Seemingly just moments after an iTunes update added the ability to browse our App Store wish lists, along comes Mentio, an iPhone app to do the exact same thing. Only instead of using your existing iTunes wish list, it lets you build your own, and buy apps, movies and music from within the app itself.
To quote the all-seeing Strobist, “Memo to @Nikon: THIS is how you do a retro-dialed digital camera.” Take a look. These are the official product shots of the Fujifilm X-T1, an SLR-style mirrorless camera joining Fujifilm’s X-Series lineup. Isn’t she purdy?
More than two million videos from the web are being saved to Pocket each week now. To make the viewing experience more seamless, Pocket has integrated AirPlay into its iOS app for sharing with the Apple TV. The update went live today in the App Store.
Thanks to the slickness of AirPlay, users can exit the Pocket app when a video is streaming. There’s a new AirPlay button embedded in the app’s video player.
“This is just the beginning of how Pocket plans on truly becoming the DVR for the Web, and we think it’s going to be a great addition to our users’ experience in general,” said Pocket.
Source: App Store
Twitterrific 5, a popular third-party Twitter app for iOS from The Iconfactory, was updated today with a few new features.
Beats Music launched yesterday as a Spotify/Rdio alternative, and the new music service is already having scaling issues.
Due to an “extremely high volume of interest,” Beats Music has stopped adding new users until it can support the unexpected demand. The app is currently sitting in the number one position in the free chart of the App Store’s Music category.
Have you had problems with iOS 7 randomly crashing and rebooting? For many, the white screen of death (or black, depending on your device color) has been a big enough problem to fill countless pages of complaints on Apple’s support forum.
“We have a fix in an upcoming software update for a bug that can occasionally cause a home screen crash,” said Apple today in a statement. While Apple hasn’t specified when the fix will be released, iOS 7.1 would be a safe bet. The software is rumored to drop in March.
Source: Mashable
I’ll be honest: Missile Command was never my favorite classic game from the glory days of Atari. Originally released as a coin-op in 1980, designed by Dave Theurer (the man who also created Tempest and the world’s first commercial game to feature 3-D polygonal graphics, I, Robot), Missile Command came straight out of an era in which the scariest thing imaginable was a nuclear attack.
The game puts you in control of three anti-air missile batteries, as you defend cities from being destroyed by an endless hail of ballistic missiles. Like every game of its era, Missile Command didn’t have fancy graphics to carry it: it had to make do with limited processing power and graphical/audio capabilities by crafting a playing experience simple and fun enough to keep you pumping quarters into the arcade.
Today Apple released a minor update to iTunes that brings the ability to view your iTunes Store wish list directly in your local library. Support for Arabic and Hebrew has also been improved with other stability improvements.
Source: Apple
Last night Bill Gates jumped onstage at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to talk about how he’s curing the world of polio as well as the next big tech ideas – weirdly there was no mention of an iWatch. What begins as a gushing interview takes an awkward turn when the former King of Windows starts eying Jimmy’s MacBook at the of his desk corner.
Watch the awkward exchange in full glory below:
Carl Icahn’s relationship with Apple has been rocky ever since he became the company’s most loquacious investor last Fall. While ribbing Tim Cook publicly with one hand for not doing a bigger buyback, the other has been busy forking over fat stacks of cash for more and more AAPL shares.
This morning Carl went classic Icahn and took to Twitter again to complain about Cook and the Apple board not giving him and other investors more money with his proposed $50 billion buyback, while also announcing he’s been gobbling up AAPL shares faster than Jaws went after those guys on the boat:
https://youtu.be/8ShyrAhp8JQ
Apple added two new videos ads to its YouTube channel this afternoon – ‘Light Verse’ and ‘Sound Verse’. The two ads have been running on TV for a couple days now and are pared down 30-second variants of their new 90-second ‘Your Verse’ ad that debuted during the NFL playoffs.
As the name implies, Light Verse features a bunch of scenes featuring the iPad Air, light beams and enough lens flair to make J.J. Abrams proud. Sound verse focuses on, you guessed it, sound. Both ads also featureRobin Williams’ narration from Dead Poets Society.
Here’s Sound Verse:
If you’re anything like me, as much as you love your Apple TV, the fact that it is so small actually causes some problems in your entertainment center, as it can actually be nudged around and fall behind things. That’s a big pain, especially since the accompanying Apple remote isn’t just equally tiny (and even easier to use), but depends on line-of-sight to work properly.
The Apple TV holder by Tinsel & Timber is a wonderful solution to this problem. A beautifully carved block of walnut with indentations for your Apple TV and remote, not only will it keep your entertainment center organized and the remote where you can find it, but it also looks great.
Tinsel & Tinder’s Apple TV holder is also available in maple, and no matter which one you buy, you can choose between three different felt colors to line it. It’s not actually that expensive, either: each one costs just $49.99.
Looking for a slightly cheaper alternative? Consider the similar product Bloc, which we previously wrote about here.
Source: Tinsel & Timber
As with many of Apple’s more prosaic advertisements lately, Apple’s recent Dead Poet’s Society inspired ad for the iPad Air and iPad mini, “What will your verse be?”, has alternately been praised and ridiculed by critics who were either touched or wanted to barf at the idea that buying an iPad is heling you write a living human poem.
Even if you love the ad, though, you have to admit that the ad shows a very different use scenario for the iPad Air than the one you have. In the ad, it’s used by helicopter rescue pilots, storm chasers, ice hockey coaches, musicians, Bollywood filmmakers, scuba divers, rock musicians and artists. You? You mostly just use it on the toilet. Admit it. You’re reading this on the toilet right now.
Source: Doghouse Diaries
In this era of heightened security fears, when headlines routinely shout about hackers stealing millions of personal records in a single digital heist on some of the nation’s biggest companies, you should never be handing your Apple ID and password over to anyone who isn’t Apple. Yet that’s just the permission that the new Sunrise calendaring app asks when you first load it up, and not only is there no rule against apps doing so in Apple’s internal guidelines, but Cupertino’s actually awarded Sunrise with a coveted spot in the “Featured” section of the App Store.
Every time, the game of cat-and-mouse between Cupertino and jailbreakers goes like this. Apple releases a new version of iOS, patching existing jailbreak exploits. Jailbreakers poke and prod at the code for a few months, until they find a new exploit. They hold off on revealing the nature of this exploit to anyone for as long as humanly possible, lest Apple get wind of it and close the hole in a point release. Then, when the finished jailbreak is finally released, Apple’s programmers sniff out the exploit, patch it, and the whole game starts anew.
When Team Evasi0n released the iOS 7 jailbreak, then, it was only a matter of time before Apple fixed the exploit that allowed it to happen to begin with. Surprisingly, though, Cupertino did not patch Evasi0n in the developer betas of iOS 7.1… until now.
The glass cube of Apple’s 5th Avenue Store in New York City might look iconic, but there’s one big problem with glass: It shatters. And in the latest wave of polar weather to hit the East Coast, that’s just what happened when a snowblower got too close to the Apple Store.
For any longtime Apple fans, it’s amazing to think that today marks 30 years since the January 22, 1984 airing of the Nineteen Eighty Four-inspired Macintosh commercial, directed by Ridley Scott.
Not only did the commercial usher in Apple’s most famous desktop computer brand, but it also served as a perfect articulation of the Apple identity: an identity that continues along the same lines three decades later.
Despite the lack of concrete news available on the subject, we’re hardly short of concept designs for Apple’s eventual iWatch.
This one, by San Francisco UI designer Todd Hamilton, is among the best yet — a sleek design that resembles a cross between the Nike Fuelband and an iPhone.
The team behind cult drawing app DrawQuest have sadly announced that it will be closing shop.
For those unfamiliar with it, DrawQuest is was an iOS app — originally for iPad, but with an iPhone version launched in November last year — that set daily drawing challenges to a niche community of artists.
In a blog post on the DrawQuest site, app creator Christopher “moot” Poole (also the man behind 4Chan) wrote the following:
The Todoist todo app has been updated and renamed. It’s now called “Todoist Next,” and it has been turned into a lean, mean visual-scheduling-and-collaboration machine.
Adobe has issued an update to Adobe Reader, its popular PDF reader app.
Version 11.2.0 introduces a new design that matches the look and feel of iOS 7. The new look includes alterations to the color scheme as well as plain glyphs, as well as improvements and relocation of menu bars for better navigation.
The update also places recently viewed documents up front, adds a better integrated help system, and includes improves single file edit (which lets you perform basic operations without having to open a file) and text selection features (letting you select a single character rather than entire words).
Source: iTunes
Instapaper’s Instapaper Daily feature, which shows the day’s most popular new story for your quick-consuming delectation, was apparently so successful that it has spawned a sequel. Instapaper Weekly. This time it’s not a new website which shows you an ultra-clean view of the day’s top Instapaper story: it’s an email newsletter.
Quick: You have taken a bunch of great photos of your recent birthday weekend in [EXOTIC LOCATION], and your parents want to take a look at your vacation pictures on the big screen. But you also spent some “quality time” with your girlfriend/boyfriend/spousal unit in the hotel room, and you sure as hell don’t want your folks to see those photos. What do you do?
You use Boinx’s PhotoPresenter, an app that’s designed for impromptu slideshows.
Tech companies such as Apple and Google will pay $1 per stop, per day for employee shuttle bus services using public bus stops in San Francisco — according to a new pilot program approved by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA).
In a scheme that will bring in around $1.5 million in fees over an 18-month trial, companies such as Apple will pay SFMTA more than $100,000, while smaller tech companies will pay around $80,000 per year. Any money gained will be put back into the program to cover administrative fees, permits, enforcement, and other related costs.
Keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures are fine, but they’re not as good as dedicated knobs and dials for just getting out of the way and letting your concentrate on the job instead of the interface. But knobs and dials are annoyingly fixed, whereas an on-screen control panel can be changed to fit the function.
Can you see where we’re going here? The Palette does both. It’s a modular, Lego-like set of buttons, knobs, dials and sliders which can be configured in hardware and software to do whatever you want them to.