An anonymous reader writes "Fast Company takes a look at the Apple App Store and concludes that it's a casino where most developers are making tragic losses and a tiny few are striking it filthy rich. The article discusses a new book exposing the App Store millionaires, called 'Appillionaires,' which compares the psychological effects of a hit app on a programmer to a gambler's high. One millionaire programmer explains the intense feeling of being in the top-ten: 'The App Store had established some kind of intravenous connection to my body and was pumping me full of Apple-branded heroin.' But, the piece warns, the majority of developers fail to make any return on their app."

An anonymous reader writes "Why are there so many free games listed in the top 10 grossing games over in Apple's App Store? Because some feature exorbitant in-app purchase fees for virtual items. Quoting ZDNet: 'Developing "free" games aimed specifically at children, and then bundling ridiculously priced in-app purchases inside those "free" games feels scammy to me. Sure, it's not illegal, and it's not against Apple's developer terms and conditions, but Apple is a company that prides itself in protecting users from harm. Most of the game developers do make an attempt to warn users that the game "changes real money for additional in-app content" but it's a lame attempt. It's easily missed, and kids aren't going to read it anyway.'"

Diggester writes "Unless their chipset has already been exploited and jailbroken on a previous device, it takes a lot of time for the iOS jailbreaking community to jailbreak for a new iOS device. The iPhone 4S and iPad 2, both of which are based on a still unexploited dual-core A5 chip, haven't received a jailbreak for iOS 5 yet. However, it appears they'll be getting one soon, as a certain eminent iPhone hacker has let us know that the iPhone 4S has jailbroken, and a jailbreak for the iPad 2 is in the works." In related news, Hackers have succeeded in bringing a limited port of Apple's new Siri voice assistant feature onto jailbroken versions of the iPhone 4 and the fourth-generation iPod touch.

jfruhlinger writes "Apple's North Carolina data center will, it appears, be turning greener: the company is building a dedicated solar farm to power it. That would be a welcome turnaround for proponents of green energy, as Apple was lured to North Carolina in part by the promise of cheap electricity from coal-fired plants."

New submitter landofcleve writes "When the writing is on the wall, you fight harder — or at least that's what we've seen from Apple in recent months. Now we know why: Samsung has reached a market share above Apple's for smartphone sales. 'Samsung shipped 27.8 million smartphones in the last quarter, taking 23.8 percent of the market ... Apple’s 17.1 million shipments, comprising 14.6 percent of the market, pushed the Cupertino, California-based company to second place. Nokia maintained its third position.'"

Revotron writes "Apple has released the full source to their Apple Lossless Audio Codec under the Apache license. ALAC was developed by Apple and deployed on all of its platforms and devices over the last 10 years. Could the release of the ALAC source code mark a possible first step in opening up more of the iOS platform?"

An anonymous reader writes "One of the famous stories about Steve Jobs is that he used to drive around in a Mercedez Benz sports car with no license plates, and that he would sometimes park in Handicapped spots on Apple's Cupertino campus. Jon Callas, who used to work on OS security at Apple, explains how Jobs was able to do this legally."

generalhavok writes "The United States Patent & Trademark Office has approved Apple's patent on the slide to unlock gesture used on iOS devices. Interestingly, this patent was earlier dismissed in Europe due to prior art. With many Android phones using a similar slide gesture, it will be interesting to see how this new patent will affect the patent wars between Apple and Android vendors."

hype7 writes "With yesterday's release of the Steve Jobs biography, a raft of interesting information has come to light — including Jobs' favorite books. There's one book there listed as 'profoundly moving' to Jobs — The Innovator's Dilemma by innovation professor Clayton Christensen. The book explains how in the pursuit of profit, good managers leave their companies open to disruption. There's an interesting article over at the Harvard Business Review that explains how disruption works, and how Jobs managed to solve the dilemma by focusing Apple on products rather than profit."

harrymcc writes "It's been exactly ten years since Steve Jobs stood on a stage at Apple and explained to a surprisingly small group of journalists that his company was going to make a music player and call it iPod. Technologizer's Benj Edwards celebrated the iPod's first decade by rounding up a dozen iPod-related oddities, including the iPod-powered tooth cleaner, an iPod mount for a semi-automatic sniper system, and the classic 1958 Dieter Rams Braun FM radio that may have helped inspire it all."

PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article exploring the question posed in the headline, which says that "One answer may lie in biology. Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women's voices more pleasing than men's. 'It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,' said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of 'The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships. 'It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.' One notable exception has been Germany, where BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on its 5 Series cars in the late 1990s after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on why the company gave Siri a female voice in the U.S. Nor would she say why Siri speaks like a man in the UK, where iPhone 4S owners have swarmed online forums to request a female voice instead."

