Fresh Apple: TheAppleBlog (14 сообщений)

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TheAppleBlog
TheAppleBlog, 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.
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Daily Apple: Wal-Mart, Crime Fighting Clouds, Lots of Gas, 3D Investments, & Snow Leopard
iPhone Confirmed For Sale at Wal-Mart on Dec. 28th - It was the rumored date, and now it’s the confirmed date. Wal-Mart will officially begin selling Apple’s iPhone in their stores across the U.S. on December 28. The confirmation comes via Bloomberg, who called multiple retail locations to ask about the start date.

The Cloud Fights Crime - One lucky iPhone user was able to track down the vile criminal who stole his Apple handset. The thief, unaware of MobileMe syncing, was adding his own contact information to the address book, leading the original owner to the culprit via his friends.

14 Fart Apps. One Day. - How many flatulence applications can you approve in one day? 14, apparently. As with the landscape email bottleneck before it, this is clearly an example of a decision made at Apple HQ that yes, Pull My Finger was acceptable, as was anything else along those lines. Those stinky, hilarious lines.

Apple Invests in Imagination - Imagination Technologies, that is. Apple is a licensee of their trademarked PowerVR technology, which is behind the 3D chipset for the iPhone and iPod touch.

More, Better Snow Leopard at Macworld - Apple Insider is reporting that Steve Schiller will use a portion of the keynote at the upcoming Macworld conference to show off an improved version of Snow Leopard, the newest installment of Mac’s OS X. The source of the information is anonymous sources cited by UK’s Guardian. Not the most solid ground, but then again, showing off a refined version of an OS everyone knows is in active development wouldn’t exactly be an earth-shattering move.

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Is a 24″ Cinema Display For Your MacBook Worth the Money?
Apple’s new notebook-oriented 24-inch LED Cinema Display is certainly a glorious piece of equipment. If you’re not up to speed, this 24-inch LED-backlit 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution glossy-finish widescreen unit includes a built-in iSight video camera, mic and speakers in an elegant, thin aluminum and glass enclosure stylistically consonant with the new unibody MacBooks and the aluminum iMac. Designed specifically for use with the unibodies, the LED Cinema Display also includes an integrated MagSafe AC power adapter and battery charger, plus three self-powered USB 2.0 ports and the new Mini DisplayPort allowing unibody MacBook users to quickly connect and power their notebooks and favorite peripherals.

The 24″ Cinema Display is mounted on an aluminum stand with an adjustable hinge that makes tilting the display easy and convenient. The downside? This puppy has a suggested retail price of $899. Ouch! If you can afford that comfortably, more power to you, but I think most of us will swallow hard before coughing up 900 bucks for a monitor — even a super-monitor like the 24″ Cinema Display.
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Google Calendar Sync: We Have Choices
A little while ago, Google released a free iCal-to-Google Calendar sync tool called Calabaration. I don’t believe that Calabaration works very well, given how it generates a new calendar group within iCal and has limitations on how the Google Calendar can then sync to MobileMe. So, I reached out to BusyMac, the makers of BusySync, and Spanning Sync, makers of the Spanning Sync application, to see if they wouldn’t mind me reviewing their products. Both companies happily agreed. Here is what I learned…

Commonalities

Each one:
- Installs as a preference pane in the System Preferences.
- Is very easy to configure.
- Has fantastic support. Also, hats off to both developers for answering so many of my questions and for helping me to diagnose some key problems with sync services.
- Doesn’t appear to have any tangible impact on system performance.
- Works with MobileMe, enabling you to view/edit your Google Calendar within iCal, on the MobileMe web site and via an iPhone.
- Has excellent instructional videos, tutorials and documentation.
- Let’s you perform a reset of the application so that you can start over with clean settings.
- Has exceptional logging so that if you do come across a problem, it is easy for the developer to help resolve it.
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Where To iPhone App Acquired by FutureTap

Many of you will be familiar with the iPhone application Where To which provides a quick way to find points of interest around you (whether you’re looking for food, places to shop, fun things to do or a whole range of other options). The application has been available through the App Store since day one, and generated significant success on account of the intuitive user interface and simple execution.

Recent months saw the developers of the application, Tap Tap Tap, struggle with personal problems and reach a decision to sell their flagship application to a new developer. The new owner has recently been announced as Ortwin Gentz, the founder of a new iPhone software company called FutureTap, who purchased Where To in a transaction worth $70,000.

