News tagged ‘Time’

In the month since Apple opened an online software clearinghouse called the App Store, users have downloaded more than 60 million programs for the iPhone, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in an interview at Apple's headquarters.

While many of the applications were free, Apple sold an average of $1 million a day in applications for a total of about $30 million in sales over the month, Mr. Jobs said.

If sales stay at the current pace, Apple stands to reap at least $360 million a year in new revenue from the App Store, Mr. Jobs said. "This thing's going to crest a half a billion, soon," he added. "Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time."

Apple is keeping only 30% of the proceeds from application sales -- about enough to cover expenses from credit-card transactions and other costs of running the online store -- while the programs' creators keep 70%.

via Wall Street Journal

Newly arrived in the App Store is pTerm, an iPhone port of the PuTTY terminal emulator. It supports SSH and Telnet, among other things, and has a built-in Control key.

Eric Maland says that a 1.1 update is already on its way (it has been submitted to Apple and is awaiting approval). Unfortunately a handful of "major crashy bugs" (as Eric puts it) were discovered after the 1.0 release had been submitted.

Planned features for future releases include multiple simultaneous connections, custom sizes and colors, port forwarding and lots more.

And in the meantime, if you download and experience crashy behavior, Eric's message is: be patient. The fixes are done, but when they reach the Store is out of his hands.

pTerm is $4.99US in the US App Store

More screenshots and the list of features:

Read the rest of this entry »

The main purpose is bug fixing. Many applications work faster. Here is the list of changes:

• Drag an app icon across multiple pages in one motion, rather than having to drag it, drop it, pick it up again and drag it over to next page, and repeat.
• Contacts are now more responsive.
• Backup is much faster.
• Apple may have changed the calibration of the iPhone's reception "bars" while connected to a 3G network to reflect a stronger signal than before.
• Keypad loads quicker.
• Screen rotation in Safari appears to be smoother.
• Some apps may ask to be updated after the firmware upgrade.
• SMS typing faster.
• Google Apps works faster.
• Netshare still works (for those who use it).
• Works with iPod.
• Multimedia content is kept after update.
• No Support from Pwnage and WinPwn. If you update you'll loose unlock and jailbreak.
  

Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that produces the iPhone 3G for Apple, has ramped up production to 800,000 units per week, says a source close to Apple with direct knowledge of the numbers.

Apple sold just 6 million of its first generation iPhones. Foxconn factories will be able to ramp production up significantly over time, says our source. But at current sell rates, the company is producing iPhones at a run rate of over 40 million units per year, well beyond early estimates of demand for the product of 25 million over the 3G product lifecycle.

via techcrunch

WebSearch is a very handy app that saves lots of time especially on slow networks.

Consider normal use of the web on say EDGE. You pull up a web page, you have to wait for it to load. You then get to the search page, wait for it to load, type in your search, wait for it to load. With websearch, you program in search criteria (based on firefox’s “add a keyword search”) and then you just click the search for the site, type the search string, and wait only one time for the search page to loa with results.

I've seen it today at about 2pm SPB time. According to the news the Moon hided about 60% of the Solar.

There was a method to use IPhone's internet connection on a desktop (Get internet on a desktop or notebook through IPhone 3G), now there is an officail one:

NetShare is one app we never thought would make it onto the official iPhone App Store. The $9.99 application promises to allow you to share your iPhone's network connection with your computer. All it does is set up a SOCKS5 proxy for you to get your laptop/computer online through use of the 3G/EDGE connection. Does it work? Yes. Yes it does, much to our surprise. EDGE works just fine, although Mahoney says it's slow as balls. 3G impressions in a sec. Be careful of how much bandwidth you're using, since your provider probably makes a frowny face at you using their network to power your laptop, however "unlimited" your plan may be. How this got passed Apple and AT&T who knows.

Link to AppStore: NetShare. Tutorial is here: NetShare HOW TO.

Update 1: There are some bugs with iPhone 3G.

