Twitter for iPhone and iPad has been updated with several new features that focuses on headlines and photos, discovering popular tweets, and searching for a new perspective. You can now preview photos and article summaries in Discover without tapping and "View all Tweets" to see what's popular among the people you're connected to. Also, when performing a search, related photos will appear at the top of the stream and can see who's favorited a Tweet.

I would love to provide feedback on the on the new Twitter 5.1, but unfortunately, I've been unable to successfully stay logged it. The few times I didn't receive an authentication error, I was kicked out only moment later. Is anyone else having issues logging into Twitter for iPhone and iPad? If not, let us know what you think of Twitter's update!

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Source: Twitter

While many folks have started to notice iOS 6 Maps improving as of late, there is still plenty of customers out there who don't think Apple's new solution is anywhere nearly as good as the old, Google-powered one. If you're one of those, the lost and disillusioned, then good news. The long-rumored standalone Google Maps app may soon see the light of day (read: App Store). That, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Google has distributed a test version of its new mapping app that will work on Apple's iPhones to some individuals outside the company, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Google has been putting the finishing touches on the app before submitting it for approval to the Apple iTunes store, this person said, though it's unclear exactly when that will happen.

Apple, for their part, has refused to comment on the matter citing the fact they don't dicuss apps that haven't been submitted for approval. Those 'finishing touches' mentioned by the unnamed source are surely what most folks will be interested in.

It is expected that Google will include turn-by-turn navigation built right into the app, compared to when Apple was using Google Maps and Google reportedly refused to provide it unless Apple included Google's Latitude service as well.

While some stories have alledged Apple might reject or "pocket veto" Google Maps, delaying or refusing entry, given the scrutiny Apple faced over Google Voice a few years ago, and given that Google Search was approved, although with a suspiciously long delay, Apple likely has no choice but to approve Google Maps. Eventually.

Also, according to the WSJ, newly appointed yet of Maps, Apple senior vice-president of internet and services, Eddy Cue, hasn't wasted any time getting his hands dirty.

Apple has continued to work to fix the bugs in its mapping software. The maps team is now under senior vice president for Internet software and services, Eddy Cue, who also oversees products like iTunes and iCloud. Mr. Cue has been hands-on with the maps team and participates in regular meetings to fix the product, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In any event, Google Maps for iOS has yet to arrive on the Apple App Store so we'll have to wait this one out and see what, exactly happens here. If Google does manage get it released, are you ready to give up on iOS 6 Maps?

Source: WSJ

Facebook for iPhone has received a pretty nice update that includes a Share link to re-post stories from your news feed as well as the ability to tag your friends in any post, comment or photo. Both of these features have been huge requests of Facebook for iPhone users for a very long time, so it's great to finally see Facebook deliver.

You may have noticed that in one of Facebook's past updates, the ability to sort your feed by Top Stories or Most Recent was removed. This update brings that feature back! To find it, head to the sidebar and tap the Setting icon next to the News Feed tab.

When sharing a story to your news feed you have the option to choose your audience from Public, Friends, Only Me, Friends except Acquaintances and any one of your Friend Lists. The last new feature added to Facebook for iPhone is the ability to add smileys, hearts, and other emoji in messages.

Surprisingly, there aren't any "bug fixes" claimed to be included in this update, but if you notice that any of them have disappeared (or that new ones have arrived), please let us know!

So what do you think about this update? Are you happy that Facebook is finally bringing in features they should've included ages ago? Or is it too little too late?

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Aaron Sorkin, who is writing the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic, revealed some details of the film while speaking at The Daily Beast's Hero Summit. The film will take place over three scenes, each thirty minutes long, and all told in real time. Each scene will be backstage at a different product launch, the original Macintosh, the NeXT cube, and the iPod.

