iLounge noticed Apple is now selling iBooks gift cards in its retail stores. The cards were spotted in the Washington D.C. area Apple Store, and it’s an interesting move because regular iTunes Gift Cards worked just fine with the iBookStore.
I guess Apple wanted to make it clear that books can be bought with a gift card, and I assume those cards are going to be huge this holiday season. I still haven’t spotted them here in Italy, though.
As noted by MobileCrunch, alternative 3rd party iPhone browser Skyfire did great in its first weekend in the App Store. Even though the app wasn’t exactly off to a great start (the developers had to pull the app as they couldn’t keep up with the server demand), it still managed to win the hearts of thousands of iPhone users who apparently needed a browser capable of playing Flash videos:
The company isn’t sharing exact numbers, but they did just tell me that their download numbers for their first weekend on the store were well over 300,000. At $2.99 a pop, that works out to one hell of a bounty. SkyFire isn’t walking away with that whole million, of course; Apple’s going to get their 30% cut, which brings SkyFire’s share down to somewhere between $600-700,000.
You can add this to the “iPad as a…” list. Spotted by 9to5mac, an iPad has been used in Lithuania during a protest against the government:
If the Western World use iPad for business and entertainment, in Lithuania the iPad is used by pensioners in demonstrations against the government.
Magical?
Steven Troughton-Smith found a way to make printer sharing work on 10.6.5, but you’ll need an old developer version of the OS to enable it:
What I consider the best app currently installed on my iPhone and iPad just got a lot better. With the 2.3 update (which is still propagating in iTunes as I’m writing this) developer Marco Arment introduced so many fixes, refinements, optimizations and new features it’s really hard to keep track of them. Instapaper basically got a lot better, both on the iPhone and on the iPad’s larger screen (perfect for reading, if you ask me).
You can now send articles to OmniFocus, QuickReader and all the previous sharing options have been fixed to work properly again. The app now also supports a “ihttp://” URL scheme: every time you find something interesting in Safari you want to send to Instapaper (assuming you can’t get the other options to work, such as the bookmarklet) just add an “i” before the regular URL and tap Go. Instapaper will open. Genius.
On the iPhone, the article list now includes a few lines of text like on the iPad. iPad updates are faster, I can confirm. The iPhone can now toggle the Dark mode from the font panel, and you can set the app to automatically switch to dark mode at night.
Seriously, you gotta take a look at the changelog yourself (embedded below) and go download Instapaper right now if you still haven’t. Highly recommended. Read more
Just like we previously reported, it looks like Apple removed AirPrint support from 10.6.5. Available to developers in previous beta versions, the feature allowed iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users on iOS 4.2 to print documents to printers shared via Mac OS X or Windows.
It turns out AirPrint now only works with supported HP printers, as noted by Macworld and Ars Technica. We’re also getting reports from readers who have already installed 10.6.5 (which came out a few minutes ago) confirming that, indeed, AirPrint to shared printers from iOS 4.2 GM isn’t working. Read more
The long-awaited OS X 10.6.5 update is finally out of the cage and available for you to download in Software Update. Mac OS X 10.6.5 is the the fifth maintenance update for Snow Leopard – version 10.6.4 was released in June 2010.
I’ve been looking for a very specific type of app since the iPad came out: something that would allow me to pull content from Twitter and Google Reader favorite items and read it on the iPad. That’s simple. I don’t need tags, categories, offline access or sharing features: if I’ve saved the articles from social networks in the first place, it’s very likely that I won’t send them to Twitter again.
See, I save lots of links both from Reader and Twitter every day: most of them is silly stuff I don’t usually go back to, but a good part of them is made of articles, posts I want to check out later and I’m not sure they need to go into Instapaper. You know what it’s like on Twitter: you put a gold star there, another one here – and you’ve faved 60 tweets on a single day. Same happens on Google Reader.
So like I said, I’m looking for a simple solution to display this content all together so that late in the evening I could sit down with my iPad and enjoy the stuff I saved during the day. This morning I found out about this new iPad app called Readict (free) which promises to aggregate all your favorite items from Twitter and Google Reader. Read more
Last night we reported some developers on Apple’s forums noticed information about AirPrint through shared printers on Macs and PCs has been mysteriously removed from Apple’s online printing documentation. According to those developers, Apple Tech Support chimed in as well claiming that AirPrint through shared printers had been cancelled from the upcoming 10.6.5.
So it’s not that AirPrint has been pulled. Rumor has it Apple may have cancelled or delayed the functionality through a printer shared on Mac or Windows. Read more
