A few minutes ago Apple released an update to Xcode 4.1, which is required to build apps for OS X Lion. Xcode 4.1 Developer Preview 4 is available now in the Mac Dev Center, and we’re hearing Interface Builder added support for NSPopover and NSWindow animations in this build, among other enhancements and bug fixes.
The first build of Xcode 4.1 was released in February soon after the original Lion Developer Preview, with new builds following the schedule of Lion DP releases and updates.
Currently the #1 free app in the iPad App Store, Terra Web Browser is one of those apps I didn’t know if I should take for a spin at first. There’s no shortage of alternative browsers for iPad: from the excellent iCab Mobile (which I use on a daily basis) to more innovative solutions like Sleipnir, it’s very easy to achieve the perfect browsing experience on the tablet if you think Safari is too limited and you’re willing to spend a few extra bucks. It needs to be mentioned, however, that unofficial browsers don’t get access to the latest Nitro Javascript engine goodness, and there’s no way on iOS to set a default browser other than Safari. Still, many users like me feel like having a (perhaps slower as far as webpage rendering goes) browser companion to Safari is necessary for more complex tasks like saving files locally, or displaying open pages as tabs under the main app’s toolbar. Again, iCab is quite possibly the perfect app if you’re looking for desktop-like interactions on the iPad.
Back to Terra, it comes from the guys behind ReaddleDocs and Calendars, and it’s free. I was a little skeptical at first because I really don’t need another browser on my iPad, but for what it does and for its current price, I have to say Terra is a really good app. All those positive ratings in the App Store can’t be completely wrong, after all. The app’s got a minimal interface with tabs, and you can go fullscreen with the tap of a button. Unlike many, many other apps that try to replicate fullscreen mode with semi-transparent icons on top of a webpage, Terra places a single button in the upper right corner. If you want to focus on something you want to read, hit fullscreen and forget about it. Thanks to the implementation of multitouch gestures, you can switch between open tabs with a three-finger swipe. The top toolbar gives you access to the usual functionalities of an iOS browser, such as address bar, refresh button, Google search, settings, bookmarks and action button. In the settings you can set a passcode for the app, choose to navigate in incognito mode (your cookies and history won’t be saved), change the user agent and modify the selected search engine. You can also import bookmarks from your computers, but you’ll have to use iTunes File Sharing for that. Bookmarks, history and “saved files” are located in a bookmarks popover on the left, but I couldn’t figure out how to export my Chrome’s bookmarks bar to Terra. I guess I’ll have to properly edit my exported .html file to make it work. The action button has got some interesting features as well: you can create a new bookmark, AirPrint a page, save a page locally for offline access, mail a link or forward to Safari.
What most impressed me about Terra, though, is how it handles tabs. Not only the app is stable and can handle dozens of open pages just fine (tested last night, 13 open tabs and none of them reloaded after several minutes of navigation), it’s also got a nice popup menu that will show a webpage’s full title as you tap & hold a tab. If you have a lot of open tabs and you can only see the favicons, that’s quite handy. Switching between tabs is not as fast as iCab, but it’s more than acceptable. The animations are smooth and, overall, the system works well.
Terra for iPad was a surprise. The app is free, but it does a lot of things better than many apps priced at $2.99 and above, without sacrificing its minimal approach to UI and responsiveness. Get it here.
I think that there’s a fundamental difference between gamers who want to spend $60 on the next Mass Effect or Gear of War, and casual users who are looking forward to the next Angry Birds update. I used to play a lot of console games, but now I’m one of those addicted to the .99 cent apps. On the other hand, a friend of mine who didn’t abandon console gaming bought an iPad last year and now he plays both the latest Xbox hits and Angry Birds.
I think Capps he’s right when he says apps have changed the market, but I disagree with him as far as “killing” games goes. It’s all about value: those who care about high-profile console games will keep buying them. Let’s face it: there’s no Mass Effect or Halo on iOS devices. Those people who don’t recognize the value of console – or simply don’t have the time and resources for another device in their lives – will be just fine with Angry Birds and Cut the Rope.
I think the real problem for game developers like Capps is that the number of these users who prefer quick, mobile gaming has turned out to be larger than expected. For the same reason why I disagree with Nintendo about the culture of disposability, I believe the issue is not the association of portable games with low prices: it’s about the time users are ready to invest on a platform.
I’m one of those who think console games won’t go away anytime soon. But at the same time, I wonder: what’s going to happen when the iPad will be capable of running Metal Gear Solid 4?
Samsung is not giving up. After countersuing Apple in Europe and Asia for patent infringement in technologies like power conservation and 3G data transmission as a legal action against Apple’s lawsuit (which claimed the company copied the iPhone and iPad “look & feel” with the Galaxy series devices), Samsung is now suing Apple in the United States as well, as reported by Bloomberg. According to Samsung, Apple is infringing 10 patents related to mobile phones with its iOS devices, and whilst it’s clear that Samsung is simply trying to defense itself and counterattack to Apple’s original lawsuit, it’s still interesting to notice the cellphone maker is committed to broadening the litigation to the US, with documents filed yesterday in federal court in San Jose, California.
In the U.S. complaint, Samsung accuses Apple of violating patents that “relate to fundamental innovations that increase mobile device reliability, efficiency, and quality, and improve user interface in mobile handsets and other products.”
The patented technology includes ways that a phone allows calls and Internet surfing at the same time; improvements in how text messages and attachments are sent; reductions in interference among mobile devices; and increases in the capacity of mobile networks, according to the complaint.
At the Q2 2011 earnings call, Apple’s COO Tim Cook said Samsung is an important partner to Apple’s supply chain (the company provides chips used in the iPhone and iPad), but he also stated that the mobile division of Samsung “crossed a line” and, after several attempts to resolve the situation without going to court, Apple felt like it was time to sue to protect their intellectual properties.
Samsung, which received the second-highest number of U.S. patents last year after International Business Machines Corp., is seeking an order to prevent further use of its innovations by Apple, plus cash compensation.
“Apple continues to violate Samsung’s patent rights by using these patented technologies without a license,” Samsung said in the lawsuit.
Both companies are trying to protect their IP by seeking orders to pay up for infringements and block further use of patented technologies, but as the lawsuits extends to outside the US and Samsung countersues Apple, we’ll only see a final decision or settlement years from now. But in the meantime, Samsung has decided that it’s time to move and sue Apple in its own territory.
If there’s another industry the iPad is disrupting (together with media consumption, digital reading, medical applications – you name it), that’d be music discovery. The category isn’t nearly as popular as news readers and social aggregators and RSS apps, but two apps that came out in the last months which I also reviewed here on MacStories, Aweditorium and Discovr, are leading the way towards better, more interactive, beautiful discovery of new artists and songs on mobile devices. Where Ping failed at empowering people to share, buy and discover new music, apps like Aweditorium make it super-simple to “touch” music you’ve never listened to, explore genres and albums you didn’t know you might be interested in, share the results with your friends on Twitter and Facebook. The iPad does its job extremely well in this case: with a large screen that’s meant for swipes and taps, it easily becomes a piece of glass functioning as a wall for music. Like those walls in guitar shops advertising this week’s shows from those unknown bands your friend keeps talking about all the time. Here, that’s what music discovery on the iPad is all about: the intertwinement of social, digital stores, and personal taste.
Music Hunter is the latest entry in the music discovery market for the tablet, and at $0.99 it offers a sweet way to find new songs to purchase later on the iTunes store. While Aweditorium and Discovr are based on indie artists and correlation between music you already know, respectively, Music Hunter starts up with a window displaying two sliders: one for genres, one for styles. As you move the sliders, you can get to results like “high energy hip hop” or ”90’s electronic music” that will load a wall of artists with the first song picked for you. The results are generally accurate as they’re based on the echonest engine, the same infrastructure that powers Discovr for iPad. Like Discovr, song previews are fetched from iTunes and a button allows you to quickly jump to the store and hit Buy. You can scroll through the wall to see more songs and previews, or mark something as favorite and start exploring from there as the app allows you play “music similar to your favorites.” There’s no support for AirPlay (unlike Aweditorium), but you can check out quick artist bios from a popup window that can be activated from the bottom toolbar. What I like about Music Hunter is that it packs a lot of features: you can search, adjust the settings at any time (and thus load other genres and styles) or aggregate different artists and music styles into the Favorites for the ultimate personal playlist. Everything’s really minimal and good looking.
If you’re a fan of Aweditorium and Discovr, Music Hunter is the app to add to your collections of music discovery tools. It’s elegant, well integrated with iTunes and “intelligent” in the way it aggregates results from echonest. Go download the app here.
