Follow iPhone OS 4.0 Event Live on MacStories

That’s right, we’ll be covering tomorrow’s event here on MacStories. You just have to go here, signup for a reminder and wait for our live chat to start. You’ll be notified if you previously subscribed using the widget.

From the live coverage page:

MacStories will offer live coverage of the event, instantly aggregating news from sources like Engadget, Gizmodo and Ars to keep you up to date with what’s happening.

But it doesn’t stop at live coverage. Various Mac and iPhone designers and developers (together with yours truly and our editor Cody Fink) will participate to the live chat, thus bringing first impressions and thoughts to the discussion.

See you tomorrow folks.

P.S. We’ll be kicking off 30 minutes before the official start of the event. You know, just to gather last minute predictions.

Kinetic Type Video Made with CSS, Webkit and Javascript

We’ve seen many Webkit / CSS experiments, but this one, seriously, it’s an outstanding achievement. We’re talking about a kinetic type videos, one of those you usually see realized with Flash and advanced After Effects techniques. This time, we have a kinetic type video made entirely with Webkit, CSS and javascript. The experiment is called “The Man from Hollywood” and it’s available here.

From the website:

“It’s a Kinetic Type experiment that makes use of Advanced CSS selectors and Webkit CSS properties. The idea is based off of kinetic type videos that are usually created using After Effects, Flash, or other animation tools. Javascript is used, but minimally, really just to turn class names on and off. All of the animations are accomplished using CSS.”

Be sure to check out the screenshots after the break, and see the video in action here.

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OmniVision Hints at 5MP Camera for iPhone, iPad 2nd Gen

The iPad came out 5 days ago, an Apple Media event is scheduled for tomorrow, but the rumor mill never stops. Today some OmniVision executives suggested that the next generation iPhone and iPad (yeah, already) might include one of their 5 megapixels sensor, instead of the widely adopted 3MP. Actually, JP Morgan analyst Paul Coster added that OmniVision is “well positioned” to provide sensors for Apple’s next products.

OmniVision’s sensor have been used by Apple before, and they have a long history of rumors behind them. Whether this might turn out to be true or not, I think we should only focus on the OS 4.0 now. Honestly, I can’t see myself holding a tablet to snap photos. I really don’t understand why people want this so bad.

Via Electronista

Mirror’s Edge for iPad: Reviewed.

The Mirror’s Edge iPad launch has had quite an interesting story. Initially, it was planned to launch for iPhone and iPod Touch early this year, but then it was mysteriously delayed. Why this delay? Well know we know. EA decided to wait for the iPad to launch, and it was well worth the wait.

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Matt Patenaude’s Open Letter to Mozilla

Link

Matt Patenaude, developer of Bowtie and Bluebird, regarding Firefox and Ogg Theora support:

“Mozilla’s decision to use Ogg Theora and Vorbis for video and audio (respectively) is certainly admirable: personally, I would love an open codec to gain widespread industry notoriety and usage. The fact is, however, the production industry has already standardized on H.264. Nowadays, H.264 is perhaps the most common codec for Internet-distributed video, with the exception of Flash, much of which is encoded in H.264 anyway.

Content producers love H.264 because it works with their existing workflow tools, and there’s widespread hardware-level support for H.264 on a number of devices, including the iPhone and Android-based phones. The benefits brought by a switch to Ogg Theora — if any even exist — are vastly outweighed (for most content producers) by the time and effort required to make such a switch, and quite frankly, most producers don’t want to be serving up both H.264- and Ogg-encoded content.”

Could you say he’s wrong? You can’t deny H.264 has become pretty much a standard, and Firefox is still missing from the list of compatible browsers.

I think this time would be quite fair to follow the trend.

A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time

I once read the best way to test a tech product’s design is to give it to someone who’s not tech savvy and see what’s all the interaction about. What better than a 2.5 year old to test the iPad? We’ve stumbled upon this post over at Laughing Squid, and the result is very interesting.

From the post:

“My iPhone-savvy 2.5 year-old daughter held an iPad for the very first time last night, and it turned out to be an interesting user-interface experiment.

As you can see, after geeking out on my Sutro Tower homescreen, she took right to it — including figuring out how to enlarge some of her favorite iPhone-legacy apps to 2x to display full-size on the iPad screen. If you’re good at understanding kid-speak, you’ll also notice that she immediately saw its potential as a video-display device. She lamented the lack of a camera, and wondered about its potential for playing games.”

Watch the video after the break. As Cody also said, “she’s a good example of why there’s the big bezel.”

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Verizon CEO Has Told Apple of iPhone Interest

Associated Press reports:

“Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg says the company has told Apple that it wants to carry the iPhone. But he declined to say when - or even if - the popular smart phone will be available for Verizon Wireless customers.”

So they officially asked. I still have many doubts though.

iBooks and Private APIs

Latest post by Marco Arment on his blog:

“iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.

I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my customers will expect them, making my app inferior to Apple’s in key areas.”

Now this is an important problem developers have to face right now. Apple’s official applications (the iWork suite, iBooks. I expect MobileMe to join the list in the near future) make use of private APIs that enable features, like the aforementioned system dictionary, 3rd party developers don’t have access to. And as Marco reports, it’s a huge problem, especially to the average customer’s eyes who doesn’t know anything about APIs and frameworks.

Say you want to develop an alternative spreadsheet application because you have a good idea, you’re most likely headed to fail when it comes to implement the basic functions you can see in Numbers, from Apple.

Now you can either give up or come up with a custom solution for your needs. As it stands now, you simply don’t have access to those APIs, and there’s nothing you can do about it but complaining, hoping Apple will its their decision. It’s time to be creative again.