Archive for 2010

More than 3 years after Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on the stage at Macworld 2007, Apple has finally secured the trademark. iPhone is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. – officially as of Feb 09, 2010. The registration number is 3,746,840.

The procedure, as you can see, required a lot of time, becasue Cisco in the US and Comwave in Canada were marketing VoIP products under the same name.

Now Apple has a new goal - iPad trademark.

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Square iPhone payment system trial is now avaliable to the public. If you're interested to be one of the few first users, just sign up and try it.

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CNet expert Donald Bell shows us how to sync iTunes libraries among multiple computers using a new feature called Home Sharing:

Gameloft has just released the new exciting video podcast (February). This month is particularly interesting, because we can see the spectacular graphics of Brothers in Arms 2, online multiplayer mode in NOVA, news about Pocket Chef, and much more. Let's watch:

Apple is about to reach another great result: the 10 billion songs sold through iTunes. They set up a new page with a counter similar to the one for the first billion downloads in AppStore. Apple also created a contest with a prize of a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

According to the official contest rules, participants may make up to 25 entries per day either by purchasing/downloading songs from the iTunes Store or by filling out an entry form on Apple's web site.

The prize will be awarded for the entry (either through a song download or through the non-purchase online entry) sent immediately following the download of the 9,999,999,999th song. The potential winner will be determined by the order of the entries received. In the event that more than one entrant would be a winner based on the simultaneous timing of entries, one entrant will be randomly selected from those entrants as the winner. Each entrant's chances of winning are dependent upon the number of eligible entries received.

Apple has periodically offered similar contests in the past, such as its One Billion Song contest in 2006 and a One Billion App contest last year.

T3 is reporting that Mike Tedesco, Microsoft's Senior Product Manager for WindowsBU, stated that a version of Microsoft Office for the iPad is "something that we're looking at." Tedesco added that he couldn't make any official announcement today, but from the sounds of things, Microsoft is at least considering a version of Office for Apple's newest creation.

Bringing Office over to the iPad would go a long way toward establishing it as a legitimate productivity device.

Sherif Hashim has discovered an exploit which may allow unlock of the latest iPhone OS 3.1.3 baseband 05.12.01. Such unlock utilities for previous baseband versions were called blacksn0w, ultrasn0w и and yellowsn0w. MuscleNerd, the member of DevTeam, has already confirmed it is working. So the timing of the unlcok release is totally up to them right now.

Here is an official update from DevTeam:

"We’ve started to look at his crash but it’s a long road between any given crash and a fully working unlock, and we couldn’t put an ETA on it even if we wanted to. It’s not even guaranteed that an working unlock will come from this particular crash — it’s just too early to tell."

If your iPhone battery is running low you can always use oranges to charge it. Unfortunately you need quite a few of them for a full battery. The video shows how many orange slices it would take to charge an iPhone. The answer is 2,380 segments or 595 oranges:

This video was found on one of the Korean sites. And its pretty hard to describe the feelings you experience when watching this movie. The first question to ask yourself is probably why he uses sausages instead of his fingers? But here is an explanation:

According to the Korean portal Hani.co.kr the sausages are the best substitutes of human fingers for iPhone. If your fingers are too sweaty for continual touchscreen use then sausages are the only solution for your problem, because neither gloves nor stylus will work on the capacitive iPhone screen.

We don't know about how many Koreans have sweaty hands, but we have an information that sausage sales in that country increased by 39% over the same period last year. Obviously, the sausages become a usual practice in Korea.

If you are an existing member of Apple's iPhone Developer Program, you can login on their site and download the new SDK, which includes an iPad simulator for testing apps that are under development.

There are also available new iPad Human Interface Guidelines and iPad Programming Guide that introduces new iPad features and how-to about their implementing in applications. New user interface guideline outlines ""how to effectively use the new views and controls available to you to deliver unforgettable applications to your customers".

Apple also launches a new Universal Application binary format for iPhone OS apps. It will allow developers to create an app that can take full advantage of the features of the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. So the iPad and iPhone code will be wrapped into one app package making distribution and management much easier.

Google Buzz - is a new social communications feature that was revealed yesterday. It really looks like a mix of Google Wave and Twitter with an ability of posting media and status updates in an ongoing conversation. New service is running in almost every Gmail account and in the Mobile Safari web app. The latter has the same features as the main service and additionally includes an option to see "buzz" nearby while you're out and comment on like other people's "buzz".

The service is new, and many people discuss on how it will affect on Twitter and social networks popularity. But it is important that Google made iPhone fully compatible with Buzz in spite of a tense Google/Apple relationship.

Hell has returned! Prepare yourself for DOOM II RPG for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the sequel to id Software’s hit mobile game Doom RPG. The forces of Hell have invaded our dimension once again, and you're the one to stop them from conquering the Earth!
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A new job offer on the official Apple website gives one more evidence that in future the iPad and iPod Touch will have a camera and will be able to record video. In particular, Apple is looking for an engineer for the team "Media Systems" who will test the possibility to take pictures, playback and record audio and video:

The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines. You will work together with the development team to ensure quality. Your focus will mainly be on performance testing and developing performance measurement test tools. You will be responsible for the development and maintenance of methodical testing strategies and accompanying test documentation. Day to day activities will include developing and conducting functional/system/regression testing.ad-hoc testing; creating and tracking high quality bug reports; and reporting on project progress.

WordPress for iPhone has been updated to v2.2. The major addition is the ability to reply, edit, and highlight comments.

Manage your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod touch. With WordPress for iPhone, you can moderate comments and create or edit posts and pages. All you need is a WordPress.com blog or a self-hosted blog running WordPress 2.7 or higher.

What's New In Version 2.2:

• Reply to comments
• Edit comments
• Highlighting for new items in the comment list

You can download WordPress from the AppStore for free (link).

Opera Software company just announced that it plans to show Opera Mini browser for iPhone during the Mobile World Congress 2010 (MWC).

"We are thrilled to offer journalists and partners an exclusive preview of Opera Mini for iPhone during the year’s biggest mobile event,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software. “This is a unique opportunity to introduce the fast, feature-rich Opera Mini experience for the iPhone, and to showcase our latest beta releases of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini on other platforms and devices. Opera’s mission is to bring the Web to the world, and by making Opera Mini available on yet another platform, we are one step closer."

But remember that Apple would never allow alternative browsers that are not based on WebKit. So what's the point of all this? A Cydia Store release? The real intent might be to draw attention to Opera's Mobile and Mini browsers running on other platforms where the software is actually released like Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Android.