Wow, this is a surprise. StoryBuilder is a new browser-based web app from… Amazon. It’s a pretty great corkboard app for screenwriters to plan their screenplays, and because it’s browser based you can use it anywhere, on your Mac, iPad or iPhone.
I love wireless gadgets, but sometimes they’re more trouble than they’re worth. For instance, I’m forever getting dropped connections on my AirPlay speakers, making them more annoying to use than wired speakers, despite the promised convenience. And wireless earbuds seem like an exercise in frustration. I regularly lose even my white Apple EarPods, so imagine how bad it’d be with two separate (and tiny) buds.
Jabra’s new Rox wireless earbuds at least address the last question. How? By adding a wire.
I’m a great example of why backup iPhone batteries don’t really work. I have a stack of the things in all shapes and sizes, and yet where are they when I need them? At home in a gray felt cat house (don’t ask). I just never remember to take the things with me.
Photojojo’s new Power Boost Keychain aims to change that, putting a smallish battery pack and charing cable on a keychain. Now you’ll never leave the thing at home. Or if you do, you’ll be locked out, and you won’t be able to call a locksmith.
According to Tim Cook there is good reason to feel excited about the possibilities offered by Apple’s deal with China Mobile.
Cook — who is currently in Beijing ahead of the iPhone going on sale on the China Mobile network this Friday — said he is “incredibly optimistic” about Apple’s partnership with the world’s largest mobile carrier.
MakeDoc looks like a good bet for otherwise right-thinking folks who find them selves required to supply a Word DOCX file. Being a smart nerd, you undoubtedly write in Markdown, converting to the required format on output. But DOCX isn;t an output option for most iOS text editors. That’s where makeDoc comes in.
Horizon is a great new iPhone app that shoots horizontal video however you hold your phone. It uses the gyroscope and accelerometers inside the iPhone to work out just how you’re holding it, and grabs a proper, level landscape-format shot for you.
Check out the video demo:
The big intrigue in the tech world today is why Google bought Nest Labs for $3.2 billion and Apple didn’t.
A lot of the speculation is paranoid: Google wants to track everyone offline as well as online, and Nest’s thermostat and smoke alarms give the Googleplex motion sensors right in peoples’ homes.
But wouldn’t Apple be a more natural fit for the home-automation startup? Nest was co-founded by two former Apple staffers, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers. Fadell was one the fathers of the iPod — a key hardware engineer who led the music player’s development over 17 generations. Rogers was one of Fadell’s top lieutenants.
With great design and easy interfaces, Nest’s combination of hardware and internet software services makes its products very Apple-like. And as home automation is poised to take off (thanks largely to the iPhone and iPad), Apple is surely interested in this potentially huge market.
So why didn’t Apple didn’t pick up the company? Maybe it’s because Jony Ive, Apple’s head designer, was responsible for getting Tony Fadell pushed out of Cupertino.
A lot of us were surprised that Apple didn’t even put up a fight to outbid Google for Nest – co-founded by Tony Fadell aka, the Father of the iPod – and its army of smarthome employees. Not only did Google score Nest’s innovative smart-thermostat and smoke detector in the $3.2 billion deal, but in an age where quality talent is getting harder to come by, the company also scooped up 100 ex-Apple employees in the process.
As if we didn’t have enough fat shaming to go around, there’s a new game on the App Store called Plastic Surgery For Barbara, and it’s a doozy.
The idea here is that Barbara (or Barbie, if you will) is overweight. The developers want kids aged 12+ to play a game in which they can assume that fat is ugly, and that the only way to fix a weight problem is through surgery.
“Barbara likes to eat a lot of burgers and chocolates and once she found out that she looks ugly,” says the App Store description. “She can’t make it up with this situation any additional second. And today plastic surgeon is going to make operation on her body and face in order to return cute Barbara’s look.”
So, she’s fat, which means she’s ugly, and she can’t wait any longer. If she just gets surgery, she’ll be “cute” again. Whew.
Gag.
The team behind Evomail, a popular third-party mail client for iOS, today released Evomail+, a new version of its app designed for iOS 7. In addition to a beautiful new design, the new release adds a whole host of new features, including customizable gestures, filtering tools, and Dropbox and Box.net integration.
Oh, and like it’s predecessor, it’s completely free.
Moment has taken high-end, multi-element lens design and brought it to the iPhone. Going up squarely against Olloclip, Moment’s two new lenses promise “no” distortion, minimal chromatic aberration and great build quality. Sounds amazing.
It’s possible to make a lot of money by writing an iOS app. In fact, the top iOS app makers each gross as much as $90,000 a day from their offerings. Yet despite these success stories, the vast majority of app developers are finding it difficult to make money on the App Store, and the bad news is, it’s only going to get worse, with a new forecast predicting that less than one app in 10,000 will make money by 2018. Woof.
We’ve been waiting for years for Apple to start using Liquidmetal in its products. The company has an exclusive licensing agreement to use the space-age alloy in its products, but until now, the only thing made by Apple of Liquidmetal is the SIM Ejector tool for the iPhone.
That’s not stopping Apple from dreaming about exciting new uses for their T-1000 alloy,, though. New patents from Apple published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggest that future pressure sensors, like the home button, could be made of Liquidmetal.
One of the most bizarre games of recent memory is The Binding Of Isaac. Inspired by both The Legend Of Zelda and the Old Testament, The Binding Of Isaac is rogue-like game that follows a deformed naked child as he explores a subterranean world of his own Freudian nightmares to try to escape his insane Christian fundamentalist mother. I told you it was weird, and playing it is even weirder.
The Binding Of Isaac is already available on the Mac, and thanks to a remake/sequel The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth, it may — may! — be coming to the iPad as well.
If Apple makes a larger iPhone this year — say, a 4.7-inch model — it’s unlikely that they will just phase out the 4-inch iPhone. Instead, they could take an approach similar to this year’s iPad Air and iPad mini: two functionally identical devices with different screen sizes.
So what would an iPhone Air look like? Designer Federico Ciccarese of SET Solution has put together some renders of his dream iPhone Air, and, well, to be honest, it’s pretty much a fantasy. But it’s a pretty one.
While games dominated the App Store in 2013 in terms of top grossing apps, digital comic app comiXology has announced that it was the highest grossing non-game iPad app — for the third year running.
Originally arriving in the App Store last Thursday, Rhythm Thief & the Paris Caper mysteriously vanished the following day after SEGA discovered “unexpected problems” with the game.
Do you get annoyed at struggling to find symbols on iOS, or find yourself missing the Unicode library found on OS X?
If you’re the kind of person that needs to make frequent use of symbols and characters not found on QWERTY keyboards, you could a lot worse than checking out the new Simbol app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
For some time now, a number of pundits have been calling on Apple to release a cheaper version of the iPhone to grow market share in developing countries.
To some extent Apple has apparently listened — since it is reportedly planning to sell the discontinued iPhone 4 in India for the reduced price of around RS 15,000 ($250) — making it among the cheapest unsubsidized iPhones in the world.
Feedshare is a great new service for sharing your RSS feeds. That is, you can upload the OPML file containing all your subscribed feeds and it will be available to anyone who cares. And you don’t just have to share your entire RSS setup either. You could use this to share a set of feeds on a particular subject for instance.
The iOS 7.1 beta seems to be way more in flux than previous betas, adding odd little experiments (f.lux-style white-point adjustment) and handy – and surely temporary – little tweaks for developers (manual deleting of install files). But one thing that has been going crazy throughout the betas 1–3 is the keyboard.
And man is the keyboard in iOS 7.1 beta 3 a pain in the ass.
A new feature in iOS 7.1 beta 3 is the ability to delete iOS installation files that have been automatically downloaded over-the-air.
Until now, iDevice users who chose not to install a particular update to iOS would find that their iPad or iPhone would nonetheless download the install file and store it locally — the only way to remove it being to update your device’s firmware.
The verdict is in — and Apple is stuck with Michael Bromwich, the antitrust monitor appointed to ensure the company’s compliance in e-book price fixing antitrust rulings.
The new bandwagon onto which camera makers can desperately throw themselves in the hopes of saving their low-end camera sales is “smart lenses,” like Vivitar’s new Vivicam IU680. These are in fact just cameras, only they look like lenses and they sit on your iPhone, connecting wirelessly to allow you to control the device from an app and receive pictures from a large-sensor camera in return.
But really, what’s the point?
When Sunrise Calendar got its big iOS 7 makeover last fall, it solidified itself as one of the leading third-party calendars in the App Store. The biggest thing it was lacking was an iPad version—well, until now. Released last week, Sunrise had made its way to the iPad, and it’s great.