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  • Ed
    Filed under: Rumors, Internet, Apple
    TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that rumors beginning to float around the blogosphere are stating that Apple is interested in purchasing Twitter for US$700 million in cash. Twitter, in case you've been off of the planet for the last two years, is the magical "social networking" tool that has you answer the question "What am I doing right now?" in 140 characters or less.

    Twitter currently has more than 25 million users, and it is rumored that growth has been exploding since Oprah blessed the service with her presence in mid-April. However, despite the size and growth potential of Twitter, there's simply no compelling reason for Apple to spend part of its huge cash reserves to purchase the company.

    Google recently tried to purchase Twitter, but was turned down by Twitter's CEO Evan Williams. Today's rumor comes from a "normally reliable source" who told Arrington that "Apple is in late-stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June."

    Despite the popularity of Twitter, the service hasn't figured out a way to make a profit, and is strictly powered by venture capital at this point. Can any TUAW readers think of a reason why Apple should buy Twitter? Leave us a comment!TUAWRumor Watch: Apple to buy Twitter originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 05 May 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.


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  • Ed

    Beta 4 of iPhone SDK 3 is out

    By Ed, in OSx86,

    Filed under: SDK
    Just a quick heads-up on the flood of tips in our inbox this morning: Beta 4 of the iPhone 3.0 SDK is available now, along with a preliminary build of iTunes 8.2.

    New features noted by readers include support for additional over-the-air PIM synchronization sources (including Google and Yahoo in iTunes, per Joachim), copy and paste in Calculator, continued tethering support, and a basic UI for managing an iTunes store account. Update: reports coming in that Notes syncing requires Mac OS X 10.5.7, yet another broad hint that the OS revision is due momentarily.

    Thanks to everyone who sent this in.TUAWBeta 4 of iPhone SDK 3 is out originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.


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  • Ed
    The standard NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 card for the Mac Pro is merely adequate. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 upgrade—which should be shipping any day now—is an excellent option, though it's limited to 512MB of memory and can't connect two 30" Cinema Displays without a costly adapter. For Mac Pro users with serious graphics needs, NVIDIA is gearing up to give you what your heart desires.
     

    First, the company announced last week that it is preparing a version of its Quadro FX 4800 workstation-class graphics card for the Mac Pro. If you lamented the loss of the Quadro FX 5600 option available for previous Mac Pros, the Quadro FX 4800 should give you all the "visual supercomputing power" you need. This two-slot beast has 192 processing cores and 1.5GB of fast, dedicated memory to deal with large data sets and complex models. The card also has two dual-link DVI ports that support stereo 3D.
     
     
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  • Ed
    For those who have dilly-dallied in buying your tickets to Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, you have officially run out of luck. Apple updated its ADC site today with a small update at the bottom mentioning that WWDC '09 is now officially sold out. This will mark the second year that WWDC tickets have sold out in the history of the conference—the first being last year.
     

    Apple announced the dates for the conference late last month—June 8 through 12—and it will take place at the Moscone West hall in San Francisco, CA. It's clear from the graphics and wording used in WWDC materials that this year's WWDC will heavily feature the iPhone, though those interested in sessions focused on the Mac and IT will also get some love. Apple has been listing out its session names and descriptions on its ADC WWDC site, so be sure to check it out if you plan to attend.
     

    As for the rest of you, videos of the sessions will start to trickle onto iTunes after WWDC is over so you can catch up on all the stuff people learned without you. You will not, however, be able to download all those beers you would have drank if you had been in San Francisco during that magical week in June.


     



  • Ed
    Apple may have a smaller-footprint, sub-$1000 notebook in the works after all, despite COO Tim Cook's poo-pooing of typical netbooks during last week's quarterly earnings call. Why do we say that? A reference to a computer model identified as a "MacBookMini" has shown up in stat logs for the Mac OS X chat client Adium X.
     

    You may recall that just before the MacBook Air was launched at Macworld Expo in January 2008, a reference to "MacBookAir" was found in Adium's stat logs. One occurrence does not a trend make, but the evidence turned up by a TUAW reader once again seems plausible enough to suggest another miniature device may be launched soon. 
     
