Macgasm

It’s looking like Apple is cracking down on some developers not using the officially licensed iPhone images in the advertising of their apps.

Mike Arrington, PandoDaily:

While we understand that Apple is worried about controlling their brand, the question still remains why they don’t explicitly allow developers to use any white iPhone imagery to advertise their app. With some restrictions, devs are licensed to use Apple-approved iPhone images to display their apps. Unfortunately, only black iPhones are among the approved in the license. As it stands now, there isn’t any known reason for this to be the case. Maybe they are still reeling from the embarrassment of not being able to ship the white iPhone 4 on time. Alternately, Apple may just like having a Vader-like grip on how their devices are used in marketing.

What do you think? Should Apple lighten up on their restrictions for developers? Sound off in the comment section of this post so we can hear from you. We’re curious to see if you all have any plausible theories.

Source: PandoDaily

After much complaining in the community about Apple’s end user license agreement for iBooks Author, Apple has pushed a new update that clarifies the restrictions.

iBooks Author EULA:

Turns out, Apple doesn’t actually care to own your content. They just want their 30 percent if you’re using their free tool to make money. That’s not an unreasonable position to take. At the very least, it is roughly consistent with the way Xcode works for iOS. Apple doesn’t want to own your app. They just want a cut of the revenue from using their resources.

Hate on iBooks Author all you want, but their EULA isn’t really unfair. If you don’t like the terms, that’s fine. Just use another tool to make your eBook. Apple isn’t in the business of making others money without getting theirs.

Eric Slivka over at MacRumors is reporting that a number of users still on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard were affected by this week’s security patch that left PowerPC apps using Apple’s Rosetta broken.

While it is noted that some people are reverse engineering the patch, we don’t recommend you touch anything like that. If you have a backup — like you always should — from Time Machine or SuperDuper, just restore to a previously working version. If not, just hold tight until Apple fixes this. Dicking around in system files is bound to cause more problems than it’ll fix. Trust us on this.

These issues with the latest updates for Lion and Snow Leopard just emphasize how important backups are. I ran into the horrid “CUI” issue on my main machine, but I have hourly backups that had me up and going within hours. Please take a moment and set up a backup system if you haven’t already.

Hat tip to MacRumors
Image Credit: Hans Hillewaert

The Internet is abuzz with a rumor of Apple having a strange and unusual event this month. Well, there is another rumor going around calling the first rumor complete and total horseshit.

Jim Dalrymple, The Loop:

So, Jim says that there is no event. Given his experience and reputation as opposed to the questionable Macotakara, we’re going to believe Jim.

Everyday we see more and more spaghetti being thrown at the wall in our community. Here at Macgasm, we strive to keep our heads on straight with all of these crazy rumors flying around. When something seems strange or hard to believe, it is probably bogus. Heck, most believable rumors are bogus. Until you hear something directly from Apple, don’t place any bets — just a word to the wise.

Source: The Loop
Image Credit: Polina Sergeeva

This Apple Television rumor just won’t die. Steven Musil at CNET is reporting that the oft-quoted Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says that Apple is in talks with screen manufacturers.

Firstly, analysts are rarely, if ever, to be trusted. They are notoriously terrible at guessing what Apple is up to. Secondly, even if Apple is approaching manufacturers about screens, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see an Apple Television — let alone an Apple Television any time soon. If true, these discussions could simply be Apple doing research on the market. That said, let’s hope that they really are working on making an Apple Television.

I have regular dumb displays in my home. They are simply receptacles for HDMI devices. If Apple can do something different and make a television that offers more than the Apple TV plus dumb screen set up, I know I’d consider buying it. Many of you are in the same boat, and so you’re looking for evidence that it will become a reality. It’s just too early to know if the Apple Television is real, though. Just remember to take what analysts say with a grain of salt.

Source: CNET

As of this week, T-Mobile is now selling Square credit card readers at select retail locations in the United States. This isn’t their first retail pretense, though. In April of last year, Apple started selling Square readers in their retail locations. Of course, anyone or any business can go to Square’s website and get a card reader and account for free. That said, it is pretty hard to stock a free item in a retail store. Also, you do get the convenience of having the card reader available immediately instead of waiting for USPS to get around to delivering your package. It makes sense.

At this point, it is hard to understand why everyone everywhere in the US doesn’t accept credit cards. When I worked as a community evangelist for a genealogy company, I was in charge of selling accounts to our service at our booths at conventions. I used Square on the company’s iPod touch, and it was a wonderful experience. In fact, most people were pleasantly surprised that we could just swipe their card instead of only accepting cash or doing a manual credit card transaction.

From personal experience, I only have positive things to say about Square. Any opportunity for more people to get access to this great service is a good thing. Let’s hope this is the start of a world-wide trend.

Source: BGR

Flipboard, the wildly popular reading application for iOS, is setting its sights on localization. This week, they announced that Australia, Canada, UK and Ireland will be getting region-specific content guides:

This is great news for our non-American readers. Frankly, it is surprising to us that more applications don’t take advantage of region-specific content. Localizations aren’t just slight spelling and grammatical differences. Flipboard’s move to customize content for different localities is very commendable. While I like reading things that are US-focused, I would never expect someone in Australia to want to read the same thing.

Is your Flipboard experience better now? Sound off in the comment section and let us know if you’re getting better recommendations. We’re particularly interested in hearing about this topic due to our international predilections.

Source: Flipboard Blog

A while back, I was looking at HTML5Test in my browser of choice: Safari 5.1.2. MPEG-4 and h.264 were listed as supported codecs for the HTML5 video tag, and that is to be expected from Apple’s browser since those are their formats of choice. Ogg Theora, unsurprisingly, is not supported. Then I looked down to the next line, and I saw that WebM, Google’s “Open” format, was in fact supported.

I did a lot of testing to see what the deal was. Nobody seemed to be reporting this, so I thought that there must be something up. By luck, I happened to be wiping a MacBook Pro and giving it a fresh Lion install, so I was able to try out Safari without any system modifications. Oddly, WebM support disappeared. What was different in my main machine that allowed WebM support in Safari? After a bit of googling, it looks as if Perian, the “Swiss-Army knife for Quicktime,” is the culprit.

By having Perian, or a similar program installed, it transparently lists WebM as a compatible codec for playback through the video tag. Developers don’t have to do anything special. They just write standard HTML5-compliant code, and your Perian-boosted Safari will act just the same as if they were using h.264.

While it isn’t quite as easy as having everything baked into the browser by default, this is a good intermediate step on the road away from browser plug-ins. At this point, HTML5 video support is so broad, Flash is almost never needed on the web.