Leander Kahney's Blog, page 1489

Apple's 15-Inch MacBook Air Set to Begin Shipping in March [Rumor]

[image error]Apple's MacBook Air has been an incredibly popular machine since the company introduced solid-state drives as standard and reduced its price tag back in October 2010. But for some, it just doesn't come big enough.

However, dreams of a 15-inch model are about to come true, according to sources in Apple's supply chain. And it'll be here by March 2012.

DigiTimes reports that "upstream suppliers" have recently started shipping a small number of components to Apple for a 15-inch "ultra-thin notebook." It's unclear at this point whether the device is indeed a 15-inch MacBook Air, or whether it's an all-new, ultra-thin MacBook Pro.

Whatever it may be, the suppliers have claimed that the device will appear as early as the second-quarter of 2012:

Estimated by the product planning, mass shipments of the notebook device will start in March and could be cataloged in either the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro line.

Like existing MacBook Airs, the 15-inch notebook will not feature an optical drive. That suggests the machine will join the Air family, but in Apple's mission to eliminate optical media, it's also possible the MacBook Pro will lose its SuperDrive in favor of a 0.8-inch-thin form factor.

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Pogoplug's New Cloud Service Has Video Streaming, First 5 Gigs Free

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Adding to their now dizzying array of cloud-in-box hardware and desktop app that turns your Mac into a cloud server, Pogoplug has just unveiled a web-based cloud service that can be used as a standalone media storage option, and either accessed through a web browser, or through the desktop or Universal iOS app. And just like Apple did with iCloud, they're giving the first five gigs away for free.

Just like iCloud, the service will automatically backup your iDevice to the Pogoplug servers — but unlike iCloud, it'll also allow you to stream movies (in HD, of course) to your iDevice; in your face, Cupertino.

Fees ramp up quickly after the first 5GB though: 50GB is $10/month, and !00GB will cost you $20/month.

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Occupy Those Idle Moments With Blueprint 3D [Review]

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When you first hear about it, Blueprint 3D doesn't sound like it could be a compelling iOS puzzle game – but it is.

The premise couldn't be simpler. Each level shows you the blueprint image of an object, exploded in 3D so that the object itself isn't immediately obvious. Your task is to move the exploded view around until its identity is revealed. That's it.

Many of the puzzles take moments to solve, just a couple of seconds. So you might find yourself whizzing through the levels at a furious pace. Very often, you can see the solution almost instantly, and the game becomes a test of your manual dexterity more than anything else. The faster you can get it right, the more points you get.

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Despite the simplicity of the challenge, this is a game with that just-one-more-go factor. As each new blueprint appears before you, your eyes are scanning it for recognizable features – anything that will help you find the solution. Five seconds later, you'll be on to the next one.

The game comes with 240 levels in seven categories (architecture, electronics, military, space and so on). Don't spend your dollar (for that's what this game costs) and expect hours of entertainment, because it just won't last that long. You'll get minutes, not hours. It's nicely done, though, from the detail in the blueprints to the sound effects.

But if you're the kind of gamer who loves to play games at those random short moments during the day when you just have a couple of minutes to kill, Blueprint 3D is the perfect idle-moment filler.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

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It Takes Two Steves to Make Apple [Logo]

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By Laurent Bourrelly

Love this portrait of Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs silhouetted in an old-school Apple logo.  It brings to mind the early days of the Cupertino company and its humble beginnings.

It's the handiwork of Laurent Bourrelly who was inspired by Jonathan Mak's iconic black-and-white image of Jobs that spurred a media storm.

"I thought Woz deserved as much props as Jobs," he said.

Let's hope this re-imagined logo ignites less controversy.

Via Flickr

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Developer Realizes That He Can Cut App Prices And Not Lose Money In The App Store

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The man behind the popular iA Writer app, Oliver Reichenstein, has posted some interesting observations on the App Store ecosystem. In a Google+ post titled "Revenue = X," the founder of Information Architects explains how his decision to drop the price of iA Writer on the Mac and iPad has resulted in a way to "increase exposure without affecting profit."

Dropping iA Writer's price has resulted in more purchases than expected, and Oliver's profits have largely stayed the same since he made his app cheaper.

iA Writer for iPad's price was recently dropped from $5 to $1, and Oliver is selling exactly 5x more apps than he was before. On the Mac, iA Writer's price drop from $10 to $5 has resulted in the same sales behavior. Oliver notes that, "No matter what price we choose, we always make the same revenue."

