News - page 1233

When camera companies began putting a “record” button on DSLRs, things got really interesting for Rob Whitworth. Is he a photographer or a filmmaker?

The ambiguity about his work description does not matter for anyone who has taken a heart-racing, stomach-dropping ride through his time-lapse videos.

In his latest, Dubai Flow Motion, viewers will feel shot out of a canon for a three-minute hectic but thorough tour of this sparkling Middle East city. Whitworth’s camera will take you up the tallest skyscraper, send you blasting through its floors to see rooms teeming with life and send you crashing into the sea.

You’d think one patent-infringement lawsuit would be enough, but Ryan Seacrest’s iPhone case startup clearly didn’t get the message after its last courtroom tangle with BlackBerry.

The new Typo Keyboard for the iPhone 6 was supposed to have fixed any infringement issues committed by its predecessor, but that is apparently not the case. This week BlackBerry filed another lawsuit against Typo, claiming the case maker “slavishly copied” its keyboard design “down to the smallest detail.”

Eccentric rocker Neil Young has never been swayed by the critics. He has always made the music he wanted.

But he may not be able to be so carefree, as some critics eviscerate his latest musical endeavor – a pricey, Kickstarter-funded digital music player aimed at rescuing music from the MP3 format.

The PonoPlayer, resembling a Toblerone bar in shape and color, was supposed to revolutionize the digital listening experience and with a $400 price tag, not to mention a $6.2 million Kickstarter campaign, expectations were high. Users can download music from the Pono site and listen to high-quality files that restore the quality historically compressed out of digital music.

Turns out, it sounds no better than music on an iPhone, according to several critics who have put the PonoPlayer through its paces.

Apple’s is continuing to make big changes in the friendlier post-Kate Cotton PR era with the announcement today that Chris Breen, the long-time senior editor at Macworld, has been hired by the fruit-flavored tech company.

Breen has worked at both Macworld and MacUser, but is making the change to working at the mothership after decades of covering the company as an Apple journalist.

The Brits surely know how to celebrate Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day, with a lovely meal full of pleasure food, like pancakes. Tuesday, February 17 is this year’s celebration, and we’ve got a tasty video below to celebrate.

The Star Wars UK YouTube channel wishes all of us a happy Pancake Day with this delicious video full of edible Star Wars characters, like Yoda, Boba Fett, a Stormtrooper and Darth Vader. Apparently, these chefs have a soft spot for the Dark Side.

Hit the jump below to see how strong the Force is with these foodie artists as they create delicious snacks for your Pancake Day celebrations.

If you’ve been longing for a cooking show with smart writing, attractive hosts and a ton of sexual innuendo, look no further than The Katering Show, where Aussies Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney smile for the camera while comparing too-expensive German multi-mixers to gangbangs.

“So, ‘What is a Thermomix?’ I hear anyone under the age of 33 ask,” says the perky McLennan. “It’s a blender, a microwave, an ice bucket and a set of kitchen scales. It’s a gangbang of kitchen appliances that’s created a futuristic robot saucepan. It’s the kind of appliance that your rich mother-in-law gives you as a wedding gift because she doesn’t think you can cook. Or something that you buy yourself because you’ve always wanted to join a cult, but you don’t have the energy for the group sex.”

Right? Now you need to watch the funniest cooking show I’ve ever seen, with the episode about making risotto (hot wet rice) in a gadget that looks like (and costs like) it might have come out of Jony Ive’s design shop.

It was only a matter of time before Sparrow flew off into the sunset. The beloved email app’s days were numbered the moment Google bought it in 2012.

Now Sparrow is nowhere to be found in the App Store on both iOS and OS X. What was once an incredibly popular email client among Apple fans is no more.

Apple is no stranger to having competitors copy its style. Samsung, HP, and Xiaomi have all been caught in the act multiple times, but the last company we expected to rip off Apple is Comcast.

For its new cable remote, Comcast has taken a page out of Apple’s playbook by copying the company’s iconic “Designed by Apple in California” tagline. The copy job is so bad, they didn’t even bother to change the font. It looks like the words “Comcast” and “Philadelphia” were basically slapped over Apple’s original tagline after production.

Take a look at the ‘premium’ remote below:

It’s been about six months since iOS 8 came out, and the official Dropbox app has been lacking one major thing: the ability to save files to Dropbox from any app’s share menu.

Today the long-awaited feature is finally available.

You may have never heard of the Aral Sea, even though it was the fourth largest lake in the world as recently as the 1960’s.

The once-gigantic body of water which rests on the border of Uzbekistan has shrunk to less than 10% of its former size over the last half century. It’s been dubbed one of the worst environmental disasters ever, but looking at Apple Maps you’d never even know the Russians drained the mighty lake dry, destroyed its robust fishing industry, and left behind a wasteland of salt, pollution, and toxic dust storms.

Touch ID has completely changed security on the iPhone, and now Apple’s fingerprint-scanning technology could soon be coming to the Mac.

Apple is planning to bring Touch ID to the upcoming 12-inch MacBook Air, according to sources at Taiwanese Apple blog Apple.Club.tw. In the past, the site successfully leaked the iPad Air 2 logic board, the Touch ID sensor and the iPhone 6 Lightning port, so it has a track record for accuracy. The site claims Apple has big plans for Touch ID in 2015 and wants to put it in everything from MacBook Pros to Magic Mice.

The iPhone 6 Plus has a hard time sliding into most pants pockets, but if you’d like to make the iPhone 6 Pinch even more unbearable, Bandai is coming out with a new case that transforms your device into the time machine from Back to the Future.

The DeLorean time machine case brings all the incredible details of Marty McFly’s DMC-12 to your iPhone with moving parts like wheels that switch between hover and street modes. The case doesn’t come with actual time-traveling and levitating features, but Bandai did pack in a couple extra goodies.

Apple may have sold 10 million+ handsets in the first weekend of the iPhone 6 going on sale, but don’t expect those kind of numbers for the Apple Watch.

Despite being eagerly-anticipated by both fans and the press, Apple has reportedly asked its suppliers in Asia to manufacture a total of 5-6 million units of its three Apple Watch models for the device’s upcoming launch in April. Of these, half are expected to be the entry-level Apple Watch Sport model, one third will likely be the mid-level device, and the remaining ones will be the ultra-luxurious models — including the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition.

MacBooks and iPhones have been no strangers on Modern Family but in an upcoming episode, Apple’s mobile devices are also taking over filming duties.

Modern Family plans to be the first major TV show to air an episode shot almost entirely with the iPhone 6, iPad Air 2 and MacBook FaceTime cameras. The episode, titled “Connection Lost,” airs February 25 on ABC, but the sitcom’s creator, Steve Levitan, says filming a TV show with the iPhone was even more difficult than anticipated.

Any way you slice it, the iPhone 6 has been a phenomenal hit for Apple: the kind of record-shattering sales phenomenon that would seem once-in-a-lifetime, were it not for the fact that Apple will probably beat its own record within a couple of years.

As is well known by now, between the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple sold a whopping 10 million units in just the first weekend of its next generation handset: a gigantic increase versus the 5,000,000 units the iPhone 5 sold in its first few days, or the paltry 525,000 that Apple managed to sell of its original iPhone back in 2007.

If you’re like me, these numbers are kind of hard to imagine in real-world sales terms. Fortunately, a new webpage aims to put these figures in context, by breaking down exactly how many handsets Apple sold every second of its iPhone opening weekends.

The Apple Watch might have been four years in the making and the most Jony Ive-centric Apple product yet — but the company didn’t get everything it was wishing for from the device.

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple originally wanted its smartwatch to focus far more prominently on health-related innovations, only to be forced to go in another direction midway through the project.

If Apple had had its way, the Apple Watch would have boasted smart sensors capable of tracking blood pressure, heart rate and even stress levels — but despite hiring top people from the biosensor industry, the technology didn’t work quite as well as had been hoped.

The recent New Yorker profile of Jony Ive revealed how he was the driving force behind the Apple Watch, and how he felt the “the obvious and right place” for wearable tech was the wrist — and not the face, as Google tried with its Google Glass project.

In the same story, Tim Cook offered his dim appraisal of Glass, saying that, “We always thought that glasses were not a smart move, from a point of view that people would not really want to wear them. They were intrusive, instead of pushing technology to the background, as we’ve always believed.”

While the two disses may read like potshots at an Apple rival, a patent published today reveals that — yes — Apple has indeed tried virtual reality goggles, roughly three years before settling on the Apple Watch form factor. Here’s what it came up with.

People are calling The New Yorker profile of Jony Ive the most important thing written about Apple in quite a while, and I’d have to concur.

Not only is it full of fascinating details, it puts Ive at the center of Apple, where he belongs. As the piece’s author, Ian Parker, writes: “More than ever, Ive is the company.”

This is something that’s been true for a couple decades, but still isn’t apparent to most people — even veteran Apple watchers. Such is the company’s secrecy, and the tendency of the public to equate everything Apple does with Steve Jobs, that the true story has yet to be told. Ive has not gotten the credit he deserves.

When you’ve designed some of the most successful consumer electronics in modern history, where else can you look but up?

One of the many interesting tidbits in The New Yorker’s 17,000-word profile of Jony Ive surrounds his fascination with the Apollo space program and, yes, designing spacesuits. It doesn’t sound like the spacesuit itself was what inspired Apple’s top designer as much as the process that went into it.

Ive mentions he’s been watching the old Discovery channel series Moon Machine about the challenges facing the Apollo program. NASA designers had no idea what goals they even needed to meet for the suit, but built up to the final design with invention after invention until they got it right.

An anecdote from The New Yorker’s time in Ive’s hallowed design studio (emphasis added):

Nothing quite solidifies an Apple product’s significance in pop culture like The Onion’s take. America’s satirical publication of note has already decided to give us a glimpse at the rumored Apple car.

The mysterious automotive project that’s reportedly codenamed “Titan” will have the following features:

If there’s one thing today’s New Yorker profile of Jony Ive hammers home, it’s how important the Apple Watch is to Apple’s design guru. The 16,000-word story reveals how Ive pushed the Apple Watch as a project, shortly after Steve Jobs’ death, when Apple was under pressure to come up with its next insanely great idea.

Here’s all the ways

As rumors of an Apple car start to gain speed, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has run the figures to find out what kind of business proposition automobiles could be for a company that tends to steer clear of small or low-margin markets.

His verdict? If Apple cars were even a “moderate success,” Tim Cook and pals could be looking at an extra $50 billion per year in revenues. To put that figure in context, it would be an increase of 23 percent on top of the already impressive cash-generating machine that was Apple in 2015.

Remind us to remortgage our homes to buy AAPL stock!

Computer users of a certain age remember the Commodore 64. Millions brought the future into their homes with this, their first personal computer.

And if you still have a Commodore 64, dust it off and make sure it’s not a Commodore 65. A model with the higher digit sold on eBay Sunday for close to $23,000.

The 64 still holds sales records. It outsold IBM and Apple during the early 1980s, in part because it sold in retail stores and not just electronics or computer stores.

But the 65? It never made into the stores.

In what may be the longest magazine feature yet dedicated to Apple’s industrial design guru, the New Yorker has just published a sprawling 16,000 word profile of Jony Ive — taking readers from his early meetings with Steve Jobs up to the present day.

It’s jam-packed with fascinating tidbits about Ive, his secretive design studio, and Apple’s past and future. While I’d thoroughly recommend reading the whole article, here are the details that really leaped out:

Based on what Steve Wozniak has said in the past, it would be very easy to come to the conclusion that the Apple co-founder is far from excited about the Apple Watch. In an interview with CNNMoney late last year, Woz seemingly dismissed it as a “luxury fitness band,” and said that he had gotten “real negative on smartwatches.”

What a difference a few months makes. In a new interview for the BBC, Wozniak touches on everything from the new Steve Jobs movie, to rumors about an Apple car, to — yes — his thoughts on the Apple Watch.

And if he wasn’t enthusiastic before, he certainly is now!