Entries Tagged 'Apple' ↓

Jailbreaking, the act of hacking an Apple mobile device to allow for the installation of unapproved, third-party apps, is often seen as a niche activity undertaken by only a small subset of users. But the truth is, when you're dealing with Apple devices, even a small subset equates to a large number. According to Jay Freeman, who runs the largest jailbreak app store Cydia, around 10% of all iPhones are jailbroken. In total, he says there are approximately 10 million jailbroken devices in the wild, including iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices.

And now, this rapidly growing user base will have their very own conference: MyGreatFest, the world's first convention for the jailbreaking community.

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Jaibreaking Goes Mainstream

Jailbreaking, once the domain of hackers and the tech elite, has rapidly become a force to be reckoned with. It attracts a much wider crowd these days, thanks to easy-to-use tools put out by both individual hackers and teams of hackers. Some, like the recently launched JailbreakMe.com, don't even involve software downloads. All a user has to do on with JailbreakMe.com is open its URL on their mobile device to begin the jailbreaking process.

The benefits to jailbreaking are plentiful. Although the activity has been associated with application piracy in the past, many jailbreakers simply want access to the apps that Apple rejected or wouldn't permit in the App Store. In the past, these have included things like mobile hotspot tools, themes, widgets, replacements or upgrades to core apps, changes to the device's default functionality and other such tweaks. But more importantly, jailbreakers have a sense of control over their devices, and a sense of ownership.

If there's something a device doesn't do that you wish it would, there's probably a jailbreak "app for that."

Even Apple itself seems to be warming up to the jailbreaking community of late. The company recently hired well-known jailbreak app developer Peter Hajas, whose "Mobile Notifier" app appears to have served as the inspiration for iOS 5's new notifications center. Does that mean the jailbreaking scene will now be the testing ground for new iOS features? Considering the wide range of innovations that emerge there, we hope so.

MyGreatFest: The First Ever Jailbreakers' Convention

For those who have watched the community from the sidelines, following well-known personalities like @saurik or @P0sixninja on Twitter, the new jailbreaking conference MyGreatFest will put them up close and personal with their favorite hacking idols. And for fellow hackers, who often jockey for position among their peers, as hackers tend to do, it will offer a venue where they can show off their skills, maybe even get into a coding grudge match in front of a live audience. Meanwhile, fans who really want to meet the hackers one-on-one will have the opportunity to buy tickets to a VIP area where they can "have lunch" with the developers, or just hang out and chat.

There will also be a series of presentations from big names in the jailbreaking community, where they will tackle subjects like the piracy problem, and whether or not DRM (digital rights management) should be included in the jailbreaking tools provided to mainstream users. In addition, the event will offer Q&A sessions, giveaways, vendor booths and everything else you would expect from a traditional conference.

First Official iOS 5 Jailbreak May be Revealed at MyGreatFest

And there may be one more big event at the upcoming show: the first official iOS 5 jailbreak, says MyGreatFest organizer Craig Fox. Although the beta of the OS has already been jailbroken, until the commercial release, there's no way to know if the exploits used will still be available when the new iPhone launches.

However, there's a good chance the next iPhone will arrive before the conference's start date of September 17th, 2011 in London. Fox says that if that's the case, it's very likely we'll see the new iPhone jailbroken right there at the event.

Interestingly enough, Fox (pictured, right) isn't a developer, hacker or event planner by trade - he's a carpenter. Cearly, a jailbreaking enthusiast, too. It's a testament to him that he's been able to pull this event off at all, much less attract the big-name developers as both speakers and attendees.

The London event is only the beginning, Fox tells us. By October, he will be ready to announce the dates of future events here in the U.S., as he plans to bring MyGreatFest to both coasts by 2013, starting sometime in spring 2012 with an event in the San Francisco Bay area.

In the meantime, despite the distance, the first jailbreakers' convention has attracted a wide audience of attendees. Tickets have have been sold all over Europe, North America and even India and Singapore. For those who can't make it, sessions will be both livestreamed and posted to YouTube.

The conference has a very grassroots feel, which is makes sense, given that jailbreaking itself is very much a grassroots movement. But now that jailbreaking has its own convention, Apple is stealing jailbreak app developers and the jailbreaking user base is numbering in the millions, this activity is rapidly losing its niche status in favor of mainstream success.

Still, that's not necessarily a bad thing, if you ask us.

For more info on the event, check out MyGreatFest.net.

Why did Apple put out a press release today about reaching the milestone of 15 billion downloads? Maybe to distract you from the other news about how it just lost the rights to the term "App Store" in a high-profile lawsuit against top competitor Amazon.

Well, guess what? It worked! Look what our headline reads!

Still, it is an impressive number, and one that puts competing app stores to shame. And Apple had even more new numbers to reveal today, too.

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Apple also said that there are now 425,000 apps available in the App Store, including over 100,000 native iPad apps, which have been downloaded by consumers in over 90 countries. It again noted that there are over 200 million iOS devices worldwide and Apple has paid out over $2.5 billion to developers to date.

Some of these numbers represent an increase over those revealed at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. At that time, Apple had reached 400,000 mobile apps, 90,000 of which were iPad-specific and 14 billion downloads.

Compared to Others

To put these numbers in context, Google said at its I/O conference in May that the Android Market had reached 4.5 billion downloads, and Google has seen over 100 million devices activated worldwide. Also at that time, Google was activating 400,000 Android devices daily. By the end of June, Google's Android chief Andy Rubin reported that daily activations had increased to 500,000 per day.

Google said, too, that there are over 200,000 apps in the Android Market. What it didn't want to tell you, however, is how many work on Android tablets. It's an embarrassing number that may be somewhere from 50 to 100, reports The New York Times.

As for Nokia, it's seeing over 6 million apps and content downloads per day, and more than 300,000 new Nokia accounts created daily. The Ovi store is now home to over 48,000 apps. Nokia also said that Qt developers can target more than 100 million devices now, and will be able to target 150 million more in the future, due to the Symbian smartphones Nokia intends to sell.

RIM is now seeing 3 million app downloads per day, the company announced in March, up from 1 million just under a year ago. And Microsoft's newcomer Window Phone reached its own milestone recently: 25,000 apps, up from 11,500 in March.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security issued a warning today that iPhones, iPads and the iPod Touch have a "critical weaknesses," the Associated Press reports. The malware is delivered by an infected PDF that can affect the user's device without them knowing. The same a result would occur when a user visits a website with an infected PDF.

This is one of the first malware weaknesses discovered for iOS. Android has an increasing problem with malware and rootkits but so far there has not been a significant weakness exploited on iOS (not counting the 120,000 iPads that were hacked last year that was really more the fault of AT&T than iOS). Is this just the first drip of a coming wave of mobile malware?

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According to a Google Translation of the German Federal Office for Information Security, the exploit will give the attacker administrative privileges over device which would include any data, email or contacts stored on the device. So far there is no official patch available for the exploit from Apple. Yet, if you have jail broken your iOS device there is a patch available through Cydia.

The exploit exists for all iOS devices running version 4.3.3. The agency stated that it
"currently can not exclude that other versions of the IOS operating system are affected by this vulnerability," (translated from German with Google Translate).

Apple works with Good Technologies to help secure iOS and has been consulted by corporations that focus on mobile strategy such as Juniper. If there is already a patch for this exploit in the Cydia store than it is likely that the security companies like Good and Fingerprint Security (a popular security app for the iPhone) will have the loophole closed relatively quickly.

The new iPhone, expected to launch sometime in Q3 2011, will be "thinner and lighter" than the iPhone 4, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the situation. It will also include an 8-megapixel camera - a big step up from the 5-megapixel camera now in the iPhone 4, claims the paper.

While the 8-megapixel camera has been reported by numerous sources, the design itself is still in question. Last month, for example, Bloomberg said the new iPhone would "closely resemble" the iPhone 4. And in May, This is my Next... reported the iPhone would sport a teardrop-shaped design. What's really going on?

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What's going on is that no one knows. New design, same design, thinner, lighter, teardrop-shaped? Everything's in full "rumor" territory until Apple CEO Steve Jobs steps on stage and holds up the new device for the world to see.

That being said, when comparing all the reports in aggregate, some trends can be seen.

Biggest Rumors So Far

For starters, in the Journal report, an unnamed component supplier stated that Apple's sales estimates for the next iPhone were aggressive - Apple told them to prepare for 25 million units by year end. But two other sources cautioned that the new iPhone is "complicated and difficult to assemble," which could prove challenging for Hon Hai, the global assembler for Apple products. And what makes a phone complicated to assemble? Hon Hai Chairman Terry Gou said it was because some of the devices it handles are "so thin," explains The Journal, referring to something Gou said at the company's annual meeting in June.

For what it's worth, the iPhone 5 (if that's what it will be called) described by The Journal could confirm both the This is my Next... report of a teardrop-shaped phone as well as an earlier BGR report which states that the next iPhone will not be "an upgraded iPhone 4 as had been previously rumored." Instead, said BGR, it will sport a "radical new case design."

At the time, BGR didn't have any news on what that case design would be, but referenced the This is my Next... blog post as one possibility.  And Joshua Topolsky of This is my Next.., formerly of Engadget, had reported all the way back in January that the next iPhone would be "completely redesigned," according to his sources.

While it's entirely possible that all the sources referenced are just the machinations of Apple PR, the trend does seem to point to a new look for the new iPhone. At least, that's what we're hoping for, especially considering all the drama over "antennagate" with the iPhone 4. Oh, had you all forgotten that? But of course the new iPhone will be redesigned - Apple doesn't want to go through that again!

Image credit, mockup: This is My Next...

In our continuing tradition of rounding up new mobile application releases we found interesting and/or exciting over the past month, we present you with this new list of apps for June 2011. Previously in June, we shared a list of apps that came out in May and during the first part of June, so be sure to check that post for some early June app launches.

This time around, we're again focusing on new (and notably updated) iPhone and Android applications, as well as a few iPad, tablet and cross-platform apps that caught our eye. As always, share which apps are your new favorites in the comments below.

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iPhone Apps

Discovr Apps: An interactive map of all the iOS applications on iTunes. Search for a favorite app, and Discovr shows you related apps in a beautiful visualization. ($0.99, iTunes)

Frenzapp Music: A social music player for sharing songs with friends. (Free, iTunes)

Roger Ebert's Great Movies: Offers all of the reviews in Roger Ebert's series of Great Movies books, from 1915 to the present. ($0.99, iTunes)

Doxo: A file cabinet in your pocket. Snap photos of bills and receipts, view digital files, backups supports, and receive paperless statements from select providers. (Free, iTunes)

BiteHunter: Like Kayak.com for restaurants, this iPhone app helps you seek out dining deals via real-time search. (Free, iTunes)

SayClip: Free & private video messaging. Coming soon to Android. (Free, iTunes)

Agenda: A beautiful calendar app with a clean, minimal design. Great replacement for the stock calendar. ($1.99, iTunes)

WeatherTrends 360: Discover your future weather...up to a year ahead! Uses the company's high level statistical forecasting model to project temperature, precipitation and snowfall trends for 6.4 million locations in 195 countries. ($0.99, iTunes)

SmartFuel: Lets you find cheap gas, but also rate station cleanliness and safety. Uses the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) database which tracks credit card swipes at the pump for determining fuel rates. (Free, iTunes)

Photosynth: Microsoft's 360-degree photos app was recently updated to offer cropping, expanded sharing (now Bing, Facebook and email) and includes "Best of Bing Maps" contest, where the prize is free Xbox 360 and Kinect. (Free, iTunes)

Flixwagon Live Video Share: Broadcast live video from your iPhone and share on Facebook, Twitter, via SMS or email. Sketch and draw over the live, video too. (Free, iTunes)

Universal (iPhone/iPad) and iPad-only

exfm: Social music discovery app goes mobile, letting you follow favorite tastemakers, note songs to favorite or share, listen to friends' shares and buy from iTunes. (Free, iTunes)

NBC: Clips and previews, not full-length episodes. Worth noting, we suppose, but kind of lame. (Free, iTunes)

Fring: Recently updated to include video conferencing on iPad 2. Supports groups of up to 4 people. (Free, iTunes)

Flixlab: Lets a group of friends share video clips and pictures to make movies together. (Free, iTunes)

Hipmunk: Popular flight search app is now available for iPad, letting you sort flights by "agony." (Free, iTunes)

Roadshow: Lets you save online videos for later viewing, even if you go offline. Supports Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Funny or Die, The Onion, but not YouTube. (Free, iTunes)

Book Crawler: Book database and reviews app was recently updated to integrate Skyhook's Local Faves. Now lets you talk to others nearby about the books you're reading. ($1.99, iTunes)

Next Page: Android & Cross-Platform Apps

Popular iPad magazine app and Apple's iPad App of the Year Flipboard has just released a new version featuring a handful of updates, including one which has the company rethinking a user's first-time experience with the application. Now, instead of having to configure Flipboard with your favorite sources for online news, photos and other topics, a new content guide lets you immediately start browsing well-known websites formatted in an easy-to-read magazine-style layout.

