Category: I-phone

We’ve heard before that iPad demand is super high around the world, and here’s another reason why: households that already have an iPad are actually pretty likely to go out and buy another one. In a recent survey of Americans who own iPads, 17 percent said they already own more than one iPad, and another fifth (19 percent) said that they were considering purchasing another device in the future. And which device are they considering? Another iPad, of course. The most common reason given for purchasing another iPad is that someone else in the household (either a spouse or a child) is using the one they’ve already got.

That’s pretty crazy. Not only is the iPad strongly demanded by people who haven’t bought one yet, Apple actually has a good chance of selling yet another iPad to households who already have one. This backs up what we’ve heard about customer usage as well: people are tending to use their iPad more the longer they’ve owned it.

A figure like this helps lend some credence to those gigantic predictions for iPad sales in 2011. Especially if we see a revision as predicted early next year, a lot of households in America and elsewhere might end the year with more than one tablet device around.

Survey: 19 percent of households with iPads are likely to buy another originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 23 Dec 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We’ve sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier.

Chances are, if you’re reading this post and this site, someone you know — maybe you yourself — has thought about learning to develop for iOS. For the person on your gift list who’s got ambitions of coding the next Angry Birds, you can certainly pick out some items that will ease the path up to the mountaintop.

The biggest challenge for the gift-giver is knowing where to start; you’ve got to match the continuously variable levels of programming expertise that your recipient might have. From novices and noobs to l33t coders, we’ve got a list of presents that will challenge, educate and inform; even better, many of them are available in digital form for last-minute gifting, or overnight for Christmas Eve from Amazon or Apple (where there’s free overnight shipping on orders of $50 or more). Some are even free!

The Basics

Needless to say, anyone who’s diving into iOS development is going to need one thing first: a Mac. Whether it’s the most affordable new machine Apple makes (the Mac mini), or a used machine (any Core 2 Duo-based Intel Mac will do), getting on the Mac is a prerequisite. Technically, you can do Objective-C development in GNUstep on Windows, but you can’t run Xcode and build projects for iDevices without Mac OS X. We’ll leave aside for the moment the question of whether doing development on a hackintosh is a worthwhile idea.

The Mac mini makes an excellent development machine; it’s fast enough, unobtrusive, and it works with the keyboard and monitor your lucky recipient already has. Xcode does crave memory, though, so you’re best off bumping it to at least 4 GB for an extra $100. If you’re looking for a used machine, you can go with Apple’s refurbished list, third-party resellers like Small Dog, or local used machines via Craigslist. The Xcode environment itself is completely free of charge, although a thoughtful gift-giver might download the multi-gigabyte installer on a fast connection and hand it over on a USB drive.

Continue reading TUAW’s Holiday Gift Guide: For the would-be iOS developer

TUAW’s Holiday Gift Guide: For the would-be iOS developer originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s that time a year and for many of you out there that means the need to send out the annual Christmas cards and well wishes. In this age though who has the time to write out the physical Christmas card every year for however many people you know. Not me for one. Looking for solutions to my lazy nature of not wanting to write something out and having my iOS device handy at all times I decided to check out the App Store and see what was around that might be able to assist me in my needs. I came across the Rudolph Cam by Oceanhouse Media. It’s an app that lets you create Christmas cards using characters from the classic Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer TV special. I chose this app because of the significant presence of Rudolph in my childhood and watching it multiple times a year with my family during the holiday season. I believe it was a good choice.

After purchasing the application and downloading it I fired it up for the first time to browse around and see what I can do with this application. When it comes up you are given a list of 25 different “cards” to use. Scrolling through them, there are a lot of characters and head cutouts of the Rudolph universe. Once you select your card image you’re given the option of either taking a new photo to fit into the image or cutout or to go through your library and select a previous photo from your library to use. Once you have chosen the photo you want to use you can pinch or rotate the photo for a final fitting on your card before moving onto sending it. You have the option of posting your card to Twitter and Facebook along with emailing and saving the card locally. Fairly straight forward and easy way to share your Christmas wishes.

This application is perfect for a simple quick fix to getting some kind of Christmas card out to friends and family. You have a lot of options of cards to choose from the Rudolph cast and the option to buy other card images from properties such as Dr Seuss’ The Grinch. The applications price makes it a bargain at under $2, you can’t go wrong spreading some cheer for that little amount of money. I would give this application my endorsement or seal of approval if I had such things. As a geek who is a kid at heart though you have my guarantee of an enjoyable time with this Christmas card application.

• Features –                        4/5 Stars
• User Interface –             4/5 Stars
• Ease of use –                    4/5 Stars
• Pricing –                            5/5 Stars
• Personal Opinion –      5/5 Stars
• Overall Score –               4/5 Stars

This may come in useful for you iOS developer types 🙂 https://crashpool.com/ Thanks to @tonyarnold for the heads up. Share:

Tonight I’ve been working on stabilising Glyph Designer and adding features such as inner shadows, gradient outlines and the preview panel. They are all pretty much finished now and looking great, so I thought I step away from the code for a moment and put up a couple of screen shots. The first shot shows […]

According to Japanese Mac blog MacOtakara, the next-gen iPad will have a flatter backside and smaller bezel compared to the original iPad. The “iPad 2” will also have a larger “wide-ranged speaker” located behind a mesh speaker grille.

MacOtakara notes that their Chinese source has told them the next iPad will be three millimeters smaller than the original, but the display will stay the same size. That means the bezel surrounding the iPad’s display should shrink substantially. The rear case has been flattened to be more like an iPod touch, which should make it easier to lay on a flat surface. Though I didn’t mention either of those things in my list of things I’d like to see in the iPad 2, a smaller bezel and flatter rear case would definitely improve the iPad’s design, and if this image from MacOtakara accurately represents the revamped speaker, we can expect much better sound out of the next iPad as well.

MacOtakara’s source claims production of the iPad 2 has already begun, with orders scheduled to begin shipping to Apple by mid to late January. This aligns well with an earlier iPad 2 shipping date rumor from Digitimes. MacOtakara also notes that, while “unreliable information,” the next iPad may have both front- and rear-facing cameras, with the rear-facing camera having the same resolution as the iPhone 4.

[via AppleInsider]

iPad 2 rumored to have flatter backside, smaller bezel, ‘wide-range’ speaker originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 23 Dec 2010 01:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We’ve sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier.

Chances are, if you’re reading this post and this site, someone you know — maybe you yourself — has thought about learning to develop for iOS. For the person on your gift list who’s got ambitions of coding the next Angry Birds, you can certainly pick out some items that will ease the path up to the mountaintop.

The biggest challenge for the gift-giver is knowing where to start; you’ve got to match the continuously variable levels of programming expertise that your recipient might have. From novices and noobs to l33t coders, we’ve got a list of presents that will challenge, educate and inform; even better, many of them are available in digital form for last-minute gifting, or overnight for Christmas Eve from Amazon or Apple (where there’s free overnight shipping on orders of $50 or more). Some are even free!

The Basics

Needless to say, anyone who’s diving into iOS development is going to need one thing first: a Mac. Whether it’s the most affordable new machine Apple makes (the Mac mini), or a used machine (any Core 2 Duo-based Intel Mac will do), getting on the Mac is a prerequisite. Technically, you can do Objective-C development in GNUstep on Windows, but you can’t run Xcode and build projects for iDevices without Mac OS X. We’ll leave aside for the moment the question of whether doing development on a hackintosh is a worthwhile idea.

The Mac mini makes an excellent development machine; it’s fast enough, unobtrusive, and it works with the keyboard and monitor your lucky recipient already has. Xcode does crave memory, though, so you’re best off bumping it to at least 4 GB for an extra $100. If you’re looking for a used machine, you can go with Apple’s refurbished list, third-party resellers like Small Dog, or local used machines via Craigslist. The Xcode environment itself is completely free of charge, although a thoughtful giftgiver might download the multi-gigabyte installer on a fast connection and hand it over on a USB drive.

