MacRumors

Several bits of news regarding carriers for iPhone 4 in the UK have been surfacing recently, with the most notable one possibly being O2's announcement of new tariffs that no longer include unlimited data. Instead of offering unlimited data and texts across all monthly plans with call minutes being the primary differentiator, O2 is now tiering both call minutes and data across its plans.

Monthly plans begin at 100 minutes and 500 MB of data priced at 25 for a 24-month contract and 30 for an 18-month contract and ramp up to unlimited calling and 1 GB of data priced at 60/65. A footnote to O2's pricing matrix indicates, however, that the carrier will continue running a "promotion" offering unlimited data for all smartphones until October, at which time the company will offer additional data in 500 MB (5) and 1 GB (10) buckets.

O2 has also announced its early upgrade policy for iPhone 4, allowing customers currently on a contract with the carrier to buy out their remaining terms at a rate of 20 per month left on their contracts, at which point customers will be eligible for new contracts at the lowest iPhone 4 prices. The early upgrade offer comes instead of the carrier's usual policy of requiring customers to pay off their contracts in full.

In other UK iPhone 4 news, both T-Mobile UK and Three UK will be offering the new iPhone, joining existing carriers O2, Orange, Vodafone, and Tesco, which operates on O2's network.

The Financial Times reports that the U.S. government is continuing to take a look at Apple's forthcoming iAd mobile advertising system in order to decide whether to pursue a full antitrust investigation of the service. The possible investigation comes just after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concluded an exhaustive inquiry that ultimately resulted in the approval of Google's acquisition of AdMob, with the FTC pointing to Apple's iAd as a competitive factor contributing heavily to its decision in that case.

According to two people close to the situation, US regulators have already taken an interest in Apple's actions, though it is not yet clear whether it will be left to the Federal Trade Commission, which carried out the recent Google investigation, or the Department of Justice to take an investigation forward.

Apple's latest rules for developers who create apps for its devices limit the situations in which they can send approved information about their apps' audiences to advertising services. The information cannot be sent to advertising networks that are affiliated with companies developing or distributing mobile devices or operating systems - a definition that effectively excludes Apple rivals like Google and Microsoft.

Word of iAd interest on the part of federal regulators first surfaced early last month after the company altered its developer terms to exclude analytics companies from collecting data on users, although details of the FTC's interest at the time were not revealed.

Earlier this week, Apple again tweaked its developer terms to permit some analytics data collection, but a requirement that such companies be "independent" from mobile device or platform developers appears to shut out Google and AdMob from the platform, a move which unsurprisingly drew heavy criticism from AdMob's founder.

Apple has become embroiled in a number of potential antitrust cases in just the last month or so, with federal regulators taking a look at Apple's Flash-to-iPhone compiler at the behest of Adobe, as well as the company's tactics in the digital music market.

Valve Software today posted a teaser on its official blog for Team Fortress 2 hinting at a release for the game on Mac OS X tomorrow. Team Fortress 2 would mark the third major Valve series to hit Mac OS X, following Portal and Half-Life 2 (plus two Half-Life 2 sequels) released since Valve announced that it would be making its game library as well as its Steam game distribution platform offering a host of third-party games available on Mac OS X beginning last month.

Big things are happening RIGHT NOW at Valve. Things involving cultivated tree-fruit. BIG things. Things that rhyme with "grapple." Things that rhyme with "Speem Gortress zmavailable on the Babac."

Not today. But tomorrow. BIG THINGS. Stay tuned...

The news comes just after Valve announced that it will be delaying the release of its much-anticipated Portal 2 until 2011, citing the fact that "making games is hard". Portal 2 had been expected to see a release before the end of this year.

Valleywag reports that a security breach on AT&T's website has allowed public access to email addresses and SIM card identifier numbers (known as ICC-IDs) for 114,000 iPad Wi-Fi + 3G users on the company's cellular network.

The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's information was compromised.

The security hole, which has been closed by AT&T, appears to have been related to data meant for a Web application accessible on the iPad. Those who discovered the hole were able to guess large swaths of ICC-ID numbers based on a handful of known numbers and use a script paired with an iPad user agent setting on their browser to query the email addresses associated with the ICC-IDs.

Beyond the obvious privacy implications of having personal email addresses exposed, it is unclear exactly what the ramifications of the security breach are. Despite claims from those who discovered the breach that the information might be able to be used to spoof devices or intercept data, other security researchers do not believe that to be possible. AT&T and Apple have yet to comment on the situation.

Ars Technica spoke with Tweetie developer Loren Brichter this week at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference and received a status update on his plans for Mac and iPad development. Brichter had promised a beta version of Tweetie 2 for Mac for late March, with purchasers of MacHeist's nanoBundle set to receive access to it, but the release is still nowhere to be seen.

The reason for the delay is that Brichter has been a bit preoccupied in recent months with Twitter's acquisition and rebranding of Tweetie for iPhone for use as the company's official iPhone client. The delays and focus shift for Tweetie have led many fans of the Mac version to wonder if development has been abandoned, but Brichter promises that he's getting back to work on the project.

Although Tweetie 2.0 for Mac has been put off for a while thanks to the acquisition and the re-release of Tweetie for iPhone (now known as Twitter for iPhone), Brichter says he'll be back to working on Tweetie for Mac within weeks.

He also promises that development on Tweetie for Mac will continue through at least version 3, suggesting that he already has ideas about future feature implementations for the platform.

Brichter is also looking to bring Tweetie to the iPad platform in native form, a space where other iPhone applications have already been establishing themselves.

As many iPad users know, Tweetie/Twitter has yet to arrive on the iPad in native resolution, but Brichter says it's coming soon and, in fact, it's so great that he wishes he could share some of the iPad code back to the Mac. "The goal is to exceed the Twitter iPhone app in the iPad," he said.

Early this week, Tweetie for Mac was named a winner in Ars Technica's Ars Design Awards for Mac OS X applications in the "Best Mac OS X User Experience" category. The awards were created by Ars Technica this year in order to fill the vacuum left behind by Apple's elimination of Mac OS X categories from its own Apple Design Awards.

In a blog post yesterday describing the Microsoft team's attendance at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, Microsoft MacBU's Jake Hoelter reveals that the company's forthcoming Office for Mac 2011 will be a 32-bit only release. Hoelter blames the lack of a 64-bit version of the next-generation productivity suite on the need for his team to focus on compatibility between Windows and Mac versions of Office, a focus that has prevented Microsoft from fully transitioning Office to the Cocoa API required for 64-bit.

In Office 2011, we've made investments in better compatibility between Office for Mac and Windows Office, which is the largest request we receive from customers. We think we have some outstanding improvements to show you in this area, and we'll continue to share details in coming weeks. Our work to increase compatibility means we haven't completed the transition of moving the entire user interface over to Cocoa yet. And because Apple's frameworks require us to complete the move to Cocoa before we can build a 64-bit version, Office 2011 will be 32-bit only.

Hoelter notes that the primary difference between a 32-bit and a 64-bit version of Office would be memory availability, but that the vast majority of users do not work with large enough documents and files for performance to be an issue on 32-bit versions. Those users working with very large files, such as "Excel files with data in millions of cells, or PowerPoint presentations with thousands of high resolution images", would, however, experience a performance hit working in 32-bit.

Office for Mac 2011 is scheduled to ship by the end of this year. The company has released several beta versions, with the most recent one issued a few weeks ago revealing that the company is beginning to finalize the look of the release with new icons and graphics.

Yesterday, we noted that Apple has again revised its developer agreement, and among the changes were adjustments to its rules on analytics data collection. The changes appear to allow applications to send data back to analytics companies to assist in advertising and other efforts, with the limitation that analytics companies receiving data must be "independent" and not owned by or affiliated with a developer of mobile platforms or devices. The limitation would appear to prohibit Google-owned AdMob from participating in analytics data collection on the iPhone.

AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui today responded on the company's blog, acknowledging that the terms as written would prohibit developers from using AdMob and Google advertising products on the iPhone.

This change threatens to decrease - or even eliminate - revenue that helps to support tens of thousands of developers. The terms hurt both large and small developers by severely limiting their choice of how best to make money. And because advertising funds a huge number of free and low cost apps, these terms are bad for consumers as well.

