Hackers use Android 'master key'

 Chinese app Symantec said the exploit has been added to two Chinese health apps A security firm says it has identified the first known malicious use of Android's "master key" vulnerability.

The bug - which was first publicised earlier this month - allows attackers to install code on to phones running Google's mobile operating system and then take control of them.

Symantec said its researchers had found two apps distributed in China that had been infected using the exploit.

Google has already taken moves to tackle the problem.

A fortnight ago it released a patch to manufacturers, but it will not have been sent to all handset owners yet.

Google also scans its own Play marketplace for the exploit, but this will not protect consumers who download software from other stores.

Premium texts
The vulnerability was first reported by security research firm BlueBox on 3 July.

All Android apps contain an encrypted signature that the operating system uses to check the program is legitimate and has not been tampered with.

But BlueBox said it had found a way to make changes to an app's code without affecting the signature.

It warned the technique could be used to install a Trojan to read any data on a device, harvest passwords, record phone calls, take photos and carry out other functions.

According to Symantec, hackers have now exploited the flaw to install malware called Android.Skullkey, which steals data from compromised phones, monitors texts received and written on the handset, and also sends its own SMS messages to premium numbers.

It said the Trojan had been added to two legitimate apps used in China to find and make appointments with a doctor.

Android phones The fragmented nature of the Android market means updates take time before they become available
"We expect attackers to continue to leverage this vulnerability to infect unsuspecting user devices," its report warned.

"Symantec recommends users only download applications from reputable Android application marketplaces."

The firm added that affected users could manually remove the software by going into their settings menu.

One telecoms consultant said the news highlighted the difficulty Google had in distributing changes to Android.

"When Google releases its updates, manufacturers want to check them and then network operators also want to certify the code as well," said Ben Wood, director of research at CCS Insight.

"It's a consequence of having so many different firms making Android devices, with most running their own user interfaces on top.

"By contrast, Apple just pushes its updates directly to consumers."

Amazon Reports Small Loss as It Focuses on Investments

But with revenue up 22 percent, Amazon showed that it could still deliver the sales growth demanded by investors, who have lifted the company’s stock 21 percent this year. So far, those demands do not include an insistence on big profits.

Until it does, Amazon seems content to pour money into initiatives aimed at gobbling up an increasing share of spending by consumers.

For the quarter that ended June 30, Amazon said it had a net loss of $7 million, or 2 cents a share, compared with net income of $7 million, or a penny a share, in the same period a year earlier. Amazon’s revenue was $15.7 billion, up from $12.83 billion the year before.

The results were slightly below the estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, who expected Amazon to report earnings of 5 cents a share and revenue of $15.73 billion.

The miss did not seem to trouble investors too much. The company’s stock dropped less than 2 percent in after-hours trading after the release of its earnings report.

A good illustration of Amazon’s long-term bets is online video. The company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on licensing rights to build a large library of video that its customers can watch through their Kindle tablets and other devices. These agreements are critical as movies, music and other media — which account for 28 percent of Amazon’s total sales — shift from physical to digital form.

The company recently cut its biggest such deal ever, with a multiyear agreement to license television shows from Viacom, including children’s shows like “Dora the Explorer” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

As a result, Amazon spent almost 47 percent more on technology and content in the quarter, for a total of $1.59 billion — roughly 10 percent of its total revenue. Included in that spending is the company’s investment in Amazon Web Services, a lucrative business through which Amazon rents capacity in its data centers to independent companies.

“We’re investing for the large opportunities we have in front of us,” Tom Szkutak, the company’s chief financial officer, said in a conference call.

While Amazon is feared as a seller of physical goods, it faces several formidable rivals in the digital content business, including Netflix, Apple, Hulu, Microsoft and Google.

Still, Amazon is also spending aggressively on the warehouses it needs to deliver physical goods, building them in locations that have been inching ever closer to big cities with the goal of offering next-day, or even same-day, deliveries to shoppers. This year, Amazon began selling groceries in the Los Angeles area, using its own trucks to shuttle fruit, meat and boxes of cereal from a new warehouse in the city to customers’ doorsteps.

The effort is expensive and risky, though Amazon would not say whether or how much money it was losing on it. The grocery business has killed Internet retailers before — Webvan was the most notable casualty — so Amazon chose not to expand the service beyond a test in Seattle until recently.

“The challenge we’ve had over the past several years is how to make it economically viable,” Mr. Szkutak said.

All the spending on warehouses and other projects has led to a surge in hiring at the company. Its head count swelled to 97,000, up more than 40 percent from 69,000 a year ago. The hiring earned the company a plum position as the backdrop for a speech on middle-class jobs that President Obama is expected to deliver on Tuesday at an Amazon warehouse in Chattanooga, Tenn.

A big part of Amazon’s allure for investors remains its pre-eminent position in e-commerce, which is expected to rise 14.8 percent to $248 billion in American sales this year, according to eMarketer. That is far better growth than the single-digit growth expected for retail sales over all in the United States this year.

Kerry Rice, an analyst at Needham & Company, said investors believed that Amazon could keep stealing market share from Walmart and other physical retailers, and that eventually its profits would improve.

“On some level, I think some people are buying the stock because they’re hoping for that investment cycle to begin to reduce,” Mr. Rice said. “If they pull back on spending, you’re going to see that operating margin tick up.”

Mr. Rice added: “I don’t think that’s going to happen for a long time.” 

Corner Office: Paul English of Kayak, on Nurturing New Ideas

Q. Did you have the entrepreneurial itch early on?

A. I always wanted to just try new things, and I think it was probably in my DNA or something. As a kid, I would see something I didn’t like, and I wanted to make it better. So, for example, we had a phone in my house that was a one-line dial phone, and I had to get a second phone line for my computer. So I rewired the phone to handle two lines. I was really proud of that phone.

Q. And what about your high school years?

A. I had lots of side interests, but I wasn’t very interested in studying in high school. My grades were pretty much all D’s, and I didn’t apply to college. The only reason I went to college was that my parents found out I could go to state school for free because of my SAT scores. I had a day job and I went to school at night. But I had a different job every 12 to 18 months because I’d get bored and I’d want to learn something new.

Q. Once you launched your career, what were some leadership lessons you learned?

A. The most important thing I learned is something I’m still actually working on, which is how to be really blunt with feedback. It’s the most difficult thing for a manager to do. But I worked hard at it, because when managers were blunt with me, it hurt a little bit, but I’m very grateful to those few managers who helped me.

I developed this technique over the years. When I gave people their performance reviews, I would literally take a crinkled envelope, and I’d write five words on it. I would take them out to lunch, and I’d say to them, “Let’s say I left this company, and five years from now I was sitting in a bar and someone said, ‘Hey, what’s that guy like?’ What I would tell them is what I’m going to tell you. And there are two or three words that are positive, and there are two or three words that are really negative.” I would give examples and I would give them the piece of paper, so I had no written record of what we had talked about. One guy in particular e-mailed me 10 years later, and claimed that he still carries that piece of paper around. That really reinforced for me the idea that the best way you can help someone is to be on their side and to be honest with them.

Q. You were a co-founder of Kayak nine years ago. What’s unusual about the culture?

A. We’re a little bit reckless in our decision-making — not with the business, but the point is that we try things. We give even junior people scary amounts of power to come up with ideas and implement them. We had an intern last summer who, on his very first day at Kayak, came up with an idea, wrote the code and released it. It may or may not have been successful, but it almost doesn’t matter, because it showed that we value speed, and we value testing ideas, not talking about them.

It’s all about fast iteration. When you push down decisions, and you don’t require people to write up plans and do designs by consensus, enormous amounts of work just disappear. We cut out all the middle layers and you let the designers talk to the customers. Otherwise, something gets lost in translation with a lot of layers.

Q. What else?

A. We’re known for having very small meetings, usually three people. There’s a little clicker for counting people that hangs on the main conference room door. The reason it’s there is to send a message to people that I care about this issue. If there’s a bunch of people in the room, I’ll stick my head in and say, “It takes 10 of you to decide this? There aren’t three of you smart enough to do this?”

I just hate design by consensus. No innovation happens with 10 people in a room. It’s very easy to be a critic and say why something won’t work. I don’t want that because new ideas are like these little precious things that can die very easily. Two or three people will nurture it, and make it stronger, give it a chance to see life.

Q. How do you hire?

A. You always have to be recruiting. When I meet somebody who’s amazing, I’ll often say to them, “Who’s the smartest person you’ve ever met?” My team might be sick of me asking the question, because I’ll keep asking. Finally, after the third or fourth time, they’ll say, “You know, there was this person.”

Then the two criteria I really look for are productivity — which is about speed and judgment and drive — and the second one is fun. A lot of companies have the no-jerks rule. But I have the “no neutrals” rule.

Q. Can you explain that?

A. We want to be a hyperproductive company and we want to make it fun, and I make a commitment to people that in 20 years they’ll look back and say this was the most fun job they had. If you surround them with people who are annoying or just kind of neutral, it’s going to make the job a drag. And you don’t ever want to hurt someone’s creative energy.

Certainly, annoying people will hurt them, and so will people who are just kind of boring. They’re nice, but they don’t ever provoke the creative person in a fun way. That diminishes their productivity. If I have a commitment to improving people’s productivity and fun, then I have to surround them with people who are fun and who will challenge them.

Q. So how do you get at that in an interview?

A. I know how to assess people about their speed and their product sense and their technical skills. The area that’s much harder to assess is culture. So I’ll look at the résumé, and find something that’s interesting. Then I’ll have them describe to me the team they worked with, and I’ll ask them about each person on the team — “Tell me something they did that blew you away and tell me something they did that annoyed you.” I make them talk about real people and the real product. From that, I can figure out their values and how they see other people. That gives me a really good sense about whether they will fit on my team. 

Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

 F.B.I. via Getty Images; Tripathi FamilyWhen a picture of Sunil Tripathi (right) was posted on Reddit alongside an image of Suspect No. 2 in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, it fueled speculation that they were the same person.

On an overcast day in early May, I traveled to suburban Philadelphia to visit the family of Sunil Tripathi, the deceased 22-year-old Brown University student who, for about four hours on the morning of April 19, was mistakenly identified as Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings. The Tripathis had just arrived home after nearly two months spent in Providence, R.I., where they went to organize the search for Sunil, who disappeared on March 16. When I entered the house, Judy Tripathi, Sunil’s mother, asked me for a hug. In a shattered voice, she said, “I need hugs these days.” We sat at the kitchen table and talked, and at one point Judy handed me a photo of a young, smiling Sunil, caught in the motion of throwing a ball. “Look how happy he looks,” she said. For the next two hours, she and her husband, Akhil, and their daughter, Sangeeta, described what happened to them in the early-morning hours of April 19, and how the false identification of their son derailed their ongoing search for him and further traumatized their lives.

 At 5 p.m. on April 18, three days after the bombs went off at the marathon finish line, the F.B.I. released grainy photographs of two suspects. For the past month, the Tripathis had been renting a house and spending their days working with F.B.I. agents, Brown administrators and an organization dedicated to finding missing persons. Early on in the search, the family created a Facebook page called “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi,” which included video messages from family and friends and recent images of Sunil — walking the beach with his older brother, Ravi; attending his sister’s graduation ceremony; posing with his mother at a Phillies game.

Minutes after the world first saw the suspects’ photos, a user on Reddit, the online community that is also one of the largest Web sites in the world, posted side-by-side pictures comparing Sunil’s facial features with the face that would later be identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The pictures were accompanied by speculation about the circumstances surrounding Sunil’s disappearance and the F.B.I.’s involvement in his search. By 8 p.m., three hours after the F.B.I. released the suspects’ photos, angry messages began to appear on the Tripathi’s Facebook page, and at 8:15 Ravi received a phone call from a reporter at ABC News in New York, who asked if Sunil had been spotted in Boston and if Ravi had seen the F.B.I. photos of Suspect No. 2. Ravi, unclear at what she was getting at, told her there had been no word from Sunil. As the minutes passed and the volume of threatening Facebook messages increased, the Tripathis finally called their F.B.I. contact in Providence, who assured them that nobody within his office believed that Sunil was Suspect No. 2.

The family had been told that missing people sometimes go to libraries or other places with free Internet service, where they type their own names into search engines to track their cases. The Facebook page was created with the hope that if Sunil searched for himself, he would find loving messages from his family and friends. Now they worried that he would see what was being written about him and take drastic measures to harm himself. Around 11 p.m., at roughly the same time that the news came out that Sean Collier, a 27-year-old police officer at M.I.T., had been shot and killed, the Tripathis closed the page so that no more messages could come in.


The removal of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noted by several people in the media, including Sasha Stone, who runs an inside-Hollywood Web site called Awards Daily. At 10:56 p.m., Stone tweeted: “I’m sure by now the @fbipressoffice is looking into this dude” and included a link to the Facebook page. Seven minutes later, she tweeted: “Seconds after I sent that tweet the page is gone off of Facebook. If you can cache it . . .” For Erik Malinowski, a senior sportswriter at the Web site BuzzFeed, the takedown of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noteworthy enough to pass along. At midnight, Malinowski, whose Twitter following includes a number of journalists, tweeted: “FYI: A Facebook group dedicated to finding Sunil Tripathi, the missing Brown student, was deleted this evening.” Roughly 300 Twitter users retweeted Malinowski’s post, including the pop-culture blogger Perez Hilton, who sent Sunil Tripathi’s name out to more than six million followers. From there, the small, contained world of speculation exploded on every social-media platform. Several journalists began tweeting out guarded thoughts about Sunil’s involvement. If the family had taken down the Facebook page, the reasoning went, it must mean that the Tripathis had seen their missing son in the grainy photos of Suspect No. 2. 

Facebook Is Erasing Doubts on Mobile

The social networking company said Wednesday that it had revved up its mobile advertising from virtually nothing a year ago to 41 percent of its total ad revenue of $1.6 billion in the second quarter.

“Soon we’ll have more revenue on mobile than desktop,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, said in a conference call with analysts.

Facebook’s results elated investors, who sent the company’s stock up nearly 17 percent, to $30.94, in after-hours trading.

Analysts said the strong performance dissipated lingering worries that the company could not adapt to the current Internet environment, in which users are relying more on mobile devices instead of personal computers to access the information they want.

Those concerns have dogged the company since its disappointing initial public offering in May 2012, in which it sold shares at $38 and then saw them fall by half.

