That wasn't much of a big prediction, but I was right when I said we'd see a new verison of iTunes. Today Steve Jobs announced the release of iTunes 10, which not only comes with a new logo, but also with new features...
Unless you've been underneath a rock for a few weeks you're aware that Apple will be holding their annual September event this Wednesday. With such an event so close, you can pretty much find a rumor for any wild idea you could think of. We figured here at iDB we'd toss around some ideas and let you add your own.
I'll start with the casualties:
The jailbreak community is always exciting. There's always a new application in development soon to be released to an unsuspecting public. Today, Synchronicity takes the throne. It allows you to use your iPhone while it's currently synchronizing with iTunes. I'm not sure why Apple disables us by disallowing usage of devices during a sync. Personally, I think Apple should allow this function by default.
You either love custom ringtones or you invariably loathe them. You can put me down in the latter category. Nevertheless there are many who love hearing a portion of their favorite jam when someone calls, or assigning certain songs that fit the personality of a specific contact in their address book. If you fit into the group that loves custom alerts, you're in luck.
If you check out the Apple iPhone Dev Center you will see an encouraging vow to developers stating that they can expect to see quicker, more consistent payments in the future.
As it reads on the website there is a new payment and financial report module in place. Here is an excerpt from the site:
Surprisingly, we didn't get an invite for this, but TechCrunch did, and according to it, Apple will be holding a "special event" on September 1st, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco at 10 am.
The invite comes with the image above, which strongly indicates the event will most likely be focused on music. Let the speculations go wild! What are they going to unveil? My guess is we're going to hear about the new iPod Touch with a nice Retina Display and a front-facing camera for FaceTime. Apple will also probably unveil a cloud-based version of iTunes...
iLounge reveals a bit of discerning information that took a mysterious amount of time to surface. It turns out that the iPhone 4 shares the same limitations as the iPad and the Apple TV in regards to being unable to transfer rented movies back to your iTunes library.
The ability to move rentals had never been a problem before when renting on previous iPhone models. An excerpt from the iPhone iOS 4 User Guide briefly mentions the limitation on page 99, and it reads as such:
TechCrunch announces some inspiring statistics released by Apple that show the educational access platform, iTunes U has leaped over 350,000 available files. Even more impressive is nearly half of the 800 plus universities worldwide that have active iTunes U accounts are distributing their content publicly.
Also revealed were the 300 million downloads recorded to date that are free of charge. Institutions supplying the content include Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and University de Montreal...
A couple of months ago we reported that the App Store had been hacked, resulting in a massive fraud whereby hackers would get into people's iTunes accounts and buy their own apps. At the time, Apple issued a weak statement, the App Store got hacked again, and we never heard anything about this matter until today.
A TechCrunch article reveals what seems to be a major security flaw in iTunes accounts linked to Paypal.
Well I didn't see this coming after the supposed hangups with iTunes regarding "minimal" access through the cloud. Gizmodo reports that a fellow by the name of Michael Robertson has discovered streaming capabilities of your iTunes library through iDisk. Public sharing between devices with iDisk has been possible for a while, but never streaming in the background, until now. To those who aren't hip to the MobileMe features, iDisk is the online based storage that is included with the $99 annual fee.
Here's your formula:
Drag your songs, one by one, or folder by folder, into your iDisk. There is no playlist support as of now, though this writer thinks that feature is an inevitable reality. Right now iDisk has a 20GB maximum, so you big spenders, (or less than ethical gatherers), will have to be selective in the songs you want shared/streamed.
Having tested this myself, I'll say that it works flawlessly over Wi-Fi. Like I previously stated, the MobileMe service is $99 a year, which includes the apps it offers. Those of you with 3G service, let me know in the comment box how it works over the network. Enjoy!
Do you remember last week when the App Store was hacked? Well, the App Store was hacked, again, as uncovered by 9 to 5 Mac.
In an article I wrote a few days ago, I explained how Apple was downplaying the situation by saying only 400 accounts were hacked, which to me didn't make sense, and was way less than it could possibly be. It seems that I was right.
This week's shady developer is from China and goes by WiiSHii. All the fraudulent apps are in the travel section which contains over 11,000 applications. That means these apps didn't make it in the Top 100 because they were so few to compete with. People who thought I was wrong about this whole situation won't be able to argue on that point.
They clearly used some cheating mechanism to get their apps in the top 100. Additionally, Ars Technica reports about a user who was falsely charged for a bevy of apps from the same WiiSHii development company.
Your turn now, Apple. How do you fix this?
After issuing a somewhat weak statement about the App Store hacking situation, Apple is now blatantly lying to our face and downplaying what seems to be a massive criminal activity.
Apple recently told Dayton Morris that around 400 or so iTunes users were impacted by the fraud, which, considering there are over 150 million iTunes users, only represents 0.0003% of them.
Oh great, they seem to have this under control, you might think. Wrong, and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. Here is why...
Thuat Nguyen, the developer who was first caught taking advantage of the the iTunes App Store got 41 of his applications rank in the top 50 of the book category. Now tell me, how can 400 iTunes accounts boost an app sales all the way up to the top 50? Right, they can't. You need muh more purchases than that to rank at the top of your category. Each app needs to be downloaded thousands of times on a period of time to rank that well.
Let's use conservative numbers and assume that to rank at the top of the Books category you need 1,000 downloads for 30 days. So each app would need to be downloaded 30,000 times (1,000 downloads x 30 days) in order to take the top spot because one account cannot buy the same app over and over again.
All the sudden, we are far from the 400 accounts Apple claims were impacted by the fraud. I might not be exactly right about these numbers, but I'm sure I'm not too far from the truth.
Apple impassiveness has been pretty flagrant lately and I'm not really sure the "no-talk policy" Apple has been maintaining for years now is a good things for both the company and its customers.
Thoughts?