9to5 Staff

When the end of the world arrives, Apple employees will be swept into space.

The idea for Apple’s incredible campus which looks a lot like a spaceship – already dubbed the Mothership – has hit the ground running with officials. Just a day following Steve Jobs’ presentation to Cupertino City Council, Mayor Gilbert Wong has issued a statement and organized a press conference confirming they’re on board. “

“There is no chance we are saying no” to the Mothership, Wong said. They set up a section on the Cupertino homepage at www.cupertino.org/apple dedicated to progress reports related to the new facility and released stunning renders of the new campus. Go past the fold for the news conference video and more jaw-dropping Mothership renders.

Jobs told Cupertino City Council there is “not a single piece of straight glass” in Mothership

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Whoa, Apple has reconsidered its stance on in-app subscriptions and has changed strict guidelines of its iOS developer agreement to allow in-app subscriptions outside the App Store. MacRumors spotted a crucial change in section 11.13 which previously required that content sold outside of the app be “also offered in the app using In-App Purchase at the same price or less than it is offered outside the app”. This requirement, which applied to both purchased content and subscriptions, is no longer in effect and has been entirely removed from section 11.13. Here’s the new wording:

Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app. Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues for approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app.

Put simply, prices no longer need to be identical outside the App Store, although publishers are still barred from providing links or buttons that lead to external pages where subscriptions are being offered. In all, that’s good news for the likes of Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, eBay and other companies which rely on content subscriptions. On the downside, it’s a little late for e-books publishers like BeamIt Down Software which closed down the shop, arguing it couldn’t sell books at a loss due to Apple’s 30 percent cut on iOS subscriptions. Anyway, Apple may have just dodged an anti-trust lawsuit.

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Custom vibrations in Settings (left) and the new interface to customize vibration patterns (right)

iOS 5 comes with a bunch of accessibility improvements, like the AssistiveTouch feature that lets you use your device with adaptive accessories and even create your own gestures. Another easily overlooked addition: Custom vibrations, on a per-contact basis, as pointed out by MacRumors. This is kinda cool, not just for the hearing impaired but for the rest of us as well. Example: If you’re in a meeting and your device is in silent mode, you can tell when your wife is calling based on a vibration pattern – how cool is that?

But why stop there? Combine custom vibrations with LED flash on incoming calls, ringtones, the iTunes Tone Store where you can buy custom alert sounds and deep Twitter integration which automatically adds Twitter user names and photos to your contact cards and suddenly iOS 5 looks pretty strong in the customization department. Here’s a quick guide to customizing vibrations for your contacts…

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MacRumors discovered an interesting change in the App Store Review Guidelines, the one that puts DUI checkpoint apps out of their game on iOS devices. Here’s what section 22.8 of the updated App Store Review Guidelines now reads:

Apps which contain DUI checkpoints that are not published by law enforcement agencies, or encourage and enable drunk driving, will be rejected.

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. So, Apple has bent over backwards to make US Senators happy after all. Go figure. You may wanna hurry up and download those controversial apps that help avoid speed traps and speed cameras…

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Apple has issued a small firmware update to resolve graphics glitches on 2011 iMacs running Mac OS X 10.6.7. These issues manifest themselves as a white screen during startup, causing your computer to become unresponsive, or vertical lines on the screen while in use. From the release notes:

This firmware update fixes an issue that in rare cases may cause an iMac to hang during startup or waking from sleep. Do not shut off the power on your iMac during this update. Loss of power could result in your iMac failing to start up.

You can either grab the standalone iMac Graphic FW Update 2.0 (a 700KB download) if your mid-2011 iMac exhibits the aforementioned issues or choose Software Update from the Apple menu and follow the onscreen instructions.

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The case of patent troll Lodsys suing iOS developers has taken a turn for the better. After Lodsys took seven indie iOS developers to court last week, they are now about to taste their own medicine. According to FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller, all four Lodsys patents are under invalidation attack in federal court:

I have news concerning Lodsys because a Michigan company named ForeSee Results Inc. has filed a declaratory judgment suit against Lodsys’s four patents with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

This will help move legal proceedings from East Texas, which favors patent trolls like Lodsys, to Michigan. ForeSee is moving the case to another district because Lodsys’ CEO and sole employee “resides in, and conducts business from this Judicial District”. Lodsys has also issued letters to Adidas, Best Buy and WE Energies over an alleged copyright infringement related to a different patent. After issuing a mild statement, Apple appears to be keen on learning which developers are under lawsuit threats from Lodsys. A Sydney, Australia-based programmer James Wilson spotted an unusual notice when he logged in to iTunes Connect, Apple’s back-end for managing iTunes content submissions. The site asked him whether he was updating an app “because of a legal issue”, which may or may not relate to patent troll Lodsys.

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Is this what Final Cut Pro X looks like?

MacRumors has published a set of alleged screenshots said to depict the upcoming Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5. The images have been sourced from a Twitter account @BWilks2001 which has been removed shortly following the posting, presumably at Apple’s request. The images look genuine and AI confirms they most likely represent the real thing.

Final Cut Pro is due in June so expect it to hit the App Store in the next few weeks.

So, what could we expect in Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5?

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A consumer study by Reputation Institute has Apple and Google sharing the #1 spot as the world’s most reputable companies. According to the 2011 Global RepTrak 100 index, Disney, BMW and LEGO placed third, fourth and fifth, respectively. Sony, Daimler, Canon, Intel, and Volkswagen round out the top ten. As a matter of fact, the study found out that Apple, Google, LEGO and Sony are the only companies to make the top ten in nine of the 15 countries. This quote caught our attention:

A major finding of this study is that most companies have stronger reputations in their home countries than abroad.

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While the update notes for iTunes 10.3 claim that it includes the “Automatic Downloads” feature announced during WWDC, it seems that many of us haven’t been taking advantage of this feature… at all.

Turns out you need to enable Automatic Downloads for your music, apps, and books in the iTunes Preferences (under the “Store” tab) before the feature will start to work.

Interestingly enough, after I purchased a book on my iPhone, my iTunes had already finished downloading it before my iPhone’s iBooks could swivel around to show the bookcase.

For those with multiple iTunes accounts (for instance Europeans who have a US account for US software) be careful with this because Apple’s new policy will cut off multiple accounts using automatic downloads as part of their 90-day between switching accounts rule.
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Pictured above: Forging the iPhone 4’s stainless steel band

Terry Gou, the CEO of Apple’s long-time contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry (that’s Foxconn for Westerners) hinted at optimizations in the iPad production process that will help Foxconn profit more from its assembly contract with the California-based gadget maker. Bloomberg reports that Gou told investors at a recent shareholder meeting that working with Apple requires the latest in manufacturing technology because Cupertino’s gadgets are “very difficult to make”. The CEO praised Apple as a high-value customer:

We’ve helped Apple make a lot of money. If our customers make money, then we can also make money. I most fear customers that don’t make money.

Why are Apple products “very difficult” to make?

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This is a pretty cool trick that works in the Camera app on iOS 5: Simply swipe your finger from left to right to bring the camera album roll up. Continue swiping from left to right to flip through your images. If you go too far, tap once to reveal the on-screen toolbar with image controls and hit Done to immediately return to your camera. Pretty neat. Thanks, Jared!

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Because Emoji is now a standard international keyboard in iOS 5, you can easily add some mood to your iMessages and liven up any text entry with emoticons without having to download a bunch of apps from the App Store to access it

One of the little things appearing briefly in a slide during Apple’s keynote talk Monday was the Emoji keyboard in iOS 5. Originating from Japan, the emoji picture characters are standardized and many phones support them without requiring a Japanese operator (heck, even Gmail supports emojis). The Emoji keyboard is not new to the iPhone, but those who’ve used it in iOS 4 are painfully aware it has never been designed to work like a normal keyboard for the rest of us. You either had to use third-party Emoji apps from the App Store to access it or use emoticons via the clunky Japanese Romaji keyboard. Not anymore, Emoji is now a standard international keyboard accessible in any app. Here’s how it is enabled…

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The awesomeness you see above is an iPhone 4 case dubbed the Opena. It is the result of the work by Melbourne, Australia-based industrial designer Chris Peters and Rob Ward, a former Toolmaker. The pitch?

The idea for The Opena came to us one afternoon when we were out having some beers. Some people have bottle openers on their keyrings, but many times you don’t always have your keys with you. But what is always with you? Your phone!

The injection-moulded case is machined from solid blocks of ABS plastic while the bottle opener part is stamped out of food-grade stainless steel. The final production-spec Opena case will have a fine satin textured surface finish. They are raising $15,000 on Kickstarter to complete the project – it’s costly due to the tooling and 3D CAD technology involved. You can secure yourself one the first Openas for just fifteen bucks. We just hope opening bottles with this thing won’t scratch or break the iPhone 4’s glass back.

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Google has updated the stable Chrome channel with new security, privacy and graphics acceleration enhancement. Carrying a build number of 12.0.742.91, Google’s browser now warns you before downloading certain malicious files “without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download”, software engineer Adrienne Walker explained in a post on the Chrome blog.

The team has also advanced Chrome’s GPU-assisted hardware acceleration to include 3D CSS elements on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows Vista or later. Finally, Google has worked closely with Adobe to provide greater control over local storage for Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects directly from Chrome’s settings, without having to visit a special page on Adobe’s site to tweak your settings . Thanks to Chrome’s silent updating mechanism, your copy of Chrome will automatically update itself to the latest stable version available. If not, choose About Google Chrome from the wrench menu.

Cross-posted on 9to5Google.com

Check out GPU-acceleration improvements in the “Shaun the Sheep” Chrome experiment which lets you rotate and scale the video, disable or enable cool reflections and more.

