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Tweetbot for iPhone 2.6 Adds Custom POIs, Header Images→

Tweetbot for iPhone 2.6 Adds Custom POIs, Header Images

Tweetbot 2.6 is out today on the iPhone, and it’s a minor update from the previous 2.5 version. There are, however, two changes I would like to cover.

Tweetbot 2.6 comes with support for Twitter’s new header images for profiles. You’ll have to upload them directly from Twitter’s website – you can’t upload new ones in Tweetbot – but the app will display them nicely in user profiles, just like Tapbots’ other app, Netbot.

Tweetbot 2.6 also lets you create custom POIs for locations. If you think a location is incorrect, or simply would like to customize the location Tweetbot finds, click on the location in the compose screen, and create a custom POI. Be aware that other Tweetbot users will then be able to use the POI, as it’s based on Twitter’s geolocation features and the address of the location.

Tweetbot 2.6 is a minor, but nice update. Get it from the App Store.

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GTA: Vice City Coming To iOS This Fall→

GTA: Vice City Coming To iOS This Fall

As reported by Polygon, Rockstar has announced a special 10th anniversary edition of GTA: Vice City coming “later this fall” to iOS and Android devices.

The touch-controlled ports, which Rockstar says will “[bring] the full experience to mobile devices, featuring native high-resolution graphics and several enhancements unique to the iOS and Android platforms,” will be available “later this fall.” Last year, Rockstar highlighted the 10th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 3 in the same way, with updated versions for iOS and Android that launched in mid-December.

Originally released on PlayStation 2 in October 2002, Vice City is regarded by many fans of Rockstar as one of the highest points ever touched by the series. With a satirical look at Miami in the 80’s, Vice City went on to become one of the best episodes of GTA thanks to a mix of “open world” gameplay and engaging plot.

Last year, Rockstar brought Vice City’s predecessor, GTA III, to iOS devices, but hasn’t updated the game for the iPhone 5 and Retina iPad yet. Hopefully the port of Vice City will be natively optimized for Apple’s latest devices. According to Rockstar, the game will feature “native high-resolution graphics and several enhancements unique to the iOS and Android platforms”.

Check out the full press release here.

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Apple Changing App Store Prices for Several Countries

Section on VAT clarified, more updates at the bottom of the article.

As pointed out by several readers on Twitter, Apple appears to be changing pricing tiers of App Store applications in several European countries. Specifically, the lowest price used to be €0.79, which has today been bumped to €0.89. We’ve been able to confirm this is indeed the case, as shown in the screenshot above, taken from the Italian App Store.

So far, we’ve received notices of App Store pricing changes in:

  • Italy
  • Spain
  • Netherlands
  • Portugal
  • Greece
  • Poland
  • Germany
  • France
  • Belgium
  • Austria
  • Czech Republic
  • Denmark
  • Luxembourg
  • Hungary
  • Russia
  • Ireland
  • Finland

Read more

Apple Q4 2012 Results: $36 Billion Revenue, 26.9 Million iPhones, 14 Million iPads, 4.9 Million Macs Sold

Apple has just posted their Q4 2012 financial results for the quarter that ended on September 29, 2012. The company posted revenue of $36 billion ($8.67 per diluted share), with 14 million iPads, 26.9 million iPhones and million 4.9 Macs sold. Apple sold 5.3 million iPods. The company reported quarterly net profit of $8.2 billion. Gross margin was 40.0 percent compared to 40.3 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

In this quarter, Apple’s Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $2.65 per share of the Company’s common stock.

The dividend is payable on November 15, 2012, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on November 12, 2012.

From the press release:

We’re very proud to end a fantastic fiscal year with record September quarter results,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re entering this holiday season with the best iPhone, iPad, Mac and iPod products ever, and we remain very confident in our new product pipeline.

We’re pleased to have generated over $41 billion in net income and over $50 billion in operating cash flow in fiscal 2012,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the first fiscal quarter of 2013, we expect revenue of about $52 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $11.75.

Estimates and Previous Quarters

For Q4 2012, Apple had set its guidance at revenue of about $34 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $7.65.

The Street consensus’ average estimate was earnings of $8.75 per share and revenue of $35.80 billion.

On October 24, 2012, both independent and “pro” analysts polled by Fortune (68 in total) forecasted earnings and revenue higher than Apple’s guidance, as it often happens.

After getting clobbered quarter after quarter for nearly four years by a bunch of bloggers, day traders and other amateur analysts, the professionals seem to be giving their clients more realistic numbers. And having badly misjudged two of the last four quarters, the more bullish independents have, for the most part, started to come back to earth.

In Fortune’s poll, the “pros” averaged earnings per share of $8.82 on sales of $36.02 billion; the independent analysts forecasted earnings of $10.14 on sales of $38.8 billion.

Horace Dediu of Asymco also published his forecast for Apple’s fourth fiscal quarter on September 20, 10 days before the quarter (and fiscal year) ended. As he notes, it’ll be difficult to predict iPhone sales for the quarter as consumers have been probably holding off their purchase due to rumors of a product refresh. Furthermore, the iPhone 5 has only been on sale during the quarter for 8 days: the device went on sale in 9 countries on September 21, and 22 more on September 28. Apple only stated that iPhone 5 sales topped over 5 million units during the opening weekend.

The iPhone is going to be extremely difficult to project. On one hand we have the launch of the i5 which will account for about 10 million units in the quarter, on the other, chances are that sales were very weak prior to the launch as purchases were being deferred even more than during the last quarter.

