If you're reading this, you've successfully managed to survive the Thanksgiving weekend as well as Black Friday, so Happy Cyber Monday! Now you can stay at home in your jammies and soak in the bargains online, and if recent IBM data is correct, many of you will be doing it from the comfort of your iPad. Didn't hear about that? Then read on to find out all about it...
AllThingsD has summed up the Thanksgiving weekend and the Black Friday mania that followed rather nicely with a look at new IBM data that shows many iPad owners were doing their holiday shopping online -- and some were even shopping for their next iPad. “The [Apple] iPad generated more traffic than any other tablet or smartphone, reaching nearly 10 percent of online shopping," the IBM report revealed. "This was followed by iPhone at 8.7 percent and [Google] Android 5.5 percent. The iPad dominated tablet traffic at 88.3 percent followed by the Barnes & Noble Nook at 3.1 percent, Amazon Kindle at 2.4 percent and the Samsung Galaxy at 1.8 percent.” eBay's PayPal unit even got into the groove, noting that one of their bestselling Black Friday items was none other than the iPad 2, which sold 250 units per hour between noon and 8am PST.
iTunes 11 missed its October release and we're now in the final days of November, so Apple is running out of time quickly. According to MacRumors, the release may be imminent, with one of their forum members posting an email received from German music distributor Feiyr claiming the software "is about to be released within the next days." The distributor is asking their music artists to prepare new pictures and image galleries as part of their Feiyr account to help expedite the prep work required for the new release.
Despite the love users feel for Evernote, the same has not been the case since the company took over Skitch for Mac, the company's popular annotation software. Skitch has taken a bit of a backwards turn with regards to its feature set on the Mac version since debuting in 2008, but the company is now acknowledging the problems and charting a course to get back on track. Skitch 2.0 for Mac is essentially a new foundation which Evernote plans to build upon, which will soon include missing features such as FTP/sFTP support, automatic sharing URLs, short URLs, direct hosting of images and the ability to use multiple fonts, custom colors, streamlined cropping and resizing and automatic type tool selection. Evernote promises "the best Skitch is yet to come," so stay tuned for these improvements in the near future.
On Saturday, MacRumors reported that both Apple and Samsung are looking to ramp up the hurt on each other in their respective patent infringement battle in the U.S. Samsung drew first blood by adding the fourth-generation iPad and iPad mini to their own claims last week, which was soon followed by Apple's own attempt to add six recent Samsung products to its own claims, singling out the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Tab 8.9 Wi-Fi, Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, Rugby pro and Samsung S III Mini. All this activity and it's still early days for this lawsuit, which isn't expected to go to trial until March, 2014.
As noted on the MOTUNation.com message boards, audio software developer BIAS has managed to get their website back up and running, which is good news for owners of its abandoned software such as Peak. Due to the company's draconian copy protection, users were unable to reinstall their software without the proper online authorization, which stopped working after the website went dark last year. The BIAS website is again serving updates to its products, in case you weren't able to grab the final releases prior to the company closing its doors. The even better news is that Peak appears to work fine on OS X Mountain Lion, which we were able to confirm after installing our own copy. Still no word on whether the BIAS software will eventually find another home, but for those of us who have invested in their products over the years, all hope is not quite yet lost.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
