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- iPhone 3G S Specs Revealed
The “S” in the speed of the iPhone 3G S has been divulged by Apple’s carrier partner in the Netherlands, T-Mobile. A specifications page indicates the CPU runs at 600 MHz, up from 412 MHz in previous models.
The iPhone 3GS will also come with 256MB of RAM, up from 128MB. While not mentioned by the T-Mobile site, the new iPhone is rumored to have upgraded the GPU to the PowerVR SGX, up from the PowerVR MBX. So how does the iPhone 3GS compare to previous devices? Very favorably.
Device Released CPU speed RAM EDGE iPhone 6/29/07 412 MHz 128 MB 1G iPod touch 9/13/07 400 MHz 128 MB iPhone 3G 7/11/08 412 MHz 128 MB 2G iPod touch 9/9/08 533 MHz 128 MB iPhone 3GS 6/19/09 600 MHz 256 MB Besides surpassing the iPod touch again, the 600MHz CPU puts the iPhone 3G S on par with the just-released Palm Pre. While the Pre still has a tacit advantage in application switching, opening and closing programs quickly simulates part of that experience, especially on a device where you can only see one program at a time.
The question now becomes whether the iPod touch will again leapfrog the iPhone in CPU speed in the next revision. Even if it does not, the increased speed and memory, and possible GPU upgrade, of Apple’s latest devices will almost certainly impact future software development, fragmenting what has been thus far a unified user base.
Переслать - Apple Testing Push Notifications Once More With AIM
The big day is only a week away, and it looks like no one is more keenly aware of that fact than Apple. Those enrolled in the iPhone Development Program received an email late today telling them to go and download a developer preview version of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in order to further test Apple’s push notification servers. Included in the email was a special code redeemable via iTunes.
Unlike the AP News app, no specific expiration date is specified for the AIM preview, though the email does state that the app can only be installed on iPhones using the 3.0 GM Seed. Most likely, next week when everyone upgrades to the full, final version of 3.0, this version of AIM will no longer be operational.
The beta app doesn’t boast any new feature additions or functionality beyond the push notifications, but they are definitely impressive. Unlike with AP News, when we were basically at the mercy of their schedule in terms of receiving pushed content, it’s fairly easy to engineer a received message in AIM. I tested it out with a number of people, including myself, just to make sure things were running smoothly, and they definitely were.
New messages bring up a notification window, with the message and the user name of the sender, and play the AOL chime that has become permanently associated with the AIM brand identity. The app icon is also badged with the number of unread messages, and it does increase if more than one message is received. New messages replace old ones, in terms of the content of the notification window. I can see rapid fire AIM conversations becoming very aggravating unless they introduce some way to customize how you receive consecutive messages from the same user.
Potentially annoying or not, this true test of push notification in a more user-controlled setting is very promising. If possible, I’m now more impatient for next Wednesday to arrive, after which point I’ll be relieved for exactly two minutes before I begin anticipating next Friday and the official release of the 3G S. Heady times for Apple fans.
Переслать - My Living Desktop: Beautify Your Screen
With My Living Desktop, adding a little tranquility to your Mac has never been so easy. With plenty of built-in scenes, and a custom import option, your desktop will never be the same again.
The ability to run a screen saver or movie on your Mac's desktop has been around for quite a while now. Unfortunately, the performance hit you take by running an intensive screen saver like Flurry with most of the hacks and applications out there is just a bit too much, not to mention that I've found them to not be very stable. And let’s face it, not too many people want to watch their kid on the backyard swing set over and over again.
My Living Desktop offers a soothing environment courtesy of peaceful movie scenes, accompanied by tranquil sounds, right on your desktop to help you cope with the stresses of your workday.
Now let me just say that I've tried running screen savers on my desktop in the past, and at least while I'm writing or working on something that requires lots of concentration, I don't care for music, beeps or buzzing in the background. To my surprise, though, My Living Desktop struck a great balance with the scenes offered. At no time did I find myself wanting to shut it off because the sound or constant movement on my desktop was too distracting. You can tell the developer put a lot of thought into which scenes to include with the application. They're all subtle movies and sounds that aren't constantly fighting for your attention while you're editing your spreadsheets for the boss, or editing photos of the kids.
My Living Desktop Scenes
With nearly 40 different built-in scenes, such as ocean beaches, forest waterfalls, falling rain, wind blowing across an icy mountain, and more, you'll most likely not grow tired of the built-in offerings. But if you do, a handy scene-import application comes with the Screensaver/Desktop combo that allows you to use your own movies instead.
But wait. What if you want to listen to your iTunes while you work? My Living Desktop allows you to use the menubar icon to keep the scenes running, but mute the sound. You can also use the icon to turn the desktop scene off completely and return to your normal desktop picture should you need to do so.
Because all work and no play makes for a dull and unproductive Mac user, My Living Desktop adds the capability to remind you to take Serenity Breaks. You can set reminders for specific times of the day, or every X number of minutes, as well as how long the breaks should last. The screen saver plays throughout the break.
My Living Desktop Serenity Prefs
My Living Desktop offers a host of customization options which can be found in the Screen Saver tab in your System Preferences. Along with the above mentioned Serenity Breaks, you can adjust which scenes you want to use, or have it automatically cycle through all of them at specified intervals. You can also adjust the volume and brightness of the desktop scenes independently of the screen saver.
As I stated earlier, the performance-hit was a concern for me. I was sure this was just going to bring everything to a halt on my MacBook Pro. I was pleased to find that I noticed little-to-no performance hit when using Pages, Photoshop, InDesign or any other apps I normally run. Obviously if you're running a lot of apps at once, you're probably going to notice slowdowns — but having three or four apps open caused me no pain. Your mileage may vary.
To help out those who just can't live without having every app they own running at all times, the developer has built in the ability to reduce CPU usage by using a less sharp version of the movies. You also have the ability to shut off the desktop scene automatically when using specified applications. So when you launch iTunes, iMovie, or any other app that has audio feedback, you won't have to bother visiting the menubar icon to shut it off.
My only complaint about My Living Desktop is that while the screen saver portion works on a multiple-monitor setup (the screensaver appears on both screens at the same time), the living desktop portion only works on one screen of your choosing, with a static image from the scene appearing on the second monitor. Because the scenes aren't distracting, I would really like to have them appear on both monitors at the same time. I suppose this was a planned "feature" to maintain acceptable performance.
A demo version of My Living Desktop is available, and requires a G5 or Intel Mac running OSX 10.4 or above with at least 1GB of RAM. Once you've purchased a license ($34.95 for a single user, discounts for multiple users), a high-speed Internet connection is recommended for downloading more scenes.
Переслать - Apple Design Award 2009 Winners
Apple announced the winners of the 2009 Apple Design Awards last night at a special ceremony hosted by John Geleynse, director of Software Technology Evangelism, and Shann Pruden, senior director for Developer Relations. These awards are an annual affair to recognize “technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement in iPhone and Mac software development.”
The depth and breadth of submissions has been accelerating, as interest in the Mac and iPhone has picked up over the last few years. As a point of comparison, the iPhone awards last year were handed out to early pre-release apps because the App Store had not even launched yet. There were about 1,700 web apps in Apple’s online directory, and this year there are over 4,000 web apps and more than 50,000 native apps available in the iTunes App Store.
Rather than being split out into categories for best game, best user experience, best application, and so on as has been the practice in past years, this year’s awards were simply organized into Mac and iPhone showcases. Here are the 2009 winners.
iPhone Developer Showcase
MLB.com At Bat 2009 from MLB.com
Postage from Rogue Sheep
Mac OS X Leopard Developer Showcase
Billings from Marketcircle Inc.
BoinxTV from Boinx Software
Things from Cultured Code
Student Awards
Wooden Labyrinth 3D from Elias Pietil
Fontcase from Pieter Omvlee
iPhone OS 3.0
AccuTerra Beta from AccuTerra
This last entry is pretty interesting. We saw lots of exciting and innovative apps in the WWDC Keynote on Monday that take advantage of the new features of iPhone OS 3.0, but AccuTerra was not presented there. The technologies utilized in this new hike tracking app are pretty extensive, though. I’m definitely looking forward to checking this out when it becomes available.
For more information about this year’s winners, here are some articles from TheAppleBlog that mention a few of them…
Weekly App Store Picks: March 14, 2009 (Topple 2)
Tweetie for Mac Update: Now With Video Tweeting
Billings 3 Brings Welcome Updates, Fresh Design
BoinxTV: Broadcasting for the rest of us
Keep Your Fonts Together With Fontcase
Fonts 201: Font Management Apps for the Mac
Переслать - The Lowdown on Apple's HTTP Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
Apple very briefly mentioned a new HTTP adaptive bitrate streaming technology for QuickTime on desktops and on the iPhone at the WWDC keynote Monday. This development actually has some pretty significant implications for Mac and iPhone users and developers, and our sister site NewTeeVee has the scoop.
Because the new HTTP streaming will support live and on-demand H.264 video play directly within a browser, companies will no longer have to make and sell branded applications for video, as MLB and TV.com do today. It also means a lessening of the impact of AT&T meddling with approval of applications that try to stream over the 3G wireless network.
The adaptive bitrate aspect of the streaming is at the forefront of what other players like Adobe and Microsoft are doing in video. Through new Mac software called Segmenter, video publishers will divide their content into tiny chunks of different qualities that are subbed in for each other when a user’s bandwidth and CPU constraints improve or degrade. That means improved video start times, no buffering, and streaming at the highest quality possible in any situation. Read the rest of this article on NewTeeVee →
Переслать - Dig Into Unix
When Apple revamped its operating system and adopted Nextstep as the base of OS X, they brought along with it an extremely powerful version of Unix based on the open-source project FreeBSD, now known as Darwin.
Unix has a long history, one that started in the basements of Bell Labs by a group of AT&T engineers some 40 years ago. A professor in a C programming course I took once said that they were supposed to be writing drivers for the AT&T hardware, but instead, they wanted some way to use the system to play games, so they invented Unix.
Unix is now a mature and robust operating system, and since OS X is based on Unix, it has inherited all of its power, and some of its complexity. The beautiful aqua interface that we are used to seeing is really all that is needed, but if you would like to take a look at what makes your computer tick, Apple included Terminal.app to act as a window into the GUI and into the Unix soul of OS X.
Nick started a great series back in January 2007 on this subject, and now I’d like to cover some of the basics again, and maybe bring a different point of view to the table as well.
Open Terminal.app (found in Applications → Utilities), and you’ll see a window with a prompt waiting for you to start typing.
At this point, it’s important to understand a few things about the Terminal. For one, the commands that you can type are interpreted and carried out immediately, no waiting around. So if you tell it to remove a file, it will do it right then, with no easy way of recovering it. There isn’t a recycle bin on the command line (not without a little coaxing, anyway). Secondly, since Unix was developed decades ago, many of the commands seem a bit archaic. Back when most of these utilities were written, they were all abbreviated to save space and cut down on the number of keystrokes you’d need to type. Below is a list of a few essentials, and another list from Nick’s post is here.
ls(list): Probably one of the most important commands, it lets you see what’s in your current directory.cd(change directory): This is how you move about the filesystem in Unix, for example, to move from Library to Documents.file: This one isn’t short for anything, but it will give you a brief description of what a particular file is.cat(concatenate): Or “Grab everything in this file and let me read it.”man(manual): The online manual will describe most commands that you’re interested in; for example, typingman lswill give you the manual page about thelscommand.
It might be helpful to open a Finder window and put it right next to the Terminal. Open the Finder so it shows your home directory. Type
lsin the Terminal to see the same files that you see in the Finder. Try another command:touch.touchis designed to change the last accessed timestamp of a file, but it will also create a blank file. You can see the file created in the Finder as well. You can cat the file, and see that there is nothing in it.Now that you’ve created a file, and looked at its (blank) contents, you can remove the file using the
rmcommand. This is one of those dangerous commands that, if used carelessly, can really screw things up. For this example, carefully typerm fileinto the terminal, and watch the file disappear in the Finder. You’ll notice that your Trash stays empty — that file is goners.The Unix filesystem is a nested hierarchy, with each directory separated by a forward slash (
/). The current working directory is symbolized as a dot (.), and the parent directory is symbolized by two dots (..). The top of the hierarchy, known as the root, is symbolized by a single forward slash.So, to move to the parent directory, you could type
cd ... If you were in the Library directory and you typed this command, you would then be moved into your home directory. To see the very top of the hierarchy, you would typecd /. Type this command now.Also, move in the Finder to the hard drive where you have OS X installed. I have mine named, originally, “OS X”. Type
lsin the Terminal, and you’ll notice a few more files than you can see in the Finder. These files are important Unix system files, and should not be touched unless you really know what you’re doing…and really, not even then. To illustrate the importance of these files, you could typefile mach_kernel.
