With the release of Beta 2 of iOS 4.3, it seems there is more evidence that Apple is working on integrating more social features to iOS. The first beta revealed evidence of a "Find My Friends" features for MobileMe that might provide users with real-time location data of their friends. In Beta 2, 9to5Mac points to findings of references to two new services called "Media Stream" and "Photo Streaming".
With Photo Streams, you will also be allowed to invite" other users to view your pictures as you take them and upload them to a service. This service looks like it is connected to MobileMe, and we speculate that Media Stream can be directly connected to Find my Friends. We think Find my Friends will be another aspect of Apples social network, a part of a free MobileMe, where you can choose to view your friends Photo Streams all on that same map.
The site speculates that this service could tie in with Apple's massive NC data center. There only appears to be scant evidence of the new features in the latest betas, so it's hard to know how close they are to completion. This along with "Find My Friends" references could point to a significant new social initiative for Apple.
In a previous email, Steve Jobs claimed that MobileMe would get "a lot better" in 2011.
Update: We've received additional information about what "PhotoStream" is. According to text found in the iOS 4.3 beta:
Photo Stream uploads and stores the last thirty days of your photos on MobileMe and downloads them to all of your devices.
Photo Streams can also be shared to other individuals.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
