Keeping tabs on your brood this Halloween? Sure, you could use Apple’s Find My Friends. But it doesn’t have as many cool features as these two new apps, and it also can’t track Android phones — while these two apps can.
The people behind Vybe are calling it a “smart bracelet,” because it’s missing a key element included in all smartwatches: the screen. Instead of relaying information through a display, Vybe vibrates, nagging you to look at your phone.
A device that repeatedly requires halting your current activity seems to defeat its own purpose — namely, untethering you from your phone. It’s also strange that Vybe’s promotional clip suggests you pick up your phone while driving, which is illegal in many states — including California, where WearVybe, the bracelet’s maker, is based.
Just over a week after 2K announced there would be a sequel to their turn-based strategy dogfighting game Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol, we now have details about pricing and release date, along with a wee screen shot to whet our appetites.
Back in 2010, when the idea of the iPhone as a great gaming device was generally scoffed at, the game developer dudes at One Man Left offered up an instant classic called Tilt To Live. It didn’t try to minimize the iPhone’s weaknesses; instead, this brilliant little gem seemed like it was built specifically for the iPhone, and perfectly harnessed its strengths. The result was a beautifully addictive game that had the player frantically twisting and tilting the iPhone in order to both survive and destroy a horde of menacing…dots. Yes, dots.
Now, over three years and one strategy game later, One man Left is finally revealing details, in the form of a short video, about their the ridiculously titled Tilt To Live sequel — Tilt To Live 2: Redonkulous.
We’ve all been there: Some mornings simply aren’t compatible with a task as sophisticated as groping for an iPhone and then pawing at the screen or volume button to activate the snooze.
And for those especially drooly mornings when even smacking a massive rubber button is too much of a challenge, there’s the wobL: a stand-app alarm combo for iPhone that works simply by — you guessed it — wobbling it.
I’m forever intrigued with Booq — a bag-maker headquartered just a stone’s throw from design-crazy Pasadena — and its maverick creations. The company’s latest is the Boa Shift backpack; while it doesn’t much that’s new, it seems to gather all their signature design elements into a single bag.
We know that the new Mac Pro — and as we learned earlier this week, the new MacBook Pros — sport new Thunderbolt 2 ports, which double the speed of the initial version to a maximum throughput of 20GB/second.
All that speed is academic without peripherals designed specifically for Thunderbolt 2. So today, Promise Technology is the first company to announce Thunderbolt 2 stuff — namely, their Pegasus2 RAID storage boxes and SANLink2 Fibre Channel-to-Thunderbolt 2 SAN device bridge.
There’s little worse than coming home with a new iPad on the very first day it’s available, only to find your editor has suddenly and immediately re-assigned you to cover raging tropical storms on the Yucatán Peninsula (happens all the time). Or something.
Fear not, adventurer person, Griffin has announced their ruggedized, military-spec’d Survivor case will be available to protect the new iPad Air the same day you can buy it from an Apple Store.
The ring of Tim Cook’s softened Southern twang hasn’t yet left our ears, and yet Belkin has already announced, not one, but practically a whole wall at the Apple Store full of iPad Air cases and keyboards.
Of the ten cases and three keyboard cases announced by Belkin after today’s event, the most interesting is the minimalist Qode (perhaps a Star Wars character?) Thin Type Keyboard Case — one of Belkin’s excellent keyboards wrapped in aluminum and equipped with a hinge that lets it double as a cover for the screen. For a little more protection, there’s the Qode (Peruvian dessert?) Ultimate Keyboard Case, which adds a protective aluminum backing around the iPad Air.
This is it — we’re entering a golden age of video. Thanks to processor and camera upgrades that allow phones and tablets to shoot high-quality video, edit them then turn around and very quickly share them with pretty much any audience.
Apple has obviously realized this, and beefed up the populist iMovie, on both the Mac and iOS.
According to Apple’s website, T-Mobile is now offering 200MB of free data each month with the purchase of one of the new iPads announced today — the new Retina iPad Mini or the iPad Air. This is in contrast to the three other carriers, which have plans that start at $15 or $20 — though they come with more data.
What do high-end bicycles, Formula One race cars and Shure’s pricey new SRH1540 headphones have in common? Yes, they’re all snazzy objects that can boost your coolness factor, and/or might help you get laid (except maybe the bicycle). Also, they’re all made with carbon fiber.
I dig biplanes, but nothing says dogfighting like a British Spitfire up against a Messerschmitt Bf 109, or a Marine Corsair duking it out with a Mitsubishi Zero.
For the next installment of turn-based strategy gem Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol, 2K and Firaxis Games have gone with the latter, and bumped the game ahead several decades from World War I, setting it smack in the middle of the Pacific during World War 2.
A year and a half ago, Bob Shor’s diabetic dad asked him if he had seen his dad take his insulin. Bob’s answer, “No, I didn’t see you take your meds” was interpreted by his father as “No, you haven’t taken them.” His dad overdosed that day, which Bob says was the reason he and his brother Rotem created MediSafe, a collaborative app that helps keep track of long-term medication.
