iPad - page 98

The devil is in the details: Tim Cook said that Apple’s commitment to accessibility is so complete that the Cupertino company never looks at the return on investment but considers it “just and right.”

That’s a pretty different picture than the one venerable news org Reuters painted by giving a quick chop to his comments in a piece about blind app users seeking more accessibility from Apple.

The latest iOS 8 beta serves up many minor tweaks that put a friendly, usable face on the major improvements at the heart of the mobile operating system. In today’s video, we take a quick look at iOS 8 beta 3. We’ll show you the latest upgrades to the software to give you an idea what to expect to see on your own device this fall, when Apple releases iOS 8 to the public.

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At the Wall Street Journal‘s D8 conference back in 2010, Steve Jobs predicted that tablets such as the iPad would eventually overtake the personal computer for the majority of people. Five years after he made that prediction, it seems as though it may be set to come true.

According to research firm Gartner, worldwide shipments of tablets will top the PC market by next year — with traditional PCs and laptops shipping a combined 317 million units in the year, while tablet shipments will top 320 million. This year, tablets ship in the region of 256 million, against 308 million PCs.

Has the iPhone done away with the good-old-fashioned celebrity autograph? The answer is a resounding “yes” according to pop singer and professional bitter-ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift. In a new op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Swift writes that:

Most of us couldn’t have been any more excited for the iPhone and iPad. Then again, most of us aren’t the Finnish Prime Minister.

Speaking to Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri, Prime Minister Alexander Stubb has accused Apple’s late-founder Steve Jobs of crushing his country’s job market with two innovations that caught Finland completely off-guard.

“We had two pillars we stood on: one was the IT industry, the other one was the paper industry,” Stubb said — noting that both were affected by the arrival of Apple’s smartphone and tablet combo in the mid-2000s.

iOS 8’s Handoff feature looks totally rad. Imagine starting off a task on your Mac and then being able to continue where you left off on your iPhone or iPad without waiting. Just pick up the device and everything has already synced.

But wait! There’s no need to imagine this, because you can already do it right now, and you don’t even need iCloud. Handoff looks truly useful, and will blur the lines between our devices more than ever before, but let’s take a look at some apps that already work seamlessly between platforms.

Three years after it was released for the iPhone, Facebook has finally brought its Messenger app to the iPad. Like most messaging apps for the iPad, Facebook Messenger features a sidebar of conversation threads with a chat window to the right.

Remember Picturelife? It was one of our top picks for online photo storage when Everpix bit it, and now it has been upgraded to version 3.0. The highlights are a new $15 per month unlimited plan, which is really truly unlimited and can be shared with up to three other family members, plus an all-new, redesigned iOS app.

Things in the online photo world are definitely heating up again. iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite will bring exciting new features for photographers and a recent update to Adobe Creative Cloud gives shutterbugs even more options for editing and storage.

But Picturelife has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve to make it a worthy competitor to the big guns. Here’s why it deserves a shot at becoming your new super-awesome online photo library.

Future Apple devices may be able to dynamically modify user interface elements, security levels, and other types of behavior based on location, according to a new patent application published Thursday.

Referred to as “Location-sensitive security levels and setting profiles based on detected location,” Apple’s application describes a setup in which both the hardware and software of your iPhone, iPad, and whatever other mobile devices Apple releases in future can seamlessly work together to automatically adjust various UI and device behavior settings.

The Los Angeles Unified School District decided to blow its entire $1 billion tech budget on an iPad for every student last year, but after security hacks and supply issues got the program off to a rocky start, the district has decided to adjust course and let on a few challengers.

Officials at the U.S.’s second-largest school district have decided to allow a group of high schools to choose between six devices instead of the iPad, effectively putting distribution of Apple’s tablet on hold district-wide.

As expected, Apple’s website is currently advertising the company’s “Back to School” promotion.

Details about the promotion appeared early today, following a period during which the Apple Online Store was temporarily closed for business. Much like last year, Apple is offering students free gift cards of varying amounts when they purchase a Mac, iPhone, or iPad. A Mac purchase will net customers a $100 Apple Store Gift Card, while iPhone and/or iPad purchases will be rewarded with a $50 gift card.

iPad screenmaker Sharp is allocating a major chunk of its LCD production facilities to Apple — but doesn’t seem all that happy about it.

According to an interview published Monday with Sharp Senior Executive Managing Officer Norikazu Hoshi, the company worries about what it means for the entire output of the Japanese display maker’s Kameyama No. 1 plant to go “to just one company (Apple).”

With Apple’s mobile and desktop platforms growing closer in iOS 8 and Yosemite, I started wondering: Is the laptop inherently better for computing than a tablet, or does it just seem that way because we’re so used to the folding form factor?

Could it be that, if the iPad had launched before the Mac and we’d spent the last 30 years using touchscreens, we would balk at using keyboards, mice and dumb screens to do our computing work? Or, in my time-reversed world, if Apple unveiled the Mac in 2010, would we all cling to our iPads and claim Cupertino was nuts for foisting OS X upon us?

3-D scanning is set to get a whole lot more user-friendly, thanks to a new app from visual technology company Itseez.

