News - page 1067

Twitter finally resurrected its Mac app with just about everything its users have been asking for over the past several… well, for a really long time. The update at long last looks much like the Twitter you’re familiar with on your smartphone or desktop browser. It’s complete with highly requested features like GIF support and group direct messages with up to 50 people, plus a dark theme for power users and more.

“Don’t call it a comeback!” Twitter wrote in the update description. “Twitter for Mac is getting the update you’ve been asking for.”

The new Apple TV may soon get some competition from Microsoft, which according to a new rumor is considering making slimmer, cheaper version of the Xbox One console in an effort to beat Apple in the living room.

When you’re counting down the seconds to New Year’s tomorrow night, make sure you’ve got an Apple Watch nearby.

“As a piece of hardware, [Apple Watch is] far more accurate as a timekeeping device than the iPhone,” Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch revealed in a new interview. “With New Year’s coming, those who have the Apple Watch will be the most accurate watch in the room. There will be no question about when New Year’s Eve actually is now.”

We aren’t going to pretend we’re perfect, but that doesn’t mean we have no appreciation for the mistakes of others. They make us feel better about our own glaring flaws, and they also make for some good fodder for “weirdest of 2015” news roundups.

This year, we saw some really impressive corporate blunders as well as some head-slapping moments from Apple fans.

Aside from a few big developers, no-one much likes in-app purchases, which have long been used to ruin mobile gaming on iOS.

However, the parents of 7-year-old Faisall Shugaa probably like them less than most — after their son racked up almost $6,000 in IAP bills, including $2,200 spent in just one hour.

We’ve heard enough at this point to be pretty sure that a 4-inch iPhone 6c is coming, but how will it stack up against the last 4-inch iPhone, the iPhone 5s? Pretty well, according to a new report: You can expect better battery life, better performance and better security!

Smart upgraders know that when a major new version of iOS drops, older devices might want to think twice about updating. That advice isn’t much comfort to people on the iPhone 4s, though, who pulled the trigger on iOS 9, and saw their devices slow down as a result. Now, a class-action lawsuit is targeting Apple on behalf of iPhone 4s owners, arguing that Cupertino essentially crippled their phones with the update.

The iPhone may have fundamentally changed Google’s plans for its Android smartphone platform, but according to Google’s design chief, the iOS homescreen layout — consisting of grids of apps icons — is disappointingly stagnant.

“[The iPhone] crystallised a lot of other things that were kind of stayed even by that point, like the rows of icons, which don’t scale very well,” Matias Duarte, Google’s vice president of design, told Wired. “This idea of a tiny grid that you manually curate starts to feel very heavy and burdensome.”

We’re still waiting for an official decision from European Commission regulators about Apple’s alleged tax avoidance through its Irish subsidiary, but in the meantime the company has agreed to pay €318 million ($347 million) to settle a tax investigation in Italy.

Apple is focused on expanding into new markets, and after its success in China, it seems the next focus is on the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region.

According to analysts at Counterpoint Research, Apple saw its market share in the region climb 3.9 percent in the third quarter of 2015, compared to 2.2 percent during the same period one year earlier. Overall, iPhone shipments grew 133 percent on-year in 2015 to enter the top 5 smartphone brands in the area.

If you haven’t suffered Steve Jobs overload already (and the disappointing box office results for Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs suggests that many people have), Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s controversial feature-length Jobs documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, debuts this Sunday on CNN.

An Atlanta man claims his iPhone 6 Plus caught fire when he was charging it in his home, setting his bed on fire in the process.

“There were sparks and flames,” said David Grimsley. “The whole apartment could have burned down.”

We’ve heard for years that Apple could incorporate OLED displays into next-generation iPhones, but over the past few months, those rumors have ramped up, suggesting that the power-sipping display technology could land as early as the iPhone 7.

Now, a new report buttresses those rumors, saying Apple is close to finalizing a supply agreement with Samsung and LG to give future iPhones OLED displays.

Apple fans obsess over which new features will get added to the iPhone every year, but if the latest concept from designer Martin Hajek ever becomes a reality, the new iPhone will be more notable for the hardware it’s missing.

The iDot concept packs no camera, no internet connection, zero apps and minimal distractions, so you can focus on what’s really important instead of having your soul slowly sucked away by your iPhone screen.

Apple won’t tell you it makes the world’s best computing products. That’s because rhetoric doesn’t have the same power as seeing is believing.

Apple is showcasing the work of some of the more creative users of iMacs, iPads and iPhones in an advertising campaign called “Start Something New.”

‘Tis the season to be jolly — or, if you’re a tech writer hoping to score enough clicks to help pay off the post-Christmas credit card, ’tis the season to label this the worst year for Apple since records began.

From Gizmodo’s restrained “Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked,” to The Verge calling this the year Apple spent in beta, to Bloomberg banging the “lemon of the year” gong for the Apple Watch, pundits aren’t exactly being kind to Cupertino as 2015 draws to a close.

But, you know what? They’re dead wrong. This was the most important year for Apple since 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.

Twitter has hired away Apple’s Director of Worldwide Inclusion & Diversity, Jeffrey Siminoff, who will join the microblogging company as its new VP of Diversity and Inclusion from January.

Pretty much everyone who met or worked with Steve Jobs has some anecdote about Apple’s late CEO that shines a light on an aspect of his personality and/or approach to life.

The latest is Evan Doll, co-founder of news reading app Flipboard, who worked at Apple from 2003 to 2009. In a series of tweets, Doll recalls the time Jobs was asked why Apple didn’t better remunerate its engineers.

Jobs’ response was classic Steve: part obfuscation, part passive-aggressive masterclass, all while subtly (or not-so-subtly) reminding the asker that they were lucky to be at Apple, and that it was their own fault if they weren’t being paid more.

User privacy has been a massive focus for Tim Cook during his time as CEO at Apple, but it’s apparently not an area of much concern for North Korea’s OS X ripoff RedStar OS.

The operating system, which borrows Apple’s “look and feel” but little else, is basically the “wet dream of a surveillance state dictator,” according to security researchers who analyzed RedStar OS.

Johny Srouji may only have been an Apple Senior Vice President for a hot minute, but already he’s reaping the benefits of his new position — courtesy of the festive awarding of restricted stock units currently valued at $9.6 million, plus common stock holdings worth $10.9 million.

It looks like Kris Kringle spent quite a bit of time delivering iPhones and iPads this year. Apple still remains very much in the dominant position for the tech logo people find most under their Christmas trees. The company garnered almost half of the market share — 49.1 percent, to be exact — for device activations this holiday season, far ahead of the usual runner-up, Samsung.

Apple might need to play catch-up on virtual reality in the coming year. Oculus, Samsung and Sony are already promoting their own brand of VR headsets and technologies.

Virtual reality is the next big thing. As such, we undoubtedly will see a ton of it at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show. But one analyst already jumped in with his predictions about Cupertino’s chances for another hit product in the VR space.

Verizon Wireless is just about matching the deal other carriers have offered for a while to entice customers on other networks. It’s essentially offering to buy you out of your contract with up to $650 per line, less the trade-in value of your current device. But Verizon also has a few extra bonuses to brag about.

iOS 9 finally brought split-screen views to the iPad, but it’s still not nearly as useful as the windowed multitasking views you get on a Mac. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has come up with a much better solution with a new proof-of-concept called iOS window management that would bring the joy of working in a windows environment to the iPad.

Apple already has the foundation built thanks to UIKit. It only took Troughton-Smith 500 lines of code to build the concept with the UIWindow subclass, allowing individual app screens to be resized an overlaid on top of each other.

Check out the concept video:

Just when you thought it was hard to achieve a first in flight in this day and age, a city near Las Vegas has broken ground on what is believed to be the first commercial drone airport.

The Aerodrome, a non-profit in unmanned aircraft education, has partnered with Boulder City, Nevada to develop the droneport. The 50-acre site about 28 miles from the Las Vegas Strip is already partially operational but won’t be complete until 2018.