Although iOS 8 got off to a slower start than iOS 7, it’s finally starting to rebound. New numbers suggest that over half of all customers have upgraded to iOS 8. But all’s not well yet. In fact, iOS 8 uptake is pretty much stagnant.
One of the many, many things that Apple does right is trackpads. Not only is the trackpad hardware that Apple uses in the MacBook lineup the best in the world (seriously, I’ve never used a non-Apple trackpad that even came close), but the software backing it up is world-class.
A lot of that has to do with the library of consistent trackpad gestures Apple has built into OS X over the years. Compared to OS X, Windows feels downright schizophrenic when you’re using gestures. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But it now appears that Microsoft is putting an end to the trackpad schizophrenia by borrowing Apple’s approach to gestures.
If you’re looking for a good keyboard for your iPad Air 2, Logitech has just announced three new beauties, including a pair of sleek keyboard cases.
The top awards for the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards have been announced at London’s Natural History Museum. More than 42,000 entries from 96 countries were submitted this year, making it the biggest event in the history of the awards.
There were many incredible entries, but the one that really grabbed us was the beautiful photo you see above, taken by Marsel Van Oosten, an extraordinarily talented photographer from the Netherlands. It shows a Japanese monkey submerged in water, using an iPhone.
OS X Yosemite’s Mail app is a Mac-crashing memory hog, but that might be good news for Microsoft — it appears from new leaked images that Redmond is readying a special version of Outlook built especially for the new Apple OS X. And Office probably won’t be far behind.
Are you interested in Inbox, Google’s innovative new attempt to “fix” email, but haven’t gotten an invitation into the beta?
Good news: as long as you have a real-world friend who is already part of Inbox’s invite-only beta, you can easily get in, no invite required. Here’s how.
Do you take pictures of all your meals to share with your friends on Facebook and Instagram? Wish there was a way to share even more of it with your FOMO-ing virtual friends?
Well, you can’t share the taste, or the smell, but 3DAround is an upcoming iOS app that lets you share the food you’re eating in all of its three-dimensional glory. And you can do it with other things too.
Although he gets most of the blame for it, skeuomorphism wasn’t really Scott Forstall’s fault. He was just following the orders of his boss and mentor, Steve Jobs. The man who gave the world the first skeumorphic consumer operating system, the Macintosh, loved computer interfaces with gaudy textures that made them look more like real-world things.
In fact, if it were not for Steve Jobs’s love of skeuomorphism, Apple’s design language might have been a lot flatter a lot earlier. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1999, the company was moving away from skeuomorphic design… but Jobs bought it back, with the famous brushed metal texture in the Quicktime app.
Apple pays more attention to the details then anyone else. Sometimes the details they pay attention to are so small, you don’t notice them at all for a long time… but once you see what they’ve done, you can never unsee it, or accept anything less.
Here’s a great example from OS X Yosemite. Compare the two images above. The top is from OS X Yosemite, the bottom from Windows 7. Notice anything? One of these images has much better typography than the other. But can you tell why?
With its candy-like icons, gradients, and transparencies, OS X Yosemite is a major departure from the look and feel of the Macintosh operating system. But if you don’t like that look and feel, here’s a few things you can do to make OS X look less candy-like, hearkening it back to the design language of OS 9.
Ever been annoyed by the placement of light switches in your house? Is there never one around when you need it? The Avi-on Switch is a new light switch (with an associated iPhone app) that you can literally just stick onto your wall like a Post-It Note, no wiring required.
When the Apple Watch is released next year, it’s going to represent a major paradigm shift for iOS: it’ll be an interface made up of fingertip-sized bubbles, not rounded square icons.
Don’t you think that calls for a new logo to mark the occasion?
Well, here’s one for the record books. Apple just rejected a developer’s app for violating its policies against pornographic content.
Nothing weird about that, except for the way that Apple went about it: by sending that developer pictures of a dude masturbating. What?
Continuity is one of the best features of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, allowing your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to all operate more seamlessly together than ever before. But there’s a problem: Continuity requires Bluetooth 4.0 LE to work, and many older Macs don’t have it.
But don’t despair. A new tool has been released makes it possible to easily hacktivate Continuity, even if Apple doesn’t want you to.
One of the things that makes a Mac a Mac is the beautiful startup sound it makes when you turn it on: a soothing, sonorous noise that sounds like electronic harp strings being plucked as you enter the gardens of Zen.
But it wasn’t always this way. When the original Macintosh was released, the startup sound was horrible. Yet it wasn’t Steve Jobs who fixed it. It was an unknown sound engineer who hated it with such a passion that he defied his bosses and literally snuck it onto the Mac.
For the last decade or so, Apple has made some of the most beautifully designed devices on the planet. But because those devices are technology, not furniture or art, they have an incredibly short half-life in our home. Yet these are still classic designs that, in any other context, we might keep around for decades.
That’s why I like this bench built by Klaus Geiger.
As they so often do when new Apple products land, the gadget vivisectionists at iFixIt have used one of their trademark spudgers to crack open a brand iPad Air 2, and there’s at least one interesting finding.
All the iPad Air’s specs have improved this generation except for one critical thing: battery.
Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped by an iPhone factory in Zhengzhou yesterday during a trip in China, and not only did he spend a few minutes having a laugh with an assembly line worker, he even tweeted a picture about it.
Here’s a confession: I was terrible at math in school. From Algebra 1 on, I just couldn’t keep the various symbols, numbers, and denominators I was faced with straight, and so I flunked pretty much every test.
But I grew up in the 90’s. If I was in high school today, I’d never fail a math test again. I’d use the new iOS app PhotoMath instead, which literally solves math problems like magic.
If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to have every episode of The Simpsons ever streamable on your iPhone or iPad, there is no longer any reason to, as a certain yellow-skinned tyke might say, “have a cow.”
You can now stream the complete Simpsons archive over an iOS app, no matter where you are. But there’s a catch.
The iPad Air 2 is starting to hit doorsteps for preorders today, and already, the benchmarks are blowing us away, with an early Geekmark score showing that the iPad Air 2 is the fastest, most powerful tablet out there. Period.
But that’s not the surprising thing about the iPad Air 2.
If you’ve got a business that Apple Maps just keeps on getting wrong, great news. Apple has just launched a new portal for U.S. businesses to add or edit their listings within Apple Maps.
In Spike Jonze’s film Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” played by Scarlett Johansson. But falling in love with Siri doesn’t just happen in the movies. In The New York Times, there is a beautiful piece about a 10-year-old autistic boy named Gus whose best friend is Siri.
Shanghai’s #Unicom store offers alteration service to enlarge pants’ pockets so to fit #iphone6 pic.twitter.com/uvjuTskGcn
— People's Daily,China (@PDChina) October 17, 2014
Is your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus just too big for your skinny jeans? You’re not alone: a store in China is actually keeping a tailor on hand to enlarge pants for customers who can’t fit their new smartphones in their pockets.
Now that Marc Newson is one of Apple’s design bigwigs, the guys at Curved Labs wondered what sort of new products might result from the collaboration.
Their concept? An updated AirPort WiFi router that is also a smart smoke and CO2 detector, a la Nest Protect.
