Photos Of Apple’s Decorations At Yerba Buena For October 22 Event

Every year, we try to post photos of Apple’s decorations at Moscone West and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for WWDC and other media events. We won’t lie – besides the interest that photos generate among our readers, we like to keep our own archive of past decorations that has been going for a few years now.

We’re a bit late this time, but we didn’t want to miss this year’s photographic archive for MacStories. So thanks to longtime friend and reader Nicola Zaghen, we have collected some high-quality photos of Apple’s decorations at Yerba Buena and embedded them below. As you can see, the decorations match Apple’s invitation graphic for the October 22 event, which carried the “We still have a lot to cover” tagline.

Make sure to click the photos to view them at full size, and thanks again to Nicola for sending them to us. Read more

Lucius Kwok On The App Store’s Gold Rush→

Even after the gold rush is over, there’s still gold in the hills. It’s just harder to make a successful app that gets noticed, and requires teams with the specializations and experience to quickly and efficiently release one, the same way that the remaining gold requires geologists who know the land and heavy machinery to get to it.

And later in the same post:

Free with in-app purchase or subscription pricing looks more sustainable than paid apps. We may need to form ourselves into small teams, because being independent doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself. I see this as a challenge to figure out what’s next.

I still think that In-App Purchases don’t work for some niches of the App Store, and I wouldn’t want to see developers switching to the IAP model in what may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But with Apple leading by example, I believe we’ll see a lot of developers trying IAPs for productivity apps and utilities before next year’s WWDC.

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GarageBand For iOS Going Free with In-App Purchases→

MacRumors’ Eric Slivka:

Aside from the new icons, the updated page also reveals in a footnote that GarageBand will become a free basic download for all iOS 7 devices, joining the other five iLife and iWork apps that became free alongside the release of iOS 7.

GarageBand will, however, include in-app purchase content from Apple, with additional instruments and sounds available for a fee. Licensing fees associated with some of those sounds had been the presumed reason why GarageBand was left out the original move to make Apple’s iLife and iWork apps for iOS free of charge, and it appears that the company has settled on in-app purchases as a way around this issue, offering basic functionality for free and then premium content through the paid upgrade options.

The icons and text have been pulled by Apple since last night, but it seems fairly safe to assume this change will be officially confirmed tomorrow.

It’s interesting to see Apple switching to a freemium model while so many third-party developers are discussing new approaches to selling apps after five years of App Store. Also worth noting is how with iOS 7 they added support for new purchase receipts to automatically unlock IAPs for customers who already bought an app – I assume, likely what they’ll be doing with GarageBand and IAPs for old customers so they won’t have to buy the new IAPs again.

What parts of GarageBand will be free? Will Apple redesign the iWork apps (besides icons) and add IAPs to those as well (they already went free). And what does this change mean for education customers? I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s event.

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Apple’s New iPhone 5s Commercial

Aired last night and then posted on Apple’s website and official YouTube channel, “Metal Mastered” is the company’s latest commercial for the iPhone 5s that follows “Plastic Perfected” for the iPhone 5c and a 5s promo video released last month after the device’s announcement.

The commercial focuses on the iPhone 5s’ gold color option and Touch ID with Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La” playing in the background. The song’s lyrics are timed with the appearance of Touch ID on video, and the commercial prominently features the 5s’ dual-LED flash system as well as iOS 7.

We have embedded the commercial below.

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CaptureAudio & Notes [Sponsor]→

Our thanks to G8R Software for sponsoring MacStories this week with CaptureAudio and CaptureNotes.

Delivering much greater levels of efficiency and productivity when you record important lectures, meetings and other events, CaptureAudio & Notes incorporate the sophisticated marking system and text notes to audio recordings. Simple to use, yet very powerful. With Universal support for Audio Recordings with precise time marking using a flags system, you are now able to enter typed text notes independent of audio recording.

CaptureAudio users can now sync across multiple devices using Dropbox sync. Once the Dropbox sync has been established, CaptureAudio keeps track of the changes, and updates the devices both ways to keep everything up to date; Audio Recordings, Text Notes, Recording Tags, Custom Flags Sets – all aspects of the sessions are synced between devices. With CaptureAudio, you can also tag your recordings with keywords: tag with a client name, particular class or activity… CaptureAudio keeps your recordings organized the way you think.

Thousands of users have successfully added CaptureAudio to their productivity suite. With CaptureAudio & Notes, you can stop forgetting and start capturing.

Check out the apps here.

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Google Hangouts For iOS Updated with Support for GIFs

In what can be heralded as the first “major” update to the app since May 2013, Google has today released a new version of Hangouts for iOS that brings support for animated GIFs.

Hangouts 1.3 also lets you make and receive calls using your Google Voice number, it has indicators for contacts that are online and reachable, and it even fixes a pesky bug that caused audio playback to stop when the app was running in the foreground – but the highlight is, clearly, support for inline visualization of GIFs.

Considered a priority over smooth scrolling and proper iOS 7 support (the app sports a lovely iOS 6 keyboard), GIF support works in tandem with the iOS Camera Roll: whenever you’re in need of sending a friend, a co-worker, or a loved one a GIF that can, more than any other static image, prove a point through the use of animated cats, the new Hangouts app can pick a GIF from the Camera Roll, preview it, and insert it in a conversation. The GIF will be played inline across the web and the new iOS app.

In my tests, GIFs that I had archived in Evernote and saved to the Camera Roll weren’t attached as animated GIFs to the Hangouts app; however, it’s possible that this may be an issue of the Evernote app, as GIFs saved from Safari worked well with Google’s client, retaining their beautiful and modern animations.

Support for inline animated GIFs is welcome; based on our first few tests, we can’t pinpoint whether Google also made much-needed improvements to the app’s performance – particularly an issue for long threads and group conversations. On a somewhat related note, Apple released an update to iOS last month, but Google didn’t decide to take advantage on it for version 1.3, deeming inline GIFs the feature worth improving in Hangouts.

Google Hangouts 1.3 is available on the App Store. GIFs are available on the Internet.

Feedly Adds Custom Sharing and “Popular” Section→

I’ve been keeping an eye on Feedly since they unveiled their Pro plan earlier this year (I bought a $99 lifetime membership). Their newest additions to the web app are interesting: Popular is an algorithm that detects articles with “engagement” in the Feedly community, and Custom Sharing lets you add your own sharing URL for links.

Here’s how they describe Popular:

Thanks to the engagement and sharing behavior from the community, we are getting a very clear signal of which articles are the most popular within each feed. We added a “Popular” section at the top of each feeds to make sure that you do not miss those articles. If you prefer a chronological view only, this feature can be turned off in the preferences via Preferences > General > Popular.

I just turned on the feature in my account. The first impression is good as it does seem to be recommending articles about popular topics.

Custom Sharing is pretty neat in that it lets you set up a URL to send links to using placeholders for an article’s title and link. I have set up a custom service to bring up the Pinboard add interface, but I’d like to see an option to set up multiple custom sharing services at once (right now, you can only add one, and it doesn’t get a custom icon but a generic envelope one). The feature is reminiscent of Mr. Reader’s custom sharing menu, but for websites, and I think that it is a good addition.

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Facebook 6.6→

Out today on the App Store, you can now edit comments and posts from the new version of Facebook for iOS (for posts that contain photos or locations from Instagram, you can only edit the text part of the status update). When leaving comments, you can also attach photos from your device (a feature that was added to the website a while back); at last, Facebook is providing easier access to privacy settings from mobile devices (tap the More tab on iPhone, then tap the lock icon next to your name).

You can download Facebook 6.6 here.

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Marked 2.1 Improves Word Repetition Visualization and Text Statistics→

Marked 2’s first point release has landed, and it’s chock full of great improvements. If you haven’t purchased Marked yet, think of it as fancy document preview tool that helps you catch formatting mistakes, catches overused words, and highlights cliché phrases. It’s a mini-editor for your text documents, especially useful for those who write in Markdown and publish text on the web. For those who already have Marked, download the latest update to grab bug fixes and notable feature improvements such as background calculation for text statistics.

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