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Cable Company iPad Apps Are Killing It
Today’s Time Warner Cable earnings call revealed that its iPad app was downloaded 360,000 times during its first month of availability. Cablevision revealed that it saw 50,000 downloads in the first five days of app availability, and when contacted by GigaOM, Comcast shared that its Xfinity TV app has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times since its launch in November.

What’s the message? Cable subscribers are highly amenable to the idea of accessing content on their iPads. Even Cablevision’s 50,000 downloads only represents the first five days, and it has a much smaller total of 3 million subscribers, versus 12 million for Time Warner Cable. Comcast had 22.8 million subscribers at last count, so it makes sense that it has the largest pool of potential users to draw from.

It’s also worth noting that Time Warner Cable lost only 65,000 subscribers this past quarter (and even gained subscribers in March, according to the Time Warner Cable CFO Robert Marcus), while it lost 155,000 during the quarter before that, and 141,000 two quarters ago. It’s probably too early to infer that the iPad app is the reason behind the decrease in subscriber bleed. But it’s worth considering that the iPad is a significant variable that’s been introduced only recently, and if these download numbers are any indication, it definitely seems to be a hit among cable subscribers.

Maybe cable companies can use these numbers to convince content providers to go easier when it comes to license requirements. Time Warner Cable is putting more time and money behind the app, too. There are now 70 channels available, whereas the product launched with 30. The company also said it plans on updating the app with ongoing improvements, including two-way communication with smart TV devices, and the ability to act as a remote and program DVRs from a distance.

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Getting Your Stuff Off of Your iPhone
There will come a time when you realize that you want to get something off of your iPhone, and yet you don’t have access to the Mac your normally sync with, or your Mac’s hard drive has failed. That’s when getting information off of your iPhone can become a daunting task. Here are a few different ways to recover different types of data from your iPhone.

iPhone Photo Library

The good news is that you can access the iPhone photos you’ve taken from any Mac (and not just the one you sync with) using the OS X Image Capture app. In fact, you can even use the iPad Camera Adapter. The iPhone itself will look like any other camera that you connect to either your Mac or your iPad. You also even use iPhoto or Aperture directly to perform the transfer. Some of the techniques outlined below can also be used to directly copy image files off of the iPhone when importing from iPhoto fails.

iPod Music Files

Ever since the arrival of the iPod, there have been ways to extract music from your Apple device. These same utilities are still applicable to the iPhone. The tricky part is that the files and directory structure are not represented in human friendly text. There is a database file that Apple uses to translate the gibberish back into the artist, album, song format you are familiar with. Many of the free solutions like Macroplant’s iPhone Explorer, will allow you to copy the music files directly from the iPhone to your Mac in the nonsense naming format they are in on the iPhone.

So long as you have iTunes configured to “Copy files to your iTunes Media folder”, as well as to “Keep iTunes Media File organized”, then the file names will all be restored once you have imported the music back into your iTunes Library. It will retrieve the names of the artist, album and song from the ID3v2 tag embedded in the music file.

Other free solutions like HeadLightSoft’s DeTune (formerly know as expod) will perform the translation before you transfer the files. There are other paid solutions like FadingRed’s Senuti for $18.99, which are also quite good at what they do. But for the money, DeTunes offers a more than adequate solution if all you want to do is recover your device-locked music.

iOS App Data and More

Sometimes you may have to get app and data regarding iPhone usage from your phone to your computer outside of iTunes. While you can use Macroplant’s iPhone Explorer to perform this task, I have found that their Pod to Mac product for $19.95 delivers more value. Also in this category, and my personal preference is Ecamm’s PhoneView also for $19.95. Both Pod to Mac and PhoneView offer a way to access SMS Messages, VoiceMail, Call History, Contacts, and Calendar information. They also offer solutions to access your Photos, Media Files and even the locally stored files for each app you have installed.

Secret Location Data

There has been a lot of press regarding the storage of location information in the consolidated.db file on your iPhone. Apple recently revealed that it actually provides a database of cell and Wi-Fi tower locations in and around where you use your device, but the info is still interesting. While not part of a formal product offering, there is a crude yet effective tool called iPhone Tracker on GitHub that lets you see it.

Extract From Backup

Sometimes something has happened to your iPhone and you need to extract a file from your iPhone backups. This includes accessing any photos you had on your iPhone at the time of your last backup. There are two utilities that I use to perform this task, SuperCrazyAwesome’s iPhone Backup Extractor which is a free utility, and addPod’s Juice Phone, also free. Neither solution will work if you have encrypted your backup files. Both allow you to access the backed up data as if the iPhone was connected to your Mac.

