Iphone Updates

Reviewer Edward Mendelson (pcmag.com) calls Snow Leopard “Apple’s fastest, most functional, and feature-rich operating system yet,” awarding it 4.5/5 stars and a “Very Good” editor’s rating.

Illumina, a San Diego, CA-based biotechnology company that designs breakthrough tools for genetic analysis, uses iPhone to track customers and manage employees across five continents. And soon it will make it possible for consumers to carry their personal genomes with them on iPhone.

Apple today announced that Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard users for $29.

Today Apple filed with the FCC the following answers to their questions.

iPhoto 8.1, the latest update to iPhoto ’09, introduces an extra-large version of the popular hardcover photo book. The new 13 x 10-inch size book — nearly 40% bigger than the traditional large book — features the same full-cover dust jacket and a new satin finish on the photo wrap cover. It makes a perfect gift or coffee table addition. Also included in this update are new travel book and holiday card themes.

“There’s an App for that,” is Apple’s ubiquitous catch phrase for why you should purchase their iPhone mobile device. It does indeed seem to be the case that the iPhone offers applications for a wide variety of uses, but…

European newspaper giant Axel Springer has transformed itself from an old-school, print-based publisher to a digital media powerhouse. Key to that transformation was embracing mobile digital content delivered by iPhone 3G.

In It Might Get Loud, director Davis Guggenheim invites Jimmy Page (The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin), The Edge (U2), and Jack White (The White Stripes) to tell the history of the electric guitar from their own unique perspectives. How did each develop a sound unique to rock music? See It Might Get Loud and find out. The documentary comes to theaters on August 14.

To keep Surfline.com, with 150 live-streaming cameras in key surf spots around the globe, functioning glitch-free, product manager Graeme Rae uses iPhone: “The surf doesn’t stop. With iPhone, I can reboot a server from the beach.”

Filed under: Apple

Yes folks, it looks like the online Apple Store is currently down. Given that it is 10:00 PM on a Saturday night over in Cupertino, I’d say chances are pretty good that it could just be some simple maintenance, but you never know.

We’ll keep an eye out for any changes and post an update if anything exciting happens!

TUAWApple Store is currently down originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Hardware, Snow Leopard

We’ve gotten more than a few emails over the past 24 hours ruminating over how Snow Leopard has changed the way that file and drive sizes are calculated. It’s been traumatic for some, having a psychological effect similar to Pluto losing its status as a full-fledged planet.

A great post over at MacFixIt explains the math about determining a file size — and how the folks at Apple decided to follow the definitions of a “gigabyte,” “kilobyte” and “megabyte” as they are commonly used in English (or, put a different way, just like in the metric system). So, a kilobyte is actually 1,000 bytes, and “officially” has been since 1999. Technically, the word for a 1,024-byte chunk of data is a kibibyte. Having kilo-, mega- and giga- SI prefixes refer to powers-of-10 in almost all realms, and powers-of-2 in information technology, was apparently becoming too confusing.

What does that mean in the real world? MacFixIt sums it up best:

“For all intents and purposes it means absolutely nothing! It does not change anything in how the computer runs, or how efficient it is at storing items on the drive. It has not compressed any of your data or somehow altered it to ‘free up’ any more space. Rather, it just means that everything will be reported as being slightly larger than [it] used to be, with the amount of difference depending on the prefix being used (the larger the prefix, the greater the percent difference).”

It’s not a new issue at all for people dealing with changing clothing sizes, especially for women. What used to be a size 12 back in the 1950s is considered a size 6 today. And a kilobyte weighing in at 1,024 bytes yesterday is now 1,000 bytes today.

It’s worth noting that you will see different file sizes reported when moving items between Snow Leopard and earlier systems, and the amount of free space on removable drives will appear to fluctuate — but byte for byte, you’ve got the same amount of space in each case.

TUAWSnow Leopard: The new one gigabyte, now slimmer than before originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For anyone trying to navigate Lollapalooza 2009, one of the biggest music festivals in the U.S, running August 7-9 in Grant Park, Chicago, Jim Dalrymple (www.loopinsight.com) reports that there are several iPhone apps for that.

“There’s an App for that,” is Apple’s ubiquitous catch phrase for why you should purchase their iPhone mobile device. It does indeed seem to be the case that the iPhone offers applications for a wide variety of uses, but…

Thanks to the Virginia Department of Education and the Professor Garfield Foundation, you — and your kids, of course — can get an Introduction to Comics on iTunes U. The 15 video episodes encourage children to draw, sculpt, and carve. In fact, Jim Davis — who created Garfield — gets the course off to a great start, showing us all how he draws his famous lasagna-loving feline.

Meryl Streep is already receiving rave reviews for her performance as Julia Child in Julie & Julia. The film, which co-stars Amy Adams as Julie Powell, is based on Powell’s memoir, Julie & Julia, and Child’s My Life in France. Written and directed by Nora Ephron (You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle), Julie & Julia opens in theaters on Friday, August 7. Bon appétit.

