I ordered a Retina iPad mini (128GB, LTE, silver if you’re asking) barely 30 minutes after I noticed Killian had posted about it. And yes, I have to wait 5–10 days, but so does everyone else. Even those hippies on the West Coast who sleep in ’til noon every day before making their mango smoothies.
Which is to say that I agree with Ed Dale’s smart take on Apple’s weirdly quiet launch of the Retina mini: that it was designed to keep folks happy.
Coffitivity is an app that turns your too-quiet (and frankly pretty creepy) home office into a buzzing coffee shop, only without the jerk who’s hogging the single power outlet all frikkin’ morning after buying one measly coffee. And not even a real coffee. It’s one of those lame-o frappa-latte-chinos or something.
Anyhow, Coffitivity adds a backing track to your office, via a Mac or iOS app.
After the recent Everpix shutdown, I moved all my photos to Flickr. If you read my roundup of Everpix alternatives, you’ll know that Flickr wasn’t my first choice, but it turns out that neither is it my only choice. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Everpix was great because it just sucked in all your photos, whether you kept them in iPhoto, on your iPhone, in a weird beardo folder structure on your Mac, or even if you took all of your photos using Instagram. It was far from perfect, but it was the best. And then it went away.
Coburns might sound like some kind of hippie Portland-based cooperative for growing sideburns aka. “mutton chops” aka. “bugger grips,” but it’s anything but: Coburns are a pair of hardwood kickstands for the iPad, and they mix in two of my favorite ingredients: frikkin’ magnets, and felted wool.
The Slope is similar to the MiStand I reviewed yesterday, only it goes long on style and short on utility. It’s essentially a bent piece of aluminum with sticky pads on each side, and it holds your iPad, hovering, above your desk.
The MiStand looks like the mystery tool you might find at the back of a machine shop, especially in the industrial blue colorway of my test unit. It has a utilitarian angularity, a huge, over-engineered ball joint and it is as sturdy as anything you have in your home. It’s also just about the best iPad desk stand I’ve ever used.
Good news for lovers of extremely light, slim and functional iPad cases: Lioncase’s Folio Shield has been updated to fit the extremely light, slim and functional iPad Air. Regular readers will recall that the Lioncase cases are some of my favorite iPad cases of all.
Before I got lazy and did everything in Snapseed and Instagram, Filterstorm was one of my favorite iOS apps, and now it’s back, bigger, faster and, uh, neuer than before. Developer Tai Shimizu started over and came up with a whole new take on his powerful photo-editing app, which is appropriately called Filterstorm Neue.
If you’ve been hunting for a flawless solution to mirror your gameplay, videos, photos, presentations, and so much more right to your Mac then the application Cult of Mac Deals is currently offering will bring value to your life.
With X-Mirage you can wirelessly mirror your iOS device’s display to your Mac to take advantage of the big screen, and record everything onscreen with one click. This is a simple solution for showing off your iOS devices on a bigger screen. And the price is one that simply can’t beat – just $8.99 for a limited time.
In the past three years, Apple has dared to be dull.
During Apple’s best years, between 2007 and 2010, Apple introduced the first iPhone and the first iPad, two world-changing products that now define the company (and bring in most of its revenue). These products, along with their touch interfaces and apps stores, were a shock to the industry.
That’s great, Apple. But what have you done for me lately?
Here’s one theory about how Apple works: The company finds a horrible content consumption experience. They figure out how the experience can be made wonderful. They work on the products until they’re ready, both from product quality and price perspectives. Then they ship it and spend the next few years refining and perfecting the original vision.
If that oversimplification about how Apple works is accurate, then Apple isn’t really in full control of when its groundbreaking new products ship. They have to wait for technology, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), or for various industries to come around to making a critical mass of content deals.
In the past three years, every Apple announcement has been preceded by speculation and rumor that Apple would at long last announce an iWatch, an iTV set and other products that would signal a radical new product category for Apple. And every announcement ended in disappointment. Every announcement was about refinement of old products, rather than bold launches of new products.
Will Apple ever enter new markets again, including the ones perennially rumored?
I say they will. The fact that they haven’t shipped the long-rumored iWatch or iTV, for example, makes perfect sense from a readiness perspective.
In fact, I think the next three years will be twice as awesome as the iPhone-iPad years, in the sense that Apple will break into four new businesses. Why? Because the technology and content deals will fall into place during this time.
Here’s what I think is going to happen.
I have one of Doxie’s neat candybar-shaped paper scanners, and it’s great for getting through piles of paper. I can scan bills, flyers, photos and even whole books – I ripped all the pages from a beloved but falling-apart cookbook and scanned the pages one at a time to make a PDF.
But for anything less sheet-shaped, it’s useless. And often the next best option – your iPhone’s camera – isn’t much better. You have to focus it, hold it steady, and somehow wedge the pages of your Moleskine notebook open with one hand while lining up your scanning app with the other
That’s the slot that Doxie’s Flip wants to fill. It anything that’s not a big sheet of paper. Although it can kinda do that too.
