Buster Hein - page 173

Assimilating into the mothership’s culture isn’t easy (just ask John Browett) but Angela Ahrendts looks well on her way to becoming one of the regulars at Apple HQ.

The recently hired retail chief has only been at Apple for two months, but in a recent blog post, the former Burberry CEO says she’s learned a few tips transitioning from London and the fashion industry to Silicon Valley’s tech scene, and she’s ready to divulge her wisdom to anyone disoriented during the first 90 days of a new job.

Here are three tips she has on how to assimilate and thrive during a transition:

ABC News has landed on Apple TV this morning as a stand alone app, but unlike other channels on the set-top box, ABC is giving away all its content for free. Starting today Apple TV customers can watch on-demand content from ABC News along with access to four live stream video sources and a dash of exclusive content.

Along with the added ABC News channel, Apple TV also added new channels for AOL, PBS Kids, and a channel dedicated to to the sport of cricket, called Willow.

Apple expanded its enormous retail empire this weekend with the grand opening of its new Puerta del Sol store that let its first customers through the crystal clear glass doors Saturday June, 21st in Madrid, Spain.

Customers lined up early Saturday morning to be among the first customers to enter Apple’s newest sanctuary, with some reports claiming nearly 600 queued up before opening hours to see the second largest Apple Store in Europe.

No matter how many updates Microsoft makes to its Surface tablets, it just hasn’t been able to live up to its promise of killing the iPad and MacBook Air in one swoop, but now Redmond is ready to try another tactic — buying you out.

Microsoft announced that starting today, MacBook Air owners can walk into any Microsoft retail store and trade-in their Apple machine for $650 of store credit toward the purchase a Surface Pro 3, which Microsoft swears can replace your laptop, because you know, it’s got Office.

Custom keyboards are landing on iPhones and iPads this fall after Apple finally decided to give users more options than Jony Ive’s horrible shift key.

We’re still a few months away from finished keyboards being ready for the public, but this morning we got our first taste of using a custom keyboard on iOS 8 thanks to the guys at TouchPal. My fingers still need a lot of training before I’m able to sweep words together faster than an Android user, but the future of iOS keyboards promises to be swift, swipeable and super-simple.

Here’s what it’s like to install and use iOS 8 custom keyboards:

Construction of Apple’s new headquarters is still underway as Cupertino braces for the mothership to touchdown sometime in 2016, but if you want to know what the glass and aluminum ring will look like during a flyby, Technology Integration Services just published a gorgeous rendering of Apple’s campus.

Other than showing yet another render of Apple campus, the new video also gives a nice layout of the dozens of other buildings that will makeup the new campus, as well views of the surrounding streets and houses.

Take a look at the full video below:

We’ve been trudging through a toxic hellstew of iWatch rumors for more than 18 months, but if rumors are to be believed, the world is about to finally see the fabled iWatch.

Production on Apple’s first smartwatch is set to begin next month, with Taiwan’s Quanta Computer handling production, says Reuters, who says the iWatches display will be a little bigger than expected.

Apple has the best App Store on the planet. Thousands of developers.  Millions of apps. Billions of sales. But no one can find a damn thing.

Since 2008, iOS users have downloaded more than 75 billion apps. How we locate a winner from among the App Store’s 1.2 million apps hasn’t changed much, but Andy Baio thinks Apple could revolutionize the way we discover and consume apps. And he’s got a brilliant concept Apple should borrow.

Apple didn’t tell anyone during WWDC, but it wants iOS 8 to be the ultimate city tour guide.

Cupertino is adding a new Flyover City Tours feature to its Maps app. And even though the code has been hidden, developer Pierre Blazquez managed to unearth it from the latest iOS 8 beta release to give us a preview of the new feature that’s still in development.

Flyover tours are currently only available for Rome, Stockholm, Barcelona, New York, Paris and a few other cities, but in a video posted by Mac4Ever, we’ve been given our first glimpse of the tours in action.

Looking for a little extra summer cash? It might be time to dust off your old iPhone.

Some hopeful eBay seller is hawking their “rare” mint-condition, first-generation iPhone with only 4GB of storage — and all they’re asking for is enough money for a down payment on a house.

Apple is on a price-slashing spree this morning after taking down its online store for a few hours last night. Not only did Cupertino just release a cheaper low-end iMac, but it’s also dropping prices on the Apple TV and Mac mini across the UK and Europe.

Apple’s new headphone company has been spewing its love for the World Cup all over the internet with huge cinematic ads and exclusive Jay Z tracks, but there’s one place you won’t see a pair of Beats headphones – inside the actual stadiums.

FIFA has banned Beats headphones from the football pitch and official media events thanks to a licensing agreement with rival Sony.

Ben Heine is a magician.

Like David Blaine and Criss Angel before him, he has a special talent for blurring the line between reality and fiction. But instead of utilizing sleight of hand or his indomitable will to delight his audience, Heine keeps it simple by using just a pencil and camera to create his illusions.

