Posts in news

First Look: Apple’s Grand Central Retail Store Unveiled

As anticipation mounts for the grand opening of the Grand Central Retail Store on December 9th, at 10 AM, Apple has soft launched their retail store by taking the covers off early, giving journalists and passerby a sneak peek at what to expect come this Friday. Techfootnote writes that the the Grand Central Retail Store is also providing free public Wi-Fi for commuters. You can find more pics past the break thanks to Ross Rubin.

Apple and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are currently under scrutiny for the 23,000 square foot space, as the MTA is accused of giving Apple an overly favorable lease for the space. While Apple is only paying $60 per square foot, the MTA has argued that Apple has already made an upfront payment to the previous tenant, and is paying to upgrade the space’s infrastructure with additions such as elevators to assist daily commuters. Apple’s $800,000 rent (for the ten year lease) is apparently small change, however, as the Grand Central Retail Store is expected to rake in $100 million a year in sales.

[via techfootnote] Thanks Dan!

Update: Apple has formally announced the opening of the Grand Central Retail Store. You can can catch the press release below.

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iBooks 1.5 Available Now, Includes Night Mode, Full-Screen Layout, New Fonts And More

A few hours ago Apple released an update to their iBooks app. Now at version 1.5, the update adds some significant features to improve the reading experience of the app. The release notes below detail those improvements:

  • Nighttime reading theme makes reading books in the dark easier on the eyes.
  • Full-screen layout lets you focus on the words without distraction.
  • iBooks now features an improved selection of fonts, including Athelas, Charter, Iowan, and Seravek.
  • Beautiful new classic covers for public domain books.
  • A redesigned annotation palette makes it easier to choose a color for your highlighted text.

You can download iBooks for free from the App Store.

Flipboard For iPhone Now Available, Includes New Cover Stories Feature

Flipboard 1.7 has just gone live in the App Store and it brings support for the iPhone and iPod touch. The iPhone version has been long anticipated and it has launched with a new feature called Cover Stories, which at the moment is exclusive to the iPhone and iPod touch. Cover Stories is a feature that curates a selection of articles and images being shared with you - it will even become ‘smarter’ over time. Whilst it isn’t yet available for the iPad version, the Flipboard team say that they are working on bringing the feature to the iPad.

With Flipboard for iPhone we’re introducing Cover Stories — one place to quickly catch up on some of the most interesting news, updates and photos being shared with you right now. The more you interact with your friends and the stories being shared, the smarter Cover Stories gets. You can refine what appears here by adding content to your Flipboard, muting anyone you’d rather not hear from, and connecting to your social networks. Cover Stories will be coming to your iPad in the near future.

The Los Angeles Times sat down with Flipboard CEO, Mike McCue about the new release. He revealed that the Flipboard team, now nearly 50 people, has spent most of the year developing the iPhone version - making sure it wasn’t just a shrunken version of the iPad app.

Building on Flipboard’s deep links to Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, McCue wants to harness the huge amount of data being generated by users of these major services to build a kind of social media nerve center – a digital brain that listens to all your social networks and picks the most important and interesting stories, and presents them to you in a simple and organized way.

The Flipboard team has also a made a short advert for the new iPhone version of Flipboard - we’ve included it and the version 1.7 release notes of Flipboard below the break. We’ll have some more thorough thoughts on the new iPhone version of Flipboard in the next few days - so stay tuned for that. You can download the universal Flipboard app for free on the App Store.

[Flipboard Blog via The Verge]

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Minecraft: Pocket Edition Getting a Basic Survival Mode

Minecraft: Pocket Edition landed on iOS weeks ago with a $6.99 price tag and barebones gameplay that mirrors the creative mode from its parent sibling. Minecraft fans will have no qualms in having a small playground to explore and construct buildings in, but the mobile version (designated as an alpha) does leave something to be desired. While building with a preset list of block choices is fun, there’s virtually no want to explore (especially since you can’t construct any tools), and the Pocket Edition leaves some in-game elements from the desktop version such as coal and gravel (that you can’t mine) which can be found on mountains. This might leave you to believe that the iOS and Android versions will eventually grow into the same game that’s finally reached 1.0 status as of Minecon. While it’s true that the mobile version will eventually get a survival mode, it won’t necessarily mirror the expansive world generation and gameplay that the desktop game provides.

Daniel Kaplan for Mojang writes,

The plan now is to start digging into making Minecraft – Pocket Edition with Survival features!! Please note that we will NOT replicate Minecraft and try to bring all the features that are already out. This is not possible and does not match the touch platform. I’m trying to be as detailed as possible to show you why some stuff may take some time.

This is what the plan looks like right now and being worked on:

  • A new file system – to make sure we can support items and mobs in the world
  • Item system – to be able to pick up items
  • Crafting – we know you want this. This will probably need some iterations since the interface will be customized for the touch devices
  • Inventory system
  • Mobs – animals and enemies!
  • Optimizing rendering code – we are experimenting with caves but need to make it work better before we are able to release it
  • Clean up of code and overall optimization

These updates will take time: Minecraft has to be optimized for mobile devices, and the current controls are only good enough to get by for what the game currently implements. Just like with early Minecraft, you’ll have the opportunity to watch it grow into a product that’ll have a lot more interaction than its predecessors. Even if the Pocket Edition could only match the early Minecraft beta days, that’s what I remember best, and it would be a nostalgic blast from the past.

[Mojang via Cult of Mac]

Highland Village Retail Store to be Texas’ Little “Upper West Side”

Houston, Texas is about to get a new Apple Store that’s getting an early sneak peek thanks to a curious Apple fan. The Upper West Side Retail Store, a massive glass-roofed complex unveiled at the end of 2009 (and pictured above), appears to be the inspiration for the Highland Village Retail Store said to be currently under wraps on the west side of Houston. The same all glass front, limestone walls, and glass roof made up the construction of the retail space, though not at the same scale as it’s older NYC counterpart. There is a difference, however, as the back of the store will also be all glass (there will only be one entrance to Apple’s new retail space). Inventory will apparently be held in next door in an adjacent space instead of in the retail store itself.

The future Palo Alto (N. Calif.) and Third Street Promenade (S. Calif.) stores—both expansions of existing stores—will also feature the UWS design, according to renderings submitted by Apple to city planning officials. However, the scale of the stores will be smaller than the original Upper West Side store that opened to rave architectural reviews in 2009.

Photographs posted on ifoAppleStore show off the similarities in architecture between the NYC and Houston retail spaces. The open design, featuring high glass ceilings overlooking open spaces, looks like it’ll be a common theme for Apple heading down the road.

[ifoAppleStore via TUAW] image via Apple

YES! Grand Theft Auto III: 10 Year Anniversary Edition to Land on iOS and Android December 15th

Grand Theft Auto fans are going to have an early Christmas present come December 15th as Rockstar Games celebrates the 10 year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III with a launch on iOS and Android mobile devices. Grand Theft Auto III made waves when it was launched on the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox back on October 22nd, 2001, introducing players to a vast open world with a gripping story line and hours of endless gameplay. There’s nothing quite like GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas, and I’m terribly excited to see games from my youth (in hindsight that I probably shouldn’t have been playing) find its way onto iPads and iPhones. Here’s the list of supported devices:

iOS:

  • iPad, iPad2
  • iPhone 4, iPhone 4S
  • iPod touch 4th generation

Android:

  • Acer Iconia, Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Dell Streak 7, LG Optimus Pad, Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1, Sony Tablet S, Toshiba Thrive
  • HTC Rezound, LG Optimus 2x, Motorola Atrix 4G, Motorola Droid X2, Motorola Photon 4G, Samsung Galaxy R, T-Mobile G2x

The game will only cost $4.99 when it launches. An official trailer will be released next week with the launch of the mobile remake. Be sure to check out Rockstar’s post for more iOS and Android screenshots.