After Apple announced the iPhone 5s in gold, we felt sure that the latest iPads would be available in the same color, but that wasn’t to be the case. But don’t be disappointed. As long as you have lots of spare cash that you’re itching to spend, you can buy a gold-plated iPad Air or iPad mini from Goldgenie with prices starting at just $1,860.
Last month, Facebook released an update that allowed iPhone users to edit posts and comments and even preview all of their changes. It was a small, but welcome update. Unfortunately, it was also exclusive to the iPhone, but now users of Facebook for iPad can avail themselves of the same trick.
Apple has topped the list of world’s most valuable brands for the third straight year in a row, and is now worth almost twice as much as any other brand on the planet, Forbes reports. The Cupertino company is now valued at $104.3 billion, up 20 percent over last year, which puts it way out in front of Microsoft, Samsung, and even Google.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrJ4LNZrIkM
I’m a genuine believer that even if you have an iPad, there’s room for an e-ink Kindle in your life if you love to read. No one is questioning the design or hardware superiority of the iPad, but the truth is, it’s the distinction between a general use device and a specialized device. An iPad may game, check email, play video, and more, but a Kindle is perfectly suited to the one task it’s meant for — reading books — in a way that the iPad never really can be.
It’s hard for me to really get too bent out of shape about Amazon’s newest ad for the Kindle Paperwhite (a fantastic e-reader), showing users trying to read books on the iPad and Kindle in bright outdoor light. The iPad is criticized for the constant glare bouncing off the screen, while the Kindle is praised for being easy-on-the-eyes.
That’s all true. The iPad kind of sucks at outdoor reading compared to the Kindle. But in the dark, it can do so much more.
The question of whether there exists such a thing as an objectively perfect work of art remains the stuff of artistic scholarship and debates, but one particular artist feels they’ve cracked the question of how to improve a time-honored masterpiece — by adding in a number of Apple products.
If you’re a programmer who needs to learn iOS, a student, someone with a great app idea, or a computer science teacher who wants to add iOS to their skill set then the latest Cult of Mac Deals offering is going to be right up your alley.
With over four hours of video instruction, numerous lab exercises and dozens of code examples, The iPhone and iPad App Development Course gets you ready to create your own iOS Apps for the iPhone, iPad or both. And it’s available for 50% off for a limited time – just $49 – thanks to Cult of Mac Deals.
The genre of tower defense has been fairly represented on iOS over the past several years, with notable entries like Fieldrunners and Kingdom Rush turning in fantastic examples of fixed and variable path classic tower defense gameplay.
iPad-only RoboMouse HD, then, is a new, well-balanced entry to the genre, and while it brings nothing innovative to the table, it’s adorable and provides a solid set of features that make it an essential entry to any tower defense fan’s gaming library.
Getting kids to read 19th century literature is virtually impossible unless you attach a grade to it these days. While I was content with thick tomes of Brönte(s) and Austen in high school, my classmates were quick to avoid most books not written by popular authors within the last 20 years. If only someone made an infinite runner with book passages as the levels so children would have to look at words when playing games!
Stride & Prejudice by No Crusts Interactive is a surprisingly simple yet elegant way to read Pride & Prejudice without abandoning your love of repeatedly tapping your phone. You control the novel’s heroine Elizabeth (Lizzy) Bennet as she leaps daringly from sentence to sentence. Depending on which gameplay mode selected, you can actually read all of Pride & Prejudice at a leisurely pace.
Drawing apps on the iPad are pretty neat, but it always seemed to me that they cleaved to strongly to the limitations of the physical world. Why, for example, should your piece of virtual paper be limited in size and shape like a piece of paper paper? It shouldn’t. And that’s the premise of Sketchology, a vector app with an almost infinite canvas.
Today Twelve South unveiled its new BookBook Travel Journal for the iPad, a leather-bound traveling case that has the vintage look Twelve South is known for. While the outside has the appearance of an old book, the inside of the case allows for storing headphones, cables, and other accessories.
We’re not sure why Google just doesn’t change the name of their Google Search app for iOS, as it does pretty much everything Google Now does on Android, but this new update is pretty fantastic, whatever you want to call it.
Google Search is “now” updated to version 3.1.0, with a whole new set of features, including Notifications, Reminders, new Cards, and a Siri-like Handsfree voice. This last bit lets you command your iPhone to do stuff with the phrase, “OK Google.”
How cool is that?
Thinking about upgrading your old iPad to an iPad Air, or a new iPad mini with Retina display? Well, Target wants to help. The retailer is now offering customers at least $200 in store credit when they trade in any old iPad, including the original model.
While the iPad’s Retina display has traditionally been considered the finest tablet display on the market, that’s no longer the case thanks to Amazon. Its new high-end Kindle Fire HDX has the best tablet display ever tested by DisplayMate expert Dr. Raymond Soneira, “significantly outperforming” the iPad Air’s in several key areas.
In more welcome airport-related news than the reports that Apple’s Maps app steers people the wrong way across Fairbanks Airport taxiway, Apple has released an update (version 1.3.3) of its AirPort Utility — the app which allows you to manage your Wi-Fi base stations, including AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time Capsule, from the comfort of your iOS device.
