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26 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
A story has leaked from a former Apple engineer who says the current user interface on the Apple TV is an old design that was previously rejected by Steve Jobs. There are those that agree, with many saying it's reminiscent of an older version of iOS, and there are even others that say it has a certain cheap and tacky look to it. And then there's this article from The Next Web, where Matthew Panzarino says for better or worse, the new Apple TV UI is about familiarity and touch control.
Any time a new Apple patent is released, it's always great to imagine what kind of products could be produced. This time around, Patently Apple shows off a few more patents — some to do with audio crossfading (possibly for GarageBand), another to do with an antenna assembly not too dissimilar to the one seen in the iPod touch, and yet another to do with dual image sensors for better cameras.
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25 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
A closer look at some image resources in the Mountain Lion beta has revealed double-sized graphics, says Ars Technica. Doubled graphics are one of the first clues people look for to indicate Apple's well-known retina displays, and if these doubled graphics are anything to go by, it means we'll be seeing Macs equipped with retina-class displays sooner, rather than later.
The rumour says that Apple are looking into universal remotes that customises the UI intelligently. There's a patent that examines how this could possibly be done, and it's possible an iOS device with IR capabilities could be used for this very purpose. What's more, instead of manually programming your intelligent universal remote, you would just take a photo of your existing remote, send it to iCloud, and be on your way.
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22 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
When you see articles saying how it's possible Apple may ship more mobile processors than chip giant Intel by the end of the year, it's time to realise how big this whole iOS business actually is. Apple shipped 176 million in iPhone and iPad devices, compared to Intel, who shipped 181 million mobile processors in things like laptops and the like — I'll give you a moment to think about those kinds of numbers for a second.
Continuing the trend they started with Lightroom 4 earlier this year, Adobe has made available a public beta of Photoshop CS6. The latest version of Photoshop ditches 32-bit mode and only works on 64-bit Macs, and there's a heap of nice little improvements all over the place. The full release of Photoshop CS6 is slated to happen sometime later this year — presumably alongside the full Creative Suite — and pricing has not yet been announced.
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21 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
Apple and Steve Jobs have won patents for the design of the Shanghai Apple Store. The design of the Apple Store in Pudong, Shanghai bears certain similarities to the well-known Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York, with the majority of the store being underground and with only the large glass cylinder visible from ground level.
Lex Friedman from Macworld explains why Apple events seem to dominate the spotlight. Admittedly there's quite a bit of bias here (yours truly included) but what's undeniable is the fact that if you follow technology news on the web, you're bound to come across a few articles about Apple events here and there. Rumours are another matter entirely, but Apple news just seems to dominate the news.
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20 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
The second developer preview of Mountain Lion has unveiled a few new features, including the ability to sync Safari tabs across machines using iCloud, as well as having notifications from Twitter appear in Notification Center. Syncing of tabs via iCloud is particularly nice, as you can see tabs from other computers (running Mountain Lion) on one computer, a feature that will no doubt go to iOS devices in the future.
The Apple online store has added a feature called "Answers from the Community" to product pages on the Apple online store, where users can ask questions to other owners of Apple products. It seems like a good feature, especailly where users can find out answers to questions that relate to a product they might potentially buy.
It's more iOS-related than Mac, but the One More Thing conference for iOS developers is happening once again in Australia. It's aimed at iOS developers, but it's not like a traditional programming conference. It does have a stellar line-up of incredibly talented people in the iOS space though, so head over to the website and check it out.
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19 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
Apple has announced that they will be starting a stock buyback to the tune of US$10 billion starting September 1st, along with a per-share dividend of US $2.65 beginning July 1st. Tim Cook has been quoted as saying how Apple already has more than enough money in the "war chest" for strategic opportunities, not to mention enough cash to run their business for the foreseeable future.
The second developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion contains a little feature best described as iOS-like location based reminders. For those familiar with Apple's plans for the Mac in the past few days this shouldn't be completely unexpected, but still, like Notes, it's great to see Apple adopting stand-alone apps for at least a few features here and there — and that they integrate a few of the more useful iOS features is nothing but a good thing, in my eyes.
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18 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
Over the weekend Apple released the second developer preview of Mountain Lion. The latest developer preview contains a few new additions, namely new notifications from Twitter in Notification Center, iCloud tab syncing in Safari and requesting access to contacts. Mountain Lion aims to bring even more iOS features back to the Mac, and is slated to be released sometime later this year.
The new Apple TV has been taken apart, which has revealed details about the internals of the latest 1080p-compatible accessory. Besides sporting a unique single-gore A5 processor, there's the same amount of flash memory as the previous model (8GB), but what's more interesting is that the new Apple TV has double the RAM of its predecessor, with 512MB on board the new Apple TV over the previous generation's 256MB.
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15 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
Apple has released the 2012 Apple TV, and it's pretty similar to the older model with one important exception: it now supports 1080p content, either streamed from your Mac or directly from the iTunes Store. In addition to supporting 1080p content, the newer Apple TV also comes with an updated interface, also available for the older Apple TV. The Verge says that while it's still the same great little box, a lack of content mars an otherwise fantastic experience.
Speaking of 1080p content on the iTunes Store, there are those who are comparing it to 1080p Blu-ray quality. AppleInsider took at look at some 1080p content and compared it to the quality of a Blu-ray version, and they found the sharpness in most scenes was definitely on par for the most part, in all but the most detailed of scenes. A little strange, but you would probably be hard pressed to notice the difference between the two anyway.
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14 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
According to MacRumors, issues with Nvidia GPU production are forcing Apple to strongly consider the onboard integrated graphics for future Mac laptops. Nvidia's GPU production issues mean that Apple might even be forced to go entirely with the integrated graphics option currently found in all Macs, and that combined with the improved performance on Sandy Bridge Intel CPUs might mean a discrete GPU isn't necessary for all but the most stressing of tasks.
Aperture has been updated to version 3.2.3, and aside from the usual performance and stability fixes it also brings the ability to delete individual photos from Photo Stream, a feature much wanted by people that use the feature on their Macs and iOS devices. Firefox was also updated, and seeing as they're now following a more aggressive release schedule we're now up to version 11, which adds a style editor and 3D DOM viewer.
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13 March 2012
Posted in
Apple
Up until now Thunderbolt hasn't seen the mass adoption that Apple would like, and apart from a few expensive peripherals, consumers don't see any reason to buy Thunderbolt peripherals over USB ones. That said, it looks as though Thunderbolt is here to stay, with Intel planning to release optical Thunderbolt cables sometime later this year. Current Thunderbolt connections have a bandwidth limit of about 10Gbps, but optical cables might push that up to around 100Gbps, as well as providing an distance advantage — conventional cables max out at around 6m, with optical cables operating at tens of meters.
Apple has released Safari 5.1.4 which contains many fixes for the web browser that ships with every Mac. The list of updates is actually quite long and covers a wide variety of categories, but the fix includes things such as improved Javascript performance, better stability, compatibility and start-up time of Safari extensions, along with a whole host of other fixes too numerous to name briefly.