Prior to the launch of the iPhone 5S we posted a report titled "Apple Passing on a larger iPhone Display still a Head Scratcher." The Market en masse had shifted to larger display smartphones with Apple being the odd man out. Rumors of Apple preparing to shift to a 4.8" display in 2014 began to emerge as early as June of this year. A new rumor emerged once again today renewing the fervor in a larger sized iPhone display by financial firm Jefferies.

Portable Bluetooth speakers can sometimes feel as if they're a dime a dozen, at this point. Here at MacNN and Electronista, we seem to get word of new ones launching several times a week -- it's reached a stage where it's simply impractical to cover everything. The Mini Boom is a natural exception, since both Logitech and Ultimate Ears are well-known names. In our review, though, we'll see if there's anything that genuinely separates it from the competition, or if it's simply riding on brand recognition....
  ...

...

An ITC import ban on some older models of Samsung smartphones will go into effect at 12 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 8, unless the Obama administration vetoes the action as it did for Apple.
   ...

It's time to save some of that hard-earned cash with our Daily Deals, featuring exclusive TUAW Deals, a handy list from Dealnews and our own hand-picked iOS and OS X selections.

TUAW's Daily Deals

The 3-in-1 Universal USB Charging Cable [On sale for $19, down from $59]

If you just upgraded to the new iPhone 5s or 5c, but still have an older generation iPad or iPod, this product is your charging solution. Most of us have more than one device that needs charging, but cords get tangled, power strips get overcrowded and USB ports get used up quickly.

The 3-in-1 Lightning/30-Pin/Micro USB to USB Charging Cable replaces three cables with one that SIMULTANEOUSLY charges all of your devices at once. Whether you need to juice up an iPhone 5s/5c/5, iPhone 4/4S, 3G/3GS, iPad,...

Attackers have stolen Adobe source code and information on 2.9 million customers. How did this happen and how can you protect yourself?

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Portable Bluetooth speakers can sometimes feel as if they're a dime a dozen, at this point. Here at MacNN and Electronista, we seem to get word of new ones launching several times a week -- it's reached a stage where it's simply impractical to cover everything. The Mini Boom is a natural exception, since both Logitech and Ultimate Ears are well-known names. In our review, ......
  ...

It turns out that the Galaxy Gear isn’t a very smart watch. Sure, it might do more than the watch you are wearing right now — at least on paper — but your everyday watch can tell time faster than the Gear, and is certainly more comfortable and attractive. And while the Gear does put some smartphone functionality on your wrist, it still requires you to grab your phone quite a bit, whether it is for installing apps or checking for more information about certain notifications. And that’s all assuming you can keep it on for long enough, given the comfort and battery life hurdles.

Joanna did a great review of the Galaxy Gear. Samsung’s entry into the smart watch market was more about being first than actually helping users. That is very clear.

...

This weekend, Samsung began running new television ads for its Galaxy Gear smart watch. The ads, which have received positive feedback from critics, pay homage to the first ads from another revolutionary device: the iPhone.

The ad from Samsung uses movie clips from "Star Trek", "Dick Tracy", "Knight Rider", and others with actors using their watches to communicate. The clip ends with a normal person using their Samsung Galaxy Gear, referencing a long-running pop culture fascination with wrist phones.

Six years ago, Apple used a similar ad to introduce the iPhone during the 2007 Academy Awards, stringing together movie...

.bar-17-4 { width: 17.4%; }
.bar-23-1 { width: 23.1%; }
.bar-23-8 { width: 23.8%; }
.bar-24 { width: 24.0%; }
.bar-27-9 { width: 27.9%; }
.bar-30-2 { width: 30.2%; }
.bar-31-4 { width: 31.4%; }
.bar-38-6 { width: 38.6%; }
.bar-41-7 { width: 41.7%; }
.bar-55 { width: 55.0%; }
.bar-58-1 { width: 58.1%; }
.bar-62-1 { width: 62.1%; }
.bar-63-1 { width: 63.1%; }
.bar-63-9 { width: 63.9%; }
.bar-64-8 { width: 64.8%; }
.bar-65-1 { width: 65.1%; }
.bar-66-4 { width: 66.4%; }
.bar-67-5 { width: 67.5%; }
.bar-69-4 { width: 69.4%; }
.bar-69-5 { width: 69.5%; }
.bar-71-1 { width: 71.1%; }
.bar-73-4 { width: 73.4%; }
.bar-77-7 { width: 77.7%; }
.bar-79-4 { width: 79.4%; }
.bar-79-9 { width: 79.9%; }
.bar-81-1 { width: 81.1%; }
.bar-81-2 { width: 81.2%; }
.bar-83-2 { width: 83.2%; }
.bar-83-6 { width: 83.6%; }
.bar-85-7...

Japan's NTT DoCoMo suffered the worst month of customer attrition in the company's history in September, placing blame in part on constrained supplies of Apple's new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c.
  ...

In this week’s ExtraBITS, Apple’s rescue of iOS developers from patent troll Lodsys is thwarted, we learn what 64-bit really means for the iPhone 5s, a developer dissects the iOS 7 date picker, the woman behind the original voice of Siri comes forward, and Fraser Speirs notes that putting games on educational iPads helps with discipline problems.

