iPad By Davis: “AT&T and Verizon staff rumored to have been given holiday blackout dates from September 21, iPhone 5 launch day?” plus 9 more |
- AT&T and Verizon staff rumored to have been given holiday blackout dates from September 21, iPhone 5 launch day?
- How to take awesome HDR photos with your iPhone
- Samsung executive says $1 billion verdict was the worst case scenario, Google says it was more Samsung than Android
- Editor's desk: Forumed, friendless, and fined
- Posts for iPad review
- 13-inch Mac Book Pro rumored to be going Retina as soon as this fall
- How to set up two-step verification for Dropbox
- Dropbox releases two-step verification beta, rolling out to all accounts soon
- Weekend iPad Wallpapers – Back to Basics
- iOS 6 preview: Shared Photo Streams
| Posted: 27 Aug 2012 01:00 AM PDT
We still expect Apple to announce the iPhone 5 at an event which we have heard will happen on September 12. As of yet, Apple hasn't issued any invitations so it is still unconfirmed. There is nothing unusual about this as last year Apple issued invitations for its iPhone 4S event just seven days before the announcement. If Apple sticks to the same format, expect to hear official news of the event around the September 5; Apple doesn't believe in giving the press too much notice for events like this. So there you have it, mark your diary with September 21, that should be the day you finally get your hands on that shiny new iPhone 5. Who's excited? 
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| How to take awesome HDR photos with your iPhone Posted: 26 Aug 2012 11:24 PM PDT
Have you ever wondered what that HDR toggle in your iPhone's camera options are? And why you want to use it? HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to a scene that includes both bright and dark elements. When we talk about HDR photography, we are referring to taking photographs of such scenes. In this week's article we're going to discuss more details about HDR and how best use your iPhone's camera to get the most dynamically awesome photos ever. What is HDR?As mentioned above, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is not exclusive to photography. When you step outside on a sunny day and view a scene that has both really bright area and very dark, shaded areas, you are living in a setting with a great dynamic range -- a huge range of light intensity levels. On a foggy day, the dynamic range is very low (and usually ideal for photography). By definition, photography is the art of recording light. This act must be done with the camera sensor -- which is only capable of capturing a certain range of light intensity at any given time. Even the most expensive and most professional cameras on the market on not equipped with sensors that can capture all ranges of light in one photograph. That's where "HDR photography" comes in. HDR photography is traditionally done by taking multiple photos with the exact same composition but with different exposure settings, then merging them all together as one photo. For example, a photographer will set up his camera on a tripod, take one photo that is exposed for the darkest area of the scene, a second photo exoised for the mid-range section, and a third photo exposed for the brightest area of the scene. The photographer will then edit these photos in sophisticated software, such as Photoshop, and blend them together so that all the properly exposed areas of the three photos are merged together as a single photograph. A quick search for "HDR" on Flickr will provide a lot of great examples of the types of photographs that are created with this technique. The iPhone uses a similar, though slightly less sophisticated, method of creating HDR images. When you enable HDR, the iPhone will take three photographs at the same time, with different exposures, and layer the best parts of each one to create one photo -- all in a matter of seconds. There are definitely noticeable improvements when using this feature, but it turns out that you can do more than just enable HDR to produce a better image. How to enable HDR on your iPhone's camera
Enabling HDR on your iPhone's camera is very easy. With the Camera app open, you should see a button at the top of the screen that says Options. Tap this button to see the Grid and HDR toggles. To turn on HDR, switch to toggle to ON by tapping it. Tap Options again to get the menu to disappear. HDR will stay on until you repeat the process to turn it off. Since the iPhone will take three photos every time you trigger the shutter, Apple has included an option in the Settings app that lets you keep the normal photos -- meaning the photos you would've taken if HDR was turned off. To turn this on, go to Settings > Photos & Camera > Keep Normal Photo > ON. Tap to expose for darkest part of scene
Following the above instructions will have HDR up and running without any effort on your part. However, I've learned through much experimentation a little trick that will improve results -- exposing for the darkest part of the scene. Everyone is familiar with the tap-to-focus feature of the iPhone's camera, but what many people don't realize is that not only is the camera focusing on your subject, but it's also exposing for this area of the photo as well. I don't have an explanation as to why, but exposing for the darkest part of the photo seems to produce better results than to let the iPhone choose an exposure automatically. The algorithm that the software uses appears to do a better job at recovering bright areas of a photo vs dark areas. The sequence of photos shown above demonstrates this. The first photo was taken without HDR. The second photo was taken with HDR enabled and the exposure that the Camera chose automatically. For the third photo, I tapped on the left part of the screen where the grass is darkly shaded before taking the photo. It could be a matter of taste, but I prefer the last photo out of the three. HDR apps
The built-in HDR feature of the iPhone's camera is a great, but there's no denying its limitations. That's where the App Store comes in. The App Store has a plethora of various apps dedicated to HDR iPhoneography that provides features like creating HDR effects on non-HDR photos from your Camera Roll, more sophisticated algorithms for merging photos, filters, and more. Here's just a few:
Do you have any favorite HDR app? Now go out and shoot!Now that you know all about HDR photography, go test your new knowledge on the streets! Or other beautiful scenic areas. As always, please share your best photos with us in the iMore Photography Forum. Most importantly -- have fun! 
