When you buy an app or game in the App Store, book in the iBookstore, or music, movies or TV shows in iTunes, you’re asked for your iTunes password before the transaction goes through and the download begins. That’s important when there’s money involved. As the great Smurf berry scandal of 2011 taught us, you can never be too careful when it comes to preventing unintentional or unauthorized purchases — that’s why Apple now requires a password for every in-app purchase. But what about when there’s no money on the line? What about when you’re not buying something but just downloading a free app or game, or free song or feature? Should iTunes still ask for your password? What about when you’re simply updating an app or game? Should iTunes ask then?

Some people, really security conscious people, would probably prefer iTunes ask for a password any time it does anything, always. Better safe than sorry. Who knows who could be using your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad after all, from a friend to a colleague to a spouse to a child to a friend’s colleague’s spouse’s child. You really want to risk $100 in Hello Kitty apps suddenly showing upon your Home screen?

Other people, really convenience-oriented people, would probably like iTunes to ask for a password as little as possible. Maybe never. If you’re the only one who ever uses your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, and it never leaves a place you control, then why should you be bothered by having to enter in a password every time an app has a minor bug fix update?

Personally, I’d like a choice (big surprise, right?) Give me a Settings option for “always ask”, or “only ask for paid transactions”. I don’t think “never ask” is safe, so I’m fine with that not being there. What about you? How often do you think iTunes should ask for your password?

With your iPhone you have one of the best 4:3 compact cameras in the world, but what happens when the world you want to capture isn’t 4:3? What happens when you come across a gorgeous scene — the Golden Gate bridge at sunset, the Manhattan skyline at dawn, the crystal-clear island beach, the magnificent Old Port architecture, the rally that’s filling the campus. You can still take a photo, or several photos, of part of it, but nothing can really compare to capturing the full breadth and majesty of such an image all in one shot.

Enter the panorama.

The difference between wide angle and panorama

There’s a fine line between what separates a photograph taken with a wide angle lens and a panoramic photograph. We’re not going to get into the nitty-gritty details, so for the sake of simplicity, we’ll say that a panoramic photo is one that has a wider field of view than the human eye, is at least twice as long as it is tall, and was created by using software (in our case, apps) to stitch together multiple images.

You’ve probably seen panorama’s displayed and showcased at various places — they’re long and skinny and commonly have cityscapes, landscapes, and sports stadiums as their subject. The iPhone’s built-in camera does not have the ability to take panoramic photographs (at least not yet), but there are many affordable apps in the App Store that do offer this functionality.

My personal favorite iPhone app for creating panoramic photographs is AutoStitch Panorama. The reason I like this one so much is because it lets you stitch any arrangement of photos. You’re not limited to stitching photos to the left and right of each other — you can also go up and down. It also supports high resolution creations up to 18 megapixels.

• $1.99 – Download Now

How to take a great panoramic photo with your iPhone

While the software will take care of the stitching, it can only do as good a job as your images allow. There are several things you need to do to make sure the photos you take will come together into an amazing panorama, including maintaining a steady camera position, taking sufficient pictures, keeping focus and exposure consistent, and leaving enough room to crop the final image.

Don’t shift the position of the camera

The biggest key to taking good panoramic photos is to make sure you don’t shift the position of the iPhone while taking the photos. What I mean, is to imagine that there’s a pole sticking out of the bottom of your iPhone, centered under the lens) and that the only motion you’re allowed to do is to spin the pole so that the iPhone rotates. Since panoramic images are created by stitching multiple photos together, it should make sense that any shift of the camera’s position will lessen the quality of results.

To prevent shifting your iPhone as you pan across the scene taking photos, I recommend holding your iPhone in the landscape position with two hands. To increase stability, you should also press your elbows against your torso. As you take the photos, do not to twist your body or move your feet. Place your left thumb and forefinger below and above the lens and position your right hand similarly on the right of the iPhone. The only movement you want to make is with your right hand. Keep your body facing the same direction and just rotate the camera in front of you with your right hand without changing your position. Just keep telling yourself that your feet can’t move, that you can’t twist your body, and you’re only allowed to move your right hand — the motion you are allowed to do will follow naturally.

The easiest types of panoramas to take are of landscapes or big open spaces. Since everything is far away, there’s plenty of room for error. The app you use for stitching will still be able to produce great results even if you shift the camera more than you should have.

Err on the side of too many photos

Just about every iPhone app that’s dedicated to panoramic photography will advice you to make sure that you have at least 30% overlap between your adjacent photos. Unless you’re using an app that overlays the previous image while taking the next one, I recommend overlapping a little more than 30% to play it safe. I say this for two reasons: 1. you may not be correctly estimating 30%, and 2. the more photos you have, the better chance you have at completing a nice precise stitch job.

Use AE/AF lock to keep a consistent exposure and focus

If your scene has a lot of dark and light elements, of if you’re close to something you want in focus, make sure you trigger the AE/AF feature of the iPhone’s camera. To do this, simply hold your finger down on the screen until the blue focus box starts pulsating. When you release, “AE/AF Lock” should appear on the screen.

Give yourself room to crop

Make sure that you give yourself enough room to crop your your final image. In the photo above (a panorama of the school I teach at), I made sure to capture enough of the sky and grass to give me the flexibility of cropping it exactly how I wanted when the stitching was done. First, I cropped it like this, applying the rule of thirds to the horizon and giving the interesting sky the spotlight.

But it’s common practice to critique every image that I take, and after looking at this one a bit, I wasn’t happy with how the left building is underexposed and didn’t feel it really added to the photo. Sure, including it makes the panorama longer, but my goal isn’t to create the widest pano, but to create an interesting photograph. To further justify cropping out the building on the left, I noticed that the sky was least interesting on that part of the photo as well. Here’s the final image after cropping off the left.

This is a much better photograph, in my opinion. It may not show off as much of the campus, but that’s ok. I’ve instead brought the focus of the image to the properly exposed buildings and the interesting sky.

Panoramic macros

When I saw these mushrooms in the grass, I was dying to take photos of them, and since I was working on this panoramic iPhone photography article, I thought I’d try to get a close-up, macro-style panorama. Nearly 15 tries later, I settled on the above image.

Remember how I mentioned that if you shift the position of the lens while taking the photos that it increases the chance of a bad stitch job? This is a prime example of the truth of that statement and demonstrates why close-up panoramas are very difficult.

For each of my attempts, I took 35-40 photos in hopes of improving my results, but they still all ended up with a lot of unwanted distortion. The problem was that since I was laying flat on my stomach propped up on my elbows, keeping a perfectly steady rotation was extremely challenging. In the end, I created a platform with the knuckles of my right hand while also keeping it stable on the ground. Then I stabilized the iPhone with my left hand and used my thumb to press the volume buttons to trigger the shutter. I did my best to carefully pivot the iPhone on my knuckles without allowing it to slide around.

In the end, I got an OK panorama. You can see a lot of distortion in the background, though — it looks like the background is moving (take a look at a larger version to better see what I mean). But I think this is something that’s going to be associated with close-up panoramas.

Panoramas as substitutes for wide angles

In addition to creating traditional panoramic photographs, you can use apps like AutoStitch to give the illusion of having a wide angle lens. I’m going to use my desk as an example for this. Here’s a photo of my desk from the view of me sitting in my chair.

Horrible photo. It’s way too close and cuts off a lot of stuff on my desk. Why don’t I back up, you ask? Ok, I will.

Better. This photo does show off more of my desk, and I could’ve backed up further to show even more, but it’s still not giving the look that I want. When envisioning a photo of my desk, I pictured one of those wide angle photographs that actually have some distortion to the photo. I mean this is a photo of my desk for crying out loud — it needs something special to make it interesting.

That’s where thinking of this as a panoramic project comes in. Only instead of creating a long and skinny image, I’m going to stitch a bunch of photos together from all directions, and give it a traditional crop. Here’s what I got before cropping — and I did this while sitting in my chair, the same position as the first photo.

Now we’re getting somewhere! Lastly, I rotated and cropped the stitched image to an 8″x10″ and got this.

Bingo. This is exactly what I was imagining what an interesting photo of my desk might look like. It has the feel of a wide angle lens, yet I didn’t need any fancy gear and a DSRL — just a $2 app and my iPhone!

Now go out and shoot!

Your assignment this week is create some killer panoramic photos and share them with us in the iMore photography forum. Make sure you also let us know which app you used to stitch your panorama!

Under the traditional book-selling model, retailers like B&N, Amazon, and others could get 50% or more of the revenue from the sale of a book. Under Apple’s “agency model”, they get 30%. The traditional model is retailer-centric. Apple’s model is publisher-centric.

This upsets the US Justice Department. Under the old model, the retailer set the price and so could sell the book at any price they wanted, even at a loss. Under Apple’s model, the publisher sets the price, so there’s no retailer discount. What’s more, part of Apple’s deal is a “most favored nations” clause that means publishers can’t sell to competitors for less than they could sell to Apple, thus making deep discounts for consumers pretty much impossible.

According to Reuters, however, this may be about to change.

The Justice Department could reach a settlement in the next few weeks with Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and some of the major publishers suspected of colluding to push up electronic book prices, according to two people close to the negotiations.

While negotiations are still fluid, the settlement is expected to eliminate Apple’s so-called “most favored nation” status, which had prevented the publishers from selling lower-priced e-books through rival retailers such as Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) or Barnes & Noble Inc (BKS.N), the people said.

Publishers like Apple’s model because they made more money but more importantly, they felt deep discounts devalued their books. Just like the App Store has lowered the price of software, they fear eBooks will lower the price of books. (TV executives fear low priced digital access will lower the value of video as well.) Once prices go down, it’s very hard if not impossible to bring them back up.

Typically, however, the market decides the value of content. If it gets too low, creators go out of business (or switch businesses), quality suffers, customers stop buying, and the market crashes. Then supply diminishes, and prices rise again (often with new players involved, and/or new models).

Right now Apple uses the 30/70 model for the App Store, iBookstore, and subscriptions in Newstand. (I’m not sure if they use it for iTunes music, movies, or TV shows.) If the iBookstore changes, it will be interesting to see if and how Apple’s ecosystem as a whole changes with it.

I’ve mentioned this several times already on the iPhone & iPad Live podcast, in the new iPad round-table, and on Twitter, but I wanted to get something up here as well. The Retina display is great, but I’m not a designer or a photographer and I still read more on a computer and on paper than I do on my iPad. I have a Wi-Fi iPad so LTE isn’t a consideration for me. Dictation is great and will make a huge difference to people who prefer to, or need to, talk rather than type. But for me, none of that is truly compelling. For me, instead of supporting a double density display or a faster network, I would have loved the extra power of that Apple A5X chipset and that extra RAM to do one thing and one thing only — make my iPad faster.

I hate waiting. I watch lower resolution videos because I hate waiting for streaming to start or buffering to finish. My iPad turns on instantly and I love that. But then when I launch a website, I’m still waiting for pages to render and when I launch a game, I’m still waiting for it to load. Because things like turning on are so fast, when you do have to wait for something it feels so much more apparent.

The iPad 2 was such a speed increase from the original iPad that it I noticed it immediately. Even the iPhone 4S is fast enough compared to the iPhone 4 that I noticed it immediately. The new iPad… is about the same as the iPad 2. That it’s the same given a Retina display is awesome, but I can’t help wishing it would have stuck with a regular display and been twice as fast again.

The resolution of text or images never bothered me; the speed of getting them to show up on screen did. Maybe that wouldn’t have been as sexy and upgrade, or maybe “thinner, lighter, faster” wouldn’t have been a strong enough selling point two years in a row, but I’m willing to bet it would have been welcome by many.

Also, let’s not forget battery life. It’s remarkable that the new iPad gets a Retina display and keeps the same 10 hour battery life as an iPad 2. Imagine how much battery life it would get without it? Probably 17 hours.

Retina display and LTE now done, next year’s iPad will probably lose the extra bulk and speed up again, maybe even get longer battery life as well. That’s the upgrade I’ll be waiting for.

In the meantime I’ll be waiting for my web pages to load and games to start…

Steve Jobs sometimes liked to quote Henry Ford — “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Instead he gave them something they had no idea they wanted until he gave it to them — a car. With the new iPad, however, I suddenly find myself on the opposite side of that equation. All I would have wanted was a faster iPad.

Google continues to enjoy a unique position in the mobile space — they make money off of pretty much every platform. If you use their own, freely licensed Android platform, they earn revenue off of advertising. If you use anyone else’s platform, including Apple’s iOS on the iPhone or iPad, Google still earns revenue off of advertising.

Recent Nielson numbers claimed Android owned nearly 50% of the US smartphone market. Google, however, owns the vast majority of advertising revenue on nearly 100%.

According to The Guardian, since 2008 Google has earned $550 million from Android, or roughly $10 per device per year. (Since Google gives away Android licenses for free, that money likely comes from advertising related to search and other services). By contrast, Google is estimated to earn $30 per PC per year. What’s more, Google CEO Larry Page recently claimed revenue from mobile was now running at $2.5 billion. So $2.5 billion minus $0.55 billion leaves roughly $2 billion in revenue from other platforms. And given market share, much of that would likely be iOS.

Marketingland calls foul on The Guardian‘s numbers, however, saying there’s no way to tie settlement valuations to earnings figures from Android, and hence no way to determine what percentage of Google’s mobile revenue comes from iOS vs. Android.

Fair enough. Even if they’re not 20/80 but closer to 50/50 or even 80/20, that’s still a huge amount of money to make from a competitor’s platform, and a huge competitive advantage.

Apple, of course, makes no money from Android users. They offer other platforms precisely nothing in terms of services or software. While you can get iTunes on Windows, you can’t get mobile iTunes Store.app on Android or any other platform. You can’t get the mobile iWork or iLife suites. You can’t get iBooks. You can’t get anything.

While the iOS App Store plays host to several apps from Google (and Microsoft), Google play (and Microsoft Marketplace) have exactly nothing from Apple.

That means iOS users have absolutely the best choice when it comes to mobile software (what else is new?), but it also means Google (and to a lesser degree, Microsoft) have revenue opportunities beyond their own platform.

That’s part of the reason Android exists. Google originally fielded Android in part so that it could never be frozen out of mobile, where they and everyone else saw the future was headed at an accelerating pace. Back then, Android was meant to compete with Windows Mobile, and the potentially dominant Microsoft cutting out Google and using their own services was a legitimate concern.

Then the iPhone happened, and with it the mobile web happened in a way never possible before. Microsoft’s mobile future suddenly dimmed sharply, and Google responded, smartly, by doing an about face and making taking Android decidedly in an iPhone direction. Whether or not Apple would ever field a Google competitor remains in question, but Google fielded an Apple competitor. It caused a schism to the degree that the late Steve Jobs vowed “thermonuclear war” to stop what he considered to be “stolen property”. It also gave the carriers a powerful OS to do with as they would (and if we can agree on anything, it’s that the carriers are more “evil” than Apple and Google squared).

Now, four years later, despite attacking Apple as being the enemy of openness, despite giving control of the user experience back to carriers, despite creating an uncertain update and compatibility environment for a growing segment of the smartphone market, Google remain the default search and map engine on iOS, and iOS remains a valuable revenue source for Google.

Sure, Apple could one day flip a switch and make a different provider the default search engine, and even with the market dominance Google enjoys, that would hurt. (For some percentage of users, settings don’t exist and whatever is the default remains the default.) Yet, ironically, it’s Android itself that’s made that more likely than it may otherwise ever have been.

Still, for now, the more users Android gets, the better for Google. The more users iOS gets, the better for Google. The more users anyone gets — with the exception of forked variants of Android itself, like Amazon’s — the better for Google.

Reference: The Guardian, Marketingland

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