Graham Spencer

917 posts on MacStories since January 2011

Former MacStories contributor.

graham@macstories.net

Apple Announces Holiday Sale For This Friday, Across The World

Update: Apple has now confirmed the “One-Day Shopping Event” is also occurring in the US this Friday - but it makes no mention of the sale also taking place in its retail stores, suggesting this is an online-only affair.

Apple has begun placing banners on its online Apple Stores across the world, indicating that it will be holding a sale this Friday - on the yearly “Black Friday” as it is known in the US. The banners, found on the store page, inform us that this “special one-day Apple shopping event” is this Friday, November 25.

Mark your calendar now, and come back to the Apple Online Store for the special one-day event. You’ll discover amazing iPad, iPod and Mac gifts for everyone on your list.

The banner has gone up on the Australian, Italian, UK and a number of other international stores. No mention has yet been made on the US store, but it is expected to also receive the banner in a number of hours. In the US the Black Friday sale is expected to also take place inside Apple’s retail stores - no mention of the sale in retail stores is made on the Australian or Italian notices.

djay For Mac Adds ‘Harmonic Match’ And iCloud Support

For those of you who are DJs or just enjoy listening and mixing music, the latest version of Algoriddim’s Mac App ‘djay’ might interest you. Now at version 4.0, Algoriddim is claiming that this is the biggest update to the app yet. The big headline new feature is ‘Harmonic Match’ a new system that allows users to “create perfectly matched mixes with a simple click”.

With the introduction of Harmonic Match, djay automatically detects a song’s key and allows to match it to songs of the same key within your iTunes music library. It allows you transpose songs into different keys, and even sort your entire music library by key, perfect for creating studio quality mash-ups of your songs.

Beyond Harmonic Match, djay 4.0 also features a new audio engine that allows high quality Audio FX on the fly, precision scratching, visual waveforms and a host of other more advanced features. A particularly useful new feature in djay 4.0 is the support for iCloud, which means cue data and other metadata can by synced across the Mac, iPad and iPhone versions of the app. Another nice touch is support for the multi-touch trackpad where a user can “use rotate gestures to adjust the EQ, or two fingers to scratch the record and operate the crossfader”.

djay for the Mac is available on the Mac App Store for a special launch sale price of  $19.99. Jump the break for a promotional video, as well as a full list of additions and improvements in djay 4.0.
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Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store Re-Opens Today With Its Redesigned Glass Cube

In just a short few hours, at 10 AM local time, Apple’s flagship retail store at 5th Avenue in New York City will have a grand re-opening after its glass cube was renovated and re-created. As you can see above though, Apple has spent the night removing all the barriers and plastic wrapping and the new design is bare for all to see. The new design has just three tall glass panes on all sides of the cube, coming to a total of just 15 panes — compare that number to the old design which had 90 panes.

Jump the break to view a picture before the plastic wrapping came off, to have a look at renderings of what the store was designed to look like and what the old cube (with its 90 panes) looked like.

We will update this post as more pictures come in and the grand re-opening begins.

[Image via 9to5 Mac]

Update: MacRumors shares more pictures of the redesigned cube, showing the new “seamless” design that eliminates most of the hardware that kept the old 90 glass panels together.

Update #2: View of the redesigned cube via @andinieffendi.

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Apple’s Supply Chain Secrets→

Apple’s Supply Chain Secrets

A recurring piece of information throughout this year has been how Apple’s supply chain is so integral to their success in recent years. Bloomberg Businessweek’s article from yesterday is just the latest this year and it chronicles a few stories of Apple’s impressive control over their supply chain and gives some interesting insight to how it works.

Apple has built a closed ecosystem where it exerts control over nearly every piece of the supply chain, from design to retail store. Because of its volume—and its occasional ruthlessness—Apple gets big discounts on parts, manufacturing capacity, and air freight. “Operations expertise is as big an asset for Apple as product innovation or marketing,” says Mike Fawkes, the former supply-chain chief at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and now a venture capitalist with VantagePoint Capital Partners. “They’ve taken operational excellence to a level never seen before.”

