The Wall Street Journal has shared the results of an eye-opening investigation on how apps share personal data. Since the success of the App Store, apps have become the backbone of what makes or breaks a successful, mobile device.
The Journal looked into how some apps (both iOS and Android) actually behave with your phone's information, and examined the personal data that most don't know is shared through apps. The results were a little disturbing...
Apple recently patented a new, spiral-based, graphical UI. Details on the patent reveal that the new "Spiral" interface is most likely intended to replace Cover Flow, an already existing interface in OS X and iOS. The design of the interface looks like it will work well with both standard and multi-touch displays, and will most likely be included in OS X Lion next summer.
The goal of this new interface is to display more information than was previously possible in a limited space. Like everything Apple does, another goal is to also make it as visually and aesthetically appealing as possible to the end user...
WikiLeaks, the globally recognized brainchild of Julian Assange, has its own unofficial iPhone app. This unofficial app was recently approved by Apple and released in the App Store.
The app's official description reads, "The Wikileaks app gives instant access to the world’s most documented leakage of top secret memos and other confidential government documents." You can now have all of the sensitive WikiLeaks data easily available on your iPhone...
Yesterday, Apple announced that the Mac App Store will officially open on January 6, 2011. The Mac App Store, like the iOS App Store, will be used to distribute and sell applications for the Mac.
Apple began accepting Mac App Store apps for review in the first week of November, and they are urging developers to submit their apps by December 31, 2010 to be a part of launch day. Apple hopes for the Mac App Store to be just as successful as its iOS counterpart. And while there are certainly mixed feelings among developers, it seems that the Mac App Store will be very successful...
Cydia is a household name in the jailbreak community. Anyone who has jailbroken their iDevice has most likely used Cydia. Some of us may even know that Cydia is the brainchild of Jay "saurik" Freeman, whom most consider the father of the jailbreak.
Cydia is used by millions of people, but how many know why it has such a weird name? I mean, "Cydia?" What in the world does that mean? There has even been dispute as how to say the word "Cydia." Little do most know, there is an interesting reason for the odd title behind the icon that every jailbreaker recognizes...
It's not that often that an app like Inception comes along. That's right, Christopher Nolan's masterpiece film has its very own iPhone app!
The Inception app pioneers the use of augmented reality with sound. It synchronizes an augmented layer of music and ambient noise with the world around you.
This groundbreaking app experiment is the project of Christopher Nolan, Michael Breidenbrücke and Hans Zimmer. In case you didn't know, Christopher Nolan was the writer and director of the Inception movie and Hans Zimmer wrote and produced the movie's score...
We've heard the rumblings about the supply problems stemming out of Apple's current relationship with LG, the South Korean firm that currently supplies the iPhone LCD screens.
In a move that will likely give Apple more control over supply, Toshiba has announced that it will build a factory for 100 billion yen to produce future LCD panels. That's a lot of money, about 1.2 billion in US dollars, which will certainly put Toshiba in the drivers seat when it comes to supplying screens for the iPhone.
Production isn't scheduled to start until Q3 2011, so it's entirely possible that these new screens could be used for the inevitable iPhone 6...
According to certain device management vendors, Apple, without an explanation of any kind, has dropped its own jailbreak detection API from iOS no less than six months after releasing it. The reasons behind this decision are a mystery, as Apple has declined to comment on the decision to abandon the API in the release of iOS 4.2.1.
Apple's API let MDM (Master Data Management) applications access core information about the version of iOS running on any given device. Basically, the jailbreak detection API allowed certain applications to ask an iOS system if it had been compromised. Surprisingly, in the newly released iOS 4.2.1, that API is nowhere to be seen...
In classic iTunes tradition, Apple has posted their "iTunes Rewind" for 2010. The best content from the iTunes Store is listed in different categories, from "top grossing" to "hot trends."
A huge section of iTunes Rewind 2010 is dedicated to the App Store, as one might imagine. There's a huge selection of chosen apps to check out...
With the recent release of iOS 4.2, Apple has joined efforts with Nokia to make smartphone carrier signaling more efficient. The Nokia Siemens Networks recently did a test to show that iOS 4.2 supports a relatively new and unadopted technology called "Network Controlled Fast Dormancy." That may sound like a mouthful, but what it actually means isn't that hard to understand.
Nokia already implemented this technology earlier this year, but Apple has been the first smartphone platform to support NCFD since Nokia. Based on Nokia and Apple's combined market share, Apple's adoption of this technology now puts NCFD-supported devices into the hands of more than half of the people buying new smartphones around the world...
AirPlay just got the jailbreak treatment. AirPlay (one of Apple's new technologies in iOS 4.2) allows streaming video to be pushed from any iOS device to an Apple TV.
AirPlay is only intended to allow streaming from the iPod and YouTube app, but this new jailbreak tweak opens up AirPlay possibilities to any playable media on an iOS device...
Even though jailbreaking is now legal, the cat and mouse game will never stop between Apple and the jailbreak community. Last example is the fact that iOS 4.2.1 has introduced a new baseband requirement, as explained by Notcom, the developer of TinyUmbrella.
While it's not clear yet what Notcom means by "baseband requirement", we can nonetheless assume that it is some kind roadblock that's going to make it harder for us to jailbreak, unlock, and downgrade.
Here is what Notcom has to say about this new baseband requirement: