iPad - page 129

Pan Am, a U.S icon that died in 1991, thankfully before it’s name could be ConCatenAted into PanAm, and not before some clever entrepreneur with an eye to the future squirreled away dome of the planes’ old life rafts.

Fast forward to today, when those rafts are being chopped up and made into cases for another American icon: the iPad. For just $20, you can wrap the back of your tablet in a strip of – uh, whatever life rafts were made of in the 70s.

I have been using one on my iPad mini for the last week or two. It’s fantastic, but I had to administer some tough love to get it onto shape.

The iPad is pretty great for photographers, but in typical Apple fashion, if you want to really use the device then you keep knocking up against crazy and annoying limits. The most obvious of these is probably the whole iPhoto/iPhoto problem: two apps, for Mac an iOS, that share a name but little else. They certainly don’t share their photos.

So what would I like to see fixed in iOS7? Here’s a list, complete with some suggestions for making things better

Jason Citron is a veteran of both the console and gaming space, involved with developing Double Fine’s Brutal Legend in 2006, and then releasing one of the first hit iOS games in the early, heady days of the iOS App store, a match-three puzzle game with a twist, Aurora Feint. Soon after, he created OpenFeint, which was the de facto leaderboard and multiplayer matching system for Apple mobile devices long before Game Center.

After OpenFeint was sold to Japanese social-gaming company, GREE, in April of 2011, Jason headed out to engage his passion for video game development once again with a new company, Hammer & Chisel, and a new game, announced today, called Fates Forever, an iPad-only massively online battle arena (MOBA) game.

Citron took some time out of a busy schedule to talk to Cult of Mac about the new game, it’s mechanics and business strategy, and his own take on what iPad games should be.

Mail Pilot, the email client that was born on Kickstarter and first hit iOS back in April, is coming to the Mac. We don’t have a release for it yet, but if you’re itching to get your hands on it, you can sign up for the public beta today. 

Logitech has today announced that it is acquiring TT Design Labs, a two-person startup responsible for the TidyTilt cover for iPhone. The deal will make Logitech the owner of TT’s assets, and the accessory giant has already made the TidyTilt available to pre-order.

Google’s YouTube apps for Android and iOS have helped the company triple advertising sales on mobile in the past six months, the company has said. Mobile ads now contribute an estimated $350 million to YouTube’s revenue, with around a quarter of the site’s 1 billion users accessing videos on smartphones and tablets.

I use a lot of different devices — I’m always switching smartphones — so I store all my photos in Dropbox so that I can get at them no matter which platform I happen to be using. But it’s not always easy to get all the photos I’ve imported into iPhoto into the cloud. At least not yet.

But that’s about to change. In the latest Dropbox for Mac beta, you can finally import your iPhoto library.

Kindgom Rush has been one of our favorite tower defense games for the past two years, so we’re really excited to hear that Ironhide Game Studio just released the sequel, titled ‘Kingdom Rush Frontiers.’

The new game features all new levels as you defend your lands in the deserts, jungles, and even the underworld. You get some new customizable abilities along with a host of new bad guys and nine legendary heres.

We got the full release notes after the break, but if you’re already eager, you can pick up Kingdom Rush Frontiers in the App Store for $4.99.

Game Features:

According to Russel Grandinetti, vice president for Kindle content at Amazon, publishers involved with the e-book anti-trust federal case told the Seattle-based retailer that unless Amazon agreed to their terms, it would have been barred from releasing e-books on the same day as print on Kindle, the wildly popular e-reader device that Amazon sells.

Grandinetti testified today that this ultimatum to switch to an agency model of publishing, in which the publishers set book pricing, came after the publishing houses made deals with Apple for their then new iBooks e-book service on the iPad.

This just in: your iPhone (and iPad or iPod touch) is a marvel of engineering and does some amazing things, keeping you connected to the rest of the world with its super amazing technology. All that connectivity, though, can come with a price.

Push services are there to let you know when you have stuff to do, or emails to check. It’s pretty handy. However, when you need to conserve your battery, it’s probably time to turn them off. Here’s how, straight from Apple.

A hacked carrier update that has the potential to deliver improved data speeds is now available to iPhone 5 users on Sprint. The modified update, which has previously been made available to devices on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, does not require a jailbroken device — just a Mac or PC with iTunes.

Apple is expected to refresh its iPad lineup this fall, but its next-generation tablets may not arrive together. According to supply chain sources in Taiwan, the fifth-generation iPad will enter production as early as next month in time for a launch during the third quarter, but we might have to wait longer for a new iPad mini.

Every once in a while an app comes along that looks – at first glance – to be just like every other app in its category. Then, when you take it for a spin, it blows you away. Tayasui Sketches is such an app. It’s a painting and drawing app for the iPad, and it does just what you’d expect: multiple brushes, colors and a few control gestures. But when you use it the slick feel, high level of polish and great results will win you over.

Remember when it seemed like some special future high-tech magic to edit video in the web-browser? Now it’s almost as mundane as composing an e-mail inside Safari. But Pics.io is about to let you edit RAW photos in the browser. The site is currently in private alpha testing, but the promise is of fast online RAW editing on your iPad.

The iOS developer behind Home Remind has published a blog post about the Facebook apps for iPhone, iPad and Facebook Messenger. He says that according to his testing, the Facebook apps consume way more CPU time than is strictly necessary. Excessive CPU time can lead to battery drain.

The developer used Apple’s own Mac-based app, Instruments, to look at what was running on his iPhone, and found that his Facebook app was activating, doing something for ten seconds, then going back to sleep. It did this all day long during his test. He tested the Messenger app and the Facebook iPad app, and found the same pattern.

If that’s the case, the Facebook app is never truly going to sleep and then terminating like a good app. As a result, it’s using up CPU time, and a lot of your battery.

Battery life, it’s the bane of every iPhone user’s existence, right? It’s hard to tell, really, reading the internet, which specific steps to take to make sure your battery is working at its most efficient, giving you the longest life without compromising performance.

One of the most misunderstood areas of managing battery life may just be the brightness settings. Here’s what Apple has to say about it.

WordPress just released a new update for its iOS app that is sure to make WordPress bloggers happy. The new app features a overhauled UI that makes it easier and faster to blog from your iPhone than before.

The new update ditches the single pane view for a multi-pane view that users can swipe between to access different areas of the app (kind of like the Facebook and Rdio apps). WordPress also added a shortcut to the sidebar to make posting faster, there are also new translations for Russian, Danish, and Korean, improved Tumblr importing, and bug fixes.

Here are the full release notes:

PopCap has today confirmed the release date for the much-anticipated Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time, which will be exclusive to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The company has also released an awesome new launch trailer that teases some of the new plants and new worlds.

Asus has today announced its latest Transformer Pad Infinity slate at Computex 2013 in Taipei, and boy is it a beast. Not only does it carry NVIDIA’s latest Tegra 4 processor — which has a 72-core GeForce GPU — but it also has a 10.1-inch display with the same 2560×1600 resolution as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.

That’s a whopping 299 pixels-per-inch.

Evernote is a fantastically useful service, with clients for the web, Mac, PC, and iOS. The iOS version is as full featured as the desktop version, a rarity these days, and really makes Evernote my go-to app for keeping track of stuff of all kinds.

Here, then, are four fantastic tips and tricks to get the most out of the Evernote app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Circumstantial evidence may suggest that Apple has acquired the predictive search app Grokr. And if they haven’t done, they should do.

Grokr has been called the “Google Now for iOS.”

With Grokr’s predictive search capability and Siri’s natural language capability combined into a single feature could put Apple in the overall lead in the crucial area of virtual assistant technology.

Here’s why Apple needs to buy Grokr (and why I think they already did).

Want to give your Apple TV more power? Want to open a whole new world of capabilities? Then aTV Flash from FireCore is the solution!

This hugely popular software package gives you a ton of functionality that will make your Apple TV more powerful than you could imagine. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $19.99 for a limited time.

We already have a pretty good idea of what the fifth-generation iPad will look like, thanks to the many rumors and leaked parts that we’ve seen in recent months. And the latest, a purported front panel with a new design, reinforces those expectations.

If you use Google’s maps app on your iPad, you’ll know that it kinda sucks. Search is great, and the fancy maps look ok, but the UI elements are comically big when blown up to fit the iPad screen, and they cover most of what you really want to see – the maps. And Street View isn’t much better.

Enter Streets 2.0, an update to – you guessed it – Streets, which brings Googles vector map tiles and live traffic as well as big-screen Street View.

Apple has increased the prices for the iPad mini, iPad, and iPod touch in the online Apple Store in Japan.

According to Reuters, the Japanese yen continues to weaken after a devaluation across the past several months, which could be the reason for the price increase.