On this iPad thing…

Nik Fletcher nails it in his latest blog post:

“Yes, it’s an entirely prescriptive way of computing - one that the hackers, tinkerers and geeks will find alien and protest about its lack of openness. But here’s the thing: for the people who the iPad is aimed at it really doesn’t matter that this experience is prescriptive - and the more you look at the decisions Apple seem to have made in building the software on the device, the more you realise that the iPad is perhaps the first high-technology product ready for - and entirely aimed at - a mainstream audience right from the get-go.”

Rocketbox Winners Announced

Thanks everyone for the comments on the Rocketbox review & giveaway. Also, I’d like to thank Matt Ronge of Central Atomics for the 10 licenses he gave to MacStories.

Here are the names of the winners:

Tony Martinez

Nguyen

Toon

Xendo

Rico Gasser

Jono

Tim Steinbach

Fabio

Miša

Shadowchaser

You’ll receive the license in your inbox in a few hours. Also, don’t get forget that we have a Touchpad giveaway up and running.

Cheers!

Itsy Gets A Facelift With Two Beautiful Themes

Remember Itsy? The new, minimal Twitter client we reviewed a while ago here? I still think that Itsy it’s a very promising application, the best among all those Twitter clients that are rising for Mac (again) after Tweetie easily ascended the throne. The design of Itsy is nice, but it could be better.

Thank God this guy, katsu3477, created these two stunning themes for Itsy.

Read more

Chrome 5 for Mac Is Out

Link

The Dev channel has been updated to 5.0.307.1. here’s the changelog:

Improved plugin stability;

Cocoa NPAPI plugins will now get:

NPCocoaEventMouseDragged and

NPCocoaEventFlagsChanged events

Fix crash that sometimes happened when dragging tabs;

Fix %cpu in task manager;

Give the cookies manager a search field;

Make copying of big images more robust;

Improve task manager resizing behavior;

Known Issue: Crash when deleting cookies

Evidence of Video Conferencing Found in iPad OS

We’ve got another big news guys. Following our previous post about iPhone OS suggesting support for camera tethering and Wildcat references, our source reported that OS 3.2 beta contains references about video conferencing.

We don’t know too much about it now, but we can prove it with two images we received - two camera icons.

Clearly they’re very similar to the icons we can see on iChat on Mac OS X. Could this confirm the presence of a camera in the final version of the iPad? Or maybe Apple was forced to remove it right before the event, pretty much like they did with the iPod Touch? We’ll keep you posted about it.

BREAKING: References to Camera Tethering and “Wildcat” Found in New Beta of iPhone OS

This is interesting.There are numerous references to new features coming up in a later version of iPhone OS including image capture input devices as well as “wildcat”. We are yet unsure to what wildcat actually is. However there are several references throughout the beta 3.2 OS.

Here are some new API methods and preference list keys that mention wildcat:

  • “SBDeviceLockKeypadWildcat keypadImage”

  • ”+(id)[SBDeviceLockKeypadWildcat keypadImage]” “[[UIDevice currentDevice] isWildcat];”

  • “SBDeviceLockViewWithKeyboardWildcat”

After our sources investigated properly they found that there are very strong hints about a cellphone device with sms and mms running the iPad OS.

Is this the “wildcat”?