Apps

Since opening the tool for developers to migrate from MobileMe to iCloud, Apple has revealed to MobileMe users that they will retain their MobileMe storage when their account becomes an iCloud account. Standard $100 MobileMe accounts included 20GB of storage and free iCloud accounts include 5GB of storage, furthermore iCloud users who came over from MobileMe will begin their iCloud journey with 25GB of cloud storage space.

These 25 GB are for email storage, calendar storage, and documents – and, thankfully, media like music, video, and Photo Steam photos do not count against your 25 GB. This plan will go until June 30, 2012 – when MobileMe is completely discontinued – and will cost $40 to renew. These users can still upgrade their accounts to a full 50GB (when the current plan expires) or max out to 75GB right now for a $50 charge. Reader Arman tells us that this does not apply to family MobileMe accounts.

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We’ve covered numerous noteworthy Cydia tweaks over time and most of them tackle the iPhone’s user interface, letting you customize your iOS gadget to death. Interestingly, only a handful of tweaks mess with the stock Maps app in iOS, which is strange considering that the iOS mapping experience, although great, in many areas pales in comparison to Android. The Speed for Maps tweak (via Funky Space Money), as the name suggests, adds a cool speedometer icon to the Maps app that feels as if it were integral to the experience. You can even pick you speed unit in settings (MPH, KPH, FPS and Knots). It won’t replace a pedometer in your iPod nano, but you no longer need a dedicated GPS app (the better ones don’t come cheap) just to be able to read your velocity while in Maps. This is one of the little things Apple should have thought of.

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This weekend only, EA is having an up to 80% off sale on many of their iOS titles for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

Parents and kids: These titles will likely not help at all with school.
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Vonage has released a new application for the App Store called Time to Call. The application is free to download and offers low-cost international calling to users. Vonage is currently offering free 15 minutes of calling to early adopters of the application but after those 15 minutes the cost of calling is still very cheap. Vonage says a user can talk for 15 minutes with a person in one of 100 countries and will only be charged up to $1.99 for those 15 minutes.

• Pay per call and talk for up to 15 minutes to 100 countries for $1.99 or less (excluding applicable taxes)
• For an additional 90+ countries, talk up to 15-minutes for $2.99 to $9.99 (excluding applicable taxes)
• Bill directly to your iTunes account
• Works on Wi-Fi® worldwide
• Also for use on high quality 3G networks in the U.S. and Canada
• Special bonus! For a limited time, unused minutes can be used for additional calls
• No need to be a Vonage home customer

Additionally, a separate set of 90 countries costs from $2.99-$9.99 for those same 15 minutes. Vonage offers a web-based tool to find prices for you’re calling needs. The application is open to anyone with an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad  – users do not have to have a Vonage home account already setup. Finally, and perhaps most important, the aforementioned costs will be billed through iTunes.

Yep.  Apple gets 30% and is now in the telecommunications market officially.

Check out more screenshots of the application running on an iPhone after the break.

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Following Apple flicking the on switch for iCloud’s implementation of Find my iPhone, multiple readers have let us know that Find my Mac is live as well within iCloud. The feature, as we revealed in February, is simply Find my iPhone for the Mac; hence the name Find my Mac. The user can turn the feature on in the iCloud control panel within system preferences and then their Macs will show up on iCloud.com.

Apple uses WiFi router data in order to pinpoint the user’s location and according to what we have seen, it is fairly accurate. Find my Mac offers all of the same Find my iPhone features that are offered for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch: remote locking, remote wiping, playing a sound, and showing a message. Check out more screenshots of the feature in action after the break. This service was previously available to some through the iOS application.

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Update: Find my Mac is live as well. All the details here.

Following iCloud.com’s opening in beta for developers earlier this week, Apple has hit the on switch for their revamped Find my iPhone page within iCloud. The new Find my iPhone web application is only live for developers until the official iCloud launch this fall and offers the same Find my iPhone features that users are accustomed to in the MobileMe version. The main change in the iCloud version is an all new user interface that features an old-style map and iOS-like popover menus.

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China is many things, not just the United States’ biggest creditor and the home to cheap child labor that assembles your iPhone in sweatshops. One thing we can all agree on, though: In China, the government is pretty much in control of many things, including what you read, listen to and consume on the web (hint: The Great Firewall of China). The same could apply to mobile software if it weren’t for one slight problem: China doesn’t get to control the App Store where hundreds of thousands of apps are vying for users’ attention.

So when the Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China decided to release their official app called PLA Daily, basically a glorified news reader, one of their top priorities was to bypass Apple’s mobile bazaar, the environment they cannot control. Instead, the app’s target audience – mostly members of the People’s Liberation Army of China’s (PLA) – are expected to jailbreak their devices in order to install the unsanctioned app.

iSmashPhone.com has the story:

The app isn’t going to be an official App Store app. Not here or in China. Users must jailbreak (install software that allows for use of the iPhone that was not intended by Apple) their iPhone if they want to read up on what the PLA is doing. They will receive news and updates direct from the PLA’s Daily. It’s interesting that the iPhone must be jailbroken in order to use the app. Usually, jailbreak apps are made by single independent users who want to add a certain functionalities not included in their iPhone. Larger, public organizations have always stuck to official app store releases.

Of course, it’s also possible Apple rejected the app so the powers that be reckoned to give Apple a taste of their own medicine. Either way, Chinese armed forces have gotten their free publicity.

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FPqqA712Rs]

Mike Matas demoing Al Gore’s Our Choice

AllThingsD reports that Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press – the newly established interactive iPad book maker. The company is known for creating the interactive version of Al Gore’s Our Choice. Notably, the company was co-founded by former Apple designer Mike Matas. Unsurprisingly, Matas was a lead designer of both the original iPhone and iPad interfaces. Facebook does not plan to sell interactive iPad books, but the technology and design talent will be used in Facebook’s future. Facebook said:

We’re thrilled to confirm that we’ve acquired Push Pop Press, a startup whose groundbreaking software changes the way people publish and consume digital content. We can’t wait for co-founders Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris to get started, and for some of the technology, ideas and inspiration behind Push Pop Press to become part of how millions of people connect and share with each other on Facebook.

Push Pop Press’s statement is after the break:

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Nuance, which is said to power speech-to-text features in iOS 5, released today a new cloud-based service and iOS app which makes it easy to organize, access and share any document from any desktop or mobile device. The Nuance PaperPort Anywhere service gives you one gigabyte of free cloud-based, searchable storage for your documents with permission-based file sharing via email.

Paid upgrades are also available: $10 a month for 10GB and $25 a month for 50 gigabytes of storage. Nuance’s price tiers actually fare pretty favorably compared to iCloud, Dropbox and SugarSync. Cloud scanning is enabled through their PaperPort scanning and document management application for Windows PC which was also updated today. All of this is augmented by a free app for iPhone and iPad that lets you access and send documents from PaperPort Anywhere. You may remember Nuance in July released a free Siri-like Dragon Go for iOS app. More features of their latest offering and a video tour right below:

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Apple kicked off digital software distribution on Macs with the Mac App Store and Lion, a major operating system revision released exclusively as a four gigabyte download. As a consequence, folks no longer get an elegant USB key for restoring the operating system if your machine goes south. Instead, new Macs now have the Lion Internet Recovery feature that boots your Mac from Apple’s servers if something goes wrong. As useful as Lion Internet Recover is, however, having a bootable Lion installer on an USB thumb drive is recommended for everyone, not just for those plagued with a slow Internet connection or users that upgrade multiple Macs to Lion.

The process of creating a bootable Lion USB or DVD is now a one-click affair thanks to a useful program by Guillaume Gete which automates the whole thing – you are only required to put the Lion Installer in your Applications folder (if you don’t have it, re-download the installer off the Mac App Store on a pre-Lion Mac). In addition, the Lion DiskMaker 1.1 script lets you work with a 4GB flash drive rather than the 8GB minimum requirement when manually burning the install disk image onto a DVD or USB drive. It also works with SD cards and FireWire/USB external drives. This is especially useful if you still have a Snow Leopard USB key lying around somewhere.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/?v=FpANHa8VsSw]

