News tagged ‘sed’

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 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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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

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.

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.

Yesterday AppleTell revealed that Apple asked developers to prepare their applications for a launch as soon as possible. According to an unknown source, the upcoming Mac App Store will be revealed on Monday, December 13. But initially Steve Jobs planned to launch it even sooner than today, said the author of the note Kirk Hiner.

"That obviously didn't happen, but Apple appears to be way ahead of schedule on the Mac App Store nonetheless, and looks to take advantage of the Christmas rush".

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Apple surprised everybody when it decided to discontinue its Xserve line on November 5th.  The company officially offered a faster Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, both with Snow Leopard Server installed, as the replacement of the Xserve. IT professionals who maintain data centers small and large claim that these aren’t complete solutions compared to the density of the Xserves. About a third of Xserve shops will be migrating to other hardware within the year.  Some Apple’s System Engineers assure that Apple has another solution in the pipeline beyond what they’ve announced.  Nobody knows what it could be, because Apple builds its own A4 processors, running in parallel, and a data center for cloud services.

Some new promo materials appeared in Apple Stores around the United State. They have an interesting signage which claims that the white iPhone 4 will be available Spring 2011. That confirms an earlier report.  Though, we may hear rumors about the fifth-generation iPhone handset, which also is expected to be released spring 2011. Steve Jobs will most likely announce the device at WWDC ’11. Many believe that Apple sooner will simply release a modified version of the iPhone 4 or a white version of its fifth-generation handset than the white iPhone 4.

This week 9to5Mac reported that an American clothing and accessories retailer Gap was using Apple's iPod-based POS system in a few of its Old Navy stores. The blog wrongly decided that Apple started to market the custom mobile software used in its own retail stores, and that Gap became a retailer which helps the company to test pilot it.

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Apple added 12 more patents to their lawsuit against Motorola. So, the total number of patents that Apple accuses Motorola of violating reached 24. Motorola claims that Apple infringed on 18 of its patents that include 3G, GPRS, 802.11 wireless and antenna design and accused Apple in refusing to pay a license. Apple’s motion to add 12 more patents to the lawsuit is just counter-suit against preemptive request filed by Motorola in October, which reference 11 patents 11 patents that Apple used in its suit against HTC but not Motorola.

Apple was called the "world's most-sued tech company" since 2008. For example, in 2009 27 patent infringement lawsuits were filed against Apple. Of course, responding to those claims takes lots of time and money.

Michael Katz, the 60 years old Florida man, believes that he was subjects of discrimination. He was denied to be promoted when he worked at an Apple’s retail store because of his age. Now he is seeking back pay and damages in excess of $15,000 from the Cupertino, California, company. He began working in Apple in 2006 when he was 60. Although he expressed his desire to be promoted and there were available positions, each time he was denied. His younger colleagues were selected. They were at least 15 years younger than him. As lawsuit claims, Katz was not given any explanation for his repeated denial of promotion opportunities.

Today Peter Kafka, who is a journalist writing for MediaMemo blog, reported that publishers and Apple cannot still come to an agreement on subscriptions for iPad content in the App Store.  The reason is still the same - publishers want to provide personal data about subscribers to advertisers, while Apple doesn't want to do this.

However, Apple proposes an alternative to the publishers, notably an opt-in form which will allows subscribers to choose whether publications can get an access to a "limited amount of information", which includes user's name, e-mail and physical mailing address, or not.

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