Category: Tutorials

We’ve heard horror stories of piracy from iPhone developers before, but PocketGamer has news of an iPad developer also suffering from a surprising amount of customers who likely didn’t actually pay for their software. Qwiboo says that its iPad app, Aqua Globs HD, is seeing about 50% of its customers on the OpenFeint leaderboards have obtained the app illegally. Vladimir Roth says that the number of users who have actually submitted an OpenFeint score is double the number of legitimately sold apps so far.

Now, you can bring up the usual arguments against worrying about a number like this — that pirates likely wouldn’t have purchased the game anyway, or that many of them would pay if given the chance — but that’s a significant number, especially for a system that’s supposed to be as closed as the iPad. Roth also says that piracy has been higher for him on the iPad than on the iPhone, and that pricing plays a big part. iPad apps tend to be more expensive (he says that they often don’t provide extra functionality, though that obviously differs from app to app), and customers who prefer universal versions don’t like paying twice for the same app.

Still, the app in question is $1.99 — that’s hardly breaking the bank. It’s disappointing to see that even with all of the authentication and verification built in to a platform like the App Store, piracy is still a significant issue.

TUAWiPad app dev sees 50% piracy rate originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I still haven’t seen an actual iPad arcade cabinet for sale (all the ones we’ve seen so far have been made by hobbyists for themselves), but here’s a pretty cool case/accessory for your iPhone or iPod touch. Pinball Magic is a little device that you can slide your handheld into, and with the help of a free app, you can play a full pinball game live on a little miniature table. There’s a real ball plunger, flipper buttons, a full LED backlit display, and even a Tilt detector, so you can hit all the usual lights and gadgets (albeit in an extremely small form factor) without throwing quarters in at the local arcade. Assuming they still have those local arcades — I haven’t seen one around in a while now.

Unlike the cardboard iPad arcade units, this one’s on sale and ready to go — you can pick it up from Best Buy for US $39.99. Sure, that’s a little steep (especially since it only works with the one app), but it’s a small price to pay to take yourself back to those heady days of reaching for high scores while pushing a little silver ball up and down ramps. If you happen to pick one up and try it out, let us know how it works for you.

[via TouchArcade]

TUAWPinball Magic turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a tiny pinball machine originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last summer, Ten One Design sponsored a contest for artists who were using the Pogo Stylus with drawing or painting apps on the iPhone. The contest was quite popular, and some of the entries were astoundingly good.

Well, things change, and now the canvas of choice is the iPad. Today, Ten One Design announced the 2010 Capacitive Canvas Challenge, also known as the 2nd Annual Pogo Art Contest. Grab an iPad, a Pogo Sketch, and your favorite drawing app, work up some beautiful art, and then post it to the contest site before 11:59 PM EST on October 29th. If you’re picked as the Grand Prize Winner, you’ll get a booq Boa squeeze laptop bag filled with $1000 worth of goodies (including $300 cash, a Twelve South Compass iPad stand, and the lovely DODOcase).

There will be four secondary winners as well, who will receive some goodies from Ten One Design, an iTunes Gift Card, and an iPad stand or case. You have to be at least 15 years old to enter, and you must use the Pogo Sketch for your iPad artwork. Finger painting is not allowed. The winners will be selected on the basis of Artistic Skill, Creativity / Originality, Realism, and Judge’s Choice, and you’ll see the works of the winners on November 5th on the Ten One website. Good luck to all who enter! Maybe we’ll see the work of some creative TUAW readers up there in November.

TUAWTen One Design sponsoring Pogo Sketch iPad art challenge originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gather up the kids and press the software update button: the latest Security Update (2010-005) for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 is now on the prowl. The full list of fixes is below, but the headlines include a patch for an embedded font vulnerability, network interceptions, ClamAV antivirus bundled with OS X Server, malicious PDF and PNG file protection, and updated versions of PHP and Samba.

The 84 MB update (for 10.6.4 users) will require a reboot. Enjoy!

TUAWSecurity Update 2010-005 now available originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Disney buying Tapulous was one of the most high-profile App Store acquisitions so far, and here are the first fruits of that partnership. First up, Disney reports that Tapulous has been integrated into the rest of the company — the studio is now fully part of the “Disney Mobile” division, so all future releases will come from the Disney Mobile name rather than the Tapulous brand. That contradicts with the actual App Store listing at the moment — there’s no mention of Disney in any of Tapulous’ app listings. But that information can take a while to change, so we’ll have to see if Disney updates those listings.

Second, the studio’s first game under the Disney banner is out now — Katy Perry Revenge is a Tap Tap Revenge-style title built specifically for Katy Perry songs. There are ten songs from the pop singer in the app, from “I Kissed a Girl” to “Teenage Dream,” and there’s lots of other fan-specific material, as well as a Facebook connection to share scores and updates. It’s available for US $4.99, the same price as Tapulous’ other artist-targeted Revenge titles.

So it sounds like things are both different and the same for Tapulous — they’ve been brought into the company as a whole, but they’re either cleaning out the queue of old projects (this new game easily seems as if it could have been done without Disney’s help), or continuing to work on the same type of app as before. We’ll have to see what Tapulous releases in the future now that they’re brought into the Disney Mobile division.

