This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today

Posts tagged with "apple"

NYT: Apple Considering Stake In Twitter→

NYT: Apple Considering Stake In Twitter

The New York Times’ Nick Bilton and Evelyn Rusli are tonight reporting that Apple is considering an investment in Twitter to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Whilst the companies are not currently in negotiations and there is no guarantee that the two would come to an agreement, earlier talks do suggest “they may form a stronger partnership”.

As the New York Times report explains, the deal would be one of Tim Cook’s “most important strategic decisions as chief executive” because of intensifying competition from Google and Facebook and the fact that Apple has struggled in the past with social. It would be a unique move for Apple, which typically buys a small start-up and absorbs it into the company rather than investing in a company.

The turf wars have fortified alliances and pushed companies to choose sides. Apple’s dealings with Twitter, for instance, began after its relationship with Facebook soured. In 2010, the company was eager to integrate its Ping service with Facebook, but discussions broke down. Mr. Jobs, the Apple chief executive who died last year, told the technology news site AllThingsD that Facebook had demanded “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”

Apple, which had spent months preparing to hook Facebook into iOS, its mobile operating system, swiftly reworked it for Twitter. One former Twitter employee, who described Twitter as the “lucky mistress” in this chain of events, said the partnership was essentially “handed to Twitter on a silver platter.” Ping, in the end, never caught on with users.

One big question to be resolved is whether Twitter would want a large investment from Apple. Earlier this year, chief executive Dick Costolo said Twitter had “truckloads of money in the bank”. At the same time though, Costolo also recently said in an interview that “[Apple] is a great partner, we think of them as a company that our company looks up to”.

The relationship with Apple is so prized at Twitter that the company assigned a vice president, Kevin Thau, to work with Apple full time, according to an Apple employee who asked not to be named.

[via The New York Times]

Permalink

A History of Skeuomorphism In Apple Interfaces→

A History of Skeuomorphism In Apple Interfaces

Thomas Brand has published a detailed overview of Apple’s past skeuomorphic designs in applications for classic Mac OS and OS X. As he notes, the trend towards designing apps that resemble real-life objects didn’t start with iOS at all.

As time progressed, the Aqua interface has evolved to reflect the changes in Apple hardware. Gone are the over the top transparencies, deep drop shadows, and distracting pinstripes. Subtle grays, mute reflections, and soft gradients now fill the retina displays of Apple’s latest portables. Some might say that Aqua is not a skeuomorphic interface because it does not resemble a specific real world object. To them I say Aqua is a mirror reflecting back the design decisions that have made Apple’s hardware so appealing over the last 10 years.

In his article, Thomas mentions old software such as Sherlock, the Appearance Manager of Mac OS 8, Apple CD Audio Player, and the Classic Calculator that Steve Jobs famously designed himself with a “build your own” kit created by a former Apple engineer. iOS may not have reinvented skeuomorphism in software per sè, but it surely gave this way of designing apps a whole new meaning and set of interactions thanks to screen constraints and multi-touch.

Check out Egg Freckles’ article for the full list of apps that influenced Apple’s skeuomorphic interfaces.

Image via TUAW

Permalink

Rovio’s Amazing Alex Is Now Available

The next game from Rovio, creators of Angry Birds, Amazing Alex has today arrived for iPhone, iPad and Android. The game, like Angry Birds, fits into the genrè of a physics puzzler but this time you’re setting up “objects to bounce, pop, ricochet, bash, and crash into each other and create an elaborate Rube Goldberg device”.

Meet Amazing Alex! With his boundless imagination, this whiz kid turns everything into adventure! From cleaning his room to battling cardboard robots in his backyard, Alex creates amazing chain reactions to get the job done. Now he has some challenges for you! What’s the most creative solution YOU can create? With 100 challenging levels, there’s a whole world of creations to explore!

The game features 100 levels across four locations but as Rovio has already said, regular future updates will see more levels added, just like Angry Birds. Where Amazing Alex gets more interesting is the ability for you to create your own levels with “35 interactive objects” and then share them with friends or even the whole world.

You can purchase Amazing Alex for the iPhone ($0.99) or iPad ($2.99).
Read more

Dropbox Doubles Pro Subscribers’ Space

 

The very popular folder sync service Dropbox is giving every Pro member a big surprise today by doubling the amount of space of their Dropbox account. Pro accounts will now get double the space they had before. Their new blog post says, “Today we’re happy to announce that our upgrades are getting a huge upgrade! Dropbox Pro now comes in flavors of 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 and 100 GB plans. For those of you who need even more space, a brand new 500 GB plan is also joining the posse! If you’re already a Dropbox Pro subscriber, just take a seat and enjoy the fireworks — your Dropbox will supersize itself automatically tonight.” Check out the Pricing page this evening to see the all new plans.

