Square Releases Major 2.0 Update for iPhone and iPad

Square, the mobile payment company that allows you to pay with your credit card on the go by simply swiping it through an iPhone or iPad secure reader, teased some major announcements last week, leading to speculation that the service might have something huge up its sleeve after being featured by Apple multiple times in iPad and iPhone commercials and receiving approval to sell the card reader in Apple’s retail stores. While Square’s Jack Dorsey is stil holding a special announcement at TechCrunch Disrupt in about two hours, it turns out the big new update was a major overhaul of the mobile app, which has just been upgraded to version 2.0 in the App Store.

Square 2.0 brings a refreshed interface on the iPhone (which looks pretty neat from the screenshots) and an entirely new design on the iPad that lets business owners organize items into shelves for “easier browsing.” Alongside other bug fixes, the UI changes seem to be the focus on this new update. Apparently, the new Square is now allowing merchants to easily organize different items with different “variations” (categories, we assume) on these new shelves that should make it easier and faster for customers to select something they want to buy. You can swipe through shelves, add items to the processing queue and, as usual, swipe your credit card to pay. The interface changes on the iPhone make for a more professional-looking, elegant app we’re pretty sure Apple will feature again soon.

From the changelog:

- iPad: Arrange your items into shelves, for easier browsing and faster checkout.
- iPad: Small, medium, large; chocolate, vanilla, strawberry – create variations of your items.
- iPhone: Refined look and feel.
- Minor bug fixes.

Square 2.0 is now live in the App Store. We’re still waiting for other major announcements later today, especially considering the company recently achieved 3 million payments processed every day. Check out more screenshots below. Read more

Backblaze Launches Location Service to Find Stolen Computers

Backblaze is the fiery backup service well known for their series of custom red-hot storage pods used to encapsulate all of your sensitive data, and today they’re launching a new location service designed to help you recover a lost or stolen computer. Locate My Computer aids in the recovery of a computer by reporting the IP address, the ISP the computer is on, the time the computer was last online, and by showing the computer’s location on a map. Mapping updates may take a while (after I enabled Locate My Computer for the first time I received a notice that it may take up to four hours), but time and IP address related information is updated frequently. Blackblaze also provides links to various IP services to help track down the exact location (possibly even the house address) of the stolen machine.

Locate My Computer is available immediately and is free to all Backblaze customers. Mapping is enabled for new users; users with existing accounts can “Turn On” mapping. To turn mapping on or off, sign-in and visit the Locate My Computer page. (Please click “Check for Updates” from your menu icon to ensure you are using the latest version.)

The update is free to all Backblaze customers. To enable the new feature, simply install the latest Backblaze update over your previous installation before turning the service on.

[via Backblaze]

Scott Forstall Places Second In Most Creative Business People Award

Fast Company has placed Scott Forstall as second in their 2011 ‘Most Creative People in Business’ awards. Forstall, who is VP of iPhone software, received the award for leading the development on iOS, with Fast Company noting that “the popularity of that tap, pinch, and swipe interface has sent Cupertino’s earnings rocketing”.

Jonathan Ive’s slick designs may grab the headlines whenever Steve Jobs introduces a new product, but it’s Scott Forstall’s smart software that fills Apple’s coffers.

Meanwhile, Wadah Khanfar took out top honors for his work as Director General of the Al Jazeera network – which has seen recent surge in popularity for its extensive coverage of the uprisings in the Arab world, notably for its coverage in Egypt and more recently, Syria. In its entirety, the list featured a variety of people that exhibited creativity in business from Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post (10th) to Oprah Winfrey (12th) to the singer Bruno Mars (58th).

However of most interest to us at MacStories are those which have heavily utilized iOS as part of their business strategy – in some cases even dedicating their entire business to the success of iOS. Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter made the list at number 4, whilst Marcos Weskamp of Flipboard made the list at number 42. Others included Aaron Levie of Box.net (59), Kevin Systrom of Instagram (66), Dong Minghzhu of Gree (71) and Mikael Hed of Rovio, who rounded out the list at number 100. [via Setteb.it]

DwellClick Changes The Way You Click & Drag

Whether your main desktop setup consists of an iMac rocking a Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse or you’re more of a MacBook user relying on the built-in glass trackpad, input methods on OS X machines don’t change. In fact, moving the cursor on screen and clicking and selecting and dragging stuff around hasn’t changed for decades. In the same way Steve Jobs saw the first mouse device almost thirty years ago and was impressed by the concept of interacting with items on screen, today’s pointing devices retain the original concept of a user’s hand and fingers touching an external or embedded surface / buttons to perform actions like scrolling, selection, clicks and drags. Of course iOS devices have changed this: with multi-touch gestures and displays, the user no longer moves something on screen, he touches the screen. Many say Lion is going the way of iOS with the addition of gestures and iOS-like commands, but as long as computers have non-touch displays the fundamental concept of indirect clicking and controls will live. DwellClick, a new app available on the Mac App Store, provides a way to change the default behavior of clicking and dragging on OS X by enhancing the experience with less clicks and button pressing.

DwellClick basically enables clickless operations on a computer. Instead of clicking you move and point, and DwellClick will take care of the actual clicking for you. Same applies for dragging windows and files or scrolling a page: as DwellClick is smart enough to recognize whether you’re hovering over an app window, a folder or a scrollbar, the utility will understand what you want to do and contextually change its functionality to let you move a window, scroll without releasing you hand from the trackpad, and so forth. DwellClick wants you to save hundreds of clicks every day, but it’s clearly not an app for everyone. Those who are used to clicks and scrolling after years of computing won’t probably appreciate the new ideas brought along by DwellClick. In fact, I had a hard time trying not to click everything on screen in my first tests when I was just moving the cursor with DwellClick enabled – as you move and stop the cursor, DwellClick clicks. You can set a click delay time in the settings, as well as disable automatic clicking and dragging, or customize the color of the blinking light that tells you DwellClick has clicked something on screen or started dragging an element around.

DwellClick also plays well with modifier keys and control-clicking: when the app’s turned on, you can hit keys like Cmd, Option or Control to tell DwellClick they should go with the next click. Or, you can simply double-press one of those keys to “lock it” with a visual cue displayed on screen. Similarly, hitting the Fn key when DwellClick’s running will activate an iOS-like popup menu to double-lick, drag and control-click. It sounds complicated but it’s actually very intuitive once you’ve found your perfect delay time. You can read more to get the hang of it in DwellClick’s online User Guide.

At $11.99 in the App Store, DwellClick doesn’t come cheap but it’s undoubtedly an app that dramatically changes the way you control your computer. For users who don’t mind change and innovation, this utility will probably make using a Mac even easier; for people like me, change will be difficult especially when you’re really used to the standard way of clicking and selecting files. But you should give it a try if you’re looking for something new.

Aelios Lets You Explore The World’s Weather with an Innovative Concept

Released earlier today in the App Store and created by Jilion, developers of the beautiful SublimeVideo HTML5 video player, Aelios for iPad is a new weather app that I’ve been testing over the past week, which aims at offering a fresh and innovative experience for “exploring weather” on the tablet like no other. The app, rather than displaying complex data sets and graphs to showcase current weather and forecasts with every possible detail, wants to give users a great new way to browse an interactive map on screen that’s also able to automatically tell the app the location you might want to check out.

The concept is new, so here’s how Aelios works: the main UI is made of a map and a “ring” you can dial and move on the map. When you move the ring on the map, it automatically locks to the most highly populated location it finds; so, for example, if you head over Italy quickly, the ring will lock into Rome by default, and same applies for London in the UK. If you do want, however, to fine tune your location search and see the map in greater detail, you can zoom in and choose any other location recognized by the software, or simply hit the button and fetch your current position. You can also manually search for a location thanks to the search button in the upper right hand corner. Once you’ve found a location you’re interested in, it’s time to focus on the ring. By default the ring displays time in a convenient 24 hour format that places midnight at the top and noon at the bottom in a virtual watch. The watch also shows the hours of dark and light, and visualizes how many hours of the current day are left before tomorrow. As you tap on the screen, weather icons for current conditions and forecasts will jump next to the ring to show temperature and wind depending on the time of the day. Everything happens around the ring and virtual watch locked to your location, basically. But if you try to rotate the dial, the ring switches to a different view and shows the next 7 days of forecasts, rather than just today. The concept is the same with icons next to the virtual watch, temperature, wind, and so forth. When you want to go back to the 24 hour view, rotate again and you’re set. The animations, the graphics, the sounds are top-notch in Aelios. The app supports both landscape and portrait mode and allows you to tweak units in the Settings.

At $2.99 in the App Store, Aelios is a beautiful app by Jilion that doesn’t disappoint when it comes to quickly checking out weather forecasts through an innovative UI that might be disorienting at first, but grows over time as it makes the entire experience of browsing maps and tapping around real fun. Make sure you don’t miss the promo video on the app’s website.

iPad 2 Head Tracking + Glasses-free 3D App Now Available

Back in April, you might remember we posted a video showing a software experiment by Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay from the Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble at the EHCI Research Group aimed at bringing glasses-free 3D to the iPad’s screen. The demo, largely based on Johnny Lee’ 2007 work with the Nintendo Wii, used the iPad 2’s front-facing camera to track the movements of a user’s head and simulate various 3D animations on screen without the need of glasses, by simply modifying a 2D environment in order to give the illusion of “looking at a small window.” Francone wrote in April:

I use the front facing camera to detect and track the 3D position of the face of the user in real time. Then I use this data for dynamically adapting the perspective of the 3D scene. This Head-Coupled Perspective system gives the user the illusion that he looks at a small window. Objects can be displayed in front of the screen surface, or behind the screen surface. Such technique has a number of great properties, especially on mobile devices.

