AT&T still besting Verizon in iPhone activations

AT&T still besting Verizon in iPhone activations If Verizon thought it could swoop in and take AT&T's iPhone market share overnight, it thought wrong. In the recent quarter, AT&T reported activating 3.6 million iPhones, roughly 56 percent greater than the 2.3 million iPhones activated by Verizon in the same three-month period.

Source: http://rss.macworld.com/click.phdo?i=e41867c38cb1ec68e086ca32d2e8894b

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AT&T still besting Verizon in iPhone activations

AT&T still besting Verizon in iPhone activations If Verizon thought it could swoop in and take AT&T's iPhone market share overnight, it thought wrong. In the recent quarter, AT&T reported activating 3.6 million iPhones, roughly 56 percent greater than the 2.3 million iPhones activated by Verizon in the same three-month period.

Source: http://rss.macworld.com/click.phdo?i=e41867c38cb1ec68e086ca32d2e8894b

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OS X Lion's 'Resume' feature lets you pick up where you left off

Resume, one of the new features in OS X Lion, addresses a common complaint among users of desktop OS users. Traditionally, quitting an application in Mac OS X (or any other desktop OS) has meant starting over from square one when you next launch the app. This has also made restarting a Mac particularly painful for users who run multiple applications at once, because after a restart you'll generally have to relaunch them manually, then reload all documents you may have been working on before the restart, resulting in several lost minutes of productivity.

That's changed in OS X Lion. Apple has taken a page from iOS, where iPhone and iPad apps usually load up right where you left them, and brought the feature to the Mac. Quitting an application no longer means a laborious hunt for the document you were working on before you quit, because it loads up automatically. The old warning Safari used to give you about closing a window with multiple tabs is now moot, because the next time you launch Safari those tabs will reload automatically.

Resume is a great usability feature, and it really does make working on a Mac feel faster than ever before thanks to automating processes that used to require significant amounts of user intervention, just another way the Mac "gets out of your way" in Lion. It does have some troubling implications for security and privacy, however. If you had potentially sensitive documents loaded in Pages when you quit, they'll pop up again the next time you launch it. This applies to video applications like QuickTime Player, too, which will even launch movies stored on an external disc when you relaunch the app. If you watch, er, certain kinds of movies on your Mac, Resume might be a feature that could get you into a lot of trouble.

Thankfully, there are two ways of getting around those potential issues. First, you can disable the Resume feature entirely. In the "General" tab of System Preferences, there's a checkbox for "Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps." Unchecking this completely disables Resume and reverts OS X to the traditional behavior where you have to manually relaunch documents and media files after relaunching an application.

Uncheck yourself before you wreck yourself

A less drastic workaround allows you to decide on a case-by-case basis which files you want to relaunch automatically after quitting an app, but as far as I can tell it hasn't been documented anywhere. Simply close the windows of any files you have open in the app before quitting it, and those files will not relaunch under the Resume feature the next time you launch the app. So if there's a document or movie that you'd rather not have come up automatically the next time you launch Pages or QuickTime, just remember to close the window before quitting the app. It's an extra step, sure, but if you want to use the Resume feature on your Mac without potentially giving Grandma a heart attack when your last session auto-loads in Safari, it's worth your while.

Thanks to Lion's autosaving Versions feature, even "Untitled" and unsaved documents will show up again. In the video below, you'll see that after restarting my MacBook Pro, all of the programs and files I had opened before the restart pop up again automatically, even a TextEdit document that I hadn't bothered saving.

The Resume process does take quite a while to get everything back up and running after restarting an older Mac, particularly if you're like me and saddled with a low-speed notebook-class hard drive. It's still faster than going through and re-opening everything manually, though, so if you need to restart your Mac during the middle of the day's work, go grab yourself a cup of coffee after the restart; by the time you head back to your desk, everything should be right where you left off.

Below is a video of the Resume process in action -- though I've edited out my doddering MacBook Pro's 3 or 4 minute boot time in the interests of brevity.

