Skyfire Makes Another Million With iPad App

Remember Skyfire? The alternative browser for the iPhone that comes with a lot of extra functionalities, including the possibility to play Flash videos through remote proxy servers that transcode Flash content to iOS-optimized video. The iPhone app was insanely successful as it managed to pull in a million dollars in just three days in the App Store. The app has also been sitting on top of the iPhone charts for weeks now.

In case you didn’t notice, right ahead of Christmas the Skyfire team released an iPad version of the app, priced at $4.99. It was good timing and a clever move as the App Store was about to shut down for developers and apps that climbed the charts in those days gained thousands of downloads. Skyfire for iPad is no exception: three weeks into the App Store, another $1 million in the developers’ hands – although 30% will go to Apple. That’s around $700,000 in revenue so far, as MobileCrunch reports.

Skyfire for iPad is available here. It’s a cool browser, but I’m still not sure what’s the real need of Flash compatibility for videos on iOS devices. Apparently though, people bought it. And that should be enough for the developers. Read more

Apple Employees Average $46k a Year

The New Yorker’ John Cassidy looked over the balance sheets of Apple and Goldman Sachs to decide which company offers the best return on its capital. Cassidy used the latest earnings reports from the two American companies, then calculated that the two had similar profit margins but very different economic returns. Each company’s return on assets was examined, determining that Apple is twenty times more profitable than Goldman Sachs.

Apple is more profitable for a few a few reasons - it makes highly desirable products that people spend their hard-earned money on. There’s always a huge demand all Apple products so they can decide their margins (usually high ones) which are well over the cost of manufacturing; thus giving them a nice profit on every iDevice or Mac sold. Read more

Transparent iPhone 4 Exposes Ive’s Best Kept Secrets

This iPhone 4 mod is the best I’ve seen so far. There, I said it. No other mod can compete with this one, from my personal point of view. I don’t know about build quality and difficulty of installation (I guess it’s not a 5-step How To), I just know I like it.

It’s a fully transparent mod for the iPhone 4, where you get to see the battery and innards through the back of the device, front-facing camera, sensors and screen at the front. It reminds me of those semi-transparent Game Boy Colors Nintendo released in the mid-90s, only for something made in Cupertino.

Full gallery available here. If you know where to buy it, please let us know in the comments. [via TUAW]

Update: Looks like it’s a DIY mod with paint thinner used on standard black OEM components. [Thanks, Markus]

#pastblast - The Potential of MobileMe→

#pastblast - The Potential of MobileMe

We think Shawn Blanc’s “Blast from the Past Link Day” initiative is a great idea: today only, get to share and discover again great & interesting articles from months or years ago. I thought I might link back to an article from Shawn himself, from October of last year. The article is about the potential of MobileMe, and I think it’s still particularly relevant to Apple fans and iOS users as it provides exquisite insight into features we’re still waiting for Apple to implement:

In many ways Dropbox and Google are driving the iOS / OS X relationship more than MobileMe is. While MobileMe is syncing my contacts and calendars, Dropbox is syncing my most-dear files: the projects, articles, and notes I’m interacting with every day. What are iWork.com and MobileMe for if not for the sharing and syncing of everything between our Macintoshes, iPhones, and iPads in sync?

Imagine if you will what a merging of Dropbox and MobileMe might look like. Something simple and completely expected, I suppose. It would be free, it would sync and share info and files, and it would let other apps use it for syncing. Imagine setting up your iPhone with your Apple ID once, and then any app that has a Mac and/or iPad counterpart would sync. Sounds like mobile bliss.

To keep some bit of a revenue stream, there could easily be a paid version of MobileMe as well. The free version could offer syncing and come a small yet reasonable 2GB of data storage. Paying for an upgrade might buy you increased cloud storage, an @me.com email address, Find my iPhone support, and that photo gallery thing which nobody uses.

Sounds like the perfect solution for geeks, or those OS X users who know what app-to-app OTA sync is. I don’t know if the average iOS user – your friend who bought the iPhone for Angry Birds – would be excited about a Dropbox-like feature in iOS, though. And that’s why Apple is working on two features that can be easily explained to anyone: Photo Stream and Media Stream.

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Physical Mailbox Sends Push Notifications to iPhone

Matt Richardson over at Make: Online might have just come up with the ultimate way to get push notifications on the iPhone from physical objects in the real world. Like your garage door, your secret stash drawer – or your mailbox. Thanks to the power of open-source hardware Arduino, a PHP web server and the Prowl iPhone app, he managed to create a system that sends a notification to his iPhone every time mail is delivered to his mailbox. The notification arrives in seconds, as the mailbox is wired to an internet connection (no wireless for now) and the Arduino board tells the web server to forward a notification to the Prowl app via API. Of course, there is a sensor below the mailbox that knows when the lid is opened and closed.

The concept is great, useful and requires minimal PHP and hardware knowledge to be up and running. Sure, you still need to get an Arduino and follow the instructions, but it’s price worth to be paid only to be able to connect the real world with iOS. Let me say it again: real word sends push notifications to iOS. [via Boing Boing] Read more

New Apple Patents: Multitouch Display On Mouse, Heart Monitor for Music

A new day, new Apple patents surface on the Internet. Unlike most days when we get to know the latest inventions the teams at Cupertino have been awarded, today’s design embodiments and ideas are fairly interesting and not so much projected in the future like a touch-based iMac could be. As reported by Patently Apple, a new patent shows two new possible touch input systems that might soon replace our usual mice and physical keyboards.

The patent applications reveal a mouse equipped with a multitouch display capable of visualizing information and virtual keys such as a numeric pad on the device’s surface. The mouse would still come with standard features like soft left / right buttons, but in the middle there would be place for a display carrying an additional interface for users. Read more

iOS 4.3 Gestures, Bezels and An Apple Patent From Last Year

In the first beta of iOS 4.3, Apple introduced “multitasking gestures” for iPad: offered as a preview for developers to play with and test compatibility with apps, these 4 and 5-finger multitouch gestures allow users to execute a series of actions otherwise assigned to the Home button. You can switch back and forth between apps, open and close the multitasking tray or pinch back to the homescreens. The gestures need to be activated through Xcode as, again, they are a developer preview of a feature that won’t even be enabled in the public release of iOS 4.3, as Apple let devs know last night.

The presence of gestures that offer some functionalities previously exclusive to the Home button also let the rumor mill run wild, with some bloggers speculating that Apple may get rid of the Home button in the next iterations of the iPad and iPhone. Personally, I think gestures on the iPhone’s tiny screen are a terrible idea – and it gets worse if you have non-average, big hands.

Gestures are a neat new feature for the iPad that provide a glimpse at something Apple is clearly working on: more multi-touch capabilities for iOS devices. These very same gestures, though, gave several developers a hard time trying to figure out how to integrate them with their apps. Read more

Here’s Why Gestures On The iPhone Are A Bad Idea

Rumor has it Apple may be willing to implement the multitasking gestures already seen in the iOS 4.3 beta for iPad on the iPhone as well. Those willing to believe that gestures will take over buttons on our mobile devices someday even claim that Apple may get rid of the Home button altogether on the next iPhone and iPad.

Four and five-finger gestures on the iPhone’s screen, however,  have always sounded like a terrible idea to us. And now there’s video proof that, indeed, the iPhone isn’t meant for all those fingers.

It goes like this: a Youtube user enables multitasking gestures on the iPhone (weren’t they supposed to only being tested internally?) and records a video of the multi-touch galore in action. The result is embedded below. And, quite frankly, we do believe the Home button is here to stay.

[Youtube via Engadget] Read more