Posts in iPad

AppShopper 1.4: Top 200, App Ratings, Reviews, and more

Last week, Arnold Kim gave twitter a little preview of some new features and functionality of AppShopper 1.4 for iOS. The new update was just approved by Apple and now has features like Top 200 and App ratings. Other new features include:

  • Links to 3rd party app reviews like 148apps and TouchArcade
  • Automatically load apps when scrolling to the bottom of a list
  • New filters for search
  • Email notification settings
  • Disable push notifications during certain times of the day (Yeah!)
  • In-app AppShopper account registration
  • Share an app’s info via Twitter, Facebook, email and more
  • Various bug fixes

Screenshots for iPhone and iPad after the break.

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Apple Highlights Why Macs, iPads and iPhones Are For College

Apple has promoted the best features of the Mac, iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch for students in three new web pages on Apple.com. The three pages, found on the Student portal on Apple’s website all start with premise of “Why Mac for College” or “Why iPad for College” and proceed to list some of the features that will appeal to students such as the Mac’s compatibility with Windows and Office, or watching iTunes U videos on the iPad, or recording audio memos on the iPhone or iPod Touch. 

It’s interesting to note how Apple continues to put significant effort into marketing their products to students in College - despite their success in recent years in attracting more of the mainstream community. Whether it is the continued education discounts, Back to School promotions or this refresh of the student portal, Apple sure doesn’t want to let go of the student market.

If you want to have a look for yourself at how Apple is marketing their products to students, you can jump through to the student portal or go straight to the new pages for Mac, iPad and iPhone and iPod Touch.

[Via AppAdvice]

Apple Blocks SHSH Blob Method Of Downgrading Firmware Versions In iOS 5

Apple and the jailbreak community have always enjoyed somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game between them and today we are learning that Apple has pounced to fix up one of the common circumventions used by jailbreakers. The circumvention in question doesn’t involve an actual exploit to jailbreak devices but rather a way that people were using to downgrade from one iOS version to another – often to a version that was capable of being jailbroken.

Apple had implemented a system where it would only authorize certain iOS builds to be installed, making it nearly impossible for downgrades. The circumvention was that by using SHSH blobs people could use iTunes to restore to a previous firmware version. According to what the jailbreak Dev-Team has said in a blog post today, that is all changing in iOS 5 as Apple moves to a new signing process. As the Dev-Team explains, the new process will become much more like the BBTicket (Baseband Ticket), which will make it much more difficult to reverse engineer:

Starting with the iOS5 beta, the role of the “APTicket” is changing — it’s being used much like the “BBTicket” has always been used. The LLB and iBoot stages of the boot sequence are being refined to depend on the authenticity of the APTicket, which is uniquely generated at each and every restore (in other words, it doesn’t depend merely on your ECID and firmware version…it changes every time you restore, based partly on a random number). This APTicket authentication will happen at every boot, not just at restore time. Because only Apple has the crypto keys to properly sign the per-restore APTicket, replayed APTickets are useless.

It isn’t all bad news though, restoring to pre-iOS 5 firmware versions will still be possible (although it will probably require an old version of iTunes) and tethered limera1n exploits will not be affected by this. As for why Apple has decided to now change this process, the Dev-Team explains that it was only a matter of time before Apple made the changes and that with delta iOS updates, it was made all the more necessary. The Dev-Team ends the post by noting that whilst Apple has “stepped up their game”,  there may be ways to combat this move.

[Via Dev-Team Blog]

The Financial Times’ Web App Is Doing Well With Nearly 200,000 Downloads In Two Weeks

Two weeks after The Financial Times launched their new web app, they are apparently close to racking up a rather impressive 200,000 downloads. The Financial Times had launched the web app as a result of imposing conditions that Apple was asking for with its In-App subscription service, in particular was the lack of data that The Financial Times could attain from user activity.

The statistic comes from Media Week which says Financial Times is about to hit 200,000 downloads of the web app after getting 100,000 downloads in its first week. Given the apparent success of the app (although it remains to be seen how many people will subscribe) it could see other news publications move to the web app model instead of developing a native app. Publishers that develop a native app and charge a subscription fee must give up 30% of revenues to Apple – something all publishers have been somewhat hesitant of doing.

It is not known whether Apple’s revised In-App subscription guidelines will entice The Financial Times back to offering their native app. But they did comment on Media Week’s article, saying:

“We’ve seen strong demand for the FT web app since its launch. We have an ongoing marketing campaign encouraging users to migrate to the new platform and we’re confident we can maintain the momentum.”

[Via The Next Web]