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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Cloud Connect for iOS Gets 3.0 Update, Brings Finder Integration

When it comes to remotely accessing your computer, AirPort Extreme station, FTP, Dropbox or WebDAV servers, Cloud Connect Pro is a staff favorite here at MacStories. Not only the app provides a full-featured solution to connect to all kinds of machines, servers and online services, it also offers a neat way to browse files and media in a Finder-like view for iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. We have covered the app a few times in the past, and I was impressed when Antacea managed to port the whole tablet experience to the iPhone.

The latest 3.0 update, however, makes things look much better with some UI refinements, a new audio player, a proper PDF viewer and some stability enhancements. The app retains all the functionalities of the previous versions, but introduces some welcome features and little touches throughout the whole package that add a new layer of accessibility, communication with iOS built-in tools, and more. For example, Cloud Connect 3.0 can directly play music stored in the iPod.app library, or visualize photos and videos from the camera roll. Songs can be sent to the new audio player’s playlist, which sits at the bottom of the app and displays album artwork, a list of songs waiting in the queue, as well as an AirPlay button to beam music to external speakers. Speaking of which, gone is the hideous Mac-like dock, leaving room for a more minimal bar of icons. Browsing files and folders in Cloud Connect has been improved, too: alongside the (great) column view, the developers have implemented icon-based navigation to tap your way around the filesystem. What’s cool is that you can switch between views with a tap in the toolbar, and a new button in the column view allows you to bookmark, copy, download & compress or delete any file or folder. On top of that, this new version allows you to browse songs and media from the camera roll using your Mac’s Finder by connecting to the “iPad” device under the Shared tab once Cloud Connect is running. This is by far the easiest way to import photos and music off an iOS device and onto an OS X machine I’ve tried, with Cloud Connect acting as a bridge between the two. It works great.

The app could still use some UI polish (I personally can’t stand those blue and grey tones), but I can see why Antacea decided to focus on adding and refining features for now. The lack of a serious PDF viewer, for example, was a major disappointment in Cloud Connect 1.0: the new PDF viewer introduced in version 3.0 is quite fast and responsive, lets you create bookmarks and search for text within a document.

Other features in Cloud Connect 3.0 include Google Picasa support, possibility to use a Mac or PC as a gateway to connect to other Easy Connect computers, and RDP for HP printers only. At $24.99 in the App Store, Cloud Connect doesn’t come cheap but it’s powerful, easy to use and works both on the iPhone and iPad. The app keeps getting better on each release, and I’m looking forward to some serious design improvements in the next version. For now though, Cloud Connect surely is one of the best ways to manage your remote and local connections. Read more

Castlerama Takes On Epic Citadel with Unreal Engine for iOS

If you were one of those who followed or watched Apple’s September 1, 2010 media event – where, among other things, iOS 4.1 and Game Center were officially unveiled – then you most definitely remember Epic Games’ Mike Capps and Steve Jobs talking about a revolutionary game that would set new technical standards on iOS devices. The game was based on the popular Unreal Engine ported to iOS, and on stage it was presented as a work-in-progress demo called Epic Citadel, also released for free on the App Store. The demo was impressive: there was nothing to do besides wandering around a medieval village, but the graphics, the lightning and the details were impressive. Tech-wise, everything about Epic Citadel was amazing. And as you may know, the game evolved and eventually became a real adventure with a plot and sword fights: Infinity Blade, based off the Unreal Engine and Epic Citadel’s first-person setting, was a huge success on iPhones and iPads.

As the story goes, however, other developers have tried to implement the Unreal Engine powerful set of tools in their games. The latest entry in the Unreal Engine-based game market is Castlerama by the Codenrama development studio, a first-person game with a striking resemblance to Epic Citadel and its environment. Castlerama seems to offer different landscapes though, as well as its own control scheme based on two virtual analog sticks displayed on screen.

