We know 2010 has been a terrific year for Apple. New MacBooks, New iMacs / Mac Minis and Mac Pros, the iPhone 4, the iPad. Not to mention the new & improved Apple TV, iOS 4, Retina Display on the iPod touch, the fiscal results….overall, it’s been a good year. One of those that will end up on Wikipedia someday.
The video below puts all of this in perspective by placing all the events that marked Apple’s 2010 in chronological order.
“We think it’s great.”
[via Seth Weintraub]
And here’s why: “The worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and a get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide. I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.”
According to Patently Apple, the antenna engineers at Cupertino might have figured out a better placement for 3G antennas in future iPhone and “telephonic” MacBooks: hidden behind the Apple logo.
As Patently Apple reports, while the whole Antennagate story was spreading like a virus on the Internet and general media, Apple was busy thinking about a new patent they call the “logo antenna”. Placed behind the famous logo that’s on the back of computers, iPhones and iPads, such location would allow to “gain a stronger signal without intervening metal or other conductive housing walls interfering”.
It is difficult to place antennas in small and lightweight mobile devices, and the solution detailed in this patent would imply a “conductive antenna cavity” with “vertical sidewalls and a planar rear surface or may have other suitable cavity shapes”. Technical details are provided in Patently Apple’s coverage of the patent.
To regular users, this means that Apple has been thinking about new ways to improve antenna placement in mobile devices, and they’ve been thinking about MacBooks with built-in 3G connection, too. Me? I just want a glowing Apple logo on my iPhone.
iOS devices come with great accessibility support. It is fairly easy for developers to implement in their apps, and iOS is packed with accessibility functionalities out of the box. The Thimble is “a concept multimedia finger glove” designed by Erik Hedberg and Zack Bennet that has an optical scanner right above the finger tip which is capable of on-the-fly conversion of text to Braille messages.
We know the iPhone 4 can be controlled with Braillant-32 bluetooth Braille Displays, but this concept is different: the Thimble also acts as a location-aware device that can connect to the internet to pull news and other data and pass them along as Braille messages. From the video below, it also looks like there’s some kind of speech recognition technology in there.
The Thimble is just a concept for now, but I think it would make for a great product to further extend iOS’ accessibility features. [FSM via dvice]
The highly anticipated new version of taptaptap’s Camera+ was released only two days ago, and while we’re still testing it in real-life situations before our huge review, we do think already it’s a great app update. In fact, Camera+ is one of our Top Camera Apps of 2010.
According to the numbers shared by taptaptap’s John Casasanta, Camera+ 2 has sold 500,000 copies so far. This made the app quickly climb the charts of the App Store, placing it at the #2 spot of overall Top Paid Apps right behind Angry Birds and above all the discounted EA games, which have taken over the iPhone and iPad App Store charts. Casasanta doesn’t know whether Camera+ will manage to get to #1 before the iTunes Connect shutdown (the App Store charts will be “frozen” from today until December 28th, and developers won’t be able to submit new apps, updates or price changes) or not, but releasing Camera+ this week was a clever marketing move nonetheless. They priced the app at $0.99 to celebrate the re-launch, put an additional effect pack in the app sold through in-app purchase and gained visibility thanks to all the blogs and Twitter users who mentioned Camera+ these 2 days. Thus, it got to #2 and it will likely stay there until next week. Very clever indeed.
Just as a reminder: the first version of Camera+ generated $250,000 in revenue in the first month of sales earlier this year. Well deserved.
In spite of the major conflicts and debates going on right now in the Italian Parliament, it seems like every member agrees on one thing: getting an Apple device for Christmas. As noted by iSpazio, members and senators from PD, PDL (Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s party) and FLI are all getting iPads from Santa.
It is unknown whether the devices will be gifted as a “bonus” for personal use or will be deployed for work purposes in the Parliament. We read about the iPad being used by congressmen at the U.S. House of Representatives before, and at the White House, too. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Italian Parliament coming up with its own apps to check on daily appointements, logs and activities.
As iSpazio also notes, members of FLI will be able to choose from iPads and iPhones. Not bad! Why not giving away some Macs as well at this point? I think members would enjoy an awesome app like Screens.
As noted by 9to5mac, Skyfire for iPad is now available. As previously reported, Skyfire takes advantage of the iPad’s larger screen to integrate more social features in the app and allow users to constantly share items on Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader (or send over to Pinboard, Instapaper and Read It Later) with the app of a button. Most notably, Skyfire for iPad comes with a series of buttons in the bottom toolbar that let you check on your Reader feeds, Twitter timeline and Facebook wall, together with the possibility to like every page with a universal Like button and see only updates from friends who shared links.
Social features aside, Skyfire for iPad has the same on-the-fly Flash video conversion technology seen on the iPhone version. If the iPhone app is to be trusted, Skyfire Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool is pretty awesome, and it converts video to an iOS-compatible format in seconds. One could ask why Flash videos are needed on iOS when most of web video has iOS-optimized fallbacks now, but still. Skyfire for iPad also comes with additional functionalities such as a new tab design, desktop option to avoid loading websites in mobile versions, private browsing a.k.a. “porn mode”. Also, guess what kind of websites still doesn’t provide iOS-compatible video. I think I know why Skyfire is selling all those copies.
Skyfire for iPhone made $1 million in its weekend in the App Store. With the App Store charts freezing tomorrow until the 28th, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the app having a tremendous success on the tablet as well. Go download it here at $4.99, and check out the demo video and feature list below. Read more
Remember Richard Branson’s Project for iPad? In case you have forgotten, it’s Virgin’s first attempt to build an iPad-only magazine “about creative people, for creative people”. While the first issue of the app wasn’t that revolutionary or feature-rich, there was some potential in there, for sure. The animated cover looked nice and content was pretty good, too.
Today Virgin has announced that users will be able to download Project Issue 1 for free starting tomorrow (December 23) until December 29. Project Issue 2 will be released on January 7, although no further details have been provided.
In early 2011 Virgin will also release an entirely crowd sourced issue of Project, with a new animated cover that’s been selected from a contest held in NYC three weeks ago. Videos of the selected cover and the contest featuring Richard Branson have been posted online, check them out below. Read more
myPhoneDesktop is an app for iPhone, iPad and OS X we’ve covered on MacStories a few times in the past. While packed with functionalities, the basic concept of mPD is fairly simple: it provides a way to link your desktop web browser, computer and mobile devices over the air, through the cloud. myPhoneDesktop allows you to easily move data between computers and devices and relies on iOS’ push notification system to let you instantly get the data shared on a Mac or PC.
With this app, you can share text, URLs and images, initiate phone calls and send SMS, send links to alternative browsers for iOS, send content from any webpage to your iPhone and iPad via bookmarklet. It comes with a browser plugin and a desktop app to simplify sharing of data, it’s deeply integrated with several third party iOS apps such as Instapaper, Skype and GoodReader. The latest 1.6 update, though, takes everything a step further: the app can run in the background and receive clipboard data for 10 minutes, it’s got Google Voice integration and the desktop companion can even initiate Google Voice calls and send SMS.
We have 5 copies of myPhoneDesktop 1.6 to give away. Unlike our usual giveaway though, each winner will get 2 promo codes. Jump after the break to check out the giveaway rules, or if you can’t wait – go download mPhoneDeskop here. Read more
