Apple news blog

Speaking to attendees of the MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco yesterday, Google Engineering vice president Vic Gundotra predicted that the Web would prevail as the dominant mobile application development platform despite the huge success o…

The powerful new Walt Disney World Guide Notescast iPhone App is updated with new content, categories and more. At over 200 pages, including over 150 photos, guests can now have all of Walt Disney World Resort in the palm of their hand wherever they go and whenever they want. This comprehensive vacation planner and in-park guide covers nearly every aspect of the entire resort and all four theme parks.

Noise Industries announced that development partner SUGARfx has won Microfilmmaker’s Award of Superiority for the new Heads Up Display FxFactory powered plug-in. This is the second FxFactory plug-in within the past month to be honored with the prestigious award. FxFactory powered FxPacks are designed by Noise Industries and their development partners to extend the visual effects capabilities of Adobe After Effects CS3 / CS4, Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion and Apple Final Cut Express.

Opcoders today released GraphicDesignerToolbox 1.2.0, a free update to their powerful Mac OS X graphics editor. Perfect for web designers that need to compose seamless tiling textures, trim pixels, prepare thumbnails and add shadows, plus much more. A round milestone is crossed, the 100 building blocks. Improvements since last major release are 13 new building blocks, documentation for 30 blocks, extended 5 blocks with new features and more.

TUAW reports that with the introduction of age-based ratings for App Store applications in iPhone OS 3.0, Apple has taken the step of preventing developers of applications carrying mature (ages 17+) ratings from issuing promo codes for the affected a…

I don’t know if this is already common knowledge, but it’s been an irritation to me for some time and I finally figured it out. Whenever I tried to use CPAN to install Perl modules in Mac OS X, I would always get a never ending series of long waits and error messages akin to:

Fetching with LWP:  ftp://xxx/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gzLWP failed with code[404] message[File '01mailrc.txt.gz' not found]Fetching with Net::FTP:  ftp://xxx/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gzCouldn't fetch 01mailrc.txt.gz from carroll.cac.psu.edu

When I searched for the error messages, all the top hits lead to the same question others had with no responses. Finally, I kept digging and tweaking my search parameters until I found a solution that worked. You need to set an environment variable to tell CPAN to use passive FTP mode. I have aliased this so that I never need to think about it again:

env FTP_PASSIVE=1 perl -MCPAN -e shell

If you type th…

Sometimes you want to be able to dock your iPhone and not have the display go to sleep. For example, when you have a 3rd party app like AIM or Twitterrific open that doesn’t have a disable lock function. The screen will not lock automatically if the iPhone is docked and music is playing. Simply start playing music and then dock the iPhone and open the app you want to use. The iPhone won’t sleep until the playlist, album, or podcast is finished. If you don’t want to listen to anything, you can always turn down the volume.

[Ed Note: You can also set the Auto-Lock setting to Never.]

iFunia announced today the immediate availability of its new family of Mac video converter products that offer a quick and simple way for consumers to convert video formats on Mac. iFunia Mac video converter products allow consumers to convert their digital video content to appropriate format for use on personal computers or popular portable and mobile devices such as the Apple iPod, iPhone, Sony PSP, Apple TV Vision and Smartphones.

Sappi Fine Paper North America today announced that it has extended the deadline for entries for the 2009 Ideas that Matter design grant program to the postmarked date of July 31. Sappi Fine Paper North America partnered with Project M, to find out the social causes and other ideas that were top of mind among conference attendees. The program has awarded $9 million in grants to support causes that range from youth centers and health care awareness to wildlife protection and sustainability.

Apple today issued a media alert announcing details for the July 21st release of its financial results for the third fiscal quarter and second calendar quarter of 2009. The results will cover sales from March 28th, 2009 through June 26th, 2009, and w…