Continue reading TUAW’??s Holiday Gift Guide: For the would-be iOS developer

TUAW’??s Holiday Gift Guide: For the would-be iOS developer originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pioneer has shipped out some brand new 3D Blu-ray players just in time to catch the tail-end of the holiday season (maybe they’re hoping people making returns after Christmas will pick these up instead of whatever else they got). The players are actually pretty awesome, if indeed a Blu-ray player is what you want in this age of Netflix and Hulu. There’s an Ethernet jack to watch those services, and of course they spit out the highest quality audio and video, with DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD surround, along with 1080p video upscaling.

So why are we mentioning these players here on TUAW? Because Pioneer has also released an app on Apple’s App Store called iControlAV, designed specifically to control these devices. The app connects up over the network connection, so there’s no actual IR device needed. Unfortunately, according to the iTunes reviews, that comes with its own set of problems — you can’t use the app to power on the devices, and while the app does receive information from the player (like custom labeling of input names), it’s pretty limited in terms of what it can send back — basically just adjust volume and balance controls. Not an all-in-one at all, it sounds like.

When you look at the prices on these players, from $299 to the basic model up to $499 for the best version, the app isn’t much more than a novelty. Not that I’d refuse one found underneath my Christmas tree this weekend (and if you want a Blu-ray player, I’m sure it’s a nice one), but I think there are probably better and cheaper solutions for home video around these days.

Pioneer releases 3D Blu-ray players controlled by iOS app originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hidden is an app that claims to help you track down and find your Mac — it runs in the background of your desktop computer, completely invisible, and only starts to send out location information when you actually go to the Hidden website and choose to flip it on. That way, if your Mac is ever stolen, you can log on from any computer and immediately get updates on where your stolen computer is, helping you track it down as quickly as possible. Getting it back is up to you, but just finding a stolen or lost computer is often all you need to do to provide proof that it’s yours anyway.

Our own Steve Sande really liked Hidden when we first wrote about it a few months ago, and as a special holiday giveaway, the app is now free for everyone for the rest of the month. That’s a great deal — the software is usually $20, and most security software of this type is much more expensive, with some even requiring an ongoing subscription. All you have to do is get the app for free and of course register on the website (so you can log in to find your computer if needed).

After January 1st, the price will return to $20, presumably, so make sure to get the app soon.

Stolen Mac tracking app Hidden free until January originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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They may be somewhat late to their own party, but AT&T is now selling Wi-Fi + 3G iPads in its own online store. Priced the same as in the Apple store, the AT&T store sells the 16 GB model for $629, the 32 GB for $729, and the 64 GB for $829, and ships them all for free. Data plans for all three models are also still the same, at 250 MB for $15 and 2 GB for $25.

While the iPad is available from at least seven retail vendors and maybe even from TJ Maxx & Marshalls, AT&T is the latest to start selling the iPad direct to customers online along with Best Buy and of course the Apple Store itself.

And don’t forget that if you ran out of time to have an iPad shipped for Christmas or your local store has run out of them, you can always head to an Apple retail store and pick up an iPad gift card for that special someone on your holiday list!

[via 9to5Mac]

AT&T finally selling 3G iPads at online store originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A leaked Photoshopped screenshot that was supposedly of a new Flipboard for Mac found its way into many email inboxes yesterday, and now 9 to 5 Mac has confirmation that it is indeed a fake and not from Flipboard Inc. at all. While our own Steven Sande recently wrote about the possibility of Flipboard coming for the Mac soon, in talking to 9 to 5 Mac the company had this to say:

“We definitely believe the desktop is part of our future, but it’s still on the whiteboard and not something we are launching soon. The desktop requires a lot of attention to design and UI and we’d like to take the time to get it right.”

So if you happened to see and believe the “screenshot” of Flipboard for Mac, sorry to burst your bubble. It is still available for free at the App Store to those of you with iPads, and I recommend you check it out. It’s a different way of reading news, looking at pictures, and responding to updates on Facebook and Twitter, and we can only hope that the Mac version comes out soon enough. Since Apple named it the iPad App of the Year, I imagine we won’t have to wait too too long.

Flipboard for Mac screenshot fake, real thing still in the works originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Merry Happy Christmanniversary!

