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Apple Teams Up With Dentsu To Bring iAds to Japan

With a press release today Apple announced its exclusive partnership with Japanese brand agency Dentsu Group to bring iAds to Japan. The iAds following this partnership will be rolled out in Japan in early 2011 and Dentsu “will be responsible for the selling and creative execution”.

Dentsu subsidiary cci will provide creative production and media planning.

Check out the full press release below. Read more



Smule Wants To Make You A Musician Again With Their Magic Fiddle

There’s no doubt Smule knows how to release popular applications. If you look at their iOS portfolio, there’s not a single app that hasn’t sold thousands and thousands of copies in the App Store: I Am T-Pain, Magic Piano, Ocarina, Glee Karaoke and now, again on the iPad, the new Magic Fiddle.

Just like Magic Piano allowed you to play some sort of digital piano based on its own rules and system, Magic Fiddle recreates a violin on screen you can play with a few taps and swipes. The app is getting rave reviews on many blogs and publications, and while I haven’t tried the app myself (I’m not really a big fan of music apps in general) I have to admit it looks good from the screenshots and video posted by the developers.

The app contains a tutorial section to teach you how to bow, pluck, trill, vibrato and glissandi with your fingers; when you’re good enough to show off your skills, you can play with your friends and aim at the global leaderboards. Graphically speaking, Magic Fiddle looks interesting.

Magic Fiddle is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the demo video below.


1.0 Is The Loneliest Number

1.0 Is The Loneliest Number

I imagine prior to the launch of the iPod, or the iPhone, there were teams saying the same thing: the copy + paste guys are *so close* to being ready and we know Walt Mossberg is going to ding us for this so let’s just not ship to the manufacturers in China for just a few more weeks… The Apple teams were probably embarrassed.

But if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.

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Researchers Sound Alarm Over Critical Mac OS X Bug

Researchers Sound Alarm Over Critical Mac OS X Bug

Security researchers Tuesday warned that Apple’s OS X contains a critical vulnerability that attackers could use to hijack Macs running the older Leopard version of the operating system.
Although Leopard was supplanted by the new Snow Leopard operating system more than a year ago, the older version still accounts for about a third of all installations of Mac OS X.

It’s a variation of the bug that made JailbreakMe possible.

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Apple Confirms iTunes Connect Will Be Closed December 23-28

With a brief note on the iOS developer center, Apple informed developers that iTunes Connect won’t be available starting December 23rd through the 28th:

iTunes Connect will be temporarily unavailable from Thursday, December 23 through Tuesday, December 28 for the winter holidays. iTunes Connect access will be back online for use on December 29. If you choose to set an available date for your app to go live during the scheduled holiday shutdown, your app will not go live on the App Store until iTunes Connect resumes for business on December 29. Please plan your releases accordingly.

Previous rumors reported that Apple was planning an additional “lockdown” for the Thanksgiving week. Nope, that won’t happen. Developers, get your apps ready before Christmas.


Rumor: Apple Has Cancelled Support for AirPrint Through Mac and Windows

Update: Unlike many other blogs that linked to this post claim, the rumor isn’t about AirPrint being cancelled. It’s about AirPrint through shared printers on Macs and PCs.

When Apple released the first beta of iOS 4.2 for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, they also officially announced AirPrint, the wireless printing system that would work with specific HP printers and shared printers on Macs and PCs:

AirPrint is Apple’s powerful new printing architecture that matches the simplicity of iOS—no set up, no configuration, no printer drivers and no software to download,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users can simply tap to print their documents or photos wirelessly to an HP ePrint printer or to a printer shared on a Mac or PC.

We have been told from a few Mac developers that a few days ago Apple removed all the references to printing via OS X 10.6.5 and PCs both from Readme files and other online documentation posted in the iOS developer center. It seems like all that’s now mentioned in the release notes are the aforementioned HP networked printers, as if the shared printing option never existed. See here, here and here.

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Beautiful Modeler Sculpts 3D Models Using An iPad [Video]

Of all the purposes we’ve seen the iPad used for, 3D models are kind of a novelty. Interactive Fabrication released a software tool for “gestural sculpting” which uses the iPad as a multitouch-based remote controller. The software renders 3D models on a Mac, the iPad is used for touch controls up to 5 fingers.

TUAW reports:

As you can see, the iPad works as a controller for the app running on the MacBook, and not only is touchscreen information passed on to the 3D modeling program (I like that multitouch works as well, so you can mold five different points in the sculpture at once), but accelerometer information is also passed across, so tilting the iPad around also tilts the onscreen view.

You can even pass the information along to a 3D printer and get a physical result of what you’ve been creating with the iPad and OS X. The developers released the tool as open source code, it’s available on their website. Check out the video below. Very cool. Read more


1Password 3.5 Released With New Chrome Extension, Better Dropbox Integration

Last week we talked about the new Google Chrome extension included in 1Password for Mac beta: it looks great and it retains the look of the app we all love on our Mac desktops. With the public release of 1Password 3.5 today, AgileWeb Solution is bringing the new and updated Chrome extension to life together with lots of bug fixes, better Dropbox sync status visualization in the sidebar and overall performance improvements.

1Password 3.5 for Mac is available here. Check out the full changelog below. Read more