Apple just released two firmware updates to address some rare battery issues with the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air lines Tuesday. The firmware can be downloaded directly from Apple’s support website.
The firmware for both models fixes some rare issues with the battery, one of which will shut your Macbook Air down after 1000 charges.
Back in the iOS 7 beta, we noticed a feature that would focus your iPhone camera when you held down the volume button in landscape mode.
When I went to do the same thing yesterday while taking pictures of my Macbook Air’s trackpad (don’t ask), and instead of a nicely auto-focused picture, I got a bunch of pictures of my (not-moving) trackpad, inadvertently activating what Apple calls “burst mode.”
Here’s how to use it to get action shots on your own iPhone or iPad running iOS 7.
The Bitizens are back, and this time, it’s all about trains! Who doesn’t like trains?
Fresh off their hit Snake re-imagining Nimble Quest, NimbleBit has turned in a lovely little game that looks and plays a lot like last year’s hit Pocket Planes, with retro pixel art style and transit-themed, schedule-based gameplay. There’s a lot to like in this new iteration, as well, including streamlined mechanics, refined strategies, and updated graphics.
Let’s take a look.
If there’s one thing PC users have the hardest time with when they use my Macbook Air, it’s the trackpad. What seems completely common and functional to me leaves them baffled and confused.
“How do I click the mouse?” they ask, tapping away in frustration, not knowing that all you need to do is press down a bit and, you know, actually click the thing.
If you’re one of those folks, or you just like to be able to tap the trackpad without actually pressing it down, here’s how to do so.
iOS 7 comes with a brand new set of Siri voices. Here in the US, there’s an updated female voice, as well as a new male voice included in the latest and greatest mobile operating system.
Did you know, though, that Siri is proud of her new voice? Well, just let him know that you like her new vocal apparatus, and you’ll see a few fun new easter eggs as answers.
When you’re writing up a long document, or even in the middle of a simple one, it’s good to be able to move around and edit in the text without taking your hands off the keyboard. All the little switches from keyboard to mouse and back again take up valuable time, and–perhaps more importantly–force you to change the way your brain is processing information.
Using the arrow keys is a good way to move the cursor around, and of course there are the standard Command key shortcuts, but did you know that there’s some legacy keyboard shortcuts that come to us all the way back in Emacs, a popular text editing program for Unix, the operating system Mac OS X is based?
There are, and here are a few good ones. I’ve tested them in Text Edit, but chances are several Mac text editing programs will take advantage of these.
If you want to store two classrooms of third graders’ fingerprints on one iPhone 5s, then we’ve got the bug for you.
YouTuber Tom Rich found this interesting feature with Touch ID on the new iPhone 5s. So he did what any other good videographer would and made a video of it.
Have you ever realized just how much random chance is involved in your favorite video games?
Consider dashing through Diablo III dungeons, mashing buttons and watching your little avatar cut through swathes of demon enemies. Each of those hits is managed by a vast mathematical model in the background, deciding how many hit points each swing of your sword or blast of your magic will take off of each monster in your path.
Tower of Fortune 2, like it’s predecessor, seems like an indie meditation on the RPG genre itself by exposing the mechanics in the background of typical RPGs with the biggest symbol of luck ever: the slot machine.
There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.
We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.
Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.
This week, it’s highlights, game stats, player news, and all sorts of Football fun with NFL Mobile, from NFL Enterprises. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporters think.
The OS X Finder is an amazing thing, letting you create folder within folder, duplicate files, find your documents, and generally get stuff done. More and more, the Finder features are being integrated across all apps and documents on your Mac.
Case in point is the ability to find the directory path of a document from the document’s title bar, as well as being able to (since Mountain Lion, anyway) rename your documents in the title bar as well. All of this is thanks to the proxy icon, which Apple defines as: “An icon in the title bar of a document window that users can manipulate as if they were manipulating the corresponding file-system object.”
Here’s how to use them on your Mac.
On the Mac, you can always hit Command-Z to undo something. You can also hit Command-Shift-Z to redo something and put it back to what it was before you hit undo. Make sense?
This isn’t so easily done on iOS, as there isn’t a Command key, to being with, but there is, in fact, an option to undo and one to redo hidden in the iPad keyboard. Here’s how to get to each of them.
Apple just released a new patch for iOS 7 that fixes a bug that allowed anyone to bypass the lock screen in the new iOS 7. The exploit involved swiping up on the lock screen to access Control Center, then opening the alarm clock. Holding the iPhone’s sleep/wake button brings up the power off option, and you could hit cancel, double click the home button, and have access to the multitasking screen. This would give anyone access to your photos, camera, email, Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr account.
Today’s update to iOS 7.0.2 purports to fix that, and reintroduces a Greek keyboard option for passcode entry.
Source: Apple
With an odd mix of Bejeweled and Pokemon, including a dash of inspiration from Puzzles and Dragons, Dragon Academy aims to be your next iOS game addiction. available now in the App Store for the low price of free-to-play, Dragon Academy tasks you with matching jewels of different dragon-enhancing powers to level up your adorable, charming dragons for even more jewel-matching fun.
We got the chance to sit down with Trent Polack, creative director at developer Team Chaos, and chat a bit about dragons, “hatch-three” puzzle games, and why the team decided to go with such a saturated genre to begin with.
You might not want to use your iPhone 5s to find your way out of the woods just yet.
A number of users are reporting that their iPhone 5s compass and level are showing incorrect values when placed on flat surfaces. It might be a hardware issue, leaving Apple with a costly hardware recall or replacement issue. The problem could also point to a software snafu that needs speedy patching.
The problem was first spotted on by “tharepairguy” on a forum thread over at Mac Rumors. He set his iPhone 5s and his iPhone 4 to magnetic north. The iPhone 4 reads 179 south, while the iPhone 5s reads 165 south. His car compass confirms the iPhone 4 reading.
He then checked the level app on each phone. The iPhone 4 showed a surface to be level, as did two other Johnson analog levels. The iPhone 5s? -4 degrees.
Notification Center has new tabs now, including Today, All, and Missed notifications. Even with this bit of filtering, things can get overwhelming fast, especially if you have a ton of apps that default to sending notifications to you for darn near everything.
If you want to lower the amount of information overload in your Notifications Center, it’s a fairly simple affair. Here’s how.
Time to come clean: I play guitar and sing in a disco band. I know, I know, the backlash against that kind of music has been going on since 1977. Trust me, I know.
But the way people respond to this still-valid, we-use-real-instruments form of music is so much better than the way they used to when I played guitar in modern or classic rock bands. In those days, the most reaction I’d see in an audience was a foot tap, or maybe–if I was lucky–a head bob or two. Happy, gorgeous people dancing their butts off? So much more fun.
Now, playing in a cover band requires knowing a lot of music, like the chords for the 50 plus songs that we play. As I also take on half the lead singing duties, so I’m required to know the lyrics as well. I don’t do this for a living; I do it for fun and some beer and gear money. I don’t have tons of time to memorize all those songs, let alone the new ones we learn every few months. So I use lyric sheets. I used to use them on paper, but boy is that annoyingly old school and easily lost.
Now I use my iPad (and an amazing app called GigBook) to organize and keep track of my lyric sheets. And I also use the incomparable iKlip 2 iPad holder to attach that iPad to the microphone stand right in front of me.
Looks like Apple’s Maps app is in the spotlight again, as it is directing folks directly across a taxiway where airplanes take off in Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaska Dispatch reports that at least two out-of-town drivers relying on Apple’s navigation system for turn-by-turn directions to the Fairbanks International Airport (FAI) were directed across the runway to the airport ramp side of the passenger terminal.
That could be pretty dangerous if a plane was taking off or landing.
