While iOS 4 is a significant upgrade to Apple’s multi-touch operating system, it is not without its quirks. And one of these quirks (an extremely annoying one) is the Nike+ app. Simply put, the app is so buggy that it is almost unusable (the operative word here being “almost,” since it takes a lot of fiddling around to get it to work correctly).

A search for “Nike+ iOS 4” on the Apple and Nike support forums and Google will produce a smorgasbord of user complaints. I’ll address some of those here and offer some possible remedies.

TUAWNike plus is a minus on iOS 4 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Released back in April, Chaos Rings for the iPhone became a runaway hit and a top seller soon after its debut on the App Store. Reviewers praised the title from Square Enix, and many of them felt that the US$12.99 iPhone title could easily have been a successful game on the Nintendo DS or Sony’s PSP at more than twice the price.

Square Enix promised that the game would be coming to the iPad, and it has delivered on that promise. Chaos Rings for iPad has just debuted and is now available for $15.99 on the US App Store. As far as we can tell from the screen shots, it’s essentially the same game as the iPhone version, but the resolution is bumped up to the iPad’s 1024 x 768, which allows for crisper details and a less cramped UI.

To celebrate the launch of Chaos Rings for iPad, Square Enix has reduced the price of all of its App Store games for the next two weeks. Chaos Rings for iPhone, for example, has gone from $12.99 to $9.99. Final Fantasy I has gone from US$8.99 to $6.99, and Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes has been deeply discounted from US$9.99 to $4.99. Square Enix’s games tend to be higher-priced than most others on the App Store (and deservedly so, given the quality of its titles), so if you’ve been holding off on checking out some of these titles because of pricing, now’s the time to jump in.

TUAWChaos Rings comes to iPad – all Square Enix games on sale originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the best things about Mac OS X is its built-in support for PDF files. Instead of testing your sanity while you wait (sometimes it can seem like forever) for Adobe Acrobat to open a PDF file, you can use Preview.app to open them up quickly. However, built-in PDF support allows you to do other neat things as well. Here are five of my favorites.

Print
At the top of the list is the ability to create a PDF from almost any document. Whether it’s a Word or Pages document, a spreadsheet, or a Web page, in most instances you’ll be able to create PDFs out of them. Many Windows users print to a PDF printer in order to create a PDF file, and in a similar manner, creating PDFs on Mac OS X involves selecting the print option from the app that you’re working in. Within the app, click on “File” and then select “Print.” Then, you’ll be presented with a dialog box with a “PDF” button on the left. Click on this button and select “Save as PDF.”

Annotate
Once you’ve created your PDF, you can annotate it. Open up your PDF in Preview.app, click on “View,” and select “Show Annotations Toolbar.” After doing so, a toolbar will appear on the bottom left of your document. Alternatively, the toolbar will also be displayed if you select any of the annotate options under the “Tools” menu. Annotations include the ability to create text boxes (useful for filling out forms), add notes, or highlight and create shapes (among other things).

Rearrange
You can also move pages around within Preview.app (like rearranging the songs in an iTunes playlist). Simply choose “Contact sheet” or “Thumbnail” view from the sidebar, and then drag and drop your pages as you see fit.

Bookmarks
Let’s say that a couple of pages within a PDF interest you, and you want to revisit them later. To do this, click on “Bookmarks” in Preview.app and select “Add Bookmark” (or use the Cmd+D shortcut). One of the neat things about this feature is that, even if your PDF isn’t open, you can still access your bookmarks.

Crop
I’ve made no secret about my fondness of Preview.app’s image editing ability, and this extends to PDFs as well. One neat image editing feature for PDFs is the ability to select an area and create a new image based on this selection. To do this in the PDF, click on the “Select” tool, select an area, and copy it. Then, in Preview.app, click on “File,” select “New from clipboard,” and voila, your selection is in a new document. This document can be saved in a variety of formats, including PDF, JPG, and PNG.

PDF parsing and rendering are core features of Mac OS X and iOS. While providing for native support for PDF files, it also served as the foundation for the recently released Web-based jailbreak for the iPhone.

TUAWMac 101: Five tips for working with PDF files in Mac OS X originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is great! Photographer Jordan Hollender and musician Scott Harris put together this music video that covers Survivor’s classic anthem and uses only iPad apps as instruments. The video itself was recorded with a couple of Canon HDSLR video cameras, but as you can see in the embedded version above, all of the music is created with iPad apps. Unfortunately, they don’t identify the apps used, but that sounds like a great job for you TUAW commenters. I think I saw Pianolo HD being played on the floor there, and Pocket Drums is being used as percussion, but I couldn’t find the guitar app or the DJ app that they are using.

Of course, what I really want to know is where he got that sweet lightning bolt iPad strap. The video’s great, though. Apparently it was all lit in one day and shot in another. There’s no word on how long it took to make the song, but with the iPad involved, it was probably both magical and revolutionary.

(Thanks, Rachel!)

TUAWi(Pad) of the Tiger originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve covered the issue tangentially before, but in case our guides on EPUB and the process itself haven’t been enough to inspire you would-be authors to self-publish your book in iBooks, Greg Mills has a step-by-step guide just for you. Of course, the hardest part may be actually writing the book, but once you’ve gotten that out of the way, you’re just a format check, a registration, and an upload away from becoming an e-published author.

It’s really not complicated, and while there are a few hoops to jump through (you need to make sure that your files match up exactly to the store’s format, and then, of course, you need to let Apple know that you’re legit and responsible), Mills’ steps make the process almost completely transparent. The toughest part (besides the technical tweaking and forms to fill out) might be going through the ISBN application process, but even that’s just standard bureaucracy.

