Category: I-phone

With all of the hoopla about the alleged Verizon iPhone now being stirred up by such illustrious sources as the Wall Street Journal, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen much physical proof of the device turning up. Usually there are a few good leaked photos, devices are left in bars, and excited engineers spilling the beans to blogger friends.

Boy Genius Report (BGR) is quoting a “solid Apple source” as saying that iPhone model 3,2 is ready for field testing. This is widely expected to be the CDMA version of the iPhone 4, and has reached the last testing stage (“AP”) before retail release with finalized hardware and software that just needs minimal tweaking.

The identifier 3,2 refers to a revised iPhone 4, as iPhone model 3,1 is the current iPhone 4. BGR’s source stated that the new iPhone contains a SIM card, which indicates that the phone can run on GSM standard systems. Rumors earlier this month implied that the Verizon iPhone could use a dual-mode baseband chip from Qualcomm that would enable it to run on both CDMA and GSM networks. There’s also speculation in the BGR post that the new model could include a fix for the “antennagate” issue.

The site is also saying that the iPhone 5 (model 4,1) is now in Engineering Verification Testing for a release sometime next year. As AppleInsider pointed out, BGR has been wildly incorrect with some previous rumors. They asserted that iTunes 9 would include support for Blu-Ray, and were slapped upside the head by Apple PR after they published a set of emails allegedly sent between Steve Jobs and an unhappy customer. In other words, if you have salt, sprinkle it liberally on this rumor.

[via AppleInsider]

Rumor: Apple field testing revised iPhone 4 originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With less than 24 hours to go before Apple’s “Back to the Mac” press event, oddsmakers have laid odds on what we’re likely to see. Specifically, CEO Mickey Richardson and his team at Bookmaker have presented the following odds (note that the +/- denotes the return on any wager) and the likelihood of a response occurring:

There will be an 11-inch version of Macbook Air

YES -750 88.5%
NO +150 40%

Updated iWork & iLife

Oddsmakers lay bets on Wednesday’s event originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Piper Jaffray has raised the price target on shares of AAPL to US$429 following yesterday’s financial report from Apple. The company posted its first $20 billion quarter, beating expected earnings.

In addition, Piper Jaffray raised FY11 revenue growth rate from 24% to 32%. In a note to clients issued today, Jaffray said, “While shares of Apple may pull back today (10/19), we would be buyers based on our belief that investors will gain optimism over the next three months that the growth story will continue.”

Indeed there was a bit of a pullback, as AAPL dropped 5.6% in after-hours trading on Monday. The stock fell to $299.70, down $18.30 (-5.75%), within two hours of yesterday’s announcements. The drop was blamed on iPad sales of 4.1 million; more were expected.

For more Apple financial news, look here.

Piper Jaffray raises Apple price target to $429 originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Years ago, when Apple announced they were opening retail stores I don’t know that anyone expected them to be such a resounding success. But yesterday’s call confirmed this fact, as nearly every metric was up: sales, traffic and number of new stores. The Apple retail engine is firing on all cylinders.

Some highlights:

• Revenues are up 75% since last year. Last year revenues were $2.04 billion, and this year they were $3.57 billion.
• Mac sales went up from 670,000 to 874,000, a 30% increase.
• Almost half of Mac sales were to new customers, something we’ve been hearing for years.
• Foot traffic in stores were also up significantly, reaching 74.5 million, up 62% from last year.
• Expansion has been a big deal as well, with Apple opening 24 new stores, and 16 of those were outside the US. The Beijing and Shanghai stores were noted in the call, with the Shanghai store opening on the last day of the quarter yet blowing away sales records from all store openings in years past.
• Further increasing its reach, Apple plans to open 40-50 new stores in 2011, with half of those overseas, and it plans to renovate many existing stores to reflect its new product lines and achieve “service goals.”

No matter how you look at it, Apple’s retail efforts have been a huge success in Q4.

Apple retail presence continues to grow and produce originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MarketWatch is reporting that iPads are to be offered to passengers as in-flight entertainment on Qantas Airways’ Jetstar flights, according to a company official speaking to the Dow Jones Newswires. The move is to draw would-be flyers to Jetstar in an increasingly competitive market for budget airlines operating in and around Australia and Asia.

According to ZDNet Australia, passengers will have the option to rent an iPad for the duration of the flight at AUD $10.