If these detail hold together, this will be an altogether different film than what many were expecting. We can't say with any certainty what the narrative content of these scenes will be. His previous film, The Social Network, told a fairly linear story using the framing device of a legal negotiation set after most of the action in the movie. Backstage at a product launch sounds like a similar device at first, but Sorkin says that these three scenes will comprise the entire movie. With the setting confimed but with no inkling of content, we'll have to wait a bit longer to see what Sorkin's take on Steve Jobs will be.

Also of note, Sorkin reveals that Jobs asked him to help with Jobs' famed Stamford commencement address, and to write a Pixar film.

Here's the video.

Source: Hero Summit and Baba Shetty

It's been over a year now since Siri launched alongside the iPhone 4S in October of 2011. When I first saw Siri, it seemed to have enormous potential as: 1) A natural language interface that may one day do to multitouch and graphics was they did to the command line; 2) thanks to that interface, a way for Apple to intermediate and broker search away from Google and towards parter content; and 3) by virtue of that intermediation and brokerage, a gateway into customer insight analytics.

On the client side, I've enjoyed the type of results Siri delivers enough, both in terms of content and presentation, to wish Apple would: 1) hook it into Spotlight so I could still use it when talking would be impossible or inappropriate, or the natural language parser wasn't available; and 2) fix it so the natural language parser wasn't so frequently unavailable. (Purple-dot-purple-dot-purple-dot-nothing is the mouse only randomly getting food.)

Since then, Apple has brokered deals for sports, restaurant, and movie knowledge bases in Siri, including the ability to start table reservations and, soon, movie ticket purchases right from within the service. However, also since then, Google has launched their competing Google Now service. And Google knows services the way Apple knows hardware and software. It offers on-device voice parsing, Google's industry-leading backend infrastructure, and goes a step beyond Siri by attempting to predictively provide information and answer questions before you even ask them.

Now, Apple has started hiring people away from Amazon to help with the service and, in the wake of a management re-ogranization, Siri has been given to Apple's "fixer", senior vice-president Eddy Cue to help set, or reset, its course going forward.

Because Siri is only as useful as its weakest server and slowest response, and both those things are going to need some serious attention.

Speed and reliability

It's tough to argue that the biggest problems Siri faced at launch, and continues to face today, is that it sometimes doesn't work, and oftentimes when it does, it's annoyingly slow. Part of that is due to the network. Literally everything you send to Siri needs to go to Apple's servers for parsing and back to your device before you get a response. That's certainly understandable if the result set includes information stores on the internet, but for local tasks like setting an alarm, it's a single point of unnecessary congestion and all too frequently, failure.

Google switched to on-device voice parsing for Android 4.1 and that should be at the top of Apple's Siri list for iOS 7. Moving that all on-device is no doubt non-trivial, but removing the burden of the cloud from where it's not needed has so many benefits that it's absolutely worth the effort. That way not only setting alarms but anything involving local or locally-cached data in apps, most especially dictation (say goodbye to purple-dot-purple-dot-purple-dot-nothing!) becomes not only nearly instantaneous, but immune to outages.

Sports scores, movie listings, Wolfram|Alpha queries, restaurant table books, and anything else that absolutely had to hit the internet would still be slower and riskier, but even local map and point-of-interest data could be cached locally, greatly reducing the dependency on Apple's backend. And about that backend...

Infrastructure

The elephant in Apple's room, the wrench in their reliability, is their server-side infrastructure and its glass jaw. Siri and it's issues since launch are just one example. Game Center has infamously gone down thanks, perhaps, due to the launch of just one popular game. iMessage has had it's ups and down. So has the App Store (in fact, as I write this, App Store downloads aren't working). iOS 6 Maps feels more like a data aggregation, cleansing, and quality assurance issue than an infrastructure one at this point; I haven't seen maps "go down". The Apple Online Store has to go offline simply to be updated (even if there's marketing value to a stunt like taking the store down, there's real-world value to live updates on ecommerce engines).

