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Shazam 5.0 Brings Faster Tagging

Music recognition service Shazam announced this morning a major update for its Shazam Free, Encore and RED apps, which reach version 5.0 and add a number of new functionalities and refined user interface design. Renowned for allowing users to tag songs and certain TV content in a few seconds by using the iPhone’s microphone and an Internet connection, Shazam has managed to improve on the already solid functionality of the app by cutting start-up times and reworking the way the app listens to music to tags songs.

Shazam’s startup is now over a second quicker, and the “Touch to Shazam” action has been moved to a new button in the app’s bottom toolbar. You may noticed this button will “pulse” every few seconds when the app is open – that is related to the new “instant listening” feature of the app, which contributes to making recognition and tagging super-fast. In my tests, I have noticed songs now take 4-5 seconds on average to be recognized (on WiFi) – a significant improvement from the previous 10-15 seconds it generally took me to tag songs.

Shazam 5.0 brings other improvements aside from better tagging. The Friends feed is faster, the UI more polished throughout the app; Twitter integration with iOS 5 is now properly supported, allowing users to edit their tweets; LyricPlay, a feature to associate lyrics with songs, has received improved sync and streaming.

Shazam 5.0 is available today on the App Store in three versions: Shazam, Shazam Encore, and (Shazam)RED.

iOS Text Editor Roundup→

iOS Text Editor Roundup

In my article about text editors from two weeks ago, I compared my four favorite apps for writing on the iPad. In his amazingly researched text editor roundup, Brett Terpstra did the opposite: he took every text editor for iPhone and iPad out there, crowdsourced the initial compiling of the data, then put everything back together adding features, descriptions, links, and images for the apps.

This is a feature comparison of text editors on iOS. The information was compiled by the web community on an open Google spreadsheet. I cannot vouch for its current accuracy, but will be verifying everything as I’m able. It’s meant to help you find the most useful way to write, code or take notes for your personal needs. Every editor is geared toward a slightly different purpose, with their own strenghts and focus.

Brett did a fantastic job and I’m already downloading some new apps I didn’t know about thanks to his roundup. Check it out here (and make sure to bookmark it, as he’s adding new features to the webpage every day).

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Apple Announces Q2 2012 Conference Call For April 24

Last night, Apple updated its Investor Relations webpage to include a placeholder for the company’s next earnings call, scheduled for April 24. As usual with Apple’s conference calls, the event will be provided as an audio webcast for investors and listeners.

Apple plans to conduct a conference call to discuss financial results of its second fiscal quarter on Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 2:00 p.m. PT.

Ended on March 31, Apple’s second quarter of the fiscal year typically brings in lower sales and volume for the company, although this year’s Q2 may signal a change in this tradition with AAPL soaring to new heights every week, and the new iPad selling very well in a larger number of countries than the iPad 2 last year. In fact, whilst Apple didn’t provide any official numbers for the iPad 2’s release last year, it is safe to assume this year’s debut of the new iPad saw larger sales thanks to a wider rollout on Day One (10 countries on March 16, as opposed to only 1 launch country for the iPad 2), rapid follow-up in more countries a week later (25 countries on March 23) and previously reported initial sales figures (3 million iPads were sold in 4 days, prior to the second worldwide March 23 rollout). Sales from the March 16 and March 23 iPad launches will be included in this year’s Q2 results.

Apple’s previous quarter, Q1 2012, has been the company’s biggest to date. The company posted record-breaking revenue of $46.33 billion, with 15.43 million iPads, 37.04 million iPhones and 5.2 million Macs sold. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The company posted quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share. iPhone represented a 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter, while iPad reported a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Until Q1 2012, Apple’s most profitable quarter had been Q3 2011 with $28.57 billion revenue.

In Q1 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook remarked how the company was seeing China as “an extremely important market”, with “staggering demand” for iPhone. Cook also revealed that, in spite of the “bold bet” they took in terms of iPhone supply, Apple was short of iPhone supply throughout the quarter; the situation had improved by the time of the earnings call, but the company was still short in some areas. In the conference call, Cook also referred to iCloud as the company’s “big insight” for the next decade.

For Q2 2012, Apple set its guidance at $32.5 billion revenue and diluted earnings per share of about $8.50. As Apple’s own estimates are generally low, it is no surprise to see analysts projecting bigger sales and revenue, but as noted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Fortune, this quarter’s estimates show a great difference between estimates from the “pros” (Wall Street analysts) and the “indies”. With a $6.8 billion gap, Wall Street analysts expect the company to report $35.88 billion revenue, while the indies forecast revenue of $42.68 billion. While more bullish, estimates from the independent analysts tend to be more accurate, with only a few notable exceptions in the past (such as when they failed to predict customers were holding out for an iPhone upgrade in October).

In his own estimates for the upcoming Q2 results, Asymco’s Horace Dediu forecasted the following numbers:

  • iPhone units: 37.3 million (100%)
  • Macs: 4.7 million (25%)
  • iPads: 12.2 million (160%)
  • iPods: 7 million (-22%)
  • Music (incl. app) rev. growth: 40%
  • Peripherals rev. growth: 25%
  • Software rev. growth: 10%
  • Total revenues: $42.7 billion (growth: 73%)
  • GM: 44.7%
  • EPS: $12.0 (88%)

To put these possible numbers in context, here’s a graphical representation of how Apple performed in the past quarters.

Apple’s recently announced quarterly dividend won’t begin until the fourth fiscal quarter of 2012. We will provide live updates from the call on our site’s homepage on April 24 starting at 2 PM PT. For a recap of news and events that may have affected Apple’s results in the quarter, check out our January, February, and March In Review sections.

Air Display Gets HiDPI Mode Support on iPad Retina Display

Announced last week, Avatron’s popular utility Air Display, a $9.99 app that can turn any iOS device into an external display for a Mac or PC, has been updated today to include support for two major new features and technical achievements: HiDPI mode and Retina graphics. Meant to be enjoyed on the new iPad’s Retina display, Air Display 1.6 requires the installation of a desktop application that will handle the wireless connection between Lion and the iOS app.

Once installed, Air Display Connect on the Mac will allow you to easily select the device you want to turn into an external monitor. For the new iPad’s display (and Retina iOS devices in general, but of course the app gives its best results on the iPad), Avatron has enabled support for high resolutions, although an option is present to render items at non-Retina resolutions as well. The Retina display’s tightly packed pixels have also allowed Avatron to use HiDPI mode – a hidden feature of Lion which draws element on screen at double the size – in a meaningful and gorgeous-looking way. Read more

Facebook for iPad Gets Retina Graphics

The official Facebook app for iOS, available for free on the App Store, has been updated today to include graphics for the new iPad’s Retina display, and a series of other enhancements. Alongside crisper images for the new display, the 4.1.1 update to the app brings an option to go offline in chat, fixes for the profile picture and names displayed in photo sets, support for more languages, and a number of additional bug fixes to improve the performances of the app. Unfortunately, this version doesn’t sport integration with the Facebook Timeline yet, which, however, was enabled on the iPhone back in December.

You can find Facebook 4.1.1 on the App Store.

Tweet Marker Launches “Plus” Version To Sync Timeline on the Web, Index Tweets

Last year, when Manton Reece of Riverfold Software, maker of Tweet Library, announced he was working on a new service to sync Twitter timelines across apps and platforms called Tweetmarks, Twitter users and iOS nerds alike rejoiced, and began hoping the service would work as well as Manton promised. Not only did it work, Tweet Marker – the final name of Tweetmarks – turned out to become the de facto solution to implement synchronization for timelines across different Twitter applications. In the past nine months, we have seen Tweet Marker find its way into popular apps like The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific and Tweetbot, spanning a variety of mobile devices and platforms like iOS, the web, and even Android. Today, Reece is launching Tweet Marker Plus, an enhanced and paid version of Tweet Marker that adds new features on top of standard timeline sync.

At $2 per month, Tweet Marker Plus offers new functionalities and a web interface for Twitter users, while keeping the basic sync you may already be using in Tweetbot or Twitterrific completely free. On top of that, developers who are already integrating with the “regular” Tweet Marker can now also check out version 2.0 of the API, a minor upgrade to improve reliability.

