Enable AirPlay for Video In Third-Party Apps

Disappointed Apple didn’t enable AirPlay streaming for video on all apps on iOS 4.2.1 for iPhone and iPad? Well, we are too. We thought we’d be able to stream just about anything from our iDevices to the new Apple TV, but it turns out you can only stream video using AirPlay from Apple’s native apps. Streaming video in Safari isn’t enabled, nor is it in 3rd party apps and Apple’s own camera roll. Bummer.

Fortunately, TUAW’s Erica Sadun has done some good hacking to find out what exactly is going on under the hood. She decompiled the frameworks and got ahold of Apple’s APIs and, without entering the most technical details, it seems like the whole concept is still a little bit rough for the average developer.

So caveat hackteur – this isn’t going to be appropriate for the casual developer. Yet.

Having gotten this proof of concept working, there’s still a lot left to get done to transform this into a stable solution that works with general applications. Keep in mind that you’ll be working with unpublished APIs, so the above classes and code are not App Store Safe. That’s why we have a jailbreak world, after all.

Head over the video below and see what Erica got working on her iPad. AirPlay for video in 3rd party apps isn’t impossible, I guess we just need to wait for Apple to officially enable it. Maybe in iOS 4.3? Read more

MacStories Black Friday Guide: 150 Great iOS Apps [Update: Mac Apps, Gadgets]

With Thanksgiving just around the corner and that credit card already set up with your iTunes account, it’s impossible to resist the temptation to grab all those discounted apps in the App Store. Indeed, great deals have surfaced this past week and we’re also waiting for Apple to go public with its own Black Friday deals.

We don’t think you should force yourself to not buy all those discounted apps and gadgets because you have to save money for the iPhone 5. No, there’s time for that. We want to offer you a roundup of the best apps we think are currently discounted for Thanksgiving, great pieces of software we have reviewed in the past and you should go buy right now. We haven’t listed any app in here, we have simply collected the ones we love.

So jump after the break, fire up iTunes and check out these amazing deals from the App Store. Read more

What Happened To App Subscriptions? [Video]

Last night we reported Apple is already working on a new build of iOS that should be coming as early as mid-December to support plans for recurring subscriptions in App Store apps. The first app to take advantage of these new options? The Daily by News Corp.

Well, at least that’s what the rumors say, and of course we won’t be hearing anything official from Apple until the day the collaboration with News Corp. goes public. But plans for recurring subscriptions have been going around for a while at Cupertino, although they didn’t play out the way we wanted. Or perhaps Jobs and Forstall wanted. As a matter of fact, yesterday I remembered Forstall had mentioned “subscriptions” as a new business model for developers in iPhone OS 3.0. At the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event in March 2009, he clearly stated that many developers (especially magazine app publishers) were asking for a way to renew subscriptions in-app. So what did those publishers get? Recurring subscriptions? No, they got in-app purchases, which are far from being a way to automatically renew a subscription.

So we took the part from the preview event video where Scott Forstall mentions subscriptions and re-uploaded it. Looking back, it’s not clear whether Apple really saw in-app purchases as a way to automatically renew magazine subscriptions in-app or not. Maybe they wanted recurring subscriptions to be part of the in-app purchase system but they had to remove them from the final version of iPhone OS 3.0. I mean, blogs back then really seemed to think subscriptions were a go. Thing is, Apple hasn’t changed its position since then (not even when the iPad came out) and we think it’s about time to have a proper system for recurring subscriptions tied to iTunes accounts.

Check out the video below. Read more

How To Wrangle Outlook 2011 To Work With Gmail

Wrangling Outlook 2011 with Gmail

Wrangling Outlook 2011 with Gmail

Last Updated: 05/20/2013

In 2010, Outlook poorly supported Gmail accounts, but today it’s a lot better. Most of the setup that was previously required is now automated. In this revised guide, you’ll now find two major sections. The first shows you where to plug in your account information, and I’ll also walk you through some extra steps to remove a couple unnecessary folders. The second details how you can make Outlook feel more like Mail, and includes some of what was previously covered in the 2010 tutorial. I’ve also removed the previous introduction — I’ll get straight to the point. I hope you find this guide more more relevant and useful than it was before.

Read more

UberTwitter For iPhone Reminds Us Why We Didn’t Pick A BlackBerry In The First Place

Every day, 10 million tweets are sent using UberTwitter for BlackBerry handsets. Enterprise folks tweet with it (but please remind me why the business dudes tweet, I think I’m missing something here), celebrities tweet with it, the developers were so happy with the popularity of UberTwitter for BlackBerry that they decided to port it to the iPhone.

