Luke Dormehl - page 347

This week saw the publishing of one of the iPhone’s most recognizable patents.

Arriving with iOS 3 in June 2009 was the ability to select, copy, and paste text using two draggable selection handles displayed on screen. Miles ahead of what other smartphones were offering at the time, Apple’s solution was a neat way of transferring to mobile a tool that was a key part of the personal computer user experience.

To celebrate the publishing of this historic patent, Cult of Mac spoke with one of its inventors, user interface designer Bas Ording, about the development process.

With rumors of the iWatch and future Apple products focusing on health continuing to swell, Apple has hired yet another medical device expert.

Marcelo Malini Lamego joined Apple at the end of last month, having previously spent 8 years as the CTO of Cercacor — a medical device company, based in Irvine, CA, involved with the development of non-invasive patient monitoring technologies, including medical devices and sensors.

The popular Hitman franchise will finally break away from consoles and make its way to iOS with a forthcoming game called Hitman GO.

Created by the Square Enix Montréal team, Hitman GO features a turn-based gaming experience, set in the Hitman universe.

Today sees the iOS launch of Deadman’s Cross, a zombie-themed collectible card battle RPG from Square Enix, the company behind Final Fantasy and the multimillion-download hit Guardian Cross.

Set sixteen years in the future, the game takes place in a zombie apocalypse in which a rampant virus has turned large numbers of people into the walking dead.

Phil Schiller and possibly Scott Forstall are expected to make witness appearances for the next round of the Apple v. Samsung trial, when the two companies return to court in California in late March.

As Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Schiller was the highest-profile witness to take the stand during the first jury trial in the patent case between Apple and Samsung in August 2012.

Responding to the tech industry’s effect on San Francisco housing, Bay Area artist Alfred Twu has taken it upon himself to show what Silicon Valley tech campuses might look like if they converted their parking lots into accommodation for their employees.

Alongside mini-cities for Facebook and Google, Twu created these designs for iTown — with 13,000 apartments for Apple’s 13,000 Cupertino employees, ajoining the new Apple 2 campus.

A patent application published Thursday reveals how Apple could incorporate flexible OLED displays into future devices to improve their function without sacrificing strength. The technology could get Apple closer to producing bezel-less devices in existing product lines such as the iPhone, iPad and MacBook as well as speculative product categories like the iWatch.

The patent refers to a technique for reducing a display border by bending the sides of a display surface in such a way that electrode materials used in the device could be made to stretch rather than break when bent or folded. The application, titled “Flexible Displays” and filed in July 2013, means that future Apple devices need not be limited in size by the requirement that they include metal or plastic housings.

Comcast, the number one cable provider in the U.S., has announced that it plans to acquire Time Warner Cable, the second largest cable firm in the U.S., for a reported $45 billion.

The deal — set to be officially announced later today — will see Comcast offer $158.82 per share in an all-stock deal.

Around half of U.S. consumers are hoarding their old iPhones in cupboards and sock drawers — representing an inventory worth around $13.4 billion in total.

According to the annual “Mobile Mountain Study” conducted by research group OnePoll for resale site SellCell.com, this figure is down from the 55% of people who admitted to holding onto their old smartphones last year — although the total amount of money being left on the table is up from last year’s sum of $9 billion, thanks to the growing smartphone market.

“Americans are still unaware of the money they can make by trading in their old mobile,” says SellCell founder Keir McConomy.

A new survey of 2,000 iPhone users saw 3/5ths of respondents admit to having a “blind loyalty” to the Apple brand.

78% percent claimed they “couldn’t imagine having a different type of phone now,”  while 52% said they had been “really impressed” with the iPhone.

Ahead of the 86th Academy Awards show, the Heads Up! app dreamed up by this year’s host Ellen DeGeneres has received a timely update — offering questions related to the Oscars.

Joining existing game categories including Celebrities, Animals, Accents, and Characters, the new time-limited Oscars game deck offers users a chance to brush up on their movie trivia knowledge in the most time-pressured setting imaginable. “It’s perfect perfect for your viewing party, or preparing for the big night starring Ellen,” the app’s developers state.

Apple has released its eighth annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report.

The forty-page document focuses on Apple’s progress in providing the 1 million+ people working in its supply chain with “safe and ethical working conditions,” as well as the company’s efforts to ethically source minerals.

To coincide with Steve Jobs’ appearance in the National Portrait Gallery’s new “American Cool” exhibition, Cult of Mac had the opportunity to speak with Charles “Chuck” O’Rear — the photographer who took the 1981 portrait of Jobs currently on display.

