By brolloh Since iPhone received notifications in iOS 5, we’ve been much happier seeing our alerts roll in at the top of our devices instead of over the top of our current task.
However, a lot of standard Apple and third party apps have navigation buttons in the same place. So whilst you may want to simply go Back, instead your unfortunately timed prod takes you to a lonely smiley face from your friend. Not ideal.
As ever there’s a trick for getting rid of notifications rather than waiting 6 seconds for them to retreat. Simply wait for one to appear and slide you finger (or thumb!) from right to left. A well aimed slide will get rid of your notification in an instant.
More soon!
By Alex Brooks Apple’s fiscal second quarter revenue with top end Apple estimate
Apple today announced financial results for its second fiscal quarter of 2013 which ran from January 1, 2013 until March 31. Apple posted revenue of $43.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $9.5 billion, or $10.09 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $39.2 billion and net profit of $11.6 billion, or $12.30 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 37.5 percent compared to 47.4 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 66 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple reported the following number of shipments for its products during the quarter:
37.4 million iPhones compared to 35.1 million in the year-ago-quarter
19.5 million iPads compared to 11.8 million in the year-ago-quarter
3.95 million Macs compared to 4 million in the year-ago quarter
5.63 million iPods compared to 7.7 million in the year-ago quarter.
“We are pleased to report record March quarter revenue thanks to continued strong performance of iPhone and iPad,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline.”
“Our cash generation remains very strong, with $12.5 billion in cash flow from operations during the quarter and an ending cash balance of $145 billion,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO.
Apple provided the following guidance for its fiscal 2013 second quarter:
revenue between $33.5 billion and $35.5 billion
gross margin between 36 percent and 37 percent
operating expenses between $3.85 billion and $3.95 billion
other income/(expense) of $300 million
tax rate of 26%
By brolloh Our second foray into YouTube with SquareCMD tells you how best to wipe your hard drive and reinstall OS X. Follow this video guide and we’re sure you’ll find this difficult sounding task easy!
By brolloh Do you find you write the same phrase over and over in iPhone messages? For example if you’re a happy, contented sort you might be writing “I love you” in every message. That’s 8 characters! Your time is precious, 8 characters typed ten times a day means you’ll have wasted three days by the end of your life being mushy!
If you must stick with love-based cellular communication, we have a suggestion.
Navigate to Settings>General>Keyboards and scroll down until you reach Add New Shortcut….
Now you can type ‘ily’ and your phone will fill in the rest, romance will arrive on your darling’s phone as usual, but they’ll be unaware you’ve regained three days of your life back. If they do find out you’ve found a romance shortcut, firstly we didn’t tell you, and secondly you only did it so you could have three more days with them, which is quite romantic anyway.
By brolloh To celebrate our SquareCMD diamond anniversary we’ve taken a step in a YouTubey direction!
Square’s very own Jonathan Dixon takes you through what to do if you forget any of your passwords with Keychain Access.
By brolloh We can’t believe it’s taken us seventy four tips to get to this one!
This tip has a big fan base amongst educators but we’re sure you’ll find a valuable use for it.
OS X has a universal zoom function to get you closer to your work. To enable this, head to System Preferences > Universal Access > Seeing, or the SquareCMD endorsed method: alt + cmd + 8 for On or Off.
After this is enabled, simply hold ctrl and scroll up on your mouse or trackpad. If you have an older Macbook or a non-scroll mouse, hold alt + cmd and press + to zoom in and – to zoom out
As you can see here, zoom has a wealth of uses.
By brolloh There’s a super helpful application hidden in your Services menu called Summarize.
The role of Summarize is very much a ‘does what it says on the tin’ one. Whenever you find yourself gazing at a long stream of text that could do with some refinement or in need of a general overview, Summarize is your best bet.
Because Summarize appears in the Services menu, it’s available to all text based applications.
Select your colossal batch of text and head up to the application menu, in this case TextEdit.
Go down to Services and select Summarize.
You’ll be presented with a small window and a slider, the slider lets you refine just how summarised you want the text.
By brolloh Another simple but widely unused and unknown trick for the iOS mathematicians! This one has existed since the days of ‘iPhone OS 1′ and really shows the innovative way Apple used the accelerometer from the start.
