Following its launch in the U.S. back in January, CloudOn has finally arrived in the U.K., allowing British users to access Microsoft Office applications on their iPad. The free app lets you view, edit, and create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on your tablet, which can then be saved directly to your Dropbox account.
This weird-looking gadget is a Strap Stylus for iPad, designed for people who require assistive devices to help them use computers.
The Strap Stylus, along with the Mouthstick and Steady Stylus pictured below, all come with soft-touch capacitive tips. They’re the brainchild of Dutch designer Ivo Beckers, who now sells them worldwide on Etsy under the name ShapeDad. (We previously mentioned his conductive paintbrush socks a couple of years ago.)
His company makes a lot of 3D printed stands and supports for iPads, but assistive devices are now an important business line.
A photograph of what is believed to be an iPad 3 logic board with an unreleased Apple “A5X” processor has appeared within a forum post on Chinese site WeiPhone. If the component is genuine, it suggests Apple’s next tablet may not ship with that quad-core A6 processor after all.
Yet another rear panel for Apple’s iPad 3 has surfaced, refueling rumors that claim the third-generation tablet will feature a new camera and a slightly modified design to accommodate its new components.
Are you interested in making iPhone and iPad apps for the App Store? If you’d like to get your feet wet, or at least see what’s involved, Apple has posted a new walkthrough called “Start Developing iOS Apps Today.”
The simple guide takes you through the initial setup and teaches you about basic tools, frameworks, Apple’s design policies, and more. The goal is that you will be able to create an app from scratch and have it ready to debut in the App Store.
Apple’s announcement of Mountain Lion breaks with the past in a few ways including by announcing with out a major Apple event. One of the other changes is the news the Apple is moving OS X to a yearly release cycle like iOS. That may be a great way to introduce new features for consumers, but it’s likely to create problems for organizations that have a large number of Macs.
Schools and colleges are still among the organizations that have large Mac populations and have always been a key market for Apple. A yearly release schedule stands to impact them more than any other type of organization and that impact isn’t likely to be a positive one.
One of the easiest and most effective ways of taking panoramic photos on your iOS device is with 360 Panorama. Unlike other apps that have you moving your device an inch at a time and snapping a number of photos, this one allows you to simply pan around while it snaps the images automatically.
Once complete, 360 Panorama stitches everything together to provide a fantastic 360° image which you can share with the world on Facebook, Twitter, or via email.
Here’s how to take panoramic photos with 360 Panorama.
One of the big new Mountain Lion features is AirPlay Mirroring. This will let you beam your Mac’s desktop, videos and Keynote presentations to any screen connected to the Apple TV. This feature alone will probably sell zillions of Apple TVs into conference rooms the world over. But who wants to wait until OS X 10.8’s summer launch? With a couple of apps, you can use AirPlay on your Mac right now.
What do you do when you’re sitting on a mountain of cash and have a labor condition crisis that has resulted in terrible PR? Give your employees a couple more dollars and hope that satisfies everyone, duh! Apple’s manufacturing partner, Foxconn Technology Group released a statement today that they have raised the wages of their Chinese workers by 16-25% this month. This is the second time wages have risen for Foxconn employees, but the first pay raise still didn’t resolve criticisms over Apple’s labor conditions.
Way back in the mists of 1991, in the dark days when Kevin Costner somehow beat Martin Scorsese for the Best Director Oscar (Dances with Wolves vs. Goodfellas. Seriously?), WinZip was first launched. The frustrating, hard-to-use piece of shareware is still going today, and has just elbowed its way into the iOS App Store. That’s right: WinZip is now available for the iPhone and iPad.
The psychedelic Whale Trail for iOS has been updated with 32 brand new levels and more power-ups. As the lead developer of Whale Trail told us in a recent interview, the popular App Store game now includes a second Challenge Pack called “Baron’s Revenge.” Among other additions, players can now keep progress synced across multiple devices.
The new levels in Whale Trail 1.2 will take you to the dark side. Now that’s what we’re talking about!
Zooka bills itself as a wireless speaker bar for any of your sound-producing gadgets, but one look will tell you the truth: it’s made for iPads and skinny MacBooks. The Zooka is a silicone cylinder which can work alone, but which also has a slot into which you can slide the edge of your favorite Apple device.
It’s light, it’s tough and it’s beautiful to both look at and touch. Is there anything better than bamboo for making an iPad case? Maybe not. And Silva’s bamboo case for the iPad 2 is finally, finally available to buy.
It’s amazing what you see when you look closely at numbers, and super-analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco looks closer than most. Parsing some of Tim Cook’s keynote speech at Goldman Sachs earlier this week, he did some digging came up with the incredible graph you see above.
If you grew up during the 1980s, many of its style tropes will have been burned indelibly into your brain. Shoulder pads, snow-washed jeans, pleated pants, and tacky, tacky poster art, exemplified by selective-colored black and white photos. If you can imagine a monochrome image of a rose, with the petals colored lipstick red, then congratulations: your mind just traveled back to 1985. Now, with Paint FX, your iPad can do the same.
Nowbox is a slick iPad app that allows you to waste spend many hours watching YouTube.
Nowbox was co-founded by Thomas Pun, who worked at Apple for six years, including stints as technical manager for the team responsible for the H.264 encoder technologies that shipped with QuickTime 7 and on the first video iPod.
When Apple announced iMessage for iOS 5 last summer we were excited to finally have a universal messaging app that sought to free our cellphones from the slavery of wireless carrier texting plans. Today with the announcement of Messages for OS X it looks like Apple is serious about creating a messaging service that supplants texting and chat services by providing a one size fits all solution that works well on every screen. The new Messages app is pretty awesome and it’s a needed step forward that finally unifies iChat, iMessage, and Facetime, but it is not without its flaws.
In case you hadn’t already noticed, Apple announced OS X Mountain Lion earlier today, its latest operating system for the Mac which will make its public debut this summer. Mountain Lion will further increase the iOS influence on Apple’s desktop operating system, with the arrival of features like Notification Center, Messages, and Notes.
But for gamers, undoubtedly the most exiting new feature will be Game Center’s arrival on the Mac. With promises of cross-platform multiplayer and the ability to rack up achievements on both your Mac and iOS devices, this is set to create a new bridge between mobile and desktop gaming that will revolutionize cross-platform play.
Knock, Knock!
Who’s there?
Doctor.
Doctor who?
Doctor who owns an iPad, along with 26 percent of my peers.
A good pun it’s not, but the facts are worth my terrible setup: Fully one quarter of European doctors own an iPad, according to a survey of “1,207 practicing physicians in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK.”
Imagine yourself at an Apple keynote event. A special, one-off launch for the newest version of Mac OS X. You see the familiar format: Phil Schiller and a couple of other Apple execs run through the successful sales numbers. Then they announce the new product, and then they work their way through a deck of pitch-perfect keynote slides.
It seems familiar, right? Only now imagine that you are alone. This presentation is for one person: you. This bizarro scenario is just what happened to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber last week when Apple briefed him on Mountain Lion.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook has shared his thoughts on what Mountain Lion means for the future of the Mac, and has hinted Apple may be considering a grand unification of iOS and OS X somewhere down the line.
Earlier this week, Centrify launched an open beta of the company’s DirectControl for Mobile service. The service, which supports managing iPhones, iPads, and Android devices in business and enterprise settings, currently includes a subset of the features typical in other mobile device management (MDM) systems. Centrify, which is known for providing enterprise integration technologies for OS X as well as various Unix and Linux distributions, plans to maintain the current selection of controls as a free solution when the product emerges from beta while adding further management capabilities to a commercially licensed version.
Most MDM solutions are of the bolted-on variety – they run on a dedicated server or cloud offering that can pull information from enterprise systems like Microsoft’s Active Directory but use a separate management interface and data store for management profiles and other information. Centrify’s DirectControl does offer a cloud management system, but it uses Active Directory itself as the primary interface and data store, an approach that has several advantages including a very minimal learning curve for experienced systems administrators.
Never have I felt worse about buying a gadget accessory than I did buying the Speck SmartShell, a flimsy plastic cover for the back of the iPad 2 which Speck somehow summons the stones to sell for $35. Worse, I bought it in Europe, where it goes for €30, or $40. After a few months of use, though, it turns out to be the best iPad “case” I own (and I have rather a lot).
If you think about it, printers are probably the worst-designed gadgets in our homes (unless you own the same awful Samsung Behold as I do). But despite the mythical advance of the paperless office, nobody has been able to kill them off. Until now. A new survey says that the iPad has finally doomed the printer, and is even saving trees.
Oh, man. We’ve seen some dorky iPad accessories in our time, but none has managed to be both embarrassing and stylish at the same time. The GoPad performs this seemingly impossible feat, and adds a little bit of campness at the same time.