The larger screen would certainly be a plus, but I must admit, holding an iPad for the duration of a flight would become slightly tiresome. However, I know that if I was on a long-haul flight, I’d certainly choose an iPad loaded with games, music, and movies over the usually clunky in-flight entertainment service offered on most airlines these days. Though, not at an additional cost — especially if I’ve got an iPad of my own already.

[via MacDailyNews]

Qantas to offer in-flight iPads on Jetstar flights originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over the weekend, I attended the Camp Logos training seminar for Logos Bible Study software. I have been to lots of seminars, but this was my first one specifically about software, and I went in not really knowing what to expect. I was completely blown away by how useful it was.

When Logos for Mac came out last year, I spent a little bit of time using it, but I never really got into it. Logos 4 is a major redesign, and it was recently released for Mac. This is software that I could use on a daily basis, and learning more about it would save me a great deal of time, so it seemed like a good fit.

Read on for more…

Continue reading Camp Logos took me from know-nothing to advanced

Camp Logos took me from know-nothing to advanced originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Peter Kafka at All Things Digital thinks that Steve Jobs might want to buy Facebook. His reasoning is that Jobs, when asked what Apple plans to do with its now $51 billion in cash, said, “We firmly believe that one or more unique strategic opportunities will present itself to us, and we’ll be in a position to take advantage of it.” Kafka believes that one such “unique strategic” opportunity is called Facebook.

Jobs and Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg met for dinner the other day. Many presumed that they were discussing Facebook Connect and Ping integration, but what if it were something more, like Apple buying Facebook? Kafka thinks that Apple acquiring Facebook makes sense because Facebook doesn’t compete with Apple in any significant way, and Facebook is something that Apple couldn’t compete against even if it wanted to. Plus, Facebook is already competing with Google, “which has to make Jobs like it even more,” Kafka argues.

What would Apple buying Facebook lead to? Every Facebook user would probably automatically have an iTunes Store account. FaceTime chat could be integrated into Facebook chat, potentially leading to increased sales of iOS devices. If Apple continues down the road of using not only phone numbers, but email addresses and eventually Facebook IDs as designated FaceTime “phone numbers,” then 500 million users would already have a FaceTime ID to use when all telephony goes VoIP.

Apple has the cash to buy Facebook outright (Facebook is valued at around US $25-35 billion), but will they? Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg seem to share a lot of traits (not to mention both having had movies made about them), but could two of the most powerful people in tech — with equally powerful egos — work together?

Does Apple want to buy Facebook? originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I have to say, I’m a little more interested lately in longer and more developed experiences for the iOS devices, which is one reason why I loved Game Dev Story so much. But there is still some space in my app diet for quick, pick-up-and-play experiences, and Tap Disc is one of those. Actually, “pick-up-and-play” might not be the right phrase to use — there is a lengthy tutorial with the game, and lots of things are happening. But at its core, Tap Disc is a pretty straightforward action game, and it’s clean and satisfying enough to be well worth the buck it’s selling for on the App Store right now.

The basic gameplay has you following a series of discs around the iPhone’s screen, and you tap the screen to create matching orbs for them to touch. Touch to create an orb, then line it up so the bouncing disc touches it at the right time. The twist is that the discs are all different colors, and the orbs you create change colors over time. For example, a white disc simply has to hit a white orb, which is the color it is when it’s first created. But a red disc can only hit an orb after it’s turned red — about a half second after you create it. You have to calculate the angles and time your orb placement just right in order to match colors and clear the discs.

It sounds complicated, but in practice, it’s not. What you end up with is a fun mix of a timing and angle game that’s pretty addictive. There is also a “preschool” mode for kids (much less complicated — just tap the moving objects to clear them), and there are a number of different difficulties and powerups to contend with. OpenFeint integration extends replayability, and the team is even offering a monthly contest with cash prizes for the game’s best players. Tap Disc is definitely worth checking out.

TUAW’s Daily App: Tap Disc originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tapmates Inc. is a privately held company based in Central Europe, and made of of 10 employees from Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States. They entered the App Store with Cookmate followed by many client apps. Their latest product is Dribbblr.

MO: What is Dribbblr and when was it released?

Robin Raszka: Dribbblr is a simple to use and beautifully designed Dribbble client for your iPad. So far it’s been an overwhelming success and the feedback has been incredible!

MO: Who is the target market for this app and what problem does it solve?

RR: Basically, the target market is the community around Dribbble (circa 5,000 registered users) plus everyone else who is looking for inspiration, design trends and has passion for *stalking* what the best designers in the world are working on right now.

The problem that Dribbblr solve’s is quite obvious, a better way to enjoy browsing Dribbble from your iPad. There are no subpages, no small thumbnails, just a stream with full size shots (images). The large iPad display provides a superb viewing experience.

MO: How long did Dribbblr take from the idea to the App store?

RR: We started working on Dribbblr right after Dribbble released their API. It was one month of hard and creative work. You can read more about the story behind Dribbblr on our blog.

MO:> Tell us a bit more about development. How man lines of code is there? What language is it written in?

Petr Reichl: Dribbblr is developed in Objective-C, as most of the iOS apps in the App Store. It has around 8k lines of code which surprised me a little bit as it is about the same amount of code as our first App Store product, Cookmate, which was a much bigger project from the functional point of view.

MO: What challenges did you face during development?

PR: The biggest challenge of development was probably performance. We work with plenty of images and a fast UI was required so we really had to work hard here. We have rewritten UISCrollView similar to UITableView so that we are recycling pages similar to the way Apple does it in the case of cells.

MO: How is developing an iPad app different from an iPhone app?

PR: Dribbblr is not yet available for iPhone but we were thinking about it at the beginning. The question was whether to use the Three20 framework as on our other projects or not. Unfortunately Three20 for iPad is still not in such a state that it would allow serious implementation so we had to go without it. I have to say that it complicated the situation a little bit and the development was more demanding than we expected at the beginning.

MO: Did it take long for your app to get approved, what was the approval process like for you?

PR: It took the app 13 days to get approved. I have to say we all were a bit nervous whether Apple would let the app through due to the in app purchase, which has caused problems on some of the projects we worked on in the past. Luckily in this case it is made in a very transparent way so it got approved without any problems. For sure apple could approve the app faster thanks to the fact that the app is free and pretty simple from the functionality point of view.

MO: How are you and how do you plan to market Dribbblr?

RR: The marketing plan for Dribbblr is very simple, personally I think the best PR is the app itself. If the community like’s the app, it will find it’s way to the target market automatically. I’m talking about users who became self-assigned ambassadors of the app and spreading the word on social networks on their own.

Another very powerful tool to market the app is reviews in media and on community websites focused on design and inspiration. There’s no plan for paid advertisement. These are the market strategies that we have found work the best, except for being promoted directly by Apple.

MO: Any new projects in the works for your company, Tapmates?

RR: You bet! We’re working on a new version of Cookmate for iPhone and iPad that will bring a totally new way for social cooking. Can’t say too much about it yet but it’s gonna be huge, I promise.

We’re also developing few tiny side projects for the App Store, for example the forthcoming nifty app focused on writing markdown on the iPad

MO: Finally, what is your favorite iPhone/iPad app?

RR: Basically, I don’t like many apps because of their look and feel. I’m using mostly native apps made by Apple like Notes, Calendar and Mail. There’s also a few “must have” apps and magazines on my iPad: Instapaper, Flipboard, Dropbox, Reeder and Twitter. I really like the Popular Science magazine app! I’m don’t play many games on iPad.

PR: Definately this would be Things and Instapaper. Just a pity that there are still some features missing in Things, but I did not find a better alternative yet that would cover iPad, iPhone and Mac OS X.

MO: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Best of luck to you with Dribbblr and your future projects.

The folks at Tapmates are currently looking to revolutionize cooking apps with a new version of Cookmate. You can keep up with what is going on with Tapmates by visiting their website or following Robin (@robinraszka) and Petr (@meap) on Twitter.

I am pretty confident in stating that the popularity of mobile apps is more than just a passing fad. While some may wish the App Store would go the way of the pet rock and bell bottoms, most people realize it is here to stay. However, some say HTML5 is the way to go for app development on mobile devices.

Will HTML 5 be the end of the App Store as we know it? Many developers are quick to embrace it because it it cross platform so time is not spent porting an app from one platform to another. It is also a relatively easy and cheap to get started developing, which opens up the space to many more aspiring app developers and in turn many more crappy apps.

Just think, no more waiting on approvals from Apple to get your app listed. How does 100% of the app price sound instead of 70%? These two things alone should be enough to make developers think about making the switch. If those two things are not enough, there is also the whole cross platform thing I mentioned earlier.

