The tech giant will roll out the iPhone 6 in two sizes - 4.7 inch and 5.5 inch - in September, according to industry insiders who have seen the prototypes.
The new iPhone screen will be made entirely from scratch-resistant sapphire crystal glass, they said. Sapphire crystal, second to diamond as the hardest material, is now used by Apple for its iPhone camera lens cover and touch identification.
It will also sport a new display at 441 pixels per inch (ppi), the same as the Samsung Galaxy S4. The highest definition Apple now offers has only 326 ppi.
On the sapphire element, obviously it is going to more expensive to some degree than an established commodity (reinforced glass). However, I don’t think you can know how much more expensive it will be to produce when Apple is the one doubling the worldwide output of sapphire to use solely for itself.
On the PPI jump, I get the feeling an increase of 100 PPI, while impressive as a technical specification, isn’t going to translate into a meaningful real-world difference. Modern Android phones have displays with PPI in excess of 400 and I can’t tell the difference pixel-density wise between those and the iPhone’s 326 PPI display.
So why go to such an extreme then? I think it is merely a by-product of Apple wanting to go above the resolution of full HD, 1920x1080. What I’m saying is I don’t think Apple is increasing the PPI so they can advertise a better PPI — this characteristic isn’t going to be called ‘Retina+’ or anything.
What Apple can advertise though is the ability to watch TV shows and films at full resolution. If you are making the screen bigger, you have to change the resolution so you might as well kill two birds with one stone. Going to a 5.5 inch screen yields a 400 PPI alone. It’s not that much more of a leap to land at 440.
For some email providers, new email messages in Mail may only appear to arrive when Mail is first opened. No new email arrives until Mail is quit and reopened.
Resolution
Quitting and reopening Mail forces it to re-establish a connection to the email server. You can use these steps to receive new mail messages without quitting Mail:
Choose Mailbox > Take All Accounts Offline.
Choose Mailbox > Get All New Mail.
What an embarrassment. Just fix the thing. iOS 7 Mail is buggy too, occasionally refusing to mark messages I am currently reading as read.
A set of new renderings of the proposed Union Square Apple retail location was presented to the San Francisco Planning Department this week that show an updated design for the store’s entrance. The new renders depict the store with massive 23-foot wide sliding glass doors (which measure nearly 45 feet tall each) that a large section of the storefront to open to the street.
Those doors are huge. I bet that looks amazing when it’s finished.
In our push for polish we had a goal of never dropping a frame on high-end devices, and we mostly achieved that goal. The engineering complexity here is finding a way to fully utilize the multicore architecture of newer iPhones on top of the UIKit framework which has no support for multithreading. Significant work went into creating a framework for doing rendering work on multiple threads, and we spent a long time finding the balance between performance and complexity. Turning synchronous operations into asynchronous ones adds a lot of cognitive overhead, and this was one of the biggest challenges of the project.
Even if the app turns out to be a massive flop, you have to admire the the engineering talent here. Prado says that Paper is one of Facebook’s longest running projects. They truly doubled down on this — somehow managing to overcome Facebook’s ‘ship quickly’ culture.
Solar panels have, until recently, been pretty inefficient. You need plenty of area and lots of sunlight in order to generate worthwhile amounts of power. Of all of Apple’s products, the iPhone offers some of the least surface area to work with. The latest generation of solar panels are a lot more efficient reaching close to 40% in the labs, but still, there’s no way that a panel the size of an iPhone screen – even the larger one we expect in the iPhone 6 – is going to power the phone on its own.
But delivering a useful boost to battery-life, an hour or so, say, would likely be feasible. Not, admittedly, if the phone spends all its time in your pocket or bag when not in use, but I can certainly envisage a situation where you know you’re getting low on power and you’d be glad of the opportunity to be able to put it out on a desk or table to help you make it through the day.
At a surface level, the idea is appealing, as manufacturers search for ways to prolong battery life in spite of the fact that advancements to battery capacity are nowhere to be seen. However, solar panels need to be relatively big and exposed the sun to work. This doesn’t really seem to gel with the form factor of a phone, which are inherently small and stowed in pockets when not in use.
