“Keep Looking, Don’t Settle”

Three years ago, I didn’t know what to do with my life. University wasn’t really for me, and I had just been fired from a job I didn’t like anyway. As I stood for weeks at a point where I needed to figure out how to survive without going back to my parents asking for help, it hit me: I could try writing about Apple for a few months and maybe someone was going to like the things I had to say and maybe I could make a living out of that. I decided I was going to do what I always loved: discussing technology.

I’m 23 now, and I write about Apple products every day. I don’t run a huge news site, my English is far from perfect, and I never met Steve Jobs. I never will. Yet somehow, I feel like I must thank him for making it possible for a guy with an iPhone in his pocket to turn a passion into a business that seems to be enjoyed by a few readers every day. Something I do believe in. That gets me out of bed in the morning. That makes me fight with my girlfriend sometimes, because I should care less about news reporting and spend a little more time with her in the evening.

Steve Jobs was – is – a visionary genius of our time, a leader, an artist and a man who firmly believed in what he loved, as well as the things he didn’t like.

This personal, brief and sincere “thank you” isn’t about the qualities of Steve Jobs. We all know those stories. For those who don’t, now it’s a good time to start reading.

I thank Steve Jobs for creating products that let me stay up at 5 am, writing. I thank Steve Jobs because he was right: the only way to do great work is to do what you love. And I know I am.

Thank you Steve.

Steve Jobs: 1955 - 2011

Apple:

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.
Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

We’ll miss you Steve. On behalf of everyone at MacStories, thank you.

Siri Example Phrases→

Siri Example Phrases

Erica Sadun at TUAW says they’ve tracked down a series of example phrases for the iPhone 4S’ voice assistant, Siri. The list of “Apple-supplied examples” includes categories like Alarms, Friends, Messages, and Notes. The “Email” commands are the ones that intrigued me the most:

- Email Lisa about the trip

- Email Jennifer about the change in plans

- New email to Susan Park

- Mail Dad about the rent check

- Email Dr. Manning and say I got the forms, thanks

- Mail Lisa and Jason about the party and say I had a great time

In the first two examples, I assume Siri will start composing a new email message with “trip” and “change in plans” in the Subject field. That’s also assuming Siri interprets “about” as the subject of “email” – which would make sense. But the last phrase is where I think Siri will really prove its potential – chaining different fields and multiple strings of text together. You see, the last phrase contains a command (mail), two Address Book contacts (Lisa and Jason), a subject (about the party) and the message (I had a great time). The examples Apple ran yesterday on stage were rather simple, albeit still impressive, and provided some context into Siri’s artificial intelligence.

What I’m really curious about at this point is the chaining of multiple commands – if I had an assistant in real life, I imagine I’d ask her to “schedule a meeting with Jason then call Chris and check on my schedule for Friday”. Will Siri be able to go back and forth between multiple commands from a single question? Perhaps something a little simpler than my example above? Will it support basic if/then operations? I guess we’ll have to wait for a real hands-on to find out.

In the meantime, check out the full list of examples over at TUAW.

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Real Racing’s “Party Play” To Bring Split Screen Multiplayer with AirPlay Mirroring

One of the lesser publicised new features coming in iOS 5 is AirPlay Mirroring, a new functionality that enables an app to connect to an Apple TV and mirror its contents on to the connected TV. It effectively allows users to show their iPad or iPhone screen on a TV without the HDMI cable as is currently required. Back in June, Apple’n’Apps posted a video of how it worked and Engadget showed off Angry Birds Rio HD and Real Racing 2 HD being played on a TV through AirPlay Mirroring.

In June Firemint announced that it will be bringing an optimised AirPlay experience to the app, and today they are expanding upon that announcement, revealing ‘Party Play’. Using AirPlay and wireless local multiplayer, ‘Party Play’ in Real Racing 2 will enable up to 4 players to play together in a split screen match streamed to a TV through AirPlay.

The only downside is that it will require a host player to be using an iPad 2 or the newly announced iPhone 4S (this is due to the requirement of the A5 processor when using AirPlay Mirroring). The other players can be using any other iOS device that supports Real Racing 2 or Real Racing 2 HD - you can even have a mix of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. Firemint is also promising that the update including ‘Party Play’ will also come with “gorgeous graphical enhancements that make use of the iPad 2 & iPhone 4S A5 processor”.

Jump the break to view a promo video of Real Racing 2’s ‘Party Play’ mode.

