your typical Bluetooth headset.
Ya dig?
7 Neat iPhone Accessories Just Added to the iPhone Shop is a post from Apple iPhone Review.
Apple has enabled beta testing of Find My Mac to registered OS X developers, according to MacRumors. Just like Find My iPhone, Find My Mac allows users to locate their Macs from any web browser or iOS device. When found, you can choose to play a sound or send a message on the Mac; you can also remote lock or remote wipe the Mac. However, remote locking and wiping will prevent you from locating the Mac again.
The Find My Mac feature will be free. All you’ll need to use it will be OS X Lion and a free iCloud membership. iCloud is expected to debut this fall, and we’ll likely start hearing the first Find My Mac success stories soon afterward.
Apple opens Find My Mac to beta testing originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 21:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In a recent interview with Edge Magazine, Electronic Arts founder and current Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins gave his opinions on Apple’s App Store and the company’s post-Steve Jobs future. In the process, Hawkins managed to cram several tired Apple-related doom-and-gloom memes into only a few hundred words. Let’s do a checklist and see how many we can find.
Apple is “closed,” and closed is bad: Yep, right in Hawkins’s opening remarks.
“I think it would be an incredibly positive thing for the industry if Apple decided to support all of the web standards, because then Apple could be the best about everything. Right now they make a conscious choice. They want you to be in the App Store rather than the browser, so they cripple the browser.”
Odd, my iPad doesn’t feel particularly “crippled” when I use it to browse the web. Neither does my iPhone. Hmm, what could Hawkins possibly mean?
Apple is a big meany boo-boo head for not supporting Flash Player in iOS: Ah, there it is.
“Flash can actually make a really good game, and with HTML5 you can’t do that. But give HTML5 another few years to mature, and that could solve the problem. Or Apple could be more generous about deciding to support more de facto standards like Flash, or at least let it run its course.”
Look at the statistics for mobile video and try to convince me Flash hasn’t already run its course. As for games, I’ll take a native app that doesn’t slow my iPhone to a standstill and chew through 2/3 of my battery in an hour over a Flash-based in-browser game any day. The idea that Apple’s ditched Flash because it wants to control the iOS experience is correct, but not for the reasons Hawkins and others have provided. In an interview with Adobe’s CEO a couple months ago, Walt Mossberg pointed out that he hasn’t used one smartphone that provided him with a positive experience with Flash Player, and Mossberg has pretty much used them all. Apple’s “generosity” only goes so far, and anyone who expects the company to sacrifice positive user experience to placate third-party vendors is fooling themselves.
But that’s far too logical of an argument, and logic has no place here, because…
Steve Jobs is a tyrant, and Apple is a dictatorship: Variations on this constitute the bulk of the Edge interview’s excerpt. Hawkins is certainly in a position to know about Steve Jobs’s personality traits — he used to work directly with Jobs — but where this crosses into meme territory is Hawkins’s insistence that Apple as a company is directly tied to the whims of a tyrannical dictator. It’s the same story we’ve heard thousands of times before: Apple is the Chocolate Factory, Steve Jobs is Willy Wonka, and every other soul in Cupertino is a faceless Oompa Loompa without any input into the direction of either the company’s products or its overall future. Sure, that’s exactly how a business consisting of thousands of individuals becomes the most successful tech company in history. Right. Speaking of which…
Apple’s growth is unsustainable: This is the kind of thing that people used to thinking about Apple as a scrappy underdog like to repeat like a mantra. Hawkins isn’t any different.
“If you look at any institution in history — look at the Roman Empire — anything in history, and what it looks like when it’s peaking. Look at Apple, and how can you say it’s not peaking? The CEO is still alive, let’s start there. They invented this tablet thing that’s going to be really big. They’ve done really well by reinventing the phone. They breathed new life into the Mac. They’ve got this super-high marketing. All these things are about as good as they ever can be — how much better can it really get?”
I’m no history major, but even I know that the Roman Empire was already in a centuries-long decline before the Visigoths trashed the place. And if Apple is peaking as Hawkins says, I’d love to see which numbers actually support that theory. Virtually every quarterly financial statement from Apple over the past year has had the word “record” somewhere in the first paragraph. Apple takes in the majority of profits from the smartphone industry while having a relatively small slice of overall market share. It’s the same story with PCs; Apple dominates profits in the $1000 and up category. The iPad dominates the tablet market to an even greater extent than the iPod ruled the mp3 player market.
