Archive for December, 2010

Apple finally deployed a new short URL for Ping tweets, itun.es. The itun.es domain was purchased by Apple years ago. Since Apple announced Twitter integration for Ping many thought itun.es would be a great option for tweeted items. The itun.es links are now ready to go. Links are show up in the iTunes Store when sharing a song / album on Twitter. Third party clients like Tweetie for Mac and Weet for iPhone don’t use itun.es. The itun.es links are visible to everyone in iTunes and Twitter.com.

Recently Jay Freeman, better known as Saurik, creator of popular alternative store Cydia for jailbroken devices, claimed during the 360|MacDev conference that Cydia is coming to the Mac. Not surprising! Cydia is used by more than 10 million devices (about 10% of all iPhone users) and provides access to some amazing tweaks, apps and extensions of iOS. There are well over 30,000 packages available for iOS. The Cydia’s creator refers to that Cydia as a store for things that are not apps, but extensions of what iOS devices can do. Saurik feels like the same type of store would be useful for Mac OS X devices. That is why he created Mac Cydia, which will be available in some weeks. We don’t know exactly what kind of tweaks and apps could be sold into Cydia for Mac. Perhaps Cydia will be aimed at offering easy installation of themes, system mods and tweaks.

This week The Seattle Times revealed that a discount wholesaler Costco is no longer a partner of Apple and won't sell its products anymore. Such a decision was made after two companies had come to a "mutual agreement" to cancel their partnership.

Costco chief financial officer Richard Galanti said Apple didn't allow to sell its products online while other stores have had this privilege.

"In the past couple months, we agreed to wind down".

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Reuters' sources claimed today that the iPad 2 will have dual cameras, and its production will presumably be started in the first quarter of 2011.

This is another report that confirms the rumors about FaceTime support in the next-gen iPad. It also named battery maker Simplo Technology, chip designer Wintek Corp and "an unlisted maker of covers for electronic products" AVY Precision as suppliers for the second Apple's tablet.

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This week the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office made public another Apple's patent application that describes the new voice control method. It is entitled "Contextual Voice Commands" and its aim is to make voice control more efficient and reliable.

Apple's proposed system determines the voice command possibilities for every application so that you could give more precise directions by voice to the device.

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Today Apple has announced its year-end top lists for iTunes called "iTunes Rewind", which span music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, etc. The most interesting list in our sight is a list of apps.

So here are the four "award winners" for 2010:

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According to the check found on the State of California's unclaimed property search website, Apple owes Steve Jobs $37.91.

Besides that, Steve Jobs waits for $0.20 worth of dividends from Time Warner, along with one share of this company and two shares of IBM. The latter also owes Apple's CEO around $35 of unclaimed income.

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On Wednesday Apple released a MacBook Air EFI firmware update 2.0 to resolve issue with display. The update is recommended for all new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models and requires Mac OS X 10.6.5. It addresses problems where the MacBook Air is unresponsive or displays just a black screen after booting or waking. Despite scattered reports of issues with the MacBook Air, the laptop has continued to sell well, especially the 11-inch model. Analysts tracking retail activity on Black Friday found that the 11-inch MacBook Air was "flying off the shelves" and a "customer favorite."

Download the MacBook Air EFI firmware update 2.0

Today Apple has begun offering 90-second previews of songs in the iTunes Store. All songs longer than 2 minutes 30 seconds will now have a 90-second preview available. Songs shorter than this length will continue to offer only 30 second previews. Good news for us, consumers! But Apple literally forced labels to accept new terms. Any labels who do not wish to agree with the terms must withdraw their music from the iTunes Store.

MobileMe users report about multiply bugs in the service. Some of them do not satisfy with service's email, photo/file hosting, and syncing capabilities and experience performance and access issues while others believe that the $99 annual price is too high. It’s reasonableб because the "Find My iPhone" service that had previously required a MobileMe subscription is free for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users running iOS 4.2.

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Yesterday Apple released a new 7.6.9 version of QuickTime media software, which has 15 vulnerabilities patched, including issues with FlashPix, PICT, GIF and JP2 images and AVI, MPEG, Sorenson, QTVR and other movie files. Most of it could cause an arbitrary code execution in case of exploit or unexpected application termination.

The security update is necessary only for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 and Windows users, as Mac OS X 10.6.5 already has fixes to the vulnerabilities included.

QuckTime 7.6.9 can be installed through Software Update or by visiting the QuickTime website.

Currently iOS 4.2.1 jailbreak for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS new bootrom, iPad, iPod 3G/4G is a tethered jailbreak. That means if you have to reboot your device, it will show a "connect to itunes" logo until you run the jailbreak software again. Musclenerd from iPhone DevTeam has announced that untethered jailbreak for iPhone iOS 4.2.1 is ready. Unfortunately this will be only for those who saved 4.2b3 SHSH keys via Cydia or tinyumbrella.

Got "backup plan" for untethered 4.2.1 JB working (video coming up). Uses mysterious 4.2b3 hashes Cydia kept for you.

"Backup plan" because hacker comex is working on a more extensible jailbreak. We'll keep you up to date with more information as it develops. For now you can watch the proof video:

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Yesterday Mike Lazaridis, who is a co-CEO at Research in Motion, revealed that the company's upcoming Playbook tablet will have a QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS that will eventually appear on multi-core BlackBerry smartphones and other tablets coming in the next ten years.

In his interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at D: Dive Into Mobile conference, which was taking place in San Francisco, California, Lazaridis showed RIM's upcoming 7-inch tablet and said it has "the perfect size", though the company plans to produce tablets of other sizes too.

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DisplaySearch has published results of their research, which reveals that Apple is the number one mobile PC manufacturer in North America and third overall in the world. But these results are given for all Apple’s mobile computers, so the iPad alone gets 8% of mobile computer shipments in the third quarter alone. Of course, that percentage will be increased, because Apple pushes their device into other markets, such as Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Hewlett-Packard’s mobile PCs remained number one with 17.3 percent of the market share. Acer came in second with 16.5 percent. Apple finished third with 12.4 percent. Noteworthy that HP and Acer market shares are only getting smaller.

Ticongera Securities analyst Brian White provided another update for investors while touring the Far East. In his note he says that iPhone 4, iPad and 11-inch MacBook Air are the most difficult products to purchase in China.

Local carrier China Unicom cannot fulfill almost a third of preorders, and people wait for their devices for around two months. That creates wide growth opportunities in China, and White says Apple's interest in this market is definitely positive.

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