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| Posted: 26 Aug 2012 09:45 PM PDT
In the matter of Apple's $1 billion verdict over Samsung, we've already had two separate, yet equally important PR statements. Since then, a Samsung executive has said it's their worst case scenario, and Google, not surprisingly, has tried to keep Android well away from the fallout. The unnamed Samsung executive was quoted by the Korea Times' Kim Yoo-chul:
Google's comments come by way of The Verge's Bryan Bishop:
Normally I say the "it's not over, but if it is, it wasn't us it was them, but it it's not over" vibe feels remarkably close to Samsung's trial strategy of "we didn't copy, but if we did copy, Apple copied first, and who cares about copying anyway?" which gained zero traction, or dollars, from the jury. But what else can Google say at this point? Even if they indemnified Android, TouchWiz and the hardware are all Samsung's. Google's relationship with Apple is probably still sub-optimal at the moment, but before the verdict sticks, doing everything they can to help lubricate a settlement wouldn't be a terrible idea. Source: The Loop, AllThingsD, Korea Times, The Verge 
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| Editor's desk: Forumed, friendless, and fined Posted: 26 Aug 2012 08:42 PM PDT
This week was a blur punctuated by something neither tragic nor triumphant. Part gut check, part gut punch. So let's spin up the FTL drives and jump right to it... iMore Forums app
Earlier this week we launched the iMore Forums app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Thousands of you have downloaded it already, but in case you somehow managed to miss it, it's FREE, it's fabulous, and it's available via the App Store: (If you have any trouble logging in, just see here.) Friendless; or: who's followers are they anyway?
While I was busy ranting about Twitter restricting third-party clients, I completely forgot to address the parallel dickosity of Twitter turning off API access to Instagram and Tumblr. Both services were using Twitter's service to help you find your friends -- they'd show you the people you follow on Twitter so you could follow those same people on Instagram or Tumblr. Now you can no longer do that. Twitter's happy with Instagram and Tumblr pumping gazillions of tweets into their service, but apparently not with Instagram or Tumblr pulling any social value back out.
So that demands the question: Who owns my follow list anyway? Is it the property of Twitter, the service that enables it, or my property, the user who builds it? Obviously, Twitter thinks it's them. But the way they're going about it makes me want to strongly disagree. And throw things. Is that really the best strategy? The verdict
I've written and said far too much already about the Apple vs. Samsung U.S. court verdict, but two things have stuck with me over the course of the weekend: First, it was almost uncomfortable watching Apple paint the board aluminum (or whatever color represents Apple in these things). A good fight is a spectacle, but there's no spectacle to be had in a beating like that. Sadly, there was also no Big John McCarthy to pull the jury off, no one gracious enough at Apple to stop the pounding, and no one smart enough at Samsung to throw in the towel. Let's hope now that the bell has rung, this gets settled and settled well before the appeals, bans, and further infringement cases are brought. I don't know who was being more stubborn in the talks to date, Apple or Samsung, but the time for stubborn is over. There's way too much blood on the mats already. Second, the reaction by extreme Apple and Android supporters on both sides was difficult for me to comprehend. Make no mistake, this was a loss for Samsung, but it was no cause for strutting by Apple. To argue either way is silly. These companies should be fighting over us, not us over them. If you hate a company, or worse, if you hate the people who work for or even just use the products of a company, you need to stop. Now. It's not okay. The bits of plastic in your pockets, and the bits of plastic in other people's pockets are just that -- bits of plastic. There's much more important stuff for all of us to expend energy on. 
