The best dang iPhone and iPod touch show in the ‘verse hits the net again tonight to talk iOS 5.0.1, battery life issues, Apple televisions, Gmail for iPhone, and more… with our special guest Marc Edwards of Bjango!

Time: 6pm PT, 9pm ET, 1am GMT!

Place: http://live.tipb.com/live/

Show notes: Follow along with us!

(You can watch from iPhone via Ustream Viewer app (here’s how) and iPad (we recommend Duet Browser.)

Look for Mobile Nations in Ustream after 9pm EDT!

If you have any questions or stuff you want us to make sure we cover tweet them to @TiPb, email them to podcast@tipb.com, or leave them in the comments below!

Missed a compelling piece of iPhone news, a great review, or a killer how-to? We’re not collecting absolutely everything in iPhone here — you can hit up TiPb.com/iPhone for that! — but we’re carefully picking what we think is the best of the last 7 days and presenting it here for your review.

And hey! — these double as show notes for our iPhone Live! podcast tonight at 9pm Eastern. So join us at TiPb.com/live and follow along!

Meta

• Introducing Mobile Nations, our new community network brand!
• Announcing the winners of the Mobile Nations No Tricks, Just Treats Halloween Costume Contest!
• iPad Live 80: Wonder Vader, dammit
• TiPb TV 2011 Hallowe'en special
• Hey! You can subscribe to and watch our videos via RSS and iTunes now!

iOS 5.0.1 and battery life

• iDoodle: Drained
• Apple admits iOS 5 battery issues, working on update
• Apple releases iOS 5.0.1 to developers, includes battery life fix, iPad 1 gestures

Gmail for iOS

• Google releases official Gmail app for iPhone, iPad [Updated]
• What is Notification Error "no valid 'aps-environment' entitlement string found for application?
• http://www.tipb.com/2011/11/02/gmail-ios-gmail-android/

Apple Television

• Apple television, the next great unicorn chase
• More Siri-powered Apple television set rumors

News

• Apple airs new iPhone 4S commercials: Siri, Camera, iCloud
• Apple misses iTunes Match launch deadline
• Samsung wants iOS source code, carrier contracts, to depose Jony Ive
• Sprint claims iPhone users consume much less data than other platforms

Jailbreak

• Why the iPhone 4 Siri port will not be distributed (yet)

Apps

• Apple's GarageBand comes to iPhone

Tips

• How to quickly dismiss iOS 5 banner notifications on iPhone, iPad
• Top 10 secret Siri commands
• Top 10 tips and tricks for new iPhone and iPad users

Contests

• Contest Winners: Jawbone ERA, Lifeproof case, The Early Edition 2, ReaddleDocs for iPad

Apple has made iOS 5.0.1 for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV 2 available to developers.

• Fixes bugs affecting battery life
• Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
• Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
• Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation
• Contains security improvements

If you’re a developer and you want to test on it, hit the link below.

Source: developer.apple.com

Jim Dalrymple of The Loop received the following statement from Apple concerning iOS 5 battery life complaints:

"A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices," an Apple spokesperson told The Loop. "We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks."

If you’re one of the few, the small, the bugged, TiPb has compiled a list of battery life tips that might help you fix or at least minimize the issue in the meantime.

Source: The Loop

Yahoo! released their new personalized living magazine Livestand, today. It includes stories from ABC News, Forbes, Source Interlink, Yahoo’s global media network, and more. From these sources, you can create a “Personal Mix” of the topics that interest you. Additionally, Livestand supports up to 4 profiles so that each member of the family can have their own Personal Mix.

Livestand is your living magazine app, where the news and stories you care about come to life with visually stunning photos and videos. Explore its publications for breaking headlines, celebrity news, sports, or whatever you're into—as you've never seen it. You’ll lose yourself for hours with its electrifying images and captivating content. Livestand is the ultimate tapping, scrolling, and swiping magazine experience!

• Inline videos and photo galleries are displayed in a unique way always tailored to what will look best on the iPad.
• Fresh Content: Articles, photos, and video update constantly. Headline news, stock quotes, and Twitter feeds update automatically.
• Make It Personal: Create your own "Personal Mix" magazine of your favorite topics from Yahoo! and around the web, whether it’s science headlines or the latest design trends.
• All About You: With Yahoo! Today, exclusive to Livestand, you get a personalized serving of your daily basics: weather, stocks, horoscope, and TV. Add the titles you want to "My Library".
• Up To Four Unique Profiles: Everyone in your family can have their own personal Livestand on the same iPad.
• Spread The News: Share your favorite articles by email or on Facebook right from Livestand.

Livestand from Yahoo! is available on the iPad for Free.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Phil from Android Central put the brand new (and currently pulled for bug fixes) Gmail for iPhone and iPad app on an iPhone 4 and iPad 2 running iOS 5 against the Gmail app on a Samsung Nexus S running Gingerbread and a Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Honeycomb.

It’s easy to see Google took the easy way out with Gmail for iOS, going for a tragically thin native wrapper around the similar-old web content. Maybe they’re still limited by the iOS SDK, maybe they want to keep Android as the premiere Gmail experience (and who could blame them?), maybe it’s a hormone thing, or maybe they just want to prove Facebook isn’t the only rich, powerful web company that can’t release a stable iOS app, who knows?

Hopefully Google takes this as an opportunity to learn and gives their massive iPhone and iPad wielding user base a new Gmail app worthy of the name. And of Google.

Source: Android Central

Google released their new Gmail for iPhone and iPad app today and due to some launch-time bugs involving push notifications, TiPb’s getting a lot of questions about Notification Error “no valid ‘aps-environment’ entitlement string found for application, what it means, and what can be done about it.

Short answer: It means Google messed up Push Notifications and there’s nothing you can do about it until Google fixes it and Apple pushes out that fix.

Long answer: We reached out to Paul Haddad of Tapbots and Tweetbot fame to get a better informed idea of what’s going on, and this is what he was kind enough to share:

In the iOS Provisioning Portal you need to various different certificates. For all apps you’ll normally generate a Development, AdHoc distribution and Store distribution certificates. For push enabled apps you also need to generate Development and Production Push certificates.

What I think happens is that most people start by generating and downloading the 3 standard certificates and at some later point generate the Push certificates. However when you create the Push certificates it modifies the standard certificates in some way that tells the OS that it can be used for push notifications. You’ll often re-generate/download the Development and AdHoc certificates as you add new devices for testing, but you only have to re-genrate the Store certificates once a year when renewing with Apple.

So again what Google probably did is create the standard certificates, then create the Push certificates and didn’t re-generate/download the Store certificate. It’s a really easy mistake to make and there’s no indication of a problem anywhere within the submission process to Apple. It’s also a pretty trivial thing to fix and I’d expect Google to re-submit and Apple to expedite the release pretty quickly.

It does make me wonder why Apple didn’t catch this issue, my guess is something about the way they run apps prevents this error from showing up.

As far as I know the only way to see if this is a problem or not is to run the following command

codesign -dvvvv –entitlements – .app

and look for the following two lines in the output

aps-environment production

Thanks Paul!

Well happy Hallowe’en TiPb Nation! And Mobile Nations! Wow, what an awesome response to our No Tricks, Just Treats Halloween Costume Contest! The judges worked long and hard going through the 300+ submissions in the, and they have finally narrowed it down and chosen 15 winners! There were so many incredible entries, from funny to scary with everything in between, and all of them were so creative, it was a really hard contest to judge! We appreciate all the pictures that were submitted, and hope that you all had as much fun entering as we did getting to see everyone.

Watch the video above for all the fun and check out the winners — and some of your favorite, and might I say wonderful — ahem! — Mobile Nations staffers below and in our official Flickr Gallery!

Mobile Nations Halloween Costume Contest Winners!

Scariest costume

Cutest kid/family

Coolest pumpkin

Best couple outfit

Biggest fan of their platform

Most creative use of a phone/tablet

Funniest costume

Hottest costume

Best impersonation of a Mobile Nations writer/editor

Most stylish entry

Thanks again to everyone that participated! If you are one of the winners listed above, CONGRATULATIONS! Watch your email for your Hallowe’en treat from TiPb Mobile Nations.

Google has officially announced a native Gmail app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Yes, you read that right. No, this isn’t a dream. You finally — finally — have native Gmail, stars, labels, attachments, and all, on iOS.

[Google] has created a new Gmail app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. We've combined your favorite features from the Gmail mobile web app and iOS into one app so you can be more productive on the go. It's designed to be fast, efficient and take full advantage of the touchscreen and notification capabilities of your device. And it's one more reason to switch to Gmail.

Google says Gmail for iOS has been optimized for speed, efficiency, and touch, and includes nice little iOS-nods like “pull down to refresh”. It might be so good even I won’t mind having two separate apps for email…

Go grab it and let us know what you think, and if you don’t see it in the App Store yet, hang tight. It takes a while to propagate through Apple’s servers, but it should be any time now. (One down, 4 to go, 2 months left…)

Free – App Store link

Update 1: Push notification broken, app disappointing

Looks like it’s a thin app wrapper around a WebView with push notification already broken. Hopefully a fix is on the way, not to mention a major update to include features like multiple account support.

Update 2: Google pulls Gmail for iOS

Google has pulled the app to fix the error. If you’re curious about the error, here’s an explanation.

How to quickly and easily get rid of iOS 5 banner notifications — the little roll-downs you get in-app and on the home screen — seems to be a hot topic for our tipsters this week, and luckily you can do it in a couple of different ways.

1. Touch and pull down slightly on the banner, then flick it up and away. (You’re really activating Notification Center for a moment, but it has such a terrific, tactile feeling to it.)
2. “Swipe” from right to left. (You’re really not swiping, it’s a subtle down up motion that’s a faster but not as reliable version of the above.)

In both cases you need to be really careful you touch and keep your finger down, otherwise it will be interpreted as a tap and you’ll be whooshed away to another app, likely the exact the opposite of what you wanted.

Either way, it does nothing to fix the central problems of banners — they roll down over content instead of pushing the content down, and they come in surprisingly enough that you can be about to tap a top-bar control only to hit a new notification instead.

Hopefully some sort of visual cue will be added, and the page content slid down, in a future update.

Thanks: @mpanzarino for figuring out the reliability issue with the “swipe”.

TiPb’s getting a bunch of reports from people saying they’ve been having problems with their AT&T service today. Network problems are nothing new, and any major carrier will have intermittent problems from time to time and place to place, but the number of reports today are out of the ordinary so we figured we’d ask the TiPb Nation.

Where are you, are you having AT&T problems, and if so, what kind and for how long have you been experiencing them? And… Go!

Random House has released the mother of all Doctor Who apps, Doctor Who Encyclopedia for iPad. It includes access to thousands of entries about the Eleventh Doctor’s first two series and the Ninth and Tenth Doctors are available as an in-app purchase.

Explore and search over three thousand entries by episode, character, place or object and see the connections that link them together. Open interactive 'portals' for the Doctor, Amy, Rory, River and other major characters. Build an A-Z of your favourites, explore galleries of imagery and preview and buy must-have episodes.

• 'Portals': launch special interactive entries for the Doctor, Amy, Rory, River and other major characters
• Connections: Each entry includes links to episodes, people, places and objects that relate to it – how many connections will it take to get from Jackson Lake to Stonehenge?
• Series: search unique A-Zs covering each of your favourite episodes
• Episodes: link to episode previews in iTunes – and then purchase them!
• Enemies: from Abbadon to Zygons, find out everything about the Doctor's deadly foes
• Allies: from Captain Avery to the Zocci, a complete guide to the Doctor's friends
• Places: an A-Z of every city, star, building, planet, spaceship….
• Objects: the Doctor's favourite (sonic screwdriver) and not-so-favourite (Genesis Ark) things
• Gallery: Explore an archive of images covering six thrilling series
• Random: Let the Encyclopedia send you from one fascinating entry to the next!
• Favourites: create a personalized A-Z of your favourite entries!

Doctor Who Encyclopedia is available on the iPad for $6.99.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Interested in following certain news and people on Twitter but don’t want the hassle of another account to manage and password to remember – then Meet The Tweet is just for you! Perfect for anyone who has no interest in tweeting themselves, Meet The Tweet allows you to follow the timelines of any Twitter users you wish.

With this app, you can follow any Twitter account you want. An important difference between the old fashioned Twitter clients and this app, is that you don’t need a Twitter account to use it. Instead, it makes up your own, customized timeline by crawling Twitter and collecting timelines of interesting people you choose to follow.

• Favourize tweets
• View current trending topics (and trending tweets)
• Choose whether you want to see mentions in your timeline or not
• View user profiles, user timelines, user mentions and user favourites
• View anyone’s followers and friends
• Share cool tweets by email or just copy them
• Follow any Twitter account you’d like to

Meet The Tweet is available on the iPhone for $0.99.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Noted Jailbreak developer chpwn has posted a statement on the state of the iPhone 4 and iPod touch Siri port and further explained why it’s not currently being distributed.

Many people have managed to display the Siri UI on the iPhone 4; it is, in fact, reasonably trivial with access to the files copied off an iPhone 4S (as explained above). But only Steven and myself — yes, I know there are others that claim to have: I'll tell you this, they haven't — have managed to make Siri successfully contact the Apple servers and receive responses. Why? Here, the answers become slightly more murky. Partially this is because I don't want to reveal too much about the procedure to try and ensure that you all will be able to use it in the future, and partially because it requires a jailbroken iPhone 4S, something which is currently not publicly available. Anyway, the general gist of it is that you almost certainly need the access provided by the a jailbreak to extract all of the information necessary to get Siri working on another device, and that's not yet availble. (And, no, I don't know when it will be. You can follow along with me while we wait, though!)

