Apple has lost a visonary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.

According to a statement just issued by Apple’s Board of Directors, company co-founder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs has passed away (Wednesday 5 October 2011 ).

No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.   (by Tim cook)

Jobs remained Chairman of the Board at the company, as well as director and an Apple employee. He recommended that company COO Tim Cook take his place as CEO. Yesterday, Cook gave his first keynote address as CEO, unveiling the new iPhone 4S.

Jobs had battled cancer, and in 2004 had an operation related to the disease. In recent years, illness had forced him to step back from his role as CEO of Apple on separate occasions. He also had a liver transplant in 2009 during one of those medical leaves.

But after each battle, he came back and continued his amazing work at Apple. In 2007, he unveiled the iPhone. In 2010, the iPad. His last appearance on stage was at Apple’s 2011 WWDC event in San Francisco. There, he laid the groundwork for Apple’s latest innovations including iOS 5, OS X Lion, and iCloud.

It’s amazing that most of us have not had the pleasure to meet Steve Jobs, but yet he’s touched all of our lives without a doubt. If we could all live half the life the Jobs lead, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. We’ve lost a visionary and a genius that has left behind a legacy that will never be forgotten. Rest in Peace Steve Jobs.

(Src TechCrunch)

The next version of Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox 6, will be officially released on Tuesday, August 16. There are no major UI changes; most of the other changes are under the hood. That’s a welcome upgrade as Firefox 6 is reportedly 20% faster than Firefox 5. Also, while Firefox 6 does offer full screen support, it’s not Lion-native fullscreen support, which is somewhat of a disappointment.

For those of you who don’t want to wait till Tuesday, you can actually download the final release of Firefox 6.0 here from Mozilla’s FTP servers.

The Google Plus social network has kicked into high gear, despite a limited number of available invites over the first few weeks. Starting today it’s even easier for iOS users to share with Circles, follow a Stream or do rapid-fire messaging with a Huddle: the iPhone app for Google+ is now in the US store.

The free app supports the Stream, Circles and Huddle features; it’s just now downloading on our iPhones so we’ll check out the detailed options shortly. Enjoy, Plussians!

A few quick notes: the app is truly iPhone-only, and will not install on the iPod touch or iPad. Some users running the iOS 5 beta report crashes, which is unsurprising but worth mentioning. Also, it’s very difficult to search for the app in the App Store (one would think that the world’s largest search company would know that ‘+’ is a common search modifier and tricky to include in a literal search string); the easiest way to find it, short of the direct link, is to browse the list of all the apps published by Google.

Thanks to MediaKat for the tip.

Update: The app was updated within an hour of release. Fastest update we’ve ever seen. From the app’s description it appears to have been an issue on Apple’s end (ouch!):

We discovered an issue with the version of the iPhone Google+ App that was on the App Store. When we launched, the App Store started serving a previous test version of the App which didn’t have the stability and fixes that the latest version had. It started serving the correct version a little later. If you downloaded within the first 1 hour 40 mins, you may have downloaded the older test version.

Cover of iSteve The Book of Jobs

“iSteve The Book of Jobs” – The official biography of Steve Jobs is now abailable in Amazon. It is abvilable in hardcover and a Kindle edition which is US$18.00 and US$14.99 respectively. The book iSteve: The Book of Jobs is written by former managing editor of Time magazine Walter Isaacson.

iSteve: The Book of Jobs will be published by Simon & Schuster on March 6, 2012 and is set to be 448 pages. From the Amazon product description: “From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In iSteve: The Book of Jobs, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life.

According to the press release, Isaacson spent three years interviewing Jobs, his family members, Apple colleagues, and competitors to write this book. He has written biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Kissinger.

The book is sure to be an international bestseller and at the time of this writing is currently ranked #28 in Amazon’s Top 100 books and #1 in three separate categories: Technology, Biography & History, and Business.
Source tuaw.com

WWDC was first held in Monterey, California in 1983. This small gathering of developers has blossomed into one of the major annual events for Apple’s extended community of vendors, engineers and enterprise/academic IT management.

