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Apple Informs Australian WiFi + 4G iPad Owners Of Refund Offer, Tells Resellers To Update Marketing

Apple today began emailing Australians who had purchased the new iPad WiFi + 4G model, informing them of their option to get a full refund if they had purchased it on the basis of thinking it would work with Australian 4G LTE or WiMAX networks. The offer is available to anyone who purchased the model before March 28th and they can return it for a full refund until the 25th of April.

It follows events from last week when the ACCC alleged Apple of misleading customers over the 4G capabilities of the new iPad and Apple responded by offering refunds and agreeing to clarify its marketing. Users who wish to obtain the refund must return the iPad and accessories to the original point of purchase and inform them that they had purchased the iPad on the “basis that it was compatible with current Australian 4G LTE networks or WiMAX networks”.

As noted by 9to5 Mac, Apple has also begun informing Australian iPad resellers to update their iPad signage to more accurately describe the iPad’s cellular capabilities in Australia. Notably the new signage includes the paragraph that Apple and the ACCC agreed on last week:

This product supports very fast cellular networks. It is not compatible with current Australian 4G LTE networks and WiMAX networks.

Jump the break to view the full email that Apple has sent to Australian consumers who purchased the “WiFi + 4G” model of the new iPad.

Thanks Stuart Hall, reseller information via 9to5 Mac.

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Apple Releases iAd Producer 2.1

Apple today released an update to iAd Producer, its Mac application aimed at allowing designers and developers easily create and test rich advertising banners to feature on Apple’s iAd platform. The new version of the app, 2.1, provides support for WebGL assets in iAd content, brings support for the new iPad, and supports the new media object in iAd JS.

From the release notes:

  • Provides improved load and save performance for iAd projects.
  • Improves the performance of exported ad units.
  • Facilitates better pre-load behavior for assets in exported ad units.
  • Allows ad upload and testing with iOS devices connected via USB.
  • Reduces device memory usage for image views.
  • Enables use of image sprites.
  • Provides support for on-device debugging.
  • Enables Twitter integration in iAd content.
  • Simplifies visualization of animations by providing an onion-skinning view.
  • Expands the types of assets that can be imported and managed in the asset library to include common document types.
  • Supports the new media object in iAd JS.
  • Provides support for integration of WebGL assets in iAd content.
  • Extends device support to include iPad (3rd generation).

Version 2.0 of iAd Producer was released in November. iAd Producer is available for download here.

World Contacts+ Is A Quick Dial App with a World Clock

Developed by Caleb Thorson, World Contacts+ is the classic example that, sometimes, good ideas can be remixed and combined to produce something new that’s still fresh and has a place on the market. In the past months, the App Store has seen the rise of “launcher apps” that, through URLs schemes, leverage many iOS apps’ capability of exchanging data and information to facilitate the process of forwarding files, short bits of text, or data. Shortcuts, if you will, collected in a single app that acts as a bridge between the user and all the other apps installed on a device. At MacStories, we’re big fans of Launch Center and Buzz, two apps that take the concept of “quick launcher” and apply it to third-party apps and Address Book contacts, respectively.

World Contacts+ is a bit of both, but stands out on its own because of the very specific approach it takes in regards to quick dials. World Contacts+ keeps a short list of the people you contact the most during the day, and allows you to initiate a call, FaceTime call, send a message or a new email with just one tap. Like Launch Center, it displays a vertical list for your shortcuts. Like Buzz, it allows you to pick contacts from the Address Book, and it uses native iOS frameworks to activate actions like email and iMessages. The app, however, adds a world clock to the mix, allowing you to see the local time for each entry in your list, so you can decide if it’s an appropriate time to call them or text them. The app even cleverly dims contacts that are located in time zones where it’s currently night. To assign a time zone, you simply search for a contact’s location every time you add a new entry to the list.

World Contacts+ isn’t as customizable as Launch Center, or as powerful as Buzz. If you’re looking for more advanced options when it comes to app shortcuts and contacts, go with those apps. But because World Contacts+ cuts the feature set down to a minimum and only adds one very specific feature, I believe the app could have a chance on the App Store for those people, like me, who communicate with people from different timezones on a daily basis. Currently, the MacStories team is made from people living in Italy, the US, Japan, and Australia, and it’s incredibly convenient to know the local time of each person without doing the math every time.

World Contacts+ is available at $0.99 on the App Store.

Sparrow 1.1 for iPhone Available, Push Coming “With or Without Apple”

Sparrow for iPhone, the alternative email client for iPhone I reviewed three weeks ago, has an update on the App Store today, adding a number of functionalities that didn’t make it into version 1.0 of the software. Sparrow 1.1 allows you to show or hide the dock badge per account, open links through a built-in web browser (which includes options to open in Safari, and mail a link), and selectively choose which folders or labels to show in the app. There are new actions to empty trash or spam, and you can now activate a Send & Archive option in the Settings to instantly archive a message or conversation as you send a new email.

About push, which had to be removed from the final version of Sparrow 1.0 – the developers tested push notifications while the app was in beta, and they worked well, but Apple didn’t approve the implementation – the developers are confident Apple will revise its position. They will submit version 1.2 of the app soon, re-including support for push notifications. And if Apple won’t approve Sparrow with push for the second time, the developers say they are working out a solution to include push in other ways “with or without Apple”. It will be interesting to see whether Sparrow will consider adding push notifications through external services such as Boxcar, which recently raised new funding to build a push notification service for mobile developers. Update: the beta version of Sparrow I tested included push through a method that let the app run in the background leveraging the VoIP API. It’s not clear whether Apple will ever revise its position on letting a non-VoIP app use the VoIP API.

