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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Sending Emails From @mac.com Accounts Will Soon Be Impossible

According to a recent thread on Apple’s Discussion boards and a support document on Apple’s website, users of @mac.com email addresses who upgraded to iOS 4.2 are no longer able to send email messages through a @mac.com account unless it was setup prior to updating to iOS 4.2. Alternatively, the @mac.com account details can be synced through iTunes on the desktop, but this won’t enable push for emails.

A user on Apple Discussions explains:

Because of this unannounced development, I had a sneaking suspicion that Apple may be planning to do the same in the future for sending email from @mac.com addresses via www.me.com and a desktop email client.

It appears my suspicion was true. Here are the relevant sections from a Chat Session I’ve just finished with a very nice MobileMe Support agent.

Read more

Angry Birds Valentine’s Edition, Coming February 14

In December we reported Rovio was working on a new update to its incredibly successful series Angry Birds, a new Valentine’s-themed version that was rumored to be scheduled for a February release.

At the end of the video below, you can see the first exclusive footage of Angry Birds Valentine’s Edition (not an official name), which sports lots of hearts, pink-colored birds and clouds. It would be very romantic if the concept of the game wasn’t to kill pigs. I guess from Rovio’s standpoint, that makes sense though.

Still, prepare to see this game become #1 in the App Store. [Electricpig via 9to5mac] Read more

Flight Control Lands Nearly 4 Million Sales

Firemint, which recently acquired Infinite Interactive has posted on it’s blog some sales statistics of it’s popular Flight Control game that is currently featured in Apple’s Top Paid Apps of all time. As of the post it had sold 3,881,634 copies and has raked in $3.8 million dollars and that’s after Apple 30% take.

As demonstrated by the graph it released that is shown above (click for larger size) it’s pretty clear that Christmas and big feature updates really helped increase sales of the game. In particular the addition of Game Center support led to a peak of 120,000 sales, the largest peak since the release of the app. The new maps update and Retina display support were the other notable peaks.

Also notable is the sales by country, as the graph below the break shows, the US has the lion’s share followed by Great Britain, Australia and Germany.

Read more

Skyfire Makes Another Million With iPad App

Remember Skyfire? The alternative browser for the iPhone that comes with a lot of extra functionalities, including the possibility to play Flash videos through remote proxy servers that transcode Flash content to iOS-optimized video. The iPhone app was insanely successful as it managed to pull in a million dollars in just three days in the App Store. The app has also been sitting on top of the iPhone charts for weeks now.

In case you didn’t notice, right ahead of Christmas the Skyfire team released an iPad version of the app, priced at $4.99. It was good timing and a clever move as the App Store was about to shut down for developers and apps that climbed the charts in those days gained thousands of downloads. Skyfire for iPad is no exception: three weeks into the App Store, another $1 million in the developers’ hands – although 30% will go to Apple. That’s around $700,000 in revenue so far, as MobileCrunch reports.

Skyfire for iPad is available here. It’s a cool browser, but I’m still not sure what’s the real need of Flash compatibility for videos on iOS devices. Apparently though, people bought it. And that should be enough for the developers. Read more

#pastblast - The Potential of MobileMe→

#pastblast - The Potential of MobileMe

We think Shawn Blanc’s “Blast from the Past Link Day” initiative is a great idea: today only, get to share and discover again great & interesting articles from months or years ago. I thought I might link back to an article from Shawn himself, from October of last year. The article is about the potential of MobileMe, and I think it’s still particularly relevant to Apple fans and iOS users as it provides exquisite insight into features we’re still waiting for Apple to implement:

In many ways Dropbox and Google are driving the iOS / OS X relationship more than MobileMe is. While MobileMe is syncing my contacts and calendars, Dropbox is syncing my most-dear files: the projects, articles, and notes I’m interacting with every day. What are iWork.com and MobileMe for if not for the sharing and syncing of everything between our Macintoshes, iPhones, and iPads in sync?

Imagine if you will what a merging of Dropbox and MobileMe might look like. Something simple and completely expected, I suppose. It would be free, it would sync and share info and files, and it would let other apps use it for syncing. Imagine setting up your iPhone with your Apple ID once, and then any app that has a Mac and/or iPad counterpart would sync. Sounds like mobile bliss.

To keep some bit of a revenue stream, there could easily be a paid version of MobileMe as well. The free version could offer syncing and come a small yet reasonable 2GB of data storage. Paying for an upgrade might buy you increased cloud storage, an @me.com email address, Find my iPhone support, and that photo gallery thing which nobody uses.

Sounds like the perfect solution for geeks, or those OS X users who know what app-to-app OTA sync is. I don’t know if the average iOS user – your friend who bought the iPhone for Angry Birds – would be excited about a Dropbox-like feature in iOS, though. And that’s why Apple is working on two features that can be easily explained to anyone: Photo Stream and Media Stream.

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iOS 4.3 Gestures, Bezels and An Apple Patent From Last Year

In the first beta of iOS 4.3, Apple introduced “multitasking gestures” for iPad: offered as a preview for developers to play with and test compatibility with apps, these 4 and 5-finger multitouch gestures allow users to execute a series of actions otherwise assigned to the Home button. You can switch back and forth between apps, open and close the multitasking tray or pinch back to the homescreens. The gestures need to be activated through Xcode as, again, they are a developer preview of a feature that won’t even be enabled in the public release of iOS 4.3, as Apple let devs know last night.

The presence of gestures that offer some functionalities previously exclusive to the Home button also let the rumor mill run wild, with some bloggers speculating that Apple may get rid of the Home button in the next iterations of the iPad and iPhone. Personally, I think gestures on the iPhone’s tiny screen are a terrible idea – and it gets worse if you have non-average, big hands.

Gestures are a neat new feature for the iPad that provide a glimpse at something Apple is clearly working on: more multi-touch capabilities for iOS devices. These very same gestures, though, gave several developers a hard time trying to figure out how to integrate them with their apps. Read more

Further Evidence of Camera in iPad 2 and Photo Booth and FaceTime Apps

After digging around the 4.3 Beta 2 of iOS for iPad, Mac Rumors has found fairly solid evidence that pretty much confirms not only a camera addition to the iPad but also the addition of a Camera app (obviously), FaceTime and Photo Booth apps.

An image (homeScreenOverlayFaceTime~ipad.png)  used by the iPad in the Setting’s app to preview the wallpaper was found by Mac Rumors to contain three extra icons that do not exist on the image contained in iOS 4.2, those additional icons were those for a FaceTime, Camera and Photo Booth app.

FaceTime and Photo Booth are also largely dependent on the presence of a front facing camera, whilst a Camera app would seem rather redundant without a rear facing camera and so it could be thus presumed that this latest discovery seems to confirm previous reports of both a front facing and rear facing camera on the iPad 2.

Mac Rumors also says they found filters for Photo Booth that included the effects of Thermal Camera, Mirror, X-Ray, Kaleidoscope, Light Tunnel, Squeeze, Twirl and Stretch.

[Via Mac Rumors]