This is the kernel, the core of the operating system. Do not mess with this file. Several of the other files are directories. You can change directories into
/bin, for example, and typelsto list the contents of that directory. You’ll find a file in that directory named “ls,” which is the executable for thelscommand. When you typelsinto the terminal, it executes this tiny app. A great place to learn about Unix is to get a list of this directory, and then read themanpage for every file listed.To exit the Terminal, just CMD-Q like any other app, and you are back in the comforts of OS X.
This has been a very brief overview of how to go from absolutely no Unix knowledge whatsoever to the smallest amount of Unix knowledge necessary to poke around a bit. There’s a lot of power under there, but before you can really start to harness it, you need to get a decent understanding of the hows and whys.
Переслать - Value Shootout: White 13″ MacBook vs. Unibody 13″ MacBook Pro
A Mac laptop question I’ve been getting asked over the past few months is which 13-inch MacBook is the better value — the posh aluminum unibody model, or the $300 cheaper carryover white polycarbonate unit, which, after two substantial updates in 2009, had been upgraded to pretty closely match the more expensive machine performance-wise, and had the bonus of a FireWire port, which the unibody didn’t.
My take has been that it’s a nice sort of dilemma, since you really couldn’t go wrong. Both models offered excellent value — more computer for the money than ever before in Apple portables.
However, the Mac portable landscape, and the relative value equation for these two models, shifted dramatically with the MacBook Pro line announcements at WWDC, and I can now declare a clear value-leader. The renamed, upgraded, and price-chopped 13-inch MacBook Pro now wins at a walk, retaining all the goodness of the aluminum MacBook but with a boatload of value added, along with a $100 price reduction. You really can’t go wrong with the new baby MacBook Pro now having a FireWire port restored and the welcome addition of an SD Card slot for good measure — something that’s never been seen before on an Apple laptop. You also get a backlit keyboard, a quarter-gigabyte more clock speed, and a built-in battery claimed to go up to seven hours between recharges.
The WhiteBook, now sole designate of the plain “MacBook” name, is still a formidable machine for $200 cheaper if you’re on a tight budget. Last week, prior to WWDC, Apple refreshed the white MacBook, quietly bumping the Core 2 Duo clock speed to 2.13GHz, the RAM speed to 800MHz, and matched the base unibody’s 160GB standard hardware drive capacity (upgradable to 500GB), which for a brief interval actually made the price-leader MacBook faster than the more expensive base unibody. But no longer. Here’s how it all shapes up between the WhiteBook and the 13-inch MacBook Pro now that the dust has settled a bit.
The Shootout
Processor Clock Speed
WhiteBook: 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo
Unibody: 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo
Advantage: UnibodyFrontside Bus Speed
WhiteBook: 1066MHz
Unibody: 1066MHz
Advantage: DrawRAM speed
WhiteBook: 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Unibody: 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Advantage: UnibodyStandard RAM
WhiteBook: 2GB
Unibody: 2GB
Advantage: DrawGraphics Chipset
WhiteBook: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
Unibody: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
Advantage: DrawHard Drive Capacity (Standard)
WhiteBook: 160GB
Unibody: 160GB
Advantage: DrawDisplay Backlight
WhiteBook: CCFL
Unibody: LED
Advantage: UnibodyUSB Ports
WhiteBook: 2
Unibody: 2
Advantage: DrawFireWire Ports
WhiteBook: One FireWire 400
Unibody: One FireWire 800 (backwards compatible with FW400 via optional adapter)
Advantage: UnibodySD Card Slot
WhiteBook: None
Unibody: 1
Advantage: UnibodyBacklit Keyboard
WhiteBook: No
Unibody: Yes
Advantage: UnibodyBluetooth
WhiteBook: Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Unibody: Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Advantage: DrawEthernet Port
WhiteBook: One Gigabit Ethernet
Unibody: One Gigabit Ethernet
Advantage: DrawVideo Out
WhiteBook: Mini-DVI
Unibody: Mini DisplayPort
Advantage: Depends on your needs and legacy hardwareTrackpad
WhiteBook: Conventional with button
Unibody: Glass multi-touch buttonless
Advantage: UnibodyiSight Camera
WhiteBook: Yes
Unibody: Yes
Advantage: DrawHousing Enclosure
WhiteBook: White polycarbonate plastic
Unibody: Aluminum carved from a single billet
Advantage: UnibodyPrice
WhiteBook: $999
Unibody: $1,199
Advantage: WhiteBookScore (Wins in these 18 categories)
13″ Unibody MacBook Pro: 8
13″ White MacBook: 1
Draws: 9There are also a few important distinctions that don’t show up in a straightforward features inventory comparison. While both machines have 13.3-inch glossy displays, the unibody has also been upgraded to a higher-quality screen from AU Optronics with 60 percent greater color gamut, another advantage over the WhiteBook.
Drop-Dead Gorgeous Jewelry Finish
The advantages of the unibody case are partly aesthetic (it is drop-dead gorgeous) but also structurally much more rigid, and presumably more durable and rugged than the white machine’s plastic case (which has had a history of cracking issues). The solid aluminum also has a sound-deadening effect that makes the machine virtually silent. You really have to see, feel, and (not) hear the unibody firsthand to truly appreciate its quietness, jewelry standard of finish, and precision component fits.
The Mini-DVI versus Mini DisplayPort advantages and disadvantages will depend partly on how important connecting to existing monitors and/or other devices you might have on hand is to individual users.
I like the buttonless trackpad in the unibody better than I thought I would, and it’s one of the best trackpads I’ve ever used. I experienced no difficulty in adapting to “buttonless” clicking. Both machines have “chicklet” type keyboards of which I’m not the biggest fan, but you get used to them.
I think the value equation between the two, which prior to this month’s revisions had been a bit of a saw-off, is now crystal-clear. The only category on which the WhiteBook beats the 13″ MacBook Pro is price, and my recommendation is that if you can somehow scrape up the extra $200, the unibody machine is well worth the extra outlay. My 2.0GHz 13-inch unibody MacBook is a delightful computer, and the new 13-inch MacBook Pro is even better in an abundance of ways.
What about the $1,499, 2.53GHz, 13-inch MacBook Pro? I’ve never thought that the top-of-the-line MacBook’s higher price was justified by what you get extra, but if a quarter GHz greater processor speed, 90GB more hard drive capacity, and an added 2GB of RAM look like $300 more value to you, then go for it. Also worth considering is that for another $200 on top of that, you can get a 15-inch display with basically the same specs as the $1,499 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Переслать - Apple Officially Puts PowerPC Behind Them With Snow Leopard
One detail that escaped mention during the keynote presentation at Apple’s WWDC earlier this week likely does not sit well with users still clutching their beloved G4 machines, namely that OS X 10.6, also know as Snow Leopard, will finally drop PowerPC support and only run on Intel Macs. It’s unfortunate for people attached to their eMacs and 12-inch Powerbooks, especially given that Snow Leopard appears to be more resource-efficient than Leopard ever was.Yes, it’s unfortunate, but it also makes sense from Apple’s perspective. The company hasn’t released a PowerPC computer since October 2005, which will be nearly four years ago when Snow Leopard is released in September. Four years might not be a long time to own a car or a refrigerator, but with computers, it’s a lifetime. Just think about the difference between the original MacBook and the 13-inch MacBook Pro announced this past Tuesday.
A lot of what Snow Leopard brings to the table won’t be all that applicable to a computer with PowerPC architecture, either, such as multicore processing improvements with Grand Central Dispatch, and OpenCL tech that leverages graphics processor capabilities for general computing tasks. Not to mention that the whole thing runs in 64-bit mode, which probably wouldn’t play all that nice on older Macs.
Macs have always been notable for their value proposition in the long term. I was only recently shopping for a PowerPC G4 12-inch PowerBook as a gift for my girlfriend, thinking I could pick one up for a song at this point. In fact, for a decently spec’d machine with a newish battery, I was looking at paying at least $550-$600. Many people were unblinkingly asking $750 and up for their cherished machines, and weren’t open to being talked down at all.
Does a lack of continued OS support hurt the value proposition of those machines? Sure it does, but probably not as much as one might think. Anyone looking to buy an older Mac, for instance, probably doesn’t have technological currency at the forefront of their mind. In fact, whether they find Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard on the computer in question probably won’t make much difference in terms of their usage.
Maybe Apple is leaving a lot of people out to dry when it comes to Snow Leopard’s backwards compatibility, but at the same time, you have to remember that Apple is a hardware company first and foremost. Yes, it makes a lot of software, too, but that’s not its primary source of revenue. Snow Leopard is really just another reason to buy a new machine, and you can’t really blame Apple for wanting people to do that.
Переслать - Google Quick Search Box Officially Released
Sometimes really useful software comes in small packages. Just about six months ago, I stumbled upon the developer preview of Google Quick Search Box (QSB) for the Mac, and I’ve been using it ever since. Google should be proud, because generally speaking, I shy away from desktop search applications, including their own Google Desktop for Mac product. Today, they released the full, stable version of QSB for Mac.
Quick Search Box succeeds by being simple and unobtrusive, instead of trying to superimpose itself on top of my computing workspace. In case you haven’t yet taken a peek at the developer preview, it basically consists of a floating Google search bar that retrieves results not only from the web, but also from your files, applications, history, contacts, and more. And Google plans to expand QSB’s reach further still in upcoming versions. Might I suggest Mail.app integration, Google QSB team?
Launching QSB is a simple matter of pressing Control + Spacebar (or a shortcut of your choosing, changeable in the app’s preferences) at any time. Results are automatically returned as you type, and you can specify searchable items and locations if you’d rather simplify your results. Gmail and Google Apps are also searchable via QSB.
Applications can also be launched and documents opened directly from the app, capability which makes QSB resemble a certain launcher app for OS X that has acquired a pretty significant following. The app I’m talking about is of course Quicksilver, a tool many swear by for eliminating some of OS X’s unnecessary steps and just generally making life easier for Mac owners.
The similarity between the two apps is far from coincidental. One of QSB’s developers is none other than Nicholas Jitkoff, the man responsible for Quicksilver, which is now open-source since his move to the Google team. QSB is a natural extension of Jitkoff’s work with Quicksilver, according to comments he made to Ars Technica when the QSB developer preview was originally launched in January of this year:
There were limitations to the way Quicksilver works that would make certain types of functionality very difficult to do, particularly anything that involves text entry—like handling URLs or typing search queries. Quicksilver and Quick Search Box are both focused on search, but QSB is going to try to search everything — something QS wouldn’t be able to scale well to do.”
QSB certainly can scale, owing to its ability to support plug-ins, which should, in theory, give it the ability to eventually search anything that is indexable. One great plug-in that comes with the launch version of QSB is a Twitter support, so that you can actually send tweets right from the application. Hopefully, that’s only a taste of what’s to come.
Переслать - Dear AT&T: Maybe It's Time to Get On the iPhone Bandwagon
I’ve defended AT&T on occasion regarding the iPhone, but its latest moves (or non-moves) make it hard to do so.
To recap its defense, I’ve praised AT&T for the following:
- Without AT&T we don’t even have the iPhone as we know it. You think Verizon was gonna allow it? Heck, it’s been two years, and there’s still no Wi-Fi on Verizon’s phones.
- At the initial iPhone launch, the unlimited data at $20/month was better than most, and in-home activation was also new. (For 3G, the company raised the data rate to $30, but that was what it charged for other 3G phones, so it’s not as egregious as some think.)
- It leveraged its Wi-Fi hotspot service and made it free to iPhone (and other smartphone) users. This is huge, and something I use daily.
Yet, for all the good, AT&T lately is acting like a tanker that takes forever to turn. Apple’s comments about AT&T in the WWDC keynote on June 8 seemed tinged with dissatisfaction. In my opinion, AT&T has been a clear disappointment in four areas. Let’s take a look at those.
MMS
The iPhone will get it late this summer. Yes, all its other phones have it now, but the iPhone must wait. This is nonsense, and I don’t believe it’s due to any technical hurdle so much as fear on AT&T’s part that somehow its network will be negatively affected. I’ll discuss the network shortly, but AT&T should look at it this way: It can be criticized for poor coverage, dropped calls, and no MMS, or just for poor coverage and dropped calls. That’s its choice.
Tethering
This one’s worse than the above. Not only is it allowed for other phones (though it costs too much), but in the iPhone’s case, AT&T won’t even supply a date! Instead, AT&T just says “it’s coming,” as if that’s supposed to mean something. To me, this just implies that the company thinks its network will be negatively affected when it allows it, but I'm not buying it. The iPhone is not hammering its network because of the 10 percent of iPhone geeks grabbing a load of bandwidth, but rather because, of the millions of iPhone users, the remaining 90 percent use it much more than the average smartphone user.
To clarify that last statement, assume two groups: One, of 10 million BlackBerry Curve users, the other, 10 million iPhone users. Each group has their 10 percent using the system relatively heavily. The difference is the remaining 90 percent. Those Curve users hardly use it at all (relatively speaking), whereas the iPhone users do. Month after month of web market share figures confirm this fact. (This isn’t about the Curve — substitute any high-volume smartphone, and you’ll see the same thing).
