News - page 1433

Springpad launched on the heels of Evernote in 2008. Though the two are superficially alike — they’re both cloud-based note-taking services often accessed though their respective iOS and Android apps — Springpad was always a little more geared toward collecting and organizing groups of things, like products or recipes.

Springpad’s latest update further underscores this difference; it now has a set of templates that can be used for organizing different categories of saved items, as opposed to the more open format of Evernote.

Apple and other tech companies have come under fire for taking all their manufacturing to China, but iPhone-maker Foxconn is looking to turn the tables a bit with its announcement that it plans to build a new $30 million high-tech manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania.

Old computers tend to lead sedentary lives. Parked in shelves and closets, maybe touched by the occasional dusting; the lucky ones still run old games from time to time. But sometimes one becomes a sensation.

The Twiggy Macintosh is a prototype Macintosh 128k that used a 5.25-inch disk drive. Long thought lost to history, two of these primordial Macinti were recently resurrected and returned to life in full working glory. Their rebirth brought about a rare reunion of the original Macintosh design team. And one of them recently repaid the effort by fetching about $40,000 at an auction.

They are — without a doubt — the oldest working Macs in the world.

Here is the story of their amazing journey.

Apple is still facing supply constraints on the 3G/4G units of the iPad mini with Retina display, but it looks like customers can finally walk into an Apple Store and purchase a Retina iPad mini without ordering online first.

Apple has today begun selling the iPhone 5s unlocked and SIM-free to customers in the United States. Customers can stick in any GSM SIM card (so that’s one from AT&T or T-Mobile) when they receive the device and begin using it immediately with their existing plan — but they’ll have to wait 1-2 weeks for it to ship.

You probably don’t remember Clumsy Ninja, a totally unknown game that Apple chose to debut alongside the iPhone 5. The game was supposed to be out in 2012, but was delayed for mysterious reasons for a full year, without a word of explanation.

But Clumsy Ninja is finally here. And it debuts a new App Store feature along with it.

Apple has the exclusive license to liquidmetal, prompting all sorts of speculation that we would sooner or later see liquid metal iPhones, iPads and Macs. Despite this, so far, we’ve only seen Apple release one “product” using liquidmetal: the iPhone SIM ejector tool.

But Apple’s liquidmetal plans might be gearing up. The company has just filed five new patents, explaining the process by which it would use liquidmetal to build next-gen smartphones, tablets and digital displays.

I love my Apple TV. I hate the Apple TV remote. Oh, sure, it looks slick, but it might as well be a contact lens for all of the instantaneous ease with which it is lost.

I’ve taken to just velcro-ing my Apple TV remote to the back of my bigger, bulkier TV remote, but if you’d like a slightly less duct-tape solution, why not consider these fluorescent skins for the Apple TV remote that glow-in-the-dark?

Like most glowing items, these charge by absorbing ambient light and releasing it later. They come in multiple colors, and just peel on and off.

You have to admit, this would help you more easily spot your Apple TV remote. If you want one, you can get it now for just $9.95.

Source: Slickwraps

The third-generation iPad mini and second-generation iPad Air will have Touch ID, there’s no doubt. Just like Siri — a feature that debuted in an ‘S’ year for the iPhone — took a year to creep to the iPad, TouchID will have a year’s exclusivity before it comes to Apple’s line-up of tablets.

Don’t hold your breath, though. We’re almost a year away from Touch ID coming to the iPad mini. So you should take this picture of a ‘leaked’ iPad mini 3 with Touch ID with super pessimism.

Fed up of hearing about iPad Christmases already, and want to be reminded of what winter is actually all about?

Head over to the App Store then and download the free Sickweather iOS app, which will provide you with real-time, geo-tagged alerts whenever you are about to enter a location in which a person has recently reported feeling ill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Le9wvoY00

It’s sometimes easy to forget just what a paradigm shift the tablet computer — and specifically the iPad — represents. Well, Phil Schiller just reminded us by tweeting a link to Apple’s latest “Life on iPad” campaign.

Boxer is another of the new breed of apps that let you swipe your way through e-mail and get to the Zen state known only as “inbox zero.” Mailbox was arguably the first of these apps – which also let you turn your e-mails into to-dos – but it’s Gmail only and the iPad version sucks. Boxer, née Taskbox (which supports pretty much every e-mail service including vanilla IMAP), has just gotten bumped to v4.0, adding in iPad support and a slew of other welcome extras. It’s also $1 instead of $5 for a while, in way of celebration.

Wren’s V5AP is still one of my favorite AirPlay speakers, but recently I’ve been kinda off the whole AirPlay thing thanks to an the crazy East German walls of my apartment building. These walls are too crumbly to let me drill a proper hole for even a coat hook, but somehow thick and dense enough to confuse even a strong dual-band Wi-Fi signal. To recap: AirPlay speakers just won’t stay connected.

