Tag Archives | Apple iOS

The WWDC Keynote is a Go–and It’s About Software

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 31, 2011 at 11:04 am

We pretty much knew this already, but now it’s official: Apple’s WWDC event next week will begin with a keynote on Monday. The big news at the keynote will be OS X 10.7 Lion. And the next version of iOS. “And iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.” Steve Jobs will host the keynote. (Okay, that part we didn’t know.)

Last week, one site said that it had learned that Apple’s UK PR team was urging journalists over there to make the trek to San Francisco for the event. That site came to the “obvious conclusion” that Apple must have been planning to announce the next iPhone at the keynote. I never understood what was so obvious about that conclusion. New hardware is neat, but the biggest opportunity for any phone or tablet platform to make great leaps forward lies in in its software and services. So WWDC has the opportunity to be a huge deal even if not a single new device is announced.

I’ll have more thoughts between now and Monday morning, but in the meantime: What features would you like to see in Lion, the next iOS, and/or iCloud?

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Apple to Lodsys: Flake Off

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 23, 2011 at 3:18 pm

Last week, a company named Lodsys sent letters to a bunch of iOS developers saying their use of iOS features were violating its patents, and demanding royalty payments. Now Apple has sent a letter to Lodsys saying that the license Apple holds to the patents in question covers third-party developers as well. The story doesn’t end here–the companies which Lodsys is threatening still have to choose between coughing up money and facing protracted, expensive legal trouble-but Apple’s intervention is an encouraging development. I’d like to see Lodsys’s bid to collect royalties from users of Apple’s APIs fail decisively, if only so that other patent trolls don’t have an incentive to pull similar tricks on small developers.

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Will Over-the-Air iOS Updates Render iTunes Irrelevant?

Posted by Ed Oswald on May 5, 2011 at 11:55 am

Yesterday, there was news that Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” may be delivered through the Mac App Store. That may not be the only delivery method for updates that Apple may soon be changing. 9to5Mac reports that Verizon and Apple are working to bring over-the-air updates to iOS 5 after its release this fall.

The site’s sources could not confirm if the Cupertino company was working on a similar deal with AT&T.

Given that Android already does updates in this manner, the basic idea is nothing new. But it does take iTunes further out of the equation, long a necessary evil for iPhone owners (and now, iPadders too). Once updates come over-the-air, there’s almost no reason anymore to sync.

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Apple Responds to the iOS Location-Logging Discovery

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 27, 2011 at 9:26 am

It took a week, but Apple has published questions and answers about the discovery that iOS devices keep an unencrypted file with months of data that can be used to figure out where the device has been. It does a good job of explaining what the data is (a subset of a database of Wi-Fi hotspots, some of which may be up to a hundred miles from where the device is), what it’s used for (pinpointing the device’s location more quickly than can be done with GPS alone), and why it stores so much data and does so even if you shut off location services (because it’s buggy). It also confirms that Apple can’t use the data to track you–it sees it only in anonymous, encrypted form. And it says it’s collecting anonymous traffic data for a service–built-in turn-by-turn navigation?–which it plans to release eventually.

Apple says that it’ll release an update in the next few weeks that collects less data and none at all if location services are turned off, and doesn’t back it up to iTunes. And in the next major iOS revision, it’ll encrypt the data on the device.

Was reaction to all this overblown? Yes, since some of it suggested that Apple had access to data it could use to track individual consumers, a scenario that the evidence didn’t support. But it’s important that we know what our phones know about us. The researchers who wrote about this did Apple customers a favor–and they seem to have done Apple a favor, too, by finding bugs in iOS.

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FileMaker’s iOS Databases Get Printing, Charting, and Signatures

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 20, 2011 at 11:11 pm

FileMaker Inc.’s FileMaker Go–which brings databases created with the Windows and OS X versions of FileMaker to iOS devices–just got a bit more powerful.

As before, the new 1.2 versions for iPhone and iPad aren’t fully standalone apps: You use it to view and edit databases created with full-blown Filemaker Pro, and can access databases both by syncing them onto the device and by connecting remotely. (That’s a different approach from FileMaker’s more consumery Bento database apps for iPhone and iPad, which can be used in conjunction with the Mac version or on their own.)

You can now use Apple’s AirPrint to print wirelessly to recent HP printers. Charts–a feature introduced in last year’s FileMaker Pro 11–can be viewed, updated, and edited. And you can capture signatures into FileMaker Go on an iPhone or iPad, and then transfer them back into a FileMaker Pro database. (The FileMaker folks say that Go is often used to automate processes that would otherwise be handled with paper and pen.)

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Your iPhone Logs Where You’ve Been. Why?

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 20, 2011 at 8:43 am

Where have you been lately? If you’ve got an iPhone or a 3G iPad, it knows. And two researchers have discovered that these devices store a record of your locations in an unencrypted file that gets backed up to your computer.

The researchers says that the information seems to be based on cell-phone tower triangulation, not GPS. They’re going to discuss what they’ve found at today’s Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California. They’ve also released an open-source Mac application that maps out information from the file. That’s data for the iPad 2 I’ve been using at right, correctly showing that it’s been all around the Bay Area and also visited Austin, Texas.

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iOS Still King, Regardless of Smartphone Market

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 19, 2011 at 9:44 pm

Data coming out of research firm comScore validates what many have been saying about the battle between Android and iOS: that across all devices, Google’s mobile operating system still has a long ways to go to supplant Apple’s dominant position overall, despite analyst claims.

Across an estimated install base of some 236 million “connected media devices” — that would include phones, tablets, music devices with Internet connectivity and app support, etc. — Apple has a 16.2 percent share or about 37.9 million devices. Android trails with a 10.2 percent share or about 23.8 million devices.

In other words, Apple has a 59 percent larger market for its devices right now compared to Android — highlighting its strong position for iOS outside of smartphones.

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