Ultimate Apple

Sounds like Google has hired away Simon Prakash, formerly Apple’s senior director of product integrity, to work on a “secret project” deep in the heart of the Googleplex. Reports VentureBeat

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Our challenge this week was to find an app that could capture a still image — a photo — while simultaneously shooting video on the iPhone. With the default camera

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There’s many ways you can follow the Super Bowl straight from your iPhone or iPad. The New England Patriots go up against the New York Giants and it’s sure to be a good show. If you can’t be in front of your tv or attend it live in Indianapolis, there’s tons of great App Store apps available to keep you up to date.

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Following up on the information iMore received yesterday on potential ZFS hooks in iOS 5.1, a reliable source let us know that Apple has been investing heavily in ZFS appliances from Oracle. (Whether or not this will be made public is unknown; it doesn’t seem to be right now.)

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Every week a few of us from team iMore will bring you our current favorite, most fun and useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web

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Every week a few of us from team iMore will bring you our current favorite, most fun and useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web

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Bob Borchers used to be an iPhone product marketing engineer for Apple. Part of the team that brought the first iPhone to market in 2007, he’s now a venture capitalist with Opus Capital. Borchers recently gave a talk to students at a California school talking about the thought processes that were involved in the iPhone’s development.

Borchers says that Steve Jobs didn’t have a specific device in mind, but instead gave the team a mission: create a phone that people would love so much that they’d never leave the house without it. Borchers believes that Apple has been so wildly successful with the iPhone because the company focused on fundamentals — breaking the rules, but in an exceptionally well manner; paying attention to details; and making people focus on the relationship they have with their device.

Jobs wanted the phone to be revolutionary, the best iPod the company had ever designed, and allow users to access the internet easily from a pocket-sized device. What the iPhone has become — a device with downloadable apps, GPS capabilities, video and photography features, and voice integration — wasn’t part of the original concept.

Borchers noted that the original iPhone almost shipped with a plastic touchscreen, but Jobs was concerned that the plastic would scratch if users put the phone in a pocket with keys and other metallic items. The team improvised, convinced Corning to re-start production of the abandoned Gorilla Glass, and the iPhone has had a fairly scratch-resistant display since day one.

Apple’s obsession with product packaging was mentioned by Borchers, who said that the company spends “way too much time” on presenting products, but he conceded that it is ultimately worthwhile to do so since it communicates the special nature of Apple products to consumers.

With future “insanely great” products in the pipeline, we can only hope that the Steve Jobs obsession with details remains part of Apple’s DNA.

Former Apple employee recounts how Jobs motivated iPhone team originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The ongoing patent spat between Motorola and Apple has reached an interesting crossroads. Just recently a German court granted an injunction against sales of many of Apple’s 3G-bearing products, including older model iPhones and the iPad. That injunction held for less than a day, however, pending further review of Motorola’s claims against Apple.

Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents found new information that suggests Motorola has offered to end the patent dispute and license its wireless patents to Apple — in exchange for 2.25 percent of Apple’s sales. It’s unclear whether this is a percentage of all Apple revenues or, more likely, a percentage of sales of devices which contain a 3G antenna and therefore potentially fall under the umbrella of Motorola’s patent claims. In either case, Mueller finds the 2.25 percent shakedown “excessive,” and it only takes a glance at Apple’s latest quarterly earnings statement to see that Apple finds it pretty excessive, too.

Revenue from iPhone sales, in aggregate since 2007, amounts to just under US$93 billion. Motorola’s cut of those revenues would have been nearly $2.1 billion over those years. Since the iPhone sales juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down, Motorola’s cash pile would only grow bigger over time — and those numbers don’t include sales of the Wi-Fi + 3G iPad, which Motorola also claims falls afoul of its patents.

What makes this move seem even skeevier is that Google is in the process of trying to acquire Motorola, meaning that if Motorola succeeds in its claim against Apple, Google would eventually be collecting a patent tax on the iPhone and 3G iPad.

Apple has filed motions to obtain information from several other handset vendors, including Nokia, HTC, LG, and Sony Ericsson, presumably to find out how much they’re paying in royalty fees to Motorola for the patents in question. If it turns out that Motorola is demanding more from Apple than it’s demanded from those other companies, the judge in the patent case is going to want to know why.

Motorola wants 2.25 percent of Apple sales to license patents originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Calendar apps are great, but sometimes you need to track how many days until a future event or project. In some cases, you might want to track days from the past. D-Day is a free, simple iOS program that manages both scenarios on iOS devices.

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Haven’t heard of AnyPlay? That’s not surprising. It’s a small initiative slowly being introduced by Comcast into select cable markets. With it, you can watch live television over your home network on your iPad. So if your spouse is hogging the HDTV during your CW night, you can watch Supernatural using your local Wi-Fi. (Cablevision and Time Warner have similar apps on the App Store now.)

AnyPlay consists of two parts: there’s the standalone box ($10 one-time charge) and the iPad software, which is built into Comcast’s existing XFINITY TV app. To get them to work together, you must sign into the app with your Comcast credentials and enable AnyPlay using the app’s settings.

On the hardware side of things, Comcast provides a media streamer box — a Motorola unit in my case. Its job is to manage devices and convert cable signals into viewable video streams. Those streams currently must be on the same Wi-Fi network, although I think with a little hacking and AirVideo Server, it might be possible to eventually get those streams to travel out to mobile devices away from the home. With the standard package, AnyPlay is in-home only.

Setting up the box was simple. You hook it to power, to cable, and to your network using an Ethernet cable. You then visit the activation page http://comcast.com/activate and enter your account information and phone number. Theoretically this information ships with your starter kit. It was missing for me, so I ended up having to track down a cable bill to find my account number.

You can actually connect to the box using its built-in web interface. Just do a DHCP scan of your network, figure out which unit it is, and connect on port 8080. Built-in features include general alerts, device management, and tuner diagnostics.

It took several hours and long support phone calls to get everything working. In the end, it turns out that I needed to power-cycle the standalone box after activation because it wasn’t broadcasting properly to the iPad app.

The Comcast support personnel were friendly, courteous, and professional, but the material they used to guide their support calls were flawed. At one point, the tech asked me to uninstall and reinstall the XFINITY TV app on my iPad, for example.

Once it got going, the app and the service worked great. Video quality has been excellent, and best of all, you can use AirPlay to stream the show out to Apple TV. That means you can use AnyPlay to watch live Comcast video on any Apple TV-augmented HDTV, and you can do this without renting an extra tuner box. You can watch this video to see the AnyPlay/AirPlay connection in action on my home network.

For ten bucks, and no recurring fees, AnyPlay is a great add-on for any Comcast TriplePlay customer who has a good home network and an iPad. It’s currently deployed only in Denver and Nashville, with national roll-out expected over the next year.

Thanks, Paul Donaldson.

Hands on with AnyPlay: Live Comcast video on your iPad originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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