Tweet Marker Plus brings a web-based timeline that remembers the read position from Tweet Marker-enabled apps; a searchable archive of your tweets and tweets from people you follow, and an option to manually select the tweet you want to sync with other apps. I have been able to test Tweet Marker Plus prior to its public launch, and I’ve been consistently impressed with the sync implementation that seamlessly switches from the web, to clients on the Mac and iOS.

The most visible feature of Plus, the web timeline, is very straightforward, but I believe it’ll prove to be a worthy addition for, say, those users who rely on iOS and Mac apps at home, but who are forced to stay on Windows environments at work. Tweet Marker’s web timeline can pick up from where you last left off on another connected client, and it’s got a “scroll to marker” option to manually load your last-seen tweet. On the timeline itself you can reply, retweet, mark as favorite and check out a tweet’s unique URL, but these actions will simply forward you to a dedicated page on Twitter.com. Tweet Marker’s Plus timeline isn’t meant to be a full-featured client: rather, it is a basic way to rely on your existing sync position if nothing else is available.

At the core of Tweet Marker Plus there’s the new search option, which will keep a searchable archive of tweets from you and the people you follow. This is something I’ve been obsessed with lately – to be able to keep a fully indexed archive of tweets I saw appearing on my timeline on any given day. I have been using a combination of Greplin and CloudMagic to search for old tweets from my timeline, and it looks like Tweet Marker Plus will be a fantastic addition to this category of services. Reece told me the goal is to begin by keeping an archive of about a month of tweets, indexing 800 tweets (per Twitter’s limits) when a user signs up to the service. As more tweets are scanned and indexed in the background at regular intervals, Reece plans to increase the amount of tweets searchable by Tweet Marker as the service grows and evolves.

With over 170,000 users to date and 1,000 new ones added each day, Tweet Marker is now a reality that is not going away anytime soon. Twitter hasn’t shown any particular interest in allowing users to sync their timeline position through apps and platforms, and Tweet Marker has turned out to be the proverbial “right idea at the right time” as users were growing tired of having to manually reload and scroll timelines in their clients of choice. Tweet Marker’s servers now process over 40 million hits a week, and the service has been enabled in 15 different apps across 6 platforms. The idea for Tweet Marker Plus, Reece explained, is to lay the foundation for an improved service that will give subscribers more features inside supported apps while continuing to work with the free version, which doesn’t require any registration or subscription.

It may be a version 1.0, but Tweet Marker Plus is already a solid offering. At $2 per month, the service adds search and a web-based interface on top of a platform that has reliably synced Twitter timelines on a variety of apps and hardware. You can subscribe to Tweet Marker Plus here.

March 2012 In Review

March was the month of the new iPad, an updated Apple TV and the announcement of a dividend and share repurchase program. It was most certainly a ‘big’ month. If a new iPad wasn’t enough, we also got a lot of new apps (alongside all those being updated for the Retina Display) and big app updates - everything from Angry Birds Space (world productivity took a dive that week) to both iA Writer and Byword iPhone apps launching to Camera+ 3.0 and our eyes were in heaven after Instapaper was updated to support the Retina Display with some truly beautiful new fonts. On the story front, Federico tackled the issue of what was the best aspects of our favourite iOS text editors, talked about the ‘Apple Community’, Cody reviewed the new iPad and I expressed sadness and frustration with lies of Mike Daisey.

Jump the break to get a full recap of March 2012. You can also jump back to see what happened in January and February of this year.

The New iPad

On March 7th, Apple held its iPad keynote - announcing the third generation iPad, simply calling it the ‘new iPad’. It featured a Retina Display, improved rear camera, quad-core GPU with the new A5X processor and support for 4G networks. We posted a review roundup, featuring the highlights from various reviews on the internet, as well as our own review by Cody. Apple announced that in its opening weekend it sold 3 million of the new iPads.

