John Brownlee - page 110

Insult, meet injury. Microsoft has just inadvertently ended up buying 1,400 iPads to schools in Madison, Wisconsin. Bet they wish they were Windows 8 tablets instead.

ADR Studios is the Italian design company behind the iPhone SJ, a sultry concept design for the iPhone 5 featuring an edge-to-edge capacitive touchscreen, 10 megapixel camera, A6 processor, and a polycarbonate body that’s about as light as you can imagine.

It’s a design that’s not realistically going to happen, but we’ve been a little obsessed with it for the last month or so. We feel similarly about ADR’s new iWatch2 concept: Apple’s never going to make a device that was so exclusively and unapologetically a wristwatch, but if they did, man, I wish it would look like this.

Apple’s excellent innovation of lining the sides of the iPad 2 with magnets is one that is distressingly uncapitalized upon by accessory makers. Oh, sure, a few case makers slap a magnet into their iPad 2 case to turn the screen on and off, but where’s the imagination?

That’s why I’m so pleased by the idea of the Magnus. It’s an iPad 2 stand that uses the magnets inside the tablet’s hinge to keep itself upright on your desk. Brilliant!

I’m not a huge fan of The Big Bang Theory, but this clip from the latest episode is too good not to post.

What if Siri wasn’t just Wolfram Alpha stapled onto a smart text-to-speech program, but instead an actual woman, working a call center, and just as slinky and sexually promiscuous as any bro showing off in front of his drunken friends by asking for a blow job could ever hope?

That’s probably not many people’s fantasies, but it is the hilarious chimera of Big Bang’s Raj, who is as cripplingly shy as he is addicted to his new iPhone 4S.

Counterintuitively, for the fourth year running, the winners of 148Apps annual “Best App Ever” contest have just been announced at Macworld / iWorld 12012. And my girlfriend’s going to be positively giddy, because the app that she’s spent most of the last year grinding her fingers down to the bone playing has won: Halfbrick Studio’s Jetpack Joyride!

The hope of a new Apple product on the horizon tends to make tech blogs a little fanciful, sometimes even delusional, so it’s hard to fault Techno Buffalo too much for their “exclusive” report that an Apple-made OLED HDTV with Siri functionalities — the much talked about iTV — is coming out “this April, or possibly May at the latest.” Hey, we all get carried away from time to time.

That said, TechnoBuffalo’s report isn’t too be trusted. In fact, it’s total bullshit. Here’s why.

The App Store is a morass of to-do list managers, but there’s reason to perk up your ears about Clear. It might seem like just another to-do list manager from another new studio, but it’s neither. Clear is something special.

You know that moment when your iPhone slips out of your hands and begins its slow tumble to the ground? Time slows down, as it does in the milliseconds before any horrific accident, and you absolutely freeze with a sort of full-body shudder of anticipation at the shattered glass screen you just know will be the end result of its 32 feet per second per second fall towards the concrete.

In a recent episode of Fred Armise and Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia, they did a skit that documents the internal monologue of such a reverie. The end’s a bit surreal (and a little weak), but as an iPhone owner myself, I can relate. Looks like it’s time for Brownstein to buy a bumper.

Last August, Spotify launched a public API for mobile developers to piggy back off of their system and release their own apps. The hope was the abiogenesis of a series of cool new music apps that pushed the boundaries of how we discover music, with Spotify’s library of 15 million tracks as the lifeblood.

The first app to really come from Spotify’s initiative and impress? SpotON Radio, a Pandora-like service built upon Spotify that allows you to create custom tailored music stations, share them with friends and sync them across the iCloud. Plus, it’s got a really swank visual aesthetic that just sings on iOS devices.

Zynga Games is a company that has made most of its many millions on games “inspired” by other titles. And by “inspired,” we mean “shamelessly ripped-off.” Mafia Wars was a rip-off of Mob Wars. Words With Friends is a rip-off of Scrabble. Cafe World is a rip-off of Restaurant City. And so on.

So when Zynga came knocking and wanted to buy up NimbleBits, developers of Tiny Tower (which Apple recently named one of their games of the year), it didn’t take a genius to figure out that if the deal didn’t go through, Zynga would rip-off NimbleBit’s games anyway. And — shocker — it turns out that’s just what happened.

Sick of the boring old gray linen background on your Siri? If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone 4S, why not try the new Custom Siri Background Cydia tweak, which allows you to apply a picture from your Camera Roll as Siri’s background wallpaper.

Apple has passed Exxon as the world’s most valuable company before, only to lose the title shortly thereafter, but after last night’s blow-out holiday quarter results, Apple is once again the undisputed king of Wall Street, beating Exxon Mobil’s market cap by a cool $6 billion. Let’s hope this time it lasts!

For a company named after nature’s candy, Apple’s releases a surprising lack of edible products. That’s not likely to change any time soon, but if you’d like a cake or a bit of pastry with Apple’s eye for style and incredible packaging design, look no further than this incredible Taiwanese bakery.

Nuff said. [via Science Dump]

It is common for the President of the United States to honor American heroes by inviting them to the annual State of the Union address. No surprise, then, that President Obama is tipping his hat to the legacy of Apple founder Steve Jobs at tonight’s State of the Union address by inviting Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs to share First Lady Michelle Obama’s box at the event.

The event is believed to be Powell’s first public appearance since her husband’s death.

Remember that amazing interactive iPhone we posted about a while back that was made up of nothing but CSS 3 + Javascript, with absolutely no image files used for rendering at all?

Yeah, that was pretty impressive. But you know what’s even more killer? How about Roman web designer Alessio Atzeni’s spiritual followup, which emulates Mac OS X Lion’s boot, login and desktop screens using only CSS3 properties, and no image files at all.

Amazing. Check out the full demo here. Steve Jobs was right: who the heck needs Flash?

[via iClarified]

What’s more valuable: the White House or the Apple Store? The most iconic and easily identifiable residence in the country might seem like the safer bet, but guess again: it’s actually worth just about as much as any one single Apple store.

Ever since the iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S first debuted, a small but extremely loud and angry minority of handset owners have reported extraordinary battery drainage, and despite the iOS 5.0.1 update, the problem is still unresolved.

It’s well known that the iOS 5battery issues are a software problem, but since Apple hasn’t been able to fix the problem in three months, maybe it’s time to give the jailbreak community a shot at things. In fact, that’s what a new Cydia tweak called iOS 5 Battery Fix claims to do… and initial buzz suggests that it may just have delivered on its promise.

As part of its annual promotion to get more Americans to cram nacho cheese-flavored asbestos triangles down their gob during halftime, Doritos throws a Crash The Super Bowl contest where they invite fans to make their own commercials. Win the contest and your winning ad gets aired during the Super Bowl.

I don’t usually pay attention to stuff like this, but this entry for the contest is just wonderful. It portrays Siri (or a Siri-like) as a magical genie in a smartphone capable of automatically beaming bags full of Doritos, a festive sombrero or even three hot, bikini-clad girls into a bro’s apartment at just a long press of the home button, no questions asked.

The only problem? In Dorito’s land, Siri’s speech-to-text transcription abilities have a couple of small auditory processing kinks to work out. The result? A guy’s request for hot wild girls leads to him being torn apart by… well, you’ve got to see it for yourself. Brilliant.

[via iDownload Blog]

If you have ever used iBooks or the Kindle app on your iPhone or iPad, you probably have experienced virtual page turning… and probably turned it off shortly thereafter.

Why? Well, virtual page turning is just a fancy animation that does nothing practical. It slows the reading experience down (however minutely) just to give you a little millisecond voyage through an e-reading uncanny valley.

After all, in the real world, pages do more than just flip: you can rifle through them, bend them back, check multiple spots in a book at once, bookmark places with your fingers, etc. Wouldn’t it be cool if your iPad’s virtual page-turning animations could do the same things?

The untethered jailbreak for the iPad 2 has finally been released. After months of waiting, you can download the Chronic Dev Team’s free Absinthe Mac tool to jailbreak your iPad 2 in a matter of seconds.

We’ll show you how to jailbreak your iPad 2 running iOS 5.0 or iOS 5.0.1 the right way in this guide.

It’s here! It’s finally here! The long-awaited Absinthe jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 running iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 is finally here. The server’s getting hammered, but you can download the Absinthe app directly here. Download the latest version here.

You can download a Windows version of Absinthe, too.

We have a tutorial for jailbreaking your iPhone 4S with Absinthe and jailbreaking your iPad 2 with Absinthe. If you’re getting errors when trying to install Cydia, you can also try this handy fix.

Apple first announced its incredible new Thunderbolt interface technology way back in February of 2011. Combining PCI Express and DisplayPort technology into a serial data interface, Thunderbolt allows for up to 20Gbit/s transfer rates, as well as the ability to daisy chain multiple devices, all in a tiny form factor that can fit even in the MacBook Air’s slim housing.

As usual, with Thunderbolt, Apple was at least a year ahead of the rest of the industry… and that’s not hyperbole. Only now are Acer, Asus and Lenovo getting ready to put Thunderbolt in their ultrabook offerings.

The Raspbery Pi project is a darling little exercise in ingenuity. It looks like a USB thumb drive, but instead of 2GB of flash, it’s a fully functional computer running Debian Linux, featuring a 700 MHz ARM 11 processor, 128 MB of RAM, a USB port, and an Ethernet port… all for just $35. Splendid, splendid geekiness. Hanging this from your car keys, you can literally get connected anywhere. But where’s the Apple angle?

Try this one for size: it supports AirPlay.

Earlier today, iOS 5.0.1 hacker extraordinaire pod2g said that the long anticipated iPad 2 and iPhone 4S jailbreak was “almost ready to pop”. Considering he’s been promising the jailbreak any time now for a couple weeks, though, what does “almost ready to pop” really mean?

It means keep hitting “refresh” on your browser. pod2g has just written a new blog post, and he’s now promising the jailbreak in just a few hours, courtesy of a tool called Absinthe.