News tagged ‘API’

As you remember, recently we wrote about police investigating the deal about Gizmodo purchase of an iPhone 4G prototype. The company paid $5,000 to obtain it from an unknown person who found it at one of the California's bars.

Last Friday California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team visited Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's home and seized 2 servers and 4 computers for a felony investigation of an iPhone 4G prototype. If to be exact, here is a list:

• MacBook
• MacBook Pro
• 32 Gb iPad
• 16 Gb IPhone
• AirPort Extreme
• IBM ThinkPad
• Dell desktop
• External hard drives and some other devices and accessories

This information was revealed by Gizmodo. The author of the post placed copy of the warrant, which was issued by a superior court judge in San Mateo County, California. It is also stated in the article that warrant is invalid because of a section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

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Apple's iPhone OS 4 event ended just few hours ago and now we finally have fresh information about the upcoming operational system.

So the main idea claimed by Jobs was that it has seven tent poles. Here they are:

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The Street's analyst Jason Scwarz thinks that in June Apple will show a new version of iPhone, and it will have a smaller screen size. That will be a part of a new politics that will be focused on popularization of iPad.

Another analyst Ben Reitzes from Barclays Capital expects Apple to make another splash by new iPhone form factor:

“iPad yields should improve dramatically throughout the year even if the launch starts out capacity constrained. These developments support upside to consensus forecasts for the iPad, should demand materialize like we think it can. We estimate Apple will sell almost 5 million iPads for CY10; including 1.2 million in the June quarter – which could prove conservative.

… Also, we have increased confidence that Apple will make a big splash this summer with a new iPhone form factor. We believe that the new model will launch with considerable fanfare and expect unit expectations to rise in turn.”

Macrumors found interesting information in the latest Beta 3 iPad SDK. Apple's private framework which controls the camera, has 3 additional camera characteristics that are not found in the iPhone 3.x SDK:

It looks like Apple built in API support to test if your iPad had a Front Facing Camera, Zoom and a Camera Flash. The front facing camera could be used for video chat, while Zoom and Camera Flash are often requested features for the iPhone's back camera.

9to5Mac made further investigation and found the following icons which clearly show an interface to accept or decline a video chat:

The size of these buttons show that they will be used on the the iPad's screen rather than the iPhone.

It is still unknown, if these new features will be available in the first version of iPad. We hope to see them in future versions of the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

A few days ago Epocrates Inc., the developer of mobile software for healthcare professionals, revealed a new study of more than 350 clinicians who were asked about their opinion about iPad. The results were stunning - 9% said they will buy an iPad when it will be available, another 13% plan to purchase one in the first year. That means that one in five physicians will likely have an iPad in a year.
Epocrates Inc. also announced that it intends to improve clinical reference applications so it could run on iPad.

By optimizing our software for the iPad, we are capitalizing on the larger screen real estate and interactivity provided by this sophisticated device. We are committed to providing the most productive experience at the point of care, keeping physicians informed and focused on the patient rather than searching for answers.

- said Epocrates SEO Rose Crane. The company's software has more than 275,000 subscribers among physicians in America and over 900,000 worldwide.

As time passes by, more hospitals look at potential of the iPad. One San Francisco program even aims to use tablets to provide charts, X-rays, notes and prescriptions to hospital workers at the touch of a finger. That looks like a whole new way of enforcing last technologies to make our life better.

On Thursday's night Charlie Rose show featured an interesting discussion with Michael Arrington, Walt Mossberg and David Carr about the upcoming Apple iPad.

Michael Arrington is known as the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch. Walt Mossberg writes 2 columns for the Wall Street Journal. David Carr works as a culture and media columnist for the New Your Times. The 25 minutes long coverage reveals some interesting opinions that are worth to hear:

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There is only one day left until Apple's event on Jan 27, where Apple Tablet is expected to be presented. The number of rumors thow grow rapidly. There are discussions about the name, the price, specifications and much more.

Here are two images published on TechCrunch:

The photos are really well done. In previous rumors we have heard that the tablet should have a shape similar to that of the iPhone and a Home button. How Apple Tablet will actually look like? Nobody knows yet.

In addition to the photos here are couple videos, which look like fake, but a very good one.

