While searching for injury reports on the Lions for my upcoming Fantasy Football game, I came across a nice review of the new Macbooks by Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press. It also breaks down why he tells people to just ‘get a mac’.
Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along
VentureBeat has some details on the progress of the Mac version of the Google Chrome browser. According to a Google spokesperson, “We release early and often and while we are working hard on the Linux and Mac versions, the Windows version is ready so we want to get it to users as soon as possible”.
There are additional details on the Google Code Page for Chromium.
Apple Rising – Apple “stock” rising in the Enterprise
According to Business Week, Apple is quickly gaining ground in the enterprise. Citing a study by the Information Technology Intelligence Corp, Apple is gaining in both the desktop computing and smartphone areas.
Among the findings:
- More than two thirds of respondents – 68% – said they will allow their employees to use Macs as their corporate enterprise desktops in the next 12 months, a rate double that of an earlier survey.
- Half of all survey respondents said they plan to increase their integration with the iPhone as an alternative to Research In Motion’s Blackberry as mobile email device.
Revisited: Gmail and gCal on the Iphone – Part 1
Note: The information here is not new. However, from reading forums, etc., it seems as though that a lot of people still aren’t informed as to the best way to utilize Gmail/gCal with the iPhone.
If you don’t use Exchange with your iPhone and want cloud-based email and calendaring, Apple’s solution is MobileMe. Known startup problems notwithstanding, there’s nothing really wrong with MobileMe if you don’t mind paying $100/year. However, if all you need out of MobileMe are email and calendar syncing between your desktop, iPhone, and a web client, then Gmail and gCal already have it covered.
Boingo Releases iPhone App
Via ArsTechnica
Boingo Wi-Fi for the iPhone and iPod touch lets you use your iPhone at about 85,000 locations worldwide after entering your user name and password only once. Boingo offers unlimited service for smartphones and handhelds through its Boingo Mobile service, which is $7.95 per month. Boingo’s software is already available for Nokia and other smartphones and tablets.
iPhoney for iPhone Web App Development
I’ve not developed any web apps for the iPhone (beyond installing the very cool wptouch iphone-friendly WordPress theme for this blog). However, I do appreciate the continuing value of web apps for the iPhone. I just came across a very cool OS X app that acts as an iPhone simulator for web apps called iPhoney.
iPhoney simply runs Safari in the form of an iPhone, and allows you to choose between Webkit, iPhone, and custom user agents.
Here are the full “iPhacts” from the iPhoney home page:
- Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
- Open any website that works with Safari (use Safari 3 beta for the most accurate experience).
- Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation.
- Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
- Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.
- Zoom out to see how your current pages might look while zoomed out on iPhone.
- Turn off plug-ins (including Flash, but note that they all turn off (including QuickTime).
- Automatic updates with Sparkle, so you’ll always know if there’s a new version.
- And of course, open source code so you can contribute to iPhoney’s rapid development.
Washington Mutual iPhone Web App shows us why Web Apps are still cool
Washington Mutual (WaMu) has rolled out an iPhone-optimized version of their web site. It pretty much lets you do all of the basic account management stuff the full version of the site allows, except you can’t view canceled checks. This is a great example of why web apps for the iPhone aren’t going away as some have contended.
iPhone web apps have a number of advantages over native apps, including but not limited to:
- Rapid development using existing web development skills/bodies.
- Use of existing web application infrastructure (i.e., no additional costs).
- Avoidance of the time consuming and magic-8 ball logic of the App Store vetting process.
- Seemless application updating.
- Things like phonegap will eventually help bridge the divide between web apps and native apps by taking advantage of the iPhone’s hardware features.
I currently have home screen icons for 5 different iPhone-optimized Web Apps (Digg.com, ESPN, WaMu, Flickr, and Dropbox), plus a few other mobile web sites that are in need of an iPhone-optimized version, including the DirecTV Scheduler and cnn.com.
iPhone market share grew 327.5%
via Apple 2.0
We’ve known since October, when Apple released its latest earnings report, that the iPhone had a bang-out summer – shipping nearly 7 million units in the quarter, up from just over 1.1 million the year before.
But it wasn’t until Thursday, when Gartner Research issued its smartphone sales report for the third quarter of 2008, that we learned just how well the iPhone did vis-a-vis its competitors.
Apple’s (AAPL) share of the worldwide smartphone market leaped 327.5% in Gartner’s survey, catapulting past Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile to grab the No. 3 position and putting it within striking distance of Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry for the No. 2 spot.
Smartphones running on Nokia’s (NOK) Symbian operating system are still No. 1, with nearly 50% market share, but they lost ground as Symbian sales shrank for the first time, down 12% for the quarter.
Apple’s results would have been even more impressive – and would have knocked RIM off the No. 2 perch, as Steve Jobs claims - if Gartner’s researchers hadn’t reduced the iPhone’s quarterly sales numbers by the more than 2 million units that Apple shipped before the end of the quarter but were still sitting in inventory.
Gartner’s preliminary sales figures – listed both by vendor and by operating system – are available in its press release here. But they are easier to visualize in the bar graphs, pasted below the fold, that Ars Technica’s David Chartier has helpfully produced. See here.
