Some radical Orthodox Christians in Russia are starting to have a hard time with Apple’s logo that decorates every iPhone, iPad and MacBook. These Russian Orthodox believe that the half-bitten logo is anti-Christian and represents the act of original sin committed by Adam and Eve in Garden of Eden when they first bit into an apple from the Tree of Knowledge.
To get past Cupertino’s symbol of evil while still using their products, many radical Orthodox, including priests, have swapped the Apple logo out for the much more “holy” image of the cross, a symbol of Jesus Christ.
To vastly simplify matters, every LCD screen is made up of a bunch of pixels connected to each other with a mesh of tiny little wires. These pixels don’t actually emit light themselves, but simply regulate the color of the light being displayed in that pixel. Behind this mesh is a lamp, and before a pixel can light up on your screen, the light from this lamp needs to shine through this mesh of wires. Because this mesh is so densely packed, though, the lamp needs to shine very, very brightly to get through… and the brighter an LED light shines, the more power it soaks up.
This is why the new iPad needs such a massive battery. The Retina display has over 3 million pixels in in a tiny area, which means the mesh behind the display is even thicker and more densely packed. To compensate, Apple needs to use a very bright light to shine through this extremely dense mesh, which results in worse battery performance over all.
What if there was a way to make the mesh of wires behind every pixel a lot less dense? That’s the idea behind Sharp’s IGZO technology, and the reason why we’ve been excited about it finally coming to Apple products since at least the beginning of the year. Now it looks possible that, with the iPad mini, we could finally get our wish, as Sharp is now announcing that their IGZO tech comes in 7-inch varieties… and they are releasing a tablet to prove it.
It pays to be a madman behind the wheel in Carmageddon.
The violent driving sensation that is Carmageddon makes its debut on iOS today, 15 years after it was first released — and subsequently banned for its twisted mix of automotive killing machines — on Mac and PC. It’s available to download right away from the App Store, and it’s free for today only — so grab it quick.
The iPad mini could be in your local Apple store on November 2.
Invites to Apple’s iPad mini announcement went out yesterday, so it’s time speculation turned its focus to when the much-anticipated device will actually go on sale. One source claims that you’ll be able to pick it up in shops on November 2, with pre-orders starting a week earlier — on October 26 — via the Apple Online Store.
At yesterday’s second U.S. Presidential Debate, President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney were both asked about the iPad, the Mac and the iPhone, specifically in relation to how to get Apple to start manufacturing their products in America again. The two candidates’ answers differed, with Romney opining it was because China “cheated” and Obama saying that “there are some jobs that are not going to come back.”
Sega has turned its hand to vertical jumping games with a brand new title called Sonic Jump that’s coming to the App Store tomorrow. The title looks a lot like Doodle Jump, only it features Sega’s beloved blue hedgehog instead, and rather than being just an endless jumper, you’ll have to beat new and familiar stages in pursuit of the infamous Dr. Eggman.
I’m a borderline weather geek. I don’t just like to know the temperature — both inside and out — I even keep a hydrometer in my home so I can keep tabs on the humidity, cause you know, that’s important.
So naturally, when I found out about the Netatmo Weather Station ($179), I was a little excited. With its indoor and outdoor weather modules, the Netatmo tracks a lot more than just the current temperature. Plus, unlike my crappy $5 hydrometer, it relays all its readings in a unified way, presented beautifully in an iOS app optimized for both my iPhone and iPad.
We got a couple of comments yesterday on our tip about using shared Photo Streams on iOS devices. One of them was how to add new people to a Photo Stream once it’s been created. It’s fairly unintuitive (Apple, are you listening?), so here’s a quick step-by-step on how to do so.
The Microsoft Surface looks really neat. It does all the cool things that a tablet can do, plus you can use the keyboard cover to switch toward more desktop oriented tasks. Now that Microsoft has announced pricing and a release date for the Microsoft Surface, we’re finally getting a clearer picture of whether it can truly compete with the iPad, and we think it’s going to put up a good fight.
For dedicated Windows users, the Surface is a dream machine that’s just as cheap as an iPad with an innovative operating system to match. There aren’t as many apps available for Windows 8 RT as there are for iOS 6, but surely Microsoft is going to be throwing dollar bills at developers over the next few months to get them to port their apps over. Are you thinking about getting a Microsoft Surface, or will you just get an iPad Mini instead?
Could iPad mini demand mean we'll have to wait longer for the next iPad?
DigiTimes has a rather poor track record when it comes to Apple rumors, so it’s always best to take its reports with a healthy heap of salt. The latest claims that Apple has informed its suppliers to prepare for a next-generation iPad in “mid-2013.” The Cupertino company has always launched its latest tablet around March, it is expected next year’s model will come slightly later.
The report also claims that Apple is working to reduce the number of LED backlights in the new model in an effort to simplify its manufacturing process.
Mondaine should have exclusive access to this design.
Apple struck a deal with Swiss railway operator SBB earlier this month that allows the Cupertino company to continue using its iconic railway clock design for the clock app on the iPad. It seems, however, that SBB may not have had the right to license its design to Apple after all.
You see, a clock and watch manufacturer called Mondaine has an exclusive license with SBB that means it should be the only company with the rights to the design. Mondaine says it was “surprised” to hear that SBB had been granted Apple a license, too.
The iPad mini could be in your local Apple store on November 2.
According to the latest round of rumors, Apple will unveil the iPad Mini and a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display on October 23rd. Both aren’t radically new products, they’re just smaller versions of the iPad or 15-inch MacBook Pro.
So which one is more lust worthy? I’ve been using a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro for a few months now and it’s beautiful, but too bulky compared to the 11-inch MacBook Air I had been using for the last year. A smaller MacBook Pro with a Retina display would be perfect. As far as the iPad Mini goes, I don’t play a lot of games on my iPad, and a smaller screen would make it more portable and better for reading in bed. I can’t decide which one I should want more though. What do you think?
Last week I argued that Apple’s ingredients for an ‘iTV’ experience could be simpler than you think. Quoting Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, I suggested that the iPad could be the remote control hub for Apple’s desired TV interface. Imagine swiping through your favorite channel icons on the iPad and having them play live on your living room flatscreen. A TV guide menu designed by Jony Ive would be a dream come true. There’s so much untapped potential.
Cult of Mac reader and user interface designer Adrian Maciburko sent me some great concept designs of how iTV could work with the iPad. Check them out and let everyone know what you think!
There are games, and there are brands, and there are games that become brands. Angry Birds is one of those, and Bad Piggies Best Egg Recipes is the latest iOS Angry product to emerge from studio Rovio. It’s not a game. It’s a cookbook for iPad. Not an ordinary cookbook: this one’s just about eggs.
We constantly share our snapshots from our iPhones to Twitter and Facebook, we send them via e-mail and iMessage, print them from our phones, and even share them to group sites like Picasa and Flickr. It’s a veritable frenzy of photo sharing!
It’s all really amazing and fun, of course, but what about those times we just want to share our photos with a select group of friends or family members? Setting up special lists in Facebook or Flickr can be unintuitive and tricky, so chances are good that it doesn’t happen that often.
Luckily, Apple’s got shared Photo Streams in the new iOS 6, and it’s fairly straightforward to set up. Here’s how.
In some fields, the iPad just isn’t suited to take over from a PC. And that’s cool, because it can still help out. Take pro-level Photoshopping, for example: without actions, multiple windows and keyboard shortcuts, no iPad app is going to be better than PS on OS X. But you can put your tablet net to your Mac and let them work together.
Today’s example: Colorotate, a color editing app for your iPad.
iTrack Solo is a little box which lets you record two inputs directly into your iPad or your Mac. The aluminium unibody box has inputs for a microphone and a guitar, and outputs not only for the iPad but also for your headphones or anything that you can connect to stereo line-out plugs.
Like an app, only without all the pesky local storage requirements.
Dropbox photo-sharing just got a little more handy. Now, if you head over to Dropbox.com in Mobile Safari, you get a fantastic new mobile view which lets you swipe and tap your way through your photos.
The iPhone-Dev Team has updated its popular Redsn0w tool to offer full iOS 6 compatibility, including an official Cydia app. Until now, the iOS 6 jailbreak was strictly for developers, and so Cydia was not installed automatically when jailbreaking an iOS 6 device. Now it’s ready for the public.
The iPhone 5 is way ahead of its siblings when it comes to Geekbench performance.
Geekbench benchmarks for the new iPod touch prove Apple has made lots of improvements to the fifth-generation device, with its dual-core A5 chip making it significantly faster than its predecessor. When compared with iPhone performance, however, the iPod touch is lagging far behind.
Despite the same 800MHz processor, the new iPod touch is still slightly slower then the iPhone 4S, and not even half as fast as the iPhone 5.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a brand new Newsstand publication that’s “loosely about technology,” from Instapaper developer Marco Arment. We also have an awesome new email client that turns items in your inbox into tasks and to-dos, a great little iPhone app for remembering recommendations, the ultimate unarchiver, and more.
The Patagonia MiniMass commuter bag ($69) is my first taste of Patagonia’s gear, and I’ve always wondered if their stuff was worth the hype. The company has a bit of a reputation — perhaps fair, perhas not — as the outdoor industry’s bourgeois player, probably due to generally higher prices than the competition, an innovative design ethic and the use of green materials throughout their line.
But Patagonia has also spawned a fanatical following. I once worked with someone who literally camped outside the company’s Southern California headquarters (it sits literally right aross the road from the beach) in the hopes she’d be hired. She wasn’t, but toting around my tablet in the the fantastic little MiniMass let me grasp why she tried.
The MiniMass is the smallest sibling in Patagonia’s family of courier bags (all of which end in “Mass” — a nod to the Critical Mass bicycle movement). This makes the MiniMass a perfect tablet carrier. And even though it isn’t explicitly to ferry tablets, it excels in the task.
It’s the weekend, and if you’re looking for a cute little romp through the monster-battling arena for some down time, Mo’ Monsters just went live. It’s a free to play game from Rumpus, a development studio out of San Francisco, and it’s fairly typical tap-tap-tap fare, with some cute characters and fun monster capturing mechanics in addition to the standard battling.
As you know, the upcoming media event for Apple’s smaller, thinner, and less expensive tablet, the as-yet-named iPad Air iPad mini, is being widely reported as happening on October 23,2012.
While the invites haven’t gone out yet, we’re seeing a rumor that the event will focus on iBooks, which makes a ton of sense considering that a smaller iPad is in the same market category as a device like the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is kind of like a souped-up eReader, with media consumption its main purpose, at least from Amazon’s perspective.
While this seems like a plausible rumor, I’m not ready to fully embrace it yet.
Take a magazine. Put an iPad behind an advert on a printed page. Behold: moving pictures.
This is one of the latest advertisements from Lexus, and in reality all the paper is doing is acting as a screen, with images projected on to it from behind. Just as huge buildings have become popular film backdrops using projection mapping technology, now simple printed pages are doing the same thing.
