MAC News

Accede a la web de MobileMe desde el iPhone e iPod touch

Samuel Campos — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:38:56 -0800

En Applesfera tendríamos que crear una sección llamada “Apple y sus extrañas cosas“ para hablar de todos esos movimientos incomprensibles que tiene Apple. Dentro de esa categoría podríamos meter la web de MobileMe, la cual Apple no deja visitar desde un iPhone o un iPod touch, algo bastante raro cuando Apple siempre ha dicho que su navegador móvil es el más completo y versátil de todos los disponibles.

Aunque pueda parecer que acceder a la web de MobileMe es una tontería desde el iPhone, lo cierto es que es bastante útil puesto que únicamente desde ella podemos configurar algunos parámetros de la cuenta o consultar donde están nuestros dispositivos.

Por suerte, Apple no limita el acceso desde el iPhone si no únicamente mediante Safari, por lo que podemos usar otro navegador (como el integrado en los clientes de Twitter) para acceder a las preferencias del MobileMe si necesitamos modificar algo sin estar delante de nuestro ordenador.

Vía | MacWorld

TUAW's Steve Sande provides gift ideas on the latest MacJury podcast

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Odds and ends, Podcasts, Holidays

Here it is, T-7 days until Black Friday, and you don't have any gift ideas?

I joined MacJury podcaster Chuck Joiner earlier this week to provide my ideas for gifting. This was part two of a holiday gift ideas episode on the popular podcast.

Joining me on the podcast were MacMouseCalls support genius (and grandmother) Pat Fauquet, Julio Ojeda-Zapata from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and The Mac Observer's Jeff Gamet.

Storage seemed to be a popular gift idea from the panelists, along with iPhone / Mac jewelry, video tools, and even some freebies. I take no responsibility for the singing that was taking place...

You can listen to MacJury Episode 918 at the MacJury website, or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

TUAW TUAW's Steve Sande provides gift ideas on the latest MacJury podcast originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MacUpdate Desktop version 5.0.2 released, win a membership from TUAW

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:15:00 -0800

Filed under: Software, Cool tools

MacUpdate announced today the release of version 5.0.2 of the MacUpdate Desktop utility, which allows users to manage application and widget software updates on their Mac OS X machines. The new version of the application adds some features and bug fixes as well as support for more languages.

MacUpdate Desktop can track software updates for 30,000 Mac applications, and it also provides update support for applications on the iPhone, although iTunes handles that pretty well. Updates can be triggered manually and individually, or set to install automatically when MacUpdate Desktop is open. It also provides support for updating screen savers and allows users to sort applications into "watch lists," so they can keep track of programs that are more important to keep current than others.

The update includes improved handling of the software it tracks, such as version and application matching, as well as French, German, and Italian localization. Some of the bugs it fixes are community preferences, registration problems, and issues with extracting tar bzip2 and dmg.zip downloads.

There are several update managers out there for Mac OS X (including AppFresh, LogicielMac, VersionTracker Pro, etc.) with fans and detractors of their own. If you've had great or not-so-great experiences with any of the updater tools, let us know in the comments.

Want to win one of two subscriptions to MacUpdate Desktop, courtesy of MU and TUAW? Read on for details!

Continue reading MacUpdate Desktop version 5.0.2 released, win a membership from TUAW

TUAW MacUpdate Desktop version 5.0.2 released, win a membership from TUAW originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Geotagged tweets now alive in Stone Design's Twittelator Pro 3.3.1

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0800

Filed under: iPhone, App Store

Twitter has flipped the switch on some new features, including geotagging of tweets and automatic retweeting. As a happy user of Stone Design's Twittelator Pro 3.3.1 [iTunes link], I was even more giddy when I found out that my favorite Twitter app already supports both of these features.

The geotagging feature lets you optionally attach a latitude and longitude to your tweets. If you receive the tweet in Twittelator, you can tap on the sender's avatar icon to see the geotag and pull up a Google map of the location near where the tweet was sent. The app lets you turn off geotagging when you send a tweet, which is useful if you're trying to shake off a stalker. It's also cool to use "nearby search" to find people who are near you and sending out tweets, and view their location on a map.

The official retweet feature has been going live for the past two weeks or so, although as of yet I haven't seen or been able to send a retweet that appears with the new retweet icon. In the web-based Twitter, I do see the new icons and messages that say "Retweeted by you," but I'm not sure why I'm not seeing this in Twittelator Pro.

Is anyone else using Twittelator Pro 3.3.1 who can vouch that the new retweet capability is working for them? Leave a comment.

TUAW Geotagged tweets now alive in Stone Design's Twittelator Pro 3.3.1 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Navigon briefly cutting price on its popular Nav app

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:30:00 -0800

Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone

Gee, we were just saying how competitive it is getting in the iPhone nav department, and Navigon has gone and cut prices for holiday travelers.

For 10 days only, beginning today (November 20-30) Navigon's iPhone app, Mobile Navigator [iTunes link]will be on sale for U.S. $69.99 instead of $89.99 providing a $20.00 savings. In addition, Navigon's Traffic Live feature is also on sale for $14.99 instead of $24.99. Traffic Live is a one time charge, not a continuing cost.

That's a significant saving for this very popular app, and puts it under similar featured apps from TomTom ($99.99) and Magellan ($79.99).

In my tests of the Navigon app I have found it accurate, and it has a superior user interface that is easy to use. Of course you shouldn't be looking at it while you are driving, and the text to speech does an excellent job of helping you keep your eyes on the road.

The Live Traffic feature will route you around major traffic congestion and adjust your ETA times.

It's nice to see prices heading south on some of these GPS packages. Now you'll be able to head south (or north, or any direction really) for less money and with more features. Have a safe trip.

TUAW Navigon briefly cutting price on its popular Nav app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CrossOver Games releases version 8.1.0

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:30:00 -0800

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Odds and ends, Developer, Snow Leopard

The folks behind CrossOver Games sent us a note that version 8.1.0 of their software has come out, and it's got some nice upgrades for Mac and Linux folks who prefer to run their games in Windows almost-emulators (it's based on Wine, and as we all know, Wine Is Not an Emulator) rather than Boot Camping over to the real thing. We tried out CrossOver Games a while back, and found it lacking in almost everything but Steam games, but actually that's OK, because lately Steam has a lot of games going on. Accordingly, this new version has support built-in for the brand new Left 4 Dead 2, as well as fixes for Steam's voice chat, a few upgrades for WoW on Linux and Guild Wars, and a couple of changes to ensure compatibility with Snow Leopard. Sounds like a nice solid upgrade -- owners of the software can grab it for free, or you can try out the app for yourself from their website.

In case you don't have the app yet, CodeWeavers also let us know that they're giving away a Linux rig that's the "ultimate" in... wait for it... gaming. Yes, putting together a Linux rig for gaming is like putting a UFC fighter on a dance show, but we guess stranger things have happened. Anyway, CrossOver Games will definitely help you play at least a few games on the decked-out rig, if you want a shot at winning the thing, all you have to do is pick up the software before December 1st. They'll pick a name out of a hat, and if it's yours, there'll be an awesome 'nix box headed your way. Good luck with getting smooth fullscreen Flash video to work. We kid! You Linux guys make it so easy.

Oh wait, what's that? Flash on the iPhone? I have no idea what you're talking about.

TUAW CrossOver Games releases version 8.1.0 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Virgin Mobile Canada: Fifth Canadian outlet for iPhone

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0800

Filed under: iPhone

The iPhone is getting yet another carrier in the great white north. Virgin Mobile Canada has announced that it'll start selling the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS in the coming months.

When exactly? How much? Can I get a Richard Branson ringtone? Actually, I can make my own ringtones, but what about the rest of it? We'll have to wait to find out. All the company said in its incredibly short notice was that it'll sell the phones online and in its brick-and-mortar stores at some point. Well, that and that its gotten some love from J.D. Power and Associates for its prepaid and postpaid wireless services.

The phones are already on sale north of the border through Rogers Wireless, its subsidiary Fido, Bell Canada, and Telus. While a Canadian friend tells me Virgin Mobile Canada has a reputation for inexpensive phones with prepaid service, Canadian mobile news site MobileSyrup expects Virgin to charge roughly the same prices with the same three-year contracts as Canada's other iPhone carriers.

Thanks EZ Mac Mike for the tip!

[via iLounge, MobileSyrup]

TUAW Virgin Mobile Canada: Fifth Canadian outlet for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FunMail adds instant images to Facebook status & MMS

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:45:00 -0800

Filed under: iPhone, App Review

At the risk of invoking a round of reader rage, I'll admit that I've never really been that hyped on the idea of MMS on the iPhone (and, by the way, get off my lawn). If I want to send someone a picture, I've got their email address; I'll just send them a picture. No big whoop.

I do have some friends and colleagues who 'came up' on mainline camera phones and they gleefully pop pics back and forth via MMS. I also appreciate the ability to decode the snapshots my wife sends from her Motorola RAZR, but overall I wouldn't rate it among the top iPhone features I was eager to get from AT&T (not like the ongoing lack of tethering, which is making me grind my teeth in my sleep).

That prejudicial attitude may have made me a little skeptical when I met with FunMobility's CEO Adam Lavine this week to get a preview of his company's new free app FunMail [iTunes link], which promises to leverage the Semantic Media Project and add appropriate imagery to your MMS messages, short emails, Facebook wall posts, et cetera. It's available in the US App Store as of last night.

Sure, the app is simple enough to use (once you register and accept the company's TOS, which may subject you to occasional text messages from them if you don't opt out) -- type in your message, and the system gives you the text (up to 140 characters) atop your choice of image from a list of five, sourced from FunMobility's licensed libraries along with Creative Commons remixable content from Flickr and other repositories. If you want to include a hidden search term, putting it at the end of the message with a double-hash (##) will tell FunMail to search those words without including them in the sent message. You can send it to any mobile phone number in your address book, to email recipients, or to your Facebook friends or wall via Facebook Connect. The result is a little bit inspirational office poster, a little bit LOLcat, and in some ways strangely intriguing... but not really, you know, useful.

Continue reading FunMail adds instant images to Facebook status & MMS

TUAW FunMail adds instant images to Facebook status & MMS originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hackeando Mac OS X 10.6.2 para (volver a) soportar procesadores Atom

Miguel Michán — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:49:18 -0800

Como ya os comentamos, la última versión de Snow Leopard no solo solucionaba un buen número de problemas y fallos sino que también desactivó el soporte para el chip Intel Atom dejando a un montón de hackintosh con la cara partida.

Al parecer, anteriormente, el kernel comprobaba únicamente si el modelo de procesador era superior al Pentium M Dothan (Apple TV), por lo que cualquier micro más moderno superaba la prueba. En la versión 10.6.2, el nuevo código busca específicamente las familias de procesadores Yonah, Merom, Penryn, Nehalem, Fields, Dales y Nehalem_EX, dejando fuera de este modo al resto de chips no utilizados por Apple como el Atom.

Afortunadamente, un usuario de los foros de InsanelyMac ha trasteado en el código del kernel mediante la aplicación IDA Pro Disassembler y ha logrado modificarlo para volver a poner en circulación a todos los netbooks con procesadores Atom. El proceso no es del todo trivial pero los primeros comentarios de quienes lo han probado indican que funciona.

Antes de nada advertiros de lo delicado de la operación. Básicamente es como hacer un cambio de cerebro al sistema operativo así que proseguid bajo vuestra cuenta y riesgo. Avisados estáis. Descargad el kernel modificado y descompridlo haciendo doble click sobre él en el escritorio. Abrid el Terminal y escribid las siguientes instrucciones:

1. sudo -s (e introduce tu contraseña de administrador)
2. cd /
3. mv mach_kernel mach_kernel_1062
4. cp ~/Desktop/mach_kernel /
5. chown 0:0 mach_kernel

Por último, reiniciamos el equipo y cruzamos los dedos para que nada explote.

Vía | InsanelyMac
Más información | Patched mach_kernel 10.2.0 for Atom-based netbooks

Jobs to dev on app name change: "Not that big of a deal."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Software, Steve Jobs, Apple, Developer

I don't know if this was the right thing for Steve Jobs to say, but on the other hand, I do think it's the perfect thing for him to say. The story, as reported by our buddy Daniel Brusilovsky over at Crunchgear, goes like this: A company called The Little App Factory got a letter from Apple, who had a legal issue with one of their apps, formerly named iPodRip.

Apple didn't like the fact that "iPod" was clearly in the name, and so despite the fact that the software was meant to transfer songs back and forth specifically from an iPod, Apple wanted the name changed. The company's co-owner, John Devor, sent a very long and well-reasoned letter to Mr. Jobs himself explaining that their only wish was to extend Apple's hardware's capabilities, and that they were all Apple fans, and that they'd used the name for a long time and they were worried that a competitor might steal their customers and Jobs was an inspiration to the guy, who'd just dropped out of school, and could they please get a pass on this one?

Jobs' response -- yes, he wrote back personally -- was just three lines:

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

Kids, that's how you become the kind of guy who runs a brilliant computer company, is seen on the cover of Time multiple times, gets named CEO of the Decade and just generally rocks. I feel for The Little App Factory, I really do, but you gotta believe the Steve. It's not that big of a deal.

We'll do our part, though: the app formerly known as iPodRip is now known as iRip, and is available with a free trial period from the developer's site.

[via Techmeme]

TUAW Jobs to dev on app name change: "Not that big of a deal." originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ravensword: The fallen King, impresionante juego de rol para el iPhone

Pedro Santamaría — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:10:49 -0800

Ravensword: The fallen king es un juego de rol que definitivamente demuestra todo el potencial del iPhone y iPod Touch como plataforma de juego. Con unos gráficos geniales, una historia elaborada y una duración aproximada de diez horas. ¿alguien pide más?

El juego mezcla aspectos de aventura, rol y acción. Multitud de enemigos, armas, objetos,... areas secretas y grandes escenarios por recorrer. Además de la posibilidad de jugar en tercera o primera persona. Y una banda sonora a la altura de los gráficos. Y a buen precio, sólo 5,49 euros.

Como muchas veces hemos remarcado, tal vez sustituir un sistema de control típico como la cruceta de muchos mandos o consolas portátiles por los controles táctiles del iPhone o iPod Touch no sea lo más acertado. Pero viendo el vídeo que acompaña a este artículo vemos que no se hace muy complicado de manejar a nuestro personaje.

Sin entrar en polémicas discusiones sobre si es o no mejor o peor que otras opciones de ocio móvil, lo que está claro es el interés que está despertando la plataforma entre los desarrolladores de juegos y para la propia Apple. Un interés que nos beneficia a los poseedores de dichos aparatos pues en un sólo dispositivo aunamos multitud de posibilidades.

Cuadernos Mac
Sitio Oficial | Chillingo
Descargar | Ravensword: The fallen King
En Applesfera | Ofertas de trabajo en Apple desvelan el interés de la compañía por el mercado de los videojuegos

Steve Jobs nos enseña cómo ahorrarse un dineral en abogados

Miguel López — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:37:32 -0800

El CEO de Apple, Steve Jobs, ha sacado a relucir su carisma en un conflicto de intereses entre la compañía de Cupertino y The Little App Factory, un pequeño equipo de desarrolladores responsables de la aplicación iPodRip entre otras.

iPodRip es una aplicación desarrollada y presentada por primera vez que permite, en caso de pérdida de datos, recuperar nuestra librería de iTunes desde la memoria de nuestro iPod. La aplicación ha tenido cierto éxito, ya que más de seis millones de personas se la han descargado.

Resulta que a Apple no le hacía ninguna gracia que la palabra ‘iPod’ figurara en la aplicación iPodRip, de modo que recibieron una carta de unos representantes de la compañía pidiendo que cambiaran el nombre de la aplicación a otro que no contuviera esa palabra.

John Devor, el CEO de The Little App Factory, escribió un extenso correo con todos los argumentos de su equipo en referencia a su aplicación y a los logros que ha conseguido, pidiéndole al CEO de Apple que tomara medidas para que no tuvieran que cambiar el nombre de la aplicación.

Y sorprendentemente, Steve Jobs le respondió. Y lo hizo desde su iPhone, de forma rápida y efectiva:

Cambia el nombre de tu aplicación. No es para tanto.

Steve

Enviado desde mi iPhone

Con ese breve correo, The Little App Factory cambió el nombre de su aplicación de iPodRip a iRip eliminando así el ‘iPod’ en dicho nombre, y Apple se ha ahorrado una posible gran cantidad de dinero en abogados para proceder a tomar medidas legales para cambiar el nombre.

Viendo los resultados que ha conseguido la compañía de Cupertino con un simple correo de Steve Jobs y viendo por otra parte todas las luchas legales que tienen a base de demandas de la competencia, no sería una mala opción que Jobs escribiera este tipo de correos más frecuentemente, ¿no creéis?

Vía | 9to5mac, TechCrunch
Más información | The little app factory
Imagen | Tom Coates
En Applesfera | David Pogue entrevista a Steve Jobs

Una nueva patente de Apple muestra la interfaz de los dispositivos en los accesorios

Miguel López — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:51:23 -0800

Apple sigue publicando patentes a un buen ritmo, y desde la ofocina estadounidense nos muestran una publicación que trasladaría la interfaz de los dispositivos portátiles a los accesorios, dejando a un lado las interfaces propias de dichos accesorios.

Para conseguirlo, el dispositivo móvil (un iPod, un iPhone…) contaría con un sistema que enviaría la imagen de la interfaz a la pantalla de accesorio, consiguiendo que en el esa pantalla tengamos elementos de la interfaz que quiera Apple controlables por los botones del dispositivo o del accesorio.

Con esta patente Apple conseguiría mejorar el uso de sus dispositivos con accesorios de terceras marcas, ya que no tendríamos que aprendernos ni siquiera el funcionamiento del accesorio pudiendo usar en su lugar la interfaz que nos ofrecería Apple, que sería tremendamente parecida a la que ya conocemos en los iPod y en los iPhone.

Vía | Macrumors
En Applesfera | Patente de texturas variables y control por huellas dactilares

Especial regalos Navideños: de 50 a 100 euros

Samuel Campos — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:50:28 -0800

La Navidad empieza a llegar poco a poco a nuestro hogares y con ella una de las fechas en la cual se realizan más regalos a lo largo del año. En Applesfera somos conscientes de ello y por eso te traemos unos cuantos especiales con regalos para comprar o para pedir.

Como estamos en “crisis” estos especiales estarán divididos por rangos de precio, así te será más fácil ajustarte a tu presupuesto y no caer en la tentación de comprar cosas caras. El primero de estos especiales arranca en los 50 euros, un precio alto, pero a partir del cual podemos encontrar un montón de cosas interesantes.

LaCie Sound² Speakers

En Applesfera ya hablamos hace tiempo de los altavoces Firewire de Lacie. Hace poco han presentado la nueva versión de los mismos que poco o nada tienen que ver con los que ya analizamos en Applesfera.

La principal queja de los altavoces de Lacie era la calidad acústica, la compañía ha decidido poner fin a este problema dejando el diseño acústico a Cabasse, una compañía puntera en este sector. Lacie por otro lado se ha dedicado a lo que mejor sabe hacer, el acabado exterior con la ayuda de Neil Poulton.

Destacar los 30Wts de potencia RMS, un diseño compacto, amplificador incorporado en los propios altavoces, posibilidad de conexión mediante USB o Jack, además no requiere de fuente de alimentación externa.

Más información | Lacie – 96,90 €

FreeAgent DockStar

Tengo cierta obsesión por los cables, creo que quedo bastante claro a la hora de hablar sobre Time Machine y los discos duros externos. Por eso me encantan todos los accesorios para liberar mi espacio de cables, esta base creada por Seagate nos ayuda un poco a esta tarea.

La principal utilidad es la de conectar un disco de 2,5 pulgadas a su conector especial y a la vez acoplar la misma a la red de casa mediante ethernet. Pero además de esto, nos permite conectar hasta tres discos duros distintos por USB para compartir todos al mismo tiempo.

Por si fuera poco, además de acceder a nuestros archivos desde un ordenador de la red, podemos acceder a los mismos desde cualquier ordenador mediante un entorno web, un Dropbox propio por muy poco dinero.

Más información | Seagate – 79€

Conserve Surge Protector

A pesar del horrible nombre que ha decidido poner Belkin a este accesorio, no se puede negar la fantástica idea de la compañía. Vivimos en la era del ahorro y eso actualmente no se refleja en la mayor parte de nuestros aparatos eléctricos, los cuales siguen consumiendo energía incluso cuando no hacemos uso de ellos.

Belkin ha pensado en ello y ha creado una regleta de enchufes como la de toda la vida con la peculiaridad de tener enchufes especiales que se apagan desde un mando a distancia para dejar de consumir recursos.

Pero además cuenta con dos enchufes adicionales para los equipos que no se pueden desconectar, como los routers. Por si fuera poco también incluye un protector de subidas de tensiones con seguro incluido de 150.000€ para cualquier equipo conectado al dispositivo.

Más información | Belkin – 49€

Deskstandz

No me suelen gustar muchos las bases para apoyar portátiles, a la mayoría le veo fallos y la otra mitad no me gusta, pero la Deskstandz me parece francamente interesante para algunos usuarios que buscan máximo espacio en su mesa de trabajo.

La idea es más que buena, en lugar de poner el portátil de forma horizontal se coloca de forma vertical. Con esto conseguimos mucho más espacio sobre la mesa y un acceso más rápido a los conectores laterales.

También podemos esconder fácilmente el portátil detrás de una pantalla para que pase completamente desapercibido.

Más información | Deskstandz – 50€ aproximadamente

iPod shuffle 2Gb

Todos estamos de acuerdo en que estos accesorios son bastante chulos y prácticos, pero también es verdad que en este rango de precio contamos con un fantástico iPod shuffle de 2Gb.

Es pequeño, es bonito, es útil, es un iPod y encima cuesta 55 euros. Si no te convencen ninguna de las otras opciones, esta es una alternativa francamente interesante. Otra de las ventajas es que es un complemento perfecto para cualquier iPod touch e iPhone, no todo el mundo ve comodo salir a correr con un iPod touch en la mano.

Más información | Apple – 55€

Google revamps mobile Google News format

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Internet, iPhone, iPod touch

Like most "mobile versions" of websites, Google News was simplified for use on devices featuring what Steve Jobs once called "the baby Internet." Sadly, this simplified version also showed up by default on the iPhone, leading to an experience that was, to put it charitably, subpar.

That's all changed now that Google has redesigned the mobile version of Google News for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. The new mobile version is far more feature-rich than the old one and is more consistent in its appearance (i.e., it's almost indistinguishable from the desktop version) compared to the old "mobile-optimized" Google News.

It also includes a handy "Jump to" link which brings up a window that allows you to skip to the news section of your choice, saving your thumbs from severe scroll fatigue.

There's no need to download anything. Simply go to Google News on your iPhone and check out the changes.

[Via MacRumors]

TUAW Google revamps mobile Google News format originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Shareholders ask Ballmer about Apple

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

While Bill Gates looked on, Microsoft shareholders asked CEO Steve Ballmer about Apple at their annual meeting this morning. Steve's CEO-speak responses illustrate the larger problem.

Portfolio reports that one investor asked about the company's reputation with young customers:

"I'm just wondering why your marketing group can't do something to try to rein in this next generation, because you've got a real bad image out there."

He also said that Apple's ads make Microsoft look like "a buffoon." That's when the CEO-speak began.

"There's certainly always opportunities for improvement," Ballmer said. "[There is] ... a group of people with whom our market share is less."

When you hear "opportunity for improvement," you're screwed. Euphemistic language clouds meaning and hides the truth. Think "economic downturn" and "previously enjoyed" instead of "depression" and "used." Or "opportunity for improvement" instead of "problem."

Remember the Windows Mojave ads, in which producers tricked customers into thinking Vista was an unreleased version of Windows, only to then throw open the curtain and essentially say, "See? It's really Vista! You DO like it! There's nothing wrong here!"

Instead of telling people what they like, sanitizing language, insisting that the only reason the iPhone has 75,000 apps available is to make it usable on the Internet and denying your kids iPods, just say, "Our reputation with young people is poor and here's what we'll do about it." That's when you'll get something done.

[Via MacDailyNews]

TUAW Shareholders ask Ballmer about Apple originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Found footage: History of Apple in 2 minutes

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Hardware, Multimedia, Found Footage, Apple History

Here's a great video assembled by applemctom that presents the history of Apple (more or less) in two minutes. There are some huge leaps in time and some obvious errors (Apple Mac II? MacIntosh?), but that's OK. It isn't easy to cram decades of history into 120 seconds.

There's much nostalgia for old-timers like me, as the Pippin and Newton make an appearance. Though I still use my Newt, I've never had the pleasure of a face-to-face meeting with a Pippin. The dark days described in the video (the early 90's after Steve left) is exactly when I started using Macs in earnest. It's amazing that I stayed a customer after bloodying my hands on a 7100's beastly innards.

The video ends with the introduction of the iPhone, so don't expect to see anything beyond that. Still, it's a bit of fun. Check it out.

TUAW Found footage: History of Apple in 2 minutes originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to revert to the stable version of Flash player

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Software, Internet

It's no secret that Flash is a blight on the Internet and should be killed with fire. However, some sites insist on using it, and so you may be interested in having it around.

Towards that end you may have read about the pre-release of Flash player 10.1 and decided to install it for the possible improvements in performance.

If you then decide to uninstall it, ha ha! You can't! Sorry!

Update: there is a uninstaller available, it is not included in the installer package. Read on for manual un-installation instructions, but use of the uninstaller is recommended. My apologies for the confusion. I wrongly assumed that Adobe would package an uninstaller with the installer, as that is what most Mac developers do when they offer an uninstaller. I regret the error.

