John Brownlee - page 15

Rumors of a larger 12-inch iPad have been swirling for months now, but we’ve yet to see any credible parts or renders. That may have just changed, though: renders of a larger rear iPad Pro shell, allegedly from a Foxconn factory.

GoodReader is a popular document reader app that can view or read pretty much every type of document under the sun. The latest update to the app makes it more powerful than ever, introducing a new Speak feature that can basically turn any PDF or TXT file into an audiobook.

But it also just got a little worse: the latest update to GoodReader has dropped certain iCloud Drive functionality to prevent being pulled from the App Store. And, as usual, the issue has to do with Apple’s complete opacity when it comes to what is and isn’t allowed with iCloud Drive.

It’s winter, and that means there’s just tons of snow out there. Ever wonder, though, if your iPhone could survive being frozen in snow? Well, don’t fret: it looks like it can.

Real estate in New York? It just ain’t cheap. In fact, it’s so expensive that even if you have a successful business you might not be able to afford it.

Case in point? Look no further than Restoration Hardware. The American chain of home furnishings, hardware, and outdoor and garden products may be worth over a billion dollars in revenue as of 2012, but Steve Jobs once had to personally bail the company out.

When John Legere, T-Mobile’s weird and charismatic CEO, speaks up, we listen. He’s not always right, but he’s always compelling. And in 2015, John Legere is bullish about the Apple Watch. In fact, he thinks it’s about to turn the wearables market on its head.

VLC, the much beloved cross platform video player, hasn’t historically had much luck on iOS. But that looks about to change, with the app reportedly coming back to the App Store early in 2015… and possibly as early as today.

It’s come a long way in recent years, but even so, Internet Explorer may be Microsoft’s most reviled product: a web browser so bad it held web standards back for years. From a Mac fan’s perspective, the best that can be said about Internet Explorer is that, for the most part, you never have to use it at all: the most up-to-date versions only run on Windows.

But that could soon change. A new report suggests that Microsoft could be rebranding Internet Explorer while giving it a radical overhaul… while simultaneously releasing it on non-Windows systems like Mac and iOS.

Most of my work day is spent at a 27-inch iMac, circa 2009. It’s admittedly getting a bit long in the tooth, but buffed up with as much RAM as it can take and a homemade Fusion Drive, it still gets the job done.

One complaint I have about the iMac, though, is that the screen is actually a little too low by default. Resting on my desk, the center of the iMac’s screen doesn’t exactly line up with my line of sight. Over an entire day, that can result in neck pain and bad posture.

And so, over the past few years, I’ve experimented with a lot of stands to lift the iMac up a couple inches to more naturally line up with my line-of-sight. Of all the ones I have ever tried, though, the Walnut Monitor Stand by Portland’s Grovemade is my favorite. After using it for the last few months, I can comfortably say it’s a perfect fusion of design and functionality.

Never able to find an open Wi-Fi signal when you need one? Maybe you should carry around this sword. Modeled after Frodo’s weapon in The Lord of the Rings, it glows when it’s within range of open Wi-Fi.

When people opened up their brand new iPhones and iPads for Christmas, what was the first app they were most likely to download?

Well, the data’s in, and it looks like Minecraft: Pocket Edition had a pretty great Christmas, raking in more money in holiday sales than any other game in the world.

After previously snubbing Sony’s offer to distrubute the film in the wake of the Sony hacks, Apple is now streaming The Interview on iTunes.

Let’s face it. Deep in our hearts, we all know some colored M&M’s taste better than others. For me, it’s the red and green ones; for my wife, it’s the brown and orange ones. And Van Halen famously stipulated in all its contracts that the band should never be served any brown M&M’s, requiring some lowly stagehand to pick them all out by hand from a bowl before every show.

These days, things would be easier. Case in point: This simple machine, which was custom-rigged out of just an iPhone and an Arduino to individually sort M&M’s by color, no human intervention required.

