Would you pay $39 for the convenience of a front-facing USB port in your iMac? If so, you’re gonna love the iMacompanion, which is simultaneously one of the neatest widgets ever, and one of the worst-named gadgets in history.
The little Luxi turns your iPhone’s front camera into a light meter. A what? A light meter, a device that measures the amount of light falling on a subject so that you can set the exposure correctly on your camera.
But wait, doesn’t you camera already set its own exposure? Doesn’t it have a light meter built in for when i want to kick it old school in manual mode? Yes and yes, but this $30 widget might still be handy.
If you’re a Klout user, you’ve probably noticed the service’s huge switch in February: Instead of simply measuring your social-media popularity and throwing you free goodies when you’re ranked up, Klout now actively guides you on your way to Internet stardom by providing more insight and nudging you in the right direction through suggested shares.
Today the Klout iOS app followed suit, bringing all the service’s new features to the iPhone in a major update.
Steve Ballmer. A total doofus, right? The man who said the iPhone was destined to be a failure, who thought the iPad was a dud, who stood in the way of Office being released for the iPad long after it was clear that Windows 8 was a total bust.
Okay, sure, Microsoft’s sweatiest ex-CEO was a bit of an idiot. But to be fair to the man, he did make his amends before he was forced out by incumbent CEO Satya Nadella. In fact, Ballmer’s last oleaginous act as CEO appears to have been greenlighting the release of Office for iPad.
The Tao WellShell is probably unlike any iOS-connected fitness device you’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t simply track steps, or heart rate, or weight, or any of the other standard metrics tracked in dozens of other connected fitness devices. Instead, this little guy actually acts as the fitness device itself, rather than simply a tracker (though it does indeed also track heart rate, steps and sleep patterns).
Office for iPad hasn’t been in the App Store for very long, and it has already done surprisingly well. Microsoft recently bragged that Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote have been downloaded 12 million times combined in a week.
Microsoft won’t say how many Office 365 subscriptions have been bought through its new apps. Anyone can download them for free to view documents, but the editing features have to be unlocked with an in-app purchase.
The team behind Office for iPad took to Reddit today to answer questions about how the suite of apps was made, what took so long, and what’s planned for the future. Here are the five most interesting revelations:
You may have heard that Comcast wants to buy Time Warner. In a proposal published today that pitches the merger to the FCC, Comcast drops a hint about Apple’s future plans for the TV.
Although by no means a definite indication beyond the previous rumors that something new is coming, Comcast says that Apple is working on a set-top box. Given that Apple and Comcast have been in talks, the cable giant would be in a position to know.
The newly discovered Heartbleed bug is being called the Web’s worst security bug ever.
It allows hackers to steal passwords and login details when users visit vulnerable sites — undetected. That’s the bad part: affected sites probably have no idea they’re vulnerable. The bug is subject to an emergency security advisory. Some experts are estimating that up to 66% of the Internet’s servers could be affected. Each server has to be fixed manually. So it could take a while.
In the meantime:
We’ve reached out to Apple’s PR department for comment. No reply yet. We’ll update if Apple makes any statement or issues an advisory.
Back in the early 1990s there was a series of handheld games consoles made by Japan’s Epoch company. Called Barcode Battlers, they let you enter the numbers from real world barcodes to generate characters, monsters, and power-ups, which could be used as part of in-game battles. Novelty aside, they were never much good, but they were certainly popular — and the idea was intriguing enough that the Barcode Battlers are still remembered today.
Jump forward thirteen-or-so years, and the rear-facing camera used by iOS devices have proven adept at scanning barcodes and using this to access information.
Perfect timing, then, for a game like Barcode Kingdom to come along. The basic premise is pretty much identical to the Barcode Battler: you scan in barcodes to create warriors, weapons, and other items that you can then use in RPG-style battles like the one depicted above. But is it any good?
If you didn’t win the lottery for Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, you’re in good company. For the third year in a row, AltConf is hosting a get-together for the rest of us.
Formerly called AltWWDC, the conference will boost Fog City’s already-high nerd quotient by hundreds of developers who didn’t get the golden tickets. AltConf will be held in parallel to WWDC at the Children’s Creativity Museum in Yerba Buena Center near Moscone West — which means that haves and have-nots will be waiting at the same stoplights and heading to the same bars after hours.
The hit game Doodle Jump was one of the first and most popular games to hit iOS in 2009. Since then many updates have been made to the app enhancing and continuing its platform hopping and monster obliterating gameplay. Just recently the very same developers behind the famous Doodle have released a new app for their fans called Doodle Jump Race. Go head-to-head in online races as you help your doodle come across the finish line first. Do you think you have what it takes to win?
Take a look at the video and find out what you think.
Disruptor Beam, the company behind Game of Thrones Ascent, hopes to thrill the thousands of Star Trek fans worldwide with its upcoming social strategy roleplaying game, Star Trek Timelines.
You’ll need to build your own starship and crew to boldly go where no one has gone before, exploring the Star Trek multiverse alongside characters from all eras of Trekdom.
There’s a new teaser trailer with the voices of Commander Data, Leuitenant Uhura, and Captain Jean Luc Picard to get you excited.
Editor’s Note: Due to the sheer size of Elder Scrolls Online, we’re publishing our hands-on impressions in three chunks. Here’s part one.
I dash up a sandy dune, rushing past palm trees, looking for the spot on my map where an eyeball icon beckons my attention. The sky is blue — it’s mid-day here in the Hammerfell region — with a few clouds to tease the eye. It’s hot enough to fry an egg on my heavy armor, but hey, I’m not really running anywhere.