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Notable software releases this week include Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.6 and Express 3.4.5, DEVONagent Lite, Express, and Pro 3.5.2, Yojimbo 4.0.1, SMC Firmware Updates for MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro Retina, and MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5 Supplemental Update, iTunes 11.1.1, and Dropbox 2.4.1.

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Remo Software has rolled out Remo Privacy Cleaner. It's a privacy app for protecting your privacy and cleaning unwanted junk from your Mac.

Remo Privacy Cleaner features a "One Click Clean" solution that helps to permanently delete files, such as browser history, download history, cache, auto-complete forms, app junk, recent items, trash, search history and more, all in one simple click. This solution provides nine different erasing patterns to ensures complete security, says Remo Software CEO Omer Faiyaz.

read more

EuroComp has announced that its mathematics software, PocketCAS for iPhone and iPad, is now also available for Mac OS X (10.8 or higher).

PocketCAS is an advanced computer algebra system. It's targeted at scientists, engineers, teachers and students.

PocketCAS is being discounted by 50% for a limited time. Features include Linear Algebra functions for matrices and vectors, 2D & 3D Plots, and more.

read more

On Monday, Skype released version 4.10 of its iOS app.

According to 9to5Mac, the new version includes the following fixes and changes:
- Refreshed look and feel for iOS 7.

Accessibility improvements, including:
- Improved accessibility of dialpad with touchtype support.

- VoiceOver announces the senders name when messaging.

- VoiceOver improvements for group chats.

- General fixes

The update, available as a...

Jefferies analyst Peter Misek has upgraded Apple stock from a "hold" to a "buy" rating, and set a new $600 price target. The change is attributed to a talk Misek had with suppliers, who are allegedly becoming more flexible with their component pricing. Apple's profits depend heavily on its ability to secure cheap parts, since the company is mostly inflexible when it comes to retail pricing....
  ...

There is just no shame—or original ideas—in this company at all.

∞ Read this on The Loop

I use Markdown and MarsEdit every day to update The Loop. Here are a few tips to make sure you are getting the most out of MarsEdit.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Google is taking Glass on the road, going across the U.S. to let people get their hands on its wearable device, and AppleInsider was on location at the first stop of the "Experience Tour," where enthusiasts got their first chance to see the world through Glass.
  ...

As expected, Apple has filed an appeal in the Federal ebook price fixing case where Judge Denise Cote ruled that Apple conspired with book publishers to artificially raise prices. Apple has steadfastly maintained that it did nothing wrong, and that there never was any form of collusion with book publishers.

The Mac Observer Spin:
The real winner so far in the ebook price fixing case has been Amazon. The online retailer is free to undercut competitors by selling books below cost, and for everyone else the book market becomes a money losing venture. The Federal Courts have effectively endorsed an Amazon-controlled monopoly on the U.S. book market.

On September 30th, AT&T updated its iPad-optimized U-verse app with the ability to stream live television. Over 100 channels can be streamed to the iPad app while you are in your U-verse connected home, and a growing list of 20 channels can be streamed while you are away from home. Today, AT&T matched its iPad update by enabling the same functionality for its (separate) iPhone application:

Today AT&T launched more than 100 live channels on the U-verse App for smartphone and tablet, with more than 20 channels available to watch...

Microsoft has updated Skype for iPhone and Skype for iPad with a refreshed look for iOS 7 as well as compatibility improvements and accessibility features.

While the new updated apps look great in their iOS 7 skins, the best changes are the little compatibility improvements you don't see right away. For instance, the updated Skype for iPhone completed all of my test calls without a problem, which is not something I could say about the previous version.

Skype for iPhone and Skype for iPad are free downloads.

Skype gets updated for iOS 7 originally appeared on...

Macs make automated backup childishly easy: simply plug in an external hard drive and OS X will ask whether you want to use it as a Time Machine disk. Say yes, and you’ll then get fully-automatic, hourly, versioned backups without doing anything further.

Unplug it to take your MacBook out & about, and it will catch up as soon as you return and plug it back in. Even easier, get a Time Capsule, and those backups take place over wifi, so you don’t even have to connect a drive.

But I’m a belt-and-braces chap. I like multiple backups, and I like one of those backups to be off-site. That way, if the house burns down, or a burglar takes both my Macs and my backup drives, I still have access to my data. Which is where online backup services come into play. Think of them as your backup of last...

You can obtain a pretty decent amount of information about leases your OS X computer gets just by looking in the Network System Preference pane, for each interface.

However, you can get a little lot more information, as with most things, from the command line. First, we’re going to take a look at en0 on our host and see what the MAC address is:

ifconfig en0 ether

Now, we can look in the /var/db/dhcpclient/leases directory to see a list of all of the leases we have running on our system. Based on the MAC address of our computer, we should see a file there that starts with the name of our interface and finishes with our MAC address. Let’s cat this file:

cat en0-1\,84\:38\:35\:63\:87\:2e

The output is similar to the following (a standard plist):

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

IPAddress
...

