MacRumors

Apple announced today that they had sold over 5 billion songs on iTunes. According to data from the NPD Group, iTunes remains the number one music retailer in the US. iTunes features the largest online music catalog with over eight million songs.

Apple also reveals that customers are buying and renting over 50,000 movies every day making iTunes the most popular online movie store as well. iTunes now houses over 20,000 TV episodes and over 2,000 films including over 350 in high definition.

Apple first reported it had become the number one music retailer in the U.S. in April.

A recently published patent application discovered by MacRumors reveals that Apple has been researching more advanced uses of the built in sensors on the iPhone to predict what the user wants to do. The patent application describes various scenarios in which a mobile phone could automatically change its configuration based on built-in sensors.

Apple describes the use of proximity sensors, ambient light detectors, temperature sensors and accelerometers to help determine the current state of the device. Apple has already incorporated basic state detection into the iPhone. When a user holds the current iPhone to their ear, the proximity sensor disables the touch screen to prevent unintentional key presses.

Combined with similar sensors in Bluetooth wireless headsets, Apple proposes some additional possibilities:

- Accelerometer to determine if device is being picked up
- Temperature, ambient light, and proximity sensors to determine if device in a pocket
- Proximity to see if the phone is held up to your ear or Bluetooth headset is being worn
- Audio detection to see if you start talking into Bluetooth headset vs phone

Based on a combination of these situations, the iPhone could change configuration. Examples given include: Turning vibrating ring on when placed in your pocket. Turning off speakerphone when holding the phone to your ear. Routing the call correctly to your wireless headset or your phone depending on which one you are planing on using at that time (based on speaking into, wearing or picking up the appropriate device).

One final intriguing possibility also described is using the docking/undocking of the iPhone to trigger certain events.

Specifically, Apple describes passing off voice over IP (VOIP) calls from the computer to the phone and back again. With the phone docked, the user could answer the phone using their computer's speaker and microphone, and then automatically pass this call over to the phone when it is removed from the dock. This passing-off of phone calls between the iPhone and iChat was previously depicted in a concept iPhone video (at 14m 15s) by Abilene Christian University.

The National Post claims that Rogers Communications will be instituting changes to their mobile phone plans in the next two weeks in preparation for the iPhone launch. Rogers has traditionally charged significantly more for data plans than mobile carriers in the U.S.

"There's a recognition on the part of Rogers that the world has changed," Mr. Mohamed said. "We'll be changing our prices to reflect that."

Today, an unconfirmed data sheet was posted to ehMac.ca (via Electronista) claiming to be leaked plans from Rogers. If the specs are to be believed, Rogers is planning on introducing data plans comparable to AT&T data plan pricing.

Specifically, Rogers is rumored to be offering $30 unlimited data plans for consumers, and $45 unlimited data plans for enterprise. Customers, however, will have to sign 3-year agreements. The remainder of details are very similar to leaked AT&T records. We should note that this data has been unverified and could simply represent a hoax, and there are some doubts in the original discussion thread.

MercuryNews reports on how the iPhone and upcoming App Store are attracting many developers to Apple's mobile platform. Loopt's cofounder, Sam Altman, describes how he's seen an excitement amongst mobile developers:

"People who said they'd never start a mobile (applications) company because they didn't want to rely on the carriers are now starting companies focused only on the iPhone."

The existence of stable development tools, relatively favorable sales percentages, and streamlined application delivery are cited as the most attractive features of the iPhone platform. No other mobile platforms provide as integrated a solution as the App Store to distribute applications directly to the customer. Despite some vocal concerns about the 70%/30% developer/Apple split on App sales, other carriers are said to take up to 60% of revenue on other platforms. One analyst projects that the App store could create a $1 billion-plus iPhone ecosystem by the end of 2009.

Of interest, Apple based the iPhone software development kit (SDK) around the existing Mac development tools. This common toolset has even led some to suggest that these new iPhone developers may also begin developing for the Mac.

Mozilla announced the launch of the Firefox 3 web browser today. Firefox 3 is said to incorporate over 15,000 improvements and claims to be over two to three times faster than its predecessor.

Were really proud of Firefox 3 and it just shows what a committed, energized global community can do when they work together, said John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla.

