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“Think Of iCloud As The New iTunes”→

“Think Of iCloud As The New iTunes”

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, in a post where he details some of the iCloud features he has “heard” from sources (but doesn’t state as a fact) and other personal wishes about iOS 5, doesn’t describe iCloud as a new music service or “cloud services offering” – rather, he says he’s heard iCloud is something more on the lines of a full replacement for iTunes:

The italicized sentence that follows is fourth-hand information, at best, and also the sort of thing that many of you might have already guessed based merely on your own hunches and hopes. But here goes:

Don’t think of iCloud as the new MobileMe; think of iCloud as the new iTunes.

Instead of simply overhauling MobileMe with a new name, new UI, new functionalities and call it iCloud, Gruber pictures a scenario (again, based on unconfirmed sources) where iCloud becomes the de-facto standard to sync all kinds of media and information to an iOS device:

But in short let’s just think about the ways that iCloud might be a major, dare I say game-changing, step away from USB tethering between iOS devices and iTunes running on your Mac/PC. Consider just the new out-of-box experience. Rather than “Take this out, plug it into your Mac or PC (after first making sure your Mac/PC is running the latest version of iTunes), wait for it to sync before you actually play with it”, you might get something like “Take this out, turn it on, sign into your iTunes account, and start playing with it.

There’s been a lot of speculation around iCloud, iOS 5 and the rumored Time Capsule refresh in the past couple of days. Whilst many had initially pegged iCloud as a standalone music service with streaming features, others later claimed iCloud would be a rebranding of the existing MobileMe service, accommodating options previously reserved to me.com subscribers and new features like music, movie and TV show storage and streaming. A new option surfaced in the iTunes Store earlier this week suggested iOS devices would soon get the possibility to receive automatic app updates, and indeed over-the-air sync of applications and media has long been rumored as a major functionality coming to iOS.

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App Store Reaches 400,000 iOS Apps?

Just ahead of the WWDC keynote that kicks off tomorrow at 10 AM PDT in San Francisco, AppAdvice reports the App Store has passed 400,000 available iOS applications. According to data provided by App Store tracking system AppShopper, there are 401,446 iOS apps at the moment of writing this, though in three years Apple approved just over 500,000 apps – 507,293 to be exact. The important milestone of 400,000 apps (if AppShopper’s figure is to be trusted, but we believe so considering 148Apps reports 398,845 as of May 30, 2011) will surely be part of Steve Jobs’ keynote slides tomorrow as he explains why the App Store is a thriving marketplace for developers willing to monetize their efforts, in spite of the recent Lodsys controversy that, perhaps, will also be briefly addressed by Apple executives on stage for the purpose of clarification. Interestingly enough, however, AppShopper reports 97,946 iPad apps available whilst the App Store app on my iPad says there are 92,483 apps as of today.

The App Store officially launched on July 10, 2008, a day before the release of the iPhone 3G running iPhone OS 2.0.1. In 1060 days – or 34 months and 26 days as Wolfram Alpha calculates – the original App Store has been organized in two different sections in iTunes (iPhone and iPad apps) and a separate one living in its own application, the Mac App Store, launched on January 6, 2011.

iCloud To Be Deeply Integrated With Apple’s Time Capsule?

In an article today by Cult of Mac, the website claims to have a scoop on what iCloud is and how it will work. Their source, which is supposedly ‘close to the company’, told Cult of Mac that iCloud will be deeply integrated with Time Capsule. Apparently iCloud will become less of a local backup and “more of a personal cloud server”. The source corroborates the recent rumors that suggested a refreshed Time Capsule would come with embedded A4 or A5 CPUs.

There will apparently be a “Home Folder” in which files saved on a Mac connected to the Time Capsule will be instantly backed up and then made available to any remote Mac or iOS device. The Time Capsule will archive and serve up any files to any connected device, even if the computer that made the file is off. If you do work on a device outside of your local network, the changes will be automatically made when you get back home.

Then in terms of iOS devices, it will allow you to upload photos and videos from, say, an iPhone to the Time Capsule – making them available to the other devices on the network. iCloud becomes the “conduit” for all your files and media.

“Your computer gets backed up to Time Capsule anyways,” said the source. “Now it’ll serve up your content when you want it, where you want it, right there on your iOS device.”

However the source wasn’t entirely sure if it was going to be announced at WWDC, just saying it was “what’s next in line” despite also noting “I heard that they have [it] ready to go”. The final thing the source noted was that they hadn’t heard of anything “about a Time Capsule holding iOS updates”, calling the rumor “incredibly stupid”.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Authorized Biography of Steve Jobs Now Available For Pre-Order

The previously announced biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which will be the first ‘authorized’ biography of Jobs, is now available for pre-order. iSteve: The Book of Jobs will be released on March 6th, 2012. The description of the book from Amazon provides:

From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In iSteve: The Book of Jobs, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs’ family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, iSteve is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.

You can pre-order iSteve: The Book of Jobs from Amazon right now for $19.80 in paper, or $14.99 for the Kindle edition. Curiously the release date (March 6th), will be on the fourth anniversary of the release of the iOS SDK that allowed developers to build third party apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Rumor: Lion To Launch On June 14th

In last year’s ‘Back to the Mac’ event, Apple publicly revealed that the next version of OS X, Lion, was scheduled for a summer 2011 release, but didn’t specify an exact launch date. 9to5 Mac today claims to have information that suggests Lion will launch on Tuesday, June 14th, less than two weeks away. It comes after Lion was said to have gone “live for internal testing” less than two weeks ago, suggesting a public release in the near future.

