Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

Apple lost its main iPhone and iPod developer

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

papermasterSenior Vice-President and Head of the Devices Hardware Engineering Department of Apple, Mark Papermaster, left the company, reported the New York Times.

Mr Papermaster came to Apple from IBM in 2008. In the new place he was responsible for iPod and iPhone development.

According to some observers, the reason of Mr Papermaster’s resign was the notorious problem with the iPhone 4 antenna, which made Apple start giving away free cases for this smartphone.

The former Vice-President didn’t comment his resign. The speaker from Apple, Steve Dowling, confirmed Mark Papermaster’s resign having mentioned that his duties passed to Bob Mansfield, Senior Vice-President and Head of the Mac Hardware Engineering Department.

By the way, Mr Papermaster didn’t take part in the conference dedicated to the ‘case distribution’. Steve Jobs, Bob Mansfield and the main operation director Tim Cook carry his can.

By the way, iPhone application development is probably the most rapidly developing trend in the sphere of mobile application development at present. So any change in the management may influence it.

Analytics: Android will overcome iPhone by popularity in 2012

Monday, August 16th, 2010

In 2012 Android will become more popular than iPhone. The main reasons for this are its attractiveness among other manufacturers and the modeliphone vs android of distribution.

According to the analytics from iSuppli, the number of Android smartphones will exceed the number of Apple smartphones by 2012. iSuppi predicts that by the end of the year 2012 the market share of Android will be 19.4% on the world’s market of smartphones in comparison with 2.7% in 2009. The market share of iOS from Apple will increase from 13.8% to 15.9% for the same period. By 2014 the Android sjare market will increase to 22.8% and the iOS share will reduce to 15.3%.

The future domination of Android is due to the different model of the platform distribution. iOS is a proprietary solution unavailable for third party producers. Android is an open OS available for everybody. By now it has been supported by NTS, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Acer, Samsung, LG and other companies while iPhones are produced only by Apple.

By 2014 the high quality content and mobile application will bring more than $100 bln. It’s a very promising and profitable market not only for smartphone producers but also for mobile apps developers who create apps for Android.

Apple informed about an all-time high quarterly proceeds and profits

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

ipadApple presented its quarterly report for the third financial quarter ended at the end of June, which was so expected by specialists. As it was expected, the report turned out to be positive due to high sales of iPhone 4 smartphones and new iPad devices (at the same time, the demand for products from iPad application developers has also increased). Moreover, the company stated that PC and laptop users have started purchasing new products from Mac more actively.
In the third quarter the net profit of Apple reached 3.25 bln dollars or 3.51 dollars in comparison with 1.83 bln dollars or 2.01 dollars for a share a year before. On average the experts were expecting the net profit of Apple at the level of 3.11 bln dollars.
According to the head of the company Steve Jobs, till the end of this year Apple will concentrate on the mobile developments with low marginality in order to expand its users’ base. Jobs noted that now all key products including Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod are sold either at the expected level or a bit higher. Also the head of the company promised a few more product innovations till the end of the year.
In the reporting period the proceeds of the company increased by 61% and reached the all time high level of 15.7 bln dollars having exceeded the expectations of analytics at 14.7 bln dollars. According to Apple, the quarterly proceeds at 15.7 bln dollars are the highest result for the whole 30-year period of their presence at the market.

Google recorded 160,000 activations of Android devices a day

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

google-androidOnce again Google shared the statistics of the growing popularity of the Google Android platform. According to it, 160,000 devices pass daily activation (4.8 mln a month).

Activation means the input of user’s data from the Google services after which the regular Android OS service clients start working (synchronization of the address book, calendar, letters, Android Market and so on). This figure has increased by 60%.

The amount of software offered by Android apps developers is also growing – from 50,000 up to 65,000 applications as of the end of June. According to the Google’s management, the given dynamics can be considered positive and shows that the platform is welcomed by users. Moreover, Google is sure that the Android OS will become the top mobile OS and will probably replace Windows if we compare it with the PC market.

It should be noted that Android communicators are really sold very actively – now quarterly about 15 mln of them are sold and for the first quarter of 2010 were sold about 54 mln devices, according to the analytics from Gartner. Against this growth, the success of Apple is very illustrative – thus, according to some statistics, the number of people wishing to buy iPhone 4 on the first day reached 600,000 people.

Only one day to order iPhone 4

Monday, June 21st, 2010

iPhone4After starting taking preliminary orders for iPhone 4, Apple and AT&T encountered some technical problems on their websites because of the boom from the side of buyers, reported Reuters. Apple even had to disconnect the hotline because of the excessive number of phone calls.

Many buyers who were trying to place an order for a new iPhone which is going to be on sale from June 24 got the error about the impossibility to execute the operation at the given moment with the request to try later. By the evening the AT&T site gave the information that the whole volume of iPhone 4 reserved for preliminary orders for June 24 had been realized. Now the operator is accepting orders for the next days after the official launch of sales.

The desire to become one of the first owners of iPhone 4 was so strong that some users who hadn’t managed to place a preliminary order online rushed to the AT&T store and subscribed manually. Among the customers, there were professionals who specialize in iPhone programming, because they will have to work actively with the new device. The company announced that it is the result of ‘incredible interest’ to the new smartphone and added that for its whole history they hadn’t seen such a demand.

