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Apple’s 2011 “Back to School” Program To Launch Next Week?

Following speculation on what Apple employees and store managers will discuss at the all-hands meetings set for Sunday, May 22, AppleInsider reports one of the subjects of discussion may be Apple’s new Back to School program.

People familiar with the Apple’s retail operations have told AppleInsider that the company is currently gearing up for its yearly educational promotion. The news comes as numerous reports have revealed that Apple has scheduled early 7 a.m. store meetings with employees this coming Sunday, May 22.

But with the annual back-to-school sale set to kick off as soon as next week, the educational promotion is potentially a more likely subject for Sunday’s meetings. Additionally, other people familiar with next week’s plans say some of the materials and shipments rumored to be making their way to stores around the same time will be part of ‘procedural changes’ to the way the shops run or operate, rather than new products customers could buy.

The Back to School program usually runs until the first week of September – before Apple’s music event – and in the past allowed students to get a free 8 GB iPod touch with the purchase of a new Mac. The timing of this report sounds appropriate, with rumors running wild about an Apple 10th anniversary of retail event and new product launches, but with Back to School seemingly ready to be launched considering the company followed a late May / early June timeframe in the past years. The current iPod touch family – assuming Apple is following its tradition of giving away free iPod touches to new Mac owners – starts at $229 with the 8 GB model, featuring Retina Display and FaceTime HD camera.

Screenstagram: An Instagram Screensaver On Your Mac

After the release of an official API months ago, Instagram has become a ubiquitous service that already has a plethora of third-party tools for Mac, Windows and iOS devices in spite of the lack of a website to browse photos and the fact that it still is ”just an iPhone app.” The ecosystem built by Instagram is amazing, especially considering the kind of growth the developers had to face and the number of devs that suddenly signed up for the API to start creating external tools and toys like Postagram, an iPhone app that sends you real postcards based off Instagram photos. Like I said multiple times in the past, Instagram’s success on the iPhone has no equal. And we have seen there are some pretty good clients on the Mac, too.

If you feel like there’s never enough Instagram around, perhaps you should check out this new utility called screenstagram, a Mac screensaver based on, you guessed it, Instagram pictures. That’s it: just photos rotating on a grid once your Mac is in screensaver mode. The cool thing the developers added? You can log in with your account and have the screensaver serve photos found in your feed. Otherwise, screenstagram will simply use Instagram’s popular feed to deliver its magic to a sleeping OS X. The developers write on their blog:

It took us a while to figure out what to build with the new web service. We’re no strangers to leveraging that kind of resource, but it’s generally for data-driven services, like Twitter or Foursquare. It’s not too often that a visually rich system like Instagram comes along and releases an API. We wanted to do something that took advantage of the eye candy, something beyond a web-based photo browser – something to really showcase our friends’ grainy, bar room photography. A way we could sit with the photos and soak them in longer than usually allowed by the ephemeral, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach taken by the feed in the Instagram iPhone app. Once those photos are out of your friends’ feed, they’re sort of gone, never to be seen again without some digging on your part. So we decided on an old fashioned screen saver, a medium that doesn’t get much love these days.

The idea is very neat and well-implemented. We recommend you check it out here, as it’s a free and lightweight download. Read more

Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 3.7 and ProKit 7.0 Released

As part of their usual weekly software update cycles, Apple today released ProKit 7.0, improving performances and enhancing stability in Pro applications like Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro, iPhoto and Aperture, and Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 3.7, adding support for more cameras in Aperture and iPhoto. Changelogs below.

ProKit 7.0

  • Improved support for PopOver style tooltips.
  • Improved support for Font Smoothing.
  • Addresses an issue with an unwanted gap between a menu and submenu.
  • Fixes leaks and improves stability for the color picker and timecode interface in Final Cut Pro and Motion.
  • Improved compatibility when importing assets from older versions of Soundtrack Pro.
  • Fixes an issue with the scrubber appearance in Logic Express and Logic Pro.
  • Addresses AppKit related crashes in Motion.

Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 3.7

  • Fujifilm FinePix X100
  • Nikon D5100
  • Olympus E-PL2
  • Olympus XZ-1
  • Samsung GX-1S

As usual, software updates can be viewed and directly downloaded on Apple’s website, or from the Software Update control panel.

Large Pharmaceutical Companies Subscribing iPads to Sales Reps

 

Back in April, we reported that many medical facilities are now using iPads in the workplace, specifically The Ottawa Hospital. Apple has always enjoyed showing medical applications in keynotes and commercials; banking on our doctors using iPads in the office is now getting the attention of the pharma sales market. Eye For Pharma posted back in October about this same subject, “Will the iPad kickstart a pharma sales and marketing revolution?” This is another great article written to and for the pharma market.

Pharmaceutical sales reps are trying to find better ways to engage and sale their products during all their sales calls. Doctors and physicians typically only give these sales reps 30 seconds of their time as well. That’s not very much time so every second is important, and so is presentation.

Eric Newmark, an analyst at IDC Health Insights, says that sales reps “still struggle with their ability to differentiate themselves through clear, concise, and interactive messaging.” So the pharmaceutical industry may have a solution to the problem: Purchase many Apple iPads to give the sale reps “a quicker, lighter and more attractive way of displaying drug-related information,” Newmark wrote.

Most companies prefer the iPad to rival tablets, but they are also doing this without waiting for vendors to release salesforce apps for the iPad.

“Several major pharmaceutical companies are putting the cart before the horse by purchasing iPads in large quantities prior to even owning a single application to run on the iPad,” Newmark said. “More than one company has told us they have already purchased iPads in significant volume and are storing them for later use,” when sales apps become available.

It appears that iPads in pharma sales and marketing will put Apple in a great position to be a dominant hardware vendor in their market.

[via TUAW via Computerworld]

Reposado, An Open-Source Update Service Independent of OS X Server

Hosting an internal Apple Software Update service involves having to rely on Mac OS X Server to update you various testing machines if you want to test software against various releases of Leopard and Snow Leopard across hardware. Walt Disney Animation Studios, however, have released Reposado, an open-source project founded upon Python that eliminates the need for OS X Server while alleviating some previous limitations.

The open-source benefit of this project is immediately applicable for small businesses. As TUAW’s Chris Ward points out, running your own update solution for businesses allows administrators to economize on bandwidth by downloading the update once, and distributing it internally. For both developers and IT administrators, Reposado takes this a bit further by leveraging what a company is likely to already have available in equipment. It’s a cost effective solution that’s currently available for download via GitHub.

All you need available is a box running an Apache 2 web server and the ‘curl’ binary tool, and provided you already have an old Mac around (such as a Mac Mini), utilizing these tools is incredibly easy. Replicating Software Update catalogs and updates, Reposado is powerful in that it supports deprecated updates. Apple’s course of action only offers and encourages admins to download the latest software, yet testing environments require that software be compatible across multiple iterations of software. With Reposado, you can branch any update to various machines on your schedule, giving you time to test new software before deploying it.

[Managing OS X via TUAW]

Intel To Embrace Mobile Space with Silvermont, Airmont Atom Chip Architectures

Given the fierce competition in the mobile space and the increasing availability of smartphones and lightweight, low-power mobile devices, Intel currently doesn’t offer the mobile chips needed to compete with AMD. With the desktop being ousted for laptops, eventual chromebooks, and tablets, Intel wants to embrace a new strategy to take on the mobile space. CEO Paul Otellini said today,

“We’re shifting from 35-watt to 15-watt…the center is increasingly about ultramobility,” said Otellini. “Every device has to be always on and always connected,” he said. Today, a device with a 15-watt processor is typically an ultrathin laptop like the MacBook Air.

Intel specifically wants to shift company focus onto always-on and always-connected devices by revamping their product line with a series of new Atom chip architectures fit for low-power, constant draw devices. Silvermont, a 22-nanometer Atom chip, and Airmont, a 14-nanometer Atom chip, are currently under development and are to be included in future Android and MeeGo devices. As Intel “scales down” their current offerings to fit the tablet space, Otellini notes,

“No big announcement from Intel on smartphones today. Phones in first part of next year…an area of intense focus for us.”