They claim to have heard chatter from several sources, suggesting the June 14th date is a “strong possibility”. Furthermore they report that Apple retail stores will revamp their storefront window to publicise the launch of Lion.

Apple is said to be planning one of their product launch-indicative “visual updates” for the morning of Tuesday, June 14th

The report also suggests that the launch of Lion will mark the beginning of reduced software presence within Apple stores, starting with the possible removal of Snow Leopard. In line with this, another source claims that the retail supplies of Snow Leopard are dwindling, solidifying the possibility of a mid-June launch of Lion. Earlier this year the appearance of several Lion manuals on Amazon had suggested a late-July launch based on their launch dates.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

New Apple Store Opens In Lyon, France

Announced by several media outlets earlier this week, Apple opened a new retail store today in Lyon, France. The seventh Apple Store in the country is located in the La Part-Dieu shopping mall which, as noted by MacRumors, is very close to the Lyon Part-Dieu railway station – a transportation hub that will surely make it easy to customers to reach the Store.

French website AccessoWeb has posted some photos and a video of the grand opening, showing a long queue to get in and the usual cheering and clapping from Apple Store employees. Other videos posted on YouTube, and embedded after the break, show the interactive iPad displays on each store table as recently introduced by Apple in the so-called Apple Store 2.0 experience.

Check out more photos here, and the store’s official page on Apple’s website.

Update: More photos of the grand opening, courtesy of Anthony Nelzin. Check out his full photo set on Flickr.

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Video: Steve Jobs Discusses Remote Computing in 1997

Here’s an interesting video from WWDC 1997 brought to our attention by our friend Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger: at the conference’s keynote, as you can see from the video around the 13 minute mark, Steve Jobs starts talking about the “connected” world he lives in where, thanks to networking hardware at NeXT, Apple and Pixar, he’s able to take all his files and folders, his entire “home directory” wherever he goes thanks to what we call the “cloud” nowadays. By storing his personal data in the cloud, on the server, Steve says he doesn’t have to care about data loss and backups anymore – he can simply change computers and, thanks to the speed and RAM capacity of the servers,  have the Home folder quickly coming down from the server in seconds. He says this was already happening in 1990 at NeXT.

Let me describe the world I live in. About eight years ago 1 we had high-speed networking connected to our NeXT hardware. Because we were using NFS, we were able to take all of our personal data — our “home directory” we called them — off of our local machines and put them on a server. The software made that completely transparent…a professional could be hired to back up that server every night.

In the last seven years, do you know how many times I lost any personal data? Zero. Do you how many times I’ve backed up my computer? Zero.

I have computers at Apple, at Pixar, at NeXT and at home. I walk over to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server and I’ve got my stuff, where ever I am. And none of that is on a local disc. The server…is my local disc.

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The MacStories Team: What We Want from WWDC 2011

WWDC 2011 starts in two days, and all of us have our own hopes to be crushed, wishes to be granted, and features to drool over once we finally see Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud in action. We’ve all got something we want most out of the upcoming announcements, whether it be iOS compatibility with AirDrop, or seamless iOS updates through iOS 5, and we’ve decided to publish our wants from Apple’s big three for your viewing pleasure. In return, we expect you guys to tell us in the comments what you want to see on Monday. In the meantime, we’ll get the ball rolling! Read more

Ben the Bodyguard Finally Released, Keeps Data Safe On Your iPhone

Teased a few months ago with an impressive website that made great use of scrolling and animations, Ben the Bodyguard for iPhone has managed to gain the interest of everyone who’s closely watching the iOS development scene and is always looking for well-designed and innovative apps. In spite of the fact that little was known about the actual purpose of the app and how it would compare against other “secure data managers” like 1Password and Wallet, Ben the Bodyguard was intriguing because of the attention to detail and design, the character himself (a French bodyguard, indeed, called Benoit – Ben) and, again, the amazing website.

After months of silence (as it seems appropriate for a good spy / secret agent / whatever it is Ben does), the app came out last night on the iPhone at $4.99 and I decided to take it for a spin. Unfortunately Ben the Bodyguard can’t be compared with full-featured solutions like 1Password, but thanks to its cool design and adventure-like nature, I believe the app still has a chance to attract casual users looking for something to keep their data safe and private.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Ben the Bodyguard is an app that, like 1Password, can keep a variety of data safe & private in its database. The app uses a master password and 256-bit AES encryption to secure your data, which consists of photos, contacts, reminders, notes, and passwords. The password tab is particularly interesting, as it allows you to choose between different templates like web login, credit card, driver’s license and bank account, or create your own template if the categories above don’t fit the password you want to protect. The most interesting aspect of the app however (and what I believe will be the main selling point for the developers and users), is how the entire interface and menu options revolve around the character of Ben. For instance, once you fire up the app for the very first time you’re greeted with an intro sequence describing the life of Ben before he became a bodyguard – you can skip this intro, but it’s so well realized you might end up watching it anyway. Just like the website (which made the rounds of the Internet months ago) puts the focus on Ben – and not the features – as a man you can trust to protect your data, the app doesn’t present itself as a software capable of encrypting and securing notes and password: instead, the general feeling you get is that there’s this man on your iPhone’s screen telling you with a French-English accent that your stuff is safe with him. Character and story-wise, Ben the Bodyguard is a winner: graphics are beautiful, voice over is fun, animations are fluid – you can see the effort that went into designing the application and giving Ben an “identity” to make it stand out from the App Store ecosystem. Read more