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Unfortunately there is no flash on the iPhone's camera. The picture quality and the resulting video are really  good, but when it's dark you just do not see anything on photos. According to rumors, in fact, Apple is looking to buy from a specialized manufacturer a large amount of LED flash to be mounted close to the camera probably in the next version of iPhone.

These Items, according to a company in Amsterdam, are usually combined with 5 megapixel sensors. Hopefully we will soon see a new version of iPhone with 5-megapixel camera and LED flash.

Analyst Ashok Kumar of Northeast Securities shared his ideas about the future Apple Tablet device. Kumar said the tablet processor will be manufactured by Samsung and will be based on the Cortex-A8 ARM architecture with a speed of about 1GHz. There are also rumors that the tablet, along with the next generation iPhone, would be based on ARM's new Cortex-A9 architecture with two or four cores.

Also this week, Jeffrey Fidacaro of Susquehanna Financial provided a projection of how much the internal components of Apple's tablet might cost without even knowing for sure what they are. The analyst assumes the device will run on an Intel Atom processor, would include 2GB of DRAM, and sport a 3.2 megapixel camera. If Apple went with an ARM-based processor, Fidacaro said, the tablet's cost could be reduced by as much as $50. If Apple will use a 128GB SSD, the price will be increased by several hundred dollars. Here is a quick list:

Google today announced the launch of its Nexus One smartphone. It is based on the Android 2.1 operating system and offers 800x480 screen, 5 megapixel camera with flash,  Qualcomm's 1 GHz Snapdragon processor. The Nexus One offers 512 MB of Flash and 512 MB of RAM, and ships with a 4 GB Micro SD card with support for cards up to 32 GB.

Nexus One is initially available from the Google web store in the US without service for $529 or starting at $179 with a two-year contract from T-Mobile USA. In the near future, Verizon Wireless in the US and Vodafone in Europe plan to offer similar service plans.

Here is the full list of hardware and software features:

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OmniVision Technologies is the current manufacturer of the iPhone 3GS 3.2-megapixel CMOS image sensor. Digitimes sources are claiming that OmniVision won a new contract with Apple to provide new sensors for the next-generation iPhone (iPhone 4G?). The new CMOS image sensors are 5 megapixels. The orders are expected to be increased too, from 20-21 million estimated this year, to 40 to 45 million CMOS for the 2010.

More and more developers complain about the rejection of their applications in the AppStore. There's a good reason behind all this.

It seems that Apple has created a tool that can automatically review applications and APIs that are used. According to the rules of the SDK, the developers can not use private API. If this initial test is passed examiners begin to manually check the app.

So the advice is quite simple - follow the rules of the SDK.

Apple has just announced that all iPhone developers can now use the In-App Purchase in free applications! In the past the use of these APIs was reserved only for commercial software.

This is great, because developers can completely eliminate the Lite version, creating only a limited free version with full function unlock through an in-app purchase. All this is also intended to provide greater security for developers.

Dropbox is a very useful and popular application. It has already received 75,000 downloads. However it requires firmware 3.1 due to the usage of some API's for video upload and download.

Good news for anyone who wanted to test the application Dropbox but was stopped by the firmware compatibility. A new version compatible with 3.0 will be released soon. It has already been sent to Apple and will be available in a few days. We will keep you informed.

You can register and download the application for your desktop computer here (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Here is a link to application in AppStore (firmware 3.1 is required).

It looks like Google and Apple have been steadily moving from friends to enemies. Google created Android and CloudOS, Apple rejected Google Voice and Google Latitude, Google’s CEO left Apple.

So Back in July Apple stealthily acquired Placebase, a mapping company that provides a service similar to Google Maps, but with more robust customizations and set of APIs, called Pushpin.

The obvious interest Apple would have in the company would be the mapping content and expertise that they are currently relying on Google for in their iPhone maps application. Placebase, however, also offered additional functionality that is not currently available in Google's offerings that Apple could theoretically take advantage of.

Given that Apple wrote the iPhone Maps app themselves, and just used Google for the backend, a switch to Apple Maps might even be transparent to the end user.

Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman LinkedIn profile now listed his position as part of the "Geo Team" at Apple.

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