From answering trolls online to busting out near-fluent Mandarin in front of a surprised audience, Mark Zuckerberg’s all about defying expectations these days. That trend continued yesterday, as he gave a reasonable (and even Steve Jobsian) answer about why Facebook moved messaging out of its main app and into a standalone Messenger one.
Telling the audience at his first public Q&A that, “I’m grateful for hard questions” and “it keeps us honest,” Zuck noted how:
My math-averse daughter wanted to cheat on her algebra homework. So we downloaded PhotoMath, a free app that lets you take a picture of your mathematical and algebraic equations, solving them for you and showing the steps to the solution.
PhotoMath has been at the top of the App Store charts for a couple of weeks, hitting number one on the Education, Kids Games and Top Apps lists. Small wonder, as it seems like a great way to get out of doing homework.
However, despite the concerns of some parents and teachers, apps like PhotoMath just won’t help when it comes to cheating — they’re far too limited. Still, it’s a promising technology that, once it matures, might actually turn into the type of wonder tool for education we’ve long been promised, turning our iOS devices into useful educational tools that will help kids actually learn math, rather than simply giving them a shortcut to homework answers.
Today Apple quietly added a new feature to the developer beta version of iCloud.com. Photos can now be uploaded directly from the browser to a user’s iCloud Photo Library, which was introduced with iOS 8.1.
Since Apple isn’t releasing its new Photos app for OS X until next year, this could very well be the only way to upload photos to iCloud from a desktop for months.
Today’s good news: a new Toy Story movie.
Pixar just announced that it’s releasing the fourth installment of Toy Story in June 2017. The movie will be directed by John Lasseter, the legend who directed the first two movies and currently serves as Chief Creative Officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Toy Story 3 came out in 2010 and earned nearly $1.1 billion worldwide at the box office. No plot or character details about Toy Story 4 have been revealed yet.
Via: Variety
iOS 8 has been technically jailbroken since October 22, but it’s taken weeks to get it polished enough for Cydia, the jailbreak alternative to the App Store.
Now that things are “stable enough,” Cydia creator Jay Freeman has flipped the switch to start allowing the sale of iOS 8 tweaks and themes.
Today CBS News added a new channel to the Apple TV. The network’s CBSN channel is the first of its kind to offer live, anchored coverage without a cable subscription.
CBS is now seriously competing with Fox, ABC, CNBC and other competitors on the Apple TV with a mix of streaming news and on-demand content.
In this new, three-minute-long trailer, Warner Bros. teases us with the epic conclusion to Peter Jackson’s Hobbit film trilogy.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will complete the story of Bilbo Baggins’ journey with Thorin Oakenshield and his company of dwarves as they reclaim the wealth of their homeland. But the heroes also must deal with Smaug (that pesky dragon they unleashed in the last movie) and take care of that badass orc that’s been following them from the get-go.
Check out the full trailer below.
Principal photography has wrapped for the much-anticipated Star Wars Episode VII, and to celebrate the crew has revealed the movie’s official title: Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Aaron Sorkin was tapped by Sony to write the ultimate Steve Jobs movie, but the Oscar winning screenwriter says despite tons of other movies and books written about Jobs, Hollywood could make 10 more Steve Jobs movies and they’d all be worth watching.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Sorkin discussed his relationship with the Apple co-founder, revealing that Steve actually tried to recruit Sorkin to help write a Pixar movie, and another time Steve hooked him up with an pre-released MacBook Pro because Sorkin told the media he’s written everything on a Mac.
Sorkin says he and Steve only talked three times, one of which was to help him fix a couple typos in his famous Stanford commencement speech from 2005, but Sorkin says the message and the words were 100% Steve.
Watch the full interview below:
Microsoft announced new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are coming to the iPhone today, giving users more tools to create and edit documents, so you can finally get some ‘real work’ done on that giant iPhone 6 Plus screen.
The new Office apps for iPhone are pretty much exactly like the iPad versions which were released in March, only they’ve been optimized for portrait mode, and unlike the old Microsoft Office Mobile app for iPhone, users will finally be able to do a whole lot more than just edit text.
In an interesting Wall Street Journal profile of Beats founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, the two music industry vets and current Apple employees describe their new $70m undergraduate academy at the University of Southern California as a training ground for future Apple and Beats employees.
“We wanted to build a school that we feel is what the entertainment industry needs right now,” Iovine is quoted as saying. “There’s a new kid in town, and he’s brought up on an iPad from one and a half years old. But the problem with some of the companies up north [in Silicon Valley] is that they really are culturally inept.”
“I’ve been shocked at the different species in Northern and Southern California—we don’t even speak the same language. The kid who’s going to have an advantage in the entertainment industry today is the kid who speaks both languages: technology and liberal arts. That’s what this school is about.”
From Klingon to GIF-based keyboards, we’re seeing some really interesting examples of new third-party keyboards with iOS 8.
Here’s a particularly exciting one, though: a keyboard which translates messages into other languages as you type. It does the opposite, too, which means that if you receive a text message in say, French, it can instantly translate it into English, or your choice of language. Neat, right?