~~There is no uninstaller, and~~ you can't re-install the older version over the pre-release version, because the installer sees it as a newer version and won't let you.

Fortunately it can be removed by what I like to call "brute force."

Quit all browsers
Go to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins in Finder and delete the "Flash Player.plugin" and "flashplayer.xpt"
Download the latest stable version of Flash player (which will download a file called "install_flash_player_osx_ub.dmg")
Double-click "install_flash_player_osx_ub.dmg" which should open "/Volumes/Install Flash Player 10 UB" where you will find a file called "Adobe Flash Player.pkg"
Control (right) click on "Adobe Flash Player.pkg" and choose "Show Package Contents".
Open the "Contents" folder
Drag the "Archive.pax.gz" file to your Desktop
Double click on the "Archive.pax.gz" file to unarchive it, which will create a folder called "Archive"
Open the "Archive" folder and locate the "Flash Player.plugin" and "flashplayer.xpt" files.
Copy the "Flash Player.plugin" and "flashplayer.xpt" files to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins (you can then throw away the Archive folder on your Desktop, as well as Archive.pax.gz if it is still there.)
Launch Safari and check your Flash version here. As of this writing, the current stable version is "10,0,32,18"
(Optional) Install ClickToFlash so that Flash will only load when you want it to.

It is utterly baffling to me that a company as large as Adobe would ship a pre-release version of their plugin without an uninstaller [that you don't have to download separately, see above]. Then again, given Adobe's reputation, perhaps it shouldn't surprise me.

Some of you may be wondering why I didn't just delete the files from /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ and then run the installer for the stable version. I tried that, but the installer still insisted that there was a newer version installed, even after a reboot.

My advice is to keep using the stable version (with ClickToFlash) for now.

TUAW How to revert to the stable version of Flash player originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Boot Camp Drivers update 2.2 for Windows available

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:30:00 -0800

Filed under: OS, Software

Earlier today, Apple released version 2.2 of Boot Camp drivers for Windows. Installation requires Boot Camp 2.1 to have been previously installed as well as Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista.

Boot Camp is included with Leopard and Snow Leopard and lets you install Windows on an Intel-based Mac. Shops or individuals who want to go Mac despite an unavoidable Windows-only application should consider Boot Camp along with virtualization options like VMWare and Parallels. For full information on installing Boot Camp as well as upgrade instructions, manuals, troubleshooting tips and more, look here.

Please note that Boot Camp Drivers Update 2.2 is for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard only.

TUAW Boot Camp Drivers update 2.2 for Windows available originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's alive: Intel Atom support returns to 10.6.2

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:00 -0800

Filed under: OS, Snow Leopard

The day that Apple killed Atom support with the release of 10.6.2 was a sad one for many in the hackintosh community. Just as many expected, however, Atom support has returned; and no, Apple had nothing to do with it.

InsanelyMac forum member teateam has developed a replacement kernel for installation on Atom-powered, hackintosh netbooks. Keep in mind that this is bleeding-edge stuff here and not for the faint of heart. Nevertheless, this development bodes well for those of you running your own version of a MacBook mini.

[via Macworld]

TUAW It's alive: Intel Atom support returns to 10.6.2 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TomTom delivers promised iPhone update

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:30:00 -0800

Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Store

TUAW told you it was coming, and it has arrived. TomTom has updated its U.S. GPS navigation app [US$99.99, iTunes link] and added text-to-speech, advanced lane guidance, and a 'help me' feature for use in emergencies.

TomTom has been a little late to the text-to-speech party, with most competitors already offering this important function. Magellan has now jumped into the game with a very nice nav app as well, and at an introductory price that undercuts the TomTom app by twenty bucks.

All of the major navigation apps for the iPhone are quickly approaching feature parity. At this point, your main decision is whether you want the data streamed to your phone (as the AT&T app does), or have maps and data built into the app (like TomTom, Navigon, Magellan and some others).

Looming over whatever decision you make is trying to figure out if Apple will ever allow the Google turn-by-turn navigation app into the app store. It's going to be free, and Google says it wants the app to be on the iPhone. Of course things haven't been going swimmingly between Google and Apple of late (Google Voice, Android competition), so it's just a guess as to how that will all turn out.

If you need a navigation app in order to get to Grandma's house for the holidays, it's probably a good time to buy one. However, If you're willing to wait for the possibility of Google's free turn-by-turn nav app making it to the iPhone, you might be rewarded for your patience.

TUAW TomTom delivers promised iPhone update originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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First Look: Voices for iPhone

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0800

Filed under: iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, First Look, App Review

Novelty and social applications are a big hit on the iPhone. A new one from the folks of Taptivate is sure to be a big hit when it is released in the near future. Voices for iPhone is touted as an "audio recorder with a twist" and even a "social voicemail" utility.

With Voices [iTunes Link], you're given tools to manipulate your own voice in many fun and odd ways. Whether you'd like to transform into Darth Vader or a chipmunk, you're good to go with Voices. Sporting a unique and very pretty user interface, the application boasts a lot of cool extras sure to show you how hard the developers have worked on it.

The app has a home screen-like selection window where you can choose the way in which you want your voice manipulated. A stack of your recordings can also be accessed with just a tap.

After initially seeing this app when it was in early beta, it has come a long way since then. The app is being published by Tap Tap Tap and is available for only 99 cents. Also, to celebrate the release, MacHeist is offering a special "Tweetblast" deal, giving away a free copy of Voice Candy for Mac to people who help spread the word on Twitter.

Here's some shots of Voices in action:

Gallery: Voices for iPhone

TUAW First Look: Voices for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Targus Lap Chill Mat, base refrigeradora para tu portátil

Pedro Santamaría — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:43:59 -0800

Targus Lap Chill Mat, alfombrilla refrigeradora para tu portátil Mac. Un accesorio perfecto y funcional tanto para usar el equipo sobre tu regazo o directamente en la mesa de trabajo.

Si hay accesorios que me gustan desde que uso mi MacBook Pro como equipo principal son este tipo de bases o alfombrillas refrigeradoras. Si bien es cierto que en invierno el calor generado no es tanto como en otras temporadas como verano siempre viene bien si vamos a dar un uso intenso a nuestro ordenador, o si lo usamos en el sofá tapados con una manta en una tarde lluviosa.

Desde hace tiempo he usado el Belkin Cooling Laptop, una base con un ventilador central que refrescaba mi MacBook Pro durante las largas horas de codificación de vídeo. ¿El problema? que era solamente para usar sobre la mesa. Por tanto, cuando quería usarlo sobre mi regazo esa base era realmente incomoda y sin la base el calor producido por el portátil se notaba al instante.

Con el Targus Lap Chill Mat he resuelto ambos problemas. Por una parte sustituyo la base de Belkin por ésta que además de refrigerar gracias a sus dos silenciosos ventiladores tiene una inclinación perfecta para trabajar con el portátil sobre ella en la mesa. Y además, al estar pensada para usar sobre las piernas puedo llevarla al salón y seguir trabajando sin pasar excesivo calor.

Construida en plástico y neopreno tiene la suficiente consistencia y confort, que como bien dicen hace agradable el uso durante periodos largos. Los dos ventiladores de 8cm de diametro están situados en la mitad superior de la base coincidiendo con los puntos de calor de la mayoría de equipos. Su superficie es suficiente tanto para pequeños equipos como hasta portátiles de 17”. En la propia base hay cuatro gomas que permiten levantar lo justo el equipo para mejorar el flujo de aire.
Sin duda, si estáis buscando algo parecido creo que es una gran opción a tener en cuenta. Además de ser un buen regalo para ese ser querido en estas fechas que se acercan, también valen los autoregalos como es mi caso. El precio de la Targus Lap Chill Mat ronda los 30 euros y podréis encontrarla en muchos establecimientos.

Más información | Targus
En Applesfera | Accesorios Targus para Mac

Building a great iPhone app

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 -0800

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch

CIO.com has posted an article (single-page reprint here) covering one company's foray into the app development scene. Recently, clothing retailer Gap held an app development contest. The goal was to develop the "best" app to represent the retailer on the iPhone or iPod touch. Gap partnered with Mobclix, the mobile ad exchange operator (more here), to come up with the contest for the best Gap-branded iPhone app.

The contest ran for three months and had ~~100,000~~ 400* submissions. While the winning entry isn't available for download on the App Store yet, and Gap doesn't currently have a release plan, CIO.com has a list of 5 attributes that contribute to a quality iPhone app. One of my personal favorites is the consideration for how far to stray from Apple's UI guidelines. On the one hand you have an easy-to-use app that everyone can understand, but on the other hand you have to consider how "similar" you want to be to everyone else.

I won't spoil the fun and tell you all of the different attributes, but if you want to check out the winning app, you can see the submission video in the second half of this post.

Mobclix contacted us to correct the count of the number of app submissions.

[via Macworld]

Continue reading Building a great iPhone app

TUAW Building a great iPhone app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Buyer's Guide: 33 things you don't need if you have an iPhone

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Features, iPhone, Holidays, iPod touch

Every time I walk through Warehouse Stationery (New Zealand's equivalent to Office Depot) or Dick Smith's Electronics (pretty much Best Buy), I'm struck by how probably half the products in each store are pretty much useless to me since I've got an iPhone.

Thanks to the apps that come pre-packaged with the iPhone and the more than 100,000 third-party offerings now available in the iTunes Store, the iPhone has gained functionality that might have seemed hard to fathom under three years ago when Steve Jobs first announced the device.

"A widescreen iPod with touch controls... a revolutionary mobile phone... a breakthrough internet communications device... these are not three separate devices. This is one device." So Steve Jobs told us all back at Macworld Expo 2007. But since then, the iPhone has grown to be much more than just those three concepts.

What follows is a sort of anti-buyer's guide, a list of products and devices that you may never need or even want to buy again (or receive as a gift) if you have an iPhone. Some of these are certainly open for debate, but more than a few of them are products that, for all intents and purposes, are completely unnecessary if you have an iPhone. (Items in bold also apply to the iPod touch).

Continue reading Buyer's Guide: 33 things you don't need if you have an iPhone

TUAW Buyer's Guide: 33 things you don't need if you have an iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chrome for OS X before 2010

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:30:00 -0800

Filed under: Software, Internet, Internet Tools

Google is making some big announcements today during their Chrome OS press event. In addition to the official announcement for Chrome OS they also let another little tidbit of information loose:

"Just this year alone in Chrome, there's tons of new stuff coming. Before this year gets over, we'll have 3 more announcements to make. Chrome for Mac will be ready, very close to launch."

That's some pretty good news for those of you out there who are running the developer preview and are looking forward to integrating Chrome into your daily browsing.

TUAW Chrome for OS X before 2010 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ask TUAW: Silencing iPhone notifications, remote control a PC, printing over the internet, and more

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about controlling a PC over the internet, silencing iPhone email notifications at night, replacing a MacBook Pro SuperDrive with a hard drive, printing over the internet, setting iCal as the default calendar, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

Continue reading Ask TUAW: Silencing iPhone notifications, remote control a PC, printing over the internet, and more

TUAW Ask TUAW: Silencing iPhone notifications, remote control a PC, printing over the internet, and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Working with the new Apple Mac mini Server and Snow Leopard Server

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Enterprise, Mac mini, Mac OS X Server, Snow Leopard

It's always nice when, as a Mac consultant, I can play with the latest hardware and software and get paid to do it. Last week was no exception, and when I received a call from a new client who wanted assistance with a Mac mini Server, I jumped at the chance. Since the introduction of the Mac mini in early 2005, I've been using "regular" Mac minis as servers, and they've worked flawlessly. I had two servers of my own at Macminicolo.net for quite some time, and Brian Stucki, the owner of that Mac mini colocation firm, noted in a discussion a few years ago that the failure rate on the mini hardware is phenomenally low. I've set up Mac minis with Mac OS X Server for architectural firms, PR companies, design firms, non-profits, and a number of other companies that needed centralized control of digital assets, but didn't want to spend a lot of money to do so. Usually after setting up these servers, I rarely, if ever, need to go back and fix anything.

Unboxing the server (sorry, no unboxing movies this time...) unveiled a plastic-wrapped mini Server and the traditional power brick, along with a small box containing Mac OS X 10.6 Server and assorted manuals. While I didn't check for the usual Apple stickers, I did find the server software serial number cards that are essential during the setup process.

There was a bit of a holdup when I discovered that the server came with a mini-DVI to DVI adapter, while I had brought my old VGA display with me. Fortunately, one of the employees on-site had a monitor that was quickly pressed into service, and after plugging in the keyboard, mouse and power, the server quickly booted up.

Apple is marketing the Mac mini Server as "Easy to set up. Easy to run," and they're right on -- to a point.

Continue reading Working with the new Apple Mac mini Server and Snow Leopard Server

TUAW Working with the new Apple Mac mini Server and Snow Leopard Server originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MS software architect: Apps don't make the phone

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Desktops, Hardware, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store

This sounds an awful lot like sour grapes to me: Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software engineer, told a Professional Developers' Conference earlier this week that it wasn't the apps that would make or break the smartphone platforms. Of course, that's what most press and blog outlets seem to be focusing on (maybe because we all already know what the hardware is like -- apps change every day if not every minute, and the hardware only changes occasionally), but Ozzie says customers won't buy a phone for the apps. The biggest apps, he says, will eventually be available on every platform. To put it in as few words as possible, you'll be able to tweet from everything in the future.

