Category: I-phone

The weather app in iOS 5 has a new feature that lets you view the hourly forecast of the current day with a simple swipe of your finger. It’s a minor improvement that doesn’t compare with full-featured apps like Weather HD or Weather Bug Elite. But still, it’s a nice touch for those that prefer the simplicity of the built-in app.

iOS 5 weather app to include hourly forecasts originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has begun construction on the glass cube at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in NYC. According to building permits, Apple is replacing the glass on the building and upgrading portions of the surrounding plaza. The renovations will cost a whopping US$6 million which is just shy of the $7 million Apple originally spent to build the structure in 2005.

Plywood walls now surround the iconic cube and scaffolding is expected to go up in the next few days. Work should be completed by the end of November. So much for those summer and fall photo ops.

5th Avenue Apple Store’s iconic glass cube to be reinstalled originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Shazam has released another update for its paid Encore app, this one adding full lyrics of over 25,000 songs on the service from provider LyricPlay. It lets you stream the lyrics in real-time as the song plays, so you can sing (or even just read) along. It’s not exactly a reason to shell out for the US$5.99 app — I’m still using the free version to identify music that I listen to, and it works just fine for that purpose. But it’s a nice addition to the Encore functionality, and it’s good to see that someone has worked out how to make song lyrics available to listeners in a simple and easy way.

In fact, this makes us wonder just where iTunes is on this issue. We’ve seen rumors for a long time that iTunes has been trying to add a lyrics feature (and there are plenty of ways to just do it yourself if you’d like to do that). But especially now that Apple has figured out something as complicated as iTunes Match, surely lyrics shouldn’t be that hard to do, right?

Unfortunately, the RIAA is still against it, and they’ve actually shut down any relatively easy solutions for quickly bringing lyrics into iTunes. It’s a real shame — especially for any music purchased from the iTunes Store (and because of the way iTunes Match works, all of your music will probably come from the App Store soon), we should really have access to the lyrics as the songs play.

Shazam Encore updated with lyrics, how about iTunes? originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I first heard about 1000 Heroz, a brand new iOS game available from Trials HD developers RedLynx, a while back, and when I did, it wasn’t clear just what it was all about. The game promised new content every day for a full thousand days (almost three years, according to my calculator), but didn’t exactly say what that entailed. But now, of course, we know: the game is out on the App Store right now, and it’s a platforming/racing game with players running a little man (or woman) along a track and trying to hit the fastest time.

It’s interesting — the physics are just a bit floaty, which adds to the difficulty of jumping your character in at just the right moment in order to move as quickly as you can up and down the hills. The real hook here is that there is a new level for the game every single day, and there will be new levels out, for free, for the next few years. That’s a pretty solid chunk of content — there are only a few levels now, but promising new stuff to see every day is a pretty good deal.

The game’s just 99 cents on the iPhone (and a buck more on the iPad), and while there are a few in-game achievements and rewards to go after for each level, it’s also connected up to Game Center for leaderboards. Each level also comes with its own hero and relic, so you’re not just getting a new level to race through, but new graphics on that end as well. It’s a pretty ambitious plan, and man, when you think of all the content you’ll have in a few years, all for just a buck, it’s a hard app not to buy.

TUAW’s Daily iPhone App: 1000 Heroz originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The New York Times recently profiled a new iOS app named Recco. It’s yet another social network app, but this time one built around restaurant recommendations. Rather than a service like Yelp, Recco is attempting to be extremely local, picking up restaurant recommendations not from people in your state or city, but from your actual friends and a few food experts.

It’s an interesting idea, even if the Times’ piece makes the app sound just like any other social network startup. The Times actually mentions that Recco only has 2000 users so far, which is adorably tiny in this day and age.

Still, if you have a circle of friends out frequenting new restaurants and ready to let you know which ones are the best, Recco seems like it might be an interesting experiment — it’s a virtual replacement for the kind of standard food chatter around town. Recco launched back at SXSW this year, and it’s available for free on the App Store right now.

Recco claims to provide hyperlocal restaurant savvy originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ve built web apps and mobile apps (and probably even mobile web apps), but have you ever wondered how the technology differences between the traditional web and mobile web are affecting how your app runs?

The 2 biggest issues that affect mobile users today are the network (how the data gets to their phone), and battery life.   Simple optimizations to your application can improve both of these issues noticeably for your users.

Background:  Latency
Mobile networks have limited bandwidth and high latency compared to WiFi and broadband.   Mobile networks take 100-1000x LONGER to initiate a TCP connection over traditional connections.  The first connection to the internet requires phone radio-tower-internet connections, which can take up to 2 seconds!  This is something that you (and your users!) notice.

