iPhone

WordPress acquires Poster for iOS

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Tom Witkin built a beautiful app in Poster and I’m really happy for him. Poster is an app that I’ve used and tested since it first came out, and it’s still my favorite. However, I worry that the folks at Wordpress will ruin it. They shouldn’t try to incorporate what Tom built into the official Wordpress app, they should throw theirs away and make Poster the new official app.

iOS 7

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There is no doubt that iOS 7 is a great looking operating system. In fact, I liked everything that I saw, except the icons on the home screen. I don’t know what it is, but they seemed kind of odd to me.

Who cares that Android is ‘open’?

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  • Less than a tenth of Android users care that it’s open

  • The number of people who care that Android is open is about the same as the number of people who run Linux

This was a fascinating read.

ITC rules against Apple in patent dispute with Samsung

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The U.S. International Trade Commission today reached a decision [PDF] in the ongoing Apple vs. Samsung case, ruling that Apple infringed on Samsung Patent No. 7,706,348, titled “Apparatus and method for encoding/decoding transport format combination indicator in CDMA mobile communication system.”

It’s important to note that any sales ban that comes from this ruling will only affect older iPhone models. The iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and future models will not be held up with this decision.

Apple leads Samsung in US smartphone market share

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Market research firm comScore on Tuesday released results of its latest research into smartphone market share in the United States. The results showed that Apple is leading and growing faster than its competition, including Samsung.

App Camp for girls

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App Camp for Girls wants to address the gender imbalance among software developers by giving girls the chance to learn how to build apps, to be inspired by women instructors, and to get exposure to software development as a career. Our goal is to grow our non-profit organization into a national force, with programs in multiple cities, helping thousands of girls.

Much respect to Jean MacDonald.

How iMore takes great photos

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iMore is one of the sites that includes some great photography in its posts. Over the weekend they put together a story from several of its writers detailing what gear they use to shoot and edit.

How concert experiences have changed with the smartphone

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Michael Mulvey:

In the 2010’s photo, the connection is no longer one-to-one between the audience and the performers. A middleman has been inserted between the two sides. What this means is the priority is to capture a great version of what’s happening, not to experience the performance.

Just look at those two photos. I’m guilty of doing this at recent shows too.

Apple betrayed by its own lawyer

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Joe Mullin for Ars Technica:

Court documents unsealed this week reveal who’s behind FlatWorld, and it’s anything but typical. FlatWorld is partly owned by the named inventor on the patents, a Philadelphia design professor named Slavko Milekic. But 35 percent of the company has been quietly controlled by an attorney at one of Apple’s own go-to law firms, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. E-mail logs show that the attorney, John McAleese, worked together with his wife and began planning a wide-ranging patent attack against Apple’s touch-screen products in January 2007—just days after the iPhone was revealed to the world.

That’s almost too crazy to believe.

iOS wish list from a non-techie

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By non-techie, I mean she isn’t an engineer, programmer, analyst or reporter. It’s pretty clear she has a good handle on things though.

Line 6 Sonic Port for iPhone and iPad

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Sonic Port delivers inspiring guitar tones and best-in-class audio quality on your iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. Jam with the tones of your favorite artists, connect keyboards and speakers to create your mobile recording studio, or plug into your amp and play live. Every time, Sonic Port gives you pro-quality sound with GarageBand, Line 6 Mobile POD, Jammit and other CoreAudio music apps.

This looks incredible. I’m getting one.

Samsung Galaxy S4: A “messy experience”

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Om Malik:

In the case of S4, when I used the device for the first time, I encountered three screens asking me to either sign-in or sign-up: Google, Samsung and AT&T. The phone is packed with Google Apps (good), Samsung Apps (meh!) and AT&T apps (why.)

WWDC Expectations

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Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is only a couple of weeks away and everyone is wondering what the company will unveil during the keynote address. As much as we all have long wish lists for what we would like to see, I think it’s important to balance those with realistic expectations for what’s likely to happen.

iPhone users will abandon iMessage for BlackBerry Messenger… Wait, what?

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Just when you think we got rid of the RIM co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis comes back.

BlackBerry (BBRY) founder Mike Lazaridis said he’s confident that users of iPhones and other devices will embrace the company’s BlackBerry Messenger platform, which will be offered on rival phones later this year.

“BBM is by far the most compelling wireless experience and wireless social-networking environment,” Lazaridis, who stepped down as co-chief executive officer in early 2012, said yesterday at the Bloomberg Canada Economic Summit in Toronto.

GO AWAY!

The harsh reality of the Android ecosystem

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Om Malik:

HTC was the shining star during the early days of Android. Now it is reeling under the pressure of cheap Androids, a dominant Samsung and a management disarray. It’s a damn shame, as the new HTC One is actually a nice device.

I thought it would do better than it has.

Tech gear and saving money on energy

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Jeff Bertolucci for The Saturday Evening Post:

Beware. Your tech gear is costing you money while you sleep. Sure, the stuff looks innocent enough: cable box, HDTV, computer monitor, and sundry other electronic gadgets that consume power even when in “sleep” mode. While their energy-sucking ways may seem harmless, they cost you big bucks over time.

It all adds up.

Intel passed up on the original iPhone

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Intel CEO Paul Otellini:

”We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

So basically, Otellini is the Pete Best of the tech business.

Mophie Juice Pack Plus for iPhone 5

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I have never used a case on my iPhone, except for the Mophie Juice Pack Plus. Having the extra battery power made it worth while and the Mophie never let me down. Good seeing it available for the iPhone 5.

Mobile malware exploding… for Android

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Daniel Eran Dilger:

Malware targeting mobile devices is rapidly growing in both the number of variants found in the wild and in their complexity and sophistication, but the only platform being actively targeted is Google’s Android, which researchers now say is resembling Windows on the desktop PC.

Perfect.