What I expected was that at a certain point the price change would impact the sales profit positively or negatively but it never did.

I'm happy to be able to offer iA Writer to more people without losing too much money (see below), but I'm still puzzelled: It seems that cutting the price is a way to increase exposure without affecting profit. Either the app store is rigged, or the market seems to magically decide in it's invisible head quarters how much money is going to be spent on an app. (I don't think that the app store is rigged).

Oliver also says that app growth is affected by many factors, including, "support costs, the probability of super rare bugs and negative comments (not just on the App Store.)" Therefore, "unless your goal is to grow a big user base, cutting the price is not a recipe to increase revenue but to inflate your app."

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What do other developers think of this phenomenon? Do low-cost apps end up providing steadier profit in the long run?

(via AppAdvice)

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Adobe's Product Manager Explains Why Flash Failed

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Adobe recently announced that it was effectively killing Flash for mobile devices, and the company's Principal Product Manager has felt the need to take to his blog and share the reasons that Flash failed.

Hardware fragmentation, the growth of HTML5, and Apple itself all played into Adobe's decision to end Flash.

Mike Chambers, Principal Product Manager at Adobe:

This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple's iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.

The ubiquity of HTML5 made Flash obsolete:

Related to the point above, HTML5 has very strong support on modern mobile devices and tablets. Indeed, on mobile devices, it has a level of ubiquity similar to what the Flash Player has on the desktop. While performance and implementations haven't always been great or consistent across devices, they have continued to improve at a pretty dramatic rate (just look at the insane Canvas performance increases between iOS 4 and 5).

Apple's App Store and the success of apps in general have pushed users away from Flash:

On the desktop, users are used to consuming rich content (such as games and applications) via both the browser and native applications. However, on mobile devices users are much more likely to look exclusively toward applications for consuming rich content. The mobile platforms make it very easy to discover new content and applications by providing tight integration between the app stores (Apple App Store, Android Marketplace, etc..) and the mobile operating system. In general, users do not look to the web on mobile devices for finding and consuming rich content (such as games and applications).

Chambers goes on to list other factors, like the difficultly involved in making Flash plugins for multiple mobile browsers. Adobe is shifting its focus towards AIR and HTML5 development. Flash will continue to be supported on the desktop.

We recommend reading Steve Jobs' incredible letter on Flash from last year. We're sure that he would say something along the lines of "good riddance" today.

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The Best Alternatives to Super Mario Bros On iOS [App Store Roundup]

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I fell in love with Super Mario Bros. when my parents bought me a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) for Christmas as a young boy, and I've been obsessed with Super Mario games ever since. There's nothing that would please me more than having the chunky plumber in my pocket on my iPhone. But since Nintendo refuses to bring its titles to iOS, we're forced to play the alternatives.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. The absence of Super Mario has spawned a number of terrific platforming alternatives that are just as enjoyable. I've been enjoying a number of them over the years, and thought it was about time I shared the best of the bunch.

So, here are 9 of the best iOS alternatives to the classic Super Mario Bros.:

Pizza Boy — ACNE Play — ($1.99) iPhone

Pizza Boy is by far my favorite 2D platformer for the iPhone. Like classic Super Mario Bros., this game is just plain old-fashioned fun, with no fancy gimmicks that get in your way. As Pizza Boy, it's your job to recover the 'pizza present' from a scrupulous thief, traveling through levels filled with threat and danger — such as evil birds and vicious dogs — using only soda bottles as your weapon. The controls in this game are just perfect, which is important for a fast-paced 2D platformer; it looks awesome; and it's incredibly well made — which is why it's one of my favorites. Its only downside is that it's not iPad-compatible.

Super World Adventures — Triniti Interactive Limited — ($1.99) iPhone

In Super World Adventures you play a young lumberjack named Richie who is chasing a wild boar (yes, a wild boar!) in a bid to recover his stolen lunchbox. It's not exactly Mario saving Princess Peach, but it's still a lot of fun. It boasts some decent graphics, a smooth control system, 36 action-packed levels across six environments, 12 challenging bosses, and over 100 collectibles items. There's plenty of fun to be had with this game, and it's easy to pick up and play.

