Alex Heath - page 53

In China, the state-run press has been attacking Apple non-stop for the past couple of weeks over warranty policies that showed the company’s “unparalleled arrogance.” Apple Stores were fixing broken iPhone returns instead of replacing the devices entirely like they do in the United States. There was also an issue with Apple’s 90-day warranty on replaced parts not matching China’s mandatory one-year warranty policy.

Things got so heated that Apple CEO Tim Cook had to issue a public letter to Chinese customers apologizing “for any concerns or misunderstandings.” Apple’s scrutinized warranty and return policies have also been changed to address the concerns.

After the apology, China is starting to warm back up to Apple.

Apple has released the first beta of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.4 to third-party developers. “Please be aware that you will not be able to revert back to your previous system after updating,” warns Apple. “Please install this update on a system you are prepared to erase if necessary.”

The seed’s release notes don’t contain anything significant, but devs will surely find new stuff once they get to digging through the OS. 10.8.3 was released to the public a couple weeks ago after going through 13 beta revisions over a period of nearly 5 months.

It was February of last year when Apple unveiled Mountain Lion as the successor to Lion. Bets are on for what cat the next major OS X release will be named after.

Source: Apple

Apple has revealed that it will announce its official earnings for the second fiscal quarter of 2013 on Tuesday, April 23rd. The call will be held at 2:00 P.M. Pacific, and anyone can stream it from Apple’s Investors Relations page.

Tim Cook may be leading one of the most influential and valuable companies on earth now, but he used to be in high school just like the rest of us. Some yearbook photos of Cook’s early years at Robertsdale High School in Robertsdale, Alabama have surfaced. How adorable!

Cook was unsurprisingly voted “most studious” freshman year, and it was an obvious mistake to exclude him from the “most likely to succeed” list.

Twitter has a released an update to its video sharing service Vine that adds a couple of new features. You can now quickly share videos taken by other people in your feed on Twitter and Facebook. Just tap the ellipsis on the bottom right of a video and then “Share this post.”

Another addition is the ability to embed Vine videos on the web like tweets. Anything in your Vine feed can be embedded with the new option. Getting the actual embed code is a little clunky in the app right now. Tapping “Embed” in the iOS app creates an email with instructions to use the code on the web. You can choose from the “Simple” and “Postcard” frames along with the width of the actual video.

Today’s update also includes some bug fixes, so be sure to grab it for free in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Apple has been rumored to release a Spotify-like music streaming service for quite some time, but complicated licensing negations with the record labels have kept the product at bay. Multiple reports from this year alone have suggested that Apple is finally starting to gain momentum; it seems clear that some kind of ‘iRadio’ is in the pipeline.

Previous speculation has said that Apple wants to release its upcoming music service sometime in 2013, and now a new report says the company is “pushing hard” for a launch this summer.

iOS is the most popular gaming platform in existence, and Apple has managed to create an incredible ecosystem of titles with only iOS devices. The company sells no actual controllers or joypads; everything is touch-based.

So does it make sense for Apple to make a physical game controller that somehow connects to your iPhone and iPad? According to a new report, the answer is yes.

While Apple’s Maps has certainly come a long way since its release last year, there’s still a lot of improving that needs to be done. The good news is that Apple is working to improve the accuracy of its mapping, and the company is hiring “Ground Truth” managers to help improve the “quality” of Maps in different regions around the world.

It has been two years since Apple debuted the completely redesigned Final Cut Pro X in the Mac App Store for only $300. Final Cut Pro X was a simplified, barebones version of the $700 workhorse that came before it, and Apple managed to lose the faith of many media professionals in one fell swoop. Although Apple has continued to add big features to the new Final Cut over the years, many pro users have abandoned it for other alternatives.

Apple is beginning a new Final Cut marketing push to win back the hearts of professionals, according to a new report.

Reader is one of the most popular RSS clients out there for Apple devices. It’s available on OS X and iOS, and up until now it has mainly been used in conjunction with Google Reader. Now that Google has announced its plans to kill Google Reader in the coming months, many are starting to look to alternative RSS aggregators.

Today the maker of the app Reeder, Silvio Rizzi, announced that Feedbin support will be added soon to the iPhone version. Feedbin is a simple, clean-looking Google Reader replacement with an API that third-party clients can utilize.

The Retina MacBooks are fabulous machines. They’re super thin, powerful, and just plain sexy. But have you ever opened your Retina MacBook and watched the screen just sit there in limbo for a few seconds before it actually comes alive again? It’s frustrating that you can see the password box, but you can’t actually type anything until the MacBook fully wakes up.

Apple has baked a feature called “standby mode” into the Retina MacBook Pros and the post-2010 MacBook Airs. Standby mode is the reason newer MacBooks sometimes take a little longer to wake, and there happens to be a simple terminal command you can enter in OS X to change the timing.

Today Flipboard received a huge 2.0 update that brings a slew of new features and additions, most notably the ability to create custom magazines and share them with friends. You can assemble articles, photos, audio and video into a collage of content that Flipboard will format. It’s a big step towards putting curation in the hands of Flipboard users, and it’s implemented beautifully.

There’s no denying that Twitterrific 5 is a beautiful third-party Twitter client for the iPhone and iPad, but the app has been lacking a huge feature until today: push notifications. Now that push has become an expected feature in modern Twitter apps, it was only a matter of time before The Iconfactory added it to their app.

You can get push notifications for new mentions, direct messages, favorites, retweets, and followers. The catch is that only 1,000 Twitterrific users will get access to the feature initially. Availability will be then rolled out gradually to new users.

Remember Quicksilver? The lightweight Mac utility used to be the go-to app launcher on the desktop, but that was years ago. A lack of updates combined with the rise of more feature-rich alternatives like Alfred turned the attention away from Quicksilver long ago.

Now the developers behind the app are breathing new life into Quicksilver with a major update. Quicksilver 1.0 has been released, which marks the end of the 10-year beta period the app has been in since 2003.

T-Mobile is set to hold a press conference tomorrow about its new, contract-free wireless plans, and it so happens that the carrier recently entered an agreement with Apple to officially sell the iPhone in 2013. Since the iPhone 5 hasn’t been made available on the network yet, T-Mobile has been waiting for the right time to showcase the device.

According to a new report, the iPhone will be front and center at T-Mobile’s press event tomorrow.

The Chinese Communist Party is continuing to attack Apple in the press, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. After China Central Television (CCT) ran its big hit piece, the government’s newspaper has also decided to throw dirt on Apple now. The first criticisms revolved around Apple’s product warranty practices, while the second volley of propaganda calls out Apple’s lack of interaction with the Chinese media.

We’ve known that T-Mobile was doing away with two-year phone contracts for quite some time, but exact details haven’t been revealed until today. Unlike the other big U.S. carriers (AT&T, Verizon and Sprint), T-Mobile isn’t doing subsidized, two-year contracts for smartphones anymore. Instead, you pay as you go—and the monthly rates look very good.

Apple has purchased a small startup called WiFiSLAM, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The two-year-old company specializes in indoor mapping, which is something Google has already been doing with Google Maps for some time.

Since Apple debuted its own mapping technology in iOS 6, it’s been working to bring its service up to par with Google Maps. WiFiSLAM’s expertise could very well be used to improve Apple Maps, and the acquisition also bodes well for another Apple service, Passbook.

Apple has quietly added a new labeling system to the App Store that shows which apps have in-app purchases. You can only see whether an app or game has in-app purchases on the desktop version of iTunes, but the feature will presumably be rolled out to the App Store on iOS devices soon.

Coincidentally, Apple recently settled a lawsuit with some parents over in-app purchases. Kids were spending thousands of dollars making in-app purchases in freemium games.

Alfred is a great shortcut and productivity tool for the Mac that received a huge update last week. In case you don’t know, Alfred allows you to quickly perform tasks with a series of keyboard shortcuts. If you’ve used similar tools like Quicksilver or LaunchBar, then you already have an understanding of how Alfred fundamentally works.

Over the past couple of years, Alfred has matured from a little app launcher into a full-fleged base station for getting things done on the Mac. Alfred 2.0 is a huge step forward with additional features like customizable themes, but the biggest addition is undoubtedly workflows. You can, for instance, hit a keyboard shortcut, type in the name of a new movie, and have related browser windows from IMDB, YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes instantly pop up.

Alfred has built up a community of users who have created some pretty cool Alfred 2.0 workflows you can download and use for free. Whether you’re a coder or a complete novice, it’s easy to get started with workflows and take control of your Mac.

Spotify has updated its iOS app with the ability to view artist biographies and images. The new artist view will be displayed when you tap on an artist’s name for a currently playing track. There’s a cover image you can tap to view the full biography. This feature has been available on the desktop for some time.

J.D. Power & Associates has released its latest semi-annual smartphone customer satisfaction survey, and Apple once again sits at the very top of the list.

Apple has won the industry survey 9 times in a row now, and J.D. Power notes that Apple continues to do “particularly well in physical design and ease of operation.”

NetNewsWire is a classic RSS reader. It came out on the Mac more than a decade ago, and it’s still used on OS X and iOS. As a staple application in the Mac community, NetNewsWire has remained a fan favorite despite the lack of updates it has received in recent years.

The world of RSS got rocked last week when Google announced that it was killing Google Reader, one of the most-used RSS aggregators on the internet. In the wake of Google Reader’s death sentence, NetNewsWire is about to be reborn.

Apple has released a big update to GarageBand for iOS that brings support for Audiobus, an iOS app that routes audio between other apps. This means that GarageBand can record and work with other music creation apps from the App Store. You could make a beat in DM1 and bring it right into a multi-track GarageBand project, for instance.

In this latest version of GarageBand you can “turn off grid snapping to get finer control over region and note editing.” A feedback issue has also been resolved.

GarageBand costs $5 in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Good news for BioShock fans: the latest installment of the hit game will be available on the Mac this summer. Aspyr Media has confirmed that BioShock Infinite will be hitting OS X in a couple of months. A specific release date has not been given at this time. The PC and console version will ship on March 26th.