Hot on the heels of announcing 25 billion song purchases since the iTunes Store's inception nearly a decade ago, today Apple of California has conveniently kicked off a fitting Valentine's Day love music promotion.
The company has discounted some of its most popular love songs, which now cost 69 cents a piece. These music tracks span genres and decades, from artists like Aerosmith, Celine Dion, James Taylor, Kenny Chesney and Whitney Houston, to name a few...
Some of you who used evasi0n to jailbreak their iPhone earlier this week might have encountered an issue where the Weather app would just crash at launch. The evad3rs were quick to identify the issue, and yesterday, they released a "manual" solution to fix the problem.
This fix, which we detailed and explained, required a bit of code manipulation, and was not really the easiest way to go at it. Fortunately, the evad3rs have now released and update that can be downloaded right from Cydia...
Just in time for Valentine's Day $0.69 love music sale, Apple this morning issued a press release announcing that music lovers have downloaded more than 25 billion songs from the iTunes Store. The company's song sales now average to 15,000 tracks downloaded per minute. The iTunes Store opened for business on April 28, 2003 and its catalog is now over 26 million songs strong. Remember that it was only back in September 2012 that Apple announced 20 billion iTunes song purchases.
With the recent addition of 56 new markets, music on iTunes is now available for sale in 119 countries. And with the recent Apple TV 5.2 software update, owners of Apple's $99 set-top box can now see upcoming songs when playing music, choose what plays next and access their previously purchased songs from iCloud, right on their television set...
Vine, Twitter's new app for sharing short 6-second clips, has had somewhat of a rocky start. Immediately following its launch two weeks ago, Twitter got inundated with complaints that the Editor’s Pick section was populating users' video feed with adult content. Twitter blamed the problem on "a human error" and promised to fix it in the next update. And just like clockwork, Vine version 1.0.5 landed today on the App Store, bringing with better sharing and the 17+ age rating (was 12+)...
Here's something that I think our own Jeff Benjamin might love a lot. Pixel Film Studios has launched its first iOS app, ProCutX (developed by Lightwork Solutions), which allows video editors to control Final Cut Pro X on their Mac through an iPad. As you can see for yourself, the user interface replicates pro video editing consoles that people who are serious about film making use in conjunction with the Final Cut Pro X software...
With Valentine's Day just around the corner, Apple's App Store yesterday launched a new Valentine's Day Gift Guide to highlight "some of the finest apps and games" for your significant other. The promotion ties nicely with the app gifting feature which was relaunched on iPhones, iPads and iPods last December. Should you choose to give the gift of apps this Valentine season, you can purchase your gift right now and have it delivered on Valentine's Day on any other date of your choosing...
After years of sitting on the sidelines, Microsoft entered the modern tablet space late last year with the Surface RT. And although it sparked a lot of initial interest, it failed to translate that into sales, with reports claiming it didn't fair very well over the holidays.
But alas, the Redmond company has a second shot at greatness with its new Surface Pro tablet. And it too has stirred up quite a bit of commotion, with some pundits deeming it a possible iPad/Macbook Air killer. But will this MS slate actually live up to the hype this time?
On Monday, we passed along a report claiming that Apple is in jeopardy of losing its 'iPhone' trademark in Brazil. It applied for exclusive rights to the name back in 2007, and is expecting to hear a decision from the country's copyright regulator next week.
The problem is that the iPhone trademark has belonged to electronics maker IGB Eletrônica SA since 2008. And rumor has it that the Brazilian Institute of Intellectual Property is going to rule in its favor, meaning Apple couldn't use the term anymore...
Remember when Jay Freeman said that Cydia wouldn't get bogged down by the massive demand for users of the evasion jailbreak, thanks to measures like including the package catalog in Cydia? The lesson here is to never underestimate the demand for jailbreaking. At its peak, Freeman's servers were hit with over 4 million HTTP hits per five minutes. There aren't many independent websites that can survive that kind of spike in traffic overnight, so it shouldn't be a surprise that downloading tweaks through the Cydia app remains an unreliable process...
There used to be a long-standing joke about Apple's public relations department that it was the least demanding job in Silicon Valley. It was almost as if Apple's PR bunnies were only required not to return calls from journalists and disregard email inquiries from various media outlets. Couple this inaccessibility and Apple's penchant for dreaming up shiny gadgets people lust after with the infamous culture of secrecy and you have a winning formula for a kind of coverage other companies would die for.
But the times they are a-changin', to paraphrase musician Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs favorite songwriter. The Wall Street Journal fittingly reported Tuesday that Apple's public relations team now has to work a little harder to get the message across, a tell-tale sign that competition is heating up. Hit the jump for more tidbits and my own insight on how Apple owns the media...
This week's evasi0n release has garnered a lot of attention over the past two days—and not just from folks who intend on jailbreaking. Sites like CBS and DaringFireball, who don't normally cover the jailbreak scene, are running multiple stories on the hack.
The consensus seems to be that folks are just genuinely flat-out impressed with the technical aspects of evasi0n, and the team behind it. And for good reason too. Check out this Forbes interview with planetbeing, where he talks in-depth about the jailbreak...
It's pretty obvious that Apple doesn't want people jailbreaking its devices. While the company isn't going out and suing hackers like ahem, Sony did, it's not exactly making it any easier for them to open up its mobile OS either.
And the company's disdain for the process is especially evident in its Knowledge Base article on jailbreaking, which points out that unauthorized modification of iOS can cause instability and other major device issues...