Following leaks, reports, guesses, approximations and the like, Apple has finally set the date for its unveiling of the new iPhone, call it iPhone 4S or iPhone 5.
Mark the calendar to October 4th, which happens to be next Tuesday, at 10:00 am Pacific, which converts to about 8 pm in Beirut.
Invitations to the event were sent under the title “Let’s Talk iPhone” and had the following format:
Who’s excited?
Steve Jobs has just submitted his resignation as head of the world’s most lucrative company, Apple.
To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:
I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.
As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.
I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.
I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.
Steve
For any Apple-fan, this is a sad day indeed. Steve Jobs has been responsible for making Apple what it is today: one of the world’s leading companies with its introduction of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes, OS X, Macbook, etc…
Steve Jobs will remain as chairman on the Apple board.
Let me get this out there: I do not like jailbreaking. I tend to stay away from it like a cat avoiding water.
But when I heard that Facebook hid some sort of easter egg in its iPhone application, I decided to take the plunge. How bad could it be? I figured the worst case scenario would be restoring the iPad’s software in iTunes.
Why jailbreak? Well, the easter egg in question was actually Facebook’s long awaited Facebook for iPad app. It turned out that by changing a number in the app’s build, it converts to the iPad version. Pretty cool, no?
If you want to test it out for yourself, there are plenty of guides online. And quoting the ever-wise J.K. Rowling: ” If you have to ask, you will never know. If you know, you need only ask.” (hint)
Now let’s get down to what’s important: the app itself.
It could be the iPad’s bigger screen but the app feels more natural on it compared to the iPhone and similarly to the Twitter app, whenever you switch between landscape and portrait orientations, the app changes its layout accordingly. Not groundbreaking, obviously, but the only thing that changes w/ the iPhone version is the 180 degree switch.
Always present on the bar on top are four different buttons: the first one from the left opens up a sidebar on the left which has quick shortcuts to your news feed, profile, messages, events, places, friend list, photos, as well as some of the groups you joined or were forced to join (what’s up with that by the way?).
The second one opens up a friend request list. The third one opens up your messages and allows you to reply to any new message right there.The last earth-shaped one shows you all your notifications.
Similarly to the iPhone app, your news feed has three additional shortcuts to post a photo, a status or check in places. Sliding your news-feed to the left, in order to have more space to the right, while you’re in landscape mode, gives you a new sidebar: Facebook chat, equipped like the iPhone version with speech bubbles.
Your Facebook profile page is very similar to the way you see it using the regular Facebook website, adding to it the two iPhone shortcuts to post a status or share a picture.
Facebook Places has been given a rather interesting layout where you get to see where your friends have checked in on a map.
You can also see your friend list and albums similarly to the grid layout in iTunes: big thumbnails that feature the album cover or a friend’s profile picture.
Overall, the Facebook for iPad app is pretty neat. Using it is intuitive and it merges the computer version of Facebook and the iPhone version quite well, which is what the iPad is all about: your computer experience in a mobile form.
The app looks nice, as you can see from the below pictures, and I think all the different shortcuts are rather smart. It basically comes down to this: I guess Mark Zuckerberg is eating his words after saying they have no interest in developing an app for the iPad seeing as it’s not a mobile platform. Because from what I’ve seen of the app, they’ve put more work in it than the iPhone version. This can be considered as “beta” and it’s less buggy than the iPhone app I’m using.
Good job Facebook.
Mac OS X Lion has just been released and these are my thoughts of the new Mac operating system that I’ve been using for a couple of weeks now.
Installing Lion is a very easy task. You just run the installer that you download, input your administrator password and the OS automatically installs. Of course, it’s always advisable to back up your data beforehand since you never know what might go wrong but most probably nothing will.
Once the installation is done, you’ll be taken to a newly designed welcome screen where you enter your password and access your desktop.
The first thing Lion welcomes you with is an introduction its new way of scrolling. However, Apple has decided to set the scrolling to “natural,” which, like the iPad, is actually the reverse of what you’re used to: scrolling up takes you down and vice versa. However, unlike the iPad, your Mac does not have a touch screen making the scrolling as set by Apple not “natural” at all. So I went to system preferences and changed it.
OS X Lion boasts many addition and tweaks that are truly great. But I think there are five which can be considered as the highlight of this update: Resume, Mission Control, Airdrop, Full Screen and Launchpad.
1 – Resume:
Have you ever shut down your laptop and regretted it because you didn’t have something saved? Well, with OS X Lion, you don’t need to worry about that anymore. Whenever you turn on your mac after shutting it down, you will be presented with the exact same state you left your mac in prior to shut down. Did you have iTunes, Twitter, Firefox and iPhoto running? They’d still be running and open to the tabs you were browsing, the tweets you were seeing and the songs you were selecting.
