Apple’s Phil Schiller took the stage today at Apple’s media event in San Francisco to officially unveil the iPhone 5, Apple’s major upgrade iPhone family. As widely rumored, the iPhone 5 features a taller display to visualize more content, a thinner profile, and a new metal backplate. While similar in the overall aesthetic to the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, the changes made to the iPhone 5’s body construction, display, and glass design represent a major change from the industrial design first introduced in 2010. Read more
iPhone 5: Our Complete Overview
The Numbers and Facts From Apple’s September 12 Event
As usual with every Apple product announcement, keynotes start with “state of the business” introduction that, through various numbers and facts, reveals how the company is doing in several areas such as retail, the App Store, and hardware sales. At today’s media event in San Francisco, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared some interesting details on a variety of subjects.
- The new Apple retail store in Barcelona is made of limestone from a local quarry.
- Apple is opening a new retail store in the 13th country (Sweden) this Friday.
- There are 380 Apple retail stores worldwide.
- Customers’ response to Mountain Lion has been “fantastic”. Seven million copies have been downloaded to date.
- 17 million iPads have been sold in the last quarter (April-June).
- More iPads were sold than any other PC maker sold of their entire line-up.
- 84 million iPads have been sold to date.
- iPad’s share of the tablet market went up from 62% last year to 68% in spite of the competition.
- iPad accounts for 91% of web traffic from tablets.
- 94% of Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPads.
- The App Store has now over 700,000 apps. 250,000 are made exclusively for the iPad.
- 90% of all apps are downloaded every month.
- More than 100 apps are downloaded per customer on average.
- 400 million iOS devices have been sold through June 2012.
For more coverage, check out our September 12 news hub and follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter.
“iPhone 5”, “New iPod Touch and Nano” Appear On Apple’s Website
As noted by 9to5Mac, search queries for “iPhone 5” on Apple’s website are returning links to press releases and product pages that haven’t been released yet. With a media event scheduled for later today in San Francisco, it only makes sense that Apple is getting ready to update its website with information on the new iPhone, rumored to be a major upgrade to the iPhone 4S.
There’s been some speculation as to whether Apple would call it “iPhone 5” being the device the sixth iteration, but, at this point, there seems to be little doubt in regards to the monicker chosen by Apple. It could be a well-played “fake leak” orchestrated by the company, but it seems unlikely.
Other search queries for iPod Nano and iPod Touch reveal similar results, with links press releases and webpages not available yet.
This isn’t the first time Apple let product names and details slip a few hours ahead of media events. Last October, the “iPhone 4S” name, image, and release date briefly appeared on Apple’s Japanese website before they were pulled.
As noted by MacRumors, different search queries are also returning results for a press release called “Apple Unveils New iTunes”, dated September 12, 2012.
Favstar Redesigns→
Favstar Redesigns
Favstar is one of my favorite web services. Alongside Evernote, Simplenote, Cue, and Dropbox, it has become an essential part of my daily workflow. Today, Favstar has launched a major redesign that will surely come in handy in monitoring tweets from tomorrow’s Apple event.
Favstar works with Twitter. By default, it monitors the “faves” and retweets your tweets receive, by which users, and when. It then provides a clean interface to access these statistics, and, aside from “ego-boosting” purposes, it can actually be a great tool to see the kind of tweets and content your followers like and engage with the most. However, if you decide to unlock the Pro functionalities for $30 every six months, you’ll gain the option to give the “tweet of the day award”, see older tweets in your timeline, see retweet details, tweak your profile, get custom notifications, and a lot more. For me, it’s 30 bucks well spent on a service that has enabled to understand Twitter besides wasting time making fun of Samsung.
Matthew Panzarino has a good overview at The Next Web about today’s redesign:
The tweet view now lets you see the profile pics of those who have retweeted/fav’d you, which is standard, or provides you with a detailed analysis of the first 1k retweets of a tweet, with the account, its followers, a profile pic and text profile for reference. This can be cool as it shows which accounts are ‘first responders’ in retweeting you, allowing you to perhaps reciprocate with a follow of your own.
The old Favstar was feeling a little long in the tooth, and the new version looks great both in terms of design and features. The new Favstar offers more data and simpler navigation; the mobile website has been updated to a new design as well, sporting a panel-based layout that’s a terrific improvement over the old Favstar. I use Favstar’s mobile site every day through Tweetbot (double-tap on the Profile tab), and this is a welcome improvement that doesn’t sacrifice any functionality of the desktop site.
You can sign up for Favstar here.
Diet Coda 1.1→
Diet Coda 1.1
Earlier today, Panic released a nice update to Diet Coda, its iPad version of popular web development app for the Mac, Coda. I’m not a web developer, but in my initial look at the app I appreciated the workflow it enabled to copy URLs for images uploaded to my web server.
Diet Coda, finally, allows me to copy the public URL for images uploaded to my FTP server. That’s a small feature, but you’d be surprised to know how many FTP iPad apps end up lacking it amidst dozens of other “power user options”. I wish Diet Coda would let me upload from the Camera Roll — hopefully that’s coming in a future update.
And in version 1.1, uploads have indeed been enabled. By tapping on a + button in the upper right corner of the UI, you can choose to upload photos or videos from your Camera Roll. Before uploading, you’ll be asked of you want to convert a .png file (such as an iOS screenshot) to .jpg, or if you want to keep it as it is. If you’ve been looking for a way to upload images from the iPad for, say, a mobile blogging workflow, this is the Diet Coda update to check out (too bad the app doesn’t support CDN providers such as Rackspace yet).
Also in this version, among other things, there’s an option to display folders on top, a toggle to show hidden files, a light theme, and code indentation as you type.
