Archive for November, 2010

Last week Cult of Mac reported that Microsoft wasn't the first company that was really interested in the Kinect technology.

The history actually begins with Israeli military engineers, who developed Kinect camera and infrared sensor. According to the report, after inventing the technology they hired PrimeSense CEO Inon Beracha so he could "shop it around Silicon Valley and find partners to commercialize it".

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After iOS 4 release in June, it was laggy and generally not a good experience for many iPhone 3G users. Nevertheless, the due to release iOS 4.2 is running pretty well on iPhone 3G. Here is a video of iPhone 3G running the iOS 4.2 GM version, which is usually identical to the final release. The video was shot by TIPB.com. There were not any significant lags, and the keyboard was responsive. But, as usual,  the real problems appeared after some usage time , when you bloat the system with all your email, calendar entries, and vast number of contacts.

With the arrival of iOS 4.2 on the iPad, Apple will give its users more control over the quality of images they share through email. The iPad will get the image quality setting feature. Now a new field will appear in the new message creation screen. This field should indicate the size of your email. If you tap it, you’ll be presented with a selection of sizes for your pictures, namely: “Small,” “Medium,” “Large” or “Actual Size.” The changes will be applied to all images in the same email. Unfortunately, it is impossible to change size of a separate image in the email.

Some new rumors about a possible release of final version of iOS 4.2 have appeared today. Apple recently provided developers with the golden master seed of iOS 4.2 and this means that the public release is imminent. According to Inside-Handy.de the launch may be this Tuesday, November 9. Apparently the German website made contact with some Deutsche Telekom representatives who informed them of the November 9th release date.

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9to5Mac reports that an ad for the upcoming iPad 2 may have already been filmed by David Sims, a British photographer, in New York last month. The iPads used in the shoot were all current generation models which will be swapped out with the new ones in post production.  A participant at the shooting, said that there were no new products on scene, and that everyone had to sign non-disclosure agreements. At this point, the only thing may be confirmed is that the new iPad 2’s will probably be the same size as the current generation iPads.

MobileTerminal is a terminal emulator application for the iPad and iPhone. The version of MobileTerminal that is available in Cydia doesn't work with iPad iOS 3.2.2, iOS 4.x and iOS 5.x. However there are beta versions that do work, but aren't on Cydia because they are still in beta stages. This tutorial will show you step-by-step how to install MobileTerminal on iPad (tutorial for iPhone is here). If you have old version of MobileTerminal installed - uninstall it in Cydia (Search - MobileTerminal - Remove).

First of all you need to jailbreak your iPad. After you successfully jailbreaked iPad:

1. Run Cydia by tapping on Cydia icon



2. The Cydia will start:

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Here is a chart that shows where Apple's iPhone is selling. Nowadays Apple sells its device in 79 countries. Of course, Apple is expanding to other countries. It is coming soon in other 25 countries. Note that 18 of them are in Africa, a fast-growing market for smartphones. On the chart above you may see that the most important market for Apple is America. But Europe has become also rather important and Asia - mostly China – is very quickly catching up.

This week Apple announced that it is going to discontinue Xserve after January 31, 2011. Apple will not be developing a future version of Xserve. Customers may choose between the Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server, and the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server. Both systems should replace existing Xserve systems. The documentation notes that the 12-core Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server meets or exceeds the performance of the baseline Xserve hardware. The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server, on the other hand, is significantly outperformed by Xserve, but it has been Apple's most popular server system since its introduction in the fall of 2009.

In the screenshot above, you can see a Macbook Air with a picture of the new Mac App store, which divines some potential prices for Apple's official apps.  This is directly from Apple’s website. So, what are the prices? Turns out they're pretty close to current software prices. The iLife apps are priced out at $14.99, while the iWork apps are priced at $19.99, and when you add them all up, they cost about the same as the bundles you can buy in the Apple retail store. There's also a few other titles at various prices. There's a dice game called Roll 'Em which is priced for free, an app called Color Studio at $29.99, and another game called Fast Lane priced at just $4.99.  If this is a real picture of what some of the Mac apps might cost then it will be interesting to see what we get when the store officially opens.

If you ever wondered what Apple thought were the very best apps of the last two years, there’s now a list for that. Apple has launched a new section of the iTunes App Store, a Hall of Fame, containing everything iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad from Angry Birds to Zen Bound 2. There are around 50 apps honored so far and includes news, travel, sports, entertainment, productivity, and of course, lots of great games. The list includes both free and paid apps. Apple did a great job selecting these. Of course, they were probably helped by the massive app sales data they have. Most, if not all of the apps, are fairly “obvious” choices that you probably already own.

What app is now on the top of the list? No wondering, it is Angry Birds.

Apple seeds Mac OS X 10.6.6 build 10J521 to developers on Thursday ahead of the public release of Mac OS X 10.6.5. The changelog for Mac OS X 10.6.6 notes that the beta "contains developer support for fetching and renewing App Store receipts." App Store receipts could be a reference to the recently announced Mac App Store that is coming to Snow Leopard in the next three months. Strangely, the download is only 3.7MB. The last update to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard came in the form of 10.6.4 in June. Mac OS X 10.6.4 resolved issues with the trackpad and Adobe's Creative Suite 3.

This week Barron's site published a forecast of Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair, which reveals details on Apple’s suggested progress based on the study of the company's supply chain. He is assured the Cupertino's company will sell 100 million iPhones, which in turn means almost 100% year over year sales growth for the device in 2011. Besides that, the analyst also suggested the number of iPads sold will reach 45-48 million next year.

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Yesterday Apple released an update 9.1 to the iPhoto'11 application to solve a problem causing data loss for some users upgrading from iPhoto '09. The update also restores support for the photo calendars that had gone missing in the initial iPhoto '11 release on October 20. It adds several new print product options to iPhoto '11 and also improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues:

• Provides the ability to create and order calendars in iPhoto.
• Additional letterpress holiday greeting card themes are now available.
• Fixes an issue that prevented videos downloaded from MobileMe or Flickr from importing correctly into iPhoto events.
• The update is recommended for all users of iPhoto '11.

Download iPhoto Update 9.1.

Apple sent registered Mac developers emails inviting them to begin submitting programs to the Mac App Store. Moreover, on the Apple's developer website appeared the above banner. That means that Apple has started accepting Mac Apps for their upcoming Mac App Store. The Mac App Store was announced in October as part of Mac OS X Lion's feature set. Apple claimed that it would be launched in 90 days from the time of the announcement. The Mac App Store mirrors many of the submission guidelines and policies as the iOS App Store. The Mac App developer program is $99/year just like the iOS App developer program.

Gizmodo posted shots of dorm blocks, in which Foxconn’s factory workers spend their off-duty lives. Men and women have separate facilities. Eight workers sleep in four bunk beds in a room about the size of a two-car garage. Long shifts, under-exploited exercise equipment, sinks on the balconies, where workers have to wash their clothing and themselves, and tiny televisions (one per a floor) in depersonalized common rooms, this is life at Foxconn’s iPhone factories. Since a spate of eleven suicides earlier this year, every building on the Foxconn campus is draped in netting. It is morbid but seemingly effective; there have been no suicides since the nets were installed in May.

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