Today Facebook open-sourced Tweaks, an application framework that lets iOS developers test changes to an app in real time, simply by using an iDevice, 9to5Mac reported. Incorporating Tweaks into an app provides a new settings menu by which developers can change parameters that affect how the app looks and feels—as it's running on an iDevice.
Changing such parameters usually requires a developer to "recompile" an app, which can be time-consuming for repeated testing of different combinations. Some of the adjustments developers can make affect animation timings, colors and motion speed.
Facebook says it relied on Tweaks while building Paper, Facebook's news reader application. You can find Tweaks on Github.
Intel has acquired Basis Science, the maker of a line of health and wellness bands, the technology giant announced Tuesday.
The chipmaker's interest in wearable tech is well known; in fact, the category featured heavily in a presentation Intel CEO Brian Krzanich made at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
See Also: Why Intel Shouldn't Get Into The Fitness-Tracker Business
For now, Basis will continue to sell and develop its bands that track heart rate, sleep, and activity while supporting Intel's future ambitions in the business. Hopefully, that means Basis's promising software will join forces with Intel's other initiatives to create something new, rather than Intel merely selling a promising but underwhelming first-generation product.
We've already started to see Apple iBeacons make there way into retail stores across the country, using Bluetooth Low Energy technology to sense and interact with customers as they move throughout a building. But so far those launches have been fairly small scale: Apple Stores, Petco Park, American Eagle Outfitters and a few Macy's locations.
Mobiquity Networks, however, has been quietly building a large-scale beacon network in large shopping malls across the country, and this week it is opening that network up to the retailers. It's launching an SDK that can link their mobile apps to its proximity-based network.
Mobiquity said its beacon network touches 3,000 unique retailers with a combined 15,000 storefronts in its malls. The beacons aren't in the stores themselves, but rather in the corridors and common areas of the malls, but they're in close enough vicinity to individual shops that Mobiquity can deliver targeted advertising and promotions to customers who agree to receive such notifications.
Retailers can tap into the network in two ways. They can either join Mobiquity's managed advertising network, which will push messages to customers linked to the mall's beacon network. Or, through the SDK, retailers can include proximity-based communications in their own apps.
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According to Christie, who joined the secret "purple" iPhone project after an invitation from Scott Forstall, his team was responsible for many key iPhone elements, such as sliding to unlock, placing calls from the address book, and more. He and his team spent countless hours perfecting details like the speed of scrolling, and the feel of bouncing back at the end of a list.
He said his team "banged their head against the wall" over how to change text messages from a chronological list of individual messages to a series of separate ongoing conversations similar to instant messaging on a computer.Christie gave two progress reports to Jobs each month, in a small, windowless meeting room at the company's Cupertino headquarters. Few people had access to the room and even cleaning people were not allowed to enter. The secrecy surrounding the original iPhone's design was incredible, with Jobs even requiring employees to encrypt images of the device.
He also said the team was "shockingly small." Apple declined to specify the number of members.
Jobs was initially unhappy with Christie's progress on the device, and gave his team two weeks to improve.
"Steve had pretty much had it," said Mr. Christie, who still heads Apple's user-interface team. "He wanted bigger ideas and bigger concepts."Christie's team was able to impress Jobs within the deadline, later giving presentations to Apple's design chief Jony Ive and Apple director Bill Cambell, who said the iPhone "would be better than the original Mac." All three approved the 2005 design, kicking off a "2 and a half year marathon" where the iPhone was designed from the ground up with Jobs clearing every minor detail, as has been noted in several previous reports of the iPhone's development.
Christie's details on the creation of the original iPhone come just ahead of a second major patent infringement lawsuit, set to begin tomorrow. Apple initially accused Samsung of grossly infringing on both its patents and its designs in 2011, a lawsuit that resulted in a $890 million penalty for the South Korean company in the United States.
While the first lawsuit covered older devices, the second U.S. patent lawsuit between the two companies covers more recent products like the Galaxy Note II, the Galaxy S III, the iPhone 5, and the iPad 4.
The full interview on The Wall Street Journal, which is well worth reading, also includes additional tidbits on the secrecy behind the development of the iPhone, major last minute changes, and details on the original iPhone's unveiling.
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With April 15 looming, plenty of bitcoin barons have been wondering how to treat their newfound crypto-fortunes. Does it count as capital gains? Is it taxed like a currency? Is it taxed at all? Well, on Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service announced definitively that Bitcoin is property, and will be taxed as such.
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Microsoft Corp. on Monday issued an emergency security warning saying that hackers have found a way to booby-trap certain common Word files with the .rtf extension.
Microsoft says it's aware of attacks going on now, but there's no fix yet to stop the hackers. It's working on a way to stop the bug.
The only way to be sure your computer won't get infected is not to open a document with the .rtf file extension until Microsoft says it's fine to do so.
This is the worst kind of attack. A hacker who manages to get you to open a booby-trapped file can gain control of your computer. From there, the hacker can do all kinds of things. For instance, the hacker can turn your computer into a so-called zombie by putting it on an illegal botnet. That means hackers can use your computer as part of a bigger network of computers to do all kinds of illegal things — like send spam, spread viruses, and commit fraud.
Even scarier is that the hack could work in preview mode. That's where you don't actually open the file but view it in an email instead. Outlook, for instance, lets you preview attachments.
Microsoft is recommending that you block all .rtf documents from your computer. It released a free tool that will set that up for you.
While .rtf files are not the default for Microsoft Word — the default is .docx or .doc — this is not a strange or unusual type of document. RTF stands for rich text format. For example, it's the default file format used by TextEdit, the free word-processing app that comes with Macs.
If people tend to email you a lot of Word documents, and you don't want to block all .rtf documents, another good choice is to set up your email to be in text mode, recommends security blogger Paul Ducklin via the Sophos security blog. The downside: This can make formatted emails, like newsletters, more difficult to read.