     
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  • Ed
    If you're keeping track of Snow Leopard's progress, you'll be pleased to know that a new build (10A335) has been released into the hands of devs (and consequently, the world). Most interestingly, however, is that it seem this new iteration has a handy screen grab feature that hasn't made an appearance until now -- namely, the native ability (under QuickTime) to "record" your on-screen activities. There are other third-party apps that handle this duty, like the classily-named Snapz Pro X, but the inclusion in this latest beta will almost certainly mainstream the function. It should come in handy if you're constantly trying to tell you parents how to change their network settings, or if you're thinking about producing your own version of You Suck at Photoshop.



    [Via Mac Rumors]
    Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
    New Snow Leopard beta build includes screen recording capabilities, a certain je ne sais quoi originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Ed
    Apple still has a (perhaps unenviable) goal of getting the next major version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, out the door this summer. Work continues on that front with a new beta build of Snow Leopard released to developers last night. Meanwhile, the 10.5.7 update to Leopard also got a new beta release with some additional improvements. Both OSes are getting more frequent updates as the product cycles inch closer to release.
     
     
     
    The latest test build of Snow Leopard, 10A335, had no significant changes since the last beta. Developers are still being encouraged to develop and test 64-bit kernel extensions. The accompanying release notes also noted some known issues, including crashing bugs in QuickTime X and Rosetta, problems with Migration Assistant, and odd errors being reported by Disk Utility.
     
     
     
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  • Ed

    View .cbr comics on your iPhone

    By Ed, in OSx86,

    Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch
    Of course there's an app for this, but I'd never even considered it. While I do occasionally read .cbr (Comic Book Archive files) on my desktop, the iPhone didn't really occur to me as a portable comic book reading device. But sure enough, there are apps for that. iComic is probably the cheapest, but I hear it's a little tough to get set up. ComicZeal is extremely popular, and just a little bit cheaper from the somewhat similar myComics. Pull Lists uses a desktop client to sync up comics for you, which is a little more than I need, but it seems like some people like it. There are actually lots of choices, it turns out -- I would have thought that the iPhone's screen was pretty small for reading comic book pages, but I'll have to give those apps a try.

    Or, if you're too cheap to pay a buck or two for a full app, you can even do it yourself. .cbr files are really just .jpg archives, so as this tip from a while back on the iPhone Comic Book Reader says, you can actually extract out the jpegs, and then just sync them up to your iPhone via iPhoto if you want. Three dollars really isn't that much, and any of those apps listed above will give you a little more functionality (easy flipping between pages, bookmarking, and many other features per app), but if you really want to DIY, there you go.

    Now it would be nice to be able to officially buy .cbr archives over the web from some of the major companies -- the closest they've come that I know of is a subscription service, but of course you've got to use their own client for that (and there's no iPhone app that I can find, though Uclick has a few apps in there for certain books). As long as reading pirated .cbr files is outlawed, only outlaws will end up reading them.TUAWView .cbr comics on your iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.


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  • Ed
    Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPhone, iPod touch
    Admob has released another monthly survey of smartphone metrics, and Apple continues to look very healthy both in the U.S. and around the world. In website requests, Apple iPhones and iPod touch devices are up 4.2% from the previous month, while Nokia, still the top dog in handsets world wide, is down 3.6%.

    One other interesting piece of data is that half of the requests for internet data on the iPhone are coming from 3rd party apps, telling us the impact those apps are having. Apps like sports scores, news and weather apps, streaming music players etc. are really getting heavy use, not only from the iPhone but similar numbers apply to other smartphones as well.

    The research paper also sees the Android phone coming on, with 2% of mobile requests in the U.S., and is the number four smartphone behind the iPhone, Blackberry Curve and Blackberry Pearl. With the iPhone combined with the iPod touch, Apple has the top devices in the world generating mobile traffic.

    Admob measures the impact of various mobile phones by looking at requests for mobile ads from a network of 6,000 websites and 1,000 applications. While the numbers may not exactly reflect the universe of mobile phone use, it does show trends that are important to keep an eye on.

    When you consider that the iPhone is only about 2 years old, the numbers are even more impressive.

    If you'd like to read the complete report, click here.TUAWiPhone and iPod touch continue to dominate smartphone web traffic originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.


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