Apple’s overall worth as a US-based company is second only to Exxon, and Apple’s even closing in on them. Exxon, the company responsible for pumping liquid gold out of the ground and transmuting into the life’s blood of modern society. And as a widespread meme from last week points out, Apple’s cash reserves recently bypassed those of the US Treasury.
You might look at all this success and conclude that Apple has nowhere to go from here but down. But the only way to do that is to completely ignore the past four years of financial data. If Apple was truly peaking, the influx of dollars would be slowing down, and its profit graph would be either plateauing or declining. The thing is, that’s not happening at all. Not even close. But what about the future? Get ready for another meme.
Without Steve Jobs, Apple is doomed: How many times have we heard this one? I’ve lost count. But here we go again:
“The thing is, it may take another year or two before it starts to decline, but it has to — everything does. Everything revolves so much around Steve, and no matter how good his lieutenants are, they’re not Steve. None of us is going to live forever, though I hope he lives for a really long time.”
Steve Jobs got the ball rolling on this, yes. But even while he’s been on extended medical leave, Apple’s momentum hasn’t slowed. Like Hawkins, I hope Steve Jobs will be around for a long time, but Apple will not wither on the tree without him. Apple as a company is nothing like Microsoft, where all the forward-looking vision and drive to succeed went out the door with Bill Gates. Steve Jobs has surrounded himself with fellow visionaries, and that’s the real key to Apple’s business success. The idea that one man and only his ideas has made Apple what it is today might make for a compelling David Fincher film someday, but it doesn’t jibe with reality.
The only way I see Apple facing the kind of decline Hawkins talks about, even without Steve Jobs at the helm, is for someone to start deliberately mis-managing Apple and its assets. How else is a company sitting on a $76 billion pile of cash supposed to decline? Don’t answer that.
EA founder rehashes ‘Apple will falter without Steve Jobs’ and other memes originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Something tells me kids and college students are going to love this one. Submerged is not a “useful” app like your address book or even a Twitter app — it is a toy, or novelty app. Submerged takes video from the iPhone and warps it depending upon how you shake or move the iPhone. Silly? Perhaps, but it’s the sort of thing that also shows off the fancy tricks iOS can do with your phone. A few years ago this sort of thing wouldn’t have even been possible on mobile hardware!
Of course, Submerged isn’t just looking at the world as though it were underwater — it can freeze those images and you can (at any time) poke and prod the image to further distort it. You can also modify pictures you’ve already taken. Of course you can share these images in myriad ways as well.
To see submerged in action, just check out the video below. It’s actually a kind of fun (if not entirely useful) novelty app.
Video App Demo: Submerged originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A survey by GPS mobile apps developer TeleNav reveals that 40% of iPhone users would rather give up their toothbrushes for a week than their iPhones. That number compares to 22% of total smartphone owners (Android, BlackBerry, etc.) who said the same thing. What does that mean? Either iPhone users care less about personal hygiene or they really love their iPhones.
The study, which was done for no other reason than so blogs could quote it and mention TeleNav’s brand, also reveals that among iPhone users, 35% believe the iPhone reflects their sense of style, 45% have never paid more than a buck for an app, 28% would rather go a week without seeing their partner than their iPhone, and 18% would rather lose their wallet and its contents than their iPhone.
Among total smartphone owners, 70% of people would rather give up alcohol for a week than their smartphone and 33% would rather give up sex. Still not disturbed? You can check out all the obsessive results of smartphone love in this handy infographic.
[via GigaOm]
Study: iPhone users would give up their toothbrushes before their devices originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Samsung originally planned to host a media event on August 11 for the Australian launch of its Galaxy Tab 10.1, but it has now officially been postponed, according to TechCrunch. Over the past couple of days, Samsung’s story has changed multiple times. First it said the Galaxy Tab would launch in Australia despite Apple’s patent-related complaints to Australia’s Federal Court. Then, Samsung said it had no plans to launch the Galaxy Tab in Australia in the first place, and its decision had nothing to do with Apple’s complaint.
