Apple Archive

Microsoft's first-ever iPhone application is a slick photo viewer with a browsing capability that handles a large number of photos on a mobile device screen. The Seadragon mobile application is free through Apple's application store. It a product of Microsoft's Live Labs division, which focuses on developing Web-based technology and applications. Seadragon incorporates the Deep Zoom feature, which is also integrated into Silverlight 2, Microsoft's multimedia tool. It allows a user to quickly magnify a particular area of a photo, regardless of its size.

On StoriesofApple.net there's an exclusive interview with John T. Draper, better known as Captain Crunch, speaking about blue boxes, meeting and working with Wozniak and Jobs, the Charlie board and all of his business with Apple throughout the years. Related to this article, the latest addition to the OSNews team (who will step forward soon enough) supplied us with an interesting link to a story that shines a different light on John T. Draper.

"I'm about to tell you a true story. It's not about me (honest). I have this friend who submitted an application to Apple for review. After a few weeks, it came back with one of those embarrassingly stupid rejection letters that said more about the person reviewing the application than it did about the application itself. In a nutshell, the application violated one of those user interaction rules that seem to exist in certain pompous minds rather than in the actual Apple Human Interface Guidelines. After a day or so of calming down, this person decided to go ahead and resubmit the application. And did so without making a single change to the application. I'm sure you know where this is going."

"After what were surely a few extra pots of coffee last night, Apple released iPhone OS 2.2, the latest update to its operating system for the iPhone and iPod touch. As with the 2.1 update just over two months ago, Apple administered a healthy dose of new features and fixes throughout the OS and a handful of applications, many of which we saw previewed over the last couple months. Let's take a look at the most significant changes, some appreciated polish, and recap what's still missing."

With the success of the iPod, the subsequent resurgence in popularity of the Macintosh platform, and the recent iPhone smash hit, it's hard to imagine that Apple was once a company that tried to enter every market possible, leaving a trail of flopped products in its wake. Forbes lists ten of them, and we take a look at some of them, and add one of our own.

Apple has presented its financial earnings for the 4th quarter of the 2008 fiscal year yesterday. Despite an across-the-board slump in growth, spectacular iPhone sales more than made up for the lost growth, beating the ten million iPhones claim. You can read all about it at Ars. What's more interesting were a number of remarks from Jobs regarding netbooks and cheap computers.

During a special press event at Apple's campus in Cupertino, the company refreshed its entire notebook line - the MacBook Pro, the Air, and the ordinary MacBook. In addition, the company also launched a new Cinema Display. The rumours on the 'net were more or less spot on, so there will be little news for those that keep up with that kind of stuff. Read on for a breakdown.

If you're looking for a party, Wall Street probably isn't the place you're going to find one. And to make matters worse, there are apparently people out there who are wilfully trying to make the life of the people on Wall Street (and subsequently, the rest of the world) even harder. By making up fake stories. And publish them on CNN's Digg - iReport.com. Some individual had posted a fake report last Friday, claiming Steve Jobs had suffered from a heart attack and was rushed into the hospital. As a result, Apple's stock made a 10% nosedive.

The saga surrounding Apple's policies concerning the App Store hasn't reached its climax just yet. After several seemingly arbitrary application rejections, high profile developers quitting iPhone development, and Apple adding a non-disclosure clause to its App Store rejection emails, we now have another high-profile Mac developer contemplating giving up iPhone development. Craig Hockenberry, of The Iconfactory, has written a public letter to Steve Jobs, detailing his worries that Apple's restrictive App Store policies are detrimental to the young platform.

The iPhone is revolutionizing the mobile computing market, largely on the strength of its "it just works" credentials. The availability of easily-downloaded apps from the app store is one of the iPhone's big strength. However, the app store has its dark side both for developers and users.

Quite often, Steve Jobs is given all the credit for the original Macintosh - but in reality, it wasn't Steve Jobs who made the largest contribution to the project; in fact, he didn't even come up with the idea. Jef Raskin envisioned an easy-to-use computer with a graphical user interface, and somewhere in 1979 he got the green light to start the Macintosh project, and together with Bill Atkinson he put together a team to develop the hard and software. It wasn't until much later that the project caught Steve Jobs' eye, who realised the Macintosh project had more potential than his own brainchild, the Lisa. One of the people on the Macintosh team was Andy Hertzfeld, and O'Reilly News interviewed him a few days ago.

"Apple Inc. has pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices, which had been set for next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas."

Software engineer Satoshi Nakajima, the lead architect of Microsoft's Windows 95, picked up a Mac for the first time two years ago.He was so impressed, he says he'll never again touch a PC again.Satoshi loves Apple products so much, he started a company in April, Big Canvas, to develop for Apple's iPhone platform full-time."We have chosen iPhone as the platform to release our first product (for) several reasons," explains his company's website. "We love Apple products... You need love to be creative."

Perhaps the weirdest creature to come out of the iPhone 2.0/3G launch paraphernalia is the iPhone Configuration Web Utility. It is a Rails app, downloaded and installed on your local machine. It literally starts a server on port 3000, as a service using WEBrick on Windows and as a launchd job using Mongrel on Mac.