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Apple Updates MobileMe Backup to 3.2

Macworld:

“The update is about par for the course, including reliability improvements, but it introduces one interesting new feature apparently borrowed from Time Machine: automatically recycling old backups to conserve space.

Detailed in this Apple support document, Backup 3.2 for MobileMe users will now “recycle” backups (read: delete them to recover space) after a certain time period, depending on the original schedule used to back up that data, as well as the destination.”

Was about time. Still using Arq and Dropbox though.

Every Time Zone: Beautiful, iPad Compatible Web App

Living in Italy and writing MacStories, I have to keep up with what happens in the rest of the world, which in most cases means “catch up with the news from the US”. As you can guess, I had some problems with time zone at the beginning, but I’ve gotten used to it. Coffee also helps a lot, if you ask me.

But for those of you who still have problems with timezones, there’s an app for that. It’s a webapp actually, and it works pretty great on both Safari for Mac and iPad. It’s called Every Time Zone and through a beautiful, mouse and touch compatible interface allows you to quickly check what’s the time on the most important timezones around the world. All you have to do is move with either your mouse or finger that little tab which is your local time and see the changes in the other timezones. It works great on the iPad.

Check out the screenshot after the break.

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Video Shows Jailbroken iPhone 3G With OS 4.0 and Multitasking

Last week we reported that some developers found out you can enable multitasking on the iPhone 3G by simply changing a string in a .plist file from “false” to “true”. Today a video has been released, and it shows an iPhone 3G, running OS 4.0, jailbroken and with multitasking.

The jailbreak has probably been done with the iH8sn0w tool, whose developers has announced they are working on the iPhone OS 4.0 version. You can easily spot that it’s an iPhone 3G by how slow (compared to the 3GS) it opens Settings and Clock. Check out the video after the break.

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Apple Delays International iPad Launch By One Month

Bad news: Apple has officially confirmed what we were fearing the most, a delayed international launch for the iPad.

Press release:

“Although we have delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week, demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad™. We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models for delivery by the end of April.

Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10. We know that many international customers waiting to buy an iPad will be disappointed by this news, but we hope they will be pleased to learn the reason—the iPad is a runaway success in the US thus far.”

In the meantime, you can either wait or try Bundlebox. It works great.

Apple: PhoneGap Framework Is Ok for the App Store

After all the buzz about Apple and the changes to the section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Dev Agreement, many people feared tools like MonoTouch, PhoneGap and Adobe’s Flash to iPhone compiler may no longer exist. While this is true for Adobe and, perhaps, MonoTouch, PhoneGap’s developer has just received word from Apple that PhoneGap is ok and PhoneGap-based apps will be reviewed based on their own merits and not the framework.

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A Night at the Opera - And Back

I believed in Opera for iPhone. Really, I did.

I’ve always pictured the folks at Opera like a bunch of guys who were striving to create a good, alternative yet standard compliant browser that could show people around the world that developing an alternative browser was possible, and that developing a good alternative browser was possible too. This is not an attack to the Mac or Windows versions of Opera: those are good browsers, even though they have their problems. Especially Opera for Mac, whose interface has been designed by Jon Hicks, has finally started to feel native and snappy on Apple computers. But what happened yesterday - and what’s been happening for the past 2 months actually - is very sad. So sad that looking back, it’s ridiculous.

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Feeds Reading on the iPad: Is Headline The New Reeder?

Many applications try to take the minimal approach nowadays, and a very few manage to achieve it and combine it with an actual usability. Fortunately, these very few apps are indeed some of the best apps around, and if you take a look at the App Store you can see plenty of them in the top paid and top grossing charts. I’m talking about apps like Reeder, Simplenote, Taskpaper: applications that didn’t aim at empowering the user with tons of features and graphical goodness, whose developers just focused on elegance and usefulness. Sure there are applications like Pastebot that mix custom, rich graphical elements with a real purpose, but I thank God every day for apps like Reeder.

But what about the iPad? If you look at the apps out now, you’ll see that most of them try to follow the user interface guidelines suggested by Apple, just like with the first iPhone apps that came out in 2008. Then, after some months, designers and developers started to explore new ways of designing mobile apps, and I bet the same will happen with the iPad. But then again, there are some differences between the launch of the iPhone App Store and the iPad one: it turns out that some devs have already started experimenting with their apps, trying to break the rules established in Cupertino  by introducing custom, different and non-native looking UI elements in their apps.

Now back to Reeder, there’s a reason why I mentioned it: today I’m going to take a look at Headline, a feeds reading app for the iPad which, in my opinion, might be the “new Reeder” for iPad.

Too soon to tell? Let’s take a look.

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