Category: I-phone

I’m always blown away when I remember that every single one of the raw materials that goes into making an iPhone or iPad has existed on this planet for hundreds of millennia.

Just think about that for a second. When Neanderthals roamed the earth, and when the Roman emperors ruled — all the raw materials needed for an iPhone or iPad were already available. However, just because you have the raw materials available, doesn’t mean you have the knowledge or technology to build such wondrous devices — that’s what time and progress are for (and Steve Jobs).

But once you have the knowledge and materials, look what you can create: solar panels, iPads, MRI machines. Oh, the wonders! Of course the problem with raw materials is consumption. As our technology advances and we consume more raw materials, there’s less of them left on the earth to keep making cool devices like the iPhone. This is especially true for a group of raw materials — mainly certain types of metal — known as rare earths.

Rare earths are used in any number of electronic devices from iPhones to batteries to lasers. And they’re called “rare” for a reason — they aren’t abundant and we are running out of them. China currently controls 97% of rare earth production, but the US, Russia, and Australia also produce rare earths. Despite who controls the production, the simple fact is that we are running our of rare earth metals and once gone, say goodbye to future electronic devices. It’s great if Apple comes up with a way to make the iPad 6 have a tactile 3D holographic display, but if there’s no more rare earths left to build the parts it needs everyone is gonna be stuck using the iPad 5 — forever.

Even though we are running out of rare earths on land, Nature Geoscience is reporting that rare earth materials are abundant in the mud of the Pacific ocean floor. Best of all, mining and extracting the rare earth metals from the sea floor mud is apparently actually easier than extracting the metals from terrestrial sources. That’s great news for everyone who likes technology. So in a few years when you pick up your new iPhone, stop to think for a moment and wonder at the fact that parts of that iPhone were once buried in mud on the bottom of the sea floor.

[via Ars Technica]

Your future iPhone’s parts could come from the ocean floor originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A group of Chinese authors is petitioning Apple to halt the distribution of their books through multiple apps in the App Store, according to the 21st Century Herald Tribune (as reported by Reuters). The authors are part of a group called the Writers Rights Alliance, and this isn’t the first time the Alliance has gone after a technology company for offering its books for download without consent. The group previously petitioned China’s largest search engine, Baidu, to cease the publication of its books in the Baidu Library (similar to Google Books).

However, a spokesperson for the Writers Rights Alliance said Apple’s allowance of apps on the App Store is a graver situation. The Baidu Library offered Alliance books downloads for free, but some of the apps in the App Store make a profit through sales of the app or in-app purchases. From the Writers Rights Alliance’s perspective, Apple is infringing on the Alliance’s intellectual property by taking its 30 percent commission on sales of the authors’ works. Apple has not yet publicly commented on the matter.

Chinese authors to petition Apple to halt book downloads originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 08 Jul 2011 04:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The most ardent jailbreaking fans among you might want to book flights to the UK, as the WWDC of jailbreaking events is hitting London in September. MyGreatFest is a convention that plans to attract jailbreakers from all over the world. There they can attend jailbreaking presentations, Q&A sessions, participate in codeoffs with other hackers and jailbreakers, and even have lunch with some of the jailbreaking greats.

MyGreatFest takes place on September 17, 2011 at The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in London. Tickets are now on sale and range from £17 (US$27) for children to £27 (US$43) for adults over 16. There are also group admission tickets available as well as VIP tickets which give you face-to-face time with some of the biggest jailbreak developers out there.

MyGreatFest organizer Craig Fox told ReadWriteWeb that the first official iOS 5 jailbreak may be unveiled at the show, unless the next iPhone ships before September 17, in which case attendees will likely see the iPhone 5 jailbroken right at the event. Fox also said that the response to MyGreatFest has been staggering, and sometime in October he will be announcing dates for MyGreatFest San Francisco 2012.