There are mostly three ways to read articles coming from the web on the iPad nowadays: with an RSS reader; with social aggregators like Flipboard or News.me; with Instapaper or Read It Later. While aggregators and read later services are actually ways to plug into a social stream or a website, respectively, to fetch content to consume on an iPad, RSS is the most direct way to interact with a website: you log in with your Google Reader credentials, and you get the most recent feeds from your saved sources in chronological order. There are several great RSS apps for iOS out there, but the biggest problem of RSS is that articles lose their original “feel” – the way they look on a website as the author intended. Percolater, a $4.99 news reader for the iPad, wants to be an alternative that’s entirely based on the opposite concept: getting articles the way they would look in a web browser.
As the developers write in the app’s iTunes page, Percolater gives you the Internet “unprocessed” and “unfiltered.” Articles aren’t fetched in the form of textual excerpts or brief summaries with accompanying images: rather, the app loads a thumbnail preview for each article of your favorite sources, and allows you to swipe through these visual previews as if you were scrolling through the pages of a magazine – only the magazine is made of pages that look exactly the way they’re rendered in a web browser. Indeed, everything’s unfiltered. Including images, video, and ads.
Percolater can get content from your Twitter and Google Reader accounts. On the top section of the main page (which has a wooden background), the app also displays “popular” content it found on the web on a specific day, but I’m not sure how this section works. Maybe it gets the most popular articles from your Twitter account, or maybe it just runs a Google News search. You can import all your sources from Google Reader (and edit them later in the Settings), but you can’t add specific Twitter streams like users, favorite tweets, or lists. I wish Twitter integration went to a deeper level – as it stands now, Percolater only gets links from your timeline and renders them as browser previews in-app. So what happens when you tap on a thumbnail? You’re brought to another view that displays these “images” of articles stacked on top of each other, and you navigate between them with a vertical swipe. Alternatively, you can go back to the main screen with a horizontal swipe. The original tweet is displayed below the preview, and the quality of images is generally acceptable – obviously they’re not saved in super high-resolution, but it’s enough to get a glimpse of an article without reading it. If you do want to have a broader view of a post, however, you can tap on the preview to see the full-sized image Percolater saved. Tap the browser icon and, boom, Percolater loads the original link in a real browser window – meaning it will let you select text and do all the stuff a regular browser allows you to do. You can also share articles on Twitter or send them to Instapaper.
Percolater isn’t a product for everyone and it’s not perfect either. The app could use some speed optimizations and more Twitter functionalities, as well as a few fixes to reduce crashes on heavy load when the app is refreshing multiple sources at once. Still, Percolater is an interesting app in the way it puts the focus on the real web you see with a web browser. The app is available here at $4.99, and I’m looking forward to future updates. Read more
The white iPhone 4 came out earlier today, and it looks just like a regular black iPhone 4…only in white. While Apple doesn’t list any size difference in their Tech Specs page, Ryan Cash of Marketcircle notes on his personal blog that the white iPhone is actually slightly thicker than the black iPhone. As you can see from the photo above, and others after the break Ryan kindly sent us, it’s not the steel enclosure that’s thicker on the white version, it’s the plastic. Sure, it’s a very minimal difference that may not even be spotted from these photos, but it’s there and it may cause problems when trying to fit the white iPhone in older iPhone cases. I’m sure not so many cases will have this problem, but the difference is visible when comparing the devices.
A colleague of mine just picked up a 16 GB iPhone 4 in white. I was a bit surprised when I picked it up off his desk (I had my black 32 GB in my other hand at the same time) – it immediately felt thicker.
We placed them side-by-side on his desk, and sure enough, the white iPhone was a hair thicker.
Have you purchased a white iPhone today, and it doesn’t fit in the case you already have? Let us know in the comments. More photos below.
Update: TiPB notes the white iPhone is 0.2mm thicker than the black iPhone. They’re testing different cases updating with results in their post.
