The MacBook Air is a hell of a machine, a computer that created an entirely new class in the PC market. No wonder it’s absolutely dominating sales, with 56% of all ultrabooks sold being — surprise! — MacBook Airs.
Leather never goes out of style.
For most of the twentieth century, it’s been a material that testifies to professionalism and distinction, and while Apple’s glass-and-aluminum products may be designed with timelessness in mind, this timelessness interfaces well with leather’s inherent timefulness: the way the oils in your hands and the way you touch it give it character over time.
SENA is a company specializing in premium leather cased for phones, tablets and other devices. We gave their Folio Case for the 11-inch MacBook Air a spin. Leather looks good against aluminum and glass, but how does it feel? That’s what we set to find out.
It’s looking very likely that the so-called “budget” iPhone will be announced in September. In reality, it will be less budget than mid-range, costing about $350 before contract subsidations. Even so, that should be enough for carriers to sell for $0 with a two-year contract, strengthening Apple’s presence in the market.
We’ve heard before that the budget iPhone would come in an iPod-style assortment of colors, and now new pictures purport to show exactly what the rear shell of the budget iPhone will look like.
A new shot published by Letemsvetemapplem — which has a credible history with Apple leaks in the past — suggests that Apple might make a major change to the home button in iPhone 5S, replacing the icon that exists there now with a big, glowing Apple symbol.
One of iOS 7’s signature new effects is parallax tilt shifting, which gives the operating system a 3D effect. But how does it work?
This is a neat touch: the camera quick launch drawer in iOS 7 actually has its own gravity bounce effect, so that you can effectively bounce it against the bottom of the screen like a rubber ball. You can even do it so hard that it will bounce all the way to the top of the screen and the camera app will open. Very cool.
Via: Reddit
Motorola Mobility, Google’s gadget making sub-company, has just unveiled a new logo that embraces flat design elements: the Motorola badge has been surrounded by a ring of colors, and there’s a new proclamation of Motorola being “A Google company” underneath everything.
Killian thinks it looks a bit like Motorola was aping Jony Ive’s iOS 7 redesign, but I have to say, between the busy-ness of the design, the atrocious font choice, and Motorola’s existing (terrible) logo, I think he’d do a spit-take looking at this. What do you think?
It’s been a stagnant year so far for new Apple product announcements, and Foxconn, Apple’s biggest manufacturing partner, is starting to feel the pitch: sales are down 12.6 this year, against a target of 15% growth. And in response, Foxconn’s looking to become a lot less dependent upon Apple, who generated 60 percent of the company’s 2012 $100 billion in revenues.
At 21 years old, Brian Hogan became one of the most infamous people in Apple news when he found and sold a prototype of the then-unreleased iPhone 4 to tech blog Gizmodo. It was one of the biggest ‘gets’ in the history of tech journalism, but it tore Hogan’s life apart… and now he’s answering questions about the experience on a Reddit AMA (or Ask Me Anything thread).
Here’s a couple neat new features to Messages in iOS 7 Beta 2: you not only can see contact photos for users in Messages.app now, you can also see the time that messages were sent.
As we predicted, iOS 7 Beta 2 dropped for developers today, but substantially, it’s the first iOS 7 beta to support the iPad 2, Retina iPad and iPad mini.
We’ve already seen official shots of what iOS 7 looks like running on the iPad, as well as shots of iOS 7 running on Xcode’s iPad emulator. Now, though, we’ll get to finally see it running on a real device.
Here are the direct download links:
Amazon has just update its Instant Video app for the iPhone and iPad today. The bad news is there’s still no AirPlay video support, but there is a new interface that makes it a lot easier for you to discover movies and television shows you want to watch.
The new Mac Pro is looking like it will be an absolute powerhouse, but even regulars Macs should see a major performance improvement running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, thanks to the new operating system’s incorporation of OpenGL 4.
This is a fantastic idea. When Apple overhauled iTunes in the latest version, they did something pretty with Album View, so that the color of the Album View was matched to the dominant color in that album’s artwork.
It’s a nice effect, and as Reddit user Bostonlbi has shown, it looks even prettier on iOS 7, especially if you change the color of the rest of the interface elements with the second and third most dominant colors. Come on, Apple! It’s not too late to take this idea and run with it!
