News tagged ‘Mac’

Almost twenty years ago Scientific American posted an article of Xerox PARC. Its authors were thinking about the future technology and decided the next stage of it will be the ubiquitous computers.

"Ubiquitous computers will also come in different sizes, each suited to a particular task. My colleagues and I have built what we call tabs, pads and boards: inch-scale machines that approximate active Post-It notes, foot-scale ones that behave something like a sheet of paper (or a book or a magazine), and yard-scale displays that are the equivalent of a blackboard or bulletin board.”

They were right - tabs are the iPhones and iPods Touch and pads are iPads. But does it mean that we can expect from Apple something really huge like big-screen hubs? Such devices have already been developed (the best example is Microsoft's Surface table, the other one is Samsung MultiTouch Board shown on the picture), but they are still too expensive because of a flat-screen TV components.

9to5mac reports that the latest iPhone 3.2 Beta 4 SDK has the new gestures folder. And there are two new types of commands (3Tap.plist and LongPress.plist), that are certainly not implemented in the iPhone SDK 3.1.

Apple will probably allow developers to use these new capabilities in the next version of the iPhone OS. We might even see these next month in the shipping version of the iPad.

9to5mac found several interesting facts from Apple's iPad commercial.

The first one is about iBookstore pricing. They to be below hardcover books, audiobook, paperback prices and even Kindles's pricing. For example, Ted Kennedy's memoir, True Compass costs $23 for the hardcover, $19.25 for the B&W Kindle version and $14.95 for the iPad version. Other books show similar prices.

It looks like Apple will store documents on the iPad in a "My Documents" folder, at least for iWork touch. This is funny that Apple had chosen this name. This perhaps will make life easier for PC people. You can see that on the screenshot below:

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Apple announced a launch date for the iPad. The result is very exciting - Apple stock (AAPL) closed at an all time high, almost 219. This puts Apple's market cap near $199 billion dollars.

This week Steve Jobs answered an email question from Sweden. The question was from Jezper Söderlund:

I'll keep it short.

I'm Jezper from Sweden, a long time Apple fan, currently about to replace the very last computer at home with a brand spanking new iMac i7. I'm also awaiting the release of the iPad. However, I have one question:

Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

Two devices, based on the same OS, with already built-in technology to share one data plan suggests a secondary contract could possibly be redundant.

From the look of your keynote, where the iPad sits well between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, I was hoping the three of them could interact as seamless as possible.

All the best,
Jezper Söderlund

This is a very interesting question, since iPad's network settings with tethering were found recently. Here is Jobs' answer:

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(different search engine strings on SDK on the left, Firefox 3.6 for Mac on the right)

Here's some more interesting information from the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK. Users will be able to set search to something besides Google in the search bar of the iPad's Safari in upcoming iPhoneOS releases.

Right now, the two options besides the current default Google are Wikipedia and Yahoo, but plugins could be developed to do things like Amazon and Bing searches directly from the search bar in the Safari browser.

There is even a suggestion manager for both Google and Yahoo depending on which search engine you choose. Unfortunately, no Bing… yet.

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We really thought that Korean sausages era will be ended after the presentation of capacitive gloves on MWSF2010. But no such luck! They're back - reborn and improved!

CaseCrown present a sausage-like stylus for only $0.99 (dropped from $3.99 regular price). The product is compatible with any iPhone and allows you to keep your gloves on when it is cold outside. You can purchase it here.

Site 9to5mac posted several interesting screenshots with iPad's Network System Preferences. These settings even  include Tethering via Bluetooth or USB. Do you think AT&T will allow this?

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Penguin, one of the biggest publishers, gave a very interesting presentation in London. Penguin CEO John Makinson spoke about eBooks, iPad Books and Apps.

Penguin is not using the ePub format for books, rather building the applications in html according to Makinson:

"We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about".

"So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs".

"We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error."

Makinson sees ebooks hitting 10% of book sales next year (up from 4%). Take a look at the video:

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Here is the top 5 worst product names according to CNet. Guess who's got first place? Let's watch:

Less than a month has passed since MacWorld Expo 2010 was closed, and IDG World Expo already prepares for MWSF 2011 (which is announced to be on January 27-29 in Moscone Cetner West in San Fransisco). Today they announced a one-week free registration window for the show! All you need you do to take a free pass is to click here and fill in the information in the form. Enjoy!

TruePower iV Pro is a backpack 3100 mAh battery for iPhone and 1G iPod Touch. Its main advantage is simplicity of use - just slip your device and it will automatically start charging. CultOfMac calculated iV Pro allows you to use your iPhone for 1,5 times more after the built-in battery is depleted. In turn it will take 1 h 20 min for recharging backpack battery to 3/4 full (and almost 11 hours for complete recharging).

TruePower claims the iV Pro improves performance of the iPhone's wifi and cellular radios. It also has USB port to charge other devices.

It is available now from Amazon for $99.99. More pictures are under the cut.

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What firmware version do you expect Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, to use on his iPhone? Probably something like 3.2 beta or 4.0 beta with many new unannounced features.

Mike from Macsoda got a response from Steve Jobs to his email wondering about the future of Final Cut Pro (40 Final Cut Pro developers were recently let go). Typically brief, Steve Jobs said:

No worries. FCP is alive and well.
Sent from my iPhone

Now let's look at the header information from the email as well:

The email looks legit as it originates from an internal Apple 17.x.x.x IP address. Here is an interesting part: Steve Jobs iPhone is listed as iPhone Mail (7D11) which means he's using firmware 3.1.2. That's not even the current version of the iPhone OS (3.1.3 - 7E18), let alone the 4.0 Beta we're were hoping to see.

Flash might be quite power consumptive. Adobe posted a video through its blog where the new version 10.1 refutes all previous data.

The phone plays a video on YouTube for 17 minutes. After that the battery has fallen by 6%. So the battery provides several hours of video playback via the FlashPlayer and this new data is not bad.

The Wall St. Journal published a small article about Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen's talk at the Goldman Sachs technology conference this week. Adobe's CEO spoke on his view of why the iPad wasn't equipped to play Flash:

Narayen said Apple's decision likely had everything to do with its business model as it tries to keep a proprietary, closed system so everything goes through its iTunes store, and has nothing to do with the Flash technology. He said about 85 of the top 100 Web sites in the world use Flash, and 75% of the video on the Web today is in Flash, including Google Inc.'s (GOOG) YouTube, News Corp.'s (NWS) Hulu and broadcasters such as ABC and Fox.

Flash will be on every Android device sold at the end of the year. It will also be on Nokias, Palm Pres, Windows Mobile, Blackberries and just about anything else with an ARM Cortex processor. Not to mention 98% of all the Macs and PCs (and Windows/ChomeOS Tablets) throughout the world. It looks like Apple has it's own vision of what is good and bad for the business.