“One of the biggest overhangs from their I.P.O. is that this company had been blindsided by mobile,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “They caught up. Instead of being behind the curve on mobile, they are ahead of the curve.”

The company said it had net income of $333 million, or 13 cents a share, in the second quarter. Excluding stock-based compensation expenses, profits were $488 million or 19 cents a share, compared with $295 million, or 12 cents a share, in the second quarter a year ago.

The company’s revenue soared 53 percent, to $1.81 billion.

Facebook had particularly strong demand for ads that appear in its users’ news feeds, the flow of updates from friends that they see when they log on. About 1 in 20 posts in the news feed is an ad, and advertisers cannot seem to get enough of them.

The company expects those ads to continue to grow in the second half, its chief financial officer, David Ebersman, said in a conference call with analysts.

One concern for the future is whether Facebook will annoy its users if it significantly increases the number of ads in news feeds, said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with eMarketer, a research firm.

“How many ads will people tolerate?” she asked.

Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook’s studies had shown that users were noticing ads more, and the company was working to improve the quality and relevance of ads.

Facebook is also studying when and how to introduce video ads, which are expected to command at least several hundred thousand dollars each.

“We have nothing to announce today,” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said in an interview. But she said video was “tremendously important” for users as well as marketers. Videos made and shared through Facebook’s new video feature in Instagram are growing quickly.

The company’s results also show how its users are continuing to shift toward mobile phones and tablets to use the site instead of a computer’s Web browser. Although the company’s total number of active monthly users worldwide grew slightly from the first quarter, to 1.15 billion, the number of people who use its mobile versions at least once a month grew 9 percent, to 819 million in that time.

Total ad revenue, a crucial measure watched by Wall Street, was $1.6 billion, up 61 percent from the second quarter of 2012. Of total ad revenue, 41 percent came from mobile, up from 30 percent in the first quarter.

“I think this shows that all the questions that people might have had in the past about whether Facebook could monetize on mobile devices, they’ve settled definitively,” Ms. Williamson said.

Users’ preference for reading Facebook on the go has created special revenue opportunities, like ads that prompt users to install mobile apps like games. But advertisers are generally willing to pay much less for a mobile ad than they are for the desktop.

The company’s sharp revenue growth reflects increased competition among advertisers to reach Facebook’s large user base, said Rob Jewell, chief executive of Spruce Media, a firm that helps advertisers like McDonald’s and the insurer Progressive to buy ads on the social network and measure their effectiveness.

Facebook’s ad rates are generally set through a bidding process, and Mr. Jewell said that his clients paid about 10 percent more on average for ads in the second quarter than in the first quarter. Ads in the news feed, both on the desktop and mobile versions of Facebook, were in particularly high demand, with rates up about 75 percent from the first quarter for both categories, he said.

“Facebook is the best channel for mobile app advertisers to purchase advertising,” Mr. Jewell said.

In the second quarter of 2012, the company reported a net loss of $743 million, or 8 cents a share. But that figure included $1.3 billion in compensation expenses related to the company’s initial public offering. In the year ago quarter, Facebook’s revenue was $1.2 billion.

The company far exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. Analysts had predicted the company would report earnings of 14 cents a share, excluding stock compensation costs, on revenue of $1.62 billion, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

Facebook’s surprisingly strong second-quarter earnings contrasted with those of Google, which last week reported disappointing profits in mobile advertising.

While the two companies are not strictly comparable because Facebook is expanding its ads from a much a smaller base, Ronald Josey, an analyst at JMP Securities, said Facebook was doing extremely well in mobile categories like ads prompting users to install new mobile applications.

“This company is becoming more and more of a mobile company,” he said. 

House Defeats Effort to Rein In N.S.A. Data Gathering

The 205-to-217 vote was far closer than expected and came after a brief but impassioned debate over citizens’ right to privacy and the steps the government must take to protect national security. It was a rare instance in which a classified intelligence program was openly discussed on the House floor, and disagreements over the  program led to some unusual coalitions.

Conservative Republicans leery of what they see as Obama administration abuses of power teamed up with liberal Democrats long opposed to intrusive intelligence programs. The Obama administration made common cause with the House Republican leadership to try to block it.

House members pressing to rein in the N.S.A. vowed afterward that the outrage unleashed by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures would eventually put a brake on the agency’s activities. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and a longtime critic of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts, said lawmakers would keep coming back with legislation to curtail the dragnets for “metadata,” whether through phone records or Internet surveillance.

At the very least, the section of the Patriot Act in question will be allowed to expire in 2015, he said. “It’s going to end — now or later,” Mr. Nadler said. “The only question is when and on what terms.”

Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, promised lawmakers that he would draft legislation this fall to add more privacy protections to government surveillance programs even as he begged the House to oppose blanket restrictions.

The amendment to the annual Defense Department spending bill, written by Representatives Justin Amash, a libertarian Republican from Western Michigan, and John Conyers Jr., a veteran liberal Democrat from Detroit, turned Democrat against Democrat and Republican against Republican.

It would have limited N.S.A. phone surveillance to specific targets of law enforcement investigations, not broad dragnets. It was only one of a series of proposals — including restricting funds for Syrian rebels and adding Congressional oversight to foreign aid to Egypt — intended to check President Obama’s foreign and intelligence policies.

But in the phone surveillance program, the House’s right and left wings appeared to find a unifying cause. Representative Raúl R. Labrador, Republican of Idaho, called it “the wing nut coalition” and Mr. Amash “the chief wing nut.”

Mr. Amash framed his push as a defense of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, and he found a surprising ally, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin and one of the principal authors of the Patriot Act. Mr. Sensenbrenner said his handiwork was never meant to create a program that allows the government to demand the phone records of every American.

“The time has come to stop it,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.

Opposing them were not only Mr. Obama and the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, but also the leaders of the nation’s defense and intelligence establishment.

On Tuesday, the director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, spent hours providing classified briefings to lawmakers about the program, and the White House took the unusual step of issuing a statement urging lawmakers not to approve the measure. On Wednesday, James L. Jones, the retired Marine Corps general who was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser from 2009-10, added his name to an open letter in support of preserving the N.S.A. programs that more than half a dozen top national-security officials from the Bush administration had signed.

“Denying the N.S.A. such access to data will leave the nation at risk,” said the letter, which was circulated to undecided members.

Mr. Rogers took a personal swipe at Mr. Amash, a darling of social media, when he said the House was not in the business of racking up “likes” on Facebook. He said the calling log program was an important tool for protecting against terrorist attacks.

“This is not a game,” he fumed. “This is real. It will have real consequences.”

But many rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats appeared impervious to such overtures. Representative Jared Polis, Democrat of Colorado and a supporter of the amendment, said that if the Obama administration felt strongly about defending the program, Mr. Obama would have spoken out personally. Instead, the White House released a statement under the name of the press secretary, Jay Carney.

“The press secretary says hundreds of things every day,” Mr. Polis said.

The divisions in Congress seemed to reflect the ambivalence in the nation. In a CBS News poll released Wednesday, 67 percent of Americans said the government’s collection of phone records was a violation of privacy. At the same time, 52 percent called it a necessary tool to help find terrorists.

But the final tally in the House suggested the tide was shifting on the issue. In the weeks after the Snowden leaks, the united voices of Congressional leaders and administration officials in support of the N.S.A. programs seemed to squelch the outrage Mr. Snowden had hoped for. Anger seemed to be trained more on Mr. Snowden than on the programs he revealed.

