News - page 1356

From complaints about the use of shuttle buses in San Francisco, to Apple’s own security guards protesting for better pay, the tech industry in San Francisco has come under increased fire in the last few years.

The latest protest took place on Tuesday, with a crowd gathered at Apple’s Union Square store in San Francisco, dressed as Apple Store workers, to call on the company to pay U.S. taxes on the $102 billion it alleges is held overseas.

“We’re trying to have a little fun on Tax Day and show how Apple’s unpaid tax revenues could help Bay Area infrastructure,” said spokesperson Alfredo Fletes. “We could have done this in Cupertino, but not as many customers would come by — this is partly an education campaign.”

Apple’s continued Chinese expansion saw App Store revenue in China increase by 70% last quarter. That’s according to figures from a new Q1 2014 report from app analytics firm App Annie.

Key to this increase is the China Mobile deal which was announced at the end of last year, opening up Apple’s potential customer base to the 763 million users currently on the country’s biggest mobile network.

This picture comes via Mac Desks (and Dribbble), a blog showing – that’s right – photos of desks that have Macs on them. And some of them are gorgeous.

Of course, reality often doesn’t match up to such fantasies.

Apple is one of several tech giants to enter a voluntary agreement to add a global anti-theft “kill-switch” to their handsets from July 2015.

Other companies on board include  Google, HTC, Huawei, Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia, and Samsung — while carriers have reportedly agreed to help “facilitate these measures.”

Apple’s support of the need for a kill-switch doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. The company added an Activation Lock with iOS 7, designed to make it tougher for thieves to use stolen iOS devices. The feature allows users to remotely locate, lock and wipe their iPhones if they are stolen.

I have a Libratone Zipp speaker, and it works great – within five line-of-sight meters of my router that is. Any further and it just goes nuts, shows me a red light and refuses to play.

What I need is a way to extend my network throughout my apartment, but without spending a fortune on AirPorts Express. If only there were a $30 box that not only extended my network but came in a package so tiny I could dot them around the house.

Wait, what’s that? The Gramofon?

I must admit, I got pretty excited just now when I got an email from Amazon telling me that my Kindle documents had been integrated with my Cloud Drive. At last, I thought, I can easily upload personal documents and have my reading progress synced between all my Kindle devices and apps.

But guess what? Disappointment.

Ever since Office for iPad launched a few weeks ago, folks have been claiming that it costs $100 just to use it. This isn’t true at all. And as of now, with Microsoft’s new Office 365 Personal plan for $7 per month (or $70 per year), it’s even less true.

Macally’s BTKEYPRO looks like a nice do-everything keyboard, for all your devices. The main selling point is that it can pair with and switch between up to five devices, letting you use it with your iMac, MacBook, iPad, iPad Mini and iPhone, all at the touch of a key.

But it does more than just that.

Grovemade’s neat iPhone bumper cases offer protection to your phone, and although they’re a bit bulky they’re light and they look great. This new MacBook Back, a self-adhesive walnut panel, offers no useful protection, but it only adds 1.8 or 2.5 ounces to the weight of the whole package.

Edovia makes the most polished VNC client for iOS, but its Mac app has been needing some attention for quite some time, especially in the design department. Screens 3 for Mac was released today, and it has been rebuilt from the group up for Mountain Lion. It also looks much cleaner and promises to be faster.

Apple has been releasing its weekly top games charts as of late, and they make interesting reading.

The latest list — published Tuesday afternoon — shows the cumulative iOS game downloads for the week running April 7 to April 13.

In the world of mobile design, Sketch is a household name on the Mac. Apple gave it a design award in 2012, and it has been featured numerous times in the Mac App Store The highly anticipated 3.0 update to Sketch was released yesterday by Bohemian Coding as a separate purchase, and it’s currently the top paid app in the Mac App Store.

Why all the hype? Sketch 3 is being hailed as a better design tool on the Mac than Photoshop. And at $50, it’s a lot cheaper too.

While many apps in the app store claim to have impossible gameplay, only some present true gamers a real challenge. The app Stickman Impossible Run is an endless runner that boasts tons of tough difficulty modes. Tap to help the stickman jump from platform to platform without dying as the speed gradually increases. Do you think you have fast enough reflexes to top the high-score charts?

