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We know 2010 has been a terrific year for Apple. New MacBooks, New iMacs / Mac Minis and Mac Pros, the iPhone 4, the iPad. Not to mention the new & improved Apple TV, iOS 4, Retina Display on the iPod touch, the fiscal results….overall, it’s been a good year. One of those that will end up on Wikipedia someday.
The video below puts all of this in perspective by placing all the events that marked Apple’s 2010 in chronological order.
“We think it’s great.”
[via Seth Weintraub]
Watch out TinyGrab users - the second iteration of this fantastic image sharing application is going live in the App Store as we speak. From the mouth of the @TinyGrab team themselves on Twitter, keep an eye out for updates including iOS 4.0 compatibility, the ability to share grabs on social networks like Facebook & Twitter, and a recent lists updates that fetches your history from your account instead of the handset. I love TinyGrab because it’s so useful for sharing screenshots, and it’s only a dollar if you’re a member but don’t yet have the mobile version. For only a dollar in the App Store, it’s a free update for previous owners and a must have tool for those without.
A few minutes ago Apple released an update for the official Remote app, which reaches version 2.1 and adds a number of new features and performance improvements. Remote 2.1 now comes with AirPlay video support so you can control videos that are being streaming from iTunes on your computer to the Apple TV; it’s also got remote radio control to play radio stations on iTunes.
The Remote app can now control TV shows and movies rented on the iTunes Store and it includes fixes for users who experienced errors when trying to connect to a shared library.
Remote 2.1 is free and available here.
We know you’re all playing with Camera+ 2.0 now, but let’s put that iPhone away for a minute and enjoy a good BBC comedy skit, shall we? In the following video, two BBC comedians have fun trying to make apples and blackberries to work because you know, they can freeze or crash sometimes.
I won’t tell you what happens in the video, you’ve got to check it out by yourself. And yes, you can go back to shooting pictures with Camera+ after this. [via TUAW]
In spite of Apple’s numerous attempts to inject new features and 3rd party online integrations in it, Ping is struggling to take off. Not only does the service seem useless and too tied to iTunes to many, several publications are also calling it one of the biggest flops of 2010.
You can now add NPR to the list of Ping non-fans, as they have named Apple’s social network for music one of the “worst ideas of 2010”. Ouch.
The most popular services — the Facebooks, Twitters and MySpaces of the world — allow users to share links, thoughts, ideas, photos and music to connect with each other. Ping, run through iTunes, was supposed to be an evolution in musical connection. But iTunes, being a self-contained fortress requiring endless software upgrades and with more than a few frustrating quirks, isn’t conducive to the type of sharing Web-based networks enjoy across a variety of devices. I can access all three of the aforementioned sites from my Android phone, and I have a variety of apps that allow me to seamlessly integrate these applications into my life. To use Ping, I would have to be tethered to my iMac.
NPR also notes that Ping is a “weakened” version of Twitter only meant to drive sales to the iTunes Store. Looking at artists’ profiles and the messages they share on Ping, it’s not difficult to understand NPR’s position. Perhaps their hammer went down a little too hard on Apple’s new service, though? Sure Ping is not a massive hit, but it has room to grow.
As it stands right now, Apple wants its users to believe in Ping. The problem is, people sometimes don’t want to wait for things to get better. Here’s to hoping Ping will get insanely better in 2011.
Missed Erica Sadun’s latest AirPlay hack yesterday? It’s a new Mac app called AirFlick that allows to send video and URLs (say, from Youtube.com) from OS X to the Apple TV without needing to load a file from iTunes. It’s a standalone app that can send video files through AirPlay to an Apple TV 2nd gen running on your local network. Together with AirPlayer (which allows you to send videos and photos via AirPlay to a Mac), it’s another great hack from Erica Sadun.
It turns out, anyway, that AirFlick can do a lot more than “simply” allowing you to send video from OS X to the Apple TV. First, TUAW reader BC managed to stream with AirPlay .avi files using Air Video Server’s live conversion system, by copying the URL of AVS’ m3u8 playlist and paste it in AirFlick. It requires some serious Terminal skills, but it’s possible. Read more
When Apple announced AirPlay, it also confirmed that several AirPlay-enabled third party speakers would come out for consumers to use in conjunction with iPhones and iPads without the need of setting up a wireless system based on AirPort Express. Since then, though, those speakers haven’t found their way to the market. Yet. Read more
Apple just sent out a press release announcing that the company expect Apple TV sales to top one million units later this week. It also announced that iTunes users are now “renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day”.
The best part? The Apple TV is not a hobby anymore, but is described by Apple PR as “the perfect iOS accessory”, thanks to AirPlay. That’s quite an evolution.
Press release below. Read more
9to5mac points to four new job listings that appeared on Apple’s website earlier this week and suggest the company is looking forward to implementing more speech recognition features in future versions of iOS. The job positions (1, 2, 3, 4) include one “iOS Speech Application Engineer”, two “Speech Recognition Engineers” and one “Senior Speech Research Scientist”.
Are you looking to contribute to a product that is redefining the smartphone? The iOS Application Frameworks team is looking for an exceptional Speech Engineer. You will work with our team on a wide variety of speech-related development activities. We need a team player - you will be working closely with engineers on the Application Frameworks team as well as other teams at Apple - and we need someone who is comfortable working in a fast paced environment with rapidly changing priorities.
The fact that Apple is looking for not one, but four Speech engineers may be a sign of the iOS team at Cupertino willing to catch up with Google, which already has powerful voice search and voice action functionalities on Android. Speech recognition features on iOS are limited to Voice Control and a few other App Store apps that come with their own speech technologies – apps like Siri Assistant, bought by Apple earlier this year.
If you think the pieces are coming together now for speech-related features to show up in a major new version of iOS next year, then I guess we’re all excited for voice actions to find their way on the iPhone and iPad.
