It begins, right? With iPhone 4 pre-orders already sold out and new orders becoming available on February 9th, Big Red just launched a new commercial, this time featuring an actual iPhone.
Low-quality video is embedded below, but look for it soon on Verizon Wireless’ Youtube channel.
Update: Verizon just posted the commercial on their channel. Read more
The new version of Greenpois0n is live, and it brings untethered jailbreak for iOS 4.2.1. The jailbreak tool is only available for OS X machines right now, Windows version is coming soon. The Greenpois0n’s servers seem to be a little bit slow, so it might take a while to download the app.
Go download here.
An update in iTunes Connect shows that developers can now generate promo codes for apps sold in the Mac App Store:
You can now generate promo codes for your Mac apps in iTunes Connect. These promo codes can be redeemed in any Mac App Store worldwide. For each version of your app, you can request up to 50 promo codes.
Up until today, Apple didn’t allow developers to generate promo codes for Mac apps. The also-updated iTunes Connect Developer guide further explains:
Promo codes can now be generated for Mac OS X apps and redeemed through any Mac App Store internationally.
As a developer, you’d think you’ve hit big time when Apple names your creation “app of the year”. Or when everyone on the Internet is talking about you. Or again, when your app appears in Apple’s commercials. But I guess some developers would pay to have MC Hammer visit their offices and have the video featured on Oprah’s website.
That’s what happened to Flipboard, as MC Hammer is apparently a real iOS geek now, with an iPhone 4 he uses to tweet “30-40 times a day” and an iPad that runs Flipboard, that according to him is an “awesome app that turns social media into a digital magazine”.
Check out the video here. Also: what is Mike McCue showing to MC on his iPhone? A new version of Flipboard?
On February 3rd, 1986 Steve Jobs acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. Jobs, who was forced to resign from Apple, renamed the group “Pixar”. After some years of initial business struggle, the rest is history: Pixar is now the most successful animation studio in the world with masterpieces such as Toy Story, Up and Wall-E in their portfolio. The company became a subsidiary of Walt Disney in 2006.
From the unofficial Pixar blog:
Happy birthday, Pixar.
The official Financial Times app for iPad keeps generating interesting numbers: downloads have reached 600,000 copies up from 430,000 in November, and the app is driving 20% of Financial Times’ subscriptions.
It will be interesting to see whether Financial Times will update the app to support Apple’s new in-app subscription system.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing a new version of Simplenote, which just went live in the App Store. The new Simplenote, which reaches version 3.1, is a huge update that adds many requested features and a great surprise from the developers: the app now comes with native Dropbox support, configurable in the Settings. Simplenote can now sync text files back to a “Simplenote” folder in your Dropbox account (you can rename it), and syncing sessions happen every several minutes, but can be triggered manually. Dropbox integration is a feature exclusive to the Premium subscription, which can be purchased for $12 a year. In my tests, Dropbox syncing has been very reliable and now allows me to natively integrate Simplenote with a plethora of other iOS and Mac word processors that support Dropbox. Read more
Apple just released a GM seed of Xcode 4. It’s available now in the iOS and Mac dev centers. The release of the GM seed means the final version of Xcode 4 is nearing completion and should be available soon.
Xcode 4 is a major new version of Apple’s development suite which sports lots of new features and a new single-windowed UI. The first version of Xcode 4 preview was released during the WWDC in June, the second build was seeded in late July, Preview 3 was made available on September 2, Preview 4 was released in October. The latest developer seed, preview 6, was released on January 10.
From the release notes:
Xcode 4 GM seed can now be used to submit iOS and Mac apps to the App Store.
Xcode 4 GM seed includes the iOS SDK 4.2 and Mac OS X SDK 10.6.
The ReadMe file of the GM seed also comes with an interesting notice:
Xcode 4 requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion or later.
Which we’re sure is just a mistake on the release notes.
Update: it appears that Apple has pulled the GM seed from the developer center, which shows Preview 6 again. Perhaps a bug was found at the last minute, so we guess it should be back shortly.
Update #2: the GM seed is available again in the Dev Center. The OS X 10.7 mention has been removed:
Xcode 4 requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later. See the installation notes below for additional information.
The Daily is a cool experiment, although the app needs some serious optimizations in our opinion. Still, the content seems to be pretty nice, and it’s indeed being updated “daily” with new articles, covers and videos. As you may have noticed, most of the articles from The Daily app are also shared by News Corp’s team on the web, but there’s no index for all these links. Either you follow @thedaily on Twitter to read every single link, or you can’t just head over the website and browse a complete archive of stories. The availability of backlog issues was a also a subject discussed by News Corp and journalists at the official announcement of the app yesterday and it looks like, at least for now, The Daily has no plans to create a public archive of all their stories on the web.
But, there is a solution. The unofficial “The Daily: Indexed” archive by Andy Baio provides a single place to find all the articles from The Daily that have already been shared on the web. The blog aggregates all the links, organizes them by day and even offers a preview of each day’s cover. It’s an interesting (and useful) experiment that also plays very well with Instapaper and Read It Later, if you like the content of The Daily but don’t want to download the app.
Check out The Daily Indexed here. [via Daring Fireball]
