Hasta La Gadget!

Apple has posted a news bulletin for iPhone developers, informing them they may not use the phone’s geolocation features primarily for delivering targeted ads.

What that means is if you’re playing a game that doesn’t use geolocation for gameplay, and all it’s doing is tracking your location to serve location-based ads, it’ll get rejected. (Many media outlets have reported that Apple has banned location-based ads altogether, which is not the case.)

Apple’s news bulletin reads:

The Core Location framework allows you to build applications which know where your users are and can deliver information based on their location, such as local weather, nearby restaurants, ATMs, and other location-based information.

If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.

Many apps currently serve location-based ads through AdMob, an advertising firm recently acquired by Google. Apple’s new rule implies apps using AdMob ads will get rejected if geolocation is not part of the software’s functionality.

In a statement provided to Wired.com, an Apple spokeswoman said the move was for the benefit of the consumer.

“The Core Location framework allows developers to deliver information to customers based on their location,” an Apple spokeswoman said. “This should be done with the customer’s permission and for a purpose that is directly beneficial to the customer.”

Many, however, have been quick to conclude that the regulation is a move for Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising company Apple purchased in January, to gain a leg up in mobile advertising against Google’s recently acquired mobile ad firm AdMob. It’s conceivable that Apple could indeed be improving the mobile ad experience for customers, the Core Location regulation could also be an effort to deter developers from serving ads with AdMob.

My friend Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo argues, “It’s not to protect you.”

“It’s not too much of a stretch to see Apple’s ad platform in the future being the best way to deliver ads in apps, which might offer perks like, say, location-based targeted advertising, or more dynamic ads than you can do now on an iPhone,” Buchanan writes. “It’s also not crazy to think Apple’s way is going to be the only way to get some of those features, like location-based ads.”

Updated 12:30 p.m. PDT with a statement from Apple.

Photo: Fr3d.org/Flickr

Automakers such as Audi, Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Honda release previews of the ads to air during the Superbowl. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10448210-48.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Car Tech blog/a/p

There’s a 2-year contract involved, of course, but this is still an incredible bargain on a phone that cost $200 just a few months ago. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-10448198-58.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Cheapskate/a/p

It likely won’t be ready for your next vehicle purchase, but some researchers from Imperial College London say that this rather modest-looking piece of material could eventually do nothing short of change of the way that cars are powered. The material itself is still a bit of a mystery, as you might expect, but it’s apparently able to store and discharge electrical energy, and (here’s the real kicker) is strong and light enough to be used for a car’s bodywork — essentially making the car itself one giant battery. That would obviously open up a whole host of possibilities, including being used to complement traditional batteries for even longer runtimes, or being used on its own to make smaller and lighter vehicles. The applications also wouldn’t necessarily be limited to cars, and the researchers specifically mention cellphones as another area that could see smaller and lighter (or longer-lasting) devices if the material is used. Let’s get on that, shall we? Video demonstration after the break.

[Thanks, Clinton C]

Continue reading Researchers say new material could let cars be powered by their bodywork

Researchers say new material could let cars be powered by their bodywork originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PhysOrg  |  Imperial College London  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on June 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mac only
A few months ago we found an awesome online regular expression (regex) utility that was something most programmers could really appreciate. Assuming you have Adobe Air installed you could also download that regex tool onto your computer so that it would also be available offline. At the time I didn’t think it could get much more convenient than that, but I was wrong.

If you’re looking for a tool that is slightly less robust then maybe all you’ll need is the Regex Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard. As you can see in the screenshot above it is fairly straightforward, and it works pretty well for testing out any regular expressions that you develop. Something like this would also be handy to have for people just learning how to create the regular expressions.

The widget is nice if you’re working with a small amount of text, but it gets a little cumbersome once the scrolling has to kick in. What you see in the screenshot above is the actual size of the widget, and there’s currently no way to resize it. In my opinion there should be three different viewing modes for a widget like this:

• Auto-minimize – This mode would collapse the widget down to a simple icon when not being used. That way it takes up a minimal amount of room on your Dashboard.
• Compact – Expands to the size of the widget in the screenshot above.
• Maximized – Expands the widget to take up the full screen, or it maximizes to a user-defined height and width.

Even without different viewing modes the widget will still be very convenient for me, but being able to increase its size would make it that much more useful. I definitely recommend this widget for anyone that is learning or has to use regular expressions.

Get the Regex Widget for Mac OS X

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