News - page 1416

One of the nicer things Apple does every year is its “12 Days Of Gift” promotion, in which iTunes account holders in the Europe (and most recently, the United States) are given twelve digital gifts in the days following Christmas for the considerate price of nothing.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and Apple has just released its last free offering as part of this year’s “12 Days Of Gift” promotion. Luckily, it’s a good one: a free mini-album by the Rolling Stones themselves!

If you were a kid in the 1970’s or 1980’s, you probably had a Trapper Keeper, a famously popular line of loose-leaf binders and folders featuring velcro flaps and bright, colorful, kitschy designs. Trapper Keepers are still out there, but they’ve lost a lot of their cool kid cachet over the last couple decades… but if you grew up in their heyday, just the site of a Trapper Keeper is enough to bring a smile to your lips.

Over at If Industries, a Seattle-based maker of Etsy gear, they have mocked up an awesome look at what an officially sanctioned Trapper Keeper iPad case would look like, right down to the retro-tastic Back to the Future and Lisa Frank designs. And there’s even an embedded Bluetooth keyboard in each one!

Parisian tech company KEECKER promises to let users project movies, listen to music, surf the Internet, make video calls and play videogames through a new smartphone innovation.

So far, so normal, you might think. Instead of simply acting as a universal remote control for the devices around you, however, KEECKER offers this functionality courtesy of your very own personal robot!

In Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, a mustachioed Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.

You’d think Siri would appreciate having a movie made about her, but instead, kitty’s got claws when it comes to her filmic counterpart: thanks to Apple’s cheeky and surprisingly timely programmers, if you ask Siri “Are you her?” she will respond: “No. Her portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial”, “No. You know that it’s just a movie, right?” and “No. In my opinion, she gives artifical intelligence a bad name.”

LAS VEGAS, CES 2014 – Chatting on Facetime with friends is great. That is until your double-comes barreling over the screen. We’ve seen people go to some pretty extreme lengths to overcome the unflattering Facetime camera angles, but Brookstone is introducing a new product at CES that finally gives users a Facetime facelift without the need for cosmetic surgery.

iTOi Booth is a case/console that goes over your iPad and uses a patented optical lens system perscription to adjust the camera angle of your iPad so your eyes are level with the screen when Facetiming. The result is direct eye contact with the other person on the screen and a more natural appearance, but will anyone want to lockup their iPad in a gigantic console just to look prettier on Facetime?

Here’s video of iToi Booth in action:

As a Christmas present, hackers over the holidays released two great jailbreaks. For the majority out there running iOS 7, Team Evad3rs released the much heralded Evasi0n jailbreak, while for the holdouts, p0sixninja released a working jailbreak for iOS 6.1.3, 6.1.4 and 6.1.5 called p0sixspwn. It’s the latter jailbreak which has been updated today with support for OS X Snow Leopard, and numeorus bug fixes.

Have you ever watched somebody with long fingernails tap-tap-tapping at their iPhone or iPad screen? It’s painful. Either their overgrown keratin caps skitter over the screen in a chitinous clatter, or they have to approach the screen with the flat pads of their fingers, as if they were carefully giving the government a perfect image of their fingerprints.

But no longer. The most useful new product showcased at this year’s CES is Elektra Nails, a set of capacitive stick-on talons.

We recently called SteelSeries’ H Wireless gaming headset a “miracle of sound and function.” Will the same enthusiasm hold true about the company’s other gaming accessories?

SteelSeries is obviously hoping so, since is has announced its new wireless iOS gaming controller — the Stratus — at CES 2014.

You know what would make all of those crazy-dangerous squirrel-suit action movies even better? A big, wide, cinematic 2.39:1 aspect ratio. And that’s just what you’ll get with the new Letus AnamorphX Adapter for the GoPro Hero.

Griffin has added a non-ugly, multitrack version of its StudioConnect music box. The sturdy-looking unit lets you record multiple instruments on your iPad (or Mac, if you’re still living in 2010), piping the results straight into the music software of your choice.

Having beaten out Apple TV as the most-used streaming set-top box in the United States, Roku is set to debut its own smart TV — called Roku TV.

“That’s right, actual TVs, designed to give consumers a simple and powerful entertainment experience in today’s connected world,” Roku CEO Anthony Wood noted in his company’s announcement. “We’ve applied the same principles that have made Roku the most popular streaming players in America to TVs.”

Ever felt the need to turn your Mac up to 11? Of course you have, and now, thanks to Griffin’s new Bluetooth PowerMate, you can do it wirelessly.

The rush to announce products at CES means we often see CGI renders and vague price promises, just to get in on the news action. But we’re giving SuperTooth a break here for two reasons. One, the company makes great speakers, and two, pretty much every one of those speakers has started life as a dummy model on a trade-show stand.

Withings isn’t content with looking after your body throughout every waking hour of your life. Now it wants to make like some kind of Inception-style doctor and keep an eye on your dreams with the help of the Aura.

Today LaCie announced its new lineup of hard drives, including the Fuel, a wireless 1TB hard drive that works with the Seagate Media iOS app. This is the first collaboration between the two storage companies since Seagate bought LaCie last year.