As the news media and the government chronicled Mr. Snowden’s flight from law enforcement, a web of privacy activists, libertarian conservatives and liberal civil liberties proponents rallied support behind Congressional action. House members said they received hundreds of phone calls and e-mails before Wednesday’s vote, all in favor of curtailing the N.S.A.’s authority.

Ultimately, 94 House Republicans defied their leadership; 111 Democrats — a majority of the Democratic caucus — defied their president.

“This is only the beginning,” Mr. Conyers vowed after the vote. The fight will shift to the Senate, where two longtime Democratic critics of N.S.A. surveillance, Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon, immediately took up the cause.

“National security is of paramount importance, yet the N.S.A.’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records violates innocent Americans’ privacy rights and should not continue as its exists today,” Mr. Udall said after the vote. “The U.S. House of Representatives’ bipartisan vote today proposal should be a wake-up call for the White House.” 

Q&A: Installing Windows Updates, Automatic or Manually

Q. I have Windows 8 set to update itself automatically, but it doesn’t always work and I end up having to click around and install some updates myself. Why?

A. Like earlier versions of the operating system, Windows 8 can check to see if software updates for your computer are available from Microsoft — and then install them for you so you don’t have to remember to do it yourself. Security updates and other software patches deemed important or critical are typically installed automatically when Microsoft pushes them out. (The company often releases the updates on the second Tuesday of each month, but it can happen as needed).

But even if you have the automatic updates option turned on, not all the software Microsoft sends you will install itself. Certain types of updates, including fresh versions of programs that have new user agreements or terms of service statements, require your attention because you are asked to read the legal fine print — or at least click the Agree button — before you can install the software.

Some updates, like feature enhancements or updated device drivers, are considered optional and not critical to a program’s ability to function. When an optional update is ready, you usually get an alert that it is available if you want it, and Windows leaves it to you to do the installation yourself.

Restoring Scroll Bars on a Mac

Q. I just got my first Mac laptop and am confused by the lack of scroll bars on the sides of the Safari browser and other windows. The scroll bars seem to appear sporadically, so how do you get around the Web on this system?

A. Recent versions of OS X keep the scroll bars on the Safari browser and other windows hidden unless you need them — like when you are already scrolling. While the lack of scroll bars makes for a cleaner look, many people find it disorienting because of the inconsistent behavior and inability to see just where they are within a Web page.

If you would prefer to have scroll bars visible at all times, you can change the setting. To do so, go to the Apple menu and choose System Preferences, or click on the System Preferences icon in the Mac’s Dock. In the Personal area, click the General icon. In the box, next to “Show scroll bars,” click the button next to “Always.” Close the System Preference box when you are finished.

If you are reading long articles on the Web, you can scroll down one screen at a time within the page by tapping the Space bar on the keyboard. To go back up to previous screens, hold down the Shift key while pressing the Space bar. 

In the Beginning Was the Word; Now the Word Is on an App

For millions of readers around the world, a wildly successful free Bible app, YouVersion, is changing how, where and when they read the Bible.

Built by LifeChurch.tv, one of the nation’s largest and most technologically advanced evangelical churches, YouVersion is part of what the church calls its “digital missions.” They include a platform for online church services and prepackaged worship videos that the church distributes free. A digital tithing system and an interactive children’s Bible are in the works.

It’s all part of the church’s aspiration to be a kind of I.T. department for churches everywhere. YouVersion, with over 600 Bible translations in more than 400 languages, is by far the church’s biggest success. The app is nondenominational, including versions embraced by Catholics, Russian Orthodox and Messianic Jews. This month, the app reached 100 million downloads, placing it in the company of technology start-ups like Instagram and Dropbox.

“They have defined what it means to access God’s word on a mobile device,” said Geoff Dennis, an executive vice president of Crossway, one of many Bible publishers — from small presses to global Bible societies to News Corporation’s Thomas Nelson imprint — that have licensed their translations, free, to the church.

When Jen Sears, 37, a human resources manager in Oklahoma City, wants to pray these days, she leaves her Bible behind and grabs her phone instead.

“I have my print Bible sitting on my dresser at home, but it hasn’t moved” in the four years since she downloaded YouVersion, Mrs. Sears said.

The app, marketed simply as “The Bible,” has brought new donors to LifeChurch.tv. About $3 million was given by a handful of large donors to support development of the app last year; the church raised nearly $60 million over all, according to its financial statements. The church says it will have spent almost $20 million over all on YouVersion by the end of this year.

The church was founded in 1996 by a team consisting mostly of former business executives. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, a wider association of 850 congregations, which gives its members wide latitude in their operations. It has 50,000 weekly attendees in 16 locations.

The Gutenberg behind YouVersion is the church’s 36-year-old “innovation pastor,” Bobby Gruenewald, whose training was in business, not religion.

Mr. Gruenewald grew up in Decatur, Ill., in an evangelical church, where as a teenager he started a Christian rap ministry. Later, he moved to Oklahoma to join his sixth-grade crush, now his wife, who left Illinois to study at Southern Nazarene University.

Here at the church’s headquarters, Mr. Gruenewald wears the same tennis shoes, slouchy jeans and T-shirts that suited him as a Christian rapper and small-time entrepreneur who bluffed his way into building Web sites, then ran a Web hosting company out of his dorm room and later sold a pro-wrestling fan Web site for $7 million.

He joined LifeChurch.tv in 2001 after playing keyboard in its house band. Since then, the church has allowed him to experiment without an eye to profit.

Mr. Gruenewald’s early efforts for LifeChurch.tv included a virtual church for the online Second Life community and a Google ad campaign to lure pornography consumers to the church instead. But then he had a critical insight: if the church wanted to attract younger people, it needed both to be technically advanced and to offer its resources free.

“We have a generation of people that can’t fathom paying 99 cents for a song that they love,” Mr. Gruenewald said, “and we were asking them to pay $20 for a book that they don’t understand.”

He made YouVersion available in 2008, as the first Bible in Apple’s App Store. That early release contained only a few translations, like the King James Version, mostly in the public domain. When he began trying to persuade traditional Bible publishers to enter licensing arrangements with him, he encountered suspicion.

“People would say: ‘If people read it on YouVersion and they’re not paying anything for it, what’s going to happen to my pew Bibles?’ ” said Mr. Dennis of Crossway. “‘What’s going to happen to the thinline Bible that people carry to church?’”

Adam Graber of Tyndale House, another publisher that provides translations for the app, expressed some reservations about YouVersion’s strong position in the market for Bible apps. 

Chipping Away at the Smartphone Leaders

Samsung is now more profitable than Apple, according to second-quarter financial results released by Samsung on Friday in Seoul. But while the two rivals have successively one-upped each other with ever sleeker, more technologically sophisticated phones, new competition is stirring.

Already, the combined share of the worldwide smartphone market controlled by Apple and Samsung slipped to 43 percent in the second quarter from 49 percent a year earlier, IDC, a research firm, reported on Friday.

Some of the companies that are chipping away at the leaders are familiar names trying comebacks, like Sony, Nokia and HTC. Others are relative newcomers, like LG of South Korea and Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei of China.

“The story is no longer Apple versus Samsung,” said Bryan Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Going forward, they will both face similar challenges.”

Analysts say buyers are more willing to look at alternatives to Apple or Samsung because the differences among smartphones are becoming less pronounced.

The proportion of phones running Google’s Android operating system keeps growing, and technical specifications are converging. Like Samsung’s Galaxy S4, a number of other phones, including Sony’s Xperia Z, also include high-definition 5-inch screens.

That makes price, where the Chinese smartphone makers have an edge, an increasingly important selling point.

Those challenges were evident in the latest earnings report from Samsung on Friday, when the company said it expected competition in the smartphone business to stiffen in the third quarter, with new models pending from LG and other rivals. “The strong growth streak for the smartphone market is expected to continue in the third quarter, albeit at a slower pace,” the company said in a statement.

Samsung remains a powerhouse, reporting big gains on Friday in sales and earnings for its latest quarter. Net income rose 50 percent, to 7.77 trillion won, or $6.96 billion, from 5.19 trillion won a year earlier. Revenue rose to 57.46 trillion won, or $51.6 billion, from 47.6 trillion won.

On Tuesday, Apple posted quarterly net income of $6.9 billion on revenue of $35.3 billion.

Strategy Analytics, a research firm, said Samsung had passed Apple for the first time to become the world’s most profitable maker of mobile handsets. Samsung, which does not break out results for its handset-making business, generated $5.2 billion in quarterly operating profit from the unit, Strategy Analytics estimated, compared with $4.6 billion for Apple.

Samsung previously pulled ahead of Apple in market share, and its gains continued in the second quarter, when it controlled 30.4 percent of global smartphone shipments, compared with 13.1 percent for Apple, according to IDC.

Samsung has had to work harder than Apple to achieve those gains. Ubiquitous TV ads around the world and big-ticket promotional events like an introductory party for its flagship model, the Galaxy S4, at Radio City Music Hall, have driven up marketing costs. And while the S4 has been selling at a brisk pace, it has fallen short of some analysts’ expectations. Investors have grown accustomed to bigger gains, and the share price of Samsung, like Apple shares, has taken a beating this year.

“In a way, Apple and Samsung have become victims of their own success,” said Pete Cunningham, an analyst at the research firm Canalys. “When these companies report many billions of profits every quarter, it’s hard to say they are doing anything wrong.”

While the old generation of phone makers — Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry — struggle, together Samsung and Apple still collect more than 90 percent of the profit in smartphones, analysts say. Yet that success has emboldened more companies to try to challenge them.

Individually, none of these companies pose a threat to the top two. Collectively, however, the next three top players showed strong growth over the last year. No. 3 LG’s share of worldwide smartphone sales increased to 5.3 percent from 3.7 percent in the second quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. No. 4 ZTE rose to 5 percent from 3.7 percent and No. 5 Huawei went to 4.8 percent from 4.2 percent.

IDC had a slightly different ranking, with Lenovo replacing Huawei in the top five and also showing solid growth, to 4.7 percent from 3.1 percent.

As recently as the first quarter of 2011, three Western companies — Apple, Nokia and BlackBerry — topped the IDC list.

The eastward shift reflects the growth of sales in China, which has surpassed the United States to become the biggest smartphone market, and other developing economies. Analysts say much of the growth in coming years will occur among lower-priced smartphones, an area in which Chinese makers are strong and Apple is notably absent.

But both Apple and Samsung face new challenges at the high end of the market, where their dominance has been most pronounced. Sony, for example, has shown renewed strength in Japan, where its Xperia Z has been outselling the iPhone, and Europe, where IDC showed Sony’s market share rising to 10 percent in the first quarter from 6 percent a year earlier.

LG, which said in the last week that its smartphone shipments had more than doubled in the second quarter from a year earlier, to 12.1 million from 5.7 million, clearly has bigger ambitions in the United States. For the introduction of a new flagship model, the company has planned a splashy event along the lines of Samsung’s Radio City extravaganza, sending out a “save the date” notice to journalists for Aug. 7.

Why are rivals to Samsung and Apple so optimistic? Despite the slowdown in growth that the market leaders have signaled, the business continues to expand. Smartphone shipments worldwide rose 52 percent in the second quarter, to 238 million phones, according to IDC.

“The smartphone market is still a rising tide that’s lifting many ships,” said Kevin Restivo, an analyst at IDC. “Though Samsung and Apple are the dominant players, the market is as fragmented as ever. There is ample opportunity for smartphone vendors with differentiated offerings.” 

Under Code, Apps Would Disclose Collection of Data

A variety of groups, including app developers and consumer advocates, have agreed to test a voluntary code of conduct that would require participating app developers to offer short-form notices about whether their apps collect certain personal details from users — including health and social networking data — or share user-specific data with entities like advertising networks or consumer data resellers.

The idea is to allow people to compare the data collection practices of, say, flashlight apps and choose one that does not ingest unrelated material like their photos or contact lists. The determination that the notices are ready for testing is the outcome of yearlong negotiations — convened by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a division of the United States Commerce Department — to increase mobile app transparency for consumers. Participants included app developers, digital marketing, civil liberties, consumer and privacy groups.

On Thursday, many participants in the process voted to support a version of the code drafted by a diverse coalition including the Application Developers Alliance, an industry association, and advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the World Privacy Forum.

Although major mobile app developers like Apple and Google, which develops mobile apps for its Android platform, have not indicated whether they intend to sign on to the code of conduct, groups involved in drafting it say it is a significant advance in mobile privacy for consumers — and an unusual agreement among industry and consumer advocates.

“It’s a victory for common sense,” said Tim Sparapani, vice president for law, policy and government relations at the Application Developers Alliance, a group representing more than 100 companies and 20,000 individual developers.

But other participants in the negotiations said the notices would do little to give individual consumers more insight into or control over the vast piles of information about them that online entities collect and analyze. The notices would display only a limited list of data collection categories, they say, and would not allow consumers to opt out of data-mining or even see the records companies had amassed about them.

“A very modest slice of privacy was put forward,” for the groups to tackle, said Susan Grant, the director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America, a research and advocacy organization representing about 300 consumer groups. “As time went on, that slice became more and more narrowed.”

She abstained from the vote Thursday on whether to support the code.

In the past, the app industry has been heavily criticized by some federal regulators and consumer advocates for collecting personal details from users without their knowledge or consent. A review last year by the Federal Trade Commission of 400 popular children’s apps available on Google and Apple platforms concluded that only 20 percent disclosed their data collection practices.

The code of conduct would require participating mobile app developers to show notices indicating whether their apps collected user-specific details in any of eight categories: biometrics, including fingerprints or facial recognition data; Web browsing history; logs of phone calls or texts made or received; contact list details like e-mail addresses or social network connections; financial information, like credit or banking data; health or medical data; precise location data; and stored text, video or photo files.

Signatories to the code would also have to list any of eight categories of entities with which their apps shared information; these include ad networks; mobile carriers; consumer data resellers; data analytics companies; government entities; operating systems; social networks; or other apps.

Companies that violated a promise to adhere to the code would be subject to enforcement action by the Federal Trade Commission. The code is the first step in a larger plan by the Obama administration to institute a wide-ranging consumer privacy bill of rights that would give consumers some rights to access, control and correct the personal details companies collected about them.

