Category: I-phone

There’s a thread on Apple’s Discussions boards suggesting that Mac OS X 10.6.7 introduces issues with OpenType PostScript fonts when it comes to printing and PDF handling. Kurt Lang writes:

“As soon as you install 10.6.7, OpenType PostScript fonts are indeed broken… [the issue] is confined to OT PS fonts. All PDF files, including those using OpenType PostScript fonts display correctly in Preview. With the Acrobat Reader, all PDF files display correctly except those using OT PS fonts. So no matter who gets PDF files created under 10.6.7 using OT PS fonts, they will not display correctly on the Mac or in Windows…”

Oops. Lang goes on to note that everything was working perfectly under Mac OS X 10.6.6. Also, he has not changed his installations of Adobe Reader or Preview. Only the OS is different.

Since everything works fine in Preview and is only troublesome in Reader, you might be inclined to point the finger towards Adobe. However, we agree with Lang that it isn’t solely Adobe’s responsibility to ensure compatibility with minor OS updates — if something’s changed in the OS’s type handling without Apple announcing it, there’s not much Adobe could do in advance. Update: Adam Engst at TidBITS dives into the issue and reports that the impacts are wider than we knew.

As far as we know, Apple is not yet working on the issue. If you’ve experienced this trouble, let us know. Hopefully a fix will be issued soon.

Thanks, Laurie.

10.6.7 update causes OpenType font issues originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Barron’s compiled its annual list of the world’s 30 best chief executives, and Apple’s Steve Jobs tops the list, again. Jobs was selected for his vision and forethought that anticipates the products and services that customers want, even before they realize it. Jobs’ insight has led to the development of the iPod touch, the iPhone and the iPad. These three products top their respective markets and have become must-have items for technophiles and the average consumer alike.

Barron’s also notes that Jobs took the PC company from an all-time low in the 90s and turned it into the second most valuable company in the US. Apple’s current market value has climbed to US$315 billion, a figure that is only topped by ExxonMobil. Other CEOs on the top 30 list include Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway and Reed Hastings of Netflix.

[Vai Macstories]

Barron’s: Steve Jobs among world’s best CEOs originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you follow our tech startup sister site TechCrunch, or if you’ve read any of the reports from the South by SouthWest (SXSW) conference this year, you’ve probably seen a lot of column inches given to current-media-darling “group messaging” apps. SXSW has a reasonable track record of predicting the Next Big Thing. It was where Twitter first came to many people’s attention in 2007, for example, and it was an early success story for Foursquare in 2009, too.

My usual reaction to hype like this is to roll my eyes and avoid the apps in question altogether, although that might just be because I’ve never blagged tickets to SXSW. Eventually, though, TechCrunch’s relentless enthusiasm wore me down, and I took a look at one of the commonly mentioned apps, Beluga. To my surprise, what I found was a slick, well-designed app that solved a communication problem I didn’t know I had. That’ll teach me to be cynical!

Before I explain what I liked about Beluga, an aside: there are a number of other significant group messaging apps, including GroupMe, Fast Society, Yobongo, the soon-to-relaunch Betwext Talk and the brand new, bought-by-Google Disco. However, international availability of these apps is spotty.

For example, at the time of writing, only Beluga and Yobongo were in the UK App Store — this is probably because these apps incorporate free-to-the-user SMS features that are tricky to make work cheaply internationally. As I’m in the UK, this means I can’t do a detailed review roundup of all the apps. Look for this in a future TUAW post by one of our American bloggers. I’ll use Beluga as an example to demonstrate concepts that are common to all the group messaging apps.

Continue reading A primer on group messaging apps

A primer on group messaging apps originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last year’s Apple Design Awards were met with a minor brouhaha, as Apple restricted eligibility to apps in the iOS App Store. This year Mac apps are eligible, with a caveat.

The WWDC FAQ states that “Apps must be available on the App Store by May 23, 2011, to be considered for an Apple Design Award.” Which App Store is Apple talking about? Both, actually. The ADA home page states, “This year’s Apple Design Awards will be awarded to developers whose iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps are currently on the App Store and demonstrate excellence…”

Of course, if your Mac apps are ineligible for inclusion in the Mac App Store (by design or by circumstance), you can’t enter the ADAs this year. Hardly sporting, Apple.

Good luck to all entrants, and to those of you who’d like to be considered but aren’t yet in the store, you have until May 23.

Want to be eligible for an Apple Design Award? There are two App Stores for that originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case you didn’t know, the 2011 edition of the Great American Pastime starts Thursday the 31st. I’ll be watching MLB.tv on my AppleTV — and my iPhone and my iPad. Baseball everywhere! Awesome.

MLB’s television broadcast rules black out home team games via MLBtv, unfortunately, so I can’t watch my local team, but that’s OK. I’ll watch whatever game looks interesting at the moment.

Enough of that! Welcome to Ask TUAW, your favorite weekly question-and-answer column. Now, we can never have too many questions, so please, go to the comments of this post and ask away. To get fabulous answers, we need your fabulous questions. You can also email your questions directly to ask [at] tuaw.com, or ping us on Twitter.

Now, off to the questions!

Prem has a question about prepaid cell plans:

I’m having a plan to be in the US for 3 months. While I’m there I’ll bring my trusted iPhone 4 with me. However, I don’t want to pay the roaming charge, so surely I’ll need to find a SIM card and data plan there. What would you recommend me for the carrier and plan? I will be use about 1GB of data for each month.

Continue reading Ask TUAW: iPhone US visitors, RAM upgrades, iPad buying advice

Ask TUAW: iPhone US visitors, RAM upgrades, iPad buying advice originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple announced the dates for WWDC 2011 this Monday morning. The Apple developers’ conference will take place from June 6 to June 10 at Moscone West in San Francisco.

As expected, Apple will “unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS” at the developers conference. Apple will also host hundreds of technical sessions and offer code-level assistance from Apple engineers.

Besides details on iOS 5.0, WWDC is also expected to unveil the final details and availability of Mac OS X Lion. Apple may also introduce the iPhone 5, but recent rumors suggest a fall launch of iOS and the iPhone 5 instead of the traditional summer debut.

Update: The Loop has chimed in with information that suggests WWDC this year will be a software-only event. No iPhone, iPad or Mac hardware will be introduced. Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg also cautions customers about getting caught up in this yearly cycle, “There is no reason for Apple to follow a predictable yearly pattern, and it keeps their competition off guard a little bit.”

[Via TechCrunch]

Apple sets dates for WWDC 2011: June 6-10 originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Trigger points are taut bands of muscle that send pain to other areas of the body. Oftentimes people with trigger points might suffer pain in one area of the body, like the lower back, and not realize that the pain is actually originating on the other side of the body (the psoas, in this case). The field of trigger point therapy was pioneered by Dr. Janet Travell, personal physician to John F. Kennedy. After Travell’s 40-plus years of work, she co-wrote a (very expensive) two-volume, 1600 page book detailing over 700 trigger point locations and their effects on the human body.

For those of you who don’t want to spend a few hundred dollars on Travell’s books, Real Bodywork has made a universal iOS app called Muscle Trigger Points that details trigger points for over 70 muscles and their pain referral patterns. The app itself is an excellent reference guide that lets you search for trigger points by specific muscle, or by pain zones on your body. Best of all, the app is cheap compared to Travell’s books.

For those of you who are into trigger point therapy, I highly recommend Muscle Trigger Points just for the fact that it provides an interactive reference that you can carry with you on your iPhone or iPad. That being said, the app does have some drawbacks. It doesn’t feature all the muscles or trigger points in the human body, and it does leave out some major ones (Extensor hallucis longus, anyone?). The app also doesn’t show you how to deactivate your trigger points, though it does talk you through self-treatment in a four-minute audio guide. (For those who want detailed instructions about self-treatment, Claire Davies’ respected Trigger Point Therapy Workbook is the best.)

Muscle Trigger Points is a universal app, and it’s available for US$2.99 on the App Store.

