ArsTechnica reports on the discovery of Retina-sized artwork in OS X Mountain Lion's.
A source with access to the latest Mountain Lion preview alerted Ars that double-sized graphics have popped up in some unexpected places, once again suggesting that Apple may be close to releasing MacBooks with high pixel-density screens.
We'd previously spotted these same Retina-sized graphics in the Lion beta of Apple's new Messages application.
As well, we've found in our testing that Apple's HiDPI mode in Lion is already fully functional and will use the Retina assets appropriately. These screens show the Lion Messages app running in HiDPI mode.
HiDPI mode on OS X 10.7. Left: Retina enabled, Right: Non-Retina
The left image shows that Lion with HiDPI mode enabled uses the full resolution Retina artwork from the Messages app to improve the pixel sharpness of the images. When the Retina assets are selectively removed from the app (right), you can see it fall back to the normal non-Retina images bundled.
Users will be able to test this themselves to full effect when Air Display is updated to support Mac HiDPI mode on the new iPad. Apple's Messages Beta for Lion is one of the few Mac applications that are already Retina-enabled to a large degree. Some elements, such as font rendering will automatically scale upwards as it does on the iPad.
With news of the dividend and record iPad sales, Apple's stock has been at all time highs in the past week.
Update: Bloomberg pinpoints the issue to a single trade for 100 shares executed by Bats Global Markets Inc.
A single trade for 100 shares executed on a Bats venue briefly sent Apple, the world’s most valuable company, down to $542.80, triggering a circuit breaker that paused the shares. The order was executed at 10:57 a.m. New York time. Two more transactions, which sent the stock back above $598, were made before the halt. The stock stayed around that level once trading resumed.
Reuters profiles Samsung Electronics and their design process in the setting of Apple's ongoing legal battle accusing Samsung of "slavishly copying" Apple's products.
Samsung Mobile's vice president for design Lee Minhyouk takes Apple's charges personally and denies the allegations:
"I've made thousands of sketches and hundreds of prototype products (for the Galaxy). Does that mean I was putting on a mock show for so long, pretending to be designing?"
"As a designer, there's an issue of dignity. (The Galaxy) is original from the beginning, and I'm the one who made it. It's a totally different product with a different design language and different technology infused."
Lee admits that he may not be at the level of Apple's VP for design Jonathan Ive, but believes Samsung "will produce such iconic products one day."
Samsung has proven to be the largest Android smartphone manufacturer and one of Apple's biggest competitors. Samsung is also one of Apple's biggest suppliers and the manufacturer of Apple's 3rd Generation iPad's Retina Display. Apple and Samsung are in an ongoing legal battle over design and patent claims.
AllThingsD reports on findings of a survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners which investigated where iPhone owners purchased their device.
The found that the breakdown of retail vs online sales was 76 percent retail vs 24 percent online. Of that 76% from retail stores, the breakdown showed that Best Buy was almost as big as Apple's own retail stores as a point of sale:
Carrier stores are clearly the dominant point of sale for most consumers, but Best Buy's presence has also proven to be a significant location for iPhone sales.
“Apple Stores and the Apple Web site are tremendously productive, but they are limited by their relatively small retail footprint,” CIRP’s Josh Lowitz told AllThingsD. “There are four times as many Best Buy stores, and probably 20 times as many AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint stores, so aggressive distribution through all these channels is critical to Apple’s U.S. strategy.”
The company has since announced that the new version will also be available for iPad and be available in the summer of 2012.
IGN has already had some hands on time with an early build.
The iPad port will include all the improvements and additions found in the PC version, including full integration of the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion pack. The title is also running on the refined Baldur's Gate II Infinity Engine, allowing gamers to experience the original adventure with the sequel's refined graphics options and other engine tweaks.
IGN reports that the new version of thegame will feature new content, more quests and a new party member. The early build of the iPad version runs smoothly though the interface has not yet been revamped to be more touch friendly. Those changes are still in the works, though pinch and zoom has already been implemented. The iPad version is expected to launch this summer.
Apple has updated their iTunes Movie Trailers App with support for the new iPad's Retina Display. The trailers app mirrors the content on Apple's own Movie Trailers site and offers a good showcase of the iPad's new screen.
Here's a screen capture from Pixar's upcoming movie Brave does show a lot of detail, though it's hard to say exactly which resolution Apple is streaming.