Google and other competitors like Facebook and Amazon come from the clouds. Their infrastructure isn't as old as Apple's WebObjects past, and has been their singular focus since their respective launches. As good as Apple is at hardware and software, that's as good as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are at the data centers, servers, and services that comprise their clouds.

For Apple to re-create their backend architecture in a way that's more modern and advanced, or even as modern and advanced, as Google Facebook, and Amazon will be non-trivial. One look at Microsoft's valiant efforts to date in that respect shows just exactly how non-trivial it is to turn an old, stubborn aircraft carrier into a new, shiny hellicarrier.

Maybe Apple is already doing that. They're slowly but surely pushing their Objective-C based development platforms forward, maybe they're doing the same thing with their cloud infrastructure. Maybe something just as good as what runs on Macs and iOS devices is being worked on to run iCloud and all Apple's ancillary services.

If not, however, their should be. And soon. And with massive, billion dollar efforts not spent on data centers alone but on the next generation of software to run them.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon are buying up apps, developers, and designers to address their cultural weaknesses, and the Sofa, Sparrow, Snapseed, and other teams are hard at work making sure every new generation of native app they release is less embarrassing than the last. And it's its working.

Apple has a much harder problem to fix, but that just means that have to work harder at fixing it. Whether it's buying Nuance or former OS X head Bertrand Serlet's new startup (if what it does is even appropriate) or raiding Google, Facebook, and Amazon (again) for every cloud engineer they can, they need to get it done.

Otherwise Game Center, App Store, iTunes, iMessage, iCloud, and yes, Siri will suffer.

API

While engineers and architecture are vitally important to Apple, APIs are what matter to developers. And developers have wanted Siri APIs since they first saw it announced at the iPhone 4S event. And it still seems unlikely.

Guy English of Kicking Bear explained how Apple's internal secrecy made even the integration of an Apple app, Find my Friends, convoluted. Here's the crux (but read the whole thing, the linen-play is killer):

Apple doesn't appear to have an internal SPI for Siri yet, and it's my bet that they're a year or so away from it. Even internally it appears that they've not yet drafted an approximation. And I don't blame them. For an AI system like Siri that would require determining the plug-in based upon confidence that it could handle the request. How do you write an API that gauges the trustability of thousands of plug-ins to properly report their confidence?

Guy also talks about hand-off collisions in the first episode of Debug as well, where different apps offer up potentially overlapping knowledge sources, and the Siri AI has to try to figure out which one gets what and when. A pop-up requester, the kind Siri already uses to offer up different contacts or locations, could handle the obvious stuff, but not everything is obvious. Good natural language parsing is all about subtlety, context, and yes, nuance.

A Siri API wouldn't just have the potential for conflicting app hand-offs, but for conflicting with Apple's partnership deals. That goes back to Apple using Siri as a way to intermediate and broker search. An API intermediates Apple. What value would a content deal have between Apple and Yelp, or Apple and OpenTable or Fandango or anyone else, if any app could hook into an API "for free"? Right now Apple seems to want to handle Siri access the way they handle Apple TV access, through closed partnering deals rather than open access.

That sucks for developers, and may or may not suck for users. Apple might feel controlling access provides a better, saner experience, even if many power users would disagree -- the classic conflict.

Either way, I'd argue fixing Siri's speed and reliability, fixing iCloud's backend infrastructure, and adding in predictive functionality should all be done way before Apple even considers taking on the responsibility of a Siri API.

Functionality

Beyond speed and reliability, architecture and API, for end users, Siri is still a mixed bag when it comes to functionality. Even with Apple's built-in apps, there's not a lot of inconsistency. For example, Siri can compose both emails and messages, but can only read incoming messages, not emails. That Siri will tell you it can't do certain things shows the natural language and contextual parsing knows what you want to do, the ability to do it simply hasn't been implemented, turned on, or allowed. Over a year later, and Siri still doesn't provide basic Settings toggle functionality.

