The Winter Festival Of Artisanal Software
Straight from Apple’s Review Guidelines for iOS apps:
Why even bother developing one?
On November 12th we reported Apple was planning to “delay” the release of iOS 4.2 due to the WiFi connection issues reported by several users running the GM build seeded to developers on November 1st. Indeed, the plan was to release iOS 4.2 on November 12th but Apple decided to release a second GM build for iPad to address the WiFi issues instead.
Eventually Apple released another GM build of iOS 4.2 to address other minor issues, which is the iOS 4.2.1 version that’s currently shipping to users – even if Apple simply calls it “iOS 4.2”. We did a little research on Apple’s discussion boards and MacRumors forums though, and we found out that, actually, WiFi issues are still being widely reported by users who have recently upgraded to iOS 4.2.1. Read more
Last week Mic Gadget posted shots of a pretty realistic Steve Jobs action figure: slightly taller than an iPhone 4 and representing Apple CEO with his blue Levi jeans and black turtleneck, it’s no wonder the action figure made the rounds. It looked really well realized.
Too bad it’ll never see the light of day and if you hoped you could put SJ on your desk in a few week, well I’m sorry for you. A law firm representing Apple, Inc apparently sent a letter to Mic Gadget:
Unauthorized use of a person’s name and/or likeness constitutes a violation of California Civil Code Section 3344, which prohibits the use of any person’s name, photograph or likeness in a product without that person’s prior consent.
Too bad. It looked nice.
Digitimes has other interesting tidbits to share this morning: according to sources close to component makers (the ones being used in Apple’s computers), Apple is set to ship around one million MacBook units per month in Q4 2010, with the new MacBook Airs accounting to 20-25% of the volume.
The sources cited IDC’s figures and pointed out that Apple’s combined shipments for the first three quarters of 2010 reached about 6.88 million units, and its global notebook market share rose from 3.7% in the first quarter to 5.2% in the third, while its market share in the US market surged from 6.7% to 12.6%.
Rumors have also surfaced in the past few days regarding Apple willing to remove optical disk support and add SSD to the next generation MacBook Pros, which will likely be refreshed next Spring.
With shipments of current MacBooks ramping up to 1 million per month, the Mac App Store opening in January, new MacBook Pros on the horizon and OS X Lion coming next summer – it looks like 2011 will be an interesting year for Mac users.
Apple just posted the details of the Black Friday sale for the US Apple Store. You can save $101 on iMacs, MacBook Pros and Airs, $41 on the iPad, $11 on the iPod Nano and $21 on the iPod Touch.
Just like in other international Apple stores where the sale is happening, the deals include a variety of accessories. Check out the details below. Read more
The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Apple has made a 98-acre land purchase in Cupertino to double the capacity of its original campus. The new location is the historic Hewlett-Packard campus, the same where Steve Wozniak was working when he and Steve Jobs were working on the first Apple computer in the 70s.
HP is in the middle of an operation to consolidate its headquarters in Palo Alto, and Apple apparently secured the old HP campus in an effort to expand Cupertino’s Infinite Loop. Put simply, Apple needs more room. Read more
Looks like those ahead of us timezone-wise can already enjoy the discounts offered by Apple in its Black Friday sale. A few minutes ago the sale went online in the Australia and New Zealand Apple online stores, and it applies to MacBooks, iPads, iPod touches and a variety of accessories. Read more
Frankly, I saw this coming: with all the offers and deals that have started to pop up in the App Store since last week, the rapid arise of games in the App Store charts doesn’t come as a surprise at all. Still, the results and numbers are noteworthy: while counting all the games in the App Store is nearly impossible (at least basing on official data, which Apple doesn’t provide), we can simply take a look at the “Top Paid Apps” and “Top Grossing Apps” charts to see what happened.
Games are dominating the Thanksgiving week in the App Store. Especially on the iPhone App Store, where at the moment of writing this only 26 apps out of the top 100 are non-games apps. The fact that we refer to them as “non-games apps” also tells a lot about the environment Apple created. The situation is slightly different on the iPad App Store (“only” 40,000 apps, newer platform) but the trend is just about the same on both the stores. Games are selling like hotcakes, huge discounts or not. Read more
Last night we reported Apple is already working on a new build of iOS that should be coming as early as mid-December to support plans for recurring subscriptions in App Store apps. The first app to take advantage of these new options? The Daily by News Corp.
Well, at least that’s what the rumors say, and of course we won’t be hearing anything official from Apple until the day the collaboration with News Corp. goes public. But plans for recurring subscriptions have been going around for a while at Cupertino, although they didn’t play out the way we wanted. Or perhaps Jobs and Forstall wanted. As a matter of fact, yesterday I remembered Forstall had mentioned “subscriptions” as a new business model for developers in iPhone OS 3.0. At the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event in March 2009, he clearly stated that many developers (especially magazine app publishers) were asking for a way to renew subscriptions in-app. So what did those publishers get? Recurring subscriptions? No, they got in-app purchases, which are far from being a way to automatically renew a subscription.
So we took the part from the preview event video where Scott Forstall mentions subscriptions and re-uploaded it. Looking back, it’s not clear whether Apple really saw in-app purchases as a way to automatically renew magazine subscriptions in-app or not. Maybe they wanted recurring subscriptions to be part of the in-app purchase system but they had to remove them from the final version of iPhone OS 3.0. I mean, blogs back then really seemed to think subscriptions were a go. Thing is, Apple hasn’t changed its position since then (not even when the iPad came out) and we think it’s about time to have a proper system for recurring subscriptions tied to iTunes accounts.
Check out the video below. Read more