In addition to the ‘meat’ of the event (technical sessions covering hundreds of topics for developers, code labs and face time with Apple engineering staff), WWDC has become an opportunity for Apple to announce new versions of Mac OS X, new hardware and new versions of iOS. The event has grown in importance as Apple has eliminated or scaled back its participation in trade shows like Macworld Expo.

Read on for the best of WWDC Past: a funeral for an operating system, a spoof of Steve Jobs and much applause. Read more…

One of the french blog NoWhereElse nicely showing rumors regarding the iPhone 5. There are lots of rumors going for the next generation iPhone 5. Like the iPhone 5 will definitely get the new A5 processor which is dual core processor, other rumors are NFC chip technology for near field payment, 3D, 4 inch screen, metal back.

Next generation iPhone 5 is rumor to be launch on jun 2011 at WWDC or at  September.

Steve Hemmerstoffer from nowhereelse.fr, showcases 27 of the most popular iPhone 5 rumors to hit the web. He also has added in some percentages that indicate how likely a feature is to actually become reality on next iPhone 5 generation. Read more…

iOS 4.3 Software and features

This update available from today, contains new features and improvements, including the following:

• Personal Hotspot*
- Share iPhone 4 cellular data connection with up to 5 devices (combination of up to 3 Wi-Fi, 3 Bluetooth, and 1 USB)
• iTunes Home Sharing
- Play music, movies and TV shows from a shared iTunes library on a Mac or PC (requires iTunes 10.2)
• New AirPlay features**
- Play videos from the Photos app including the Camera Roll album, iTunes previews, enabled third-party apps
and websites on Apple TV
- Play slideshows from Photos on Apple TV using
transitions available on Apple TV Read more…

Steve Jobs today introduced iPad 2, At a special event in San Francisco. New iPad 2 is an all new design which features:

1.2GHz Dual-core A5 chip processor – Which is 2x faster than original iPad A4 chip processor and Graphics performance is nine times faster. Display on iPad 2 look amazing.

Gyroscope – As in iPhone and iPod touch.

Built-in cameras – Front and Rare facing camera. The front camera is capable of recording VGA-resolution (640-by-480) video at 30 frames per second with audio and photos at 640-by-480. The back camera can record HD video at 720p at 30 frames per second with audio. When in still camera mode, the back camera has a 5X digital zoom.

The iPad 2 features a 9.7-inch LCD screen with a 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch, like the original previous iPad. Striking things about the iPad 2 is that’s dramatically thinner. It is 33% thinner than original iPad. That is 13.4mm to 8.8mm. And its lighter too only 1.3 pound compared to 1.5 pound of original ipad. It’s available in both black and white color. Read more…

Apple has an official Twitter account for the App Store, appropriately named @appstore, which promises “official App Store tweets including featured apps, exclusive offers, and more.”

The first post from the account came only a few hours ago, but there are already 80,000 followers signed up.

One of the questions that people have had with the Mac App Store was the question of “discoverability” of apps on the store that aren’t “featured” or on the “top” lists; hopefully this account will be one more way for Apple to get the word out about new apps that you might not otherwise hear about. If you aren’t a Twitter user, you can always follow the RSS feed for the account. If you’re on Facebook, App Store is there, too.

Apple started the countdown to 10 billion earlier in the week with a counter on its homepage, so we knew the time was near. The are hundreds of thousands of apps to chose from in the App Store in a number of categories.

As of this writing Apple has not said who downloaded the 10 billionth app or what that app was. The page on the company’s Web site announcing the 10 billionth app says the winner is Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent, UK.

Davis downloaded Paper Glider, an app that tests how far can you flick and fly a paper plane.

For downloading the 10 billionth app Davis will receive a $10,000 iTunes Gift card from Apple.