Apple Granted Patent for “Slide to Unlock”

When Apple introduced the iPhone and Steve Jobs showed how to unlock it for the first time, people went “ooohhh”. Back then, it was a revolution. Over the years smartphone makers and OS designers for touch screen-enabled mobile devices have been trying to copy Apple’s unique implementations and to reach the bar set high by Cupertino’s magical designers.

Three years ago Apple filed patents for the two most distinctive features of the iPhone: “slide to unlock” in the lockscreen and pop-up letters when you type on the virtual keyboard. Perhaps you’re so used to them you wouldn’t even think there’s a need to patent them.

Indeed there is, and United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple two design patents titled “Animated graphical user interface for a display screen or portion thereof ” that will allow Steve to keep on sliding on his iPhone 5 while wandering around Google’s campus without the fear of being observed by Eric Schmidt and his evil design team.

I guess that’s what Apple patents are all about.

[via TUAW]

Read more

Super Prober: Sort Of Like Chrome for iPad, Gone Wrong

Two years of App Store and I still haven’t found a decent alternative to Mobile Safari. Something I could keep on my homescreen for more than 2 days. The reason is obvious: you are not Apple. Developing a browser is not like building a Twitter client: we’re talking about the primary tool to access the web here. And if Apple ships an almost state-of-the-art mobile browser by default, well then - sorry if I don’t trust you.

Mobile Safari is a simple application that lets you navigate the web, we call it “browser”. Developing a browser for a cellphone is a difficult task: you don’t have windows, you don’t have tabs, favicons don’t make sense on a small screen. Also, the elegant interface of the iPhone makes it really hard to implement features seen in desktop browser without looking awkward.  Have you seen Opera Mini? Exactly.

But the iPad is magical, right? It’s got a larger display, it’s a tablet, you can put your hands on it! Let’s develop a full-featured browser for the iPad! Not so fast, cowboy. For as much as the iPad is indeed bigger and more suitable to richer applications, take a second look at what Apple offers: Safari for the iPad is, again, simple. Sure, it has those beautiful thumbnail previews for open tabs. Sure, there’s a bookmark bar. Still, it doesn’t overwhelm you with dozens of features that would probably look cool in the App Store description page, but kill usability. Mercury Browser, I’m looking at you.

It turns out, though, someone decided to develop some kind of Chrome-like browser for the iPad and call it Super Prober. I went into the App Store and bought it. Here’s what happened.

Read more

Elements Brings Dropbox Integration to Your Notes - 3 Codes Up for Grabs

Two weeks ago we posted an exclusive sneak peek at Elements for iPhone and iPad, a new text editor by Second Gear Software that stores your notes in Dropbox, so that you’ll have them always available no matter the device you’re using. Whether it’s the iPhone, iPad, desktop Mac or even a Windows PC, just log in your Dropbox account and you’ll find the notes created with Elements in there.

The app was finally released in the App Store a few hours ago.

Read more

Actually, Apple Has Been Using Liquidmetal All Along

Last week we found out that Apple had closed a deal with Liquidmetal, a Californian-based manufacturer of an alloy that is extremely light, hard and that shows a glass-like structure. From what we heard, Apple had acquired “substantially all of [Liquidmetal’s] intellectual property assets,” not to mention a “perpetual, worldwide, fully-paid, exclusive license to commercialize such intellectual property in the field of consumer electronic products in exchange for a license fee.” [Engadget]

Read more

Flickit Pro 2.1 Released with Background Uploading to Flickr

Flickit Pro, the Green Volcano Software client for Flickr.com, was updated to version 2.1 last night, which brings full support for iOS 4 and iPhone 4. Besides improved video quality upload and overall upload speeds, version 2.1 brings the much-request background uploading to Flickr and UI optimizations for the Retina Display.

I’ve been beta testing Flickit Pro 2.1, and it works like this: in the Settings you can choose to hide / show a notification for when the upload is complete. Choose some photos, send them to Flickr, close the app and they will be uploaded anyway. It works really well.

Personally, I think Flickit Pro is the best Flickr client for the iPhone. The new and improved version makes it even better. Available at $4.99 in the App Store.

Lady Gaga at Infinite Loop - iPhone 4 Commercial Coming?

Apparently, Lady Gaga just dropped in Cupertino and visited Apple’s campus at Infinite Loop. Not that big of a news, but remember? Back in May, when we didn’t even have a name for the iPhone 4 (we kept calling it “4G” - some people still do), 9to5mac reported of a deal between Apple and the pop singer about a commercial for the new device.

Back then, Gaga’s label Polydor said “no comment”. Sure, many artists visited Apple’s campus (Maroon 5 performed, too) - we just thought that, considering the previous speculations, this might mean something.

We’ll see.

Read more

Over-the-Air Updates for iOS Beta Apps? Yes, Please.

Writing for MacStories, I test many beta versions of new applications coming out for the iPhone and iPad. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the situation, but installing betas on iOS devices is a pain: you have to download the app’s file and the .mobileprovision profile, add them to iTunes, sync and hope that iTunes doesn’t screw up. With each version of the beta (Beta 1, Beta 2, Beta 3…) you have to repeat these steps.

Now we have a solution to this problem: an upcoming open source framework that will allow beta apps to update over the air by directly contacting the developer’s servers, without the need of syncing the device via iTunes. Pretty much like Mac applications do.

I’m seriously looking forward to this. [via Ken Yarmosh]

Read more