Google Launches Catalogs App for iPad

In an effort to make shopping “more engaging, social and creative” and, at the same time, connected and interactive in the digital era, Google is launching Google Catalogs for iPad today, a brand new (and free) app to browse and interact with shopping catalogs from popular brand directly on the iPad’s screen. Said to be coming to Android tablets as well, Google Catalogs is now exclusive to the iPad and it offers access to hundreds of different catalogs slightly reworked to take advantage of the iPad with tags, photo albums and videos, as well as the possibility of zooming on product shots, and a button to see whether an item is available in a nearby shop.

Users can organize items they find interesting in Favorites, or create a “collage” with custom themes and resizable photographs to share with fellow Google Catalogs users. Google is touting this feature as a way to shop digitally using the iPad’s intuitive gesture-based system, and be creative.

For the launch of the Catalogs app, Google has partnered with the following brands:

  • Anthropologie
  • Bare Escentuals
  • Bergdorf Goodman
  • Crate and Barrel
  • L.L. Bean
  • Lands’ End
  • Macy’s
  • Neiman Marcus
  • Nordstrom
  • Pottery Barn
  • Saks Fifth Avenue
  • Sephora
  • Sundance
  • Tea Collection
  • Urban Outfitters
  • Williams-Sonoma

Google says more brands will be added soon, and merchants with a shopping catalog can contact the Google Catalogs team right away to apply for inclusion in the app. From the promo video embedded below, you can see how Google Catalogs seems to heavily rely on sliding animations, pop-ups and links placed directly on a product’s photo or description – rather than forcing users to navigate to a specific page like printed catalogs often do, the app enables them to have more information quickly available in a new window.

Google Catalogs for iPad is available for free on the App Store.

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HTC Sues Apple Over Patent Infringement

As reported by Reuters, smartphone maker HTC is suing Apple claiming infringement of three patents owned by the company. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, relates to patents allegedly infringed by Apple with its Mac computers, iPhones, iPads and “other products”. Details are scarce right now – we’re sure Florian Mueller at FOSS Patents is already looking into this – but the Taiwan-based company is seeking a ban on the infringing products in the United States, plus “triple damages for willful infringement, and other remedies”.

In July, Apple filed an ITC complaint against HTC, looking to block the sale of several HTC products infringing Apple’s patents – that was the second complaint against HTC, as Apple was apparently looking for “a second try” with stronger patents, according to Florian Mueller.

We will update this post with more news and details on HTC’s lawsuit as they become available.

MacRumors details the patents addressed by the lawsuit:

- 7,765,414: Circuit and operating method for integrated interface of PDA and wireless communication system
- 7,672,219: Multipoint-to-point communication using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
- 7,417,944: Method for orderwire modulation

Apple first sued HTC back in March, with an International Trade Commission judge finding HTC guilty of infringing on two of Apple patents in July – one of them, patent 5,946,647, said to be “fundamental” to the Android platform. HTC is however arguing they have a “strong case” against Apple’s claims, and said they will appeal the ITC ruling.

Tweetbot 1.5: Muting is Forever


Well, it’s finally here. You asked for it — you wagged your finger about it — you hate the people you follow on Twitter so much that you don’t want to hear another peep out of them, yet deep down you don’t really want to get in one of those uncomfortable, “Why did you unfollow me!?” moments. Or maybe someone’s had a little too much caffeine and you just need a break. With Tweetbot 1.5, you can mute those pesky over-tweeters and keep meme-esque hashtags from cluttering your #pantsfree timeline. Although I hear there’s a self desctruction mechanism built in if you ever mute #tweetbot.

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TextExpander for iOS Updated with Dropbox Sync, Tweetbot Support

If you own an iPhone or iPad and you’re used to typing a lot using Apple’s virtual keyboard for iOS (which will soon receive some interesting updates with iOS 5 on the iPad), you might also be a TextExpander user. Developed by Smile and available both on the Mac and iOS, TextExpander is a fantastic utility that allows you to create “snippets” to type frequently-used text using short abbreviations. Personally, I use TextExpander on a daily basis on my Mac to type “http://” in Twitter for Mac (which for some reason doesn’t allow you to copy links), personal information in websites I visit every day, or sentences I often write down in email responses. Whilst TextExpander for Mac is tightly integrated into the operating system and works with every app, because of the different nature of iOS third-party developers have to manually integrate their apps with TextExpander once installed on a user’s device. Currently, more than 100 apps for the iPhone and iPad sport TextExpander integration.

With an update released today, Smile has added Dropbox support to TextExpander for iOS, allowing users to sync snippets created on the Mac through the popular online service. Dropbox integration in TextExpander for Mac has been around for months as an alternative to MobileMe and local sync to share snippets “over the air” on multiple Macs. The same functionality is now available in the new TextExpander for iOS, which will require you a couple of taps to authorize with your Dropbox account, and import snippets into the app. The Dropbox sync option is available in the Settings, and it works both on the iPhone and iPad. In the Settings, there’s also a new option to sort snippets – version 1.2 brings “other fixes and improvements” as well.

You can try the new Dropbox sync functionality by downloading the latest TextExpander for iOS on the App Store. Apps that support TextExpander snippets include Second Gear’s Elements (recently updated to version 2.0), and Tapbots’ powerful Twitter client, Tweetbot.