Since the launch of iTunes subscriptions for apps in February, adoption of the new service from magazine and newspaper publishers has been growing at a somewhat slow rate. Following the controversy that sparkled after launch – which was quickly dismissed by Steve Jobs himself in an (alleged) email that confirmed subscription were meant for “publishing apps” – only a handful of publishers decided to implement the system which, as you may remember, requires publishers to give up a 30% of revenue off every subscription sold in-app, through iTunes. Those who implemented subscriptions in their apps, however, posted some interesting results: Popular Science, for example, sold roughly 10,000 subscriptions in 6 weeks. On the other end of the spectrum, though, many speculated that the highly promoted, long anticipated The Daily – a joint collaboration of Murdoch’s News Corp. and Apple – saw a decline in sales and user engagement, although we (and many others) assume that’s because of some poor editorial choices and the very nature of the app, rather than a flaw in Apple’s system. Overall, iTunes subscriptions seem to be working for those that chose to test them: the problem is trying to convince publishers to test them. And as the iPad keeps selling well and the App Store userbase grows, there’s no doubt Apple wants to get more publishers on board. Perhaps a lot will come by June. We’ll see.
In the meantime, Apple also wants to let iOS users know about subscriptions, and the magazines that allow them to subscribe with just one click, with their iTunes accounts. That’s exactly what they’re doing with their latest App Store homepage refresh: in a new section called “Magazines - Subscribe to your Favorites”, Apple is showcasing apps that are powered by subscriptions. This section includes – you guessed it – The Daily, alongside Bloomberg Businessweek (they’re very “pleased” with Apple’s terms), Popular Science, SPIN Play, Popular Photography, Elle, and Nylon. Seven apps aren’t much, but Apple’s goal is different here: they’re not betting on numbers, they want people to know about their “favorite magazines” that now come with the best way to subscribe to digital content. You can check out the App Store section here.
Of course, there are some big names missing from the list. Businessweek is there, but the Financial Times refused to accept Apple’s subscription terms. The Daily provides fresh, downloadable content on a daily basis, but The New York Times still has to flip the switch on Apple’s in-app subscriptions (but, eventually, they will). And so does the Wall Street Journal, which keeps on relying on embedded browser sessions to let users log in & subscribe.
A new version of iOS is expected to be previewed at the WWDC in June, and publishers will be forced to update their existing iOS applications with Apple’s subscriptions by June 30. If the rumors are true and iOS 5 will really feature a completely new notification system, Apple could come up with some intriguing ways to let magazine apps download content in the background, automatically, all day, and let users know about news and fresh content through the new notifications. I’m just speculating here, but a new OS (with betas during summer, and a planned launch in September) might be a great way to tell publishers that iOS is the platform to invest on. Or, Apple could bundle iOS 5 and the new Xcode 4.1 with new tools for publishers to design and develop magazines and newspapers for the iPad. They did it for advertisers. As it stands now, Apple cares about letting people know that magical subscriptions exist. The next step is tell every publisher that iTunes is the only way to go in the digital newsstand era.
According to a new report by research firm Canalys, in the first quarter of 2011 Apple grabbed 74% of the worldwide tablet market. Canalys is the first firm to include tablets and, more specifically, the iPad in total PC shipments, and as the PC market grew 7% overall in Q1, the research group notes how the most impressive growth was reported by Apple.
Taking into consideration the iPad’s ‘halo effect’ on the company’s other products, Apple has grown considerably in most markets worldwide,’ said Canalys Analyst Tim Coulling. ‘As the iPad 2 and its competitors continue to roll out, we expect pad sales to propel PC market growth for the rest of the year.
Apple continued with its strategy to dominate the pad market, with the iPad or iPad 2 available in 59 markets by the end of Q1. A combination of strong Q4 sales and the announcement of the iPad 2’s launch across major markets at the end of March contributed to Apple’s iPad shipments being down 31% sequentially. The full impact of the iPad 2 launch will not register until subsequent quarters, as Apple gets the product into the hands of consumers.
Apple positioned #4 in worldwide total PC shipments behind HP, Acer and Dell, shipping 8.5 million computers & tablets in Q1, as opposed to 2.9 million Mac shipments in the year-ago quarter. Whilst Dell was the only PC vendor of the three ahead of Apple to post positive growth in the quarter with a 2.8% increase, Apple reported a 187.9% growth with Macs and iPads combined. Canalys notes tablet shipments reached 6.4 million units in the quarter, with Apple grabbing 74% of the market. In their Q2 2011 earnings call for the quarter that ended on March 26th, Apple posted record revenue of $24.67 billion with 4.69 million iPads and 3.76 million Macs sold. iPad shipments are expected to grow in Apple’s Q3 as suppliers recover from the Japanese disaster and are able to meet demand of tablet components such as LCD displays and RAM.