Apple yesterday opened up its iCloud service for developers so they can integrate web-based documents storage into their apps. YouTube user helpfulmactips2010 (via MacRumors) provides this helpful video tour showing off the various features and the rich iCloud.com web interface that provides access to web apps which closely resemble the appearance of their iPad counterparts. This includes web-versions of Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Find My iPhone, iWork data storage and iPad-like “task switcher” at the bottom, as we showed you in our extensive screenshot gallery. It’s worth noting that web app icons are exact carbon-copies of their iOS versions. The web interface even sports iOS-style notifications and subtle animations. Apple has also revealed price points beyond the free 5GB of storage ($20 for 10GB, $40 for 20GB and $100 for 50GB a year) and released new versions of iWork for iOS and iPhoto for Mac to developers, featuring full iCloud support. And you gotta love those cute error messages, as shown in the screenshot below. More screenshots of error pages here and another video below the fold…

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5G_CkPfDOU]

Skype has finally released their native application for the Apple iPad. The application brings everything you love from the iPhone version to the iPad’s larger display. This includes instant messaging, audio chatting, and video conferencing. Just like the iPhone version, everything works over both WiFi and 3G cellular data networks.

• Join Skype on your iPad in a few moments or just sign straight in to your account.
• If you already have a Skype account, your Skype contacts will automatically be there on your iPad.
• We’ve made adding new Skype contacts really easy.
• Once they’re in your Contact list, call, video or instant message them in one touch.
• Flick through recent calls and instant messages in your Skype for iPad history.
• Skype for iPad works over Wi-Fi or 3G (operator data charges may apply). Call Skype contacts on their iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, PC, Mac and even Skype enabled TVs.

Users won’t find the new version as a free update to the iPhone and iPod touch download, but instead will find a brand new application called ‘Skype for iPad’ on the iTunes App Store. This application is, of course, free. The app seems to be available worldwide as of right now.

Update: Skype for iPad, for reasons unspecified, has been removed from the iOS App Store until further notice.

Updated 2: Skype is back up as of 8am EST.

Screenshots and release notes are after the break…

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Some iOS developers have reportedly taken matter into their own hands, teaming up to create a joint opposition to serious legal threats coming from patent troll Lodsys which has been seeking to extract royalty fees from iOS developers small and big alike, including the likes of Atari, Rovio and Electronic Arts, the world’s biggest publisher of entertainment software on any platform. As you know, Lodsys is asserting its license to use patented in-app purchasing technology covers store owners Apple, Google and Microsoft, but not third-party developers that put their digital warez for sale on those stores. Per ArsTechnica story:

On Monday, renowned iOS developer Mike Lee announced the Appsterdam Legal Defense Team, which will be made up of indie developers fighting patent trolls as a single unit and funded by contributions from participating companies. The goal, aside from the obvious one of being free from frivolous patent lawsuits, is to become “the ants of East Texas, minding their business until someone invades their anthill.”

FOSS Patents, the intellectual property blog, reported last week that Lodsys opposed Apple’s motion for intervention. Apple’s response to Lodsys’s intimidations has been mild, to say the least. Apple filed a motion with the Eastern District of Texas to intervene as the defendant in a lawsuit from Lodsys in June. The company ambiguously asserting it might step up in defense of third-party developers targeted by the patent troll firm. Apple’s deafening silence had even prompted EFF to issue call to arms, demanding that Apple protects its developers.

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A little tip for you weekend Lion users:

Launchpad feeling a little cluttered? Launchpad Control is a free application on OS X that will assist you in cleaning out the unnecessary apps in your Launchpad. The app is pretty simple in that you just check off which apps you don’t want to see . via LifeHacker

Download here.
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The new icons are bigger so you can filter search results without sanding down your finger.

Google last month announced a bunch of enhancements to its search engine and today they confirmed via a blog post an overhauled layout on iPad and other (read: Android) tablets, just two days after the blog Digital Inspirations leaked the new UI. From now , running a query by visiting www.google.com in your iPad’s browser produces an iPad-optimized layout in search results.

Gone is the left-hand column that had ridiculously tiny search controls, making room for bigger buttons and more white space which is definitely a lot easier on the eyes. It’s surprising how long it has taken Google to optimize web search experience on tablets, really. Now you can finally hit the controls on smaller tablets without having to sand down your finger first.

Our favorite: The big buttons right below the search box for quick access to specific search silos, such as Web, Images, News and so forth. Also noteworthy, image results are  now way more attractive due to larger previews and they continuous scroll – just reach the bottom of the page and a new batch of images will load automatically. The new layout will be available on iPad and Android Honeycomb 3.1 tablets and in 36 languages “in the coming days”, everyone’s favorite search monster noted. Another pretty screenshot right below.