Screenshot from Brave trailer. Click for full size.
The app works on both Wi-Fi and LTE, though if you use LTE, you may find yourself using all of your LTE bandwidth allotment rather quickly. [Direct Link]
Last year, Apple was fined $1.2 million in Italy over how the company advertises its warranty to customers. Italy's antitrust regulators ruled that Apple has not been providing adequate disclosures about the two free years of product warranty assistance required under Italian law, while also pushing customers to purchase AppleCare extended warranties without disclosing that many of the benefits overlap the standard warranty.
As pointed out by @setteBIT, Apple has lost its appeal [Google Translate] in the case. There will be a followup hearing on May 9th. In the meantime, Apple will have to pay €900,000 fine previously assessed by the Italian antitrust authority.
Apple added disclosures to its Italian online store to address the court's concerns, after the initial ruling. It's unclear if those will be returning as part of the appeals court's decision.
This comes on the heels of a series of letters sent earlier this week to European Union regulators from consumers groups in 11 countries asking for action against Apple regarding its warranty practices.
As a reminder for our international readers, the new iPad will be on sale in 25 more countries starting tomorrow, Friday March 23. In fact, it's currently on sale in New Zealand, where it's already tomorrow.
Starting March 23 the new iPad will be available in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.
The 3rd Generation iPad launched in 10 countries including the U.S. last Friday and is now expanding further internationally. The iPad is available for online order with 1-2 week delivery delays.
Wired profiles Linus Torvalds the creator of the popular open source operating system Linux. The article reveals that Apple's Steve Jobs tried to recruit Torvalds to Apple with a job offer.
Torvalds has never met Bill Gates, but around 2000, when he was still working at Transmeta, he met Steve Jobs. Jobs invited him to Apple’s Cupertino campus and tried to hire him. “Unix for the biggest user base: that was the pitch,” says Torvalds. The condition: He’d have to drop Linux development. “He wanted me to work at Apple doing non-Linux things,” he said. That was a non-starter for Torvalds. Besides, he hated Mac OS’s Mach kernel.
In 2000, Apple had had not yet shipped the first version of OS X 10.0 to the public. Apple had adapted the NeXTSTep operating system after acquiring NeXT in 1997. It wasn't until March, 2001 that the first version of OS X was launched.
Steve Jobs' job offer was at a time when Apple was heavily investing in Mac OS X which would later serve as the foundation for their iPhones and iPads.
A security firm has discovered a security issue in the iOS 5.1 version of MobileSafari, the most recent version of the operating system that runs on millions of Apple mobile devices. The behavior was discovered and detailed by David Vieira-Kurz of MajorSecurity.net.
The weakness is caused due to an error within the handling of URLs when using javascript's window.open() method. This can be exploited to potentially trick users into supplying sensitive information to a malicious web site, because information displayed in the address bar can be constructed in a certain way, which may lead users to believe that they're visiting another web site than the displayed web site.
To test it out, visit this demo page on an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad running iOS 5.1. Click the 'Demo' button and MobileSafari will open a new window displaying "www.apple.com" in the address bar, though it's actually loading a page from MajorSecurity.net.
The security firm does note that Apple was informed of the vulnerability three weeks ago, and it is only being made public today. Apple acknowledged the bug and should be pushing a fix soon.
Representatives Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) and G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) have sent letters to thirty-four app developers with a number of questions about their information collection and use practices. This follows on a letter from the Congressmen sent to Apple requesting information on the company's data collection policies it imposes on App Store developers.
The letters were sent to a wide variety of developers, and were selected by the Representatives on the basis of "their inclusion in the “Social Networking” subcategory within the “iPhone Essentials” area of Apple’s App Store." They include Turntable.FM, Twitter, Tweetbot, Path, Instagram, Facebook, and Apple itself.
Last month, a developer of applications ("apps") for Apple's mobile devices discovered that the social networking app Path was accessing and collecting the contents of his iPhone address book without having asked for his consent. Following the reports about Path, developers and members of the press ran their own small-scale tests of the code for other popular apps for Apple's mobile devices to determine which were accessing address book information. Around this time, three other apps released new versions to include a prompt asking for users' consent before accessing the address book. In addition, concerns were subsequently raised about the manner in which apps can access photographs on Apple's mobile devices.
