Ultimate Apple

Filed under: Rumors, iPhone

Imagine you and a friend are on a phone call, and both of you own iPhones. You’re trying to meet up somewhere downtown in a city neither of you know very well, so the best answer you can give your friend when he asks, “Where are you now?” is “Uhhh…” followed by several seconds of silence. It’s already possible to share your location using the Maps app on the iPhone — find your current location, tap on the blue marker on the map, tap “Share Location,” and then send it to your friend either as an e-mail or MMS. Then your friend receives the e-mail or MMS with your location, opens it in Maps, and has the option of finding directions to your location from his current location.

If that sounds like a lot of unnecessarily complex steps to answer the simple question of “Where are you,” you’re in luck, because according to a new patent application, Apple agrees with you. By putting “Request location info” and “Release location info” buttons on the call screen in the Phone app, it would be possible to share your location or request someone else’s with a single button press. The same process applies — the iPhone polls its GPS to find out where you are, then transmits that info to your friend’s iPhone — but instead of having to jump through all the hoops yourself, the OS handles it for you in the background. Once your phone receives a request for location info it comes up in a notification, probably very similar to the notifications location-based apps already use when they request permission to use location data. If you agree to release your location data to the caller, it’s transmitted in a fully encrypted signal to the caller’s iPhone. Your location data would then show up on your friend’s iPhone, complete with the option to find directions.

Some other interesting information has come out of this patent application. In describing the type of call this feature could be applied to, Apple says, “Note that the reference to ‘voice call’ here is not limited to a conventional, sound-only conversation. It may also include video of the two users, synchronized with their audio. The call may be a cellular network telephone call that has been initiated by either user.” This shows further evidence that Apple is researching the possibility of including video conferencing capabilities in a future iteration of the iPhone.

Additionally, Apple seems to be exploring greater location-awareness options for its own apps, including weather and a Yellow Pages app. The patent also refers to several apps as “Widgets” — Calculator, Alarm Clock, and Dictionary all fall under an application module subset referred to as “Widget Modules.” There’s two possibilities here: either these apps are still being referred to as widgets because their basic interfaces grew out of OS X’s Dashboard Widgets (an explanation I’ve heard a few times before), or Apple is looking toward bringing Dashboard-style functionality to a future version of the iPhone OS, with smaller apps like Calculator and Alarm Clock being implemented as “widgets” rather than standalone apps. This has been offered as one possible explanation for the mysterious absence of several of Apple’s apps from the iPad.

TUAWPatent suggests location-based social networking for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone – Apple – Unofficial Apple Weblog – Global Positioning System – Smartphone

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Qik VideoCamera [$1.99 - iTunes link] has gotten an update and to celebrate they’re giving away four (4) FREE copies to TiPb readers!

For a quick look at the Qik VideoCamera update — and the give-away — follow along after the break!

If you haven’t yet, check out my first Qik VideoCamera review because we’re only [...]

TiPb Give Away: 4 FREE Copies of Qik VideoCamera for iPhone! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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We all know by now there’s no Flash on the iPhone or iPod touch, and it doesn’t look like there’ll be Flash on the iPad, which is probably why Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer fired off an impassioned defense of the plugin, while a software engineer shows how a still-unfixed bug crashes it, and the first [...]

On Flash Crash and Sublime HTML5 Video Clash is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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We all know by now there’s no Flash on the iPhone or iPod touch, and it doesn’t look like there’ll be Flash on the iPad, which is probably why Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer fired off an impassioned defense of the plugin, while a software engineer shows how a still-unfixed bug crashes it, and the first [...]

On Flash Crash and Sublime HTML5 Video is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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Filed under: Multimedia

Matthew Dempsky has discovered a bug which will crash the Flash player on every supported platform. That might not seem like a huge deal, except that he discovered this bug in September of 2008 and has reported it to Adobe, which hasn’t fixed it yet.

16 months later.

If you’d like to test it for yourself, make sure there’s nothing important open in your browser window and head to http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/.

In Safari and Google Chrome, this crashes the plugin but not the browser. It took Firefox 3.6 down entirely.

Why would Matthew post such a page? Isn’t that reckless? Well, he explains on that page:

“Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today,” Lynch wrote. “Addressing crash issues is a top priority in the engineering team, and currently there are open reports we are researching in Flash Player 10.” (Source: PC Mag, “Adobe Defends Flash, Calls Apple Uncooperative”)

He goes on to say:

This page exploits a bug that I reported to Adobe in September 2008, and has affected every release of Flash on every platform since then. Despite numerous email exchanges with the Flash product manager about the bug, the bug report being hidden from the public for “security” reasons, and [although] Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch’s claims otherwise, it continues to be an issue.

