News from category ‘Software’

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

Today Apple has begun offering 90-second previews of songs in the iTunes Store. All songs longer than 2 minutes 30 seconds will now have a 90-second preview available. Songs shorter than this length will continue to offer only 30 second previews. Good news for us, consumers! But Apple literally forced labels to accept new terms. Any labels who do not wish to agree with the terms must withdraw their music from the iTunes Store.

MobileMe users report about multiply bugs in the service. Some of them do not satisfy with service's email, photo/file hosting, and syncing capabilities and experience performance and access issues while others believe that the $99 annual price is too high. It’s reasonableб because the "Find My iPhone" service that had previously required a MobileMe subscription is free for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users running iOS 4.2.

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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.

Currently iOS 4.2.1 jailbreak for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS new bootrom, iPad, iPod 3G/4G is a tethered jailbreak. That means if you have to reboot your device, it will show a "connect to itunes" logo until you run the jailbreak software again. Musclenerd from iPhone DevTeam has announced that untethered jailbreak for iPhone iOS 4.2.1 is ready. Unfortunately this will be only for those who saved 4.2b3 SHSH keys via Cydia or tinyumbrella.

Got "backup plan" for untethered 4.2.1 JB working (video coming up). Uses mysterious 4.2b3 hashes Cydia kept for you.

"Backup plan" because hacker comex is working on a more extensible jailbreak. We'll keep you up to date with more information as it develops. For now you can watch the proof video:

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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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Graviboard is an upcoming interesting iOS jailbreak application, which will be soon available in the Cydia Store for $2.99. The application allows iDevice owners to set their icons free by abolishing the gravity that holds them on their places on the Springboard. You may drag these “floating” icons around the screen, and there still might open the apps by touching.

Everybody knows that the iPhone Springboard can’t be turned in landscape mode. Apple wants you to hold the device in portrait mode only. But some apps, like Mail, support the horizontal orientation. So, Cydia developers offer us the alternative solution, a new hack available in Cydia called “SBRotator” ($1.99). If you change your iPhone’s orientation, using the app, the Springboard will just follow it. But Springboard orientation change requires a proper layout change too. SBRotator puts an extra tab which enables you find the configuration that best suits your needs. Moreover, the program allows you to resize icons for landscape mode.

You had spent minutes or even hours organizing your countless applications into Folders and finally noticed that folders gone and your apps exploded back across your Home Screen. Not surprising! Unfortunately, the disappearing folders had been noticed already in iOS 4 came out in June. So we see that the bug wasn’t fixed. Since it’s been around for several months and is still around after iOS 4.2 release it’s hard to understand the cause. Some users have experienced it after updating to a new version of iTunes, others after updating their applications on-device or doing hard resets.

As we wrote earlier, the latest release of Mac OS X 10.6.5 did not include the support for AirPrint, though Apple had earlier announced it. After a while the guys at Netputing released an app called AirPrint Hacktivator, which was simply copying system files from those developer betas of OS X 10.6.5 that had AirPrint support implemented.

But eventually Netputing received an e-mail from one of Apple's legal representatives omm.com,  where it was asked to remove any versions of AirPrint Hacktivator from the company's site as they redistribute Apple’s source code.

The guys were forced to agree but have kept a good heart and finally came up with a new solution:

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The iPhone Dev-Team has issued a notice stating that updating your iPhone to the iPad baseband for unlock could result in the loss of GPS functionality.

Unlockers have been reporting mixed results about GPS functionality at 06.15.00. Until we can track down what differentiates those who retain GPS vs. those who lose it, be conservative and assume you’ll lose GPS at 06.15.00. As we work on finding the cause (and possibly a fix), please report your personal findings in our comments section. (Update: early indications are that while 06.15.00 is capable of GPS, it will require some further hacks. But please still be conservative and assume you will lose GPS at 06.15, in case the hacks don’t work).

Hackers are currently working to fix this.

As usual we remind all users - if you don't absolutely need to update your baseband, don't do it.

According to MacNN report, another yesterday granted patent application reveals that Apple devises new radial pop-up menus which will be an alternative to currently used drop-down menus. Peter Warner, who is listed as a "Designer at Apple" in his LinkedIn profile, is the inventor of this patent.

The application assures that radial menus can be more efficient than the current model of moving 'to menubar to select standard features', which is used in almost every major operational system. An order for both menus can be static and prioritized, when higher priority items are being displayed more prominently.

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