Apple I Comes Back To Life In Italy

Remember the Apple I that was auctioned off at Christie’s in London last year, and was sold for roughly $220,000? It turns out, the machine was bought by Italian entrepreneur Marco Boglione, a long-time Apple user and fan who spent €150,000 to buy the #82 copy of the original Apple I – a computer that back in the 1970’s was sold by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’ garage at $666.66, and was the first machine to come with 8K of RAM. The item sold at Christie’s to Boglione included the original motherboard, manual and a letter from Steve Jobs, but no screen or keyboard.

The computer was rebooted for the first time in years today at the Politecnico di Torino university in front of a large crowd and Boglione himself. Italian website Macity, which was there to cover the event, reports [Google Translation] after an initial technical issue that was fixed in a couple of minutes the Apple I was able to start up, display its usual list of random characters upon booting (while connected to an external display and keyboard this time), the typical blinking cursor and then, after running a simple BASIC program, a sort of “Hello World” message appropriately changed to “Hello Polito” in honor of the school that hosted the event.

Boglione and other attendees went on to stress the importance of the Apple I, and the revolution in the computing space Jobs and Wozniak started 35 years ago in a garage in California. Apple has become the tech giant we all know today, but the very first computer produced by the “visionary and the engineer” is still here to remind us how great ideas and technology survive through time.

Check out a video of the booting process and a photo of the motherboard below. Read more

Apple Stops Serving iAds In Apps Targeted To Kids

Since its introduction last year, Apple’s iAd advertising network has been off to a somehow rough start: touted as the best way for advertisers to build interactive campaigns to deliver effortlessly to iOS users, the service was repeatedly criticized by advertisers and ad agencies due to Apple’s strict design requirements and control, expensive minimum buy and low fill rates compared to Google’s AdMob network. In the past months, Apple tried to address several issues reported by iAd’s initial partners: they released a desktop tool to design iAds visually on a Mac, they cut the minimum buy in half from $1 million to $500,000, and rolled out fullscreen ads with even more interactivity on the iPad. They updated the official iAd website to display more information and details, and released an iPhone app entirely focused on showcasing experiences built for the iAd network.

A change in the way Apple chooses the apps that can display iAds, however, might cause a little bit of confusion among developers that, until now, have relied on iAds as the sole source of income for their free apps. Mike Zornek, developer of the free Dex app for iPhone and iPod touch (a Pokèmon browser application), relays an email from the iAd Network Support team in which an Apple employee explains how iAds may not be displayed anymore in apps targeted to “young children” because of the advertisers’ preference to not show ads to this particular audience. Read more

IM+ 5 Updates to 5.0 With Neighbors Location Service

ShapeService’s popular instant messaging app for iOS, IM+, has updated to version 5.0 today bringing a neighbors location service for chatting with friends and persons in your vicinity. IM+’s new Neighbor enables persons to find friends and chat with people whom have similar interests nearby. It isn’t too dissimilar from something like Google Buzz, with the exception that your location can be tightly controlled by exact, approximate, or city based positioning accuracy. While I see a service such as this being useful for natural disasters or emergencies, Neighbors is advertised as a way to initiate conversations, make new friends, and find people of interest using the IM+ service in your local city. Merchants looking for an alternative to Craigslist may find great use in Neighbors, updating their status to include products being sold while giving them the opportunity to talk with customers in real time. Friends and neighbors are displayed on a map with their respective avatar, giving users an overview of those that are nearby.

Version 5.0 also includes the ability to delete your account history, fixes numerous bugs, and includes some visual tweaks to the service icons. IM+ has long been known as the instant messaging client that does it all on the iPad and iPhone, and is available for free on the App Store or you can pick up the Pro version for $9.99 as a universal app.

Music Beta by Google: Mac Uploader, Flash, iOS Safari Playback

At its I/O conference earlier today, Google officially announced a new cloud service called “Music Beta” which, similarly to Amazon’s Cloud Player, allows users to upload their music collections and playlists to the company’s servers, and play them back anywhere on a web browser, tablet or smartphone. Like Amazon, Google’s service has a few limitations for now: it doesn’t come with a native iOS app as it’s only got an Android app for compatible smartphones and tablets, it requires Flash in some sections of the website and it’s restricted to US access only. Music Beta is, well, a beta product by Google, and it’s free for now – Google didn’t mention how much uploading and streaming 20,000 songs once the service hits stable status will cost you.

As detailed by MG Siegler at TechCrunch, Music Beta comes with a native Mac uploader that can look through your iTunes library and playlists or hard drive contents to find songs and albums to upload. On desktop browsers, MG Siegler says Flash is required for playback as indeed a screenshot of a technical error seems to prove, whilst Cnet claims Music Beta can stream songs on iOS devices as well, without Flash, using Mobile Safari. It was discovered a few days ago that Amazon’s Cloud Player quietly rolled out iOS Safari support, and it’s unclear at this point whether Music Beta really works on iPhones or iPads, meaning Flash is only required for some transitions and animations. As more users are invited to try the product, we’ll make sure to check Mobile Safari compatibility. Read more

Photo of Clipless Next-Gen iPod Nano with 1.3 MP Camera Surfaces

MacRumors points to a photo posted by Taiwanese website Apple.pro [Google Translation] of what they claim to be a seventh generation iPod nano featuring a 1.3 megapixel rear camera. The website, often a reliable source of Apple rumors and product leaks, posted a similar picture of the iPod nano’s case back in early April, but the photo detailed the internals of the device showing a hole for the alleged camera, failing to explain,however, how the camera would be placed externally considering the clip Apple places on the iPod nano’s back. Today’s photo seems to confirm previous speculation that, in order to make room for the camera, Apple would have to ditch the clip entirely, although it doesn’t make much sense considering Apple has been heavily touting the iPod nano as a sport accessory that can easily clip to your shirt or trousers – it’d be a curious choice for the company to revert to a clipless design to make room for a camera on such a small screen.

It’s unclear whether this new photo belongs to an iPod nano prototype Apple has been testing, or the final version of the next-generation model as Apple.pro claims. A 1.3MP lens would make for some decent photography on the nano’s screen, and indeed previous generation models featured a camera for shooting flicks and applying effects – although on a bigger screen and different case design. Since its introduction last year the 6th generation iPod nano has become an incredibly popular accessory thanks to the inclusion of a clip by default, and it’ll be interesting to see if Apple is really going to change the design for a rear camera. An announcement will likely be made in September at Apple’s usual music event, leaving plenty of room to speculation and rumors in the next months.

Carousel Is A Beautiful Instagram Client for Mac

Back in April we covered Instadesk, the first Instagram client for Mac that, through an interface design similar to iTunes and iPhoto, allowed you to browse Instagram photos, users, likes and comments directly from your desktop. The app was one of the thousands of results coming from the launch of the Instagram API, a set of tools that enable third-party developers to plug into your Instagram feed to retrieve photos uploaded by you or relevant to you. Of all the Instagram-connected apps we’ve covered, Instadesk saw a huge success as it was the first one to land on the Mac App Store.

Carousel, however, wants to step the game up by offering a beautiful and slick way to access Instagram from your Mac with a design that’s heavily inspired by iOS, yet runs natively on OS X. I don’t know if the developers are using the Iconfactory’s Chameleon framework for this, but it certainly looks like Carousel has some similarities with Twitterrific – the Twitter client from the Iconfactory that shares it codebase across the Mac, iPhone and iPad. So what’s this all about? First off, Carousel presents a minimal, vertical-oriented interface as if you were looking at your iPhone’s screen in portrait mode while browsing Instagram. The photo stream is embedded directly into the app’s window, with beautiful Instagram photos to flick through as they load. At the bottom, three tabs allow you to switch between your feed, popular photos and your profile. Every photo can be enlarged via Quick Look, saved locally on your Mac, or commented / liked thanks to a wide selection of keyboard shortcuts to choose from.

In Carousel, you can open every user’s profile to check out their photos. You can comment and like pictures, too, with interaction happening inside an iOS-like popover that resembles Twitterrific’s implementation of conversation views and profiles. You can even view if a user’s following you, or if you’re following him. Last, the app can be themed. Carousel’s default theme is already gorgeous in my opinion, but you can switch to a classic Mac or red one from the Settings.

Carousel can be downloaded for free, or you can purchase a license at $4.99 (introductory price) from the developer’s website. More screenshots below. Read more

Apple’s Guy L. “Bud” Tribble Explains Location Tracking at Senate Hearing

At a U.S. Senate hearing this morning entitled “Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy”, Apple’s Vice President of Software Technology Guy L. “Bud” Tribble offered his remarks about Apple’s privacy policy, location tracking system implemented in iOS devices and App Store app control, reiterating many of the points already explained by Apple two weeks ago in the Q&A on Location Data.

As summarized by AppleInsider, Tribble testified before Senate members that Apple doesn’t collect personal information about its users nor does the company share any information with advertisers – rather, the cache file that was discovered by security researchers (which was incorrectly large in size and backed up to a computer during the sync process) is meant to store information about nearby cell towers and WiFi hotspots to enable iPhones and iPads 3G to quickly get signal without having to rely on real-time GPS data all the time. This is a crowd-sourced database that Apple keeps in a small amount on every device as an offline cache – personal data and device identifiers are never sent to Apple, Tribble explained.

