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.
Originally released in 2012, I stumbled upon the game thanks to its latest December 2013 update — which added new missions and various options related to the Dinosaur Battle Arena. As its title suggests, Jurassic Park Builder essentially puts you into John Hammond’s shoes: asking you to build a dino-themed attraction, and then run it in a way that brings in a constant stream of punters to gawk at your prehistoric predators and gobble down raptor-shaped ice creams.
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.
Apple has released iOS 7.0.5 as a minor update for all devices capable of running iOS 7.
Bug fixes for network provisioning are included for iPhone 5c and 5s models sold in China. Apple recently struck a deal with China Mobile to sell the iPhone on its network, which has the largest subscriber base in the world.
Among the 31 published patents newly granted to Apple this week was a camera-related patent designed to provide iOS devices with swappable, add-on camera lenses to provide optical functions including autofocus, lens zoom, and anti-shake.
Text-to-speech is great. But have you ever wished that it could be a little more creepy? As in, child’s-voice-coming-out-of-your-computer creepy? Well, you’re in luck. Thanks to a service designed to help kids to communicate, you too can make your iPad talk in the voice of a little girl or boy. Shiver.
Super-popular iOS strategy game Clash of Clans has received a major update — most notably adding a slew of new Hero abilities.
Version 5.172 also features numerous gameplay enhancements involving flyers, freezers, boosts, clan co-leaders and gem overgrowth. On top of that, there are various interface improvements, balance tweaks, performance improvements, and the usual unspecified bug fixes.
President Barack Obama may not be able to use an iPhone for security reasons, but that doesn’t mean he can’t praise the work Apple is doing.
In his State of the Union address to the American people Tuesday, Obama credited a number of technology companies — Apple included — for helping with his ConnectED program, which aims to improve Internet access at schools across the U.S.
The Evasi0n7 jailbreak opened iOS 7 up for all kinds of tweaks ,ranging from lock screen launchers to mods that let you use Touch ID in place of your Home button.
Eclipse is almost certainly the most instantly noticeable tweak so far, however — taking the bright colors that are standard with the iOS UI and replacing them with a darker palette of colors and shades to give your iPhone a suitably moody “night mode”.
Felix’s FlipStand is like a better version of Apple’s Smart Cover. It covers the screen and leaves the rear case mostly naked, but instead of using a flimsy folding action to give limited viewing angles when used as a stand, the FlipStand is almost infinitely adjustable between zero and ninety degrees, and holds the iPad steady like a kickstand.
Most iPad drawing apps take a rather old-fashioned approach. They try to mimic paper and pencil, or paint and canvas, and of course they never get it quite right, even with pressure-sensitive styluses and fancy paint engines. Archipad takes a different approach: it recognizes that you’re drawing on a computer screen and embraces that fact, letting you draw to scale, in 3-D and with perfect lines, all my using a finger or stylus.
Regardless of whether you think Apple’s falling share prices are justified or the result of bozos who don’t understand how Apple works, one person is seemingly happy with the immediate response to Apple’s recent financial quarter: Carl Icahn.