If you’ve ever wanted to use Siri on your Mac, we’ve got the next best thing: how about using Siri on your iPhone 4S to pass along commands to your OS X desktop, launching apps just by giving your command out loud? Now you can, thanks to the latest update to the popular iTeleport VNC app.
A good report by Horace Dediu over at Asymco shows that about every quarter, about 56% of all new iPhones are replacing old models that have been discarded.
That’s interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily paint a good picture for AT&T, which seems to be growing new iPhone customers at a much slower rate than they once did.
Noticing that people really liked to wrap the new iPod nanos around a wrist band and turn them into watches, Apple decided to embrace the Nanowatch movement with their latest update, specifically by rolling out a number of fun new watch faces. The most iconic of the new options, though, is the one that mimics the classic Mickey Mouse watch face, famous with Mouseketeers all around the world since the 1950s.
If you don’t have an iPod nano, there’s a cool, easy way to get yourself the nano’s Mickey Mouse watch face on your Dashboard. Here’s how.
There’s an easter egg in iOS 5: a new panorama mode that lets you stitch together multiple shots you take with your iPhone’s camera into a gorgeous 180+ degree image. Unfortunately, while Apple clearly spent some time putting this together, there’s no way to access it as a consumer unless you jailbreak your iPhone. Here’s how to get Apple’s panorama mode working on your iPhone 4, iPhone 4S or iPad 2.
Remember that new cheekily-christened “EasyTheft” system Apple was planning on rolling out to its official Apple Store app? The official update is here, and anyone can now try it out!
When it comes to Mac hacking, there are few security experts more dangerous than Charlie Miller, who can hack a Mac in mere seconds. Luckily, Miller only uses his hacking powers for the forces of good, so his hacks often lead to more secure systems for you and me.
Let’s hope that’s the case for the latest vulnerability Miller identified for the iOS platform. He has discovered a huge bug in iOS that allows malicious devs to write innocuous looking apps that slip by the App Store review process, only to phone home to a remote computer and repurpose all of iOS’s normal functions for malicious ends.
Hysterical. In a recent response to HTC’s ITC complaint against Apple, Cupertino didn’t just deny all of HTC’s charges… it even went as far as to correct the Taiwanese device maker’s punctuation, snarkily writing:
Apple denies that its correct name is Apple, Inc. The correct name of Respondent is Apple Inc.
Priceless.
One of the few contemporaries in tech that Steve Jobs openly admired was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the Apple founder said that he admired Zuckerberg “for not selling out, for wanting to make a company.” In other words, Jobs saw a lot of himself in Zuckerberg: a young kid out to change the world.
Well, it turns out the respect was mutual. In an interview with Charlie Rose that will air later today, Zuckerberg says that Jobs’s help was formative in building Facebook.
Wall Street seemed ready to have an epileptic seizure last month when Apple merely reported an incredible, record-breaking quarter instead of whatever financial fever dream they imagined, so this ought to give them a little spring in their step: the iPhone 4S is now the best-selling smartphone at all three of the top US carriers. Duh.
Despite the fact that Samsung’s being sued by Apple in pretty much every country in the world short of Xanadu and Zembla, the IP rip-offs just keep on coming from the plucky Korean electronics giant!
This time, as ObamaPacman notes, Samsung isn’t just content on ripping off the design of the iPod touch for their new Samsung Galaxy 4.0 Android MP3 player… they’ve ripped off the iPod touch’s official product image, right down to the way the white earbuds coil around the player!
Comically shameless. What bozos.
Despite the fact that Siri’s guts are in a billion dollar data facility in North Carolina somewhere, the iPhone 4S can actually be used to voice control an old Mac 512K.
Even just looking at the picture, it’s easy to see this 11-inch MacBook Air “luxury mod” is a grotesque mockery. Crystallize-Your-Design would probably have you believe that recreating “Angel of the Chapel Sistine” on a MacBook Air in Swarovski Crystals took some sort of artistry, but this is the high-end equivalent of smearing your laptop in glue and then rolling it in crushed glass and glitter.
Here’s where you’ll want to lose your lunch, though. This frickin’ thing is being positioned as a product that pays tribute to the life of Steve Jobs! A man whose obsession with clean zen aesthetics would have caused him to suffer some sort of rectal prolapse just looking at this glittering pile of faux-diamond puke. The audacity!
I’ve been in the blogging-in-my-underpants business for a long time now, and over the years, one of the only things that has been an immutable law is that the long-awaited iControlPad for iPhone will always be just on the cusp of release.
So imagine the way my whole world flipped topsy-turvy when I checked my email box this morning and noticed that the unthinkable had happened, and iControlPad had finally been released. Is this even real life?
It’s not set to open for another hour yet, but the curtain’s already been pulled back on Apple’s redesigned 5th Avenue store, which sees the iconic cube pared down from 90 panes of glass to just fifteen, and the architectural cruft needed to support them eliminated in favor of a new “seamless” design.