Horace Dediu’s forecast was the following:

  • iPhone units: 27.8 million (62%)
  • Macs: 5.6 million (15%)
  • iPads: 18.8 million (69%)
  • iPods: 5.6 million (–15%)
  • Music (incl. app) rev. growth: 40%
  • Peripherals rev. growth: 10%
  • Software rev. growth: 15%
  • Total revenues: $39.5 billion (40%)
  • GM: 42%
  • EPS: $9.75 (38%)

A better picture of iPhone 5 sales, as well as those from the iPad mini, iPad 4, and recently-updated Macs, will be offered by Apple’s current holiday quarter – Q1 2013.

In the previous quarter, Q3 2012, Apple posted revenue of $35 billion, with 17 million iPads, 26 million iPhones and 4 million Macs sold. iPhone represented a 28 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter, while iPad reported a 84 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 6.8 million iPods, a 10 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The company posted quarterly net profit of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 per diluted share. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

In the year-ago-quarter, Q4 2011, Apple posted record-breaking revenue of $28.27 billion, with 11.12 million iPads, 17.07 million iPhones and 4.89 million Macs sold.

Apple will provide a live audio feed of its Q4 2012 conference call at 2:00 PM PT, and we’ll update this story with the conference highlights. You can find the full press release and a graphical visualization of Apple’s Q4 2012 after the break. Read more

Words: Instapaper Client for Mac→

Words: Instapaper Client for Mac

Last week, I stumbled across a Mac app called Words, which is a desktop client to access your Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability “read later” lists. Especially following Pocket’s acquisition of Read Later, I thought it was appropriate to post my impressions of the app after using it with my Instapaper account for the past week.

Unfortunately, while promising, Words isn’t there yet. Words looks decent when it’s focused on text (generated by the Instapaper parser) in full-screen mode, but everything else is pretty buggy, unstable, and unfinished. Sync fails often, reporting incosistent errors for actually-correct account information; there are no font options to control the text’s apperance, or keyboard shortcuts to navigate the app; the window’s width can’t be resized (it only supports height), and the sidebar with tags (I assume they are tags, though I never created those) often “gets stuck” on a black background. There are no sharing options, no additional menus, no support for Instapaper’s Archive or Liked items. Just the Unread list, and it doesn’t even work well.

Even Instapaper is spelled as “InstaPaper” in the app.

The Words developers say they’re working on fixes and improvements, and I’m looking forward to trying Words again in the future. But at $5.99, I can’t recommend it right now.

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Bartender 1.0→

Bartender 1.0

Bartender is one of my favorite OS X utilities. It is a menubar app to contain other menubar apps in its own menubar. I can confirm it’s not some kind of Inception. As I wrote in my original look at the beta version:

Bartender lets you organize your menubar apps while retaining the functionalities they come with. The app automatically finds third-party apps running in the menubar; it allows you to completely hide them, or show them in the Bartender bar. If you choose the latter option, your menubar apps will stil remain fully working with popover windows and keyboard shortcuts.

If you tried the app while it was in beta and abandoned it because it didn’t support system icons, now’s the time to check it out again. Bartender 1.0, released earlier this week, comes with full support for system icons that you can customize individually. It also supports the Notification Center icon if you’re on Mountain Lion. Items can be manually rearranged if you, say, want to keep Spotlight in the main menubar, but Notification Center on the rightmost side of Bartender’s bar.

There’s a good selection of keyboard shortcuts, too. You can create hotkeys to show the full menubar or the Bartender bar; you can also customize the appearance of Bartender’s icon, its position, or its autohide settings. Menubar apps with interface elements, such as Fantastical, Currencies or Take Five, usually work out of the box even inside Bartender, but you can apply a fix if they’re not working. Alternatively, you can choose to show those apps in the main menubar for a few seconds when they receive activity – for instance, when Sparrow’s icon is highlighted for an incoming message.

Bartender is a great utility to hide menubar items you don’t use often but still want to keep running. Get the app here for $15 – there’s also a four-week free trial available.

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Languages Review

Can an offline translator for iPhone be beautiful?

Translations are boring. Even Google, which has put some effort into caring more about its appearance in the past year, has seemingly forgotten that Google Translate is used by millions every day. Not only is Google Translate outdated from a design perspective, it also doesn’t take advantage of the trends and interactions that have recently defined great mobile experiences.

In a collaboration with Sonico, award-winning development studio Tapity wants to reinvent mobile translators for iPhone starting with two core concepts: multi-touch and offline access. Read more

Pocket Releases Mac App

Pocket, the “save for later” service that relaunched as a major revamp of Read It Later back in April, is launching today its first official desktop application for OS X. Pocket for OS X is available today for free on the Mac App Store.

I’ve been able to test Pocket for Mac during the past week. Michael Schneider, creator of Read Later (nèe Read Now), joined the Pocket team to create the new Mac app; you may remember Read Later as a client for Instapaper/Pocket/Readability articles that we’ve been following here at MacStories since the first version. According to Pocket, the former Read Later app will continue to work for existing users, but it will no longer be supported.

Pocket for Mac is a new app, but it borrows heavily in terms of underlying concept and flow from Read Later. On the left, there’s a sidebar listing articles and videos with thumbnails for visual previews; the actual article (or video) is displayed on the right in a clean, Pocket-formatted view that uses the same parser of the mobile app. I personally find Instapaper’s parser to be slightly more precise than Pocket’s when it comes to long articles, but I also find Pocket way better at parsing content than Readability, especially for embedded videos and images. Read more