Appletell

Apple has been granted four new patents today by the US Patent & Trademark Office. The patents cover four inventions that relate to Apple’s multipurpose dock, QuickTime’s transmission of differently formatted media, measuring network bandwidth between two computers, and a communication between media servers and media clients.

Stand invention (US Patent D567800) does not offer a detailed explanation as to why this dock is much different than other docks on the market. Apple only provided a one sentence explanation in the patent filing: “The stand, which can be utilized as a dock, is used to support an electronic device, such as a media player, media storage device, cellular phone, PDA and/or the like.”

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For those of you who use Aperture, a new version of the SDK for the popular photo management app has arrived. If you can’t remember straight, Aperture 2.1 added a greater ability to write and create plugins, extras, and even editing tools. A month later, the SDK has arrived, allowing the general public to stop looking at and finally create these add ons. Hopefully with the SDK out, Aperture’s functionality will be greatly improved (sorry, I’m a Lightroom fan.) The SDK is available for download from ADC, so go, check it out, and start coding!

[ADC] via [TUAW]

Apple can do a better job at selling iPhones in Europe, says Apple’s genearl manager of European operations: Pascal Cagni. In a conversation with a French newspaper, Les Echos, Cagni said that Apple intends to expand its distribution of the iPhone to more European countries - however, he did not mention the names of the countries. He also reinstated Apple’s determination of selling ten million iPhones this year. Apple has currently sold just under 5.5 million iPhones since the launch in the USA.

The countries expected to receive the iPhone next are the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Italy - not to mention the other countries in Europe who are awaiting the iPhone’s launch. It is most likely that these countries will have their launch around the time of the new 3G iPhone, therefore skipping the first generation iPhone.

Cagni also mentioned that Apple’s French users will soon get TV show downloads through the iTunes Store in France in the coming months. Apple introduced this same service in Germany earlier this month.

Via [Macworld UK]

As suspected by the rumor websites, Apple’s latest update comes to us on a surprisingly early Monday. The all-in-one desktop success has just been upgraded with brand new Intel Core 2 Duo “Penryn” processors and new video cards. The new processors range from 2.4GHz to 3.06GHz. Unfortunately, for 4 or 8 cores, you’ll still need a Mac Pro - as these are still dual core processors.

The new models are as follows:
20-inch, 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, 250GB Hard Drive, ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT 128MB. $1199
20-inch, 2.6GHz, 2GB RAM, 320GB Hard Drive, ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256MB, $1499
24-inch, 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM, 320GB Hard Drive, ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256MB, $1799
24-inch, 3.06GHz, 2GB RAM, 500GB Hard Drive, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS 512MB, $2199

Similarly to the recent MacBook Pro update, this update brings no new design - it is simply a regular update to keep the iMac’s up to speed with the competition. The new iMacs are available to purchase immediately from Apple retail stores, and the Apple Store online. Authorized Apple resellers should also be receiving stock of the new iMacs, if they haven’t already.

The US Patent and Trademark Office published several of Apple’s patent approvals today, all of which relate to different aspects of the iPhone’s functionality. The first patent that has been approved deals with organization of the iPhone’s interface, mainly to reduce the clutter of adding too many visual elements to a document. The patent indicates the use of nested interface elements, for example, clicking a button to bring up a menu with operations that the user may perform.

The second patent approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office demonstrates user input on the iPhone’s touch keyboard and how the iPhone highlights the letter that is pressed, as well as how long the button stays highlighted.

The third patent relates to touch gestures which can select, as well as delete items using the iPhone’s touch screen. The process recognizes gestures in the order of first editing a list, selecting an item for deletion, and then finally being prompted on whether or not to delete the item.

Check out the three iPhone patent applications at MacNN.

Geeksugar, who was right about the new MacBook Pros refresh last time around, is now reporting that new iMacs will be out next week, most likely on Tuesday.  The last time this product was updated was all the way back in August 2007, but that was a complete case redesign.  These new machines will be at the same price points, but will have faster speeds (i.e. the new Penryn processors) and a larger hard drive.  With recent news of Apple shipping 2.289 million Macs this most recent quarter, this could help raise that even more this coming quarter.