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Apple’s iOS software wizard Scott Forstall saved iMessage as the last of the ten big iOS 5 features in Monday’s WWDC keynote talk. We’ve shown iMessage in action in our eleven-minute overview of iOS 5 features and the iOS 5 features page teases with some interesting capabilities promising to override costly text messages whenever possible:

With iMessage, we’ve created a new messaging service for all iOS 5 users. You can send unlimited text messages via WiFi or 3G from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to anyone with one of those devices. iMessage is built into the Messages app so you can send text, photos, videos, locations and contacts. Leep everyone in the loop with group messaging. Track your messages with delivery receipts and optional read receipts, see when someone’s typing and enjoy secure encryption for text messages. Even start a conversation on one of your iOS devices and pick up where you left off on another.

That pitch leaves a lot of questions unanswered. For example, do iMessages count against my text messaging plan? Where do I sing up for iMessage? What if the person on the other end cannot receive iMessages? What about sending iMessages to non-Apple devices? Here’s what we have found out so far…

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Well, what do you know, it looks like Apple’s ambitious messaging service unveiled Monday as part of the iOS 5 software is seen as a threat to Research In Motion’s popular BlackBerry Messenger instant messaging protocol for BlackBerry devices. According to TechRadar, investors punished the BlackBerry maker’s stock Tuesday as they digested Apple’s iMessage:

iMessage announced by Apple on Monday will challenge RIM’s highly popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant chat service which has given the Canadian company an edge over its rivals. The Apple announcement made investors more jittery, plunging RIM stock on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and Wall Street Tuesday. It slipped more than three percent in Toronto to close at $36.92, and 2.8 percent on Nasdaq to close at $37.82.

Why are investors worried about iMessage affecting RIM’s chat service?

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As soon as he took the stage, Apple’s boss noticed someone dear to him in the audience.

If you wanna learn more about iCloud but hate the idea of streaming the WWDC 2011 keynote via Apple’s site due to interruptions and varying image quality, you can now download the entire presentation to your computer and sync it to your favorite iOS device for offline viewing anwyhere, anytime (see the irony of that?). The keynote video is available as an iTunes podcast or as a direct download here. Weighing in at a cool 1.22 gigabyte, the MP4-encoded file in 640-by-360 pixel resolution is probably the highest-quality Apple keynote we’ve downloaded from iTunes to date. If you were wondering why all the fuss about Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud, grab the episode and enjoy in nearly two hours of the uninterrupted reality-distortion field.

Apple’s chief walked on San Francisco’s Moscone West stage yesterday to a noisy applause. Check out journalists and developers in the audience snapping the charismatic CEO using their iPhones and iPads.

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Chart courtesy of paidContent.org

With all three players having introduced their respective cloud music offerings, we can now pit them against each other. The above chart is from paidContent which opined that “Apple doesn’t always get it right the first time”. Author Amanda Natividad observed that in iTunes “syncing should be faster and easier” while “song quality may get a boost”. She obviously wasn’t paying attention to yesterday’s unveiling of iTunes Match, a new iTunes feature that works in conjunction with Apple’s upcoming online service dubbed iCloud. iTunes Match scans your music tracks (regardless of their sources), making matching songs instantly available to all computers and mobile devices without you having to spend weeks to upload gigabytes worth of music to servers. Jobs said yesterday:

With 18 million songs we’re most likely to have what you got.

Apple’s boss also noted that his company will automatically upgrade all matching songs to 256Kbps AAC. On the downside, you cannot stream songs via iCloud – yeah, you read that right. Instead, you are required to manually download iCloud songs that aren’t stored on your iOS device by tapping a tiny cloud icon next to each missing song in the iTunes app before you can actually listen to it in the iPod app. Great, what else should you know?

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If you’re a MobileMe subscriber, prepare for some inconveniences while Apple moves your stuff to its humongous North Carolina datacenter. Between yesterday and this fall, when iCloud becomes available to everyone with iOS 5, some services won’t be available and other may need your attention. Apple outlined what’s to be expected in both a support document and an unreleased guide we uncovered. We’ve spotted another support document, this one related to MobileMe email aliases. So, what’s the deal?

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyzmX_s8xiM?rel=0&w=670&h=411]

One of the new iOS features that has been met with great enthusiasm from journalists and developers attending yesterday’s WWDC keynote is AirPlay Mirroring. Apple’s iOS software head honcho Scott Forstall only briefly described it during the keynote talk:

AirPlay Mirroring, you can now mirror your entire iPad 2 right to your television, wirelessly, using Apple TV

Sounds pretty cool and here’s a video of AirPlay Mirroring in action. Check below for more information from Apple and a video showing lag time.

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Yesterday, Apple killed MobileMe and replaced it with the iCloud online services suite which will be available free with iOS 5 this Fall. Apple has published a nice Q&A explaining what the transition means to MobileMe subscribers and how the company plans to go about it. Additionally, a notice at www.me.com/upgrade says that “you’ll be able to upgrade your account to iCloud soon”. With that in mind, you may want to prep your migration ahead of the Apple-imposed June 30, 2012 cut-off time when the MobilMe service will no longer be available. Wondering how? Turns out there’s a leaked document for that!

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