Gallery: iPod touch internals from the FCC

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During today's Apple event, Steve Jobs announced that the next version of the iPad flavor of iOS, 4.2, will be available as a free update in November 2010. The iOS 4.2 version will support the iPhone and iPod touch (4.0 friendly versions of those devices) in addition to the iPad.

Among the new features in 4.2 will be folder organization for apps on the iPad, bringing parity with the 4.x smaller devices.

Innovations include AirPlay, which will allow you to stream video and audio from iTunes to your iPad or from your iPad to the newly-announced Apple TV. Also added: printing! The iPad will be able to print to networked printers or printers connected to your computer, details TBD.

Not much of a surprise, but nice to have some details: Cult of Mac cites a source close to Apple saying that the live stream of today's iPod event will be used to put some real-time load on Apple's new North Carolina data center. The facility isn't all the way operational quite yet, but it's apparently ready enough to play a major role in today's festivities.

The NC datacenter is five times the size of Apple's similar facility on the West Coast and is officially intended to support the iTunes music and app stores. Obviously there's a lot more horsepower needed for streaming content, so here's where you'll find it.

As noted last night, today's live stream is intended for Intel Mac OS X 10.6 users in Safari, iPhone/iPod touch users running iOS 3.1 or higher, and iPad users. Support for the HTTP Live Streaming methodology is included in the current version of the ffmpeg open source library, so in theory apps like Mplayer should be able to handle the stream; VLC may also work.

As the Atlantic storm season heats up and US East Coast residents warily eye Hurricane Earl's projected path, the team at Kitty Code has put their flagship iPhone app -- Hurricane 3.3 -- on sale for US$1.99 through September 5. The separate iPad version, Hurricane HD, remains priced at $3.99. We've checked out both the mini and mega versions previously.

There are scores of hurricane-related apps on the store, so if the Big Kahuna isn't to your liking you have some other options too. Stay safe!

There are plenty of hurdles between a good idea and App Store success; even after your killer app hits the virtual shelves, the challenges of discoverability and competitors sandbagging your app with Astroturfed bad reviews add up to plenty of headaches. Still, once past the biggest stumbling block -- Apple giving a thumbs up or thumbs down -- things should get easier, right?

Unfortunately, some intriguing apps end up in approval limbo, the stranded state between all-clear and no-thanks that's reserved for some of the most innovative and paradigm-busting apps; the apps that make Apple go "Hmm..." and force the app approval team to exercise the pocket veto. Without a clear rejection (telling the dev what can be fixed), there's nothing to do but wait.

The most high-profile limbo case is Google Voice, which as far as we know is still being reviewed by Apple's team more than a year after it was submitted. The latest is Briefs, a well-regarded app prototyping tool which may be running afoul of the no-interpreted-code ban in section 3.3.2 of Apple's developer agreement, despite the assertion that Briefs doesn't work in a way that's forbidden by Apple's rules. Even though developer Rob Rhyne made a cogent case to Apple's team on the merits, and even with some high-level support from contacts made at WWDC, Briefs remains unapproved and unrejected.

Rather than wait indefinitely with his 1.0 growing stale, Rhyne has decided to offer the existing version as open source, which iPhone developers can compile and install on their testing devices. Rob's colleague Jeff Lamarche at Martian Craft voices his frustration here.

In many ways, this could be an App Store success story: developer dedication and innovation, open lines of communication between indies and Apple, an open source tool that can improve app development for scores of coders. The only problem is that darned silent treatment, and the missing timeline for escalation. If an app can't make it on the store, it seems the least Apple ought to do is say so and say why.

While it may not come as much of a surprise, it's still going to aggravate owners of aging PPC Macs that the upcoming Firefox 4 browser is probably going to drop support for the older architecture. Mozilla program manager Mike Beltzner noted that the next version of the open-source browser, currently in beta, is not working on PowerPC machines now and the update will not be automatically offered to them.

Computerworld points to two separate technologies in FF4 that are standing in the way of a PPC build: the OOPP isolated plugin system, which prevents browser extensions from gumming up the works; and the JIT (just in time) compiler for the new JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine, which sounds like a drunken simian but is actually supposed to speed up JavaScript compilation manyfold. Neither have a functional equivalent on the PowerPC.

It's not clear if the Camino browser, which does work on both Mac processor platforms and is based on the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, will be able to update to the Gecko 2.0 platform that powers Firefox 4. In the same message thread, Beltzner allowed that developers could certainly work on a PPC version that left out the two problematic components, but that it most likely would not be allowed to carry the Firefox brand (which has happened before with custom optimized builds for specific architectures). He also pointed out that there aren't development resources within Mozilla to extend support for OOPP and the JIT compiler to PPC, and that outside help has not been forthcoming.

[via Download Squad]