Flipboard has also added built-in search, LinkedIn integration and has reformatted how the links from Twitter appear. But the company's biggest update is still yet to come.

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Easier for First-Time Users

The newest release of Flipboard is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The most notable change is the improved access to finding and discovery content. In the latest version, tapping on a red ribbon at the top right of the home screen ("More") takes you into a content guide where you can delve into sections dedicated to topics like "Business," "Science & Technology," "Cool Curators," "Art & Photography" and others.

When viewing articles or posts from these sources, a new "Add" button at the top of the screen lets you mark the publication as a "Favorite" for easier access in the future.

Also new is a "Featured" section which Flipboard will use to showcase its partners, the latest addition being The Economist, which will be available at launch. Although many websites can be viewed in Flipboard, the company's partners have the ability to run magazine-style advertisements alongside their articles, formatted in a reading-friendly iPad layout, and track the visits from the application's users.

LinkedIn, Search & More

Another big update this summer release is the new LinkedIn integration. Flipboard is the first company to provide third-party access to LinkedIn Today, a news feed-like look at various industry verticals. 37 major industries are covered by LinkedIn Today, like Food & Beverage, Law and Non-Profit, for example. The end result is something like a trade magazine for following your industry's most important news.

Other updates to Flipboard include the added ability to continue flipping through a magazine or publication after reaching the last page of article, a revamped way to read articles coming from tweets (the article is now given priority while the tweet and its associated actions are moved to the bottom of the page) and the addition of a search feature that returns results for RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook updates, results from Flickr, Instagram, Google Reader and more. People search is supported as well.

There are several "behind-the-scenes" improvements, too, to make the app run faster and to offer less noticeable user interface improvements in spots.

Coming Soon: Personalized Recommendations

However, what we really wanted to know was when Flipboard would begin to capitalize on the technology it acquired at launch through a startup once known as Ellerdale.

The answer is that Flipboard has already done so. And we'll see more of that technology soon, according to Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue.

Ellerdale's smart data-parsing algorithms are currently used in the app's search feature and for deriving what's popular on its network, but Ellerdale's technology will be even further baked into the product in the near future.

Will this just be a series of incremental updates, like what we've seen so far? Or does Flipboard have an even bigger launch on the horizon? Both, says McCue. The product will get smarter over time, as new versions are released. But another update, which McCue says is "coming pretty soon" will offer an even better personalized experience involving recommendations.

In the meantime, Flipboard's next big focus is its iPad app, due to arrive later this summer. Versions for Android or other platforms aren't out of the question, but the company hasn't reached any solid conclusions on that front.

The new version of Flipboard is now live in iTunes here and is a free download.

Apple will release two new iPhones come September, according to speculation from analyst Chris Witmore of Deutsche Bank: the iPhone 5 and the 4S. The idea makes sense, as it would allow Apple to simultaneously address both the mid-range smartphone market with a more affordable device while also providing a more expensive model for the high-end.

However, the theory appears to be nothing more than that: a theory. Meanwhile, a separate report from Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty states that production for the next iPhone will begin in August.

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iPhone 4S: $349, Unlocked, Prepaid?

Witmore's prediction, published this morning on Fortune, comes from a note issued clients earlier today. The analyst says that now is the "right time for Apple to aggressively penetrate the mid-range smartphone market (i.e. $300-500 category to dramatically expand its [total addressable market] and market share." The iPhone 4S, priced around $349 unlocked, would come with a pre-paid voice plan.

Sounds like a great theory, let's see how that pans out.

For what it's worth, Apple already has a plan in place for addressing the needs of this more price-sensitive market here in the U.S.: the iPhone 3GS, offered for $49 at AT&T. For many first-time iPhone upgraders, the 3GS is a "good enough" phone for their needs. That means the more disruptive part of Witmore's (unsourced) speculation is the part of about a pre-paid voice plan. Now that would really get Apple into a new market: the part of the world where mobile users prefer to pay upfront for unlocked phones. This, says Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt, includes regions in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

It's also the same market where low-end Android devices will compete alongside any Apple newcomer. According to a report from Juniper Research from January, there will be over 185 million entry-level smartphones by 2015. Shipments of these devices will be driven by operators who hope to boost data usage on their networks by offering phones running the Android OS, Juniper says.

In other Monday morning iPhone rumor news, Morgan Stanley's Huberty states that production for the next iPhone will begin in mid to late August and will "ramp up aggressively into C4Q." As for the rumored Apple TV - the TV set, not the media center box - that's still in the early design stages, she says.

Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.8 yesterday in preparation for its Lion release. There are several things to like about the new update, including changes to Final Cut Pro X as well as enhancements to the Mac App Store ahead of the release of Lion.

Overlooked in the update is the fact that Apple has included a fair amount of security updates in the software. When it comes to Apple, people always want to talk about what is cool and sleek and fun to use. Yet, as the fake anti-virus malware Mac Defender has shown us, Apple is becoming more of a target for malicious hacks. Apple releases security updates with each version of Mac OS X. Let's take a look at what is significant in version 10.6.8.

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According to the Sophos Naked Security blog, the most important fixes concern "arbitrary code execution."

"That's computer-speak for 'allow a bad guy to run malicious code on your computer, without your authorization,'" wrote Graham Cluley of Sophos.

Digging into the Mac OS X 10.6.8 security summary, one striking aspect is how long it is in comparison with other security summaries from previous patches and OS versions. OS X 10.6.7 had three security updates, all dealing with Mac Defender. Two were file quarantine updates and one was specifically for "malware removal."

The 10.6.8 update has 28 specific items. Five items are related to QuickTime and have to do with downloading malicious movie or picture files that could lead to arbitrary code execution. Other updates of vulnerabilities to arbitrary code execution include OpenSSL, MySQL, ImageIO, CoreGraphics, CoreFoundation, ColorSync and ATS.

Apple also patched MobileMe where a vulnerability where "an attacker with privileged network position may read MobileMe's email aliases."

Apple is expected to sell between 13 and 15 million MacBooks in 2011, driven largely by a coming refresh of its MacBook Air series. In comparison to how many Windows computers are shipped every year that is not a lot. Yet, criminal hackers are starting to recognize that Mac computers are susceptible to malware and socially engineered attacks. The fallacy that Macs are safer than PCs is starting to erode. As such, expect more security updates to come from Cupertino on a regular basis.

Registered Apple developers who were unable to attend this year's WWDC can now watch what they missed over on Apple's Developer Center website. Apple has posted 109 WWDC session videos online, which include both videos of the presentations and the accompanying slideshows.

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The session breakdown is as follows:

• App Frameworks: 32 sessions
• Core OS: 13 sessions
• Developer Tools: 20 sessions
• Graphics, Media and Games: 24 sessions
• Internet and Web: 19 sessions

Of course, in order to access any of this content, you'll need to be a member of Apple's Developer Program. If that's the already the case for you, then go ahead and click here for the Developement Videos page.

I very rarely review a single mobile app these days - we prefer to do mobile app round-ups here on ReadWriteWeb - but I'm going to make an exception this time for Photogram. This new iPhone application, launched just yesterday, is deserving of a mention, if only for catching my attention among a sea of mobile photo app startups.

From the description, the app seems somewhat basic, maybe even a little boring: share photos via Facebook, Twitter or email. But it does so with a simplicity, elegance and ease that I've often found lacking elsewhere.

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Above: Sample Photogram

Even though there are social networking sharing mechanisms built in to give the app a more universal appeal, the app's target demographic is, to be sure, parents. Like me. And especially parents who need to share iPhone photos with their kids' grandparents, and everyone else who "doesn't have a Facebook yet." (Yes, despite Facebook's some 500+ million users, there are still so many who still prefer email for photo-sharing. I know, shocking.)

While the iPhone's photo gallery app makes emailing photos easy enough, the end result is just a plain email. Photogram, instead, lets you dress things up a bit with a selection of artistic themes to showcase your photos, some of which are free and some that are paid. There are "baby" and family-oriented themes, party themes, minimalist themes, outdoor themes, and many others.

But the real killer feature is the ability to create recipient groups so you can share with the same folks (e.g. "grandparents," "friends," etc.) over and over again, without having to address the emails by hand. Facebook and Twitter can be combined with email recipient groups too, so you can send our your photos everywhere in just one step. Genius.

An App for Everyone

While none of these things are new innovations, necessarily, it's the way they're put together that makes the app so great. There aren't those trendy photo filters to mess with like in Instagram and its clones, you don't have to create a "profile," add friends or find others to follow - you just pick a few photos (4 max.), add a message and share. So easy, anyone can use it. And that's the point.

Sometimes, simply making a task easier, quicker and more fun is all it takes to win me over. Now, Photogram, won't you please come to Android?

Below: Photogram of the most adorable child in the world: mine.