Today is the day after christmas. Mine was very comfortable and relaxing. My biggest present I made to myself, it was my 27″ i7 iMac which I unboxed earlier this month on YouTube. And when I unboxed my other Christmas presents I was excited to find a Microphone desk arm and a pop killer screen. This episode is already being recorded with this and on the new iMac. Ah and by the way, there is a new firmware for the graphics card in the i7 iMacs that supposedly fixes some screen problems. Though I never saw any of these. So I am blessed.
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My script (aka “Show Notes”) after the fold below.
The News
As promised Apple turned off the iTunes Connect site. But fortunately for all of you who cannot live with their daily dosage of sales data you can still get to your reports on the address itts.apple.com. This is the site that hosts the daily and weekly sales data all along, but usually Apple want you to log in via iTunes Connect. But with ITC being down you can still go there and log in with the same credentials. I made a fix in version 1.0.15 of MyAppSales to go directly to the ITTS site if iTunes Connect is down. Other report downloading services and applications report that they continue to work as they where going via ITTS all along.
Yet another video grabbing app has been approved into the app store. Generally it now seems that the private method to grab the screen is no longer contraband.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog deducted the dates for the Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 to be June 28th through July 2nd. How did they get this date? Well, the Moscone Center is booked solid around and on these dates there is a placeholder “corporate event” scheduled. We have no confirmation that this is in fact by Apple, but unless they have another venue, then this is a very good bet. So if you a a professional, then you better block this week in your schedule and start saving.
And save you must, one ticket is around $1300 and there have been quintuple-packs for about $5200, that’s about a thousand each. Add another thousand for a cheap flight, accommodation and food, so it’s about a months salary for most people. So if you put away 333 Dollars each month for the next 6 months you will have the funds.
Also July 29th 2010 will be the date when the exclusive deal with AT&T ends. We can already smell the iPhone going to be available with other carriers. So Mid of next year we will in all likelyhood see an even bigger explosion in market growth. Good for us developers. More carriers mean more customers.
Tablet rumors have gotten much more interesting due the MacRumors reporting that Apple has approached a couple of big developers and asked them to prepare their apps for running in “full screen resolution”. Usually you would take a shortcut and hard-code the sizes of views to something that fits on the iphone. But view as well as interface builder support that views can be resized and would autoresize their children. So if a button is set in a certain distance from the lower left border it would stay there if the view is resized.
It appears that Apple will demo something in January that has a higher resolution that iphones but will still run binaries compiled for the current SDK. Now this could be multiple things. It could be a 7 or 10 inch tablet. Or it could simple be a renaissance of the TV-output with higher resolutions if you use an iPhone as game console. You might know that you can play videos via the USB connector on TV-screens, but currently not play games or use apps in this mode. This might be around the corner. So that’s something that gets us to jump into the new year with a feeling of immediate anticipation of what Apple has cooked up.
Meanwhile the Financial Times discovered that Apple has reserved the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on January 26th, the same location used for the last iPod event which featured Steve Jobs’ return to the stage. MacRumors has evidence that Apple registered iSlate.com as early as 2007. So let’s call it that from now on until we know better. iSlate is a nicer name than iTablet or iPadd anyway.
A senior Apple employee was caught stating “I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet,” and a former Apple staffer quips that “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”
So, thank you Apple, you certainly know how to get our hopes up. We’ll be looking forward to doubling our app store sales when the masses flock to the super-cool iSlate and want to purchase our apps to run on the big screens.
Categories: Podcast
