The mockup surely sports some pretty pixels. Still, it breaks many of Apple’s interface guidelines, such as the camera button in the tab bar. Looks great nonetheless.
What do you think?
Yesterday we told you Apple re-launched the “iTunes 12 Days of Christmas” website in Europe for the 2010 holiday season. On the website, a banner suggested that an official iPhone app would come soon to let users receive push notifications for exclusive offers in the iTunes Store. The app is now available, it’s free and it runs both on the iPhone and iPad.
From December 26th until January 6th, Apple will give away a selection of books, apps, songs, movies and TV episodes for free. The app doesn’t show much right, except that it asks you for push notification authorization and it displays a countdown to the daily giveaway on screen.
The app is not available in the US Store, I downloaded my copy from the UK one. I guess it should be available in other European stores as well. If you have a UK account, you can go download the app here. Read more
David Newman is one of the most talented artists that use the iPad as a canvas for their creations. We covered David’s impressive portraits before, but his latest is just too great and geeky to not deserve another spot here. I mean, it’s the Woz!
That’s right, a portrait of Steve Wozniak while using a MacBook with his custom white iPhone 4 sitting on a Glif. The portrait was entirely realized on an iPad and Steve set it as his new profile picture on Facebook. It can’t get any geekier than this.
Check out the animation video of the portrait below. As usual, Newman doesn’t disappoint.[via RazorianFly] Read more
CNN released its first official app for the iPad earlier today, and it’s a solid first iteration on the tablet. It’s available now for free in the App Store.
The CNN app is meant to let you enjoy the full CNN experience with stories, insights and videos directly on your iPad. Being the iPad both a personal and communal device, the developers over at CNN thought it would be appropriate to build sharing features and a commenting system right into the app. You can share stories on Facebook and Twitter, send them via email, save a story for offline viewing (as you can guess, very useful on iPad WiFi devices). Read more
Apple has announced that MobileMe’s account page and sync services will be down for maintenance later today. MobileMe account will be down from 10 PM until 11 PM Pacific Time. MobileMe sync will be unavailable from 10 PM until midnight Pacific Time.
Fotopedia Heritage is one of those iOS apps (universal, free) that keeps on getting better on each release. First they released a 1.0 version that aimed at becoming the digital encyclopedia for humanity. Version 2.0 added support for the Retina Display, 25,000 more photos and shuffle mode. Today, with the release of Fotopedia 3.0, the developers re-imagined the app from the ground up and redesigned the whole experience to make it more intuitive, fast and beautiful. Read more
Buddies for Facebook is a neat app for the iPad we reviewed in November which provides a quick and easy way to check on your Facebook friends. With an interface based on a “split view” aimed at letting you navigate across all the sections of Facebook, there’s no doubt Buddies is one of the most curious and innovative way to use Facebook on the tablet.
The latest 1.15 update, released last night, improves the app’s integration with Facebook by adding support for Chat. To access the chat interface, you have to tap on an icon in the upper right corner in the main page. The app will “rotate” its UI to accomodate a new page with all your online friends. To start chatting, you tap on a contact and tap again to initiate the conversation. That’s it. The app allows you to switch back and forth between your friends lists and it’s pretty fast at switching between the main screen and the chat UI, too.
At $2.99 in the App Store, Buddies may not have all the features of Friendly (which happens to have a free version available now) but it’s got the feel of something new and specifically geared towards iPad users. It’s not just a webpage wrapped around an app, it’s a native version of Facebook that now comes with Facebook Chat integration.
Give it a try.
Ok, so Cydia is coming to the Mac. But what will it bring to the OS X platform, which starting January 2011 will have not one, but two ways of installing software? Just as I assumed last week, it’ll bring easy installation of mods and tweaks without having to do those things manually, through the Terminal, and keep them updated after that. The unification of desktop hacks.
Chris Foresman over at Ars Technica reports:
True. Installing themes have been a complete mess (remember Magnifique?), not to mention those neat hacks and mods (to the Finder, for example) that magically disappear on every OS update. But there’s more:
This is exactly what tinkerers on OS X wanted, and needed. Cydia for Mac will simply be the iOS version brought to the desktop.
Back to the Mac.
LittleIpsum is a neat utility for Mac OS X we covered a few months ago here. By sitting in the menubar, it allows you to quickly copy Loren Ipsum text to the clipboard. The developers tried to submit the app to Apple for Mac App Store approval, and it got rejected. Why?
I’m sure many applications have been rejected so far, but this is the first public post from a developer I’ve seen talking about it. Seems like it’s going to be a very different store than we first thought. [via]