The latest update on the matter seems to be a combination of all the previous takes. Samsung chooses not to classify the situation as withdrawing the Galaxy Tab from sale since the launch hasn’t happened yet. The company also states that the decision to postpone the Australian launch is directly tied to the current legal situation with Apple. Samsung appears to be trying to work around the patent battle by producing a specialized Australian variant of the Galaxy Tab, but the unit is still in production with no ETA for a launch, and TechCrunch speculates that launching a variant of the same product may violate the spirit of the agreement.
Samsung isn’t characterizing this as an injunction against the Galaxy Tab’s launch, but rather a mutual agreement between it and Apple as part of the ongoing “look and feel” patent dispute between the two companies. Another hearing on the matter is scheduled for August 29, but a final resolution to the case may take years. Meanwhile, in the United States the ITC has agreed to review the case, and the Commission has the power to impose an injunction against US imports of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 if it agrees with Apple’s position.
Samsung officially postpones Australian Galaxy Tab 10.1 launch originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apple has hired recruiting firm Egon Zehnder International to find a replacement for Apple Retail Chief Ron Johnson, who is leaving the company after eleven years to become the president and eventual CEO of J.C. Penney. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is intentionally seeking our a replacement from abroad and Egon Zehnder’s services were obtained on the orders of none other than Steve Jobs.
Egon Zehnder was apparently chosen because Jobs is looking for an executive with retail experience outside the US.
Apple has repeatedly said that their international expansion is a driving force in both their profits and sales. Given that China, a country which Apple had virtually no presence in until very recently, seems key to Apple’s growth, its likely that Ron Johnson’s replacement could very well come from the Asia Pacific territory or someone with extensive knowledge and experience in the territory.
Apple reportedly hires firm to help replace former retail chief Ron Johnson originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Apple is used to setting the standard in the laptop industry. Before Apple eschewed 4:3 screen for 16:9 ones, widescreen laptops were virtually unheard of. The 17″ laptop market only exploded after Apple unveiled their first 17″ PowerBook G4. And now that Apple’s MacBook Airs have become a huge hit, all the naysayers that bemoaned you couldn’t offer laptops with non-removable batteries and no optical drives are doing just that with Ultrabooks — MacBook Air-inspired PCs.
Intel, who is pushing the Ultrabook platform, feels like sales of the slim notebooks could make up 40% of the laptop market by 2012 and PC manufacturers like ASUS and HP originally said that users could expect Ultrabooks for under $1000 in time for Christmas. However, now PC manufactures, who are used to selling laptops at much cheaper prices than app to rope in as many customers as possible, are finding that the technology and manufacturing necessary to create the MacBook Air-like Ultrabooks are costly, and they will not be able to undercut the MacBook Air’s pricing. That could mean defeat for the PC Ultrabook initiative, according to Digitimes.
Intel Ultrabooks must compete with MacBook Air on price, parts suppliers say originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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David Drummond, Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer at Google, has posted a diatribe against Apple and Microsoft, both competitors against Google’s Android platform. “Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” Drummond writes.
What’s going on according to Drummond? It’s “a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.” Some of those said “bogus” patents, it bears mentioning, were subject to a US$900 million opening bid from Google, a bid the company later lost to a consortium of companies including Apple and Microsoft. Just saying, $900 million is a lot of money to put on the table for something that’s bogus.
“Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it,” Drummond says. I can’t argue with that — Lodsys immediately comes to mind — but is he trying to tell us that Google would never leverage the Nortel patents against Apple and Microsoft if the bidding had gone the other way? Indeed, that seems to be exactly what he’s saying when he accuses competitors of “fighting through litigation” instead of “competing by building new features or devices.”
“Unless we act, consumers could face rising costs for Android devices – and fewer choices for their next phone,” Drummond says. It’s hard for me to read this, or the rest of Drummond’s piece, without translating it thus: Google is scared.
The question is, should Google be scared? That depends on a few things: the strength of the Nortel patents, any possible regulatory intervention in the purchase of those patents, Apple and/or Microsoft’s willingness to actively pursue patent claims and “strangle” Android, and finally, the courts’ determination as to whether or not Google has violated those patents. It’s pretty obvious on casual inspection that Google hasn’t been innovating in a vacuum, however, so if Apple or Microsoft actually are intent on “strangling” the free ride Android’s had so far, then maybe Google should be exactly as scared as it sounds.
Google accuses Apple and Microsoft of teaming up to strangle Android originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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