GarageBand and iMovie coming to iOS

A large portion of Apple’s Keynote this morning was a demo of iMovie and GarageBand for iOS. On Apple’s iMovie page, it states specifically that it is only compatible with iPad 2, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 4th generation. There are no requirements listed for GarageBand, but we’d assume that it requires newer devices as well (at least iPhone 3GS). Let’s talk about iMovie first. We’ve heard many people wonder why they couldn’t manipulate photos and movies on their iOS device… for a long time now. With the introduction of iMovie, Apple has given us the ability to do some heavy-duty video editing on the iPad. We’re still waiting for iPhoto to make its way over to the platform, but many third-party apps can edit photos. Here’s a run-down of the feature of iMovie iOS: Every movie you shoot with the iPad automatically appears in iMovie so you can edit it in the MultiTouch interface. Themes (just like the desktop app) allow you to add a little polish to your day at the beach. Titles, tap-to-edit, soundtracks, pictures, voice-over, and volume adjustments… nearly everything the desktop app can do. It’s quite impressive. Publish straight to Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, or CNN [...]

You’ll probably have to pay for mobile Hulu

We reported earlier last week that Hulu will be making it’s way to the iPad (iPhone and iPod touch will likely follow suit). Since that possibility was leaked, more information has come through the grapevine… and it’s not going to make you happy. It appears that the three owning studios — ABC, NBC, and FOX — have been trying to figure out a way to make more money from Hulu besides the already annoying ads. This will probably result in a premium model that will give us access to more content. Currently, shows available on Hulu contain the latest three episodes (on average). That’s always been our biggest issue with Hulu: we can’t watch anything older than a few weeks. Even the networks’ online players tend to limit shows to the current season. Anyone else want to watch old seasons of Big Bang Theory? So what does this premium model look like? It’s been suggested that paid users will have access to content on three devices: a computer, a TV and a mobile device. That seems like a pretty big step backwards to us. Just this last year, Apple gave us a great music sharing tool with iTunes Home Sharing. [...]

Plants vs. Zombies shuffles to the iPhone

PopCap finally has brought its most recent popular title to the iPhone: Plants vs. Zombies. It’s not your mother’s tower defense strategy game; it’s a completely new variant of the style, which sends waves of zombies to your door — they want to eat your brains. Defend your home by placing 49 different plants. The game also boasts 29 different zombies. From pole vaulters to Michael Jackson, they can come at you fast or slow, so be ready. This game is probably one of the best iPhone ports we’ve seen and definitely matches the quality of other PopCap titles. How does Cocoa Touch change the gameplay? To us, it seems easier. There’s no precise clicking as your finger is doing all the work. We’ve found ourselves tapping randomly at the screen in order to pick up all of the sun that comes our way. However, placing the plants can be somewhat difficult at times: we’re constantly putting the wrong plants in the wrong spot, but that’s probably because our fingers are somewhat large (they’re not huge and fat, just big). Anyway, we’ve played both versions — iPhone and Desktop — and we’re excited to have it available in our pocket [...]

Apple removes fake Flash ads from the iPad promotional video

Remember the speculative post we wrote about the fact that the iPad is showing Flash content in Apple’s promotional video? Well, it’s been replaced with a non-Flash version that shows the infamous blue lego. It appears as though we’re never going to see Flash on the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch… especially with Steve’s comments from the Apple town hall meeting. We’re not terribly disappointed with Apple’s decision to avoid Flash… we’re more disappointed with the fact that most sites are using it to display their content. Flash is notoriously buggy and a resource hog. Why watch low-quality hosted content instead of high-quality local content? The mere fact that we have instant access to thousands of TV episodes and movies will create a demand for hosted content: no one has a collection as large as the internet. We really hope to see services like Hulu, the TV networks, and even YouTube move away from Flash sooner rather than later. From a technical standpoint, Apple is completely correct: Flash sucks. But they also shouldn’t ignore the fact that it’s the current standard… they should be aggressively moving a different direction, working with companies to support different media playback: we all know [...]

Cocoa Touch devices wallpaper

Cocoa Touch Apps designed a new wallpaper or desktop background to commemorate the iPad announcement. We used Apple’s high resolution PR pictures (we had to photoshop them a bit) to make this background. The max resolution is 3000px by 1668px, resize it as necessary — hopefully that will work for most of you. ;) We started with the iPad and then resized the iPhone and the iPod touch to scale. We’ve been dreaming of a Cocoa Touch tablet for over 1.5 years and Apple finally brought that dream to life with the iPad. Just right click it and save it to the destination of your choice. Please enjoy our wallpaper! Note: Internet Explorer has trouble loading the file because it’s so large. Here’s a hint, don’t use Internet Explorer. Try Safari or Firefox instead. The full resolution wallpaper is after the jump… this one is 1024 by 576 to help reduce load times.

Apple Can Kill Your Apps?

Your guess is as good as ours, but Jonathan Zdziarski, the author of a recently published book — iPhone Forenzics — has discovered a URL hidden in a CoreLocation configuration file that suggests Apple could remotely delete any application from your iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple has suggested that they wanted to control each application that appeared on the Cocoa Touch platform in order to determine that it withheld the standards set by the SDK and that no Malicious software made it onto their customers’ mobile devices. We’re cool with that, but we’d be pretty upset if they decided to use this ability in any other situation. More about it after the break…