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Sparrow 1.4 Gets CloudApp Integration, Pull to Refresh

Sparrow, the minimal email client for the Mac that recently gained with full Lion compatibility, received a new update in the Mac App Store, this time adding native integration with file sharing service CloudApp, a “pull to refresh” gesture to check for new messages, and a number of fixes and improvements aimed at enhancing the email experience and make it faster and more stable.

With CloudApp support, users are now able to drag & drop files into Sparrow’s compose window, and have the app automatically upload them to CloudApp and insert a clickable link in the message. Once authenticated with your CloudApp account in Sparrow’s preferences, every time you’d like to send an attachment through CloudApp, you won’t need to have CloudApp installed on your Mac: Sparrow will directly communicate with CloudApp’s servers and upload the file for you. The UI for this action is very simple – the top section of the message is a CloudApp “drop zone”, while the lower part at the bottom is for classic email attachments as explained by the developers in this article. There is a new cloud indicator in the top toolbar of the compose window to show the status of an upload, which will turn blue after it’s complete. Overall, CloudApp integration is well done, simple and useful if you share with CloudApp on a daily basis.

Sparrow 1.4 also comes with the “pull to refresh” gesture made popular by Loren Brichter’s Tweetie on the iPhone years ago, and later implemented by thousands of other App Store apps. In Sparrow, you can pull the inbox to check for new messages, and whilst I don’t think I’ll ever use this functionality as I like my email client to stay in the background and refresh every few minutes automatically, I assume some people who want to manually check for new messages will like this option.

As usual with every Sparrow update, there’s a series of bug fixes and improvements under the hood. Sparrow now syncs and sends emails faster than before, and Gmail-like reverse threads have been implemented in the conversation view. Sparrow is now compatible with Zoho and Lotus Domino, it’s got a new draft management system and the mail database has been improved, too.

Sparrow 1.4 can be considered a minor update, but it’ll make those who rely on CloudApp for their file sharing needs more efficient when dealing with email. You can get Sparrow 1.4 on the Mac App Store.

Apple’s iPhone Event: More Details And Some Things We Missed

As with every Apple event and keynote, there is a lot of information disseminated in a short period of time. Whilst we have already covered most of the information covered in yesterday’s iPhone event (just scroll the MacStories.net homepage to see how much there was), it’s time to have a roundup of what we missed and add some more details on information that we only briefly mentioned previously.

The iPhone 4S Camera

Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch has an excellent recap of the new and improved camera featured in the iPhone 4S. If you want a really in-depth understanding of all the features of it, be sure to jump over and read his article. The key points to take away though, are that it has an 8 megapixel camera (up from 5 MP that the iPhone 4 has) and can record 1080p video (the iPhone 4 could only handle 720p). Those two specifications are clearly the headline grabbers, but arguably more important is the improved sensor from Omnivision in the camera.

Apple claims this sensor features “next-generation backside illumination” which allows 73% more light and more light on the sensor means better quality images. Apple has posted some unedited iPhone 4S photos that show how great pictures can look, and they are certainly a notch above the quality of iPhone 4 photos. When Phil Schiller spoke at the event yesterday, he made note of how the sensor was “1/3rd faster”, and as Coldewey notes, this likely refers to the speed at which images can be processed. With the combination of the powerful A5 processor, new sensor and improved GPU, the iPhone 4S could be up to a second faster than other smartphones at processing an image.

The most important part of a camera is… the photographer — but right after that is the lens. And the lens of the iPhone 4 was already pretty solid for a camera phone: F/2.8 (apparently limited to F/3) at about 30mm equivalent focal length. The new one is f/2.4, about half a stop better, which doesn’t sound like much but at this point of the aperture scale counts for a lot. It’s a pretty big increase in the total amount of light hitting the sensor.

If you’ve ever tried taking a video with the iPhone 4 when in motion, you’ll have noticed how shaky the footage can turn out to be. The iPhone 4S features real-time stabilisation, and whilst not much is known about how it works, Coldewey presumes it will be “electronic stabilisation based on live image analysis” thanks to the A5’s power. We won’t really know how well this works until people try it out for themselves, but Apple has posted a demo of the new feature.

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The (Big) Numbers Apple Touted At Their iPhone Event

At yesterday’s iPhone event, Tim Cook took to the stage and as he has done at previous events, he gave the audience an overview of Apple’s business. He ran through various statistics of how the iPhone, iPad, Mac and other aspects of Apple’s business are doing. The numbers he gave were clearly chosen very carefully to shine the best possible light on Apple and were an important premise to the first Apple keynote in which he presides as CEO. But regardless of how carefully chosen, its clear that Apple is doing exceptionally well, virtually across its entire business.

We’ve reviewed the keynote and laid out all the key statistics he showed off into each of Apple’s product categories, so make sure to jump the break to view them all.

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iPhone 4S: An Interplay of Hardware and Software

Here’s a quick thought about the new iPhone 4S. There really isn’t much to say about the iPhone 4S as a device: it’s the iPhone 4, only faster. It looks like an iPhone 4. It weighs just like an iPhone 4 (unless you’re going to feel a 3-gram difference). It’s got the same Retina Display of the iPhone 4, and its glass back is just as likely to break as the iPhone 4’s. The iPhone 4 is the foundation of the new iPhone 4S.

But the iPhone 4S is undoubtedly better than the iPhone 4. Thanks to the dual-core A5 CPU and dual-core graphics Apple put into it, the 4S will deliver snappier navigation between apps and webpages, up to seven times faster graphics and an overall more responsive experience. In practical terms, this means the multitasking tray will open faster, launch apps in less time, and Safari will load webpages faster. Game developers will be able to create more impressive games with more complex graphics and texturing techniques; app makers will take advantage of the iPhone 4S’ A5 to develop software with more elaborate actions and architectures.

In day to day usage, the iPhone 4S will be the iPad 2 of hardware upgrades: when compared to an old iPhone 4, it’ll look amazingly fast. Even if I haven’t tried an iPhone 4S yet, this is pure math. The iPhone 4S is faster. Perhaps not every corner of the OS will show that, but the hardware will allow for faster operations out of the box.

The A5 processor (and faster graphics, and presumably more RAM) doesn’t simply make games more powerful and apps quicker to open and use. The A5 processor – a custom-made silicon designed by Apple – has repercussions on a variety of software-related functionalities, and this has enabled Apple to come up with new features that won’t make it to the iPhone 4 once iOS 5 comes out next week.

The iPhone 4S is the finest example of Apple’s interplay of hardware and software yet.

Take the new camera for example. Thanks to a new 8 MP sensor, wider aperture, new lenses and backside illumination, it shoots better, sharper, more vibrant pictures. They look good. The new optics inside the iPhone’s camera have allowed Apple to improve on one of the most popular aspects of the iPhone, which is taking photos everywhere you go. Yet the new camera isn’t just about the optic hardware itself: because of the A5’s processing power, Apple has added face detection for better exposure and focus when a subject is recognized, as well as better white balance. The iPhone 4S’ A5 comes with a new Image Signal Processor designed by Apple. On top of that, the faster 4S also happens to record 1080p video with image stabilization and noise reduction.

This is fairly technical stuff, but you see where this is going. In a demo of the iPhone 4S posted by the BBC earlier today, I noticed something odd about the 4S camera: the swiping animation to switch from the camera view to the Camera Roll (a new feature of iOS 5) looked strangely fast and smooth. I’ve been testing iOS 5 on my iPhone 4, and I can tell you that animation isn’t as nearly as responsive and immediate as the BBC’s demo video. Throughout the day, I’ve looked at other hands-on videos (not many of them are around this time, unfortunately), read first impressions from journalists who were in Cupertino and yes – everyone reported the camera was faster and more responsive. A simple functionality like swiping back to your Camera Roll to see the picture you’ve just taken has been improved thanks to new hardware. These are the details the make the experience better, more balanced and enjoyable as the months roll in and you get used to a device.

At this point, it’s starting to feel like iOS 5 was specifically designed for the iPhone 4S. The most technologically advanced features of iOS 5 are now available on the iPhone: improved camera and HD video recording, AirPlay Mirroring, Siri. That’s not to say Apple didn’t exclude some of these from the iPad due to design compromises (the thinner iPad 2 wouldn’t probably have room for the 4S’ camera) or obvious impracticality (Siri on a tablet?), but on a checklist comparing Apple’s devices running iOS 5, the iPhone 4S gets more. The iPad 2 still has Photo Booth on its side, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on the iPhone soon.

The importance of “hardware that enables better software” and “powerful software based on advanced hardware” is best explained by Apple’s own slide. Four hardware-related features (A5, new wireless system, new camera, 1080p HD recording), four software-related functionalities coming to the 4S. And that’s not to count the 200+ features of iOS 5, which will benefit from the improved specs of the iPhone.

The iPhone 4S is a good phone because it’s based on the iPhone 4. But the 4S has got some new stuff that has been made possible by its new hardware, and it will make for a more pleasant experience thanks to iOS 5, for a simple reason: Apple understands that hardware and software together drive innovation and customer satisfaction, not specs alone.