John Brownlee - page 18

For us old farts, T9 texting still has a sort of nostalgic allure. Now a new iPhone keyboard allows you to text message your friends like it’s 1999 all over again.

These days, the closest most iPhone owners come to experiencing what it’s like to take a picture on a Polaroid instant camera is loading up the Instagram app. But a new startup is hoping to bring a built-in instant printer to your iPhone by way of a Polaroid style case, with a little dash of augmented reality on top

Thanks to Pangu, we have all been able to jailbreak our iPhone 6’s far earlier than most of us thought possible. Unfortunately, though, Apple has been moving to close the loophole that makes the iOS 8 jailbreak possible with the iOS 8.1.1 beta, which is currently snaking through developer channels. When it arrives, poof, no more jailbreak.

Unfortunately, it seems like the iOS 8.1.1 update could arrive soon, perhaps as early as today. Better jailbreak now, people

How big of a success is Apple Pay? Just three weeks after its launch, Apple’s mobile payment system is already a player at Whole Foods, where it represents almost 1 percent of all transactions.

Of the many podcasting apps available for iOS, Overcast on iOS is one of our favorites. Programmed by Instapaper and The Magazine founder Marco Arment, it’s a slick podcasting app with some unique tricks up its sleeves, like smart speed, voice boost, and variable playback speed. We love it. There’s only one problem. It’s been iPhone-only. At least until now.

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPad, there are a fair number of apps you can download for free: Pages, Numbers, iMovie, GarageBand and so on.

But did you know there’s a secret cache of Apple apps that no one but Geniuses can download? There is, and they range from a basic flight sim game to a tank battler to an internal newspaper only Apple employees can read!

With working specimens of the original 1976 model routinely selling at auction for as much as $905,000, chances are, even the most die-hard Apple fans will never be able to own a vintage Apple 1 for themselves.

But don’t despair: If you have the know-how, you can build one yourself for a fraction of the cost.

AirDrop on iOS makes it easier to share images and other files with the people around you than ever before, but it’s also a great way to troll innocent bystanders with space sloths. But there’s a way to protect yourself.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has long been an unabashed believer that Cupertino should release a bigger iPhone. Around the time of the iPhone 5, he said Apple should have released two different models, one “regular” and one jumbo-size, to better compete with Android superphones

Now that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are here, Woz is glad. But he’s still being hard on Apple, saying they’re three years too late with the big phones. And he’s not too crazy about the Apple Watch either.

Are you one of the many, many OS X Yosemite users who have been plagued with intermittent, seeming unsolvable problems with Wi-Fi dropping since upgrading from Mavericks? The end to your problems may very well be coming down the pipe.

AppleCare has started to rollout to enterprise, thanks to Cupertino’s new strategic partnership with IBM.

Although Apple has given us our first peek at the Apple Watch, so far we don’t know much about it, including when it will be released or how much its many versions will cost.

A new report, however, provides some possible answers to these questions. According to a French website, the Apple Watch will start at around $500 for the steel model. And gold? Gold will be even more expensive.

I love interactive Notification Center widgets. Widgets that let me use Notification Center like a quick entry form for my best used apps. Stuff like PCalc’s calculator widget that gives functionality to users that Apple seems conflicted about.

That’s why I love Neato. It’s a quick jot notepad for Notification Center that lets you speedily enter notes no matter where you are in iOS 8.

Beamdog Entertainment is a team of ex-Bioware and Black Isle developers who specialize on taking classic Infinity Engine RPGs and updating them for modern devices, like the Mac or iPad. First, they did it for Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II. Now they’re doing it for Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, which has just been released on the PC and Mac.

On my aging 2009 iMac, one of my favorite apps is iStats Menu, which lets me see at a glance which of the various programs I have running has slowed my desktop down to a crawl. And I have to admit, it’s gotten me a little performance obsessed: I spend a bunch of time every day checking out iStats Menu, just to see if there’s something I can close to maybe drop CPU usage another half-a-percent.

Because of this, I’ve always sort of wished that there was a similar program for iPhones and iPads. And now there is.

HealthKit’s supposed to make it easier to stay healthy. This app doesn’t care about your health. It wants you to die, and it’s going to tell you exactly when that will happen.

Back in May, Apple’s iPad regained its illustrious titles as the top tablet according to the J.D. Power’s U.S. Tablet Satisfaction survey.

Fast forward five months, and Apple’s lost the title… to Amazon, of all companies. Is this even real life?

It was only a matter of time. Just a few hours after Tim Cook bravely and historically made his sexuality open, the gay-bashing has already begun.

Where? In Russia, where Vitaly Milonov, the politican behind Russia’s anti-gay laws and the politican who threatened to arrest gay athletes at the Sochi olympics, argued that Tim Cook should be banned from Russia because he could be a carrier of AIDs or Ebola.

One of my favorite runners to be released in the last year is Gameloft’s Spider-Man Unlimited. Released last month, it would probably be the best runner I’ve ever played, if not for it’s onerous free-to-play mechanics which make leveling up or unlocking new Spider-Men a total grind if you don’t pay out money.

It’s a testament to how good the core gameplay is that even though the free-to-play mechanics are so bad, I keep coming back for more. And now I have even more reason to be addicted, because the first major update to Spider-Man Unlimited is here, bringing more Spider-Man, more villains, new environments, and a new gameplay ‘issue’ to the already content-packed runner.

NASA’s unmanned Antares rocket exploded at launch above Wallops Island, Virginia, yesterday on route to dropping off supplies at the International Space Station.

A lesser casualty of that explosion? One rocket watcher’s iPad, which was blown to smithereens by the explosion.

But don’t worry. Cupertino did the right thing: They replaced it.

Samsung may ship more devices, but there’s no doubt that Apple is winning the war.

That’s the takeaway from Samsung’s latest earnings report, which stated that the Korean smartphone maker’s Q3 operating profits were just $3.8 billion, a 60 percent drop over last year.

And things are even worse in the mobile division, which dropped 73.9 percent year-over-year.

Now compare those numbers to Apple.

In a beautifully written personal essay, Apple CEO Tim Cook has just come out as gay, finally confirming rumors that have circulated since he took over as Steve Jobs’ replacement in 2011.

One of my favorite games for the iPhone is Game Dev Story, an adorable and addictive game by Kairosoft that puts the player in the role of managing a team of video game developers.

Something about Noodlecake Games’s upcoming title, Bitcoin Billionaire, reminds me a lot of Game Dev Story. But befitting a game by the creators of Super Stickman Golf, it looks a lot funnier.

Following our report yesterday revealing several leaked shots for the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac, we’re hearing confirmation that not only are the shots legitimate, but that Office for Mac could be here sooner than you think.

If there’s one thing Apple knows how to make, it’s money. Even so, the iPad Air 2 is one of the best value tablets Apple has ever made.

Even though it costs Apple roughly the same amount to make an iPad Air 2 as it did to make a first-gen iPad Air, Apple’s margins have actually gone down slightly on the superslim, A8X-powered tablet.