John Brownlee - page 31

Want to supercharge your stock music player? If you’re on a jailbroken iPhone, check out Aria. It’s a new Cydia tweak that adds a number of new improvements to the stock Music.app in iOS 7.1, including the ability to see albums in a grid view, a new ‘Now Playing’ interface (like in Apple’s Remote app), an ‘Endless Playing’ feature that will start a shuffled play after an album ends, improved lyrics views, and a number of UI improvements, including gestural support.

From a tectonic perspective, any time Apple releases a new version of iOS, it’s like an Earthquake hit the internet. But you might be surprised by how high on the Richter Scale an Apple iOS release is.

This chart by network management services provider Deepfield shows just how big of a seismic event the release of iOS 71 was. From almost zero traffic, iOS 7.1 caused traffic to spike to over 1 terrabyte of data per second… and that’s just a partial view of the effect iOS 7.1 had on the world’s networks. Imagine what this chart will look like when iOS 8 comes around?

Via: GigaOm

Blackberry — which recently celebrated the notable achievement of a zero percent marketshare in the smartphone space — has turned into a patent troll now. In suing Ryan Seacrest’s Typo iPhone Keyboard case (which gives the iPhone a physical QWERTY style keyboard which can be slide onto the screen when necessary) now claims that it is a “deliberate” copy of Blackberry that violates three patents.

Of the endless barrage of clones that emerged after Flappy Bird’s surprise success, Flapthulhu is the one that I go back to over and over again. Not only is it a clever parody of both the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Flappy Bird phenomenon in general, but it’s a genuinely better game than Flappy Bird, with a subverseive sense of humor, fantastic 8-bit style graphics great style. Now, Flapthulhu has gotten better thanks to a version 2.0 update, which adds to major new features.

Consumers update their iPhones at a fairly aggressive pace: when a contract expires, usually within two years, most consumers immediately upgrade to another one. But that’s not the way people upgrade their iPhones… in fact, it’s looking like iPads might be, for most consumers, more like Macs, which are replaced every 2-4 years.

The MacBook Air already feels impossibly thin and light, but it’s set to get even thinner and lighter if a rumor out of Asia is to be believed.

We’ll admit we’ve called the iPhone 5c a flop more than a few times. But it’s important to remember that what is a flop for Apple would be a huge success by the standards of any other company, which is why the iPhone 5c outsold every Blackberry, Windows Phone and Android flagship in Q4.

That’s not to say that the iPhone 5c’s sales are what Apple wants it to be. In the most recent quarterly earnings conference call, Tim Cook himself admitted that iPhone 5c demand “turned out to be different than we thought.” Even though the iPhone 5c is selling well according to the standards of the rest of the smartphone industry, you have to wonder if even for $100 less, people would really prever a colorful plastic iPhone 5c than a premium-feeling iPhone 5. Even people opting for year old miles are buying an iPhone to get a high-end product, and the major failing of the iPhone 5c seems to be the plastic just doesn’t satisfy that requirement. What do you think?

Thanks to a glitch in iOS 7, it was possible to put folders inside of other folders. With iOS 7.1, Apple fixed the glitch, but lo and behold, they seem to have missed an even bigger glitch that makes it much easier to accomplish the same thing. Here’s how.

In the Marvel universe, Captain America is a World War II era super soldier who happens to get frozen in ice, only to dethaw in modern times. As such, there’s a lot he’s missed out on, and in the latest Captain America film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we get a quick list of Captain America’s notebook, tracking the things he doesn’t “get.”

Lo and behold, Steve Jobs and Apple made the list, alongside Nirvana, Rocky, Thai Food, the moon landing, and — inexplicably — I Love Lucy.

Via: Reddit

Amazon has been rumored for years to be making its own smartphone, but now, according to reputable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, it’s actually going to happen.

But the weirdest thing isn’t that Amazon’s planning on releasing a smartphone… it’s that they are going to release a smartphone with six cameras per unit. What what?

When Jony Ive ripped Scott Forstall’s spine out (metaphorically speaking) and took over as the design head of iOS, he got rid of many gradients, shadows, and other elements that made the app look, at worst, skeuomorphic.

Sadly, though, Ive hasn’t had a chance yet to take the same approach to OS X. But everyone’s expecting OS X 10.10 to flatten OS X out, and Dribbble designer Danny Giebe has a gorgeous look at what the next version of Mac OS X — which he codenames ‘Syrah’ — would look like if Ive extended iOS’s design to the Mac.

Check the full redesign out after the jump. What do you think?

Everyone at Cult of Mac knows I’m a sucker for wood-paneling all of my gadgets. I wood-paneled my iPhone 4s, my iPhone 5, my iPad, my iPad mini, and even my MacBook Air.

I have to say, though, that as understated as they are, I love Richard Clarkson’s wood-panels for the iPhone 5 most of all. They replace the tiny glass accents on the upper and lower parts of the iPhone 5 with little wood slivers in a variety of accents that looks amazingly understated and lovely.