OS X Lion's 'Resume' feature lets you pick up where you left off originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/07/22/os-x-lions-resume-feature-lets-you-pick-up-where-you-left-off/

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Apple may need Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 to use iCloud

Apple's upcoming launch of iCloud may need an update to Mac OS X Lion two versions ahead. A claim late Saturday has supposedly shown an "iCloud for OS X Lion beta 5" in the developer channel that would need the 10.7.2 update to run. The BGR source's notes had the far-term update being available solely for the sake of testing iCloud....

Source: http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=33984aab8d8ac9b2eb87466bb176799e

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Vulnerability exposes Apple MacBook batteries to 'bricking,' malware

One prominent security researcher has discovered a vulnerability in the batteries of Apple's MacBook line of portable computers that could allow hackers to ruin the batteries or install malware on them that could corrupt a Mac.

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Source: http://feeds.appleinsider.com/click.phdo?i=9761f58dbfe50c9f174cb29b2eb93e95

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iOS 5's final release may include "Assistant" speech-to-text feature

Apple has included limited voice control functionality in the iPhone since the debut of the iPhone 3GS, but the company's plans for voice control in iOS 5 are reportedly far broader in application according to 9to5 Mac. While no such feature was announced at WWDC and it has yet to show up in the iOS 5 betas, 9to5's sources claim Apple's test units are already testing out an "Assistant" feature meant to introduce widespread speech-to-text functionality in iOS 5.

Those of you who have used Siri or the recently-launched Dragon Go! know how powerful third parties have been able to leverage speech-to-text in iOS already. Apple purchased Siri outright in 2010 and has reportedly been working with Dragon's parent company, Nuance, in further expanding the speech-to-text functions of iOS 5. Apple's partnership with Nuance has even extended to OS X, with several of Lion's optional text-to-speech voices coming directly from Nuance's stable of high-quality voices (and we'll provide you with an overview of those new voices in an upcoming post -- spoiler alert, they are awesome).

9to5 notes that since these new features have been missing from developer betas of iOS 5, it may imply that the new voice navigation "Assistant" feature may be an iPhone 5 exclusive. However, it's equally probable that since the feature has only just entered testing within Apple, Apple is not yet ready for developers to begin prodding at it in the betas. Given how well Siri and Dragon Search function already, there doesn't appear to be any technical reason why the iPhone 4 or iPad 2 wouldn't be able to run the "Assistant" feature as it's been described.

According to 9to5's additional findings, a "start" button on the systemwide keyboard will initiate the speech-to-text function with a popover microphone screen. Similarly to how Dragon Dictation works, the system may then translate that speech into text at the user's option.

The implications for systemwide speech-to-text functions in iOS 5 are fairly extraordinary. Siri and Dragon Go! have already shown how naturally spoken language can be leveraged in web searches, and if the same function can be expanded to the rest of the iPhone's functions, it may be possible to navigate the iPhone's functions entirely by voice. Apple has already filed a patent including such features, so this is far more than pie-in-the-sky musing on our part.

This obviously wouldn't be an out-and-out replacement for the traditional touchscreen interface, but as a supplement to the touchscreen, a voice nav system would be a very powerful tool. I'm already picturing a day when I can ask my iPhone for directions to the nearest petrol station without having to pull off to the side of the road and fiddle with the screen first. Hopefully the "Assistant" feature will be a bit smarter than VoiceOver when navigating my music library by voice, so I'll have less instances of my iPhone translating "Play album: Kid A" into "Calling 555-8888."

Although 9to5 has found some powerful evidence that Apple's working on integrating this feature, there's no telling when it will actually debut. If it's ready in time, I wouldn't be surprised to see it as one of the marquee features of the rumored September iPhone event.

iOS 5's final release may include "Assistant" speech-to-text feature originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 23 Jul 2011 20:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/07/23/ios-5s-final-release-may-include-assistant-speech-to-text-fea/

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