Firefox 3 offers enhancements to its user interface, increased performance, security and customization. Top new features listed include:

- One-Click Bookmarking
- Improved Performance
- Full Zoom
- Smart Location Bar
- Platform-Native Look & Feel
- Password Manager

Firefox 3 is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux as a free download at Mozilla.com.

Growing threads on both MacRumors and Apple's discussion forums are reporting intermittent vertical striping with current generation 15" MacBook Pros.

According to affected users, the striping appears to occur when the display is changing brightness, often when waking from sleep or powering up or taking pictures with Photo Booth. To temporarily resolve the issue, users have shut and re-opened the lid or used the ctrl-shift-eject keyboard combination to reset the LCD.

This particular issue has been documented by several sites over the past several months, however Apple has yet to respond in any formal manner.

The Khronos Group, a member-funded consortium focused on establishing open standard application programming interfaces (APIs), has announced the formation of the "Compute Working Group" to focus on open standards for parallel computing across graphics processing units (GPUs) and CPUs. Apple, AMD (ATI) and Nvidia are amongst the initial members.

The group will specifically evaluate and establish Apple's proposed Open Computing Language (OpenCL) specification. OpenCL aims "to enable any application to tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU and CPU resources through an approachable C-based language." The press release gives us a broader overview of what OpenCL is trying to accomplish:

A widely available open-standard compute programming specification with high-performance, general computation support and robust numerics will complement existing solutions and further liberate GPU-based compute power from the realm of graphics-only applications and provide a multi-vendor, portable interface for coordinating all the many-core GPUs and multi-core CPUs within a system. Such capability will have broad applicability - including a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem by providing a powerful compute front-end to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, and a platform for accelerating tasks such as physics and image processing / recognition.

The Khronos Group is also responsible for OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards as well as many others.

At WWDC, Apple first announced its plans to introduce performance enhancing technologies into their next version of Mac OS X (Snow Leopard). The technologies included "Grand Central" and "OpenCL" which promise to improve computer performance by taking advantage of modern multi-core processors as well as the GPUs found on modern video cards.

According to the president of the Khronos group, this technology could be used in both desktop and handheld devices in the future.

Apple recently took the wraps off their first Apple Retail store in Australia and officially announced the date and time for the grand opening. The Sydney, Australia store will have its grand opening on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. This means the store will be open in time for the Australian launch of the iPhone 3G on July 11th.

Located at 77 King Street, the three story building is expected to have about 1335 square meters of floor space. Two other Apple Stores are expected to follow: one in Melbourne, and another in Sydney.

Additional photo galleries of the new store can be found here: gallery one, gallery two, and gallery three (by Kenneth Nordahl).

AppleInsider reports that Apple detailed their use of a JavaScript framework called SproutCore at WWDC last week.

SproutCore is an "open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications". Apple also contributed to performance updates and added new functionality to the SproutCore framework, which serves as the basis for their new MobileMe web-applications. Apple describes the user experience for their new MobileMe web applications as Desktop class, providing features such as drag and drop, click and drag, and keyboard shortcuts (guided tour video).

Apple's interest in SproutCore is, in part, to reduce their dependence on Adobe's Flash player, which traditionally is used for more interactive content on the web. Being based entirely in JavaScript, any modern web browser can run these SproutCore based applications without any additional plugins.

Those frameworks offer prebuilt code that has been polished to work on all browsers, making it easier for the developer to concentrate on what their web page should be doing rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel for various low level functions. In that respect, open JavaScript frameworks can replace Flash without requiring any secondary plugin runtime because they are simply open JavaScript that runs in the browser directly.

Apple has also notably resisted adding Flash support to the iPhone, and made significant efforts to optimize Javascript in future versions of Safari. These improvements should trickle down into the iPhone's mobile Safari as well. This being said, the functionality of SproutCore can not replicate many of the advanced functions of Flash (such as videos and advanced animation).

The article makes the leap that SproutCore represents "Cocoa for Windows" suggesting that Apple may use the tool to develop cross-platform web-versions of its productivity applications, such as iWork, but this appears to be speculative. In a related note, a new startup called 280 Slides has introduced a web-based PowerPoint/Keynote presentation application. 280 Slides was founded by two former Apple employees and also utilizes a Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework called Objective-J/Cappuccino.