Do I really think HTML5 will be the downfall of the App Store? No way. While all the things I listed above sound too good to be true we all know how great a lot of apps are that were developed specifically for iOS. I find it hard to believe that someone can make a cross platform app as fun as ‘Cut the Rope’ or as nice looking as ‘Kinetic’. iOS has a horde of loyal developers content with cranking out apps for the iPhone and iPad. Most couldn’t care less about developing for other platforms.

What does the Mobile Orchard community think about cross platform development?

Core Graphics is a cool API on iOS. Developers can use it to customize their  UI with some neat effects. Most of this can be done without getting an artist involved… just tweak the code and see results instantly!

However, to many iOS developers – Core Graphics can be quite intimidating to begin with. Because it’s a fairly large API and it has plenty of snags to get caught in along the way – mastering its concepts can be quite a challenge.

Ray Wenderlich, founder of Razeware – a small iPhone development studio, has recently posted a very informative tutorial that takes the mystery out of Core Graphics. He has presented things in a step by step series of practical exercises.

His first article of the series, shows how to make a beautiful table view cell with Core Graphics. It covers how one can get started with Core Graphics, how to fill and stroke rectangles, how to draw gradients, and how to deal with 1 pixel-wide line issues.

In future articles in the series, he says that he will talk about how you can work on beautifying the rest of the app – the table view header, footer, and finishing touches.

Visit his blog post to see how you can get started and have some fun with Core Graphics on iOS!

The always insightful Stuart Dredge over at MobileEntertainment has crunched some numbers on Game Center’s actual popularity. Since Apple’s own gaming social network on the iPhone launched, I’ve heard lots of different things from developers in terms of how they’re implementing and using it. Some developers jumped in head-first, bringing all of their apps on board quickly, while others have only brought one or two apps on board at a time, waiting and seeing what their users are into. And some developers haven’t even started on it yet, instead waiting to see how adoption works.

So in order to get something resembling hard numbers, Dredge took the reported sales of a few popular App Store apps, and compared those to the number of players listed as playing them in Game Center. You can see the top few examples above — keep in mind that this is a picture painted with a roller rather than a fine brush, just created to give an idea of what’s happening rather than exact figures.

But there are some conclusions to draw — a title like Angry Birds, with over six million players, is only seeing about a quarter of those users using the Game Center integration. At the same time, a newer title like Cut the Rope has a majority of its players using Game Center. In other words, Game Center is still in the early adopter stage — the mass market of iPhone users hasn’t yet jumped on board. But users who seek out and find the latest and greatest apps (and Cut the Rope is a hit that’s only a few weeks old) are signed up and playing on Game Center already.

Continue reading Determining Game Center’s current popularity

Determining Game Center’s current popularity originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve written about MacBook decals in the past, but I couldn’t resist showing this one to you guys and gals (especially the comic book fans out there). Stuff Off Decals is selling a Justice League sticker for MacBooks. The sticker is designed in the Justice League animated series fashion and features (from left to right) Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman, The Flash, and Hawkgirl. Superman’s “S” symbol lights up when you overlay the sticker on your MacBook’s lid.

The sticker is made of high quality vinyl and leaves no residue should you decide to remove it. At US$18, it’s a little pricey, but for DC comic book lovers, this is a must have!

Thanks to TUAW reader John for the tip!

UPDATE: The creator of this decal (who had no idea I was going to write about it) just sent me an email. He is offering all TUAW readers 15% off the JLA decal as a thank you to TUAW readers for making his Iron Man decal a best seller after appearing on this site. Just enter “TUAW” on check out (will only work with Google checkout at this time, darn Paypal!) to get your 15% off! Sweet!

Turn your MacBook into the Justice League originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ok, this is a little weird, and a little gross, but if you’re as big a fan of Total Recall as I am, you’ll love it. One of the characters in that movie, named Quatto, actually lives in the stomach of another character, and rather than recreate the creepy effect with puppets or makeup, YouTube user minimatefactory just put some high resolution video of the character on his iPad, and then strapped it to his shirt to wear around.

The effect isn’t completely realistic, of course (it looks like he’s got a video screen on his stomach), but it is a clever Halloween costume, and clever goes a long way after a few drinks at a Halloween party. Just stay away from bobbing for apples — you don’t want the iPad getting wet or falling into someone’s candy bag to take home.

[via Cult of Mac]

iPad-equipped Quatto costume for Halloween originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[via MacStories]

Continue reading Driverless taxi gets called with an iPad

Driverless taxi gets called with an iPad originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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