Posts tagged with "iOS"

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 Releases iOS 4.3 Beta 3

A few minutes ago Apple seeded the third beta of iOS 4.3 to developers. It’s available now in the iOS Dev Center. Build number is 8F5166b . Updated versions of the iOS SDK and Apple TV pre-release software have been released as well. The release comes after nearly two weeks after the previous beta; iOS 4.3 beta 1 was seeded to developers on January 12. iOS 4.3 is expected to introduce a rather small set of new features like AirPlay video streaming for third-party apps, HTTP live streaming statistics and full-screen iAds. In the developer betas Apple also enabled support for multitasking gestures on the iPad, although the feature won’t be part of the public release of iOS 4.3. The software update has also been rumored to carry support for the iTunes subscriptions that will power The Daily, but no references of such functionality have been found in the SDK so far.

Last week, several reports indicated that Apple is already accepting iOS 4.3-compatible apps in the App Store. We will update this story as we find out more about the new beta. 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]

The New Readability Has Ambitious Future

Readability, the Javascript library that stripped websites of unnecessary graphics and elements to provide the user with a simple, easier to read page, has today revealed the next step in it’s future. The ambition plan includes fundamental new advancements including; usage on mobile devices, saving Readability-enhanced pages, social features, a subscription service that supports writers and a partnership with Marco Arment’s Instapaper.

One of the biggest new features of the new Readability is it’s subscription service which is a new model that aims to give back to the writers and publishers that you read from. The subscription starts from $5 but can be as high as you want to pay, and 70% go back to writers and publishers, so obviously the more you pay the more goes back to the content creators. There will still be the basic Readability which does not require a subscription.

Jump the break for full details.

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Apple Possibly Tightening the iOS Walled Garden

Apple seems to be tightening its control over the App Store ecosystem after telling some developers including Sony that the selling of e-books within their app must go through Apple. The move is somewhat contradictory of recent movements by Apple to open up the App Store and gestures of collaboration with publishers.

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division told the New York Times that Apple rejected Sony’s e-book reader iPhone application on the basis that the app would have let users buy e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store, bypassing Apple and that any purchases made from within an app must go through Apple from now on.  Mr. Haber said; “We always wanted to bring the content to as many devices as possible, not one device to one store.”.

[Updated and points clarified in light of responses to the NYT article]

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Apple Releases iOS 4.2.6 For Verizon iPhone

It seems like Apple just released a new iOS firmware for the Verizon iPhone. The iOS version is 4.2.6 and it’s available for direct download here. Apple apparently did some subtle tweaks to the operating system for the CDMA iPhone, which was running iOS 4.2.5 at the Verizon media event where the iPhone was officially announced. iOS 4.2.6 is a modification to the original 4.2 OS that can run on Verizon’s CDMA network, and includes the Personal Hotspot feature that allows users to turn their devices into mobile hotspots capable of sharing a 3G connection with nearby phones.

The firmware posted online is for the “iPhone 3,3”, which is the model name of the Verizon unit. It’s a 642 MB download, build number 8E200.

Rumor has it Apple sent out review units to selected journalists and bloggers earlier today, and that’s probably why the firmware has been posted online.

PhotoToMac Is The Fastest Way To Transfer Photos to OS X

I share a lot of screenshots and photos between my iPhone and Mac every day. Up until today, I’ve relied on third-party apps like iFiles to import pictures into its library and get them on my Mac using Cyberduck, which can connect to iFiles’ built-in WebDAV server. PhotoToMac, a $1.99 app by Galarina, improved my workflow with a system that allows me to import photos and videos without using additional Mac apps. Files shared with PhotoToMac, in fact, end up directly in the Finder. Read more

Portal: A Revolutionary Browser for iPhone

Over the weekends, I usually spend a bit of my free time browsing the App Store and AppShopper, looking for new apps to try on my iPhone and iPad. Sometime I find interesting new things to test; sometimes I find great apps. Other times – but this is a very rare exception – I find really great apps I can’t stop using. This is the case with Portal Browser for iPhone.

I have been trying a lot of alternative browsers for iOS over the past months, as you may have noticed. Thanks to tweaks available in Cydia, I also installed several modifications to make Apple’s Safari a better, faster, more functional browser. Still, testing new browsers from third party developers has become one of my favorite “work hobbies”, as I believe there’s great room for experimentation and innovation in a mobile app to browse the Internet. I do believe we have only scratched the surface with mobile browsers on iOS and Android which, if you think about it, haven’t done much besides porting the desktop experience to a smaller screen. Portal for iPhone is the first step towards a much better approach to mobile browsing, entirely based on touch interactions, features and menus developed with the iPhone in mind. Don’t get me wrong: Safari is an excellent browser. But Portal, which is sold at $1.99 in the App Store, is more than the usual alternative: it’s a completely different take on mobile browsing. Read more