Iphone Updates

So if this ad is to be believed Canada could be getting the iPhone as early as December 7th. The alleged pre-order date is November the 20th so if you believe this ad you might want to start saving up.

Sure, the ad looks pretty convincing, but it’s a rumor because its nowhere to be found on Rogers site, and can only be found through various places where it appears to have been leaked. The ad says the iPhone will sell for $499.99 Canadian with a 3-year contract.

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You don’t even need a computer anymore, just an activated iPhone and a WiFi connection. Here is exactly how hard it is, take your freshly activated 1.1.1 iPhone, and connect to a WiFi network.

Then direct Safari to jailbreakme.com and click install AppSnapp, that’s it, all, finished finito. Wait a few minutes and you will have a jailbroken iPhone with Installer installed.

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It varies from carrier to carrier from O2 to T-Mobile to Orange it all varies, but they all have some rather strict limits. T-Mobile has three plans sized like your shirts, M, L, or XL with data limits of 200MB, 1GB, and 5GB respectively.

After you go over those limits your still have unlimited data, just your access speeds get throttled to 64Kbps instead of the normal speed of 220Kbps. That ad was taken down shortly after being posted, but if I had to guess it will still stay that way, just the fine print will be hidden somewhere else.

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Or your gift cards for that matter. Since when did one of the few nations to somewhat successfully run on a fiat monetary system stop accepting cash anywhere as an acceptable form of payments, let alone in the retail industry?

Then they decide they won’t take gift cards either, I am pretty sure its almost always been a policy to not take checks, so you are left with credit or debit, both easily traceable mediums. I reckon Apple is just supporting big brotherism to keep people from reselling iPhones that are hacked, unlocked, or otherwise altered.

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It’s been a while since we’ve looked at Twitter apps for the iPhone, but if you’ve been chomping at the bit to inform every person in your hideously-bloated social network whenever you turn off the TV, buy a book or break wind, the Apple Web Apps Directory has thrown up ThinCloud, which is being called “the most Twitter-like experience you’ll find on the iPhone”.   

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We already knew that Apple has decided to limit the number of iPhones an individual can buy in a single transaction - down from five to two - but its emerged that they’ve also decided that your cash just isn’t good enough.  Several would-be iPhone owners were turned away from Apple Store cash desks when they tried to pay for their handsets in cash; after a quick call around, it was confirmed that this wasn’t just the odd anomoly but now official policy.

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Yeah, not a big surprise here, that notes syncing feature that was maybe going to happen, well it didn’t. Really it was just a rather big typo by Apple, but Tiger was released, and the Notes are syncing with your iPhone.

I am sure someone could script something to automatically email them to you, and then they’d be synced, sort of, but it looks like that’s as close as you are going to get for now. So, if this was a big selling point of upgrading to Leopard for you, then don’t waste your time, but chances are it was one of the other 300+ new features the new OS X offers.

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So yesterday, we got the tip from the guy from UBS, Ben Reitzes, and that was pretty much all about the iPhone, now we have more news. Basically it’s all about finances, but there are some interesting things, first off, the Halo Effect.

No, it has absolutely nothing to do with the video game made by Bungie and released by Microsoft, it’s a psychology term, and according to Mr. Reitzes, is the driving force behind Apples upward sales/popularity swing. Basically what the Halo Effect is, is the idea that a single trait standing out as very positive, will make all the other traits of that person or item seem more positive than they might without the leading positive trait.

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So Google has decided to be a pioneer, again, and give away free IMAP support for your equally free GMail account. Why is this a big deal? Organization is easier with IMAP support because all of your tagged emails will convert into folders made from those tags, and your emails will be sorted into those folders, making it easier, and quicker, to find what you are looking for.

How does this pertain to the iPhone? The iPhone is one of the few mobile devices out there with IMAP support, so, it will be a lot nicer, and a lot more organized when you peer into your inbox if you have been using GMail and tagging your emails.

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So the iPhone seems like a pretty good business tool right? Wrong, at least that’s the case if you work in a business where you sling around code names or other secretive info in emails, text messages, or other text based communications.