Besides the Fuel, LaCie is also unveiling three new hard drives at CES, including the Little Big Disk portable drive with Thunderbolt 2.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2014 – At the big “CES Unveiled” press event on Sunday night, one of the biggest draws was the TrewGrip keyboard; a funky Bluetooth keyboard for smartphones and tablets with the keys on the back of the device.

The company’s reps were mobbed by curious journalists, jockeying each other to get a better a look at the keyboard that claims to be “the evolution of typing.”

Designed for typists on the go, like healthcare professionals making hospital rounds, the TrewGrip is a unique reverse keyboard with a full set of QWERTY keys on the back.

Using it requires retraining and takes a week or more to master, but at the booth, company reps were tapping out 60-80 words a minute. Not as fast as many touch-typists on a regular keyboard, but a lot faster than pecking away on a glass screen.

Apple has acquired SnappyLabs, the small startup behind the SnappyCam iPhone app, according to a report from TechCrunch. SnappyCam gave the user the ability to shoot 20 full-res photos per second with the iPhone’s camera. By comparison, Apple’s new Burst Mode on the iPhone 5s can only capture 10 photos per second.

The price Apple paid and exact date of the acquisition remain unknown, but the SnappyCam app was recently pulled from the App Store.

This time on The CultCast: We all know the NSA likes backdoor access, but are they really spying on us via our iDevices, and worse, is Apple in cahoots? We’ll tell you what we think… Plus, if you had to pick just one app, one piece of tech, and one movie as your favorite of 2013, what would they be? We’ll tell you ours on this first episode of the year!

Have a few laughs and get caught up on each week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below adventure begin.

Thanks to Squarespace for supporting this ep.! If you need a beautiful website that will look great on any device that visits, you need Squarespace. Try it for free, or checkout with code Cultcast1 to save 10%.

Cult of Mac Magazine wants to help you get it together in 2014: you are probably already using your iPhone, iPad and Mac to track the bejesus out of your habits, right? We’re calling it iFitness (*yeah, I know!) because Apple devices have kickstarted a new way of thinking about and monitoring everything we do.

But maybe in between logging your couch to 5K you’ve discovered that your iPhone isn’t always the best running partner — or that it still can’t kick you out that line for the cronuts.

Cult of Mac talked to a bunch of fitness experts, including personal trainers, on how to make sure your iPhone or iPad and those apps you love can help you reach goals you’ve set yourself for this new year and lessen the more painful fitness fails.

Reporter Sarah Stirland also examines the growing body of health-related apps and discovers what’s on the horizon for this burgeoning business and why doctors are keen on keeping track of patients this way.

Cult of Mac Magazine

Since the iOS 7 jailbreak came out, one of the hottest new iOS hardware features that hackers have been looking to utilize is Touch ID in the iPhone 5s. For example, a tweak was just recently released that allows jailbreakers to use Touch ID to simulate pressing the home button.

The coolest use of Touch ID I’ve seen in a jailbreak tweak so far is AppLocker, which was updated to version 2.2 today in Cydia with 64-bit and iPhone 5s support. The premise is simple: AppLocker lets you lock individual iOS apps (stock or third-party) with a password. On the 5s, you can now use Touch ID to unlock.

Here’s a hands-on look:

Today Corning announced that it’s ready to manufacture a new 3D-shaped Gorilla glass for availability this year. The new glass is designed with curved phone and wearable displays in mind.

As the main glass supplier for iOS devices, Corning’s 3D Gorilla glass could very well end up in future Apple products.

Last month, we told you about a new startup called Typo Keyboard that’s backed and co-founded by TV/radio personality Ryan Seacrest. The story behind it was that Seacrest was so frustrated with the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard that he decided to personally invest $1 million in a solution.

We called the Typo keyboard accessory “BlackBerry-inspired” at the time, which was a mild way of saying that it looks like a complete ripoff of Blackberry’s layout. Blackberry isn’t happy, and the company has now sued Seacrest’s startup.

The Yahoo! Sports app just received an update, bringing the interface more in line with iOS 7. The company also added a new feature to the app–Loops–which will let you and thousands of other sports fans create short animated gif-like clips of your favorite moments in sports.

Nothing says “I’m a super sports fan” than a carefully crafted photographic meme, complete with wacky motion and large outlined text.

Apple’s new Mac Pro is quite the work of art. It might look like a trash can at first glance, but when you stop and think about everything Apple packed into its new high-end machine, you can’t help but admire its efforts. Measuring just 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 inches deep, it’ll squeeze into the smallest of spaces atop or beneath your desk.

But if for some reason you’ve decided you don’t like it stood in an upright position, you can lie it down. Apple designed the Mac Pro to work in both vertical and horizontal positions, and it says it’s fine to use the machine on its side — as long as you take some simple precautions first.

Best Buy has knocked $75 off all iPhone 5s models for a limited time, making the 16GB model just $124.99 when bought with a two-year contract extension on AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon. It’s one of the lowest prices we’ve seen for the device since it made its debut last September, but you’ll need to grab yours soon.