Twitter announced on its blog yesterday that the company is finally rolling out an update to its mobile web application which will integrate HTML5 and introduce some nice new features, meaning it will no longer suck so much under mobile Safari.
The popular IM+: Instant Messaging application from Shape Services has just been updated to introduce an innovative new feature called ‘Neighbors’, which offers users the ability to find new friends in their vicinity who share the same common interests.
When users are signed into the Neighbors service, they will be greeted by a map that allows them to locate and chat with friends in their area, post and view local announcements, and initiate conversations with other people nearby.
iOS applications that alert drivers to DUI checkpoints and speed traps could soon be pulled from the App Store following a review by Apple that will determine whether or not these applications are illegal.
Guy Tribble, Apple’s Vice President of Software Technology, told senators during a U.S. Senate subcommittee yesterday that the company is currently looking into the legality of these applications, and will pull them if they are breaking the law.
iAd slots in iOS applications designed for children will no longer be filled with adverts, according to an email one developer has received from Apple.
Mike Zornek, the developer of the Dex a Pokemon browser application for iPhone and iPod touch, noticed that his iAd fill rates had dropped and emailed Apple’s iAd Support Team for an explanation:
OCZ has just announced its Agility 3 and Solid 3 series of 2.5-inch solid-state drives aimed at users dying to get their hands on a super-speedy SSD, but with a tight budget to contend with.
Pix and Stix is a new accessory duo designed for those who love to rock out with GarageBand on the iPad. It’s a set of drum sticks and a guitar pick featuring electro-conductive rubber tips that make them compatible with the iPad’s touchscreen, allowing you to drum and strum naturally without wearing out your fingertips.
The team behind Pix and Stix is currently trying to get Kickstarter-like funding, so the kit isn’t quite available just yet. If you want to get your hands on it, you can order now for $14.95 and as soon as it reaches its funding goal of $8000, the team will start making them and your order will be guaranteed. If it doesn’t reach its funding goal, you’ll get your money back.
One of the biggest niggles with the iOS Mail application – for me – is that in order to delete multiple emails at once, you need to go through and select each individual message before you hit the delete button. I think that kind of defeats the object of having a multiple delete function; you might as well just delete them individually if you’ve got to touch them all anyway. However, a new jailbreak tweak called DeleteMail offers a solution to this problem.
Developed by Andrea Oliva, and now available in Cydia for $0.99, DeleteMail allows you to delete every single email in a particular mailbox in just two taps.
Following the sellout success of its San Francisco and Dallas events, MacTech Boot Camp is set to land in Boston in less than two weeks, and Cult of Mac readers can save $200 on registration. On May 18th, the event will be held at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, with a number of confirmed speakers who include:
The Skype application for Mac has finally been updated to fix a critical vulnerability discovered last week. Version 5.1.0.935 fixes a major flaw that exposed your Mac to attacks from malicious contacts via instant messages, and meant another user could gain remote access to your system.
Interestingly, Skype actually fixed the flaw on April 14th, but didn’t bother pushing the update out to its users because there was no exploit active in the wild. Reassuring, isn’t it?
Adobe first announced its first three Photoshop Touch applications at Photoshop World back in March, and they’re now available to download from the App Store. Color Lava, Eazel and Nav are all designed for the iPad and aim to enhance your desktop Photoshop experience with the help of a touch-based device.
Here’s a little bit about each of the applications:
A digital game manual discovered on Steam for the upcoming Duke Nukem Forever release features some information regarding Apple’s App Store that suggests the title could be headed to iOS devices.
Starjimstar from the Touch Arcade forums found that at the bottom of all the legal text in the game’s documentation, there’s some “Apple App Store Additional License Terms.”
A new jailbreak tweak that’s just hit Cydia allows users to upload photos to Facebook directly from the photo library on their iOS device without having to use a dedicated application. Native FB Upload allows you to select your photo and send it to Facebook just as easily as you can to MobileMe.
While the App Store is full of Facebook applications that allow you to upload photos, this $1.99 tweak from Tyler Nettleton (@InfectionX) cuts out the middle man. Once installed you can select a photo in your camera roll, or any other photo album, and tap the ‘export’ button in the bottom left that you’d usually use to send an image via MMS, email, or to MobileMe. You’ll have a new option to upload to Facebook.
A new resource called ‘Cydia Search’ lets you browse the Cydia’s huge collection of jailbreak tweaks and applications from the convenience of your desktop. Finding the packages you’re looking for in Cydia can sometimes be a slow and unpleasant process, but thanks to Planet-iPhones, you can now find them from your web browser.
Cydia Search checks all of Cydia’s default repositories – as well as 7 others – for new and updated packages once every hour. You can browse packages by repository and category; by top rated, newest, and updated packages; or you can search the collection for a range of things like package names, descriptions, and authors. You can also subscribe to the newest and updated packages RSS feeds so that you never miss a Cydia release.
Everyone who owns an Apple TV loves AirPlay – it’s a fantastic way of streaming your moves and music straight to your TV that was previously a luxury only iOS and iTunes users could enjoy. However, thanks to the doubleTwist software, users can now send content to the Apple TV from their Android smartphones.
The doubleTwist software for Mac & PC advertises itself as “the iTunes for Android” and allows you to wirelessly sync your iTunes playlists, photos and videos to your Android phone with the accompanying Android application. Its most recent update introduced the ability to stream all of this content to the Apple TV over AirPlay.
The iPhone comes with a pre-installed weather application that takes its data from The Weather Channel. While it looks okay, it isn’t exactly crammed with features, it doesn’t go into any detail, it doesn’t come with the iPad, and I find its weather forecast to be far from accurate.