Investment firm Jefferies, which slashed its price target for Apple stock in March after incorrectly expecting a television set from the company in 2012, is once again bullish on the iPhone maker, and on Monday advised investors to buy.
  ...

Very bizarre.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Skype has updated its iPhone app to give a “refreshed look and feel for iOS 7″ as well as a number of accessibility improvements and bug fixes.

Although the UI is clearly iOS 7 focused, Skype for iPhone 4.13 is compatible with iOS 5 and 6 too. Full details of the update below the fold … 

What New in Skype for iPhone and iPad 4.13:

• Refreshed look and feel for iOS 7
• Accessibility improvements, including:
  • Improved accessibility of dialpad with touchtype support
  • VoiceOver announces the senders name when messaging
  • VoiceOver improvements for group chats
• General fixes

The update,...

A recently self-published book captures most of Apple's products in one eye-catching place. This photography book is lean on text, but large on photographs of everything you've ever loved from the company that was forecast to fail.

The aptly named, Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation, is the brainstorm of Australian native Jonathan Zufi, who collected 500+ Apple products over the last four years. He captured more than 150,000 product shots in his photographic studio in Atlanta, GA to complete this "photographic shrine," as described by Betsy McKay at the Wall Street Journal. The simple silver-gray cover with black writing and a power button inserted in the letter "o" presents a subtle visage, just like the first 20 years of Apple's advertising. The book includes beautifully captured products of almost every device ever produced by Apple in...

A four-month long investigation into Apple’s tax affairs by the Securities and Exchange Commission has cleared the company of any wrong-doing in regard to the way the company accounted for taxes in respect of its overseas operations.

A Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing into Apple’s tax affairs had previously accused the company of seeking ”the Holy Grail of tax avoidance” over cash held overseas. The hearing proved anti-climatic, with no wrong-doing established, and the investigation handed off to the SEC. The SEC has now closed the case.

Tim Cook made an unequivocal statement during the Senate hearing that Apple used no tax gimmicks...

Some terrific shortcuts here. My favorite:

Typing punctuation can be a drag on an iOS device. Take the humble question mark. First, you must tap 123 key to get to the number and punctuation keyboard, then tap the question-mark (?) key, and then tap the ABC key to get back to the letter keyboard.

Here’s a quicker way to do it. Tap and hold the 123 key. Now, without removing your finger from the keyboard, slide your finger over to the question-mark key (or any other punctuation mark) and then release. The keyboard will insert your symbol and automatically switch back to the ABC keyboard.

This trick is even better if you want to type a special mark, such as the upside-down question mark (¿).

∞ Read this on The Loop

I love this review.

The frequent “First!” cry of the Internet troll declares some strange pride in being the first to comment on an article. The commenter put little to no effort into the post; it added nothing to the conversation, and it was completely devoid of substance. The troll did secure the spot at the top of the thread, though, and every additional commenter will be forced to scroll past the pointless contribution.

The Samsung Galaxy Gear says “First!” in hardware form. Samsung has beaten Google and Apple as the first major manufacturer to market, but much like the Internet commenter, it has sacrificed substance for the sake of timing. The Galaxy Gear is a product (with some impressive internals, no less) that has such limited use and such crippling compatibility requirements that it is currently the equivalent of hardware spam.

Ouch. I wish I had written this.

...

As a sequel to their popular Capo 2 music learning software, SuperMegaUltraGroovy today has launched Capo 3 for Mac, a new version of Capo with several feature improvements and enhancements. Let’s take a look at what’s changed.

If you’re familiar with Capo 2, you’ll be right at home with Capo 3, which features the same great design as its predecessor, with just a few tweaks. If you’re new, however, you might be surprised by just how great Capo looks. it’s not difficult to use either. The first time you launch the app, you’ll be greeted by a series of quick start videos which teach you the basics of...

Ember (formerly LittleSnapper) is your digital scrapbook of things that inspire you: websites, photos, apps or other things. Just drag in images that you want to keep, organise them into relevant collections, annotate the images you need to give feedback on, and share your images to your favourite web services.

Ember is built exclusively for the Mac for creatives like you, and we're just getting started. We hope you enjoy it.

Organise your ideas and design inspiration. Drag in images from your Mac and around the web, and organise them into Collections. Apply tags to images, and build Smart Collections based on the tags and other metadata in your library.

Subscribe to your favourite websites. Subscriptions allow you to visually browse the web. Images can be saved to your Ember library, and shared with friends and co-workers.

Build a scrapbook of designs you love. Save websites to...

Developers who didn’t upgrade their iOS devices from beta 6 to the public release of iOS 7 are finding their iOS devices temporarily bricked this morning after the beta expired, reports Gizmodo.

Around midnight UK time, my iPhone 5, along with thousands of other iOS 7-running devices which hadn’t updated from their dev betas, randomly crashed. An error message of “could not activate iPhone” appeared, and prompted users to sign in with their iCloud details. Unfortunately this did not solve the issue, with Apple’s activation server being “temporarily unavailable.”

Fortunately, a fix is available – such as the one detailed at iPhoneHacks...