Riding high on the success of his iPhone video editing app Videoshop, developer Joe Riquelme decided to splurge on his parents for Christmas.

How much did he splurge? Let’s just say that he made every other kid on Earth look like little ingrates by comparison.

He paid off his parents’ mortgage in full. And he documented it for the rest of us, just so we could share in the joy.

Nike is re-releasing the Zvezdochka, a line of space-inspired sneakers first designed for the company 10 years ago by Marc Newson, Jony Ive’s BFF and Apple’s newest star designer.

Notice anything about them? Yup. They look just like the iPhone 5c case. Got to make you wonder if the iPhone 5c case was designed by Newson, don’t you think?

If you’re like me, you’ve probably had that experience of giving an older relative a gift of tech for the holidays, only for it to go unappreciated. In this absolutely priceless video, though, one family turns that situation on its head, tricking their very sweet grandmother into thinking she’s been given an iPhone she has absolutely no use for… until she discovers it’s made of chocolate!

Christmas may be over here in the United States, but the season’s just starting in Japan. Apple has just announced that it will kick off its annual “Lucky Bag” celebration in its Japanese retail stores starting January 2.

It’s December 24th, and there’s no sign of Apple’s annual iTunes 12 Days Of Gifts. We’re calling it: it’s not happening this year. But why not?

Well, that didn’t last long: Floppy Cloud, the NES and SNES emulator for iOS we wrote about yesterday, has been pulled from the App Store.

Facebook has just released yet another in its seeming interminable series of single serving apps of dubious utility. It’s called Stickers for Messenger, and surprise! It lets you slap virtual stickers on your photos before sending them to your friends through Messenger.

Every once and a while, someone slips a cool emulator past Apple’s App Store guardians in the guise of a seemingly inoffensive app. Well, just in time for Christmas, it’s happened again! Meet Floppy Cloud, an app by developer Kyle Hankinson that is actually a Nintendo and Super Nintendo emulator in disguise.

Worried that the cops might bust in your door any minute, or simply really paranoid? How cool would it be if you could initiate a self-destruction sequence for your Mac using only your voice, just like Captain Picard would use to destroy The Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation?

Well, awesomely, you can. And it’s pretty easy to do!

Every comics-loving kid has spent more than a few houra wondering who would win in a fight: Superman or Thor? Captain America or Batman? Spider-Man or the Flash? Wonder Woman or Captain Marvel?

In comics, we’ve seen those questions answered a few times, most recently in Marvel and DC’s Amalgam crossover of the mid-90’s. But when it comes to Marvel and DC’s cinematic universes, we’ve never seen a cross-property showdown.

This epic trailer, though, gives a pretty good idea of the movie that would emerge if Marvel and DC did decide to team-up for a summer blockbuster.

Read receipts. They’re the first thing I turn off when I get a new messaging app or iOS device. But Facebook is doubling down on read receipts in the new Facebook Messenger, which has new, blisteringly fast notifications showing you exactly what’s going on with your message after you send it.

With iOS 8, Apple has been showing a lot more indecision about what kind of app extensions, keyboards, and widgets are and aren’t allowed under the developer guidelines. This has caused even popular apps like PCalc and Drafts to have to scale back features, because they have inadvertently stepped over some invisible line in Apple’s mind about what a third-party app should be allowed to do.

Now, there’s another fatality of Apple’s weird App Store waffling. Jormy, the developer behind the popular (and absolutely insane) iOS 8 keyboard Nintype, has been informed by Apple that he needs to remove one of his app’s most useful functions in a future update.

A couple months ago, we wrote about the Continuity Activation Tool, an app that hacks Continuity into older Macs that can’t support Handoff, Instant Hotspot, and AirDrop by default.

The only problem? It was rough: you needed to physically break open your Mac and replace it’s wireless and Bluetooth card. Dongles just wouldn’t work. But guess what? Two months later, and things are very, very different.