Giana Sisters — Bad Monkee — ($4.99) iPhone or iPad

Giana Sisters was competing with Super Mario long before the rest of the games in our feature, with its first release way back in 1987 as The Great Giana Sisters, which featured on the Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64, amongst others. It's now completely revamped, with impressive visuals and even better gameplay. As its description states: "Even though Giana Sisters has been polished off from its decade old dust, now it goes strong with the known style, legendary sound and all classic features." This title features a whopping 102 levels — 32 of which are retro, and 80 of which are brand new. It's available on both the iPhone and the iPad, but they are separate releases at $4.99 each.

Mos Speedrun — Physmo — ($1.99) Universal

Mos Speedrun is like Super Mario on speed. Your aim is to race Mos through 25 stages of retro platforming action, finding secret areas, collecting spooky skulls, grabbing every coin, and attempting to beat the speed-run time. There are 12 different costumes to collect throughout the game, but you'll need to find every ghost to unlock each one. It's incredibly fast-paced, but very entertaining — if you can keep up. It's also highly addictive, so you have been warned. One of the best things about this title is that for $1.99, you get both the iPhone and iPad titles in a universal app.

Stardash — OrangePixel — ($1.99) Universal

Stardash looks and feels a lot like early Super Mario titles for the Game Boy, thanks to its retro black and white visuals, and is probably the most Mario-esque title in our roundup. From the developer of Meganoid and Super Drill Panic, this title is super simplistic and super fun. Your aim is to survive the many levels by jumping between platforms, collecting coins, and unlocking the special Temple levels. Super Mario fans will also recognize the name of this title, with Star Dash being an unlockable mini-game that featured in Mario Superstar Baseball for the Nintendo GameCube.

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Today Is The Last Day To Buy AppleCare+ For Your New iPhone 4S [Reminder]

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If you were one of the millions to buy the iPhone 4S, today is your last day to order AppleCare+ coverage. Apple introduced a new type of AppleCare with the iPhone 4S, and the deadline for adding the coverage to your policy is today, November 14th.

AppleCare+ gives customers a two-year warranty and coverage for two incidents of accidental damage. The plan costs $99 and is highly recommended for any new iPhone owner.

iPhone 4S and 8GB iPhone 4 customers can add AppleCare+ to their accounts today on Apple's website. It doesn't seem like people have been able to buy AppleCare+ in a physical Apple Store today, so online looks like the way to go.

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Siri Protocol Cracked Wide Open To Work With Any Device Or App, But There's Still A Catch

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Oh, wow. The engineers over at app developing firm Applidium say they've cracked Siri's security protocol wide open. In fact, using their method, they say that any app and any device can now use Siri in theory. In reality, though? There are a few obstacles remaining.

Applidium deciphered Siri's protocol by setting up their own custom SSL certification authority, adding it to their iPhone 4S and using it to sign its own certificate for a fake "guzzoni.apple.com" server, which allowed them to sniff out the commands Siri sends to Apple's official servers.

What did they learn? First of all, Siri identifies itself endlessly… and the only identifiers that return correct results are if your Siri command identifies itself as a specific iPhone 4S.

Two? Apple sends a lot more information back and forth between Siri and its servers than you would think. For example, Apple's server sends a confidence score and a timestamp of each word when you use its text-to-speech abilities.

At the end of the day, though, Applidium were able to get a correct Siri result by using the cracked protocol to send a command to Siri without using an iPhone at all. But unlike some Siri hackers, Applidium is putting the proof out there, and have provided the tools they used to talk to Siri to the hacking public at large.

What does this mean? In theory, using Applidium's method, any device could access Siri and get correct results from the servers, as long as they have the unique identifier of an iPhone 4S. That means iPhone 4S owners could theoretically hack their Macs, their iPads, or whatever other devices they own to run Siri. Perhaps more usefully, developers could implement Siri into their own apps, as long as those apps were running on an iPhone 4S. Neat!

(Thanks for the heads up, Mark H.)

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Clear Notifications In The iOS 5 Notification Center [iOS Tips]

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My Notification Center tends to get a bit busy. It shows me my favorite stocks, weather, five of my most recent emails and upcoming calendar appointments. Now and then I'd like to clear these items from the Notification Center.

Here is an easy way to do just that.

If the header for a section out of  all the displayed alerts in the Notification Center has an "X" inside of a circle you can clear all the displayed messages with two taps. The example below shows this for the Mail alerts.

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Just look for the "X" inside of a circle, which you will find on the right hand side of a the header bar. Tap it once and it will change to the word "Clear. "

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Tap it again when it reads "Clear" and that section of the Notification Center is cleared of all notifications until a new one arrives.

 

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