Fire up your iOS Calculator app, what more could you want? Well, if you’re trying to work out how many cakes to buy for a party of 15 children, nothing more. If you’re trying to work out |2(sqrt{2[log4(16)]} – {[log3(27)]3})| + 2 then perhaps you need a lot more. We know the answer is 16 thanks to this tip.
Tilt your iPhone 90ยบ and there you go, the most scientific of calculators is at your disposal!
More soon!
By brolloh With every application running in it’s own window, your cursor can quickly break into a sweat managing all of them at once! We’re hoping these two tips will ease your pain ever so slightly.
Sometimes we find ourselves using two applications concurrently, perhaps we’re referencing text from Safari but our work and focus is with Pages? Browsing iTunes but working on a Keynote presentation? To scroll through albums in iTunes running in a window behind Keynote, you may think you have to click on iTunes to bring it to the front and scroll, but you needn’t!
OS X allows your cursor to stray outside of the focus application and into one thats peeking around the side, scrolling with your mouse or trackpad will work in that application too without coming to the front!
What happens if you can’t quite see that text you’re referencing behind Pages? Awkwardly manoeuvre the reference window then head back to Pages? No! Using a similar trick, you can move any background window you want.
Hold down the command button and click on the title bar of the background window, you’ll find that you can move it anywhere you want with your main application remaining in front.
By Alex Brooks iPad with Retina Display (4th gen) | Image courtesy of Apple
Today Apple did something somewhat out of the norm for the company, despite being rumoured ahead of time Apple released a new model of the iPad. But it didn’t change anything apart from the storage capacity, offering a whopping 128GB of storage for a meaty $799 (£639) for the WiFi model or $929 (£739) for the WiFi and Cellular model. This new iPad will be available to buy on February 5th.
There are many questions as to why Apple released this iPad this week or why in the supposed era of cloud storage that a 128GB iPad is even required. However it’s not that hard to speculate as to why Apple announced the 128GB iPad (apart from to try and out do Microsoft’s release of Office 2013) today.
Thinking logically the iPad 4 which has been somewhat constrained through the holiday shopping season is now almost universally available for immediate shipping, suggesting that Apple has caught up with any assembly backlog and is in a strong position to add an additional bunch of units to inventory.
Price will also have been a strong factor, the 128GB iPad with Retina Display offers double the amount of storage to the model below it. Such a large amount of flash memory (NAND) isn’t cheap but the price is plummeting, clearly it has plummeted far enough for Apple to stick some in a sub-$800 iPad.
But in my mind the 128GB iPad sends a strong message about Apple’s intentions. It’s a subject I’ve touched on before over the years and will in more detail bring up again soon and that Apple’s new product cycle. The current iPad was unveiled alongside the iPad mini in October last year, notably it was the second model of iPad to be released in a single year. Apple had little choice but to bring out the iPad 4 just nine months after it had the iPad 3, the technology and graphics benefits of the A6X chip were on the table to be used and there was no way Apple was going to carry a flagship product through the all-important holiday shopping season that contained a now extinct connector on the bottom.
However there was one key distinction that I had seen before and that was the obscurity of Apple’s March release schedule for the iPad. With the iPhone being on a solid end of summer release cycle and iOS releases matching up closely to that it made no sense why Apple continued to release iPad models mid way through the iPhone cycle with out dated hardware (compared to the iPhone on the market) and not benefit from the latest software. In essence Apple used the Lightning connector and the advancements in the iPhone 5 as an excuse to double release in 2012 and land the iPad on a new annual cycle.
This is where the 128GB iPad comes in, the release sends a clear message that despite rumours to the contrary Apple will not release a new iPad in March or April and the next update to the iPad will come in October alongside the second iPad mini, iOS 7 and will ready Apple for another blockbuster year end.
I’ll pick up this subject in more detail soon but many have speculated that Apple will move to a twice-yearly update of iOS hardware. We only have to look at the beating that Apple’s earnings took over the quarter to realise that the ramp-up and production of these products is seriously capital intensive and even when carefully planned leaves Apple vulnerable to extreme demand and an inability to supply customers with the products they want. There’s no way Apple wants to spend three months catching up to only have to start the process again.
[And in answer to the question that is hitting my inbox a lot. What will Apple release between now and the second half of the year? Not a whole lot I suspect]