Muscle Trigger Points app helps you locate sources of pain originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We last covered the iOS RSS reader Byline back in May of last year, when it had just hit version 3. Now the app’s been updated to version 4, and it’s still an excellent RSS reader for both the iPhone and the iPad. Version 4 brought universal capability to the free version of the app (it has ads, though you can get rid of them for just a few bucks). The new version also adds an easy way to “Mark All as Read” (just slide the “Edit” button), and the 4.0 release (as well as the minor releases after it) fix all kinds of bugs and add in some performance improvements.

Byline still hooks up directly with your Google Reader account, integrates with Instapaper and Twitter very easily and has an offline reading mode that lets you browse your RSS feeds even when you’re not connected to the internet.

In other words, Byline is a quality app that’s only getting better. If you still haven’t settled on a good RSS reader for your iPhone or iPad, it’s definitely worth a look.

TUAW’s Daily App: Byline originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW’s Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science that lie behind the hardware.

One of the new features we first saw in the developer beta of Mac OS X Lion back in February is long-overdue in this correspondent’s humble opinion: it finally supports TRIM on solid-state drives.

TRIM (which, despite the capital letters, isn’t an acronym) is a way to speed up SSD access by performing important housekeeping tasks in the background or on file deletes, rather than leaving it until the user is writing data to the drive. Since then, TRIM has also appeared in 10.6.6 for new Macs with Apple-supplied SSDs only, and with third-party tools, it’s now possible to get TRIM running on any SSD under 10.6.7.

This raises the question: what exactly is TRIM, and why does it matter? If you’ve been wondering what this seemingly arbitrary abbreviation is, and why it matters, then I’m here with my best Science Hat on to remove all that wonder (as we scientists so often do) and replace it with cold hard fact.

Continue reading Keeping SSDs in TRIM: doing the math

Keeping SSDs in TRIM: doing the math originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s Sunday night and that means talkcast time! This week, we’re sharing stories of the iPad 2‘s international launch, plus rumors on the Lion and iPhone 5 front. Join us, won’t you?

To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the TalkShoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 PM EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (yay for free cell phone weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 — during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you’ve got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free Blink or X-Lite SIP clients; basic instructions are here (if you like Blink, the pro version is available in the Mac App Store). Talk to you tonight.

Talkcast tonight 10pm ET: iPad 2 international launch originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Want an assistant to help you keep up with your world and the world at large? Voice Brief might be just the thing. This US$1.99 app will read your Facebook updates, Twitter feed, email (with limitations), weather, schedule, stock prices that you follow, and even the latest news from RSS feeds of your choice.

The voices are computerized, but very clear. There are four voices to choose from: an American male and female, and a British-accented male and female. You set up the app by giving it your location (for weather) and stocks you’d like to follow, pointing it to your iPhone calendar, and selecting some news feeds (I selected CNN and TUAW). Voice Brief also allows you to add custom sentences, like a personal greeting when the app starts reading, or something for when it finishes going through your feeds. You can add multiple custom sentences for transitions between feeds, but you don’t have to use any at all.

There are some limitations to Voice Brief’s ability to read email. Apple doesn’t allow third parties direct access to the iOS Mail app, but you can configure the app to read your Gmail inbox feed. At this version, Voice Brief reads the first line of the email, but the developer tells me he is going to add full text reading in a future update.

Continue reading Voice Brief for iPhone is a great text-to-speech app with lots of potential

Voice Brief for iPhone is a great text-to-speech app with lots of potential originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LogMeIn Ignition (US$29.99) is a popular tool for making hassle-free remote control sessions to Macs and PCs. We’ve reviewed the universal app on TUAW before, and it’s a well-designed tool for those who may not want to play with router settings and firewall ports to get a VNC connection going.

Now LogMeIn has added a new feature to Ignition that raises the bar for remote control apps. In an update that appeared last week to version 2.0.264, LogMeIn Ignition gained the ability to view, transfer, and save folders between your iOS device and Mac or PC. The capability is easy to use and very simple; you have a choice of either doing a remote control session or a file manager session when you log into your remote computers. Once that’s done, Ignition keeps a status screen available containing windows with either the remote control or file manager sessions for each computer you’ve connected to.