So if you have hacked your iPhone and have access to the drive contents, feel free to go to /var/root/Library/Keyboard and take a peak at the contents of the dynamic-text.dat file. That’s right; it’s essentially all the words you have used that the dictionary, the one for auto-correction whiles you are typing, didn’t recognize.

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“Given the impressive value of Time Machine and improvements to existing programs such as iCal, iChat, Mail, and the Finder, most active Mac users will find more than enough reasons to consider [the] upgrade cost money well spent,” reports Jason Snell (pcworld.com). Leopard delivers, Snell declares, “a major alteration to the Mac interface, a sweeping update to numerous included productivity programs, a serious attempt to improve Mac OS security, and a vast collection of tweaks and fixes scattered throughout every nook and cranny of the operating system.”

“What’s new in Leopard? A lot,” say Ken Mingis and Michael DeAgonia (computerworld.com). The pair walk you through a 12-page analysis of the newest version of the Mac OS, spending time on many of the new features introduced in Leopard, including Stacks, Quick Look, Spaces, Time Machine, and numerous others. From Leopard’s “unified interface” to major under-the-hood changes, to wholly new apps, Leopard is a substantial, albeit evolutionary, advance for Mac OS X that builds on a solid foundation and adds a modicum of eye candy to reinforce the notion that this is something new and improved. It’s also fast — especially impressive given the new graphics sprinkled throughout the OS.”

“The grace of Leopard’s interface enhancements makes productivity more pleasurable with a Mac, as more than 300 functional and fun features top off this update,” reports Elsa Wenzel (cnet.com). Awarding it an “Excellent 8 out of 10,” Wenzel maintains that Leopard not only “makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did,” but that it “makes it far easier to find documents and applications than Windows Vista. Leopard’s interface niceties made the daily mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable. Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up data, become a visual treat.”

After putting Leopard through its paces, Dean Takahashi (San Jose Mercury News) finds it is aptly named—”It’s fast and sleek”—and concludes that the latest version of Mac OS X “gives Apple [an] advantage over Microsoft.” It offers “more than 300 new features, making it the biggest upgrade in a long time,” and “a lot of the features allow you to do things more quickly and more easily.” That includes iChat, which, he says, “got a good makeover. Besides doing video chats with the built-in Webcams on Macs, you can now use them to share any kind of file with the person you’re chatting with. You can also take over that friend’s desktop in case you’re diagnosing the machine from afar.”

Born in China’s Sichuan province, the highly innovative illustrator and graphic designer Qian Qian uses Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and other Mac software to create art that merges Eastern and Western influences from different eras—from classical Chinese painting and 1930s Shanghai advertising to Cultural Revolution aesthetics, pop art, and the Japanese manga-inspired Superflat movement. “Other people might have training from an early age with pens and brushes,” Qian says, “but the Mac is my main tool.”

Aperture customers can now install the Aperture 1.5.6 Update, either by running Software Update or by visiting the Aperture Download page. Recommended for all those using Aperture, the Aperture 1.5.6 Update addresses issues related to performance, improves overall stability, and supports compatibility with Mac OS X v10.5. The update should be installed before first use of Aperture with Mac OS X Leopard.

Just imagine buying a custom iPhone that allows you to control security, lighting, temp, shading, and audio. Now imagine being able to do so from anywhere in the world.

That is what the Digital Lifestyle firm CLIQK from NYC has accomplished, and is marketing. I am sure that they are Jailbroken or otherwise unlocked iPhones, because I don’t see a basic web connection being secure enough to trust control to all of that to it.

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Ben Reitzes of UBS seems pretty confident that there will be a new version of the iPhone by March of 2008. The guy got a tip from someone in the iPhone supply chain that he believes to be true.

The guy is dead certain it will be a second gen iPhone too, not an iPhone Nano, a new Newton, or anything else like that. Its definitely going not going to be an iPod with Internet calling either, its going to be the next iPhone.

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The answer is mostly no. There were however 6% of the survey set that said that yes, the iPhone is sexier than Halle Berry, or Scarlett Johansson.

I don’t even think that a normal person would have to go so far as to get a major A-List celebrity to beat out the iPhone in attractiveness. I mean, just look at this pic of iJustine and an iPhone, now which one are you focusing on?

