OS X Software

According to Businessweek and 2 Verizon insiders, Verizon has been talking to Apple to score a deal which will bring 2 new apple products to the Verizon network.

Early hints suggest that these 2 products could be an upgraded iphone, possibly 32gb, or maybe a lite version of the iphone.

The second product is still rumoured to be some kind of tablet device, hopefully an 6 to 8 inch display, or put simply a big iphone.

Either way, with more and more insiders slowly leaking information out to the public, one cannot deny the existance of a new round of phone based products coming out of Apple some time in the future.

I can’t wait!

Usually operating systems don’t include services which connect to possible rival websites, but with the new build of OS X (10.6) this has changed.

The new version of Quicktime X now allows its users to upload movies straight to youtube along with other options to share with MobileMe etc.

The other feature which allows users to record their desktop in motion, handy for screencasts again ties in well with the youtube feature to publish your tutorials or whatever you get upto online quickly and effectively.

Lets hope we get some more great additions with Snow Leopard to make it worth the upgrade.

The latest rumour on the Apple street is that we might start seeing OLED screen upgrades as an expensive option on future laptops being offered.

For those of you don’t know. OLED is basically the next big thing in TV / Monitor Screens. The colours, responce and pretyt much everything is superior to anything offered on the market at the moment.

If we see this upgrade happen, you may find a lot of designers flocking for this Mac Book to get a better colour representation on their work due to quality difference.

Either way it’s going to be so expensive I won’t be able to afford it.

Enough rumour mill has been generated on the iPhone scene.

This time it seems that SDK programmers have found certain classes or functions that can be used in the iphone 3 software.

If the functions found turn out to be true then the implications are that the iphone will have voice operated services enabled on the iphone.

Such uses include hands free devices being able to dial out via voice commands keeping you safe in your car! Also voice recognition available to app store developers will open up a large new array of products such as security apps (voice passwords) or possibly even prank call devices (change your voice pitch etc)

Time will tell as all rumours go!

The mass advertising of the 1 billionth app download from the app store is about to finish.
At the rate of downloads Apple reckons they will reach the milestone sometime this week or next week.
If you go to the Apple website you will see the counter ticking away closer and closer to the target.
If you are the one billionth “downloadee” prepared to get showered with every Apple product under the sun, probably totalling a pretty penny amount.
Although they say the competition give away is from signing up to it from now until that download day, they still must surely give something to that special one download person?

If you follow any kind of news through out the week you will know that iTunes upped the price of the top scale songs to 1.29$ and the bottom scaled songs to a lower than average price to try and balance it out a bit.

This is now old news.

The interesting part is the aftermath of this change.

Places like Amazon held off on the pricing changes and later gave in and increased prices. It would be great to see those sales figures, one would imagine to see a huge spike of music downloads.

Early sales figures indicate about a 10% fall in sales. There obviously is not enough of these figures to determine if this is just a one off, but it is still interesting if the sales kept dropping.

Greedy Artists, talk about shooting yourselves in the foot!

Remember the posts about 10.5.7 and its near completion? Well apparently it is now pretty much finished and will be rolling out “very” soon.

The release is mainly bug fixes and security plugs so nothing exciting, but it’s always good to see holes being filled and speeds increased on a semi regular basis.

Most of the core components are getting patched which will see their stability increased and to provide an increasingly solid platform for the other applications to run.

We can expect to see this release appear on your update list next week. Expect the usual size download for those on dodgy bandwidth caps!

Nokia have recently shown that they are 90% down in profit for the first quarter of the year compared to last year.

Something like from 110billion to 110 million, which is absolutely crazy.

They may have got rid of 1700 or so jobs at Nokia, but I don’t see that resolving any problems in the near future.

Has the iPhone now destroyed Nokia?

With Blackberry and Apple leading the way in smart phones and still going strong its very hard to see Nokia coming back unless they seriously change their direction and possibly focus on other areas away from the whole smart phone sector.

As you may of seen already, there are Microsoft PC adverts on TV that basically slate Apple and it’s pricing. The aim obviously is to get people to realise that Mac’s aren’t the only highly sought after laptop and that you can get a very similiar specced PC laptop for the same price.

The advert shows an average family looking for a laptop that suits there need. They end up with an average laptop for the average user without spending a lot of money.

Now Mac have released a series of adverts that take it out on Microsoft highlighting the stereotypical faults of Windows.

Now we just sit back and await more Apple bashing adverts!

The other interesting news of the week revolving around sales is the app store.

Apple have recently done a promotional event with the news of the near 1 billion app downloads mark. In conjunction to this they have also released some very interesting facts that should really get the iPhone developers motivated.

According to Apples sales figures and I’m assuming permission from the app’s developers, Koi Pond, the virtual fish pond, has had 900,00 downloads and made a total of $600,000. Thats with Apples cut already removed.

With figures like that, I’m sure they will reach the 1 billion mark a lot sooner than they might have thought!

Most of the tech savvy users will always have this topic covered down to the tee. But I’m surprised some times at the amount of people that literally don’t back up anything, even work.

With the amount of technology and software available for backing up your data there really is no reason not to atleast back up your most important files.

The easiest way in my opinion is quite simply a large USB pen drive that you can tuck away somewhere with your important work documents on. I generally keep work and my music collection on a 16gb Pen drive I picked up for 25£ which is really inexpensive.

For those of you that need a professional solution then I’m afraid there isn’t really a cheap way of going about it. For sensitive data you should be prepared to pay a bit to keep it safe at different locations in case the worst happens, which it probably will every now and again. For small businesses with this kind of sensitive data I’d recommend someone like these guys that provide Remote backup.

If you are using Mac OS then the new Time Machine software, which you will already have if you are on the latest version of OS X will solve all your back up needs for the average home user.
Literally, all you do is plug in any external drive and go through the set up and you will be able to go back to different parts of the day to get files back. If you hard drive goes kaput, you’ll have a back up to fall back on with hopefully only little time lost.

So there you have it, a few quick tips for keeping your work safe.

OmniVision, a supposive new supplier to Apple regarding camera sensors has let on that they will be producing these sensors for a new iteration of iPhones.

The company who specialize in mobile camera products offer 3 mega pixel cameras which have technology to improve picture in low light, one of the few Apple down sides. If a new iPhone was to surface with the new iPhone 3 OS it will most likely be using these OmniVision parts.

Another rumour to surface is that they also have a contract for a better sensor which is 5 Megapixels and can handle 1080p/720p Video recording.

This could be one of Apples unannounced products in the pipeline.

Standford University are currently doing an iphone development course for students that wish to learn the ins and outs of the iphone SDK and programming language.

The best bit is that all of the material and lecture notes will be made available for the general public to download and work through themselves.

The first part of the lectures notes seem to be online at http://cs193p.stanford.edu/ and there seems to be plans to be another 9 covering other areas of iPhone development.

If you are looking at getting an iPhone development license to make a start, then there can’t be much better places to look for help than here for the moment.

In a new, what seems to be expensive marketing move, Apple have decided to take note of Microsofts poor IE8 advertising campaign and heavily invested in a private Safari located just off of South Africa.

Apple plans to use this to their advantage to help promote Apple Safari Web Browser 4 when it launches later this year.

The browser is currently in beta and is showing great performence improvements over the old version, but also IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Rumours have been gathering about how Apple plans to use the African safari space, with some suggesting they plan to line up Elephants to spell out “Apple” which will be seen via Google Earth.

Apple have always touted that they are eco friendly, with this latest expenture proving just that!

For those of you finding it hard to use the Google API in iphone development this official guest article may offer you some help.

The poster explains the usefulness of using the Google API as well as talking through what he needed to learn to get stuck into iphone development.

He then goes on to demonstrate using Google Document features inside the iphone, which leads onto him showing you the finished application which is a shopping list tool using Google Documents as the data storage.

Source: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/03/using-google-apis-in-iphone-app.html