I’m the type of people who don’t like to turn off their laptops simply because I find the time it takes for them to boot and start launching my apps too long. With OS X Lion, I boot my Macbook Pro and before I know it, it’s as if I never turned it off. That is truly this update’s highlight. Sure, it’s not the most dazzling addition but in the long run, it’s the most useful one.
You can opt out of it before shutting down. But why would you?
2 – Mission Control:
The negative thing about mission control is that it takes time to get accustomed with the new finger gestures. I had my mac set up for four-finger gestures: up removed all windows from my desktop, down took me to expose. With OS X Lion, the four-finger gestures are removed entirely and replaced with three-finger gestures.
Going up with three fingers + thumb launches Mission Control.
Don’t mind my Harry Potter wallpaper. The movie is simply epic after all.
What Mission Control does is show you all of the windows and apps you’re working with, allowing you to organize them.
You can drag for example your internet browser and make a new desktop out of it.
This new desktop can now be accessed via a two-finger swipe to the left (or right, depending on where you are).
Mission Control is highly useful when you want to relieve yourself of clutter. Whenever you find yourself overwhelmed with windows, simply drag a few of them into new desktops and go to those desktops to finish your work. When you’re done, hover your cursor over the new desktops and you’ll be able to close them.
3 – Airdrop:
Ever wanted to share something with someone and you were out of a flash drive or any way to send it over to them? Well, if you’re on the same Wi-Fi network, OS X Lion has the solution in the form of Airdrop.
Found in all the windows of “Finder” on the side, airdrop allows you to share that file with any Mac in the vicinity.
4 – Full Screen:
This update also boasts the ability to go full screen in many apps: iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, etc…. Whenever you go full screen with an app, you can use a three-finger scroll sideways to switch between all full-screen apps running. I have yet to fully use this capacity, simply because I don’t feel like it’s really needed. What’s the point of looking at iTunes (or any other app) full screen?
Moreover, a simple click on the escape button wouldn’t take you out of full screen mode. You have to hover your mouse to the top of the page in order for a blue box with two reduction arrows to appear. Clicking on that takes you back to normal screen mode.
Interestingly, going full screen in Quicktime automatically transfers you to a new desktop so you can keep the movie you’re watching at full screen when you need to pause it to work with other things. However, I still don’t get how to make Quicktime work as my media player after connecting my Macbook Pro via HDMI to my TV so I’ve resorted to VLC instead.
5 – Launchpad:
Out of the new additions I have chosen to discuss in this overview, I’m the most disappointed by Launchpad. Why? Because it’s practically useless. A three-finger squeeze launches launchpad from which you can launch any app.
As you can see, it has been built in a way very similar to how apps are presented on an iPad’s screen. Even folders are the same. But I’m used to launching an app simply by clicking on my “Applications” folder in the dock and clicking for the app. With Launchpad, it’s one extra step for me to do that.
Installing any app will from the Mac App Store will appear as a “download bar” underneath the Launchpad icon, similar to what happens on an iOS device.
Launchpad is basically the most obvious of bringing iOS to OS X. But it pales in comparison to the other additions in OS X Lion.
OS X Lion has many other tweaks that are not discussed here. Preview has its interface changed, as well as the Mail app, which now allows threaded conversations as well as flagging emails in various degrees of importance. You can no longer change the size of icons and folders automatically rearrange to limit empty spaces between contents.
Is OS X Lion a must-have update? I’m inclined to say it’s no. But I personally advise everyone to update because soon enough Apple will start to iron out the kinks. OS X is a very, very strong operating system that will stay a market leader for long. Windows has a lot of catching up to do and even though OS X Lion is not a giant leap forward, it opened up even more grounds on Windows. After all, by combining elements from Mac OS X with iOS, although far from perfect, has taken the user’s mac experience to a whole new level. Mac OS X Lion gives you the feeling that you are working with a futuristic device, even though for example my Macbook Pro is almost 2 years old.
Apple is known not to release a product unless they’re sure it’s the best they can offer at the moment. Sure, they’ve had missteps. But OS X Lion is not one of them. And for $29.99 and the ability to install it on any mac computer you own, it sure is a bargain. So should you buy it? Hell yes. It offers enough for $29.99 to make the must-have update question I asked earlier somewhat irrelevant.
Old news for some but still awesome news nonetheless.
As part of its last mission to space, US space shuttle Atlantis took with it two iPhone 4’s, loaded with apps to allow the astronauts to undergo several experiments.
One of the apps in question is called Spacelab for iOS, which you can download from the iTunes store here. It will allow the astronauts to take pictures of Earth and estimate latitudes, do calibrations using the iPhone’s gyroscope and accelerometer which were proven to function with high accuracy in space. The sensory calibrations along with the pictures taken will allow the aircraft to locate itself, in addition to extensive data collection.
Interestingly, the iPhone 4’s gyroscope and accelerometer are both being considered to replace more expensive equipment because of their high-accuracy function in zero gravity.
After all experiments take place, the iPhones will be returned to have their data collected and analyzed.
Talk about multi-use, right?
A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares 