This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

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

March 2nd Liveblog: The iPad’s Second Coming

There couldn’t be a more hyped announcement than this week’s Apple Keynote at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 2nd, and we’ll be hanging out with all of you guys at a safe distance for when the fireworks misfire. Rumors will be settled, white iPads will be tossed into (non)-existence, and awkward picture moments with new cameras will be had. Plus, you can expect those heart tingling show-stoppers with a Jony Ives speech, and maybe (just maybe) a new look at the next generation of iOS. Excited yet?

Join us at 12:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time (that’s the New York gamut) for an hour long pre-show where we’ll kick around iPad predictions, overdose on coffee, and potentially ruin a perfectly good stress ball before the event. As always we’ll be consolidating all of the major announcements into a streamlined feed from everyone’s favorite websites.

Bookmark this page and come back before the event starts on March 2nd for lots of fun, question answering from the audience, and maybe a guest or two.

Time Zones:

13:00 – New York, New York
10:00 – San Francisco, California
08:00 – Honolulu, Hawaii
05:00 – Sydney, Australia
03:00 – Tokyo, Japan
02:00 – Shanghai, China
23:30 – New Delhi, India
21:00 – Moscow, Russia
19:00 – Rome, Italy
18:00 – London, England

Don’t see your city? You can use this link to get your exact time. Read more

OS X Lion and the Mac App Store Distribution Dilemma

Last week, Apple released the first developer preview of Mac OS X Lion. New and improved OS aside, something set apart Lion from the previous beta releases Apple seeded in the past years: Lion needs to be downloaded through the Mac App Store. That’s right: a 3.6 GB download, available for developers in the App Store infrastructure. How did this happen? Well, the how is easily explainable: developers can log in the Dev Center, request a Lion build and a unique promo code is generated. With the promo code, developers can fire up the Mac App Store and start the OS X Lion installer download. The promo code, as an additional security measure to prevent people from sharing it, can only be used once, on a single machine.

While the method is really clever and brings a bit of fresh air to the developer community (no need to have a download in your browser, you can just leave the Mac App Store do its job), this has raised some questions on the future of Apple’s OS downloads for consumers. Namely, some people are speculating the Lion developer preview is clearly pointing to a summer 2011 featuring Mac OS X 10.7 Lion available only in digital format. Apple is killing the CD, and physical Mac OS purchases. Read more

The Pocket Stand - A Kickstarter Project

We’ll admit, we love unique ideas, especially ones that are driven toward Apple products. We’ve found another Kickstarter project to show you on MacStories, it’s called The Pocket Stand.

The Pocket Stand, by Mike Paek and Sam Chan,  is an iPad accessory, you could also call it a compact multi-tool for the minimalist. It is both a speaker amplifier and a stand that props your iPad in multiple configurations (Bonus: It also functions as a bottle opener). In the end, The Pocket Stand allows you to gain extra functionality without sacrificing the mobility inherent of the iPad. Read more

Surprise: Leaked iPhone 5 Dock Connector Looks Just Like iPhone 4 Dock Connector

Usually-reliable Taiwanese website Apple.pro [Google Translation] posted a photo of what they claim to be a leaked part of the next-generation iPhone, most specifically the 30-pin dock connector Apple has always used to let iOS devices and computers communicate and share data with each other. The most surprising part – the dock connector doesn’t show any big difference from the one Apple is currently using in the iPhone 4. Perhaps the new one is slightly narrower in the section where it connects to the device’s logic board. Apple.pro notes part number is 821-1300-02, while iPhone 4 has 821-1093-A.

On a related note, it’s interesting to notice Apple hasn’t made any changes to its dock connector after the European commission approved a new standard a few months ago that would require smartphone makers to adopt micro-USB as a universal connector for their devices. But, then again, Apple could just get away by bundling a micro-USB adapter in the iPhone 5’s retail package – something that, admittedly, would be pretty cool in our opinion.

Last, Apple.pro says the “leaked” iPhone 5 screen we saw last week is fake. Several readers pointed out that image could be easily Photoshopped, indeed. [via MacRumors]

Apple Execs Hint at Cheaper iPhone, Carrier Expansion

Both Business Insider and Forbes report this morning of a research note issued by Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi about a meeting he had last week with Apple COO Tim Cook, CFO Peter Oppenheimer and VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue. Sacconaghi’s notes about the interview help put some future Apple plans in perspective, like the release of a cheaper iPhone model to address a different market segment and the adoption of more carriers worldwide to further expand the iPhone’s marketshare.

