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I spotted this great piece of graffiti art on the streets of Hollywood while heading home last night, and thought you TUAW readers would enjoy it. Unfortunately, I have no idea who actually put this up — there wasn’t any tag or signature on it, and it was just on a wall otherwise covered with various other pieces and posters.

But in a way, that made it even better — just one person’s anonymous sentiment that echoes what so many of us feel. And I can tell you that the excellent detail and stark spray of the whole thing (if you can’t tell, the whole picture was about eight feet tall, and really stood out on the corner) was pretty awesome to see. Thanks, LA artist, and thank you to the late great Steve Jobs as well.

Spotted in Los Angeles: Thank you, Steve originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 08 Oct 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since the iPhone 4S features the same A5 processor as the iPad 2, owners of Apple’s current-gen tablet have wondered if it’s possible that Siri, Apple’s new voice assistant, might be offered on the iPad 2. While my colleague Erica Sadun’s answer to that is “Don’t hold your breath,” I only agree with her up to a point: I don’t think there are any technical hurdles whatsoever to running Siri on an iPad 2, and the fact that the device doesn’t currently feature voice controls is meaningless. I think Siri will come to the iPad 2 eventually — certainly not right away, but possibly within the next six months.

Voice Control as it now exists on the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 doesn’t function on the iPad or iPad 2, but there’s a reason for that: the existing commands would be essentially useless on those devices. The pre-Siri version of Voice Control allows you to use voice commands to control music playback, dial phone numbers or initiate FaceTime calls, and ask the device for information about the current time or currently playing song. That’s about all Voice Control does. Those functions are all useful features on a device that spends much of its time in your pocket, but on an iPad they make very little sense.

On the other hand, Siri’s commands would be immensely useful on the iPad. The same things Apple showed off at the “Let’s talk iPhone” event, like setting up Reminders and Calendar events or looking up information on Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha, would be very handy to have — so handy that I don’t see why Apple wouldn’t offer them. Apple has long been a company that designs products its own workers want to use, and it’s hard to imagine that no one in Cupertino has thought about how Siri could vastly expand the power and capability of the iPad 2.

Since the iPad 2 has both a microphone and the same A5 as the iPhone 4S, there shouldn’t be any technical reason why Siri wouldn’t function well on that device. Some have speculated that the iPhone 4S has 1 GB of RAM to the iPad 2’s 512 MB (a claim that will have to wait for an iFixit teardown before it can be proven or disproven), but my TUAW colleagues don’t believe that Siri’s functions should be so RAM-intensive that they require such massive amounts of memory.

In fact, we’ve done some digging into Siri and found that most of the actual work of understanding voice commands gets offloaded to external servers. In essence, the iPhone 4S and its built-in processing functions determine what you said, while Apple’s servers translate that into what you meant and send that information back to your iPhone. The pre-processing that takes place on the device itself may be too taxing for an A4 processor, but the iPad 2’s A5 should theoretically be able to handle it just fine. Perhaps even better — Apple has a habit of underclocking CPUs for the iPhone in the interest of power management, so the iPad 2’s A5 is likely to outperform that of the iPhone 4S for many functions.

The fact that Apple hasn’t yet said one way or another whether Siri will come to devices other than the iPhone 4S also doesn’t mean much. The iPhone 4, 3GS, and newer iPod touch models had an exclusive on multitasking for almost exactly six months before iOS 4.2 debuted and brought that feature to the iPad, and the same thing may end up being true for Siri.

Here’s what I think is the most likely scenario: Siri will remain an iPhone 4S exclusive at least until the third tier of international rollouts completes in December. In fact, Apple will probably wait until after the end of the holiday quarter and bring Siri to the iPad 2 in the first quarter of 2012. Not only will this give market incentive for people to buy the iPhone 4S by having Siri as a device-exclusive feature during the holiday period, it’ll also give Apple’s servers and Siri’s algorithms time to adjust and scale to the number of inquiries it’ll receive.

Once Siri’s beta period ends and international rollouts for the iPhone 4S are reasonably complete, that’s the perfect time to bring Siri to the iPad 2 in a dot-update to iOS 5. By that time Siri and its supporting infrastructure will be more mature and able to handle the extra load of adding support for one more device type, and it should also help alleviate the typical post-holiday quarter sales slump.

