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John Brownlee - page 15

Apple forces GoodReader to pull some iCloud Drive functionality from app

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Photo: GoodReader
Photo: GoodReader

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.

How Steve Jobs bailed out Restoration Hardware

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What was once Restoration Hardware is now a SoHo Apple Store. Photo: Flickr
What was once Restoration Hardware is now a SoHo Apple Store. Photo: Flickr

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.

Microsoft’s next-gen ‘Spartan’ browser could run on iOS and the Mac

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Internet Explorer could be killed off in Windows 10. Photo: ZDNet
Internet Explorer could be killed off in Windows 10. Photo: Microsoft

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.

Grovemade’s Walnut Monitor Stand is an iMac accessory that will last you a lifetime

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The Walnut Monitor Stand is the perfect way to prevent neck strain while sitting at your iMac. Photo: Grovemade
The Walnut Monitor Stand is the perfect way to prevent neck strain while sitting at your iMac. Photo: Grovemade

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.

Over Christmas, Minecraft: Pocket Edition won the App Store

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Minecraft won Christmas 2014. Photo: Mojang
Minecraft won Christmas 2014. Photo: Mojang

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.

This machine uses an iPhone to sort M&M’s by color

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This M&M sorting machine is powered with an iPhone. Photo: Cult of Mac
This M&M's-sorting machine is powered with an iPhone. Photo: Cult of Mac

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.

iOS dev pays off his parents’ mortgage for Christmas

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Developer Joe Riquelme paid off his parents' mortgage for Christmas. Photo: Joe Riquelme
Developer Joe Riquelme paid off his parents' mortgage for Christmas. Photo: Joe Riquelme

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.

Did Marc Newson design the iPhone 5c case?

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Do these sneakers look a lot like the iPhone 5c case to you? Photo: Nike
Do these sneakers look a lot like the iPhone 5c case to you? Photo: Nike

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?

Granny mistakes piece of Christmas chocolate for an iPhone

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post-307224-image-fea4f462e6cda17e02ec485bd98d8eed-jpg

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!

Facebook releases a new stickers app for iOS

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Stickers stickers everywhere. Photo: Facebook
Stickers stickers everywhere. Photo: Facebook

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.

Get it while you can: This iOS app is secretly a Nintendo emulator in disguise

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RIP Floppy Cloud. Photo: Touch Arcade
This Dropbox app is an NES and SNES emulator in disguise. Photo: Touch Arcade

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.

Give your Mac a voice-activated self-destruct sequence

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You can tell your Mac to self-destruct with this simple trick. Photo: Jacob Salmela
You can tell your Mac to self-destruct with this simple trick. Photo: Jacob Salmela

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!

Watch every superhero ever fight each other in epic Marvel vs. DC trailer!

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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.

Facebook Messenger gets the slickest read receipts in town

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Facebook wants to have the slickest read receipts in town. Photo: Facebook
Facebook wants to have the slickest read receipts in town. Photo: Facebook

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.

Apple forces Nintype to drop one of the iOS keyboard’s signature features

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Apple has asked this great iOS keyboard to pull one of its signature features. Photo: Nintype
Apple has asked this great iOS keyboard to pull one of its signature features. Photo: Nintype

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.

How to add Continuity to any Mac using just a cheap Bluetooth dongle

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Continuity promo image
This simple hack will add Continuity onto your Mac. Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

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.