Kontra, questioning whether Siri is Apple's future on Counternotions, points out the advantage that contextually aware, targeted search has over Google's traditional, linear search algorithms. Here's an excerpt, and again, go read the whole thing:

A conventional search engine like Google has to maintain an unpalatable level of click-stream snooping to track your financial transactions to build your purchasing profile. That's not easy (likely illegal on several continents) especially if you're not constantly using Google Play or Google Wallet, for example. While your credit card history or your bank account is opaque to Google, your Amex or Chase app has all that info. If you allow Siri to securely link to such apps on your iPhone, because this is a highly selective request and you trust Siri/Apple, your app and/or Siri can actually interpret what "nice" is within your budget: up to $85 this month and certainly not in the $150-$250 range and not a $25 hole-in-the wall Chinese restaurant either because it's your mother's birthday.

This is even true with the the excellent Google Search iOS app. In terms of speed and, so far, reliability, it positively schools Siri. Yet it remains trapped in Google's traditional search paradigm.

But not so Google Now. In my experience Google now isn't (yet) the contextual equal of Siri, but it does something Apple (also yet) hasn't been willing to do with Siri: predictive response.

The idea isn't new. Roger McNamee, back when Elevation Partners still owned Palm, pitched the idea that your phone, because it knows where you are, what you have scheduled, and who your contacts are, could alert you if traffic became such that you could no longer make your meeting down town, and prepare messages to send the people you were supposed to meet to excuse your tardiness. Instead of a static alarm, it could remind you to leave for a meeting only a few minutes ahead of time if it was down the hall, or hours ahead if it was across town and there'd been an accident. Rather than you asking about the weather, it would know you had a trip planned for Banff and, when snow started to fall, alert you to bring your jacket. It could anticipate, and instead of making you ask for information, it could bring the information to you.

And forget asking to have Wi-Fi or LTE toggled off or on. It could know when you entered or left a trusted network or planned location to just do it for you. Not to mention, "it's 48hrs until your anniversary, dumbass, and you haven't made dinner reservations yet, would you like to see a list of romantic restaurants with seating for 2 still available?"

Add automatic search widening to that as well, so if the perfect restaurant is 11 miles away instead of 10, or there's nothing Italian available but there is something French, you don't get zero results back, and the future starts to become much more interesting and convenient.

Google Now is doing some of that already, and with a nice looking interface, and creepy as it is, it's convenient enough that many of us probably wouldn't be bothered by the privacy issues any longer than it took us to agree to the access requester.

While Siri was ahead of Google in terms of personal search, Google is getting ahead of Siri in terms of predictive search, and if it takes until iOS 7, presumably in the fall of 2013, for Apple to respond, Google Now will likely be even further ahead.

The bottom line

Whether it was the command line with the Apple II, the GUI with the Mac, or multitouch with the iPhone, Apple has been at the forefront of every major mainstream computing interface revolution in modern memory. They're not with Siri. Siri is the Apple I. The Lisa. The unreleased Safari Pad before the iPhone. If Apple needs the Apple II, the Mac, the iPhone version of Siri, or they cede the next great interfaces to the likes of Google Now or Microsoft Kinect, or whatever else comes next.

Services have never been Apple's forte, so the coming revolution could well favor the competition. But that just means Apple has to be bolder and fight harder to win this next battle for the future.

(Seriously, and not trying to be a pain, but we talk about a lot of this with Loren Brichter of Tweetie and Letterpress fame in this week's episode of Debug so check it out if you haven't already.)

We're getting flooded with reports of iTunes and the App Store being down in numerous regions. Browsing the stores still works, but downloading or trying to update apps does not.

It doesn't seem to be affecting everyone, and some who were affected for a while seem to have recovered, but others are still having the problem.

If you can't access iTunes or the App Store, or get your apps, you're not alone. Let us know, along with where you are. If you're fine, or if the problem has been fixed for you, let us know that as well.