And he's got part of a good point there: it's true, the major functionality of "killer apps" will be available across platforms. But Ozzie forgets (or is just ignoring) that that's already the case on desktops. While yes, you could claim that porting to the various smartphones is easier than porting to the various PC platforms, that doesn't avoid the fact that I can tweet, IM, email, browse, edit photos and movies, and do whatever else I want on both platforms as well. And for some reason (ahem, the hardware and the way both software and hardware are designed), I'd rather do them on the Mac. People love their iPhones not just for the apps but for the way it fits in their hand, and how just plain slick it is.

That's not to say that the smartphone platform war is over -- no way, it's only beginning, and we consumers will take innovative ideas wherever we can get them. But Ozzie saying the apps don't count (and echoing his fellow Microsofters in trying to separate Apple from their software strategy) seems to mean that even he thinks he's already lost that race -- they certainly do play a large part in which platform consumers eventually choose.

TUAW MS software architect: Apps don't make the phone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple releases updates improving printing, scanning, iSight cameras and QuickTime

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Accessories, Peripherals, Software Update

Over the past few days, Apple has been releasing updates for printer and scanner drivers in Snow Leopard, iSight cameras in LED Cinema Displays and QuickTime 7 for Windows.

First, Apple released printer driver updates for Snow Leopard for Lexmark printers and Brother, Canon and HP printers and scanners.

Next, Apple released a firmware update for the iSight camera that's built into the Apple LED Cinema Display. According to Apple, this firmware update corrects an issue with the built-in iSight camera on the LED Cinema Display where the camera may not be recognized by applications.

Finally, Apple released QuickTime 7.6.5 for Windows, which fixes an issue where applications weren't reliably loading libraries required by QuickTime at startup and the incorrect display of QuickTime movies embedded in a webpage using custom scale attributes.

All of these updates are available from the Apple Support downloads page and Software Update.

TUAW Apple releases updates improving printing, scanning, iSight cameras and QuickTime originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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1Password 3.0 out of beta

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Software, Snow Leopard

1Password 3.0 is available today for Leopard and Snow Leopard users, with a bunch of new features. Top of the list is 1PasswordAnywhere, which allows you to view 1Password data from any other computer --Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever -- with a modern browser like Safari or Firefox. (It should also allow you to use 1Password passwords on Mac browsers where the tool is not fully supported, such as Opera or Google Chrome.)

I've been using the 3.0 betas since Snow Leopard was released, and they have been completely stable. It is also possible to sync your 1Password keychain data over Dropbox so that all of your password information is available on all of your Macs. (Dropbox users: you may want to read this article about slimming 1Password backups if you store your 1Password backups on Dropbox. It dropped my backups from 21MB to 1MB.)

For those who aren't familiar with 1Password, let me tell you, it does more than just store passwords. It will generate them for you so you don't end up using the same lame password on a whole bunch of sites because it is the only one you can remember. All you have to remember is the password for 1Password (hence the name!). It will also manage multiple logins on the same page. My favorite feature? It will store credit card information and autofill forms for you with your billing/shipping address. I use this all the time, and whenever a website asks me if I want it to save my credit card information, I can say "No" and not have to worry about their security being compromised and my credit card information being exposed.

Another new feature is the Vault for storing software licenses, as well as file attachments. iPhone sync has been redesigned, and 1Password items can now be edited in the browser. (See all new features here.) This is a very worthy "new version" release packed with a lot of bang for your buck.

Which brings us to the "How much does it cost?" information. Agile is having a sale on upgrade licenses as part of the release:

If you purchased 1Password 2 on or after February 1, 2009 you get a free upgrade to 1Password 3. For bonus points: your current license should "just work" in the new version.
If you bought a license for any previous version of 1Password before February 1 (even if you got it through a bundle deal like MacHeist) single user license upgrades are $19.95, and Family 5-Pack licenses are $29.95. Note that this price is only good through November 30, 2009.
For new users can try a fully-functioning 1Password 3 demo for 30 days. New single licenses are $39.95, and Family 5-Packs are $69.95. A 30-day money back guarantee is offered.

1Password is an essential addition to my life on the web. I bought my upgrade as soon as it was available. 1PasswordAnywhere is going to solve the biggest hurdle to using secure passwords everywhere (since I sometimes have to use Windows). The folks at Agile are very responsive to support requests, both via email and on Twitter, so your money is going to support active Mac and iPhone developers.

If you haven't tried 1Password before, now is a good time to check it out.

TUAW 1Password 3.0 out of beta originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Llega Camino 2.0

Miguel López — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:27:14 -0800

Tras mucho tiempo en versión de pruebas, Camino (la alternativa a Firefox a la hora de usar un navegador basado en el motor de renderizado Gecko) al fin ha alcanzado la versión 2.0 final y ya está disponible para todos los usuarios.

Entre las principales mejoras respecto a la anterior versión destacan la mejorada gestión de tabs con posibilidad de reordenarlas a base de arrastrar y soltar, una vista previa de todas las páginas abiertas, un menú para mostrar todas las pestañas y soporte para el notificador Growl.

El navegador también estrena una protección mejorada contra spyware y phishing, así como da la posibilidad de bloquear todas las animaciones flash de una página permitiendo tener algunas excepciones guardadas en una lista. Camino es completmente gratuito y requiere de Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger o una versión superior del sistema para poder funcionar.

Vía | MacNN
Sitio oficial | Camino

Two App Store updates: Trillian ships, Google Earth 2.0 arrives

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:00:00 -0800

Filed under: App Store

There are two arrivals in the App Store of note. First, after a three month wait, the multiservice IM client Trillian is now available in the App Store [iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod touch.

We previously discussed the fact that Trillian was sitting in approval limbo with no word from Apple as to why the app was being delayed. As of today it is available for US$4.99. Cerulean Studios website has more information on features, and we will be reviewing the app soon, but we wanted to let you know that it was available (for iPhone/iPod touch devices running OS 3.0 or later).

Second, the 2.0 update to Google Earth for iPhone [iTunes link] is rolled out now. The major new feature in the app is the ability to overlay your own custom Google maps onto the geographic display in GE; the app also improves POI selection and adds a slew of new languages. Google Earth requires iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.0 or later, and it's free.

[Google Earth hat tip to Ars Technica]

TUAW Two App Store updates: Trillian ships, Google Earth 2.0 arrives originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T loses first round in battle over Verizon ads

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone

The Associated Press is reporting that an Atlanta Federal judge has denied an AT&T request to pull the Verizon 'there's a map for that' ads.

The judge has set a December 16th hearing to give AT&T another chance to make a case.

AT&T filed suit earlier this month looking for a temporary restraining order to stop the ads, and wanted a permanent injunction to halt them. The ads say that the AT&T network is not up to the quality or range of the Verizon network, and shows two coverage maps to make the point. AT&T claims the maps are misleading, and injures the company reputation.

Verizon has said the commercials are truthful and accurate.

The case pits the two communication giants against each other as they fight for increasing shares of the mobile market. AT&T has an exclusive on the iPhone, and that has brought AT&T an increasingly growing share of mobile customers.

Verizon was reportedly offered an exclusive on the iPhone more than 2 years ago but turned it down. There have been sporadic reports that Verizon would like to get the iPhone back when the AT&T contract expires, but with some Verizon ads targeting the iPhone as well as AT&T that looks to be increasingly unlikely.

TUAW AT&T loses first round in battle over Verizon ads originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Magellan car kit detailed at FCC filing

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0800

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch

That was fast. We just learned Magellan was going to offer a car kit for the iPhone and it has already hit the FCC. GPSTracklog.com has a detailed drawing of the new device, and it looks to be quite complete. Magellan has said the kit will be on sale before the end of the year, and even give the iPod touch full nav capabilities.

The car kit is supposed to allow any iPhone GPS app to work with it, so you're not limited to the Magellan app. It works in portrait or landscape mode, and has a speaker for hearing directions and also link to your iPhone for Bluetooth based calls.

The Magellan Roadmate app itself [iTunes link] has a boatload of good features, and we're anxious to get our hands on the app for a full test. Holiday travelers will have a lot of good choices for navigating to your destinations. Remember when we thought the plain old Google Maps app was cool?

Thanks to Rich for the tip.

[via GPSTracklog.com]

TUAW Magellan car kit detailed at FCC filing originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Earth for iPhone version 2.0

Scott Knaster — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:12:00 -0800

By Scott Knaster, Google Mac Team

There's a nice update to Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch available now. You can read all about it in the Google Mobile Blog and you can grab the update in the App Store.

iPhone cleared for sale in South Korea

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:00:00 -0800

Filed under: Apple Corporate, iPhone

Earlier this week, South Korean officials gave Apple the go-ahead to sell the iPhone in South Korea. At this point, the ball is in Apple's court; the iPhone can launch at any time.

It was way back in December of 2008 that The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) dropped requirements that handsets use the locally-built WIPI mobile platform, and April of 2009 before those changes went into effect. In September Apple received permission to sell the iPhone in South Korea and just this week were formally issued a business license.

Since then, Korean carriers KTF and SK Telecom have been in talks with Apple regarding distribution, but no details of an official deal have been announced. We'll keep you posted with additional details as they become available.

[Via Macworld]

TUAW iPhone cleared for sale in South Korea originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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App Store performing well in China despite hindrances

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:30:00 -0800

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Retail, Apple Financial, iPhone, App Store

Last August, China Unicom Ltd (CHU) announced a 3-year partnership to officially bring the iPhone to China. As predicted in July, the CHU's iPhone is sold with Wi-Fi disabled, in accordance with the Golden Shield Project. Additionally, 3GS hardware is still unavailable in China.

Despite these hindrances, handset and App Store sales have been doing well, AppleInsider reports. It's estimated that $1 million in legitimate app sales have been made this year, with a little over a month-and-a-half left in the quarter.

Black market phones are a huge problem in China, and it's been estimated nearly 2 million are in circulation, most of them jailbroken and running pirated apps. Apple hopes to sell 500,000 iPhones in China by the year's end.

Next year looks brighter: Wi-Fi regulations were relaxed back in May, and CHU hopes to have a Wi-Fi enabled model available soon.

[Via AppleInsider]

TUAW App Store performing well in China despite hindrances originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iAssociate: Mind mapping fun

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:30:00 -0800

Filed under: Gaming, Software, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, App Review

Last year, I was introduced to Funny Farm while working on a team project with my inlaws. I absolutely loved the idea of a puzzle that grew as you solved parts of it. The game works by associating words with their natural connections, e.g. "On the Farm" could inspire you to think of cow, chicken, and farmer (among other words). You then spin out those ideas to further connections. The chicken might be associated with rooster, hen, and egg, and so forth. So I was really excited to encounter iAssociate (iTunes link).

Developed by Fredrik Wahrman, iAssociate brings Funny Farm-style interaction to the iPhone. It's a really fun (and quite challenging) implementation with over a half dozen separate puzzles to work on, promising hours and hours of game play.

Each puzzle starts you out with a core idea. It's up to you to brainstorm ideas that fit around that idea, expanding each node into a wider set of associations. The word map is easy to scroll, and even though the iPhone display is quiter small, you can interact with a virtually large puzzle.

The game play is slightly different from Funny Farm in that instead of entering text into a central guessing area, you type text directly into nodes. If there are five nodes with six letters each, enter your guess into the central node, matching against all connected nodes. (You do get partial credit for guessing the right starting letters but the wrong word.)

I have only one real beef with iAssociate, which Wahrman promises me is being addressed in the next release. And that is the text size, particularly for the instructions. As you can see in the following image, helper overlay text is tiny. Speaking as a member of the graying community with weak eyes and a growing obsession with high fiber foods, iAssociate proved to me that I really need to look into bifocals or reading glasses. The text was headache-inducing small.

Beyond that, iAssociate was a blast to play. I enjoyed stretching my neurons a little and it makes a very good game for collaborating with friends. I do wish that Wahrman had built in some kind of multi-player feature, so groups could work on the puzzle together rather than be limited to pass-and-play. Hopefully that will be added in the future.

iAssociate costs $1.99 on the App Store. You can download a few versions (under the name "Associate This" (iTunes Link) as well, allowing you to try the game play before committing to buying the full product.

TUAW received a review promo code for this write-up.

TUAW iAssociate: Mind mapping fun originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OnLive claims to run gaming service on iPhone

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:30:00 -0800

Filed under: Gaming, Hardware, Rumors, Software, Odds and ends, iPhone

OnLive is a company that has been claiming to do the seemingly impossible -- they plan to set up a sort of "cloud gaming" console, where instead of hardware in individual houses (like we have now; you buy a console for your home), they'll have hardware over the Internet, and stream your game to you like watching television. All of the processing and coding will be done on a remote server, but with signals flowing from your controller, it'll seem like you're just playing Xbox at home. It all works in theory, but in practice, Internet connections aren't solid or stable enough to send commands and full HD video back and forth without enough lag to make things unplayable.

