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Virgin America Names Jet “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” After Steve Jobs

The saying that Steve Jobs made popular with his 2005 Stanford commencement address, “Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry” has now (literally) made its way onto a Virgin America plane.

An Airbus A320 plane (tail number N845VA) that Virgin America owns and runs, has been named “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”, with the quote emblazoned on the front of the plane, as seen above. A Virgin America spokesperson explained to MacRumors that the name was chosen after an internal naming competition.

The quote originated from the 1970’s magazine The Whole Earth Catalogue as Steve Jobs noted in his commencement address:

On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

[Via MacRumors]

A5 Jailbreak Reaches One Million Downloads in 24 Hours [Updated]

According to developer and hacker Joshua Hill, the latest jailbreak for devices running Apple’s A5 processor has been downloaded more than one million times in one day, Cult of Mac reports. The new jailbreak – dubbed Absinthe – was released for Mac OS X on Friday after months of speculation as to whether it was possible to hack into Apple’s new CPU architecture. The Absinthe jailbreak supports the latest version of iOS, iOS 5.0.1; iOS 5 was released in October, and users of iPhone 4S and iPad 2 have been waiting for a fully untethered jailbreak solution compatible with their devices since then.

According to Cult of Mac, one million downloads were achieved on Mac OS X alone as a Windows version of the jailbreak was released after the initial 24 hours. As Alex Heath notes, this figure is noteworthy as it seems to confirm that interest in jailbreaking devices hasn’t died down after the release of iOS 5; the operating system introduced more than 200 new features for iPhone and iPad as we detailed back in October. If anything, it was iOS 5 itself that led developers to create new apps and tweaks that are taking advantage of the latest features offered by Apple such as Notification Center and Twitter integration.

To put the A5 jailbreak’s numbers into context: one million downloads were reached in 24 hours by JailbreakMe 3.0 as well when it came out for iOS 4 devices last summer. Currently, the Absinthe jailbreak is available for OS X and Windows machines over at Greenpois0n.com.

Update: With a tweet, MuscleNerd says that 205,000 new Cydia accounts were created by Sunday morning, suggesting that a large percentage of Absinthe early adopters were users who had jailbroken their devices in the past, thus likely already having a Cydia account. See update below.

Update #2: Whilst we assumed “new Cydia installs” referred to the amount of new accounts created last weekend, MuscleNerd has clarified the figure indicates how many times Cydia was launched on a unique A5 device.

Update #3: Cydia creator Saurik chimes in with more numbers, clarifying that 205,000 were the iPhone 4S units with Cydia until Sunday morning.

Update #4: And last, the Dev-Team has published a blog post with the official numbers since Friday morning:

  • 491,325 new iPhone 4,1 devices (4S)
  • 308,967 new iPad 2 devices
  • 152,940 previously jailbroken (at 4.x) iPad 2 devices

For a total of 953,232 new A5 jailbreaks in over three days. At this point, if the previous 1 million/24 hours figure is to be believed, it’s possible 1 million downloads actually happened in 24 hours, but many users couldn’t immediately run Absinthe due to the server problems that affected Greenpois0n.com.

Preview: Analog 1.1 Launches Tomorrow With New Photo Options, Filters

When I reviewed Realmac’s Analog, a lightweight photo sharing app, back in September, I was impressed by the execution of a simple concept – applying filters to your photos to share them online – that was made popular on iOS by apps like Instagram and Camera+. From my review:

Analog offers 20 filters, which have been carefully researched by Realmac over the past months to make sure each one of them has its own personality (something we know that matters in this kind of apps) and will make your photos look great. Now I’m no photography expert, but I can recognize a nice filter when I see it. Analog’s filters range from washed out (Hefga, Golden Hour) to black & white (Noir, Dark Knight, Bromide — three B&W variations with different grey scales and contrast) to contrasty (Memory, XProcess) and other interesting options that I can’t quite classify (Kyoto, Hawkeye). Analog’s filters look good, and I definitely like the choice of 20 different filters offered by Realmac. You might argue some of them look similar to each other, but the developers have also implemented a system that ensures scratches, noise and other effects are always randomized on each processing session.