First jailbreak convention MyGreatFest planned for September in London originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 08 Jul 2011 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Time Warner Cable has updated its popular TWCable TV iPad app to version 2.0. Among the new features are the ability to view up to seven days of program listings in the interactive program guide, expanded channel selection with over 100 total channels available, and a remote DVR manager. Interestingly, as noted by Engadget, Time Warner went to some lengths to stop people using the app on jailbroken iPads.

As you can see from the screenshot above, if your iPad is jailbroken and you launch the app you’ll get the message “TWCable TV is not supported on ‘jailbroken’ devices.” Users with jailbroken iPads are asked to restore their iPads to factory settings and then launch the app again. However the iPhoneDownload Blog has already figured out a bypass for running the new version of TWCable TV on jailbroken iPads.

Time Warner Cable adds channels, blocks jailbreakers originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The latest blog post from Flurry reports that free-to-play revenue has overtaken premium revenue in Apple’s App Store. I think this was pretty much a guarantee at some point in the future, though it’s happening probably a little sooner than most expected.

Free-to-play gaming, where a game download is free and users spend money on extra content or convenience items using in-app purchases, has been growing on the App Store in a big way. Traditionally, premium app sales (in which a one-time purchase up front pays for the app download and any included content) have been the real money-makers. That’s no longer true, however: in Flurry’s analysis of the top 100 grossing apps, 35 percent of the revenue is now coming from premium games, with free-to-play titles making up 65 percent. Note that this analysis is for games only, but considering games make up most of the App Store’s business nowadays, it’s easy to expand these numbers out to the Store in general.

What does this mean overall? It’s not a new direction; we’ve already seen free-to-play titles get hugely popular on Apple’s App Store and other mobile platforms, and that trend will definitely continue. But even with the success we’ve seen on free-to-play, developers are still only monetizing a small percentage (usually even less than a full percentage point) of their audience, with small amounts of customers basically paying for everyone. The next big advancement in this business model will be a game that figures out how to monetize a larger audience while still keeping that gigantic group of players that dives in on F2P titles.

Free-to-play overtakes premium games revenue in the App Store originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 07 Jul 2011 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AppleInsider and 9to5 Mac have both received word that Apple is planning an “overnight” on July 13 in its retail stores. Such retail events usually precede major product launches, with store displays being refreshed and managers being trained on the new products. Following the July 13 store refresh, OS X Lion is expected to be released to the general public on July 14.

According to AppleInsider, Apple’s retail stores will also be upgrading the RAM in several display units to ensure that Lion demoes smoothly on them. Their source also claims some customers will be invited to come to the Apple Store and download OS X Lion there so they can get on-site coaching on Lion’s new features.

The sites also claim the long-awaited MacBook Air refresh will take place soon after Lion’s release to the general public, possibly as soon as a week later. AppleInsider had previously reported that the new hardware was ready to go some time ago, but Apple decided to freeze new hardware shipments for the time being so all new Macs could ship with OS X Lion pre-installed.

OS X Lion will be US$29.99 and exclusively available from the Mac App Store. The current developer-accessible version is GM Seed 1.

OS X Lion launch likely next week, new MacBook Air to follow originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 07 Jul 2011 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Music Marquee is a well-designed and easy-to-use social app for you music lovers. Listening to a great song and want to share? Music Marquee allows you to post to Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, Tumblr, FriendFeed and Ping.fm. Last.fm allows scrobbling, and wherever supported Tasty Cocoa software has used token-based authentication instead of storing your password in the app. It’s a simple app, but only $.99. There’s a free, lite version if you’re too cheap to drop a dollar on such things.

Video App Demo: Music Marquee originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Two games we’ve been eager to see on the App Store have arrived. First up, the unofficial version of Marathon (that’s officially approved anyway) is out and ready for you to play. It’s a free app by programmer Daniel Blezek, who translated Bungie’s old FPS from the Mac to Apple’s tablet. This is excellent stuff; old-time gamers will enjoy the nostalgia hit, while younger players should be interested to see what Bungie did before Halo. It’s an excellent game, and we couldn’t ask for a better way to get it ported to the iPad.