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For a moment it seemed like all-systems-go for Canada, where legions of Apple-hungry shoppers with wads of Canadian dollars burning holes in their pockets have been anxiously waiting for the iconic handset, as Molson Export - a beer company based in Quebec - advertised a competition in which several iPhones are to be the prize.  Listed as using the Rogers Wireless network and worth $800 each, it was claimed the handsets would be delivered to winners in January 2008.

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Actually they appear to be porting the entire Information Anywhere suite over to the iPhone. Their plans call for a first half of 2008 release.

They’re so smart; they even adopted the iNaming scheme and called it iAnywhere. It should provide security, and make getting your mail without switching to IMAP a lot easier.

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Piper Jaffray’s people got their hands on a calculator, who ever thought such a simple device could be a weapon wielded against large companies? Anyways they did some math and found an interesting number, $565, that’s roughly how much Apple makes off of an iPhone with 2-year contract with AT&T.

They got that number buy taking the retail price of the iPhone, $399, adding the roughly $18 per month Apple makes from iPhone contracts, and then subtracting the $265 that iSuppli estimates each iPhone costs to make. Well, now we know why it was so easy for Jobs to drop the iPhone price by a couple hundred dollars, sure it was a loss, but the 90 some odd thousand iPhones he sold the 3 days after probably went a long way towards making up for that.

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You know the Bonjour networking thingy that runs on iPhones and iPod Touches? Well Erica Sadun, the iPhone hacking genius, has figured out how to use it for file transfers.

This means lot of things, first and foremost though, you’ll be able to transfer files seamlessly between 2 or more iPhones and iPod Touches soon, actually, if you are near as knowledgeable as Erica, you could probably do it now. I for one, am going to wait for the simple GUI based interface for doing it to be released.

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It’s full-on innuendo time around the internet today, as the plucky iPhone Dev Team release their Revirginizer which promises to take your bricked iPhone back to pristine, innocent Apple goodness.  Intended to help out the many people who unlocked their iPhones and then found them to be broken when they attempted to upgrade to firmware version 1.1.1, it should restore handsets unlocked via most methods to a state ready to play nicely with Apple’s updates.

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With a name like iPhoneSlide I was expecting to see rubber gloves and a barrel of industrial lubricant, but it turns out that this web-app is rather more PG-13 than XXX.  Basically, it’s a straightforward way to get photos off of your iPhone and onto your favourite media sharing website - whether that be Facebook, Wordpress, Flickr, Blogger, Twitter or Typepad.

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Happy developers, you will have a SDK dedicated to the iPhone in February 2008, according to Apple website.

The pressure has been too much for Apple…

Tags:apple developer iphone sdkapple, developer, iphone, sdk

According to Admob (a mobile delivery ad-network), the iPhone has represented in September 2007 0.4% of the total mobile web surfing of mobile devices in the United States. It confirms the current market share of the iPhone in the US.

Tags:admob apple iphoneadmob, apple, iphone

Finally after a trip to Apple headquarters, the French director of Orange, Didier Lombard (photo) agreed the deal for the iPhone in France.

More info in french here, and the official press release from Apple here.

Tags:apple france iphone orangeapple, france, iphone, orange

If your iPhone is no longer usable due to a firmware upgrade version 1.1.1 after unlocking your iPhone, then follow this link to get back your beloved phone: UNBRICKING 1.1.1 UPGRADE

Tags:firmware iphone unbrickingfirmware, iphone, unbricking

Apple launched a nice directory of the iPhone Web Apps, very useful for all the iPhone users.

Tags:apple apps iphone webapple, apps, iphone, web

Apple has published an interesting guide for developers who want to make an iPhone friendly web application.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneHIG/

Tags:apple developer iphoneapple, developer, iphone

“St. Olaf sophomore Peter Holt, a longtime PC user, has just made the Mac switch after working in the school Mac-support department and realizing how seamlessly Apple hardware and software work together. He also likes having the option to boot into Windows as needed. He uses a desktop iMac for schoolwork and software development, as well as to play Windows games with his brother over the Internet.” Holt is not alone. As Julio Ojeda-Zapata (St. Paul Pioneer Press) points out, Mac use has surged “on campuses across Minnesota” and the rest of the US, as well, with some schools—like Pennsylvania’s Wilkes University—going all Mac.

