Archive for March 26th, 2010

Paul Rand is not a well-known person, but it was he who created logos for such famous companies like ABC Television, UPS, IBM and NeXT. He didn't actually design any of the logos for Apple, but he was chosen to be portrayed with an Apple logo for a print ad.

In 1993 Steve Jobs gave an interview to Alan Pottasch and Doug Evans. That was a time when he was a chief executive officer of NeXT and concentrated on porting their NeXTSTEP OS for x86 processors. That year Apple changed the guard from J. Sculley to M. Spindler.

At that interview Jobs spoke much about Rand as of an artist who became a "gem" for the company. He also says:

"When you scratch the surface of any of his work, you find out the depth of the intellectual problem solving that's taken place."

His speech reflects the ideal of current Apple's products. It is not only the hardware design that attracts people, it is also a software and the forseen interaction beneath it.

This morning Digg released their official iPhone app. It allows you to browse and interact with the popular news aggregator. You can view the top, recent and upcoming stories in any category; clicking a headline will lead to a built-in browser that will display a requested page. At the bottom of the screen you'll find a buttons to Digg or Bury (like or dislike) the story, Save The Story button (for this you need to be logged in with your Digg account), and an option of sharing the link. The latter is pretty convenient, as you can send the story to the Email, Twitter, Facebook or to the iPhone's clipboard.

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A few days ago Opera Mini browser was sent to Apple for the review. While waiting anxiously for the Apple's decision we have found an interesting video from IntoMobile. It compares the speed of Safari and Opera Mini browsers. Which one do you think is faster?

Take a look at the video:

PadGadget did some research of the the iTunes database last night and found that Apple has already approved and listed several iPad apps in the AppStore. The names use HD (High Definition) in the title to signify the bigger 9.7 inch, 1024×768 pixel iPad display. Here is a quick list of what was found:

• Ammoin HD
• Azkend HD
• Flight Control HD
• Grind HD
• HD Recovery
• Labyrinth 2 HD
• NBA Hotshot HD
• Numba HD
• Plants vs. Zombie HD
• Sparkle HD
• Worms HD

You won’t find any of these iPad titles using your standard iTunes browser, you need to use Apple’s more recent web interface to find the new titles mixed in with the thousands of regular iPhone and Touch titles.

UPDATE: Apple has corrected the iTunes Preview site and HD iPad titles are no longer listed.

Geohot, the famous iPhone hacker and the creator of different jailbreak and unlock utilities (purplera1n, blackra1n and blacksn0w), is now working on a new jailbreak utility. It will support untethered jailbreak for all devices with the latest bootrom and the latest firmware. This includes iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3G.

Here is what Geohot writes in his blog:

The jailbreak is all software based, and is as simple to use as blackra1n. It is completely untethered, works on all current tethered models(ipt2, 3gs, ipt3), and will probably work on iPad too.

Don't ask about a release date. You won't make it happen any sooner.

It is still unclear if he used one of the recent iPhone Safari hacks to gain control of the device or if this is something else.

Here is a teaser video:

This week Apple posted ten new vacancies on its site. They all are related to North Carolina Data Center. Currently Apple is looking for Engineers and Technicians, though the position of Chief Operation Engineer hasn't been filled since January.

Apple's new North Carolina Data Center is approximately 5 times bigger that existing 109,000 sq. foot Newark facility. It is supposed to be a key component of the company's cloud computing strategy. Apple is going to invest in this project $1 billion for the next 9 years and expects to hire at least fifty full-time employees.

The flyover of the North Carolina data center is under the cut.

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Recently MuscleNerd, the member of DevTeam, reported the presence of an interesting security bug in Safari for the iPhone. It will probably allow a quick remote jailbreak of iPhone or iPod Touch simply by connecting the device to an external website created for this purpose.

The bug was discovered by two hackers Ralph Phillip and Vincenzo Iozzo, who won the prize of $15 000 during CanSecWest. Their initial idea was to use a web portal to do the exploit of the SMS database and retrieve it's content.

Last week Alexander Vaughn from the AppAdvice.com resource had a chance to take a first look at the iBookStore. As you see from the screenshot above, late rumors about higher e-book prices for iPad are confirmed to be false. Moreover, 27 of the 32 books presented in the NYT's Bestseller section cost $9,99 which is exactly the same price as for Amazon Kindle versions.

To expand their market share Amazon chose a strategy of selling the most popular and newly released books at a loss. Now it seems that such a serious concession won't take a proper effect.

iBookStore is a platform for selling iPad e-Books. The working scheme is the same as for iPhone developers - publishers are free to set the prices they want, but Apple keeps 30% of it.

Sybase released another study based on the survey made by Zogby International. The company analyzed the opinions of 2,443 adults that have at least one mobile phone. Among them 770 have smartphones.

More than a half of respondents (52,3%) said they will most likely use an iPad or any other tablet device to do work. 36% claimed such a device will help them to be more productive at work. Every second person find iPad to be an excellent gadget for watching videos, but only every third person is going to play games on it.

"The study shows that consumers are looking for devices they can use both at home and work, with implications for the business being asked to support them. Further, findings show that while device functionality is important to satisfying people's desire for a personal and work-ready mobile experience that the experience is incomplete without greater access to data."

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The Street's analyst Jason Scwarz thinks that in June Apple will show a new version of iPhone, and it will have a smaller screen size. That will be a part of a new politics that will be focused on popularization of iPad.

Another analyst Ben Reitzes from Barclays Capital expects Apple to make another splash by new iPhone form factor:

“iPad yields should improve dramatically throughout the year even if the launch starts out capacity constrained. These developments support upside to consensus forecasts for the iPad, should demand materialize like we think it can. We estimate Apple will sell almost 5 million iPads for CY10; including 1.2 million in the June quarter – which could prove conservative.

… Also, we have increased confidence that Apple will make a big splash this summer with a new iPhone form factor. We believe that the new model will launch with considerable fanfare and expect unit expectations to rise in turn.”

MOTO Labs conducted a new touchscreen test with a number of the most popular smartphones: Apple iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, Palm Pre and Blackberry Storm 2. The results were expected - iPhone has a first place and is followed by Google Nexus One.

The test was made by 7mm and 4mm robotic fingers for accordingly medium and light touch imitation. Moto Labs reports iPhone screen to have straight and accurate lines but with weaknesses at the edges of the panel. Nexus One with Droid Eris has a "solid performance". The results are almost the same because both of the devices are manufactured by HTC. As you remember, Apple filed a lawsuit about infringing their touchscreen-related patents earlier this month.

The results for the other smartphones can be seen on the picture below.

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