Need protection for your portable computer? The Pelican ProGear 1070CC HardBack Case is a crushproof, watertight and dustproof case designed to safeguard 13-inch MacBook Pros or similar sized laptops.

The Pelican ProGear 1070CC HardBack Case has the same lifetime guarantee and military-grade attributes as Pelican's classic cases, including a watertight o-ring seal with automatic pressure equalization valve. It also features a molded-in foam insert, foam bumper pad for secure device positioning, lock hasps and an easy-open latch. What's more, it comes with a removable shoulder strap.

read more

Psykosoft (www.psykosof.net) has updated Psykopaint for Mac OS X to version 1.2.1. The app gets a complete design overhaul.

Psykopaint is a painting application with a twist: it allows you to paint while the colors are selected automatically based on a photo. It features six different brushes with 72 built-in presets and more. Version 1.2.1 also introduces support for Retina Display, an improved mad cannon brush, fixes canvas zoom issues and more.

read more

Every now and again, somebody tries to tell Erik Frieberg the same story they told him six years ago—that the iPhone is made for play, and that the iOS operating system isn’t really built for business and enterprise use. Frieberg’s eyes tell him differently.

“People talk about iPhones being consumer devices, not enterprise,” said Frieberg, vice president of product marketing and end-user computing at VMware. “But every meeting I walk into, nine out of ten phones are iPhones. They’re clearly the tool of choice by far for organizations.”

If iOS originally snuck in the boardroom’s back door and adapted, then iOS 7 strolled confidently in the front door, jammed with new features to help businesses protect their data, encourage intraoffice collaboration, and communicate with customers.

“Certainly, on the enterprise front, this was one of the largest...

Four months after opening its review of Apple’s finances, the Securities and Exchange Commission has closed it, having found nothing untoward about the company’s handling of its overseas cash and related tax policies.

In a September letter to Apple, released late last week, the SEC said it had completed its review of the company’s fiscal 2012 annual report, and would take no action against it at this time. Evidently, there’s no need to, as the agency has found Apple’s disclosures to be sufficient, particularly now that it has agreed to provide investors with more information about its foreign cash, tax policies, and plans for reinvestment of foreign earnings.

The review’s conclusion follows a summer of tax scrutiny for Apple, kicked off by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations claim that...

ClamXav is a free virus checker for OS X. It uses the tried, tested, and very popular ClamAV open source antivirus engine as a back end.

I hope you like and use ClamXav a lot and that it helps keep you and your friends/colleagues virus-free. Although I'm providing ClamXav for free, I am increasingly spending more and more time developing it and would really appreciate if you would consider making a donation please. All donations (no matter how small) are gratefully received and would be a huge incentive to help me work on future versions of ClamXav, but more importantly I rely on donations to pay for my bandwidth costs. Please consider it, see the ClamXav homepage, click the 'More Information' link above on this page.

Version 2.6:

• Minimum requirements now OS X 10.6 or later and an Intel processor
• ClamAV engine updated 0.98 *
• ClamAV engine now 32/64-bit
...

Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the lack of women on the board of Twitter, just as the San Francisco microblogging company prepared to unveil its IPO documents.

In the post, I noted that “the lack of a female director on its board even caused one board member to make a naughty joke that has been widely repeated inside the company — and forgive me in advance for this — that Twitter’s governing body has to expand beyond ‘three Peters and a Dick.’”

That quip referred to four of the members of the all-white, all-male board: Former Netscape CFO and well-known investor Peter Currie; former News Corp COO and successful Hollywood mogul Peter Chernin; under-the-radar Silicon Valley power VC Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital; and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

Yesterday,...

Maintenance release resolves a number of reported bugs after recent major update. ($30 new, free update from version 4.0, 7.7 MB)

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

New photos show that construction on Apple's Austin, Tex., campus project continues apace, with a number of facilities noticeably closer to completion.
   ...

This month is National Bullying Prevention Month and creators of an anti-bullying Kindle e-book and an iOS app are hoping to raise $100,000 through their sales during October and donate the revenue to several anti-bullying charities. The charities include Bullying UK, Stomp out Bullying...

AppleInsider sponsor MacMall is hosting an early Black Friday sale over the next couple of days that -- when reduced with this month's instant discount coupons -- offer two 11-inch MacBook Airs for less than $800.
  ...

Stock image copyright Norman Chan

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick roundup of some of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. On Thursday, Twitter finally unveiled its $1 billion IPO paperwork, first filed with the SEC earlier in the year under the secrecy of the JOBS Act. It’s one of the world’s first peeks into the social media company’s internal data, including a mobile ad gap and a...

When you enable permalinks in WordPress, you’re basically converting a link to an article you’ve written from something like krypted.com/page=2 to something like krypted.com/mac-os-x-server. Doing so makes Google like the page more (supposedly). After my site moved, the permalinks were broken, so I turned them off until I could find time to fix them. I never did. But thanks to the glory that is @sacrilicious the permalinks were magically fixed one day.