Last year, the White House issued a report proposing that Congress enact such a consumer privacy bill. The report said the bill would rely on codes of conduct, worked out in industry-advocacy group negotiations, to specify how different industries would adhere to those principles. The administration has yet to make public the proposed text for the legislation.

But some participants who helped develop the mobile app transparency notices said the modest gains that resulted for consumers indicated a need for stronger privacy legislation and regulation.

“If we want to move expeditiously through bigger issues, we are going to need some legislative action,” said Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for privacy issues at the Washington office of the A.C.L.U. 

Zynga Shares Fall on News It Is Ending Plan for Gambling

“Zynga is making the focused choice not to pursue a license for real money gaming in the United States,” the company said in a statement. “Zynga will continue to evaluate all of its priorities against the growing market opportunity in free, social gaming, including social casino offerings.”

The announcement, which came on a day when Zynga reported quarterly results mostly in line with investor expectations, sent its shares down 13 percent, to $3.06 in after-hours trading.

Over the last year, Zynga’s business model has rapidly crumbled while it continued to lose online gamers to rivals. Executives have pleaded for time to turn around the company, arguing to investors that greater fiscal discipline and execution would stabilize Zynga’s position, while its foray into casino-style gambling could pay off handsomely in the long run.

That thinking has changed in recent months within the company’s upper echelons, with Mark Pincus, a founder, and his replacement as chief executive, Don Mattrick, returning to Zynga’s roots with free social games like FarmVille, which catapulted the company to stardom in 2009.

“We need to get back to basics and take a longer-term view on our products and business, develop more efficient processes and tighten up execution all across the company,” Mr. Mattrick said in a statement.

Zynga reported $231 million in quarterly revenue on Thursday, a 31 percent drop from a year ago, as the struggling publisher continued to lose players.

Zynga said the number of active monthly players dropped to 187 million this quarter from 306 million a year ago, its lowest since mid-2010. The company, which has acknowledged fundamental problems with its business model, went public in December 2011 at $10 a share.

Excluding certain items, Zynga posted a loss of a penny a share, compared with a penny-a-share profit a year ago.

Zynga reported $188 million in bookings, which is a measure of the value of virtual goods bought by players during the three-month period that ended June 30. That is a 38 percent drop from $302 million a year earlier. 

Getting the best Amazon deal

Tips, tricks and solutions for your Mac problems

Although I’m the guy others come to for answers, there are times when I have questions of my own. For instance, while discussing beloved movies with a friend I was reminded that I don't own copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest movies. Hoping to remedy that I dashed to Amazon and found Alfred Hitchcock: The Master piece Collection [Blu-ray], which includes the greatest hits of Hitchcock’s later work. The collection looked great, but the price did not—$178.96 as I write this.

Reviews indicate that the collection has been sold for as little as $120—a price I would be willing to spring for. But how am I to know when it becomes available at such a discounted price? I turned to Twitter for answers.

Follower John Coxon (@johncoxon) told me about camelcamelcamel. This Web-based service allows you to enter the URL for the item you wish to track. You can then view a history of the item’s price to get a ballpark idea of how low it’s been priced in the past. Then just enter the price you’re willing to pay ($120, in my case) and choose how you wish to be alerted—via email or Twitter.

The camelcamelcamel site tracks the Hitchcock Blu-ray collection
Mike Hoffman (@MikeHoffman) pointed me to Delite Studio’s free Mac application Price Drop Monitor For Amazon. Download and install it and a shopping cart icon appears in the Mac’s menu bar. In your Web browser just navigate to the item you eventually wish to purchase and drag its URL to this menu bar icon. It will be added to a list of watched items. When the price of a watched item drops you’ll be notified (you can choose from among a sound, notification center, Growl, and email). To track more than 20 items you must pay $3.99 for monitoring of up to 50 items at a time.

Both Chris Lehmkuhl (@ChrisLehmkuhl) and Dave Packard (@cpadave) informed me that all I had to do is add the item to my cart and leave it there, unpurchased. When the price changes you'll see a notification in your Amazon shopping cart.

And finally, I have a solution of my own. With Safari go to the item’s Amazon page and choose File > Open in Dashboard. This is the means for creating a Web clipping. Select the item’s price area and click Add. That clipping will appear in Dashboard. Because Dashboard clippings update whenever you switch to Dashboard, all you need to do is invoke Dashboard to view the item’s current price.

Review: Prime World: Defenders an enjoyable tower-defense game for Mac

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld UK. Visit Macworld UK’s blog page for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

Prime World: Defenders is enjoyable fun, and if you ramp the speed settings up it can get pretty frantic at times. The game takes the tried-and-trusted tower defense formula and mixes it with elements of a collectible card game.

The storyline is pretty flimsy; a mysterious substance called Prime can be used both to develop new technologies and to power magical spells. Prime is concentrated in an area called the Prime Zone that is also populated by goblin-like baddies called The Touched, so it’s your job to build defensive towers and lob in the occasional magical spell to keep the baddies at bay while you harvest as much Prime as you can. However, building towers and using magic also uses up Prime, so the winning strategy lies in building strong defenses while still hanging on to enough Prime to complete each mission.

Nival
The game’s 3D graphics are neatly designed and colorful and remind me quite a bit of WarCraft, and the various levels are spread across a variety of different landscapes to keep things fresh. At the start of the game you’re equipped with just a couple of basic towers and a single magical spell, and the first mission acts as a tutorial that shows you how everything works and helps to get you started.   As you complete missions and collect Prime you’ll gain cards that give you access to new types of towers that do more damage, perhaps hurling poison at your enemies or sticky goo that slows them down and makes it easier to pick them off. You can also learn a small number of powerful spells that can affect multiple enemies all at once, but these spells use up a lot of Prime and take a long time to recharge, so you can only use them as a last ditch defence.

The basic mechanics of the game are simple enough, and Prime World Defenders is certainly suitable for young children. However, you can only hold a few cards in your deck at a time, so you do need to think carefully about the cards you want to use at the start of each mission. Adults who want more of a challenge can also increase the speed of the game so that the waves of enemies come swarming onto the screen more quickly and really force you to think on your feet.

Nival
Prime World Defenders is good fun for both adults and younger players, but it feels like the sort of casual game that would work better sitting on the sofa with an iPad rather than sitting at a desk in front of your Mac. It could be a hit on the iPad, but it’s not an essential purchase for the Mac (it require use of the Steam online gaming service) unless you’re a really avid fan of tower-defense games.

Profits dip again for Apple, while iPhone sales beat record

Apple’s profits fell for a second consecutive quarter, even as the company enjoyed record iPhone sales for the April-to-June time period.

For its fiscal third quarter ended June 29, Apple reported sales of $35.3 billion, with net profit at $6.9 billion. That translated to earnings of $7.47 per diluted share. Apple’s revenue marked a record for the June quarter, ticking up 1 percent from the $35 billion Apple posted in last year’s third quarter. Still, profits fell 22 percent year-over-year, down from $8.88 billion in 2012. Apple also reported a drop in profit during its fiscal second quarter of 2013.

Apple’s performance for the third quarter topped analyst expectations. Analysts were looking for the company to earn $7.32 a share on $35 billion in revenue.

With a tiny increase in revenue but a drop in profit, you’d rightly conclude that Apple’s gross margin dropped: For the quarter, it was 36.9 percent, versus 42.8 percent on the year-ago quarter. That’s because Apple’s most popular products now have lower margins than the top-sellers a year ago.