Let's be clear. This change is not in the best interests of users or developers. In the history of technology and innovation, it's clear that competition delivers the best outcome. Artificial barriers to competition hurt users and developers and, in the long run, stall technological progress.

Hamoui reports that AdMob will be speaking to Apple about its concerns over the impact of the change in terms as the advertising company looks to continue working with developers on a broad variety of platforms.

During a presentation at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last night, Apple announced the winners of its annual Apple Design Awards. While the awards had their roots in Mac applications and expanded to included iPhone OS applications in recent years, WWDC 2010 saw Apple at least temporarily do away with its Mac categories to focus on iPhone and iPad applications, which have been the primary focus of the entire conference this year. This year's winners include:

iPad
- Financial Times iPad Edition
- Flight Control HD
- Pinball HD
- Star Walk for iPad
- TabToolkit

iPhone
- 20 Minute Meals - Jamie Oliver
- Articles
- Brushes
- Doodle Jump
- Real Racing

Applications can be nominated by any member of the iPhone Developer Program, and awards are determined based on evaluation of four core areas of excellence: technology adoption, design and user experience, innovation, and performance.

PreCentral.net notes that Rich Dellinger, a former user interface designer at Apple who left in 2006 to join Palm and subsequently developed the banner notification system used in webOS, has returned to Apple. In addition to his contributions to notifications, Dellinger's other work at Palm included:

Acted as visual designer, interaction designer, and engineer on Palm webOS.

Co-developed the Application Framework used by webOS. Created the CSS structure and defined HTML layout and structure conventions in Mojo Application Framework, and for core Palm applications.

Co-invented software and hardware interaction models for a new generation of Linux-based, Palm-branded mobile devices.

The webOS banner notification system invented by Dellinger has received considerable positive publicity for its sleek design and unobtrusive nature compared to the pop-up notifications used on Apple's iPhone operating system.

Dellinger is the latest in a string of high-profile departures from Palm in wake of HP's acquisition of the company. He has taken on a job title of "Senior User Interface Designer" at Apple, although it is unclear exactly what projects he will be working on. He previously worked at Apple from 1999 through 2006 in a variety of capacities, initially focusing on technical support engineering and a revamp of the company's online support site before moving to user interface design for Mac OS X, iPhone and iPod.

Apple today seeded a new version of Mac OS X 10.6.4, termed Build 10F566, to developers. Those familiar with the new build note that it carries the same highlighted fixes included in the previous build issued one week ago, and continues to list no known issues.

As has been true for the past several builds released to developers, testers are asked to focus their efforts on Graphics Drivers, SMB, USB, Voice Over, and VPN. Today's release marks the seventh build of Mac OS X 10.6.4 to make its way into the hands of developers since seeding began in late April.

A public release of Mac OS X 10.6.4 had been rumored for WWDC, but it appears that Apple is not quite ready to push it out to the general public. The continued lack of documented known issues, small interval in build number since the last seed, and stability in featured fixes and focus areas all suggest that Apple may be wrapping up development on the latest maintenance update to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but the company's development schedule is unpredictable and thus we are unable to say with any degree of certainty when we can expect to see a public launch of Mac OS X 10.6.4.

After all of yesterday's news regarding iPhone 4, iOS 4, Safari 5 and other topics, things are beginning to settle down a bit today, allowing details and smaller items of interest to come to the foreground. In particular, Apple released a number of software updates for both developers and general users yesterday, and details of these releases are beginning to come to light.

- Safari 5: Released to all users yesterday, Safari 5 offers speed enhancements, increased HTML5 support, Reader functionality for facilitating reading of articles on cluttered pages, and new support for third-party extensions to add functionality to the browser application. One of the highlights demoed during Apple's Safari session last night at WWDC was Panic's "Coda Notes", an extension for annotating and sharing webpages. Developers are already quickly pushing out useful extensions for Safari, listings of which are being collated on several sites around the Internet. Some interesting ones:

- Gmail Checker
- Reload Button
- Amazon Search Bar

- Xcode 4: Released yesterday to developers at WWDC, the developer preview version of Xcode 4 is subject to Apple's non-disclosure policy for conference attendees, and thus only a few details have managed to leak out so far. Among the interesting claims coming out, however, is that Interface Builder has been integrated into Xcode, creating a single-window "unified interface" for the development environment.

Xcode 4 Developer Preview is the revolutionary new development environment for building Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications. With it, you can write better code, faster. WWDC attendees can log in and download this new version of Apple's Integrated Development Environment.

- iTunes 9.2: A beta version of iTunes 9.2 was seeded to developers alongside the iOS 4 Golden Master Candidate. iTunes 9.2 will be required for iPhone 4 compatibility and supports a number of new features, including support for iBooks enhancements such as PDF compatibility and syncing of bookmarks and other data across iOS 4 devices, app folder organization within iTunes for iOS 4 devices, faster backups for iOS 4 devices, and scrolling and other performance improvements.

One of the major enhancements included in iPhone 4 is a new camera system, integrating a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera including LED flash with a VGA-quality front-facing camera. While the rear-facing camera fails to match the resolution of other smartphones moving to 8 or even 12 megapixels, Steve Jobs was careful to mention during the iPhone's introduction that image quality also depends in large part on other factors, and the iPhone's backside-illuminated camera sensor with large pixel sizes allows it to deliver excellent image quality under normal and low-light situations.

As part of its feature page on the new camera, Apple has posted several example photos, noting that they are actual, unretouched photos taken using the iPhone 4. The images show clear, high-quality photos taken under optimal light conditions. Gizmodo took a look at the metadata included on one of the photos and offered its perspective on the image quality.

The performance under obviously optimal light is very good. The processing leans a bit to over-saturation and over-exposure, which is not a bad thing. Nikon goes for a similar image processing treatment in their cameras.

However, keep in mind that this image doesn't confirm Apple's claims about higher ISO and better performance under low light conditions, which is supposed to be a lot better thanks to the bigger backlit sensor. We will have to wait to see this in our review.

In addition to the image quality enhancements in the new rear camera, the system also supports 5x digital zoom, tap to focus, and simple sharing options.

And besides the still image features, iPhone 4's rear camera is also capable of HD video recording in 720p at 30 frames per second. With tap to focus, LED flash for video, and iMovie for iPhone for editing footage, Apple touts the new iPhone's ability to shoot, edit, and share high-quality video all on a phone with no need for access to a computer.

All Things Digital reports that just hours after being mentioned as a prominent example of the promise of App Store applications for the iPad early in Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote address at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference, Pulse News Reader disappeared from the App Store. According to the report, the removal was the result of a copyright complaint filed by The New York Times over the application's use of RSS feeds, which are used in a "visual mosaic" format to display news content to users.

But by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple (AAPL) informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company (NYT) declaring that "The New York Times Company believes your application named 'Pulse News Reader' infringes The New York Times Company's rights."

The report also notes with some amusement that The New York Times just last week published a feature profile on the application and its developers.

The application's developers, a pair of Stanford University graduate students, are planning to contact Apple today to determine exactly what is going on and whether they can simply remove New York Times content from the application.

Richard Samson, lawyer for The New York Times, argues in his complaint to Apple that the application's paid nature results in unlicensed usage of the newspaper's content, a violation of the Terms of Use. In addition, Samson complains about the application "framing" Times content in violation of the Terms of Use and objects to the featuring of Times content, which comes preloaded in the application, in App Store screenshots.

Update: Pulse News Reader is back in the App Store, and as All Things Digital notes, the restored app appears to be the same as the previous one despite the developers having already submitted an updated application without New York Times content pre-loaded.

The report also posts comments from The New York Times confirming its specific objections to the application. The newspaper and Apple have yet to comment, however, on the application's reappearance in the App Store.

Update 2: The New York Times believes that the application was restored in error. No comment from Apple or the developers yet.

"We want to be clear that we are willing to work with Pulse, but only under our terms of use," said Robert Christie, a spokesman for the Times Company.

On Tuesday afternoon the app reappeared in the App Store. When asked about the reversal, Mr. Christie said: "We think it has been reinstated by error, and we have asked Apple for an explanation."