On today’s TUAW TV Live, I’ll be celebrating not only the upcoming Christmas holiday, but the first anniversary of the show. I personally want to thank all of the regular viewers of the show, as well as those who can only join in on occasion, for helping to make TUAW TV Live a success. In 2011, we’re hoping to put the show on YouTube for syndication as a podcast, which will open up viewing opportunities to a whole new community of Apple fanatics.

We have a few demonstrations of apps and some cool accessories to show you today, as well as several surprises. How can you join in on the fun? From your Mac or PC, go to the next page by clicking the Read More link at the bottom of this post, and you’ll find a livestream viewer and a chat tool. The chat tool allows you to participate by asking questions or making comments.

If you’re driving somewhere and would like to watch TUAW TV Live while you’re stuck in traffic, please don’t — keep your eyes on the road! However, if someone else is doing the driving, you can watch the show on your iPhone and join the chat by downloading the free Ustream Viewing Application.

Continue reading Welcome to the TUAW TV Live Christmanniversary show

Welcome to the TUAW TV Live Christmanniversary show originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tapulous (purchased by Disney earlier this year) has released Tap Tap Revenge 4, the fourth iteration of the extremely popular iOS music game, and the new version brings a whole lot of new features to the series. The game is now compatible with the Retina Display, now includes Game Center integration, and has quite a few new social modes that let you “like” various songs, as well as see which of your friends has also “liked” that same music. Like Tap Tap 3, it’s a free app that sells music packs and avatars as in-app purchases, with music from artists in all genres, from Linkin Park to Rihanna, The Killers, and quite a few more.

Earlier this week, TUAW sat down to chat with Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem about the new game, and how his company has changed since it was not only acquired by Disney, but since he was placed in charge of the entire Disney Mobile operation. Read on to find out just how well Tap Tap Revenge 4 is doing (it’s showing “the biggest download numbers ever,” according to Decrem), and how he sees Disney’s future in the mobile app space.

Continue reading Bart Decrem on Tap Tap Revenge 4 and the Disney acquisition of Tapulous

Bart Decrem on Tap Tap Revenge 4 and the Disney acquisition of Tapulous originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Elliptic Labs has been working on gesture-sensing technology for a while now (where you can just swipe your hand in the air instead of actually touching a screen), and rumor has it that the company will be showing off a dock at next month’s CES show for the iPad, something that enables you to control Apple’s magical and revolutionary device without actually touching it. The main use is apparently in the kitchen (where your hands might be messy from cooking, keeping you from wanting to grease up that screen like a pie plate), but I can see this functionality in a kiosk somewhere, or any system where you wouldn’t want people actually laying hands on a device.

There’s a quick video after the break featuring one of the company’s other devices, but presumably the same gestures would be used to control the iPad. It’ll be interesting to see, too, just what kind of functionality the controller can offer — swiping between screens wouldn’t be hard, but I’d like to know if it offers any more granular control as well. Fortunately, TUAW will be live at CES, so we’ll make sure to stop by Elliptic’s booth and give it a try to let you know what it’s like.

Continue reading Elliptic Labs to show off gesture-sensing iPad dock at CES 2011

Elliptic Labs to show off gesture-sensing iPad dock at CES 2011 originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Coverage? (US$0.99) is a new iPhone/iPad app that will let you see detailed cellphone coverage maps for all 4 of the major U.S. providers. The app can find your location, then show you AT&T coverage. Even better, it will allow you to also see Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile coverage, and you can overlay any combination of coverage maps over your position.

If you’re traveling, you can show any location in the U.S., and see what the good news or bad news is for other destinations. Of course that is the depressing part. Seeing the Verizon and AT&T maps together for where i live in Arizona isn’t pretty. You can compare the 2G maps, 3G coverage, or even where there are roaming agreements. In almost every comparison, Verizon simply looks better. In southern Utah, where I spend time doing photography, the comparisons are even uglier.

Continue reading Coverage? for your iPhone and iPad is helpful yet depressing

Coverage? for your iPhone and iPad is helpful yet depressing originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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