Still, without actually releasing a product so far, OnLive claims they can do it, and now they're claiming to do it on the iPhone as well. AppleInsider reports that at a recent event in New York, OnLive showed off the same game service running on "2 iPhones, a tv, and a computer" simultaneously, with gamers on all the devices able to communicate and watch each others' gameplay. CEO Steve Perlman admits it's a "tech demo," but doesn't go into detail on what that means (it could simply be a demo running separately on the devices, to show what it would be like, or I've heard of OnLive events where the server is sitting in the room next door). And of course, there's no date or information on an actual release yet.

OnLive's service definitely sounds possible someday -- as Internet connections get faster and hardware gets even cheaper, it's not a stretch to think we'll eventually move the heavy processor lifting to another location, leaving much tinier consoles and PCs taking up space on our desks and TV stands at home. But so far all it seems they've got is an idea (and the money that excited financiers have put into the project). We'll have to believe it works when we see it.

TUAW OnLive claims to run gaming service on iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Growl at 1.2, with 64-bit support

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:10:00 -0800

Filed under: Software, Freeware, Open Source

Ever since upgrading to Snow Leopard, the one remaining 32-bit niggle I have has been with Growl's preference pane. ~~Today, however~~,* Growl has released v1.2 of its famous application notification system with, among other things, 64-bit support.

While most of the updates in 1.2 are "behind the scenes," the biggest user-facing improvement is in the upgrade to 64-bit. What this means is that for Snow Leopard users, selecting the Growl preference pane does not require Preferences.app to re-launch in 32-bit compatibility mode.

In addition to the Growl preference pane, GrowlMail and GrowlSafari have been updated to 64-bit and are now Snow Leopard compatible. Further, the Growl framework has been re-written in Cocoa dropping support for the Carbon-based API.

You can see the full list of changes over at Growl's version history page. Growl users should have received a notification to download the update. Alternatively, you can head over to Growl's homepage and click "download" to get your ticket to the notification express.

*Several readers have pointed out that version 1.2, while the current version, wasn't released today but in fact has been out for several weeks. Our apologies.

TUAW Growl at 1.2, with 64-bit support originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This just in: MacBooks are more reliable than netbooks

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:30:00 -0800

Filed under: Portables, Odds and ends

Excel nerds rejoice! What you see above is the result of a laptop reliability study conducted by third-party warranty shop Squaretrade. The study looks at over 30,000 notebooks over the course of 3 years to determine the final reliability statistics. The results may not surprise you; for instance, netbooks fail 40% more often than premium laptops and Apple's MacBook line has above-average reliability.

The report itself is fascinating to read and the graphs are simple to understand. Also, it is nice to see an independent study confirm what I've known for years: HP makes low quality laptops. A note of personal interest, had I purchased a Vaio all those years ago rather than a Presario, I might never have switched to Mac.

[via Engadget]

TUAW This just in: MacBooks are more reliable than netbooks originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New auto-expanding compose boxes in Gmail for iPhone

Scott Knaster — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:47:00 -0700

By Scott Knaster, Mac Team

Gmail for iPhone has a new feature: auto-expanding compose boxes. This means that when you're writing a new message and you reach the bottom of the compose box, the box now gets bigger automatically. And you can now scroll through the whole message just by flicking – no need to use the magnifying glass any more.

For all the details, see this post on the Google Mobile Blog.

New face-tagging, iPhoto compatibility, & more Mac-friendly features in Picasa 3.5

Scott Knaster — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:00:00 -0700

By Todd Bogdan, Software Engineer

Today, I'm happy to announce that we're releasing Picasa 3.5, a new version of our free photo editing software. Since we launched it as a beta Labs product 9 months ago, we've been steadily improving Picasa for Mac. Now that it has almost all the same features as the PC version, we've decided it's time to remove the beta label once and for all.

If you haven't tried Picasa for Mac, the new version gives you the ability to add name tags to your photos so that you organize them by what matters most: people. Picasa groups similar faces and lets you easily add a name tag to dozens of photos at once. After you've tagged some photos with names, you can do creative things with your tagged photos, like quickly finding all the photos with the same two people in them, making a face collage for a friend, or simply uploading and sharing people albums.

In addition to name tags, Picasa 3.5 has integrated Google Maps so you can more easily geotag your photos. And using our redesigned import process, you can now import photos from your camera and upload selected photos to Picasa Web Albums in one easy step.

Of course, Picasa for Mac is also designed to "play nice" with iPhoto, taking a special read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library. It duplicates instead of changing files as needed, so your iPhoto library isn't ever affected when you use Picasa.

Picasa 3.5 is available in English (for now; more languages to come). You can download and try it today at picasa.google.com.

Improved Contact Sync in Snow Leopard

Scott Knaster — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:56:00 -0700

By Greg Robbins, Software Engineer

In May 2008, we told you how iPhone and iPod touch users could sync their Gmail contacts with Address Book in Mac OS X 10.5. Now with Mac OS X 10.6, syncing Gmail contacts is also available to users who do not have an iPhone or iPod touch. If your Mac is running Snow Leopard, you can turn on contact sync in the Address Book preferences.

The syncing is better, too: in Mac OS X 10.6, only contacts in Gmail's "My Contacts" group are synced, rather than all of Gmail's contact suggestions. And photos are now transferred as well, since sometimes you just need to put a face to a name.

Before turning on contact sync, it's a good idea to back up your Gmail and Address Book contacts. Our help page explains how to do that, and covers a bit more on how contact sync works.

WWDC 2009 journal (part 2)

Scott Knaster — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:05:00 -0700

Between the lines

Wednesday morning, I discovered the gym in the corporate apartments, and found that 20 minutes on the elliptical goes a lot faster when there’s no TV intruding.

Eating the minimalist breakfast provided at Moscone, I looked over a web page of WWDC-related parties. I think I’m probably too old to go to a club called “Harlot”. In fact, I’m even too old for the music they play before sessions; there's nothing that was written before the turn of the millennium. Several other folks commented that they didn’t think much of the music either. I told them about my neighbor’s bumper sticker: “It’s Not That I’m Old. Your Music Really Does Suck.”

Two guys at the breakfast table seemed to be forming a business on the spot. They weren’t too far along, though: one said to the other, “Let me give you my card”, ripped a page from a notebook, and wrote his contact info on it.

The session rooms were the same size as last year, but with more people trying to crowd in. The poor Apple engineers, who don’t get to go in until all the paying customers have, must have been even more frustrated this year. I wonder how Apple will handle the growth next year. Some rumors claimed that this is the last year at Moscone, that Apple has met some contractual obligation.

Despite the larger crowds, there seemed to be more power outlets in the sessions. You can often spot clusters of them from a distance — those seats are more densely filled. I went the whole week without having to pull the spare battery from my pack, a first.

Nerdvana!

For me this year, the most interesting part of the week was in the labs, not the sessions. Apple said that they brought in over 1,000 of their engineers, and I can believe it. Lots of attendees (n00bies and not) queue up for help from an Apple expert in the area they need help with. At one point, an iPhone performance engineer was helping one person, with four others (including me) in line with questions.

Attendees lined up for other things, too: to get good seats for sessions, for snack tables set up between sessions, for the fridges with Odwalla juice. It felt a little like the old Soviet economy: you see a line and you figure it must be worth waiting in. Of course, the Soviet strategy has its downside: you might find that the line turns out to be a bunch of Apple engineers waiting to see if a session has seats.

iPhones everywhere

Walking to Moscone, I noticed just how many iPhones there are in the city, and not just near the conference. Maybe this platform really is as big a deal as Apple keeps telling us. I think I saw more iPhones than Zipcars, which are also plentiful.

Earlier, I mentioned the importance of the labs for one-on-one access to helpful Apple engineers, but I should say that most sessions were good, too. Sitting for that many hours was tiring – when will they introduce premium seating? I’d pay more for Herman Miller – but mostly worth it. The only time it’s not worth it is when the talk is too elementary or too advanced. Alas, that does happen. Apple has a difficult challenge because attendees have experience ranging from near-zero up to decades of Cocoa development. It’s a balancing act, and Apple did it fairly well. At least as an old-timer I thought they did. I wonder what newcomers think. All those folks focusing on their laptops in sessions: are they tuned out, or just trying the examples from the session?

Even though some sessions miss the mark, the week as a whole is useful. I think the importance of this conference is demonstrated by a Googler I know who doesn’t work with Apple products enough to justify Google sending him, so he took a week of vacation and paid his own conference fee and travel expenses just to go.

Show’s Over

I confess I blew off the last day of the conference to go to my godson’s college graduation. In the BART station, waiting for a train to the airport, I chatted with someone who was also skipping the last day of his conference, some non-Apple thing. We agreed that the last day is usually the most boring, and that we felt sorry for anyone who has to speak on the last day.

Sitting on the flight home, I had to focus on work because, again, I had no window. I tried to go through all my notes. It was a frantic week, and I had notes in my laptop, in my iPhone, in emails to my team, on scraps of paper big and small, and it was good that I made those notes, because the conference feeds me so much information, I for one have to write it down or lose it. Now it was time to look at all the cool new things in the OS and the hardware and figure out how and when we can take advantage of them!

WWDC 2009 journal (part 1)

Scott Knaster — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:02:00 -0700

by Mike Morton, Google Mac Team

Every year, Google engineer Mike Morton becomes intrepid reporter Mike Morton as he ventures to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. Apple doesn't allow attendees to disclose the technical bits of the conference, so he writes about other important observations and details: general survival tips for the week, how to figure out in advance when the conference will be held, and insight into how WWDC is like the Soviet Union. Here's part 1 of Mike's annual report.

When’s vacation?

For one week this past June, it was unusually hard to get your AT&T cell phone to work if you got too near San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Over five thousand Apple developers came from around the world to learn about Apple’s latest news at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). Most of them had iPhones, and to make up for the few who didn’t, some folks brought more than one. You could usually place a call, but most of my incoming calls never rang.

I had planned my summer carefully, scheduling vacations and other events to make sure I wouldn’t miss the conference. Advance planning is difficult, because Apple doesn’t announce the dates very far ahead of time. My partner works as a counselor in an elementary school, so summer months are precious. This year, I thought of a way to help me plan: I guessed that the conference would again be in Moscone West, and watched Moscone’s web site to see when it was booked. When I saw something like an orthodontists' convention at Moscone West, overlapping even part of the week, I knew we could consider that week for vacation, not WWDC.

Of course, Apple is smarter (and more secretive) than that. They booked Moscone West way in advance, but had Moscone list it as “Corporate Event” until Apple announced the date. Luckily, I didn’t plan my vacation during that Corporate Event week. Now that I’ve spilled the beans, they’ll have to pick a new name to pre-book under. Probably “Orthodontists' Convention”.

Having planned my summer perhaps more thoroughly than needed, I sat on the plane to California, thinking about the usual rumors that precede any Apple event. (I had to think about the rumors: my seat on the 757 had no window for watching the Rockies go by.) There was lots of speculation about both iPhone and desktop models, but I was mostly curious about something else: would Steve Jobs address the troops, even briefly, weeks before his medical leave was scheduled to end?

I checked into my corporate apartment (my first time in one; it was, well, corporate) and walked 20 minutes to Moscone to register. To my horror, I had forgotten that they would hand me tchotchkes. Nothing much, just the usual t-shirt and backpack. But I was traveling for 15 days with nothing but carry-on luggage, with not a cubic centimeter of room to spare. An Apple staffer saw my face fall. Perhaps she figured I was thinking “yet another backpack”? She burbled, “This one’s a Brenthaven!” It is indeed a very nice pack, and I quickly found a new home for it on the west coast. Perhaps next year they’ll give out iPhone cozies instead and I’ll have room to bring one home.

Lining up

No, I didn't sleep under the bridge

On Monday I woke before my alarm, and got to Moscone a little after 5:30 a.m. I asked one of the first dozen people how early he had been there. “Midnight!” Thinking of Keith Laumer’s short story In The Queue, about people spending their lives in line, I shuddered and joined the back of the line, which was only about a block long at this point. This is closer than I usually get to the front of the line, and I thought I was just earlier than I usually am, but I learned that others thought a Phil Schiller keynote was less of a draw than a Steve Jobs. (Would we show up earlier if Apple invented an RDF generator?) I chatted with strangers and old friends. Some colleagues joined me (cutting in line in this way is generally accepted). An Apple staffer came by, counting us. I was number 269.

Various people walked by offering freebies: tech magazines, brochures, pastries, and other goodies. The only thing most of us wanted was coffee; I’m surprised nobody was out selling that. I heard that later in the morning that a bunch of bikini-clad promotional models (AKA "booth babes") came by. Perhaps it was too cold for them when I arrived. And why were there no bikinied booth boys? This was open-minded San Francisco, after all.

