News - page 1393

Apple holds one of the world’s largest collection of active credit cards in the world thanks to iTunes, yet despite all that purchasing power, it has only recently begun to look into processing payments for physical goods, and PayPal is desperate to play a role in the action.

Payment industry executives say that PayPal is pitching Apple hard to let it in on the company’s rumored payment initiative, according to a report from Re/code. At this point, executives aren’t sure what type of tech Apple wants to use, or even how big a role it wants to play in the industry, but they’re willing to go as far as white-labeling their payments service, just so Apple will use it.

Episodic noir-thriller adventure game, The Wolf Among Us, gets its second episode next week with “Smoke & Mirrors.”

Bigby Wolf is hell-bent on solving the murders revealed in Episode One, and will stop at nothing to get at the truth.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll change your iPhone’s wallpaper on a regular basis to keep things fresh, but finding a good one isn’t always easy. At least that was the case — until Wallgram came along. Wallgram isn’t just another photo bank full of images; it uses Instagram photos uploaded by your friends to create beautiful parallax wallpapers.

The immensely popular SwiftKey keyboard makes its debut on iOS today via a new note-taking app called SwiftKey Note. It promises to be the fastest way to make notes on an iPhone and iPad, and it boasts features like Evernote syncing and multilingual typing. It’s also completely free.

Facebook today announced a new standalone iPhone app called Paper, and you’ll be pleased to hear it’s nothing like any of the Facebook apps that came before it. Paper’s main focus is to make all the news you’re interested in easy to access it, but it’s much more than just a newsreader; in fact, it does enough to replace the regular Facebook app for more users.

If there’s one place you can expect to see cutting edge technology at its finest it’s at a Dutch flower park, right?

Apple could open a sapphire glass manufacturing facility in Arizona as early as February, according to recently published correspondence between the company and state regulators.

Analyst Matt Margolis unearthed documents that mention the Mesa plant — described as “Project Cascade” — and note that it would be used to manufacturer “a critical new sub-component” for a future Apple product.

Carrot Fit is the new app-with-attitude from the makers of Carrot To-Do and Carrot Alarm.

Welcoming you with a message of “Greetings, tubby human” from “your new fitness overlord”, Carrot Fit is a harsh-but-hilarious taskmaster dedicated to making weight loss suck a little bit less.

As the developers explain, “Carrot is a sadistic AI construct with one simple goal: to transform your flabby carcass into a Grade A specimen of the human race. She will do whatever it takes – including threatening, inspiring, ridiculing, and bribing you – to make this happen.”

When I reviewed the Lollipod iPhone tripod, I mentioned that the super-light support would also make a great portable lighting stand. It seems I wasn’t the only person to notice this, and now the folks behind the Lollipod have added the Faith Speedlight stand to their lineup. And man, it looks every bit as well-thought-out as the original Lollipod.

Having recently purchased both Nest and AI startup DeepMind, Google is currently on a high tech spending spree. Even Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson has claimed that the search giant’s recent acquisitions have helped it take the lead over Apple when it comes to innovation in 2014.

But Apple is also putting its $159 billion worth of cash and investments to good use by carrying out its fair share of acquisitions.

When I lived in an my crumbling old apartment in Barcelona, I had more USB-charing devices that I had power points in my office. And even in the relatively modernity of an East German apartment block, I don’t want to plug in a separate box my iPhone, iPad, bike lights, Kindle… Etc. What I need is the Tunewear TUNEMAX 5USB Charger, a five-way USB charger with a name a rapper could be proud of.

Image Blender is one of my favorite iOS apps. It’s a single-purpose tool that lets you combine two photos by stacking them and choosing the blend mode to get the effect and the opacity you want. If you ever wanted to take a photo and make it look like it was printed onto an old sheet of paper, or to, uh, make an astronaut sit in front of a pile of red sand, then Image Blender is for you.

And now Image Blender 2 is for you, too. The update adds some good functionality, but the best part is that – thanks to an iOS 7 makeover – it no longer looks horrible.

If you’re a person who needs to balance lots of appointments on a daily basis, but hasn’t come across Mynd Smart Calendar yet, it’s something that’s well worth looking into.

The free app — which describes itself as an “intelligent mobile calendar” — accurately identifies the places you’re going on any given day and then predicts how much buffer time you’re going to need to schedule between meetings given the typical traffic levels at that time of day. As you get closer to appointments, the app reminds you when it is that you need to leave and even launches your preferred navigation app.

Another camera bag? Yes. The Roamographer is pretty much the complete opposite to the Booq Python Mirrorless also featured this morning. It’s big, it’s made of lovely bison leather, and it’s huge. It’s also frikkin’ gorgeous, and equally frikkin’ expensive.

Sick of all those boring blue folders that crowd your Finder windows? I know I am. I can barely copy a file without my eyes starting to cross, my breathing slowing and the tendrils of sleep starting to soothe my brain. What you and I need is Folderol, a $1 Mac app that lets you change the colors of your folders by drag and drop.

I can’t believe it took me so long to get to Jurassic Park Builder.

If somebody were designing a camera bag just for me, it would probably look a lot like the Python Mirrorless from Booq. It’s small, but holds just what you need, and is designed to carry a mirrorless-sized camera, an iPad mini and a few accessories, form a paper notebook to a spare lens to your house keys.

It’s also $80, which in the realm of camera bags is roughly equal to free.

Ever wonder what’s happening during Cult of Mac’s live blogs of Apple keynote events? Here you go, courtesy of our invisible documentary videographers at Vooza.

Want to program your own jailbreak tweak, but don’t have the programming ability? No problem. The sequel to a popular jailbreak tweak called Flex 2 has hit the BigBoss repo, giving iOS 7 jailbreakers the option to roll-the-own tweaks.

If you’re a user of the official Twitter app for iOS, good news. The app has been updated to version 6.1, and it introduces new options and features, including an easier reply mechanism that allows you to reply with (and edit) photos.

In the latest release of the iOS 7.1 beta, Apple sadly closed the hole that allowed the Team Evasi0n jailbreak to work, closing the door on jailbreaking until the next exploit comes along.

Given that, you might expect that today’s iOS 7.0.5 release would also close the Evasi0n exploit… but no! It’s actually still safe for jailbreakers. You just need to do a (very little) bit of hacking to make it work.

Everyone knows Apple didn’t come up with the name iPhone. Cisco owned the trademark on what they called I-phone long before Steve Jobs unveiled the smartphone that would change the world back in 2007. But did you know that Apple didn’t come up with the name iPad? In fact, Intel was hawking a device they called the I-pad — or “information pad” — way back in 1994.

Fish can swim into some pretty deep dark places, but now they can’t hide from anglers thanks to FishHunter, a floating sonar pod that syncs to your iPhone to tell you where all the big fish are hanging out.

Rather than attaching a sonar sensor to your boat, FishHunter’s sensor can float in the current and sketch the bottom of bodies of water while you’re sitting safely on dry land. Using Bluetooth LE, it transmits data to your iPhone or Android up to 80 ft away, signaling anything it thinks might be a fish.

Its $229.99 price tag is pretty cheap compared to other fish finders, and it’s equipped with extra features like tracking your best fishing spots via GPS and a photo sharing feature so you can let your friends know who’s the best fisherman.

Here’s the product trailer:

Automatic, the smart driving assistant I described as making my old car future-proof, has been updated with iBeacon functionality. The immediate benefit is that the connection between the Automatic hardware and iPhone app will be improved. But putting iBeacons on the road holds some exciting long term possibilities as well.

Spurred on by the holiday season, Apple sold a record 26 million iPads last quarter, which according to IDC’s latest numbers, was enough to boost the company’s tablet market share up to 33.8% to finish off the year, up from 29.7% the previous quarter.

Wall Street was less than impressed with Apple’s sales numbers though, and according to IDC there’s cause to be concerned as signs point to a tablet market that is growing dramatically slower year-over-year.