Perhaps the technology will be more applicable as part of an iPad or MacBook, where the potential surface area of a solar panel is many orders of magnitude larger, but I just can’t see it for the iPhone.
The BBC will look to Jeremy Clarkson to conquer the world with a new international channel called BBC Brit driven by reruns of one of its most popular shows, BBC2’s Top Gear.
BBC Brit, which will launch later this year, will be aimed at male viewers and feature “the best of British content from motoring, business, documentaries and adventure to food, music and sport”.
So exactly like Dave which has been around since 2006.
The big story here, however, is the inclusion of a fingerprint scanner no doubt designed to rival the Touch ID sensor found in Apple’s iPhone 5s. The document also indicates that the phone will have “3D gesture support,” which we suspect may point to an expansion of the existing air-gesture system.
I think I could have predicted that the S5 would have a fingerprint sensor the day after the 5s came out.
The original speculated resolution of 2304 x 1440 made little sense. What resolution would a 12” Retina MacBook Air feature instead? The 11.6” MacBook Air currently comes with a 1366 x 768 panel. Pixel quadrupling this resolution would represent the easiest path towards a Retina MacBook Air in terms of meeting performance and power constraints, yielding a 2732 x 1536 display.
What size would this panel be? Assuming that the rumor of an approximately 12” Retina MacBook Air has some veracity, why not something close to it?
It turns out that an ~11.88” Retina MacBook Air with a 2732 x 1536 resolution happens to have the exact same pixel density as the 9.7” 2048 x 1536 Retina iPads: ~264 PPI. It would make sense for Apple to take advantage of the same display technology it has been utilizing for the 9.7” iPads by cutting their panels to this larger size. I suspect a new 11.88” Air would be a redesign of the 11.6” model with smaller screen bezels.
The difference is, with the iPads and iPhones, a straight doubling the number of pixels across the same physical space had benefits beyond than manufacturing efficiency. For iOS, a pixel-doubled display meant better app compatibility. Pre-existing apps would just run in a 2x mode and developers only had to supply new assets to take advantage of the ‘Retina’ fidelity.
If Apple had chosen any other resolution for the iPhone 4 or iPad 3, developers would have had to redesign their apps from scratch and compatibility mode would have comprised horizontal and vertical letterboxing.
For OS X, unlike iOS, pixel-doubling is not a requirement. Due to the windowed nature of OS X, apps can run on devices with a whole variety of screen resolutions. There may be cost savings for Apple (by using iPad display sheets at a different size), but I can’t imagine that the savings are so significant as to dictate Apple’s course.
Ignoring the above issues, I still think extrapolating the Air’s display from the iPad’s display is a baseless argument. Apple could just as easily use the 15 inch MacBook Pro’s display (which has a DPI of 216), or the 13 inch MacBook Pro’s display (which has a DPI of 226), or something else entirely. Each of those options produce different end results for an ~11inch Air. The point is, you can’t tell.
“We have a fix in an upcoming software update for a bug that can occasionally cause a home screen crash,” Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller told Mashable.
Only took five months for them to even publicly acknowledge a problem exists.
iBooks Textbooks offer iPad® users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, rotating 3D diagrams, flick-through photo galleries and tap-to-play videos. iBooks Textbooks don’t weigh down a backpack, can be updated as events unfold and don’t need to be returned. With nearly 25,000 educational titles created by independent publishers, teachers and leading education services companies, including new educational content from Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Hodder Education, iBooks Textbooks now cover 100 percent of US high school core curriculum and the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) core curriculum in the UK.
I’m not certain what ‘core’ means, but that’s really good progress nonetheless. The difference between being able to say iOS has most of the content versus all of the content cannot be understated.
If the iOS device lineup consisted only of iPods and iPhones, I think Apple’s mobile OS could continue quite happily as a siloed one-application-at-a-time environment for many more years.