As for the other devices in Apple’s iOS stable, like the iPod touch, iPhone 4, and iPhone 3GS, I don’t expect them to ever see support for Siri. Siri’s developers have already confirmed that many compromises were required to get the service running on the iPhone 3GS, and it’s probably the same story for iOS devices with an A4 processor. The 2012 model iPod touch will likely be updated to an A5 processor, however, so we might see Siri support for next year’s iPod touch.

For the time being, Siri remains an iPhone 4S exclusive and one we have yet to test for ourselves. We look forward to putting this innovative feature under our interrogation lights once the iPhone 4S is released on October 14.

Why Siri should (and probably will) come to iPad 2 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jeff Rock happened to notice a push notification on his iPhone after installing Shazam. He checked it and it turned out to be an advertisement that had popped up. Since it didn’t seem like expected behavior (push notification of an advert?), Jeff tweeted the Shazam folks to ask about it. Instead of a) Apologizing and trying to sort it out, b) Taking him seriously and helping troubleshoot, or c) Ignoring him entirely, they chose d) Tell Jeff it was clearly his fault.

Not so fast there, Shazam…missing the point he was trying to make, they told him that he must have turned notification on himself and needed to turn them off. Let me just point out that his complaint was not that he received A notification, it was that he received an AD as a notification. Telling them so got him the reply that he had clearly opted-in to notification at some point.

Jeff, trying to be more clear, quoted back chapter and verse from the iOS Program Standard Agreement that this particular “feature” was violating. This got a different response at least; now they say they’ll “look into it”.

For Jeff in particular, I can see how this would be extra frustrating. He’s a developer himself, co-founder of Mobelux who built the app that is now the official iOS Tumblr client. It seems the number of “Can you believe I got rejected for that!?” incidents is in decline, but with the number of apps that still get rejected for small reasons, it is odd this particular violation happened to make it through the approval process.

Shazam violates Developer Agreement, blames Jeff Rock originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 08 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony Pictures has successfully bid for the rights to turn Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs into a motion picture. Deadline reports the deal is worth between one to three million dollars and headed by producer Mark Gordon. Deadline suspects bidding had already been taking place for film rights, but recent events have intensified interest.

Sony Pictures is responsible for the Oscar-winning film The Social Network, a semi-biographical account of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook. Even though Sony Pictures has apparently secured film rights, any film version of Steve Jobs is likely to be years away from seeing release in theatres, which may slightly help alleviate the turmoil some of us might feel at the news of this film coming so soon after his death.

Pirates of Silicon Valley, another semi-biographical film portraying a young Steve Jobs, debuted on TNT in 1999. Needless to say, there’s a lot of Steve Jobs’s life that movie couldn’t have covered. As long as the film version of Steve Jobs is handled tastefully and with dignity (and isn’t released while all of our emotions are still raw), it’s got my support.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs will be released October 24.

Sony Pictures acquires rights to Steve Jobs biopic originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 08 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are a few sales going around this weekend — most of them are in tribute to the late, great Steve Jobs.

• Steph Thirion’s Eliss is free in tribute to Jobs and his life.
• RPG puzzler Crystal Soul is also free.
• Line-drawing air combat title Pigs in Trees is free for a day.
• The official Jaws game is free as well, to celebrate the release of its sequel.
• And so is Chicken Escape and its iPad counterpart. That’s a lot of free apps!
• Gameloft is having a Columbus Day sale, with Modern Combat 2, 9mm, The Settlers, Sacred Odyssey, and Final Fantasy-alike Eternal Legacy all on sale for just 99 cents. Their HD versions are on sale as well, so some great deals there.
• All of Arianesoft’s apps are on sale this weekend, including the Minecraft-inspired puzzler Terracraft.
• Trainz Simulator on the iPad is just 99 cents, a must-have for any train fans.
• And Anomaly Warzone Earth (and its HD version) is still on sale at just 99 cents. If you haven’t picked that one up yet, you’re crazy. The iPad game especially is amazing.

Once again, there’s plenty of good stuff out there to play this weekend.

iOS apps on sale and free this weekend originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T is reportedly pressuring Apple to advertise the 14.4 Mbps theoretical maximum download speed of the iPhone 4S as “4G” in the iPhone’s status bar. Given AT&T’s aggressive attempts to market HSPA+ as 4G, that’s not surprising. What is surprising is that according to This is my next, Apple is apparently bowing to that pressure and will show “4G” in the iPhone 4S status bar. AT&T has confirmed it is “working with Apple” on the matter.

