Yesterday, Apple released a small update for iOS, but only for the iPhone 5. iOS 6.1.4 provides an updated audio profile for the speakerphone. I've searched everywhere I can think of to try to figure out what that means, and so far I've found nothing. But if you use the speakerphone on your iPhone 5, I'm sure that you don't want to be one of the uncool kids who isn't using the latest audio profile. And that reminds me: last Friday, I mentioned
that Apple's WWDC developer conference will be held on June 10-14,
2013. I should have also mentioned that there is always a keynote at
the beginning of the conference which Apple often uses to announce new
operating software, so I expect that the next version of the iOS
operating system, presumably named iOS 7, will be announced about a month from now.
Hopefully it has more new features than iOS 6.1.4 does. And now, for the other iOS news of note from the past week:
- Massachusetts attorney Jack O'Donohue discusses the new LinkedIn Contacts feature and describes how it works in the iPhone app.
- Florida attorney William Dunaway reviews iOrion, a time entry app for Orion practice management software.
- Florida attorney Mark Astor asked me to announce the launch of Lawser, a social networking platform for members of the legal profession including lawyers and law students.
- Gerry Smith of The Huffington Post wrote an interesting article on San Francisco police department efforts to arrest people who traffic stolen iPhones.
- If you use the VPN feature on the iPhone or iPad, you may have heard that Apple recently lost a patent lawsuit concerning VPN on demand behavior and, as a result, announced that it was going to remove the ability to keep a VPN connection always on. Eric Slivka of MacRumors reports that Apple has changed course or at least delayed making the change, so for now, that VPN connection will stay active.
- If you use the iPhone's built-in calculator and wish there were a way to backspace, it turns out that there is. Killian Bell of Cult of Mac reports that you can do so with a swipe gesture. Neat.
- The App Store is about to hit 50 billion downloaded apps. Whoever downloads the 50 billionth app will get a $10,000 App Store gift card, and the next 50 customers after that will each get $500 App Store gift cards. Details are here.
- Apple also announced the all-time top paid and free apps. Federico Viticci of MacStories has them listed so you can see how many you own.
- And finally, Apple has a long history of running commercials that are as well-made as their products, and they are currently running a great one called Photos Every Day. If you have watched TV this week you may have already seen it, but if not, here it is. It is a great, powerful, beautiful commercial. The background music is also great; it was composed by Rob Simonsen, who has composed music for many movies and TV shows. Simonsen also composed the great song used in the Apple ads that ran in the Fall of 2012 when the iPhone 5 was introduced (such as Physics and Cheese).
