Could your iPhone really send an airplane miles off course? At least one pilot thinks so as government regulators weigh the affects of smartphones and tablets being left on during takeoff and landing.
As the debate rages within the aviation industry, Bloomberg reported Wednesday that an iPhone left on during a regional flight caused enough interference to make compasses go haywire.
According to a NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System report, the 2011 incident claims the small jet experienced an issue while climbing past 9,000 feet, in turn sending the plane “several miles” off course. The brief crisis was allegedly resolved when a flight attendant asked a passenger seated in the ninth row to turn off their iPhone.
“The timing of the cellphone being turned off coincided with the moment where our heading problem was solved,” an unnamed co-pilot remarked.
While many people believe that smartphones, tablets and other electronics have no impact on airline equipment, lab tests conducted by NASA, airplane manufacturer Boeing and the Civil Aviation Authority in the U.K. have proven otherwise.
In January, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) established a committee to investigate the phenomenon, with the results to be revealed in July. Those findings could impact when airlines allow the use of portable electronics in the future, which is currently restricted during takeoff and landing.
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Camera apps are a dime a dozen on the App Store these days, but leave it to the creators of Clear to bring a unique approach to snapping and sharing images with others.
Realmac Software announced Tuesday that it will soon debut Analog Camera, an iPhone camera app that follows the same principles used in the company’s Clear to-do list manager.
As you can see from the quick teaser video embedded below, Analog Camera offers a new gesture-based approach to taking photos from an iOS device and sharing them with the world.
Company spokesman Rob Jarman describes the app as “super fun to use,” and the best news is users won’t have to wait long to find out for themselves: Analog Camera for iPhone is expected to hit the App Store sometime in the next two weeks.
Stay tuned to MacLife.com for more details!
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Analog Camera for iPhone – Coming Soon from Realmac Software on Vimeo.
Lots of cool stuff to report on for this mid-month Tuesday, but the lead story won’t be good news for those of you who have been vacillating about grabbing an iPhone 5 on T-Mobile US — the handset will now cost you an extra 50 bucks compared to last week, proving once again that you snooze, you lose. The rest of our Monday recap is better news, with the exception of AT&T and HTC, who appear to have a loser on their hands with Facebook Home…
As noted by TMoNews, T-Mobile US has quietly raised the up-front price of an iPhone 5 by following a Mother’s Day weekend trade-in promotion. Instead of a .99 down payment for the 16GB model, T-Mo is now asking 9.99, which also raises the price paid over 24 months from 9 to 9 accordingly. The higher down payment also affects pricing on the 32GB and 64GB models sold through the company’s website, but the good news is the monthly equipment fee on all models will remain the same as it was before.
The Google Drive Blog announced Monday that free storage between Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos will now be unified into one pool for a shared storage total of 15GB. The change will be welcome to those who don’t use Gmail too much, but need extra space for documents, photos and other files on Google Drive. On the flip side, if you’re a heavy Gmail user, unified storage means you’ll no longer be limited to a 25GB upgrade there. The change is expected to roll out “over the next couple of weeks,” so if you’re not seeing it yet, no cause for alarm.
Agile Bits released 1Password for iOS 4.2, a pretty massive update that adds the Strong Password Generator to the app’s built-in “1Browser” on iPad as well as desktop-style Go & Fill Logins, complete with AutoFill if you roll like that. 1Password items can now be shared via Messages or email using a one-tap obfuscated format or as plain text, depending on how secure you’d like to make it. Last but not least, 1Password for iOS 4.2 adds the ability to search URLs for Login items with an option to “expand search to all fields,” which should turn up whatever you seek. The update is now available from the App Store.
Amazon has been on a roll lately with marketing its cloud-based services, following up its new Cloud Drive Photos for iPhone app with a dedicated Amazon Cloud Player for Windows computers. Using the free application, desktop and laptop users can stream all of their albums, songs or playlists, download MP3 purchases for offline playback while keeping everything up-to-date through the cloud. Although it’s not available at launch, the e-tailer promises a Mac version is on the way, but for now you can give Amazon Cloud Player for PC a spin if you’re running Windows 7, Vista or XP.
BGR reported Monday that AT&T may be planning to eliminate the Facebook Home-equipped HTC First from its lineup with extreme prejudice as a result of poor sales thus far. How bad did the Android handset sell? The report claims the carrier “sold fewer than 15,000 units nationwide,” which includes last week, when the up-front price of the smartphone dropped to a mere 99 cents with two-year agreement. That’s apparently worse than AT&T’s previous Facebook-enabled handset, the HTC Status (i.e. ChaCha), which came and went two years ago. AT&T has yet to confirm or deny the rumor, stating only that “we do pricing promotions all the time and have made no decisions on future plans.”
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Stealing iPhones is big business these days–so big, in fact, that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg pinned iPhone thefts as the reason why crime went up in the Big Apple last year. Now, as the New York Times reported this morning, some law enforcement officials seek to blame Apple and other manufacturers for the spike, asserting that they’re not doing enough to prevent such incidents from happening.