Are you a parent who nearly lost his or her mind and committed an act of infanticide when you discovered that your happy little sprog, in the space of five minutes playing unsupervised with your iPhone, somehow amassed an iTunes bill of over $1,000 in frickin’ Smurfberries? Well, Apple’s ready to help you, but even if you were only burnt for less than $30 because of the way in-app purchases used to work, Apple is ready to fork over a $5 iTunes gift card as a way o make amends… and settle a class-action lawsuit.
Facebook’s getting into the content scraping biz. So claims The Wall Street Journal, at least: they say that the world’s largest social network is putting together a news aggregation service, a la Flipboard or Zite.
It’s not uncommon for new Macs to have issues that require a firmware upgrade down the line to fix, and it looks like that’s true of the new Haswell-boasting MacBook Airs, which are reportedly having a lot of problems with their new 802.11ac WiFi chips.
Earlier this year, one of the best computer RPGs of all time, Baldur’s Gate, came to the Mac and iOS. And it was an awesome, awesome, awesome port, with tons of enhanced content and a new iPad-friendly control scheme.
Even better? Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition did well enough that the guys who handled the port, Beamdog, said they were working on a port of Baldur’s Gate II… a game which (and this is saying something) is about ten times better than Baldur’s Gate!
Fast forward to today. Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition has been yanked from all e-tailers, including the App Store. Why? Contractual crapulence.
We’ve been talking a lot recently about the so-called “budget iPhone” that Apple will in all probability announce in September, but exactly how “budget” are we talking about here?
Now, the CEO of the rumored manufacturer of the budget iPhone is speaking up, and telling shareholders not to expect it to be cheap.
With iOS 7 Beta 1 now out on the iPhone, the next obvious question is “When is iOS 7 Beta 2” coming out? And what about Beta 3? Beta 4? When will iOS 7 go gold?
Good questions, and obviously, only Apple could tell you for sure. But Apple’s been releasing post-WWDC betas long enough at this point that it’s pretty easy to track how long on average each beta takes, and by doing so, we can not only forecast when iOS 7 will be released with a probable amount of accuracy: we can put a date on the iPhone 5S’s release.
Here’s what we think. We think iOS 7 Beta 2 will be released next Monday, the 24th. iOS 7 will go gold on September 10th, the same day the iPhone 5S will be announced. And the iPhone 5S and iOS 7 will be released on September 20th. Here’s why.
Steve Wozniak was the first guy to power up the vintage Apple I, the computer that gave the world Apple, Inc. and lead to all the products that followed: the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad and more.
Now Steve Wozniak is powering up the Apple 1 again, this time ceremonially for the History San Jose Museum.
Ever since Jony Ive took over Apple’s industrial design, it has been important to Cupertino to make their products out of material with authenticity and substance, not just cheap plastic. In the pursuit of these goals, Apple has managed to revolutionize the mass-production of not one, but two different materials that had previously gone virtually unused in gadgets, at least externally: glass and aluminum. And Apple’s made big plays to experiment with even more cutting-edge materials, like Liquid Metal.
Here’s a question, then. Apple likes to make its Macs and iPhones out of materials that feel authentic, that give them a unique look and feel. In the pursuit of those materials, Apple has revolutionized at least a couple of industrial design processes.
So what if Jony Ive got it in his head to make iPhones out of wood?
https://youtu.be/zut2NLMVL_k
A video from 1994 that has purportedly never been seen by a mass audience before features a bushy-bearded Steve Jobs discussing his legacy during his so-called NeXT wilderness years. And surprisingly, the egocentric and charismatic founder of Apple believes that in two hundred years, he will be forgotten.
Imagine cramming an entire iPhone stand, not just into your pocket, but into a credit card slot in your wallet.
That’s what the Pocket Tripod 360º does. It’s an ingenious little design: a small plastic card that unfolds into a sturdy dock that can keep your iPhone 5 propped up at literally 360 degree angles.
By default, when you turn on a new Mac or open a new user account under OS X, your Mac’s System Preferences icon will be sitting in the dock. It’s pretty easy to right-click on the icon to quickly navigate to whatever Settings panel you need, but how about a prettier option?
Preferences Quick Launch is a small tool that lets you add individual preferences to your Dock or Mac launchpad. Basically, it’s a set of 27 tiny applications, each of which launches a different Systems Panel pane. You can not only pop them individually into your Dock or Launchbar to access commonly used Settings panels, you can even drop the entire folder into the Dock to access the entirety of your System Preferences no matter where you are on your Mac.
Preferences Quick Launch is a free download for OS X 10.8. You can grab it here.
Source: Weebly
Via: Lifehacker