For the last three weeks, iOS hacker pod2g has been tinkering away toward an untethered iOS 5 jailbreak and blogging about his progress. We've been keeping track as he succeeds in jailbreaking device after device, starting with a third generation iPod Touch. He's now freed almost every iOS 5-compatible device from the grips of Apple's restrictions. The only ones still underway are those with A5 processors like the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.
Aware of how eager the jailbreak community is to get their hands on an untethered solution, pod2g decided to share his work with the Chronic Dev team, who develops the greenpois0n jailbreak for public use. Early this morning, an untethered jailbreak for A4 processor-based iOS 5 devices was released via both greenpois0n and redsn0w, another popular tool for jailbreaking iOS.
When the much-loved screen shot and image annotation Mac app Skitch was purchased by Evernote a few months ago, an iOS version of the service was said to be forthcoming. Evernote has made good on that promise by launching Skitch for iPad, with an iPhone-friendly version coming soon.
On the iPad, Skitch lets you pull up photos, screenshots and Web pages and annotate them with arrows, shapes, text and lines. It's a stripped-down offering compared what Skitch can do on the desktop, but for the tablet form factor, it works quite well.
The world's first statue of Steve Jobs was unveiled today, but it wasn't in Apple's headquarters city of Cupertino, California. No, it was erected in Budapest, Hungary - and with good reason. In Budapest you'll find the headquarters of a company called GRAPHISOFT, early innovators in a fascinating field called BIM.
BIM stands for Building Information Modeling. The field has the potential to give the Apple-like treatment of high-design, efficiency and pleasing user experience not to our mobile devices, but to all the buildings we live and work in. Statue patron GRAPHISOFT had its own important connection with Jobs, but the field in general is one to look at if you're interested in what Jobs did to mobile devices and computing. BIM is trying to do similar things to the whole civilized world.
The Kindle Fire has been released to great fanfare, mixed reviews and millions of devices sold. The device's growth trajectory has already outpaced that of any other tablet introduced to the market. Secondary statistics show that the growth of the Kindle Fire rivals even that of the original iPad when it was unleashed on the world in the beginning of 2010.
Advertising network Millennial Media notes in its monthly report MobileMix device index report that ad impressions on the Fire have grown at a daily rate of 19% since its launch in the middle of November. Millennial is seeing run rates of hundreds of millions of impressions from the Fire, putting it in the upper echelon of devices on the market.
Apple isn't exactly known for letting consumers and developers tinker with its products. While the Apple II had expansion slots and a relatively open design, later hardware shipped by the company would become harder to modify. What they sold was what consumers got, with very little room for customization.
Today, developers are having a field day jailbreaking each subsequent version of iOS and even hacking Siri to put its voice control technology to use in unique and interesting ways. Officially, Apple discourages jailbreaking, even though the practice has been a source of good ideas, some of which the company has borrowed.
On the heights, all the paths are paved with daggers - Robert Jordan
The Apple rumor cycle is gearing back up. It is always exciting when the mass of Web pundits get on their high horses and start making prognostications about who, when, what, how the new iDevice will be. With all the attention that new versions of the iPad and iPhone receive, it begs a question: what happens when/if Apple releases a complete flop? You know, something along the lines of a BlackBerry Storm-like disaster. The driving force of Steve Jobs is gone and, one way or another, that is going to affect Apple's products. What happens to the Cult of Apple and its iDevice line if the next iteration is widely disgusted?
Social media-fueled personalized magazine app Flipboard announced today that they've seen 1 million new users as a result of launching their iPhone app last week.
The app has long been beloved by owners of the iPad, the only device on which it was available until recently. By bringing the app to the iPhone, the Palo Alto-based startup made good on a promise they had been making for several months.
When it comes to UI design, Apple's iOS evolves pretty slowly. They rolled out one of the biggest enhancements to its mobile operating system this year with the launch of iOS 5. A radically redesigned notification system was the biggest visual overhaul and prior to that, there was the addition of folders in iOS 4.
Whenever the next big upgrade to iOS's look and feel may be, a few hints about what might be included can be found in one of Apple's latest hires. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student in Athens, Georgia announced that he was hired by the company as a design intern.
Not even a year after launching, the Mac App Store has logged its 100 millionth download, Apple reported yesterday. The app directory, which went live in January of this year, gives developers a place to sell applications for desktops and laptops running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and higher.
The Mac App Store takes the model Apple established with mobile and tablet apps for iOS and applies it to the desktop. Developers who opt to charge for apps get a 70% cut of the revenue, just as mobile developers do.
Owners of iPads, iPhones and iPods running the latest version of iOS have not yet had the option to jailbreak their devices in a way that's at all worth the trouble. For those who are dying to break free of Apple's restrictions, an untethered jailbreak appears to be on the way.
On Friday, France-based iOS hacker @pod2g uploaded a video showing that he was successful in jailbreaking iOS 5.0.1 running on his iPhone 3G. This came about a month after he announced on Twitter that he had discovered a bug in iOS 5 that would make a jailbreak possible.
