John Brownlee - page 24

Back when the Apple IIgs was released in 1986, the Internet as we know it didn’t really exist. Instead, we had electronic bulletin boards, or BBSes: simple ASCII portals for email, games, file downloads, chatting, and — yes — even porn, that we all dialed into over phone lines.

Weren’t around to experience this for yourself? Don’t worry about it. You can now experience all the analog splendor of an old-school BBS for yourself, thanks to Level 29. And even better, it all runs in a web browser.

Introduced in iOS 7, Activation Lock is a feature that prevents users who recover a lost or stolen iPhone from activating the device without signing in with the Apple ID used to erase the device remotely.

By all accounts, Activation Lock has made a difference in stopping smartphone theft, especially in New York. But in California, law may very well mandate smartphone features like Activation Lock shortly.

Slowly but surely, T-Mobile has been trying to not only become the leader of the prepaid cell phone market, but to totally corner it. It’s latest ultra-simple plan takes that mission even further, making pay-as-you-go as simple as $0.10 per minute or text, flat.

Martin Hajek usually puts his considerable 3-D rendering skills to the task of creating conceptual models of Apple’s upcoming hardware. But after producing his highly-accurate rendering of the iPhone 6 last week, the Dutch artist has tried his hand at something a bit different: imagining a new kind of retail packaging for Apple’s next smartphone, as well as what the iPhone 6 will look like when it’s on display at your local Apple Store.

Can’t get enough of celebrity gossip? You’re not alone. Up in Redmond, Microsoft is so obsessed with keeping up with the Kardashians that they have just released a custom-built an attractive new celebrity news app called Snipp3t. And while the use to which Snipp3t is meant to be put may look a little tawdry, the app design itself is actually really nice.

Vesper, the note-taking app developed in part by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, has been updated with a cool new feature that allows you to easily see the timestamp, character, or word count for a Vesper note… without adding a lot of on-screen clutter.

Since it first opened up in Julu of 2008, the App Store has paid developers over $13 billion at last count, and the marketplace hosts are over 1 million third-party programs. That makes the App Store a success by almost any measure… except discoverability.

Even today, the App Store can be extremely hard to navigate. Dominated by clones of popular apps and freemium crapware, good apps often get buried at the bottom of the App Store thanks to the App Store’s notoriously bad search engine and almost non-existent curation.

But former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée has a suggestion. Make the App Store more like Reddit. Let anonymous humans curate it.

Over the weekend, UK newspaper The Mirror published a series of photos which they claim is a working unit of Apple’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6, complete with retail box.

“There’s no 100% proof that the photos are authentic, but the details on show line up with the dozens of details already seeping onto the web about the next generation Apple handset,” the paper said.

Saying that the photos may not be 100% authentic is quite the overstatement. In fact, considering the fact that iOS 8’s biggest new app — Healthbook — is entirely missing from the screen, we’re going to say we’re about 100% sure that The Mirror got had.

More photos after the jump. What do you think?

We already know that once iOS 8 comes around, AgileBit’s password manager 1Password is going to be great. Not only will it use Touch ID to make remembering your password a thing of the past, but it will integrate with third party apps.

Pretty cool. The only problem, though, is that 1Password for iOS generally retails at $17.99. Pretty expensive. But for a limited time only, 1Password is going on sale for just $9.99… and in case you’re wondering, yes, the Touch ID compatible iOS 8 version will be a free update if you buy it at this price. And that’s not all: 1Password’s sister app for Mac is also currenly on sale for just $34.99, down from a cool $50.

If you have any dreams of being able to surplant all your internet passwords with your fingerprint come iOS 8, I suggest you get a move on.

Source: iTunes

An exhibit full of tortoises with iPads glued to their shells. Is this the next evolutionary stage of the family testudinidae? Hardly. It’s an art exhibit in Colorado’s Aspen Art Museum that has animal activists hopping mad.

Let’s face it. None of us are all that jazzed about having to plug our iPhones into the wall to charge them. We’re all yearning for the days in which wireless charging comes to the iPhone, iPad, and even Mac.

And when it does, furniture like this simple side table are going to become our de facto chargers.

It seems like a strange thing, but people who write about iOS apps on the web are often ashamed of their status bars. When they post screenshots of an app, they feel embarrassed by the fact that they don’t have a full signal from their cellular carrier, or a clear connection to WiFi, or 100% battery life. It’s an expression of the pursuit of perfection that marks Apple and its fans as a whole.

You wouldn’t think this is a pathology that Apple would really care about. But apparently, it does. And in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8, they’ve figured out a way to fix it.

We think we know a lot about the iPhone 6. How big the display is (4.7-inches and 5.5-inches). How thin it will be (really thin).What kind of processor it will be packing (an A8). And when it will be unveiled (September 9th). But do we know everything?

