Profitz 1.0.2 Released with minor fixes

post from prMac on 23 August 2012 08:34:00 PM. © prMac

Indie developer Mohammed Wahab announces a new version of the famous stock profit calculator iOS app, Profitz, released on August 20, 2012. The Profitz 1.0.2 version has some minor bug fixes. Notably includes a fix to display the pre-market no-price change scenario as '0%' as opposed to a more scientific term 'INF%'. Profitz is a stock profit calculator that considers tax rate, brokerage commission and any additional withholding while determining stock profits.

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Sharing the Stage

post from Daring Fireball on 23 August 2012 06:03:38 PM. © Daring Fireball

Back in February, MG Siegler, among others, noted a remarkable milestone:

Last quarter, Microsoft brought in $20.89 billion in revenue.Apple brought in $46.33 billion.
Put another way: Apple?s iPhone business alone is larger than allof Microsoft?s businesses combined.

You’d be on solid ground arguing that the iPhone is the single most profitable product in the world today, and without question, it is the most important single product in Apple’s lineup. The iPad may surpass it within a few years. Or a disruption from a competitor may deflate it. But as it stands today, the iPhone is king.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the rumored Apple event next month. Rene Ritchie of iMore, who’s been just killing it this year with well-sourced information and astute analysis, wrote back on July 30:

iMore has learned that Apple is planning to debut the new iPhoneat a special event on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, with therelease date to follow 9 days later on Friday, September 21.This information comes from sources who have proven accurate inthe past.
The iPad mini will be announced at the same September 12 event, aswill the new iPod nano. We haven’t heard a release date for theiPad mini yet, but it could be the same as the iPhone 5. It seemslikely the new iPod touch will make an appearance on September 12as well, though we haven’t heard any specific information aboutthat yet either.

Ritchie has great sources, so he may well know something for a fact that I don’t. But that second aforequoted paragraph in Ritchie’s report doesn’t sit right with me.

The problem that occurred to me: I don’t think Apple would want reviews of both a new iPhone and new-size iPad appearing at the same time. Why share the spotlight? Why have another Apple product battling with the iPhone for the top spots in news coverage? So I thought, well, maybe they’d only seed the review units of the iPhone on September 12, with the new-size iPad going into reviewer hands a few weeks later.

But the more I think about it, the less sense it makes for the iPhone to even share the stage at the announcement with any other product. The iPhone is too big, too cool, and garners too much attention — and it’s in Apple’s interest to keep that attention undiluted.

I’m thinking it makes more sense for Apple to hold two events. First, an iPhone event, focused solely on the new iPhone and iOS 6. Then, the iPhone ships nine days later, and there’s another wave of iPhone-focused attention as the reviews come out. Then, in the first or second week of October, Apple holds its traditional “music event”, exactly along the lines of the events at which they’ve been debuting new iPods for the last decade. (Maybe more of an “iTunes event” than just “music event”, given the rise of other media like TV shows, movies, and books.¹)

An event where the iPad Air (cool, but just a smaller thinner cheaper iPad), new iPod Touch (cool, but just an iPhone without the phone), and maybe even new or at least updated iPod music players (eh) share the stage, tied together with the theme of consuming iTunes media content — that I can buy.

An event where the iPhone shares the stage? That I’m not buying.²

And if it’s an “iTunes” event, maybe a major new version of the long-overdue-for-a-major-rewrite iTunes app? A boy can dream. ↩
Careful readers may notice that in Jim Dalrymple’s “Yep” regarding Ritchie’s scoop on the September 12 event date, the blockquoted text only includes the portion regarding the iPhone. ↩

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http://daringfireball.net/2012/08/sharing_the_stage

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Apples iPhone dilemma: Should it make a Chinese
special

post from Apple on 23 August 2012 04:03:13 PM. © Apple

If Apple would just support China?s unique 3G technology, the iPhone would make a killing in the largest country in the world ? or so concludes Kevin Wang, director of China electronics research at IHS iSuppli. Apple ranks a woeful seventh in China?s smartphone sales, but according to Wang it could easily do something about it.