While HSPA+ is faster than the standard supported by the iPhone 4 and earlier phones, it is not “true” 4G even if AT&T is advertising it that way. Given the litigious nature of the mobile industry, particularly any time Apple’s involved, it seems like a terrible mistake for Apple to bow to AT&T and advertise a feature the iPhone 4S doesn’t actually offer.

If AT&T and Apple do indeed tout “4G” in the iPhone 4S status bar, you can be virtually certain you’ll be seeing the following headline or some variant of it all over the Web very soon afterward: “Class action lawsuit begins over false ‘4G’ iPhone claims.” You can be just as certain that various pundits will go out of their way to blame Apple more than AT&T. It’s all so very predictable that it’s hard to imagine what possible advantage Apple sees in agreeing to AT&T’s proposal.

We’ve dug through the iOS 5 firmware in an attempt to locate icons for 4G status in the iPhone 4S status bar. We weren’t expecting to find such an icon in iOS 5.0, and we didn’t — all that’s there are the icons for EDGE, GPRS, and 3G (UMTS). If Apple is indeed planning on hyping 4G in the status bar, it’s going to have to come about in a future iOS update.

Apple reportedly working with AT&T to display ‘4G’ in status bar originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kitty is a US$4.99 virtual cat. Developed by Alex Komarov (that same guy who created that marvelous accordion application demonstrated at the iPad roll-out), Kitty provides an interactive virtual pet-ownership experience.

I am clearly not the target audience for this app. I have a daughter though, who loves cats and loves apps. I decided to test it out with her.

After spending a while exploring the app, my gradeschooler was quickly looking for some other game to engage in.

“It’s a little annoying,” she explained to me. “I don’t like her purring. She just won’t stop the [raspy gagging sound].” When I asked her to elaborate, she said, “At first, she really just seemed to hate me. She kept making [angry rawr sounds]. And then, it’s kind of hard to wake her up.”

In other words, the cat was acting like a cat.

This application is huge. It takes up 108 MB on your iPad, and works far better on the faster iPad 2 than the original version, as we discovered.

It also worked better for me as a tech demo than an actual application. The graphics are phenomenal — your touches seem to interact with the fur, you can see Kitty breath in and out.

Unfortunately, the cat is a bit too realistic. Wake her from her nap and she gets pretty cranky. Unlike a puppy, she has absolutely no interest in socializing, being petted, or otherwise playing.

I suspect the target audience for this app is going to be quite small children, who don’t mind that Kitty presents an interaction challenge.

As for this adult, my patience wore thin really quickly.

Love the accordion. Gonna pass on the cat.

Daily iPad App: Kitty originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Maybe it’s just me, but I love it when my machines talk to me. If my Mac could read the news when I woke up, tell me the temperature, and so on, wouldn’t it be like a real personal assistant? Well, Tweet Speaker (US$2.99, App Cubby Software) is like your own little robotic reader for your Twitter feed. How does it work? Surprisingly well, with a few quirks inherent to text-to-voice translations.

Tweet Speaker is beautifully designed, with wood grain and a logical layout. The interface is similar to a radio, but instead of a dial you’re looking at a timeline, and you can start “playing” your timeline with a play button to hear the iPhone’s built-in voice read your Twitter streams. Tweet Speaker allows you to pick specific feeds as well, like mentions, or any lists you have set up. You can add multiple accounts and you can change the speed at which the streams are read (the speed of the voice).

While more voices are “coming soon,” the built-in male voice is perfectly usable. Tweet Speaker is smart enough to read the name associated with a Twitter handle, so instead of reading “superpixels” in my case, it would read “Victor Agreda Jr” and so forth. Plus, the app reads RT as “retweet” and manages to interpret a few other common abbreviations and other Twitter quirks (like hashtags). It will also take shortened links and read the headline associated with them, which is most helpful.

There can be some unintentionally hilarious moments with Tweet Speaker, and I’m not just talking about how it reads cursing with aplomb — job is pronounced like the biblical person Job, for example. And the app did crash on me once or twice. Still, hearing “Engadget says…” followed by the latest headlines and links is a lot of fun. It’s also pretty useful if you drive a lot or just can’t look at your screen. With support for Tweet Markers and Airplay, Tweet Speaker actually goes beyond mere novelty and can be a fun, efficient way to listen to your Twitter feeds without having to stare at a screen.

Tweetspeaker is a fun diversion from your everyday Twitter app originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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