MacRumors iPhone and iPad Blog: Apps, News, and Rumors

Back in March, we noted that Safari speed improvements in iOS 4.3 brought about by the addition of a new Nitro JavaScript engine did not extend to web apps launched from the home screen, meaning that webpages launched from convenient home screen icons exhibit significantly slower performance than those exact same pages loaded manually or from bookmarks within Safari. As noticed by CNET, a threa...

YouTube user InfoZenn has posted a very nice walkthrough of iOS 5 on an iPad. Amongst many of the new features, he also shows off some of the new multi-touch gestures that were originally tested in iOS 4.3. Swiping can be used to switch applications (left/right) or to bring up the multitasking bar (up). Pinching with four or five fingers can also be used to return to the home screen. iOS 5...

Apple's logo artists have infused the iCloud logo with some mathematical elegance. In this case, the golden ratio or φ. The circles in the 'puffs' of the iCloud are sized in a ratio of 1:1.6, an approximation of golden ratio, as discovered by Australian designer Alan van Roemburg. It seems unlikely the proportion was unintentional; Apple's artists simply have an acute sense of the history of ...

Need a controller for your Mac or iOS-based game, but don't have a physical controller handy? Pull out your iPhone and install Joypad. The app turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a wireless virtual controller with a configurable set of buttons. It syncs up to a desktop client and remaps the buttons on the Joypad to keyboard buttons on your desktop. It's very clever, and is a free download. ...

Google today announced that it has updated its Google Sync service to iOS, bringing several enhancements to the company's integrated syncing for mail, contacts and calendars when set up as a Microsoft Exchange account. The new features included searching of full email history, calendar event management, and support for "send mail as" options for users with multiple accounts.Google Sync keeps...

After hearing from Apple, Google, and others last month, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) today introduced The Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011, a new bill that would require companies to take better care of user location information on mobile devices: The Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011 is a narrowly-tailored bill that would close current loopholes in federal law to require any company...

TechCrunch reports that it has receiving detailed information on a forthcoming iPhone application from Facebook that will focus on photo sharing, building on top of the company's massive existing platform to apparently pull together aspects of many other popular photo apps in what appears from the leaked documents to be an "awesome" offering.But again, the app looks amazing. We've heard that...

Earlier this week, iOS developer Daniel Amitay published a report examining trends in passcodes chosen by users of his Big Brother Camera Security application. Amitay had anonymously collected over 200,000 passcodes used on his app and offered the data up as a proxy for actual iPhone passcode usage data based on the similarity of the input system style and functionality. Amitay now reports...

Domino's Pizza's new iOS app lets users order and pay for piping hot pies right from their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The app allows Domino's customers to order from (almost) any of the 5,000 Domino's in the U.S., allowing extensive pizza customization, and even allows users to input their credit or debit card information right in the app. Finally, while you anxiously await your custom...

Could Apple shove a high-resolution 3D display in the iPad? Maybe! And that's just what Netbook News claims to discovered at the Display Taiwan tradeshow. They've got pictures and video of what is claimed to be an iPad 1 with a different, 3D, "very high resolution display". We're pretty skeptical, but wanted to give you a chance to decide for...

Buried in a Reuters report this evening about the imminent launch of the MacBook Air, there was a single sentence nonchalantly stating that the iPad 3 would launch in the fourth quarter of this year with a screen resolution "5-6 times" higher than the iPad 2. The numbers seemed absurd so we tracked down ...

We're not sure the motivation behind it, but it appears that Apple will be launching unlocked version of the iPhone 4 to Apple Retail stores sometime this week. The rumors started with some confusion over the weekend when there was a claim that Apple would finally be releasing the new MacBook Airs this Wednesday. As it turns out, there was a misinterpretation with the parts numbers that...

A few of the hundreds of "new" features in iOS 5 were "appropriated" from other developers. One, the ability to trip the iPhone camera shutter by pressing the Volume Up button instead of pressing a soft-button on-screen, came from a hidden feature that iOS developer tap tap tap included in a version of Camera+, an iPhone camera replacement app. As an added bonus, if you press the Volume Up...

iOS developer Daniel Amitay today took an interesting look (via The Next Web) at iPhone passcode trends as revealed by usage of his popular Big Brother Camera Security application.In my last update to Big Brother Camera Security (Free), I added some code to record common user passcodes (completely anonymous, of course). Because Big Brother's passcode setup screen and lock screen are nearly...

With rumors of deep integration of Nuance's voice recognition technology in iOS 5 and evidence that such tools are hidden but included in current developer builds, there has been considerable interest in determining the extent to which the two companies are working together. Nuance technology has also been showing up in OS X Lion in the form of new text-to-speech voices and has been rumored to...

During the Q&A session following Steve Jobs' pitch for a stunning new Apple campus to the Cupertino City Council, Councilwoman Kris Wang asked Jobs if the city of Cupertino would get "free Wi-Fi or something like that" in exchange for green-lighting the building project. Jobs felt that free municipal Wi-Fi was something the city was better equipped to provide and that Apple paid plenty in...

Buried in the hundreds of new features in iOS 5 is support for AVRCP 1.3 (or maybe even 1.4!), a Bluetooth standard that gives iPhones the ability to send artist, album and track name information to Bluetooth audio devices such as those in the stereos of some newer cars. iOS has been stuck at AVRCP 1.0 for nearly a year, and though the iPhone allowed control of the some music playback...

TiPb has posted a side-by-side comparison video showing the differences between BlackBerry's BBM and Apple's new iMessage. BBM is BlackBerry's proprietary messaging system which has been seen as the inspiration for Apple's own implementation. BBM offers more user management features with groups, while iMessage...