Included in the article are some fascinating stories from the supply chain - whether it be the hoarding of lasers so that that iSight’s green LED indicator light could be ‘invisible’ when off, to Apple buying up all the available air freight over Christmas of 1998 so it could ship their new translucent blue iMacs and to how Apple keeps its new products secret ahead of a launch.

At least once, the company shipped products in tomato boxes to avoid detection, says the consultant who has worked with Apple. When the iPad 2 debuted, the finished devices were packed in plain boxes and Apple employees monitored every handoff point—loading dock, airport, truck depot, and distribution center—to make sure each unit was accounted for.

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Revolutionary User Interfaces→

Revolutionary User Interfaces

In an article posted this morning on Asymco, Horace Dediu discusses how the revolutionary user interface of the iPhone served to disrupt the mobile market and unseat the incumbents - Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson.

In 2007 something happened which changed the industry. It took a few years to even realize it was happening but by the time it was obvious, it had changed to such a degree that huge companies found themselves in financial distress.

Furthermore, Dediu discusses how over time as new input methods have been created, so have new platforms and new business models - as well as hurting the incumbents of the market. A big question that Dediu poses in his article is that with next revolutionary user interface seemingly being created at a faster and more rapid rate (mouse, click wheel and then multi-touch), what will be the next revolutionary user interface? He questions whether in fact it could be Siri.

My disruptive hypothesis for Siri is that it shifts the competition from platforms positioned on a device to a “coupled” super-platform deponent on broadband and infrastructural computing. Just after collecting enough data and observing patterns in it that give us clarity, It looks like things are about to change all over again.

If you’d like to hear more from Horace on this idea of Siri being the next shift in user interfaces, this week’s episode of the Critical Path would also be worth a listen.

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Customize The Launchpad, Mission Control And Login Screen Backgrounds With Lion Designer

Since Lion launched we’ve covered a few hacks that describe how you can change Mission Control’s and Dashboard’s background, as well as how to change the background of folders in Launchpad - but most of them have required some level of manual file editing and replacement. Fortunately, developer Moritz Wette has made it a whole lot simpler to customize the look of Lion with his app, Lion Designer.

Lion Designer lets you customize the Mission Control, Dashboard, Launchpad folder and the login screen background as well as the Launchpad folder icon. The developer suggests using PNG images that are at the resolution of your screen or are images that can tile - otherwise you’ll end up with something that looks messy. Though if you don’t like how something looks after you’ve changed it, or something has gone wrong, you can easily click the reset button and Lion Designer will return it to the stock look. I gave the app a quick spin and found it worked fine, with my Dashboard now displaying the familiar and soothing linen pattern. Lion Designer is available for free, but be sure to send over a small donation to Wette if you find the app useful to you.

If you’re looking for some other apps to tweak and customise OS X Lion, have a look at these apps that we have covered in the past:

  • Lion Tweaks - Lets you turn various features in Lion on or off, examples include removing the system Window animation, disable spelling correction, enable permanent scrollbars and many more.
  • Launchpad-Control - Hide any app you want from being displayed in Launchpad
  • LaunchpadCleaner 2 - Also allows you to hide apps from Launchpad as well as some more in-depth features.

[Via TUAW]

Apple Pushes Back Mac App Store Sandboxing Requirement To March 2012

In an email to developers today obtained by iClarified, Apple has informed them that all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must implement sandboxing by March 1st, 2012. Originally Apple had told developers that the sandboxing requirement would take place this month. It isn’t entirely clear why Apple has delayed the introduction of this requirement but it does give developers a few more precious months to implement the restriction and resolve all issues that it might cause for their app.