We are writing to you because we want to better understand the information collection and use policies and practices of apps for Apple's mobile devices with a social element. We request that you respond to the following questions:
(1) Through the end of February 2012, how many times was your iOS app downloaded from Apple's App Store?
(2) Did you have a privacy policy in place for your iOS app at the end of February 2012? If so, please tell us when your iOS app was first made available in Apple's App Store and when you first had a privacy policy in place. In addition, please describe how that policy is made available to your app users and please provide a copy of the most recent policy.
(3) Has your iOS app at any time transmitted information from or about a user's address book? If so, which fields? Also, please describe all measures taken to protect or secure that information during transmission and the periods of time during which those measures were in effect.
(4) Have you at any time stored information from or about a user's address book? If so, which field? Also, please describe all measures taken to protect or secure that information during storage and the periods of time during which those measures were in effect.
(5) At any time, has your iOS app transmitted or have you stored any other information from or about a user's device - including, but not limited to, the user's phone number, email account information, calendar, photo gallery, WiFi connection log, the Unique Device Identifier (UDID), a Media Access Control (MAC) address, or any other identifier unique to a specific device?
(6) To the extent you store any address book information or any of the information in question 5, please describe all purposes for which you store or use that information, the length of time for which you keep it, and your policies regarding sharing of that information.
(7) To the extent you transmit or store any address book information or any of the information in question 5, please describe all notices delivered to uscrs on the mobile device screen about your collection and use practices both prior to and after February 8, 2012.
(8) The iOS Developer Program License Agreement detailing the obligations and responsibilities of app developers reportedly states that a developer and its applications "may not collect user or device data without prior user consent, and then only to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application, or to serve advertising.";
(a) Please describe all data available from Apple mobile devices that you understand to be user data requiring prior consent from the user to be collected.
(b) Please describe all data available from Apple mobile devices that you understand to be device data requiring prior consent from the user to be collected.
(c) Please describe all services or functions for which user or device data is directly relevant to the use of your application.
(9) Please list all industry self-regulatory organizations to which you belong.
The developers are given until April 12, 2012 to respond.
It appears that some iPad Smart Covers aren't working properly with the new iPad, including older Apple Smart Covers. The new iPad has a slight change in how its magnets work. Apple has reversed the polarity of one set of magnets related to the sleep/wake sensor that turns the iPad off when the Smart Cover is closed. As a result, older Smart Covers, that weren't designed with this change in mind, fail to turn the new iPad off when they're closed.
Mark Booth has more details as to why Apple choose to make the change:
I've learned why Apple decided to use a polarity sensitive switch in the new iPad 3. Some iPad 2 customers were having issues with their iPads entering sleep mode when they flipped Apple's Smart Cover around flat behind their iPad 2. Since the iPad 2's sleep/wake sensor wasn't polarity specific, it could sometimes be triggered from the magnet being positioned at the rear of the iPad. By changing to a sensor that requires the correct polarity, the problem is eliminated.
Booth also notes that Apple is replacing older Apple Smart Covers at Apple Stores for customers who ask. New iPad owners having difficulties with third-party smart cover-compatible cases should contact their case-makers for possible resolutions.
TechRadar reports that Sony is bringing their Music Unlimited service to iOS devices "in the coming weeks".
"We will be launching our music service on iOS in the next few weeks," said Layden, who was speaking at the IP&TV World Forum with TechRadar in attendance.
"We want to be on as many devices for users who want to be part of Music Unlimited."
Music Unlimited is Sony's on-demand all you can listen to music service that costs $9.99 a month. Sony claims to have a global catalog of over 10 million songs that you can listen to on your computer, Android phone, Sony Enabled device, and soon, iOS device. They offer unlimited skips and no ads for the paid service.
Perhaps most interesting is that on the Android version they've introduced offline playback. Users can download their Music Unlimited playlists to their devices and play them even without a wireless signal.
Angry Birds Space, the latest installment of the best selling mobile game of all time, has finally arrived. Rovio, the developer behind the series, partnered with NASA, the U.S. space agency, to promote the release, including a plug filmed by an Angry Bird-toting astronaut on the International Space Station.
Angry Birds Space delivers the biggest change yet in the series' well-known "launch birds out of a slingshot at pigs" gameplay. Instead of dealing with the gravity of just one planet, players are dealing with several. Kotaku explains:
Yes, you still play level by level. You still have a set number of birds—birds of different types—that you'll slingshot at towers of blocks, hoping to squash some pigs.