While older versions of iOS required you to email pictures and videos using the Photos app, or more recently, tediously copy and paste them into a Mail app email, iOS 6 adds the ability to insert them directly into an email. If you've ever had times where you started typing out an email and then had to close it out in order to copy and paste an image from the Photos app, you'll understand why this feature was much needed.

Now, the bad news is that instead of a simple, multipurpose attachment icon in plain site, Apple is only letting you attach pictures and emails (not documents or anything else), and they've hidden it away in the already jam-packed editing popover. Still, better to have than have not, so here's how it works...

1. Launch the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on the Compose button in the bottom right hand corner just as you normally would to send an email.

3. Fill out the sender info, subject, and body just as you would for a normal email.

4. Now double tap where you'd like to insert the image.
5. You'll see a menu come up. Tap the arrow to the right of the menu to view more options.

6. Here you'll see the option to Insert Photo or Video. Tap on it.

7. You'll be taken to your Photos so you can select the image you'd like to insert. Find it and select it.

8. You'll see a Preview of the image. Just tap on Choose to confirm it's the right one.

9. The image will automatically be inserted into your email.

10. Once you're done filling out your email, just tap the Send button in the upper right hand corner and your email, along with your image, will be on its way!

You can insert as many images into an email as you'd like but just keep in mind some email clients have a limit on the email size someone can receive so we'd recommend keeping it to under 5 images or so unless they're small.

This weekend, Nacmo Bandi has kicked off a huge sale for twenty of their big-name games. Many of them are down from $2.99 to $0.99, while even the more expensive ones have seen some hefty proce drops. So, what's being offered?

• Galaga Remix $2.99 $0.99 - Download Now
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• Time Crisis Strike $2.99 $0.99 - Download Now
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• Pac-Man Championship Edition $4.99 $0.99 - Download Now
• Dig Dug Remix $2.99 $0.99 - Download Now
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• Time Crisis 2nd. Strike $6.99 $1.99 - Download Now
• Pac-Chomp! $1.99 $1.99 - Download Now
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• Soulcalibur $14.99 $6.99 - Download Now
• i Love Katamari $6.99 $1.99 - Download Now
• Katamari Amore $15.99 $8.99 - Download Now

There are some really great games on that list, and considering how expensive some of them normally are, it's probably worth your while to pick a few up before the end of the sale this Monday. The timing is interesting considering Black Friday isn't far off, and we're bound to see tons of excellent app sales then. Any of these catch your eye?

We're getting multiple reports that the cellular/LTE enabled iPads and iPad minis are arriving at the homes of US customers, while also making their way to Apple Stores. No word yet on when the store will have them up for sale, but it could be as early as tomorrow.

We're getting multiple reports that the cellular/LTE enabled iPad 4 and iPad mini are arriving at the homes of US customers, while also making their way to local Apple Stores. No word yet on when the store will have them up for sale, but it could be literally any time now.

International customers don't appear to be anywhere nearly as lucky, with those who placed pre-orders the instant they were available still not seeing shipping notifications, or anything other than mid-to-late November availability.

Did you order a cellular iPad 4 or iPad mini? Have you recieved it yet?

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Well known accessory manufacturer Belkin has wasted no time in getting a portable keyboard case ready for the just released iPad mini. The new keyboard case not only offers great protection for your iPad mini but also gives it a well spaced removable Bluetooth keyboard for the times when the on screen keyboard is just not good enough for your needs.

Because the iPad mini enjoys most of the same features as a full-sized iPad, it only makes sense to offer a scaled down version of our award-winning keyboard folio for the iPad mini," said Jamie Elgie, senior director of product management at Belkin. "No matter the size of the device, people want an alternative to touchscreen typing that is comfortable, intuitive and accurate, and our new portable keyboard gives them that option.

With a laptop-style keyboard and well-spaced keys for its size, the Belkin Portable Keyboard Case for iPad mini helps reduce typing mistakes common on tablets. It also connects simply via Bluetooth® wireless technology and has iPad mini-specific shortcut keys to easily control audio and video. The integrated folio offers sleek, low-profile protection with a smooth inner lining to protect against everyday wear and tear. When not in use, the keyboard folds flat into the case making it easy to pack away and go.