The keynote was good. Phil is no Steve, but he and the other speakers had a lot of interesting products to hold our attention. They threw plenty of numbers at us, especially the number of apps available, and dissed various competitors. Plus we had to pay attention to the keynote, because most of us couldn’t get WiFi to work in a room that crowded. Perhaps it worked better in the overflow rooms (or “coverflow rooms”, as my colleague Mark Dalrymple calls them).

Personally, I was most thrilled by the new iPhone’s video recording feature and the keyboard going landscape. Tethering sounds great, too, but the audience was very disappointed that Apple won’t say when it’ll work in the U.S., as you can observe when watching the keynote on the web.

Another thing that struck me: in the mobile world, hacking is going to be nastier than the desktop world. If Apple can Find Your iPhone, can a hacker find you? If you can unlock your Zipcar with your iPhone, how hard will it be for someone else to do the same? It's not that these two applications are any less secure than others, but the consequences of security problems will be different for mobile apps.

The keynote ended with no Steve Jobs cameo. I wasn’t the only one hoping. The New York Times Bits blog was headlined “New Software, New iPhone, New Steve?”. Oh, well, we found out later that he was back at work by the end of June.

Oh, one more thing: my best laugh of the day came in one of the afternoon sessions. An Apple designer named Max Drukman stood up to show us Dashcode and greeted us with “Good afternoon, developers … developers … developers”. His timing was perfect homage to Steve Ballmer’s famous greeting to another bunch of developers.

Everything’s digital

I don’t know how the show does it, but by Tuesday morning I feel like I’ve already been here all week. I’m struggling to recognize faces and remember names and, when I’m lucky, put them together. Why doesn’t Apple put the name badges in a bigger font?

One thing I don’t have to remember any more is which sessions I want to go to. It used to be that Apple would hand you a small paper schedule of the week, which was nearly useless because it had lots of To Be Announced sessions. This was because when they gave it to you on Sunday or early Monday, it couldn’t list sessions about technologies that were going to be introduced mid-Monday. This year they did something great: they gave us an iPhone app listing the sessions, including updates during the week! The app let you mark favorites, and even showed you where the sessions were in Moscone. It did almost everything I wanted, but perhaps next year’s version could help me coordinate with my colleagues, to help us decide who’s covering which sessions.

A highlight of the show was a huge wall display (20 large monitors) showing icons for 20,000 top iPhone apps. Each time an app got downloaded, its icon bounced a little and jostled its neighbors. The apps weren’t organized alphabetically, though. They were sorted by icon color, creating a big spectrum. A lot of developers spent a lot of time looking for their apps. Several of us agreed that Apple could have made money by charging a dollar to find your icon for you. I never did find the icon for Google Earth. Maybe it gets downloaded so often that Apple thought the constant bouncing would just be distracting. Yeah, that must have been it.

Strange sight for the day: An attendee walking around holding a Steve Jobs doll like this one. I doubt it's RDF-enabled.

Coming soon: part 2, featuring Nerdvana and more.

Google Latitude for iPhone

Scott Knaster — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:54:00 -0700

If you're an iPhone user, you might have been waiting for Google Latitude, our service that lets you see where your friends are, which has not been available on iPhone. Well, today we're releasing Google Latitude for iPhone and iPod touch as a web application running on iPhone's Safari browser. Now you can share your location with your friends, as well as control who gets to see it, all from your iPhone.

To start using Latitude, go to google.com/latitude from the iPhone's browser. You can even add a bookmark to your home screen for one-touch access. Check out the Google Mobile Blog to learn more.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Google Mac Team

Upload Your Photos, Download Your Albums

Scott Knaster — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:46:00 -0700

By Greg Robbins, Software Engineer

In December, the Picasa Web Albums Uploader added support for downloading a photo album to your Mac. We've recently updated the Uploader to include the ability to download all photos from all albums in your account. To start the download, sign in to your account with the Picasa Web Albums Uploader application and select the Existing Album tab. Holding down the Mac's Option key will change the title of the Download Album button to Download All. Then one click will bring all of your albums home.

This update also improves reliability of the uploader's iPhoto export plug-in. The uploader typically keeps itself up-to-date, but you can also get the latest version, 1.3.1, from the download page. Please let us know how it works for you in the Mac Uploader area of the Picasa Help forum.

Introducing Google Quick Search Box

Jason Toff — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:55:00 -0700

When most people think of Google, search comes to mind – and rightly so! Hundreds of millions of people have come to know and love Google.com as their starting point for searching the Internet. About 2 years ago, we introduced Google Desktop to extend Google search capabilities to your Mac and, earlier this year, we launched a developer preview of the next evolution of search outside the browser. Today, we're officially releasing this technology to all users as the Google Quick Search Box (or QSB for short).

With Google Quick Search Box you can search for information from just about anywhere. As you type, suggestions will appear that match your query, ranging from applications and local files on your computer, to web search and navigational suggestions, to items from your browser history and contacts - and the types of results you can get will only grow over time! Check out the screenshot below for an example of the types of blended results you might see.

Once you've found the result you want, we wanted you to be able to DO something with it. To find out what you can do, select a result and press the tab key or the right arrow on the keyboard. Some examples of actions include instant messaging friends, playing a song, or emailing a URL. Just like the data you can search over, the list of actions you can perform will grow over time!

The quickest way to launch the Google Quick Search Box is by pushing Control + spacebar at the same time (Google Desktop devotees will still be able to press Command twice to summon the box). If you prefer another keyboard shortcut to summon the Google QSB, you can change it in the Preferences panel.

As you use the Google Quick Search Box more, it will learn which results you are likely to want. The goal here is that we get you to what you're looking for as quickly as possible. In the above example, if you chose Google Calendar, the next time you search for "cal", Google QSB will reorder the results so that you don't have to arrow down to your desired choice. Instead, you can just type "cal" and press enter.

Last, but definitely not least, the Google Quick Search Box is extensible. This means that anyone can create a plug-in that enables the QSB to search over additional data or perform more actions on results. As an example, we really enjoy the Twitter plug-in . After enabling that bad boy, we can send tweets right from the QSB and then do a Google search right after!

The Google QSB has allowed us to do our daily tasks faster. If you want to give it a try to see it speed up your day, visit www.google.com/quicksearchbox/.

If you're a Google Desktop user and you want to gain this functionality, you can learn more about Google QSB and see how to upgrade in this help center article.

And please, let us know what you think!

Posted by Ryan Tabone and Karen Grünberg, Product Managers

Mac OS X Spelunking in PowerPC and x86 Assembly, part 2

Scott Knaster — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 04:53:00 -0700

By Avi Drissman, Google Chrome Team

(Note: this is another of our occasional extra-geeky technical posts. If this isn't your thing, don't worry; our usual non-technical stuff will be back soon.)

Welcome back. In our last post we went through a simple function that made calls to other functions, and touched on stack frames and parameter passing. This time let's talk about a different function. We'll focus less on the things we've seen, and more on some more advanced actions that this function does.

UpdateDockTitle

PowerPC

<+0>: mflr r0 // save linkage
<+4>: stmw r28,-16(r1) // stash r28, r29, r30, r31
<+8>: mr r30,r3 // save r3 (WindowData)
<+12>: bcl- 20,4*cr7+so,0x928d2bd4 <+16>
<+16>: mflr r31 // get ip in r31

Whoa... what?

Short story: <+12> is an unconditional branch-and-link.

Long story: On the PowerPC, instructions like bge, etc. are just aliases to a more primitive branch instruction, bc (branch conditional). In this case, the first parameter is 20 (0b10100), which indicates “branch always”. Since it's always going to branch, the second parameter doesn't matter, so it was set to all 1 bits (which translates to 4*cr7+so).

Why do this? Because we're going to need to access some PC-relative data, and the PowerPC chip has no PC-relative addressing mode. And the register move instructions can't access the PC register. Therefore we cheat in a way by taking an unconditional jump to the next address. Since it's a branch and link, the link register is filled with the next address (in this case, that equals the address just jumped to) which can be moved to a normal register.

Why branch-conditional with a condition “branch always”? The b opcode only provides absolute addressing. Only bc has relative addressing.

<+20>: stw r0,8(r1)
<+24>: stwu r1,-80(r1) // make stack frame
<+28>: addis r28,r31,3533
<+32>: bl 0x928d2c50 <_Z15GetTitleForDockP10WindowData>
<+36>: lbz r0,-3364(r28) // haul initialization boolean into r0

This is where intuition comes in. We're hauling in some random byte from a PC-relative address. (lbz is load byte and zero, which loads one byte from memory and clears the high bits.) What's byte sized? A Boolean (the Carbon type; GCC makes C++ bools 4 bytes). Why a Boolean? Probably a flag. And with the value of the byte gating the call to RegisterAsDockClientPriv, it's a safe bet that it's an initialization flag.

<+40>: mr r29,r3 // stash new title into r29
<+44>: cmpwi cr7,r0,0 // was initialized?
<+48>: bne- cr7,0x928d2c04 <+64> // if so, skip
<+52>: bl 0x9287f864 <_Z24RegisterAsDockClientPrivv> // else initialize
<+56>: li r0,1 // and set flag
<+60>: stb r0,-3364(r28) // as being intialized
<+64>: mr r3,r30
<+68>: mr r4,r29
<+72>: bl 0x928d2c68 <SyncPlatformWindowTitle> // call with (WindowData, new title)
<+76>: lwz r0,344(r30) // pull (WindowData + 344)
<+80>: andis. r2,r0,64 // and pull a flag bit out of it (minimized?)

More intuition here. r30 contains a pointer to the WindowData class instance, and we're accessing some word 344 bytes in. We don't care about the destination register (we don't touch r2 again this function) but don't miss the name of the opcode: “andis.” Remember that the period means to update cr0.

Once again, this is obviously a flag (bit-sized this time). But what does it mean? Context tells us that we only call CoreDockSetItemTitle when it's set. Thus, it's a safe guess that this is the is-minimized flag.

<+84>: beq- 0x928d2c38 <+116> // if not minimized, skip this step
<+88>: addi r1,r1,80
<+92>: lwz r3,196(r30) // load WID

How do I know that WindowData+196 is the CoreGraphics WID (CGWindowID; see CGWindow.h)? I used Quartz Debug to look at the window list for a sample app. The app only had one window, and the listed WID matched.

<+96>: mr r4,r29 // load new title
<+100>: lwz r0,8(r1)
<+104>: lmw r28,-16(r1) // tear down stack frame
<+108>: mtlr r0
<+112>: b 0x92b58ce4 <dyld_stub_CoreDockSetItemTitle>

Note that we're tearing down the stack frame twice. In this case we're tail calling CoreDockSetItemTitle so that it's as if our caller called them directly. This is equivalent to the code return CoreDockSetItemTitle(wid, newTitle). Note from the setup of r3 and r4 that we can deduce the parameter types. Can we figure out the return type, though? Not really. The calling code ignores it, so we can ignore it too.

<+116>: addi r1,r1,80
<+120>: li r3,0
<+124>: lwz r0,8(r1)
<+128>: lmw r28,-16(r1)
<+132>: mtlr r0
<+136>: blr

x86

<+0>: push %ebp // make stack frame
<+1>: mov %esp,%ebp
<+3>: sub $0x28,%esp
<+6>: mov %ebx,-0xc(%ebp) // save %ebx
<+9>: call 0x92e4bbe4 <+14>
<+14>: pop %ebx // IP > %ebx

We're doing the same trick here to get the PC into a register and I'm a bit stumped as to why. From what I know, the x86 has PC-relative addressing, and surely there's got to be a better way to get the PC into a normal register. Right?

<+15>: mov %esi,-0x8(%ebp) // save %esi
<+18>: mov 0x8(%ebp),%esi // WindowData > %esi
<+21>: mov %edi,-0x4(%ebp) // save %edi

This almost looks like it was compiled by a different compiler. In the previous function, edi and esi are pushed, and then the stack pointer dropped. Here, we create the stack space and then move the contents of three registers (edi, esi, and ebx). I suspect that things change once we also have to save ebx, though I don't know why.

<+24>: mov %esi,%eax // %esi (WindowData) > %eax
<+26>: call 0x92e4bc40 <_Z15GetTitleForDockP10WindowData>

Whoa. If we're calling a function we need to set the parameter via stack-relative addressing off esp. What's going on here?

The point of an ABI is that it's a documented way for functions to call each other. But if a function, say GetTitleForDock(WindowData*), is a short one that's not public and is only used under controlled circumstances, why worry about setting up the stack? In this particular case, GetTitleForDock happens to be a nine-instruction routine. Not worth the hassle of a stack frame, so it's reasonable to pass in the one parameter in eax.

<+31>: cmpb $0x0,0xd51a36c(%ebx) // test initialization boolean
<+38>: mov %eax,%edi // window title > %edi
<+40>: jne 0x92e4bc0c <+54> // if initialized, skip
<+42>: call 0x92df9fe0 <_Z24RegisterAsDockClientPrivv> // else initialize
<+47>: movb $0x1,0xd51a36c(%ebx) // and set flag as being initialized
<+54>: mov %edi,0x4(%esp) // new title (param 2)
<+58>: mov %esi,(%esp) // WindowData (param 1)
<+61>: call 0x92e4bc52 <SyncPlatformWindowTitle>
<+66>: xor %eax,%eax // clear %eax (noErr?)
<+68>: testb $0x2,0x159(%esi) // test flag (WindowData + 0x159) (minimized?)
<+75>: je 0x92e4bc35 <+95> // if not minimized, skip this step
<+77>: mov %edi,0x4(%esp) // new title (param 2)
<+81>: mov 0xc4(%esi),%eax // (WindowData + 0xC4) WID
<+87>: mov %eax,(%esp) // (param 1)
<+90>: call 0xa0a52ad1 <dyld_stub_CoreDockSetItemTitle>
<+95>: mov -0xc(%ebp),%ebx
<+98>: mov -0x8(%ebp),%esi
<+101>: mov -0x4(%ebp),%edi
<+104>: leave
<+105>: ret

Conclusion

Poking around in assembly isn't usually something you do every day. But whether you need it for debugging your own code or exploring someone else's, it's a skill that is definitely worth learning. PowerPC and x86 processors might have had a bit of a different history, but the code that's generated for either is certainly not as intractable as some suggest.

Where to go from here? Look around some more. Use otool -tV to dump binaries and see what they do. Use nm to see which symbols are exported from frameworks and watch how they work.

Go exploring, and have fun.

(Thanks to my editor, Scott Knaster, and to David Shayer, whose introductory session on PowerPC assembly at the legendary MacHack conference started me on this path.)

Google Chrome, Sandboxing, and Mac OS X

Scott Knaster — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:28:00 -0700

By Scott Knaster, Google Mac Team

Interested in news about Google Chrome for Mac OS X? Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along fine, and for the technically inclined, Jeremy Moskovich of the Google Chrome team has written a blog post explaining how the developers implemented sandboxing, an important Google Chrome feature. To find out more, please check out Jeremy's post.

Mac OS X Spelunking in PowerPC and x86 Assembly, part 1

Scott Knaster — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:11:00 -0700

By Avi Drissman, Google Chrome Team

(Note: this is one of our occasional extra-geeky technical posts. If this isn't your thing, don't worry; our usual non-technical stuff will be back soon.)

If you're a programmer, there are many reasons why you might want to go exploring the inner workings of Mac OS X. You might want to learn how how Apple achieves interesting effects. Or perhaps you're just curious about how things work. (We're all adults here, so I won't lecture you about the dangers of using private or undocumented interfaces in your apps.)

In any case, though, you need to know how to read assembly, either PowerPC (if you have an older Mac) or x86 (if you have anything recent). While there are good resources available to learn about reading PowerPC assembly for exploration, there are fewer about x86. Despite the present and future of the Mac being x86, it seems like people have lots of anxiety about having to work with it.

I think the problem is not a lack of documentation on x86 assembly, but a surfeit of it. Most of it is Windows- or DOS-centric, usually with syntax that doesn't apply (Intel syntax vs the AT&T syntax that GCC uses), and with the aim of teaching how to write it. But reading x86 assembly really isn't that hard. If all you want to do is learn how to read the code generated by GCC, it's probably just as easy as PowerPC.

The other day I was investigating how window minimization and window titles work. While exploring, I took notes of my discoveries. Let's touch on two functions, in both PowerPC and x86 flavors.

Before we begin, I'm going to assume that you're comfortable with assembly in general (though not necessarily with any particular one). If you have the latest developer tools, launch Shark (in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools) and in the Help menu you can access various ISA references. In addition, Apple has ABI documentation for both the PowerPC and x86. I'm going to go over each function twice (once for PowerPC and once for x86); feel free to skim the PowerPC version if you're accustomed to it. And finally, this is only for the 32-bit version of each platform; things change even more with 64 bits.

SetWindowTitleWithCFString

The trail always begins with a public call that uses the SPI that you want to figure out. In this case, I chose SetWindowTitleWithCFString because it has to somehow set the title of a window even if it's minimized. I went with Carbon because sometimes the dynamic nature of Objective-C with Cocoa makes tracing code harder.

PowerPC

<+0>: mflr r0 // save linkage
<+4>: stmw r30,-8(r1) // stash r30, r31
<+8>: mr r30,r4 // save r4 (new title)
<+12>: stw r0,8(r1) // make stack frame
<+16>: stwu r1,-80(r1) // make stack frame

This is the prologue of the function. The PowerPC doesn't have a dedicated stack pointer (convention is to use r1 for that), so the common way of implementing branches by pushing the PC onto the stack doesn't work. Instead, the PowerPC has a link register and a command bl to branch and put the old PC value into the link register. Thus, almost every function starts with mflr r0, to pull the old PC into a usable register. Then in <+4> we save off some registers that we're going to smash. Every function needs scratch registers to hold local variables, and usually the high-numbered registers are used. The stmw (store multiple words) instruction is useful for ditching many high registers on the stack. Then in <+12> we drop the old PC onto the stack and allocate 80 bytes on the stack.

A note on parameter passing. Integer-sized parameters (the only kind we'll be dealing with today) are passed into a function starting with r3 and going up through the registers. Return values are returned in r3. So we see that in <+8> we stick away the pointer to the new name in r30 (whose previous value was stored on the stack earlier).

<+20>: bl 0x92881384 <_Z13GetWindowDataP15OpaqueWindowPtr>
<+24>: li r0,-5600 // errInvalidWindowRef
<+28>: cmpwi cr7,r3,0 // if no window data, bail
<+32>: beq- cr7,0x928d2ae0 <+60>
<+36>: cmpwi cr7,r30,0 // if no string to set, bail
<+40>: li r0,-50 // paramErr
<+44>: beq- cr7,0x928d2ae0 <+60>
<+48>: mr r4,r30

This is where we must start making inferences as to what the code is doing. Fortunately, we have the symbols so it's not too hard. We see that we use the WindowRef as a parameter to a C++ function GetWindowData(OpaqueWindowPtr), as the WindowRef was passed in as r3 and r3 wasn't altered before the call. In addition, note that the function return value, being in r3, will overwrite the WindowRef value which wasn't saved in a high register. That's fine, as the WindowRef was just an index into a table and won't be needed further.

At this point we run some checks. We compare both r3 and r30 to zero, and if either are zero we jump to the end with r0 set to the appropriate error code. (The end of the function will move r0 into r3 for return.)

The PowerPC condition register has eight condition sets. Why are we using cr7 here? Probably because cr7 is volatile and we can get away with not saving/restoring it.

<+52>: bl 0x928d2af8 <_ZN10WindowData14SetTitleCommonEPK10__CFString>
<+56>: li r0,0 // return noErr
<+60>: addi r1,r1,80 // tear down stack frame and return
<+64>: mr r3,r0
<+68>: lwz r0,8(r1)
<+72>: lmw r30,-8(r1)
<+76>: mtlr r0
<+80>: blr

The rest is pretty simple. We call a member function WindowData::SetTitleCommon(CFString*), and then do common tear down. We restore the stack pointer, put the return value into r3, restore the registers, move the old PC back into the link register, and branch to the link register (blr), returning us to our caller.

x86

The PowerPC register file is really easy: r0, r1, r2 ... r31. x86 has fewer registers and they've historically had different roles (accumulator, base, source index, destination index, and so on). Seriously, forget about that. There are eight registers you care about. eax, ebx, ecx, edx, esi, and edi are all general-purpose registers. esp is the stack pointer. ebp is the frame pointer. That's it.

PowerPC assembly reads right-to-left (except for stores). x86 AT&T syntax in general reads left-to-right.

<+0>: push %ebp // make stack frame
<+1>: mov %esp,%ebp // make stack frame
<+3>: push %esi // stash %esi
<+4>: sub $0x14,%esp // make stack frame

x86 is stack-based. Parameters to a function are put at the top of the stack, and the rightmost parameters have the highest addresses. To execute the function, the call instruction was used. This instruction pushes the PC onto the stack, so even before we hit <+0> the parameters are four bytes above the stack pointer. In <+0> we save off the old stack frame value and in <+1> we establish our stack frame. At this point ebp is fixed for the entire function. In <+3> we save the old values of registers we're going to use, and in <+4> we allocate space on the stack.

This is a perfect example of an ideal stack frame. ebp is the frame pointer. It points (to the stack) at the old frame pointer. ebp+4 is the PC of the function that called us. ebp+8 is the first parameter passed in, ebp+12 is the second, etc. Immediately below ebp are the values saved from the registers, which will be restored before the return. And below that is a bunch of stack space used for either register spillage or calling subsequent functions. One interesting note is that rarely are parameters pushed onto the stack for a call. The stack pointer doesn't move once we make it past the prologue. We just set the memory right above esp (the stack pointer) and make the call.

<+7>: mov 0x8(%ebp),%eax // get WindowRef in %eax
<+10>: mov 0xc(%ebp),%esi // get new title in %esi

The parameters are passed on the stack. Since fiddling in memory is slow, we pull the values into registers. It's actually pretty analogous to how things go in PowerPC. There, lower registers like r3 are reused for parameter passing so important values are kept in the high registers. On x86 the parameters go on the stack and values are kept in registers when possible. Why eax and esi? Why not?

<+13>: mov %eax,(%esp) // put WindowRef on the stack
<+16>: call 0x92dfb8f6 <_Z13GetWindowDataP15OpaqueWindowPtr>

With the PowerPC, you can tell how many parameters a function has by seeing how many registers starting with r3 are loaded. Here, we just look at the register indirect addressing with esp.

<+21>: mov %eax,%edx // stick WindowData into %edx
<+23>: mov $0xffffea20,%eax // errInvalidWindowRef
<+28>: test %edx,%edx // if no window data, bail
<+30>: je 0x92e4bb04 <+54>
<+32>: test %esi,%esi // if no string to set, bail
<+34>: mov $0xffce,%ax // paramErr
<+38>: je 0x92e4bb04 <+54>

Return values come back from functions in eax, but otherwise this is pretty much the same. The only thing of interest to note is the clever use of the peculiar register structure. In <+23> the constant 0xffffea20 is loaded into eax. But on <+34> the constant 0xffce is loaded in ax. But since ax is just an alias for the lower 16 bits of eax, the upper half of the word is left as 0xffff and we get the full constant 0xffffffce in eax. Why do this? Because loading a 32 bit constant takes 5 bytes while loading a 16 bit constant only takes 4.

<+40>: mov %esi,0x4(%esp) // load new title as param 2
<+44>: mov %edx,(%esp) // load WindowData as param 1
<+47>: call 0x92e4bb0c <_ZN10WindowData14SetTitleCommonEPK10__CFString>
<+52>: xor %eax,%eax // return noErr

Same stuff as before. The one note is the zeroing of eax with an xor. Just a fancy trick as the generated code is faster and smaller than the equivalent mov $0x0,%eax.

<+54>: add $0x14,%esp // tear down stack frame and return
<+57>: pop %esi
<+58>: leave
<+59>: ret
<+60>: nop
<+61>: nop

The mirror image of the stack frame creation.

That's one function down and one left to go. Next time, we'll take a look at a function that behaves a little differently than this one did.

Google Spreadsheets power gFlashPro Flashcards for iPhone

Scott Knaster — Sat, 23 May 2009 08:28:00 -0700

Guest post by Mike MacDonald, Founder and CTO, gWhiz LLC

gFlashPro, the first offering in the iPhone App Store from our company, gWhiz, is a popular mobile flashcards application used by students of all ages to study on the go. Google Spreadsheets provide a key element of the gFlashPro architecture.

To create a gFlashPro flashcard set, students or teachers open up a new Google Spreadsheet and put questions in the first column, and answers (including multiple choice) in the adjacent columns. Meta-data (set description, search tags, runtime options, and so on) isn't required, but can be entered into a separate worksheet as simple key-value pairs. Then, on the iPhone or iPod touch, from within gFlashPro, users are given a list of the available flashcard sets (i.e., spreadsheets) for easy download. Alternatively, they can select flashcard sets from our catalog: a searchable repository of thousands of shared flashcard sets covering virtually any subject.

Once selected, the card set (spreadsheet) is downloaded into gFlashPro and presented to the user for mobile study and quizzing.

A few reasons we chose to use Google Spreadsheets:

We didn't want to have to write our own server-side flashcard creation code. If we "rolled our own", it would have been code that we'd need to maintain going forward. Using Google Spreadsheets allowed us to leverage the strength of Google's development team, the many built-in functions (e.g., importing .xls), and in the future, Google Gadgets.
Google's server infrastructure reliability is far better than anything we could possibly afford.
User authentication is handled by Google. While this is not a huge problem, it's just one more thing that our small development team doesn't need to deal with.

