This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today

Week Calendar Comes To The iPad

When I first reviewed Week Calendar for iPhone in March, I called it a powerful alternative to Apple’s standard calendar app for iOS devices. It’s not that Apple’s Calendar.app lacks basic functionalities or is utterly broken: in fact, I think Calendar is more than fine for most users. But if you’re willing to get the most out of your MobileMe, Google Calendar, Exchange or CalDAV calendars, UtiliTap’s application is the full-featured alternative to install on an iPhone. And today, you’ll be able to enjoy Week Calendar on the iPad as well, thanks to an “HD” counterpart that’s just been approved and is now available at $2.99 in the App Store.

Week Calendar HD has all the features from the iPhone version, only on a bigger screen and with visual cues from Lion’s calendar app. The difference between the iPad’s native Calendar and Week Calendar HD is very subtle, but Week Calendar implements a leather background and bits of torn paper in a way that’s more reminiscent of Lion than Apple’s own app. Clearly some people are going to hate this choice if they were looking for a cleaner UI as seen on the iPhone, and perhaps the developers will revise their decision. I don’t know, but right now this is what you get. And, more importantly, what matters is that Week Calendar still outpaces Apple’s calendar solution when it comes down to views, gestures, copy & paste support or mere customization of the calendar. Week Calendar’s biggest advantage over Apple’s cal is support for multitouch with copy & paste, possibility to add a new event with tap & hold, easy resizing of events and pinch to personalize the selected view. You can tap and hold an existing event to move it around and change its start and end date; you can “cut” an event and paste it somewhere else; you can access an event’s info panel with a single tap, rather than having to tap the Edit button like in Apple’s calendar. Again, this works like the iPhone version but it’s been ported successfully to the iPad with the use of popovers and bigger real screen estate. From the Event Details panel, like on Week Cal for iPhone, you can set an alert, availability status, custom color, or find your away around four buttons that allow you to share an event, print it, email it or add it to the template list. Week Calendar, in fact, can turn any event into a template to use again in the future. Notes, invitees and local contacts can be attached to an event, too.

The selection of settings is equally impressive. You can turn on time zone support and specify when the week or weekend start,  manage new events’ default preferences and the aforementioned templates (these will save you a lot of time), customize standard colors to assign a color by default to events that meet certain title criteria. There’s more: you can activate TextExpander integration (save even more time), turn off drag & drop entirely, completely overhaul the way the app displays days and weeks. For instance, you can change font sizes, enable out-of-view indicators, tell the app when a day starts and ends. Anything else is just Week Calendar for iPhone, running on the iPad with a new UI: lots of features, yet easy to use.

If you’re a calendar nerd, Week Calendar HD for iPad is a dream come true. It’s got all the customization options you’ve always wanted from the tablet’s calendar app, plus a design consistent with Apple’s recent standards and tons of gestures to simplify navigation. Get it here at $2.99.

Foxconn Now Wants To Start Building iPads In Brazil In July

Last month, we reported Brazilian’s President Dilma Roussef and Hon Hai Precision’s founder Terry Gou discussed during an official meeting in Beijing the possibility for Hon Hai’s subsidiary Foxconn to invest $12 billion to start producing and assembling mobile devices in Brazil throughout the next five years, including Apple’s iPad – currently assembled by Foxconn in its Asian facilities. The investment, result of long-term negotiations between Hon Hai and Brazilian minister of Science and Technology Mercadante, is aimed at targeting Brazil’s growing consumer market, as well as allowing Foxconn and its partner Apple to directly address the distribution issues of devices in Brazil, long affected by import tariffs, inflated prices and poor retail presence.

Whilst the original reports claimed Foxconn was planning to start building iPads in Brazil this November, Reuters reports today the company has moved the estimated date to July, still seeking, however, to obtain tax breaks and other government concessions to ease high labor costs that Hon Hai had to face since they opened three other facilities to build components for Sony, Dell and HP in Brazil years ago. It’s still unknown whether iPad production will be located in an existing facility, or if Foxconn is planning on opening a new one just to build iOS devices. Speculation in the past weeks suggested the second possibility, pointing to the massive investment from Foxconn and the requirements forwarded to the Brazilian government such as training for 200 future employees in China, or the need for 20,000 specialized engineers.

Foxconn has moved up its desired start date for assembling iPads in Brazil to July from November, seeking to tap massive demand for the device in Brazil’s booming consumer market, according to newspapers Estado de S.Paulo and Folha de S.Paulo. Their reports quoted government officials.

“It’s a daring timeline. Whatever is within our reach, we’re going to work on making that viable,” Science and Technology Minister Aloizio Mercadante told Folha.

Reuters also reports Foxconn will initially import components from Asia to assemble devices in Brazil (thus the need for tax incentives on imported materials), shifting the manufacturing chain to local production in the next few years.

Search for Tweaks From Your Desktop with Cydia Search

 

iPhone news website and repository Planet-iPhones launched at the end of April Cydia Search, an online interface that allows you to browse tweaks, apps, utilities and themes available on Cydia. The web app, accessible from any computer and browser, is not meant to replace Cydia – as the name suggests, it provides a streamlined view of Cydia and the packages inside it, enabling you to browse everything without using your iPhone’s Cydia app, which can be slow sometimes. Cydia Search lets you search apps by name, author or description, comes with an embedded iPhone template to see what the package will look like in the actual Cydia (as seen in the screenshot above) and has a pretty huge list of default repositories, top packages, categories, recent updates and latest packages.

Among the features of Cydia Search:

  • View a listing of the most popular packages based on user ratings, the newest packages added, and even recently updated packages.
  • Each package offers detailed descriptions complete with screenshots, author/developer info, etc.
  • Listings clearly show paid packages in a different color similar to the way Cydia does.
  • All packages are clearly labeled whether or not they are from a default major repository.
  • RSS feeds are available for the newest packages list, recent updated packages list, and also for any search query.

If you’ve been looking for an elegant way to see what’s in Cydia without grabbing your iPhone or, more importantly, being forced to jailbreak, Cydia Search is a solid solution we hope will stick around for months to come. You can head over Cydia Search now and start browsing hacks and themes to install on your jailbroken iOS device. [via TUAW – Planet-iPhones]

Light Leakage Issues with LG Displays Caused iPad Shortages Last Quarter

Last month, a report by IHS’ iSuppli claimed the iPad 2 shortages Apple had to face in the quarter (with 4.69 million units sold announced at the Q2 2011 earnings call, well below Wall Street’s analysts’ estimates) were caused by production issues with the IPS display and built-in speaker of the device. Whilst the report didn’t provide additional details on the reasons behind the display manufacturing issues, iSupply wrote “quality concerns” affected Apple’s estimated number of initial iPad 2 shipments. The company mentioned “lamination issues with one of the touch suppliers”, yet stating that Apple was on track to increase the volume of iPad shipments in the next quarter, as also mentioned by Tim Cook when referring to the iPad 2 as the “mother of all backlogs.”

A new report by Digitimes today claims the production issues with the iPad’s display were caused by light leakage issues in LG’s units, with LG shipping only 3.2 million display units in the quarter.

In other news, Samsung Electronics shipped a total of four million 9.7-inch panels for iPads in the first quarter, outpacing rival LG Display (LGD) as the largest tablet PC panel supplier for Apple, the sources indicated. LGD’s iPad panel shipments reached only 3.2 million units in the first quarter.

LGD was forced to reduce its shipments in the first quarter due to light leakage problem for panels produced at its 6G production lines. The company reportedly has fixed the problem and will resume shipment momentum to Apple in the second quarter, said the sources.

Digitimes does not relate LG’s manufacturing issues with overall iPad shortages in Apple’s Q2, but the report seems to corroborate iSuppli’s previous claims of shipments below estimates due to problems in the iPad production chain.

Do You Miss the Mac vs PC Campaign? Watch All 66 Ads Online

As we all know, Apple has a history of great advertising. One of the most popular campaigns of all time are the Mac vc PC ads with John Hodgman as PC and Justin Long as Mac. They had 66 TV commercials before the series was ended last year. Adweek has compiled all 66 of them into one post for your nostalgic viewing pleasure, in chronological order too.

The very first commercial after the break.

Read more

YouKu To Replace Pre-Installed YouTube App On Chinese iPhones?

Over in China, iPhones and iPod Touches don’t come with the in-built YouTube app because of that infamous ‘Great Firewall of China’. Like various other websites and social networking sites, YouTube is blocked in the country. But reports today suggest that YouKu, effectively China’s version of YouTube, may soon have an app that comes pre-installed on Chinese iOS devices, just as YouTube currently does in the rest of the world.

TechNode claims, based on information gathered from a trusted source, that the YouKu founder, Victor Koo, met with Steve Jobs over the possibility of having a YouKu app pre-installed on Chinese iPhones and other iOS devices. YouKu, like YouTube is for the rest of the world, is a pretty dominant and popular videa sharing site, allowing users to upload videos of unlimited length and even has licenses with over 1,500 television stations, distributors and film production companies which are a large part of the site.

Apart from the TechNode report, information on this is scarce, but the fact that YouTube is banned in China does lend credence to the possibility that Apple would want to build in another online video streaming app directly on their devices.

[Via TheNextWeb]

 

redsn0w Untethered Jailbreak Now Available For iOS 4.3.3

This week’s release of iOS 4.3.3 may have patched some of the location log concerns people had, but it did nothing in the way of patching the exploit used by the Dev-Team that allowed them to release PwnageTool and redsn0w, both of which can jailbreak nearly all iOS devices on 4.3.3. The key exploit, discovered by relative newcomer to the jailbreak scene, Stefan Esser (@ionic) was originally used to deliver an untethered jailbreak, but surprisingly still works despite two iOS updates.

The small work that is required to get the exploit to work on the new iOS version has been done and as a result there is a new PwnageTool and redsn0w available for download. Like the versions made available for the 4.3.1 jailbreak, it uses geohot’s limera1n bootrom in conjunction with Esser’s exploit. Unfortunately the iPad 2 has yet to be jailbroken by the team, but they do note on their blog that development is currently going ahead. However apart from that, every other device capable of running iOS 4.3.3 can use the 4.3.3 untethered jailbreak – this includes the iPhone 3GS and 4, iPod Touch 3G and 4G, iPad 1 and the Apple TV (2G).

For those curious, it is presumed that the first iOS update after the jailbreak was made available, 4.3.2, didn’t fix the exploit because it was compiled the day before the release of the jailbreak. Finally, a note of warning to those ultrasn0w unlockers to stay away from redsn0w and use a custom IPSW to update to 4.3.3.

redsn0w [OS X] [Windows]

PwnageTool (OS X Only) [Torrent] [Direct Download]

[Via Dev-Team Blog]