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Macintosh product updates and announcements for October 31, 2011: Software Apparent Software’s ImageFramer has a new Halloween frame collection with 35 great-looking frames that are perfect for framing pictures of you or of your kids in costumes or as a final touch for a scary invitation. Thanksgiving and Christmas frame sets will follow soon. TheMacBundles has arranged another exclusive offer for its visitors. For a limited time, users can get Pogoplug Premium Software for the lowest authorized price on the planet for this innovative app. The app lets users stream all their music, photos, and videos from their own personal…

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New iPhone, iPod touch and iPad product announcements for October 31, 2011: New iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps Global Delight has released an updated version of Camera Plus Pro, which is fully compatible with iOS 5. This camera app now takes the advantage of iOS 5 technology for fast processing of photos at the highest resolution with live filters, and smooth video recording with video zoom feature along with live filters. Camera Plus Pro was first released in December 2009 and has been updating constantly to add new features, supporting it to be compatible with newer devices and all…

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iMessage on OS X Lion is back in the news. We had previously reported that iMessage might be integrated into the Mac OS iChat application based on strings of code found in Lion’s iChat. However a report from last night indicates that the decision to integrate iMessage into iChat or create a standalone client not been finalized. Both are reported possibilities that are being simultaneous development.

iMessage is Apple’s new messaging solution for devices running iOS 5. It allows user to send SMS-like messages using data, rather than a text messaging plan. The service is similar to Blackberry’s BBM. Integrating OS X Lion with iMessage would allow users to send iMessages to iOS 5 devices from a Mac.

Back in June, Jan-Michael Cart created a concept video demonstrating how iMessage could be integrated into Lion. Check it out here.

[9to5Mac]

iMessage Coming to Mac OS X? is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog – Canada's #1 iPhone Resource

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The folks behind the media center software Plex rolled out a massive update this weekend that added a bunch of new features to their desktop and mobile clients and also extended the reach of Plex by adding media sharing and a personal cloud service.

Here are the biggest updates in a nutshell:

• The new version of the Plex app, code-named Laika, is now officially available for Windows. Users of Microsoft’s operating system as well as Mac OS X and Linux users can download both the Plex client and the Plex media server from the Plex website.
• Accessing media through the Plex iOS and Android apps got much easier, thanks to a new personal cloud service called myPlex. After registering on Plex’s website, users can now access the content library of their personal Plex media server on their home PC from anywhere without entering IP addresses or using DynDNS-like services.
• myPlex also supports a personal video queue. Like a video while you’re at work? Simply add it to the queue with a bookmarklet, and you’ll be able to watch it on your TV via your Plex media center at home. This is very similar to what Boxee has been doing with its bookmarklet.
• Plex also introduced the capability to share media with friends. Users simply have to sign up for myPlex and then choose which part of their media library their friend should have access to.
• The Plex client for Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players, which is the work of a third-party developer, is also getting a major facelift in conjunction with this release.

Check out the Plex blog for a more detailed list of new features. In any case, this is a pretty impressive release, and it once again shows that the Plex team has been working on high gears this year, pushing out one update after another. Plex is of course based on XBMC, just like Boxee, which now has to step up and finally release the long-promised update to its Mac and PC client if it doesn’t want to cede too much of the HTPC media center market to Plex.

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FROM GAMERTELL – What do you get when you rip off Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja? MORE »

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Every Halloween since apps have been available on the iPhone, my family and I have used apps to design stencils for carving the face of at least one jack-o-lantern. The technique is pretty simple. Here is what we do:

1. Choose your jack-o-lantern face

First, you want to create a face that you can then use as a stencil. We’ve found several pumpkin-design apps that we like and that work in different ways.

Swipe and shake. Our favorite pumpkin-design app, Crazy Pumpkin, happens to be on the iPhone ($.99, Ezone, iTunes Link). Crazy Pumpkin gives you endless combinations of eyes, noses and mouths to choose from, and all you have to do is swipe to change the feature. Shake the iPhone to change the color of the design and hear a spooky noise.

Unfortunately Crazy Pumpkin is not available for iPad. The closest iPad app I’ve found is Halloween Pumpkin Creator ($.99, A3MG, iTunes Link).

Pinch and draw. If you are looking to get a little more sophisticated, Parents magazine has created Carve-a-Pumpkin for the iPad and is available for free in the app store (free, iTunes link).  Carve-a-Pumpkin gives you a little more control of the elements that you place on the pumpkin. You can pinch to grow or shrink the design.  However, while there are a lot of designs to choose from, you still do not have complete control over the design with this app.

If you want complete control over exactly how you want your pumpkin to look, try ABCya’s CarveIt! for both the iPhone and iPad ($.99, ABCya, iTunes Link).  CarveIt! has a limited number of pumpkin “heads” to choose from, but it will allow you to draw freehand any face you want.

2. Print out your pumpkin masterpiece as a stencil

Now comes the fun part, taking your virtual iOS design and turning it into a real pumpkin. The next step is printing out the design to make a stencil.

• Transfer your design to an image file. Some of the aforementioned apps will save the image your photo library for you. If the app you’ve chosen does’t do that, you can always take a screenshot to get a printable image file of your final design.
• Print the image out. You can either sync your image to your computer and print it out from there or you can use AirPrint to print the image directly to the printer. If you do not have a printer that supports Apple’s AirPrint feature, there are a number of ways you can get around this limitation. My favorite happens to be Printopia

Transfer your design and carve your pumpkin

Once you have the stencil printed out, tape the sheet of paper to the pumpkin. Use a pushpin, awl, straight needle or other tool to poke holes in the outlines of the eyes, nose, and mouth into the pumpkin’s outer skin. This will create a connect-the-dots outline of the design right on the surface of the pumpkin. From here, use the outlines to carve the pumpkin.

3. More ways to create a stencil

There are several variations on this general theme. You can certainly use your favorite iOS drawing application, or even browse the web to select your favorite pumpkin image online. I’ve also used Photoshop to stretch and move some of the features around a bit to better fit our pumpkins.

For more family fun, you can even share the design experience with the entire family by projecting the pumpkin-carving app of your choice to your TV using the new iOS 5 Airplay Wireless Mirroring from your iPad 2 or iPhone 4S to your Apple TV. Carving a pumpkin will never be quite the same again.

How have you used Apple’s products to celebrate Halloween?

Pumpkin-carving and finished pumpkin photos by Geoffrey Goetz.

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To celebrate Halloween, Deliver2Mac is making Majesty 2 and all of its expansion packs available for 50% off. The special applies to Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, along with its Battles of Ardania, Kingmaker and Monster Kingdom expansions, and is available only on October 31st until midnight, Pacific Time. Majesty 2 is a real-time strategy game that features a 16 mission campaign, quick missions and a variety of multiplayer maps. Defend your realm with noble warriors, spell-wielding wizards or wild barbarians. Choose from more than 10 different classes to oversee the protection of your lands. In the world of…

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While some may have bristled at Steve Jobs calling Bill Gates an unimaginative copycat in the Jobs biography released last week, Gates says he was not one of those people. In fact, Gates says he totally gets why Jobs would, from time to time, say some pretty mean things about him. He basically suggests it was professional jealousy.

For instance, Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson, “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology,” and “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

Here’s how Gates responded in his Sunday interview on ABC’s This Week:

“Over the course of the 30 years we worked together, you know, he said a lot of very nice things about me and he said a lot of tough things. He faced, several times at Apple, the fact that their products were so premium priced that they literally might not stay in the marketplace. So the fact that we were succeeding with high-volume products, you know, including a range of prices, because of the way we worked with multiple companies, it’s tough. And so the fact that at various times, he felt beleaguered, he felt like he was the good guy and we were the bad guys, you know, very understandable.”

Gates seems to be referring to the Apple that Jobs returned to in 1997, when the company was 90 days from bankruptcy. Jobs eventually ended up making a deal with Microsoft to invest $150 million into the company directly as well as develop Microsoft software for the Mac, which was a  huge boon to the Mac platform. And that’s also probably was Gates was referring to earlier in the interview when he sort of took credit for creating the Mac: “Steve and I worked together creating the Mac, we had more people on it, did the key software for it,” he told Christiane Amanpour.

“We” is obviously Microsoft. And as previously mentioned, they did develop Office, Internet Explorer and other development tools for the Mac. But Jobs and possibly a few others at Apple might take exception at the “worked on creating the Mac” bit.

Even so, Gates reiterates his respect for Jobs despite the blunt quotes about him that Jobs gave to his biographer:

“I respect Steve. We got to work together, we spurred each other on even as competitors. None of that bothers me at all.”

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An Apple store in China.

China Telecom Corp., the No. 3 player in the Chinese mobile market and the world’s largest CDMA operator, has managed to add 9 million subscribers in the third quarter and 26.4 million so far this year. That’s almost twice the 4.7 million added during the quarter by the top three carriers in the U.S. No wonder mobile players such as Apple and Amazon are so eager to get into the market.

China Telecom, which trails China Mobile’s 600 million subscribers and China Unicom’s 181.6 million customers, said 7 million of its 9 million new additions for the quarter subscribed to 3G services. The Chinese are at the early stage of 3G mobile broadband adoption, and are also in the middle of a huge nationwide fiber build out. So it’s not only the huge population drawing mobile firms’ eyes, but the growth in mobile broadband adoption.

Unlike the U.S., where growth is now coming from people carrying multiple lines and adding machine-to-machine connections, the Chinese market is far from saturated. According to Wireless Intelligence, the analyst arm of the GSM Association, by the second quarter of 2012, there will be 1 billion Chinese using mobile phones — about 74 percent of the population– and a quarter of them will subscribe to 3G services.

With China Telecom expected to get an iPhone, the growth possibilities are pretty substantial. Heck, even on an unsupported network the Chinese are fans of the iPhone. For example, UBS China Telco Analyst Jinjin Wang estimates that in the first half of 2012 China will add a significant boost to Apple’s earnings.

Another UBS report notes that Amazon is also planning a big Chinese push, hoping to launch the Kindle there.

Onetto, Senior Vice President, Amazon IT in an interview told Sohu that AMZN is in discussion with Chinese regulators over copyright issues with regards to Kindle products. Separately, AMZN changed the branding of Chinese e-commerce website Joyo.com which it acquired in 2004. Joyo will now be known as Amazon China. AMZN also announced the opening of a fulfillment center in Kunshan, Jiangsu province. The new fulfillment center is AMZN’s largest outside the US and occupies an area of ~1.3MM square feet.

As with all U.S. efforts to expand into China, the lure of growth is offset by government interference and concerns over counterfeiting and IP protection. But when faced with a billion potential customers, it’s no wonder firms believe the risks are worth it.

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Apple is doubling down on its retail and cloud operations. The company says it will spend about $8 billion in capital expenditures in 2012, which is almost twice as much as the $3.4 billion it spent during fiscal year 2011, which ended Sept. 30. Apple doesn’t willingly telegraph its plans, but thanks to its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, we get a peek into where the company plans to invest its money next year.

The increase was pointed out on Monday by Analyst Maynard Um of UBS in a research note.

A chunk of that new investment will, no surprise, go toward its retail operations. The company will spend $900 million on its stores in 2012, up from $614 million this past year.

Apple Stores have been growing rapidly, particularly outside the U.S., and especially in the greater China region. Apple opened 30 new stores in the  most recent quarter alone, to bring the total to 357. CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted on Apple’s earnings call two weeks ago that the company would be opening 40 new stores in 2012, and “75 percent of those will be outside the U.S.” He also noted that Apple would be “replacing” some of the company’s higher-volume stores here in the U.S.

The rest of the $7.1 billion in extra capital expenditures is listed as “other.” From the 10-K:

The Company anticipates utilizing approximately $8.0 billion for capital expenditures during 2012, including approximately $900 million for retail store facilities and approximately $7.1 billion for product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.

So some of the money is going to be spent on building the company’s new “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. and equipment for its manufacturers, but IT systems hardware, software and “enhancements” is almost certainly pointing to the company’s ongoing data center project and, by definition, its cloud infrastructure.

Apple is building out a gigantic data center in North Carolina, and perhaps even a solar farm to power it — if reports are correct. That data center will support its cloud operations, and could increase the capacity and eventually lower costs for the maintenance of Apple’s iCloud service. Apple would never be accused of  jumping on the cloud bandwagon early, but spending billions more underlines the fact that the company has much bigger plans for iCloud.

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