News from category ‘Official’

As we know, Australian state Victoria Premier John Brumby always shows enthusiasm for the Apple’s iPad. He ordered 500 devices for Victorian hospitals and bought over 500 for Victorian schools. Now Australian state Victoria plans to provide iPads to all the doctors working in Australia’s public health system.

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Skyfire announced that their web browser, which features access to Flash video content, will soon be available for the iPad.“We are working on an iPad version of Skyfire. If your primary device is the iPad, please consider waiting”, - said the company.

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As we promised, yesterday Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.5 update for Snow Leopard, which now available via Software Update. The public release is the same Build 10H574 that was seeded to developers on Monday. The 10.6.5 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The full list of general fixes and improvements in Mac OS X 10.6.5, according to Apple, includes:

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Yesterday, 9th November, the iPad was officially launched in Russia. Six models of the device are now available in three retail chains: M.Video, Bely Veter and re:Store. The iPad will be on sale only in five cities: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, and Kazan. There are only 3,000 to 4,000 iPads available in the country on launch. But by the end of the year Apple plans to ship forty to fifty thousand units to Russia. Prices range from 19,990 rubles (US$650) for the 16GB WiFi model to 32,990 rubles (US$1,075) for the 64GB WiFi+3G model. However, it seems that those Russians, who wanted to get the iPad in Russia, had already bought the one abroad or in the grey market, where price for the device reached 100,000 rubles, or US$3,256.

Three days after releasing Mac OS X 10.6.5 Build 10H571, Apple seeded Build 10H574 to developers. That just means that the company continues to work under Mac OS X 10.6.5 to prepare for a public release. The public release of Mac OS X 10.6.5 is expected to come nearly simultaneously with a release of iOS 4.2, because the 10.6.5 will enable AirPrint wireless printing compatibility between iOS devices and Macs. No details of the changes made in the latest build have yet been revealed.

Obviously, the iPad apps are more expensive than those for the iPhone/iPod touch. But you probably don’t know that their prices increased in the past six months. The average price for the iPad app increased from $4.34 in April 2010 to $4.97 in October 2010 (+14.5%). Prices for the iPhone apps increased only from $3.94 to $4.03 (+2.3%). Moreover, now developers prefer to create applications compatible only with the iPad. Although iPhone apps cost less than their iPad counterparts, the iPad only accounts for 13% of the total 300,000 apps available in the App Store, and just 7 percent of all apps are universal.

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Last week Ars Technica test found out that the MacBook Airs battery life was reduced by up to two hours when Flash was installed. But the Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch believes that it is impossible.  In his interview to Fast Company he claimed that reports of Adobe Flash causing reduced battery life are a “false argument.”

“When you're displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses”, -  Lynch explained.

Moreover, he blamed Apple in inciting and condoning a negative campaign against Flash. Earlier this year, Jobs spoke out against Flash in an open letter, labeling it unfit for the modern era of low-power devices. And as a result, the MacBook Airs and Macs are shipped now without Flash pre-installed.

People close to Apple claims that iWork '11 productivity suite is finished and ready for launch but will be released alongside the Mac App Store in early 2011. Initially iWork '11 was planed to be launched alongside iLife '11 last month and its release was held back at the last moment for unknown reasons. Now Apple is planning to launch the new productivity suite alongside the forthcoming Mac App Store. The application will include Pages, Numbers and Keynote bundles, which may be available for purchase exclusively through the Mac App Store for $19.99 each, below Apple's current $79 price for the complete retail box suite.

The Mac App Store should debut on January 18th, 2011. Last week the company began accepting submissions from developers who would like to include their applications in the Mac App Store. Developers will take a 70 percent cut of sales, while Apple will retain 30 percent.

Some days ago Patently Apple published a new patent application from Apple under the name "Scrollable Menus and Toolbars." The document describes the use of a small selection window through which a variety of options could be scrolled and offers use of an entire toolbar with all options remaining visible at all times. The drawings above and below depict implementations on both Mac OS X and iOS. The application notes that toolbars and menus are for typical commands, such as opening a file or saving a document and etc.

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Today Toshiba started selling Blade X-gale Solid state drives for mass market, the same that are used in the new MacBook Airs. That was confirmed by MacRumors, which compared Toshiba's part numbers with the numbers of the components found in the latest Apple's notebooks.

Here are the short specs of the SSDs:

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After iOS 4 release in June, it was laggy and generally not a good experience for many iPhone 3G users. Nevertheless, the due to release iOS 4.2 is running pretty well on iPhone 3G. Here is a video of iPhone 3G running the iOS 4.2 GM version, which is usually identical to the final release. The video was shot by TIPB.com. There were not any significant lags, and the keyboard was responsive. But, as usual,  the real problems appeared after some usage time , when you bloat the system with all your email, calendar entries, and vast number of contacts.

With the arrival of iOS 4.2 on the iPad, Apple will give its users more control over the quality of images they share through email. The iPad will get the image quality setting feature. Now a new field will appear in the new message creation screen. This field should indicate the size of your email. If you tap it, you’ll be presented with a selection of sizes for your pictures, namely: “Small,” “Medium,” “Large” or “Actual Size.” The changes will be applied to all images in the same email. Unfortunately, it is impossible to change size of a separate image in the email.

Here is a chart that shows where Apple's iPhone is selling. Nowadays Apple sells its device in 79 countries. Of course, Apple is expanding to other countries. It is coming soon in other 25 countries. Note that 18 of them are in Africa, a fast-growing market for smartphones. On the chart above you may see that the most important market for Apple is America. But Europe has become also rather important and Asia - mostly China – is very quickly catching up.

This week Apple announced that it is going to discontinue Xserve after January 31, 2011. Apple will not be developing a future version of Xserve. Customers may choose between the Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server, and the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server. Both systems should replace existing Xserve systems. The documentation notes that the 12-core Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server meets or exceeds the performance of the baseline Xserve hardware. The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server, on the other hand, is significantly outperformed by Xserve, but it has been Apple's most popular server system since its introduction in the fall of 2009.

If you ever wondered what Apple thought were the very best apps of the last two years, there’s now a list for that. Apple has launched a new section of the iTunes App Store, a Hall of Fame, containing everything iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad from Angry Birds to Zen Bound 2. There are around 50 apps honored so far and includes news, travel, sports, entertainment, productivity, and of course, lots of great games. The list includes both free and paid apps. Apple did a great job selecting these. Of course, they were probably helped by the massive app sales data they have. Most, if not all of the apps, are fairly “obvious” choices that you probably already own.

What app is now on the top of the list? No wondering, it is Angry Birds.