John Brownlee - page 62

Without a doubt, the coolest thing we saw at CES 2013 this year was the JamStik, a tiny, ukelele-sized guitar with real strings that connects over WiFi that you can use to record, perform or learn instruments on your iPad.

The only problem was, when we saw it, it was such a new product that it didn’t even have a booth, let alone a distributor. But now it’s finally inching closer to release, spearheaded by a new IndieGoGo campaign that promises to bring the cool-as-hell iPad guitar into your hands and ready to shred by the end of the year.

(Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Medium, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Evan Williams’ new publishing platform.)

Usually during Apple’s quarterly earnings calls, you have to read between the lines to guess what Apple’s really thinking. On Tuesday, all you had to do was read the actual lines, because Cupertino was remarkably candid for a change: there was no way that the Apple of 2013 could match the numbers of the Apple of 2012, but “new product categories” — like the iWatch — were going to blow the roof off the house in 2014. In the meantime, Apple needs investors to be patient… and they’re not above paying them off to make it happen.

Get ready to splatter some grays, slice up some sectopods, and run screaming from some Chryssalids. Firaxis and 2K Games have today released XCOM: Enemy Unknown for the Mac, the official OS X port of last year’s best strategy game.

Are you the kind of guy who needs to compulsively catalogue everything in your life? Good news. Delicious Monster have just released a brand spanking new version of Delicious Library 3, a (no pun intended) monster of an updat that will allow you to easily and beautifully catalog all of the physical media in your life, publish your collection to the web, see how much it’s worth at a glance… and use your iPhone as a scanner. Wow!

How crappy are Windows PCs these days? The most reliable, best performing, highly rated laptop for running Windows on is a frickin’ Mac: specifically, a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13. That’s the conclusion of a new report released by Soluto, purveyors of a cloud-based PC monitoring and management software suite, sampling data gathered for the first three months of 2013 from 150,000 portable PCs, and awarding them a score according to how many times programs on average crashed or hung, how long it took to boot up, how many background processes were running, and how many times it BSODed (or completely crashed).

As ZDNet’s Ed Bott points out, the laptops that were determined to be most reliable were the ones that ran clean installs of Windows, instead of bloatware-infected OEM installs. And surprise, every Mac running Boot Camp must use a clean install of Windows, making it the king.

Jeez, PC makers. This is just sad.

Source: Soluto

In a pessimistic note on Silicon Alley Insider, Jay Yarrow points out the obvious: we’re in an unprecedented drought since the debut of the original iPad when it comes to major Apple hardware releases and keynotes. When WWDC finally rolls around, it will have been 230 days since the last Apple event, the launch of the iPad mini, fourth-gen iPad and new iMac. That’s pretty much unprecedented, almost double the previous delay between the MacBook Air and iPad 2 (132 days). And, as you can see, the extreme delay in releasing a new event pretty much directly corresponds to Apple’s share price.

Not good, and as Tim Cook basically said explicitly during yesterday’s earnings meeting, it’s unlikely that we’ll see any new products at WWDC either.

Source: Business Insider

Amazon is reportedly ready to take on the likes of the Apple TV and Roku with a set-top box of its own, presumably some sort of Kindle Box.

This is the new logo for this year’s WWDC, which is scheduled to kick off on June 10th. WWDC logos tend to forecast in a round-about way what Apple thinks is the “kicker” of the conference: last year, it was the debut of the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

So what does this WWDC 2013 logo mean? It features a bunch of rounded rectangles of varying colors, stacked a top each other, with a flat font reflecting WWDC into the year in Roman numerals. Here are our guesses:

Apple has just announced the numbers for a quarter that most on Wall Street have declared to be doom. Apple has comfortably beat Street estimates, but still posted their first decline in year-over-year profit margins since 2008. What does it mean?

To help you make sense of Cupertino’s business this quarter, here’s a breakdown in easy-to-read chart form of everything from the growth of Apple’s revenues, profit and profit margins, to the rise and fall of Cupertino’s various product empires.

We even have a comparison of how Apple did this quarter compared to how Wall Street prediced Apple would do.

Update: Guys, sadly, we’re having server issues that makes this impossible. Stay tuned for the front page for updates on the call as it happens.

In just a few hours, Apple will be hosting its Q2 2013 financial earnings call, and it’s bound to be an interesting call. It’s no secret that Wall Street is expecting a bloodbath, and is calling for Tim Cook’s head amongst fears of stagnating iPhone growth, but can Apple outperform the Street’s expectations?

Check out our summary of what to expect if you want to know more about the expectations going into this thing. Starting at 5PM Eastern/2PM Pacific, we’re going to be live blogging the call, so make sure to check back at this space then. We’ll be covering quotes and questions from the call, as well as posting our own live commentary. Hit the jump for our live blog, and make feel free to listen along if you want.

Tweetbot — just our favorite Twitter client for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad — has just gotten a sweet update with one killer new feature: a swank new media timeline that allows you to quickly browse through just the images and videos popping up in your Twitter stream.

Although PC makers are feeling the pinch, Intel actually posted a surprisingly decent quarter yesterday. But Intel’s still feeling a big pinch from ARM, which is just showing explosive growth, shipping 35% more ARM-based chips (like, yes, Apple’s A-series SoCs) than it did a year ago.

If you got a $15 in the mail for no apparent reason, well, it’s because way back in 2010, Steve Jobs failed in convincing the world at large to “just avoid holding it that way.”

Yes, that cool $15 bucks you got in the mail? It’s an Antennagate settlement check.

If you’ve ever impotently raged against the FedEx man for ignoring the note you left on the door and not leaving a package for you behind the toolshed like you asked, great news: FedEx has just updated its Mobile app, allowing for you to sign for packages, reroute a package to another address or provide delivery instructions, all from your iPhone or iPad.

Today at 2PM Pacific/5PM Eastern, Apple will announces its 2013 first quarter earnings. Cult of Mac will, of course, be covering it live, but here’s a very brief primer of what to expect.

Yahoo! has been undertaking something of an iOS App Store renaissance lately. First, they made their Flickr app into a bonafide Instragam challenger; then their new Yahoo! Weather app effortlessly fused beautifully wrought weather information with the best photographs on Flickr; and now Yahoo! has updated its iOS app with natural language summaries of all the news likely to be of interest to you.

Earlier today, we reported that the Wall Street consensus was that Apple’s profit in this last quarter probably shrank for the first time in a decade, and that results will be even more dire next quarter, with iPhone sales units being extremely low.

But Wall Street’s pessimism in regards to Apple is, as usual, nuts. For Apple to perform as low as Wall Street thinks it will next quarter, Apple would have to show zero growth in the iPhone market compared to the same spring quarter a year ago. This would rank it as one of the smartphone industry’s worst disasters ever. Which is crazy, because Apple’s selling more iPhones than ever.

Supposedly, these nanoSIM trays are for the iPhone 5S. They look exactly like nanoSIM trays for the iPhone 5, except for one thing: they are in gold and gray. This is notable because in the iPhone 5 the nanoSIM trays were silver and black, and the iPhone 5S is rumored to come in different colors.

Except… gold seems like a pretty gaudy color to release a new iPhone in, don’t you think? And gray is sort of an anti-color, not the kind of thing you get excited about buying a new iPhone for. “Check out my cool gray iPhone!”

So I’m a little skeptical. What do you think?

Source: Moumantai.biz
Via: iDownloadBlog

My girlfriend and I aren’t so much collectors of books and records as we are black hole like vortexes to which books and records are inescapably drawn, gravitational wells from which any media that passes our event horizons can not escape.

As such, we’re constantly trying to keep track of the books and records we already have. One of our favorite apps to do so is Delicious Library, a fantastic media cataloging application that lets you keep track of your stuff by using a webcam as a barcode scanner (as well as manual entry), but it hasn’t really seen a serious update in years.

Thankfully, that’s about to change. Delicious Library 3 is coming soon, and it apparently will have some pretty rad new functionality: a recommendation engine, and a corresponding iOS app.

A Chinese paper is reporting that Apple and Foxconn may have had a staggering setback in the production of the iPhone, with up to eight million iPhones returned to Foxconn because they didn’t meet Apple’s standards.

Perpetual PC chipmaking underdog AMD is having a rough time of it in the mobile age. The stock is in the tank, and they lost $146 million last quarter on $1.09 billion in revenue. AMD needs to figure out a way to make a splash in mobile quick if it intends on surviving.

Over the past year, there’s been some sign that AMD has been taking this threat seriously. Last August, Jim Keller — previously director of Apple’s mobile platform architecture group — was enticed over to AMD, reporting to former Apple hardware chief Mark Papermaster. Reportedly, Keller was focusing on developing high-performance, low-power processor cores at AMD.

Now it looks like AMD is looking to beef up its mobile division even further. It is now being reported that AMD has poached Raja Koduri, Apple’s director of graphics architecture.

Ah, the iCar. We’ve been waiting for Apple to make a real one for years, ever since they transformed a Porsche into one way back in 1980. And we know Steve Jobs was game.

So the promise that Volkswagen is preparing an iBeetle might, at first, seem of interest to Apple fans and auto enthusiasts. But don’t get too excited, because the iBeetle is lame.

Earlier this week, we wrote about Grabby, a rad little Cydia tweak that let you extend the lockscreen camera launcher into a quickbar for up to five favorite apps.

Here’s a similar idea. Atom is an upcoming Cydia tweak that is set to be released this weekend which allows you to unlock your iPhone directly to up to six different apps, just by dragging the on-screen ‘locked’ icon to one of six positions.