But now you're shooting your birds through space, from one planet to the next. Each planet has a gravitational field. Gone is the simplicity of just lobbing a bird in an arc. No. Welcome to the physics of the heavenly bodies. Shoot a bird into open space and it'll fly off in a straight line. Shoot one toward another planet and it'll get caught in its gravitational field and start orbiting the planet... or slowly descend as it encircles the planet to smash into the ground.
iDownloadblog reveals some new iOS 5.1 strings that include references to "4G".
“4G_ON_CALL_CANCEL” = “Cancel”; “4G_ON_CALL_OK_DISABLE” = “Disable”; “4G_ON_CALL_OK_ENABLE” = “Enable”; “4G_ON_CALL_WARNING_DISABLE” = “Disabling 4G will end your phone call. Are you sure you want to disable 4G?”; “4G_ON_CALL_WARNING_ENABLE” = “Enabling 4G will end your phone call. Are you sure you want to enable 4G?”; “4G_ON_FACETIME_4G_WARNING_DISABLE” = “Disabling 4G will end FaceTime. Are you sure you want to disable 4G?”; “4G_ON_FACETIME_WIFI_WARNING_DISABLE” = “Disabling 4G may end FaceTime. Are you sure you want to disable 4G?”; “4G_TEXT” = “Using 4G loads data faster, but may decrease battery life.”;
The site suggests these may have been put in place for true 4G ("LTE") in the next iPhone.
While we do believe the next iPhone is likely to get LTE, our guess is that these 4G strings were put in place at the same time to reference the updated 4G indicator that Apple also included in the iOS 5.1 update. Existing iPhones now show "4G" at the top of their screen when they are on AT&T's HSDPA+ network. We expect Apple will continue to distinguish the faster LTE networks by specifically calling them "LTE" as they do on the 3rd Generation iPad.
We also don't think references to 4G and Facetime are necessarily predictive. Apple has had strings in the past suggesting that Facetime might work under cellular data, but the restriction appears to be carrier imposed rather than a technical issue.
The original mod was revealed late last year, and they've since added a new feature which they describe as a "headphone jack torch". This video walks through the original glowing Apple mod and also the new headphone jack one:
The headphone jack remains fully functional, and they are even working on a fibre optic headphone cabling that would give you illuminated cables in different colors.
iPatch is a a third-party iPhone repair company based in the UK and can also be followed on twitter at iPatch_iPods.
A couple of new findings as people spend more time with their new iPads. First, iLounge reports on findings by DisplayMate on the new iPads charging behavior. It turns out the iPad continues to charge for as long as an hour after it says its at 100%, suggesting the on-screen indicator isn't quite accurate and may still need more charging.
In an email exchange with iLounge, DisplayMate President Ray Soneira indicated that the third-generation iPad—when connected to power via the included Apple 10W Power Adapter—actually continued to draw 10W of power for up to one hour after reaching what is reported by iOS as a full 100% charge
iLounge found in their battery testing of the new iPad that sometimes the charge would drop initially quickly when they thought the iPad was fully charged.
Earlier in the week, Tom's Hardware noticed that Safari on the new iPad was automatically scaling large images down significantly.
Large images were automatically scaled down to near 1 megapixel resolutions. This means that if you are viewing large images through Safari, you aren't getting the full Retina experience. A workaround mentioned is to save the image to Photos which seems to preserve the original resolution.
These findings were confirmed by web developer Duncan Davidson who ran into the limit when trying to enhance his websites with Retina-sized images.
Bloomberg reports that Apple's iPhone surpassed RIM's BlackBerry as the number one in Canadian smartphone shipments in 2011. RIM is based in Canada and has had strong loyalty amongst its customers.
RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, shipped 2.08 million BlackBerrys last year in Canada, compared with 2.85 million units for Apple, data compiled by IDC and Bloomberg show. In 2010, the BlackBerry topped the iPhone by half a million, and in 2008, the year after the iPhone’s debut, RIM outsold Apple by almost five to one.
RIM has been on a decline since the launch of the iPhone and Android platforms with sales and profits dropping. RIM's worldwide numbers have been dropping precipitously in contrast to significant grown from iOS and Android.
Last year, Apple was 
