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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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Yelp Update Brings Augmented Reality As an Easter Egg

Yesterday, we looked at Paris Metro, supposedly the first augmented reality app officially available for the iPhone. Today, Robert Scoble uncovered an Easter egg that looks like it may grant that title to Yelp, which got a version update earlier this week that carried a nice surprise: an AR mode dubbed “Monocle.”

Yelp is one of the App Store’s early successes. It offers crowdsourced locations and reviews of restaurants, bars, and other points of interests for tourists and leisure seekers. As such, it’s the perfect app for AR, which in this case consists of location names and ratings overlaid on a live feed from your iPhone’s (3GS only) camera.

Since it’s an Easter egg and not an advertised feature, activating Monocle mode requires an extra step beyond just downloading and opening the free app. Specifically, you have to shake your 3GS three times in succession with the app open. Mine worked on the first try, but I’m sure just shaking it until it works will open up the option eventually.

In my extremely brief, extremely office-based test, the app appears to work perfectly, so long as my sense of direction isn’t terribly off. As you can see from my screenshot, many culinary delights lie in the general direction of my iMac. I’ll be doing some more involved tests later this evening to see what kind of effect Monocle mode has on my battery life, but I can’t imagine it’s very energy efficient.

It’s unclear whether or not Apple was aware of this feature when it let this update through, so grab it now while you still can. If it gets pulled, let us know so we can be collectively indignant.

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Facebook 3.0 Arrives in the App Store

For those of you waiting with baited breath for Facebook 3.0, the time has come. Pretty much exactly in time for that two week turnaround estimate, too, despite fears it might not make it. Here’s a taste of what’s available with the new update:

- See your upcoming Events and RSVP
- See Pages and post updates and photos to Pages you administer
- Write Notes and read your friends’ Notes
- Upload videos from an iPhone 3GS
- Complete photo management (create albums, delete albums, delete photos, delete photo tags)
- Change your Profile Picture
- Like posts and photos
- See the same News Feed as the Facebook website
- Visit links in a built-in web browser
- Quickly call or text your friends

For a full list, check out app developer Joe Hewitt’s Facebook note from last week. Facebook 3.0 is a free download from the App Store (iTunes link).

Join our first live online event, "Analyzing Google's Mobile Strategy: A GigaOM Pro Research Roundtable" on Thursday, Aug. 27, at 10 a.m. (PST). Sign up for our free webinar.

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Snow Leopard: The Installation Process

In addition to the numerous refinements that Snow Leopard brings, among the first you’ll notice is an easier installation experience. Some options that experienced Apple users have come to know and love have been changed or relocated, resulting in an experience that is far less intimidating than installing Microsoft Windows.

Traditional OS X users may be familiar with some of the more advanced installation options beyond the usual "Upgrade Mac OS X." Options such as "Erase and Install" and "Archive and Install" have been changed for Snow Leopard. To prevent users from accidentally erasing their hard drive, the erase and install functionality has been relegated to manual formatting via Disk Utility.

Should one need to archive and install (which is where your previous system files are archived in a separate location and a new system is installed in their place), the installer will it automatically when it detects an attempt to install the same operating system as is currently found on the Mac. When installation is complete, Snow Leopard cleans up after itself and doesn't leave users with an ugly "Previous System" folder as before.

Trickery With Versions

With Snow Leopard's "behind the scenes" archive and install process, it now automatically installs the current OS version number. For example, if someone is running 10.6.3 and reinstalls, when installation is complete they will still be using 10.6.3 instead of 10.6. This removes the need to run an hour of software updates, but it does present a potential problem. When "dot releases" come out, compatibility is sometimes affected, and users archive and install to revert back to a previous system version. Beyond erasing and installing, this doesn’t seem possible with Snow Leopard.

Wither Rosetta?

By default, when you install Snow Leopard, it will not install Rosetta, Apple's technology to allow older PowerPC apps to run on Intel processors. As most applications are Universal and Snow Leopard itself requires an Intel processor, Apple is finally making big strides to leave behind the world of PowerPC. Should users still need Rosetta, it is available as an optional install.

QuickTime X vs QuickTime 7

Snow Leopard introduces Apple's redesigned version of QuickTime, dubbed QuickTime X. Though several of the more popular third party plugins will work with QuickTime X out of the box, users may need to resort to QuickTime 7 and any plugins they've used with it for playing more specialized content (or you could just turn to the much more robust VLC).

Snow Leopard will include QuickTime 7 as an option, but will not install it by default unless users already have QuickTime 7 Pro on their system. Should you try to open a file in QuickTime X that requires QuickTime 7, Software Update will automatically download it for you if it’s not already present on the system.

Unanswered Questions

As mentioned earlier, it remains unclear whether Apple has a solution in place in case users install a "dot release" like 10.6.4 and wish to revert back. What we've heard about the archive and install seems to infer you would end up with 10.6.4 upon completion.

There’s also still some question as to how Snow Leopard will behave with fresh installs and with older operating systems. Will users need to install Leopard first when swapping in a new hard drive, for example? Recent evidence points to no, but we won’t know for sure until tomorrow.

I'm sure many of you are going to have questions about the installation process, upgrade requirements, and the like. Feel free to use with the comments below to help the process along as the Apple faithful adopt yet another new operating system.

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Tip From Mossberg: Snow Leopard Upgrade Good for All

While many of us had suspected it to be the case, Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital in his review of Snow Leopard has confirmed it: The 10.6 upgrade will work with 10.4 Tiger. Which means that if you’re not keen on iLife or iWork ‘09, you can skip the full version included in the box set and save yourself a cool $140.

Of course, while Tiger users are probably pleased as punch, it’s unclear how Apple’s going to feel about this. On the one hand, Mossberg has let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, and advised users of a course of action that could deprive the company of a lot of potential revenue. Not to mention that those who do use this upgrade method will be in clear violation of Apple’s licensing agreement.

On the other hand, Walt’s exact words are:

[H]ere's a tip: Apple concedes that the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade will work properly on these Tiger-equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140.

That “Apple concedes” bit makes it sound like Cupertino had a hand in this particular revelation, which could mean the company expects to make more off of Tiger users buying the upgrade at a discounted price than it would from straight-up sales of the box set. Which makes sense, since why would you pay $169 for an update when your machine is humming along fine without it? A $30 price point, by contrast, will convince an awful lot of fence-sitters.

It remains unclear whether the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade disc (or $49 family pack) will work for standalone (ie. clean slate) installations, though it seems likely that it will, at least according to Lifehacker’s review of the software. Snow Leopard goes on sale tomorrow, Aug. 28th; the NYT and USA Today have interesting reviews as well.

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Backup to Server Based Storage with Chronosync

Recently the group that I work in was given the opportunity to move from Dell laptops to MacBook Pros. Score! Since the business infrastructure has been 100% percent PC to date, we had to develop something of a business plan for how to deal with having Macs in the workplace. Chief among our concerns was how to keep them backed up to protect all of our hard work. Probably not unlike many businesses, we have a NAS that everyone’s machine backs up to, and surprisingly, this is where we [temporarily] came to a bit of a sticking point with our Mac migration.

Some of the more obvious choices (at least to this author) were Apple’s own Time Machine (free with OS X), SuperDuper! ($27.95), and Carbon Copy Cloner (free). It came as a surprise, however, that none of these options seemed to allow for targeting a Samba mounted shared server. Some Googling showed that Time Machine could manage it with a hack, but we were unsuccessful in making this solution work. So the search was on — what could we use as a backup solution to target a password authenticated Samba share?

We tried nearly everything. We Googled until we were blue in the face, but to no avail, which was surprising, as this can’t be an isolated need for Mac business users. So I raided my Applications folder (a mess of apps that I’ve toyed with over the years and never deleted) to see if I couldn’t find something. Luckily, I came across Econ Technologies’ ChronoSync, just lying in wait, right there in my own apps directory!

Chronosync offers the typical options for backing up or synchronizing anything on your Mac. Its superior flexibility of different source and target folders was ultimately what made it the go-to for our scenario at work. One of my favorite features is the ability to do a trial sync, which shows you what files will be copied and how, before committing a full-fledged backup operation. Add to this a myriad of settings for defining rules about what’s synchronized, when, and how, and this is one of the most powerful backup solutions I’ve seen for OS X.

If you’re in the market for a seriously capable and configurable backup solution on your Macintosh — and especially if you’re a business Mac user — I suggest you give Chronosync a try. The demo version limits the number of files that can be synced, but you’ll get a better idea of whether it’s worth you $40 for a single license or not.

Will Google Wave be the end of email as we know it? Find out at NewNet on GigaOM Pro.

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The True Size of the iPhone App Economy

I’ve always wondered if everyone else with an iPhone was as susceptible to the urge to buy apps as I myself am. According to GigaOM’s look at the App Store’s revenue figures, I’m definitely not the only one succumbing to impulse shopping.

The average amount spent by an iPhone/iPod touch owner per month on apps is $5. That’s an astounding number, when you consider how many of the devices are out there.

GigaOM has a more detailed look at how much money is being spent, and how the App Store stacks up against Android marketplace.

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