So until Apple comes up with a solid cloud-based solution for iOS products, the fact remains that all iOS devices are just satellites to their Mac hosts. And so long as you need to sync between your Mac and your iOS device, there is a chance that either your Mac will fail, or your iOS device will fail. The above solutions will have you covered until Apple comes up with a better solution of its own.

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Fring First With iPhone Group Video Calling
Fring released an update Thursday for its iPhone app that brings group video chat to the service. You can now use Fring to chat with up to three friends (for a total of four people) over 3G and Wi-Fi. Android users can also get in on the action, using Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G and both platforms can talk to each other. Fring had been testing the group video chat feature in limited beta since the beginning of April.

Fring is the first app that brings group video chat to the iPhone, beating out industry leaders like Skype, and also Apple itself. Code found in FaceTime for iPhone seems to indicate that Apple plans to eventually roll out group video chat for the service, but for the time being, Fring gets to be the only game in town (for iOS; there’s a group video chat for Android and Mac/PC called Oovoo). Best of all, video calling is completely free with Fring. Enabling group video chat in the Skype desktop client requires a paid premium account.

Group video chat may not be a feature many users find themselves pining for just yet, but if you do happen to need it, not having a mobile option is a considerable drag. And even if not many users actually take advantage of Fring video calls, the company still scores a significant victory just by being first to market, especially in a field like video calling, which is expected to become huge in the next few years, especially on mobile devices. That Fring also managed to bring cross-platform support for the two biggest mobile operating systems out of the gate at feature launch is also no small victory.

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Our Choice: The First in a Wave of Truly Enhanced E-Books?
Our Choice, a new e-book app penned by Al Gore and developed by Push Pop Press went live in the App Store Wednesday, bringing a unique take on the e-book reading experience to iOS (both iPhone and iPad). It combines audio, photos, video, maps and infographics with text in a package that truly earns (for the first time in my experience) the moniker of “enhanced” e-book.

The app boots directly into a video in which Al Gore himself describes how to use Our Choice (embedded below), including hands-on demonstrations of the interactive interface elements in action. That’s the first sign that Push Pop is thinking about the e-book as app in a way that’s conducive to great user experience. Even if a new interface is well designed (as Our Choice’s is), providing a simple, one-time explanation of something brand new that goes beyond static instructional graphics is a smart move, especially if you want to appeal to more than just seasoned tablet veterans.

And then there’s the books’ cover page: a full 3-D rendering of the earth, complete with a pinpoint marker indicating where you (the reader) are currently located (so long as you authorized the app’s request to use your location data at launch). By tapping on the screen, you can switch the view to a research-based prediction of what the earth will look like if global warming continues unchecked. The location feature provides a nice personal touch, as you can see exactly how your own area will be affected.

The rest of the app is both a natural extension of, and a far cry better than interactive reading experiences that have preceded this one in other magazine, newspaper and book apps, like The Daily, for instance. Embedded videos and audio are intelligently placed, and interactive elements like animated infographics come to life with simple, yet sophisticated multi-touch gestures. Pinching, zooming and swiping to navigate feels remarkably natural, and because the book in many ways resembles a textbook rather than a linear story, the ability to jump around back and forth between sections and elements makes perfect sense here. Compare and contrast data, refer back to an earlier section, or just show a friend an interesting video or infographic quickly and easily with the app’s visual navigation style.

Our Choice already existed before today as a traditional paper book, and while it contained static images and charts, the information has a much greater impact presented as dynamic graphics in the iOS app. It is somewhat reminiscent of hands-on displays in museums, and it really helps information that might otherwise be boring leap off the page.

It may be that Our Choice is just uniquely well-suited to Push Pop’s publishing model, but the company’s founder thinks it’s a model that can do well for many different types of books. And according to Push Pop Press co-founder Mike Matas (speaking to the Huffington Post), it’s a model that should be easy for others to leverage:

It’s over 400 pages–if you want to make an app, the approach is to hire a team of engineers to handcode each page. But to build a nice book you need the creative loop of being able to try things. We ended up building a platform, a tool that the publisher could use independent of a programmer to lay out the entire book.

Other apps, like The History of Jazz have explored the potential of the enhanced multimedia e-book experience, and Inkling has delved into interactive textbooks. But if Push Pop can really make the process incredibly simple and easy to implement for licensee content producers, it could prompt a wide-scale change in digital reading and what readers expect from the book.

