The first ‘authorized’ biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson is now available for pre-order from Amazon for $19.80 in paper, or $14.99 for the Kindle edition. Curiously iSteve: The Book of Jobs will be released on March 6th, 2012, the fourth anniversary of the release of the iOS SDK. The description of the book from Amazon provides:
From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In iSteve: The Book of Jobs, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs’ family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, iSteve is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.
Amazon has announced its own Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player to store and distribute music, video, photo content via the cloud. These services allow customers to securely store music in the cloud and play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free.
In other words now Amazon is offering the following services to its customers:
According to CNN, Apple is currently negotiating with different record labels to improve the quality of songs available in the iTunes Music Store.
Current songs can be downloaded in 16-bit format, and Apple wants to increase the quality of downloads to 24-bit high-fidelity format. This is a format in which studio recordings are being originally captured. Then they usually get downgraded to 16-bit format and delivered to CDs and iTunes. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday Apple released a minor update for its media player suite iTunes. Now the version of the app is 9.1.1 and here is a list of issues that were fixed:
Addressing some issues that improve stability and performance.
Addressing a usability issue with VoiceOver and Genius Mixes;
Addressing several stability issues with VoiceOver;
Addressing issues with converting songs to 128 kbps AAC while syncing (this function was previously available only for iPod shuffle)
More information about security updates can be found on Apple's support page here.
You can update your iTunes via software update utility or download it directly from Apple.
Few days ago we wrote about Steve Jobs' biography that will be written by Walter Isaacson. While most of the people are waiting for the book to be published, one of the Flickr members decided to think about how would its cover look like.
Here is a series of the cover mock-ups for the rumored forthcoming Job biography by Flickr member flypig:
The last one is commented by its author like this:
No matter what design style the English version will be, after importing to China, the cover will look this way.
There is a handful of people who have been trying to tell the story of Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple and one of the front-rank hi-tech innovators of modern era. A number of attempts to tell about this remarkable personality have either enjoyed very modest success or were vehemently repulsed.
It looks as if only Walter Isaacson, the author of two other best-selling biographies and former editor of Time magazine, could persuade Jobs to take part in the project. He says that the book will cover the most important stages of the Steve’s life, from his life in the notorious Silicon Valley through the years at Apple.
Though the Apple spokesmen do not comment on these rumors.
Apple has improved their new iTunes Preview service by activating in-browser previews for iPod and iPhone applications.
iTunes Preview was launched by Apple in November. It worked for those iTunes links, which used to simply open the application. Before that your browser would open a blank page and prompt you to open the link with the iTunes application. Now you are also able to view screenshots, changelogs, descriptions and reviews for iPod Touch and iPhone applications.
Besides, last month Apple also started using QuickTime to offer 30 second song samples encoded in 44.1 AAC 300+ kbits/second.
YXFlash is a new application that is available in Cydia and includes the codecs to display Xvid / DivX video files . We will not longer need to convert movies into a format supported by Apple. The converted videos do play a bit smoother due to hardware acceleration, but xvid videos are watchable, at least the ones I tested. The player also plays flash content if you have downloaded flash flv videos to your device. It is not a web based flash player, this does not play flash videos embedded on websites. In order to add the videos just upload them using iFunBox or iPhone Browser.
Here is the complete list of formats supported by the complete version:
Flash Video -> .flv
Mpeg4, H.264
Windows Media Video (.wmv)
Xvid/DivX (.avi)
MP4, MP3, AAC and Windows Media Audio
The free version offers support only for MP3 and DivX. You can download the application via Cydia in the BigBoss repository. The full version costs around $10.
FileAid is free until March 17. The price was $6.99.
FileAid is a file manager and viewer for your iPhone and iPod Touch. Easily copy files on your device for a quick look on the road. Copying files over to your iPhone or iPod Touch takes place wirelessly (by FTP) or via USB using DiskAid (freeware).
Quickly display or play files :
- Images (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF and others)
- PDF
- MS Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint)
- iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynotes, iWork 09 not supported yet)
- Plain Text and RTF (Rich Text Format)
- Audio (MP3 VBR, AAC, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, CAF)
- Video (standard iPhone formats : H.264, MPEG-4, 3GPP)
- Web Archives
- HTML files
One more interesting, fantastic device. Indeed it is the first phone in the world to record video in HD 720p (1280 × 720). Here are the photos (click to get high resolution images):
Samsung OMNIA HD (I8910) Product Specification:
Network
HSUPA 5.76Mbps / HSDPA 7.2 Mbps
EDGE/GPRS Class 12 Quad Band (850/900/1800/1900)
UMTS Tri Band (900/1900/2100MHz)
OS
Symbian S60 5.0 (Full touch UI)
Display
3.7" 16M Full Touch QHD AMOLED (360x640)
Camera
8 Megapixel CMOS + CIF
Auto-Focus / Power LED Flash / Face Detection/Smile Shot / Blink Shot / Panorama Shot
Video
DivX / XviD / H.263 / H.264 / WMV / MPEG4, RV
24fps@HD(1280 x 720p) Video recording
DLNA & HD TV out (DLNA dongle needed)
Video Editing: Trim video, Audio dubbing, Live dubbing, Add subtitle, Image capture