Being in London, this year we haven't been lucky enough to attend the Apple World Wide Developer Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco. We'll be following Twitter along with the rest of the world's Apple fans, but just in case Twitter goes down (not that that's ever happened before... oh wait) we'll be keeping you posted on developments throughout the day.

Follow WWDC in style, updated every 30 seconds: http://wwdc.twistori.com/#apple

Updates

Apple homepage and iPhone pages updated.

Apple Store already back online

iPhone 3G Specs from online Apple Store:

Same camera 2MegaPixels - ouch.
Same screen.
GPS - wooooo.
3G - wooooo.
Price - woooooo from $199 for 8GB.

Read the rest of this entry »

I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of this guy until today, but I thought it would be important to share just how (for want of a better word) STUPID he appears in this video.

When asked on what Apple needs to do to really improve its chances in the corporate sector, Mr Krakow suggested that Apple should "Bite the bullet, and either get Blackberry or Windows Mobile on the iPhone"

His reasons for Apple doing so were very vague, and mainly focused on people "being happy" with what they currently have. How can an industry ever evolve if they're always happy with what they have?

Gary's comments on "moving to the Apple system" made him sound as if he really didn't have a clue about what he was talking about. Also, on a side note, you don't tend to hear people in the industry calling anything a system these days - it's more "platforms" and "devices". His comments were as if Apple hadn't got ANY plans to bring out a whole host of enterprise features in the coming weeks.

All I can say is, it's hard to believe this isn't a joke.

Inquisitor, the brilliant little search plugin for Safari has been purchased by web giant Yahoo!

In a move that has surprised many, Yahoo! has seemingly made a smart decision here. The Inquisitor plugin is used by a large number of Apple users to get instant search results from the built in search field that Safari comes with. The search field defaults to Google when Safari is first downloaded, enabling both Google and Apple to earn through search advertising from a high number of searches. So Yahoo! will ensure Inquisitor's default search is through them to increase their slice of the multi-billion dollar search advertising market. Thankfully, the default search engine is still changeable via the newly designed preference pane.

Yahoo! purchasing this plugin is not just a sign of good business sense. It is a very clear example of the importance of interface design. Interface = Brand. The interface of Inquisitor is beautiful, and has developed throughout its life. Being a user of Inquisitor from the beginning, it has been great to see it develop into a thoroughly useful, efficient, and beautiful tool.

Let's hope the buyout from Yahoo! will keep Inquisitor at its prime for years to come.

On a side note, David Watanabe has not joined the ranks of Yahoo!, he's still focused on creating his own awesome software.

Welcome to the all new GoSquared.

We have been working on building this for a long time now, and are proud to finally present the long awaited Squares system.

We are introducing 3 major new products with this release today:

All New Control Panel

Sign in, or join GoSquared to experience where most of our time has been spent. We think you'll like it.

The all new Control Panel lets you do what you want to do, fast. From here you can monitor all of your Squares from one page, view dynamic graphs of your traffic data, update your Site details in real time, and a whole lot more.

Instead of reading more about what the Control Panel is like, why not try it out for yourself, by joining GoSquared for free today.

The GoSquared Network

Squares are no longer confined to just GoSquared. Add your Site to the GoSquared Network now, and earn money with pure and simple Squares on your Site.

By adding your Site to GoSquared, you not only gain the ability to sell Squares on your own Site, but can also monitor traffic from within the Control Panel.

Squares on other Sites

GoSquared is perhaps the easiest way to purchase advertising on any Site. Simply submit your Square, a 140x140 pixel image, and choose some keywords. GoSquared matches these keywords with similar Sites on the GoSquared Network, and suggests the most potentially effective ones. You can then choose to purchase your Square on as many of these Sites as you like, for as long as you like. Click purchase, and you're done.

Your Square will show up in the Control Panel instantly, and you can start monitoring from there.