Thanks to your amazing support, we feel confident that Apple might revise its position on the Push API. We’ll submit a first version of Sparrow 1.2 including it. This might delay Sparrow 1.2 validation but we’re already working with some partners to include Push in future versions of Sparrow without needing Apple clearance.

Sparrow 1.2 for iPhone will also include landscape support, 9 more languages, and a gesture to swipe up or down between messages. The team is also working on Sparrow 1.6 for Mac, which will bring fixes and POP support.

Sparrow is a fantastic email client for iPhone, as I’ve already detailed in my review, and this 1.1 release adds some nice features that didn’t make the cut in the original 1.0. You can find Sparrow 1.1 on the App Store today.

Instagram’s Rise To 30 Million Users Visualized

(Instagram’s growth. Click for full size.)

With the launch of the official Android app today, Instagram has released updated stats that show the stunning growth of the service over the past 18 months. It was only back in December 2011 that we reported 15 million users had signed up to Instagram; the growth rate of the service is accelerating, as the company announced 27 million users in mid-March, and 30 million users today. The Instagram Press Center reports additional numbers, including 1 billion photos uploaded so far, with 5 million photos each day and 575 likes per second on average.

In the past year, Instagram has added new designers to its relatively small team based in San Francisco, who helped revamping the iPhone app and worked on the launch of the Android client. More recently, Instagram started opening up its API to allow developers of other mobile applications to directly upload photos to Instagram – that was the case with Hipstamatic, and the company is keeping an eye on this API experiment to see if wider adoption among developers could lead to an even faster growth pace. The launch of Instagram for Android will surely help, as more than 430,000 users were already on the waiting list for the app.

Instagram Stats (April 2012)

  • 430K+ on Android Waiting List
  • 30 million+ Registered Users
  • 1 billion+ Photos Uploaded
  • 5 million+ Photos Per Day
  • 575 Likes Per Second
  • 81 Comments Per Second

Looking back at Instagram’s success over the past two years, it’s clear Instagram has become one of the fastest growing social networks that launched exclusively on iPhone. While many are wondering when the company will decide to monetize the service with advertising, more partnerships, or other plans, Instagram says they are actively considering more devices and platforms for the future.

App Updates: PDF Expert, OneEdit, ReaderX, Watchlater

A number of iOS applications have been updated following the release of the new iPad. While most of the software updates quickly approved by Apple have focused on Retina graphics, others that have come out in the past few days have brought new important functionalities as well.

PDF Expert, our favorite app to read and manage PDFs on the iPad, adds Retina graphics and document thumbnails in its new 4.0 version. On the new iPad, graphics are shaper and more detailed, but more importantly text is crisper and more readable. The new thumbnail-based interface makes for a more visual presentation and intuitive file browsing, although support for drag & drop could be improved (I’d like to be able to create folders by dropping a file on top of another, like on the Home screen). PDF Expert 4.0 also supports PDF portfolios, attachments, and embedded media.

ReaderX has improved a lot since my original review. The app now comes with more fonts, more options, a revised preview popover, improved scrolling, and better sharing. The wallpaper concept makes a lot more sense on the iPad’s Retina display, as it makes it easy to set smaller fonts, while maintaining readability and detail. Give it a try again.

OneEdit is an app I use on my iPad to quickly resize multiple photos at once and save them back to the Camera Roll. The app doesn’t support Retina graphics yet on the new iPad, but the issue will likely go unnoticed (except for the icon) as the app uses a lot of native UI elements that Apple is already providing at Retina size. OneEdit 1.8 (the app is sold in separate versions for iPhone and iPad) enhances the batch-processing features of the app with support for individual photos from Dropbox, upload to WebDAV, and possibility to resize images based on scale. I particularly like OneEdit’s approach to image editing with separate sources/tasks/output processes that makes it easy and clear for me to select images, act on them, and save them somewhere else. OneEdit is also pretty powerful with tons of other options I don’t use, so make sure to check out the app’s full description on the App Store.

Watchlater keeps on being one of the best options to save videos from the web for later by adding a new design and more sharing options to version 2.5. Functionality-wise the app is mostly unchanged from my original review, but the UI is much better and collaborating with friends on playlists is a great idea.

Other minor updates have been released on the App Store as well: Note & Share added fixes and new iPad compatibility; LogMeIn Ignition added Retina graphics; Path started hashing user data with version 2.1.1; Alien Blue for iPad added a new gesture to load Reddit comments.

Make sure to check out the Great apps for the new iPad App Store section for a comprehensive list of software updates released in the past weeks.

Sync Documents From iCloud to Dropbox→

Sync Documents From iCloud to Dropbox

TJ Luoma at TUAW has written the post I was going to save for the weekend: a simple way to sync documents from iCloud to Dropbox using Hazel on the Mac (our review of Hazel 3.0). Because a number of apps – text editors in particular – have started to offer a second option to sync documents with iCloud, and because iCloud, unlike Dropbox, doesn’t offer document versioning, finding a way to keep files in sync from iCloud to Dropbox might be a workflow worth considering.

The good news is that you can sync iCloud to Dropbox. The bad news is that it’s a one-way sync from iCloud to Dropbox. But if all you want to do is backup iCloud files and be able to retrieve previous versions from Dropbox, it’s pretty simple to do.

Aside from text files, the Mobile Documents folder used by iCloud can be configured on the Mac to do all sorts of crazy automated tasks when combined with the right apps. For example, you can use it with GoodReader and find the same documents on the Mac, in spite of the lack of a GoodReader app for Mac.

Check out TJ Luoma’s guide here.

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