Jobs and Ive Rejoice: Apple Granted Patents for iPhone 4 and iPad Industrial Design

Apple wins dozens of design and tech patents every week, and most of them are about unannounced features and products the engineers at Cupertino may or may not use in the future. Think about the hybrid iMac: we haven’t heard anything about it yet, but the patent is out there. Same applies for hundreds of different patents: they’re cool to look at, but it’s likely that you’ll never see them in action.

Today’s patent, though, is a major win for Apple’s design team and Steve Jobs: as Patently Apple reports, Apple was granted patents for the iPhone 4 and iPad industrial design and the iPhone UI overview. Read more

TaskForce: The Uber Minimal To-Do App for iPhone

I love OmniFocus, but many of you guys probably don’t need its complex feature set and just would like to have a simple todo list app for iPhone. You know, something like a digital piece of paper where you can jot down tasks, mark them as complete and delete them.

That’s it, no contexts, projects, teammates or tags to choose from. Personally I wouldn’t go anywhere with such a system and I know there are thousands of apps similar to the one I’m going to write about available in the App Store – yet TaskForce is minimal and polished enough to deserve a mention.

TaskForce for iPhone is a simple and beautiful app that does just that: it allows you to create a list with tasks and delete them once you’ve completed them. Read more

T.J. Maxx Mystery Solved: A Marketing Strategy

You remember T.J. Maxx and their brief iPad adventure, right? The popular apparel retail chain started selling iPads last week, at the curious price of $399 – which was $100 off Apple’s suggested price. Steve Jobs, of course, didn’t like the idea and allegedly confirmed a user T.J. Maxx wasn’t an authorized reseller. The Internet, on the other hand, went nuts over the news.

So why did T.J. Maxx sell those iPads in the first place? Well, it turns out it was all a marketing strategy to end up on tech blogs (like this one) and generate traffic in their stores. They bought the iPads from retail (perhaps an Apple Store, who knows) at $40.000, they sold them at $32.000 generating a loss of $8.000 but they ended up on all major blogs and thousands of people visited their stores hoping to find a discounted iPad. With just $8.000, they gained a huge visibility that would have costed way more with standard advertising methods. Very clever. Read more

GridTab for Safari Enables iPad-like Tabs On The iPhone | Cydia Store

Is there’s one thing I can’t stand on Safari for iPhone is the way it displays “tabs”: by default, when you hit the tabs button in the toolbar you’re brought to a page with a “gallery” of all your open pages, and you have to swipe between them to navigate to the site you want to switch to. On the iPad, Safari is much better: it doesn’t display real desktop tabs (although there’s an iCab for that), but at least it presents them as beautiful thumbnails on a dark grid. It’s easier to switch between websites on the iPad because you just have to tap.

GridTab, a new tweak available on the Cydia Store at $0.99, enables iPad-like tab navigation on the iPhone. Once installed, you’ll be able to switch between open pages just like on the iPad by tapping on thumbnails. Very cool.

GridTab is available at $0.99, and I highly recommend it.

Barrel Brings 3D To Your iPhone’s Springboard | Cydia Store

Barrel is a new tweak available in the Cydia Store at $2.99 which doesn’t do anything particularly useful, but adds an incredibly cool 3D effect to the iPhone’s Springboard.

If you’re familiar with Linux and the Compiz desktop effect, you know what I’m talking about: instead of swiping between pages, you’ll swipe between different sides of a cube. In the tweak’s settings, you can customize the effect so that homescreen icons will appear to be either inside our outside the cube. Words pay not justice to the cool factor of Barrel, you’ve got to see it by yourself. Read more

Opera Tries to Be Relevant Again With Slick “Tab Stacking” Feature, Extensions and More

For all those of you who have always been interested in trying Opera but never quite made the switch, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. Today the Opera team shipped version 11 beta, which adds a lot of new features to the already innovative (yet not so popular) browser including what the team says to be a revolutionary “tab stacking” functionality.

Think of tab stacking as “tab grouping” ported to the address bar: if you click and hold on a tab, you can drag it onto another one to create a “stack”, which is basically a group of tabs aimed at uncluttering your browser window. Say you want to group all your social networking sites or TSA-related links in one place, now Opera lets you do that with stacks. The implementation on OS X is nice, although I wished stacks had some sort of 3D” effect, where one would easily understand how many tabs are in each stacks. Instead, you get an expand button that indicates a tab is a stack. Animations are cool. Read more

iOS 4.2.1 Tethered Jailbreak Available, We Suggest Waiting

A few hours ago the Dev Team released a public version of redsn0w (version 0.9.6b4) which can jailbreak iOS 4.2.1 on all devices and install a working Cydia, also on the iPad. As we wrote last night, though, this one’s a first jailbreak for iOS 4.2.1, and it’s a tethered one.

This means that unless you have an older device (iPhone3G, older iPhone3GS, and non-MC iPod touch 2G) you’ll be forced to manually boot in a “jailbroken state” on every device reboot using redsn0w on your computer. And considering that many jailbreak tweaks force you to reboot your device, you can guess a tethered jailbreak it’s a real pain to deal with. Read more

Apple Teases Black Friday Sale

We were browsing the Apple Store online, and look what we found. Apple is having a Black Friday sale of some kind, but the details won’t be announced until Friday, it seems.

The special one-day Apple shopping event.

November 26.

Come back to the Apple Online Store this Friday for a special one-day-only shopping event. You’ll find dozens of great iPad, iPhone, iPod and Mac gifts for everyone on your list.

Still, take a look at the teaser page and start making a list of the new Apple products you might want to purchase. We think some sweet deals will be available on the 26th.