What’s worse than buying a brand new iPad, getting home and opening the box — only to find out that what you’ve bought isn’t an iPad at all, but rather a lump of clay?
Well, trying to return said lump of clay, only to find yourself arrested under suspicion of pulling the prank yourself.
One of my regrets when moving from sunny Barcelona to chilly Leipzig was that I couldn’t ring my Steelcase Leap chair, which despite its ugly blue leather squab and back is the best chair I’ve ever sat in.
But no matter, as I now have my eye on the new Steelcase Gesture, an office chair designed for the slouching and leaning associated with using an iPhone or iPad. The chair is designed to be comfortable even when you sit in it wrong, with arms that “move like the human arm” and a seat that’s soft all the way to the edges.
Otherwise the Gesture looks a lot like my old Leap, with the same supportive back design that bends as you move, and the same ultra-adjustable everything else. And it also has the same kind of price, $979. Still, at least the colors are way better.
Source: Steelcase
Thanks: Trisha
He may feel more than comfortable publishing an open letter to Tim Cook calling for Apple to engage in an immediate $150 billion buyback of shares, but (vocal) activist investor Carl Icahn has said that he would never push Apple to buy Nuance Communications Inc., maker of the software that runs the Siri feature on Apple’s iPhones.
Folks love to complain about Apple, but I figure that a lot of that bitching is down to the inadequacies of the bitchers themselves: It’s easier to just whine about something than to strive for greatness yourself. Which is to say, Apple is far from perfect, but it tries harder than almost anyone else. And the new solar farm which powers it’s North Carolina data center is a great example of this.
I find the idea of “distraction-free” writing apps to be bunk: after all, why on Earth would the presence or lack of a menubar make any difference to your ability to concentrate? I am, however, a sworn enemy of clutter, and so I immediately downloaded the $0.99 Focus app, which is kind of like a virtual rug under which you can sweep your mess of Mac application windows.
As the holidays draw near, shipping estimates for the iPhone 5s are starting to be more reasonable. Today the Apple Store’s estimates for all models of the 5s improved to 3-5 business days, which is significantly better than the 1-2 week estimates Apple was giving just last week.
Before that, shipping estimates were 2-3 weeks. Supplies for the 5s have been very tight since its launch, and it’s still hard to find the phone in gold. It looks like Apple planned on the demand for the iPhone 5c to be above and beyond the 5s, but the company reportedly cut orders for the 5c recently. A report from this morning said that an entire Foxconn factory has stopped producing the 5c and is now making the 5s.
Source: Apple
I’m not a guitar amp nut; I have little appreciation for old-and-moldy audio components and purist babble (oh yes, I know! “Vacuum tubes! Blah blah blah!”) But a look at the promo video for Positive Grid’s new Bias iPad app has even me drooling.
Think your inbox is a dizzying mass of junkmail? The serial entrepreneur who started About.com wants to help you unclutter; not by getting rid of spam, which has been pretty much wiped out at this point — but by allowing you to group or unsubscribe from commercial emails with laser precision.
The big idea behind Looxcie’s video cameras is that they can live-stream video to a variety of audiences (including Facebook) by linking, via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, to an iPhone or Android phone running Looxcie’s free companion app.
But unlike the action-oriented $200, 1080p Looxcie HD, which is pretty expensive, or the lightweight Looxcie 2, which is only capable of 480p, the more social Looxcie 3 seems to have found a $100, 720p sweet spot. Plus it looks far less dorky when worn.
“Siri, what are your political views?” You’d think that Siri would answer that question with a clever quip about how she doesn’t take sides, but no, she has an answer. And it’s not what you would think.
For some odd reason, asking Siri her political views will take you to Ron Paul’s Wikipedia page every time.
This morning Apple released its first major beta build of iOS 7 to developers since the release of iOS 7 in September. On the surface the update seems to be just a bunch of bug fixes and performance improvements for a number of apps, but once you dig into the new software a little more there are a couple UI changes and new features that we’ve found.
Here are the new changes to iOS 7.1 that you might actually notice:
Today Sprint announced a limited time deal that gives students a full year of free cellular service with the purchase of a smartphone at any Best Buy location. The offer includes unlimited talk/text and 1GB of data per month, with the option to have unlimited data for $10 per month.
The typical two-year contract isn’t required, but Sprint is charing a “student activated price” that’s actually a little more than the full, unsubsidized cost of most phones.
Along with the iOS 7.1 beta, Apple has also released a new beta for Apple TV to developers today. According to the installation guide, the new Apple TV Software beta “enables users to mirror content of an iPad to an Apple TV using AirPlay.”
Developers can find the Apple TV Software beta in the iOS developer center, Apple notes that the beta is being provided to test the latest AirPlay functionality with your iOS apps and websites. We’re downloading the software now and will let you know what’s inside.
Stay tuned. More to follow.