TUAWTapulous integrated into Disney Mobile, releases Katy Perry Revenge originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The A.P. is reporting the story of a Dallas man who went out of town to visit relatives 1400 miles away in Hartford, Conn. While he was there he got an alert from his iCam app running on his iPhone that motion had been detected in the house — which turned out to be two intruders trying to get in, and eventually throwing a brick through a glass door to gain access.

He called 911 and the next motion alert he received was the arrival of police officers with guns drawn. It isn’t clear from the story if the burglars got away with any loot, but certainly iCam did work and relayed the message to the owner of the house.

We’ve reviewed iCam before. I use it to keep an eye on the house and pets when I’m away, and for the cost of US $4.99 plus a couple of webcams it really is a great low-cost security system. The software can be set to take a rapid series of still photos when motion is detected, so the police should get some shots of the burglars to help make a case when and if they nab them.

[via the Dallas Morning News]

TUAWMan watches his home being robbed on his iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s another update from the folks at Box.net on how the iPad deployment at D7 Consulting is going. Through TUAW, Box.net found a company to give 20 free iPads to. Box.net helped D7 set up a workflow that’s built and run around Apple’s tablet and their service.

The first fruits of that collaboration are starting to grow, and as you can see in the video above, Box.net is getting some solid feedback from D7. Box.net is looking at using that feedback to develop future features for their software, including some methods for offline access. Another exciting forthcoming feature concerns more ways to share not only text and documents but also “rich content,” including drawings and audio notes about those documents.

CIO magazine talked to D7’s president Joseph Daniels, who described five lessons he’s learned in implementing the project so far. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, especially if you’re considering using iPads on your job. For the rest of us, what’s probably most surprising is that iPads can take all kinds of abuse without having issues. The one problem D7 has had so far is overheating; on a job in the deserts of Las Vegas, an iPad did overheat on them after being in the sun. But 20 minutes in the AC got it back up and working just fine. Another problem is a lack of enterprise support from Apple directly. Don’t forget that, while it has a lot of applications on the job, the iPad is still a consumer-targeted device, and D7 has bumped up against that designation a few times already.

It’s very interesting stuff. It looks like this collaboration is paying off for all involved, including those of us who are just watching to learn from the sidelines. We’ll continue to watch how the project is going, and we’ll provide you with another on-location look at the project here in a while. In the meantime, if you have questions for Box.net or D7, post them in the comments below. If Sean Lindo (of Box.net) or Terrell Woods (of D7) don’t reply directly, we’ll make sure to ask in the future.

TUAWBox.net’s iPad project at D7 Consulting: How the iPad works at work originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Acting on the suggestion of the always awesome Bruce Stewart, I recently took a look at several QBooks selections from New Zealand-based developers Kiwa Media. Picture books present a real challenge for app developers. They have to balance end-user reading abilities (which are usually quite limited) with enough application richness to make younger readers want to come back, again and again, to the same story. I think that Kiwa Media has done a surprisingly good job in delivering value for the app dollar.

Kids’ books, especially for younger readers, suffer from being very, very short. It’s common to sit down with a stack of a dozen books and easily read through them in a single session. So, how do you add compelling content to something so minimal in duration? Kiwa Media created the idea of the “QBook.”

TUAWQBooks bring kids’ picture books to life on the iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If iPhone owners are sometimes susceptible to a wee bit of Android envy, one reason might be Google Goggles. If you’re not familiar with the Android app, Google Goggles uses pictures from your mobile phone to search the Web.

Point your phone’s camera at a Russian restaurant menu, and it is translated for you. Take aim at a landmark, and find out about the history of the place. Take a photo of a book cover, and you’ll get a summary of the contents, bookstores that carry the title, and pricing. Or there’s always the feature shown above — the Nearby Places Overlay — where you pan your phone’s camera on a street and see labels describing every business.

According to The Register, iPhone users won’t have to wait very long to put on their Google Goggles. Google Staff Engineer David Petrou, speaking at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Monday, mentioned in passing that the app could be released for iPhone by the end of 2010. That, of course, assumes that the app makes it through Apple’s approval process — that’s never a sure thing, as the Google Voice team could share with their colleagues.

[via CNET Web Crawler]

TUAWiPhone users may soon be putting on their Google Goggles originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last weekend provided not one, but two opportunities for me to do some upgrades to some “old” MacBooks to bring ’em up to workable condition. To start with, one client of mine wanted to get rid of an unused MacBook, so I decided to purchase it from her as a machine for training. The other client had one of the original 15″ Intel Core Duo MacBook Pros and doesn’t want to spend the money on a new machine. In both cases, the machines were running older versions of Mac OS X, had insufficient RAM, and had hard drives that were both slow and small. The following post is a textbook example of how you can bring new life to slightly old Macs by just spending enough money to upgrade the memory, OS, and hard disk drive.

