Apple : Apple goes after Samsung Galaxy Nexus |
- Apple goes after Samsung Galaxy Nexus
- Hands on: iBooks Author review
- Updated: iPad 3 rumours: what you need to know
| Apple goes after Samsung Galaxy Nexus Posted:  Apple has issued its first legal challenge to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone as its patent infringement war against Android rumbles on in 2012. Cupertino lawyers have filed suit in a German court claiming that the Android 4.0 device is guilty of copying the iOS slide to unlock functionality patented by Apple. Apple's decision to focus on the Galaxy Nexus aims to hit both of its chief hardware and software competitors The Galaxy Nexus is one of Samsung's flagship devices as well as being the first Android 4.0 phone, meaning there are more of Google's fingerprints on the device than many other Android devices. Escalation"Judging by the first three weeks of 2012, Apple's intellectual property assertions against Android continue to escalate," Florian Mueller, a patent analyst told the AllThingsD website. "Samsung appears to be no less determined to fight. Apple's supplemental infringement contentions targeting the Android 4.0 lead device are an unequivocal signal to Google that Apple doesn't shy away from a frontal assault." Meanwhile, on Friday, a German court also threw out Samsung's assertions that the iPhone infringes upon one of its 3G patents. It continues to be advantage Apple in the global patent wars, but things don't show any sign of cooling off, especially with Samsung planning the below for Super Bowl weekend. |
| Hands on: iBooks Author review Posted:  Hands on: iBooks Author reviewApple's latest content creator is designed for a very specific audience: textbook publishers. If you're looking for a do-everything app that will export in every conceivable file format, iBooks Author isn't for you - for that you'd be much better off with Scrivener. If you want to make eye-popping textbooks for the iPad, however, iBooks Author makes it exceptionally easy to produce very high quality stuff. Getting started is simple The first thing you'll see after the licence agreement - more of that in a minute - is the Template Chooser, which looks exactly like the one in Apple's iWork apps. You have six templates to choose from, and you can export your own projects as templates for future use or unlock the templates' various component parts, fiddle with them and then save the results.
Once you're in the program proper, you'd be forgiven for thinking you're in Pages. The two programs are very, very similar, with a sparsely populated toolbar at the top, pop-up Inspector, Media, Colors and Fonts panels and sidebars for viewing thumbnails and managing styles. It's very easy to use, and the thumbnail navigation - which you can expand and collapse by chapter or by section - means you're unlikely to get lost.
As you'd expect from an Apple product, the templates are very, very good and you need to try very hard to make a bad-looking textbook. As with Pages, previously invisible guides appear to help you get your images, text boxes and other items just-so, and the styles-based formatting means you can quickly change something and apply it to the entire book. In addition to normal text you can add boxouts, shapes, tables and charts, and the new Widgets button adds interactivity.
As Widgets are written in dashcode - the same language used for OS X's Dashboard widgets - we should soon see a wide selection of add-ons. For now, the choices are a photo gallery, an embedded media file such as a video or audio file, Q&As, Keynote presentations, interactive or 3D images, and HTML code.
EASE OF USE: Images don't do justice to how ridiculously easy iBooks Author is to use. You need to try very hard to make a mess Changing appearance and behaviours is just a matter of bringing up the Inspector palette and choosing the appropriate options. Importing and previewing iBooks Author has not been designed as a writing environment: the idea is that you write your book first, and then bring it into Apple's program when you want to make it pretty. Word and Pages are the obvious candidates for the writing bit, but for complex jobs we'd suggest having a look at the wonderful Scrivener too. You can bring text in in several ways. You can type directly into the documents - you can enable editing of placeholder text in Preferences - or you can drag in a Pages or Word document. The Word import is particularly good, bringing in the text and applying appropriate styles without any obvious messing around, although as you might expect, bringing in anything more complex than text, such as documents containing embedded images, tends to throw the layout out a bit.
STRAIGHT FROM WORD: Importing even enormous Word documents is almost instant, and iBooks author does a good job of applying appropriate styles Once you've got your text you can bring up the Glossary toolbar, adding new entries as you go, and you can then switch to the Glossary view to cross-link entries and add definitions. The final stage before publication is to make sure that your iBook actually works. Using the Orientation buttons to switch between portrait and landscape mode is essential, as some bits of the template designs disappear completely in portrait mode, and if you've got your iPad handy you can preview the book in iBooks. You need iBooks 2 and a USB connection for this. It doesn't work on other iOS devices or over Wi-Fi. Publish and be... damn! There's more to iBooks publishing than simply clicking the publish button. You need to have an ISBN number for your book, which costs money; you need an iBookstore seller account, and you need to submit your book for approval via iTunes Producer. It's a bit of a hassle, especially if you're not resident in the US, as you'll need to get a unique reference number from the US taxman, the IRS.
iBooks Author is a very capable program, but it's not for everybody. Your books work on iPads but not iPhones, and they won't work in the previous version of iBooks. There's no versioning or collaboration tools for keeping track of successive drafts, edits and others' input, so if you're working in an environment where lots of people are involved in book production iBooks Author probably isn't for you. And there's that licence agreement. The iBooks Author end user licence agreement says that if you're charging for your book you can only sell it through iBooks; if you fall foul of Apple's approval process, you're not allowed to take your finished project, export it and sell it elsewhere.
CONDITIONS: Apple really doesn't want you to use iBooks Author for anything but iBooks - it reserves the right to tell you to get stuffed. We're sure it'll be technically possible - the underlying format is EPUB3, albeit a slightly tweaked version, so converting it shouldn't be a tough job, and you can export as PDF too - but the end user licence forbids it. That means you could put in months of work, only for Apple to say no. When you consider the time and effort involved in making even a simple book, that's a level of uncertainty publishers really don't need. We've got another concern about the approvals process: what makes the cut? Bear in mind we're talking textbooks here: will Apple check every fact? Will it approve books espousing Intelligent Design? Will everything have to be of the highest quality, or will iBooks become stuffed with crappy book apps that bring back the bad old days of interactive CD-Roms? So is iBooks Author any good? If you're happy with Apple's terms, and if you don't mind having to use different programs if you're publishing to other stores, then it's a very fast and effective way to turn text into something more interesting. It's too simple for major projects, we suspect, but it does what it's supposed to do very well. |
| Updated: iPad 3 rumours: what you need to know Posted:  iPad 3 release date, processor and moreThe Apple iPad 2 has been out since early 2011, so it's nearly time to say hello to iPad 3. The web is teeming with rumours about the new iPad 3 processor, cameras and display, so we've gathered together as many details as we can on its possible specifications. Of course, some of these can be taken with a pinch of salt, but there's definite patterns occuring and we'd say the final iPad 3 release won't be that far removed from many of these rumours So what's the word on the street about the next iPad? Apple iPad 3 release dateOn 1 July 2011, Digitimes reported that Taiwanese-based component suppliers were gearing up for production of the iPad 3. This was followed in October by a suggestion that production would begin before the end of the year. Digitimes reported in late November 2011 that panel makers had already started shipping panels for the new iPad 3 - a million in October and two million in November. Foxconn, Apple's major manufacturing partner, is said to have started production of the iPad 3 in January. 