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If you’re a Communicator for Mac user, you no doubt were disappointed finding out that the software crashes a lot in Lion. Worry not, as Microsoft tells us via a blog post that an update is due via the Microsoft AutoUpdate mechanism “in the next day or so”. The team’s Pat Fox also revealed that some of the most exciting features in Lion are coming to Office for Mac 2011:

Yes, we are working hard with Apple to enable versioning, auto save, and full-screen for Office for Mac 2011. I know your next question will be “when?”, and unfortunately I can’t answer that – but it’s likely measured in months not days – just to set expectations.

And if your daily productivity involves Office for Mac 2004, Microsoft warned earlier, don’t upgrade to Lion because Office 2004 was a PowerPC-based product and Lion no longer includes Rosetta, a software emulator for the PowerPC instruction set. It’s nice that major software developers are adding Versions, Auto Save and Full Screen to their apps. Are you listening, Adobe?

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Guardian reports that BBC iPlayer will launch in eleven European countries, coming later this year to United States. The subscription-based service that streams some of the finest BBC programming launched its iPad app today in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland. In those markets, BBC iPlayer will require a monthly fee of 7 Euros. The app provides on-demand access to BBC’s popular news and documentaries, in addition to both archive and most recent shows such as Doctor Who and Top Gear. Initially, BBC’s catalogue will include about 1,500 hours of content, with a hundred hours added each week.

In the US, BBC.com managing director Luke Bradley-Jones told the publication, will go head to head with the likes of Hulu and Netflix subscriptions and the low monthly fee of eight bucks should help BBC compete with those content providers on their own turf. You can download the app free on App Store in select markets, but note the system won’t let you stream content unless you access it from one of the supported countries. Another goodie for international viewers: Content can be streamed over 3G cellular networks and individual episodes can be downloaded for offline viewing. Interestingly, the team worked closely with Apple on the offline feature, Smith explains:

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Today, NASA released (iTunes, Free) a cool new app for exploring Space and the world around us.

NASA science: revealed! This is the NASA Visualization Explorer, the coolest way to get stories about advanced space-based research delivered right to your iPad. A direct connection to NASA’s extraordinary fleet of research spacecraft, this app presents cutting edge research stories in an engaging and exciting format. See the Earth as you’ve never seen it before; travel to places otherwise unavailable to even the most intrepid explorers! Download it now, tap into the power of NASA’s cutting-edge research today and check for new stories every week!

More imagery below:
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Google has released an update to their Shopper app conveniently giving users information on daily deals, including Google Offers. The update adds a “Offers” and “My Offers” tab at the bottom, along with the Shop tab you know and love. The Offers tab displays deals in map view that are available in your city. The deals you find can be saved in the My Offers tab for later use.

Businesses, on the other hand, can publish deals through Google Places. If Google Offers is available in your city you can redeem your purchased offers in the My Offers tab. Check out the update in the App Store.

Cross posted from 9to5Google.
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Now that Apple let Lion out of the cage, Google is developing a Chrome browser version to take advantage of the operating system’s gestures support. The search company announced on the Google Chrome Releases blog a new developer build (version 14.0.835.0) that re-enables a two-finger gesture “which respects the system preference”. A three-finger swipe that would previously move you backward and forward in browsing history now respects system-wide preference in Lion that flips between full-screen apps. Chrome still lets you go forward and backward in browsing history by invoking a two-finger swipe left or right.

The release also comes with a multi-profile user interface improvements and support for a new communication protocol for Web Sockets. The former lets one browse the web using multiple online identities and switch them easily. Windows and Linux builds added platform-specific tweaks and changes as well. It’ll be some time before Chrome 14 makes it down to the stable channel, but if you wish to try out experimental new features without messing with your existing Chrome installation and user profile, we recommend installing the Canary build of the browser.

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Following TechCrunch’s finding that Facebook’s official iPad application can be found within their latest iPhone application update, Facebook shut down the find. Those who were not lucky enough to gain access early on are in the dark. Until now. iOS jail breaker extraordinaire, Chpwn, has managed to create a tweak that can easily turn any jailbroken iPad user’s Facebook for iPhone application into the full-blown iPad version. The tweak called FaceForward is dead simple: just install Facebook for iPhone on your jailbroken iPad, install FaceForward in Cydia, and run.

Update: Video of the installation and setup process after the break:

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