…I’m not an Apple fan boy out to prove Steve Jobs right in Apple’s decision not to support Flash on the iPhone / iPad. Instead, I’m just a software engineer who at one time had to deal with Adobe’s sorry excuse for a development platform and made an earnest effort on several occasions at helping them improve it for everyone. (This issue is merely the tip of the iceberg of ridiculous bugs and random backwards and forwards incompatibilities known as Adobe’s Flash Player plug-in.) After trying to work with them to fix this issue and experiencing nothing but frustration, I just don’t give a damn anymore.

Adobe has been able to rest on its laurels with Flash, because it was a de facto standard. Now that the platform is being left behind by new mobile devices and computing metaphors, Adobe is making an appeal to the public that Flash isn’t that bad.

Adobe’s been able to do much the same with Photoshop and CS4. Even people who love the apps and use them every day have learned to live with the crashes and other problems. Adobe seemed not to be in too much of a rush to get Snow Leopard compatible versions out. Ditto for when Apple switched to Intel.

I’m amazed by people who continue to defend Flash, including those who believe that alternatives will have a chance if web developers weren’t pushed to start using newer alternatives like H.264 and HTML 5. (No, I’m not saying H.264/HTML 5 is a drop-in replacement for Flash, and I’m not even going to mention SVG.)

If we all went with the “de facto standard” we’d be using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. Actually, we’d probably be using Internet Explorer 4.

No doubt that Flash has done some great things. At one time, it was cutting edge stuff. Now it’s a dull butter knife.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you about ClickToFlash which I’ve reviewed previously.

(Hat tip to Craig Hockenberry and Mike Damm for bringing this story to our attention.)

TUAW16 month-old bug continues to crash Flash originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flash Player – Google Chrome – Steve Jobs – Safari – Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

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While much of iPad presentation thus far has been focused on content consumption, Apple’s iWork demo and the ability to run iPhone productivity apps — and eventually iPad-specific apps — as well as 1024×768 web apps means it’s got a fighting chance in business, especially key verticals like medicine, and with developers like Omni Group.

First [...]

iPad in Business — Doctors Want it, Omni Group Gets it is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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According to Game Developers Research, their new study shows the iPhone platform is more popular with game developers than either the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. Electronista sums up:

Demand for the iPhone has surged to where about 19 percent of all game developers are writing for the iPhone and iPod touch. The figure [...]

Game Developers Like iPhone More than Nintendo DS, Sony PSP is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Filed under: Hardware, Rumors, Macbook Pro

A quick couple of tips from readers Ken and Jack, and this thread over at the MacRumors forums, point us towards an interesting results page at the Geekbench site (Google cached version, in case they get hammered), which aggregates benchmark results from thousands of users all over the globe. This particular page reports the performance of a previously unreleased MacBook Pro model (MacBookPro6,1) which claims an Intel Core i7 M 620 processor running the show.

Real? Maybe, although at this point it’s a bit suspicious that it’s not running a dev build of 10.6.3 instead of an internal build of 10.6.2 as reported on the page; also, Geekbench results are frequently spoofed by hackintoshes (unless Apple built an AMD-based MacBook Pro and simply neglected to tell us about it). Fast? Heck yes; the benchmark score of 5260 handily blows by the speed of currently shipping machines.

The eventual appearance of the 6,1 version of the MBP has been a bit of a foregone conclusion since October of last year, when developer builds of OS X 10.6.2 were found to include support files specific to those model IDs. A laptop refresh in Q1 would be a very nice thing, but in this case I wouldn’t get the checkbook sharpened quite yet.

Thanks to Ken and Jack for sending this one in.

TUAWRumor: Geekbench hints at a Core i7 MacBook Pro originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple – MacRumors – TUAW – Google – Intel Core i7

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Filed under: Software, iBook, Apple

Amazon has run into more trouble with its pricing — after Macmillan and HarperCollins, a third company has pressured the online book retailer to raise prices on their Kindle eBooks. This time it’s the Hachette Book Group, and their CEO in an internal memo says that the company will switch to an “agency model” for eBook sales.

What’s an agency model? Why, it’s the 70%/30% split between platform and content provider currently used in the App Store, and the same model that’s planned to be used in iBooks on the iPad. And it’s important to note that this is exactly what Jobs said would happen — that publishers would move away from Amazon when they had another system to go with.

What we don’t yet know is where prices will end up on the iPad — Jobs said that prices would be “the same,” and it’s looking more and more like the $9.99 bestseller price is going to be abandoned for $14.99 or even higher. But that’s only because Amazon is fighting shadows with the iPad right now. If they can actually woo some content back to their side when the iPad actually releases, we may see prices get a little more competitive. Until then, the iPad hasn’t even come out and it’s already shaking up the ebook industry completely.

TUAWMore eBook trouble for Amazon originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HarperCollins – E-book – Apple – Amazon.com – App Store

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Filed under: Macworld, TUAW Business

TUAWTUAW is going to Macworld 2010 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple – San Francisco – GuyKawasaki – kevinsmith – Leo Laporte

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