I’ve just picked up one of those fancy USB 3 drives to use with my Macbook Air as a sort of secondary backup when I travel, as it was so inexpensive for a 120 Gb drive. I wanted to know how much faster it might be, even on my non-USB 3 Air, than the run of the mill USB drive that you can pick up for a few bucks at the local electronics store, or get as a giveaway at a tech conference, for example. I also wanted to see how fast the new SSD drive that I installed in my Macbook Air was, just for kicks.
I wasn’t sure how to measure the relative speed of these drives, though, until I found out about Disk Speed Test from the fine folks over at OS X Daily. I was able to check the speed of my fast USB drive, my internal SSD drive, and an external USB-powered drive, and compare them all, which is pretty peachy.
Here’s how it works.
It used to be simple to delete text messages from your iPhone (or, I suppose, your iPad if you use iMessages), but with iOS 7, the cute little Edit button has gone away from the upper right corner. Instead, there’s a Contact button up there, which–while useful–used up the space where the Edit button used to be.
You can still delete entire message conversations by swiping to the left in the list of all your text messages, but how do you delete specific messages within a conversation? Swiping to the left just shows you the timestamps of the messages.
Never fear, we’ve got the answer.
You’ve got to admire a game that matches its own intent so perfectly that you suddenly can’t visualize how else the genre should be done. That’s certainly the case here with Zynga’s Solstice Arena. It’s currently my favorite MOBA game on any platform, which is great, since it plays well on both iOS and the Mac. I’m reviewing the Mac version here, but assume that–aside from touch controls–the game plays exactly the same on iOS. This is a good thing.
As a genre, the action real-time strategy (ARTS), or multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), has a history reaching back to modified RTS game maps for Starcraft and Warcraft. Recently, League of Legends from Riot Games has taken on the mantle as the most well-known game of its type, moving into the lucrative world of eSports, as well.
Zynga may be more known for Farmville and other Facebook games, but the San Francisco games publisher has delivered a much more midcore game than I expected. Developer A Bit Lucky has created a streamlined, compelling take on the ARTS genre, and while the game may not surpass more traditional entries in the field, Solstice Arena still engages players of all levels without sacrificing too much of the strategic depth of the game type.
With all the excitement over the recent release of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7, it’s easy to forget that the Cupertino-based company has another OS in the works, OS X Mavericks Beta. Currently at version 8 of the Developer Preview, or beta, OS X Mavericks continues to quietly update in the background, with more refinements over time.
One of these improvements is the ability to delete tags from the sidebar. As you may recall, we showed you how to add and modify tags to the list in the Finder sidebar, as well as how to drag and drop files to tag them.
It turns out, though, that now you can actually delete tags as well, completing the tag circle of life. Here’s how.
With iOS 7, you are no longer a slave to the constant need to update your apps. John McCain should be totally happy.
With this new automatic update feature, though, it might be nice to see what’s been updated lately. To do that, it’s just a quick trip into the guts of iOS 7. Here’s how.
Friday, we reported that Apple TV was updated with a new v6.0 update, bringing with it features like AirPlay from iCloud and iTunes Radio.
Today, however, Electronista reports that the update has been pulled. We’ve confirmed that the update is no longer available, as our un-updated Apple TV still says it has up to date software today, showing Apple TV software version 5.3.
We assume the update was pulled due to several user reports on the Apple TV discussion forum of Apple TV devices becoming useless after updating to the new OS.
Maybe it’s just me, but I always picture someone yelling at me when I get messages and emails in all capital letters. It might just be a mistake on their end, I suppose, since it’s fairly easy to accidentally hit the Caps Lock when you’re aiming for the Shift key on today’s smaller laptop keyboards.
No worries, though, since it’s pretty easy to actually turn the Caps Lock key off on your Mac. Here’s how.
There are a bunch of video games out on iOS for kids, from educational games to adventure games and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.
We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.
Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of video games on the App Store that they’re playing.
This week, it’s creature-creating, monster-battling Pet Peaves Monsters, from RED Interactive Agency. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter thinks.