Tim Cook referred to the iPhone as “the mother of all halos”, being the reason why sales of other Apple products like Macs and iPads have skyrocketed over the past years. Cook knows, however, that Apple can’t afford to not explore the possibilities offered by other types of markets, and he suggested Apple is not “ceding any market”. As for the cheaper iPhone and the rumors we’ve heard in the past weeks (the ones that pointed to a smaller iPhone as the new cheap entry-level device), this report seems to corroborate other media outlets’ theories:

The analyst says Cook “appeared to reaffirm the notion that Apple is likely to develop lower priced offerings” to expand the market for the iPhone. Cook said the company is planning “clever things” to address the prepaid market, and that Apple did not want its products to be “just for the rich,” and that the company is “not ceding any market.”

Expanding to other carriers is also a “priority” for Apple. Currently, the iPhone runs on 175 different networks versus RIM’s 550. As for the tablet market:

Cook indicated that the tablet market would be much bigger than the PC market. Sacconaghi concludes that if so, it could eventually be a $60 billion to $100 billion business for Apple alone. Cook also said he expected intense competition in tablets, more so than in smart phones, with all PC and smart phone vendors likely to participate, but he added that Apple has a strong head start, and that it has interesting new things in the pipeline.

From this research note, it sounds like Apple is really considering moving to a more variegate line of iPhones to address more markets, with more carriers. Time will tell, and hopefully we’ll know more come the WWDC in June. [via Forbes, Business Insider]

Place Clock Combines iPhone Alarms and Location

Sometimes, you don’t want to be reminded of something you have to do at a certain time during the day – rather, you’d like to be notified of events and tasks you need to take care of in a specific location, say pick up the laundry at home or meet Mike at the office. But as the default iPhone clock application doesn’t allow you to attach location info to alarms, you’re forced to assign a “time” to everything.

Place Clock, a new app by Ocoomo, aims at fixing these issues by providing a solution that combines both time and location to create the ultimate alarm clock application that’s aware of where you are in the world, yet can rely on time-based alarms as the native Apple software can. What’s cool about Place Clock (I have been testing the app for 2 days now), is that it completely works in the background without draining too much battery (at least on the iPhone 4, might be different on the 3GS) and it continuously keeps track of your location as a possible way to initiate alarms. The app doesn’t need to be open all the time, but it can fire off an alarm when you arrive to, depart from a location or get in a specific range. This, combined with classic time-based features, makes for a very solid app that’s, at least for me, something new on the iPhone. Read more

Hackers Find A Way to Stream PlayStation 3 Games to iOS Devices

Here’s something you’d probably like to try right away, but likely can’t because it’s really too geeky to understand: a group of hackers and developers known as “pandaelf” managed to stream PlayStation 3 games to the iPhone and iPad on a local network using a series of USB devices attached to the PS3, and an “interpreter” to send iOS gestures back to the console. Somehow, it’s working.

Here’s what they did: they connected a USB mouse and keyboard to the PS3 as input controls, and another “third party capture device” that streams video to a PC running a build of “everyAir”, a remote desktop controller. everyAir really handles everything, from iOS to PC communication to live video streaming from the TV and PS3 to the iPhone and iPad. It’s one hell of a setup but as you can see from the demo video below, it seems to be working.

Video and Q&A below. Somebody please find a way to play Game Cube games on the iPad now, and I’m sold. [via iThinkDifferent] Read more

Jailbreak Tweak Greatly Improves iOS Notifications

A few weeks ago it was rumored that Apple might buy a third-party developer to improve the notification system in the future versions of iOS. In case you missed my piece on the problem with iOS notifications, here’s what I think the problem is:

iOS notifications get in the way, interrupt one’s workflow or media consumption and once they’re gone, they’re gone.

I believe people don’t like notifications on iOS because they need action, and quickly. What I would like to see in iOS 5 is a smart notification system that doesn’t stand in your way, yet it’s entirely accessible from the statusbar or the multitasking tray at any time.

Developer Peter Hajas has apparently been listening to the complaints of people like me, and has released a new tweak available in Cydia that completely re-imagines the iOS notification system by providing an interface that’s unobtrusive and, at the same time, allows you take control over your incoming notifications. MobileNotifier (this is the name of the tweak) displays notifications in a bar under the iOS statusbar which allows you to quickly jump to an app, and yet doesn’t force you to stop scrolling the Springboard, for example. Hajas has also taken advantage of the empty space usually assigned to the multitasking tray: instead of displaying a transparent overlay for your Springboard when you double-click the home button, an “alert dashboard” with a list of all your notifications will appear. You can take action on them, or dismiss them. Similarly, MobileNotifier also brings notifications to the lockscreen – something we’ve been wishing Apple would implement in iOS for years.

I can’t comment on the stability and speed of the tweak as I haven’t installed it yet, but it looks really good. Check out more screenshots below, and the notes from the developer at his personal blog. You can download the tweak from Cydia by adding this repo: http://phajas.xen.prgmr.com/repo. Read more