So if AT&T really wanted to avoid the network being negatively affected, it’d have to stop adding new iPhone users, not limit the 10 percent who currently use it most. Tethering will not harm its network nearly as much as the flood of new customers getting on board with the cheaper 3G or new 3G S models, yet I don’t see AT&T rushing to limit them.
Low-Cost Data Plans (and $99 iPhone)
There were many rumors of a “low cost” data plan for the iPhone. Most suggested maybe $20 a month with a cap of 200MB or so. While that cap is small to me, it would likely cover most people attracted to the cheaper iPhone, and for those it didn’t, they could upgrade to an “unlimited” plan anyway.
I can’t help but think the $99 iPhone 3G and the rumored low-cost plan were meant as a one-two punch in the face of every smartphone vendor. The iPhone pretty much set the smartphone price floor at $199, and even then RIM’s Storm and Palm’s Pre required mail-in rebates to get there. Dropping it to $99 could be a huge blow.
But a $99 iPhone only harms the competition when people buy it, and staring at a ~$75 monthly bill will restrict sales. The rumored “low-rate” plan would drop that by $10-$15 a month, and with the $99 phone that would be a huge draw. But no new pricing has been announced, even though the $99 iPhone is here.
The Network
Whether it’s just an excuse or the real deal, this all comes down to AT&T’s network and the appearance it seems to convey that it’s a house of cards waiting to topple if it adds any new features for the iPhone crowd (though, strangely, it can add as many new iPhone customers as it wants). And all we get from AT&T on this is talk.
Here’s my advice to AT&T: Let half of the marketing people go. You know, the ones writing the press releases about improving the network with so much technology that soon we’ll be able to connect to the Hubble telescope and control it with our phones, and instead hire more people to actually do the upgrades. It’s cliché, but talk is cheap. When you brag about the advancements on paper, but don’t allow MMS and tethering, well, let’s just say I know into which action I put more stock.
Переслать - Tap Tap Revenge Goes Gaga for Universal Music
iPhone-owning fans of Lady Gaga, rejoice: Today a new version of Tap Tap Revenge, Tapulous‘ iPhone rhythm game phenomenon, hits the App Store, loaded with 14 tracks from the breakout pop star. It’s also the first version of TTR that can be played with the iPhone held sideways during “boss tracks,” which require all four fingers.
The release of Lady Gaga Revenge is actually part of a much larger partnership with Universal Music Group, one of the big four record labels, that will see more Universal artist-branded versions of TTR come out later this year, and a track-purchasing system so TTR owners can buy songs for gameplay via Apple’s new in-app commerce feature. (When that service launches with Tap Tap Revenge version 3.0, cuts will cost you 50 cents each.) Tapulous’ partnership is similar to the one between the major labels and the video game studio Harmonix, which sells singles for play on their blockbuster, Rock Band (which have consequently sold 40 million tracks).
The Tapulous/Universal deal is a pretty big one for an app that launched only last July, first incorporating music from indie artists, then gradually coming out with versions with big-time acts like Nine Inch Nails and Weezer. In that time, TTR has remained among the top 25 apps and earned an install base of 11 million, Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem told me in a phone call yesterday. He credits that continued popularity to the frequent release of new TTR-playable content, and estimates the game has already sold an incredible 4-5 million songs.
Those sales numbers are particularly impressive because up until now, players had to exit out of Tap Tap Revenge to locate and download new content in the app store. Consequently, Decrem estimates only 4-5 percent of Tapulous owners have bought tracks. However, the addition of an in-game purchasing system will likely increase that conversion rate.
Along with new versions of Tap Tap Revenge featuring UMG music, look for Tapulous to expand the game’s online community experience. Tapulous’ Andrew Lacy told me TTR’s chat feature already processes a million messages a day, sent by hundreds of thousands of players who participate regularly. “We’re just scratching the surface of the community in Tap Tap,” as he put it. With that kind of engagement, I wouldn’t be surprised if Universal stars began showing up in TTR chatrooms to promote their Tap Tap music themselves.
Переслать - Netbooks, History and Apple
Dave Winer published a piece explaining his views on netbooks, and he brings up Apple because a) he uses Macs and b) Apple has publicly stated its disinterest in getting in the netbook game. (I'm setting aside whether Apple really isn't getting in the game.)He also mentions there’s “more sniffing from people who love Macs about how inadequate the current crop are.”
I believe there’s some truth to that statement. The gist of his article is that netbooks are great, and people who don't get that may be missing something.
People who don’t think these are great computers must not have a sense of history. My first personal computer, purchased in 1979, cost $10,000, had two small floppy drives, 64K of memory and ran a very bare-bones OS.
True enough but, unlike David, it’s the sense of history that has me uninterested in netbooks, not enamored of them.
First of all, the argument should be about today's netbook stacked up to today's laptop. After all, that's the choice the consumer is making. However, if I use the perspective of history, consider the $700 Radio Shack laptop I bought circa '89. It was text-based with a Tandy “easy to use” text front-end. It stored everything on a floppy. I bought it to write on the road, then I'd import the text into Word 4.0 on my Mac SE/30 to format it. Worked like a charm. I consider that somewhat analogous to what a netbook does for people today (i.e., supplement their desktop PC).
But in '89 I could not get desktop performance in my lap. The average laptop cost way more, with way less power, than the average desktop. Both gaps have closed tremendously since then. Especially in the last half-decade, where chips and laptop design have received the engineering attention necessary as the market demanded more portable solutions. The trade-off now in performance between laptops and desktops is almost trivial, and the price delta is much smaller as well. No, I'm not talking about a monster desktop video editing station with three video cards, a 2TB RAID array, and six monitors. But then, neither is David. The 2.4GHz unibody MacBook I'm using right now runs neck and neck with the 2.8GHz iMac I bought only a year earlier — including graphic-intensive apps — yet it cost nearly half as much. That's a price/performance delta unimaginable even 10 years ago, let alone 30.
I do not "sniff" at netbooks. If someone wants a machine analogous to what I bought 20 years ago — in terms of price/performance — go for it. Everyone has their own needs. But back then, we chose between "good" performance (desktop) and "bad" performance but with portability (laptop). Today's buyer can choose portability with "good" performance (laptop) or "bad" performance (netbook). For maybe 25 years we lived with much weaker performance on portable machines because we had to; that's no longer true. That Tandy served me well, but I’ll pass on taking a step backwards for something similar today.
Переслать - Get to the Point: OS X's Summarize Service
There are a few really handy features in OS X that get very little attention — perhaps because they don’t have a snazzy GUI, or maybe it’s because they only appeal to certain users. Whatever the case, Summarize (found in the menubar under the Application menu) is one of those handy features that gets little attention, but delivers big by helping you get to the point.
