Apple Archive

"Continued issues with the App Store approval process are prompting developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100000 iPhone apps, will continued migration away from iPhone development result in less quality software for the platform? Worse yet, will users even care?"

The web went aflame today with headlines like "First iPhone worm discovered", and many other variants. Most of those headlines, however, left out a very important little fact which diminishes the impact of the news considerably: it only affects jailbroken iPhones with SSH installed, and with default root passwords.

Geeks.com, a popular shop for computer parts and mp3 players sent us over the second generation iPod Touch 8 GB for a review. Check in for more!

As expected, Apple has refreshed its entire consumer line of Macintosh computers. The Mac mini, the MacBook, and the iMac lines of computers have all been overhauled, with the MacBook even getting a complete redesign. Prices in Europe have been dropped slightly, and there's a new mouse, too.

It's getting a little bit predictable, but Apple has reported yet another stellar set of quarterly financial results. The company has sold more Macs and iPhones than the same quarter last year, but sales of the iPod were down compared to the same quarter last year. Profits and gross-margins were also up.

Geeks.com sent us over for a whirl the highest capacity available iPod mp3 player, the 120 GB version of the iPod Classic. In the era of the touchscreen iPods and smartphones, how is the Classic design holding up?

Late June 2009 I bought a 13" MacBook Pro (2.26 GHz, 4 GB RAM). I suppose that after just three months, the blinding "first joys" over getting a laptop have worn off. By now, I deem my thoughts about this device to be realistic and of an appropriate level. The past few weeks I attained mastery over the Mac OS through personal discovery, accompanied by a very insightful book; I bought additional software and hacked the Dock to suit my preferences.

"MacRumors discovered that Apple quietly acquired mapping service Placebase back in July. Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman's updated LinkedIn profile now lists him on the 'Geo Team' at Apple. So what's Apple's interest in a mapping company? The obvious guess would be as a replacement for the Google Maps application that is installed by default on all iPhones."

If you have Apple's QuickTime media player and/or iTunes installed on your Windows machine, you might want to keep an eye on apple's Software Update tool. Apple is once again using the update tool to push unwanted software onto users' machines without asking for permission.

When Intel unveiled its Light Peak optical interconnect (video) at IDF earlier this week, many noticed that the demonstration computer used to show the new technology was in fact a hackintosh. Well, thanks to Engadget we now know why: Apple is very, very involved in the conception of Light Peak. Let's take this opportunity to look at some of Apple's other connection standards from the past.

"Apple's rejection of the Google Voice app for the iPhone went all the way to the top - the bad news was personally delivered to Google by none other than Apple's Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller. New details of the controversial decision came to light today when the FCC released an unredacted version of Google's own confidential letter to the agency. Google replied to a set of FCC questions about the Google Voice app rejection on August 21, but requested that the letter be kept private due to the 'sensitive nature of commercial discussion'. Interested parties immediately filed Freedom of Information Act requests to get at the juicy tidbits that might be found in such a letter; rather than fight the request, Google waived its confidentiality."

"Watching Steve take the stage and roll out a new version of iTunes got us all nostalgic for the old days, when iTunes logos changed color and our jukebox looked like it could withstand a bomb blast. Below is the history of the application that is running more than any other on our Macs. It spawned the iPod, iPhone, Apple TV and gave us an excuse to throw out those ugly CD towers that resided in the corners of our houses in the 90s. The ever present, iTunes."

Novell has announced MonoTouch 1.0, a commercial SDK kit that allows developers to build iPhone apps using Microsoft's .Net Framework instead of the Apple-designated C or Objective-C languages. The SDK leverages Novell's Mono runtime for running Windows apps on non-Windows systems, allowing developers to utilize code and libraries written for .Net and programming languages like C#.

"The new versions, 3.1 for the iPhone and 3.1.1 for the iPod touch, are fairly minor upgrades which on the surface seem to add compatibility features with the newly introduced iTunes 9. While the iPhone software update is free, iPod Touch users will once again be forced to ante up if they want to upgrade."