?Among all the international smartphone brands competing in China, Apple is the only one not offering a product that complies with the domestic TD-SCDMA air standard,? Wang said in a new IHS iSuppli?s report. ?For Apple, this is a huge disadvantage, as TD-SCDMA represents the fastest-growing major air standard for smartphones in China, with shipments of compliant phones expected to rise by a factor of 10 from 2011 to 2016.?

He?s not wrong. By snubbing TD-SCDMA, Apple misses the opportunity to sell the iPhone through the country?s largest carrier China Mobile, and by ?large? we?re talking scale unheard of in the U.S. or Europe. China Mobile is the world?s largest operator with 650 million connections ? six times more than Verizon Wireless. While Apple counts the country?s No. 2 and No. 3 carriers, China Unicom and China Telecom as distributors, together they only serve 30 percent of the market. In other words, China Mobile is the big enchilada of the globe.

An Apple store in China.

So why doesn?t Apple take a bite? Adding TD-SCDMA support to the iPhone isn?t quite as simple as it sounds. As I?ve written before, adding a new radio technology to a phone isn?t just a matter of procuring the right Qualcomm chip, it requires power amplifiers, antennas and filters ? all of which add expense, drain power and generally make a mess of the radio frequency characteristics of the device. Apple could do it, sure, but it would wind up with a crappier and costlier iPhone.

If Apple really wants to tackle China Mobile, it will need to come out with an iPhone variant for China, and so far Apple has been loath to do any such thing. Apple did build a CDMA iPhone for Verizon, but after the first generation of device, Apple once again unified its product line, embedding both CDMA and GSM radios in every phone. Plus, it didn?t take long before Apple started selling that device to other CDMA carriers globally.

Would Apple consider designing a ?Chinese Special?? The answer is a big maybe.

China Mobile may be a big juicy target, but Apple?s strategy has always been to move markets rather than move with the market. It?s so far taken the attitude that if you want an iPhone in China, you should move to Unicom or Telecom. It took that same approach in the U.S. for years with AT&T. And it?s why some of the world?s other large carriers, T-Mobile USA and NTT DoCoMo for two, get snubbed.

But at some point Apple will have to start making iPhone variants whether it wants to or not. There?s a huge amount of fragmentation in the LTE bands used globally ?there are six designated 4G bands in the U.S. alone ? which will force Apple and other vendors to create region-specific and even carrier-specific devices (subscription required). The new iPad is just the first example: there are separate devices for AT&T and Verizon?s separate LTE networks.

If Apple has to start churning out variants anyway, it may figure it might as well make a Chinese iPhone, too.

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http://gigaom.com/apple/apples-iphone-dilemma-should-it-make-a-chinese-special/

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Why Waiting in Line Is Torture

post from Daring Fireball on 23 August 2012 04:03:12 PM. © Daring Fireball

Tom Petty nailed it.

?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting-in-line-is-torture.h
tml

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Black Widow

post from Daring Fireball on 23 August 2012 04:03:12 PM. © Daring Fireball

Astute observation from Dustin Curtis:

Outside of the direct value from its graph, Twitter is in anextremely unusual position for a social service. While it isostensibly a sharing service, it is actually a broadcastingmedium. People use Twitter more like they use TV; they followaccounts they are interested in, namely celebrities and companies,and then they consume the content as a form of entertainment.Normal people have very little incentive to use Twitter except tocommunicate unidirectionally with their interests. This is why ithas been shown that the vast majority of Twitter users who sign upnever tweet, even though a huge number of those people view theirfeed often.

Where by “TV”, he means traditional TV, where people watch what’s on right now, not the time-shifting or on-demand style of TV that many of us are now accustomed to. That’s why advertisers are so intrigued, perhaps — it brings back some control over not just what viewers see, but when they see it.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://dcurt.is/twitters-graph

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Profitz Lite 1.0.1 Released with minor fixes

post from prMac on 23 August 2012 02:40:00 PM. © prMac

A new version of the famous stock profit calculator iOS app, Profitz Lite, released on August 17, 2012. The Profitz Lite 1.0.1 version had some minor bug fixes. Notably includes a fix to display the pre-market no-price change scenario as '0%' as opposed to a more scientific term 'INF%'. Profitz is an easy to use stock profit calculator that considers tax rate, brokerage commission and any additional withholding while determining stock profits. Setup the preferences once and calculate.

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http://prmac.com/release-id-46991.htm

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Facebook finally fixes its freakishly slow iOS
app

post from Apple on 23 August 2012 02:03:46 PM. © Apple

You know how the Facebook app on your iPhone pretty much sucks? The social network has heard your complaints. On Thursday Facebook rolled out a broad rewrite of the code behind the super-slow and constantly frustrating Facebook iOS app that’s intended to speed up its performance so it’s twice as fast as the current version.

The Facebook 5 update applies to Facebook’s iPhone and iPad apps. On its blog, Facebook said the app has been rewritten so it’ll not only open faster, but news feeds and notifications will load right away. When scrolling within the app, Facebook says friends’ updates will “appear faster than ever” and there will be banners letting you know when new stories are added.

That rewriting of the code means moving away from an emphasis on HTML5 for the iOS app, which Facebook has been relying on in order to address the needs of thousands of different devices that access Facebook. AllThingsD has the details on why Facebook chose to deliver a native iOS app with this update instead:

While the current Facebook app is predominantly HTML5-based, [Facebook iOS mobile project manager Mick] Johnson and his team gutted it and rebuilt it using the Objective-C programming language, which essentially makes better use of the iPhone hardware and focuses on the advantages of using a native application, rather than render Facebook items in the app using Web data.
This doesn?t mean that Facebook is abandoning HTML5, Johnson says. ?The mobile web is still very important to us, as are all of our interfaces,? he said. Problem is, HTML5 is a technology that, while promising in the long run, isn?t able to deliver the type of speed and performance we expect right now. It?s a long bet, and something that Facebook aims to continue developing.

This is one of those updates that should have been done a long time ago. Facebook is the most-downloaded free app in Apple’s mobile app store, yet the reviews are scathing — and have been for a long time. Why is Facebook getting its act together on iOS just now? It probably has something to do with Apple integrating Facebook into iOS 6, set to be released in a month or so.

Facebook didn’t leave out its Android users: updates for both iOS and Android are waiting in their respective app stores now.

Read The Full Article:
http://gigaom.com/mobile/facebook-finally-fixes-its-freakishly-slow-ios-app/

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DesignMerge for InDesign CS6 Now Available

DesignMerge Pro is an award-winning suite of plug-in modules that allow users to quickly and easily create variable data output from any Adobe InDesign document. It includes many sophisticated VDP features, such as automatic copy-fitting, menu-driven conditional logic programming, multi-up layout support, as well as PostScript, PPML, Creo VPS and PDF/VT output. The new version of DesignMerge (for CS5, CS5.5 and CS6) includes many new features, such as direct PDF/VT output and 2D barcode support.

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http://prmac.com/release-id-46937.htm

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Prismatic wants to conquer the new frontier:
Mobile news

Most traditional media companies are still trying to handle the disruption that the web has caused in their business models and content strategies, and if they think about mobile at all it is via their iPhone or iPad app, or an awkwardly stripped-down mobile version of their website. But others are more than happy to try and conquer this new frontier: Prismatic, a San Francisco-based startup that is trying to build a customized newspaper for the digital age, has just launched an iPhone app that it says gives users a truly mobile-native way of reading the news, without all the pain they have gotten used to from traditional media.

Founder and CEO Bradford Cross said in an interview with GigaOM that he hopes the app will transform the way people think of the mobile web, by making it easier than ever for them to browse and discover content.

Cross says the normal mobile experience is so irritating for users — who are usually pushed to either dysfunctional mobile versions of news sites or full-fledged web versions that are impossible to use on a handheld device — that many people simply don’t bother to try and consume much news on their iPhones. Prismatic’s app, which went live on Thursday morning in the iTunes store, has a built-in browser that strips out everything but the text and images from an article, the same way that services like Readability and Instapaper do, and this makes the reading experience substantially faster and more user-friendly, Cross says:

“Most of the time you won’t go into Safari on iOS and click on links, because you’ve been trained that that experience is so bad that you almost never do it — so you wind up not really using the internet. We wanted to make it so you could really explore on your phone and discover new things.”

Like the web version of the news-filtering and recommendation service, which came out of invitation-only beta in May, the Prismatic app allows users to connect using their Twitter or Facebook accounts, and will also import RSS feeds from Google Reader. All of this information is used to customize the content that is shown using Prismatic’s recommendation algorithms, and users can also create their own topic feeds and content lists from within the app. Because it is iPhone-based, the app also uses location as a way of suggesting topics that the user might be interested in, provided they agree to share that information.

Cross says the service has also tried to do some innovative things when it comes to the user interface and design of the app that make it more appealing to interact with the content inside the app, whether it’s to flag it as interesting or non-interesting, or to share it via Twitter and other social networks. So Prismatic came up with a pop-up interface that consists of three small buttons, and all the user has to do is slide their finger towards one to activate it — a system that is very similar to the fly-out menu options that mobile social network Path came up with for their iPhone app. Other menus within the app can be discovered by swiping the page right or left.

I’ve been using the Prismatic beta on my iPhone for some time now, and it definitely offers one of the fastest and cleanest news-browsing experiences I’ve had on a mobile device. News.me also had a good mobile news-discovery app that used your Twitter stream and follower graph as a source for its recommendation engine, but the service has since been merged with Digg, after its parent company Betaworks acquired the former news-sharing service earlier this year. Flipboard is probably the mobile news-based app I use the most, because it provides easy access to my Twitter lists and other content, and it also has a great user interface and is extremely fast.

Cross says that Prismatic had an even harder job than Flipboard when it comes to speed, because Flipboard (and other apps like Pulse) can do a lot of pre-fetching of content behind the scenes, since the content they allow users to interact with is relatively fixed. But in Prismatic, every tag on an article or blog post or other piece of content is a keyword that can be clicked on to reveal other content the service has found about the same topic, so the path a user will take is much more unpredictable. And speed is always a constant concern, he says:

“It’s got to be fast, so we had to bite the bullet and do a few things that took a couple of months to build. You know, with the phone you’re sitting in line, you’ve got three minutes, that makes your fuse for bull**** almost zero — you see a ‘loading’ image and if it crosses some time threshold, you immediately close the app and go somewhere else. That kind of ADD world is the reality for the phone.”

Most media companies take whatever website they have already developed and try to squish it into a mobile app or a mobile version of their website, but Prismatic has done the opposite — although it started with a website, Cross says it was it focused on the mobile experience from the beginning, and has actually changed the website version to make it more like the mobile app. That’s an approach that many traditional media players might want to emulate as mobile becomes an ever bigger part of the news-consumption business.

Click to view slideshow.

Read The Full Article:
http://gigaom.com/2012/08/23/prismatic-wants-to-conquer-the-new-frontier-mobile-n
ews/

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First Mountain Lion update is out: fixes
Thunderbolt, iMessage and other bugs

Apple issued the first update to its new desktop software Thursday: OS X Update 10.8.1. The software fixes a variety of bugs discovered when Mountain Lion was released a month ago. Among other fixes, Apple says 10.8.1 should address a problem related to playing audio through a Thunderbolt display, and another with iMessage sending.

Here’s a list of all the issues the update address:

It also appears the update may address battery life problems that cropped up for some MacBook owners after installing Mountain Lion.

Mountain Lion went on sale for $19.99 in late July, and is Apple’s first attempt to sell desktop software entirely through the Mac App Store. So far, it’s working well. The company announced that it had sold 3 million copies in the first 4 days. And likely because of the ease of downloading directly from the App Store, it was one of the fastest desktop software uptakes in Apple’s history: after two days it was already on 3.2 percent of Macs.

Users will be prompted to update automatically or you can find the update in the Mac App Store under Updates.

Read The Full Article:
http://gigaom.com/apple/first-mountain-lion-update-is-out-fixes-thunderbolt-imess
age-and-other-bugs/

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