VentureBeat doesn’t think so. The well-respected publication says that a well-informed source has confirmed to them that in addition to all of the above, the iPhone 6 will feature 802.11ac Wi-Fi, NFC capabilities, a non-sapphire screen, and a 2.0GHz A8 processor.

If you love playing XCOM on your Mac or your iPad, you’ll love this. Fantasy Flight Games in cooperation with 2K Games have announced that XCOM is coming to a game chest near you. Called XCOM: The Board Game, it’s basically RISK for alien hunters. But don’t think this is just analog: you’ll need your iPad or iPhone to play.

Grovemade already makes some of our favorite wooden accessories for the iPad and iPhone, but now the San Francisco based woodworkers are entering the realm of the desktop with the Grovemade Desk collection, a gorgeous array of accessories for the wood-obsessed Mac fan.

While he was whipping up the most accurate and beautiful renders yet of what the iPhone 6 will look like when it is released next month, conceptual designer nonpareil Martin Hajek also decided to do something fun, blinging out the iPhone 6 with so much gold and encrusted gemstones that it would make a Saudi Arabian prince blush. More images after the jump.

Designed in collaboration with Steve Jobs by Norman Foster, the new Infinite Loop has Apple fans excited… but not architects. Informally polling a group of 6,000 architects around the world gathered for a South African conference, Fortune’s Philip Elmer DeWitt discovered that, by and large, the professionals he encountered hated Apple’s new Spaceship Campus.

But DeWitt reminds us all that Steve Jobs is no newcomer to architecture. He designed Pixar’s headquarters personally, and it’s a design that has resulted in some of the most creative cinema to come out of Hollywood in the last generation.

Conceptual designer Martin Hajek has no peer when it comes to turning the latest Apple rumors into blisteringly sexy 3-D renders, and with the iPhone 6 just around the corner, he’s already made a number of mockups imagining what it will look like according to the latest rumors.

But with the iPhone 6 now set to be unveiled on September 9th, Martin Hajek has re-examined all of his old renders and every rumor and part leak for the iPhone 6 so far, to come up with the most realistic and accurate iPhone 6 renders yet, right down to a gorgeous exploded view of what all the components look like inside.

If the real iPhone 6 looks even half this good, it’ll be one of the most beautiful consumer objects ever released. Check out some more renders after the jump, and prepare to be absolutely astounded.

The San Diego Comic Con has a rich history of giving us our first look at the best upcoming sci-fi movies. Case in point: on August 4th, 1979, Comic Con was where George Lucas showed an excited crowd the very first live-action trailer for The Empire Strikes Back.

For thirty-five years, this trailer was thought to be lost, but it has now popped back up online, and it features some footage from Empire that was left on the cutting room floor… including a very icky scene between Luke and Leia.

If I had to list the apps I couldn’t live without, Plex would be high up on the list. Think of it like a Netflix for your local video. A multimedia server client for Mac with a slick iOS app, Plex allows you to stream your local television shows and movies on demand to any device on your local WiFi network, or even away from home. It even works on the Apple TV.

Now, Plex for iOS version 3.5 is here, and it brings some cool new features to the already feature-packed app, including the ability to play movie trailers before your movie!

Will the iPhone 6 have a sapphire glass display or won’t it? So far, the jurt’s still out, with a leaked ‘sapphire’ panel turning out to be just a different type of Gorilla Glass.

Whether the iPhone 6 will or won’t have a super-hard, nigh-invulnerable sapphire glass screen, though, Apple is still doubling down on its investments into the material. In fact, it was announced today that Apple’s sapphire glass facility is nearly ready for mass production.

Ever since the iPhone 3GS was first released back in 2009, new iPhones have shipped in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB flavors, priced $199, $299, and $399, respectively.

But 16GB doesn’t get you very far these days, and although iOS 8 will help users out with cheaper iCloud storage, smartphones like the Amazon Fire are shipping with 32GB of storage these days, minimum.

Could Apple follow suit? According to industry experts, it’s very, very possible.

First released in 2008, Bioshock remains, to this day, one of the most unforgettable first person shooters you can play. The game takes place in the dystopian city of Rapture, an underwater metropolis built upon the ocean floor so that it’s citizens can pursue Ayn Rand style objectivism and eugenics. Pretty soon, everyone’s DNA is “spliced,” they’re all crazy, and it’s total chaos.

It’s a great game, and you can already play it on the Mac, but I never thought I’d see Bioshock come to the iPad. But it very much appears I was wrong.

We all know that in China, clones of the latest iPhone go on sale long before Apple actually starts selling them. But what’s it actually like to own an iPhone 6 knockoff before the iPhone 6 is even available?

First debuted in November last year, the iPad Air is coming up on a year old. In Apple terms, that means it’s due for an upgrade, but we still don’t know what the iPad Air 2 will be. Will it be a spec bump, or will it be a redesign?

According to new leaks from China purporting to be the rear shell for the iPad Air 2, the correct answer is: “A little bit of column A, a little but of column B.”