Now, I’m not usually huge on app portings from one platform to another. I don’t like developers who are successful on the iPhone and convert an app to Android without considering Android’s nature, and I had the same feeling when I heard of UberTwitter for iPhone this morning.

Indeed my feeling was correct. The app is simply ugly, and doesn’t feel right on the iPhone. It tries to be an iPhone app, but I stopped caring the moment I saw floating controls above a web view and a split view badly squeezed on the iPhone’s screen. It feels wrong most of the times.

UberTwitter for iPhone might be huge brand-wise, but it’s not really a great app at all. If you feel like trying something new this morning though, or you simply want to be reminded why you switched from BlackBerry last year, the app is available here. Press release embedded below. Read more

The Coolest Thing You’ll See Today: iPhone Seen Through Oil & Water

We have seen many videos about the iPhone screen in the past: some of them focused on the magic of the Retina Display, some of them aimed at capturing pixels on our old 3GS. The same pixels we didn’t think were so important before we got our hands on the iPhone 4.

Today’s video is about the iPhone’s screen, as seen through a Canon EOS 5D looking down a piece of glass with oil & water on it. Jesse Zanzinger, the photographer who realized the video, set the maximum level of iPhone brightness, placed a piece a glass with oil and water above the iPhone and looked down with his camera to capture both science’s best enemies and the screen in a single shoot.

The result is kind of surprising. Check it out below, but don’t this at home kids. I don’t want oil to end up all over your iPhones. [Vimeo] Read more

Apple-1 Goes For $213k In Christie’s Auction→

Apple-1 Goes For $213k In Christie’s Auction

Two hundred Apple-1 computers are estimated to have been created and sold for $666.66 before Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1977. Once the Apple II, the company’s first official product, was released, many of the Apple-1 models were reclaimed as trade-ins. Only about 50 are still known to exist, many of them indexed by hardware developer Mike Willegal.

Of those 200 machines, Christie’s Apple-1 is No. 82. This same Apple-1 is thought to be the same one that was sold on eBay in November 2009 by a user named “apple1sale” to “julescw72”. At the time, it sold for a winning bid of $50,000.

Remember the original Apple-1 that was up for auction at Christie’s? Someone bought it for almost $220,000.

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Due 1.2 Alerts You It’s The Best Reminder App for iPhone

Back in September I reviewed Due, an interesting new app to quickly create reminders and set up timers on your iPhone. The first version of the app featured a cool UI and a good set of functionalities, allowing you to easily switch between the reminder and timer window. Most of all, the best thing about Due was that it looked great and enabled you to just forget about the app once reminders were set.

It’s really simple: once you enter a new item you can choose a due date & time, but there are some handy shortcuts in the same screen. If you find yourself constantly using some reminders as countdowns, you can create a timer. That’s it. The interface is clean and polished, and the app doesn’t even need an internet connection to work as it’s based on iOS 4′s local notification system.

The new 1.2 version, which was approved yesterday and I have been beta testing for a while, adds terrific new features to an already great package. If you tap on a reminder in the main screen, for instance, you’ll be presented a bar containing shortcuts to turn snooze on and off, set the reminder as repeating, reschedule the whole thing to 10 minutes, 1 hour or 1 day later. Useful. The developer added reminder management (something many fans hoped they would not, in order to keep the app simple) but by stuffing it in a bar you’ll only see after a tap, they didn’t clutter anything. It feels good.

Due for iPhone is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the huge changelog with all the new features and more screenshots below. Read more

iPad Drawings on Display in Paris

The iPad drawings of David Hockney are being displayed at the Pierre Bergé in Paris. The Yves Saint Laurent Foundation dedicated its 14th exhibition to over 200 of Hockney’s iPhone and iPad drawings. It’s showing now thru January 30th, 2011. If I lived there, this would be so cool to go see. If you’re close, check it out!

Hockney used the Brushes.app to create these digital paintings and the way he carried his iPad around was very original - custom pockets in his suits, which you can read more about here. His jacket pocket has a deep inside pocket that the iPad, or as he calls it ‘sketchbook’, fits snugly into.

Another cool thing about the exhibition is that it is being presented on iPhones and iPads; the brightness and vibrant color originally intended by the artist are respected. To see a video from the exhibition, click here. This is just another example of what a great product Apple’s iDevices are, they can be used in so many ways and people keep coming up with great ideas to use it for.

[via kottke.org via Fondation Pierre Bergé]