This Week's Sponsor:

Winterfest 2025

The Winter Festival Of Artisanal Software


Posts tagged with "apple"

About Time: Italian FaceTime Commercials

A few hours ago some major Italian TV channels started airing the first, official FaceTime commercials for the iPhone 4. Smart move from Apple: Sunday is football’s day in Italy, and Apple picked sport-based channels like Sky to air the commercials. Even though the iPhone 4 came out in late July and they could have aired the ads before, this is a clever day choice.

As for the videos, it’s the same background music of the US commercial, but the subjects are different. Check them out after the break, we like them. Hat tip to iSpazio for finding the videos on Youtube.

Read more


Apple Adds Badge to Game Center Apps in the App Store

This is a neat little feature, a small improvement, but we like it: Apple has added an indicator in the App Store page of Game Center-compatible apps. You can check it out in the top-right corner of a page like this one.

It’s easier now to know whether a game supports Game Center or not, but an indicator is not enough: what does the app allow you to do on GC? How many achievements does it come with? I don’t think that developers should put all this information in the product description, a dedicated one is needed. Also, what about already-purchased apps? You still have to try and click Buy to find out, as there’s no indicator for that. (Update: not to mention a “Retina Display-ready badge)

Apple is working on making the App Store a better marketplace (remember, it’s not a simple showcase of 10.00o apps anymore), but it still lacks basic features like a complete and detailed history, or a better wishlist. We’ll just have to wait, I guess. Read more



Apple, Mobile Phone Profit Analysis

Asymco has posted an interesting story/graph on the analysis of mobile phone profits. Horace Dediu writes, “if the available profit (i.e. excluding losses) were summed and each vendor’s profit were measured as a percent of this total, this chart would tell the story of the last three years.” Read more