O’Rear, 73, recalls Jobs being aloof and preoccupied but — despite being young (he was just 27) — carried a real aura that this was someone who couldn’t be ignored.

“We had barely heard of him at the time,” O’Rear says. “With the same project I ended up photographing names like David Packard and Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard, and Bill Noyce of Intel — all of who were better known than Steve. But there was a sense that Steve was a renegade, and so we should make sure we get his picture.”

Footage has been released of a television crew discovering an original Lisa mouse used by Steve Jobs. The mouse was one of a collection of miscellaneous items found inside a time capsule in Aspen, Colorado.

Jobs had visited the area in 1983 for the Aspen International Design Conference — during which he delivered a speech predicting many of the Apple technologies which would come to pass during his lifetime — including the iPad, wireless networking, and even the App Store. Afterwards, Jobs was one of several conference attendees who donated objects for the “Aspen Time Tube” which has now been recovered.

Last week we revealed that Steve Jobs was set to feature in a forthcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, titled “American Cool.”

With the exhibition having now opened, this is the portrait of the Apple co-founder that curators Joel Dinerstein and Frank H. Goodyear III chose to use: an image taken by photographer Charles O’Rear — perhaps most widely known for his digitally augmented “Rolling Hills” background used for Microsoft Windows XP.

A new Cydia tweak lets Snapchat users easily log their conversations in a way that subverts the original concept behind the private one-time message sending tool.

Integrating with the existing Snapchat app, the tweak adds an additional option under the “Open Settings” button on the official app. To access past conversations, users can hit the the settings icon to access the popup menu, then tap on the “Open Snapchat Log” option to view the log.

New app Metadata+ tells you whenever a drone strike kills somebody overseas.

Working by pulling data from the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the app plots the location of each strike on a map, and then sends a push notification when an attack takes place.

If that doesn’t strike you as something the often-conservative Apple would want available in its App Store, you’re not wrong.

The app’s official release comes on the back of five separate rejections by the company, and a renaming from Drone+, Drones+, and Dronestream to the more innocuous-sounding Metadata+. The official App Store description reveals only that the app deals in, “Real-time updates on national security.”

Popular account manager and bill organizer app Manilla has received a significant update.

Back by the Hearst Corporation, Manilla is designed to let you manage and share personal finances, household bills, subscriptions, healthcare account, and travel rewards — alongside acting as a handy reminder tool for various bill payments.

Fancy a blue virtual keyboard for your iOS 7 device? If so, the appropriately named Cydia tweak BlueBoard may just be the tweak for you.

Once installed, users need to launch the Settings app and respring the device to get the tweak up and running. The tweak affects both keyboards within iOS 7, so that when enabled both the standard light keyboard or dark keyboard come with blue keys.

Excessive demand and limited production cycles have pushed the Mac Pro’s estimated shipping date back to April.

The high-end machine, available in both Quad-Core and 6-Core editions, was originally supposed to ship in December, before being pushed back to February, then March, and now April.

It’s easy to forget just how much the iPhone changed things. Today saw the publishing of one of the iPhone’s most familiar patents — its gesture/touch-based text selection tool.

Describing a new way of selecting text using gestures on a multi-touch sensitive display screen, the patent, which was filed back in March 2008, is credited to Wayne Carl Westerman, Apple’s Multi-Touch Architect; Bas Ording, a User Interface Designer who joined Apple not long after Jobs’ return; B. Michael Victor, and Stephen O. Lemay.

Perhaps paying homage to its fallen brother Flappy Bird, award-winning iOS flapping game Badland is currently priced 50% off its usual cost of $3.99.

That’s not all. In time for Valentine’s Day, Badland adds a new friendly multiplayer level where the aim is to cooperate with — rather than compete against — friends, along with a new “lovely” main menu to get you in the mood for amore.

Ever wondered if somebody you thought you could trust is going through your phone when it’s out of sight?

That’s the (all too pertinent) premise behind Catchr, a new app designed to give users peace of mind while they are away from their iPhone. While the app won’t protect against “leaky apps” or other forms of government eavesdropping, it can tell you whether your phone has been moved, and which applications have been started or stopped during your absence — along with plotting on a map where your iPhone has been during the time Catchr is running.

The general thought process when it comes to iOS 7 game controllers is this: “I would like one of those, but they’re horribly expensive.”

MOGA is apparently trying to do something about that, since it has just dropped the price of its Ace Power iOS 7 controller from $99.99 to $79.99. That’s still $40 more than you can buy a PlayStation 3 Dualshock 3 wireless controller for (which you can then use to play iOS games provided you’re willing to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch), but if cost is the one factor that’s been holding back your decision to buy an Ace Power controller, this may help sway you in the right direction.