For the MacBook, I decided that I wanted to max out its RAM, add more hard drive space, and speed up the hard drive while I was at it. I wanted to set up the machine with Mac OS X 10.6 and a Boot Camp partition running Windows 7, with an alternative external boot drive containing Mac OS X Server 10.6. The machine’s initial setup: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 160GB 5400 RPM SATA hard disk. I chose to max out the RAM to a total of 6GB, purchase a 500GB 7200 RPM drive for the internal drive, and procure a USB 2.0 bus-powered external shell for the existing drive. This MacBook was also running Mac OS X 10.5.8, and I wanted to update it to the latest version of Snow Leopard. Click “Read More” to find out how the upgrades went.

TUAWMacBook makeovers bring new life to a couple of old laptops originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook has posted some pretty impressive numbers regarding its mobile users recently, including a developer saying there are more than 150 million active mobile Facebook users. The site itself has more than 500 million members.

– 12 million are using the Android client
– Nearly 59 million are using the Blackberry client
– 105 million are using the iPhone client*
– The rest are using clients built for Palm, T-Mobile’s Sidekick and more.

*Note these numbers were pulled at 11:20 a.m. EST and are updated frequently.

Wait a minute … 105 million? Steve Jobs indicated at WWDC in June that the 100 millionth iOS device (spanning iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) would be sold that month. With the flurry of iPhone 4 sales since then, it’s no surprise that there’s more than 100 million iOS devices out there in the wild. But are all of them really running Facebook?

You can log into multiple Facebook accounts from a single iOS device, and those probably count. The number provided by Facebook isn’t the number of downloads the app has had, but the number of people actually using it. The client itself is still ranked among the top 10 free App Store apps. Even so, a penetration rate hovering somewhere around 90 percent — if you take into account the number of iOS devices sold since June and the fact that there’s not a Facebook app for the iPad — is a little hard to swallow.

[via Mobile Entertainment]

TUAWFacebook iPhone app has 105m users? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With the sweet glass-fronted, LED-backed displays on the newer MacBooks, Apple seemed a step closer to giving us touchscreen displays beyond the current ultra-portable devices. Patently Apple has recently unearthed a couple of Apple patent filings that seem to point in that direction, not just for MacBooks, but for a future iMac as well.

Apple is clearly driving very quickly toward mass adoption and integration of its iOS software, and these patents certainly support that. As far as the “iMac Touch” patent, apparently you’d get the best of both worlds as far as Apple’s OS offerings are concerned. Based on the orientation of the display, the iMac would switch between Mac OS and iOS. Lay it flat, you get iOS. Stand it up, you get Mac OS.

Obviously there are many Apple patents reported that never will see the light of day, but I believe this one has some meat to it. For an iMac refresh, this seems a very logical update. Though it makes sense we could see the same thing in a MacBook update, I’d say we’ll see an iMac sporting this dual-OS first.

TUAWPatents hint at iMac Touch and touchscreen MacBooks originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The past few weeks have been fascinating for Apple watchers. The business press has been reporting that the brand, formerly a pariah in the buttoned-down world of corporate IT, is now being accepted with open arms. We had a story yesterday about the growth of Mac sales in the government and enterprise markets, and now the Wall Street Journal is reporting on how the iPad is finding a home in the business world.

In the WSJ Tech piece, reporter Ben Worthen notes how the iPhone was banned by companies when it first came out in 2007 for being inappropriate for the workplace. The iPad, however, has been quickly embraced by companies.

One such success story cited in the WSJ piece talks about Chicago-based law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP. The company pre-ordered 10 iPads prior to the release of the device in April so that they could learn how iPads could be used with the company’s internal systems. The technology department at the firm now supports more than 50 attorneys with iPads, and they plan on issuing iPads as a less-expensive alternative to laptops soon.

TUAWWSJ says iPads gaining acceptance in corporations originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TUAWNo Comment: Inception explained for Mac users originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The BBC reports that a web scam is affecting a number of iTunes accounts that are linked to PayPal. Amounts ranging up to $4,700 were reported on Twitter and through Techcrunch as being stolen.

All signs point to users falling for an online scam known as phishing. People will get e-mails that look similar to those from official sources urging them to change their user name and password for security reasons. They’ll be redirected to a fake website which collects the credentials.

The perpetrators then use the information to engage in further scams, such as the royalty scam we reported on earlier today. MobileMe was a target for phishing in the past. There are also new ways of ferreting this information being developed, such as tabnabbing that could even fool those who are familiar with these sorts of scams.

One of the best defenses against phishers on a Mac is to invest in 1Password. If you click on a fraud e-mail and it tries to get you to change a password, it’s going to detect the phishing site and steer you away.

Otherwise, use common sense. Neither Apple, PayPal or any legitimate company will send you an e-mail asking for personal account information. If you get an e-mail asking for your full name, Social Security Number, credit and/or debit card numbers, passwords, etc., it is always fraud. Likewise, never click on an e-mail link to access your account. Go directly to the web site itself. If you have a parent or child that is not web-savvy, double check to make sure that they have not fallen for any of these scams.

If you are a victim of this, contact PayPal immediately. The company told the BBC that it will reimburse any unauthorized charges.

[All Things D reports that Apple is denying any iTunes-specific security breaches, adding to the likelihood that the account credentials were phished. -Ed.]

TUAWThousands stolen through iTunes/Paypal scam originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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