Posts in news

Apple’s Furthest-North Store To Open in Anchorage, Alaska

ifoAppleStore reports Apple will open a new Store in Anchorage, Alaska in September, making it the furthest-north Apple Store for months and years to come. The report comes after a job listing on Apple’s website that suggests the company is looking for retail staff in the Fifth Avenue Mall (Anchorage) location. The store, reportedly in construction at the second floor or the mall in a space left by Eddie Bauer at the end of January, will become the most-northern Apple retail store at 61° north latitude, 20 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

The website also notes the new Store will be geographically located “above” the current most-northern Aberdeen store in Scotland and any Scandinavian city that might be chosen by Apple in the future. That’s quite an interesting detail to share and, why not, it’s also pretty cool. Apple is also rumored to use other spaces in the mall for stock, offices and Genius rooms, although no official construction plans have surfaced at this point.

New MacBook Pros To Feature Hard Drive / SSD Combo for Faster OS?

The new MacBook Pros are approaching the rumored February 24th release date, with several retailers sold out  and various Apple online stores reporting shipments within 3-5 business days – a timeframe that plays very well with the Thursday, Feb. 24th rumors. BGR has posted some interesting details on the new models, which will come in five different SKUs as previously reported and will be lighter at around a half-pound less than the current generation. BGR also claims the new MBPs will have bigger glass trackpads.

The curious tidbit, however, is about a hard drive / SSD combo that would allow the new MacBook Pros to store the OS on the faster solid state disks and load everything else straight off the regular (and perhaps very large in capacity) drive:

The next bit of information doesn’t quite make sense to us, but we have been told the OS on the laptops will be loaded to a separate (internal) 8-16GB SSD while everything else will remain on the regular hard drive. There will be options for just SSD drives but the base models will feature regular hard disks with the SSD combo for the OS.

The rumor is interesting because it replicates what many users have been doing over the years to achieve a faster OS and still manage to store hundreds of GBs of media on their computers: install the OS on a small internal SSD, offload media and apps on a second internal (spinning) hard drive. It’s not a full SSD setup, but it has worked well for thousands of Mac users in the past years.

Does this make sense to you? Personally, I think I will go with the single (and more expensive) SSD option, but this could be a good move to introduce SSD in the MacBook Pros without increasing costs for the base models and yet provide a full-featured SSD option for those who want the speed and efficiency of solid state.

Affix Lets You Email Notes to Yourself With Prefixes, Gmail Filters Approve

Back in September I reviewed Captio, a simple iPhone app to send text or pictures to yourself via email. The concept behind Captio is simple and very appealing: when things to remember are too many and opening your GTD app of choice always feels like a thousand taps away, Captio offers you the 1-tap shortcut to dump anything into your mail inbox. Cool link to check out later? Email to myself in the inbox. Task to complete? Email. Youtube video? Same. Captio literally requires one tap to be ready to feed your inbox content to be consumed later, and for many it’s an insanely useful and time-saving little app.

Starting from this idea, developer Raul Rea Menacho created Affix, which is a $0.99 iPhone app that like Captio lets you email things to yourself, but gives you more control over the ‘Subject’ and ‘From’ fields. Captio, in fact, focuses on speed but doesn’t let you specify a subject for the notes you’re going to email yourself. Furthermore, incoming messages are received from Captio’s own email address – something that might not be OK for some users. Affix aims at becoming your new default solution for dumping tasks and ideas onto your inbox by providing a way to set multiple templates for subjects, completely editable from the main screen at any time. You can change the default email address to send messages to with the tap of a button but, more importantly, Affix relies on iOS’ mail interface to let you change the ‘From’, ‘CC’ and ‘BCC’ fields when you want to. In fact, Affix uses the in-app email UI you know and love and that’s it.

The interesting feature is the possibility to create the prefixes to achieve God-knows what complicated workflows in your Gmail or Apple Mail inboxes. Think about it: if you can set up different subject templates with prefixes and if you have control over the sender information, it means you can easily create filters and rules to turn these emails into actions. In Gmail, for instance, you could create a filter to label messages coming from Affix with the “Work” prefix as “Important”, star them and leave them in the inbox. Or again, you could set up Apple Mail to receive emails from Affix with a certain Subject and pass them along as tasks to OmniFocus. The possibilities given by this kind of control over email fields are almost endless and totally up to your geek dreams and needs.

Affix could use some UI refinements, but overall it’s a very good app. Think of it as “Captio for nerds” who would love to deeply customize the way emails can be turned into actions, tasks and reminders within a desktop or web mail program. Affix is available at $0.99 in the App Store. Read more

Amazon Takes Another Swing at Apple with New Kindle Commercial

Amazon released another Kindle commercial today, titled “The book lives on”, which is – again – clearly targeting the issues with the iPad as an eBook reader. Just like in the first commercial posted months ago, Amazon points out you can’t read books in direct sunlight on the iPad because of screen glare – something the Kindle addresses with its digital ink paper-like technology.

The latest commercial, however, showcases more features than direct-sunlight reading. The Kindle is touted as a lighter device with battery life “up to a month”, is being used by people in their mid twenties / thirties (Apple’s typical userbase) and has access to more than 800,000 books available in the Kindle Store. Last, the commercial is backed up by a catchy pop song that’s very similar to Apple’s usual commercial strategy. It’s a very nice commercial if you ask me, but I do see a trend here.