In the email Apple notes; “Sandboxing your app is a great way to protect systems and users by limiting the resources apps can access and making it more difficult for malicious software to compromise users’ systems”. For those who aren’t familiar with the technical ‘feature’, John Siracusa has a great (and in-depth) discussion of the feature in his Mac OS X 10.7 Lion review on Ars Technica. In short, sandboxing restricts the number of actions that an app can do so that if the software is compromised, the amount of damage it can do is greatly minimised.

In Lion, the sandbox security model has been greatly enhanced, and Apple is finally promoting it for use by third-party applications. A sandboxed application must now include a list of “entitlements” describing exactly what resources it needs in order to do its job. Lion supports about 30 different entitlements which range from basic things like the ability to create a network connection or to listen for incoming network connections (two separate entitlements) to sophisticated tasks like capturing video or still images from a built-in camera.

In its email to developers, Apple also notes that if an app requires access to “sandboxed system resources”, the developer must also include justification for why it needs those entitlements when submitting the app to the Mac App Store. Finally, Apple notes that it is willing to offer developers additional, temporary, entitlements if the app is being re-engineered for sandboxing - but only on a short-term basis.

[Via iClarified, Image via Apple]

Angry Birds Reaches Half A Billion Downloads

Rovio today announced a massive milestone for its hit game Angry Birds, revealing that the game has been downloaded more than half a billion times in less than two years. In a short video celebrating the milestone (shown after the break), Rovio also throws out some other interesting statistics including:

  • #1 in 79 countries
  • 266 billion levels played
  • 400 billion birds shot
  • 44 billion stars collected
  • 200,000 years played Angry Birds total
  • 300 million minutes played daily

The app, which originally launched on iOS on December 10th, 2009 has now gone on to be a worldwide hit and has spread to a large swathe of both mobile and desktop operating systems including Android, Symbian, Windows Phone, WebOS, OS X, Windows, Google Plus and more. Last October Rovio also released a special Halloween edition of the game called Angry Birds Hallloween, which was subsequently renamed ‘Angry Birds Seasons’ - it has seen regular updates featuring new levels that are themed by various holidays. This year Angry Birds Rio was released in March, this version tied in with the 20th Century Fox animated film Rio.

Note: Angry Birds Downloads includes downloads from all the platforms it is available on.

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Native Gmail App From Google Coming To The iPhone Soon?

If you’ve been yearning for a good, native, Gmail app for the iPhone, you might not have to wait much longer. MG Siegler claims that Google “is on the verge of launching their native Gmail app” and have likely already submitted it to Apple for review.

Although Google has a good web version of Gmail that is optimised for the iPhone and is also supported by iOS’ inbuilt Mail app, many have long wanted a fully native Gmail app and experience on iOS. Probably the biggest reason for a native Gmail app is push notifications (in the native Mail app, Gmail only supports fetching every 15, 30 or 60 minutes). Yet according to Siegler’s sources, the app is also “pretty fantastic” - something that many users of Android’s Gmail app have also often commented on. His understanding is that this is Google’s first iOS app since they began their recent commitment to design and that “all indications point to it being a good [app]”.

The native Gmail app will likely bring other key functionality as well: like Priority Inbox and one-click starring of messages. Other possibilities include some of the stuff Google is about to roll out for Gmail proper: like contact icons, better threading, and deep searching functionality. Maybe there will even be some Google+ integration, which Google is also hard at work on for Gmail.

The big question is whether Apple will approve the app, because to date they have rejected alternative email apps that would compete against the native Mail app. However, Siegler believes Apple probably will approve it, in which case it could mean that we could also soon see other third party Mail apps on iOS. One such example could be Sparrow for iPhone, after the developers revealed in August they have started development on such an app. In an interview with Business Insider in August, Dominique Leca from Sparrow noted that it would be highly inconsistent for Apple to continue to reject alternative Mail apps when Apple has since allowed replacements for Safari on iOS in recent months.

[Via parislemon]