We hope you enjoy the all new GoSquared,

Thanks,

The GoSquared Team

Two years ago, building a portable computer game in 14 days that responded to touch screen actions, and physical movement via accelerometers was something only the most revolutionary people would even dream of.

Today, Apple announced the iPhone SDK, and have made it possible to build apps for the most talked about device of the last year. The SDK (Software Development Kit) has been a long time coming, but was worth the wait - developers are only really limited by their imaginations, meaning we will be seeing some truly astonishing apps over the next year.

So far, applications on the iPhone have all been made by Apple. Some make more use of the iPhones abilities than others, but none show how truly capable this device is. An app shown in the keynote really made me think of just how natural to use this device can be - they showed an image editing tool, where you pinch the image to literally apply a pinch effect. Sure this is cool, but then to undo the change, you simply shake the phone (just like in the old Etch-a-Sketch days).

I am really looking forward to seeing how far people's imaginations can push the most advanced mobile computing platform ever made.

A brilliant article on Wired today, by Fred Vogelstein on what it was like behind the scenes while working on the iPhone.

I highly recommend reading the full article, if not to see how the iPhone was made, but to see how Apple have, undeniably, changed the mobile phone market.

Consider that Apple began working on a mobile phone back in 2002, just after the launch of the iPod. They quickly realised that, one day, phones would replace their most successful consumer product, the iPod, so began a project that combined a phone and an iPod, code-named Purple 1. After many revisions of P1 (and failure to reach market), and the development (and failure once on sale) of the ROKR Motorola iTunes Phone, Apple continued working on cell phones, but focused their attention on building a true convergence device that would be game changing.

An interesting snippet: In February 2005, Jobs secretly met with Cingular executives, including Stan Sigman. Jobs presented a three-part message to executives:

• Apple had the technology to build something truly revolutionary, "light-years ahead of anything else."
• Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done.
• But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.

The phone market is now more competitive than ever. The iPhone has raised the bar on what consumers can expect from a handset, and for the past year every phone manufacturer has been working day and night to simply catch up with what Apple has brought to the table.

It makes you wonder what Apple are working on at this very minute.

Apple today announced that it will be standardising its music pricing across Europe. This means that UK prices will fall from their ridiculously high 79p per song.

Currently, Apple charges more per song in the UK due to higher wholesale pricing by the music labels. However, today's announcement makes it clear that Apple will reconsider their deals with any music labels that do not lower their UK pricing to the same level as the rest of the EU within the next 6 months.

This move has been referred to as "pan-European" pricing of music - it is only fair that we should all pay the same price for the same content after all.

“This is an important step towards a pan-European marketplace for music”, said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We hope every major record label will take a pan-European view of pricing”.

As a UK iTunes user, I warmly welcome this announcement, even if it is a little late.

Read the official press release...

The "copier" company.

For such a major brand, I am surprised the logo design is so short term, so "web 2.0".

It works today, but will I be saying that in 5 years?

Ever since Facebook began to dominate headlines, people have been criticising their "closed wall" approach to the web by not allowing developers to build apps on other sites that can use the network's data, and by not joining Google's OpenSocial project.

“… Users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems …”

Facebook recently disapproved of Plaxo's Pulse, an app that allows you to link your Plaxo and Facbook accounts and grab all of your friends' information including (the bit that Facebook really rejected to) email addresses. Facebook responded to Plaxo by banning people (mostly reporters trying out the new system) from Facebook entirely.

The biggest surprise of this announcement is clearly the unexpected (and sudden) willingness of Facebook to progressively become more open.

Will this change anything in the near future? Who knows, but it can only be a good thing if the major companies are (at least) appearing to work together on more open, flexible standards.

This move will surely help to make several more major players think about becoming open.

The open web is the future.

Apple's PR article here.

Interesting to see the focus in this article on how Andrea Jung is so successful at running "the company for women".

Apple looking to increase their products' appeal to women will surely aid their already strong affinity with the opposite sex. How many other computer companies do you know that employ the CEO of a beauty company?