YouTube is a major video platform owned by Google — and it has grown to be one of the most famous social media destinations on the web.
When it comes to Apple and iOS, YouTube has a storied history. When Apple first launched the iPhone and iPod touch, it infamously had a first-party YouTube viewing application which was deprecated after the launch of the App Store.
Now, YouTube is one of the most popular apps on the App Store, and we regularly cover news and updates. There’s also a YouTube app for Apple TV, and of course, there are always privacy conversations to had at the intersection of any Apple product and a Google service.
Earlier today, we noted that PC World tested the new iPad against some Android tablets for heating during use and found it to be on the high-end but not always the hottest.
Sina Technology News on March 26 morning news, according to informed sources, Apple iOS operating system next month will be formally introduced Baidu search, Baidu and Apple between cooperation component in the China region.
Google’s Susan Creighton revealed last fall that two-thirds of the Mountain View, Calif.-based Company’s mobile search comes from Apple iOS devices.
Meanwhile, recent speculation claims Apple is moving to an in-house Mapping solution that would replace Google Maps. The firm also recently removed its publish to YouTube option in QuickTime for Mountain lion. If these latest rumors deem true, Apple’s move to Baidu would further indicate a significant effort to reduce Google’s presence in iOS.
With that said, the move to Baidu might be more than a snub to Google. As SearchEngineLand noted, Baidu holds 80 percent of the search market in China, and it would make sense for the Chinese to carry the same search on their mobile devices as they have on their desktop.
Love this idea for controlling your Mac – especially for applications which don’t require you to be near your computer. Apple has lots of patents on 3D gestures so it wouldn’t be absurd to see some of this at the OS level in the not-so-distant future.
Apple’s rumored HDTV might be called the iTV, according to a new report fromBloomberg citing Jefferies & Co. analyst Peter Misek. In a note to clients this morning, Misek also claimed Apple might buy licenses for programming through possible partnerships with Verizon and AT&T and could “leverage content into a YouTube-like model” by taking advantage of user created video from iPhone and iPad users. He also noted “Lower margins and higher risks” will most likely keep Apple away from creating original programming. Misek did not comment on a possible timeframe for the product’s launch.
Misek’s scenario of Apple partnering with carriers for content follows a report from Reuters today that confirmed Verizon and Coinstar’s Redbox division have partnered with plans to create a video streaming service to rival Netflix and Hulu Plus. Verizon and Redbox plan to offer its first product resulting from the partnership in second half of the year. As for the possibility of Apple calling its HDTV product the “iTV.” Apple will of course have to work out rights to the name from the major United Kingdom TV network of the same name.
Just last week, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster weighed in claiming Apple was talking with a “major TV component supplier” about “various capabilities of their television display components.” He also offered three possible scenarios for how Apple will approach content on its HDTV product suggesting a simple integration of third-party live TV services, to a live TV/web content combination, to an iTunes monthly subscription.
In related news, you might have come across a BestBuy survey recently that aims to gauge interest in an Apple HDTV concept. If you are interested in seeing what BestBuy dreamed up for the survey, a copy sent to us by a reader is available below (Thanks Alan!):
Owners of the Apple TV set-top box around the world took to Twitter to complain about an unknown issue affecting the device’s ability to stream YouTube clips through the Internet section of the main menu. According to reports, attempting to play any YouTube clip produces this error message:
No content was found. There is a problem communicating with YouTube. Try again later.
It would appear that some sort of backend issue is to blame, but it is inconclusive. The problem persisted since the past couple days; with a bunch of posts over at the Apple Support Communities indicating it is widespread. One poster claimed an Apple representative advised him to contact Google because this is “a YouTube issue.”
It seems to be particularly bad in Japan, Australia, Canada and various European countries, including the United Kingdom, Scotland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, Denmark, Romania, Argentina and Croatia.
Not all users in the United States seem to be experiencing this issue, although some do. Resetting a router or the device will not help. Likewise, performing a factory restore to the latest 4.4.4 firmware did not do the trick for another poster. Some users are only able to see the videos in their History. Are you having same issues with your Apple TV? We would love to hear from you in the comments.
You are probably familiar with Shazam’s iOS app that lets you identify the name of the song being played, but today, Shazam launched a new iOS app called “Shazam Player.” Shazam Player is free and aims to be a more feature-packed alternative to the default iOS music player. Shazam Player offers options like streaming lyrics; tour dates from artists, YouTube videos, artist biographies, and even the ability to buy new tracks from iTunes within the app.
Besides the ability to play music, Shazam Player can also identify songs similar to the original Shazam app can. From there, you can launch iTunes from within the app to preview or purchase the song. You can share music with your Facebook and Twitter friends. The ability to view tour dates and bios from your favorite artists right within the app is very cool.
Shazam Player certainly is not as lightweight as Apple’s music player, but it does add a great list of features. If you are big on listening to music, this might be the perfect app for you. Try Shazam Player in the App Store!
Apple is hiring dozens of talented people on a daily basis, but this one deserves your attention. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student from Georgia, is the brains behind a bunch of very insightful iOS interface concepts you’ve likely seen on the web, as noted byiPhoneinCanada.ca. This includes the notification center and application switcher mockup videos below.
As Apple is always on the lookout for young blood, Cart’s work caught the company’s attention and they decided to hire him as an intern, he announced in a blog post:
Soon I will be embarking to California, where I will be interning at a fruit company for seven months. I will be updating this to chronicle my adventures and misadventures in the Bay Area for my family, friends, and followers online. Stay tuned, I leave in less than a month!
“And like that, my time has come — I am now a member of the Apple community”, he confirmed on the front page of his personal web site. Congrats to Cart on his new gig! We sure are looking forward to seeing some of his great concepts implemented in iOS.
Heck, even the BlackBerry maker Research In Motion hired the Astonishing Tribe design shop to make the PlayBook tablet’s operating system aesthetically appealing. Watch Cart’s Dynamic Icons and Speech Recognition user interface concepts right after the break and don’t forget to check out his YouTube channel.
Seems to be Beatles day at Apple. Earlier, we noted the iBookstore offering an enhanced iBook version of The Beatles Yellow Submarine (also worth noting: in the credits at the top it says ‘For Steve’).
A few minutes ago, the above ad appeared in Apple’s YouTube feed.
Photoshop Elements 10 (App store) and Premiere Elements 10(App Store) became available overnight with the same functionality improvements that the box versions produced, including:
New Facebook features allow you to auto analyze your images to identify people and tag them based on your Facebook friends. Those tags are then carried over to Facebook when uploading from Elements. A new object-based search is one of the most impressive enhancements, allowing you to find images containing a particular object such as a house or vehicle.
Other features include auto enhance and color correct for video footage, allowing you to “Automatically boost tone and vibrance without affecting skin tones, or use sliders to adjust color with complete control”. You can now also paint 1 of 100 new paint effects onto specific photo areas, add new text effects, and immediately upload video clips to Facebook and Youtube. Learn more about all the new features in these latest releases here.
“It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”These are the exact words of Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs, as revealed in the just released authorized biography by Walter Isaacson. In his own admission prior to his death earlier this month, Jobs was working on “an integrated television set that is completely easy to use”, a solution which would be “seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud”. The quote served as the basis for Piper Jaffray’s resident Apple analyst Gene Munster, the most outspoken proponent of an Apple-branded television set. Munster wrote in a note to clients that Apple is already building prototype TV sets, according to a Fortuneblog post:
A significant hurdle to a full-fledged Apple (AAPL) television set (as opposed to the Apple TV set-top box), Munster writes, is combining live television with shows previously captured on iCloud. “Perhaps this code is precisely what Jobs believed he has ‘cracked,'” Munter suggests, adding that Apple could use the new Siri voice activated system “to bolster its TV offering and simplify the chore of inputting information like show titles, or actor names, into a TV.”
If it eventually becomes a reality, the analyst speculates, the rumored product could cost up to $2,000, which is at least double the asking price for a typical 40-inch television product. In addition, Apple’s will likely require users to sign up for an iTunes TV Pass subscription service in order to enjoy bulk television programming, costing anywhere between $50 and $90 a month. It’s unclear whether the strategy stands a chance at a time when Internet providers are capping bandwidth. All told, the Apple television sounds like a pricey proposition…
We stumbled across this video on YouTube… and Siri clearly should not yet be used by non-native speakers of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, or Germany. As you can see in the video, the speaker is talking in English but with a foreign accent, and Siri does not understand one command. “Read dick”.
Update: Australian accent tested by Gizmodo AU below:
Adobe today quietly released Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10, bringing with them new Facebook and YouTube integration, video editing and burring features, object-based search, and new color correcting and text curving and flowing effects.
New Facebook features allow you to auto analyze your images to identify people and tag them based on your Facebook friends. Those tags are then carried over to Facebook when uploading from Elements. A new object-based search is one of the most impressive enhancements, allowing you to find images containing a particular object such as a house or vehicle.
Other features include auto enhance and color correct for video footage, allowing you to “Automatically boost tone and vibrance without affecting skin tones, or use sliders to adjust color with complete control”. You can now also paint 1 of 100 new paint effects onto specific photo areas, add new text effects, and immediately upload video clips to Facebook and Youtube. Learn more about all the new features in these latest releases here.
Among a bunch of Google+ improvements announced today, Google said it would bring Hangouts to mobile phones including iPhone (and iPad 2 and 4G iPod likely). We’re big fans of Google Hangouts and having it on mobile is going to be really great. They are also offering Hangout broadcasts which might be fun ways to broadcast a keynote for instance :D
Google announced a bunch of other big Google Plus stuff including open invitations today. Check full coverage on 9to5Google.com Expand Expanding Close
We’ll never stop sharing our memories…or getting lost in a good book. We’ll always cook dinner and cheer for our favorite team. We’ll still go to meetings, make home movies, and learn new things. But how we do all this will never be the same.
You’ll notice a well-timed little lesson in ‘Lion’ toward the end as part of the Alphabet Fun App.
You have to be intrigued by Google’s ambitious attack on Facebook here, in much the same way they are competing with Apple in mobile devices, Microsoft in DesktopOS and Office and Oracle/Microsoft in Enterprise Apps. It feels like if there is a big market in technology, Google is there.
Apple has just pushed out a software update to the Apple TV and it’s version 4.2.2 build number 8F305. The update is likely bug fix related and we’ll update with more details when they are available.
If you haven’t seen it yet on Google.com, today is Charlie Chaplin’s 122nd birthday anniversary. Marking the occasion, MacPhun has updated Silent Film Director, a fun video effects app currently ranked #4 in the US App Store’s photography section. I’ve been playing with Silent Film Director this morning and found it very addictive and a pleasure to use. If you’re anything like me, your iPhone is jam packed with a bunch of clips shot on the go whenever inspiration strikes.
Silent Film Director lets me breathe new life into my videos by applying high-quality effects ranging from standard Black & White, Sepia and Vintage Sepia filters to the more sophisticated 20’s Movie, 60’s Home Video and 70’s Home Video effects. In short, anything from the beginning of the movie era to a hippie style music video from the ’60s to the modern hipster look.
You can choose between two silent movie piano tracks, the movie projector background noise or select a song from your iPod library. It’s a lot of fun and only a buck on the App Store (works best with iPhone 4, 3GS and fourth-gen iPod touch). Sample clips and more information right below the fold.
I remember when installing Toast was one of the first things I did when I got a new Macintosh. Now, I don’t even have an optical disc reader on my main computer and I use optical less and less on the home Macs.
However, I know there are a lot of uses of optical still out there and for those folks that create it, Roxio today updated their Toast software to Toast 11 with some important updates.
For existing users, Toast 11 adds many requested features such as recording to multiple drives simultaneously, a streamlined product update mechanism, and the ability to save custom video profiles, which is very useful for those that are often converting video for a particular device. The latest version now also offers built-in features for directly uploading media to social networking sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Facebook and technology optimizations, dubbed VideoBoost, that help dramatically speed H.264 (high definition) video conversion or encoding.
New or exclusive-to-Toast features include: Internet audio recording; the ability to capture, save, and convert Web-based video content; disc spanning (automatically spreading a large amount of data or audio tracks across many discs); one-click backup of HD camcorder footage; dual-platform compatible disc creation; and TiVo-to-Go support.
Also launching today is Roxio Toast 11 Pro. Toast 11 Pro includes everything offered in Toast 11 Titanium as well as the Blu-ray Disc Plug-in and four award-winning digital media applications for making stunning video, photo, and audio projects…. Expand Expanding Close
Apple has confounded industry watchers who expected the rumored noon launch time and the Mac App Store is available immediately, with over 1,000 apps available to download. Fire up Software Update and go grab it, people…(and read this while you wait). Update: No iWork 11, but you can get the individual apps and Aperture here. Press Release after the break. Expand Expanding Close
It appears that an upcoming update to Skype will allow iPhone and iPod touch users to video chat with desktop Skype users or other iPhones (an iPod touch 3rd Gen) users with Skype installed. Skype hasn’t released the software just yet but maybe they have a Christmas surprise?
The Airplay boundaries just keep falling today and now it looks like the XBMC project has Airplay running as a service on their product.
That is interesting news because services like Plex which will be the back end into LG televisions are based on AirPly. Long story short, AirPlay will probably be on every TV made in a year. Oh and Windows boxes too. Expand Expanding Close
Erica Sadun has put together a new Mac application called AirFlick . To put it simply, AirFlick lets you watch any video stored on your Mac or any video from the internet that is compatible with the AppleTV/iTunes ecosystem (.mov, mp4, etc.). Simply launch the application (screenshot after the break) drag a file path from your Mac or an internet video URL. As soon as you hit the play button the video will start playing on your TV via the Apple TV.
The first time we tried it we got an error message but then we left the error window and tried again and it worked. AirFlick is a bombshell piece of software for your Mac and if you’re like me you will find it extremely useful. AirFlick sort of turns your Apple TV into a video web browser as you are no longer limited to the built in YouTube or Netflix player. You get way more now.
Sadun notes that AirFlick is “quite alpha” with 0.01 as its version number. AirFlick has worked as it should so far for us, and you can give it a try here too. A third party developer has proved that the Apple TV can act as a “data server” and as an internet browser to a point. So why is it taking Apple so long?
Update: Erica Sadun figured out how to get AVIs streaming too. Video after the break.
