For students and busy bees sporting Microsoft Office 2011, a 110.5 MB update just hit the pipes. Microsoft’s AutoUpdater should catch the latest update, which improves stability when opening Microsoft documents from third party applications, and fixes issues that caused Outlook to previously crash. You can find a direct link to the update at Microsoft’s Download Center, and you can find more information pertaining to the December 13th update at Microsoft Support.
Microsoft Update for Office 2011 Improves Stability
Gazaro Protect Saves You Money Post Best Buy Purchase
I hate having to wait for a good deal. Take a good pair of headphones for example – you absolutely shouldn’t sacrifice the miracles of good sound pumping through your ear holes for Apple’s ear buds (sorry my little white friends). A hundred bucks can pick you up a pair of in-ear Shures that are leagues beyond those tacky ten dollar gel buds you’ve gunked up with pocket lint, and it’s better to just pick up the damn things now instead of shortening your life span through another lousy teeth grinding music session. But what if a Christmas deal comes along a week later? You could have saved a Jackson or two! Not to worry savvy consumers, Gazaro Protect continues to save you cash after the fact, ensuring you’ll get the best deals out of your Best Buy purchases.
Toshiba Is Building A $1 Billion Factory To Make Apple Displays
Reuters is reporting that, according to the Nikkei business daily, Toshiba will build a $1.19 billion factory (that’s 100 billion yen) to make LCD panels, “mainly to supply to Apple Inc’s iPhones”.
The company’s wholly owned unit, Toshiba Mobile Display Co, will construct the facility in Ishikawa prefecture and the plant will churn out low-temperature polysilicon LCD panels, which allow for high-resolution images, the paper said.
Work on the plant will start by early next year, with the production due to begin in the second half of 2011, Nikkei said.
Could this mean that Apple is moving away from its current suppliers of LCD panels, or are they simply looking for other ways of getting the panels into the production chain? Reuters is reporting that Toshiba will “mainly” supply to Apple, which lead us to think that the manufacturer will also make displays for, say, Android or Windows Phone 7 devices.
So is Apple looking for exclusivity or just more manufacturers?
MacStories Giveaway: Win A Copy of Screens for iPhone & iPad
Screens is an excellent new VNC client by Edovia which, unlike other similar apps in the App Store, it’s not aimed at letting you move a cursor on your computer through the iPhone and iPad. It’s an app specifically meant to take advantage of the platform it runs on – iOS – so that you can actually touch your computer remotely.
From my review:
The “simple approach” doesn’t stop at touch controls, however. Once you’re controlling OS X on your device and you’d like to do some actual stuff with it, Screens offer two separate keyboards to execute most of the commands you know and love on the Mac. The first keyboard is a standard iOS keyboard with an additional bar on top which allows you to navigate using the arrow keys, or press Mac-only keys like Command and Control. Those buttons stay pressed until you tap on them again — useful. The second keyboard, though, is much more functional: it contains the same Mac-only and arrow keys on top, but there are no letters at the bottom. Instead, you get these “action buttons” that let you perform tasks that would require a series of taps and dialogue boxes instead. For instance, you can cut, copy, minimize, log out and activate Spolight with a single tap. Huge time saver.
We have 5 copies of Screens to give away to lucky MacStories readers. Check out the giveaway rules below (it ends tomorrow!), and if you can’t wait the app is available here. Read more
#MacStoriesDeals - Monday
In case you missed our announcement earlier today, we’re starting another new feature, this one being a daily occurrence. We’re calling it #MacStoriesDeals. If anymore show up during the day, we’ll be sure to update this list!
Here’s some great deals for today on iOS apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!
Verizon iPhone Rumored to Debut Right After Christmas
Rumor time! Today MacDailyNews is saying that the iPhone 4 is going to appear on Verizon’s network, and running on their new 4G LTE network.
“iTunes 12 Days Of Christmas” Website Goes Live In Europe
Just like every year since 2008, Apple is having a special Christmas promotion on the iTunes Store. Ever day from December 26th to January 6th, users will be able to download a “fantastic selection of songs, music videos, apps, books, TV episodes and a film” completely for free on iTunes. This year’s “iTunes 12 Days Of Christmas” website went live in Europe a few hours.
You can check out the UK version (which was unavailable until today) here. Read more
Flipboard To Launch A Web App?
As spotted by The Next Web earlier today, the Flipboard team is hiring. Most specifically, the latest job openings on Flipboard’s website reveal that the company is looking for a “Designer-Web Developer” and a “Front-end Web Developer”, together with an additional iOS developer. Flipboard was named iPad App of the Year by Apple last week in the annual “iTunes Rewind” compilation.
The web developer Mike McCue’s startup is looking for should be able to “envision and design the future of reading content online” across “web and mobile”. Standard JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP and Photoshop skills are required for the front-end web developer opening.
A web version of Flipboard, in my opinion, would make a lot of sense, especially considering the availability of magazine and newspaper web apps in Google’s recently launched Chrome Web Store. Flipboard for the web would directly compete with the already popular paper.li service, which allows you to build digital newspapers around Twitter links and users. What’s for sure is that if this is true, if Flipboard’s really planning a full-featured web version, we won’t be seeing it until 2011. We’d also appreciate an iPhone version, a lot.
Infinity Blade: $1.6 Million In 5 Days→
Infinity Blade: $1.6 Million In 5 Days
Great results for the first game based on the Unreal Engine for iOS:
The first Unreal Engine-powered game for iOS, Infinity Blade, has sold at least 274,000 copies in its first five days on sale, according to recent player counts on Game Center. At $6 a copy that’s a $1.64 net for the publisher, and a new record, according to Gamesindustry.biz.
Take away Apple’s revenue and it’s over 1 million for the developers. Not a bad start, right? Now we’re waiting for multiplayer to be activated in a next update, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for “free roaming” to find its way in Infinity Blade. At least not in this first version.