It’s pretty amazing that with just a standard Mac, a little patience, and the right information, almost anybody can publish on Apple’s iBooks store. If you go through the whole process and get a title published, send us a tip, and let us know how it went.

TUAWHow to publish an Apple iBook originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Solipskier is kind of a mix of the growing line drawing genre and the classic Line Rider game. A little headphone wearing skier (at least he wears headphones as long as he can keep them on) travels along a snow ridge that you actually draw with your finger as you play the game; he speeds up or slows down based on the slope that you trace out with your finger. The gameplay is simple to pick up, but it turns out to be pretty deep. You can draw quick ramps to make him jump, or you can draw sliding slopes that really send the guy moving along through all of the gates, tunnels, and jumps that get placed in your path.

There’s a really great pick-up-and-play vibe to the title, and it’s fun enough to keep you coming back again and again. If you don’t believe me, give it a shot online right now for free. If you enjoy it enough to spend the money, you can grab a universal version on the App Store for just US $2.99.

TUAWTUAW’s Daily App: Solipskier originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple (finally) released iOS 4.0.2 and iOS 3.2.2 firmware to patch the PDF exploit, the very large security holes exploited by @comex in the 2nd incarnation of jailbreakme.com. The only problem is they outright abandoned iPhone 2G and iPod Touch 1G users! and on the other hand iOS 4.0.2, 3.2.2 is NOT jailbreakable ATM which means all other iDevices running iOS 4.0.1 or lower are still vulnerable.

Even though Apple acknowledges in their security update the severity of these holes, they left iPhone 2G and iPod Touch 1G owners high and dry — completely vulnerable to truly malicious variants of jailbreakme (these variants aren’t out yet, but they’re sure to come!).

Luckily for Apple, the Jailbreak community isn’t so callous. All the iPhone 2G, iPod Touch 1G and all other iDevices users running iOS 4.0.1 and do NOT want to update to iOS 4.0.2 to keep their iDevice jailbroken, can still patch the PDF exploit without updating to iOS 4.0.2 firmware.

Saurik, the guy behind Cydia and a respected member of the Dev-team has released the PDF Patch, a fix for PDF exploit, in Cydia. The PDF Patch is now available in Cydia for free and you can download and install it now.

PDF Patch fixes the security hole that let Comex develop JailbreakMe 2.0 and could potentially be used to inject malicious software on your device. Open the Cydia, search for PDF Patch and install it. That’s it! you have secured your iPhone 4, 3GS, 3G, 3G, iPod Touch 3G, 2G, 1G and iPad without updating to iOS 4.0.2 or iOS 3.2.2.

NOTE: All those users who have updated their iPhone/iPod Touch to iOS 4.0.2, and iPad to iOS 3.2.2, there is no need to install this patch. This PDF patch is for all iPhones/iPod Touches running iOS 4.0.1 or lower and iPads running iOS 3.2.1 or lower.

To test that it’s working properly, visit jailbreakme.com again.  After you slide to jailbreak, you should no longer see a dialog box pop up (you’ll just see the star background).  That means you’re no longer vulnerable!

You can follow us on Twitter, Join us at Facebook, and also Subscribed to RSS Feed to receive latest updates.

In April, when I stopped publishing Mobile Orchard, I said I’d leave the site up as long as I had the server. I figured the traffic would gradually dissipate and that’d be that.

A few weeks ago I checked the site’s Google Analytics dashboard on a whim and was surprised to see that the site’s traffic is about what it was before I left! More details on this in a minute…

This tells me that the audience of iOS developers has grown, and that the site’s content is still useful. In fact, the site is still the number one Google result — beating even Apple — for iPhone Developer News, iPhone Developer Podcast, iPhone Development News, and iPhone Development Podcast.

I was, and am, proud of the site and enjoyed that it’d earned a respected place in the community. I’d like to see that continue in the hands of the right person or people. So: I’m putting Mobile Orchard up for sale.

In the past, I’ve received unsolicited offers to buy the site from charlatans whose motivation was to abuse the site’s PageRank, to mercilessly flog jeweled iPhone cases, or who would otherwise abuse the community. I’m not interested in offers from folks thusly motivated. On the other hand, if — like I did — you find a way to blend your commercial interest with the community’s interest, then I’m all for it.

What’s You’re Buying

To keep this simple, you’re buying exactly (1) the mobileorchard.com domain, (2) a tar-archive of the site’s WordPress installation, and (3) a database dump. These are the pieces you’ll need to transfer the site to another server.

I’m formally limiting the asset purchase to those items because they’re things I have absolute control over. That said, I’ll make my best effort to transfer the Twitter and Twitter Feed accounts, but obviously those are run by third parties that I don’t control.

As a sweetener, I’ll also include our community-links sister-site iPhone Flow (with its thousand feed subscribers and thousand Twitter followers), a few related domains and the podcast archive.

Google Analytics, Feedburner and Twitter Stats

Here are reports with data from the last month and the last year.

Feedburner is reporting 6818 readers. Twittercounter reports 3077 followers.

How To Make An Offer

If you’d like to make an offer, please email me the amount (for simplicity’s sake: in even thousand dollar amounts), your plans for the site, and details to prove that your offer is credible.

I’ll accept offers through Friday, August 27. If you make an offer I’ll try to keep you informed about other offers that are in contention. I’ll pick a winner and, after we execute the asset transfer agreement and you wire the funds to my account, I’ll transfer the domain and provide the WordPress files and data.

I’ve got a fantastic game for you today from one of our readers, Quantumdoor called Bomb Squad Patrol. I LOVE this game. Bomb Squad Patrol casts players into the role of an Emergency Ordinance Disposal Officer in charge of securing a Nuclear Power Plant that has been booby-trapped and rigged to explode by a group […]