Second, Chillingo has published Swords and Soldiers, a cartoony 2D real-time strategy game that was originally released for the Wii. I like both the console and iOS versions, which offers Game Center integration, three campaigns and a skirmish mode, with controls that are well adapted for the touch screen. Unfortunately, it isn’t universal — the game’s US$2.99 for the iPhone and $4.99 for the iPad — but given how different the two versions are to play, maybe that makes sense. At any rate, this one didn’t quite get the spotlight it could have used on the Wii, so maybe on iOS (like World of Goo, another Wii title turned iOS hit) Swords and Soldiers will the audience it deserves.

Bungie’s Marathon, Swords and Soldiers now available on the App Store originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For iPad-toting musicians, there’s no better solution for attaching their favorite tablet to a standard microphone stand than the iKlip from IK Multimedia. Now the company has developed a Mini-Me companion to the iKlip, not surprisingly named the iKlip MINI.

The US$39.99 iKlip MINI works with or without the accessory iRig or iRig Mic to bring a no-hands solution to musicians using iPhones. With an included detachable bracket, the iRig can be mounted either vertically or horizontally on the iKlip MINI for use with AmpliTube or other guitar effects apps.

As with the original iKlip, the MINI is made of thermoplastic to hold your iPhone or iPod touch without scratching it. While connected to any microphone stand, pole or tripod with a diameter of 11 to 20 mm, the MINI provides accessibility to all controls and connectors on the iPhone and also has a clear view for snapping photos or taking video of your audience with the iPhone’s camera.

IK Multimedia is currently taking pre-orders for the iKlip MINI and expects the devices to ship in August of 2011.

IK Multimedia’s iKlip goes MINI originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Another great week has gone by, and if you are a regular visitor to this site you have probably noticed that I am now using a new theme.  Hopefully this betters the user experience for everyone.

In the last week there were some great resources shared, those included a number of open source libraries relating to topics such as Core Text, web services, data storage, and user interface improvements.

Here are the most viewed resources that were new in the last week listed in order of popularity:

Open Source: Lightweight Asynchronous Networking Library For Easy Communication With Web Services – A great lightweight library for communicating with web services allowing you to code complex interactions quickly by taking advantage of Objective-C blocks.

Tutorial: Custom In View Popup Windows – A guide and library for creating popup windows within your main view so that you can display content without needing to navigate to another view.

Open Source: Rich Text-Editing View Using Core Text – A drop in UITextView replacement that allows for easily creating and editing richly formatted text.

Open Source: Library For Easy Data Saving/Loading – A straightforward data saving library allowing you to save or load int, float, and NSString data with just one line of code.

Open Source: UITableView Replacement With Swipeable Cells – A slick UITableView replacement that allows you to create table view cells that can be swiped by the user revealing new content behind the cell.

Open Source: Library Allowing For Tab Bars With An Infinite Number Of Items – A tab bar library that allows you to place an unlimited number of items and allowing the user to scroll between different tab bars accessing the icons without the user having to use the more screen.

Tutorial: Format Text Magazine Style Using Core Text – A great step-by-step tutorial on how to format your text in multiple columns, and format the text with different styles using Core Text.  Excellent for anyone developing a magazine style app.

Open Source: Easily Extensible Objective-C Math Parser Library – A very useful math parsing library that uses similar syntax to NSPredicate but allows you to very easily add new functions.

Open Source: Library And Guide For NinePatch Image Support On iOS Platforms – A libary for support of NinePatch format images that are commonly used for interface elements on Android.

Thanks for reading, please share and bookmark this post!

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

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I received an email recently with the subject:

"I wonder whether I might be able to ask you a question..."

It struck me as such a perfect example of a self-limiting email habit that I did actually read it. It was, of course, from a lovely person, who was extremely polite and who (as I eventually determined) had a technical query. If you’re that person, I hope you take this constructively, as intended.