The (updated) Apple TV, iOS 5.1,  iPhoto for iOS and more from Apple’s iPad event

Alongside the new iPad, Apple also released an updated Apple TV with support for 1080p content as well as new UI that was also released for the existing Apple TV. Co-inciding with the release of the new iPad was the release of iOS 5.1 which included some bugfixes and new features such as an improved activation method to use the lockscreen camera. Apple also announced the iOS version of iPhoto which was made available for $4.99 a short time later.

More minor announcements included the availability for AppleCare+ for the new iPad, iTunes 10.6 and the release of the “Apple Configurator” app after the event. Apple also bumped the over-the-air download limit from 20 MB to 50 MB to reflect larger app sizes due to Universal apps that included graphics for the Retina iPad and iPhone - as well as larger download caps that exist today. Finally, you saw Apple update a whole bunch of their own apps for the new iPad and Retina Display.

We also posted a complete round-up of the event and a bunch of minor details about the event that you may have missed. You can also watch the recording of the event here.

25 billion apps downloaded

On March 3rd, Apple announced that 25 billion apps had been downloaded from the App Store. To mark the milestone it revealed a new “All-Time Top Apps” section on the App Store. A few days later, Apple revealed that the 25 billionth app downloaded was ‘Where’s My Water? Free’ by Chunli Fu who is from  Qingdao, China - she won a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

Apple announces dividend and share repurchase program

Somewhat out of the blue, Apple announced on a Sunday afternoon that it would be holding a conference call early the next day (Monday) to announce the result of discussions by Apple’s board on what it would do with Apple’s cash balance. As was widely expected, Apple announced it would begin issuing quarterly dividends of $2.65 per share. It also announced a $10 billion share repurchase program to begin in FY2013.

Fair Labor Association releases preliminary report on Foxconn conditions

The Fair Labor Association released a preliminary report on its findings from inspections at Foxconn that were conducted earlier this year. In what now seems like planned positive PR ahead of the report’s release, Tim Cook visited Foxconn a few days before the report was published and photographs were distributed to media of the visit.

Angry Birds Space

Rovio this month released Angry Birds Space, the fourth in the series (after the original, Rio and Seasons). Unsurprisingly, the game did incredibly well and managed to receive over 10 million downloads in less than 3 days. Particularly awesome was this analysis of the physics used by the game, a great follow-up to the original investigation into Angry Birds physics.

Everything Else

 

The Really Big Reviews

Everything Else

March Quick Reviews

Retina & Universal

iPhoto for iOS Review

The Essence of a Name

On Reviewing Apps

Getting Your iPad App Ready for the new iPad

Comparing My Favorite iOS Text Editors

Daisey’s Lies Take Us Two Steps Backwards

iPad (3) Review: You Won’t Believe It Until You See It

The Apple Community, Part II

Regarding Apple’s Edge and the new Apple TV Interface

A Series of Clicks

The (Semi)Skeuomorphism

MacStories Reading Lists

MacStories Reading List: February 26 – March 4

MacStories Reading List: New iPad Special Edition

Apple Clarifies iPad “4G” Marketing On Australian Website

Two days ago we noted Apple had promised the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) to clarify the marketing for the new iPad’s “4G” connectivity options on the company’s Australian website. With the ACCC alleging that Apple was misleading Australian customers in thinking the iPad would be compatible with Telstra’s 4G network, and Apple replying that Australian networks were “misnamed”, Apple agreed to resolve the dispute by clarifying marketing, contacting customers, and sending new signage to resellers by April 5th.

As noted by The Next Web, Apple has begun making these changes by updating the description of 4G compatibility on its Australian online store, clarifying that the new iPad “supports very fast cellular networks” but that it is not “compatible with current Australian 4G LTE networks and WiMAX networks”. We’ve captured the differences in the screenshot below.

Other international stores, however, including the UK and Italy ones, are still reporting the old description for the iPad WiFi + 4G model, and it’s unclear whether the changes made in Australia will propagate automatically to other countries, or if more lawsuits by local consumer protection organizations will be necessary. Complaints are indeed taking hold in various European countries as well.

As Apple is seemingly making true on its promise to clarify marketing terms and offer a refund to customers, the ACCC is still pushing for a full trial in early May.