Thankfully, Wren now offers a Bluetooth version of the big, booming V5, called the V5BT, and it promises to be pretty good.

Changing a sentence to ALL CAPS on my Mac is dead easy: I just select the words, right click and choose Transformations from the contextual menu. If I want to do anything fancier, like weird Markdown footnotes, or adding bullet points to the start of every line, I can just write an Automator workflow and save it as a System Service.

But on iOS? In the immortal words of Run DMC, “it’s tricky”. Or was tricky: now we can use the $5 TextTool to do it for us.

Smile software’s TextExpander Touch has used hacks to get around the lack of inter-app communication on iOS, but now Apple has stepped in to end the parade. Smile has been told to stop using the Reminders database to store your snippets and figure out some other way to share your data with other apps.

Apple won’t approve any updates until this is done, and third-party apps using the TextExpander SDK may also suffer the same fate.

Apple has erected a new webpage that highlights different ways the iPad is used in various professions, from wind turbine technicians to Broadway dancers. Originally tweeted by Apple Interactive Art Director Davy Rudolph, the new “Life on iPad” webpage also includes a video of the same name that Apple originally showed at its iPad Air/mini event last month.

There are 6 stories Apple has chosen to tell about how the iPad is helping wind turbine technicians, a professional speedskater, a vineyard worker, an off-road racer, a Broadway choreographer, and a surgeon. Each story is succinct and obviously full of praise for the iPad. As the holidays approach, marketing tactics like this set Apple apart from the competition.

Source: Apple

Via: Davy Rudolph

Following last week’s first beta of OS X 10.9.1, Apple has seeded a new version of the beta – Build 13B35 – to developers this afternoon.

The new build of OS X 10.9.1 packs a couple of bug fixes for Gmail integration in the OS X Mail app. There are also some fixes for an emoji bug and improvements to Safari’s sharing capabilities. Developers can grab the new beta from the Mac Dev Center.

Apple also released second beta builds of Safari 6.1.1 and Safari 7.0.1 along with some firmware updates for the AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule base stations.

Source: Apple

Dropbox’s iOS 7 redesign landed today in the App Store, and it brings not only a new look to the app, but AirDrop support and a “streamlined” iPad interface. The colored top and bottom bars have been distilled to better fit the iOS aesthetic, and the white and blue colors in the app’s icon have been inverted.

Joining Belkin’s armada of WeMo home-automation devices today is the WeMo Insight Switch. Like the plain-vanilla WeMo Switch, the Insight Switch will let you power on or off whatever is connected to its outlet via the WeMo iOS or Android app. Unlike the regular Switch, the Insight lets you also see exactly how much money you’er spending on juice, and adds more control flexibility.

Meteor is a $1 app with a brilliant, simple solution to a common problem no one seems to have addressed until now — and it’ll almost certainly unclutter your phone.

Apple has rolled out updates for all of its iWork apps on both OS X and iOS. Earlier this month, Apple revealed features from iWork ’09 it would be adding back to the new suite in the coming months, and today’s updates address some of those features. On iOS, Pages, Keynote and Numbers have received bug fixes and stability improvements.

In the late 90s, Tamagotchi pets were all the rage. The plastic, egg-shaped pocket computers came in bright colors and housed a virtual pet you had to take care of. Fast forward to late 2013, and the only pocket computers people carry around are smartphones and tablets.

Yesterday, the makers of apps like Clear and Heads Up! launched Hatch, a modern-day take on Tamagotchi for the iPhone. It’s a beautifully crafted game that utilizes the iPhone’s internals to make the pet, or Fugu, come to life.

The Inner Balance system pairs a $99 dongle/earclip sensor with an accompanying app with the goal of training its users to de-stress themselves (probably an over-simplification, but that’s the gist of it) through gamified breathing exercises.

To further this goal, HeartMath, the company behind the Inner Balance kit, has just launched a cloud-based service called HeartCloud to further gamify the Inner Balance sessions with the introduction of social aspects. HeartMath has also announced that new Lightning dongles for the earclip sensor will be available at the end of this month.

Leander’s new book “Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products” has debuted on the New York Times Bestseller list. (Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And huzzah!)

If you want to get a feel for the book, check out this excerpt over at Medium, which is richly illustrated with sketches and photographs of some of the prototypes.

The Medium excerpt is how Leander wanted to originally write the book; illustrated with all the images leaked during the initial Samsung vs. Apple trial. We’ve seen the prototypes all over the web. What is missing, though, is the journalist’s most important tool: context. This treatment pairs the pictures with the details of Apple’s design process.

Apple’s re-trial with Samsung over patent infringement has just concluded with the federal jury ruling that Samsung owes Apple an extra $290 million for infringing on the iPhone maker’s patents.

The award is significantly more than the amount Samsung hoped to pay, though Apple’s lawyers didn’t get all the money they wanted either. Including damages awarded from the original trial, Samsung’s bill for Apple now totals $929.83 million worth damages – unless they successfully appeal of course.