Check out the video below. In the meantime, Apple is rumored to introduce a Kindle-like display technology for a better reading experience in the iPad 2. [via TechCrunch] Read more

iSocial - Upload Photos from Camera Roll to Facebook and Twitter with A Single Tap

With Facebook integration in apps such as iLife, you’d think Apple would have already considered it across iOS. Well, until that happens, iSocial by CoreLab, is going to help. The Cydia Store will soon have a tweak that will allow you to upload images from your camera roll inside Photos.app to Facebook and Twitter with a single tap (after authentication of course).

Open Photos.app, select the photo you want in your camera roll then click the cloud button in the bottom right and choose your social network of choice. There, simple enough for you? We don’t know for sure if it works on bulk uploads but according to the video, it looks as if you can only send one at a time. iSocial will be available soon in Cydia Store at a cost of $1.99, via repository BigBoss.

[via iSpazio]

Socialcam Aims At Becoming Instagram for Video

There is no doubt  Instagram has changed the way iOS users look at image sharing on their iPhones: with a few taps, you can take a picture with your device, apply some filters to make it “cooler”, send it to the Instagram’s cloud to share it with your friends and everyone else. Instagram’s appeal lies in the simplicity of the concept, and 2 million users in a few months can’t be wrong.

But the App Store image sharing scene isn’t just about Instagram. Service picplz has collected a pretty huge userbase lately as well, making it the direct competitor to Instagram and one of the most popular apps to quickly share photos from an iPhone. Videos, however, have always been one kind of a problem for iOS aficionados: put simply, there is no easy way to share a video with your friends. Email is slow with attachments, Facebook’s video uploading isn’t intuitive at all (and again, uploading is slow), Youtube is more meant for videos that need to be viewed publicly.

TechCrunch offers a preview of Socialcam, a new iPhone app from the creators of Justin.tv that, like Instagram, will allow users to upload videos with a few taps and share them with their friends using Facebook’s Connect feature. Socialcam, currently in beta and launching in the first weeks of March, has a tabbed interface with a huge “Camera” button in the middle similar to Instagram’s UI and will let you upload, browse videos shared by others, like and comment them.

The app, which will be available for both Android and iPhone, is pretty simple: after firing it up you’re asked to log-in via Facebook Connect, which is currently the only login option. The app presents you with a list of your Facebook friends who are already on Socialcam and asks if you’d like to ‘Follow’ them (Socialcam uses a one-way follower model like Twitter). After that, you’ll spend most of your time looking at the stream of Socialcam videos posted by your friends. Each video is represented by four frame grabs — tapping on one will cause the video player to pop open the clip will start playing immediately. You can leave comments and ‘Like’ each video, and you can also tag your friends in clips. If you tag a friend who isn’t on Socialcam, it will still show up on their Facebook wall (and the video is playable directly from there — you don’t have to click a link).

You can sign up to be notified about Socialcam news here, and hopefully more details will be available in the coming weeks ahead of the app’s launch.

PhotoSync Enables iOS-to-iOS, iOS-to-Computer Photo and Video Sharing

PhotoSync, a universal $1.99 app available in the App Store, has quickly become one of my favorite tools to enhance my iOS devices’ photo and video sharing capabilities. The app, which requires a free Mac companion software to be installed from the developers’ website, allows you to share photos and videos from your iPhone and iPad libraries between computers and other iOS devices running the app. PhotoSync can send multiple photos at once or sync entire libraries with iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, as well as PCs and Macs. Read more

Minecraft To Officially Come To iOS This Year

Minecraft

Minecraft

If you’re as addicted to Minecraft as I am, then you’ll be excited to learn that the hit block building title will be arriving to iOS later this year. Gamasutra reports that Markus Persson has revealed to the site that the game won’t be an exact port, but rather will be granted features that “make sense” for touch screen devices.

Minecraft is currently in the beta stages, with a full release planned sometime this year. So far over 1.3 million copies of the game have been purchased, with nearly five million registered accounts on the official site.

Minecraft has been a massive success in indie gaming, and there’s been a lot of interest from the community in an iOS version since the game’s inception. Aron Neiminen, a new recruit to the Mojang team working on Minecraft, will be developing the iOS version that’s to be released at an unannounced date.

[Gamasutra via IndieGames]

Readability Is The First Victim Of Apple’s New Subscriptions

Three weeks ago, web service Readability launched a completely revamped version of its “read later” platform including support for Instapaper (Marco Arment is an advisor to Arc90, the company behind Readability) and a new subscription system that allows publishers of content consumed through Readability to get 70% of the fees paid by subscribers.

It works like this: you sign up to Readability as a reader paying a $5 monthly fee, but you can decide to pay even more if you’re willing to support the project. Once you’re ready to use the service, you install a bookmarklet in your browser that will save articles for later in an uncluttered view that’s perfect for late-night reading sessions and mobile devices. Yes, it really is similar to Marco Arment’s Instapaper. In fact, the developers announced that the first official Readability iOS app would be heavily based on Instapaper – which also happens to have introduced support for sending logs to Readability a few days ago. Instapaper and Readability thus have become two integrated platforms for reading content and sharing it with your friends – but Readability’s unique twist allows publishers (like MacStories, or any other weblog) to get a kickback for every article saved for later. It’s a genius approach no one ever tried before. Read more