That’s the one-word assessment Rob Griffiths (macworld.com) offers for Time Machine. “Perfect for nearly everyone,” Griffiths points out that “Time Machine attempts to turn the complex and sometimes confusing world of backup and restore into a simple, visual operation. Backing up is simple: attach a drive of sufficient capacity.” And when the fateful day arrives and you need to rescue documents from oblivion, “ you launch the Time Machine application—Apple has added a Time Machine icon to Leopard’s Dock—and simply move backward through time to find the files or folders you wish to restore.”

Writing for the Telegraph, Claudine Beaumont tells us that “Leopard is slick, shiny” and offers any number of features that deliver the “wow factor.” Like CoverFlow, which in Leopard allows “you to whiz through files and documents, with the album covers replaced by mini-thumbnails showing the front page of documents. You can hover over these thumbnails to scroll through multi-page documents; if it’s a movie file, you can even play the film clip in Finder.” Stacks “another useful addition to Leopard, is a virtual ‘stack’ of documents that lives in the dock area, giving you one-click access to files.” “For me,” Beaumont states, “the stand-out feature is Time Machine,” but she’s also impressed that with Boot Camp built-in, Leopard becomes “the first Apple operating system that will also allow you to install a Windows operating system alongside it.”

“With Leopard, Apple’s operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically,” states Ed Baig (usatoday.com). Baig “migrated to Leopard” from Tiger “without pain on a MacBook laptop and my own iMac desktop; there’s mercifully none of the software driver and other hassles associated with a Windows operating system upgrade.” Calling Leopard “one cool cat,” Baig praises Time Machine with its automatic backup and effortless file retrieval; the new videoconferencing features in iChat Theater; stationery, notes and To Do options in Mail; Cover Flow, Spaces, Stacks, and the ability to “highlight and copy any portion of a Web page inside the Safari browser and turn it into a live Dashboard widget.”

“I’ve been testing Leopard,” reports Walter Mossberg (Wall Street Journal) and, “I believe it builds on Apple’s quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.” Among the more than 300 new features available in Leopard, Mossberg singles out as “marquee features” Time Machine, Cover Flow, and Quick Look.” And he was impressed that “every piece of software and hardware I tried on two Leopard-equipped Macs—a loaned laptop from Apple and my own upgraded iMac—worked fine, exhibiting none of the compatibility problems that continue to plague Vista.”

This Friday, October 26, Apple retail stores will open from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. to celebrate the availability of Mac OS X Leopard. Visit a store near you, and you’ll see live demos of Leopard and have a chance to be one of the first to test drive the most impressive version of Mac OS X yet. There’ll even be free T-shirts for the first 500 guests to visit an Apple Store.

One day, Jason Russell, Laren Poole, and Bobby Bailey bought a camera on eBay, jumped on a plane, and began filming a documentary. The next day, they were saving lives. Invisible Children, the documentary the three produced, has become a highly successful film alerting millions to the plight of the children of Uganda. But the three filmmakers weren’t done yet. They also founded an international nonprofit organization, also called Invisible Children, that’s one of the fastest-growing nonprofits on the planet. And it’s built around Mac computers.

Apple has published an interesting guide for developers who want to make an iPhone friendly web application.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneHIG/

Tags:apple developer iphoneapple, developer, iphone

When Christopher Laub “sat in” on a Spanish, social studies, reading, or math lesson, he actually “sat” at home—miles away from his classroom—battling leukemia and undergoing chemotherapy. But thanks to iChat AV and iSight, Christopher could attend classes—even recess—on a regular basis. In fact, videoconferencing via his Mac and iChat not only kept Christopher connected with his friends and current with his classwork; it also let his fellow students learn about leukemia and its treatment, according to principal Patti Purcell. “Through the use of iChat AV, we’ve had many ‘teachable moments,’ and the kids have learned so much.”

