Archive for August 24th, 2010

Phillip Shoemaker, Apple's Director of Applications Technology for the App Store, is a former App Store developer himself who has a handful of applications, several of which fall into the category of low-brow fart and urination humor, still available for sale. Shoemaker's App Store development work was handled under the name GrayNoodle LLC. The game Animal Farts features various cartoon images of animals with their buttocks facing forward, giving users buttons to trigger "Fart," "Poot," "Drop" or "Wiz" sounds accompanied with animations illustrating said emissions.

According to an Apple spokeswoman, all of Shoemaker's applications had been approved prior to his employment with Apple. Apple's statement is apparently contradicted, however, by App Store data showing that three of his applications debuted in the App Store up to six weeks after Shoemaker had tweeted that he was working for Apple in early March 2009.

Apple could be planning to introduce touchscreens to the iMac by way of a hybrid interface, a recently discovered patent application suggests. The company notes that despite the usefulness of a touch slide off-screen interface, a mouse- and keyboard-based one is still better in some circumstances. To switch between the two, Apple proposes a design in which a computer's display would be upright for the mouse interface, but slanted down and back for touch.

To make the transition possible an iMac would need a flexible display stand, and a sensor to determine when to change. For the latter Apple proposes several options, such as an accelerometer, a rotation sensor in the stand, and/or a special touch sensor at the place people would want to grip the display. Past a certain input limit, a computer would automatically switch between interfaces.

Notably, elements of Mac OS X such as the Menu Bar, the Dock and the mouse cursor could be made to slide off-screen during the handover. Apple has not specified what the touch interface would be, but it could be iOS.

As noted by analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Company Monday, Mac government sales grew 200.8 percent year over year in the June quarter, well beyond the 12.1 percent growth seen by the rest of the PC market. In addition, the business market grew 49.8 percent during those three months, besting the market-wide 15.7 percent growth in enterprise sales.

Apple's best business sales came with very large companies, where Mac shipments improved 103 percent. Large businesses also bought 98.3 percent more Macs than the previous year.

Home Mac sales were also up 31.4 percent, besting the industrywide 25.2 percent growth. Despite the growth in business sales, the home market remains Apple's most important, accounting for 61.4 percent of all Mac shipments in the June quarter.

In all, Mac sales grew 31.5 percent year-over-year, ahead of the 20.9 percent growth seen by the entire PC market over 2009.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, a well as other developers, engineers and partners have announced a new application called Facebook Places, which is able to determine the location. It's a bit like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow identifying places where you've been to share them with all your friends and family on Facebook. You can see which of your friends are now being in the same place and who of them has already been there. Of course, you can change everything in your privacy settings, and select those users who are your friends on Facebook, so they can see your places. Facebook also plans to maintain a complete history of places that you have done on a special page in the Internet.

Existing location-based services, such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp are also announced as partners. So you can still use these services, but now they integrate with Facebook “Places”, which allows publishing their data on the wall of Facebook.

Recently Facebook has released a new version 3.2.1 of Facebook for iPhone to correct some bugs. At the moment there is nothing new, but we observed only some bug fixes. Press the update button right now and tell us if you notice any changes.

Facebook for iPhone 3.2.1 is available here.

It seems the device is the latest version of the white iPhone 4, which is officially scheduled for release in the end of this year. "Some people believe that this may be one of those devices that have been destroyed by Apple in the last minute after the discovery of defects of white color that have been found." Check out

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Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, confirmed that the new software update iOS 4.x will appear in the near future to correct performance problems on the iPhone 3G, which works on iOS 4.x. He confirmed it while answering to the email he got from a user who was disappointed with the iPhone 3G performance running on iOS 4, describing it as "dog slow".

Although he did not mention a specific version or date of its release we can guess that he was specking about iOS 4.1, which is going to be released next month, when iTV (Apple TV) and the next generation iPod touch will spotlight.