Graham Spencer

917 posts on MacStories since January 2011

Former MacStories contributor.

graham@macstories.net

iOS 5 Camera App: Lock screen Shortcut, Volume Shutter Button And Photo Editing


Improvements to the iOS Camera app are next up in the WWDC keynote, and chief to the improvements made to that app includes a lock screen shortcut to taking pictures and improved auto focus options.

A camera icon on the lockscreen will take you to the Camera app, ready to take a photo. If you have a passcode it will let you take photos but not view the photo album. What is even cooler is that pressing the volume up button now becomes a shutter button.

Within the Camera app, you can pinch to zoom and holding your finger on the screen will create an auto-focus and exposure lock around that area. Finally, you can now edit photos straight from the Camera app including the oft-used ‘Red-eye removal’ feature, crop photos and ‘Auto-Enhance’.

iOS 5: Safari Improvements

Apple has unveiled a number of improvements to the iOS version of Safari and in particular is proper tabbed browsing for Safari on the iPad. As can be seen above, you will now be able to switch tabs with just one touch.

Other new features include ‘Reader’ which will strip a website down to the bare basics of just the text and image, similar to Readability and Instapaper functions. You can then email that “streamlined” article to any friends or family.

The second is the ‘Reading List’ which allows you to save articles for reading at a later time. It works on the iPhone, iPad or Safari and you can access the Reading List from any of those versions of Safari.

iOS 5: Newsstand, Subscription Magazines and Newspapers In One Place

New to iOS 5 will be a feature dubbed “Newsstand” which promises to put together all your digital Newspapers and Magazines together in one easy to find place. Scott Forstall, who introduced the feature, said that Magazines from the National Geographic to Vanity Fair to Popular Science will be available whilst Newspapers such as the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph will be available in Newsstand.

Read all about it. All in one place. iOS 5 organizes your magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in Newsstand: a folder that lets you access your favorite publications quickly and easily.

You get the Magazines from the App Store but once added will live in your ‘Newstand’ which lives as an icon on your Homescreen. New issues will be downloaded in the background so that when you pick up “your iPad, the newspaper is ready for you to read it offline”.

Over 200 Million iOS Devices Sold, 25 Million iPads And $2.5 Billion Paid To Developers

Scott Forstall has just come on stage at WWDC and revealed that in just 14 months, Apple has sold over 25 million iPads. That has brought the total number of iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) sold to over 200 million since the original iPhone launched in 2007. That brings iOS’s ‘Mobile Installed Base’ to 44% of the total market, with Android in second place at 28% of the market and RIM at 19% of the market.

Our customers couldn’t wait to get their hands on the iPad 2. In the first 14 months, we’ve sold 25 million iPads

Furthermore the iTunes store has now sold over 15 Billion songs, whilst the iBookstore (that launched last year) has seen over 130 million downloads. Apple now has 225 million accounts aggregated from the iTunes, iBooks and App Stores.

Moving to the ever-popular App Store, there have been over 90,000 apps built just for the iPad. This all contributed to what is now over 14 billion App downloads from the store - leading Apple to pay developers over $2.5 billion dollars since launching the App Store in 2008.

Mac App Store Adds In-App Purchases, Push Notification And Delta Updates

The apps in the Mac App Store are set to receive some solid enhancements including push notifications, sandboxing and delta updates.

For enhanced security, apps will have a built-in sandbox mode whilst developers will have the ability to send “delta updates”, which are effectively ‘patch based’ updates, meaning the entire app will not have to re-downloaded with every update.Apps will also be able to send push notifications to users and just like iOS apps, can also have in-app purchases.

Phil Schiller also touted that the Mac App Store has become the number one retailer for PC software, overtaking even Best Buy.

Macs Outgrowing The PC Industry


Starting the WWDC keynote is a discusion about Lion, and Phil Schiller has started out by throwing out some sales numbers surrounding the Mac platform. As of today there are 54 million active Mac users and Macs are defying the trend of the rest of the PC industry.

In terms of year-over-year numbers, Mac sales grew by 28% whilst the PC market actually shrank by 1%. Phil Schiller touted that the Mac is “outgrowing the PC industry”. Notebooks are the big success for Apple with 73% of all Mac sales coming from the MacBook range, whilst 27% are desktop Macs.

iTunes and Facebook Credit To Be Transferable For Upcoming Ubisoft Game

AllThingsD is this morning reporting that Facebook credits and iTunes credit will “play nice” with each other, with some minimal transferability of credits set to occur. The news comes from Chris Early, Ubisoft VP of Digital publishing who told AllThingsD that Apple and Facebook have agreed to honor “currency purchased on each other’s platforms for the same game”.

This system of “currency” interoperability will apparently be first demonstrated with Ubisoft’s upcoming Ghost Recon game that will be released on multiple platforms, including on Facebook and mobile devices. Early says that the “new pact” would allow a customer who purchased $20 worth of Ghost Recon credits on Facebook, also have $20 worth of credits for their iPhone version of Ghost Recon, with Facebook receiving the 30% cut of revenue. The reverse would work too, but in either case only the platform that initially received the $20 would receive that 30% revenue cut.

Ubisoft would, according to Early, be the party responsible for managing users’ credit balance across the platform. This may just be Apple and Facebook approving the practice of in-game credits being transferable across platforms, but it certainly opens the slight possibility that iTunes credit could one day be used within the Facebook platform and vice versa.

[Via AllThingsD]

iCloud To Be Deeply Integrated With Apple’s Time Capsule?

In an article today by Cult of Mac, the website claims to have a scoop on what iCloud is and how it will work. Their source, which is supposedly ‘close to the company’, told Cult of Mac that iCloud will be deeply integrated with Time Capsule. Apparently iCloud will become less of a local backup and “more of a personal cloud server”. The source corroborates the recent rumors that suggested a refreshed Time Capsule would come with embedded A4 or A5 CPUs.

There will apparently be a “Home Folder” in which files saved on a Mac connected to the Time Capsule will be instantly backed up and then made available to any remote Mac or iOS device. The Time Capsule will archive and serve up any files to any connected device, even if the computer that made the file is off. If you do work on a device outside of your local network, the changes will be automatically made when you get back home.

Then in terms of iOS devices, it will allow you to upload photos and videos from, say, an iPhone to the Time Capsule – making them available to the other devices on the network. iCloud becomes the “conduit” for all your files and media.

“Your computer gets backed up to Time Capsule anyways,” said the source. “Now it’ll serve up your content when you want it, where you want it, right there on your iOS device.”

However the source wasn’t entirely sure if it was going to be announced at WWDC, just saying it was “what’s next in line” despite also noting “I heard that they have [it] ready to go”. The final thing the source noted was that they hadn’t heard of anything “about a Time Capsule holding iOS updates”, calling the rumor “incredibly stupid”.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Authorized Biography of Steve Jobs Now Available For Pre-Order

The previously announced biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which will be the first ‘authorized’ biography of Jobs, is now available for pre-order. iSteve: The Book of Jobs will be released on March 6th, 2012. The description of the book from Amazon provides:

From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In iSteve: The Book of Jobs, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs’ family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, iSteve is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.

You can pre-order iSteve: The Book of Jobs from Amazon right now for $19.80 in paper, or $14.99 for the Kindle edition. Curiously the release date (March 6th), will be on the fourth anniversary of the release of the iOS SDK that allowed developers to build third party apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

[Via Cult of Mac]