2012. A source at one of Apple's partners also told Bloomberg that the company began production of the iPad 3 in January, with a view to reaching full volumes in February. Digitimes says the new model is expected to meet the heady heights of 9.5 to 9.8 million units over the course of Q1 2012. The iPad 3 release date looks set for Spring 2012, with Citi analyst Richard Gardner even predicting it could be as early as February. However, we'd expect the iPad 3 announcement to be in February, with the iPad 3 US release date in early March and the iPad 3 UK release date in late March. The Apple iPad 3 will have a quad-core processorIt's probable that the iPad 3 will have a brand spanking new processor, Apple's A6 - which will surely be a quad-core ARM-based processor. Quad-core designs are coming from various ARM partners and the Tegra 3 has already been launched by Nvidia, as well as the Snapdragon S4 from Qualcomm. According to the Korea Times in November 2011, the A6 processors are to be manufactured by Samsung, despite the companies' ongoing patent battles. Apple iPad 3 displayA retina display was widely predicted for the iPad 2, but of course the current iPad doesn't have a double-resolution display: for now, that's something you'll only get in the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. Could an iPad 3 Retina Display be on the way? It's the very first thing on our iPad 3 wish list. The exciting news is that it looks as though it is happening, with Apple reportedly testing suppliers' current shipments of 2048 x 1536 resolution 9.7-inch displays. Now that iBooks 2 has been launched (as of 19 January 2012), we've also seen further references to 2x iPad screen images - these will, most likely, be for iPad 3. However, it's not always been plain sailing for the display - rumours continued over the summer and autumn of 2011 that the retina display in the iPad 3 was continuing to be a challenge. Back in May 2011, we reported that the iPad 3 could launch with a Samsung-made AMOLED screen, following rumours that Apple was in talks on the matter with Samsung execs. There have also been more LG and Samsung rumours, too. However, according to the Wall Street Journal in late November 2011, Sharp will manufacture panels for the device. Apparently Apple is investing in infrastructure at Sharp's LCD plant. Further rumours said that Apple is looking to implement some nifty dual LED lightbar technology into the iPad 3, apparently in a bid to counter-balance the brightness issue that the Apple tablet may have, due to its super-high pixel density. A part leak in early December again pointed to a Sharp-manufactured 2048x1536 retina display and dual lightbar.
iPAD 2: We wanted a retina screen, but didn't get it - what about for iPad 3? There may be an iPad 3 LTE versionPersistent rumours suggest LTE support will be provided for the US. Great for the US, though it will leave the UK behind as there's no 4G connectivity as yet. Cnet.com believes that the new iPad may feature a Qualcomm 4G LTE Gobi 4000 chip. The iPad 3 will usher in iOS 5.1Alongside the much anticipated iPad 3, Macotakara sources seem convinced we'll see iOS 5.1 come out of beta in March too. Will the iPad 3 have a smaller dock connector?Parts previewed on some websites indicate that, although the iPad 3 will still have a 30 pin dock connector, the packaging is streamlined. Well, if this is true, we knew it would happen sooner or later. The iPad 3 hardware could include an NFC chipApple's very interested in Near Field Communications, and one particularly tasty rumour at Cult of Mac suggests that the iPhone 5 will use NFC to take over nearby Macs, enabling you to use your data and settings with a flick of the wrist. The iPad 3 specifications will include more storageThe iPad 2 has the familiar 16/32/64GB storage options. A 128GB option for the iPad 3 isn't impossible - although that might depend on the situation in Asia, where natural disasters caused chaos in parts of the electronics industry last year. The iPad 3 features could include a Thunderbolt portTwo generations of USB-free iPads suggest that Apple just isn't interested in adding one, but the new Thunderbolt port found in the 2011 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air could be another story: it's a combined accessory/display connector with astonishingly fast performance. There could be more than one iPad 3TUAW says the iOS 5 code features new code files for USB devices in the iOS 5 firmware, Through this, TUAW found references to an iPad 3,1 and an iPad 3,2. Is this latter variant the LTE version? The iPad 3 could be thickerThe iPad 3 might be bulking out, reportedly so it can house a higher-resolution display than the iPad 2, and the extra girth is all down to pixel density.
THICKER?: Could iPad 3 be thicker than iPad 2? The iPad 3 specs might include an SD card slotThis was widely predicted for the iPad 2 and, like the Retina Display, didn't materialise. One for version 3, perhaps? Using a separate adapter to read camera cards is rather inelegant and clunky. The iPad 3 specification should include a better cameraThe rear-facing camera on the iPad 2 isn't brilliant: an iPhone 4S-style camera and flash would do nicely. The iPad 3 might use gesture controlsCould the iPad 3 have Kinect-style gesture controls? We're not so sure, but rumours suggested so in late October 2011. The iPad 3 could feature a carbon fibre caseApple has hired a carbon fibre expert, senior composites engineer Kevin Kenney, fuelling speculation that the next iPad could be encased in the lightweight material. |
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