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Apple buys Texture, the 'Netflix of magazine plans'
Apple's bids to promote digital magazines haven't always been fruitful (remember The Daily?), but it's about to give them another boost. The company has acquired Texture, the Netflix-style magazine subscription service that gives you access to a host of publications for a flat monthly fee. Apple wasn't specific about its intentions for the Texture team, but the deal reflects its commitment to "quality journalism from trusted sources." It also noted that the buyout gave it an "impressive catalog" of magazines -- the connection to major publishers (Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith and News Corp) may be as important as the service itself.
Apple will redesign iBooks for the first time in years
For the past few years, iBooks has been a bit of an afterthought for Apple. The app, which is available on iPhones, iPads and Macs, has a clunky interface and poor navigation for the ebook store. But now, Apple is putting books front and center with a renamed app and a much-needed redesign, according to Bloomberg. Apple declined to comment on this story.
Apple adds PayPal as payment option for iTunes
You probably already have a credit card associated with your Apple ID to pay for any app, music, movie or book. But if you want to use your PayPal balance or just prefer paying for everything via PayPal, you can now do just that. Starting today, you can use PayPal for any iTunes, App Store or Apple Music transaction made through an iPhone, an iPad or an iPod using your PayPal account. PayPal promises to make the feature available in other locations, including the US "soon after," though it didn't give a timeframe for the rollout. The feature is now available for iOS users in the US, UK, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
Apple launches free courses for the next generation of app coders
Apple has unveiled a free curriculum designed to teach high school and community college students app coding skills. The Swift language course has already been adopted by six US community college systems that will distribute it to half a million students this fall. While it's generous on Apple's part, Tim Cook acknowledged that it needs to address an industry-wide shortage of coders, especially for enterprise apps. "That's really in its infancy, in terms of explosion, and so there's just a ton of opportunity here," he told USA Today.
Apple moving international iTunes arm to Ireland next month
In a note sent out to developers, Apple has confirmed it's moving its international iTunes business from Luxembourg to its European hub in Ireland effective February 5th. The company pre-empted the move last September, when it transferred all developer contracts and an estimated $9 billion in assets between the countries in preparation. And from next month, responsibility for Apple's iTunes arm serving over 100 countries (not including the US) -- and covering the iTunes, iBook and App Stores as well as Apple Music -- will formally transfer to its offices in Cork, Ireland.
iBooks StoryTime app narrates children's stories on your Apple TV
To encourage parents and kids to read together, Apple has debuted a new app for tvOS. The iBooks StoryTime app features "Read-Aloud" tool that narrates books and flips pages automatically. For the times when you'd rather read to your child yourself, you can turn the feature off and turn to the next page by swiping with the Apple TV remote.
'Game of Thrones' e-books make it easier to keep up with the action
To properly celebrate the 20th anniversary of George R. R. Martin's best-selling A Game of Thrones, there's a new iBooks edition of the series that offers features to help you keep up with all of the action. The first installment is officially called A Game of Thrones: Enhanced Edition and all of the e-books pack in character maps, annotations, house summaries, a glossary of terms and other handy tools. As books two through five are added to the collection, that glossary will expand alongside developing storylines.
Your iBooks price fixing credit is on its way
Don't fret about your piece of Apple's e-book price fixing settlement -- the check is in the mail, virtually speaking. The attorneys behind the class action lawsuit have revealed that digital credits from the case will start reaching book buyers from various online bookstores (including Apple's iBooks as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble) as early as June 21st. What you'll get depends on what you bought, mind you, and it's not exactly a windfall.
Apple's iBooks Store and iTunes Movies banned in China
Although Apple is enjoying a lot of success in China, its popularity hasn't stopped it from falling foul of the country's regulators. The New York Times reports that Chinese media watchdog, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television has banned the company's iBooks Store and iTunes Movies service as part of a strict crackdown on online services owned by foreign companies.
Apple e-book price fixing case won't reach the Supreme Court
Apple's last shot at avoiding a $450 million e-book price fixing settlement just went out the window. The US Supreme Court has declined to hear Apple's challenge of an appeals court decision that left the company on the hook for allegedly conspiring with publishers to raise digital book prices. The decision won't have much of an impact on Apple's day-to-day business (the court-approved antitrust monitor is no longer watching it like a hawk). Still, it's a symbolic loss for a tech giant that maintains it did nothing wrong.
iOS 9.2 gives you more control over Apple Music and iBooks
Apple is clearly hoping to clear its slate before the year is over. On top of that iPhone battery case, it just posted an iOS 9.2 update that brings big improvements to Apple Music and iBooks. For a start, it's much easier to reconcile your iCloud Music Library with the streaming service -- you can see whether or not any song has been downloaded, and quickly download whole albums or playlists. It's easier to start a new playlist or add a song to a recent list, too. iBooks, meanwhile, supports both 3D Touch (for peeking at pages) and background audiobook listening while you browse books inside the app.
Illustrated 'Harry Potter' novels come to iBooks
Apple fans are used to getting the latest and greatest before others, from apps all the way through to, uh, U2's latest album. But, they've also had to learn how to be patient, for instance, when it took several years before the Beatles released their back-catalog onto iTunes. That's why it's a red letter day for Harry Potter fans, since Apple has signed an "exclusive" detail with JK Rowling's people. For the first time, the digitally-enhanced versions of the world-famous novels are available on iBooks complete with high-quality illustrations and animations. The texts are still on sale at the official Pottermore website, but should you want to read them on your iPhone or iPad, you can grab each one for $9.99 a pop.
Apple Music and iTunes Movies hit China today
Folks in China don't have access to the record-breaking iPhone 6s until October, but Apple's making sure they they'll be able to get their hands on iBooks, Apple Music and iTunes Movies ahead of that. Those services are available starting today, and Music in particular is getting some very region-specific special treatment. The streaming catalog includes work from Eason Chan, Li Ronghao, JJ Lin and G.E.M.. Apple writes that there will be a raft of movies from Chinese studios too, saying that this is the first time that its customers in the country will be able to jump into the ecosystem. There's a three-month trial period, which gives way to a 10 RMB/month subscription. Family plans are part of the deal as well. And if you don't own an Apple handset but still want in on its music service, Music will hit Android phones later this fall.
Apple is taking its e-book price-fixing fight to the Supreme Court
Apple's long-running court battle over manipulating the pricing of e-books is getting even more dramatic. Next stop, the Supreme Court, Fortune reports. Back in June, Apple failed to get a Manhattan appeals court to overturn a 2014 ruling that would have it pay $450 million dollar settlement over the scandal. So Apple basically has no choice but to go to a higher authority if it wants to fight the case. A quick recap: The company was found guilty of fixing e-book pricing with publishers for the launch of iBooks on the original iPad, a move meant to raise prices from the low standard set by Amazon. Apple has argued that it didn't do anything wrong, and indeed it maintains in a filing today that "dynamic, disruptive entry into new or stagnant markets -- the lifeblood of American economic growth -- often requires the very type of" behavior it exhibited. Apple obviously can afford to pay the settlement, but at this point the legal battle seems to be more about principles than anything else.
Apple finally realized that audiobooks aren't music
Have you scratched your head wondering why Apple would put audiobooks in iOS' music player, rather than... y'know, a book app? So has Apple. Besides a redesigned music app, the early iOS 8.4 beta also moves audiobooks into iBooks, where they arguably should have been all along. You'll also get must-have playback features like chapter selection and a sleep timer. It's not certain when 8.4 will be ready for the public (WWDC, perhaps?), but it's already obvious that this is much more than a simple bug fix.
Apple has been adding 1M iBookstore users per week
Earlier this week, Apple iBooks chief Keith Moerer announced that the company has been gaining about one million iBookstore users per week since the release of OS X Yosemite. The announcement came at the Digital Book World Conference in New York City. The iBookstore comes pre-installed on Yosemite, which likely help customers find it. I'd also suggest that, as Moerer mentioned, the large-screen iPhone 6 and 6 plus make for a more pleasant reading experience.
Vellum ebook publishing app gets update and images
Back in December of 2013, the world was introduced to Vellum, a Mac app designed to make ebook publishing painless. I personally loved the ease of use of the app, since it lets potential authors and publishers create and edit their books for free, then make an in-app purchase of US$49.99 (regular price) to have the book published on both the iBookstore and Amazon Kindle Store. My only gripe at the time was that Vellum didn't allow the insertion of images in the text (cover images were allowed), whether they were simple chapter page icons or full page images. Well, with the introduction today of Vellum 1.2, that limitation of the app is now gone. Over the past month or so I've had an opportunity to beta-test the app on OS X Yosemite and I've found it to be not only stable, but still probably the easiest way to create and publish an ebook. As noted in last year's review, by publishing in ebook format only to the two biggest ebook stores on the planet, you don't need to run up the expense of getting an ISBN number. Since it's also possible to generate the ebooks in their native formats prior to sending them off for publishing, it is very easy to make sure that they're going to look great in the ebook reader apps (Kindle and iBooks) before you publish. Text can either be entered directly into the app -- it has its own built-in editor -- or imported from a Microsoft Word .docx file. Add chapter headings, select a style, and add a cover image. And now, if you wish, you can insert images anywhere in your ebook with a few clicks. If you're in the process of writing your NaNoWriMo novel and you feel that it's good enough to self-publish, you might want to take advantage of Vellum developer 180g's limited-time 50% off sale. Get an ebook published for about $25, or pay just $75 to get ten of 'em into the ebook stores? Heck of a deal, but it probably won't last for long. There's also an unlimited package for you prolific authors, which is available during the sale for $149.99. Anyone who feels that they wouldn't have the ability to publish an ebook using Vellum should just download the free app and go wild. You'll like what you find.