Update 2: The application is gone. Now we're getting the message that it's not available in the US store

Update 3: Just an official reply from Nullriver:

"We're not quite sure why Apple took down the application yet, we've received no communication from Apple thus far. NetShare did not violate any of the Developer or AppStore agreements. We're hoping we'll get some feedback from Apple tomorrow. Sorry to all the folks that couldn't get it in time. We'll do our best to try to get the application back onto the AppStore if at all possible. At the very least, I would hope Apple will allow it in countries where the provider does permit tethering."

Update 4: The application re-appeared in iTunes. It is avaliable through direct link: NetShare.

Update 5: It's gone.. again.

The iPhone 2.0 software is pretty good. We like the App Store a lot; it adds a boatload of new functionality to the iPhone. But it's certainly not perfect. Having used it for a few weeks, we've discovered a number of little quirks that we really hope are addressed in the upcoming update. From bugs to missing features, here are ten things that would make the iPhone a much more attractive device.

1. Make it Less Crashy
The iPhone with 2.0 software feels a little… buggy. It'll randomly crash or slow down to the point of unusability until you restart every few days with normal use. That's not right; this is a cellphone. It shouldn't feel like an unstable computer.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of the most interesting applications for IPhone.

Dynolicious is an all-purpose automotive performance meter, utilizing the built-in accelerometer in the iPhone and iPod touch to record your driving characteristics. BunsenTech, the makers of the software, claim that it can record 0-60 times within .08 of a second, accurately estimate your current speed and monitor and record any directional G force. The system seeks to perform nearly every function of (much) more expensive dedicated monitoring units, which seems like an awfully tall order for a $12.99 piece of cellphone software.

Specifically, the Dynolicious software gives you:

• 0-60 MPH
• Other Speed Tests (0-10 MPH through 0-100 MPH in 10MPH increments)
• Quarter Mile Elapsed Time
• Quarter Mile Trap Speed
• Elapsed Time and Trap Speed for standard intervals (60', 330', 1/8 Mi, 1000')
• Lateral G's (current and peak)
• Braking G's (current and peak)
• Wheel Horsepower
• Estimated Engine Horsepower
• Realtime Speedometer and Graphs
• Realtime graphical skidpad display
• View results for latest test run or any saved run
• View averages based on vehicle, date, or modification
• Compare results between vehicles, dates, or before-and-after modifications

More screenshots:

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United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just released a large document detailing "Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Determining Commands by Applying Heuristics".  There are lots and lots of information in this patent (#20080174570) but only one particular section that really caught my eye.  It has to do with one feature many of us have been wishing for on the iPhone --- support for Flash content.

The content from this patent doesn't say whether Apple will add support for Flash to future versions of iPhone OS 2.0, but it does tell us that Apple has most definitely considered it.  And as an added bonus, we may even see native support for Windows Media content.

[0778]FIGS. 40A-40F illustrate exemplary user interfaces for playing an item of inline multimedia content in accordance with some embodiments.

[0779]In some embodiments, user interfaces 4000A-4000F include the following elements, or a subset or superset thereof: [0780]402, 404, 406, 3902, 3906, 3910, 3912, 3918, 3920, 3922, as described above; [0781]inline multimedia content 4002, such as QuickTime content (4002-1), Windows Media content (4002-2), or Flash content (4002-3);

via iphonebuzz

Is your mail crashing on 2.0 firmware?

This is generally caused after syncing your backup. This has nothing to do with jailbreaking or not. However, the fix for it is simple and is part of a jailbreak. The issue is that after syncing your backup, your mail folder is owned by root and your mail app running as user mobile does not have permissions to access it. You can fix it in SSH. But I also added a button in BossPrefs to solve it.

Step 1:Jailbreak your device

Step 2: Install BossPrefs from Cydia

Step 3: Tap “more”

Step 4: Tap “Fix User Dir Permissions”

Step 5: Sometimes, not always, you will need to load settings and reenter your mail passwords.

via sleepers.net

Apple is already providing developers with a new iPhone firmware beta with enhanced location-finding that could lead to true navigation as well as the roots for background push services.

The one of new features is update to core Location - it can now recognize the cardinal direction of an iPhone with GPS as well as its velocity, both of which are ingredients necessary to providing turn-by-turn directions. The additions confirm statements recently by Apple's Greg Joswiak, who rejected earlier claims that iPhone 3G's GPS antenna wasn't powerful enough to handle navigation and in turn explained that "complicated issues" are holding the device back from serving as a true navigation unit.