I had a chance to try out a pre-release version of Analog 1.1, which is coming out tomorrow, and it looks like those who liked the workflow and polished design of version 1.0 might have to hit the Mac App Store’s Update section as soon as the app goes live. Analog 1.1 improves on several aspects of the first version: performances and memory management have been improved, making the app snappier and more responsive when adding filters and switching between edited and non-edited versions of a photo.

The update will bring three new filters (I tested them, they look good), two new borders, and, more importantly, a new slider to adjust the intensity of your chosen filter. In my tests, this has turned out to be quite handy to manually refine the amount of modifications I wanted to make to an image. Obviously, Analog 1.1 retains the filter randomization capabilities of the previous version (so that scratches, noise and other effects are randomized on each processing session) and all the other features that made Analog 1.0 intuitive and fun to use.

Analog 1.0 is currently available on the Mac App Store at $6.99. Analog 1.1 will be available tomorrow (January 24th) as a free update for existing Analog customers.

An Experiment with Comics, iBooks 2.0 and iBooks Author

Last week, Apple unveiled its iBooks Textbooks initiative alongside a new desktop application for OS X, iBooks Author, aimed at offering a single solution for authors willing to edit and design iBooks for the iBookstore or manual distribution through exporting options. Some limitations of iBooks Author have sparked a debate that we’ve covered extensively on MacStories last week, also through articles in our Reading List.

Proprietary file format controversies aside, it was already clear that iBooks Author would undoubtedly facilitate the creation of textbooks and eBooks heavily relying on graphics with its easy-to-use align tools and familiar interface.

Today, cartoon and t-shirt designer Richard Stevens has published an iBooks adaptation of its popular webcomic series that’s been entirely converted and tweaked using iBooks Author as an initial experiment.

Waking Up With the Diesel Sweeties is a tiny little free ebook for the iPad. It contains all my comics from last month with a few tweaks, formatted in iBooks Author. This version only works on the iPad. It’s not in the iBookstore, so you’ll need to download the file and sync it to your iPad.

The eBook is available for download through Dropbox, and it can be installed on an iPad running iBooks 2. You can manually sync the file from iTunes to your iPad, or use an app like GoodReader to download it directly on your device and open it in iBooks. Whilst Stevens’ first iBook is an experiment, it shows the possibilities opened by iBooks 2 and iBooks Author: the book fully supports iBooks’ new annotations, highlights and study cards, and you can pinch on pages to access iBooks’ new navigation with thumbnails displayed at the bottom of the screen.

I wrote last week that I wouldn’t be surprised to see iBooks Author-based eBooks be used for something else other than regular books – for instance, I’ve heard more than one developer say that they’d be interested in using the software to create interactive manuals and help tools for their apps, among other things. iBooks Author may have been criticized and there’s still a lot of features Apple has to clarify and implement (especially for independent authors and publishers), but the interactivity and WebKit-based functionalities offered by the format look more promising every day.

Review: Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad

As I mentioned in my post about new apps and tools for 2012, I’ve been playing around with a Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad, which is available at $69 through Logitech’s website or $59 on Amazon. The Tablet Keyboard connects to the iPad (or any iOS device) wirelessly over Bluetooth, comes with built-in batteries, a carrying case that can be turned into a stand for the iPad, and media keys that trigger some of the tablet’s functions such as audio controls and Spotlight. Here are my impressions so far.

Normally, I wouldn’t have much to say about a keyboard except for “it’s comfortable” or “I can’t type anything on this”. Fortunately, the Logitech keyboard for iPad fits into the former category, with a sturdy plastic design that feels “premium” when compared to other keyboards available on the market, a good keyboard layout, and a carrying case that’s not as premium as the device but certainly gets its job done. Below, the Italian layout of my Logitech Tablet Keyboard:

As you can see, the keyboard isn’t necessarily “standard” as it’s been designed to include iOS-specific keys like shortcuts for Spotlight search, Home button, volume controls, slideshows, media playback and screen lock/unlock controls. The basic layout is the one of a Mac keyboard, and the function keys can be activated by holding fn. Obviously, this isn’t as intuitive as simply reaching out to the screen with your finger to adjust volume, but if you’re going to work with your iPad using the keyboard, you’ll want to know it’s possible to do more than just type.

Which brings me to this: why would you want a physical keyboard for your iPad when the system one is more than acceptable? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working mainly from my iPad in the past month, and I found a physical keyboard to be a must-have if you’re serious about getting real, regular writing done in a text editor or word processor. iOS’ multitouch keyboard is fine to fire off quick email replies and tweets (and iOS 5’s new split keyboard helps a lot for “general typing” in every day usage), but I still can’t give up on the allure of plastic QWERTY for long-form content and serious email time. Logitech’s iPad offering fits nicely in my workflow (and Tom Bihn Ristretto Bag): I can get it out of its case, turn it on, wait a few seconds for the iPad to connect (once paired, the Bluetooth connection process is very fast on iPad 2) and start writing. Read more

MacStories Reading List: January 15 - January 22

At MacStories, we strive to produce great content every day. From news to stories and app reviews, we care about quality content to deliver to you, our readers, with insight and our personal analysis every day. But we can’t cover everything. And 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.

Today we are introducing MacStories Reading List, a weekly selection of great stories from Authors that you should read. Every Sunday, we’ll publish a collection of links that we think you should read, such as the ones below. A very simple format for the great writing that is happening in the Apple community.

Even better, you can subscribe to the Reading List in your favorite RSS reader or Instapaper. We have created an Instapaper account dedicated to the Reading List, so head over this link to get the Instapaper feed for the links we’ll post here every week. You’ll also be able to able to find us in Instapaper if you’re already following @macstoriesnet and linked the service to your Twitter account.

On behalf of the entire MacStories team, I wish you a good reading. - Federico Viticci

–

World of Apple’s Alex Brooks reflects on his past few years of blogging, and ultimately decides that quality content, not the page views alone, is what matters. A must-read.

The site I want to read and will produce will post thoughtful commentary on Apple. The kind of commentary and prose that that’s sensible, articulate and adds value to a wider discussion happening across the internet. There are already a handful of sites just like this, authors who have in some cases taken grave risk to quit their day to day lives to produce content just like this. I value those sites, I enjoy reading their content.

- Reflecting on Change, Alex Brooks (@alexbrooks)

Every month or so an analyst comes out and claims the iPad can’t be included in the same market share numbers of PCs, and vice versa. Asymco’s Horace Dediu collects actual numbers and puts things in perspective, revealing the true effect Android and iOS devices are having on the PC market.

This last view corresponds to the data in the first graph (line chart). If iOS and Android are added as potential substitutions for personal computing, the share of PCs suddenly collapses to less than 50%. It also suggests much more collapse to come.

- The rise and fall of personal computing, Horace Dediu (@asymco)

How has the App Store third-party ecosystem evolved in the past four years? Is there still much of a difference between smaller developers who actually want to charge for their apps, and bigger studios that have adopted the “freemium” or in-app advertising models? App Cubby’s David Barnard has an insightful article from an indie developer’s perspective that’s worth reading and reflecting upon.

Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize user value/entertainment. It’d be a shame if the mobile software industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.

- Free and Low-Cost Apps, David Barnard (@drbarnard)

Wandering Coder’s Pierre Lebeaupin makes an excellent case for iOS needing some sort of file management system at this point. You can disagree with him, but it’s undeniable the majority of users who want to use iPhones and iPads in a professional environment are still working with documents, and iOS doesn’t offer a native, integrated way for easily managing and searching them.

Let us contrast that with another situation. My father is a high school teacher; for the last 20+ years he has been working using computers, preparing teaching notes, transparent slides to project, diagrams, tests and their answers, student average note calculation documents, etc. on his Macs (and before that on an Apple ][e). He shares some of these with his colleagues (and back) and sometimes prints on school printers so it’s not like he is working in complete isolation, but he cannot rely on a supporting infrastructure and has to ensure and organize storage of these teaching material documents himself. He will often need to update these when it’s time to teach the same subject one year later, because the test needs to be changed so that it’s not the exact same as last year, because the curriculum is changing this year, because the actual class experience of using them the previous year led him to think of improvements to make the explanation clearer, because this year he’s teaching a class with a different option so they have less hours of his course (but the same curriculum…), etc. Can you imagine him using solely an iPad, or even solely an imaginary iOS 5 notebook, to do so? I can’t.

- iOS lacks a document filing system, Pierre Lebeaupin (@wanderingcoder)

An amazingly detailed and in-depth overview of the iOS gaming scene with a series of post-mortems and sales figures for “blockbuster” and smaller iOS games. If you only read one article about mobile gaming this week, make it this one.

Eighteen months ago, when I left Ubisoft to start an independent game studio and focus on making my own games, I looked online a bit to get an idea of how much income I could expect to make as an indie. At Ubisoft I used to work on big AAA console games, and I had some figures in mind, but I knew they wouldn’t be relevant for my new life: $20M budgets, teams of 200 hundred people, 3 million sales at $70 per unit… I knew being an indie developer would be completely different, but I had very little information about how different it would be.

Angry Birds had taken off, Plants vs. Zombies was already a model, Doodle Jump was a good example of success, and soon after I started my “indie” life, Cut the Rope was selling a million copies a week. But except for what I call the “jackpots,” there were very few public stories or numbers on the web, and this meant we were a bit in the dark when we started SQUIDS. I have been tracking figures since then, and I’m writing this article to share what I’ve learned with my fellow indie dev buddies who might be in the same position I was, a year and a half ago.

- Money And The App Store: A Few Figures That Might Help An Indie Developer, Emeric Thoa

Dov Frankel explains how the iPhone’s mute switch and audio controls really work.

On the last episode of The Talk Show, Gruber and Dan Benjamin discussed the design tradeoffs at length. During the discussion, they mentioned that you can set the iPad’s volume level to 0, but you can’t with the volume buttons on the iPhone. I understand the difference, and it’s something it took me a little while to figure out, way back in the early days of the first-generation iPhone.

- Different Levels, Dov Frankel (@MrDov)

Last week, Apple unveiled its iBooks Textbooks project as the result of deals with major US publishers that have agreed to release digital versions of their textbooks in a new iBooks format. Brian Lam has an interesting interview with former Apple intern Joseph Peters, who might have fueled Apple’s interest in textbooks back in 2008.

In 2008, Apple had its iContest in its Town Hall building. The iContest is sort of an American Idol for great ideas that gives interns a chance to present their best thoughts to executives. Here, Joseph Peters and some friends outlined the idea of bringing Textbooks to iTunes, before the iPad even existed to the rest of us. They won a set of Macbook Airs for their idea.

- Open-Mindedness, Brian Lam (@blam)

Much has been said and written about Apple’s decision to make iBooks Author a proprietary file format that only allows for selling eBooks into the iBookstore. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber looks at the “issue” from Apple’s perspective.

Glazman looks at these new iBooks books and sees a nonstandard proprietary format. Apple looks at these new iBooks and sees layouts and design features that no other e-book platform offers today. One man’s nonstandard is another man’s competitive differentiation.

- On the Proprietary Nature of the iBooks Author File Format, John Gruber (@gruber)

Egg Freckles’ Thomas Brand looks back at Apple’s platform history and how the company has built its success on directly controlling the user experience in every possible way, from content sources to delivering software to the end user.

The iPhone may have been destined to become the world’s most popular smartphone due to the amazing multitouch technology it introduced, but Apple’s control over the iOS operating system, Xcode developer environment, and App Store distribution model have made the iPhone the central member of a new application ecosystem that can’t be beat.

Yesterday’s introduction of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author were significant announcements because they complete the platform pyramid Apple needs to enter the Textbook Market with the same control as its previous successes.

- The iBooks Platform, Thomas Brand (@ThomasBrand)

Macworld’s Serenity Caldwell follows up on Apple’s iBooks Author announcements and notes how authors welcome Apple’s entry in the digital publishing industry, but are still looking forward to a broader ePub-compatible publishing tool with advanced features, a polished interface, and Apple’s refined user experience.