What do you think?  Is this just another rumor started to get some hype and commotion, or are new iMacs due for a little refresh?  Either way, it would be nice to see a few improvements made to the machine to draw some more customers.  So save that money you were just about to spend on a new iMac for another week or so if you can just in case this rumor turns out to be true.

Usually semi-major releases excite me (I consider a .1 somewhat of a major release) excite me, but this brand spanking new release from Apple seems to be quite dull. Today’s release is Boot Camp 2.1. No, it doesn’t add any cool new features, installers, management tools. In fact, nothing is visually or noticeably new. Really, this update is simple a compatibility update for SP3. For some XP users, that may be great, as Boot Camp may have been unstable or causing issues, but for other Windows users with a stable Boot Camp running, this update is relatively meaningless. The only other difference is that 2.1 comes in three versions for three different versions of Windows, XP, Vista 32, and Vista 64. Of course, if you have XP, install Boot Camp 2.1 before SP3, or else you might have some troubles.

[Boot Camp] via [Ars Technica]

“Apple might as well put out a press release”, says Forbes’ writer Brian Caulfield. 

With the iPhones sales only at 1.7 million so far, and Apple standing fast with their 10 million iPhones sold by 2009, that can only mean one thing.  There will be a fairly major overhaul of the iPhone, and soon.  The sales announcement was included in a conference call hosted by Steve Jobs, talking about Q2 profits, which, by the way, increase 37% from the previous year.  One thing that was also noted in the call were the soaring Mac sales and the slumping iPhone and iPod sales.  Another interesting little tidbit about the call was the responses from Apple COO Tim Cook and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer when asked about details of the possibility of a new iPhone.  Cross Research’s analyst Sharon Cross was the most bold in prodding the two men for information, asking if “Apple will still sell the current-model iPhone once it rolls out an iPhone able to work on high-speed so-called “3G” networks.” Nice try, Sharon.  When shot down by Cook, she replied “We’ve got to try sometimes”. 

It seems pretty apparent that a new iPhone is in the works, and it is only a matter of time.  Leave a message in the comments about whether or not you think the iPhone will get a redesign in the next few months.

Via [Forbes]

A few days ago, Apple quietly release the fourth installment of its iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK), and it is available on the Apple Developer Center site. 

The most publicized and prominent change in the newest SDK version are certain changes to the iPhone simulator.  Previously, a developer would be unable to render 3D graphics in the iPhone simulator, and would be forced to test out those changes on the iPhone or iPod touch.  The Simulator now supports OpenGL ES, allowing the previously mentioned rendering to happen within the iPhone simulator, right on your computer.  Another prominent addition to the SDK is code signing, so though invalidated code will work in the iPhone Simulator, it would be worthless on the iPhone. 

Other less significant changes in the SDK include a slimmed down program, while still maintaining the full capabilities of the last version.  Xcode 3.1 has been included, along with UIFont, UIApplication, Audio ToolBox, and more NSXMLParser support.  With 200,000 subscribed developers and counting, you can be sure to expect a good handful of great new apps available when the App Store opens its doors in June

Via [MacNN]

Earlier this week, in response to controversy surrounding the fact that Apple had chosen to include Safari as a download in Software Update for Windows even if the user never had Safari in the first place, Apple released a Software Update 2.1 Update that now categorizes Safari 3.1 as “New Software.

There are a couple catches though. First, the Safari box is still checked, so for those tons of people who just say yes whenever they see “Update Needed,” they will still be surprised to find Safari on their computer. Secondly, the Software Update update requires you to run Software Update to get it, thus installing Safari anyway if you don’t uncheck it.

Personally, I see no big issue with this for consumers. Worst case scenario, they don’t pay any attention and install the best browser in the world. The area where this gets annoying is in business networks when instances of Safari start popping up all over the network. Most IT people don’t want to deal with safari and then have to spend time deleting them all.

Have you had a Windows Software Update experience? Share below.