The Iphone Blog

UPDATE: Seth at 9to5Mac is now backtracking. While he says he’s received multiple tips that Mac Pros will be updated, he thinks the MacBook Pros tip might have been fake. “Shame on us,” he says.
Our friend Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac thinks MacBooks and Mac Pros will be updated within a week. Seth received a tip [...]

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Last week we shared some tips for getting the most out of Google Buzz for mobile. We’re back with more ways to help you become a power buzz poster and find the most interesting buzz while you’re on the go. Try these 5 tips for the Google Buzz for mobile web app (buzz.google.com) on your iPhone or Android 2.0+ device.

1. Post buzz with your voice.
You can post your public buzz simply by speaking it. From the Google Mobile App for iPhone or Quick Search Box on Android, select the voice search icon, say “post buzz” followed by the text you’d like to post, and watch your words appear. Before your post is sent, you’ll be able to edit it or change its tagged location.

2. Filter the Nearby tab for a specific place.
From the Nearby tab, you can easily filter buzz by a specific place, such as a sushi restaurant you’re about to walk by, to only see posts from that place. Open the menu showing nearby places, for example “Tartine Bakery and 20+ other locations nearby,” and then select a specific place from the list. Now, you’ll see all the public buzz anyone’s ever posted from that place or you can quickly create a post that is tagged with the place. To go back, just open the same menu and select your current location shown with the blue dot. You’ll once again see all the recently posted buzz around your location.

3. Search!
As you’d expect from any Google product, Google Buzz for mobile has a powerful search feature that lets you search all public buzz for topics that interest you. Open the menu or just select the magnifying glass icon to see the search bar. You can also search specifically for nearby posts by checking the “Search nearby” box before submitting your search (it’s already checked if you’re in the Nearby tab). Now you can find out what people around you are saying about the closest pizza spot or a traffic jam.

4. Post from your city-level location.
Tagging a post with your location is easy and adds context to your buzz posts. Sometimes, your post isn’t about a specific place or you’d rather not share your exact location. You can easily show your city-level location, so your post has a general city location tagged and will be browsable in the Nearby view and Maps Buzz layer. When posting, just select the “>” in the location box, scroll down, and select the city-level location option.

5. Refresh your location.
On the other hand, sometimes you really want your location to be exact. When you visit the Nearby tab or want to tag your post with a location, Google Buzz will try to get your location using your phone’s GPS. If you’re not happy with the location accuracy, you’re moving, or you’re just stepping outside to get a GPS signal, hit the ‘refresh’ icon to tell the Google Buzz web app to get your location again. You can also learn more about troubleshooting location problems.

Stay tuned for more tips! Visit our Help Center to learn more or tell us your feedback and questions in our Help Forum. You can also give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page.

Posted by Chris Nguyen, Product Marketing, Google Mobile

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The Menu Bar sits at the top of your screen at all times. Let’s take a moment to get to know it. It’s worth doing, because the Menu Bar is going to be one of your best friends.
When you used Windows, you were used to see menus inside each document window. File, Edit, all [...]

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Engadget is reporting that DARPA is looking at creating their own app store, to bring software quickly to combatants. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the research wing of the American military, and has thrown its weight behind some impressive stuff in its day (as well as some completely off the wall ideas). Two of DARPAs projects are related to smartphones: Mobile Apps for the Military (DARPA-SN-10-27), and Transformative Apps (DARPA-BAA-10-41), both of which are targeted at making apps for the iPhone and Android OS. According to Engadget, “the agency is calling for apps for battlefield, humanitarian, and disaster recovery missions, including command and control, mission planning, surveillance, reconnaissance, and language translation”.

For any budding app developers that want to skip over the currently swamped world of the Apple App Store, there’s nothing sweeter than a government contract…

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In a move only surprising in that it’s taken this long to announce, B&N have officially announced that they’re making a version of B&N eReader for the iPad. According to the press release, it will give readers access to the 1 million+ books, newspapers and magazines purchasable through the B&N eBookstore, and any content purchased for their nook will be accessible. The book sellers give no evidence on how precisely it will differ from the iPhone version, except to say that it’s “designed specifically for the iPad”.