So do permalinks matter to drive traffic to a site? Well, nothing else changed, same length of articles, same frequency, etc. But when permalinks were turned back on, the answer was in my Site Stats, courtesy of  JetPack:

Thanks again, Banks!

I love great design.

One afternoon last year, Menn and his business partner, Tivan Amour, headed out to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to invite passersby to walk away with their theft-resistant bike light. The team announced in poster board and Sharpie: “Free bike lights… if you can steal them.” Next to the light, Menn offered an array of bicycle light–busting tools: needle-nose pliers, an Allen wrench, lock wrenches and heavy-duty plumbing wrenches. If strangers could pry the light from the bike in two minutes (“No opportunistic thief will spend more than two minutes,” explains Menn), the light was theirs to keep.

Excellent way to beta-test.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Four months after raising questions about Apple’s foreign earnings and taxes, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has ended its investigation without plans to take any further action.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Tesla founder Elon Musk knows from success. Musk started and sold Zip2, a web software company, pulling $22 million out of that sale. He rolled that into the company that ultimately brought PayPal to market, got about $175 million in stock when eBay bought PayPal. He used that nest egg to create Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 and to fund Tesla Motors in 2004. Nothing but hits.

A lot has been written over the past few days about a fire in one of Tesla’s cars. A video of a burning Tesla S went viral, creating a large PR problem for the company.

Elon Musk took the wheel on this, so to speak. He wrote a calm narrative that laid out the facts, as he saw them. If you have any interest in electric cars, take a minute...

Whenever I get asked by my friends, family or clients for app recommendations, one of my longstanding go-to answers is 1Password by AgileBits. For those who are unfamiliar with this app, 1Password is a cross-platform, cross-device password and sensitive information management tool. This amazing application just got better with a complete overhaul that goes way deeper than simple cosmetics and frilly feature add-ons.

This newly updated 1Password 4 for the Mac features a totally redesigned interface that brings some parity to its iOS variants and already features compatibility with the upcoming Mavericks release. AgileBits has added the highly sought after feature of...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer saw his pay docked this year as a result of the disappointing performance of the company's Windows Division over the past year.
   ...

With its steel-backed, polycarbonate chassis, Apple's new iPhone 5c will likely stand up to a good deal of stress, but that's no reason to take chances, so AppleInsider has taken a look at what cases are on the market to let you wrap your colorful new iPhone in something that will protect that luster.
  ...

When you’re configuring a Mac to leverage an existing Windows infrastructure, having the clocks in sync is an important task. Luckily, Windows Server has been able to act as an NTP server for a long time. In this article, we’ll look at configuring Windows Server to be an NTP server for Mac and Linux clients.

Note: Before you get started, or any time you’re hacking around in the registry, make sure to do a backup of your registry/SystemState!

To enable NTP on Windows Server, open your favorite registry editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesW32TimeTimeProvidersNtpServer. From here, enter a key called Enabled as a dword with a value of 00000001.

The NTP Server should look upstream at another NTP host. To configure this, go ahead and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesW32TimeTimeProvidersNtpClient and create Enabled as a dword with a value of 0000001 and SpecialPollInterval with a value of 300:...

iOS developers in and around London might want to take note: Steve Wozniak will be the keynote speaker for Apps World Europe on October 23rd. Apps World Europe is now in its 4th year and is quickly becoming the conference of choice for mobile developers in Europe. The two day event sees over 8,000 developers, mobile marketers, mobile operators, device manufacturers, platform owners and industry professionals meet for workshops and discussions. Of notable interest this year will be a heavy focus on iOS 7, its hundreds of new features, thousands of new APIs, and brand new look.

In announcing his keynote role, the Woz said. "I'm delighted to be speaking at Apps World, sharing my experience of 30 years in the mobile and computing industry, as well as learning from and feeding off the passion and enthusiasm of the app developer community in attendance."

In addition to Wozniak, leaders from Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Shazam,...

With cellular devices and today’s often-limited data plans, it is important to monitor how much data you are using so you do not either pay for a data cap you don’t need, or you go over your cellular data limit, which results in extra fees. Even though in iOS 7, you can track cellular data usage for each app you have installed on your device, there are limitations to this. It does not reset the data every thirty days so it will coincide with your bill and you have to remember to do it yourself. If you want hassle-...

Today marks the second anniversary of the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Today his successor, Apple CEO Tim Cook said on Twitter that he’ll mark the day be taking a long hike and reflecting on their friendship.

Cook also marked the occasion in an email to Apple employees. As first reported by 9 to 5 Mac and since independently confirmed as authentic, by AllThingsD.

Here’s the Tweet.

Second anniversary of Steve's death. Going on a long hike today and reflecting on his friendship and all the dents he made in the universe.

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook)...

I agree with Rene Ritchie. What passes for tech reporting these days is often no more than misinformed drivel designed to get pageviews. What’s worse, it can cause harm to unsuspecting users.

∞ Read this on The Loop

I wrote up afctl (the command line tool to manage the OS X Server Adaptive Firewall) awhile back here http://krypted.com/mac-security/a-little-more-about-afctl-in-os-x-server. One thing I didn’t touch on is statistics. There’s a nice little command called hb_summary located in /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/System/Library/CoreServices/AdaptiveFirewall.bundle/Contents/MacOS that provides statistics for blocked hosts. To see statistics about how much the Adaptive Firewall is being used, just run the command with no options:

/Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/System/Library/CoreServices/AdaptiveFirewall.bundle/Contents/MacOS/hb_summary

The output provides the following information (helpful if plugging this information into a tool like Splunk):

• Date
• Date statistics start
• Number of hosts blocked
• Addresses blocked
• ...

When you are at or near the top of a market, you become a target. Microsoft lived that life for many years. Now, the emergence of the mobile market has shifted the spotlight, as well as the security risk, over to iOS and Android. Though the rigor of Apple’s app inspection and certification process does keep the iOS app ecosystem significantly safer than Android, iOS devices are just as highly valued a target for hackers.

The point is, these attacks are going to keep coming. Apple’s job is to keep tweaking their processes to keep the bad guys at bay. So far, Apple has done their job well.

This new attack takes advantage of a flaw in the “Find my iPhone” process. The video below does an excellent job laying out the scenario. In a nutshell, the thief steals an iPhone and immediately turns on airplane mode to prevent the iPhone from being remotely wiped. This gives the thief enough time to break into your phone and use your credentials to reset your Apple ID password,...

The New York Times has published an amazingly detailed behind-the-scenes story of how Apple created the original iPhone. It includes tidbits from many of the engineers who worked on the project, and it has a wealth of information that was new to me. The story is based around the Macworld Expo (now Macworld/iWorld) keynote demo in January of 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the device. It describes in fascinating detail things like the "Golden Path" of tasks you could perform without crashing the device, which was still in a very early stage of development. It describes how Apple kept everything secret, how decisions were made, and much more. Go and read it and let me know what you think. (Image made with help from Shutterstock)

The SEC investigation of Apple's foreign cash holdings and whether the company was dodging -- legally or otherwise -- any tax responsibility to the US has closed with the agency planning to take no further action on the matter. Following somewhat fiery hearings in Congress that some say used Apple as a scapegoat for the wider issues of US companies taking advantages of tax loopholes -- which Congress inserted into the tax code in the first place -- the agency appears to have found Apple doing nothing wrong within the boundaries of the current law....
 ...

According to filings by Apple of potential witnesses in an upcoming trial for redefining damage awards on a portion of the $1 billion award to Apple from the Apple-Samsung trial of last year, former Senior Vice President of iOS Scott Forstall could reappear to give testimony on the extent to which Samsung copied Apple's iOS software innovations to enrich itself and gain marketshare. Forstall resigned from Apple -- or was fired -- following the poor reception to the initial version of Apple Maps....
 ...

According to a recently discovered job posting, Apple is seeking an "iTunes Canada Music Programmer," suggesting the company may be close to releasing the service in that country sometime soon.
   ...

According to sources present at a confidential meeting between Apple India executives and the CEOs of 20 top retailers, the iPhone maker has bold plans to create 100 standalone franchise stores in the top 50 second- and third-tier markets in the country, and will also create "store within a store" (SWAS) experiences for smaller markets in a new partnership with India's top smartphone and consumer electronics chains, since Apple does not yet have any official stores there....
 ...

According to a report on Friday, Apple is looking to penetrate the emerging smartphone market in India by striking deals to build so-called "store-within-a-store" locations across the second most populous country on earth.
  ...

Saturday, October 5th, will mark the second anniversary of the death of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. His successor, current CEO Tim Cook, sent an email to Apple employees on Friday remembering Steve Jobs and reflecting on his legacy.

After two fumbled launches -- one for Windows users and one for Mac -- that frustrated gamers with networking issues, SimCity might finally be getting an offline mode. A General Manager for developer Maxis confirmed in a blog post that the company is indeed exploring whether an offline mode would be possible.

"Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode. I can't make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect. An offline mode would have the additional benefit of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking...

Apple’s popular, free music streaming service iTunes Radio looks set for an imminent launch in Canada. Since launching last month in tandem with iOS 7, iTunes Radio has been exclusive to the United States. However, Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue has noted that he would like the service to launch in “more than 100 countries.” Even with this plan in place, there has been no indication of when iTunes Radio would arrive internationally and exactly where…

Today, we’ve discovered that Canada could be one of Apple’s first international countries to support iTunes Radio. Apple is...

Creating workarounds for unsupported text characters, and more covered in this week's Q&A.

While the purpose of smartphones is to let us receive verbal and written communications from others, there are certain times when you don't necessarily want your phone to beep, ring or otherwise make a noise or show a notification. Do Not Disturb is a handy setting that lets you choose when you want receive calls or notifications.

In this short video, which can be set to full-screen for looking at details, you'll see how to enable Do Not Disturb and how to use the app's settings.

iOS 7 video tip: Using Do Not Disturb on the iPhone originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 04 Oct 2013 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source | ...

Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller and former senior vice president of iOS software Scott Forstall may testify in the upcoming partial damages retrial between Apple and Samsung, reports PCWorld. Forstall has been largely out of the public eye since being ousted from Apple in late 2012.

Set for November 12, the trial follows judge Lucy Koh's March ruling that struck $450 million from the $1 billion in damages awarded to Apple in August 2012.

...

From 9to5Toys.com:

Be sure to follow 9to5Toys to keep up with the best gear and deals on the web: Twitter, RSS Feed, Facebook, Google+.

Today’s featured deals:

• Apple iPhone 5c 16GB (unlocked) in all colors $535 shipped - You can also...

Actual court drawing of Forstall (not a joke)

We’re set to get a blast from the past on November 12th when ex-Apple SVP of iOS Scott Forstall is likely to come out of hiding to testify at the Samsung damages hearing alongside his once colleague Phil Schiller.

On Friday, the two sides filed a joint pretrial statement and lists of potential witnesses they may call. Apple’s list includes Phil Schiller, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, and Scott Forstall, the former senior vice president of iOS software. Forstall’s departure was announced last October following the widely criticized launch of Apple Maps, which some observers said may have led to his firing. Both Schiller and Forstall...

The official NFL Mobile app has been updated today to version 8.6 and with it comes the ability to access live content from the NFL.com/Live website. The feature, which is only available to premium subscribers, will provide the live content previously only streamed on the NFL website in addition to the LIVE NFL games on Thursday, Sunday and Monday nights for both preseason and regular season games offered as Premium features.

Premium features of the app are currently only available to Verizon customers and also offer live streams of NFL RedZone on Sunday afternoons and NFL Network 24/7. Unfortunately, it looks like the app still doesn’t include support for AirPlay.

@...

If you're an Apple executive, how do you size up the TV industry? How do you find the competition's critical failure points? How do you marry Apple's expertise in hardware and software integration with a vision for the user experience? How do you ensure that a TV product will have people waiting around the block at 6 a.m. on launch day? All these factors and more will play into the, for now, rumored Apple TV project.

Apple has added "Tips and Tricks" pages to the websites for the iPhone 5s, 4s, and 5c, visitors note. Each page has sections dedicated to topics like Calendar, Maps, Siri, FaceTime, and Find My iPhone. Where appropriate, the pages differ to reflect the features of each device; the 5s' Camera page, for instance, mentions options like Burst shooting....
  ...

Apple has notified the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals that it will be appealing the court's ruling that it violated antitrust laws when it struck deals with e-book publishers. It is being supported by Simon & Schuster who has filed an appeal separately, opposing the injunction that will put significant limits on Apple's business conduct with the publishers for the next three years....
  ...

Western Digital is attempting to reinvent the network-attached storage (NAS) concept with its new My Cloud device. The external storage aims to eliminate all of the network complications while expanding the available features. In our full review, we try to determine if the company has succeeded in simplification without sacrifice.HardwareThe My Cloud hardware shares the same ......
   ...

The latest edition of iLounge Weekly, our weekly newsletter covering all things iLounge, will be arriving in subscribers’ inboxes early next week. iLounge Weekly is a summary of the week’s best news, reviews, and feature articles we’ve published, and it also features giveaways and accessory discount offers from various companies.…

(Updated with Walmart discount) Following in the wake of a similar Best Buy promotion, RadioShack has announced plans of its own to cut $50 off the price of an iPhone 5c. Beginning October 5th and running through November 2nd, retail buyers will be able to get a free $50 gift card, which can be applied immediately to the cost of the device. Prices can be lowered further by trading in an old smartphone in good condition....
  ...

Currently at MacMall.com save 25 percent on the 11.6-inch MacBook Air which was $999.99, but has been cut to $749.99. That $249 price drop makes this the lowest price we've seen on a brand new MBA by $135. Free shipping is available and sales tax applies for residents of California, Tennessee and Wisconsin. This MBA features a 1.7GHz Intel core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of flash storage. A one year warranty from Apple is included....
  ...

Halfway through his otherwise excellent piece today for The New York Times on the introduction of the original iPhone in 2007, Fred Vogelstein interrupts the narrative to insert a cookie-cutter bit about Apple being lost without Steve Jobs at the helm. It includes this:

When Jobs ran Apple, the company was an innovation machine,
churning out revolutionary products every three to five years. He
told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he had another
breakthrough coming — a revolution in TV. But under Cook, nothing
has materialized, and the lack of confidence among investors is
palpable. Apple product announcements used to routinely send its
stock soaring. When Cook presented the latest smartphones in
September, the iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s, Apple’s stock fell
10 percent...

Tim Kobe is the co-founder of the design firm 8 Inc., and was one of the early designers involved in the Apple Store. Interviewed by the Dezeen website after the Inside interior design conference in Singapore, Kobe said that Apple's retail experience is "not evolving as fast as it could be."

Kobe thinks that "the design is getting a little long in the tooth," and that "retail is a competitive environment, and I think Apple's ready for that next shift." While Apple's retail results seem to prove that the design is working just fine, thank you, Kobe feels that "Since Steve passed away the momentum has slowed down a bit. It's imperative Apple shifts again. They should really refresh every five years."