Called Itseez3D, the just-launched free iPad app works with the $499 Occipital Structure sensor, which launched on Kickstarter in the fall of 2013 and went on to raise more than $1.2 million. Using the app and sensor, you can scan an object simply by circling it with your iPad — and then send this scan directly to SketchFab, a browser-based 3D design viewer and online portfolio.

There’s nothing more boring than going on a road trip without entertainment for the ride. While the iPad is good for storing all your favorite movies and television shows, when squeezed into your car there’s no convenient way to hold the tablet for hours on end. In today’s video, we review Speck Products’ Showfolio case for the iPad mini, the perfect remedy to this common problem. Simply snap your iPad into the case and hook it onto your car’s headrest: Your mobile movie theater is set to go.

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Not only are we likely to get Touch ID sensors included in all new iPhones and iPads this year — they will also be higher quality, too.

A new report suggests that 2014’s refresh of Touch ID focuses on internal modifications that will make Apple’s fingerprint scanning hardware much more durable.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is supposedly expanding its 8-inch chip plant in order in order to produce Touch ID sensors for the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3.

Custom keyboards are landing on iPhones and iPads this fall after Apple finally decided to give users more options than Jony Ive’s horrible shift key.

We’re still a few months away from finished keyboards being ready for the public, but this morning we got our first taste of using a custom keyboard on iOS 8 thanks to the guys at TouchPal. My fingers still need a lot of training before I’m able to sweep words together faster than an Android user, but the future of iOS keyboards promises to be swift, swipeable and super-simple.

Here’s what it’s like to install and use iOS 8 custom keyboards:

Logitech’s updated Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for iPad Air replaced its predecessor mere months after the original’s launch. The most obvious difference between the two is the flip-out hinge that joins the keyboard to the iPad like a cover to a book, but in reality the two devices are completely different.

Is the new one better? In one way yes. In others? Nope.

I was all set to pull the trigger on Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan, which gives subscribers access to Lightroom and Photoshop as well as Lightroom Mobile for the iPad and iPhone.

After all, it’s just $10 per month, right? (or €12.29/$16.71 in the EU). That’s about what I spend on Rdio, or Dropbox, and I get Lightroom on my frickin’ camera.

But I decided to hold off and see if one huge doozy of a design problem is fixed before my 30-day trial of the service finishes up. This will also give me time to check out the amazing new Adobe Photoshop Mix, which is what Photoshop for iPad should have been all along.

And the little problem that could be a deal-breaker? You’re gonna love it…

Facebook is trying to transform its News Feed into more than just a hotbed of baby pictures and Buzzfeed quizes and its first move is a new side panel to help users discover more timely content.

To make the app more relevant for the way people use tablets, Facebook for iPad is adding a new channel on the right-hand side of your news feed featuring trending topics, videos and tons of game suggestions to try to get users to read more news, watch more videos and play games in the app. And you can bet there will be plenty of ads to compensate.

Sooner rather than later, Google will be tracking your every move.

The Mountain View search colossus already knows whether you have the flu or are interested in dropping a few pounds, thanks to its mining of your search data and Gmail missives.

Thanks to Google’s recent bargain buy of tiny satellite company Skybox Imaging — a purchase that cost Google just $500 million, or 1/38 what Facebook shelled out for WhatsApp — by 2016, Google may be able to predict market-moving factors like consumer spending and oil prices.

That means Google might be able to foretell when you’ll be waiting in line for the latest iPhone.

Scoring a sweet deal on an iPhone directly from Apple is nearly impossible. Luck for us, a bunch of Cupertino’s retail partners aren’t afraid to cut some dinero off its price-tag to try to get you in the store. But which store is best for Apple deals?

To locate the top places to get deals on Apple products, DealNews tracked several years worth of deals for the iPhone, iPad, and 11-inch MacBook Air and discovered that certain retailers offer consistently better deals on one specific product. Many of the big name retailers are great for iPhones deals, but you might be the surprised where to look for the best iPad and MacBook Air bargains.

Here are the best places to score a deal for each Apple product:

Apart from letting you quickly edit and share photos (and always sitting, ready to go, in your pocket), the iPhone camera has one other great feature: It geotags every photo and video you shoot with the place you captured the imagery. You might not care about that now, but in the future when you wonder, “Where did I take that naked self-portrait?” or decide to take a look at your old vacation snaps, you’ll love geotagging.

Hell, half the time I use a map to find a photo — I can usually remember where I was better than when I was.

Lack of geotagging is perhaps the main reason I don’t take my regular camera out as often as I’d like, so I decided to do something about that. I’m using a combination of the iOS GeoTagr app on iPhone and iPad, plus a Fujifilm X100S camera and a Garmin EDGE 500 GPS bike computer.

Let’s take a look.

WWDC came and went without a single breath mentioning the split-screen multitasking mode in iOS 8 that was rumored to be on the way, but iPad users hoping for more productivity features might be in luck after all.

Developer Steve Stroughton Smith says he’s been digging around in the iOS 8 beta files and noticed a new “main-screen-canvas-sizes” option that wasn’t in iOS 7, but will add multi-tasking to the iOS 8 SpringBoard, and it’s more advanced that we hoped for.