Hit the link below for all the details.

Source: chpwn

Every day, TiPb gets flooded with announcements for new and updated iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps and games. So every day we pick just a few of the most interesting, the most notable, and simply the most awesome to share with you!

• Track – Realtime route tracking & sharing: Easily share your location and route with anyone. They can track you in realtime using a web browser, on any device. No additional software to install, no sign-ups and no new social network to manage. [$2.99 for iPhone - App Store link]

• TweetMe Fast: A small app that allows you to quickly send a tweet on Twetter *. Just a tap on the icon of TweetMe and you are ready to send a message using the new Twitter integration in iOS 5. [Free for iPhone and iPad - App Store link]

• PowerOFSEO: Allows you to analyze the main parameters of any SEO site. Lightweight and high performance is an excellent support for evaluating the activities on page and off page SEO done on a site and the level of existing competition for the keywords you entered. [$1.99 for iPhone - App Store link]

• Iowa Caucuses: Find 2012 Iowa caucus coverage on the go. Watch videos of important campaign moments, research candidates using our extensive and exclusive biography information and find out when presidential candidates will visit Iowa with the events calendar. [Free for iPhone - App Store link]

• Zoo Coloring Book: This coloring book includes 31 super cute designs to color and lots of bright colors to choose from. Easy to use interface and a super realistic painting engine you children will enjoy to use. [$1.99 for iPad - App Store link]

Any other big apps or game releases or updates today? If you pick any of these up, let us know what you think!

The demands and counter-demands in Apple vs. Samsung are reaching tragically comedic, or comedically tragic levels:

In Federal court today Samsung counsel Cynthia Cochrane said her client would need the source code for the iPhone 4S and agreements Apple had with major carriers Vodafone, Telstra and Optus in order to make a legal case for a ban before the court.

Unlike Google’s Android OS, which is openy-source, Apple’s iOS is proprietary, though you gotta love the gumption of a company accused of copy-catting Apple to the best of their ability requesting the ability to copy it better. They also want to depose Apple SVP of Design, Jony Ive, and other “iPhone inventors”. What’s next, Phil Schiller’s inseam measurements? Tim Cook’s birthday cards? Samsung’s non-Apple influenced design team member?

Maybe call in the big guns?

Source: Smart Office, Edible Apple

Let’s be blunt — if you’re not already in the TiPb Forums you’re missing out on the best darn discussion in iPhone and iPad today, so head on over and register now!

• iPhone 4S battery life issues

• What would you like to see in iOS 5.1?

• iCloud email delivery issues

• Giveaway: Pad & Quill Little Black Book for iPhone

See you in the forums!

The TouchFire is a screen-top keyboard that clips onto your iPad or iPad 2 and it is said to provide a touch typing experience. It has been invented by two guys with a great pedigree in product development, Steve Isaac & Brad Melmon. Steve has worked for Sun Microsystems, GO and Microsoft whilst Brad worked for HP, IDEO, Moto Development, and Speck. All of this experience had been brought together to bring the TouchFire screen-top keyboard to reality.

TouchFire puts the “touch” back into typing on an iPad. You can now feel where the keys are and rest your fingers on the home row, so you can type as fast and accurately as you can on a laptop. You can even type without looking at the screen. TouchFire cushions your fingers as you type, something both touch-typists and two-finger typists really appreciate. Typing on an iPad is no longer a pain!

The TouchFire screen-top keyboard went looking for Kickstarter funding of just $10,000; to get the project off the ground. Now with 40 days still left to run, it has achieved over $38,000 in pledges. Pretty impressive figures and it proves that there is definitely a lot of interest in such an accessory.

Take a look at the video, let us know if you feel there is a need for such a keyboard. Do you think that the current iPad on-screen keyboard is good enough?

Source: Kickstarter

Computerworld has posted a 75 minute interview with Steve Jobs, shot in 1995 before he returned to Apple.

Jobs talked about everything from his childhood in California — the area that later came to be known as Silicon Valley “was really paradise” — to his early days at Apple, the iconic 1984 Mac TV ad, his plans for NeXT and Pixar, and his fears for Apple’s future.

If you’ve read, or are still reading, the Steve Jobs biography, this is your chance to hear a lot of the early material from Jobs himself.