So, TUAW readers, do you think that Apple needs to update the general design of the Apple Store chain? Or do you not really think...

It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here.

No Flash? Click here to listen.

Subscribe via RSS

Daily Update for October 4, 2013 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 04 Oct 2013 14:45:00 EST. Please see our...

New channel supply tracking data indicates that Apple's flagship iPhone 5s is easier to find in stores than its predecessor, the iPhone 5, at the same point after its release.
  ...

A number of revelations behind the original launch of the iPhone in 2007 have been published in The New York Times Magazine. Fred Vogelstein, author of the upcoming “Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution,” profiles a number of Apple employees at the time,…

Smart Converter (free) provides a way to drag, drop, and convert a wide range of media from one format to another. You drop a file, choose an output format, and click to convert to popular device formats from iOS and Apple TV to Sony, Samsung, Android, and more.

The price is, of course, right for anyone who doesn't want to mess with adjusting presets or export settings as you would with QuickTime and Handbrake. The simple workflow is quite appealing and the app got the job done for all the formats I tested it with (flv, m4v, avi, mkv).

I did not experience any crashes or have any problems similar to some of the cranky reviews left at iTunes. I tested on a recent generation Mac mini with tons of memory and the latest OS update, which may have had something to do with it. Importantly, the quality of the output matched the quality of input and I was satisfied by all the processed files....

Apple has updated its iPhone website with “Tips and Tricks” (you’re welcome, Apple) pages to teach users about features found on the iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, and iPhone 4s (via MacRumors).

The pages detail some of the software-exclusive features to the iPhone 5s in addition to some enhancements that came in iOS 7. For instance, the section’s spends time highlighting the camera app, which arguably received one of...

Simplenote's original claim to fame was its position as one of the first iOS apps to sync notes across multiple devices. However, the introduction of iCloud made this feature easy to implement into any app and Simplenote found itself struggling to stand out in a rapidly expanding App Store. The company tried offering a few paid premium services, but in many respects fell off the radar. Fast forward to September and we see the first major update in a while, but unlike most big updates, Simplenote's didn't add any big new features and instead made a number of cuts. What's left is a lightweight n...
 ...

Apple has added new 'Tips and Tricks' sections to its iPhone marketing websites, giving new and old iPhone users a handy guide to the new features of iOS 7 and the new iPhone models.

The three pages, one each for the iPhone 4s, 5c and 5s, include sections about photography, swipe gestures, FaceTime, Maps, Siri, Calendar, Music, Mail, Safari, AirPlay and Wireless, Settings, Compass, and Find My iPhone.

The pages, which are linked at the bottom of every iPhone marketing webpage on Apple.com, appear to be something of a quick start guide, complimenting the more in-depth iPhone User Guide.

Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
•...

With Apple CEO Tim Cook’s endorsement, Anki, a company with artificial intelligence and robots-based products, debuted Anki Drive at WWDC earlier this year. Anki Drive is a car game for iOS that connects to physical cars. The app is currently available via the App Store while the cars and mat system will be available via retail channels…

The demo from Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference can be seen above. At the event, the creators of the product said that it would ship this fall. Today, we’ve learned that the company plans to make Anki Drive available in both Apple Retail Stores and Apple’s Online Store as soon as this...

Definitely worth a read.

∞ Read this on The Loop

It's time to save some of that hard-earned cash with our Daily Deals, featuring exclusive TUAW Deals, a handy list from Dealnews and our own hand-picked iOS and OS X selections.

TUAW's Daily Deals

Micro Drone [On sale for $49, down from $108]

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a flippin' quadrocopter! This crazy maneuvering remote-controlled Micro Drone can do it all! Fly up, down, laterally, diagonally, flip and perform all sorts of other agile mid-air stunts.

Quad-rotor helicopters have long been considered a luxury toy due to their pricey nature, but now you can grab this one for a fraction of the regular price.

Save 54% on the Micro Drone at TUAW Deals. Promotion is...

The Economic Times reports that Apple executives in India recently hosted executives from top retailers in the country and laid out plans to open store-in-store locations and 100 standalone stores in smaller Indian markets:

The new marketing vision for India was unveiled on Monday evening at a meeting with 20 CEOs and senior executives of the country’s top multi-brand telecom and electronic retail chains. Apple India’s senior executives spelt out plans to enter the top 50 tier II and III markets in India by selling its phones, tablets and portable music players at their outlets in an exclusive corner or a shop-in-shop, said three people who attended the meeting. They...

DPReview is well-known for its exhaustive camera reviews that analyze both the hardware and the resulting images produced by that hardware. Beside traditional point-and-shoots and DSLRs, DPReview also examines smartphone cameras with the same amount of detail it uses with its traditional camera reviews. The photography review site recently turned its attention towards the iPhone 5s in a 10-page review that features 78 sample images.

Not surprisingly, the reviewers found the iPhone 5s to be a very capable camera in the smartphone category. DPReview concludes,

The iPhone 5s features a very good camera that's easy to use and delivers strong results with little user intervention. It's a logical extension of the Apple design philosophy, with evolutionary performance increases and feature extensions. iPhone photographers looking to trade up will...