Fresh Apple: The Apple Blog (4 сообщения)

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The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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The Broken Record Keeps Playing: Why Apple's App Store Approval Process is Broken
I feel like we’re a bit of a broken record on this topic, but I just don’t think people are grasping how big of a deal this really is. So let me say it right up front so you know what I think: Apple’s App Store approval process is broken and seriously must be fixed if they want to continue fostering a thriving marketplace.

Last week, my article on farting iPhone apps presented the question, “Where should Apple draw the line or should they draw a line at all?”. Comments ranged from “Apple needs to lighten up” to “You seriously think Apple should have let a farting iPhone in the store?” (as well as a “how is this more important that war, life, and death?”, but I digress).

Then this week a “legitimate” application, Podcaster, was rejected. This time it was on the basis that “it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.” Basically, it competes with Apple so back off.

The issue here is not one of application quality and it is not one of usefulness or utility. It is an issue of a fair and thriving marketplace where iPhone/iPod touch users get the best quality applications and the developers get an honest opportunity to make some dang money.

“But what does that mean Josh?,” you ask. Well, gather ’round.
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iPhone 2.1 Now Available With Bug Fixes Galore

Today Apple released its 2.1 software update for the iPhone. The get the update, just connect your iPhone and fire up iTunes.

Some of the more significant updates/fixes in this update:
- Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
- Significantly better battery life for most users
- Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
- Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
- Faster installation of 3rd party applications
- Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
- Improved performance in text messaging
- Faster loading and searching of contacts
- Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
- Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
- Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
- Genius playlist creation
According to iLounge, if the new Genius feature is not showing up for you after the update you can just manually sync the iPhone and it should solve the issue.

Let us know if you run in to any problems with the update or if you notice the fixes addresses issues you were having.

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Ubiquitious TAB

Firefox users may have seen the blog announcement from Mozilla Labs last month introducing Ubiquity. Ubiquity is an “experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.” You can think of it as Quicksilver for the Internet. In its most basic form, it’s a command-line for your browser.

For example, say you are reading the latest TAB review of the Logitech Premium Notebook Headset and want to find out more information on it, including a rough idea of what the going rate for it is on eBay. Previously, one would have to open a new tab or window, go to eBay, enter search parameters and get to the results. With Ubiquity installed, you select the text (or type it afterwards) for the search, hit your shortcut-key (mine is ALT-Space) and enter “ebay-search” and all those mundane tasks are performed for you.

For services that are more AJAX-ified (or just more dynamic) results can be displayed inline:

(To see a list of all built-in commands, hit your shortcut key and enter command-list)

Ubiquity even interacts nicely with Growl for displaying notices or information that you may want to be delivered in a more “sticky”, but non-browser, fashion.

The real power of Ubiquity comes from the ability to develop your own commands, and users of Ubiquity should have seen the confirmation bar when they hit TAB after this article was posted as The Apple Blog now has it’s own search command.

Just hit your shortcut key after accepting the warning and you can then use search-tab anytime you fire up Firefox (again, either by selecting text first or typing after the command). You should heed the warning dialog since there are no Ubiquity “malware checkers” and even if the initial script looks innocuous (commands are basically special javascript functions), you are actually subscribing to a link that will update itself and you may not notice that you have given up control of your browser. I would recommend only using Ubiquity commands from sites you trust. You can seek out new commands via the Herd or from the wiki (or just by hitting sites and watching for the confirmation bar).

The amazing utility of Ubiquity will emerge as savvy developers contribute to the project and come up with very interesting ways to display data from natural language queries (similar to the “book a flight” concept search on the Ubiquity main page), but if you have suggestions for other useful Ubiquity-enabled sites that are not just on the drawing board, drop a note in the comments! (It would be very cool if there was a Cocoa-related one out there, somewhere).

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Second Seinfield Microsoft Ad Airs; What?

So when the first ad featuring Jerry Seinfield and Bill Gates aired, I was mildly confused and more than anything really wanted to give it a chance. But this evening Microsoft aired the second ad in the series and now I’m really just flat out baffled by Microsoft’s decisions with this ad campaign.

This particular ad has a full-length four and half minute version (below), and in keeping with the theme from the first ad, mere 5 seconds of the 270 available are used to mention anything about Microsoft or Windows.

Microsoft, bail out now before you confuse people even more.

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