Because of this high latency, mobile operators have invoked a state machine to all connections.

Wireless State Machine
What’s a state machine?  Since that first connection took 2 seconds to establish, the network keeps the radio connection between the device and network open in a high power/high bandwidth state for several seconds after the last packet is sent (in case more data comes in).  If a new TCP connection is established in this timeframe, it only takes 100-200ms to establish (still not as fast as broadband or WiFi, but still noticeably faster than 2s).  After a period of inactivity, the network drops to a lower bandwidth/energy shared channel, and if no data comes in – eventually the radio connection times out and is closed.

Basically the state machine keeps the radio network open for a set period of time whenever it is opened in an attempt to ‘hide’ the connection latency in frequent connections.  The timers in the state machine run a delicate balance to keep connections open and flowing – but also not draining the battery excessively.

So what do I do?

When architecting your application, you should consider the state machine.  Every connection your application makes adds latency to your customers and drains their battery.  Think of the battery life as a valuable resource for your customers – you want to minimize your impact.  By reducing the number of connections and maximizing the use of each connection, your app will appear faster to users, and also drain the battery less.

In future posts, I will detail several best practices for application optimization that we have discovered while working with the state machine.  For more details on the wireless state machine and how to make your application more energy efficient, you can read an article recently published by AT&T Research Labs.

AppBooker, a purpose-built shop window for the world’s best mobile app developers, today opens its doors to a second round of registrations in the run up to its full launch later this month.

The aim of the site, which has already attracted over 300 pre-registered developers from 35 countries, is to deliver quality leads to its members.

Visitors to AppBooker will enter their specific search criteria – for example location, platform, specialisms and budget range – and the site will return a list of the suppliers that fit the bill.

To attract the right clients, developers can showcase an unlimited number of apps, brought to life with video, screenshots and plenty of supporting information.

Stuart Bluman, Co-Founder of AppBooker says “The service has received great feedback so far, and we’re now looking to welcome even more developers into our growing community.

As a thanks for helping us test the site, any developer that gets their profile live before midnight BST on Sunday 26th June will get three months free at our highest account level – worth $99 / month.”

Bluman continues “The AppBooker team will be going out all guns blazing to marketing agencies, brands and other key decision makers to raise awareness of the service when we launch later this month, so now’s the time to get on board.”

To redeem the offer, developers can create an account at www.appbooker.com using the following Invite Code:

moor0611

Pathfinding is a very often talked about aspect of game development.  There are times when you want to go beyond basic predictable pathfinding and have the characters in your game move around in a dynamic, life-like manner.

Brandon Trebitowski has created a short tutorial along with some sample code demonstrating some of the algorithms that can be used to create this sort of movement. This code implements the absolute basics of autonomous steering behavior, and the results look pretty good.

Here’s a video demonstrating this idea in action:

You can see Brandon’s tutorial on his site here:
Autonomous Steering Behaviors In Corona SDK Games

The code and tutorial make a good starting point if you want to implement this more advanced pathfinding behavior.

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

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Adding variety to a game can be difficult and time consuming.   One of the ways the game Tiny Wings has done this is by dynamically changing the color of the scenery within the game every day.  Here is an image of some of the different backgrounds in Tiny Wings:

Ray Wenderlich has managed to duplicate this effect using CCRenderTexture in Cocos2D which allows you to draw directly onto the texture, then place that texture within the Cocos2D scene.  Ray’s tutorial takes you through drawing the textures, adding shadows and highlights to the texture, making the texture repeat, and adding to the scene.

You can check out Ray’s tutorial here:
How To Create Dynamic Textures With CCRendureTexture

You can check out Tiny Wings on iTunes here.

A very cool way to add some color and variety to a game.

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

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Today we present new collection of CSS3 and HTML5 tutorials.

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Apple recently boasted about Twitter integration on the upcoming iOS 5, but what if we had gotten Facebook integration instead?

iPhone already lets you link your friends’ profile pictures to their contact information in your phone, but Facebook features are otherwise restricted to the Facebook app itself.

Below are 7 Facebook features that we could have had if Apple had gone through with Facebook, instead of Twitter, integration on iOS 5:

1. Add a friend on Facebook through your Contacts.
2. Post a photo to your Wall or to a friend’s Wall directly from the Photos app.
3. Get updates in your status bar about incoming Facebook messages, comments, and other Facebook Notifications.
4. Post to Facebook systemwide.
5. Check into Facebook Places in the Maps app.
6. Facebook Chat integration in Phone or Messages.
7. Link Facebook Events into your iPhone Calendar.