And a few lessons learned:

There are document limits for each account. In our case, the number and storage of documents is distributed across many thousands of users. Having a shared document in your account doesn't count against that limit.
While the Objective-C libraries for connecting to Google Docs are incredibly powerful, they are also fairly heavyweight for content-heavy apps like ours. We found that flashcard sets with more than 300 rows would blow out memory on the iPhone because of the substantial number of objects being created for each spreadsheet cell. One alternative we're considering in another application is to write our own XML parser to exclusively process spreadsheet data coming from Google.

Any questions? Just email us at info@gwhizmobile.com.

Updated Gmail and Calendar for iPhone

Jason Toff — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 03:56:00 -0700

Today I'm happy to announce that we've updated Gmail and Calendar for the iPhone. We've completely re-architected the code so you get more consistent performance, refreshed the user interface so it's easier to perform batch actions, and most importantly, laid the foundation which will allow us to iterate quickly and provide you with performance improvements and new features in the future.

To find out more about how you can get all the Gmail goodies, like threaded conversations, search, starring and labels, all on your iPhone, head on over to the Google Mobile Blog. Or, if you're convinced and want to try it out now, go to gmail.com on your iPhone. Click the Calendar link at the top to access Google Calendar. Please note that only iPhone OS 2.2.1 or higher is supported. We're rolling out this release over the next few days, so if you don't see the updated user interface, check back soon.

Posted by Deng-Kai Chen, Google Mobile

Using Google APIs in an iPhone App

Jason Toff — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:20:00 -0700

Guest post by Tom Saxton, Idle Loop Software Design

In September, my small software company shipped our first iPhone app, a grocery list program called Grocophile. One of the most common requests from our users was the ability to exchange data over the Internet. Greg Robbins of Google's Mac team suggested that the Google Docs API might be useful, so I jumped in and took a look.

This turned out to be a great way to give our users access to free Internet storage, letting them back up their data and share it across multiple devices. To return the favor, I'd like to share my experience: the learning process, getting the code working on the iPhone, and how I found what I needed from what Google generously provides.

Greg helped me get started by pointing out some online resources. I started with the Objective-C library's overview slideshow. Then I read the Objective-C client introduction, which explains how to get the Google Data APIs library into an iPhone Xcode project. Finally, I downloaded the library sources.

There's a sample app that you'll get with the sources that shows how to talk to Google Docs. The file of interest is DocsSampleWindowController. Start by looking at the two methods "uploadFileAtPath:" and "saveSelectedDocumentToPath:", as those demonstrate how to upload and download files, respectively.

The code is part of a Mac OS X Cocoa app, so it has some Mac-specific code intermingled with the GData code. To bring it into an iPhone project, I trimmed out the Mac user interface stuff, and defined a class and a protocol to create code that should work from any Mac or iPhone application.

The library requires several steps to upload or download a file. First, you create a service object that encodes the user agent that identifies your application, along with the username and password for the account you want to access. Then use that object to request a document list feed, which is the list of documents in the user's account.

Retrieving the document list feed both validates the account credentials and captures information you'll need to either upload or download files. The feed contains the URL for downloading each document. To download, you can use any http call such as NSURLConnection or the library's GDataHTTPFetcher. The feed also has the URL for uploading new document entries.

The networking operations are asynchronous, so my encapsulating object has methods for starting an upload or download, then uses an Objective-C protocol to inform the controlling object of the progress and status at completion.

I've been calling these document objects files, but Google Docs isn't a file system. It's much more like a web publishing system: a collection of objects with associated metadata including title, creation and modification dates, and so on.

The first difference from a file system that I encountered is that you can have multiple different files with the same name. So, if you just upload a new version of a file the same way you uploaded it the first time, you'll get a second document with that same name. To avoid that, search for the document entry with the title that you want to upload to. You can then request an update operation instead of an insert.

The second issue I discovered is that much like when you post to a blog, what you upload can get transformed to match the type of document that is holding the data. When you download the same object, you get something different than what you uploaded. For example, I uploaded a plain text document (specified by MIME type "text/plain"), but when I downloaded that same object I found the text wrapped in a bunch of HTML that makes it display well on the Google Docs web page. Our app's files are UTF-8 XML files created by NSKeyedArchiver. Google Docs fails if you try to specify a MIME type of "text/xml" and totally mangles the document contents if you specify "text/plain". That is not a big surprise because there's not currently a way to specify that the text is encoded UTF-8, and the content gets stuffed into an XML file for the journey to the server.

I solved this issue by converting my files into a plain ASCII encoding, wrapping that in HTML which explains that the file our users see in the Google Docs web page is a Grocophile data file and isn't user editable, and uploading that as "text/html". When I download this file, the HTML does pick up a bunch of Google additions, but it's a simple matter to scan the file to find my encoded document contents.

Different apps will have different needs for storing their documents. If your app can store and retrieve its data in text, HTML or a spreadsheet, then Google Docs will work well for you. Grocophile's data is basically a relational database with a series of tables and joins keyed off of UUIDs. I could represent the data in text, but it would be fragile and not appropriate for end-user editing. Even though our data won't be editable within Google Docs, there's still plenty of value in being able to back up, restore and merge data sets from Grocophile.

To help out other Mac and iPhone developers, I've published my code for using the library in an iPhone application as an open source project. If you have any questions, or suggestions for improvement, please contact me at idleloop.com.

Health and Vigor in a Google Data APIs Library Update

Jason Toff — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 05:22:00 -0700

Posted by Greg Robbins, Software Engineer

If there's a hole in my memory, it's right where the date of my last tetanus shot should be stored. Luckily, Google Health promises to help us keep track of the many medical details in our lives that would otherwise be lost. But stored information only matters if it's accessible when and where we need it. Independent developer Ford Parsons' application Health Cloud provides access to health profiles quickly and conveniently, for iPhone owners anywhere.

Health Cloud is the first released app to use the Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library's new support for the Google Health Data API. The recent version 1.7 release of the library also offers a variety of performance and memory improvements for iPhone and Mac developers. It still provides easy access to Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, and many other Google services.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you can download Health Cloud today to keep your Google Health account handy. Or if you're a Mac or iPhone developer, check out the Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library open-source project page for an introduction to adding Google services to your products.

What's New for iPhone

Jason Toff — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:11:00 -0800

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

Over the past few weeks, a number of enhancements have been made to Google's offerings for the iPhone. We wanted to highlight some of those improvements here.

Google Sync Beta
Google Sync allows you to get your Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar events to your phone. Once you set up Sync on your phone, it will automatically begin synchronizing your address book and calendar in the background, over-the-air, so you can attend to other tasks. Sync uses push technology so any changes or additions to your calendar or contacts are reflected on your device in minutes.

Learn more on the Google Mobile blog or try Sync at m.google.com/sync.

Tasks
Tasks lets you easily create and manage to-do lists in Gmail and on your iPhone. While on the go, you can view tasks, add tasks, and mark them as completed. These changes are automatically reflected in Gmail. Using your iPhone, you can also add, edit, and delete entire lists.

Learn more on the Gmail blog or get started with tasks at gmail.com/tasks.

Google Book Search
Over 1.5 million public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) are now available for perusing on your iPhone. You can search for a title, author, or subject. Or you can browse the list of "Featured books" and various categories like business, the classics, travel, and more.

Learn more on the Google Book Search blog or start reading at http://books.google.com/m.

Edit Docs
Last week, we launched new capabilities to Google Docs for your iPhone that allow you to add new rows, edit existing cells, sort by columns, and filter by terms. Now you don't have to wait until you get to your computer to update a spreadsheet.

Learn more on the Google Docs blog or start editing at m.google.com/docs.

Search Without Effort: The Quick Search Box

Scott Knaster — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:00:00 -0800

By Nicholas Jitkoff and Dave MacLachlan, Google Mac Team

One of our goals at Google is to make your search experience as fluid as possible. While much of our work is focused on Google.com, we're trying to make it just as easy to search outside your browser.

For the last year, we have been working on a new, open-source quick search box. Today, we are releasing our first developer preview for the Mac.

This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come.

If you are interested in participating in our experiment, head over to the Google Code site and give it a try. We are eager to involve users in the development process and will be posting new builds frequently. Over the coming months we'll be posting a few articles about the architecture and interaction we are exploring, and we look forward to your feedback.

YouTube Upload Booth

Jason Toff — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:58:00 -0800

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

In addition to the Earth Surfer application, our Macworld booth also features a YouTube Upload Booth this year. Several famed YouTubers stopped in the booth and used Quick Capture to upload their videos to the web. For instance...

Ijustine jumped in the moment she saw it.

Chris Pirillo had some..ahem..difficulties at first but was able to make it work.

And there were many more excited people ready to try it out! Check out the video below to hear more about the YouTube booth:

Surf Through Google Earth

Jason Toff — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:39:00 -0800

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

This year for Macworld a Google engineer, David Phillip Oster, wrote a fun application that allows you to surf through Google earth. Watch the video below and read more about it on the Google Lat Long blog.

Macworld Has Arrived

Jason Toff — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:05:00 -0800

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

After months of anticipation, Macworld is finally here! We put the finishing touches on our booth yesterday and look forward to visits from many of the expected 40,000+ attendees.

More than 100 Googlers across several teams-- including Picasa, Mobile, Geo, & YouTube-- will be staffing our booth throughout the four days of the expo (from now until Jan. 9). We have plenty in store for our booth and plan to update this blog regularly-- so stay tuned.

If you're planning to attend, we hope you'll stop by to say hello! And for those of you who can't make it or aren't in the area, we invite you to visit google.com/macworld to explore Google's offerings for Mac and the iPhone.

Picasa's Macworld Debut

Jason Toff — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:15:00 -0800

By Stuart Morgan, Software Engineer

Last year we had a blast at Macworld demonstrating all our Mac products, but as Mac users, we also know that the best part of Macworld is new product announcements. This year, we're getting in the spirit by making a little announcement of our own: we're happy to say that Picasa, Google's photo management software, will be joining the ranks of the free Mac OS X applications from Google!

If you've never tried Picasa before, it's a program that helps you manage, edit, and share your photo collection. It works especially well with Picasa Web Albums, Google's free photo-sharing site, so it can help you manage the photo albums you've shared online with friends and family as well as the photos on your computer. In addition to photo editing tools, the Picasa client includes features like automatic web sync, fast and simple sharing, collage making, and simple movie editing. And on the web side, Picasa Web Albums offers unique features like name tags, which help you automatically organize your photo collection based on the faces in each picture.

You'll notice that Picasa for Mac is still in Google Labs and has a "beta" label attached—a few minor features like geotagging and webcam capture aren't functional yet, and we plan to sand and polish some parts of the user interface to make sure Picasa feels right at home on Mac OS X. Still, we think you'll find plenty to like in this first beta, and we're excited to get this release out into the hands of the Mac community at this year's Macworld! We're looking forward to making Picasa for the Mac even better, and to hearing what you think — Picasa engineers will be at the Google booth's demo stations throughout Macworld, and we always listen to the feedback on our Help Forum.

There's plenty more to say about Picasa on the Mac, so check out the video below, swing by the Google Photos blog to learn more and download a copy to play with—and of course, come see us at Macworld!

One Week Until Macworld

Jason Toff — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 06:00:00 -0800

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

With one week until the start of Macworld, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what to expect at Google's booth.

At any given time, there will be plenty of Googlers at our booth available to answer questions about any Google software made for Mac or iPhone. Demo stations will be placed throughout the booth so that attendees can try out Google software on their own, and in many cases, talk to the people who helped create that software.

Additionally, there will be larger presentations in the booth each day covering specific topics in more depth. Our goal is to make these presentations as interactive as possible, so we are hoping for feedback from Macworld attendees in the booth on the topics they'd like to see discussed.

We are very excited about Macworld and hope that you'll stop by our booth if you're in the area!

Google at Macworld Expo

Scott Knaster — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:37:00 -0800

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

I'm thrilled to officially announce Google's presence at the upcoming Macworld Expo (taking place January 5-9, 2009). We had a great time last year (see picture of our booth below), and we're excited to share our range of offerings for Mac and iPhone with everyone who can make it this year.

With exactly one month to go, we are busy preparing fun demonstrations for the 50,000+ expected Macworld attendees. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for previews of what to expect this time.

And if you'd like to come see us and don't yet have a pass to Macworld, use this link and code for 20% off the Expo Hall pass.

Bringing Your Photos Home

Scott Knaster — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 06:34:00 -0800

By Greg Robbins, Software Engineer

The Picasa Web Albums Uploader makes it easy to share your photos and videos with friends and family. But occasionally you may want to use it in reverse, and download an album back to your computer. If you've ever had a hard drive crash or had to work from a new computer, you know how important it is to get your photos back.

The latest release of the Picasa Web Albums Uploader application makes downloading photos as easy as uploading. After you sign in to your account, select the Existing Album tab, choose an album and click the Download Album button. You'll soon have copies of your photos in a new folder on your Mac.

If your copy of the Picasa Web Albums Uploader hasn't updated itself to the latest version, 1.3, you can get it now from the download page. The album download feature is available only in the Picasa Web Albums Uploader application, not in the iPhoto Exporter. This release downloads photos, but not yet videos. You can give us feedback about the uploaders at the Picasa Help forum.