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The Apple Blog

TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.

Daily Apple: Macworld Lives, Kidproofing the iPhone, Glass ApplesYesterday

The Rumors of Macworld’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated - At least according to one blog, that is. Tom Yager at Infoworld thinks the trade show will be just fine without their darling star. In fact, he thinks the move will greatly improve the show, since presenters won’t have to worry about pissing off Apple, who won’t be around to be offended any more.

Because Your Kid Isn’t Safe Anywhere - Internet filtering comes to the iPhone, courtesy of Safe Eyes Mobile. Their argument for why it’s needed: there are tons of teens walking around with iPhones just desperate to use it to find porn. Probably true.

Apple Security No Longer So Special? - It looks like we might be drawing closer to PC users when it comes to security and vulnerability to threats, at least according to this article. The past two years have been banner years for Mac security, except the opposite, meaning they were the worst ever. Still, 2008 was slightly better than 2007. So there.

The Apple of Glass - This article makes the interesting claim that

Media Messaging in the UK With iPhoneMMSYesterday

The iPhone’s lack of any MMS capabilities was said to be on account of the versatile and full featured email support. If it’s so simple to send photos via email, why pay extra to send them via MMS?

While that is a valid argument to a certain extent, the two services remain predominantly different; e-mail is unlikely to be picked up by a regular phone user ‘on the go’ and isn’t tailored in the same manner for quickly sending and receiving photo snapshots.

Enter iPhoneMMS. This service is currently a web application for the iPhone allowing you to access and send O2 media messages through a more appealing interface. For the last few days I have been using a preview of the latest edition, a native iPhone application which has recently launched.

The app allows you to send and receive MMS messages in a far more user-friendly way than through the O2 website. It brings MMS functionality closer to a real, integrated solution.

New iTunes Pricing and DRM Removal QuestionsYesterday

Like many users, I’m pleased that the labels are finally allowing Apple to sell music free of DRM copy protection. Given that the labels have allowed this for many other vendors (Amazon, Wal-Mart, Zune Store, etc.) I think they’ve been flirting with collusion on the iTunes store for a while anyway. 

What I’m happiest about is the higher quality — which I don’t think Apple would have needed permission for  – since Apple’s FairPlay DRM was pretty transparent anyway. Of my nearly 8,000 songs, about 200 of them are iTunes, most belonging to my daughter. The DRM has simply never been an issue since they play on every Mac and iPod device we have. I’m not even sure I’ll upgrade them, but a lot of that has to do with price, as we’ll see.

What I’m most curious about are the details and consequences of this deal as it pertains not just to Apple, but also the competion. Here are some questions I have…
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When The Cracked and The Cracker Meet: An iPhone TaleYesterday

Imagine sitting down to talk with the guy who just broke into your apartment and stole your TV. You might ask him, “Why did you steal my TV?” and he might answer “Because I wanted it.” or “Because I wanted to sell it.” In the real world, a thief’s motivations are generally not very complicated. On the internet, though, those who crack or otherwise pirate software usually aren’t after money, since they generally give away the fruits of their labour. Since that’s the case, a conversation between thief and victim might prove a little more useful.

And it did, for iPhone developer James Bossert, who together with his wife, Constance, developed the Whack’em All game, which is based on the concept of the popular carnival Whack A Mole game. According to an article at TorrentFreak, James took matters in to his own hands when he noticed one day that his user base had spiked, gaining over 400 users in one day, compared to the usual ten. Excited, he looked into the purchasing numbers via Apple, only to find out he’d only sold 12 copies, which was pretty much par for the course.

Macworld 2009 Keynote SummaryYesterday

TheAppleBlog attended the Macworld Expo keynote presentation by Phil Schiller yesterday to bring you all the news from San Francisco. For your convenience, here is an overview of everything that Apple announced yesterday in one place. If you are interested in watching the full 90 minute presentation for yourself, Josh Pigford has the info on how to watch the keynote video stream.

iLife ‘09

Apple has updated the media software suite with some impressive new features. After playing around with it a bit yesterday, I really think that many home users will enjoy the new Faces and Places features. Personally, I think Faces and the Facebook integration are going to be the killer combination for the casual photographer that just wants to share their snapshots with friends. In a sense, Facebook becomes a crowd-sourced solution for identifying people in your photos. That’s cool. Read our review of iPhoto ‘09 to get the full story.

I’m still not convinced that the Garageband lessons will really teach people to play (I played guitar semi-professionally for several years