[via Rockstar Games]

Cox Communications Launches TV Connect for iPad

Cox Communications has just launched a free app for streaming live TV directly to the iPad. This app is available exclusively for customers that have Essential/Preferred TV subscriptions as well as Cox Preferred, Premier, or Ultimate residential Internet service. Subscribers log in to the app with the same credentials used to access their Cox online account. It requires the user to be on their home wifi connection to stream which is an odd limitation but when attempting to use the app away from my house I received a pop-up that said it can only be used on a Cox network.. I would really like to see Cox improve the app by allowing the user to stream TV over remote wifi and 3G connections.

I am personally a Cox TV Essential provider and I have roughly 80 different channels each of which are aired in both standard definition and HD versions. After logging in to the iPad TV Connect app I found that it had 32 different channels including A&E, AMC, FX, History, USA, and many more. These are great channels I would actually enjoy watching. According to the built in TV Guide section, these are the HD versions but after streaming a few channels I would have to disagree. The quality is not bad but it does look a bit grainy when in fullscreen mode.

The iPad TV Connect app is a good first attempt but it fails in a couple of ways. The usability of the app could be greatly improved. It lacks the ability to swipe through channels in fullscreen mode which seems like a more than logical way to browse TV channels on a touch screen device. It also does not support AirPlay video streaming to an AppleTV. If you try to enable AirPlay Mirroring then the video playback will stop and you will receive a pop-up error message. You aren’t even able to playback audio over AirPlay speakers and keep the video on the iPad. I am not sure why they would choose to limit the app in this way but maybe an updated version will be released to fix these issues.

Although I am not completely satisfied with Cox TV Connect, as a Cox cable customer I am elated to have the app on my iPad. I hope to see Cox really get behind this app and strive to improve it because it does have great potential and I look forward to future versions.

Cox TV Connect for iPad is available for free on the App Store

Global BBC iPlayer App Coming To The iPhone & iPod Touch This Thursday

Update: The iPhone version of the BBC iPlayer (Global) app is now available for free on the App Store - it comes as a universal app that runs on both the iPad and iPhone.

The global version of BBC iPlayer first began rolling out internationally five months ago and is now available in sixteen countries around the world. So far the video-on-demand service, offering BBC content to an international audience, has only been available on the iPad. That will change this Thursday when the BBC iPlayer app will become available for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The announcement was made by Jana Bennett, President of Worldwide Networks and Global BBC iPlayer who noted that “moving to iPhone and iPod Touch allows us to take the service to a significant new potential audience and deliver fantastic programme content from the BBC and the UK’s creative industry”.

This platform extension shows how Global iPlayer isn’t just about moving TV to tablet devices, it’s also about a mobile strategy – about truly getting TV everywhere in a way that it hasn’t been before.

Bennett also announced that programs from DRG will also begin to appear on the BBC iPlayer service in early 2012. DRG is a program distributor that owns programs such as Peep Show, Father Ted, Black Books and Shameless.

[Via The Next Web]

European Commission Begins Antitrust Investigation Into Ebook Publishers, Apple

In a statement released today, the European Commission has revealed that it is opening formal antitrust proceedings to investigate the possible presence of anti-competitive practices within the ebook industry.  The investigation will target a number of international publishers including Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Penguin. The Commission will also be investigating whether Apple has helped the publishers engage in anti-competitive practices.

The European Commission has opened formal antitrust proceedings to investigate whether international publishers Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck have, possibly with the help of Apple, engaged in anti-competitive practices affecting the sale of e-books in the European Economic Area, in breach of EU antitrust rules.  [Shortened]

The Commission will examine the ‘agency agreements’ entered into by the publishers — with concerns that they may breach EU antitrust rules that “prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices”. It isn’t yet known for how long the commission will run for.

The Commission will in particular investigate whether these publishing groups and Apple have engaged in illegal agreements or practices that would have the object or the effect of restricting competition in the EU or in the EEA.

[Via The Verge]