Apple Highlights Apps “Enhanced for OS X Lion”

OS X Lion has been out for less than a month, and Apple is now starting to promote apps that take advantage of some of the new features of the OS on the front page of the Mac App Store. As noted by Stephen Hackett at Forkbombr, Apple has included the “Enhanced for OS X Lion” tagline in the banners pointing to applications that have recently been updated with Lion-exclusive features such as Versions, Full-Screen, or multi-touch gestures. These banners can be seen on the front page of the Mac App Store, both in the top section (Screenflow 3.0 and Touchgrind) or in the lower part of the page, where currently there are promotional images for Fantastical, swackett x, and Scrivener. Fantastical is indeed one of the apps that has been updated in the past month with “Lion compatibility” and Lion-only gestures for navigation in the calendar view.

This is not the first time Apple has taken special interest in apps updated to take advantage of new functionalities introduced by the company in a new version of their OSes. For example, Apple went as far as creating a dedicated section for apps updated with AirPlay support soon after the release of iOS 4.2 back in November 2010. In April, Apple showcased subscription-based magazines in the App Store’s homepage. The “Enhanced for OS X Lion” tagline doesn’t have its own category just yet, but it wouldn’t be a surprise as more customers upgrade to Lion, and developers start releasing Lion-specific app updates.

With over 250 new user features and 3,000 new developer APIs, Lion is opening a whole range of possibilities for developers willing to rewrite or update their applications to trigger the new OS. Such features and APIs include the aforementioned full-screen mode and Versions support, as well as desktop notifications, In-App Purchases, new UI controls, Resume, and Auto-Save. This Fall, developers will also be able to integrate their apps with iCloud, which will allow them to store documents and data in the cloud, enabling seamless synchronization of content between devices.

In November, Apple will also start requiring developers to update their apps with Lion’s Sandboxing APIs – you can  read more about this in John Siracusa’s OS X Lion review. By highlighting apps that have already been updated for Lion, Apple is both encouraging other developers to do the same in the next few weeks, and showcasing great software for new customers that have installed Lion and are looking for new apps to try out. Apple itself updated several apps ahead of Lion’s launch to enable new functionalities exclusive to 10.7, such as Safari 5.1 – which comes pre-installed on Lion – and the iWork suite.

OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive Now Available

Initially announced on July 20, when OS X Lion was released to the public through the Mac App Store at $29.99, Apple has released the OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive today, allowing customers without a broadband connection – unable to download the 3.49 GB installer from the Store, or willing to keep a physical copy of the OS – to install the latest version of OS X with a USB stick similar to the one Apple shipped with the 2010 MacBook Airs (and didn’t include in the 2011 models, which come with Lion pre-installed but no USB drive in the box).

OS X Lion is available on a USB thumb drive for installation without the need for a broadband Internet connection. Just plug the drive into your USB port and follow the instructions to install. OS X Lion is also available for a lower price as a digital download from the Mac App Store.

As noted by 9to5mac, those who install Lion through the USB Thumb Drive won’t be able to perform re-installs with Lion’s built-in Recovery functionalities, as they will need to use the thumb drive again. The OS X Lion Thumb Drive is shipping in 1-3 business days.

Earlier this month, Apple released a free utility to turn any external drive into a Lion Recovery partition, and a number of unofficial solutions have also surfaced. You can find Apple’s OS X Lion Thumb Drive at $69 in the online store.

From the boneheaded design file: Browsing Versions in Lion→

From the boneheaded design file: Browsing Versions in Lion

While some knew of the feature, and were anxious to use it, they couldn’t find it. I would have expected a function that deals with a file to be on the File menu. Nope. Apple has it in the title bar, just where you are sure to miss it. […] When you finally do figure out how to browse your versions, your entire desktop changes, and you wind up in the Time Machine GUI (which Apple calls “The Star Field”), even though you never invoked Time Machine. As my colleague Erica Sadun points out, why introduce another system?

Mel Martin on TUAW discusses how Versions (and similiarly the Auto Save functions in the titlebar of an application) are confusing to use and hard to find compared to the already intuitive menubar (the second place people look after they can’t find something in the toolbar). Let’s talk about Mel’s points real quick: why did Apple make versions so… spacey?

The biggest reason is because it simply draws parallels with Time Machine. Apple wants to associate anything that has do with recovering files with the paradigm of literally being able to travel back in time and pull in old documents (in Versions’ case, pull in old bits of text or images you initially revoked which is both very hands-on and extremely powerful). The separate UI exists so you visually see old changes and only bring back what you need — browsing a list with timestamps then manually merging two versions of the same document from your desktop doesn’t sound better either (especially since you then can’t see what changes were made without opening each old version).

I do think Versions would be good as a menubar item. I agree that new Mac users won’t look to the titlebar for accessing this feature (unless they’ve vigorously read Apple’s Lion pages). When people look to try out new features (and don’t know where to find them), I imagine they try to search for the menu item through Help as I often do. In Versions’ case, it’s nowhere to be found. I think Versions’ UI itself is okay, albeit sometimes buggy and slow which will be improved, but getting there can be the issue.

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Steve Jobs Biography Gets A Classic Cover

There are many pictures of Steve Jobs, and perhaps one of the most iconic is the scraggly bearded CEO posing for the camera, hand up to his chin as he imagines Apple’s next greatest device (at least I like to think that). The image will also be making an appearence on the cover of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs (previously: The Book of Jobs), can be seen on the Barnes & Noble storefront with a publication date set for November 21st. You can currently preorder the hardcover for $20.40 (list price is $32.50), with B&N’s digital eBook availalbe for $14.99.

[via AllThingsD]