The Bluetooth keyboard has a claimed battery life of 155 hours of use and is recharged via the included USB to Mini USB charging cable. The Belkin Portable Keyboard Case for iPad mini is available to pre-order today and will cost $79.99. Shipping is currently slated for November; so it should be available very soon.

Source: Belkin

ZEN and TECH is our lifestyle podcast that helps you center your inner geek and deal with the stresses of your connected life. Watch along!

Want to go full screen? Head to iMore.com/live. Want to watch via iPhone or iPad? Grab the Ustream app and search for "mobilenations". Want to subscribe to any or all of our shows? Head on over to our podcast page.

A bug in Apple's AV Foundation framework, which handles streaming audio and other media for podcast apps, radio apps, and more, could be behind the mysterious, maddening cellular data spikes many users, myself included, have experienced since updating to iOS 6 or the iPhone 5. In essence, iOS just keeps on downloading data, over and over and over and over again, sometimes gigabytes worth at a time. Here's what PRX Labs found after doing some research into it:

The player appears to get into a state where it makes multiple requests per second and closes them rapidly. Because the ranges of these requests seem to overlap and the requests themselves each carry some overhead, this causes a single download of an MP3 to use significantly more bandwidth than in iOS 5. In one case, the playback of a single 30MB episode caused the transfer of over 100MB of data.

PRX was testing Wi-Fi, but seem to believe cellular, including LTE, would exhibit the same bad behavior. PRX also believes the bug is fixed in iOS 6.0.1, though Matthew Panzarino of The Next Web points out that some believe they're still seeing the bug even after updating.

iMore has had complaints about video podcasts taking longer to download than usual as well, and while it's unknown if the issues are related, it's also impossible to rule them out.

Let's be clear though, this is an issue that is costing real people real money. I've never before gotten close to my $35/6GB data plan limit before, yet last month I blew past it far enough to be surcharged $50. All I do is stream audio, and I haven't been streaming anything different than I used it. Less in fact.

If this isn't fixed already, it needs to be fixed immediately.

Source: PRX Labs via The Next Web

Turns out the iPad mini isn't cannibalizing demand for its larger sibling, the iPad 4 to the degree some analysts expected. While some predicted the 7.9-inch iPad would cut into sales of the 9.7-inch iPad by as much as 50%, that hasn't been happening. Instead, any cannibalization that is happening is being more than offset by the amount of new customers Apple is gaining. That's according to a new study of 1225 U.S. adults by Cowen and Co. that says 52% of people who were planning on buying an iPad mini in the next 18 months are buying their first tablet. John Paczkowski of All Things D reports reports:

In other words, few consumers are buying an iPad mini as an iPad replacement. And, more importantly, for many buyers, the iPad mini is their first tablet. With the iPad mini, Apple isn't wooing consumers who might have otherwise purchased a larger iPad, it's jacking into an untapped market looking for a smaller version of the tablet it first uncrated in April 2010.

Of course, some who might have purchased an iPad 4 will see the iPad mini and buy that instead, but right now, that doesn't seem to be happening on a large scale. People who want the mini are buying the mini, while people who want a larger iPad are buying that. Apple's new customers are, for the most part, those who chose to wait for a smaller, less expensive iPad, rather than a smaller, cheaper tablet. Many people aren't replacing a Kindle Fire with an iPad mini. Only 13%. Most were holding out for a smaller iPad and never bought a Fire in the first place. Microsoft, however, wasn't as lucky. 42% of iPad mini buyers say they were buying it to replace a Windows PC.

Apple has always said they'd rather cannibalize themselves than wait for someone else to do it for them. They've also said the iPad cannibalizes far more than Apple itself. The iPad mini might just be extending that pattern.

Was the iPad mini your first tablet? If not, what did it replace?

Source: All Things D