“One of the best new features in all of the Final Cut Studio family,” maintains Kevin McAuliffe (CreativeMac) “is the addition of surround sound mixing to Soundtrack Pro 2.” To illustrate, McAuliffe takes readers step-by-step through a simple “surround” tutorial. “This great and easy to use feature in STP2,” he concludes, “lets you mix your entire show in surround, export your mix as surround, and then take your submix, switch it back to “1,2”, and you now have a downmix to stereo from 5.1 for a stereo version of your show.”

Announcing its fiscal 2007 fourth quarter results, Apple reported today that it had posted revenue of $6.22 billion and net quarterly profit of $904 million, or $1.01 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $4.84 billion and net quarterly profit of $542 million, or $.62 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 33.6 percent, up from 29.2 percent in the year-ago quarter. In the fourth quarter, Apple shipped 2,164,000 Macs, representing 34% growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous quarterly record for Mac shipments by 400,000. Apple also sold 10,200,000 iPods (representing 17% growth over the year-ago quarter) and 1,119,000 iPhones, bringing cumulative fiscal 2007 iPhone sales to 1,389,000.

“iTunes U, the education portal within Apple’s iTunes,” reports Campus Technology, “has expanded its content to include educational materials from sources beyond colleges and universities,” Called “Beyond Campus,” the area provides programming from Smithsonian Global Sound, KQED, Little Kids Rock, the Museum of Modern Art, and, most recently, “American Public Media, which is making its radio programming available free for educational purposes.”

Wikipedia recognizes him as “one of the most important figures in the development of modern electric musical instruments and recording techniques.” Indeed, Les Paul, invented reverb, sound-on-sound and multi-track recording. On a mission to create “a radical new sound,” the multi-talented guitarist developed not only new ways of—and new equipment for—recording music but also new instruments. Most notably: the solid-body electric guitar that would bear his name and that legions of jazz, blues, country, and rock musicians would zealously adopt. Now Paul and his technical team have tapped the Mac, Final Cut Pro, and Soundtrack Pro to help tell the story about how he brought his radical new sound to life.

Citing research from ChangeWave Research, Jonny Evans (Macworld) reports that “the iPhone now leads the pack in terms of customer satisfaction among its US customer base. An unprecedented 82 per cent of iPhone owners reported being Very Satisfied with their purchase, up five points since the previous survey in July and by far the highest rating of any mobile manufacturer.” Evans notes that “the research found 16 per cent of respondents who plan to purchase a phone in the next six months saying they’ll buy an iPhone - placing Apple up at the top among all manufacturers.”

As reported by DigiTimes, ” ‘the iPhone has become AT&T’s top selling device, commanding some 13% of AT&T’s overall handset sales, and the fourth top selling handset in the US market,’ according to Barry Gilbert, VP of the Strategy Analytics BuyerTRAX programs.” What’s more, DigiTimes also quotes Gilbert as indicating that “ ‘ the sales trajectory we are observing with the iPhone could make it the top selling device in the US over the next 1-2 quarters.’ “

“When we started to look at how to provide a quality education for our students, what became very clear was that the future is digital,” says Carl Rose, executive director of the Association of Alaska School Boards (AASB). “We needed to ensure that our kids not only had the skill-sets required by the state, but also had the digital literacy capability to use those skills. That’s when the concept of 1 to 1 learning began to make sense.” And today, the MacBook, iLife, iWork, and Apple Professional Development are helping the AASB bring its 1 to 1 learning initiative to fruition.

Music, that is. Thanks to the new iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, the editors at E! Online find it all but irresistible to indulge in the guilty pleasure of impulse music buying. “As long as you’re at a hot spot, you can click on the new Wi-Fi widget for your iPhone or iPod touch and get access to Apple’s music library at the usual 99 cents per song.”

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch.

Offering customers the largest catalog of DRM-free music in the world, Apple today expanded iTunes Plus to more than two million tracks while at the same time lowering the price of those tracks to just 99 cents. In addition to artists from EMI’s digital catalog, iTunes Plus now includes artists from Sub Pop, Nettwerk, IODA, The Orchard and many others. All iTunes Plus tracks feature DRM-free music with high-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, offering audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.