Luke Dormehl - page 318

Los Angeles teachers union president Alex Caputo-Pearl has called for an investigation into Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy’s relationship with Apple, which led to the announcement that the school system had blown its entire $1 billion tech budget on giving an iPad to every student last year.

Although the iPad deal was later put on hold, the L.A. Board of Education is being pressured by Caputo-Pearl to investigate why Deasy and his then-chief deputy, Jaime Aquino, were apparently discussing the deal with Apple and education publisher Pearson up to two years before the official bidding process was finished and contracts were approved.

Blending gorgeous black and white comic book-style visuals with compelling gameplay, iOS racer SXPD has just received a 2.0 update, not only bringing the game to iPhone for the first time, but also lowering its price from $1.99 to free.

The idea that the forthcoming iPhone 6 (expected to be unveiled September 9) is the most anticipated refresh of Apple’s smartphone in ages was given further credibility by a recent survey by financial firm R.W. Baird.

Quizzing 1,000 residents surveyed in July, 6.8 percent of respondees said that they planned to buy the iPhone 6 without ever having laid eyes on it. This number is up from the 4.4 percent who answered that same way back in February.

The firm also notes that this intent to purchase is higher than the number of people who said they would buy the iPhone 5s after it had already been announced.

We may be in something of a golden age for iOS gamers, but Candy Crush maker King isn’t reaping the benefits quite as much as it had hoped.

With revenue shrinking, and having been unable to recapture the lightning in a bottle of its breakout hit Candy Crush Saga, the company dropped 21 percent in value yesterday after posting disappointing earnings. The company’s earnings fell 5 percent (or $30 million) from the first quarter this year.

A new report coming of China suggests that the eagerly-anticipated iPhone 6 is currently in the PVT (Product Validation Test) stage of production. During this stage, the assembly line runs at full speed to produce a small number of finished units for quality assurance purposes. If any issues are highlighted at this stage, the production line can be adjusted to ensure that all faults are ironed out by the time mass production begins.

If there are no faults highlighted, Foxconn can begin work producing the “unprecedented” numbers of iPhone 6 units for Apple, ready for its expected September 9 unveiling.

In some ways Siri today is a little bit like the Macintosh circa 1984: everyone realizes the potential, but the technology is not yet as good as it could be.

With that in mind, several of the creators of Siri have set up a new startup outside of Apple called Viv Labs, aimed at creating a next gen virtual assistant capable of understanding sentences far more complex than the kind that you would normally feed to Siri.

We’re all so used to using our iPhones as our primary cameras these days that it’s difficult to remember what it was like in the dark days before the device came along.

Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a new series of Apple-related patents, including an historic 2008 filing for an Apple camera. While the patent covers both a standalone camera (something Apple hasn’t done since the QuickTake camera launched in 1994) and a camera integrated into a PDA, it is likely that this is the patent which covers the original iPhone.

How valuable is it to have an Apple Store in your property portfolio? Pretty valuable indeed, as it (unsurprisingly) turns out.

That’s the point proven by the Third Street Promenade Apple Store in Southern California, which has just sold to new real estate buyers for a record-breaking $100 million: making it the per-square-foot record holder for commercial real estate in the entire West Los Angeles area.

According to new reports, Apple has been meeting with major health providers to discuss its new HealthKit service, set to debut with iOS 8.

Apple has supposedly meet with healthcare officials at Mount Sinai, the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins, alongside Allscripts, which is a competitor to major electronic health records provider Epic Systems.

The talks concern how Apple wants to make the health data it plans to help collect (including blood pressure, pulse rate, weight, etc.) available to both consumers and health providers.

Apple hopes that physicians will be able to use this data (provided permission is granted) to monitor patients in between hospital visits, in order to make better decisions concerning diagnostics and treatment.

Tim Cook has tweeted his condolences in the wake of the tragic death of actor and stand-up comedian Robin Williams, at age 63.

Cook wrote that he is “Heartbroken by the news of Robin Williams’ passing. He was an incomparable talent and a great human being. Rest in peace.”

From the mathematical brilliance of Threes to the insanely addictive, Design Award-winning Blek, iOS users are spoiled for choice when it comes to great puzzle games on their iOS.

Does that mean developers should throw in the towel and stop making them, then? On the contrary, as the great Alan Partridge once said about regional detective shows: “Another way of looking at it is, people like them, let’s make some more of them.”

The “more of them” in question is Cubical, a seemingly straightforward puzzler that asks you to match the colours of different cubes by tapping them before the time runs out. And it’s a whole lot of fun.

Aside from the larger phablet-sized display, one of the most visually obvious changes we’d heard about for the iPhone 6 was the possibility that the cutout Apple logo on its rear would enable LED-powered user notifications, or MacBook-style illumination.

Well, that may not be happening after all, according to newly leaked images from Taiwanese Apple blog AppleClub. The website has posted what appears to be a stack of Apple logos, ready to be fitted to the back panel of the next generation iPhone, featuring nothing in the way of LEDs or connectors.

The person who posted the image also confirms that the logo is not planned to emit light as previously speculated about.

Apple’s beloved co-founder Steve Wozniak turns 64 years old today. Steve Jobs may be the most admired figure to come out of Apple, but with his imperious distance from us mere mortals, he was hard to love.

Wozniak, on the other hand, is well and truly beloved by the tech community.

A true Silicon Valley original, he’s the genius who invented the personal computer, got rich, and then spent his fortune having fun rather than taking over the world. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also a practical joker, all-around nerd, and someone who has never been afraid to speak his mind about technology’s power to change the world.

Want to improve your Monday by seeing how design guru Jony Ive lives? Over the weekend, Business Insider ran a gallery, showcasing Apple’s acclaimed design guru’s home on San Francisco’s “Gold Coast,” also known as “Billionaire’s Row.”

Another day, another apparent leak of the forthcoming iPhone 6, expected to be unveiled by Apple on September 9.

The photos appeared on the Taiwanese website AppleClub, and look to show the exterior and interior of the 4.7-inch iPhone’s front panel.

Although they don’t offer us anything revelatory that we’ve not seen before in grainy leaked-photo detail, they do does further give us one of the clearest looks yet at some of the changes we’re expecting to see with the next generation Apple handset: namely a larger display and rounded edges.

Despite its role as a manufacturer for the eagerly-anticipated iPhone 6, Apple manufacturer Foxconn has announced July as being responsible for its lowest monthly earnings since March 2013.

Surprisingly this comes not long after Foxconn posted record earnings of $131.82 billion for 2013, while company chairman Terry Gou claimed that this year’s earnings would be even greater. Nonetheless the company’s consolidated revenues of just (!) $8.66 billion for the month of July represents a decrease of 17.91 percent on month, and 13.3 percent year-on-year.

So what’s responsible for the drop?

Looks like Microsoft is up to its old tricks again!

Not happy to simply put out the Surface (and, to be honest, who can blame them?) and then let the market decide if it’s interested, the good folks at Redmond have decided on a new ad campaign that skewers Apple and its “You’re more powerful than you think” strap line.

Apple has donated 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) to support relief efforts in China following the major earthquake in the country’s Yunnan Province earlier this week.

The 6.5-magnitude earthquake is the worst disaster to have hit the area in a century, and resulted in the deaths of 615 people. A further 2,400 were injured in the quake, while rescuers have evacuated 230,000 further people, who are now displaced from their home.

Apple has updated its Chinese homepage to reflect the disaster, and Tim Cook personally sent out an email to Apple employees noting that the company is eager to hit with relief efforts.

Sporting a larger screen size, case redesign and various under-the-hood improvements, the iPhone 6 is widely expected to be the biggest refresh of Apple’s smartphone in years. That anticipation is having a major knock-on effect with Apple’s component makers, too.

We reported last month that Apple has placed an unprecedented number of orders for the iPhone 6, and that seems to be backed up by recently announced July sales for Taiwan-based Apple casing supplier Catcher Technology.

Based on growth in the Apple-driven smartphone sector, the company had its second best month in history, with monthly earnings of $154.6 million. This marks a whopping 36.8 percent increase compared to the same month in 2013.

Everyone wants to make a mint in the App Store. But while some developers slave away in coding dens on original ideas, others see a get-rich-quick shortcut through copying.

The result is an App Store littered with clones, frustrated devs, and Apple stuck playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to police the rip-off apps.

Recently the developers of micro-messaging service Yo — this year’s most unlikely App Store success story — were shocked to discover that another eerily-similar app called Yolo was hoovering up its potential downloads.

“I noticed a clone that was an exact replica, including the exact same UI, same App Store screenshots, and same App Store description copied word-for-word,” Yo creator Or Arbel tells Cult of Mac.

Sometimes a video game movie spinoff comes along that is so left field that you you a) check to see that it’s not April Fool’s Day and b) makes you wonder if the developers have actually seen the film in question.

Joining 2004’s Fight Club video game, which turned the epic David Fincher mindf*ck movie into a straightforward beat-em-up, is a new Forrest Gump iOS game, which mutates the beloved Oscar-winning comedy-drama into an endless runner. Yes, really.

Called Run Forrest Run, the game “celebrates” the twentieth anniversary of the movie by stripping it of whatever complexity it had, and transforming it into a game in which Tom Hanks’ simpleton character runs into traffic and collects coins like a “stupid is as stupid does” Super Mario impersonator.

Apple has dropped a new version of its iTunes app, solving a continuing problem for podcast listeners where subscribed podcasts stop updating with new episodes.

The iTunes version 11.3.1 refresh also fixes another podcast related issue, which saw iTunes become unresponsive while browsing through different podcast episodes.

Yesterday we wrote about the exciting news that Ace Attorney 5 (known outside Japan as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies) had landed in the Japanese App Store.

Although it came with no official announcement of an English language release, we noted that we remained hopeful — particularly since the game had already received such a translation for a Nintendo 3DS version in 2013, which went on to be heavily praised by various outlets.

Well,  developers Capcom didn’t keep us in suspense for very long, since already the company has confirmed that English-language audiences can expect to play a version of the hit game “quite soon.”

Kicking off June 2, this year’s WWDC was the most eventful Apple developer’s conference in years, bringing us massive refreshes for both iOS and OS X.

But the blogosphere is nothing if not forward-looking, and already people are talking about what next year’s event will hold. While we may not have an answer for that just yet, there may be a few clues as to when it will take place, courtesy of the Moscone Center’s calendar of upcoming events.