iOS Devices

From the Shareholder Meeting yesterday:

Perhaps the most thoughtful response of the day came when a woman wondered about the biggest challenges the company sees going forward, asking Jobs,

The Wall St. Journal this morning had a short synopsis of Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen’s talk at the Goldman Sachs technology conference this week.  That’s the same conference where Tim Cook spoke yesterday.

He spoke on his view of why the iPad wasn’t equipped to play Flash:

Narayen said Apple’s decision likely had everything to do with its business model as it tries to keep a proprietary, closed system so everything goes through its iTunes store, and has nothing to do with the Flash technology. He said about 85 of the top 100 Web sites in the world use Flash, and 75% of the video on the Web today is in Flash, including Google Inc.’s (GOOG) YouTube, News Corp.’s (NWS) Hulu and broadcasters such as ABC and Fox.

Earlier this month, Jobs reportedly told Wall Street Journal execs that if the iPad used Flash the battery life would go from 10 hours to 1.5 (has Apple been testing this?).  

But is it all about technology?  Perhaps Adobe’s CEO is partially right.  Even if Flash ran efficiently on the iPad and weren’t full of security holes, Apple might balk at having other ways to get applications on the iPhone.  Certainly, Flash/AIR developers would rather write applications once and do updates online rather than have to reprogram their Apps to work natively on the iPhone.  Those apps would run on Android devices and any other devices that run Flash.  

The first mobile devices with Flash won’t run well.  Batteries will drain fast, they will crash a lot and they won’t be capable of performing anywhere as well as native applications.

Over the next year, however, things will change.  Flash will become more efficient

We all heard last week that Opera 10.50 was crushing Chrome and Safari in JavaScript benchmarks on Windows. But how would it do against Safari on Apple’s home turf, the Mac?

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The WebOS, once thought to be a serious competitor to the iPhoneOS, hasn’t been popular enough to save Palm from imploding.

Today Palm announced lowered guidance even though it launched on Verizon and has plans to launch on AT&T in the coming months.

At this point, an acquisition seems inevitable. So who is it going to be? Motorola? Microsoft? Nokia? RIM? HP? Dell?

Update: Whoa! Opera just beat stock Safari in its own Webkit Javascript benchmarking tests.

Frankly, we mostly use Opera for its in-line (legal!) Torrent downloading ability, but it is always good to hear that they are working on features like those announced today. This version of Opera is supposed to use its new Javascript engine that it calls the fastest in the world. We’ve benchmarked it with Sunspider on a 13″ MacBook Pro here.

Headlining the list are HTML5<video> support and multi-touch gestures. The full list of updates below:

• Stabilization Improvements: You will find that this build is much more stable than the pre-alpha build.
• More polished user interface: The whole UI is more polished now. We’re still not done yet, and expect more polishes and improvements in the builds to come.
• Opera Unite: Opera Unite now works with this release. You can browse through and download unite apps through the Unite Apps Repository.
• HTML5 <video>: This beta now supports the html5 <video> tag.
• Widgets as standlone apps: We’ve already talked about widgets as standalone apps, but this functionality was till now, only available in windows builds. Now even in this build of 10.50 beta for mac, you can use widgets as standalone apps.
• New Developer Tools Menu: You can go to ‘View->Developer Tools’ Menu to access common and usefull tools for developers, such as Opera Dragonfly, cache information, the error console, the source code of the page, and more.

Download Opera 10.50 Beta for Mac

Opera via Geekword

Essentially, what they’ve done is recreate Mint.com as a Mac application. That may be good for some, but long-time Quicken users will miss the functionality.

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One of the more interesting things we’ve seen in this version (3.2 beta 3) of the iPad is the Accessibility Inspector in the settings.   When you activate this a little black window with a rainbow title bar shows up that you can drag around for a second before it disappears and never shows up again. 

This shows that there is some kind of free floating window support in the iPad OS even if we haven’t seen it demonstrated yet.  As an “Accessibility Inspector” this may be a system utility that stays open as you flip through applications.  So far though, it disappears after a few seconds and crashes the Sim after being moved around.

Update: Woops: this has been there since 3.0

Below you can see what happens when it is dragged around the display.

It crashes the sim.

Thanks to reader Stephen for the heads up!

Interesting how the titanium allows a 3G signal to pass through but aluminum doesn’t.  Aluminum is a wee bit cheaper, however.  via Engadget

http://www.viddler.com/simple/ff217092/

We’ve found a few more bits and pieces of the future iPhone/iPod touch/iPad Photos and Camera apps.  

Cropping and rotation icons in the SDK seem to indicate that future version of the iPhoneOS will allow these features.  That’s all

According to the Loop, Apple has updated its new Aperture 3 application which among other things fixes that pesky memory leak chronicled earlier this month.  Other fixes (there are many):

• Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
• Importing libraries from iPhoto
• Importing photos directly from a camera
• Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
• Face recognition processing
• Adding undetected faces using the Add Missing Face button
• Printing pages containing multiple images
• Printing photos and contact sheets with borders and metadata
• Editing photos using an external editor
• Display of images with Definition and Straighten adjustments applied
• Zooming photos in the Viewer and in the Loupe using keyboard shortcuts
• Accessing Aperture libraries on a network volume Selecting and moving pins on the Places map
• Adding and editing custom locations using the Manage My Places window
• Switching between masters when working with RAW+JPEG pairs.

This update is recommended for all users of Aperture 3.

According to Gizmodo, the ‘Explicit’ app category has now been removed from the App Store submission page.  It was added at some point last night and the thought was that, it would be a new category above and beyond the 17+ rating. 

Ever get the feeling that Jobs doesn’t have his best guy running the show over there?

Apple is having its annual shareholder meeting tomorrow in Cupertino. Apple CEO, Steve Jobs is expected to attend and possibly answer some shareholder questions according to Reuters.  Jobs was obviously absent from last year’s meeting when he was getting a liver transplant but has made every other one since he came back to Apple in 1997.

Bloomberg notes that Andrea Jung is the new Co-Lead Director, as of this past December, replacing Mentor-to-Jobs and former Intuit CEO, Bill Campbell.  

We’ll have coverage of the event tomorrow should anything interesting come out of it.

It looks like we are getting pretty close to 10 billion songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. The winner will probably buy his/her song tonight. 

We don’t have to remind you that each and every person on earth could have downloaded a song and Apple would still have 3 billion songs left over.  10 billion is a lot of music.

That’s not to say all of it has been paid for.  There have been a few counterfeit iTunes cards as well as many promotions to give out free music.  Speaking of which, number 10 Billion gets a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

Update: 10 billion song downloaded about 4:30 PM ET: