John Brownlee - page 67

Loren Brichter is a legend amongst iOS developers. The 28 year old developer is the creator of Tweetie, which eventually became the official Twitter app. He’s the guy behind fan favorite word game Letterpress. He’s the creator of ‘Pull To Refresh’, cell swipe and slide-out panels that have become synonymous features in mobile app development. Yet few people who aren’t app and design junkies even know who he is.

There’s never been much chance that Apple was going to release a new iPad mini with Retina display before later this year.

Although it’s true that Apple refreshed the fourth-gen iPad last just eight months after introducing the third-gen iPad, that refresh had the hallmark of being an exception aimed at making sure every iOS device was compatible with the new Lightning cable.

So it’s unlikely we’re going to see a Retina iPad mini this spring, and here’s further proof: current iPad mini sales aren’t tapering off, giving Apple no reason to upgrade their mini any earlier than necessary.

We iPad owners can be pretty smug about all the things we can do with our device while everyone else is using paper like some kind of cave man, but as this commercial by COlumbia’s SiceVENDE proves, there’s at least one thing you can’t — or wouldn’t want — to do with an iPad.

Via: TUAW

The photograph at the top is from the announcement of the new Pope, Benedict XVI back in 2005; the photo at the bottom is from the announcement of Pope Francis yesterday. Says everything that needs to be said about how Apple has changed the world, don’t you think?

Via: Soff.es
Photo: Michael Sohn/AP

Our fearless commander-in-chief Leander Kahney is a strange cuckoo. He is, of course, a dashing and famous technology journalist par example, while his family is inexplicably a bunch of Luddites.

So check out what happened when Leander tried to coach someone in his family how to set up an extra Airport Extreme base station over the phone. No matter how many times he explained how to do it, it wouldn’t work… so Leander drove over to see what the problem was. This is what he saw.

What’s the most ridiculous tech support problem you’ve had to solve for a family member? Let us know in the comments.

Okay, this is interesting: Apple has published a patent for a Smart Cover with a battery inside, that would wirelessly charge an iPad when it was connected to it or used as a stand, and could also potentially wirelessly charge, say, an iPhone when rested on top of an iPad.

This photograph of a Foxconn line worker working on what appears to be a yellow iPhone 5 is doing the rounds, with the suggestion being that Apple slipped up and accidentally leaked an upcoming colored iPhone on their System Reliability page.

I have no idea if Apple will colorize the iPhone 5S, but I can comfortably say that Apple’s not that stupid, and isn’t going to leak a photo of an upcoming product on their own website. That’s not a urine yellow iPhone 5S: it’s an iPhone 5 with a yellow protective coating to keep the bezel from being scraped or chipped during manufacturing.

Martin Hajek creates concepts of imaginary Apple products that I always think look pretty good, but have no thought given to usability. For example, his iWatch concept the other day, which basically shrinks an iPad mini to the size of an inch and doesn’t even try to imagine how such a design wouldn’t suck… but hey, it has a leather band!

His new iTV concept for Dutch site iCreate is a similar affair. The black, chamfered design of the device looks very beautiful, but nothing after that makes any sense. It’s like this guy has never even used a television before, right down to the fact that he envisions the iTV as having a Camera app (why?) but not one for either TV or Videos.

More pictures after the jump. I advise Apple to perhaps take the look, but not the UI.

Here at Cult of Mac, we’re huge fans of Philips Hue LED lightbulbs and Minecraft. Any hack, then, that mashes together the two and we’re in… especially if there’s a father delighting his ten year old, Minecraft-obsessed son at the end!

Which is why Jim Rutherford’s Hue/Minecraft hack is so awesome. It uses the Hue, Minecraft and an iPad to make the lights around you correspond to the game’s pixellated day cycles.

Netflix is a fantastic service, but it doesn’t do much of that “social” jazz everyone’s talking about these days. That’s about to change, though, with Netflix now introducing the appropriately christened Netflix Social, which will let you see what’s popular amongst your friends.

Heads up. Steve Jobs will be the subject of a new Japanese manga series by artist Mari Yamazaki of Thermae Romae manga fame.

Tony Stark is essentially Marvel’s answer to Steve Jobs, if Steve Jobs looked like Robert Downey Jr., was kidnapped by the Taliban, had a nuclear reactor installed as a replacement heart, and built himself a set of power armor.

In every other way, though, the two are exactly similar, which is what makes it natural that Steve Jobs’s greatest creation — the iPhone — is now capable of “suiting up” in Tony Stark’s greatest invention, the Mark VII power armor.

In France, the proletariat is not a force to be trifled with. There are expectations on how companies are to treat workers: whether there are enough golden crusted, freshly baked baguettes in the breakroom, for example, or how many fromage breaks one gets per hour. “Vive les grenouilles!” the workers cry, sousing themselves silly with wine.

It’s a good system, but Apple has fallen afoul of it, with seven Apple Stores in France now being rapped on the knuckles for violating a French law that prohibits employers from making their workers work past nine PM at night.

With Apple stock seemingly in free fall, a new report suggests that Apple is going to announce a plan to return additional value to shareholders as soon as this spring, either by increasing the existing dividend or by buying back stock from investors.

Sometimes, the smallest jailbreak tweaks are the ones that make the biggest impression.

For me, that tweak is DirectionBar, the teensiest of jailbreak tweaks that does just one thing: puts a tiny arrow in your iPhone’s statusbar, which always, always, always points true north.

Before I had an iPhone, I used to game everywhere with the dual-threat of my Nintendo DS and my trusty Sony PSP. The DS I’ll still occasionally break out, but the bulky PSP has been in a drawer for years, a victim of its bulk.

A new jailbreak project might mean that I finally get to play some of my favorite PSP games once again. PPSSPP is a new PSP emulator for iOS developed by the guy behind the incredible N64 emulator, Dolphin, and while it’s in very alpha state yet — just look at that frame rate on Wipeout Pure! — this is clearly a project with a lot of possibility.

A questionable rumor from Digitimes suggests that Intel might make 10% of all of Apple’s A7 processors. If the rumor’s true, though, here’s how it would probably play out.

The iTunes image preview may have gigantic typos, but HiddenApps lets yo do something really incredible without a jailbreak: hide stock iOS apps like Stocks, Newsstand, Passbok, Mail and more.

Siri does a pretty good job right now of figuring out what you are saying to her, but one senior iOS architect over at Honda R&D has figured out a way for Siri to understand what you think at her. That’s right, Siri has gone psychic.

If you’re anything like me, you pretty much spend all of your day clicking. Clicking a mouse. Clicking a trackpad. Clicking a keyboard. And yet, despite all of that physical exertion, I’m still somehow a fatass. How can that be? Luckily, some scientists have looked into the problem, and figured out the answer: I’m just not clicking enough.

Apparently, the aluminum from this skateboard was repurposed from an old Mac Pro (or Power Mac G5?). Since Apple’s pretty much abandoned updating their Pro desktop, that’s one way to make sure all that pretty metal doesn’t go to waste.

Via: Reddit

https://youtu.be/gW2D_Votd2Y

It is often said that Japan is a weird country.

Case in point, can you imagine any other country in which Domino’s Pizza Japanese president Scott Oelkers would make a commercial in which, over the course of a two minute period, he shills a new iPhone app featuring a virtual anime girlfriend named Hatsune Miku who “exists in a software called Vocaloid which enables you to create songs” that Hatsune Miku then sings.

Not that the Domino’s app does any of this, mind you. It just allows you order pizza online and listen to Vocaloid songs written by the wage-slavers who heat up your pie. You can also, apparently, insert Hitsune Miku into photos of your choosing, the perfect way to simulate the experience of having a cartoom girlfriend who will do whatever you want.

“Have fun with Miku!” trills Scott Oelkers with wild, manic eyes. If you choose to do so, you can download the app here (Japan only).

Via: MacGasm

The Apple TV, Cupertino’s “hobby” of a set-top box, is often used to test out new fabrication process for the A-series chips that go into iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. The last Apple TV ran a 32nm A5 processor built by Samsung with a single-core disabled, which eventually ended up (in a dual-core capacity) in the iPad mini.

With the new third-gen Apple TV, Apple’s at it again. The new Apple TV is functionally and physically identical to its predecessor, except for one detail: it features a 28nm A5 chip built by TSMC. But what does it mean?

Browsers on iOS run with a major disadvantage to Mobile Safari. Not only are they obliged to use Apple’s built-in WebKit rendering engine, but they have to use a slower version of Apple’s speedy Nitro JavaScript engine. The result? If you use any third-party browser on your iPhone or iPad, it will run slower than Safari… at least without a jailbreak.

It’s unfair, but various companies have still made excellent browsers for iOS, including Google Chrome and Opera. Mozilla, though, will not follow these company’s lead, having said at this weekend’s SXSW conference in Austin that Firefox won’t be coming to iOS any time soon.

As the story goes, before the iPhone was even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye, Jonny Ive came to him with a prototype for a tablet based on some new touchscreen technology he was working on. Steve Jobs took one look at it, and said it was the future, but “let’s make a phone with it first.” And that’s how the iPhone was born.

Now, an early prototype of a very iPad-ish iPhone prototype from 2005 has turned up, and it’s a marvelous beast, filled with USB, Ethernet and even serial ports.