Category: I-phone

According to M.I.C Gadget, Apple is canceling online iPhone 4 orders in Hong Kong in an attempt to thwart would-be resellers.

Recently, customers have either had their existing orders canceled or been prevented from placing new orders. Many shoppers received this email from Apple:

TUAWReport: Apple canceling iPhone 4 orders in Hong Kong originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

There’s no shortage of location-based search apps. One of my favorites is Around Me, but there are plenty of others. Smith Micro has come up with its own search app that has some nice additions, and misses a few things too.

The free app, called Locality, uses Google searching to find the nearest restaurants, pharmacies, hospitals, etc. It does that well, generating a list of places, or it can show them on a map. One nice feature is an ‘Events’ function, so you can see things that might be of special interest around you. Some things it found were local concerts, antique shows, and some commercial events like sales at local stores.

The app also features a selection of geo-tagged photos. They are provided by Panoramio, and it’s a nice addition to this compact little app. Sadly, the photos are only one way affairs. You can see submitted photos, but you can’t submit them from the Locality app. (Panoramio has a free app that lets you do this from your iPhone.) You can email the photos, or the app can give you directions to where the photo was taken. which is a useful feature. I’d like to see it do the same with pictures from your own camera roll.

TUAWLocality app does location based search with a few twists originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Halfbrick’s CEO, Shaniel Deo, talks about his companies app development success.

Zynga acquired Bonfire Studios on Tuesday, October 5th. Bonfire Studios is the developer of a game called ‘We Farm’ a Farmville clone.

Vijay Thakkar, technical director at Newtoy (Words with Friends) praises the iPhone’s short development time and speedy bug fixes.

Intel is developing a conversion tool in hopes of getting iPhone developers to port their apps to Intel based devices.

Gizmodo tells those hopeful for a Verizon iPhone early next year to keep holding their breath, it will be a couple of years before that happens.

This isn’t news but something I am sure will interest many of our readers. Sitepoint has an article on tips to get you started in iPhone development.

App Giveaway

This week we have a small app giveaway. If you would like to win a promo code for iPhone App ‘World Weather‘ please leave a comment telling us your favorite iPhone or iPad app. Make sure to use a valid email address so we can send you your promo code. We will select five comments at random to receive the World Weather promo code on October 11th.

Let’s face it iOS apps crash.. and sometimes it can be hard to figure out exactly why.

Apple has improved crash reporting, but I’ve found a nice open source library that takes things one step further.  What this library does is catch uncaught exceptions and trap signals and then goes back to the main run loop until it can send an E-mail to you containing a detailed report about the crash or place the crash info into your database.

The library is CrashKit from Parveen Kaler.  You can read Parveen’s informative writeup on Crashkit on his site at:
CrashKit: Helping Your iOS/iPhone Apps Suck Less

Looks like a very handy library.

Thanks for reading, please share this using the buttons below!

©2010 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

.

Share and Enjoy:

Today we presents collection of interesting 3DS Max tutorials.

read more

FaceTime is one of the most visible features of the iPhone 4, with much of the advertising for the newest iPhone showing off the emotionally-rich video chat capabilities that FaceTime provides. But if your friends are on another network or don’t have an iPhone 4, it’s impossible to use your phone to video chat with them.

Yahoo! and T-Mobile would like to change that. T-Mo announced earlier in the week that an upcoming Android phone, the HTC Slide, will come with two cameras arrayed much in the same manner as those on the iPhone. The Slide will also provide video chatting with any other phone equipped with two cameras, including the iPhone 4.

Since FaceTime is an Apple-specific feature, how is T-Mobile going to do this? Through Yahoo! Messenger. The current iOS app doesn’t appear to currently support video chats, but Yahoo!’s admission that the capability would be available for the iPhone 4 indicates that an upcoming version will take advantage of the built-in cameras.

Yahoo! Messenger will not only provide video chatting with other mobile devices, but it should also make it possible to share some “face time” with Yahoo! Messenger users on Macs and PCs as well. It’s expected that the HTC Slide from T-Mobile will be available prior to Christmas, hopefully bringing the new versions of Yahoo! Messenger for iOS and Mac OS X that will make possible video chatting for the holidays.

TUAWT-Mobile HTC Slide to provide non-FaceTime video chat with iPhone 4 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

iLuv, makers of numerous accessories for Apple devices, have released their first stereo speaker dock system specifically designed for the iPad — the iMM747.

Built to accommodate your iPad’s rather large stature, with a flexible docking structure that adjusts to fit your iPad, you’ll be able to listen to your music, use your apps and watch your favorite TV shows and movies with “orchestral tri-component sound in a speaker dock.” With separate drivers for treble, mid-range and bass, Howard Kim, the Sr. Marketing Manager at iLuv, says you’ll “fill any room in the house with superb audio.”

The iMM747 charges your iPad “ultra fast,” and syncs your iPad to iTunes while your iPad is still in the dock, too (using a sync cable).

The iMM747 is also compatible with the iPhone / iPod touch as well as just about every other iPod under the sun. And for your old CD player, the iMM747 comes with an auxiliary line input for any device with a 3.5mm output socket.

Being that there’s not much in the way of iPad speaker docks, if you’re in the market for one, the iMM747 looks like it’s worth checking out. Available in early October, the unit is priced at US$149.99 from the iLuv website.

[via IPADMODO]

TUAWFirst stereo iPad dock available from iLuv originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

WINtA is probably the best brand new game that I’ve seen so far at GDC Online 2010 (this week in Austin, Texas). It’s a title published by a group called OneBigGame, which is a nonprofit video game publisher. They commission and publish games, which are created for free by luminaries in the video game field, and then they sell them to customers for money that goes straight to charities around the world. Founder Martin de Ronde took the stage at GDC to allegedly talk about how to take an app from iPhone to the iPad, but what he actually did was show off this really amazing game and music platform, and he gave a road map to where the iPad version will eventually go.

“WINtA” stands for “War is Not The Answer,” which is what game creator Masaya Matsuura felt after September 11th, and that’s what he wanted to transfer into game form. WINtA itself is actually a rhythm game — Matsuura is well known in the gaming community for making PaRappa the Rapper, which is a highly regarded PlayStation game known for pioneering the genre that eventually launched Guitar Hero and Tap Tap Revolution. de Ronde approached Matsuura under the OneBigGame banner, asking if he would create a game to sell for charity, and with the help of Dutch developer Triangle Studios, Matsuura came up with WINtA. The app will be out on the App Store for free later this year.

Check out more, including a video of the demonstration, after the break.

TUAWGDC Online 2010: Hands-on and preview of WINtA originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Simple graphics, deep gameplay. That’s what the 2007 board game Wabash Cannonball promised and delivered. The Winsome train game, with a small print run of around 300 copies (we think), quickly sold out. The game was then licensed to Queen Games and re-released as Chicago Express. This version sold well enough that an expansion pack was released. Now, the game comes to the iOS market as an app called Wabash Cannonball [US$4.99]. It’s got everything (almost) that the earlier, nearly identical games have, but it’s all packed into a tiny screen – maybe a little too packed – along with a few digital friends to play against. Very different from your normal iPhone time-waster app, Wabash is a gamer’s game, and it deserves attention. The name might refer to a fictional train, but there’s a lot of real gameplay here. Read on for the full ride and to see if you’d like to hop aboard the Wabash Cannonball.

TUAWApp Review: Wabash Cannonball rolls in with a near-perfect score originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

In the professional guesswork that is estimating Apple’s sales numbers, numbers are varying wildly about just how many iPads Apple has sold.

According to Philip Elmer-DeWitt, the general consensus is that Apple has sold about 8.25 million iPads. He’s gathered quarterly estimates from many sources and compiled a list. They range from 3.80 million iPads sold (issued on September 28th by Brian Marshall of Gleacher & Co.) to 6.0 million (issued on October 1st by Robert Paul Leitao of Apple Finance Board).

As Philip points out, Apple sold 3.27 million iPads in the third quarter. Apple will hold its 4th quarter financial earnings conference call on October 18th, and TUAW will be live-blogging the event. Check back then to get the real numbers.

[Via MacDailyNews]

TUAWEstimates vary on number of iPads sold originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Yesterday afternoon on TUAW TV Live, I ran a 21-minute video that I put together that shows the features of the new Apple TV as well as the Apple Remote app for iPad. This was part of a special TUAW TV Live episode (which can be viewed in its entirety here) focusing on the Apple TV.

Since many readers might want to see how the Apple TV works without watching the whole hour-long TUAW TV Live episode, I’ve taken the liberty of posting two YouTube videos that show how the device works. I also have some opinions on the device, which I’m glad to share — I think version 2.0 of the Apple TV is a huge improvement over the first device in size, power efficiency, speed, price, and clarity. Apple still needs to increase the number of video sources (networks in particular) that can be streamed from the device, and AirPlay won’t go live for another month or so, but I already consider device the best $99 I’ve spent on tech equipment in 2010.

Check out the video (split into two pieces to fit onto YouTube) on the next page.

TUAWTUAW video review of the new Apple TV originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

If you are an iPhone gamer and haven’t tried Epic Citadel yet, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Epic Games wowed the crowd at the recent Apple event with the free demo, showing an astoundingly beautiful virtual town running in full 3D graphics on the iPhone and the iPad. Epic’s Mark Rein is here at GDC Online 2010 this week to talk to developers about Unreal Engine 3 on iOS and other platforms (he can’t keep from showing off the game running on Android, even when you tell him that you work for an Apple blog and don’t write about Android anyway), and I cornered him to chat about Epic Citadel and Project Sword, the game it’s serving as a demo for.

My first question was what drew Epic to a platform like the iPhone in the first place — the developer is known for titles like Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, which are big flashy titles that sell Microsoft’s platforms, not Apple’s. Rein told me that it was “the power of the hardware. It was capable of doing what we wanted it to do in mobile. That’s always been our driving philosophy, is when we have platforms that are powerful enough to run our technology, and there’s a good business case for supporting them, that we would.”

TUAWGDC Online 2010: Mark Rein on iOS and Epic Citadel originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Yet again, more analyst news regarding the iPad impacting laptop and netbook sales. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that estimated sales of the iPad for 2010 have more than doubled to 11 or 12 million units sold this year, with 20 million iPads expected to be sold in 2011 — which is still conservative according to some other analysts.

In contrast, the NPD Group estimates that sales of laptop units in the US rose by only 12% in the first eight months of this year as apposed to a 30% percent increase in sales last year for the same period. On top of that, NDP Group reports that unit sales were down 1% over July and August — the peak back-to-school season for such sales.

Naturally, the WSJ points to the sluggish economy for such a shift. The paper does also note that some shoppers are preferring to buy the iPad, even at a premium price, over cheaper laptops and netbooks, though the iPad represents only a fraction of portable computer sales overall.

The article suggests that the competition for consumers’ dollars will become even more fierce with the emergence of competing tablet devices from other manufacturers later this year and next year. But for now, there is still no doubt that Apple is leading the way with the iPad.

For the full WSJ article click here.

TUAWAnalyst: Sharp rise in iPad sales estimates originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Thanks to a couple of tips this morning, we note that iPhone 4 bumpers are once again available in the Apple Store online. The cases, which retail for US$29.99, were taken off the virtual shelves during the ‘Antennagate’ free case giveaway period, just expired.

Interestingly, Apple’s product images for the bumpers all include a product that isn’t on sale yet — the legendary, much-anticipated white iPhone 4.

Thanks Mike and Marc

TUAWApple Store restarts bumper case sales originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments