Adobe has released a public beta of Lightroom 5, the next major version of its photo editing and management application. The download is free for anyone to use until June 30th. Adobe says Lightroom 5 will ship later this year.
Apple may have some of the highest paid executives in the country, but that doesn’t mean employees are satisfied lower down the food chain.
Since Tim Cook became CEO at Apple, the company’s corporate culture has changed. A byproduct of that change is that more and more Apple employees are leaving Cupertino to work at other competitors and startups.
Pebble has updated its Bluetooth smartwatch OS with several notable additions and bug fixes. Battery life has been improved, and push notifications requesting permission to pair appear less frequently on iOS devices. Developers now have access to the SDK for creating custom watchfaces.
Twitter’s rumored music app technically exists, and it even has its own website. But normal people can’t use it yet. Twitter was expected to unveil a standalone music app to the world sometime today, but it turns out that the social network is doing a promotion with celebrities to generate more hype. This is all timed with the Coachella music festival this weekend, of course.
So for the next week or so, you’ll see some celebrities on Twitter sharing how much they love the music app. “There’s a serious dance party happening,” they’ll say. But you won’t be able to jam with them because you are a normal. Welcome to the real world. Time to wait another week.
Source: AllThingsD
What can you hope for when you’re the last major U.S. carrier to get the iPhone? That at least a few people get in line to buy one on launch day.
Considering that the iPhone 5 has been out since last fall, you wouldn’t expect many lines to be forming outside of T-Mobile stores today. But surprisingly enough, people are showing up. “Uncarrier” FTW!!!
How many times have you seen a trailer for an upcoming movie and thought, “That looks interesting. I’ll have to see that!” Then it hits the theaters, goes to DVD, and you forget about it until it shows up in the Walmart bin months later.
Since I reviewed the original version of TodoMovies last summer, I’ve continued to use the app to keep track of movies I want to watch. Today TodoMovies 2 was released in the App Store with some great feature additions. This is the iPhone app every movie lover needs.
Earlier this month, Funny or Die released a trailer for its upcoming comedy about Steve Jobs, iSteve. Starring Justin Long from Apple’s own Mac vs. PC ads, the movie is set to debut online Monday, April 15th. Unlike Ashton Kutcher’s JOBS biopic, iSteve is an intentional parody of Apple lore.
The movie is written and directed by Ryan Perez, a former Saturday Night Live writer who has taken quite a bit of “dramatic license.”
Vine is being used to tell stories at The Tribeca Film Festival, an event founded by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal. The festival takes place later this month, and there’s a competition for ultra-short films shot exclusively on Vine, Twitter’s video sharing app for the iPhone.
Aspiring filmmakers have been submitting Vines to Tribeca under the #6SECFILMS hashtag on Twitter. The submissions that make the cut will be highlighted on the festival’s website later this month and receive a cash prize.
We’ve covered the Chinese government’s multiple media attacks on Apple extensively here at Cult of Mac. The state-run press has been slamming Apple for everything from iPhone warranty practices to declining interview requests from Chinese journalists.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently issued a public apology to try and douse the firestorm, and China seemed to warm back up to Apple. Jeff Williams, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Operations, is reportedly in China right now dealing with the backlash.
Yahoo is talking to Apple about how it can integrate more of its services in iOS, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. Apple currently uses Yahoo to provide weather, stocks, and sports information. But Yahoo reportedly wants to play a more “prominent role on Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices.”
An obvious change would be making Yahoo the default search engine in Safari, but that won’t be happening anytime soon. Microsoft’s Bing engine currently provides results for Yahoo search, which complexes things. Google also has a deal in place with Apple that gives it the default search position in Safari. Apple would obviously want to cut Google out if possible. Siri already avoids using Google search for a lot of queries.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
So many apps are designed first for the iPhone, and the iPad is more or less an afterthought. Not so with Status Board, a brand new app from Panic that is designed meticulously with the iPad’s larger display in mind.
If you know Panic’s pedigree (Coda, Transmit, etc.), then you know what kind of app to expect: something incredibly powerful, focused, and impeccably designed. Status Board is no exception. And although the app won’t appeal to most iPad users, it is perhaps Panic’s most consumer-friendly app to date.
AppGratis is a popular App Store app that’s used by more than 12 million iOS users. The company consists of 45 employees and recently raised $13.5 million in funding. AppGratis offers promotions and discounts for popular paid iOS apps in conjunction with third-party developers, and the company has continued to thrive over the last few years.
Everything was going great until Apple threw down the hammer over this past weekend. Without much warning, AppGratis was suddenly pulled from the App Store for violating some developer guidelines. Poof. Gone. Now it’s a matter of working with Apple to try and fix what caused the problem. The app’s removal came as a shock to AppGratis and has left the CEO wondering how the App Store review team “could have possibly changed their minds overnight.”
Spotify has released an update to its desktop app that adds a new “Follow” tab on the left sidebar. This feature started slowly rolling out to users late last year, and now it should be available for everyone. Opening Spotify on the Mac should cause the app to want to install a new update and restart. Then the Follow tab will be available.
Services like Spotify and Rdio take great pride in helping their users discover new music, and Spotify’s Follow tab is meant to change the way you find new jams and interact with other users. It replaces the useless “People” tab with friends to follow and tailored recommendations.
Since 2011, Cory Moll has been in charge of the Apple Workers Union, an initiative that has worked to help improve working conditions for thousands of Apple Store employees around the world. Moll has been an Apple employee since 2007, and today is his last day at the company.
Ron Johnson, the man who helped create the Apple Store alongside Steve Jobs, has left his role as the CEO of JC Penney. Johnson resigned from Apple back in 2011 to accept the JC Penney position.
Morale at JC Penney has weakened since Johnson was put in charge 16 months ago. The company has been bleeding money, and Johnson’s retail strategies have not seen success. Johnson’s departure doesn’t come as much of a shock to those who have been following his failed attempts to revitalize the department store chain.
Last year Tim Cook said that Apple was working on “something really great” for the Mac Pro in 2013, and now it has been revealed that we could see a completely new model as soon as this month.
What would make the next iPhone truly exciting? That’s what people are wondering. A lighter body, better camera, and iOS 7 probably won’t cut it for most. How will Apple deliver the pizazz we’ve all grown accustomed to?
Software is always evolving, and Apple has arguably the best software experience out there for mobile devices, period. But unfortunately software by itself isn’t that exciting. You need new hardware. Now it looks like Apple is working on some interesting fingerprint sensor-related hardware off the coast of Florida.
Apple’s online store has never really been suited to mobile devices. Sure, there’s the Apple Store app for the iPhone, but navigating to the actual website on iOS isn’t the best experience. On the iPhone, the desktop site is squeezed into a narrow, 4-inch display. You have to zoom in to actually interact with and read any part of the site.
Some recent changes help to improve navigating the Apple online store on touch-based devices. Apple has added a scrollable navigation bar under product categories that lets you quickly jump to different pages. Search results for specific products are now displayed in a cleaner grid layout as well. You can click on an icon to open the product page. These improvements look particularly good on the iPad.
Source: Apple
Whenever third-party retailers start selling an Apple device at a discounted price, it’s usually a good indication that the next product iteration is on the near horizon. While this isn’t always the case, it’s a historic trend that points towards something new from Apple.
Based on recent price cuts from big retailers and the rumor mill, it looks like the iPad will be getting a refresh soon.
Today Facebook unveiled “Home,” its new, immersive Android experience. HTC has partnered with Facebook to launch the HTC First, a smartphone designed from the ground up for Home. Other Android handset makers are in the pipeline to release Home-based devices down the road.
Home is a great idea for Facebook and Facebook lovers, and it will probably be very popular on Android after it becomes available next week. But don’t expect to get Facebook Home on your iPhone. Not in this lifetime.
Launched in April 2010, the iPad took an idea Jobs had heard about from computer pioneer Alan Kay and turned it into the kind of mass-market product no one else had been able to.
Photo: Karl Mondon/Contra Costa Times/MCT
Today is the iPad’s third birthday. It was on this consecrated day that Apple shipped the original iPad with WiFi. It’s hard to believe that Apple has invented and popularized an entirely new market in only three years, but it’s the truth. Tablets just weren’t a thing before the iPad, and now they’re cannibalizing PC sales. As Apple calls it, we’re in a post-PC era.
A lot of people mocked the iPad from the beginning. Sure, there were the faithful believes, but many wondered why anyone would want to use a limited, 10-inch slab of glass over a full-fledged laptop. It just didn’t make sense at the time. The iPhone and iPod touch filled the need for portable computing… or so we thought.
The question was, as always with Apple, whether the iPad could live up to all of the hype. Looking back, the answer is obvious: yes. The iPad has seen—and continues to see—monumental success, and competitors are still playing catch up.
In honor of the iPad’s birthday, let’s take a look at some of its early critics. As it turns out, the iPad was rather hated during its infancy:
Twitter has updated its iOS app with new “App Cards” it introduced to developers yesterday. Twitter Cards let companies and advertisers embed media like photos and videos directly into tweets so you don’t have to load a separate webpage. Now developers can include download links with info about their apps for Twitter users to see without leaving the timeline.
Mozilla has released Firefox 20 for Mac users, and this major update brings several new features and improvements to the web browser. Two of the biggest features are “per-window” private browsing and a redesigned download manager.
You can now open a private browsing tab instead of having to open an entirely new window and close the current session. The new, Safari-like download manager is a little arrow that sits in the browser’s toolbar next to search. You can click it to see and interact with all current downloads.
Randolph Divisions makes the HearPod, a digital hearing aid. The company has owned the “HearPod” trademark since 2007, and it recently filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Apple in Hawaii District Court. Apparently “HearPod” and “EarPods” sound too much alike.
Apple also owns a trademark for its EarPods, but it doesn’t own the earpods.com or earpod.com domain names—Randolph Divisions happens to own the latter.
With the kind of cash Apple has in the bank, Randolph Divisions will likely be paid off to settle this lawsuit.
Source: The Next Web
There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that jailbreak hackers have exploits saved up for another jailbreak release in the future. The bad news is that we will not be seeing a new jailbreak any time soon — at least until after iOS 7 comes out.