It’s crazy that we have so few options after five years: The ebooks market is clearly making money. If Apple’s release of an authoring tool has shown anything, it’s that the demand is certainly out there. The publishing industry needs a Dreamweaver or Hype-type ePub application—one that won’t be limited by EULAs, or insistent on proprietary formats.

I’ve already written a wish-list for my perfect app; had I the talent, the skills, and the time to build it, I’d be half-tempted to try coding it myself. Silly, of course, but when it comes down to it, I just want to be able to make awesome ebooks. It shouldn’t take two weeks and six programs to create a book with images and interactive content.

- Holding out for an ePub hero, Serenity Caldwell (@settern)

Fraser Speirs, who knows a thing or two about iPad in schools, thinks that textbooks aren’t necessarily the future, but a way to get there.

Apple already revolutionized education when it invented the iPad. While iBooks textbooks are a bridge from the past to the future—and we do need a way to get to the future—they are not that future. If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.

- Apple’s announcements further iPad revolution in education, Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs)

How does Apple’s iBooks Textbooks initiative look from a teacher’s perspective? Kieran Healy’s post on the subject is insightful and detailed.

Apple’s proposed model would kill the used market, dead. The presentation emphasized that once you buy a book you always own it, and you can download it to any new devices you buy. But a corollary is that once you’re done with the book you can’t give or sell it to anyone else. So, at least initially, publishers can charge much less for their textbooks and make it up on volume. That’s fine by me if students end up paying less, though I immediately wonder whether the next step would be for publishers to modularize the books. Instead of your one giant Bio or Calc or Econ book for $14.99 rather than $129.99, you can have various shorter books available for the same price, but have to buy all of them over the course of a year or semester—like 19th century serial novels. This would likely be pitched to faculty as allowing for greater flexibility in curriculum construction, but again it’s the students who end up paying for the books.

- Apple for the Teacher, Kieran Healy (@kjhealy)

Screen Sharing For Alfred Brings VNC To Your Fingertips

Screen Sharing is a feature built into Mac OS X for remotely controlling another computer through the use of virtual network computing (VNC). Apple’s native screen sharing client is buried in the operating system making it nearly impossible to find the app when you actually need it. On top of that, it really lacks basic features like being able to store a connection for future use. Due to these shortcomings, most people turn to third party applications for managing their VNC connections. A quick search in the Mac App Store will turn up some pretty great options including Edovia’s Screens. Although apps like these work extremely well, not everyone wants to spend that much to easily connect to a remote computer. This is why I created the Screen Sharing for Alfred extension. I wanted Alfred to be able to function as my VNC client and really extend the functionality of the Apple’s native Screen Sharing app.

Screen Sharing for Alfred adds the ability to store information about VNC connections and quickly access them with a simple keyboard command. It is written in a beautiful fusion of shell scripting and AppleScript so it is fast, efficient, and capable of interacting with the user through AppleScript’s GUI prompts. It also incorporates David Ferguson’s genius Extension Updater system in case any new features are added in the future. For those unfamiliar with Updater, it is an extension for Alfred that allows developers to make bug fixes and add new features to released extensions – then when users run Updater, it will download the latest version of any extensions that have updates available. Read more

A5 Jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 Released

The long-awaited jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, both devices running Apple’s A5 processor, has been released. As posted by hacker p0sixninja a few minutes ago on Twitter – p0sixninja and other developers including Cydia’s Saurik contributed to the release of the latest jailbreak tool – users can head over greenpois0n.com to download the OS X version. A Windows version is said to be “coming soon” and, at the moment of writing this, greenpois0n seems to be down/very slow.

The A5 jailbreak, teased in the past weeks, comes with a graphical user interface called “Absinthe” that guides users through the process of jailbreaking A5 devices running iOS 5.0 and iOS 5.0.1. Absinthe has been developed by the Chronic Dev Team, whereas the iPhone Dev Team has created a CLI (command line interface) for more advanced users and diagnostic purposes. As usual with jailbreak releases, a backup of your data is advised and you should probably wait a few hours before rushing in to jailbreak your devices, so that any possible bugs left will be fixed.

The A5 jailbreak is available now, it is an “untethered jailbreak” and it’s currently out for OS X users on greenpois0n.com. [image via]