Of all the upgrades that distinguish the new iPhone 4S from its predecessors, probably the feature that's gotten the most attention is the voice-based personal assistant app called Siri, which allows a user to accomplish certain tasks almost entirely by voice. A few days ago, as reported by TechCrunch, a team of Android developers came up with an Android equivalent to Siri called Iris (spell that backwards). It took them only 8 hours to have a working, if imperfect, app to play with and submit to the Android Market. This quick video review of Iris says the app is unpolished, but shows promise. For now, it generates some accurate results, and some amusing ones.

adharma writes "According to Robert Cringely, in 1995 he was granted an hour long interview with Steve Jobs at NeXT headquarters for Triumph of the Nerds and promptly lost. Two weeks ago, a 'PAL-VHS, dubbed on professional equipment from a D1 master' copy of the interview was found and is in the process of being restored." Cringely writes there: "What we’ll do with the 64-minute video depends on how good it looks this week. Maybe we’ll put it up on the Net, maybe we’ll do something more. I’m open to your ideas."

hype7 writes "It's clear Steve Jobs didn't pull any punches from the interviews for his forthcoming biography. In the latest release from the book, hosted over at AP, 'Isaacson wrote that Jobs was livid in January 2010 when HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted many of the popular features of the iPhone. Apple sued, and Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-laced rant that Google's actions amounted to "grand theft." ... "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." ... In a subsequent meeting with Schmidt at a Palo Alto, Calif., cafe, Jobs told Schmidt that he wasn't interested in settling the lawsuit, the book says. "I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want." The meeting, Isaacson wrote, resolved nothing.'"

First time accepted submitter para_droid writes "Version 1.3 of the popular open source notification system for Mac OS X, Growl has surprised its users by going closed-source and only available for purchase on the Mac App Store. Any users who provide links to bugfixes and source for the previous version 1.2 are being banned from the discussion group, and their messages deleted. Could it be time for the community to create an OpenGrowl fork?" The linked post above about bugfixes and source ends "Hopefully the Growl 1.3 branch from the official Growl maintainers will eventually become open source again and get straightened out so that it works for most users, but if it doesn't, a fork of the project will be able to provide a working Growl to Mac users."

holy_calamity writes "Developers want to know when their apps will be able to connect to Siri, the virtual assistant built into the new iPhone 4S. Technology Review reports that providing APIs for Siri would not only make it possible to control apps with casual voice commands, but could also make Siri smarter if it is connected with other AI services able to do things like make very specific restaurant recommendations based on a person's past actions."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Georgia Tech demonstrate that a mobile phone located near a keyboard can use its accelerometers to recover text typed by a target. 'The technique works through probability and by detecting pairs of keystrokes, rather than individual keys (which still is too difficult to accomplish reliably, Traynor said). It models “keyboard events” in pairs, then determines whether the pair of keys pressed is on the left versus right side of the keyboard, and whether they are close together or far apart. After the system has determined these characteristics for each pair of keys depressed, it compares the results against a preloaded dictionary, each word of which has been broken down along similar measurements (i.e., are the letters left/right, near/far on a standard QWERTY keyboard).'"

New submitter GumphMaster writes "In the latest edition of the Apple vs. Samsung patent fight, the ABC is reporting that Samsung has filed in Australian and Japanese courts seeking an injunction to halt sales of the iPhone 4S for alleged 3G patent violations. It remains to be seen whether Samsung has any better luck with the retaliatory strike in Australian and Japanese courts than it did with courts in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, I expect that Samsung will fail partly because of overseas precedent, but mostly because their patents are sane, technical and narrow in scope (unlike the patent-a-rectangle nature of the opposition). If this stupidity ever stops, then millions of dollars, euro, or Won that are being spent on lawyers might actually go into the innovation that patents are meant to promote. Who knows where that might lead?"

angry tapir writes "A judge at the district court in the Hague has rejected claims that Samsung had made against Apple regarding four patents. Samsung wanted Apple to pay for licensing the patents in question, and the court to issue an injunction banning the import and sale of Apple's iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, as well as upcoming products, until licensing terms are in place. But the latter won't happen at this point. The ruling came in the in the same week that an Australian court blocked sales of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1."

theodp writes "On October 20th, Microsoft will open its 14th store in Seattle's popular University Village shopping center, where it will go head-to-head against an existing Apple Store. To help build buzz for next week's grand opening, Microsoft set up a temporary Kinect-equipped hut within spitting distance of the Apple store, a guerrilla marketing effort designed to catch the attention of the throngs flocking to the Apple Store for the new iPhone 4S. Microsoft will up the marketing ante for next weekend's grand opening, transforming the parking lot between the two stores into a concert venue for performances by The Black Keys and OneRepublic. Any bets on whether the concerts will drum up more business for the Zune Market Place or the iTunes Store?"