It’s going to be a while before we start seeing a score of Intel powered smartphones on the market, but does this mean anything for Apple? With Intel somewhat inexperienced and still young in comparison to competitors, I don’t know if we’d see an Intel powered iPhone or iPad in the near future, or even in later revisions of the MacBook Air. I think Intel has a long lifespan when it comes to laptops and desktops, but Apple is intent on centralizing their products on their own technologies: if Apple is going so far as to include a proprietary SSD format in the MacBook Air, I’ll bet you’ll see the MacBook Air to be the first Mac in Apple’s lineup to include a future iteration of Apple’s A5 chip. Unless of course, Intel is successful and quick to iterate on their upcoming low-power offerings, there may not be much of a reason to make that jump.

According to Otellini, Intel is currently “on track” for 35 designs in the tablet space, but whether this includes Apple remains to be seen.

[via CNET]

Infinity Blade Multiplayer Update Coming Out On Thursday

Promised late last year soon after the release of the original game for iPhone and iPad, Epic Games just confirmed the long-awaited update to Infinity Blade featuring multiplayer is coming out on Thursday, May 19. The free update, called Infinity Blade: Arena, will allow gamers to challenge each other online using Game Center assuming the role of Titan or Knight in the game. No word on automatic in-game match-making and battle requests yet, but we guess Chair Entertainment and Epic Games have gone all out to provide full Game Center support in the update.

The new Infinity Blade will also sport a Survivor mode to see how long users can last while fighting Titans, and Facebook integration to share screengrabs of avatars online. There’s more though: the developers have included “new helms for every season”, “more than two dozen new magic rings, swords, shields, and helmets for players to collect and master” as well as new achievements, new leaderboards and additional “surprises.”

You can read more on Epic Games’ official blog post, and go download the app here while you’re waiting for the update.

Mailplane Adds Evernote Integration

Users of Mailplane, a desktop interface for Gmail’s online web application, will find a new feature in the latest 2.4 update, released yesterday, that adds complete integration with capturing tool Evernote, a staff favorite here at MacStories. As you may know, Evernote allows you to easily capture your ideas in the form of notes, images, PDF documents and all sorts of document archives; with a wide range of apps that go from a native Mac client to a recently revamped iPhone app and a new version coming out soon for Android Honeycomb tablets, Evernote is a ubiquitous system that helps you save, organize and archive all the important things in your life.

The new Mailplane 2.4 adds an Evernote-specific button in the top toolbar that enables you capture a conversation, archive it in Evernote and have the app automatically include a link to the email message you previously selected in Mailplane. As the new feature saves a full copy of the message as a new note, you’ll have the possibility to enter a title, tags, as well as edit text from the message. Furthermore, a new option in Mailplane’s download manager lets you quickly send attachments to Evernote without saving them in the OS X Finder first.

Mailplane 2.4 can be downloaded here.

Apple Proposes Standard To Make SIM Cards Smaller

According to Reuters, an executive of Orange has confirmed the French carrier is backing Apple’s plans for a new standard to make SIM cards smaller in order to use them in future thinner mobile devices. The proposed standard aims at reducing the size of SIM cards, which are currently implemented as “micro” models in the iPhone 4 and iPad.

We were quite happy to see last week that Apple has submitted a new requirement to (European telecoms standards body) ETSI for a smaller SIM form factor – smaller than the one that goes in iPhone 4 and iPad,” said Anne Bouverot, Orange’s head of mobile services.

“They have done that through the standardization route, through ETSI, with the sponsorship of some major mobile operators, Orange being one of them,” she told the Paris leg of the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

Reuters claims the approval process for such a new standard would take time, with new devices carrying the new SIM models not coming out at least until next year. A rumor surfaced last year indicated Apple was working closely with Gemalto to develop an integrated SIM card that would be embedded in every iPhone to enable users to quickly switch between carriers without restrictions and obligations, but this new report seems to suggest Apple is simply aiming for a smaller chip, perhaps following the opposition from carriers to an embedded SIM that would cut mobile operators out of the retail game.