Looks like Instagram’s billion dollar deal with the devil didn’t land it in hot enough water after all. Following widespread concerns regarding Instagram’s future from what was apparently a vocal minority, the popular photography app has soared to the top of the App Store.
For the first time in the app’s 16 months on the App Store, Instagram reigns as the most popular free app for the iPhone. Take that, haters.
A new jailbreak tweak called Stride brings better-than-Android-like gestures to your iOS lock screen. Developed by talented App Store and jailbreak developer Adam Bell, Stride costs $3 in Cydia. Gone are the boring days of the ‘slide to unlock’ bar. Now you can unlock your jailbroken iPhone with a pre-set gesture of your choice! And boy does it look sweet.
Whispers have been circulating for months about Apple releasing a larger iPhone later this year. Since the original iPhone launch, Apple has kept the iPhone’s essential dimensions intact, and we still have the same 3.5-inch display size Steve Jobs demoed at Macworld in 2007. While the rest of the smartphone industry has been experimenting with all kinds of crazy screen sizes and aspect ratios, Apple has stuck with a simple 3:2 aspect ratio and 3.5 inches.
There have been plenty of arguments made for why Apple will release a 4-inch iPhone in the future, but one smart forum user has put together an argument that trumps the rest.
2012 hasn’t been shaping up to be a good year for RIM. The company has already lost some major enterprise customers, developers have publicly announced they’re shuttering BlackBerry support, and the new iPad sales beat the total number of BlackBerry PlayBook shipments three times over in one weekend.
The one bright moment, if you can call it that, came during the company’s recent quarterly financials call when RIM’s newly minted CEO Thorsten Heins told investors that his first action on the job was to seriously evaluate RIM’s business. After months of delusional pep talks, his very sober assessment was like a burst of lucid thinking. Unfortunately, the company’s executives seem to be covering that lucid moment with more of the delusional spin that’s become typical of RIM
The latest bout of RIM denying its situation involve comments by executives on the state of the BlackBerry in government.
This is the iPhone Shutter Grip. Can you guess what it does? That’s right: It adds a handgrip and a shutter release to your iPhone, letting you snap pictures one handed, and generally take photos without dropping the iPhone.
It even has a built-in tripod mount, and a secret second button.
AT&T finally began unlocking iPhones for customers whose contracts had now expired over the weekend, allowing the device to be used with other SIM-cards from GSM carriers. But for deployed military personnel, the carrier will unlock iPhones still tied to a contract so that they can be used with others carriers abroad.
So you decided to quit Instagram. You already exported your photos with Instaport, but is that enough to stop the Evil Empire from mining your account for yet more information to sell to advertisers?*
What you need to do, my friend, is delete your Instagram account entirely. Luckily, it’s pretty easy, an almost one-click process — unlike quitting Facebook itself, which is all but impossible.
What. A. Day. The single most important mobile app acquisition to date has sent the internet into a flurry of disarray. In case you haven’t heard from everyone except your aged grandmother, Facebook has bought Instagram for a mouth-dropping $1 billion.
There will be (and already have been) thousands of articles written on the internet about this news today, and for good reason — it deserves discussion. But what exactly does this all mean for our beloved Instagram?
There’s nothing worse then prepping your app for launch and then finding out you missed one crucial step to ensure it looked solid across all platforms. Keep in mind that just because you’ve “built” a mobile app, that doesn’t mean it is going to be ready for market. Without testing, your app’s not going to cut it. Not in the least.
This is why we’ve got a video course put together by Robert V. Binder that will teach you ways to test out your software to make sure it’s ready for your audience. The great part? This video course is applicable for Android, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Windows Mobile, Palm OS and mobile apps using HTML5. So you’re covered on all fronts. And no background in programming or software testing is required.
The even greater part? It’s available from Cult of Mac Deals for only $49 — a savings of $80 off the regular price!
Banjo is an iPhone app that aggregates pretty much all of your social networks’ data in one place. And a new update has just added Instagram, making it pretty much the most comprehensive option yet. There is a problem, however: While the app itself is dead easy to set up, and even works with iOS 5’s own Twitter integration, it is a complete mess in use.
On Friday AT&T made an announcement that surprised many of us who had given up waiting: customers with an out-of-contract iPhone can unlock it to work with any other GSM SIM — like from T-Mobile. Now the official unlock is here, and the process is actually pretty simple.
Before you attempt to unlock you need to make sure your account isn’t in a longterm contract, your iPhone isn’t on a contract, and that your account is in good standing with AT&T. After that, the process is pretty straightforward.
Apple is expected to announce its new iPhone later this year, most likely sometime this fall. Some expect it to be a drastic redesign compared to the iPhone 4/4S, with a larger screen and new unibody design.
Analyst Brian White from Topeka Capital Markets has dropped a note this morning, confirming these reports based upon a recent trip to China and saying that the iPhone 5 will be “the most significant iPhone upgrade” yet. He also expects that with the excitement it will bring, the iPhone 5 will push Apple’s stock to a crazy price $1,001 per-share by year’s end.
If you have already paid $6,000 for a new Nikon D4, you are either rich enough not to care that adding Wi-Fi costs another $900, or your bank account is now so wiped out that you can’t even afford to charge the battery. If you fall into either camp, though, you might still want to try out his great DIY project which adds Wi-Fi to your supercamera for just $30.
Papermill launched on Android several weeks ago. Developed by Ryan Bateman and designed with the help of Matt Legaspi, the app is a beautiful Instapaper client for Android devices. Papermill received high praise from the community and widespread media coverage when it launched, and the developer has since broken down its success based on sales. The conclusions he draws about Android users in general are particularly interesting.
Bateman says that, “Android users not being willing to pay for an apps whose focus is quality and whose price reflects this.” Is this true only for the average Android user, or should the average iPhone user be considered as well? How can one make the blanket argument that people don’t want to pay for quality apps? I think it comes down to the basic issue of supply and demand.
As a Mac user, I’ve always been a fan of Activity Monitor. It keeps track of RAM and hard disk memory, CPU and Disk usage, and Network activity. It’s a handy app to have, on my Mac.
But what about the iPhone? Doesn’t it deserve some sort of activity monitor of it’s own? Well, todays’ tip offers one such app, called Activity Monitor Touch.
Those of you who have purchased your iPhone off-contract, aka for the full price, will be happy to hear that AT&T will begin unlocking iPhones at customers’ request this Sunday. Carrier unlocking will allow customers “in good standing” to switch out the AT&T SIM for a SIM on another network, as long as the bands are supported. This is great for customers who want to travel with their AT&T iPhone internationally.
One of the mobile news items this week was the discovery by developer Gareth Wright of a vulnerability in the Facebook apps for both iOS and Android. At issue in the iOS version of the Facebook app is the fact that a user’s login data is stored in a clear text .plist file. Copying that file to another device will allow full access to a person’s Facebook account.
Facebook was quick to point out that this file could only be copied directly from an iOS device if the device had previously been jailbroken. Wright responded by saying that the portion of the iOS file system where the data is located can be accessed by connecting any iOS device (jailbroken or not) to a Mac or PC running iTunes and creating a backup. With the right tools, its fairly easy to search an iOS device backup or even the filesystem on a connected device.
This brings up an important issue for businesses deploying iOS devices or operating a BYOD program – iOS backups made through iTunes can be an attack vector to retrieve business data.
Five people in southern China have been charged with intentional injury after a Chinese teenager sold his kidney to purchase an iPhone and an iPad last April. The group includes the surgeon who removed the kidney from the 17-year-old, who now suffers from renal deficiency.
After the FLA found wide scale violations at Apple’s main manufacturing plant, Foxconn, both Foxconn and Apple promised to fix the issues by 2013. Issues that were found include the amount of overtime worked, compensation workers receive for their overtime, and numerous health and safety risks. In what looks to be the first of changes, Foxconn and Apple will be raising workers’ wages in July.
MyWi is widely regarded as one of the best jailbreak utilities for the iPhone, allowing users to turn their smartphone into a Wi-Fi hotspot and share its data connection with other devices without paying additional carrier charges. Its latest 5.5 update brings iOS 5 compatibility (finally!), faster speeds, Wi-Fi sharing, and more.
One disadvantage of using an iPhone or iPad as a camera is that you’re stuck with a single, fixed focal-length lens. Optical zoom can work only so far before even Instagram photos start to look bad, and phones with built in optical zooms tend to resemble actual cameras.
The solution? Add-on lenses. Today, we’ll take a look at Photojojo’s four-in-one set of fisheye, macro, wide angle and telephoto lenses. These accessory lenses stick magnetically over the iDevice’s camera, changing the point of view.
If you’re looking to create some smashing iOS apps and want to get all the goods delivered to you in one comprehensive course, we’ve got a Cult of Mac Deals offer that more than fits the bill…but time is running out!
This is the most comprehensive iOS app development course we’ve ever seen, containing over 66 lectures and 11 hours of content. To get this kind of training in a live setting would cost you upwards of $3000 – but Cult of Mac Deals is bringing it to you in an on-demand capacity for only $89!
Richard Gray teaches what may be the UK’s first college-level iPhone photography class.
Gray, a street photographer whose work you can check out under the handle “rugfoot” on Twitter, Flickr and Instagram, just wrapped up the first course in iPhoneography at the photography department of Kensington & Chelsea College in London; the next two sessions of the five-week course start April 26 and May 31.
He shared with Cult of Mac the required app downloads for the class and the four most common mistakes iPhone photo students make.
Marine authorities estimate that there are only 350 to 550 whales left in the world, making the mammal an endangered species. Those that are left are at risk of being killed by deadly collisions with ships, but conservationists are hoping Apple’s iOS devices can help save the species from extinction.
Ticket to Ride has become one of the most popular board games adapted for iOS devices, selling 800,000 copies and picking up a whole host of accolades since its debut back in November 2011. It has now made the leap from iOS to the Mac and is available to purchase from the Mac App Store from today.