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Posts tagged with "iOS"

New iOS Features? An Apple Social Network? Photo Stream and Media Stream

Digging into the latest iOS 4.3 beta build seeded to developers a few hours ago, we found references to two new features related to MobileMe called “Photo Stream” and “Media Stream”. There are several files, folders and code references buried deep into iOS that point to these new features as part of MobileMe and accessible through a device’s Settings.app.

As detailed by the folks over at 9to5mac, who also found out about these new features and went ahead to discover more of the implications of “Photo Stream” and “Media Stream” in iOS, Apple may be working on a serious MobileMe overhaul to offer social networking functionalities that would allow Apple to directly fight Facebook in the future, perhaps with iOS 5, with a social network built into iOS and tied to MobileMe and the Cloud. Read more

Cydia Adds Ability to Easily View All Your Past Purchases

Cydia, the App Store equivalent for all those jailbreak required apps that Apple has or would deny, has just received a handy new feature that allows you to view in one place all the packages that you have purchased from the Cydia store.

Jay Freeman, creator of Cydia has been working hard in recent months to improving Cydia in many ways from decreasing the all to common “Reloading” times, improving the polish and adding new features. This new feature has been a fairly common suggestion not only for Cydia but the App Store too, which whilst present in the Mac App Store has yet to reach iOS App Store - something which those of us at Macstories are hopeful Apple will add in the near future.

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Office To Follow Someday? Microsoft’s OneNote Comes To The iPhone→

Office To Follow Someday? Microsoft’s OneNote Comes To The iPhone

Earlier today, Microsoft released a new version of its note-taking application OneNote that’s specifically meant for iPhone users. The app is available for free (limited time offer) in the App Store. Even though this is no confirmation the full Office suite is coming to iOS soon, the arrival of OneNote on the iPhone sure suggests the Office team has been thinking about iOS apps. Even if Ballmer was disappointed at initial iPad sales (we wonder if he still is), rumors surfaced in the past pointed at the Microsoft Office team considering development of an iPad version of Office.

As for OneNote:

We know people care more about what they do than where they do it,” Microsoft Office unit Vice President Takeshi Numoto says in a blog post being published on Tuesday. “Whether it’s on a PC or Mac, a mobile phone or online through the Web Apps on multiple browsers, we continue to bring Office to the devices, platforms, and operating systems our customers are using. It should be about the ideas and information, not the device, right?”

Of course, OneNote is just one piece of Office–and one of the newer and least used of the main components at that. It’s also an interesting choice since OneNote isn’t available natively for the Mac. But, Microsoft seems to be leaving the door open to bring other pieces of Office to the iPhone.

The app can be downloaded for free here.

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Quick! Download AirView Now, It Turns Your iOS Device Into An AirPlay Receiver

AirView is a universal application available for free in the App Store that does something iOS users have been asking since the original release of AirPlay: it turns any iPhone, iPad or iPod touch into AirPlay receivers capable of playing videos streamed from another device. With AirView, in fact, video can be streamed from iOS device to iOS device (iPhone to iPad, iPhone to iPhone) or from iTunes, something that Apple only does with the Apple TV 2nd generation.

AirView must be running on a device in order to show up as receiver on a local network. The app doesn’t enable music streaming, a feature we managed to activate in the past with a jailbreak hack. Photos aren’t supported either.

AirView is a neat little app that we guess Apple will soon remove from the App Store. When used in combination with Erica Sadun’s apps that extend AirPlay’s functionalities, it can become a quite powerful tool. Go grab it here now.

Bump Data Suggests 90% of iOS Devices Running 4.x

David Lieb, founder and CEO of iPhone app Bump yesterday posted some data on Quora to a question about what percentage of users of iOS devices were on 4.x, his answer revealed that 89.7% of Bump users were on the latest major iteration of iOS, 4.x.

Although Lieb didn’t note how big the sample size is, the latest known figure of Bump downloads was 15 million back from August last year. That’s a large sample size and one that includes users of iPhones, iPod Touch’s and iPads, a sample that would suggest the ~90% is a close approximation to the real percentage of iOS device users on the latest major iteration of iOS, version 4.

Ian Peters-Campbell of Loopt, another iOS app backed up Lieb’s data but said for his users take-up was even a little higher. Anyway you cut it such a high take up rate in about six months is impressive. It also highlights concerns over how fragmented Android is compared to iOS which back in December 2010 when Froyo (2.2) was the latest Android OS only had 43.4% take up, let alone Gingerbread (2.3) which as of today ReadWriteWeb says only has 0.4% take-up.

Lieb of Bump, posted a full breakdown of iterations and percentages of users, which is posted after the break. The key data is that 53% of users are on the very latest software update of 4.2.1.

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