This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

Gallery: Amsterdam Apple Store Grand Opening

On Saturday, Apple officially opened its first retail store in Amsterdam. Located at Hirschgebouw, Leidseplein 25, the first store in the city blends historical architectural elements with Apple’s unique style and approach to retail presentation. Gary Allen of ifoAppleStore has a great recount of the opening day:

In typical Apple fashion, construction of the interior was a labor of love, taken from history. Everything is a recreation, although it is impossible to tell even from a close examination. The employees are still in awe of the store, since they had their first view of the interior just nine days ago. Steve Jobs signed off on the project before the project before he died last year, and Apple has taken great care within the company to credit the artisans, craftsman and construction team who created the store.

The superlatives are many: most number of Apple products on display of any store in the chain, second-largest store in square-footage, and largest volume of any store in the chain. But those are just numbers, when a store should really be judged by its appearance.

Whilst you’ll be able to find more information about the store on Apple’s dedicated retail webpage, we wanted to share a series of photos our friend Jack Amick took last Saturday and sent us. You can find them after the break. Also make sure to check out Jack’s Flickr photostream for some full-size shots, and a video.

Update: We’ve posted a full-size version of the photo showing Senior Director of International Retail Steve Cano at the Amsterdam Apple Store.

Read more

Apple Reveals The 25 Billionth App Downloaded & Winner Of $10,000 iTunes Gift Card

Apple has just issued a press release noting that the App Store hit 25 billion downloads (on Saturday) with the 25 billionth app downloaded being Where’s My Water? Free. The app was downloaded by Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China - that lucky person has won a $10,000 iTunes gift card for being the person who downloaded the 25 billionth app.

“We’d like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “When we launched the App Store less than four years ago, we never imagined that mobile apps would become the phenomenon they have, or that developers would create such an incredible selection of apps for iOS users.”

View the full press release here or below the break. Be sure to also read our run-down of the apps that Apple have featured in the new “all-time top” section and the trends they show.

Read more

Studio Neat, Makers of The Glif, Release Their First iOS App, Frames

When Thomas Gerhardt and Dan Provost set out to reinvent the market for tripod mounts and stands for iPhone in 2010 with The Glif, little did they know their idea would spur a new generation of creators and designers that seek out resources and funds for innovative iPhone-related projects through crowd-sourcing funding platform Kickstarter. Back when Kickstarter was still relatively “small” – the quotes are necessary here, as the site was already well known among creatives, but clearly not as popular as the service that’s now backing projects exceeding $2 million in funding – Studio Neat became an example in the tech and Apple communities of a great idea (tripod mounts for iPhone) combined with a fantastic everyday product (the iPhone’s camera) for a successful funding campaign. And Studio Neat, unlike others, even gave the whole fund-through-Kickstarter thing a second shot, coming back with an equally popular campaign – this time for an iPad stylus, The Cosmonaut. Both The Glif and The Cosmonaut turned from ideas and funding campaigns into commercially available products and feasible businesses, allowing Tom and Dan of Studio Neat to revamp their website and offer their iOS accessories directly to customers, tweaking The Glif’s package along the way with a Plus version that builds on the original vision, adding more iPhone camera-related goodness to the mix. Today, Studio Neat decides to try something new – not another Kickstarter campaign for a new iOS accessory, but a brand new iOS app available on the App Store called Frames.

Clearly meant to work best in conjunction with The Glif, Frames is an iPhone app to create stop motion and time-lapse movies with an intuitive interface. With a beautiful icon and an elegant dark design with thumbnail-based navigation, Frames makes it extremely easy to capture various “frames” – a sequence of still images – to play them back at a certain speed to achieve the effect seen in stop motion movies.

The app itself is fairly simple, and anyone will be able to pick it up immediately without necessarily being an expert in stop motion animations and editing. A main Projects view lets you create new videos and export them to the Camera Roll at 720p in a native format that can later be recognized by apps like iMovie (something you might want to consider as Frames can’t add music or text to your videos). Once in a project, you can scroll through frames at the bottom, and adjust the number of frames per second with a slider – you can go from 1 FPS up to 120 FPS. A Play button lets you roll the video so you can get an instant preview of what you’ve accomplished, whilst tapping on a + button opens the camera interface to add new stills to a project, choosing between stop motion mode (manual shutter) and time-lapse (automatic shutter: you set a time to lapse between stills, and the camera takes care of the rest).

The camera of Frames comes with a grid view, onion skinning, possibility of switching between rear and front-facing camera, AE/AF lock, and overall clear design that explains how many frames you’ve taken in a given amount of time very well.

I’ve been using Frames on my iPhone 4S, and I’m thoroughly impressed by how Studio Neat managed to turn stop motion into a streamlined process that takes advantage of the iPhone’s hardware to produce great results. Whilst you’d be able to achieve similar results with a video editing application if you know where to look and what to tweak, the focused approach of Frames (something that apps generally share) and its $2.99 price tag more than justify the purchase – personally, I can say I’ve been having fun making time lapse movies using Frames’ easy-to-understand menus and options, whereas a full-featured video editing app or manual process would have probably turned me away in frustration.