Apple is also implementing a rough version of its background push notification service in the 2.1 firmware. Announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference, the feature lets third-party native programs receive data such as alerts or new messages without actively running. The measure saves processing power without interrupting some apps that depend on constant access to the Internet.

The inclusion of this early version of the code alludes to the 2.1 update becoming public at the same time as the push notification service itself, which is tentatively due for September. In the meantime, Apple and its US partner AT&T are known to be testing iPhone 2.0.1, a maintenance release that likely fixes some of the outstanding bugs with the initial 2.0 release.

via appleinsider

AT&T has developed a software trick that will recognize voice commands without the need for specialized voice recognition software. It is based on a new version of AT&T's WATSON speech recognition engine.

As long as the software used to access Speech Mashups obeys certain web standards, particularly an AJAX framework and JavaScript, the technology can capture voice commands, interpret them at a remote server, and send them back to the device in a language a website or program can understand -- all without installing a dedicated app or plugin.

In a prototype mobile version of the YellowPages website, AT&T in a research video shows an iPhone user entering the business name and location into text fields on the page just by speaking them at the appropriate times. While typing would work in such a case, the company claims that voicing the information is faster and more convenient.

via appleinsider

There is not much defference between Safari 1.1.4 and 2.0. But Under the hood, MobileSafari 2.0's performance is hugely improved over 1.1.4. Everything related to web surfing feels faster, web pages consistently load faster on 2.0, both via Wi-Fi and EDGE. This has nothing to do with the new iPhone 3G hardware — this is about dramatic performance improvements on original iPhones upgraded to the 2.0 OS.

Using MobileSafari simply feels faster, especially with web applications. Feel is by nature subjective, but JavaScript benchmarks back this up.

In August last year, Craig Hockenberry posted a few simple benchmarks to compare the iPhone's processing power and JavaScript interpreter against Safari 3 running on a Mac with a 1.83 GHz Core Duo. At that time, the current version of the iPhone OS was 1.0.1. Here are the results of those same benchmarks on original iPhones running the 1.1.4 and new 2.0 OS versions, with Hockenberry’s 1.0.1 results included for comparison:

The last column shows how many times faster the 2.0 version of MobileSafari was versus 1.0.1 and 1.1.4. The same results, charted (smaller bars are faster) can be viewed above.

The results are obvious. WebKit JavaScript performance has improved steadily and significantly in just one year, with a huge jump between 1.1.4 and the new 2.0.0. In side-by-side page loading tests between two original iPhones running 1.1.4 and 2.0.0, the new version consistently finished at least a few seconds faster.

For all the hubbub regarding the new App Store, most “iPhone software” runs in the web browser. But improvements in WebKit performance often help native iPhone app performance, too — a slew of my favorite native iPhone apps have built-in WebKit browsers (e.g., NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, Instapaper, and Cocktails). When WebKit performance improves, any app that uses WebKit improves, and WebKit improved a lot between iPhone 1.1.4 and 2.0.0.

via daringfireball.net

With the iPhone 3G not even ten days old, virtually all of the Apple retail store stores open within the United States are without any examples of the device to sell on July 21st.

The shortage is severe enough in the 38 states that claim Apple stores that it's easier to count the locations that do have iPhone 3G units than those that don't.

In California, the only Apple store with any iPhones is the Pleasanton store with only 16GB black examples, while New York City's Fifth Avenue store is the only one in all of New York state known to have any examples left, with just 16GB white models in stock.

Only a single Honolulu store and the Salem, New Hampshire store can also claim to have any units available, and each only lists one model as ready for Monday.

Apple has been continually resupplying its stores with new iPhones - in many cases on a daily basis - but has seen fewer and fewer of its stores touting next-day availability in the several days since the July 11th debut of the handset upgrade.

Whether or not Apple's supply will meet demand in time to prevent a repeat of May's complete stockout is also far from certain. When grilled on an unprecedented spike in preorders, Britain's iPhone carrier O2 said it might take "some weeks" before it could satisfy enough of its customers on a regular basis.

via AppleInsider