Apple has just seeded the first beta for iOS 7.1. Registered developers can grab the update from the Developer Center. The beta release comes just four days after Apple published iOS 7.0.4 to the public that included a fix for failed FaceTime calls.
We’re still waiting for more info on the new goodies, but we’ll update you on new features once we’ve got it downloaded.
According to the release notes iOS 7 beta 1 includes a number of performance enhancements and bug fixes.
Here are some of the new things we’ve found so far:
It was just last week that Cult of Mac was bemoaning the kind of consumer society we live in where we’re so desperate for the latest iPhone that Apple Stores have to be opened on Thanksgiving.
Despite the presence of the anti-theft Find My iPad solution, thefts of iPads (along with other tablets) have soared on UK railways over the past year. According to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, thefts of iPads are up 10 percent for 2013 — with only 2 percent of the reported 949 stolen units ever recovered by their owners. During that same period of time, thefts of laptops and computers fell by 22 percent.
It has been reported that that Foxconn Electronics will stop production of the iPhone 5c at its Zhengzhou factory in northern China. This isn’t a sign that Apple is severing ties with Foxconn, however, as the workforce previously working on the iPhone 5c will instead be shifted to work on the iPhone 5s production line.
It’s the holiday season, and money is a little bit tight. If you’ve got an iPhone on your shopping list and want to save $100 off, AT&T is selling Apple’s new iPhones — including the 16GB iPhone 5s and 16GB & 32GB iPhone 5c — for half-off their initial up-front price. That means you can get an iPhone 5s for the price of an iPhone 5c, and an iPhone 5c for just $49.99.
There’s a reason that Apple usually invites Epic Games on stage. The developers’ mobile-only series, Infinity Blade and its sequels, shows off the gaming potential of any new iOS device by pushing its graphical potential to the very limits.
Infinity Blade games look beautiful no matter what device you run them on, but there’s a big difference graphically between playing Infinity Blade III on an iPad 2 and an iPad Air. If you happen to have a jailbroken device, though, a new jailbreak tweak will trick Infinity Blade into running at a higher graphical setting… apparently with little degradation of performance.
Over the years the reports of Apple's death have been greatly exaggerated.
According to the always entertaining Apple Death Knell Counter, Apple has been declared dead no less than 65 times since April, 1995. Usually the attempt of journalists looking to pick up click-throughs/sell books/make a fool of themselves, the disease can often manifest in business analysts, other CEOs, and generally anyone who should know better. A recent example? Trip Chowdhry, writing for CNBC, who sagely noted that Apple must come up with its debut wearables product within 60 days or it will perish. "It will take years for Apple's $130 billion in cash to vanish, but it will become an irrelevant company ... it will become a zombie, if they don't come up with an iWatch.” See what we mean?
Sadly these rumors won’t go anywhere, regardless of what AAPL stock prices do. Hey, at least they make amusing reading after the fact.
Every year, Apple takes pity on the poor App Store overseers who guard the gates of the company’s walled garden and gives them a few days around the holidays off from the crushing grind of manually approving new apps and updates. During this time, app store developers can’t submit app updates, price changes, or in-app purchases, and Newsstand publications will not be updated, even if a new issue is available.
When will this fallow period come this year? Exactly when you’d expect: Christmas week.
Fantastical is hands down my favorite calendar app for both the Mac and iOS, and Fantastical 2 for iOS went a long way to bringing the app in line with iOS 7’s major aesthetic changes. Now, just three weeks after its lauch, Fantastical 2 has seen its first app update, and there are some cool new options in here.
I like seeing photos in my Twitter timeline, but I don’t like the painful process of looking at them. You have to tap, and then wait while the picture loads, and while you’re waiting you can’t scroll through and read other tweets as they’re usually blocked by the loading photo.
Photofon doesn’t fix this (the only app that ever did it properly was Loren Brichter’s original iPad Twitter app that kept loading pages in their own independent sheet), but it does turn the viewing of Twitter photos into something you’ll actually enjoy doing.
If you’re using the Chrome browser on your Mac, then you might like to take a look at Backtick, an extension which lets you fire off bookmarklets with a few keystrokes. Like Alfred, Launchbar or Quicksilver on the Mac, Backtick lets you hit a key combo and type in a couple of letters to trigger a command. Only instead of launching apps and so on, it launches bookmarklets.
One of the essential parts in my RSS-BitTorrent-iPad TV-watching setup is iFlicks, a Mac app from Jendrik Bertram that takes a video file, adds cover art and movie/show metadata and then converts the file into an iTunes or iPad-friendly format. It even adds in subtitles if you have them in the same folder as the video file.
Now v2.0 has launched its public beta stage, so you can try out the faster, better and more powerful-er next version.
Wow, the Evernote folks are on a real roll these days. Not only does the iOS app now not suck enough to use it every day, but the new Safari web clipper is good enough to make me use my Mac for browsing the web again. It’s like a combination of Skitch, Instapaper and, well, Evernote.