Twitter now has a native interface for iPad. It looks different and has some touch gesture for interacting with tweets:
It take sometimes to get used to the interface. Try it out to see if this will be your default Twitter client on your iPad.
Here is a quick summaries for the Apple media event just ended:
Steve is on stage to showcase its flagship stores in Shanghai, Paris and London. Apple has stores 10 countries: US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Australia and China.
There are now over 120 million iOS devices shipped, with 230,000 new iOS activations per day (not including updates). There are 200 apps downloaded every second.
There are now over 250,000 apps and 25,000 of which are iPad apps.
iOS 4.1 will be released next week. Bug fixes include proximity, Bluetooth and iPhone 3G slowness. New features: HDR photos, HD video upload over WiFi, TV show rentals and Game Centre.
iOS 4.2 sneak peak: Wireless printing and AirPlay (renamed from AirTunes) allowing streaming audio, video & photos over WiFi.
iOS 4.2 coming in November for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Free updates.
There are over 275 million iPods sold. All iPod range got new models this year, biggest iPod update ever.
iPod shuffle: button is back. Playlists, Genius mixes, VoiceOver and its square in shape. Comes in 5 colors, 2GB, 15 hour battery life, priced at $49.
iPod nano: no more click wheel, multi-touch screen, square in shape, comes with clip (no more armbands), VoiceOver, Genius Mixes, FM radio, Nike+, pedometer, 29 languages, 24 hour battery life. Six colors, $149 for 8GB version, $179 for 16GB version.
iPod touch: most popular iPod. Outsells Nintendo and Sony portables combined. Retina Display at 326ppi, 24bit color, LED backlit, Apple A4 chip, 3-axis Gyro, iOS 4.1, FaceTime with front camera, rear camera with HD video recording, 40 hours music playback. $229 for 8GB, $299 for 32GB and $399 for 64GB. Available next week with pre-order starting today.
iTunes: 11.7 billion songs, 450 million TV episodes, 100 million movies, 35 million books, 160 million accounts with credit cards.
iTunes 10: new logo ditch the CD. More elegant and simple. Available today.
iTunes Ping: social network for music and concerts. Discover what your friends are listening to. See your activity from within iTunes. Find people and follow them. Follow and be followed. Invite frined from Facebook or by email. Get customized top ten chart of what people you followed are downloading. Post your thoughts & opinions. And Lady Gaga posted “I am watching all my little monsters on iTunes Ping”.
Apple TV: Steve’s “one more hobby”. New Apple TV one forth of the size of current Apple TV which you can fit in your palm. Matt black color. HDMI, USB, Optical audio, Ethernet, Wifi 802.11n, comes with white remote. You rent everything, all rentals and store nothing in it. Stream music, photos, video from computer, no syncing. Silent and cool. First run HD movie rental at $4.99. Commercial free HD TV show renting is 99 cents. ABC and Fox is onboard. On top of renting, can stream Netflix, watch YouTube, photos from Flickr and MobileMe. New interface with Rotten Tomatoes movie rating integrated. And you can push video or photo on your iPad to Apple TV. Price is $99. Available in 4 weeks, pre-order today.
Apple has announced via a media alert that it will broadcast live video streaming of its Sept 1 media at apple.com. This is the first time since 2005 that Apple is streaming live its event.
Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com.
The event is on 10.00am PDT later today (Sept 1) at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Check out Apple homepage for the live streaming url when the event goes live.
The Apple annual media event is tomorrow 10am PT. But we are guessing new iPod touch is not the only products coming in September:
iPod touch – Apple will definitely announce new iPod touch model tomorrow. Likely specs include what you can expect in iPhone 4: Retina Display, same A4 processor and memory, FaceTime & compatible camera, gyroscope and long lasting battery. We are guessing Apple might add a FM tuner in, so that all iPod models will sport FM tuner build-in. And this one will not have any antenna issue. Will we see a 128G iPod touch this year?
iPod nano – based on cases floating around the net, iPod nano is predicted to have a square dimension, lose the scroll wheel and sports a touch screen for the interface. This will make it look more like a mini iPod touch than an iPod.
iPod shuffle – expects similar offering than last generation. Maybe more colors and boost of capacity of up to 8G?
iPod Classic – we predict there will be no new model. Apple probably will announce an RIP date for the current model.
iTunes 10 – time is ripe for Apple to release a major upgrade to flagship iTunes.
Cloud based iTunes – many are eagerly awaiting a cloud based music streaming service from Apple. We predict it is not ready and will not happen during tomorrow’s event. We expect Apple will hold a special event in future just for this cloud base service as it is a game changing business model. But we should see some hints of it in the new iTunes.
iOS 4.1 – as mentioned, this is predicted to release today, one day before the media event.
iTV – will Apple release a $99 follow up to Apple TV? All signs and rumors point to a yes answer. This new model will be a diskless and cheaper model with an emphasis on streaming. Many expect it to run a new iOS and be able to run apps. This will probably not the device that will change how we watch TV.
99 cents TV rental & iBookstore – 99 cents TV rental is widely rumored by major media. It is interesting to see the scope and selection available for this service. Lets hope there is some announcement too for iBookstore to boost up the book selection.
iLife ‘11 – some have predicted an announcement of iLife ‘11. We are guessing it is not happening in September. Instead iLife’11 will be announced after iPad get its iOS 4.x release. Apple is likely to unveil new iLife for the Mac together with new version for the iPad. And probably will release a version for iPhone and iPod touch. It is interesting to see if Apple will charge for the upgrade to Pages/Numbers/Keynote for iPad.
One more thing – Apple probably will announce the availability of white iPhone 4. Many are waiting to buy one in September.
Surprises – yes we hope there are surprises. Please bring us some Apple.
Autodesk AutoCAD, the industry standard design and engineering software, is coming back to Mac. The last AutoCAD release on the Mac was in 1992. And after 13 releases on non-Mac platform since then, AutoCAD is finally back to Mac in October. Pricing will remain the same as the Windows version. Autodesk will also release a free AutoCAD WS viewer app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
“Apple is thrilled that Autodesk is bringing AutoCAD back to the Mac and we think it’s the perfect combination for millions of design and engineering professionals,” said Apple senior vice-president of Worldwide Product Marketing Philip Schiller in a news release.
Apple has a new job listing for a iBookstore Marketing Manager.
iTunes is seeking a US Marketing Manager for the iBookstore. Based in Cupertino, it will be this Manager’s responsibility to drive awareness and sales of iBooks through co-marketing programs with publishers and authors, strategic partnerships, and via online and direct marketing tactics.
Looks like Apple is determine to remediate one of the weak point of iBookstore, which is the disappointed book selection compared with its competitor Amazon Kindle.
Watch the demo of first Apple Macintosh by Steve Jobs in January 1984 in front of 3000 people.
We manage our printers and print jobs using Mac’s System Preferences->Print & Fax. Beneath the hood, Mac OS X is using a powerful printing system called CUPS. Turns out that CUPS has a web interface for you to manage and administer printers and jobs on your Mac.
To view the web interface, just point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:631/.
CUPS (some say stands for Common Unix Printing System) is by Michael Sweet and debuted in 1999. It is a free software under GNU General Public License and is also the default print engine for several Linux distributions such as Red Hat. Apple adopted CUPS since Mac OS X 10.2 in March 2002. In February 2007, Apple hired Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.
Apple has released version 9.0.4 update to iWork comprises bug fixes to Keynote, Pages and Numbers. New in this release is the support of ePub format in Pages. Pages is the first commercial word processor that can export documents in ePub format, alongside PDF and Word. ePub format will allow you to read the document in iBooks or other eBook reader software supporting ePub.
Check out Apple’s support document which explains the differences between PDF and ePub. It also contains guide and template on how to create ePub document using Pages.
This update is available via the usual Software Update or you can download from Apple Download site.
We would not call it a delay, but iOS 4.1 which is under beta right now is indeed slow to reach gold status compared with past iOS minor point beta release. The major feature for this release is the inclusion of Apple’s gaming platform Game Centre. We are guessing Apple is taking some time to make sure 4.1 release works well with iPhone 3G. Many has reported slowness after upgrading their iPhone 3G to iOS 4, and it is in Apple and its developers interest to move all iPhone to use iOS 4.
Apple tends to release iOS on a Tuesday. With its iPod event scheduled on next Wednesday September 1, we predict Apple will release iOS 4.1 next Tuesday, before the launch of new iPod models which will sport the new iOS release. The Game Centre feature in iOS 4.1 also reinforce iPod touch as a great gaming device. The new iPod touch model is expected to take most of hardware features from iPhone 4 such as Retina Display and FaceTime ready dual-camera.
iPad owners could only wait for all the goodness of iOS 4 such as multitasking, folders, universal inbox etc. We can safely expect iOS 4.2 to be in beta right after the release of iOS 4.1. iOS 4.2 is expected to be a build for iPad, and lets hope Apple can reunite the operating system so that the same iOS version runs on both iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Each beta testing cycle is expect between 4 to 6 weeks for minor point release. Thus we can expect iOS 4 for iPad to be available in October.