Think of Summarize as OS X’s way of creating a CliffsNotes version of whatever text you want to read, but don’t have the time to do so. It simply shortens your text into smaller, more readable chunks.
For example, let’s say you really wanted to read Charles’ Mystery of the White MacBook Upgrade Unravelled article here on TheAppleBlog, but just don’t have the time to spare. The article, as it appears on TheAppleBlog, is approximately 565 words. I realize that’s not too terribly long, but hang with me here.
In a Services-aware application such as Safari, Pages, TextEdit, Mail, etc., select the text you want to shorten. Next, visit the Application menu, in this case Safari, in the menubar. Scroll down to Services, and select Summarize. A resizable window will pop up with the summarized text in it.
OS X's Summarize Service feature
The Summarize service offers a slider which allows you to customize how much of the original text OS X tosses out. I’ve found that the 30-50 percent range is a good amount to use. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to tell exactly what percentage the slider is set at. In my test, the original 565-word article was summarized down to about 350 words. Even when lowering the percentage down into the 25-30 percent range, the gist of the article was still relatively clear — even though most of the details were tossed out.
The two radio buttons in the Summarize window determine how OS X summarizes the text. From what I can tell, using Sentences is the way to go. The Paragraph method appears to simply toss out entire paragraphs in random order.
Now if you don’t feel like using Summarize saves you enough time by itself, you can further your efforts by selecting the text in the Summarize window and go back up to the Application menu and choose Services → Speech → Start Speaking Text. OS X will read the summarized text to you in the default voice set in your System preferences.
Summarize is just one of the many Services Apple built into OS X. If you take a look, you may even notice some of your favorite applications add their own Services as well. And if you happen to be using an application that can't take advantage of Services, such as Firefox, you can always copy and paste the text into TextEdit and go from there.
Переслать - Asus Intends to Be Better Than Apple, After Besting Wii & Kindle First
Asus may have made a name for itself in the U.S. by making netbooks, a category which Apple doesn’t seem to want to touch with a 10-foot pole, but that isn’t stopping Asustek’s vice chairman from talking some major smack. In an interview with The New York Times’ Ashley Vance, Vice Chairman Jonathan Tsang said that Asus has set its sights too low in the past, and that it now wants to take on bigger fish — like Apple.
Mr. Tsang didn’t convey this in any uncertain terms. In fact, his exact words were ,"Our goal is to provide products that are better than Apple's,” which I think makes things pretty clear. But how does it plan to do that? Well, by first being better than Wii in the gaming market, and better than Kindle in the e-reader segment, of course. It’s actually already developed a system which Tsang says “rivals” the Wii, but content (i.e., games) isn’t forthcoming — which is sort of crucial when you’re trying to field a game console.
As to how Asustek wants to beat Apple at its own game, details are sparse. The company does spend an awful lot of capital on engineering, but up till now, that seems to have mostly gone into infinitely refining and extending its Eee line of budget computer products. The problem for the company, as I see it, is twofold. Most importantly, it isn’t a software company in the same way that Apple is regarding OS X. It doesn’t build operating systems, and to a large extent, it can only be as good as Microsoft allows it to be. Second, its business model seems to depend heavily on having many products in many categories, rather than doing a few products extremely well, as is Apple’s model.
Asus will also be entering the smartphone market later this year with partner Garmin, which will put it in direct competition with another wildly successful Apple product, the iPhone. Now that the iPhone finally supports turn-by-turn navigation, I’m not so sure Garmin will have quite the selling power it once might’ve, so Asus will yet again have to make up ground from a fairly disadvantaged position.
The whole thing seems like a case of completely ridiculous corporate posturing, but I’m interested in how it plays out, because the companies seem to have opposite business strategies for dealing with tough economic times. Apple basically refuses to go down market, barring the price drops it introduced yesterday, which help a little. Asus, on the other hand, spawned the race to the pricing bottom that led to the overwhelming success of companies like Acer.
It’s a battle to determine the how and why of our computer hardware, and it will take on greater significance as we come to terms with the new economic realities currently taking shape. A company like Asus claiming to want to take on an industry leader like Apple may seem like a ridiculous boast, but it could actually be a telling indication of where the real competition for our computing dollar will lie in the not-so-distant future.
Переслать - Intuit and Apple Announcements Include Money and a Lesson
Intuit, the company that helps manage your money, may owe you some. Heck, even Apple might.
In the winter of 2007, Intuit’s Quickbooks for Mac 2006 contained a fatal bug — an automatic update erased the desktop folders of users’ accounts (yikes). Intuit’s silence on the issue was deafening. Finally, after days of complaining and people fighting with tech support, Intuit offered a free data recovery utility and a limited apology. Now, 18 months and a bunch of lawyers later, Intuit has settled and will offer to pay most expenses related to data loss, recovery and data recreation. They’ll even give you a free copy of Quickbooks 2007. Yawn. Don’t have your receipts related to that bug? Oops.
Apple avoided a lawsuit of their own last week by agreeing to cover MacBook Pros with distorted video due to a problem with the NVIDIA 8600M GT graphics processor. If you paid for a repair due to this issue, Apple may reimburse you. These repair extensions come through every so often and almost always after significant complaints by Apple users, including petitions, angry blog posts, and such — you know the drill. Apple extends the warranty to three years for the identified issue and compensates those who already paid for the repair. As a tip, before you pay for a repair, search out “repair extension” and your model of Mac. Not all repair centers check for these repair extensions, so it helps when you do.
Both announcements underscore the importance of saving receipts for repairs and other losses related to these failures. Receipts take up little space and just only a moment to store. I scan all of my receipts for repairs and documentation into a special iPhoto album called “Disputes.” “Print PDF to iPhoto” is a real helper as well. I use keywords to make them searchable and they are backed up along with the rest of my photos. When these announcements come through, I’m ready to go. A few minutes of your time can really pay off.
Want to know which issue might be the next repair extension? Read Apple’s Annual Report 10-Q and check out the Legal Proceedings Section. Those are the issues ripe for settlement and repair extension.
Consumers really do get reimbursed after submitting receipts and filling out paperwork, usually more often then pesky rebates. All the parties involved know most people don’t like filling out forms, so often the money goes unclaimed by those who were affected. I personally got reimbursed for my faulty iBook adapter, got a battery replacement for my iPod, and received an allowance for my scratched iPod Nano. I don’t always agree with these class actions, but the fact is, if you own a faulty product, it’s worth my while (and yours) to turn in the paperwork and get reimbursed.
Переслать - ZipCar: Car Sharing/Renting With Your iPhone
Perhaps one of the most amazing partnership announcements made during WWDC’s keynote yesterday is ZipCar’s exciting story of iPhone app design. But it could easily fall through the cracks, for a couple of reasons: One, hardware announcements took center stage, and two, people who don’t live in major urban centers might not be aware of what exactly ZipCar even is. Most people will be familiar with the wacky science fiction future portrayed by “The Jetsons,” however, and that’s the sort of tech magic the two companies previewed yesterday.
For those who don’t know, ZipCar is a car-sharing alternative to vehicle ownership that operates in big cities like New York, London, Chicago and Toronto, to name a few. The idea is that many urban dwellers don’t need a car often enough that it makes financial sense to own one, so instead ZipCar provides an accessible fleet available for use when you need it, where you need, for as long or as little as you need it. It’s almost like a car subscription service, and though I’ve yet to use it myself, friends review it very favorably.
The new app from ZipCar takes advantage of the iPhone’s geolocation and wireless communication capabilities to allow it to help users locate, reserve, and even remotely control cars in their fleet. Before you get excited, this doesn’t mean that you can drive your ZipCar remotely, thereby fooling onlookers into believing that ghost cars are real. But it does mean that you can unlock the car, and/or possibly even honk its horn, so that you can pretend it’s recognizing and greeting you, if that’s what suits your fancy.
The app even looks good, displaying car images for each available model, and featuring a detail view with the rate and model information for the car of your choice. Two tabs not demoed in the app are the Drive and My Alerts pages, which it’s not a stretch to imagine might provide some kind of maps or navigation app, and maybe a traffic or severe weather alert system.
If you don’t happen to live in one of the cities where ZipCar has a presence, I can understand if you’re stifling a yawn right about now. But think about what this means not just for ZipCars, but for cars in general. Major car manufacturers could conceivably outfit their automobiles with the same kind of tech. It could be the death of the key fob, and the advent of iPhone integration that extends beyond just media and phone functions. Combine ZipCar functionality with Bluetooth stereo/calling connectivity, and turn-by-turn GPS navigation as demoed by Tom Tom, and your road trip just got a whole lot less complicated.
Переслать - Snow Leopard In Depth: QuickTime X
QuickTime has been around since well before OS X, dating back to 1991, but this old dog gets new life in the next version of the Mac OS. QuickTime X, as the new release has been named, follows the theme of Snow Leopard by incorporating both refinements and new technologies. QuickTime player has a new interface that simplifies playback and new capabilities that enhance performance and allow you to create and share video content.
Black Bezels Are the New Black
The new QuickTime X features a simplified and “uncluttered” interface for playback. The playback controls have been removed from the bottom bar and have been moved to an on-screen layer when you mouse over a video. The general effect is that you only see the black title bar in Snow Leopard and the rest of the interface disappears so you can focus your attention on the video itself. A nice little touch and I think very easy for most people that are used to the keyboard controls from previous incarnations of QuickTime Player or iTunes.
Video Killed the Radio Star
Or maybe video created the next YouTube star? In QuickTime X, the player application has been expanded to include video capture, either from the built-in webcam in your Mac or from a USB-tethered camera. QuickTime includes simple controls for trimming video so you can get just the right amount of lead-in for your next YouTube masterpiece, and then cut the lead-out just before your neighbor pops in to ask if they can borrow a cup of sugar. Just drag the yellow handles left and right to set the clip that will be exported.
Sharing these videos to YouTube, MobileMe, email, or your iTunes library is a one-click affair.
Technological Enhancements
QuickTime X is optimized for the critical HD codecs H.264 and AAC with a new foundation that should provide stutter-free playback on current computers. The player allows using hardware acceleration for H.264, which should help with HD video in that format. Also new is support for HTTP streaming, which allows QuickTime to stream content that is delivered by a web server, rather than just content from a specialized streaming server. This should help improve playback of videos from web accounts like MobileMe galleries. QuickTime X can also take advantage of new technologies in Snow Leopard like 64-bit addressing and Grand Central Dispatch to speed up performance.
Whither QuickTime Pro?
Absent from yesterday’s announcements was any mention of QuickTime X Pro. I am going to indulge my optimistic side and declare that the Pro version is no more and Apple is going to provide all the features of QuickTime Pro as part of the standard app in Snow Leopard. This is a welcome change in an age when multimedia playback, and even media creation, has been standard on the Mac platform for a good many years.
What About DVD Player?
I can’t help but wonder if DVD Player is going to get the same H.264 accelerated love from Apple, or if this feature is being folded into QuickTime Player. There is a new chapter navigation interface in QuickTime Player that would be great for DVD movies, too. Frankly, DVD Player needs to get caught up to the Blu-ray age and the H.264 improvements in QuickTime would be welcome in an HD-capable DVD Player.
Переслать - Apple Releases Safari 4
Apple today stripped the beta tag from, and released, Safari 4 into the wild. Safari 4, which has been in beta since February, offers a host of features and enhancements to what Apple claims is the “World’s Fastest Browser.”
Safari 4 features an updated user interface, and numerous under-the-hood enhancements, all of which contribute to a great new browser, built with the user in mind. If you’ve been using Safari 3, this is a fantastic update you’ll definitely want to install immediately. If you’ve been using the Safari 4 beta for the last few months, some changes have been made, and stability has improved. No matter what browser you currently use, Safari 4 is a gorgeous app that puts the content up front and gets out of your way while you surf.
Safari 4 Top Sites
Top Sites
Top Sites is one of the more notable features, where you can view up to 24 of your most visited sites, via a slick 3D wall of page previews, in one window — making it much easier to get to the sites you visit most.If you prefer to use Top Sites as your start page, which you can do in the General tab in your Safari preferences, you can “pin” specific pages so they’re always available, no matter how often you visit them. You do this simply by hitting the Edit button at the bottom of the Top Sites page and clicking the little pin icon in the corner of each page thumbnail.
Search
Searching in Safari has seen a few feature updates. You can use the new Search bar, which auto-completes terms, offers suggestions, and displays a list of recent searches for you. Pretty standard stuff. But here’s the cool part: Let’s say you want to search for a site you’ve been to in the past, but can’t remember where it was. Simply visit your Top Sites page and use the Search box at the bottom. Safari will search through your history and display thumbnail previews of the search results via Cover Flow in the browser window — making it much easier to find what you’re looking for. The Cover Flow feature also works with your Bookmarks.
Shortcuts
Apple has added a few options to the Customize Toolbar preferences. You can now add buttons for Top Sites, Bookmarks Bar, Site Information, Email Page and more. To make room for these buttons, Apple has removed the Stop/Reload button and made it part of the URL bar, as seen below.
