Edible Apple

This may be entirely new, or maybe we just haven’t noticed it, but Apple’s product page now has a listing for a wireless iPad keyboard for $69. When Steve Jobs demoed the iPad a few weeks back, he showcased an iPad keyboard dock where users could position their iPad vertically and type away. That’s all well and good, but a wireless keyboard sans the dock gives users that much more flexibility in setting up their work flow.  Now if only Apple made it compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

In what appears to be a last minute hardware change, Apple has replaced what was formerly the “mute” switch on the iPad with a “screen rotation lock” switch. Pictured above on the left is how the iPad formerly appeared on Apple’s website, and pictured above on the right is how it appears now.

MacRumors writes why the change is necessary:

Like the iPhone, the iPad automatically senses its orientation and adjusts its display between portrait and landscape modes with no user input required beyond turning the device. One common complaint among iPhone users has been, however, that there is no system-wide mechanism to lock the screen in one orientation. The lack of screen rotation lock on the iPhone is particularly frustrating to those attempting to use their devices while lying down on their sides and finding their iPhone rotating the display to an “upright” position.

via 9to5Mac

It sure is a good time to to be on Apple’s legal team. Not only is there the much publicized lawsuit against HTC, but you might also remember that Apple and Nokia are also in the throes of a potentially significant lawsuit.

Last October, Nokia sued Apple for patent infringement claiming that Apple’s iPhone infringed on a number of Nokia patents relating to wireless standards and network technologies. Apple, in turn, countersued Nokia alleging that the Finnish handset maker has been infringing on a number of Apple patents such as the iPhone UI.

Nokia then raised the stakes by lodging a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), an international governing body with the power to actually ban imports of a product. And that’s exactly what Nokia is asking the ITC to do. But Apple, ever the legal adversary, responded in kind and filed its own complaint with the ITC seeking an effective ban on all imports of Nokia smartphones.

So where does that leave us today?

Well, it was decided in a recent court filing obtained by Reuters that a trial date for the epic Apple v. Nokia showdown will take place in 2012, “raising the spectre of a prolonged legal struggle.”

How to develop an app with EA Mobile - TUAW

Overdoing the interface metaphor - Marco.org

Apple’s HTC lawsuit, another reason for someone to buy Palm? - Business Insider

JooJoo revamps interface ahead of launch - Engadget

Apple’s iPhone Developer Contract exposed - Electronic Frontier Foundation

Add a second menubar to your second computer screen - Lifehacker

Making a tablet ain’t that easy, just ask Stantum - Wired

Apple must feature PixieTea in their next iPhone ad - Gizmodo

Mac Pro ‘hexacore’ Xeon Core i7-980x coming next week? Zdnet

Open GL 4.0 comes out to play - CrunchGear

It’s no secret that Steve Jobs and Apple don’t think too highly of Flash, with Jobs reportedly noting during an internal Apple meeting that the majority of crashes on Safari are due to Flash related bugs.

Apple has refused to budge from its position of not supporting Flash on the iPhone, and with the Flash-less iPad set to hit the streets in just a few weeks, we’ll soon find out if user demand for Apple’s latest and greatest product outweighs user demand for a complete web browsing experience.

In the video below, Anup Mura, Adobe’s director of technology strategy and development for the Flash platform, address’s some of the more common complaints levied against Flash.

In regards to the claim that Flash drains battery life, Mura responds: “We’re using the same video hardware, we’re using the same graphics hardware, we’re moving more things off the CPU into hardware acceleration that gives us similar performance and similar profile as all these other devices.”

Looking forward, Mura highlights some of the improvements we can expect to see in Adobe’s upcoming Flash 10.1 player

We’ve actually done some optimizations to look at where flash is on a web page, and if content is off-screen, we actually suspend that flash instance, so that there’s extra processing not happening off-screen. Browsers don’t necessarily do that, web pages don’t necessarily do that, we’ve actually been able to be thinking about this problem more broadly and it’s not just  about what can we do in the runtime and using hardware better, but also be thinking about how the application or the webpage is being rendered, and what is being rendered on the screen, where are we in memory..

That sounds pretty nifty, but the only way Apple will cave and support flash on the iPhone and/or iPad is if consumers start complaining with their wallets. Unless that happens, Adobe’s Flash improvements are akin to the school nerd buying the headd cheerleader flowers - it’s a nice gesture, but it ain’t gonna seal the deal.

Further Reading:

Steve Jobs disses Flash, calls it a dying technology

Steve Jobs calls Adobe lazy

AppleInsider is reporting that the next-gen iPhone will finally include support for system wide multitasking, an issue some users have been complaining about ever since the original iPhone first debuted.

While some know-it-all pundits have chastised the iPhone for its inability to support multitasking, the reality is that the iPhone OS is more than capable of running multiple apps at the same time. The caveat, though, is that Apple only allows its homegrown apps to run concurrently. So while you can’t check your email while listening to Pandora, for example, you can listen to music from your iTunes library while browsing the web.

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A few days ago we reported that Pink Floyd and their record label EMI were warring over iTunes royalties. Part of the problem was Pink Floyd’s contention that their contract did grant EMI permission to sell their music on a song by song basis via iTunes. While some artists have undoubtedly made millions of dollars via singles on iTunes, Pink Floyd believes that its albums should be digested in their entirety, and that each song is inextricably tied and connected with the next. That being the case, Pink Floyd believes that selling their album 1 song at a time is a knock against their artistic integrity.

The obvious problem, though, is that Pink Floyd’s current contract was drawn up in 1999 - years before iTunes even existed. So while EMI was prohibited from selling CD tracks as singles, the issues of whether or not that should apply to digital sales was somewhat cloudy.

Until now.

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In a recent note to investors Merrill Lynch analyst Scott Craig wrote that Apple is on target to sell approximately 33 million iPhones in 2010, a figure he believes is attainable regardless of whether or not Apple strikes a deal to sell the iPhone on Verizon.

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Apple says there’s an app for just about everything, and it’s really hard to take umbrage with that. Case in point - a new app from Davka titled iBless Torah that teaches users the ceremonial blessings said both before and after one reads from the Torah.

The app description reads:

Learn to chant the Torah and haftarah blessings! iBless Torah includes the full text of the blessings recited before and after the Torah and Haftarah readings, complete with audio, vowelized Hebrew and transliterated text. As the blessings are changed, the Hebrew and transliterated text is highlighted, one word at a time.

The app is available on iTunes for $1.99. Just remember not to bring your iPhone up to the bimah with you!

CNET writes:

In fact, 9 out of 10 of this year’s nominees in the “Documentary Feature” and “Documentary Short” categories used Final Cut Studio to make their films. Final Cut Studio includes Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, Color, Compressor, and DVD Studio Pro, essentially giving filmmakers all of the tools they need to make a movie.

TUAW has a fascinating read on how Ngmoco went to work developing Eliminate, a kick-ass first person shooter.

Apple yesterday released a new beta of the iPhone SDK 3.2 and developers are already finding a few telling items. But first, developers have found that the most recent SDK removes all references to video chat and conferencing functionality which abounded in the previous SDK. Either Apple has no plans to implement video chat on the iPad, or it’s trying to keep its plans under wraps.

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