Matas stresses that what’s important with the creation of this kind of content is getting everything except for the content out of the way, in order to allow “the content to fill the frame.” Doing that, while also taking advantage of the iPad’s bells and whistles has been a challenge for developers and publishers alike, but at least in this case, Push Pop Press seems to have managed it.

The app isn’t without its limitations (you can only use it in landscape mode, for example) but it does a far better job of actually improving upon the experience of reading a book in print than anything else I’ve yet seen. Reading Our Choice on the iPad isn’t like reading a digital version of the print book; it’s a completely different experience, and this time that’s a good thing.
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Our Choice 2

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Verizon iPhone Helps U.S. Become a Smartphone Majority
Apple is the third-largest mobile phone maker in the U.S., behind only Samsung and LG, according to research presented today by The NPD Group. Apple’s sales reached 14 percent of the overall U.S. market in the first quarter of 2011, leapfrogging past HTC and Motorola, both of which it trailed in the previous quarter. NPD analyst Ross Rubin thinks the Verizon iPhone is the reason for Apple’s strong showing.

"Apple and Verizon had a very successful launch of the iPhone 4, which allowed the iPhone to expand its market share that was previously held back by its prolonged carrier exclusivity with AT&T,” according to Rubin in a statement released by NPD. The boost provided by Verizon also helped the iPhone 4 secure its place as the top-selling mobile phone in the U.S. It’s followed by the iPhone 3GS, now sold at a discount from its original price tag. Combined, both devices helped iOS climb 9 percentage points to represent 28 percent of total sales. Android lost ground for the first time since 2009, slipping 3 percentage points to 50 percent of smartphone sales during the quarter.

Smartphones overall had a strong quarter, though, as they represented a majority of all new U.S. mobile phone sales for the first time, with 54 percent of total purchases. That increase accounted for an overall rise in the average selling price of all mobile phones, but the average cost of smartphones paid by customers actually dropped by 3 percent (to $145). Greater demand for smartphones combined with falling prices is good news for manufacturers, who can move more product; carriers, who can reap the benefits of the higher data chargers typically incurred by smartphones; developers, who can reach a broader audience with smartphone apps; and consumers, who get a lower cost-of-entry for smartphone ownership.

The news that smartphones continue to grow in popularity among consumers is good for all device manufacturers, but the Verizon iPhone’s effect thus far shows that Apple still has plenty of room for growth. The real test of exactly how far Apple can extend the iPhone’s reach will come when, as Verizon CFO Fran Shammo put it, “a new device from Apple is launched, whenever that may be, and that we will be, on the first time, on equal footing with our competitors on a new phone hitting the market.”

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White iPhone 4 Now Available for Purchase
The white iPhone 4 went on sale at the Apple Store online early this morning, first internationally, then in the U.S. Apple Store just after that. The white model is available in both 16 GB and 32 GB capacities, and has an expected ship time of 3-5 business days as of this writing.

The new white iPhone 4 is also set to be available at brick-and-mortar retail stores beginning today when they open. Official Apple retail stores will carry them, as well as Verizon and AT&T stores and other Apple authorized retail partners. Long lines have formed in Beijing and Hong Kong, but I’ve yet to see any reports of U.S. lines that extend beyond one or two people.

Are you planning on buying a white iPhone 4 today? If you do, let us know where you got it and what the crowd (if any) was like.

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Apple May Have Snapped Up iCloud.com
What will be the name of Apple’s cloud-based music service? No one knows. However, a tipster of mine says that it might be iCloud. Why? Because the Cupertino-based computing giant is rumored to be a likely buyer of the domain iCloud.com.

Until recently, iCloud.com was a domain name and a storage-as-a-cloud service owned by Linkoping, Sweden-based desktop-as-a-service company, Xcerion. Xcerion’s iCloud service has just been rebranded to CloudMe, and the company acquired the CloudMe.com domain on April 5, 2011.

My source, who is familiar with the company, says that Xcerion has sold the domain to Apple for about $4.5 million. Xcerion hasn’t responded to my queries as yet. At the time of writing, the Whois database showed Xcerion as the owner of iCloud.

According to reports, Apple is building a cloud-based service and is in touch with large record labels as it plans for a service to compete with Amazon’s Cloud Locker. Of course, Apple might have acquired the name as an option and it could use it to build a whole different offering called iCloud.

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Fresh Apple

Friday, April 29, 2011

GigaOMApple (7 сообщений)

iPhone Photo Library

iPod Music Files

iOS App Data and More

Secret Location Data

Our Choice 2

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