The end result is quite lovely, and makes the 5th Avenue location even more of a wonderful contradiction: how ironic that New York’s most photographed landmark is also its most invisible! More pictures below.
Late last night, Apple seeded a new build of Safari to developers, 5.1.2 beta, which brings a fix to the embedded PDF viewing and printing issues that were present in previous versions of the browser. It also introduces a “known bug” that causes extensions to crash. As the ancient Romans used to say, caveat developor.
How does Apple do it? How do they keep secret products that require huge billion dollar deals, years of planning and cutting-edge technology up until the moment Apple wants to announce it? How does Cupertino consistently leap frog the competition to market with new products at such low prices, then keep that lead for years? And how does Apple do all of this while maintaining record profits and 40% gross margins?
BusinessWeek has a fantastic look at the intricacies of Apple’s supply chain, which is the best on Earth. The secret? Hoarding lasers, they cheekily suggest. But that’s not actually all that far off.
No, it’s not just you: Siri is down for users around the country, hard, with no ETA or fix in sight.
Users who try to access Siri get this response: “Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network.”
Of course, Siri’s labeled a beta product, and it’s likely Apple is already working on this problem. We’ll tell you more once we know what the hey’s going on ourselves.
Think Android phones are pieces of junk? Now you’ve got the data to prove it. A recent study has conclusively proven Android phones are much more prone to breaking than iPhones and even BlackBerries, and their cheapness is costing telecoms big: up to $2 billion a year, in fact.
About twelve hours after iOS 5 was officially released, I went through the considerable bother of downgrading my iPad 2 back down to iOS 4.3. iOS 5 was a great update, but for me, it had one fatal problem: it broke my beloved Stanza e-reading app irrevocably, and going without Stanza on my iPad was as impossible to contemplate as living without Mail or Safari.
For Stanza lovers, the situation is extremely frustrating, because Stanza breaks so totally under iOS 5 that you can’t even load an ebook without the app crashing. However, the original developers can’t update the app, because they sold it to Amazon.
When Amazon originally bought Stanza back in 2009, they promised they weren’t buying Stanza just to kill some of the free competition to their own Kindle e-reader. And, in fact, Amazon has updated the product several times since 2009, notably to bring excellent iPad support to the app.
But with iOS 5, Amazon appears to have abandoned all support for Stanza. That’s particularly frustrating, because not only was Stanza the best non-commercial e-reader around, it had many features the competition still doesn’t have: for example, its excellent typesetting and formatting options, its wide range of supported formats and its killer swipe-to-dim feature, which makes reading ebooks easier on the eyes.
Watch Steve Jobs: One Last Thing on PBS. See more from PBS.
Did you miss the Steve Jobs documentary Steve Jobs: One Last Thing that aired last night on PBS or the UK’s Channel 4? Those nice guys over at public broadcasting have slung the whole movie up online for streaming, free.
DigiTimes is a throw-stuff-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks kind of news org, so along with predicting that Apple will radically overhaul their iMac, iPhone, MacBook Air and iPad lineup in 2012 comes a separate report all about the iPad 3.
In the details, though, the iPad 3 report is much more interesting, because it predicts Apple will miss a March/April release window for the iPad 3 and instead launch in late summer.
Well, that didn’t take long. Just three hours after Google released their official Gmail for iOS app, they’ve already pulled it.
Why? Well, despite our initial enthusiasm, it kind of sucked.
Siri’s a smart little moppet, but she can’t do everything for you. You can’t ask her to find you a picture of a dog from Google Images, or see if the guy you have a blind date with that night is a registered sex offender, or really do anything that Siri and Wolfram Alpha aren’t already programmed to do.
The good news is that Siri hacker chpwn has teamed up with GitHub hacker Aman Gupta to figure out how to add custom Siri commands. The bad news is it’s quite complicated, and there’s no way to do it right now for yourself.
If you’ve been using a Mac for any real length of time, you probably know Retrospect. They’ve been releasing great backup tools to Mac users since the Metazoic age of MacOS 6, and despite coming under the thrall of various corporate overlords from time to time, Retrospect’s still hard at work making great software… and Retrospect 9 for Mac might be their best backup client yet.
What’s new? Growl notifications and AES-256 encryption, for one, making Prospect 9 a corporate level backup solution. Task workflows and WebDAV support are now in the mix, as well as a network backup option supporting all flavors of machines, including Mac, Linux and Windows, and the whole software package has gotten a shot in the arm to run even faster and prettier than ever before.
How much? $129 for five users, or $479 for a single-server, 20 seat license. Pay $1699 and use it on as many servers and as many users as you want. Or just download the free trial.
Remember that fantastic native Gmail app that Google was on the verge of releasing? They’ve done gone and released it, and it’s available now as a free download for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 4 or above.