Apple's latest acquisition is a printing press for the iPad
Want to make a digital magazine but Apple's iBook Author app just doesn't offer what you want? Then perhaps Cupertino's latest buy could signal a coming change that'll help you out. The iPhone company has purchased Prss, the digital publishing outfit behind Trvl, which TechCrunch notes was the first iPad-only newsstand publication way back in 2010. Prss' niche is that it allows you to make snazzy-looking iPad mags without needing to know any coding. The news started as an anonymously-sourced report from Dutch iOS blog, iCulture, but Apple confirmed the vowel-averse company's acquisition to TC, stating that it buys smaller tech firms from time to time and "generally do [does] not discuss our [its] plans or purposes." Here's to hoping that this pick-up is a bit less tumultuous than Tim Cook's last purchase. [Image credit: AFP/Getty Images]
The Swift Programming Language manual available on iBookstore
One of the bigger surprises during today's WWDC 2014 keynote was the announcement of Swift, a new programming language for developing iOS and OS X apps. Apple wasted no time in making the Swift Programming Language manual available online on the iBookstore for free. The 860 page manual contains many code samples and it's suggested that you try them out in Xcode -- in fact, the chapters of the books can be opened as playgrounds in Xcode, giving would-be Swift programmers the ability to edit the code listings and see the results immediately.
These five surprisingly pointless OS X mods may amuse you
I recently went hunting for interesting OS X mods. For every useful item that turned up, I found lots of dead ends. Many items read by the OS X preferences system (through, for example, calls to CFPreferencesCopyAppValue) have little or no application to end-user needs. They're there primarily for the app's internal state or as remnants of Apple's development process. I've curated a bit of a slush pile for items that are interesting enough to take note of, but haven't quite made the grade when it comes to utility. Here are five of my favorite "interesting, but not very handy" tweaks that I've encountered while scanning for defaults or, in the case of the System Preferences one, that I've stumbled over while using an app. 1. Reset the Dock The OS X installer regularly leaves debris in your Dock. OS-promoted apps include such items as Mission Control, Safari, Photo Booth, iLife apps and so forth. Now, with a simple system command, you can restore all those apps in the Dock that you laboriously removed at least once before. Tip to the wise: Make sure you back up com.apple.dock.plist in ~/Library/Preferences before applying this one so you have a reference guide of your prefs to help you move back to. In the Terminal app, enter the following. defaults write com.apple.dock version -int 0 ; killall Dock Once the Dock restarts, it returns itself to its newly installed default glory. Admire the jam-packed contents before spending the next 10 minutes editing it back to the way it's supposed to look. 2. Prevent edits to the Dock If you're in a particularly evil mood and this is not your Dock, you might want to add this little default tweak. It prevents users from further editing the Dock contents. defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool yes ; killall Dock To restore end-user editing, switch off the immutability: defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool no ; killall Dock 3. Reveal desktop background paths This next tweak shows the paths for your desktop backgrounds on each of your screens. Why would you want to do this? One of my testers suggested it might help when you have a regularly rotating desktop background. For most people, it's not very handy at all. defaults write com.apple.dock desktop-picture-show-debug-text -bool yes ; killall Dock and going back: defaults write com.apple.dock desktop-picture-show-debug-text -bool no ; killall Dock 4. Remove pane icons from the main System Preferences window The System Preferences app consists of rows and rows of icons, which you tap to access individual settings panes. Did you know that you could tweak this presentation and remove items? I have no idea why anyone would ever want to use this feature, but it's a standard part of the app. To choose which panes to view, select View > Customize. Uncheck any item to hide it. You can still access all the panes from the View menu. Another option, View > Organize Alphabetically, replaces the category grouping with a large mash of alphabetically presented icons. 5. Add a useless debugging menu to iBooks for OS X This tweak does just what it says on the wrapper. If you've ever dreamed of a special secret app menu, then this is the system mod for you. (Similar mods exist for several other apps, so Google around to find some other exciting suggestions.) At the terminal, enter: defaults write com.apple.iBooksX BKShowDebugMenu -boolean yes And then launch iBooks. The new Debug menu appears to the right of other options. And there you have it. Five obscure and not-very-handy tweaks. Got any more tweaks you've stumbled across and want to share? Drop us a note in our tips line. We may cover your OS X mod in a future write-up.
