News - page 1427

Apple has released the fourth beta of OS X Mavericks 10.9.2 to registered developers — suggesting that the OS update could be made public in the very near future.

The update follows one week after developers received Apple’s OS X 10.9.2 beta 3, and more than five weeks following the launch of the first beta.

Quick! If you want to bake iPhone-shaped cookies, you should grab this i-Cookie Cutter from ThinkGeek before Samsung buys them all up to help it make more iPhone clones.

Chil’s Notchbook iPad Air case has one great feature that sets it apart form other cases. There’s a notch, or rather a slice, cut into the bottom of the front cover just next to the spine, and this notch lets you shove your palm up in there making the whole caboodle sit on your hand with no effort needed to grip it.

Neat, especially for when you’re reading books.

PDF Scanner is a new iOS app that scans your paper documents and turns them into PDFs. The gimmick that sets this app apart from all the others that do the same thing is that PDF Scanner can auto-detect and split double-page spreads into single sheets. And if that’s what you need then it may be worth struggling through the rest of the app to get to them. But probably not.

You know how when you open the Evernote iOS app to joy down a quick note, or snap a quick photo reminder? Usually what happens is that you spend the first half a minute desperately trying to remember whatever it was you wanted to remember while you tap around trying to find the new note buttons. Well, the new Evernote doesn’t help you if you launch into the depths of a previously-taken note, but it does at least make the main page a lot easier to use.

Just like the old Trapper Keeper, the STM Dux iPad case keeps all your notes (which are actually inside your iPad, safe within the Dux’s covers). You can plaster photos all over the inside of the clear plastic back. And it even has a little flip-open clasp that keeps the front cover from opening.

WordPress is one of the titans of desktop blogging, but when it comes to mobile, the WordPress app has been my least favorite ways of publishing from my iPhone. Since the release of iOS 7 though the company has pushed to revamp their app, including an update today that brings a redesigned post editing experience.

The free update is available in the App Store now but is exclusively for iOS 7, bringing with it an enhanced Reader  section so you can follow your favorite blogs while you blog. They’ve also improved inline commenting, notifications, and stats while throwing in lots of bug fixes into the mix.

Here’s the full list of changes:

Realmac’s Clear ushered in a new approach to designing productivity apps, and a new calendar app called Peek has taken the same visual aesthetic and built upon it.

The name says it all. Peek is designed to let you see your schedule at a glance, and there are plenty of fairly intuitive gestures to help.

How do you increase the size of a touchscreen without increasing the screen real estate? Answer: by creating a smart bezel.

A new patent published today reveals how a future generation iPad could feature a bezel able to detect gesture and touch inputs through Force Sensing. Not only would the technique described allow gestures — such as swipes — to continue off the normal surface of the screen, but it would also allow specific virtual buttons for tasks such as scrolling to be incorporated into the iPad’s bezel.

Apple holds one of the world’s largest collection of active credit cards in the world thanks to iTunes, yet despite all that purchasing power, it has only recently begun to look into processing payments for physical goods, and PayPal is desperate to play a role in the action.

Payment industry executives say that PayPal is pitching Apple hard to let it in on the company’s rumored payment initiative, according to a report from Re/code. At this point, executives aren’t sure what type of tech Apple wants to use, or even how big a role it wants to play in the industry, but they’re willing to go as far as white-labeling their payments service, just so Apple will use it.

Episodic noir-thriller adventure game, The Wolf Among Us, gets its second episode next week with “Smoke & Mirrors.”

Bigby Wolf is hell-bent on solving the murders revealed in Episode One, and will stop at nothing to get at the truth.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll change your iPhone’s wallpaper on a regular basis to keep things fresh, but finding a good one isn’t always easy. At least that was the case — until Wallgram came along. Wallgram isn’t just another photo bank full of images; it uses Instagram photos uploaded by your friends to create beautiful parallax wallpapers.

