Posts tagged with "iOS"

Apple in Business Land→

Apple in Business Land

Rex Hammock:

I’ve watched closely (as both a customer and writer) as Apple has made attempts to better serve small business and corporate customers.

But I have a hard time believing Steve Jobs has ever obsessed over the B2B marketplace the way he’s obsessed over the materials that go into the glass staircases of major Apple Stores.

Perhaps because he has (in my opinion, brilliantly) focused the company’s products so much on great design that delights consumers, Apple’s varsity squad of product designers may have lacked the bandwidth to apply such attention to designing products that display such a deep understanding of how businesses use technology.

I just wonder if Jonathan Ive has ever sat in on a meeting where a discussion was taking place on how small business managers want to share contacts and calendars among their employees, for instance?

It’d be nice to see an update to this tomorrow, but I think the whole event will be focused on “OS X Lion Sneak Peek”.  Just for the sake of comparison, this is how Apple promotes the upcoming enterprise features in iOS 4.2 for iPad, business apps, iPhone in business and profiles.

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The Apple TV Is Jailbroken

They promised and it happened: the new Apple TV is jailbroken. According to a picture tweeted a few minutes ago by Joshua Hill (who goes by the name of “p0sixninja” online), the jailbreak tool Greenpois0n has managed to jailbreak Apple’s latest iOS device.

As you can see in the screenshot below, a custom background has been installed, together with a brand new menu to “inject software”.

This means jailbreak apps (on Cydia, perhaps) will come very soon to an Apple TV near you. This is bad news for Apple on an event day, but I suspect they saw it coming all along. Being based on iOS, you can stay assured the jailbreak community is going to find a way to “pwn” it.

No word yet on how Greenpois0n for Apple TV will work, and when it’ll be available. Now I just want to see Cydia running on this thing.

App Savvy: The Ultimate Guide To Launch Successful iOS Apps

When Ken Yarmosh contacted me asking to take a look at an early version of his upcoming book about iOS app development, I didn’t really know what to do. I read a couple of iOS-related publications before, but I wasn’t really huge on them. I used to think the most important and useful information about development, marketing and sale techniques could be found on the internet - why would I need a book to learn about the App Store?

Then I took my time to read Ken’s book. It’s not easy for me to go into books these days, as I spend most of time writing and catching up on blog posts. But it was a read well worth it: if you’re looking to get started with iOS development, have already released a few apps or are simply curious about how “stuff actually happens” behind the scenes, go buy App Savvy right now. Read more

60 Percent Of Apple’s Sales Come From New Products

Oh, would you look at that. With blockbuster iPhone sales and more than $20 billion revenue in the last quarter, you would expect Apple to be happy about its latest product line. But the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad to represent 60 percent of Apple’s sales?

As Horace Dediu of Asymco noticed, 60 percent of Apple’s sales come from products that did not exist three years ago. I guess that’s a good definition of “reinventing a company”.

“Integration” As A New Way To Define iOS

In case you missed it, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance at today’s Apple Q4 earnings call. What he had to say about 7-inch tablets, Android, Nokia, RIM and Apple’s philosophy is all over the internet. You can read a full transcript here.

Reading between the lines, what strikes me is the focus Steve put on the word “integrated”. The iOS platform is integrated, Android is fragmented. With the iPhone, you get an integrated device. You don’t have to mess with hundreds of different devices running multiple versions and variations of the Android OS. But that’s not really the point, we get Steve’s thoughts on Android. Tweetdeck’s developers get them even more.

What interests me is the use of the term “integrated” as a new way of defining iOS, and thus the devices is runs on, against competitors. By definition, to integrate means to “combine two or more elements so that they become a whole”. So it’s clear that, in Jobs’ mind, Apple deeply integrated the hardware with the software to create a new, reliable, user-friendly experience. Read more

Complete Transcript Of Today’s Steve Jobs Statements→

Complete Transcript Of Today’s Steve Jobs Statements

This one pretty much sums it all up:

Nokia makes $50 handsets, and we don’t know how to make a great smartphone for $50. We’re not smart enough to have figured that one out yet, but believe me I’ll let you know when we do. And so our goal is to make really breakthrough great products, make the best products in every industry that we compete in, and to drive the cost down while constantly making the products better at the same time. That’s what we did with iPod. We updated our products many times every year with better functionality, often times at same price and sometimes at a lower price. And it was the relentless improvement at in some cases a lower price, that was able to beat our competition and yield the market share that it did.

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Wi-Fi LED Lights + iOS App = iParty

This is a whole new use for the iPhone - the iGLO LED Set bundles a WiFi-enabled strip of 120 multi-color LEDs (over 16 feet) with a (free) iOS app to control them. The lights are $299, but imagine all the possibilities! Parties, raves, birthdays, college dorms, a colorful lasso - the possibilities are endless.

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