If you subscribe to MobileMe, you can now use your iPhone or iPod touch to view and share Pages documents, Keynote presentations, Microsoft Office documents, PDFs and more. To view documents, simply select them. To share them with others, just tap the share icon and choose your recipients. iDisk will send them an email with a download link. Get the free MobileMe iDisk app from the App Store.

Salesforce Mobile, RoamBi Visualizer, the eBay Profit Calculator, Invoice Makers, Day Tracker, Bid Estimates — they’re but a few of the growing number of apps now available for small business owners on the iPhone App Store, according to Riva Richmond (online.wsj.com). Says iphonebootcampnyc.com dveloper Jonathan Sarno, “For the road warrior, the iPhone is perfect.

Ready for a sequel that outplays the original? Rolando 2 breaks new ground, taking you underwater and up in the sky, offering new vehicles and weapons, and featuring a new 3D look and 45 levels of play. Like the original, it encourages you to touch, tilt, and slide your Rolandos to new levels of achievement. You can let friends know about your high scores, or challenge them via Facebook or email. Will you be able to discover the Golden Orchid?

For Sunbelt Rentals, the iPhone is as indispensable as hard hats. Sunbelt rents scissor lifts, cranes, backhoes and other heavy machinery to construction companies in 34 states. And its 1200-strong sales team depends on iPhone for real-time customer, business, and inventory information. The company even created its own iPhone app — Mobile SalesPro — to deliver that information to every member of its sales force.

Astronomer RIchard Massey maps “dark matter,” little understood material that holds our universe together but is otherwise invisible. The presence of dark matter can be inferred, however, by its effect on galaxies we can see. So Massey takes high-resolution photos of distant galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope. And to analyze the huge, multi-terabyte images he captures, Massey depends on his Mac.

Snow Leopard Server makes it easier than ever for the people in your organization to collaborate, communicate, and share information. Find out how easy it is to deploy and manage a server. Register to receive your free, fully functional evaluation copy of Mac OS X Server.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Bad Apple, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

TUAW has covered the fine iPhone apps from Tapbots more than once. ConvertBot is a beautifully-designed and functional app to do a myriad of unit conversion calculations, while WeightBot is my personal favorite app for keeping track of my incredible ballooning body.

Tapbots posted an entry on their blog today stating that the most recent version of ConvertBot (1.4) had been rejected by Apple. What was Apple’s reason for the rejection? As you can see in the graphic at the top of the page, the ConvertBot icon for time conversions looks very similar to the Phone app icon for recent calls. This is the same icon that has passed Apple’s scrutiny in previous versions, so it is ridiculous for the company’s eagle-eyed app inspectors to suddenly decide that the icon is unfit for iPhone consumption.

Mark Jardine of Tapbots noted “So what’s the plan? I need to redo the icon, I suppose. But Convertbot icons were meant to use as little lines/shapes as possible to identify the category. I feel that our current icon represents time as simply as possible. So how can we make Time different? What if it’s set at 9 o’clock instead of 3? Is that acceptable? The big problem here is the only way I can get that answer is by making the change, resubmitting the app, and waiting another week or 2 for Apple’s verdict.”

What gives, Apple? You release a couple of amazing apps to the world this week (Facebook, Spotify, TUAW, and Yelp), but you hold up the next release of an established app over an icon. I’m giving the App Store approval people the “idiots” tag on this post.

TUAWStupid and unjustified App Store rejection letter of the day originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macbook Pro, Mac Pro, Leopard, MobileMe

It was pretty quiet at the ole’ Apple Store here in Tucson. I got there just at ten, and while there were stanchions to organize the crowd, they weren’t needed and just sat off to the side looking lonely. There were plenty of people in the store, and about half were buying Snow Leopard. Supplies were plentiful, but I was there early.

Installing on both a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro were two different stories. On the laptop, things were ducky. Everything worked, mail accounts were there, bookmarks, the usual.

On my desktop it was not so pretty. I kept getting messages that I needed to add a password for my MobileMe account, which I dutifully did. Problem was it kept asking. Then I saw some messages about the keychain. Whoops. Not a good message to see.

Well, the short version is that somehow my keychain was hosed. I tried to repair, but that didn’t stop the problems. I finally threw away my keychain data and started again, re-entering my email passwords and a few other things. All is back to normal. I also saw a strange message about my iDisk, but I followed the directions and threw a rather large file away. It appeared to be a copy of my idisk for local use.

Other things pretty much work. My Sonos audio system is fine, Photoshop CS3 seems OK, and while it didn’t get a heavy duty run through, it opens images, applies filters, runs actions, and saves properly.
Shut down is almost instantaneous, and I noticed I’d saved 14GB after the upgrade.

I’m seeing lots of little niceties. When I take a screen shot, it has a name that includes the date and time instead of ‘picture 1′.

All in all, not too painful, but not completely trouble free. With keychain passwords gone I may wind up doing some extra typing for awhile on web sites where I have an account, but that’s not too horrible.

Snow Leopard is clearly faster, trimmer, and a bit more fun to use. A good use of $30.00 and just a little bit more time than I planned in getting over a couple of glitches.

TUAWMel Martin’s Friday with Snow Leopard: few glitches, much joy originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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