As I crest the little hill, a brilliant lens-flare from the sun draws my attention skyward, distracting me from the broken bridge. I tumble heavily to the sea below, splashing into the water.
I’m in good company: there’s a small school of orcs and elves who have made the same rookie mistake. We make the slow swim of shame to the sandy beach, then rush off to explore this idyllic, if tricky, land.
This all takes place on the continent of Tamriel, which will be familiar to gamers who’ve played the previous titles in the series: Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind. It’s like Middle Earth for game nerds. While each of the previous games took place in just one area of Tamriel, the Elder Scrolls online promises the whole land mass.
It’s paradise –I wonder if I can bring my kids with me when I move here.
A new report by Barclay’s chip analyst Blayne Curtis suggests the iWatch could boast an ultraviolet light sensor.
According to Curtis, Texas-based Silicon Labs has come up with “the industry’s first digital ultraviolet index sensors,” which could land the company an iWatch contract.
A new report out of China says that Apple’s long-awaited iWatch could debut as early as summer this year, sometime after WWDC, and ship 65M units to start. But how far can it be trusted?
A massive 87% of iOS users are currently running some version of iOS 7 — according to the latest numbers revealed on Apple’s developer site.
The figure is up from 85% at the end of March, and 83% one month ago, when Apple introduced iOS 7.1. This update added several new features such as CarPlay, and also tweaked iTunes Radio, the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, and Siri.
Remember that recent story about Apple’s lack of racially diverse emojis?
A patent, published Tuesday, may solve some of those problems by promising Automatic Avatar Creation for Apple users — literally putting a virtual “you” inside your Apple device.
The patent explains how devices could create three-dimensional avatars that resembles users by first photographing them, and then comparing this image to a database of pre-created facial components which can be fitted together in different combinations. The resulting creation could be used in gaming, social media, and video conferencing.
Want to know what a business lesson about Apple looks like at Harvard Business School?
A whole lot like a comic book, apparently. The publishing arm of Harvard Business School is turning to comics to help tell case studies related to high profile companies. One of these — called “Apple’s Core” — turns the story of Apple’s early days into sequential art, reminiscent of the Steve Jobs manga from last year.
This change was reportedly done to make the story more interesting and palatable to visual and foreign learners, who would prove less inclined to learn about Apple if made to read a printed case study.
Apple is reportedly planning on creating an R&D team to develop baseband chips for future iPhone models, according to a new rumor from Digitimes.
Baseband chips, for those who don’t know, are used to control a device’s radio functions related to modulation, signal generation, and more.
If the rumor is to be believed, these chips could debut with the round of iPhone updates following the iPhone 6 — which would mean they could arrive with the iPhone that, by current naming standards, will be called the iPhone 6s.
Lightroom for the iPad is here. It’s called Lightroom Mobile, and it runs smoothly on anything down to an iPad 2 (or first-gen mini). You can use the app to edit and organize any photos in your Lightroom collections, and it syncs automatically (and near instantly) with Lightroom on your desktop (you’ll need to upgrade to v5.4).
And the price? It’s free, but only if you already subscribe to Adobe’s $10-per-month Photoshop Photography Program, which also gets you the desktop versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. There’s also a 30-day free trial to check it out.
So how does it work? Lets take a nice long look.
Does your iPhone battery constantly drain from 100% to nearly 0%? You might think the battery is to blame, but there could be a far more dastardly culprit: Facebook.
In the past, when anyone has talked about the possibility of a low-cost iPhone aimed at the budget market, most have assumed that Apple would essentially take the iPod touch — currently the cheapest iOS device, after subsidies, which saves on cost in a number of key regards like screen quality, speed, storage and more — and graft some cellular modems onto it. Yet when Apple unveiled the iPhone 5c, what they showed was a smartphone that was essentially an iPhone 5 in a plastic shell. In other words, a last-gen iPhone that was cheaper for Apple to make, but not necessarily to buy.
Yet according to new court documents coming out of the latest Apple vs. Samsung case, such a vision for the ‘cheap’ iPhone was not always meant to be. In fact, Steve Jobs himself believed that the budget iPhone should be based off of the iPod touch.
Like some sort of corporate Willy Wonka, Apple has thrilled 5,000 eager coders by inviting them to the Worldwide Developers Conference this June. But, like the fictitious candy man, Cupertino also crushed the dreams of thousands of would-be attendees who didn’t snag a golden ticket to the Apple event of the year.
“I’m going to WWDC!!!!” tweeted Kevin Sliech after he got an email Monday saying he had been selected to buy a WWDC ticket. “So incredibly pumped it’s absurd.”
Thanks to a new lottery system, this year’s rush to get WWDC tickets didn’t result in a crippled website that sold out in 71 seconds. Still, the odds of securing a spot at the San Francisco event were probably higher than ever, since developers could register for a chance to buy a ticket without ponying up the $1,600 in advance.
New York is known for its architectural beauty and intense surroundings. With so many buildings, lights and more there is plenty of action to take place. In the new app Skyline Skaters you can become a part of that action, as you skate from the authorities jumping from roof to roof. Grind on railings, hop over rockets and so much more. How far do you think you can make it before you get caught in this new addition to the endless runner genre?
Take a look at the video and find out what you think.
Apple has already shown us how the iPad is used to explore the deepest oceans and tallest mountains, but in for its newest segment of the ‘Your Verse’ campaign the iPad has gone totally Bollywood.
Famed Bollywood choreographer Feroz Khan stars in the new Your Verse microsite on Apple.com that chronicles how he’s integrated the iPad into his entire production processes and how it helps him create spectacular Bollywood dance numbers.