No one knows for sure why Apple chose to integrate Twitter and not Facebook as a core part of the iOS platform, but one thing is certain: Facebook integration would be a much-valued feature for many users, and potential users, of the iPhone.

I use Twitter and will appreciate Twitter integration on iOS 5, but Facebook integration would have been even better, in my opinion.

What Facebook features would you like to see integrated into the iPhone?

7 Features iPhone Could Have Had if iOS 5 Got Facebook Integration is a post from Apple iPhone Review.

Just the other day we told you about the upcoming Steve Jobs comic book biography, and now PC World has the first few panels of the work to check out. It looks … good? It’s definitely a more traditional affair, so Steve won’t be displaying any latent superpowers or flying around.

Instead, as you can see above, it might actually be a pretty pertinent historical document on Apple’s history and Steve’s professional life. The original release claimed the book would show both sides of Steve’s sometimes rough personality, but what we see here seems to be pretty common knowledge so far.

Note that these sketches are still being called work-in-progress, which is why they’re in black-and-white and don’t have any comic book panels. The final book is set to come out for US$3.99 and will be available in a bookstore near you.

First panels from Steve Jobs comic book originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A Chinese court has sentenced three people to prison for collaborating to steal information from Foxconn about the iPad 2 before it was unveiled to the public. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Shenzhen Bao’an People’s Court found that the general manager of MacTop Electronics Company illegally offered a Foxconn employee 20,000 yuan, or about US$3,000, plus discounts on MacTop products for information on the iPad 2 last September. The Foxconn employee then paid another Foxconn employee who worked in the research and development department for digital images of the iPad 2’s back cover.

Cover accessory manufactures can typically make a killing if they have their covers for new Apple devices out the day the new product ships, which makes information, such as the dimensions of a new iOS device, very valuable. The general manager of MacTop was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 150,000 yuan. The two Foxconn employees were sentenced to 14 months and 13 months, respectively, and fined 100,000 yuan and 30,000 yuan.

There was no word on how the investigation led to the three employees, but Foxconn did issue a statement saying, “We cannot comment on matters of internal security, but Foxconn takes its commitment to protecting its intellectual property as well as that of its customers very seriously and undertakes all appropriate actions to safeguard against any violations.”

Three sent to prison in China over iPad 2 leaks originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 15 Jun 2011 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s annual Back to School promotion begins June 16 and runs until September 20. There are a few things different with this year’s promotion compared to years past. First, the promotion is starting about two weeks, on average, later than in earlier years. Secondly — and most notably — this year’s promotion will not include a free iPod with any Mac purchased. Instead, buyers will receive a $100 gift card that is good in the Mac App Store, iTunes Store, App Store or the iBookstore.

MacRumors offers photographic proof of this year’s promotion and its changes. Many may be dismayed over the lack of a free iPod, but it’s likely Apple feels that with the success of the iPod touch, iPhone, and Macs, it doesn’t need to offer such an incentive to get people to buy this year. A $100 gift card for use in the Mac App Store and other online stores could actually be more helpful to students and parents. There are several companies selling textbooks in the iBookstore, and there are hundreds of Mac apps that could be useful in a school setting (like the iWork suite).

The fact that no free iPods will be offered during this year’s promo also leaves the launch of the next iPods and iPhones totally up in the air. It used to be expected that Apple wouldn’t launch new iPods before the Back to School promotion ended, as it was a way for the company to clear out inventory. Now, however, the Back to School promotion is not tied to any specific timetable.

Apple Back to School promotion starts June 16 with a $100 gift card originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A monthly report from Mobile ad network Millennial Media paints a familiar picture of the smartphone market. According to impressions data, the iPhone is the top individual phone on the ad network, while the iPad is on the rise with a 29% jump in impressions from last month. Apple was the top manufacturer with a 30% impression share.

On a platform basis, Android was the leading smartphone OS with a 53% impression share, while iOS was a distant second with a 27% impression share. Rounding out the platform listing is RIM at 17%, Symbian at 2% and Windows Phone 7 at 1%.This impressions data reflects the number of times an ad is viewed.

Ad revenue from apps paints a different picture than the impressions data. In ad revenue, iOS and Android are neck and neck. iOS had a slight lead with 45% share, while Android had a 43% share. RIM grabbed 9% of ad revenue, while the remaining 3% is picked up by other platforms.

iOS is holding a slight lead over Android, but the green robot is closing in fast. In April, iOS was at 50% and Android was trailing with a 39% share. In May, that gap narrowed and in June the two platforms may trade places.

Ad network revenue shows iOS and Android are almost tied originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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