Macgasm

Apple may be looking to distance themselves even further from Google in the near future. According to some screen shots taken of a legal document within iOS 5, Apple has contracts in place to use a number of other mapping services. Companies included in the new legal section titled Map Data in iOS 5 are CoreLogic, Getchee, Increment P Corp, Localeze, MapData Sciences Pty Ltd. Inc., DMTI, TomTom, Urban Mapping, and Waze. Not all of the services offer up mapping data, but some offer crime, demographic, and school performance information, while others offer real-time traffic information based on crowd sourced data.

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No sooner had we announced that Angry Birds had reached 250 million mobile downloads, than another content update comes along for the seasonal Angry Birds Seasons. While the UK itself might be struggling for a day without rain, it’s bright and sunny in Angry Birds Summer Pignic.

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Github, the popular “social coding” website, has released a Mac app to aid developers in managing their source code repositories. A long time favorite among developers in the open source world for its simplicity, Github has provided purely a web-based experience until now, the only official interaction with their service on a developer machine being via SSH. Other great apps such as Tower have been around for a while, and there’s always Git integration with your IDE but nothing for Github specifically.

No more.

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Hacking has certainly been on the minds of many these past few months, with SONY being hacked, then a string of other gaming companies and most recently Dropbox experiencing a major security flaw on the weekend. Makes you want to secure and lock down everything in sight. One of the oft-touted features of OS X is the ability to encrypt the user’s home folderusing FileVault. Theoretically it keeps your data safe from unauthorized access.

I say theoretically because Harris Corporation, a communications and IT firm, has some nice step by step instructions detailing how to crack into a FileVault home folder, right on their blog.

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A recent study by GSMA’s Mobile Media Metrics has revealed interesting stats for the iPhone, its competitor Symbian, and general application usage. Nokia, despite claiming that it’ll phase out the operating system in a few years, still boasts potential sales of 150 million Symbian devices.

So, with a huge possible market share, does this mean that developers should move over and begin developing for the platform?

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If you’re annoyed about Final Cut Pro X’s inability to import Final Cut Pro 7, or even 6 projects, we have some good news for you. Philip Hodgetts, a popular video production blogger, reached out to Apple for some answers about missing features and got some more answers for us. Primarily, Pro X will eventually let users import FCP 6 and 7 projects in an upcoming update. The software should also get a replacement for an XML workflow as well as multicam editing. It’s his understanding that Apple will release a utility to update the projects. He also recommends not upgrading mid-project, despite the promises for importability coming in the future.

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Tim Cook is apparently in China, hanging out at China Mobile headquarters this morning, accompanied by 7 to 8 people, and likely talking to executives from China Mobile to discuss “bilateral” cooperation for the iPhone, according to Chinese reporter Sina Weibo.

It has long been speculated that Apple and China Mobile are working towards a deal that would see Apple supporting TD-LTE radio technology in future Chinese iPhones.

If this has nothing to do with TD-LTE, we’d be pretty surprised. While LTE isn’t quite ready for deployment in North America, a number of carriers have been working to bring their infrastructures up to date with modern day wireless broadband needs. Supporting TD-LTE in the next iPhone would likely play a large part in the carriers ensuring that their LTE networks are built to support the technology.

Could the iPhone 5 be TD-LTE capable?

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Three years after its filing, Apple has finally won the patent for “[a] computer-implemented method, for use in conjunction with a portable multifunction device with a touch screen display, [that] comprises displaying a portion of page content, including a frame displaying a portion of frame content and also including other content of the page, on the touch screen display,” according to PC Mag. The patent was originally filed in 2007, and has only now been awarded to Apple, four years after its submission.

Confused about what the patent is actually for? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. From what it sounds like, this broad patent has wrapped up, in a pretty little bow, the capacitive multitouch interface (the touchscreen) that made the iPhone such a huge innovation back in 2007 when it was released for the first time. If your phone lets you use gestures with your fingers to navigate a website, or even an application, there’s a good chance your phone maker of choice could find themselves in a world of lawsuit hurt in the coming months.

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