The developers also explain their decision to accept “compromises” in order to make the game run on new devices like the iPad 2 and older units like the iPhone 3GS:

While developing Castlerama, we had to face the fact that newer devices such as iPhone4s and iPad2s are very different from their predecessors, iPhone3GSs and iPads, in that the former have twice as much memory. In order to have the app run on all devices, we had to compromise quite a bit, pushing the old devices to their limits (risking crash if other applications are left running) while keeping the new devices well behind their capabilities. In the future we believe we will have to develop two versions for each application.

Castlerama is available for free in the App Store as a universal download. With more games supporting the Unreal Engine coming out in the near future, it’ll be interesting to see how Castlerama will manage to provide a unique experience for iPhone and iPad owners. In the meantime, check out the app’s demo video and a walk down the Epic Citadel memory lane below. [9to5mac via TouchArcade]
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Google News Goes Local on Mobile Browsers

With an official post on Google News’ blog, Google has announced that starting today in the United States, Google News will be able of displaying location-based content on iOS and Android mobile browsers. By giving access to your location information in iOS Safari, Google News will find news relevant to where you are in the US with a new section called “News near you.”

To use this feature, visit Google News from the browser of your Android smartphone or iPhone. If this is the first time you are visiting Google News on your phone since this feature became available, a pop-up will ask you if you want to share your location. If you say yes, news relevant to your location will appear in a new section called “News near you” which will be added at the bottom of the homepage. You can reorganize the sections later via the personalization page.

The updated section is available now on news.google.com, but it’s restricted to the United States. Remember you’ll have to grant Safari access to your location, otherwise the feature won’t work.

iOS Devs Hit by Patent Infringement Notices For In-App Purchases

Here’s an interesting news that’s making the rounds of Twitter this morning, and it appears to be spreading quickly among iOS developers. As first reported by James Thomson, indie iOS and Mac developer of DragThing and PCalc, he woke up this morning to find a “very worrying threat of patent infringement lawsuit” in a FedEx parcel. While Thomson won’t say the name of the company that is threatening to sue him before he gets a reply from Apple Legal on the matter, what’s really curious is the reason behind the alleged patent infringement: it’s not the app Thomson developed, apparently it’s the in-app purchase system he chose to implement in PCalc Lite. Apple’s own in-app purchase payment method, certainly not created by Thomson. This developer, and others with him, are receiving notices from a “patent troll” who’s going after indie developers for using IAP, rather than Apple. The legal threat is worrisome as this company claims developers are given 21 days to license the patent they’re infringing. But this patent, these developers say, it’s not about intellectual property for apps – again, it’s about the payment system. Which Apple created, not the developers.

Looking at the tweets from Thomson, this story doesn’t really make sense. Someone is threatening to sue indie developers because they’re using Apple’s in-app purchase? If so, wouldn’t it be appropriate to sue Apple, which invented the system? And why going after the indie devs in the first place – just to cause anxiety and doubt for the fear of a lawsuit? Read more

Halo Creators Likely Working On New Game for Mobile Devices

Take this with a grain of salt, but the creators of popular first-person shooter Halo may be working on a new online game for iOS and Android devices. As noted by TouchArcade and GameInformer today, a new filing at the USPTO confirms Bungie Aerospace has trademarked “Crimson”, a “computer game software for use on mobile and cellular phones.” Sounds intriguing, but what’s Bungie Aerospace? The company is likely a subsidiary of the “real thing” Bungie, and that’s already been incorporated in Delaware and Washington. Mounting speculation suggests that this new company is the official mobile division of Bungie, something that the Halo developers hinted several times in the past. Bungie has been busy hiring and opening positions for mobile developers in the past months, so it seems pretty clear at this point that something in mobile is going on. And mobile these days means two things: iOS and Android. If Bungie is really working on a new mobile game, than we can assume it’s most definitely coming to the iPhone or iPad.

What the game really is, however, it’s unclear. TouchArcade speculates it might be heavily online based, as also suggested by a Bungie staff writer in 2010 when he said it’s be great to have a world that’s “always there for you, with lots of stories to tell.”

What this project actually is, however, is still shrouded in a cloud of secrecy and, presumably, really hardcore non-disclosure agreements.

My gut says Bungie Aerospace and “Crimson” are connected to the studio’s next project, an original IP set to be published by Activision. Word on the street is that this game is a shooter MMO — an MMO that might just offer increased connectivity via mobile apps.

As a big Halo and Bungie fan, I’m looking forward to what’s next for the company in the mobile space. A new iOS game would sure make for a big announcement at a certain Apple event in September.

Apple Releases iOS 4.2.2 for Apple TV 2G

A few minutes ago Apple pushed a minor software update for the Apple TV 2nd generation. The firmware file, available for download here, is labelled 4.2.2 (build 8F305), but we’re pretty sure it’ll follow another nomenclature in the internal Apple TV settings or Apple’s website, as with previous releases. iOS 4.2.1 for the second generation Apple TV was released on March 22 with various fixes including TV compatibility and audio improvements.

Apple’s official Downloads webpage hasn’t been updated with a changelog yet, so we’ll update this post as more information about the update becomes available. [via]

Update: Here’s the full changelog for 4.2.2. As expected it contains various bug fixes and stability improvements.

Apple’s In-App Purchase Policy Forces iFlowReader to Shut Down

BeamItDown Software, developers of iFlowReader, today announced that they will be forced to cease their operations at the end of this month. The move comes after Apple decided to enforce rule 11.13 of the ‘App Store Review Guidelines for iOS Apps’ – with Apple set to begin removing apps that do not conform to this rule by June 30. This means iFlowReader, which sold eBooks through an online store, would have to offer the same books within the app through In App Purchases – consequently meaning Apple gets its 30% cut of every sale made through the app.

In a statement on its website, BeamItDown Software makes it clear how if they went ahead and followed Apple’s guidelines, they would have to take a loss on every e-book sold – clearly not a sustainable business model. They explain that this occurs because the largest publishers (which account for more than 90% of the e-books they sell) have adopted an “agency model” in which means resellers, such as BeamItDown, receive a margin of less than 30% after paying the publisher. They say that the big publishers adopted this agency model after Apple negotiated with them over the iBooks deal. Prior to the agency model, resellers would typically receive a 50% discount on e-books.

The end result of BeamItDown Software and their iFlowReader, which had become quite a popular iOS e-reader with over six million downloads, is that it has, in essence, been shoved out of the iOS e-book market by the power Apple has over developers who rely on the iOS platform.

“We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game.”

If you are a user of the app and its service, the short story is you will still be able to read your e-books, but you will have to jump through some hoops to ensure this. You will have until May 31st this year (the end of this month!) to do a few things related to back-up and downloading all your e-books from the site, which is shutting down. Jump to their statement for the details on this.

It was back in February when it was reported that Apple was tightening its hold on the iOS walled garden after it was revealed that Sony’s e-reader app was rejected for re-directing users to an online store for e-book purchases. Apple responded shortly after saying;

We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines,” Apple spokesperson, Trudy Muller, told The Loop. “We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.

The impending shutdown of BeamItDown does raise the question over whether Apple is using monopolistic behavior to force out other e-book services. In their statement they highlight that with one swift change in policy application, Apple will be able to sell e-books at a cheaper rate than every other service on iOS and likely force a number of services, like iFlow Reader to completely shut down because they cannot afford that 30% cut.

What sounds like a reasonable demand when packaged by Apple’s extraordinary public relations department is essentially an eviction notice to all e-book sellers on iOS…They want all e-book business on iOS and since they have the unilateral power to get it, we are out of business and the iFlow Reader is dead.

In the face of such questions, many will argue that Apple deserves to have complete control over its own App ecosystem, and that Android and the Kindle offer strong competition to Apple and iBooks. However, at least in my mind, I get the sense that Apple, with it’s large user base, may have unfairly forced this company out of the e-book market to advance the use of iBooks.

Section 11.13 of App Store Review Guidelines for iOS Apps

Apps can read or play approved content (magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video) that is sold outside of the app, for which Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues, provided that the same content is also offered in the app using IAP at the same price or less than it is offered outside the app. This applies to both purchased content and subscriptions.