In May, Dropbox gave users some new options to increase space by adding the option to auto-upload media from your desktop or iOS device and in April, Dropbox doubled referral credits from 250 MB to 500 MB per link.

In a world of every-increasing asset file sizes, retina displays, and computer hard drive space, Dropbox is doing a fantastic service to all of its Pro customers by doubling the space they give to us. There’s no link to click or web page to activate, they’re simply updating themselves tonight.

  • Dropbox Pro is now 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 ($9.99/month or $99.00/year) and 100 GB plans ($19.99/month or $199.00/year )
  • A brand new 500 GB plan will also be available (yet to be announced)
  • Dropbox is giving existing Pro users a three month Pro 100 trial to share with friends or family
  • Free accounts are not receiving the upgrade but with referrals and auto-uploads your 2 GB account can be up to 18 GB

AppBot Sends Developers A Daily Digest Containing New Reviews Of Their Apps

The Filter Squad development team (creators of Discovr) yesterday launched AppBot, a neat little service that’ll keep track of App Store reviews and email you a daily digest containing the latest reviews of your apps. AppBot was initially an internal tool for the two development teams but is now a free service in beta that’s bound to be helpful to some other developers who are keen to read new feedback from users but don’t want to have to take the effort of finding all the new reviews (in all the various countries).

In a blog post, Discovr’s Stuart Hall writes that despite some “not so amazing” reviews, they are a “good indication of the average user’s feeling towards your app”. By keeping a track of reviews, you can get a “good sentiment of how you are app is being perceived” - a key factor when word of mouth is such a driving factor of success on the App Store.

So the discovr team made AppBot to solve the problem of easily keeping track of new reviews of their apps from multiple countries. It neatly integrates a link to translate reviews from countries that don’t speak English and allows you to Google search the reviewer names. The app will also send you a list of Apple front page features (Editor’s Choice, New & Noteworthy etc.) to you weekly. You can sign up here and it doesn’t require access to your iTunes Connect account, so anyone can technically use AppBot to keep tabs on any new app.

Apple: New iPad Arrives in China on Friday, July 20

Apple has just issued a brief press release to announce that the new iPad will finally launch in China on Friday, July 20th. The recommended retail prices of the new iPad in China will match the current US prices at $499, $599 and $699 for the WiFi version (16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB respectively) and $629, $729 and $829 for the WiFi + Cellular models (16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB respectively). Meanwhile, from today the iPad 2 is available for $399.

Customers will be able to purchase the new iPad in China from the Apple Online Store, select Apple Authorized Resellers and by reservation from Apple retail stores. The reservation process will run daily between 9am and 12pm and begin on Thursday, July 19 and allows a customer to reserve an iPad for pick up the following day.

Apple® today announced the new iPad®, the third generation of its category defining mobile device, will arrive in China on Friday, July 20. The new iPad features a stunning new Retina™ display, Apple’s new A5X chip with quad-core graphics and a 5 megapixel iSight® camera with advanced optics for capturing amazing photos and 1080p HD video. The new iPad still delivers the same all-day 10 hour battery life* while remaining amazingly thin and light.

Get A Sense Of What A 7.85” iPad mini Would Be Like

Rumors of a smaller iPad were back again this week with a report from Bloomberg and since then the rumor mill has been in full swing. Not much detail was in the rumor, other than it’s a smaller iPad and that it’ll launch later this year. Earlier in the year, the display was rumored to be around 7.85” and A.T. Faust of AppAdvice gave compelling reasons as to why it makes sense. That number seems to have stuck around with this latest round of iPad mini rumors.

“The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point,” Jobs said. “It’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software. As a software driven company, we think about the software strategies first.” - AllThingsD

When I read the rumors this week I sighed, not again. I wasn’t the only one either, an iPad mini seems like a compromise, with little advantage. Plus the old Steve Jobs quote about 7 inch iPads just kept circling around. But others weren’t so closed minded and were considering whether it might actually have a place in Apple’s product line.

The biggest issue I have is with the screen, and whether the screen can still be sufficiently useful at the smaller size. To find out, I decided to do the old hack of making a little paper template of the iPad mini and see how it looked. I decided to stick with the 7.85” diagonal display size suggested and use a bezel only slightly smaller than those on the current iPad. For comparison I also made a paper template for the current iPad and versions of both with the bevel colored in. You can download, print and cut them out for yourself.

Note: make sure when printing that it isn’t being scaled up or down, as that will adjust the size of the “screen”. Check the little measurement guides to ensure it printed out correctly.

That was all good and well, but it didn’t really give me a sense of what the UI might look like on an iPad mini. So I decided to take some screenshots and shrink them down to the appropriate size. But I also made a duplicate copy of the screenshot and using Photoshop, reconfigured the UI to fit on a 7.85” display without adjusting the size of the buttons. To my mind that’s the only way that Apple would do this - Apple does frequently remind iOS designers to keep buttons at a tappable size (mentioned prominently in iOS Human Interface Guide), just shrinking the current iPad display would make buttons more difficult to tap.

Finally I put it all together into a Keynote presentation so that I could view it on my iPad and visibly see and compare how it would look. I’ve uploaded it, so you can do the same yourself. You just need Keynote for iOS and go into presentation mode to look at it yourself. If you want to go the extra step, cut your iPad mini template out and place it on top of your iPad whilst viewing the screenshots.

Read more

Apple Rectifies Corrupted App Store Downloads, Advises Users to Delete and Reinstall Broken Apps

Late Tuesday evening, Instapaper developer Marco Arment was met with a nasty surprise when some users updating to Instapaper 4.2.3 found that their updated app instantly crashed after opening. Upon investigating and hearing similar reports from other developers, Marco found that the App Store itself was corrupting app updates, leaving users with broken apps and developers with one star reviews from confused and upset customers. Writing at Marco.org, Marco addressed the issue to his audience and began gathering a large list of apps that were also affected, calling on Apple to quickly resolve the problem as developers dealt with the consequences.

On Thursday evening, Apple acknowledged the problem to AllThingsD and Macworld, informing the publications that the issue had been resolved.

Lex Friedman from Macworld writes,

Around 6:00 p.m. PT, Apple acknowledged the problem to Macworld, describing it as “a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded.” Apple added: “The issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again.”

Customers with affected applications should be able to delete and reinstall a working application through the App Store.

Additionally from Macworld,

Sources told Macworld that Apple will be removing one-star app reviews developers earned unfairly because of the company’s server issue.

As Matthew Panzarino from The Next Web points out, both Apple customers and developers have little to no recourse when problems like this occur. Developers currently have no way of effectively communicating with customers outside of developer blogs.

When the one-star reviews started rolling in, there was very little that developers could do to notify users of their app that it was an issue with Apple’s packaging of their apps, not the apps themselves. The users just saw that the app was crashing on launch and rated it accordingly.

Reinstalling applications also leads to users possibly losing information — Glasshouse Apps’ is still dealing with the aftereffects as the company prepares an app update and advises users on the best course of action that will keep their news feeds and data intact. The developers of GoodReader have also written a step-by-step guide that helps customers back up, reinstall their app, and restore data onto their devices.

While Apple has acknowledged and fixed the issues disrupting application updates on the App Store, they have not yet issued an apology to developers, nor did they want to themselves acknowledge that they’d be removing one-star app reviews apps received because of the error. If Apple should do anything more, they certainly need to reach out and apologize to developers, who’ve unfortunately had to run damage control to prevent one-star reviews and angry customers.

[Sources: Macworld via AllThingsD]

Some App Updates Resulting In Instant Crashes Due To Presumed Apple CDN Issue

In the last 24 hours or so, a number of apps that have been updated by users have crashed on launch due to a problem presumed to be connected to the App Store’s content distribution network (CDN). A number of popular apps from Instapaper, Readdle Scanner Pro, Angry Birds Space HD Free and CommBank Kaching amongst others have been just some of the affected apps. The issue, not affecting every customer, occurs when a user updates their apps and goes to launch them but instead the app crashes before it can load.

Instapaper was one of the first to be affected by the issue with an update that went live late on July 3rd. Developer Marco Arment was instantly “deluged” by support requests complaining of instant crashes with the latest version. After a bit of digging and looking at his support requests, Marco believes it comes about due to a corrupt version of the updated app being distributed by the App Store CDN in some regions. For Instapaper the issue was resolved (a non-corrupt version propagated to all regions) within two hours but it isn’t known if it was due to Marco’s emails to the App Review team or just an issue resolved with time.

If you’re a developer, and you have a non-critical update pending release, I suggest waiting a few days for this to presumably get sorted out before releasing it. [Marco Arment]

Apple has yet to make any statement on the issue and Marco and the other developers affected by the issue have yet to receive responces from any of the developer relations groups at Apple either. You can view a tentative list of apps affected by the issue over at The Next Web and at Marco’s personal blog which also goes into detail about the issue.

It may be wise to hold off from updating any apps for the time being as well, with the issue affecting people across all regions and all different apps. If you’ve already been affected by the issue, the only real way to fix it is to delete the app and try re-installing the app - but this will only work if the app is no longer corrupted on Apple’s side.

[Sources: Marco.org and The Next Web]