Watch: Computerworld

The Wall Street Journal has profiled Tim Cook, highlighting a few of the changes at Apple since he took over as CEO.

• Mr. Cook has tended to administrative matters that never interested Mr. Jobs, such as promotions and corporate reporting structures
• The new CEO recently announced a charitable program promising Apple would match employee donations
• Mr. Cook has restructured Apple’s big education division
• Mr. Cook also promoted vice president Eddy Cue to Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services

There’s a mix of conjecture and analyst and investor wishful thinking thrown in for good measure, and also focus once again drawn on Cook not being the “product guy” Steve Jobs was.

In the past, Mr. Cook once asked an employee briefing him on a new service, “tell me again how this helps me sell more phones,” according to this person.

Just as Jobs had Cook to complement his strengths and fill his weaknesses, Cook has Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, and the rest of the Executive Team, as well as the Apple culture painstakingly crafted by Steve Jobs over the years.

Steering one of the biggest ships in the world isn’t easy, of course, but it helps when it’s got a great crew and is already heading in a good direction.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Twelve South has unveiled the PlugBug which is its latest addition to an ever expanding Mac and iOS accessory range. The PlugBug is an accessory that piggy backs onto your existing Mac power supply and turns it into a dual charger. It will now charge your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch as the same time as charging your Mac.

The ingenious PlugBug connects to all MacBook Power Adapters. Simply snap PlugBug onto a MacBook Power Adapter, in place of the adapter's AC plug, and you now have one handy device that charges MacBook and iPad or iPhone at the same time, using only one wall outlet. This can be a real lifesaver when you need to charge both before a meeting or – even more stressful – between connecting flights with only one outlet available.

The PlugBug can even be used as an adaptor solution to those visiting the U.S. and Canada. It can convert any non U.S. Mac power supply into a compatible version.

The PlugBug is available now and costs $34.99 plus shipping

Source: Twelve South

iPdfWriter is a new iPhone app that lets you design and create PDFs. These documents can be multiple pages long and include many fonts, colors, shapes, tables, images, and barcodes.

Using iPdfWriter you can create beautiful professional multi page PDF documents while you are away from your office computer.

• iPdfWriter allows you to create your documents in portrait or landscape orientation.
• And when creating multipage documents you can add repeating page headers, footers and watermarks just like in desktop PDF editors.
• iPdfWriter is more than just a simple text editor. There are many different items that can be edited just like desktop publishing software.
• Text can be tweaked by editing many different fonts, font styles, font sizes, text alignments and colours.
• Shapes such as rectangles, rounded rectangles and ovals can be reshaped and filled or outlined with different colours.
• Lines can be added including horizontal, vertical, angled and curved. Thickness, colour and styling can be edited as well as the line type such as rounded or arrowhead.
• Tables with many rows and columns can be added for laying out data values or lists within your document. All fully customizable and resizeable.
• Images can be added to your pages and scaled or cropped to suit your own needs.
• Barcodes can be added to your document. iPdfWriter supports many barcode types, including Code128, Code39, Ean8, Ean13, Postnet, Inter2of5, UpcA and UpcE
• iPdfWriter also includes a template section where you can download professional designed templates to help you create your own documents. Each week more templates will be added to the iPdfWriter templates list.
• iPdfWriter lets you email your PDF documents directly from within the iPdfWriter App. Recipients will receive the PDF file as an attachment to the email and also a link to view the PDF file within a web browser.
• iPdfWriter turns your iPhone into a powerful business productivity tool for when you are out and about.

iPdfWriter is available on the iPhone for $3.99.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Running iOS 5 and wondering how to automatically enhance your images directly with the built-in Photos app? This is a really simple, one-touch feature that will help give bland photos a lift, and flat pictures that extra oomph.

1. Open Photos app
2. Tap on the photo you wish to enhance
3. Tap edit in the top right corner (if the menu has disappeared, tap the photo once to bring it back)
4. Tap the enhance button. It looks like a magic, sparkly wand.
5. If you like what you see, tap Save.

It’s important to note, that some photos receive more drastic changes than others. If your photo has a lot of colors, they will likely become brighter, if your photo is a little dark, it will likely be lightened, and if your photo is nearly perfect, the changes may not be even noticeable.

Additionally, the enhancement may not always have a positive impact on your photos. The biggest thing to keep an eye out for is over-saturation. For example, there may times when reds become too red, which is not something you want on a portrait.

If you decided after you’ve saved your photo that you liked it better before it was enhanced, repeat the steps above to turn off the enhancement. Your previous save did not cause any permanent destruction to the file.

Hope this helps! If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments below!

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