Retro gamers and iPad owners, this might as well be your best day ever: Touch Arcade spotted an interesting and independent project from Martin Kool, a guy who’s working on bringing old Sierra adventure games back to the iPad as web apps entirely based on open web technologies such as HTML, Javascript and CSS. Read more
Blast From The Past: Old Sierra Games Coming To The iPad as Webapps
Apple in Business Land→
Apple in Business Land
Rex Hammock:
I’ve watched closely (as both a customer and writer) as Apple has made attempts to better serve small business and corporate customers.
But I have a hard time believing Steve Jobs has ever obsessed over the B2B marketplace the way he’s obsessed over the materials that go into the glass staircases of major Apple Stores.
Perhaps because he has (in my opinion, brilliantly) focused the company’s products so much on great design that delights consumers, Apple’s varsity squad of product designers may have lacked the bandwidth to apply such attention to designing products that display such a deep understanding of how businesses use technology.
I just wonder if Jonathan Ive has ever sat in on a meeting where a discussion was taking place on how small business managers want to share contacts and calendars among their employees, for instance?
It’d be nice to see an update to this tomorrow, but I think the whole event will be focused on “OS X Lion Sneak Peek”. Just for the sake of comparison, this is how Apple promotes the upcoming enterprise features in iOS 4.2 for iPad, business apps, iPhone in business and profiles.
The Apple TV Is Jailbroken
They promised and it happened: the new Apple TV is jailbroken. According to a picture tweeted a few minutes ago by Joshua Hill (who goes by the name of “p0sixninja” online), the jailbreak tool Greenpois0n has managed to jailbreak Apple’s latest iOS device.
As you can see in the screenshot below, a custom background has been installed, together with a brand new menu to “inject software”.
This means jailbreak apps (on Cydia, perhaps) will come very soon to an Apple TV near you. This is bad news for Apple on an event day, but I suspect they saw it coming all along. Being based on iOS, you can stay assured the jailbreak community is going to find a way to “pwn” it.
No word yet on how Greenpois0n for Apple TV will work, and when it’ll be available. Now I just want to see Cydia running on this thing.
First Leaked Photos Of The Verizon iPhone?
Website Richy Rich has posted a series of blurry images of what they claim to be a N92 CDMA iPhone or as most people would call it, the Verizon iPhone. The device is running a testing operating system (the “inferno” we mentioned a few times in the past) and seems identical to the current iteration of the iPhone 4 in shape. The photos are not that much revealing, and they seem to come from the “usual” Vietnamese sources.
Just yesterday BGR reported that the Verizon iPhone hit the “AP” stage, which is the last step before mass production.
Today, I’m happy to report a follow up to that post with live shots of an “N92DVT” device, which was reported to be the CDMA version of the iPhone 4 back in August by John Gruber. To my knowledge, these shots originated from a repair shop in Vietnam, and according to the “DVT” (Design Verification Test) label, it is in final testing stages before production.
I was told that the side of the device does in fact have a micro-sim slot, like the current GSM-only variant; although the device is no longer in my sources possession, therefore I wasn’t able to obtain photos for proof. This coincides with Boy Genius’ aforementioned post, which enables us to speculate if this means it has global roaming capabilities, if it’s a one device for all unit, or both.
RIM Responds to Steve Jobs Statements
That didn’t take long. After Android Chief Andy Rubin creepy / geeky tweet, here comes the RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie defending BlackBerry against Steve Jobs’ assumptions and statements. As usual in the industry, he refers to Apple’s “distortion field”.
Unlike Steve Jobs, BlackBeery believes “7” tablets will actually be a big portion of the market” and that “Adobe Flash support actually matters to customer”. He goes on to say customers are getting tired of being controlled by Apple, and the numbers Jobs pulled out were referring to the August ending quarter, which is usually low on sales. But the thing is, it wasn’t a holiday season quarter for Apple either, so I don’t see the point here. Anyway, he concludes with the prediction that even the customers inside the distortion field will eventually grow tired of being told “half the story”.
Full statement below. Read more
MacHeist Confirms Tweetie 2 for Mac Is Still Coming→
MacHeist Confirms Tweetie 2 for Mac Is Still Coming
Ev’s tweet even took me by a bit of a surprise because we’ve been in contact with Loren Brichter (@lorenb), developer of Tweetie, ever since the bundle happened and even though Twitter has acquired his company,Atebits, he’s still been working on Tweetie 2 for Mac. If you carefully read Ev’s tweet, you’ll see that he was careful with the language and “not something we’re actively investing in” doesn’t at all mean that the app is in any way dead. In fact, we’ve confirmed with Loren that it’s alive and well and he’s still progressing on Tweetie 2, even though with the acquisition and his new responsibilities, it’s taking longer than he originally anticipated. It’s also worth noting that he’s added another developer to help him move things along.
And it should be free. MacHeist users will get access to an early beta.
Mozilla Challenges Apple & Google With a New Decentralized App Store Platform→
Mozilla Challenges Apple & Google With a New Decentralized App Store Platform
Open Web Apps, the organization says, are hybrid of the web’s openness and the desktop’s convenience, access to hardware capabilities and more. The Store Framework will enable an unlimited number of interoperable App Stores to be hosted by anyone, and compete based on quality of user experience. The apps distributed through these stores can be free or paid and can run on any browser that supports HTML5, including mobile browsers.
Sounds a lot like a bigger version of the extension gallery to me, but good luck with that. Please notice the use of the word “integrated” in the video.
Clicks Count: Simple iPhone App To Track Clicks on Bit.ly Links
A few days ago I asked this on Twitter: what’s the best way to track bit.ly links on the iPhone? It turns out there are a handful of interesting choices out there. The first app I was passed along is Clicks Count by Spicy Apps, a very straightforward way to keep track of clicks on bit.ly links posted over any Twitter account. Read more
Who’s The Best Apple Analyst?
They predicted. They estimated. Many of them failed, some of them got the facts right. Being an analyst predicting numbers about a fast moving company such as Apple is not easy, but these guys get paid for this, right?
So here’s a chart for you to see who did well, who miserably failed at estimating Apple’s sales, and who to keep an eye on in the future. Read more