Diet Coda 1.1 is a substantial update that improves on many aspects of version 1.0. Check out the app at $19.99 on the App Store.
Take Screenshots At 1x and 2x Resolutions Simultaneously On Retina Macs→
Take Screenshots At 1x and 2x Resolutions Simultaneously On Retina Macs
If you have a new MacBook Pro with Retina display, you’ve likely stumbled upon the issue of sharing screenshots that are too large in size for friends or coworkers who don’t have a Retina Mac yet. Or, perhaps you’ve wanted to be able to take both 1x and 2x screenshots for, say, a blog post served to Retina and non-Retina devices.
RetinaCapture is a new, free utility for Mountain Lion that does just that: it enables you to easily take crisp screenshots at both resolutions, at the same time. On a Retina Mac, just fire up the app, and choose whether you want your screenshot to be at 1x, 2x, or both. You can take a normal screenshot, timed screenshot, capture a window or a portion of the screen. Hit the button, and save your image. If you’re saving 1x and 2x files at the same time, the app will offer two naming schemes to name your images correctly. Either at 1x or 2x, screenshots will always be crisp and detailed.
RetinaCapture is available here for free. As a side note, if you’re not on a Retina Mac, you can test the app’s 2x mode by enabling HiDPI using Quartz Debug.
The Reality Check Of Google’s New YouTube App
In an unsurprising move considering Apple’s upcoming iOS 6 update, Google released an official YouTube app for iPhone last night. Announced on the YouTube blog, the app is available for free on the App Store, and it runs natively on the iPhone; according to The New York Times, an iPad version is also in the works.
I have taken the YouTube app for a spin, and I was quite impressed with what Google accomplished in this first version. While not excellent in terms of performances, the key to this first release of YouTube for iOS is access.
One of the most controversial aspects of the former, pre-installed YouTube client for iOS was that, as Google started monetizing the YouTube platform with “official” videos from channels like VEVO, the pre-installed iOS client couldn’t display such videos due to a lack of agreement between Apple and Google in regards to ads shown to the users. On the standard desktop YouTube website, users could watch, say, music videos from official channels because the company embedded banners or pre-roll ads to monetize; on iOS devices, official videos were omitted from search results, and links to these videos would return the infamous “this video is not available on mobile” error message. As Google goes free from Apple’s restrictions with standalone apps, this is about to change. Read more
Interactive Fiction In The iOS Age: A Text-Based Love Story
It all started with an episode of “The Big Bang Theory”. Protagonist Dr. Sheldon Cooper sits in front of his laptop, his face distorted by heavy concentration. He’s playing a game. Suddenly, he starts yelling at Leonard, his roommate: “It says there’s a troll!” Leonard answers: “Type ‘Hit troll with axe’”. Silence. “Oh yes that worked!”, Sheldon yells with a wide smile on his face. A few episodes later, the title of the game is revealed: ZORK.
At that point, I was curious. I googled the title, and just a few minutes later I was lost in the world of Interactive Fiction (hence abbreviated as IF) which is the official genre description of games commonly known as text-based adventure games.
After hours of research, I found out that although the first IF games were released in the early ’80s and quickly decreased in popularity due to the rise of graphics-based games in the middle-80s, the genre is not dead at all. IF has a vibrant and very active community of gamers, journalists, story writers, and modern implementations of any kind to emulate and play IF games on any imaginable platform. There are even modern development tools and languages available to write your own IF games.
In this post, I will discuss all these topics: the history of IF, the community and its current state, and how to play and develop IF — with a focus on IF and Apple’s operating systems – Mac OS X and iOS. The following paragraphs will be full of external links leading you to download resources, information wikis about IF, interesting essays and blog posts about the community, and all kinds of software you could use to play and write IF. Read more
Google Drive App with Document Editing Now Available
The official Google Drive app for iOS, available for free on the App Store, has been updated today to include support for editing documents directly on an iPhone or iPad. A major new feature of the app, users can now create new documents, edit them, format them, and share them with collaborators; the interface is reminiscent of Apple’s Pages word processor, with a formatting bar at the top to make text bold, italic, or underlined, insert lists, format paragraphs, and more.
In my tests, I have noticed the typing speed of the app’s cursor isn’t nearly as smooth as Apple’s Pages. Somehow, it feels like writing text inside a web view – there is a small delay between hitting a key and seeing a letter appear on screen – in spite Drive’s native nature. The aforementioned delay in typing is substantial enough to be noticed immediately and, I believe, could become an annoyance for many over time. However, it is quite impressive to see how Google managed to integrate live editing inside a document: if you’re collaborating with someone, you’ll see a green cursor appear on screen, typing words in real-time. You can also try this by opening the same document with your account on multiple devices and see what happens.
The formatting I applied on the iPhone and iPad correctly carried over to the web interface, which, obviously, still has more features, such as image uploading and easier link insertion. On iOS, you can’t paste images from, say, the Photos app onto Drive’s editing window; at least, however, Google implemented a font-picking menu with possibility to choose text and background color.
Also noteworthy in this update is the option to move files and delete them. Photos and videos can be uploaded directly from the iOS Camera roll (you can also create new ones with a Camera menu) and, if you use presentations, you should see richer animations and speaker notes (I haven’t been able to test this feature).
Overall, while not as fluid and responsive as Apple’s Pages, Drive’s document editing offers some solid online collaboration functionalities and decent formatting options. Personally, I don’t use Drive for file storage, so I was only interested in checking out the document editing aspect, and I didn’t came away disappointed by it. I wish that in a future update Google will figure out a way to integrate online editing while improving typing responsiveness, which isn’t that great right now.