Full press release:

We’ve been getting lots of questions from customers, so we wanted to confirm that we will soon be adding a new B&N eReader for iPad – continuing to fulfill our promise of providing consumers any book, any time, any where.

Designed specifically for the iPad, our new B&N eReader will give our customers access to more than one million eBooks, magazines and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, as well as the existing content in their Barnes & Noble digital library. (That includes eBooks and content customers have downloaded to their nook™ eBook reader.)

To be released around the time of iPad’s expected availability, the new Barnes & Noble eReader will join our growing list of free eReader software for most computing and mobile devices including PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod touch and Blackberry, many of which will be updated shortly for an enhanced on-the-go reading experience.

Don’t have our eReader software for your desktop or mobile device?  Learn more here to download the B&N eReader and enjoy reading on the go.

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According to Forbes, Apple has played around with the app store leading up to the iPad launch, adding more divisions in order to serve content in a more efficient manner. The biggest news is the addition of 20 top-level categories for books, including ”Fiction & Literature”, “Reference,” “Romance,” “Cookbooks” and “Comics & Graphic Novels”, which then tunnel down into another 150 sub categories. There are even two erotica sections, under “Romance” and  ”Fiction & Literature”.

According to Forbes’ sources, Apple is also flagging apps for what versions of the iPad they will work with—if any. Apps will be tagged “iPad Wi-Fi” and “iPad 3G” depending on which version of the hardware they function with.

It’s surprising to see Apple be okay with adult books, given their pulling of an app for featuring the kama sutra, and the recent cull of adult applications. However, on the whole, this system seems a more efficient way of navigating the app store, and as such is sorely needed.

If you want to be one of the first to see these new organizational categories on an iPad, try entering our competition to win one!

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Legendary rock band Pink Floyd have won a legal injunction against record label EMI, preventing the label from selling individual songs through digital means. The band argued this was against their 1999 contract, which stated that albums weren’t allowed to be sold in any but their original configuration, and EMI countered that this only applied to physical copies. The judge sided with the band, so you can expect individual tracks to be pulled from the iTunes store shortly.

According to the Telegraph, this is the first time a band has successfully prevented a label from selling individual versions of tracks, and this marks a milestone for artistic control of digital media.

[via Loop Insight]

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While not quite as exciting as the rumors of multitasking that popped up earlier, there are some other interesting features being revealed about iPhone OS. 9 to 5 Mac have continued to take apart the most recent revisions of the iPhone/iPad SDK 3.2 beta 4. In it, some new features have come to light, and some old rumors are put to rest.

Firstly, the new SDK mentions two new gestures: long press and triple tap. Both of these are pretty self explanatory, and add a few new ways to interact with applications.

Second, the previously spotted video chat files have now been removed. Where previously were references to accept or decline video, both files have been nixed.

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Now that’s a mouthful, a mouthful of powerful computing and one that could land on Tuesday. ZDNet lets us know that several tipsters claim Apple is ready to revamp their Mac Pro lineup, adding a new Hexacore Xeon Core i7-980x to the lineup. For those unfamiliar with this processor, it boasts of some pretty impressive specifications:

• 3.33GHz (TurboBoost to 3.6GHz)
• 6 cores / 12 threads
• 32nm architecture
• Socket LGA1366
• 130W TDP

If  you see the Apple Store go down Tuesday, it’s a safe bet we’ll see see this monsters available shortly thereafter.

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For iPhone detracters (and yes, there are a few left), they often harp on the iPhone’s lack of multitasking. While the iPhone offers multitasking of sorts within it’s core apps, you cannot use an application like Pandora to stream music while checking your email. Palm’s webOS and Android have different implementations of multitasking support, both of which are more robust than available on the iPhone. Apparently, that’s all going to change with the release of iPhone OS 4.0. AppleInsider is reporting that Apple will introduce their multitasking solution that will allow several third party apps to run in the background.

Their sources say Apple has developed a “full-on solution“. Apple has always reasoned that battery life was a major reason for the lack of support. This solution would have to optimize resources as to not have an overtly adverse affect on battery life. Apple’s solution reportedly leverages interface technology inherent in Mac OS X.

The only downside is that development of iPhone OS 4.0 has a “way to go” before being ready for release. Let’s hope that “way to go” doesn’t change our hopes and dreams of a June release.

via AppleInsider

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