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| Posted: 26 Aug 2012 08:39 PM PDT
Posts is an iPhone and iPad app for the Blogger and WordPress bloggers out there. It features a gorgeous interface that supports multiple blogs on Blogger and both worpdress.com and self-hosted blogs with wordpress.org. The built-in post editor is very powerful, browsing through posts is a visually appealing experience, and comment management is a breeze.
After adding all your blogs (or creating one with Posts), you can view your posts in a visual timeline view. In landscape, there will be a left sidebar that gives quick access to all your blogs and their posts, comments drafts, submissions, and pages. The main part of the screen will display you selection. When viewing posts, they are displayed in a horizontal timeline that shows all the posts under each day. Each thumbnail shows the main image, the title, and a small excerpt. One of my favorite features is that you can view all the posts of all your blogs in this view if you choose.
If you tap on a post, a preview will popup that displays the content of the post. It doesn't visually look the same as it does on your blog, but is more like what you'd see on a read-later apps like Pocket or Apple's built-in Reader feature in Safari. From this preview, you can edit, view comments, delete, or share.
When adding a post, Posts supports a rich text environment as well as HTML input. The rich text screen allows you to choose a style (body, heading, blockquote, etc), font size, bold, italic, strikethrough, justification, hyperlink, and more. If you insert a photo, you can hold your finger down on it to edit the size and wrap type as well as src, alt, and tooltip information. One thing I don't like about Posts is adding tags and categories. Both are shown as a list, which is great for categories, but terrible for tags. I have hundreds of tags and the last thing I want to do is scroll through a giant list to select the ones I want. It'd be faster to just type a comma-separated list. For categories, the lists is in alphabetical order and doesn't account for a subcategories. So if you have a hierarchy similar to Pets > Photos and Kids > Photos, you will see two Photos categories lists without any way of distinguishing them. Terrible.
One of the other great features of Posts is comment moderation. For each comment, you can reply, mark it as approved, unapproved, spam, or delete, and quickly view the article that the comment is associated with. The good
The bad
The conclusionPosts is an excellent app for managing Blogger and WordPress blogs. I'm not a Blogger user, but I can confidently claim that Posts is a much better iPad app for WordPress than WordPress' native iPad app. It's not cheap, but if efficient blogging with your iPad is something you value, Posts is worth every penny. $9.99 - Download Now
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| 13-inch Mac Book Pro rumored to be going Retina as soon as this fall Posted: 26 Aug 2012 05:28 PM PDT
Following the introduction of the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro at WWDC 2012, it should come as no surprise that more of Apple's Mac line will be making the @2x transition. The question is when. And the answer, at least for the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, could be as early as this fall according to what NPD DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim told CNET:
Larger desktop displays like the iMac and 27-inch Thunderbolt are challenged by cost and yield rate. Smaller laptop displays are challenged by battery life and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) power. 2560x1600 is less than the current 15.4"-inch Retina MacBook Pro's 2880x1800 but not by much, and would clearly look spectacular at 13.3-inches. However, the current Retina MacBook Pro drives its GPU flat out to run that display. And unlike the 15-inch MacBooks, however, the 13-inch line currently only has the built in Intel HD Graphics 4000, and not the additional, discreet NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. In addition to battery enough to support a 2560x1600, would Apple need to add a discreet GPU as well? How would those twin concerns, along with the thinner, optical drive-free design resolve themselves at 13-inches? Whether this specific report is accurate or not is hard to say. It is highly detailed, and Apple is absolutely working on more Retina Macs, so it'll be interesting to see how the timeline plays out. The iPhone went Retina at 640x960 in 2010, and the iPod touch only a few months later. It took the iPad until 2012 to go Retina at 1356x2048, and the first Mac a few months more at 2560x1600. We're still on the first generation, bleeding edge of Retina Macs, though. The 15-inch MacBook Pro is so outstanding, however, that growing pains, if any, are well worth it. Anyone been waiting on a smaller, likely cheaper point of entry for a Retina MacBook Pro? If -- and it's still an if -- Apple does have a 13-inch MacBook Pro ready to ship this fall, will you be ready to pull the trigger? Source: CNET 
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| How to set up two-step verification for Dropbox Posted: 26 Aug 2012 04:25 PM PDT
Popular cloud storage solution, Dropbox has begun enabling two-step verification for their accounts, which means in addition to your password (something you know), they send an additional access code to your phone, or let you generate a time-based code with a mobile app like Google Authenticator (something you own). Although no security scheme is unbreakable, two-factor authentication is absolutely better than one. And if you keep personal data in Dropbox, you're absolutely going to want to use it. How to enable Dropbox two-step verification on your Mac or Windows PCDropbox is currently providing two-factor verification as a beta but will be rolling it out to all accounts over the next few days. If you're reading this during the beta period, you'll have to manually enable it by downloading the Dropbox beta from their forum.
How to enable Dropbox two-step verification on your accountOnce you're sure you're running the latest, greatest, proper version of Dropbox software, you need to turn on two-factor authentication on your account.
That's it, you're done! From now on, whenever you log in to dropbox.com or enable a new computer or mobile device, you'll have to enter the SMS or generator code to make sure everything in nice and secure. How to login to Dropbox two-step verification on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPadThe next time you need to add a device to your Dropbox account, for example, in a couple of months when a shiny new iPhone 5 or iPad mini follows you home from the Apple Store, you'll need to use that fancy new authentication code to do it.
That's it! Well, Dropbox will ask you if you want to enable automatic uploads (I don't, I use Photo Stream, but that's pretty much it. Additional help and resourcesIf you need more help setting up Dropbox two-step verification, or if you want to setup additional two-step verifications for Gmail, hit the links below. And if you try it out, let me know how it works for you. 
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| Dropbox releases two-step verification beta, rolling out to all accounts soon Posted: 26 Aug 2012 02:20 PM PDT
The latest Dropbox beta adds support for two-step verification, and what's more -- Dropbox will be rolling out two-step verification to all accounts over the next few days. Similar to Google's two-step verification, in addition to your password (something you know), Dropbox will send an additional access code to you via text message to your phone, or allow you to generate something using an authenticator app, like Google Authenticator, on your iPhone or other mobile device (something you have). It's not without some caveats, however. According to The Verge's Dante D'Orazio:
Two-factor authentication gained newfound attention recently following the brutal hacking and burning of Wired's Mat Honan, whose Apple, Amazon, Gmail, Twitter, and other accounts were compromised and abused, and his data trashed. No third-party system, including two-factor, can make up for not having proper backups or social engineering attacks compromising services outside of your control. But if your data lives in Dropbox, two-step verification is absolutely better than one. You can try it out now via the Dropbox forums, or wait until the option officially rolls out to your account. If you do take it for a drive, let me know how it works for you. Free - Download nowSource: Dropbox forums via The Verge 
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| Weekend iPad Wallpapers – Back to Basics Posted: 26 Aug 2012 09:46 AM PDT
This weekend two very basic and elegant iPad wallpapers have caught my eye. Both are from Brett Jordan (no relation) – the most prolific contributor to our iPad Insight Flickr group. The first is shown above and is titled Flat Cool Grey. I think it's superb looking on the iPad home screen and really makes the icons pop. I've always loved simple background images for my iPad wallpaper; though I sometimes stray a little to more striking images I tend to always come back to the basics. (...) © patrickj for iPad Insight, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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| iOS 6 preview: Shared Photo Streams Posted: 26 Aug 2012 07:48 AM PDT
Photo Stream debuted in iOS 5 as part of iCloud and while it offered some nifty automatic backup and Here's how Apple describes Shared Photo Streams.
And, based on what Apple has shown off to date, here's how it works:
While it doesn't work the same way the old MobileMe Galleries did, Shared Photo Stream do provide some interesting functionality all their own. The question is, with the ability to share photos already built into popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and services like Instagram and Path, does anyone really need Photo Streams to be shared as well? Perhaps, especially for those who don't really want to be social with their photos, but who only want to share them directly with a few friends and family members. iOS 6 is scheduled for release this fall, perhaps as soon as September 19. For more on iOS 6 and Siri, check out: 
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AT&T and Verizon has supposedly issued holiday blackout dates to their sales staff which line up nicely with the rumored launch date of the next generation iPhone. We have 
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