Take a look at the video and see what you think.

HBO’s new comedy Silicon Valley has been the toast of TV the past two weeks with its irreverent satirization of life inside the exorbitant tech startup scene.

Not everyone in the valley is a fan of the show with its Square-toting strippers, amped-up nerd stereotypes and creepy angel investors, but we’ve been mesmerized each week with the main title sequence, which showcases the rise and fall of some Silicon Valley’s most heralded companies.

Apple’s headquarters actually pops up twice — but don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

Watch the full sequence below and see if you can spot it:

If you’ve played any of the new Telltale Games series The Wolf Among Us, you’ll know who that hairy dude with the bandages is. It’s Bigby Wolf (née Big Bad), the star of the fantastic adventure game series based on the Eisner award-winning comic book series, Fables, by Bill Willingham.

The doctor here is telling Bigby Wolf, the sheriff of Fable town, to take it easy, get some rest. Eat more chicken.

See the full video below.

When Apple finally revealed it’s iOS car integration system CarPlay earlier this year the only hope of getting iOS on your dash in 2014 was to buy a new Ferrari or Benz, but thanks Pioneer’s announcement that it’s adding CarPlay to its 2014 aftermarket in-dash car multimedia systems, you hoopty could be rolling with CarPlay later this summer.

Story-driven puzzle-adventure games are finding a new resurgence lately, with titles like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Fables finding critical success in the typically first-person shooter dominated games market.

Jane Jensen is the veteran game designer from the days of Sierra Online with massively popular games like King’s Quest and Gabriel Knight to her credit.

Developed by her new venture Pinkerton Road, funded via Kickstarter and published by Phoenix Online Studios, Moebius: Empire Rising is the first installment in a planned series revolving around Malachi Rector, a modern-day take on Sherlock Holmes with an attitude.

His bodyguard, David Walker, is a bad-joke loving ex-special forces badass with a heart of gold. It’s these two that form the central relationship in the game story, a nice break from the typical romantic love-interest interactions we see all too often.

This week we look at lightweight, easy-to-carry camera bags that are perfect for carrying a mirrorless camera, an iPad and a couple of other bits – because the days of crushing your shoulders with a giant backpack filled with DSLRs and MacBook Pros are over.

Hot on the heels of this morning’s leak of the alleged front panel of the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, a new photo purportedly shows the battery of Apple’s next-gen smartphone. The image seems to support rumors of a larger iPhone, requiring a larger battery.

Apple has chosen LG as its sole supplier for flexible displays to be used in the iWatch, according to a new report coming out of Korea.

The report suggests that Apple is aiming to sell 9 million iWatch units by the end of 2014, that the device will be launched in September, and that the iWatch will come in two different sizes (1.3 inches and 1.5 inches).

A single image showing what appears to be a larger iPhone screen has shown up on Chinese microblogging website Weibo.

The photo — posted by user jiezhixc on Tuesday — depicts what looks like a current generation iPhone 5s being held up as comparison, showing how significantly larger the iPhone 6 could potentially be.

Ever have that situation at school where a teacher who doesn’t seem to like you gives you a bizarrely good end-of-year grade?

That seems to be the case with Apple’s court-appointed monitor Michael Bromwich, who describes the company as being off to a “promising start” with its antitrust compliance program, after being last year found liable for conspiring to raise e-book prices.

Apple’s relationship with Bromwich appeared strained from the very start — with Apple objecting to Bromwich’s “unprecedented” first legal bill ($138,432 for his first two weeks’ work), along with his requests to access top Apple executives.

Oh man. It looks like “fairly well designed photo-storage and viewing services” are the new black. Or something. Now Amazon is back in the game with an updated version of Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, an app with a name only a Microsoft worker drone could love.

What’s new? Nothing less than the return of enjoyment.

Effect Stack is an OS X image editor that costs just $10 and weighs in at 3.9MB. It’ll process any image your throw at it, including RAW files, and its gimmick is that you can stack effects (hence the name) and shift the layers of this stack to switch things up.

It’s not bad.