Safari 4 buttons
For those who were using Safari 4 beta and didn’t care for the Tabs-On-Top feature, you’ll feel all warm and fuzzy when you find the Tab bar has been moved back to its Safari 3 location below the toolbar.
While browsers have had the ability to reduce or enlarge text for a long time, Safari 4 goes one step further by allowing you to zoom an entire page in and out, keeping the content and overall look of the site the way it was intended. Of course, you can also zoom the text only, and support for external style sheets is available, so you can choose your fonts, sizes and colors for all web sites.
A few other nifty features of Safari 4 include inline viewing of PDFs without cumbersome plugins, the ability to “clip” a web page to create a Dashboard Widget of the page, the ability to save images directly into your iPhoto library, and mail the contents of a page (in its full HTML glory) with the click of a button.
Safari 4 Under the Hood
The new JavaScript engine (Nitro) in Safari 4, which boasts speeds four times faster than Firefox 3, four-and-a-half times faster than Safari 3, and eight times faster than Internet Explorer 8, was noticeably improved over previous Safari versions — especially when loading JavaScript-heavy pages such as my iGoogle page.
Page rendering speeds have also been improved by up to three times, according to Apple’s statements. Not having any scientific data to back up my claim, I’ll say that it is fast. Very fast. Considering Safari 4 will run as a 64-bit app under Snow Leopard when it’s released in September, Safari with its Nitro JavaScript engine will be speeding along at a pace that will leave other browsers envious.
Safari 4 also boasts support for HTML 5, for the use of offline technologies, and some pretty cool CSS 3 effects such as animations, fonts and media effects. It’s also the only browser I know of that supports ICC color profiles out of the box, so images appear in the browser as they were intended to.
Of particular interest to web site designers and developers is the ability to invoke Safari 4’s Web Inspector to get a closer look at the underpinnings of a web site. You can view the CSS and HTML code, script and database information, as well as beautiful graphs displaying site statistics, such as image size. As you can see in the screenshot below, somebody really needs to optimize the MacBook Pro image!
Safari 4 Web Inspector
Firefox, with its plethora of extensions available, has been my browser of choice for a long time. But Safari does offer one thing that Firefox just can’t seem to catch hold-of in Mac OS X — speed! Safari 4 just blows the doors off even Firefox 3.5 beta. And it does offer some customization capability via InputManagers (not supported by Apple, by the way). Overall, if you can live without dozens of extensions for Firefox, Safari is by far the best browser for the Mac.
Safari 4 is available now as a free download for Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later and requires that you install Security Update 2009-002. You can download Safari 4 from Apple’s web site.
Переслать - Find My iPhone and iDisk Support Make MobileMe More Attractive
When June 17 comes around, iPhone customers will definitely want to upgrade to the latest iPhone 3.0 software to take advantage of huge improvements with Apple’s oft-discussed MobileMe service.
iPhone 3.0, Where Are You?
If you are like me, losing things (it happens to all of us) is unfortunately common. While I haven’t lost my iPhone yet, I’ve had it happen to many friends. With the 3.0 software, Apple has introduced a new feature called Find My iPhone which will allow MobileMe customers to log into me.com via any Internet-enabled computer and remotely locate their phone via the iPhone’s built-in GPS (or through cell phone triangulation on the original iPhone).
Additionally, users can now remotely display a message on their iPhone with the intention of alerting whomever may find their treasured mobile device. In case the screen isn’t attention-getting enough, users also have the ability to play a sound that will override the iPhone’s silent setting to make it easier to find a lost or misplaced phone.
Sometimes, however, bad things happen and you may not be able to retrieve your iPhone. In this case, Apple provides a solution that will allow a user to remotely wipe everything on their device, preventing the nefarious person who has acquired your iPhone from being able to do any real damage. In one click on the MobileMe web site, all of your personal information, including addresses, phone numbers, photos, email and more are deleted from your iPhone. If you eventually find your iPhone after you’ve wiped it, simply plugging it back into your Mac or PC will allow it to restore from its latest iPhone backup.
iDisk Now On iPhone
In other news, Apple announced that iDisk support will be coming soon to the iPhone. A free application will be available on the App Store that will allow you to browse content from your iDisk. You can also share content from your iDisk to friends and family via email, all from your phone. Since the iPhone features built-in support for a variety of formats, including Microsoft Office and iWork documents, you can browse these as well. Editing these documents, however, is not supported at this time.
Public iDisk folders are also supported, both in terms of allowing you to browse other public folders as well as other users uploading content to your own public folder, which you can then browse from your phone.
These features are iPhone 3.0 OS and MobileMe dependent. Find My iPhone & Remote Wipe will be available on June 17 and iDisk support will be available at a later, unannounced, date.
Переслать - WWDC Announcements: Smule's Ge Wang and Twitterers Respond
We had a chance to talk to Dr. Ge Wang of Smule, makers of iPhone apps Ocarina and Leaf Trombone: World Stage. He, and some of our Twitter followers, share their thoughts about the new hardware and software announcements.
With our Twitter followers, we asked for their reaction and it was definitely a mixed bag.
Our question: What are your reactions to the new hardware announcements? What are the game changers?
mattbdunn: ipod touch still $400 for 32Gb when u can pay $300 for a 32Gb 3GS iphone! Where’s the 64Gb touch? No one will b buying those
odaynasser: they flopped big time
KevYocha: as an ATT customer lack of tethering and MMS is unforgivable. The update seems great for anyone else. My 3G is new too :(
vicener: Frankly I was a bit disappointed with the iPhone 3Gs, but I am looking forward to OSX Snow Leopard and iPhone OS 3.0
bonxtivalis: Zzzzz…
ryan_doughty: New hardware is fine, For me it will be the prices and tariffs on O2 UK that could make or break this as my next phone.
freddytaul: new iphone and MB pros def stole the show. great new options and prices on the MBP’s. my ibook might be headed out.
mmccl267: pretty lame that AT&T doesn’t support tethering. Any hope that they will change that?
andreaguiar: machine hardware = excellent news + $. new iphone is nice but I think it could have used a bit more new features (3mp only?)
askbal: I am surprised no Video in the firmware upgrade for 3G. Probably just for a feature differentiation with new 3GS?
mike20: apathy and none, in that order, lol! #wwdc
cmdotkom: I am really liking the sound of the new MacBook Pro line. I need a computer for work and will look into it as an option.
decti: still no 13″ mb with 1440 resolution == sucksAnd my favorite:
aaroncflores: @theappleblog will the Dev Team have jail break ready by the 17th?What do you think about today’s announcements?
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