The answer is just the same for the iPad. What is it for? Well, I use mine to browse the Internet, cook in the kitchen, play games, manage my finances, earn a living, entertain the children, look at photos and so on. In other words, it’s a computer and that’s how I use it. The novelty of its appearance, functioning and so on seems to require re-categorization or a some highly-specialized usage scenario. Of course in many ways my iPad is significancy different than my MacBook Pro, but in others it’s quite the same.
Here’s what I’m going to do this weekend: find old articles about “Apple’s tablet” speculations and see how many got it right.
The App Store was launched exactly 848 days ago in July 2008. Today, Apple launched a new section in the App Store called “App Store Essentials: Hall of Fame” which is aimed at presenting the “very best of the best” and contains 50 apps for iPhone and iPad, both paid and free.
Among the apps, there are true gems such as Angry Birds, Hipstamatic, Instapaper, Reeder for iPhone, Siri (which was acquired by Apple), Zen Bound 2, Facebook and Photogene. Surprisingly enough, the official Twitter app didn’t make the list, nor did other clients such as Twitterrific or Weet. The list will likely grow during the weekend and the holiday season, so perhaps more apps will be added.
You can check out the Hall of Fame by following this link in iTunes.
It appears that Apple has flipped the switch on iAds, which are now showing up for iPhone users outside the United States and United Kingdom. I’ve personally downloaded a free iAd-supported iPhone app and I got to see two different campaigns: a CitiBank one and an AT&T one. Both the iAds are working fine in Italy.
With Apple getting ready to release iOS 4.2, a worldwide launch of iAds for iPad as well wouldn’t be much of a surprise. Read more
Yesterday Apple opened app submissions for the Mac App Store, which as promised at the Back to the Mac event by Steve Jobs will be opening in less than 90 days – around February 2011. Developers can now submit their applications for Apple’s approval – something you want to do now as we still don’t know what policies Apple is going to adopt on the Mac.
When a developer submit an app for Apple’s approval, he has to pick up a name. But the App Store always had a problem with name reservations: developers were able to register a name, block it so no other developer could use it and never upload an actual application for approval. The name was there, frozen, but no app with that name was ever submitted. This practice is known as “name squatting”. After thousands of complaints by frustrated developers who had seen their app’s name “stolen” by suspicious individuals, Apple acknowledged the problem in mid-September and introduced a new policy: you can register an application name, but if you don’t upload anything in 90 days you’ll receive a notification informing you that in 30 days that name will no longer be assigned to you and it’ll be “unlocked” once again. With people sitting on unused names for 2 years, that was a quite welcome change. Read more
According to an industry source contacted by CNET, Intel’s Light Peak technology development is nearing completion and it should be ready to go public in the first half of 2011 – earlier than initially expected. Light Peak is faster than USB 3.0 and can transfer up to 10 Gigabits per second in both directions simultaneously. USB 3.0 is not supported by Apple and a very few other PC makers have implemented the technology in their computers. Most of all, Intel itself hasn’t released chipsets compatible with USB 3.0 yet.
On the other hand, Light Peak has the chance to be backed next year by two major computer makers in the industry, Apple and Sony. Back in 2009, in fact, Intel stated that they had showed early prototypes of Light Peak to third parties and incorporated the feedback they got into their next designs, adding that Apple is an “an innovating force in the industry”. The demo Intel run on stage was based on a Mac, and Sony showed its appreciation for Light Peak in the past, too.
Even though Intel claims that, actually, they’re committed to the USB 3.0 project, it is clear that the money’s on the table with Light Peak, which is faster and lightweight enough to be implemented in new computers without adding bulk or extra space. Apple is expected to reveal new MacBook Pros in the April - June 2011 timeframe – that would be a good time to announce Light Peak coming to the next generation of OS X, wouldn’t it?
With Lion coming next summer, new MacBook Pros and a developer conference in June, the pieces might be coming together pretty soon.
Apple is now accepting submissions for the Mac App Store. With an email sent to registered Mac developers earlier today, Apple confirmed that Mac apps can now be sent to Apple for approval.
We don’t know which developers are jumping on this today and whether Apple has refined its review guidelines following the many doubts arisen in the past weeks, but we know it’s going to be huge – right?
The Mac App Store is set to open in less than 90 days. We can’t wait.
I’m hoping for an official suite of APIs and services that sync and store the application data all your iPhone and Mac apps to the cloud. Anytime you create a new blog post in MarsEdit, it automatically saves the data to the cloud. On your iPhone and beat another level of Angry Birds? It saves those changes to the cloud.
Whenever you purchase a new Mac or iPhone, you’ll just sign in with your Apple ID and start pulling the data in automatically from Apple’s cloud services. Google already offers a portion of this idea for their Android platform. Whenever you purchase a new Android phone, all your data is restored as soon as you sign in with your Google ID.
That certainly makes more sense than a Dropbox-like solution which would require users to mess with files and folders. That’s why Apple didn’t buy Dropbox.
This is what happens when Apple legal forces you to take a genius commercial down and release a more “normal” one. In case you missed Newsday’s story, they once released a clever commercial in which a man killed a fly using an iPad instead of a regular newspaper. The iPad, of course, was shattered.
That ad was aimed at proving that tablets are anything like old media, and you shouldn’t think of them in that way. Like I said, a clever advertisement that went viral. But Apple didn’t like and Newsday was forced to take the ad down (copies can still be found on Youtube, though).
Now Newsday is coming back with a new ad, but it doesn’t really impress much. There are some trippy animations here and there, as RazorianFly also notices, but the style and cleverness of the first attempt is far, far away.
This is exactly what happens when Apple legal messes up with your stuff. We’ve embedded the old ad below. Read more
According to Symphonic Distribution (via MacRumors) Apple has sent notifications out to music labels to communicate that they’re getting ready to extend iTunes Music previews from 30 seconds to 90 seconds for songs that are at least 2 minutes and 30 seconds long.
We have just received the notification from Apple that this will be happening soon and are very excited to report the news as we firmly believe this is a decision that will show an increase of sales for our partners. Below is an excerpt from the email we have received.
As you can see in the screenshot above, by continuing to offer music on the iTunes Store labels agree to the new terms. Previews for songs shorter than 2 minutes and 30 seconds won’t change to the new 90 second clip format.
CNET posted a rumor claiming that iTunes previews were set to change to 90 seconds two days before Apple’s music event in September.