The immensely popular SwiftKey keyboard makes its debut on iOS today via a new note-taking app called SwiftKey Note. It promises to be the fastest way to make notes on an iPhone and iPad, and it boasts features like Evernote syncing and multilingual typing. It’s also completely free.

Facebook today announced a new standalone iPhone app called Paper, and you’ll be pleased to hear it’s nothing like any of the Facebook apps that came before it. Paper’s main focus is to make all the news you’re interested in easy to access it, but it’s much more than just a newsreader; in fact, it does enough to replace the regular Facebook app for more users.

If there’s one place you can expect to see cutting edge technology at its finest it’s at a Dutch flower park, right?

Apple could open a sapphire glass manufacturing facility in Arizona as early as February, according to recently published correspondence between the company and state regulators.

Analyst Matt Margolis unearthed documents that mention the Mesa plant — described as “Project Cascade” — and note that it would be used to manufacturer “a critical new sub-component” for a future Apple product.

Carrot Fit is the new app-with-attitude from the makers of Carrot To-Do and Carrot Alarm.

Welcoming you with a message of “Greetings, tubby human” from “your new fitness overlord”, Carrot Fit is a harsh-but-hilarious taskmaster dedicated to making weight loss suck a little bit less.

As the developers explain, “Carrot is a sadistic AI construct with one simple goal: to transform your flabby carcass into a Grade A specimen of the human race. She will do whatever it takes – including threatening, inspiring, ridiculing, and bribing you – to make this happen.”

When I reviewed the Lollipod iPhone tripod, I mentioned that the super-light support would also make a great portable lighting stand. It seems I wasn’t the only person to notice this, and now the folks behind the Lollipod have added the Faith Speedlight stand to their lineup. And man, it looks every bit as well-thought-out as the original Lollipod.

Having recently purchased both Nest and AI startup DeepMind, Google is currently on a high tech spending spree. Even Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson has claimed that the search giant’s recent acquisitions have helped it take the lead over Apple when it comes to innovation in 2014.

But Apple is also putting its $159 billion worth of cash and investments to good use by carrying out its fair share of acquisitions.

When I lived in an my crumbling old apartment in Barcelona, I had more USB-charing devices that I had power points in my office. And even in the relatively modernity of an East German apartment block, I don’t want to plug in a separate box my iPhone, iPad, bike lights, Kindle… Etc. What I need is the Tunewear TUNEMAX 5USB Charger, a five-way USB charger with a name a rapper could be proud of.

Image Blender is one of my favorite iOS apps. It’s a single-purpose tool that lets you combine two photos by stacking them and choosing the blend mode to get the effect and the opacity you want. If you ever wanted to take a photo and make it look like it was printed onto an old sheet of paper, or to, uh, make an astronaut sit in front of a pile of red sand, then Image Blender is for you.

And now Image Blender 2 is for you, too. The update adds some good functionality, but the best part is that – thanks to an iOS 7 makeover – it no longer looks horrible.

If you’re a person who needs to balance lots of appointments on a daily basis, but hasn’t come across Mynd Smart Calendar yet, it’s something that’s well worth looking into.

The free app — which describes itself as an “intelligent mobile calendar” — accurately identifies the places you’re going on any given day and then predicts how much buffer time you’re going to need to schedule between meetings given the typical traffic levels at that time of day. As you get closer to appointments, the app reminds you when it is that you need to leave and even launches your preferred navigation app.

Another camera bag? Yes. The Roamographer is pretty much the complete opposite to the Booq Python Mirrorless also featured this morning. It’s big, it’s made of lovely bison leather, and it’s huge. It’s also frikkin’ gorgeous, and equally frikkin’ expensive.

Sick of all those boring blue folders that crowd your Finder windows? I know I am. I can barely copy a file without my eyes starting to cross, my breathing slowing and the tendrils of sleep starting to soothe my brain. What you and I need is Folderol, a $1 Mac app that lets you change the colors of your folders by drag and drop.

I can’t believe it took me so long to get to Jurassic Park Builder.