File transfer works very well. In the app is a Local Files folder where you can store those documents that you bring over from your Mac or PC. You can then open those documents in a compatible app (i.e., Pages for .doc / .docx files) and make changes. There is no “round-tripping” capability — that is, you can’t then save those documents back onto a PC or Mac through the app. However, I’m wondering if the “Saved from Other Apps” folder that appears in the Local Files folder is designed for future use by compatible apps so you can do a round trip.

If you have more than one remote computer that you’re connected to with LogMeIn Ignition, you can actually move files between those remote computers. There’s now support for AirPrint printing of documents that you copy or move to your iPad, and the app can even wake a sleeping remote computer through Wake-On-LAN.

Existing users of LogMeIn Ignition should make sure that they update their app as soon as possible, and those who are looking for a remote control or file management app may want to consider LogMeIn Ignition for their work. Be sure to check out the gallery for screenshots of LogMeIn Ignition at work.

LogMeIn Ignition update adds file management / transfer capability originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve been fans of the Tripit app & web travel manager since we first looked at it back in 2009, and the latest updates to it haven’t cooled our ardor at all.

Tripit makes simple something that could be very complicated. It takes all the various emailed itineraries you have for a trip — flights, hotel bookings, car rentals and so on — and turns them into one master itinerary with your car rental booking following your flight and preceding your arrival at your hotel. You can view your itinerary online; the iPhone app gives you offline access to it, and with one click you can add the whole thing to your iCal or Entourage calendar.

Now Tripit has added the ability to edit your itinerary in that iPhone app; for example, you can change a flight time in case of cancellation or delay. You can also swipe-delete items that are no longer needed, and Tripit will notify you of conflicts if you make changes to flights.

The price is still right too; the app is free with ads, or there’s a $1.99 ad-free version and then the Pro anual supscription version at US$49 a year.

(Edited to clarify ad-free pricing)

Tripit adds itinerary editing to iPhone app originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TechCrunch reports that two “solid sources” have said Apple will hold off on unveiling the next iteration of iOS, version 5, until this fall instead of debuting in the summer as in years past. If TechCrunch’s sources are correct, the iPhone 5 is still likely to debut in the summer, but it will be running a flavor of the current v4 iOS.

In addition of launching in the fall, TechCrunch’s sources state that iOS 5 will be a “major revamp of the OS” that will include:

• an heavily cloud-based iOS, with several new services
• a “music locker” service to coincide with the introduction of new iPods
• a location service that focuses on finding friends and family members

TechCrunch also states Apple will first discuss many of iOS 5’s cloud-based services at WWDC in June, and Mac OS X Lion will likely include integration with those cloud-based components.

Until Apple makes an announcement about iOS 5 nothing is certain, but if TechCrunch’s sources are right about a “music locker” service, it would make sense to hold iOS 5 until the fall when new iPods are traditionally launched. The extended timeline would also give Apple the time to devote sufficient resources to completing work on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which Apple has said will be released this summer.

Rumor: iOS 5 will be a ‘major revamp,’ won’t debut until fall originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 26 Mar 2011 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TUAW’s very own superstar Steve Sande has released a new ebook version of “Take Control of iWeb ’09,” and it’s updated to reflect the fact that iWeb is practically the same in both iLife ’09 and the newer iLife ’11. No matter which iLife you’re using, Steve’s got some excellent tips in here for you. From using Dropbox to share and publish low-cost iWeb sites, to embedding Google Calendars and Keynote presentations, and even setting up iWeb sites for mobile iOS devices, Steve has you covered on all the various functions of iWeb 3 for either iLife ’09 or iLife ’11.

Since you’re reading TUAW, you can consider yourself lucky. By following this link, you can get Steve’s ebook for 30% off, making the usually US$15 ebook just $10.50. Congrats to our own Mr. “TUAW TV Live” on another successful publication, and if you want to grab that special TUAW-only discount, head through the link above.

TUAW readers get 30% off “Take Control of iWeb ’09” originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 26 Mar 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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