This Week's Sponsor:

Drafts, Tally, Terminology, Simple Scan

Quality Productivity & Utility Apps, Ready for OS 26, from Agile Tortoise

Apple’s Secret Conference? Next Week.

It seems like Apple is back to the events. Business Insider reports that Apple is holding a “secret conference” for selected developers in Cupertino next week:

Apple is hosting an event for iOS developers in California next week, we’ve heard from an industry source. The event begins next Tuesday, and runs for three days, we’ve heard.

We are short on details, and we have not seen any public information about it, but it sounds like this will be a more intimate version of the iPhone Tech Talks that Apple hosted around the world last year.

Read more

MacStories Interviews: Brian X. Chen

[MacStories Interviews is a new series of email interviews with with well-known developers, bloggers, journalists, geeks. We hope you’ll like it.]

Please welcome Brian Chen, writer at Wired and author of the upcoming book Always On. Brian was one of the first people to accept my invitation for MacStories Interviews. You can follow him on Twitter as @bxchen. The interview was conducted on October 13th.

Tell me a little about yourself: who are you, what do you do, etc…?

I was a test-tube baby, created from stem cells scraped off Gizmodo director Brian Lam’s upper lip and Jason Chen’s right ear lobe. They refuse to acknowledge me, so I compete with them over at Wired, where I cover cutting-edge gadgets in hopes that one day Brian and Jason will accept me as their legitimate love child. (Weep.)

Some more background: I grew up in the bay area in a suburban town called Milpitas, home to the well known Great Mall, which has an Old Navy, a Burlington Coat Factory, a Dave and Buster’s, a Hot Dog on a Stick and pretty much every chain you could ever imagine. I hope to never set foot in there again.

I eventually went to school at UC Davis, where I studied English and film studies. Frankly I never really liked school — the classroom setting never really did it for me; it felt stifling. So I kept myself busy with extracurricular activities and work. I tried a gig at a student-run TV station for a while, where I was technical director (supervisor of video editors) and decided it was too time-consuming (life is too short to wait for Final Cut to render) and not much fun. So then I joined the student newspaper, The California Aggie, as a news reporter, and that’s where I really kicked ass. I got a nice high writing breaking news stories about crimes, deaths, student-government scandals, the whole she-bang. I became news editor by my senior year and directed 13 awesome news reporters. (I miss my team dearly.)

Eventually after graduating I ended up at Macworld as a a lab tester, where I benchmarked all the new Macs and wrote product reviews. And then when Wired was hiring an Apple reporter, I applied, got the job, and here I am today. Read more

Anyway, The White iPhone Was Delayed Because It Didn’t Take “Good Pictures”

Last night an Apple spokesperson told Reuters the white iPhone 4 has been delayed once again and the released date pushed back to Spring 2011. We speculated that it wouldn’t make much sense for Apple to keep on delaying the white model and release it a few months before the likely announcement of the iPhone 5, so if they’re going to really do this - it’s got to be something more than a simple color shift.

Oh but wait, Boy Genius Report claims the project has been canceled entirely. Their source confirms the white iPhone 4 is definitely not happening.

According to a tidbit by Cult of Mac, anyway, it seems like the white unit would need a major internal redesign to work as Steve wants. One of their sources close to Apple confirmed that the white iPhone has been delayed because of light leaking problems, specifically light leaking out and causing the camera sensor to take inaccurate pictures. “They’re washed out”, the source claims. Read more

Rumor: The White iPhone 4 Has Been Canceled

Boy Genius Report claims that Apple has not only delayed the white iPhone 4, it’s been canceled:

According to a previous source of ours, we have been told that Apple in fact has no plans to release the white model iPhone 4. Our source hypothesizes another “delay” communicated around March leading us into an iPhone 5 release time-frame in June / July.

BGR also reports another delay will be announced in March. Truth be told, it makes sense. Why should Apple release “just a white model” a few months before the announcement of the iPhone 5 after all the manufacturing issues they had and they’re probably still having? To keep up with the promises they once made?

If the white iPhone 4 is just a color update and it’s got nothing more than that (ehm, Verizon), then it’s time to move on. On, as in iPhone 5.

Justin Williams’ Mac App Store Blueprint→

Justin Williams’ Mac App Store Blueprint

Assuming both applications are accepted, both Today and Check Off will be in the App Store on day 1 as the exclusive distribution channel. At that point in time, I will shut down the existing Second Gear store and channel any sales traffic from my Web site to the Mac App Store.

Risky? Yeah. Insane? Maybe.

As with anything involving Apple’s App Store platforms, pricing is an issue. At this point, I’m not planning to adjust my prices for the Mac App Store. I think this will be the trend for existing software moving to the App Store, because giving up a 30% cut to Apple for the privilege is enough of a sacrifice. Tacking on a price cut as well? I can’t see many full-time developers agreeing to that.

If you’ve selling a $40 piece of software on your own distribution platform for years, moving it to a new platform doesn’t make it any less worth of $40.

A 30% cut seems to be perfectly fine for many developers as long as Apple provides the tools and the system to ensure that the only requirement for a dev is that of doing what he likes most: developing. Notable independent Mac developers such as the Omni Group, Realmac, Pixelmator and, now, Secondgear have already committed to Mac App Store development. I can see where this trend is going. We’ll check again in a couple of months.

Permalink

Volume Controls In The Multitasking Bar with App Switcher Volume | Cydia Store

Many iPhone users, especially jailbreakers who’re constantly tinkering with their devices, think Apple should have enabled more customization options for the multitasking bar. The current version of the “tray” only allows to change between apps, close them, access widget controls and screen rotation lock on the left.

App Switcher Volume is a new tweak available in Cydia which lets you adjust your device’s volume with a slider in the multitasking bar. The tweak will add its slider right under the music widget controls and that’s it. Useful if you really can’t stand adjusting volume using the iPhone’s default buttons, which perhaps you’ve remapped to do something else, like snapping photos.

App Switcher is available at $0.99 under Big Boss repository. Read more