Heine’s incredible art series Pencil vs Camera combines gorgeous landscapes and city scenes with hand-sketched drawings. The otherworldly images that result are both whimsical and intriguing, with a bit of mind-bending magic thrown in for perspective.

“I always try to express what I’m feeling,” Heine told Cult of Mac, noting that most of his inspiration for drawings come “mainly from people around me — friends, family, even strangers — and from every experience I live.”

Apple’s new beta for iOS 8 is stuffed full of bug fixes after most of the new features were unveiled at WWDC two weeks ago, but Cupertino still managed to surprise us today with a number of neat tweaks to iOS 8 beta 2 that make some of apps better than what was revealed at the Moscone Center.

We’re still combing through the beta for new features, but additions like QuickType for iPad, iBooks displayed as series and improvements to Photos are welcome additions before iOS 8 lands this fall.

Take a look at all the tweaks Apple added to the iOS 8 beta today:

Snapchat’s pivot from a sleazy app for naughty pics to an actual messaging platform to rival WhatsApp is happening faster than its scandalous photos can disappear and its newest feature is going to make the party even bigger.

Today Snapchat announced its adding a new “Our Story” feature that will allow users who are at the same location to share snaps with each other, or view an event from afar so you can feel like you were totally there with your friends, 10 seconds at a time.

Along with this morning’s release of iOS 8 beta 2, Apple is throwing some love to Mac users as well by releasing the second preview of the OS X Yosemite beta.

Apple has promised to open the OS X Yosemite beta to the public but it looks like you still need to be a developer to grab Cupertino’s newest update which can be can be downloaded directly from the Mac Dev Center or via a software update in your Apple menu.

Apple also released a new beta for Xcode 6 this morning as well as a new developer preview for OS X Server 4.0.

Yosemite brings a revamped UI to OS X along with a host of new features aimed at making your iPhone and Mac work smarter together. No official word from Apple on what’s inside the new preview but we’ll let you know what we find as soon as its installed.

We’re still crawling through the myriad of new features Apple added to the first beta of iOS 8, but now we’re about to dive back in. Apple just released iOS 8 beta 2 to developers this morning a mere 15 days after dropping the new OS on devs at WWDC.

According to the iOS 8 beta 2 release notes Apple’s mostly filled it with a ton of bug fixes, but we’ll update you on all the new features, big and small, once we’ve got it on our test devices.

Developers can pick up the new beta as an OTA update, from the iOS Dev Center or from the direct download links below:

Emojing has already replaced texting as the go-to zero-effort communication tool of youngsters everywhere, and all those emoji version of popular songs and TV shows are about a lot more elaborate thanks to huge unicode update.

250 new emoji have been added to unicode standard 7.0 that is used to standardize the presentation of text across different platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows, and while it’s still up to software makers to actually implement the new standards, you can expect them to land on iOS pretty soon.

Apple’s Siri feature has been a crown jewel of iOS ever since it launched in 2011, but the company and the tech behind it might fall into the hands of Apple’s number one enemy – Samsung.

Nuance Communications is in discussions with a number of potential suitors looking to buy the company, and Samsung Electronics is at the top of the list, according to Wall Street Journal report that also names a few private-equity firms among the list of possible buyers, but Apple is nowhere to be found.

Facebook is trying to transform its News Feed into more than just a hotbed of baby pictures and Buzzfeed quizes and its first move is a new side panel to help users discover more timely content.

To make the app more relevant for the way people use tablets, Facebook for iPad is adding a new channel on the right-hand side of your news feed featuring trending topics, videos and tons of game suggestions to try to get users to read more news, watch more videos and play games in the app. And you can bet there will be plenty of ads to compensate.

Beats already released one epic World Cup commercial this month, but last night Dre’s music behemoth tossed out another fantastic ad wrapped in an exclusive Jay Z track you’ll only find on Beats Music.

For the next week a new remix of “Jungle” featuring Jay Z alongside fellow Brooklyn-based friends, X Ambassadors & Jamie N Commons will be exclusively available on Beats Music streaming service.

Checkout the full Beats ad with J Hova’s ungodly soccer fueled verse:

Apple is definitely making a big screen iPhone that will launch this fall, the only question is how much extra is it going to cost you?

Fanboys are notoriously willing to pay an extra Apple Tax for Macs, but some analysts are worried a bigger iPhone with bigger price tag will chase some away. Those fears will probably prove to be unrealized though according to a survey by Raymond James that claims most of Apple’s potential iPhablet customers are totally cool shelling out $100 more.

Scoring a sweet deal on an iPhone directly from Apple is nearly impossible. Luck for us, a bunch of Cupertino’s retail partners aren’t afraid to cut some dinero off its price-tag to try to get you in the store. But which store is best for Apple deals?

To locate the top places to get deals on Apple products, DealNews tracked several years worth of deals for the iPhone, iPad, and 11-inch MacBook Air and discovered that certain retailers offer consistently better deals on one specific product. Many of the big name retailers are great for iPhones deals, but you might be the surprised where to look for the best iPad and MacBook Air bargains.

Here are the best places to score a deal for each Apple product: