All this bad weather in the US must be keeping App devs from dropping their prices! Here’s today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot! Read more
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#MacStoriesDeals - Thursday
#MacStoriesDeals - Wednesday
All this bad weather in the US must be keeping App devs from dropping their prices! Here’s today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot! Read more
First Impressions of News Corp’s The Daily
News Corp.’s much hyped foray into an iPad exclusive digital Newspaper has just launched and it has some high expectations to live up to, not only for consumers but for Murdoch’s News Corporation which has endured a shrinking reader base and advertising revenue. Jump the break for our first impressions and a tonne of screenshots of the app.
OK well that’s it for our first impressions, undoubtedly some of us here at Macstories will in the next day or so write up an in-depth summation of our feelings towards The Daily so keep an eye on the site and our Twitter account for that!
Push Pop Press Teases a New Brand of Digital Books
A new company focused on creating ‘a new breed of digital books’, Push Pop Press today unveiled their teaser site, beautifully minimal in its design and purely hinting at what is to come. However John Gruber over at Daring Fireball wrote up a fairly lengthy post about Push Pop Press and a demo he had been given last week, praising it and giving some fairly detailed insights into what is to come from the company.
The teaser site offers up a description of the mission of Push Pop Press;
Our team is bringing together great content and beautiful software to create a new breed of digital books. Books that let you explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface.
The team over at Push Pop Press is undoubtedly one high caliber bunch of people, with Mike Matas, Kimon Tsinteris and Austin Sarner. Mike Matas, the designer and co-founder is most notably known for working on Delicious Library and his stint at Apple (which started the young age of 19) in helping design the original iOS. The other co-founder, Kimon Tsinteris is a software architect and worked with Matas at Apple on the Map app on iOS. Finally Austin Sarner is software engineer who may be familiar from his apps including AppZapper, Disco and Pennies.
News.me To Take On The Daily, Social Reading By Article Popularity
How do you take on Apple and Rupert Murdoch? By taking a hard swing into the social field. TechCrunch has the scoop on the rival collaboration between Betaworks and the New York Times that focuses not on a newspaper, but aggregating popular content shared over Twitter. If this sounds a lot like Flipboard and TweetMag already, you’re already very much on target. News.me focuses exclusively on the Twitterverse, previewing articles in streams you choose to follow. The difference? News.me may be a subscription based service, essentially selling licensed web content. What?
#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday
iOS Devices Accounted for 2% of Worldwide Browsing in January
A new report by NetMarketShare has revealed that the iOS ecosystem of devices has broken 2% of all browsing on the web. The January figures published by the analyst revealed the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch reached 2.06% of global browsing, accelerated by the holiday period.
Singapore had the highest percentage of iOS devices at virtually 10% and Australia was one of the highest countries at 5.6%. The UK was also close at 5.1% and the US had 3.4% in January.
See above for a graphic of world browsing by iOS devices and head over to NetMarketShare for a full breakdown of each country’s percentage of iOS device usage.
[Via 9to5Mac]
Report Says 26% of Mobile Apps Are Only Run Once
Analyst firm Localytics decided to investigate how many apps are downloaded and then used only once, never to be touched again. What they discovered was that a surprisingly high percentage of 26% of all apps downloaded were only ever used once.
The research Localytics did involved thousands of apps from every major mobile platform and over a period of a year. In fact interestingly throughout 2010 the number of apps that were only run once increased from 22% in the first quarter to 28% by the fourth quarter.
Apple Possibly Tightening the iOS Walled Garden
Apple seems to be tightening its control over the App Store ecosystem after telling some developers including Sony that the selling of e-books within their app must go through Apple. The move is somewhat contradictory of recent movements by Apple to open up the App Store and gestures of collaboration with publishers.
Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division told the New York Times that Apple rejected Sony’s e-book reader iPhone application on the basis that the app would have let users buy e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store, bypassing Apple and that any purchases made from within an app must go through Apple from now on. Mr. Haber said; “We always wanted to bring the content to as many devices as possible, not one device to one store.”.
[Updated and points clarified in light of responses to the NYT article]