Currently only available for the iPhone 5, Clarkson’s wooden replacement accents cost $38 a pair. There’s cheaper and easier to apply options, but we love this none the less.

Source: Richard Clarkson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QWRY_k6V0

Sadly, iOS 7.1 finally put an end to the Evasi0n jailbreak, the versatile hack that allowed anyone running iOS 7 to iOS 7.0.6 to run unsigned (i.e. Apple verboten) code on their iOS devices.

But all is not lost! Seasoned jailbreaker Winocm has posted a video of iOS 7.1 running on a jailbroken iPhone 4, untethered.

If you’re a player of EA video games, better watch out: an EA Games server has been hacked to phish for your Apple ID. But here’s the good news: you had to be using Windows to get nailed by the attack.

Here’s a simple math question for you. How much more free space should a 16GB Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone have than an 8GB iPhone 5c?

If you said twice as much, wrong. That’s not Samsung math! Because in reality, an 8GB iPhone 5c has just 3.16 GB less usable storage than a flagship 16GB Galaxy S5.

Last month, Sir Lancelot’s Armor, a maker of screen protectors for smartphones, emailed Ars Technica and asked them if they would review the “first reusable screen protector for iPhones and iPads made out of bulletproof glass.”

So how bulletproof was their screen protector? Ars Technica put it to the test the only way they knew how… by firing a full clip from a Beretta into it at the range. Here’s how it did.

Windows 8 has been a gigantic flop for Microsoft, but Apple, at least, is giving the new operating system a surprising push. The Mac maker has dropped support for Windows 7 running under Boot Camp on the new Mac Pro, making the installation of Windows 8 the only option for those who want to dual boot Windows on the most powerful Mac yet.

One of iOS 7.1’s major changes was a new Calendar app that added such features as the ability to see a full list of events while in your Calendar’s month view, as well as a more complete list of nation-specific holiday.

If you use your iPhone as an organizer, the new Calendar app is enough to update to iOS 7.1 on its own right. Unfortunately, iOS 7.1 also broke the popular evasi0n jailbreak, meaning that to get the new Calendar, you had to abandon your jailbroken device.

No longer. If you have a jailbroken iOS device, you can now download a new app that patches the iOS 7.1 calendar into iOS versions 7.0 and 7.0.6. Called Gregorian, it can be downloaded through Cydia from the https://rpetri.ch/repo/ repository.

Via: Modmyi

We’ve seen Martin Hajek’s incredible Apple TV concept with a touchscreen remote before, but in an update to the project, Hajek has imagined what the Apple TV would be like if the next gen set-top box didn’t ship with just a touchscreen controller, but a traditional gamepad as well.

I’ll say this for Hajek’s Apple TV gamepad: it looks like a controller Jony Ive would design. Thin, sleek, classic, beautiful, and utterly unsuited for actual gaming.

What do you think? Additional images after the jump.

If you spend a lot of time on the App Store, you’ve probably wondered if app icons are colored the way they are for a reason. Are certain shades more likely to correspond to certain app types than others? And what are the most over- and under-represented Pantone swatches in the App Store pallette?

If these are the sort of questions you have ever asked yourself, you’ll probably enjoy this great infographic by Brandisty, who crawled the iOS App Store, grabbed the top 5 app icons from each category, and then ran a hisogram analysis to find out which colors were used most often.

I wish they’d polled more apps, but this is great. Business apps are just as blue and boring as I thought they were! Check out the complete infographic after the jump.

We’ve seen a lot of iPhone 6 concepts lately.

Here’s another one, in a dramatic mock advertisement that uses a much more dramatic electronic score than the poppier serenades usually favored by Cupertino. Check out the video below!

Officially, the new trash can Mac Pro only supports up to 64GB of RAM. That’s a lot, but not necessarily enough for the performance-obsessed graphics pros and video editors that Mac Pro is aimed at.

For those that absolutely need 128GB of RAM in their Mac Pro, the memory maestros at Transcend have figured out a way to double the supposed “maximum” amount of memory in a top of the line Mac Pro.

But as with almost everything with the Mac Pro, don’t expect it to be cheap: it will cost you $2,480 to juice your Mac Pro up to that crazy extent.

Source: Transcend

WhatsApp isn’t the only app Facebook updated today: the actual Facebook app was also updated today, making it much easier to share and post on the iPad.

If Google Drive’s recent price drop wasn’t enough to entice you over to the dark side, Dropbox dropped an update to its iOS client today, adding a number of improvements, including a major bug fix that addresses an issue in which Dropbox’s photo syncing ability would fall over.

The iPhone 5c is a total flop, and Apple may very well kill it off entirely when the iPhone 6 comes around. But Cupertino’s not going down without a fight, which is why the company is making a major advertising push for the iPhone 5c on Yahoo and the New York Times webpage.