However, the iPad puts a spanner in the works. Everyone is realising for the iPad lineup to keep expanding, iOS has to grow up. The decision to run the iPad on iOS brought all the benefits of a lightweight power-efficient core, but it also brought the less-desirable characteristics as well. Most of these deficiencies don’t matter on a phone but become clear downsides on a tablet.
iPad hardware is outstripping the capabilities of the OS it runs … already. With the potential of an even bigger-screened slate on the horizon, in the form of an ‘iPad Pro’, the need to develop iOS’s multitasking and productivity workflows is more important than ever.
That being said, at the same time, users do not want to sacrifice iOS’ trademark intuitive simplicity either. That is why people love iPads and iPhones as much as they do. “Professional” does not mean complicated.
Therefore, any improvements Apple makes to iOS need to satisfy both of these criteria, to be both straightforward and advanced. It sounds paradoxical, but what realistically can be done?
Windowing is the response everyone wants to give. Let two apps live side by side onscreen. Done. Of course, it’s not that easy. On a desktop, windowing is implemented in a way that adds hierarchy, because windows can stack and occlude other windows. I think its clear to pretty much everyone by now that window management is not desirable for touch interfaces. Resizing is just too fiddly — Samsung proves this point perfectly with its latest TouchWiz stuff.
With Metro, Microsoft enforces constraints on how apps can appear side-by-side. The result is users can quickly “snap” a secondary app as a sidebar, taking up about a third of the display’s width, from anywhere in the UI with just a quick swipe from the edge of the screen. Not only easy, but understandable.
I think Apple could implement this limited form of windowing, in a way that builds upon the established platform that already exists. I mocked up what this would look like in practice, but let me elaborate on the technical details a bit further. With the iPhone 5, Apple stretched the iPhone screen resolution vertically by 176 pixels. Developers were forced to invest time making their apps’ layout vertically flexible so they looked on the iPhone 5. Effectively, Apple has seeded the app ecosystem to react to respond to changing vertical screen heights.
So, if Apple set the width of the sidebar panel to be the width of the current lineup of iPhones (640 pixels), the amount of additional work developers would have to do to adapt to the new system would minimise, because apps are already used to living in environments that are 640 pixels wide and have flexible heights. Essentially, when docked in the sidebar, iPad apps would render like elongated iPhone apps. The design of most iPhone apps lends well to tall viewports. Most apps are navbar, tableview, toolbar. Just increase the height of the tableview indefinitely to fill the additional space.
Taking this ‘panelling’ concept in a slightly different direction, iOS could do with some way to open apps in a more transient manner. With iOS 7, if you want to check Tweetbot, you have to make a concerted choice to leave what you are doing and switch. For things like Twitter, that doesn’t really make sense a lot of the time. I’d love to be able to peek at an app over-the-top of whatever I’m currently doing. Imagine something similar to how iPad Mail behaves in portrait, where the message list can be popped out with a swipe and dismissed just as quickly without losing the context of your current actions completely. This kind of approach is better suited to the 9.7inch iPad form factor we have today, as the system doesn’t need to dedicate a portion of the screen to a secondary app — it just shows and hides over the top of the current primary app.
Multitasking isn’t the only problem to tackle, of course. Ideally, iOS apps should be able to coexist and cooperate between each other. Popovers are an excellent way to expose this in UI, because of their self-contained nature. Apple already does this with integration with the stock apps: presenting a picker for photos, contacts or events in a popover is already common practice on the iPad. Apple just needs to extend this to support third-party datasources. Developers could provide UI that other developers can present to users as a modal popover, without waking up the entire app. XPC would ensure that data transfer between applications remains secure.
Apps should also have the capability to be ‘faceless’, so that other apps can query for data without needing any intermediary UI. This would enable apps like to draw on information available in other apps without pushing additional UI. For example, GarageBand could import sound-clips from apps like djay or Animoog in addition to the Music app. Similarly, a word processor could retrieve definitions from the users’ preferred dictionary app rather than stick to whatever the developer bundled with the app.
