John Brownlee - page 68

Here’s a great tweak if you’ve jailbroken: QuickShoot allows you to take quick pictures right from your iOS homescreen just by tapping the app icon. You can’t frame a shot or anything, but it does allow you to quickly (and secretly!) snap a picture of someone without anyone being the wiser: not the subject, not the person looking over your shoulder. And you can even change settings for Flash Mode, Camera Device, and HDR in the settings. Totally rad, and totally free.

Source: Big Boss
Via: Lifehacker

China Times is reporting this morning that Apple is going to save costs on a budget iPhone for emerging markets by using a 28nm Snapdragon SoC which has Bluetooth, WiFi and 3G all on the same chip, but wouldn’t support LTE.

Interesting theory, but it’s not going to happen.

Gorgeous. Etsy shop owner Peter Morris has rejuvenated an old Atari 2600 by turning it into an iPhone speaker dock, replete with 6 equalizer settings, an FM radio and a 3.5mm input jack. It’s one of a kind, but if you get in quick, you can buy it for the pricy-but-still-tempting sum of about $230.

Source: Etsy
Via: TUAW

Prepare to riot. Facebook — the social network you obviously spend every single second of every single day upon — is about to change their Newsfeed… and it’ll never be the same again! Up is down! Left is right! Zig is zag! Ahhhhhhh!

Just kidding. It’s not that bad, although those who fear change won’t be fond. The new design is “mobile-inspired” and is basically aimed at making it easier for you to filter the kinds of things your friends are sharing with you, and making them look better and less cluttered when you do.

Intel and Apple, teaming up to make A-series chips for the iPhone and iPad? That’s what the rumors are saying, with a recent Reuters report going so far as to claim that executives from both companies have actually met to discuss the possibility of the x86 maker pumping out ARM chips custom designed by Apple!

“Intel Once Again Rumored To Be Working On iOS Device Chips With Apple,” read our headline this morning. But would Intel really cash in on its x86 heritage to make ARM chips? And if Apple did switch, would that really be a win for everyone?

The short answer? Yes, Intel would make ARM chips for Apple. But no, it probably wouldn’t be a win for either company. Here’s why.

Check this out: up on the International Space Station, Colonel Chris Hadfield uses an iPad as a teleprompter when recording transmissions for Earth. It looks like the app he’s using is Teleprompt+ for iPad, a $15 app that lets you film yourself via Facecam while reading your lines from the iPad display.

Via: Reddit

Wall Street has spent most of the last six months hyperventilating about the future of Apple, chomping at their fingernails and openly wondering if Apple is taking too long to innovate in the post-Jobs era.

Over at the Apple Gazette, Robin Parrish has put together a simple graphic, showing Apple’s historic product pillars. Essentially, if you add it all up, the average time between major product pillars for Apple is three years and ten months.

If you’re using Twitter on your iPhone instead of a third-party client like Twitteriffic or Tweetbot, version 5.4 has just rolled off the App Store updates pipeline, bringing better search, better conversation views and more. But it also yanks some features, including the ability to upload from Mobypicture, Vodpod and Posterous.

You know those black balls in the kid’s section of the Apple Store? Yeah, you probably shouldn’t sit on them: underneath the fabric exterior, they are essentially gigantic sponges soaked with the pee of a thousand children with such weak bladder control that they just hose off when they get excited, even in the Apple Store.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a picture of one black ball Apple was getting rid of after a bunch of kids had whizzed all over it. As the former Apple employee and Redditor who posted it says: “Just one of the nasty little “ewwws” lurking in arguable the coolest retail environments around.”

Source: Reddit

Miguel de Icaza isn’t a casual PC user. He’s a life-long Linux user whose main claim to fame is the creation of GNOME, a completely free desktop environment for Linux and other Unix operating systems.

But de Icaza no longer bothers with Linux. He’s abandoned the platform for a Mac.

Yesterday, reports hit that Tim Cook and Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine had met to talk about ‘Project Daisy,’ Beats’ secret project that, in some form or another, seems to involve music discovery.

No one’s quite sure what Project Daisy actually is, but Cook seems interested in it. It could be a music discovery engine, à la The Echo Next. It could be a streaming service like Rhapsody or Spotify. No one except Iovine and Cook know for sure.

The story about Apple and Beats’ CEOs meeting made me wonder. Apple has been a major player in the digital music business for 12 years now… yet they have never once delivered a pair of premium headphones the likes of which Beats has become known for. Why not?

Hot on the heels of a hack over the weekend that compromised Evernote users’ emails, usernames and passwords — and resulted in the company initiating a password reset on all accounts — Evernote’s hurrying through a new two-factor authentication process, which would allow you to authorize your account in a variety of ways, like entering a code you receive by SMS message.

Evernote’s not the only company to roll out two-factor authentication after a breach: Dropbox also introduced two-factor authentication after a hack last year. If Evernote uses Dropbox’s method, it won’t be obligatory, but instead something you turn on optionally in your account. Better safe than sorry.

Source: Information Week

Any chemical that can dissuade a bear from using your ribs like emory boards is potent stuff, which is why this story of an Apple Store robbery up in Vancouver is so horrifying: three perps busted up a Genius Bar and started indiscriminately spraying people with bear mace.

Cult of Mac’s vote for the best all-around fitness app for the iPhone is Runkeeper, and it just got a fantastic new update that makes your running preferences more customizable than ever, including a brilliant new ‘night color’ mode which makes the display easier on the eyes, even if you are not a night runner.

Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley’s tenure at Apple was marked for a lack in innovation that eventually almost sunk the company, before Steve Jobs came back to rescue it in the late 90s. So he’s an expert in what makes a company go wrong.

According to Sculley, that’s just what is happening in the Tim Cook years. He says the company is experiencing another “lull in innovation” and needs to find its next creative leap.

Unlike some bozos we could mention, KGI Securities Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo gets it right more often than not. He got the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, Retina MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and new iPod touch right.

Now he’s making another prediction: that Apple will unveil a new iPhone 5S with a better camera and color-shifting flash, as well as iOS 7, at WWDC in June for a July release. Also? A colorful iPhone 5 will become Apple’s new $99 iPhone.

In my experience, the iPhone already has a built-in alcohol detector. You can tell if you’re too drunk to drive by pulling out your iPhone and seeing if you immediately drop it, shattering it on the floor or dunking it in a seedy bar urinal. Pass the test? You’re ready to drive!

Alcohoot has another method of measuring the same thing. It’s a Breathalyzer that you pair with your iPhone. If you blow into it and you’re abov e the legal limit, it’ll call you a cab.

Alcohoot isn’t out quite yet, but when they launch, they are hoping to launch soon at a $70 price point. Cheaper than breaking your iPhone using the drunk test outlined above.

Via: Macgasm

We had a lot of fun earlier today coming up with our “vision” for the next Mac operating system, OS X Lion-O.

It got us thinking. What do you think the perfect mascot for the next version of OS X would be?

So we’re having a Photoshop contest! Come up with a concept for the next version of OS X using a whole new mascot and we’ll give the top five winners a free copy of Photoshop Touch for the iPhone or iPad (your choice!).

And the grand prize winner? In addition to Photoshop Touch, the person who makes the best Photoshop will receive a copy of the real next version of OS X (when it comes out, that is!).

Here’s how to enter the contest!

During the historic 2007 iPhone keynote, Steve Jobs famously called a local Starbucks and made a prank order for 4,000 lattes… enough for everyone at the Moscone Center to enjoy. He then said, “Just kidding. Wrong number. Goodbye!”

Amusingly, that quick prank call to demonstrate the iPhone’s Maps and Phone apps is still resulting in prank calls six years later. And even more incredibly, the barista who originally took the call still works at that Starbucks!

Here’s an interesting number for you: just a month after release, the Evasi0n jailbreak has already cracked wide open an astonishing 14 million iOS devices. Considering there’s only 23 million iDevices running jailbreaks across all iOS versions, that means that the vast majority of jailbroken devices are running a flavor of iOS 6.1.

Famed investor and philanthropist Warren Buffet stopped by CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning, and the Berkshire Hathaway head had some interesting thoughts on what Apple should do with its cash: by back all of its stock from investors, just like Warren Buffett told Steve Jobs to do years ago.

Following Bloomberg’s report that the iWatch is a project Apple wants to deliver this year, the Verge has an interesting report saying that the iWatch project is being lead by Jony Ive himself, and that it will run a full version of iOS.

Over the weekend, a fascinating little post over on the Panic weblog revealed that the Lightning AV adapter meant to send video out from a connected iPhone or iPad over HDMI had an interesting little secret to it: it’s not a converter so much as it is a tiny ARM-based computer with a tiny SoC and 2GB of RAM!

The guys at Panic had a theory that this meant that the Lightning AV Adapter booted a miniature version of iOS every time it was connected, and that it was using a bizarre, hardwired version of the AirPlay protocol to do its streaming. That’s not actually the case, but an anonymous Apple engineer has now given the backstory behind this fascinating little bit of engineering.

Last week, three earnest audiophiles rang my doorbell and stormed into my living room to show me a handsome Bluetooth speaker that they claimed was going to reinvent the world of Jambox-alikes and transform Bluetooth speakers into “objects of desire.”

The guys in question? Three gents from Grain Audio, an up-and-coming audio company. And the product they wanted to show me was a prototype of their upcoming Packable Wireless System, or PWS: a walnut-enclosed Bluetooth speaker with some seriously good sound for its class.

The PWS won’t be available for sale for a few months, still, but it’s a speaker worth keeping an eye on. Here’s why.

Apple has a long history of naming its new versions of the OS X operating system after successively larger cats, but after eleven years of this, Cupertino’s got a problem on their hands: they’ve pretty much run out of big Earth cats.

Far beyond the Oort cloud, however, there are even bigger and more ferocious cats on the loose. Feel the magic and hear the roar of OS X Lion-O, Third Earth’s most popular operating system.

Featuring Snarf, your Mac’s cowering new digital sidekick, revolutionary Sight Beyond iSight technology, and i of Thundera compatibility, OS X Lion-O is the best Mac operating system yet.

Think you’ve got a better idea for the next version of OS X? Join our contest for a chance to win a copy of Photoshop Touch and the next version of OS X when it comes out!