Like many movie fans out there I couldn’t be more excited about the release of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a spectacular-looking space epic from one of the greatest filmmakers working today. While I’m not going to get to see it until this weekend, its release gave me reason to revisit some of the best movie space epics in history — and dwell on a few of the worst, too.
Are you ready for a guide to both the best and worst the galaxy has to offer? Check out our picks after the hyper jump:
A CNN political commentator has hit back at reports that he was using an iPad on air, instead of the Microsoft Surface he was supposed to be using.
The gaffe occurred during the coverage for the 2014 Mid-Term elections, when it was revealed that CNN Anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper and others were furiously, err, tapping away at iPads behind the sold wall of Surface Pro 3s that Microsoft had issued the network.
Tapper doesn’t deny that he was using an iPad, but argues that he was just using it for tweeting, while happily using his Microsoft tablet for everything else.
“I liked [the Surface] fine, I just wanted to keep the screen up with exit polls,” Tapper argued on Twitter, branding the online response “idiotic” and a “false meme.”
The public release of OS X Yosemite rolled out three weeks ago, and since then Apple has been gradually bringing all of its own services in line with the look and feel of its new operating system.
Having previously tweaked the iTunes Store and its iWork suite, Apple is now updating the Mac App Store, adding the thinner fonts, simple white backdrop and gray separators synonymous with Yosemite.
As of now, only some tabs feature the newer design, while not everyone is seeing the redesign. Some users have reported not seeing it at all, others are seeing it intermittently, and yet others permanently. You can launch the Mac App Store from Yosemite to see if you currently reflect the update.
AppleCare has started to rollout to enterprise, thanks to Cupertino’s new strategic partnership with IBM.
(Updated with Apple statement below.)
A new class of malware targeted at OS X and iOS is spreading like wildfire in China, according to new research by Palo Alto Networks. Dubbed WireLurker, the trojan hides itself in apps distributed through a third-party Chinese app store for OS X and side-loads itself onto iOS devices via USB.
What sets WireLurker apart from other malware is that it is capable of infecting non-jailbroken iOS devices, and it heralds “a new era in malware attacking Apple’s desktop and mobile platforms.”
MXC has been in full damage control mode ever since its partners began blocking Apple Pay at stores, and while the consortium behind CurrentC claims there aren’t any fees for supporting Apple Pay, its partners should think twice before defecting.
In an interview with The Verge, MXC CEO Dekkers Davidson revealed what happens to stores that ignore the Apple Pay ban, stating merchants have to ultimately make the best decision for their businesses, but there are consequences for breaking ranks.
Chances are you protect your iPhone with a case. Probably your MacBook too. But what about your MagSafe power adapter?
It’s safe to say that the little white power brick that comes with Apple laptops isn’t the best design. In fact, it’s badly flawed — the cables are subject to fraying. It’s been a problem for a long time: Apple has settled lawsuits, posted long support documents and currently offers a free replacement program.
What to do? Leon Spencer, an inventor from Atlanta, Georgia, has the answer. Put your power adapter in a special protective case.
The thing about robots in science fiction, especially recently, is that they’re often portrayed as living in a clean, distant future.
The brilliance of Neill Blomkamp is his gritty, dirty, realistic portrayal of the future, and he’s bringing us a new robot to live there, named Chappie.
Chappie, motion captured by Blomkamp favorite Sharlto Copley, is a gifted young robot, an artistic and emotional prodigy. In the trailer below, you can see how much of the real world Blomkamp sets around Chappie: He-Man on the television, a wristwatch on the main propellerhead kid that befriends the robot, and a variety of militaristic types trying to blow up the special kid.
Check it out.
Microsoft proudly announced last month that it would be paying CNN to use its Surface tablets for the historic Mid-Term 2014 coverage, but when it came time to actually use Microsoft’s tablet last night, CNN political commentators discovered an incredible new Surface feature: it doubles as an iPad kickstand.
CNN’s talking heads tried to hide their iPad Airs and minis behind a barricade of Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablets, but it didn’t take long for some observant viewers to notice their preferred tablets are made by Apple.
Check out this guy working on his iPad mini behind the scenes:
It’s been a great year for Apple in China, and to top it off the China Brand Research Center just released its China Brand Power Index for the year — placing Apple in the no 1 position over long-time rival Samsung.
While Samsung Electronics took home brand value prizes in both the TV and monitor categories, Apple roundly beat it in the all-important mobile category, which Samsung has occupied for the previous two years.
With today’s tech devices becoming obsolete so quickly, it’s easy to think older models are forgotten by their creators the moment a follow-up rolls off the factory floor.
While this may be true in some instances, it’s apparently not the case for Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. In a recent email exchange with a vintage computer expert, Woz revealed that almost 40 years after the Apple II shipped he still agonizes about ways it could have been improved.
If you’re searching for further evidence that music streaming is overtaking downloads, look no further than a new report claiming that over the last quarter European revenue from Spotify streams were 13% higher than revenues from iTunes downloads.
The report comes from Kobalt, a company that helps collect music royalties on behalf of thousands of big-name artist. Currently it only collects earnings from Spotify streams in Europe — which means it’s unknown if similar figures are true in the U.S.
This time last year, iTunes’ earnings were 32% higher than that of Spotify in Europe, although streaming revenues have tripled over the past two years.