Apple says international sales accounted for 57 percent of its revenue for the quarter.

The company also says it has issued $18.8 billion in cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.

While Apple generally keeps a tight lid on future product announcement, company officials did reiterate a point made during its second-quarter earnings announcement in April—that the company plans to roll out new products starting this fall and into the next year. “We are laser-focused and working hard on some amazing new products,” CEO Tim Cook said in an statement accompanying Apple’s earnings announcement.”

Apple says it sold 32.2 million iPhones—a record for the June quarter. That’s up from 26 million iPhones in the year-ago period. For the U.S., iPhone sales rose 51 percent year-over-year, Apple says.

“iPhone 5 remains by far the most popular [phone], but we’re also very happy with sales of iPhone 4 and 4S,” chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer told analysts during a Tuesday conference call. Those older phones, of course, are lower-margin devices, since Apple charges customers $200 or $100 less for those phones, respectively, compared to the iPhone 5.

Oppenheimer said that iPhone sales remain ahead of expectations, and that Apple is particularly pleased with the iPhone’s strong year-over-year growth in both developed and emerging markets. Apple says that ComScore shows the iPhone holds the top spot in the U.S. market for the three month period ending in May, with a 39 percent share. And the iPhone is the top-selling smartphone in Japan, and the top or second-best selling smartphone in most markets IDC tracks.

With government, business, and education, iPhone holds a 62.5 percent share of the U.S. commercial market.

Cook suggested that Apple is at least open to the notion of trade-ins for smartphones. “I like the environmental aspect of it,” he said, though he stressed that Apple hasn’t announced any plans on that front. Cook pointed out that “residual value of iPhone stays high, and there’s so much demand around it. So that makes the trade-in program very lucrative.”

The picture was less rosy for iPad sales, but Apple has a perfectly reasonable explanation for the 14 percent drop in tablet sales from last year’s third quarter. A year ago, Apple introduced the third-generation iPad and enjoyed a full quarter’s worth of sales to the tune of 17 million units. This quarter, sales fell to 14.6 million iPads.

Still, Apple has plenty of reason to remain bullish on the iPad. Oppenheimer said that the iPad ranked tops in a 2013 U.S. tablet satisfaction survey by JD Power and Associates. And during the quarter, the company inked a deal with the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest district in the U.S., to roll out iPads to 640,000 students.

In fact, the iPad got the bulk of the credit for a strong quarter of sales to U.S. schools. According to Oppenheimer, the last three months generated the highest quarterly revenue ever for Apple’s U.S. education institution business.

Mac sales also fell in the quarter, down 7 percent from last year to 3.8 million units. Still, Oppenheimer pointed out that the 3.8 million Macs sold beat Apple’s own expectations. And Apple’s sales still were ahead of the total PC market, which saw sales contract by 11 percent according to estimates from research firm IDC (which is owned by the same company that owns Macworld). By Apple’s math, the Mac gained market share during the quarter.

The Mac was one of the few product lines to see any changes during the quarter, with Apple updating its MacBook Air lineup at the beginning of June by adding new Intel processors. Company executives had little to say about any impact those new laptops had on overall Mac sales, but Oppenheimer did call it the most successful MacBook Air launch to date, adding that customer response was great.

But during the call, executives implied that there were better things to come. Oppenheimer noted that June’s Worldwide Developers Conference included previews of both the Mac Pro and the next version of OS X, code-named Mavericks.

The iTunes Stores—which includes the App Store, Mac App Store, iBookstore, and the music, movies, and TV sections of iTunes—generated $4.3 billion in billings, Oppenheimer said, culminating in the best week and best month ever for App Store. That translated to quarterly revenue of $2.4 billion, up 29 percent year over year. Total quarterly revenue from iTunes, software, and services generated $4 billion in revenue.

Oppenheimer said that Apple now has over 320 million iCloud accounts, and 240 million Game Center accounts.

As for brick-and-mortar retail efforts, the Apple Store saw revenue of $4.1 billion for the quarter, virtually unchanged from the year-ago quarter. Oppenheimer reported that Apple saw 16,000 visitors per store each week.

For the quarter, Apple had an average of 405 stores, with average revenue per store at $10.1 million—down $1 million from the year-ago quarter. Apple opened six stores across five countries during the quarter, giving it 408 stores around the globe; 156 of those outlets are outside the U.S.

The company plans to open nine new stores during the September quarter, giving it 27 new openings during the 2013 fiscal year. It’s not just about new stores, however: Apple says that it relocated four of its stores to more appealing spots; it will complete 23 such relocations before the end 2013 fiscal year in September.

China has been a particularly critical part of Apple's business in recent years, but that took a hit in the third quarter. “China was weaker” in this quarter, Cook acknowledged, but maybe not as weak as it might seem at first blush, he argued. “Our sell-through in China was only down four percent from the year-ago quarter, when you normalize for channel inventory,” he said. Hong Kong drop was worse, though mainland China was up five percent year over year, “but that’s a lower growth rate than we have been seeing,” Cook added.

“I attribute that to many things, including [the fact that] the economy there clearly doesn’t help us there or others,” Cook said.

Still, China drove $4.9 billion of revenue—about 14 percent of the company’s earnings—Cook pointed out. “And a few years ago, that was within the hundreds of millions. We have a very strong market there.” He added that year-to-date, iPad sales are up 48 percent in China year over year, and half a million developers in China are working on iOS apps. He also said that Apple would double its number of retail stores in China “over the next couple years.”

Cook said that Apple will continue to work to boost iPhone and iPad sales, “both of which are currently lower then where we would like or need them to be. We’re doing that very cautiously, because we want to do it with quality.” He added that, “over the arc of time, China is a huge opportunity for Apple, so don’t get discouraged over the 90-day cycle with economic factors.”

Apple’s not done returning cash to investors. The company’s Board of Directors has announced another cash dividend, this one at $3.05 per share of common stock, payable on August 15 to any shareholder as of August 12.

For the next quarter, Apple is predicting revenue between $34 billion and $37 billion, with gross margins between 36 and 37 percent. That sales figure would put Apple’s performance in line with the $36 billion in revenue it reported in the fourth quarter of 2012. For the coming quarter, Apple also predicts operating expenses will be between $3.9 billion and $3.95 billion, with a tax rate of 26.5 percent.

That may dissatisfy some sections of Wall Street, where the focus is on growth and new products, but Apple’s Cook told analysts on Tuesday that he doesn’t think the company’s goals diverge from investors’ focus on profits.

“We’re here to make great products, and we think that if we focus on that and do that really well, the financial metrics will follow,” Cook said. “We don’t look at those two things as mutually exclusive.”

New QuarkXPress 10: Major overhaul modernizes the publishing package

Quark has let loose QuarkXPress 10, a massive overhaul of its cross-media publishing package for both Mac and Windows. QuarkXPress has been revamped from top to bottom, starting with an under-the-hood conversion from the Carbon to the Cocoa programming environment and ending with a new cutting-edge graphics engine and a refreshed user interface. More than 50 feature enhancements promise to streamline the design process and improve the user experience.

QuarkXPress 10 interface overview.
Several years in the making, this new version has updated a half million lines of code, added 350,000 new lines of code, added more than 500 new dialog boxes and palettes, and added 1300 new icons designed for Retina display resolution.