Apparently the problem’s especially bad near Apple’s own turf in San Francisco, where cell phone theft reportedly accounts for around half of all robberies. George Gascon, San Francisco’s district attorney, believes that Apple in particular can do more to halt the thefts. “Unlike other types of crimes, this is a crime that could easily be fixed with a technological solution,” Gascon said. Gascon added that he’d met with Apple executive Michael Foulkes to discuss antitheft technology, but he left the meeting believing that Apple had no interest in pursuing such measures.
Cathy Lanier, the police chief of Washington, D.C., was far more blunt, according to the Times. “They are making profit off this,” Lanier said.
The obvious response to such allegations is one that we already know at Mac|Life–that Apple has already include antitheft software in the form of its “Find My Phone” feature that’s been available since 2010. This is in stark contrast to Google, Samsung, and other manufacturers who have nothing like the feature on their phones. Elsewhere, as the Verge reports, last year AT&T enacted a service that would “deny voice, data and SMS access to any individual phone or tablet while keeping [the customer's] account intact.” As the New York Times piece reveals, however, Apple’s solution isn’t perfect as it doesn’t work when the phone’s been turned off or disconnected from the internet. Also, phones stolen in San Francisco have been reported as being found as far away as Mexico, Vietnam, and China.
Somewhat surprisingly, the measures critics such as Gascon have in mind seem to have in mind will likely pose problems for privacy. As Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune reports in a scathing critique of the New York Times article, “The workaround that allows thieves to reactivate stolen phones — hacking the phones’ unique identifying code so that it can’t be tracked — is considered a “pro-privacy” measure that is defended by civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.” DeWitt notes that the New York Times article includes this information, but shuffles it toward the end.
DeWitt also notes that the New York Post reported in Feburary that Apple does, in fact, do more to fight theft that critics give them credit for. Specifically, they work directly with the New York Police Department to track down stolen phones. “When the NYPD provides Apple with a unique identifier,” DeWitt said, “the company tries to locate it–something it can often do even if the owner hasn’t installed Find My Phone.”
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Looks like the rumor mill is going to keep the pedal to the metal ahead of this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference, as speculation runs wild about what we might see in both iOS 7 as well as OS X 10.9 later this year. Today’s recap also laments the original iPhone now achieving “obsolete” status in Apple retail stores as well as how Hollywood’s feared Copyright Alert System may not be so scary after all.
We’re among those still clinging to an original iPhone — the very same device we lined up for outside an AT&T store on June 29, 2007. So it makes our heart sink to discover that the device will soon reach “obsolete” status within Apple’s retail stores. According to 9to5Mac, the end will come on June 11, 2013, when the original iPhone is officially put out to pasture along with other products “discontinued more than five and less than seven years ago,” such as several flavors of the iMac, PowerBook G4 and Xserve. After that date, you’ll need to call AppleCare or an Authorized Service Provider for service — although it’s worth noting that AT&T hasn’t activated the original iPhone in a year and a half, and most of the App Store apps won’t even run on it anymore.
The Verge reported Monday that the Copyright Alert System launched by internet service providers in late February doesn’t appear to be doing its job very well. According to tests done by The Daily Dot over three weeks while using a Verizon account, downloading season three of Game of Thrones and a ripped copy of Marvel’s The Avengers failed to set off an ISP warning, even when The Pirate Bay was chosen as the source of those illicit BitTorrent files. So what was supposed to happen? The ISP should have verified pirated content in the torrent file and kicked off an “escalating series of warnings” via email, which attempt to educate consumers about the evils of piracy. Seems like Hollywood and the ISPs may have more work to do…
We recently reviewed Edovia’s new Mini Display, an iOS app that allows an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad to be used as a Wi-Fi display for extending the Mac desktop. While it wasn’t quite perfect, the developer is back with version 1.1, which better handles Mac login and offers several additional display resolution settings, including two which now use thousands of colors instead of millions of colors for faster screen redraws on Retina Display devices. Coupled with an update to the free Mac client, Mini Display 1.1 might be worth another look for users who were having issues with the original release.
Now that dates for WWDC 2013 are a lock, it’s just a matter of time before we get a peek at what the next versions of OS X and iOS have in store. However, the folks at 9to5Mac have gazed into their own crystal ball (with the help of insider sources) and let loose with a number of their own rumors on Monday, most of which seems to center around the addition of “power-user” enhancements as well as additional core features carried over from iOS. Among the changes are tags and tabbed browsing modes for Finder windows, proper full-screen support for multiple monitors and the debut of Siri’s virtual assistant skills on the desktop. Nothing earth-shattering on deck, but there’s not a whole lot wrong with OS X Mountain Lion at this point that a little spit and polish couldn’t fix.
This tidbit is a bit older than yesterday, but still worth a mention: Former Apple Engineering Product Manager Erin Caton recently published a brief memoir of her days in Cupertino and two encounters with late co-founder Steve Jobs. While the first involved Jobs cutting in line ahead of her in the office cafeteria, the second involved her work with the ill-fated MobileMe team following what Caton refers to as “a notoriously bad launch.” Long story short, the former employee was one of many who tried to warn their bosses that the product wouldn’t be ready by launch, then recants the tale of Jobs reading the MobileMe team the riot act as part of “the world’s best de-motivational speech.” Ultimately, Caton blames the botched launch on Jobs himself, simply because he “made himself so fearful and terrible” that those under his command failed to be heard when it was obvious things weren’t working out.
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