News - page 1239

Apple surprised developers with its new programming language, Swift, at WWDC 2014 but it hasn’t taken long for the developer community to get behind what will soon be the replacement for Objective-C.

In the latest programming language popularity rankings from RedMonk, Swift has shot up from the 68th ranked language in Q3 2014, to the 22nd most popular language going into 2015. To put that growth into perspective, Google released its new language Go in 2009, but it just barely cracked the top 20 in this quarter’s rankings.

Here’s the full rankings chart:

It seems like there’s a revolt among a segment of diehard Apple fans every time a new app comes preloaded in iOS. No one likes bloatware, and Apple is usually good about keeping crap out of its software. The main problem is that iOS apps can’t be deleted and phone storage these days is precious.

Yet it turns out that choosing to include iBooks as a stock app in iOS 8 was the best thing Apple’s ever done for its ebooks service.

At 9, Mariah Martin already has a handle on future careers. “Veterinarian, professional figure skater, fashion model and teacher – not all at once.”

For now, she must settle for tech entrepreneur.

The Seattle fourth-grader and her father, Scott, understand learning math for many children is no joyride but they have developed an iOS game app they believe will put kids in the driver seat on a road to mastering the basics.

CarQuiz allows drivers to navigate a track with math equations along the way and a choice of three answers a little further down the road. Once the equation appears, the driver must quickly figure out the answer as three choices appear. With a finger swipe, the driver moves into the lane with the correct answer.

I have no plans to buy a smartwatch at the moment, but when I do, I already know the first command to give it.

I’m going to make my jaw as square as possible, activate the phone for my first call (probably to my wife), and say: “Calling all cars! Calling all cars!”

With Android Wear already here and Apple Watch on the way, we must salute detective Dick Tracy and his his two-way wrist radio.

Comic strip creator Chester Gould first strapped a wrist radio on Dick Tracy in 1946. He upgraded it to a wrist television in the 1960s. Tracy never complained about dropped calls or bandwidth problems.

I’ve written on numerous occasions before about how we’re currently living through a golden age of iOS games, and apparently Apple agrees with me.

According to a new patent application published today, Apple may be investigating the possibility of building in a miniature joystick inside the Home button of future iOS devices.

Read on to find out how it could work.

The AMBER Alert network in your area is about to get more effective.

Social networking giant Facebook announced today that it would be teaming up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to provide AMBER Alerts through its official iOS app, as well as through its official website.

Want to see something neat to start off your day? How about a Siri RSS reader?

RSS readers, as most readers will be aware, are great at aggregating news headlines from a variety of different websites that get updated throughout the day. While they’re useful tools, they’re less than ideal for blind or partially sighted users, however.

With that in mind, one blind Redditor recently announced that they were posting a $1,000 bounty for any developer who could create a jailbreak tweak capable of not only keeping track of RSS feeds, but also getting Siri to read them out loud.

Although high-end smartphones can boast anything up to 4GB RAM these days, the iPhone has been stuck on 1GB ever since the iPhone 5. This hasn’t really been much of a problem, because iOS is so efficient that developers have been able to continue making apps and games superior to most things on Android, while sticking within the 1GB limit.

This may be about to change, however, according to a new report circulating in the Taiwanese media, which suggests that Apple plans to boost up its iPhone to 2GB of LPDDR4 memory for its forthcoming iPhone 6s, which will likely arrive this September.

The tech blogosphere has been buzzing this morning with news that Apple might be ditching Intel after ‘the world’s most accurate Apple analyst’ issued a report predicting iMacs and MacBooks will shun Intel processors for Apple’s own ARM-based solution within the next 1 – 2 years.

The ramifications of Intel getting ditched by the only personal computer line that’s still gaining marketshare would be huge. Intel’s stock has been trading down 1.53% since the news broke this morning, but before you ditch your Intel stock and start dreaming of a fanless ARM-powered MacBook Air, there are two things you need to know that show Kuo is probably wrong.

The curvy roadster with the V-8 engine is the stuff of legend and the muse of copy cats.

The Shelby Cobra turned racing on its head in the 1960s and though so few were ever produced, it became one of the most copied cars in history. Replicas continue to flood the market and a simple search on Ebay will turn up a variety of pricey replica kits.

But there’s one that might have earned a nod of approval from Carroll Shelby had he lived to see it.

For the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Shelby Cobra, a working 3-D printed replica is currently on display at the Detroit Auto Show.

Dillon Markey animates one of the hottest Adult Swim programs on television, Robot Chicken. Better yet, he uses an old Nintendo Power Glove to do it.

The Emmy-winning show consists of short sequences of stop-motion animation using action figures of pop culture characters, like Bill Gates or Shigeru Miyamoto, the famed Nintendo game designer. Funny enough, Markey used his modified Power Glove the first time on that specific scene in Robot Chicken.

Check it out in the video below.

After almost four years of fighting a court case, Apple and three other large tech companies have finally reached a deal to end the class action lawsuit against them for the anti-poaching agreements that established with one another.

I’ve been a huge fan of The Sims franchise since I first laid my hands on the original version back in 2000. Since then, I’ve played every major version, a large number of the expansion packs, and the freemium version for iOS… but never The Sims 4.

That’s because despite having been launched on PC back in September last year, the fourth incarnation of the popular people simulator has yet to make it onto Mac.

Fortunately that’s about to change, since The Sims 4 developers have finally announced that a Mac version of the game is coming next month. Here’s what we know about it so far:

A brilliant white lightning bolt strikes the Eiffel Tower in Paris. In Venice, Italy, a whale splashes joyfully through a street system made up of canals. In New York, an elephant is lifted high into the sky by a mass of colored helium balloons.

These may sound like the most fanciful of cheese dreams, but they are, in fact, the work of a fantastic artist double-act: German-born Robert Jahns and his iPhone.

Using his iPhone to assemble his surreal masterpieces, and then posting the resulting pictures to Instagram under the name nois7, Jahns is taking the art world by storm. And like many contemporary artists, he couldn’t have done it without his trusty Apple device.

Due to its failed relationship with GT Advanced, Apple missed out on releasing the iPhone 6 with the rock hard, all sapphire display that was initially rumored.

But what about the iPhone 6s? It’s still unknown, but an Apple supplier, Desay, has just announced their own smartphone with an “unbreakable” sapphire display.

The whole Bendgate incident prompted Apple to release some details about its own internal stress-testing policies for new iPhones. It’s unlikely that anyone at Cupertino carries out iPhone stress-testing quite to the degree of YouTube user TechRax, however.

Masquerading as a tech channel, Ukrainian YouTuber TechRax is really just using that an excuse to destroy the latest must-have gadgets. This week, he turned his attention to the iPhone 6 — a device that has previously had its endurance tested by him in boiling Coca-Cola, deep snow, under the treads of a tank — and a variety of other scenarios that, frankly, are unlikely to befall your precious smartphone.

In TechRax’s latest “experiment” he sets on the gold iPhone 6 with a DeWalt angle grinder. The results are… well, largely what you’d expect. You can check out the video after the jump.

In their efforts to trigger mass market adoption, most food-tracking apps and tools go out of the way to be nice to you. After all, who wants an app which publicly shames you for gorging on unhealthy food — or choosing a greasy takeout over five sticks of carrot and a crouton?

Try telling that to the creator of CARROT Hunger, an hilarious new smart calorie counter which rewards you for healthy eating — and brutally punishes you for overindulging.

Ericsson’s former CEO has gone on the record as saying his company should have taken the iPhone more seriously when it arrived back in 2007. Today, everyone takes the iPhone seriously — and there are the lawsuits to prove it.

In the latest of these, Apple and Ericsson are suing each other after failing to come to an agreement about the pricing of Ericsson-owned patents used by Apple.

Apple is claiming Ericsson is chasing excessive royalty rates, while Ericsson is holding out for more cash.

And when you’re talking about a handset like the iPhone 6, which sold upwards of 10 million units in its first weekend, who can blame it for trying?

BlackBerry isn’t quite dead yet, but don’t tell that to the person running their Twitter account.

The classic BlackBerry keyboard is great for pounding out 140-character tweets, yet whoever is tweeting from @BlackBerry was spotted using an iPhone to implore the brand’s few faithful remaining fans to keep up with the BlackBerry conversation on Twitter.

Shares of GoPro stock plummeted as much as 15% this afternoon after it was announced that Apple was awarded a patent that could put the wearable camera company in serious trouble.

Apple was granted a series of 34 patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today relating to a camera system that can be mounted to helmets and scuba masks and controlled remotely. That patent specifically mentions weaknesses in GoPro’s system, which has sent investors worrying that Apple is aiming to crush the sports camera giant.

The Macintosh will celebrate its 31st anniversary in 11 more days, and while Apple’s design team has moved on from the tiny all-in-one form factor of the first Macintosh, our friends at Curved decided to bring a facelift to Steve Jobs’ creation that led the PC revolution.

For their futuristic redesign, the Curved team slapped an 11-inch MacBook Air screen into a thin brushed aluminum frame that mimics the original shape of the Macintosh. Instead of running regular OS X, the new Macintosh packs touchscreen controls to go with 128GB of storage and 8 GB of RAM.

Take a look at some of the mockups below to see if you’d like this concept to grace your desktop.

Glitter is the “herpes of the craft world.” Once on you, it doesn’t seem to ever go away.

You might have some moral hang-ups about giving an enemy herpes, but a fast-spreading glitter bomb, while still hostile, seems less malicious and eventually forgivable. Now an Australian startup will be your glitter hitman for a small fee.

The address book is outdated. On the iPhone, while most of my contacts reside in the Contacts app, I rarely go in there. Instead, I connect with people on Facebook, via SnapChat, WhatsApp and more.

Product designer Frank Costa feels the same way, but he went one step further than simply banishing the Contacts app to an unused folder on his Home screen and designed this address book replacement concept, something he calls an Invisible Address Book.

While having a list of phone numbers might be silly, he says, there is benefit to having information about the people we contact frequently in one place.

“Therefore, as a design exercise,” writes Costa on Medium, “I elaborated on a couple of ideas to turn that seemingly static list of people into a slightly more ambitious project.”

The promise of rock-hard abs is still not incentive enough to get many men to the gym. But promise a rock-hard — well, you know — and you might launch a boner-fide exercise craze.

The makers of Private Gym guarantee “100 percent satisfaction” for gents and their partners, thanks to a pelvic fitness program that includes a rather chunky-looking piece of wearable tech.