The experiment, viewed 1.5 million times on YouTube, has become an app and it’s now available for free in the App Store. It packs all the demoes seen on the video, it also runs on the iPhone 4 and, after a few tests, I can say it works pretty well although maybe it’s not just as fluid as the original video (might have been because of my room’s light conditions though). However, the Head-Coupled Perspective technology for iOS definitely does its job in displaying monocular 3D that does not use the devices’ accelerometers or gyroscopes.

The face tracking system does not detect and track the face in every lighting condition. Read the instructions in the app to get a good tracking.

Head-Coupled Perspective does not create a stereoscopic display! It provides a kind of monocular 3D display: the same picture is seen by both eyes. In the future, it might be combined with a stereoscopic display for a better 3D effect.

i3D for iPhone and iPad is available here for free. In case you missed it, check out the original video below.
Read more

Reports Of A Grand Central Apple Store Resurface

The Wall Street Journal has today revived suggestions that Apple is looking to open an Apple Store in the New York Grand Central Terminal. Back in early February there had been reports from the New York Observer that Apple was planning to open their largest store at the terminal. Those rumors were then squashed in early March after reports surfaced that negotiations had fallen through.

Todays report from the WSJ claims that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is looking for new tenants and that Apple has expressed interest in establishing a retail presence within Grand Central. The space on offer is large, but not large enough to be the world’s largest Apple Store – which is currently the Regent Street (London) store which is 25,000 square feet.

The agency is looking for a single renter for two adjacent balconies on the north and east sides of the terminal. It will issue a request for proposals Monday.

A spokesman for the MTA told the WSJ that the agency dealing with the space has spoken to Apple and is hopeful that they bid on the space. Their report also suggests that the MTA may even be working specifically to find space for Apple, offering two adjacent spaces for rent, even though one is still occupied by a tenant. That tenant, who operates the Metrazur restaurant, would likely receive a hefty buyout from whoever purchases the space.

If Apple is interested in renting the space they will have to do so publicly – with all retail space within Grand Central awarded through an open bidding process. Jump the break for a plan of the retail space on offer – highlighted in red on the right hand side, labelled “East Balcony”.

Read more

iPhone 5 To Feature Curved Glass Screen?

According to DigiTimes, the latest rumor going around the Taiwan supply chain is that the next iPhone (whether it be the 4S or 5) will feature a curved cover glass for the display. It would see the next iPhone resemble aspects of Google’s Nexus S phone which had the glass curved into a concave, or perhaps like the older model iPod Nano which had convex glass.

In the past, manufacturers of the glass for smartphone displays had been reluctant to commit to the investment in appropriate glass cutting equipment because of the high capital costs associated with producing them. However, Apple is said to have purchased between 200 and 300 glass-cutting machines for the glass manufacturers according to DigiTimes’ sources.

Prior reports put the production of the next iPhone as beginning in August this year, but today’s DigiTimes report notes that there is no firm timetable yet for the beginning of production. Apple is supposedly still involved in working with suppliers for cover glass, glass cutting, lamination and touch sensors to improve yield rates before production begins.

[Via DigiTimes]

Explosion Tragedy at Foxconn Plant Claims Third Life

Today some more details have emerged over the explosion and subsequent fire that occurred at a Foxconn manufacturing plant in the city of Chengdu, China. The sad news is that a third life has since been lost and 9 people (of the 15 that were injured in the incident) remain in hospital as a result of various injuries.

The Chinese paper, Commercial Times is reporting that the explosion took place around the location of a building that houses coating lines and other various chemical materials. An investigation is currently ongoing, but early signs point to “an explosion of combustible dust in a duct” within one of the polishing workshops. On a related note, the SACOM watchdog group had published a report two weeks ago that criticized several aspects of the Chengdu plant, including insufficient venting of the polishing department, where it was said that there was large amounts of (highly explosive) aluminium dust.

Foxconn rejected the report when it was released, and although early signs do point to a dust explosion, it must be noted that the investigation is still in the very early stages to say with certainty that this was the cause. Meanwhile it has been reported in the Commercial Times and China Times that Foxconn, in efforts to quell investor concerns, will be increasing production of the iPad 2 at their Shenzen plant (which already produces most iPad 2s) to offset any loss in output at their Chengdu plant whilst it is being repaired and investigated.

[Via Engadget and DigiTimes]