MacRumors

Just six days after Apple seeded the first build of Mac OS X 10.6.5 to developers, it has followed up with a second one termed Build 10H529. As noted by iPhoneinCanada.ca, the new build resolves the two documented known issues from the previous build and lists no new ones.

The build's documentation also makes a slight adjustment to the list of focus areas on which developers are asked to concentrate their testing, removing iCal and adding Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) network file services.

The quick turnaround suggests that Apple is moving quickly on Mac OS X 10.6.5, as the company usually waits at least a week between its first and second developer builds. The last time Apple moved this quickly on the first developer builds was Mac OS X 10.6.2, which spent only about a month in developer testing before seeing a public release in November of last year. Still, Apple's development schedule is always unpredictable and new or unresolved issues at any point in the process could stretch out the timeline.

Fortune reports that Apple and Time Inc. have come to an agreement to allow the publisher to offer subscribers to its print magazines free access to content through their corresponding iPad applications. The agreement, which is marked by the debut of PEOPLE Magazine under the new structure, sees subscribers to the print edition receiving free access while non-subscribers can purchase individual issues for $3.99 each.

Until now, the iPad versions of People, Time, Sports Illustrated and Fortune have cost the same as the newsstand price -- $3.99 for each issue of People, $4.99 to $5.99 each for the rest -- even if you were are already paying to get the paper edition in the mail.

That changed with this week's People iPad app, which is, for the first time, free to People subscribers. Fortune and the rest of Time Inc.'s (TWX) flagship magazines are expected to adopt the same pricing structure within the next 30 days.

Additional details on the PEOPLE Magazine application and pricing policies are available through the magazine's site.

Late last month, we noted that Apple and magazine publishers had been at an impasse over subscription pricing, and while some progress certainly remains to be made in the area of offering true multi-issue subscriptions for digital content, allowing print subscribers to receive free digital editions marks an important first step.

MacDailyNews reports that Apple has reached out to users of its Quattro Wireless ad platform, notifying them that it has stopped taking new campaign submissions and will be winding down operation of the service by the end of September in favor of Apple's new iAd platform. The message comes from Andy Miller, former CEO of Quattro and currently Apple's vice president for the iAd program.

We believe iAd is the best mobile ad network in the world, and starting next month we're going to focus all of our resources on the iAd advertising platform. We are no longer accepting new campaigns for the Quattro Wireless Network, and we will soon begin winding down existing campaigns. As of September 30, we will support ads exclusively for the iAd Network.

Apple acquired Quattro Wireless early this year in order to bring on board talent for deploying its own iAd mobile advertising service. The iAd program went live on July 1st, and has served up strong performance for early-adopter advertisers and app developers, although rollout of ads for the program has been slowed by Apple's tight control over the entire process. It is clear, however, that Apple is putting all of its mobile advertising emphasis on iAd, unsurprisingly necessitating the discontinuation of Quattro's former services.

During a period of overnight downtime last night, Apple appears to have made several tweaks to the functionality of its online store.

The Loop points out a new "Compare Macs" feature offering users the ability to compare specs among up to three selected Mac models. The new option is available through either a direct link or as an option in the Mac product line menu bar after selecting a model.

Apple has also added collapsible sections to its configuration pages for various Mac models. The change allows users to open and close sections dedicated to topics such as hardware options, software options, service and support add-ons, and accessories.

Fortune noted yesterday that supply constraints for the iPad appear to be easing slightly, with shipping estimates for orders placed through Apple's U.S. online store now coming in at 3-5 business days, down from 7-10 business days. The change was noted in a research brief from analyst Jeff Fidacaro of Susquehanna Financial.

"iPad demand remains strong with production ramping above expectations," writes Fidacaro. He has revised his iPad build forecast for Apple's (AAPL) fourth fiscal quarter to 7 million units, up from 6 million units. And his 4Q iPad shipment estimate now stands at 4.75 million units, a 45% increase from Q3.

The Fortune report also shares results of a weekly survey of in-store iPad and iPod availability at Best Buy locations conducted by Barcalys' Ben Reitzes showing significant improvement this week for all iPad models.

Meanwhile, GigaOM reports on a research note from Rodman Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar claiming that production of both the iPad and iPhone 4 is beginning to approach demand, with iPhone shortages expected to ease by the end of next month.

The wait for a new Apple iPhone 4 order should be shorter by the end of September, which would help Apple sell 14 million new handsets in the third quarter and another 15 million in the final three months of 2010 according to an industry analyst. With the expectation that LG is ramping up production of 9.7-inch display panels, iPad orders should flow faster as well, with Apple having the capability to sell 5 to 6 million tablets this quarter.

Shipping estimates for iPhone 4 orders placed through Apple's U.S. online store remain at three weeks, however, suggesting that a considerable backlog still remains.

Download Squad claims that Google is preparing to launch a Chrome OS-powered tablet on November 26th, the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S. known as Black Friday for its widespread discounts to kick off the holiday shopping season. According to the report, the Chrome OS tablet will be manufactured by HTC and Google will partner with Verizon for data service plans on the device.

So what will the Google tablet pack for hardware? It'll likely be based on NVidia's Tegra 2 platform and sport a 1280x720 multitouch display, 2GB of RAM, minimum 32GB SSD, WiFi/Bluetooth/3G connectivity, GPS, webcam, and possibly expandable storage via a multi-card reader. Expect it to be every bit as geek-tastic as the Nexus One -- Google won't want to disappoint its early adopters.

Pricing for the device and data service is unknown, although speculation suggests that data plan contracts could allow for subsidies to greatly reduce the cost of the actual device.

Google previewed Chrome OS in November of last year, stating that the browser-based operating system would debut on netbooks in late 2010. The company also noted its explorations of how Chrome OS might work on other form factors, including tablets, to illustrate the potential of the platform. With the success of Apple's iPad launched earlier this year, tablets have become an increasingly visible alternative to netbook and low-end notebooks, and Google is unsurprisingly apparently preparing to make its move into the space to go head-to-head with Apple once again.

Update: Engadget casts significant doubt on the story, noting that the original author has clarified that the specs shared in the report are simply speculation and sharing details from its own trusted source claiming that ARM-based Chrome OS tablets won't appear until late 2011 at the earliest.

Wired has discovered that Phillip Shoemaker, Apple's Director of Applications Technology for the App Store, is a former App Store developer himself who has a handful of applications, several of which fall into the category of low-brow fart and urination humor, still available for sale. Shoemaker's App Store development work was handled under the name GrayNoodle LLC.

"Simulate the experience of urinating for a long time," iWiz's app description reads in iTunes. "Convince your friends that you'll never stop. iWiz allows you to simulate urination: faster, slower, or just a trickle."

The game Animal Farts features various cartoon images of animals with their buttocks facing forward, giving users buttons to trigger "Fart," "Poot," "Drop" or "Wiz" sounds accompanied with animations illustrating said emissions.

According to an Apple spokeswoman, all of Shoemaker's applications had been approved prior to his employment with Apple.

"Phillip's apps were written, submitted and approved before he became an Apple employee," an Apple spokeswoman said in a statement. "His experience and perspective as a developer is one of the valuable things he brings to Apple's developer relations team. Apple's policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they're developed and published prior to their start at Apple."

Apple's statement is apparently contradicted, however, by App Store data showing that three of his applications debuted in the App Store up to six weeks after Shoemaker had tweeted that he was working for Apple in early March 2009.

Since the publication of Wired's article, Shoemaker has deleted his Twitter accounts and updated his LinkedIn page to remove mention of his connection to GrayNoodle and the apps in question.

NewTeeVee reports that Verizon has announced plans for an iPad application that will allow subscribers to its FiOS television and Internet service to stream live television on their iPads. While availability will at least initially be limited to connecting via Wi-Fi to the customer's home Internet connection, the plans show the willingness of cable companies to embrace alternative viewing options beyond the fixed-location television set.

Verizon unveiled a series of new video applications today, including an upcoming iPad app that will allow FiOS subscribers to watch the same linear programming that is available on their TV screens on their tablet devices. The new app is expected to be rolled out early next year and Verizon expects to have all of its content partners on board by the time the app launches.

According to the report, the technology behind the streaming application is fully developed, and Verizon is now working with content providers to make sure that they are on board with the plans. Verizon is not expecting any difficulties with providers, as the service would simply treat the iPad as another television in the customer's home and be covered under existing contracts with the content providers.

Microsoft has posted a new video clip highlighting some of the features of its Office for Mac 2011 suite due for release in late October. Among the features touched upon by Microsoft's Senior Evangelist for the Macintosh Business Unit Kurt Schmucker:

- Compatibility: Microsoft has focused on making Office for Mac 2011 more compatible with the Windows version than ever before, ensuring that users and documents can move seamlessly between platforms.

We'll take a document and print it out with Word for Windows and with Word for Macintosh. Take the two sheets of paper, overlay them...hold them up to the light. If we see any difference, we consider that a bug that we have to fix.

-Graphing: Office for Mac 2011 brings a number of new tools to help users display data in graphical formats, including the Sparklines feature that debuted in Office for Windows 2010. Sparklines allows users to display simple data in small graphs that fit right into the cells of Excel spreadsheets to provide a significant amount of information at just a quick glance.

- Photo Editing: Available throughout the suite, photo editing tools will allow users to perform a number of tasks such as filter application, background removal, and color correction without having to leave the document on which they are working.

The video is part of a continuing series of behind-the-scenes previews of Office for Mac 2011. The first video posted in late July discussed template galleries, Outlook features such as Conversation View, and the ribbon toolbar.

Yesterday, Apple released Snow Leopard Graphics Update, designed to address issues being experienced with high-performance games on Mac OS X 10.6.4. The issue was brought to light by Valve Software, which had recommended that Mac gamers not update to Mac OS X 10.6.4 until the issue was addressed.

Valve, which has been working closely with Apple and graphics card companies to improve gaming performance on the Mac platform, has now posted a technical explanation of the steps it has been able to take to improve performance as facilitated by the new software update. While the details are certainly interesting, the bottom line is that frame rates have been increased by 15% to 120% on some newer Mac hardware.

We are seeing dramatic performance improvements on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models. Depending on the game, video settings and the hardware, we have measured frame rate improvements from 15% to 120% on these systems. On older systems, we are generally already operating at the limits of the hardware, so it is not obvious that any significant performance improvements can be achieved in the future.

Valve has made a significant investment into the Mac OS X platform, working to bring its entire library of high-profile games to the Mac while also opening up its Steam game distribution platform to allow other developers to easily offer Mac versions of their titles.

HTML5, the Web standard promoted by Apple in favor of Flash as the future of media delivery on the Internet, is continuing to gain support among popular Web sites and services. In particular, announcements from Yahoo! and Vimeo yesterday demonstrate the increasing adoption of the standard.

Yahoo! yesterday announced the launch of an HTML5-based Web mail interface newly customized for the iPad, bringing a number of enhancements.

If you've used our recently launched HTML5 mobile Web mail for iPhone you'll feel right at home. We've kept all the things users love about our new mobile Web mail experience, while also optimizing for the gorgeous large screen of the iPad.

Among the new features are local caching for offline access, improvements to searching and organization, enhanced attachment handling, and a dual pane view similar to that employed by the native iPad email application. Google launched a similar HTML5-based interface for Gmail on the iPad in April.

Video sharing site Vimeo also announced yesterday the launch of a new "Universal Player" to allow users of Apple's iOS devices to view embedded video content from Vimeo.

Since we rolled out the HTML5 player in January people have been clamoring for an embeddable version, especially for iPhones and iPads. Today we're taking a big leap forward for compatibility and updating our embed code. We call it the Universal Player.

The Universal Player is as easy to use as the old embed code, just a lot more compatible. Instead of being a direct link to a Flash player the new Universal Player can automatically detect what kind of device is viewing the video and choose the optimum player based on the device's capabilities. For example, it will serve mobile video to iPhones and Androids and HD to iPads and Desktops.

Vimeo launched support for HTML5-based video on its own site earlier this year, but the extension of HTML5 compatibility to embedded videos will significantly broaden users' ability to experience the site's content across the Internet.

Apple yesterday released a new iPad commercial, airing it on primetime television and posting it to the company's iPad site and YouTube page.

The ad features a series of quick shots showing off various capabilities of the device paired with related adjectives shown in text to go along with the "iPad is..." theme: delicious, current, learning, playful, literary, artful, friendly, productive, scientific, and (of course) magical.