Frames is a “neat” utility to create stop motion movies without the complexity of regular video editing. You can get the app at $2.99 on the App Store.
Read more

Square Wants To Get Rid Of Old POS Systems With Its New Square Register App

Mobile payments company Square has today stepped up its game of disrupting payment services with its new Square Register app and service. Directly targeted at retailers, merchants and small business owners, this new iPad app is aimed at replacing the old clunky registers and point-of-sale (POS) systems with the infinitely more flexible and appealing iPad accompanied with the Square reader.

“I truly believe POS, as you know it today, is dead,” says Megan Quinn, director of products at Square. “This will bring Square to an entirely new, small-market audience (bricks-and-mortar stores).”

Integrating support for their existing Card Case app, Square Register can recognise when customers arrive at their store, as well as send the Card Case app information about the business for new customers who haven’t been before. The actual app itself has a main transaction screen that lists “favourite” items (this is completely customisable), but if there are thousands of items, that isn’t a problem either because there is also a list view available. The app has support for loyalty programs to reward loyal customers and customers don’t necessarily have to pay by card, with the app also supporting some cash drawers that can be connected up.

For the business owner or manager, Square Register can require a PIN for staff to access certain functions and custom permissions can be given to staff. The service also offers powerful analytical tools with interactive charts so you can view when the store is busiest and what days may be under performing. Square Register is available for free, with the standard 2.75% processing fee for all card transactions processed through Square, just the same as their existing apps.

[via TechCrunch, USA Today]

MacStories Reading List: February 26 – March 4

It’s been a transitional week for the Apple community, with pundits busy on arguing whether a Retina Display in the upcoming iPad 3 could mean Apple is getting ready to enable Retina resolutions on Macs as well, and just about everyone else being simply excited about Apple’s media event, scheduled for March 7th. And in between talks of new displays, Mountain Lion (again), and features we should see in iOS 6, Apple still managed to hit 25 billion downloads from the App Store with an updated list of all-time top apps.

A note on the system we’re now using to track and collect our Reading List archives. When we started the Reading List in January, we wrote “there’s some great writing on the Internet that we often can’t link to in our daily coverage, if only because there isn’t much we can add to an already excellent article”. On top of that, I’d like to add that there are some great authors on the Internet, and in particular in the Apple community, that we’d like to directly support with our weekly collections of links and excerpts. That is why, starting today, you’ll find an archive of every article ever appeared on MacStories’ Reading Lists on Readability.

With a paid option that gives back 70% of users’ contributions to the sites they read the most, we hope to make it easier than ever to find articles we have liked and collected, and to actively, economically contribute to the people behind those articles. You can find the official Readability iOS app in the App Store (with the aforementioned paid option available as in-app purchase), and our review here.

Obviously, you’ll still be able to use your favorite read-later or browser app of choice to consume our weekly Reading List. And as usual, on behalf of the entire MacStories team, I wish you a good reading. Read more

Apple Reveals New “All-Time Top Apps” Following 25 Billion Downloads

Last night, Apple reached the expected milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded from the App Store since the official opening in 2008. Whilst we’re waiting for the company to announce the winner of a $10,000 App Store gift card, Apple has updated its App Store page that lists the all-time top paid and free apps to reflect the changes occurred in the past 12 months. You may remember Apple posted a similar page in January of last year ahead of 10 billion downloads, and has been tweaking the entries ever since, keeping track of overall downloads in the App Store. We’ve compiled the charts (which include 25 apps each) below. Read more

Apple: 25 Billion Apps Have Been Downloaded From The App Store

Apple announced a short time ago that 25 billions apps have been downloaded from the App Store since it launched in mid-2008. Apple has updated their homepage with the above graphic and slogan of  “A billion thanks. 25 times over” and the App Store Twitter and Facebook accounts have also publicised the milestone. Interestingly, the graphic used by Apple varies depending on whether you are viewing an international version of Apple.com (such as Japan) or whether you see the standard US website.

Apple will announce within a few days, who the lucky winner of a $10,000 iTunes voucher will be. Users could enter the competition by either simply downloading an app or filling out a form on Apple’s website - the winner will be the person who downloaded the 25th billion app or the person who first filled out the form after the 24,999,999th app had been downloaded but before the 25th billion app.

In Apple’s previous App Store and iTunes competitions, Eddy Cue (Senior Vice President, Internet and Software Services) has called the winner and congratulated them on winning. Shortly after this has happened Apple releases a press statement announcing the download milestone and who the winner was. When Apple ran the competition to mark 10 billion apps downloaded, the winner initially hung up on Cue, thinking it was a scam call.

Apple Contributes a Half Million Jobs to the U.S.→

Apple Contributes a Half Million Jobs to the U.S.

As reported by AllThingsD, Apple has a new webpage depicting its substantial contribution to the U.S. workforce. Apple claims that according to a recent study by Analysis Group, the company had created roughly  304,000 U.S. jobs in a variety of fields across the entire United States. Apple also estimates a total of 210,000 iOS related jobs generated from the flourishing economy surrounding the App Store. Other U.S. occupations highlighted were Apple’s primarily full-time retail sales-force as well as the U.S. based Customer Support call centers. Follow the link for even more details and statistics about Apple’s successful job creation efforts.

We’ve created or supported more than 500,000 jobs for U.S. workers: from the engineer who helped invent the iPad to the delivery person who brings it to your door.

[Apple via AllThingsD]

Permalink