The app will remind users when it’s time to take meds, and display dosage and an image of what the meds actually look like. There’s even a refill reminder and personalized information and details about taking the drug and effects. But the big feature is the app’s collaborative nature.
Cell phone numbers are a direct path that often lead straight to us, regardless of where we are or what we’re doing. And once we’ve given someone our number, they have it for good. And if things go south, the only option is to change your number, right?
Pretty much — but that’s easy to do if you used a new app called RingMeMaybe to give them a temporary number in the first place.
PhoneSuit’s Elite battery case crushed the field during a week-long test of battery cases for the iPhone 4 two years ago, thanks to its unmatched sleekness and, at the time, relatively large battery.
The company has finally released an iPhone 5/s version of the case, with a revised form factor but the same 2100 mAh capacity.
While other cases may have caught up in the power-per-millimeters of thickness ratio, the Elite still has a trick up its sleeve: Unlike, say, Mophie’s cases, the Elite doesn’t require the use of a headphone adapter.
We posted all about NASA engineer Mark Roper’s gruesome, iPhone-augmented Halloween shirts last year. Since then, Mark has quit his job at NASA to focus on Halloween. The result is more designs and, even better, both an improved t-shirt and a horribly gruesome effect worthy of being designed by someone who worked on the Mars Curiosity rover.
If there’s one group of people who could seriously do with less wires — or in this case, cables — it’s guitarists. Walking around with two grand worth of Fender in your hands, trying avoiding a snake-pit of cables and simultaneously tapping out Van Halen’s Eruption probably takes some concentration (I wouldn’t know; I’ve never been on stage with anything but an air guitar, which was completely wireless).
IK Multimedia’s new four-pedal iRig BlueBoard pedalboard de-clutters the floor a little, as it’s the first completely wireless pedalboard for iOS and Macs. The board connects to its companion app on an accompanying iDevice (or to a Mac) through a Bluetooth connection.
The Brother ADS-1500W scanner is the first of a pair of wireless small office/home office scanners the company is releasing this month; the two fall between its recently redesigned portable wireless scanners and its ADS-2500W workhorse.
I remember a few tech bloggers going nuts over Vine when it hit the street back in January. I wasn’t convinced; it seemed too limiting, felt too gimmicky. Vine turned out to be a more creative tool than I’d imagined — at least for others. But the concept never really hooked me enough to want to use it.
Cameo, on the other hand, had my juices flowing almost immediately. Like Vine, Cameo shoots short, six-second HD (720p) clips that can be uploaded to Cameo’s website or shared via social media and email. Unlike Vine, multiple six second shots can be combined into a two-minute (maxiumum) clip, with light editing tools, effects and music added to the mix. And Cameo even lets you collaborate with friends.
What if you could duct tape your iPhone to your baseball bat, tennis racquet or 9-iron, and use the iPhone’s motion sensors to plot your swing in your favorite sport? It’d be messy, sure, and awkward, trying to adapt your grip over the slab of phone. And then there’d be the hours of scraping duct-tape residue off the screen when (if) you recovered it from where it landed after it flung itself off during that home-run swing. And after all that you’d need an app that actually made sense of all the data.
Forget all that, and keep your iPhone in your pocket. Zepp Labs has come out with a small, light (1-inch square, 6.3 grams) sensor that attaches, via specialized rubber housings, to golf gloves, baseball bats or a tennis racquets; the sensor records your swing in three dimensions, then sends the data directly to a companion app on your iPhone via Bluetooth. The resulting 3D image of your swing can be viewed from any angle, and gets analyzed by the app.
Just as easy-to-use creative apps like iMovie and GarageBand have made it easier to craft music and videos, so AppSeed is poised to make it much easier to build iOS apps. Simply using the app to snap a photo of a rough sketch scribbled onto a notepad or napkin will turn that sketch into working, interactive interface pieces that can be arranged, re-arranged and tested.
There’re tons of battery cases out there for the iPhone, and a good selection of waterproof cases. But a battery case that’s waterproof? Just one: the new Mojo Refuel Aqua from iBattz.
The Refuel Aqua isn’t just mildly, get-caught-in-a-little-rain waterproof — it’s go-snorkeling-with-your-iPhone-for-hours waterproof; It’s rated at a mighty IPX8, the highest waterproof rating, and iBattz says it’ll seal out water at a depths of up to three meters.
Two of the versions are on sale till the end of the week: The most basic version, DataMan Next, is free (from a buck); and DataMan Pro is on sale at $5, which is half off its regular $10 price. The Pro version also now reports hourly data usage by app, which pretty much makes it the most detailed data-tracking app out there.
Perhaps it’s more of a gold trickle than an actual bona fide rush, but we’ve already found two just-released gold versions of previously un-gilded gadgets: the Kickstarted eleMount iPhone stand, and Parrot’s luxury Zik headphones (above).