Sen. Al Franken also asked both Apple and Google representatives at the hearing whether the two companies could add a fixed privacy policy to their app marketplaces to ensure users always know how their personal data is being treated, and what’s going on behind the scenes of an app. Tribble replied a privacy policy in App Store apps wouldn’t be enough as users are likely to skip that every single time – and that’s why Apple believed that adding actual graphical elements to the user interface would be a better, and more elegant solution to inform users about the usage of Location Services. In iOS, an icon in the status bar indicates when an app is sharing your location; every app must ask a user to share his location through a dialog box; in the Settings, users can revoke location access on app-by-app basis and manage other location preferences as well.

Tribble also went on to explain Apple does random audits on App Store apps and follows the tech press and iOS community to find out which apps are violating the privacy rules:

The Apple executive also detailed how his company conducts random audits on applications to make sure they’re playing by the rules. He admitted that Apple does not audit every single one of its 350,000 iPhone applications, just like it would be impossible for the federal government to audit every single taxpayer. Apple also keeps an eye on blogs and its “active community” of application users for potential violations. If a violation is discovered and the issue cannot be resolved, applications will be removed within 24 hours and the developer will be notified.

In most cases, Tribble said, developers quickly correct the issue, as they want to keep their application available in the App Store.

Tribble was joined today by Google’s Alan Davidson. A video of Senator Franken’s opening statement is embedded after the break. Read more

Apple Patents Detail Web Clip Widgets for iOS, iPad with Extra Connector

According to a series of new patent designs published by Patently Apple, Apple has been experimenting with interesting concepts to let users create web clip widgets on iOS, and have an extra connectivity port on the iPad while in landscape mode.

Web clip widgets were first introduced at the WWDC 2006, and through OS X Dashboard integration they allowed users to grab a portion of a webpage, save it as a widget in the Dashboard, and receive live updates when the original webpage changed. The feature came quite in handy for saving weather-related websites, e-commerce pages or blogs, but didn’t work really well with webpages that required a login system. However, it’s still a cool tech that enables users to visually select elements from a webpage to save locally on their Dashboards. Apple has been playing around with the idea of doing the same with iOS’ Safari, apparently, although neither the iPhone or iPad have support for homescreen widgets or Dashboard. The awarded patent design details the process of creating a web clip widget in Safari, with the possibility to “move, scale and/or rotate” content to adjust it to your needs. The menu appears to pop in as an overlay to the current webpage in Safari, but the patent doesn’t explain how a web clip would later be accessible from the Springboard. Current versions of iOS let users bookmark a website to the homescreen, but that’s still visualized as an icon – not a clip preview. Perhaps we’ll know more with iOS 5 at the upcoming WWDC.

The iPad-related patent is not new to the rumor mill, but it seems to confirm the original iPad was being tested in a version that featured an extra connector while in landscape mode.

Apple has been granted a design patent for what appears to be the original iPad Wi-Fi + 3G model that just happened to have a landscape USB slot as is clearly noted below in patent figures 1 and 6. It’s unknown at this time as to why Apple decided to scrap the secondary Landscape USB slot – when consumers clearly wanted such an option.

Apple credits Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive (alongside other team members) for the invention. Both the original iPad and the iPad 2 come with a single connector below the device’s Home button, but it was rumored before Apple was planning on adding a second port for better landscape usage.

Financial Times Still Negotiating with Apple Ahead of June 30 Deadline

PaidContent reports the Financial Times is still negotiating with Apple over the implementation of iTunes subscriptions in its iPad app, which was generating 20% of the publication’s subscribers and over 1 million in revenue a few months ago.

With a month to go until publishers must either fall in with Apple’s new in-app purchasing terms or quit iOS in June, The Financial Times is not yet amongst the small early group to have consented to the new rules.

“We’re still in discussions with them,” FT producer management head Mary Beth Christie told paidContent:UK at World E-reading Congress in London on Tuesday morning. “We’ll see where they go. But we are fixed on the idea of holding on to our consumer data.

Like Time Inc., it appears that the Financial Times can’t agree on Apple’s subscription terms unveiled last February, which require publishers to give a 30% cut off every transaction to Apple and allow users to choose whether or not they want to share their personal information with a publisher. In the past months, in fact, the Financial Times stated multiple times that the iPad app could go somewhere else, perhaps on other platforms and tablets, as they couldn’t give up on subscribers’ data to stay in the App Store. Indeed, after a five-month trial period, Apple will begin pulling publishing apps that haven’t implemented subscriptions on June 30.

Apple managed to ink deals with several magazines, newspapers and publishers over the past two weeks, such as Hearst and Conde Nast, which began selling a subscription-based version of The New Yorker yesterday.