News - page 1405

Apple dropped another heavy hint about its interest in the iWatch on Thursday, as it published a patent application relating to a smart watch-mounted pedometer.

The Wrist Pedometer Step Detection patent application is another example of Apple’s interest in health-tracking technology for future devices. The application describes a method for optimally detecting steps, which uses advanced algorithms to filter out much of the “noise” that might lead lead to it missing or inaccurately recording steps.

France’s Opéra de Lyon is set to begin performing its multimedia opera — combining the story of Steve Jobs with that of Henry V, taken from Shakespeare’s 1599 play.

Written by German composer Roland Auzet, “Steve Five (King Different)” explores the supposed similarities between the two rulers (one of Silicon Valley, the other of England) who changed the nature of reality by inventing. The opera features both sung and spoken opera, as well as poetry, rap and orchestral interludes — and will debut on Friday, March 14 at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Lyon, France. Subsequent showings will follow on March 15, 17, and 18.

Rolling out in April, United Airlines will offer a special personal device entertainment system on-board select aircraft for people using the iPhone and iPad, running iOS 7.

Customers will be able to choose from more than 150 movies, and close to 200 TV shows, which they can access free of charge.

Nikon continues to beat the dead horse that is its tiny-sensor “1” range with the new 18.4 megapixel V3. The Nikon 1 series, for those who still care, is the company’s answer to the mirrorless camera question, if that question was “How can we make it look like we actually care about anything but SLRs?”

InRoute really does look like my new favorite journey planner. It’s a Universal map app with a whole slew of useful extras, including charts for elevation, curviness (!), wind speed, precipitation and more. It looks especially good for folks who understand that a journey and its route aren’t just about the miles.

The iOS 7 update has another nice tweak in the camera app. Just like the iPhone 5S warns you when it decides to automatically engage the HDR mode, it now tells you when it’s going to fire the flash. To be honest, you should probably have the flash turned off all the time, but if you don’t, you at least now get a warning before it powers up and washes out your poor subject’s skin tones.

The Ember bag is a Kickstarter that – at first glance – seems to be a bag out of some first-person-shooter. It’s a modular backpack design, which starts out as a “20-liter urban pack” and can be extended by adding all manner of sleeves and pockets.

If you’re a normal human with normal human needs and desires, I would imagine that you want this bag like now. It’s called the Berlin, and it is a special edition from ONA made to celebrate 100 Years of Leica.

If you’re using the latest Apple devices and all your software is up to date, then your iPhone will now use Bluetooth to search for nearby AppleTVs as well as just searching on the network using Bonjour. The end result is the same – streaming over the local Wi-Fi network – but if you have an odd or non-standard Wi-Fi setup, this might help[,your devices talk to one another.

Today AgileBits released 1Password 4.2 for Mac, a big update to the popular password manager that brings over 30 new features and improvements. The bulk of the additions are actually for 1Password mini, the app’s browser extension for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

You can finally edit items directly in 1Password mini, which has been one of the app’s biggest feature requests from users. There are a lot of other improvements included in the update, and AgileBits has commissioned Lonely Sandwich to make an awesome promo:

“My phone just erased everything it had in it and rebooted,” NBA superstar LeBron James tweeted earlier today. “One of the sickest feelings I’ve ever had in my life!!!”

Hey, that does sound frustrating. Who can blame him for tweeting his frustration with his Galaxy Note phablet?

There was only one problem.

Although the iTunes Festival has been a great success in the UK for years, it’s only at this year’s SXSW festival that it’s finally come to the States, with Apple arranging for artists such as Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, and Kendrick Lamar to perform free for five nights in Austin, Texas.

What was the hold up? According to Apple’s Eddy Cue, they just weren’t sure they could reproduce the positive vibe anywhere else. But it looks like they’ve succeeded.

Although 4K Monitors are starting to become affordable, OS X hasn’t up until now supported them with the same sophistication it does a Retina Display. Even under Mavericks, the only readable resolution was 3840 x 2160, with no support for OS X’s Retina scaling options.

According to Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech, though, this has all changed, with the latest developer build of OS X 10.9.3 supporting the full range of Retina scaling modes for 4K monitors, allowing you to use those extra pixels to make things crisper instead of just smaller.

That’s good news… and probably a hint that whenever Apple releases the Retina iMac, it’ll boast a 3840 x 2160 display, and not the crazy 5120 x 2880 pixel display that would be called for if Apple just doubled the resolution of the 27-inch, as it has with other Retina Macs.

Source: Anandtech

Apple has chopped its iPhone return policy from 30 to 14 days, according to leaked document uncovered by 9to5Mac. The updated policy officially goes into effect on March 13th, but Apple’s website is already showing the change.

The change sounds like an effort to clear up return policy confusion.

In the past, customers could bring an iPhone back to Apple within 30 days of purchase, but the carrier would still charge an early termination fee if the iPhone was returned after 14 days. iPhone carrier partners have always offered a 14-day return window, and all of Apple’s other products have a 14-day policy as well.

Source: 9to5Mac

ALIENS ARE DESTROYING HUMANITY.
CAT MUST STOP THEM. WITH MIND BULLETS.
CAT MUST REMEMBER: AIM FOR THE BRAINS.
CAT MUST SURVIVE.

Seriously, do you need more from the press release than that? You do? Really?

Ok, fine. Ignoring the fact that you already knew your cat had mind-bullets, Team Chaos announced Wednesday that its latest free-to-play iOS game, Cat vs. Aliens, is live and in the App Store.

Today FiftyThree released a new version of Paper that has been optimized for iOS 7. The update also includes enhancements to existing tools, like Zoom.

Ever since the first Angry Bird flapped its wings back in 2009, Rovio has been only too happy to churn out sequel after sequel with slight variations on flinging birds with slingshots, but for its next act the video game studio is introducing a turn-based roleplaying game for the Angry Birds world.

Tons of photos are posted daily onto social networks like Facebook’s “Instagram”. While many may feel like they’ve taken the perfect picture, the app makes them compromise by not being able to post the whole photo in view. The app InstaSize is an application made to aid this common problem. Scale your photos down and do so much more thanks to tons of awesome features. Will InstaSize become your go-to editing app?

Take a look at InstaSize and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the multi-platform application InstaSize brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

The second season of The Walking Dead: The Game is well underway, with the launch of Episode 2, “A House Divided” on the 4th of this month. It’s ready for download as an in-app purchase on the Mac version of the game via Steam as well as through the iOS version of the gritty adventure game based on the award-winning comic book of the same name.

Publisher Telltale Games has just put up a slick-looking trailer for the game, with a haunting new song that plays over the end of the video. You can download the song over on the Telltale Games site for free as well, in case you’re longing for the old-timey feel of the thing after you watch the trailer below.

iOS 7.1 was only released on Monday, but already it looks as though it may be installed on close to 12% of iOS devices.

The figures come from mobile publishing and monetization platform Onswipe, who analyzed the data from approximately 3 million devices.

Microsoft will release a OneNote application for Mac later this month, according to sources familiar with its plans.

OneNote is already available on iOS and Android — and, of course, Microsoft’s own Windows platforms — and the new Mac app is part of the company’s plans to take on rival note-taking services like Evernote.

QuickTime architect, ex-Apple programmer, and former trusted Steve Jobs lieutenant Peter Hoddie has launched a new Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.

Called Kinoma Create, the project aims to create a JavaScript-powered Internet of Things construction kit, aimed at professional product designers, as well as web developers with no prior hardware experience.

Gameloft has released the trailer for its forthcoming The Amazing Spider-Man 2 mobile game.

Timed to coincide with the build-up to the movie sequel of the same name (which hits theaters Friday, May 2), the game will land in the App Store sometimes in April.

Among the new features of iOS 7.1 is the addition of a warning message for users concerning the 15-minute in-app purchase window. This quarter-hour window allows you to buy IAPs on an iOS device without further authorization for 15 minutes following the correct entry of a password.

Drug dealers, pimps and other criminals should be getting excited right now, of they live in Germany at least – their burner phones are about to get a whole lot more secure.

Why? Vodafone Germany has announced an encrypted SIM that will secure your precious data as it leaves the phone. The “digital private key and corresponding certificates” are stored on the SIM itself so it should all work with just a PIN on the device.