QuarkXPress is now ready for action on all levels of media creation for the foreseeable future. It supports Lion and Mountain Lion features like Recent Items, Dictation, and File List in Dock. It is fully compliant with current Mac OS APIs and is Mavericks-ready.

“In recent releases of QuarkXPress, there was a big focus toward digital media, and we have some added digital functionality in version 10, but we also tried to focus on features that are relevant no matter what media you’re designing for,” said Gavin Drake, Quark’s marketing VP. “A lot of what we see in version 10 is about features and functionalities that go across all media.”

Quark 10 sports a state-of-the-art Xenon Graphics Engine designed to leverage the most powerful and advanced multicore, multiprocessor, and multithreaded processing and image-handling technologies. “The Xenon Graphics Engine is a brand-new graphics engine...that was developed by our Core Technology Group, and this is the first implementation...within one of our products,” Drake says.

Xenon has what Quark calls a “native and deep understanding” of image and vector files such as PDF, AI, TIFF, JPG, PNG, and PSD, and it uses a new Adaptive Resolution feature to render the best performance at the most appropriate screen resolution. The new engine understands fonts, vectors, colors, layers, and gradients, meaning that patterns, complex gradients, and radial blends will look much better than on previous versions, according to Quark. The program can now directly manipulate TIFF color channels and clipping paths.

QuarkXPress 10 offers improved rendering of a variety of image formats.
“The Xenon Graphics Engine drastically improves the clarity with which pixel and vector files...are rendered within QuarkXPress. It always delivers the best on-screen resolution in real time, regardless of zoom, crop, and even while positioning graphics,” said Drake.

Thus, with the Xenon Graphics Engine, saving does not have to go to disk; text remains text; vectors remain vectors; and images stay as they are without being baked into RGB. In the past, for example, image previews would be cached somewhere on the hard disk, and the time to create image previews would vary depending on the type and size of the image, and the computer used. Quark 10 no longer uses image previews. The graphics engine just draws the image directly on screen using the latest processor technologies.

A vector-performance comparison between QuarkXPress 9 and QuarkXPress 10 shows a huge improvement in clarity.
“The Xenon Graphics Engine handles all of the color management, so depending on what color setup you are using, the graphics engine just applies the correct model in real time to the image on the screen without having to go to a source file and create an updated RGB preview of an image that reflects your color space,” said Drake. “For example, perhaps you switched your view and color settings into grayscale. In QuarkXPress 9 we would have to go and create a new grayscale image preview. That takes time and disk space. Now we just apply a grayscale color model to the image with Xenon, and it’s there instantly.”

QuarkXPress 10 has been optimized to take full advantage of high-resolution Retina and HiDPI displays. Adaptive Resolution means you always get the best resolution on screen, with precise positioning of imported graphics.

From the new full-screen view to auto-hiding dockable palettes, QuarkXPress 10 has been redesigned inside and out to improve the user experience. All told, there are fewer dialog boxes, less palette clutter, palette shortcut keys, palette drag-and-drop, and an enhanced page navigator. You can apply style sheets after creation, set default tool preferences from existing objects, reorder layout tabs, view Unicode values in the Glyphs Palette, and more. An enhanced Palette Sets feature lets you easily remember favorite configurations.

The measurements palette completely replaces the functionality of the Modify dialog box, while still including the previous shortcut keys, and enabling continued access to a layout with the option to modify more than 100 layout settings as you interact with the page.

QuarkXPress 10’s streamlined measurements palette is the the go-to place for tweaking a layout.
Layers are now supported on master pages, and the Paste command remembers layers. If those layers don’t exist in the target layout, QuarkXPress 10 will create new layers automatically. A new palette preference can turn this feature on or off.

New thumbnail page previews in the print dialog box ensure that your output settings are correct before you print. The new PDF Pass-Through Transparency feature lets you avoid flattening while creating smaller, device-independent PDFs. QuarkXPress objects can now interact with placed PDFs and maintain transparency.

QuarkXPress 10’s print preview.
The Key Item Space/Align feature lets you align and space objects relative to a key item in the layout; just select a key item first, and everything else will be relative to it. The Highlight Missing Fonts feature makes it easy to find text that uses a missing font in a layout. You can even change the highlight color in the preferences.

Bezier tools
Bezier tool enhancements include the abilities to continue or close an existing path, and support for joining two paths.

Like its counterpart from Adobe, QuarkXPress 10 gets with the QR-code revolution. The new version lets you generate vector Quick Response (QR) codes directly within the program and style and color them the way you want. It supports text QR codes such as URLs, SMS, and vCards.

Full-screen color browsing features let you use the full size of your screen to add and edit colors. You can browse Pantone colors in multiple views.

QuarkXPress 10 lets you choose among Pantone colors in multiple views.
QuarkXPress 10 now lets you import images and hyperlinks from Microsoft Word, so you can directly integrate Word documents with embedded or linked pictures into a layout. Hyperlinks are automatically honored and added to the Hyperlinks palette. East Asian typography features are now in every edition of the program, so you can control Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean layouts.

HTML5 is where it’s at. Flash and Blio are out.
Improved IME (Input Method Editor) support corrects entered text without your having to retype the phonetic text by choosing different characters from the candidate list. You can send text to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and third-party IMEs.

“Typing Japanese and Chinese text is time-consuming, because users have to type the phonetic (“unconfirmed”) text first, and then choose the Han characters from a list of candidates provided by the IME. Once the user chooses from the candidate list, the text becomes “confirmed” (entered). However, correcting the entered text when the user selects a wrong character(s) is very time-consuming because the user would have to retype the phonetic text again,” said Drake. QuarkXPress 10 makes the process more efficient by letting users choose different characters from the candidate list without having to retype the phonetic text each time.

QuarkXPress 10 also has updated support for App Studio, QuarkXPress’s built-in mobile app creation companion, providing continued support for the software’s ePub and HTML5 authoring tools.

While the company has released few specific details so far, Quark says there is a detailed roadmap dictating a series of updates for App Studio. However, Quark has revealed App Studio’s new abilities to flip shapes horizontally and vertically, and to set a separate trim view pasteboard color.

The flip-pages feature in QuarkXPress 10’s App Studio.
QuarkXPress 10 will be available for Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8 and Windows 7 and 8 for $849. Upgrades cost $349. It will also support Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) when Apple releases the OS update. It will open legacy file formats from QuarkXPress version 7 and higher. The software will be released publicly in mid- to late August as a cross-platform, perpetual license with dual activation.

QuarkXPress 10 will no longer support OS X Leopard (10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6), Windows XP or Vista, Flash (SWF), Blio, or HTML 4; it will rely on HTML5.

App Studio slideshow.
Quark recently instituted new upgrade guidelines for all users, encouraging legacy owners to upgrade to QuarkXPress 9, the current version. Owners of QuarkXPress 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 have until August 30, 2013, to upgrade to QuarkXPress 9. Those with the Buy 9 Get 10 Free promotion, will receive QuarkXPress 10 for free. Owners of QuarkXPress 8 have until August 30 to upgrade to version 9, and until December 31 to upgrade to version 10 for free. Also, starting now, and for a limited time, Quark is offering all QuarkXPress 9 users a 20 percent discount on preorders of QuarkXPress 10.