In May, Apple debuted an iPad ad that harkened back to a nearly 20-year-old campaign for the company's Newton personal digital assistant device. We wondered whether Apple would continue with the Newton-styled iPad ads, the company has moved away from that theme with its new ad.

Bloomberg reports on the HBO's reluctance to license their shows to Netflix for online streaming, but reveals that iPad owners will still be able to access HBO content in the near future.

Time Warner Inc.'s pay-television channel, home to shows including the "The Sopranos" and "True Blood," holds cable and Internet rights to films from Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Pictures and is unlikely to make a deal with Netflix, HBO Co-President Eric Kessler said.

Instead, HBO plans on making its shows and movies available online through its own HBO Go service. HBO Go is presently a streaming web service that offers 800 hours of HBO TV and Movie content to current subscribers at no additional cost. HBO Go will become available in the next 6 months for the Apple iPad and other mobile devices. HBO Go was described by some as a Netflix competitor when it launched in February.

Apple has publicly released the Snow Leopard Graphics Update that was seeded to developers earlier this month. The Snow Leopard Graphics Update contains stability and performance fixes for graphics applications and games, including addressing the following issues:

- Addresses frame rate issues occurring in Portal and Team Fortress 2 by Valve, on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) or MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models.
- Resolves an issue that could cause Aperture 3, or StarCraft II by Blizzard, to unexpectedly quit or become unresponsive.
- Resolves an image corruption issue that may occur when disconnecting and reconnecting external displays while the system is running.

The software appears to correct Snow Leopard performance issues brought to light by Valve.

Cult of Mac revealed yesterday that Apple had already started testing the manufacturing capabilities of Liquid Metal for one small component of the iPhone 3G -- the SIM eject tool. Atakan Peker the co-inventor of the alloy recognized the metal immediately when he saw it:

"That's my metal," he said. "I recognized it immediately. Take it from an expert, that's Liquidmetal."

Apple reportedly sourced the part from Liquidmetal Technologies as a test of the company's manufacturing capabilities. Not all the iPhone 3Gs shipped with the Liquidmetal SIM tool. European iPhone 3Gs were said to have shipped with regular steel pins.

Meanwhile, other former Liquidmetal Technology executives have speculated that Apple will be building their next iPhone out of the alloy.

"I think theyre going to make the iPhone out of it," said Dr. Jan Schroers, the former director of research at Liquidmetal Technologies, the first company to commercially develop the space-age technology. "It's quite obvious from what Liquidmetal has done in the past and what the technology is capable of."

According to Schroers, Apple could create intricate seamless enclosures by blow-molding the melted alloy like glass. The resultant structure could be thinner and stronger than existing Apple hardware enclosures.

It was revealed last week that Apple had acquired the exclusive rights to Liquidmetal for use in the consumer electronics field.

IDG News translates a new Economic Daily News report that claims a 7" iPad will indeed be launched by Christmas of this year.

The Economic Daily reports that Taiwanese companies have won a number of component contracts for the iPad 2. Chimei Innolux will supply 7-inch LCD screens, which use the same IPS (in-plane switching) technology found in the original iPad, which improves viewing angles and color on LCD screens. Touchscreen technology for the screens will come from Cando Corporation, the report says.

While talk of a 7" iPad has been circulating for some time, it has recently regained the spotlight with a report from iLounge earlier this month. iLounge offered the above mock-up and suggested the 7" iPad would launch later this year or early next. Meanwhile, Digitimes also reported on the likelihood a 7" iPad just last week.

The currently shipping 9.7" iPad has been seen as a huge success selling 3.27 million units during the first quarter of sales.

As noted by AppleInsider, Caixin Online reports that China Unicom will launch the iPhone 4 in September and has secured the rights to sell the iPad in China. The iPhone 4 will be made available in early September while no release date has been specified for the iPad.

It was reported last month that a China Unicom executive had flown to the United States to meet with Apple executives to finalize a distribution deal for the iPad and iPhone 4.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that China Unicom would begin selling iPhone 3GS models with Wi-Fi enabled just earlier this month, after months of selling the device without Wi-Fi enabled in order to adhere to government regulations.