I call this kind of email courtesy suicide, because the over-application of (what you think of as) courtesy will actually result in you not getting a reply. You’ve done two terrible things even before I consider reading your email:

1. Your subject doesn’t tell me what you want.

   I maintain a very popular blog (you’re reading it). I write for publications, including an actual paper magazine. I share a lot of code with the development community. I’m a speaker at conferences. I’m a freelance UX/UI/accessibility consultant and developer. Unsurprisingly, I get a lot of email.

   Please, please, help me to categorise it by using a subject which summarises the contents and purpose of the message.

2. You’ve made me work hard to understand you.

   Your email’s subject was hard to understand; this doesn’t bode well for the rest of the message, and my motivation to read it is already almost zero.

   You are sending me email. You should do the work beforehand to summarise and be succinct, to make the task of reading it as easy as possible. If you cannot be succinct, please don’t communicate with people. You’re a time-sink, and you’re getting in the way of better things.

Since this particular email was from a developer, and developers make up the bulk of my readership here, let me run through my mental parse-tree for the aforementioned email’s subject. It’s as follows, with my own thoughts as comments (i.e. beginning with “//”).

I wonder {

    whether I might {

        be able to {

            ask you a question... // You just did, despite lack of question mark.
                                  // It wasn't a positive experience for me.

        } // You doubt your ability to ask a question?

    } // Is there some doubt as to whether you want to ask?

} // I see. Keep wondering. Let me know how that turns out. Or don't.

It’s only 3 PM, and already I feel tired after reading your subject line. The email itself continues in this oh-so-courteous-and-circumspect way for several paragraphs, only reaching the actual topic about half-way through. For the record, the correct subject in this instance would be something like “Question about performance of real-time data storage/retrieval in Cocoa“.

That subject may pique my interest, and it will certainly gain you some subconscious points as my brain breathes a sigh of relief at how easy it was to parse and categorise the message.

When writing email (or any other communication), by all means be courteous – but understand that the primary form of courtesy is to be considerate of others’ time. Excessive verbiage isn’t courtesy; it’s just waffling. Get to the bloody point.

It’s time that’s the limited resource. If you want me to give you mine, it’s best not to start by stealing some of it.

(If you enjoy a high wit-to-words ratio, you may enjoy following me, @mattgemmell, on Twitter.)

A week or so back, I tweeted about a statistic I had seen online. The premise was that the average iOS customer spends around $150 on apps. At the time, I joked that I probably spent more than that in a few months, but then I started thinking about it. Frankly, it kind of festered in my head for a bit. Why does that number seem low to me?

So to get it out of my head, I decided to put it to a poll. Please select from the options on the right, and then we can check back on the results later to see how much our readers spend per year.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Camera Genius. The developer describes Camera Genius as the best way to take, edit and share your photos. Includes a 6x digital zoom, video with real-time zoom, anti-shake, burst mode, full screen camera button, timer, sound shot, camera guides, a photography manual, photo editing and adjustment tools, sharing with six social services including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and email. All wrapped in a beautiful user interface with two custom themes.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Camera Genius

Camera Genius

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

• Great photo taking features like zoom, full screen button, guides, burst mode and video with zoom.
• Photo Editing includes over 40 filters with crop and border tools.
• Sharing allows you to share in 8 ways including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and email.
• Review your photos quickly and easy.
• Beautiful user interface is easy to use.

Requirements: iOS 4.0 or Higher, Camera

Price: 1.00

Developer: CodeGoo

Vote for a Review

Would you like to see us write a full review of Camera Genius? Have your say in our poll:

Would you like to see Camera Genius reviewed in-depth on AppStorm?survey software

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.

Whenever you buy a product, you always run the risk of something newer, bigger and better coming along sometime soon. But with Apple products, most of the time you have a general idea when the next big thing will be on the shelves, because they follow a fairly predictable pattern.

But then the expected release date for the iPhone 5 came and went and here we are with no idea when (or if) the iPhone 5 will make an appearance in 2011. Sure, all signs are that it’s coming out in September, but with Apple, no one can ever be sure.

So what do you do if you need a phone now but believe a new one should be out any day now? Let’s talk about that after the break.

Unreliable Predictability

This concept came to me the other day, because of a completely non-iPhone related problem that came up. I’m going on a business trip in a few weeks, and it requires me to travel across the United States and across the border into Canada, where I’ll spend a few days. I’ve got to still accomplish work during this time, but I also want to pack as light as possible. Ideally, I’d have an ultraportable laptop with me at all times, something that can be used easily on an airplane while I sit in a cramped coach seat for 6 hours.

This is also an excuse for me to get an 11-inch MacBook Air, something I’ve wanted since they first were released. But now, buying one is a realistic goal, and I could make that happen before I left if I wanted to. The problem is, the Gold Master of Lion was just released, and all signs point to a new MacBook Air coming out in the next few weeks. Why buy something today when you know a newer and better model will be out soon?

The iPhone Connection

Which brings me to my good friend Chad. He was at the pool with his wife this past weekend, and he hopped in with her phone in his pocket. Since they had to hit the Verizon store anyways, he decided to buy a new phone as well. So there he was, staring at the iPhone 4 and the Droid Incredible 2, and he knew (because we talk, obviously) that a new iPhone was most likely coming out very soon. But he didn’t need one soon, he needed one today. So he bought the Droid for himself and one for his wife, and went on his way.

Because of Apple’s predictable release schedule, everyone knows that a new iPhone should be just around the corner. Yet as predictable as they are, there’s also no certainty in this assumption. Everyone assumed the Verizon iPhone would be announced last summer, and yet it came out last January, a year after they announced the iPad. So now the iPad seems to be coming out in the Spring, iPods in the Fall, and iPhones … when?

How to Fight It

One could make the argument that all you have to do is be patient and these things will take care of themselves, and you would be right. But let’s put this another way: Say that every year, around, say, December 25th, you sat around a tree and collected a few gifts. This happened every year like clockwork, until one day there was no holiday. All of a sudden it was February 5th before everyone sat around the tree, and that was it. Essentially, that’s how this plays out if you’re an Apple loyalist.

So what do you do? Besides be patient, you just take things as they go. Take good care of your iPhone/MacBook Air/iPod and plan on its shelf life to be a few years. For example, I still have my original 30GB iPod Photo, and I use it all the time in my car. Sure, I want an iPod Touch, but I can’t quite justify the price so I’ll just keep using what I have until it needs to be replaced.

That’s really how things should work, after all, it’s just that Apple has convinced us that we need a new gadget every year. Yet that concept doesn’t work for everything in the Apple lineup. I have an iPad, but I didn’t feel the need to buy an iPad 2, it just wasn’t that exciting. My MacBook Pro is doing just fine, and I only want the MacBook Air as a secondary device that I can use for business trips as well as for something that my wife can use with her job.

But the iPhone is something that’s almost intimate. It’s a device that we all hold every day, and most of us rely on it to do business or as our major form of communication. If a new one is coming out, it’s desirable, and Apple knows it. This is the device that they keep selling more and more of every year, and I’d wager a good portion of their sales are from repeat customers.

Final Analysis

I know I’ll be one of the guys who buys a new iPhone when it comes out, and I’m willing to be patient and just wait until it happens. If I were in the position of my buddy Chad though, I’m pretty sure I would’ve bought a Droid as well. Because we know Apple’s release cycle, we also know when it’s not a good time to buy. Chad was between a rock and a hard place and he wasn’t attached to any one ecosystem yet. Had the iPhone 5 been available, he might have gone that direction instead — and he wanted to, at least before we knew for sure that it wasn’t coming out at WWDC. So Apple lost a potential customer, and he’s probably not the only one.

Having a predictable release cycle is both an advantage and a disadvantage for Apple. In the case of the next iPhone, changing the cycle means potentially losing some customers. Sure, they’ll make it up in the long run, but who knows how things would’ve turned out if the iPhone had been announced in June.

There are many different ways to wake up in the morning, and tons of those options are available on the iPhone. So to stand out in a field full of iPhone alarm clocks, a company has to do something different than the rest. One contender in this field is Alarmed, and it stands out by doing more than just waking you up.

Alarmed isn’t just an alarm clock. It’s also a to-do list, reminder, calendar and more, and that’s just to get started. Find out what else after the jump.

The Core

At its heart, Alarmed is, well, an alarm clock. Although you could just use the built-in Clock feature on iOS to do the same thing, Alarmed takes a slightly different path. With the Clock app, you have to touch the screen a few different times to select multiple days, while with Alarmed, you just check off the appropriate days on the bottom of the screen, then go from there.

Setting up alarms takes just a few seconds.

Because Alarmed isn’t a root app, it won’t sound off if the ringer is turned off, but that’s really the only drawback. Otherwise, you can also adjust the length of your sleep timers, which comes in really handy if you’re the type of person who likes to get an extra 7 minutes exactly.

Alarmed also includes add-on packs.

Timers

While the Clock app has a timer function, Alarmed goes yet another step further. The dial at the bottom of the screen counts off from hours, minutes and seconds, making it easy to fine tune your alarm. There are also quick setting buttons at the top of the dial, so you can set a 5, 15 or 30 minute timer right off the bat with a few quick taps. Or, you can also set the timer to count up if you need to, something I haven’t gotten the Clock app to do at all.

Reminders are easy to input.

The nice bonus for this one though is the “Nag Me” switch. If you’re like me, maybe a timer goes off and you can’t attend to it right away, but you don’t want to let it go either. The Nag Me feature keeps on bugging you until you turn off the timer completely, that way you don’t forget what you have to do. It comes in handy more than you’d expect.

Reminders

We’ve all got our own to-do systems, and Alarmed throws itself into the mix as well. Now you could just go out and set yourself a quick reminder, which requires you entering a title and time, then going on your way. But the other option is to set a Super Reminder, which ramps things up to 11.

Alarm clocks are nice and quick to set.

The Super Reminder gives you multiple options for each alert, to the point where it gets pretty detailed. You first set the time and message like any other note, but then you can have the reminder repeat if necessary, or just repeat until a set date. Then you can adjust how the alarm sounds and turns off, then there’s even a pre-alarm setting, where you can warn yourself before the actual reminder goes off. It’s a bit overkill at times, but sometimes it’s better to have the options than not to.

Verdict

Is Alarmed worth the money? When I used it, I found that the reminder system didn’t really work into my system, but I kind of expected that since I’ve been stuck on OmniFocus for a while now. But only recently did I start using my iPhone for my regular alarm clock, so I decided that trying out Alarmed instead of Clock would work well.

It did work, although the initial settings caused me to shoot out of bed like a shot because it was just too loud and sudden. Once I tweaked around with it a bit though, I started using it all the time, and now I use it daily.

At the end of the day, this app does beat Clock by a pretty wide margin in a few different fields. But for me, I wondered why I needed all of these options when Clock does work and work pretty well at that. Do I really need to count down a timer backwards? Do I need any of the functions of the Super Reminder? Ultimately, I don’t. So for me, Alarmed has become my new alarm clock, but that’s it. None of the other features really do anything for me, so they just sit there unused.

That said, even though I have no use for the reminders, they are well done and I can totally see someone loving the features. Between the reminders and the alarm settings, you’ve got a pretty versatile app, and it is free.

So will it be a wasted app on your iPhone? Not at all. In fact, it may be one of your most used. Just make sure you have a place for it in your life and you’ll be good to go.