Apple

You may eventually be able to transfer files between a computer and mobile device just by placing the two near each other.

Published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an Apple patent application known as "Apparatus and method for interacting with handheld carrier hosting media content," describes a file transfer technology that automatically kicks in when two devices are positioned next to each other. One device would sense when the other is nearby and then send or receive a certain document, picture, song, or other item.

As one example, you may be creating an e-mail … Read more

Apple sold less than 33 million iPhones last quarter. No, wait, it sold more than 42 million. Actually, those are just the lowest and highest predictions offered by a bevy of analysts surveyed by Fortune.

Among the 48 analysts questioned about Apple's iPhone sales last quarter, Sterne Agee's Shaw Wu was the most bearish, offering an estimate of just 32.5 million. On the other end of the spectrum, Michel Contant of the Braeburn Group was the most bullish, eyeing sales of 42.5 million.

The average turned out to be almost 36.9 million, while the median … Read more

CSS Variables, a handy technology to ease Web page programming, could be one casualty in Safari with Google moving its resources to its browser engine, Blink.

Google engineers wanted to "fork" the WebKit browser engine project that underlies both Safari and Chrome so they could accelerate the pace of Chrome development and adopt changes too extensive to fit into a single open-source project. Even though splitting Blink away from WebKit may make each browser engine more nimble, it also means it's harder to cooperate.

That's because common features must be developed and maintained by duplicate teams … Read more

The home computing revolution of the 1980s and '90s was defined by a battle between two titans: Apple and Microsoft. After its IPO and the introduction of the Macintosh, Apple was riding high.

The company started losing the PC market in the '90s, though. Microsoft released Windows 3.0 as a cheaper alternative to the Macintosh in 1990, but it was the release of Windows 95, which brought a comparable GUI (graphical user interface) to PCs, that really hurt Apple. And Apple also suffered from a lack of vision, owing to the absence of its visionary leader, Steve Jobs, from … Read more

The WebKit browser engine is becoming a less flexible foundation for open-source projects with the departure of Google from the project this week and Apple's consequent paring back of the project.

WebKit is a broad project that includes participation from many interested parties -- not just Apple and Google, but also BlackBerry, Samsung, Amazon, Oracle, Adobe Systems, and the programmers involved with the KDE and Gnome user interfaces for Linux. Indeed, the open-source project began as KDE's KHTML engine for the Konqueror browser before Apple got involved.

Google's Chrome team left WebKit this week, forking the open-source … Read more

Apple's iTunes Store in China has kicked out an iOS app that offered electronic versions of books banned by the Chinese government.

Hao Peiqiang, the developer of the bookstore app, yesterday posted a letter that he received from Apple informing him that the app would be removed, because "it includes content that is illegal in China."

Apple's letter explained that while the app is no longer available in China, it can still be downloaded from the iTunes store in other countries.

Apple's form e-mail didn't specify which content was illegal. Known as "Jingdian … Read more

When it comes to smartphones in the U.S., Apple remains on top, a new study from ComScore says.

During the three months ended in February, Apple held onto its title as the No. 1 smartphone vendor in the U.S. the market tracker said. The Cupertino, Calif., company controlled 39 percent of the market, up 3.9 percentage points from the three months ended in November. Samsung, in the No. 2 spot, held 21 percent of the market, up 1 percent point.

There's some bad news for the other Android rivals, however. HTC, Motorola, and LG all saw … Read more

Apple may be eyeing its own "Street View" type navigation system and one that offers a key benefit over Google's version.

Published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple's "3D Position Tracking for Panoramic Imagery Navigation" patent filing describes a navigation technology that looks and works like Street View. The system would display a panoramic image of a certain location on your mobile device, allowing you to virtually move around the area.

Google's Street View forces you to swipe your finger or tap on a direction icon to journey along … Read more

Blink, Google's new fork of the WebKit browser engine, is alive.

Yesterday, Google announced the project, which splits its browser work from Apple's in the open-source WebKit project. Today, Blink is up and running.

The first updates -- including a new list of 36 Blink "owners" who have authority to approve changes -- are arriving.

"Chrome 28 will be the first blinking release," Chrome programmer Mike West said in a Hacker News comment. The current stable version of Chrome is version 26; new versions arrive about every six weeks.

"The repository seems to … Read more