That being the case, over the years I’ve been trying out all sorts of third-party weather apps that do a far better job – here’s my list of the App Store’s best weather apps.
Cloud Player, the recently launched online storage service from Amazon, now works on iOS devices through the Safari web browser. When it first went live, the service – which offers 5GB of storage for free – was only accessible from Flash-supported browsers and Android devices.
When you first navigate to Cloud Player on your iOS device, you are greeted by a warning that tells you your browser isn’t supported. You can just ignore that and proceed into your music collection. Once there, you can use Cloud Player flawlessly: it will pause when you receive push notifications and incoming calls, you’ll get the blue “playing” icon in your device’s status bar, and you can control playback from the buttons in the multitasking tray.
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Rovio’s Angry Birds is one of most successful iOS games of all time and it seems like everyone who’s ever used an iOS device has played it. But it’s not just humans who enjoy catapulting birds into pigs: OptoFidelity has created a robot with the sole purpose of playing Angry Birds.
The Finnish company uses its robots for touch panel testing and performance testing for mobile devices using video and optical measuring systems, so they already had the components required, and say it wasn’t hard to build a system for “this particular need.” The difficulty was getting the robot to play through every level of the game and achieve a three-star rating for each one.
Microsoft’s latest attempt at persuading customers to buy a Windows PC rather than a Mac is an advertising campaign that compares the price of Apple machines with computers from Asus, Dell, HP, Sony, and others; and then asks buyers to “do the math” and look at the money they could save – which they could then spend on a trip to Hawaii.
For example, compare Apple’s MacBook Air with a selection of Windows netbooks and straight away you’ll notice the difference in price – with the MacBook Air listed at $1,049 compared to netbooks for as little as $299. We’ll ignore the fact that Microsoft has classed the MacBook Air as a netbook and move on to specifications.
Kicking off this week’s selection of must-have iOS games is a brand new soccer game from X2 Games – the team behind the award-winning X2 Soccer titles. First Touch Soccer promises to be the true next-generation of soccer on iOS, offering the “most complete, realistic and addictive soccer sim available.”
Spider Jack is the latest puzzle release from Chillingo and I’m betting this game will be the next iOS game craze. Inspired by Cut the Rope, this game features a similar gameplay mechanic and all the ingredients needed to be a fantastic iOS puzzler.
Frisbee Forever is a whole new way to play frisbee and the only official frisbee game for iOS. It boasts super crisp 3D graphics and a frisbee experience like no other!
Find out more about the games above and check out Pulse: Volume One – this week’s final must-have – after the break!
At the top of this week’s list of must-have iOS apps is the awesome comic creation tool that previously came bundled with Intel Macs. Comic Life from plasq allows you to use the photos in your iPad’s camera roll to create your own comic masterpieces.
Notificant is a brilliant new productivity app that makes is fast and simple to create reminders for the things you’d usually forget. Choose to have notifications alert you on your iPhone, as well as any of your other iOS or Mac devices.
Exploring your music collection has never been as stunning as it is with Planetary – a free iPad app that has climbed rapidly to the top of the free app charts. Fly through a 3D universe dynamically created by information about the recording artists you love.
Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves – including Cadence.fm and 4oD Catch Up – after the break!
As WWDC and the unveiling of iOS 5 approaches, we’re all wondering what Apple may or may not bring to its devices with the next major iOS release. One thing that could be introduced is speech recognition, courtesy of Nuance Communications – the company behind the Dragon Dictation applications for the iPhone and iPad.
According to a TechCrunch report that cites “multiple sources,” Apple has been negotiating a deal with Nuance which could see them integrate the company’s speech recognition technology into the iOS platform. While negotiations could have potentially been about an Apple takeover of Nuance, TechCrunch believes that at this point that’s unlikely.
Shipment delays to the iPad during the last quarter were reportedly due to light leakage issues with displays produced by LG, according to a DigiTimes report. Apple’s other supply partners were forced to increase their shipments this quarter to rectify the shortage.
During the first quarter, Samsung supplied a total of 4 million 9.7-inch iPad panels, outpacing its rival, LG, who only shipped 3.2 million. It is believed, however, that now LG’s light leakage issues have been resolved, it will increase its supply of displays during the second quarter.
The iPhone Dev-Team’s PwnageTool has just been updated for Mac OS X users to provide a stable jailbreak for the latest iOS 4.3.3 release. Just as before the application provides an untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad (1st-gen) and the iPod touch (3rd- & 4th-gen).
PwnageTool uses i0nic’s untethered exploit to safely install jailbroken 4.3.3 firmware whilst preserving your 1.59.00 baseband. This gives users the opportunity to continue to use UltraSn0w to unlock their device.
Other World Computing has just announced its latest Mercury Aura Pro Express solid-state drive designed for the latest generation of MacBook Airs. Boasting a whopping 480GB of storage, the upgrade offers nearly 4x more capacity than currently available from factory available SSDs, and is an incredible 68% faster.
As you’d expect from an SSD, however, especially one designed for the latest MacBook Air, these babies come at one heck of a price. The 480GB upgrade will set you back a staggering $1,579.99, but you’re not going to find this kind of storage for Apple’s ultra portable notebook anywhere else.
Working conditions at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, have long been the center of attention. 1 million Chinese workers build electronics for Apple, HP, Nokia, Palm and Sony at the plant, some are reportedly as young as 12; having to endure long, repetitive work under notoriously harsh conditions. At last count, at least 14 Foxconn workers have committed suicide in the last 16 months.
The plant is now ordering its employees to sign an ‘anti-suicide pledge’, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail. Under the pledge, employees must not attempt to kill themselves, and if they do, their families can only seek the minimum in damages.