This Week's Sponsor:

Turbulence Forecast

Know before you go. Get detailed turbulence forecasts for your exact route, now available 5 days in advance.

Posts tagged with "apple"

The Daily Launch Event Will Be Live Streamed, App Launches Today

It looks like The Daily’s launch will be live streamed on the app’s official website:

Watch at 11 a.m. Eastern Time today as News Corporation unveils The Daily, featuring special guest Eddy Cue, vice president of Internet Services from Apple. Check back later today for our full web site. The Daily will be available on the App Store starting at 12 p.m. EST.

The app will also be available later today in the App Store. Check for updates on MacStories as the launch happens. In the meantime, enjoy the countdown on thedaily.com.

Apple Confirms Verizon iPhone Available for Pre-Order Tomorrow

Press release just went out confirming that the Verizon iPhone 4 will be available for pre-order tomorrow on first come, first served basis through Apple’s online store and Verizon’s store. The Verizon iPhone 4 will be sold at $199 for the 16 GB model, $299 for the 32 GB model with a two-year contract. Sales in Apple retail stores and 2,000 Verizon Wireless stores will begin on Thursday, February 10th and 7 AM – just like AT&T did for the iPhone 4 last year.

We have seen iPhone accessories have started appearing on Verizon Wireless’ website last week, and the February 3rd pre-order date was previously reported as well.

Press release embedded below.

Read more

iOS, Android and RIM Deadlocked in US Smartphone Market Share

Nielson has revealed its latest statistics on smartphone ownership in the US and there is some fascinating information contained in the report. 31% of all mobile consumers in the US owned a smartphone as of December last year. Ethnic and racial minorities also dominated ownership of smartphones with Asian/Pacific Islanders and Hispanics having 45% smartphone penetration, African-Americans also had higher numbers at 33% whilst White Americans were at a much lower 27%.

The smartphone war between RIM’s BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating system was also at dead heat by the end of 2010. Apple was just ahead at 28% of the mobile operating system share but has been sitting steady at around that rate for a year. RIM’s BlackBerry OS market share continued diving and was at 27% and Google’s Android continued steaming upwards reaching it’s highest share of 27%.

Read more

Push Pop Press Teases a New Brand of Digital Books

A new company focused on creating ‘a new breed of digital books’, Push Pop Press today unveiled their teaser site, beautifully minimal in its design and purely hinting at what is to come. However John Gruber over at Daring Fireball wrote up a fairly lengthy post about Push Pop Press and a demo he had been given last week, praising it and giving some fairly detailed insights into what is to come from the company.

The teaser site offers up a description of the mission of Push Pop Press;

Our team is bringing together great content and beautiful software to create a new breed of digital books. Books that let you explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface.

The team over at Push Pop Press is undoubtedly one high caliber bunch of people, with Mike Matas, Kimon Tsinteris and Austin Sarner. Mike Matas, the designer and co-founder is most notably known for working on Delicious Library and his stint at Apple (which started the young age of 19) in helping design the original iOS. The other co-founder, Kimon Tsinteris is a software architect and worked with Matas at Apple on the Map app on iOS. Finally Austin Sarner is software engineer who may be familiar from his apps including AppZapper, Disco and Pennies.

Read more

Apple’s “Integrated” In-App Purchases, eBooks and iOS Users

Jason Snell, reporting for Macworld about Apple’s statement regarding ebook reading apps and in-app purchases:

For a couple of years now, Apple has been boasting about how many millions of iTunes IDs are linked to credit cards. Recent rumblings suggest that the company is seeking to expand the footprint of its financial services, too. It’s clear that Apple is tired of seeing companies make money on content served to iOS devices without using its system or cutting it in for a piece of the action. The current 30-percent cut of all content purchases would seem to be an impediment to getting partners to embrace Apple’s system; on the other hand, Apple’s the gatekeeper to its platform and if other companies don’t want to play ball with Apple, they’ll be on the outside looking in.

That’s exactly the point. You have to look at this whole Sony / Apple / everyone else story in two separate ways: the business perspective and consumers’ expectations. Apple does business, and it wants publishers selling content on its iOS platform to pay the fee all developers pay. The fee is 30 percent. Whether or not Apple will ease this fee and allow for lower revenue cut on ebook content is unclear, but it’s a possibility. Maybe tomorrow’s event won’t just be about The Daily, who knows. Read more

Apple Responds To Sony, In-App Purchase Must Be Available As Option

News broke last night that Apple rejected Sony’s latest ebook reading app for the iPhone because it used a technology that allowed users to purchase books out of Apple’s in-app purchase system, through Sony’s own store embedded into the app. Sony claimed Apple told them “from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple”, and now Apple has fired back to clarify Sony’s statements.

As reported by The Loop:

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.

Basically, nothing has really changed in the guidelines – except the fact that in-app purchase through Apple’s system has to be built into the app. If an app comes with its own store to purchase books, the same option should be offered as native in-app purchase for all iOS users. Apple takes a 30% revenue cut out of every in-app purchase. It seems like at this point Amazon will have to update its Kindle app as well to offer iOS in-app purchases. I will be interesting to see how Sony, Amazon and others will update their applications to support the new in-app purchase guideline, and users’ reaction to multiple offerings inside an ebook reading app. While Apple’s 30% cut sounds like a deal-breaker to publishers, in-app purchases linked to iTunes are seen as a useful option from customers, which will be able to get receipts and detailed information about their book purchases directly into their iTunes account page.

Aluminium That Glows? Apple’s Patented That

Apple was today awarded a bunch of new patents (eighteen in total) and Patently Apple has covered those that were most important and one of those is particularly interesting to us at MacStories. The patent surrounds an invisible ‘light-transmissive’ display system that would allow Apple to craft a piece of aluminum and through manufacturing techniques, illuminate something such as a logo through the metal.

The process that Apple has patented involves thinning out the aluminum in the required area and then using a specific laser beam setup that drills microscopic holes in specific designs to create the shape that would be illuminated.

What this patent could allow for is an even more invisible sleep indicator light (that light that pulses when your MacBook is sleeping), a power button that is flush with the rest of the MacBook and even a glowing Apple logo on the back of iPhones and iPads.

[Via Patently Apple]

First Details of The Daily: Six Sections, Sudoku, Interactive Articles

The Daily, News Corp.’s much anticipated iPad-only newspaper, will be announced tomorrow with a media event at New York’s Guggenheim museum. The publication is the result of months of collaboration between Murdoch’s News Corp. and Apple, which will send  VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue to join Murdoch on stage for the presentation. The Daily, in fact, will be based on a new subscription system created by Apple that will allow users to receive fresh content every morning through an iTunes’ push feature. Read more

iOS Devices Accounted for 2% of Worldwide Browsing in January

A new report by NetMarketShare has revealed that the iOS ecosystem of devices has broken 2% of all browsing on the web. The January figures published by the analyst revealed the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch reached 2.06% of global browsing, accelerated by the holiday period.

Singapore had the highest percentage of iOS devices at virtually 10% and Australia was one of the highest countries at 5.6%. The UK was also close at 5.1% and the US had 3.4% in January.

See above for a graphic of world browsing by iOS devices and head over to NetMarketShare for a full breakdown of each country’s percentage of iOS device usage.

[Via 9to5Mac]