Ortwin has worked previously as the CTO of Equinux, a company famous for their development of Mac applications such as iSale — a two-times Apple Design Award winner. FutureTap today commenced operations by relaunching Where To in the iPhone App Store.
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Connect360 or Rivet for Xbox 360 Media Sharing?

I use my Mac for a fair number of things, and one of those is sharing media with my Xbox 360.

Ever since I got my Xbox 360 a few years ago I wanted the feature of streaming media to the machine, one of the rare instances when I was left wishing for a Windows PC. Soon after Connect360 saved me by offering exactly what I needed and expected.

Connect360 gives you the ability to stream all of your music, movies, and photos from your Mac to your Xbox 360 over a wired or wireless connection. Share your iTunes playlists, WMV+WMA, H.264 and MPEG4 video files, and your entire iPhoto library. However Connect360 is not the only option when it comes to sharing media between the Mac and Xbox 360. Rivet is a new contender in the ring offering many of the same features as Connect360, and a few extras.
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The State of App Store Reviews
While nothing short of a fantastic delivery vehicle for all things iPhone Application, the App Store still has had its share of nuisances. (Even Apple doesn’t nail everything right out of the gate.) But with the unparalleled popularity of the iPhone and the ability to pair it with 3rd party applications, growth is a necessity, and the App Store has already evolved in a very short period of time.

The reviewing process was flawed from the get go. Initially Apple had the idiotic notion that people who had never purchased or used an application should be able give it a review and star rating. Seriously, how could that work out well? The result was people who had no first hand knowledge of a [paid] application or game leaving scathing reviews because they didn’t like the price point. Apple has since fixed this, checking the ability to review an app against the user’s purchase history.
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Tales From the Command Line: textutil
I really enjoy the overall experience reading books and articles on my Sony PRS-500 eBook reader, but dislike having to fire up Boot Camp or VMware into Windows in order to purchase books from the Sony eBook Store, especially when there are thousands of books in the public domain and tons of blog and article content on the internets for free.

The problem lies with getting this information onto said device. to make my life easier, I use a utility that first appeared in OS X 10.4 called textutil. As you will see, the utility of this small tool goes far beyond formatting content for eBook readers. As always, fire up Terminal.app and have it ready to roll as we delve once again down to the command line.
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I Came, I Saw, I Played Word Flow

I’m of the opinion that word-based puzzle games are where it’s at for the iPhone. Sure, the shooters and other touch games for the platform are cool, but I get longevity from the dynamic nature of word based challenges. So when the opportunity came to play with Word Flow from 3V Games, I jumped at it.

3V Games represents the long-time-coming desire of 3 long time mobile game developers. Having made their way in the mobile gaming realm for one of the big mobile industry players, Vinni, Viddi, and Vicci (that’s Grandpa, Uncle, and Aunt, respectively) grabbed ahold of the chance to do their own thing, based on the iPhone platform. I think it’s safe to assume that they’re hoping their extensive knowledge and experience in this realm will help them to knock it out of the park when combined with the great features the iPhone has to offer for game interaction.

Their first offering to come from 3V Games is called Word Flow ($0.99), and challenges you to make words out of the jumble of letter tiles presented on the game board. Unlike Quordy, Word Flow requires you to move the letter tiles vertically and horizontally to form your words on a linear basis (this rigid departure from the likes of Quordy or Wurdle proved a bit of an obstacle for my pint sized noggin). The concept is simple yet challenging, offering the typical ‘power-up’ scoring tiles, and larger scores for longer words. Game options are light, only allowing you to choose from 1, 3, and 10 minute game lengths.
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Apple Makes Changes to MobileMe: We're Finally Where We Should Have Been From the Start
Apple’s documentation for changes in the recent 10.5.6 system update includes a line of interest to MobileMe users on the Mac:

Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac automatically sync within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at me.com.

So we now have “push” for those items on the desktop, as we’ve always had on the Web and the iPhone. That’s good news.

However, the MobileMe changes go deeper than that. Apple didn’t just change Contacts, Calendars and Bookmarks to “push” distribution (for Macs only), they changed the sync times for all items in the MobileMe control panel, and also made changes to the MobileMe service itself. Let’s take a look…
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Apple Wiiphone Around the Corner?
Smartphone industry insiders are seeing even more advanced sensors showing up in upcoming versions of the Apple iPhone, among other devices. Once such tech? Gyroscopic sensors, like those found in the motion sensing Wii remote from Nintendo. The tech, which uses Microelectrochemical (MEMS) gyroscopes to measure rotational movement, helps enhance the motion-sensing abilities for the Nintendo controller. If implemented in a future version of the iPhone, it would allow similar attitudinal awareness functions in the smartphone. The advanced capabilities would allow the device to figure out its position in 3D space, instead of just its angle of relative tilt, as is currently the case.
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The Downward Trend of iPhone Pricing and What it Means for Developers
If you wait long enough, that app you have your eye on will eventually cost $0.99, or even nothing, depending on how patient you are. A lot of iPhone and iPod touch applications go through a distorted bell curve pricing process, whereby they start off relatively cheap, owing to a “promotional, introductory offer”, then become more expensive (”regular price”), and then dip again, either for a set period to climb the rankings, or forever to stimulate sales for a product that otherwise wasn’t selling. A big reason for the yo-yo cost of apps is the level of competition in the App Store. We saw the number of available applications cross the 10,000 milestone recently, up from only 500 at launch. That’s a 2,000 percent increase. With those numbers, readers can afford to be choosy.
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Firefox 3.1 Beta Supports Multi-Touch Gestures
The latest Firefox beta has enabled support for multi-touch gestures on the latest Apple laptops (including the MacBook Air, and late 2008 MacBook/Macbook Pro). Multi touch gestures already provide a whole new way to use Expose on your Mac, and it seems that Firefox is likely to beat Apple to integrate the functionality into a web browser.

Shortly after Apple’s latest notebook refresh in October, an experimental build of Firefox was released that allowed Mac users to utilize the functionality of the multi-touch trackpad in the browser. As of the latest Firefox beta (v3.2), these features have been integrated into the official version.
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Mac Games Arcade Open Beta Released
Mac Gamers may have gotten improved video performance with the latest MacBook line refresh, but their Windows counterparts still have the upper hand, with more titles available, and more options for distribution as well. Valve’s Steam, for instance, provides one-stop-shopping for all your gaming software needs. No such service exists on the Mac platform, but that may soon change, thanks to the recent release of the open beta of Mac Games Arcade.

At this stage in the development of Mac Games Arcade, it’s probably unfair to compare it to the much more mature Steam marketplace, which offers major titles from a number of established studios. MGA offers 272 titles as of this writing, but most, if not all of these, are casual titles from smaller developers. Pricing varies between $9.95 and $39.95, and games are organized by category, though there’s also a list of new releases and an overall list of every title available. Popular casual games are all here, including Monopoly, Scrabble, and Diner Dash and a number of its spin-offs.

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Daily Apple: Snap, Copy & Paste, TuneUps, 3D, and a Two-fer
TuneUp iTunes Plug-in Released for Mac - I keep my iTunes library obsessively organized. In fact, I’ll only keep full albums, so no hit singles for me. If you’re the same, but are tired of spending so much time getting everything perfect, TuneUp might help. It fills in metadata and cover art for tracks, and generally keeps things tidy.

3D Desktop Could Be the Future of Mac, According to Patents - I don’t know what the odds are of seeing any given patent actually end up being applied in the real world, but I hope this one works out. At the very least, it’s another step in the direction of a Minority Report-type interface.

Copy/Paste Between Safari and Mail Now Possible on iPhone - No app, so no opportunity for Apple to reject it. This fix uses two Java bookmarklets to allow you to copy and paste on the iPhone, but only between the two apps mentioned.

LittleSnapper Released - It’s one of the most anticipated screenshot utility releases I’ve ever seen, and it’s finally here. LittleSnapper is a screen capture and management utility aimed at professional designers, developers, and writers, and offers a range of annotation, editing, and sharing options.

Parallels BOGO Sale - No longer limited to shoes, you can now take advantage of a buy one, get one offer with Parallels, one of the most popular Mac virtualization apps. Late last month, VMware was offering Fusion at a steep discount, so this must be Parallels’ way of saying “Hey, us too!”. You may want to check out our comparison before dropping any cash.

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