The notion of such deep access will undoubtedly sprout fear about data corruption from external sources, malicious or otherwise. However, this system of information exchange does not have to work in both directions. Read-only access alone would be enough to mature the iOS platform significantly.
In many ways, this system would end up being more sophisticated than what is available on OS X. The technologies that will enable this stuff to become reality exist in iOS today, such as remote view controllers, and are already used by Apple extensively for their own apps. Challenges arise when scaling up for third-party use, questions such as ‘which app gets priority for photo management’ are an issue.
In spite of the complexity, I strongly believe progress in this area is necessary … to make up for the shortcomings of a largely siloed OS. OS X doesn’t need this stuff because everything goes through a centralised filesystem, which iOS obviously lacks.
For example, why would they ignore the fact that as a diabetes patient, it is generally recommended that I not wear contact lenses. Yes, I understand that there are many different opinions about this, but it is generally thought of as smart to not wear contact lenses, as they always carry the risk of increased complications for diabetics.
Never heard this issue come up before. Interesting.
Dougherty’s work at Sano Intelligence is incredibly interesting in light of Apple’s work on wearable devices, and it seems likely that she will bring this expertise from Sano over to Apple. While Sano Intelligence has yet to launch their product, it has been profiled by both The New York Times and Fast Company. The latter profile shares many details about the product: it is a small, painless patch that can work on the arm and uses needle-less technologies to read and analyze a user’s blood.
Having something that can analyse blood without cutting into the skin is a hard concept to wrap my head around. Having that strand of biological analysis in a smartwatch is equally difficult to visualise. How would it be marketed for one thing?
Apple and Samsung were the winners as more consumers migrated to their flagship devices. iPhone ownership increased from 35 percent in Q4 2012 to 42 percent in Q4 2013. Likewise, Samsung Android phones increased from 22 percent of smartphones owned in Q4 2012 to 26 percent in Q4 2013.
It’s easy to take a comical stance in light of this report, play the ‘Apple is doomed’ sarcasm card and move on. However, I think it’s important to remember that the US has never been a point where Apple has struggled. The proportion of iPhones sold relative to all phones sold in the US has grown consistently for ever.
The people who genuinely believe ‘Apple is doomed’ quite rightly pinpoint other regions as the key battlegrounds for the iPhone going forward; places like India and China.
Each of us has something to share. A voice, a passion, a perspective. The potential to add a stanza to the world’s story. We were so inspired by how people use iPad every day, we set out to capture a few of these moments.
This ad has spurred quite a controversy over the weekend. It’s certainly divisive. Personally, I think the ad is okay but nothing spectacular. It is really moody and very intense but those characteristics don’t necessarily make a good ad, a trap I feel too many people fall into.
That aside, what caught my eye in particular was the accompanying micro-site for the diving expedition. I noticed Apple had put social sharing buttons for Twitter and Facebook at the bottom of the page.
This gave me an idea. I searched Twitter for the string Apple suggests (“Scuba divers are taking iPad underwater to perform research and save our coral reefs”) to gauge how well the campaign was being received. As of right now, only four people have actually tweeted the page. Make of that what you will.
Ever felt you’ve overstayed your welcome in a cafe, by reading, working or surfing the web while hugging the latte you bought two hours ago? Pay-per-minute cafes could be the answer. Ziferblat, the first UK branch of a Russian chain, has just opened in London (388 Old Street), where “everything is free inside except the time you spend there”. The fee: 3p a minute.
Ziferblat means clock face in Russian and German (Zifferblatt). The idea is guests take an alarm clock from the cupboard on arrival and note the time, then keep it with them, before, quite literally, clocking out at the end. There’s no minimum time. Guests can also get stuck into the complimentary snacks (biscuits, fruit, vegetables), or prepare their own food in the kitchen; they can help themselves to coffee from the professional machine, or have it made for them. There’s even a piano – an idea that could seem brilliant or terrible, depending on who takes the seat.
What’s stopping people grabbing a coffee and a biscuit on the way to work and then just leaving, with a total cost of 6p? Even if you take an hour to enjoy your coffee, it’s still cheaper than any other cafe in the city.