Last year the sales of iPhone 3GS reached 1 mln items in the first 3 days. iPhone 4 is expected to reach this mark even earlier since the number of preliminary orders made at AT&T is much higher in comparison with the smartphones of the previous generations. The price of the smartphone in the USA is $199 for the version with 16 Gb memory and $299 with the version with 32 Gb

Hackers have cracked iPad

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

hacked_iPadThe AT&T company has found a gap in the iPad security system. The owners of the latest Apple’s gadget have sent the corresponding notification about the leakage of e-mail addresses. The group of hackers announced that it was able to crack users’ devices connected via the authorized wireless access. AT&T claims that the given vulnerability has already been eliminated.

According to Gawker, the hackers got the personal information of 114,000 iPad owners. Among them there are dozens of managers of leading companies, show biz celebrities, politicians. In particular, according to the preliminary information, the e-mail addresses of top-managers of New York Times Company, Dow Jones, Condе Nast, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corporation, HBO, Hearst have come to the hands of the hackers. The account of Chief of the biggest helicopter squadron B-1 William Aldridge has been also cracked.

AT&T is an exclusive partner of Apple. One of the business partners had reported the vulnerability in the security system several days before the incident.

Probably, in future iPad application developers will offer in their products additional functions for protecting personal information.

Autorotation for interfaces of iPad apps

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

The majority of iPhone and iPod touch applications support portrait orientation only. Many web developers haven’t even thought about adding landscape orientation where it is really necessary. Apple isn’t an exception: it didn’t realize the support of landscape orientation in the important system programs of iPhone OS 2.x (the company has corrected its mistake in iPhone OS 3.x).

With iPad arrival the situation has changed. Apple obliged all iPad apps developers to support the both types of orientation in iPad applications. Of course, there can be exceptions, for example, games. But applications that don’t have fixed (functional) binding to the orientation must be user-friendly in any position of the device.

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iPad_orientation_2

There are no difficulties with simple interfaces. The necessary attribute autoresizingMask which describes the changes of the frame is assigned to the UIView class objects. This method is not applicable to complicated interfaces.

Smooth and pleasant autorotation of the application interface can be performed with the help of the layoutSubviews method. The detailed information about this method can be obtained at iPad Programming Guide.

The world lined up in queues waiting for Apple iPad

Monday, May 31st, 2010

ipad_salesA 19-year-old boy from Tokyo (Takechiyo Yamanaka) who wanted to be one of the first iPad owners in Japan took his place before the Apple store almost 2 days before the start of sales. In the morning of the 28th of May, the about 1,2 thousand people formed a queue of 800 meters. A similar situation was usual also in other countries.

And it’s not a surprise. The previous Friday was the day when Apple started iPad sales in nine new countries. An unprecedented boom was at the flagship Apple store in Tokyo.

The price for the model that supports Wi-Fi and 16 GB embedded memory was 48,800 yen in Japan (or about $537). For comparison: the same model can be bought in the U.S. at the price of $499. According to independent experts of RBC Capital Markets, about 476 thousand of Apple iPads will be sold in Japan.

The queues in Sydney (Australia) were not as long as in Tokyo was, but their length was also impressive — about 200 meters. A 22-year-old Rahul Koduri was the first customer there. The cost of the basic device version was 629 Australian dollars, or approximately $533. Today iPad is also available for sale in Italy, Germany, France, Canada, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

According to Apple representatives, iPad apps developers have created about 5 thousand applications for this tablet PC + 200 thousand of other applications for iPhone and iPod touch that are also available for iPad users.

Long-awaited multitasking for iPad in new iPhone OS 4

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

iPhone_OS_4_iPad_apps_developments

Apple announced a new version of mobile operating system iPhone OS 4 almost two weeks ago. Mobile apps developers state that iPhone OS 4 has about a hundred innovations. Let us consider the most significant of them.
First, we should mention long-awaited multitasking. However, it can be used only in iPad, iPod Touch, and the third-generation iPhone 3GS. Of course, companies that specialize in iPad apps developments will appreciate this innovation. But hardware of old devices, according to Steve Jobs’ words, cannot provide this feature.

In addition, the new OS 4 have introduced several additional services: a game center, iAd and iBooks. Game Center is a social network that will unite all who like multiplayer games. The next in the list is iAd, it’s an advertising service, through which developers of free mobile software will be able to receive additional benefits displaying advertisements.

Moreover, we would like to mention such features as possibility to create folders in user menu, to set custom wallpaper as background and additional features for text formatting.

iPhone OS 4 will be available for download this summer, when the next generation iPhone is released.

Apple is ready to place your iPad applications in AppStore

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Apple Inc. is accepting requests from mobile apps developers who want to be the first in AppStore with their applications for iPad. As AppleInsider has reported, all comers can send their applications before the 27th of March, 2010. And all the applications received later will be posted in the online store shortly after the start of iPad retail sales.

Apple stresses that all proposed for consideration software should be created using iPhone SDK 3.2 beta 5. iPad apps developers are invited to download their applications with iTunes Connect.

As we know, iPad can work with iPhone applications. However, in this case programs will either be stretched to fit the dimensions of iPad screen, losing image quality, or will run in a separate small window. All the special applications for iPad will be devoid of these disadvantages.

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