Does the recent spat over Writer Pro and its software-patenting shenanigans leave you wishing you could use its beautiful Nitti Light font in a different developer’s app? Or are you so scarred by years of using Microsoft Word that you can’t concentrate unless you’re staring at a page of Times New Roman?
Fear not, friends, because The Soulmen have the answer. Hidden in the latest update to Daedalus Touch is a way to import any font you like. Yup, I’m talking about Comic Sans on iOS.
The barrier to entry for emulating classic games on a Mac has always been pretty high, until now. OpenEmu is an amazing retro game emulator for the Mac that has been literally years in the making, and it’s finally available for everyone to download and use for free.
Apple has been fined 20 million New Taiwan dollars by the country’s Fair Trade Commission for illegally fixing iPhone prices with Japanese carriers. At only $670,000 U.S, the fine is chump change for Apple, but the allegations are serious.
In Japan and other Asian countries, an annual tradition that many retailers participate in during the holidays is called “Fukubukuro,” commonly referred to as “lucky” or “mystery” bags.
The concept is simple: you put together bags of heavily discounted products at random and sell them to customers who don’t know exactly what they’re getting. It may sound weird to westerners, but if you really think about it, an overweight old man in a bright robe coming down your chimney at night is a lot weirder.
Anyway, Apple Japan is participating in the tradition again this year, and it has confirmed the special sale’s kickoff date of January 2nd. Lucky Bags will cost 36,000 yen, or around $345. Bags usually contain items like iPods, random accessories and t-shirts, but customers have received more expensive hardware like iPads and even MacBooks in years past.
Supplies are limited, so Apple stores in Japan will definitely have lines of eager customers after New Years.
Source: Apple
This is the first year Apple has made its 12 Days of Gifts app available for U.S customers, and to kick things off the company is giving away a free EP of Justin Timberlake’s performance at the 2013 iTunes Festival.
The iOS app will be giving away a free gift (music, iBooks, apps, movies, etc.) once a day until January 6th. A new single from popular artist Lorde was released as a separate, bonus giveaway through the app last week.
Four exclusive tracks and two accompanying videos from Justin Timberlake’s concert are available for download. Once you tap the album cover in the app, you’ll be taken to the iTunes Store where you can get the album.
Source: App Store
Apple is by far the most secretive company in tech, so predicting its next move or the specifics of its next big thing is incredibly difficult. No one in Cupertino will leak this kind of information, so analysts and investors are forced to look a little further afield for scraps.
They usually turn to Apple’s supply chain — the people who are in some way involved with the production of its upcoming products. Sometimes this yields successful results, but other times, it results in some pretty crazy rumors.
Like every other year, there have been many memorable ones throughout 2013, so we thought it might be fun to look back at some of them. Here’s our roundup of the craziest Apple rumors from the last 12 months.
Remember all those stories that accompanied the iPad’s launch about how the device was so straightforward that a person with no previous computer experience could use one? Well, it turns out that they’re so easy that cats can use them too.
A new endeavor from the UK’s Cats Protection charity has seen pictures “painted” by felines, using the Paint For Cats iPad app, sold off to raise money.
The Rockstar Consortium — a group of several tech companies, including Apple — has reportedly been in talks concerning the sale of a portion of its $4.5 billion worth of patents.
This marks a major turnaround from 2011, when the patents — acquired from the Nortel Networks Corp — were highly sought after. In that instance, Apple and its bidding partners outbid Google for access to more than 4,000 patents.
I was all ready to write a sarcastic post about the Splitter, a little box that allows independent volume control of the two pairs of headphones you jack into it. After all, sharing a music track is something spontaneous – adding a specialist piece of hardware into the mix seems a little like quickly clipping your FitBit to your pubes before making love.
But then I thought about traveling, and movies.
If you thought that “Think Different” was the last time Apple was going to come under fire from the grammar police, think again!
Finland’s linguistic authorities, the Institute for the Languages of Finland — which rules on correct spellings, loan words and usages as the Finnish, Swedish, Romani and Sami languages develop — has decreed that the correct Finnish usage of iPhone is not iPhone, but rather Iphone or I-phone.
Samsung may have been ordered to pay Apple $290 million in patent infringement damages, but one thing the tech company hasn’t managed to steal is Apple’s knack for good advertizing.
In a holiday season in which Apple has released its effective and genuinely tear-jerking “Misunderstood” iPhone ad, the best Samsung can manage is a Galaxy Gear smart watch commercial that would have looked cheesy in 1982 — which is where we presume the creative team behind this campaign must have been summoned from.
As nerds, one of our Christmas holiday duties is to fix the computers of family and friends. And if the past is anything to go by, fixing Macs can mean opening them up for kitchen-table-top surgery. Hell, there’s even something to be done about common iPhone problems, too: switching out a smashed glass back on an iPhone 4/S, for example.
But a real doctor doesn’t go to work without a proper set of tools. I’ve stripped enough screw heads with cheap screwdrivers to know this. What you need is VisionTek’s new “12 Piece Toolkit 900671.”
DeGeo is an app that removes the location data from your photos before sharing them, while leaving non-location metadata intact. As someone who switches off the location option in Instagram whenever I’m at my home or a friend’s home, I’m totally into this $1 data stripper.
Have you ever responded to an e-mail from your boss with some angry knee-jerk reply, then you’ve accidentally sent it, only to regret it later as you sweep the contents of your desk into a cardboard filing box? Me too, but as Leander never reads any of his e-mail, I — unlike you — still have a job.
Let.ter is a brand new app which will help you stay employed next time. It’s a beautifully simple Markdown-based app with one purpose: composing e-mails away from your main e-mail app.
Call it a stocking filler if you want, but Digitimes has one last (?) rumor to take us out of 2013: that Apple is planning to release a 12.9-inch tablet in October 2014, aimed at the North American educational market.
The rumors allegedly come from “sources from the upstream supply chain”.
One of the best things about Instapaper now being owned by Betaworks is that the developers spend their time adding new features and services instead of complaining about things on their personal blogs.
And today that ethic has paid off, bringing us Instapaper Daily, a new site which shows the most popular story in Instapaper today. And of course, because Instapaper is all about reading later, you can browse back to any day in the past and see the headline story form that day, too.
Apple has just posted its iOS 7 Tech Talks videos online for streaming by information-hungry developers. The videos show the full sessions of the roving, mini-WWDC sessions that have been taking place throughout the world since October.
It’s still very early in the life of the new Mac Pro (shipping dates have already slipped to February), but the first review unit reports are starting to seep out — and they’re positive.
Tim Cook has talked about this being an “iPad Christmas”, but plain calling it an Apple Christmas might be altogether more accurate — as Apple surged to a 2013 new stock high following news of the recent China Mobile deal.
Apple stock gained 3.8 percent to end Monday trading at $570.09, reflecting what Creative Technologies analyst Tim Bajarin has called, “a huge deal for Apple.”
Although it hit several year highs over the past several months, Apple stock prices had been depressed for some of 2013 as investors appeared concerned regarding a supposed lack of innovation from the company.
More recently, share prices had wavered as nervous shareholders fretted that the long-reported China Mobile deal wasn’t happening as fast as they hoped.
Although analysts are still arguing over the long-term impact the China Mobile deal is likely to have, this strong year finish nonetheless bodes well for Apple in 2014.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google shares also finished strong after the day’s trading.
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Apple’s only Berlin store — — located on the city’s lengthy Kurfuerstendamm shopping avenue — has been broken into, with thieves crashing a stolen Opel Corsa through the attractively minimalist (but sadly overly vulnerable) plate glass entrance way this morning, and making off with MacBooks, iPads and iPhones.
Americans reportedly spend more than $5 billion upgrading their iPhones — or switching to Apple from a competing brand — each year.
She may have the fastest selling album in iTunes history, but not everyone is happy with Beyoncé’s success — and it’s not just limited to brick-and-mortar stores either.
Responding to Beyoncé’s iTunes exclusive, Amazon has joined Target in announcing that it will not stock physical copies of the Beyoncé album (although the album is available from Amazon’s online US MP3 store if a customer searches for it).
Nokia has taken aim at the iPad before. Just last month, we reported on a somewhat Freudian ad for the Lumia 2520 which showed a male iPad user unable to connect with the fairer sex because of the “shortcomings” of his chosen tablet.
If that wasn’t enough to get you to drop your Apple products immediately, Nokia now returns with an even more searing indictment against the iPad: it will make you ignore your dog.
It may have recently fallen out with Beyoncé over her decision to debut her new album on iTunes rather than in brick-and-mortar stores, but Target isn’t above going down the Apple route to grab a pre-Christmas buck either.
Customers searching for perfect last-minute holiday gift ideas can head to Target, which is offering deals on the iPhone 5c, 5s, and iPad Air between now and December 24.
Apple investors got their Christmas wish: The China Mobile deal, which could add billions of dollars to Apple’s revenue, has finally materialized.
The iPhone will be available to China Mobile customers beginning January 17, Apple announced Sunday, with pricing and availability to be released at a later date.