News - page 1440

Smartphone crime is a huge problem. In fact, New York City’s crime rate went up for the first time in twenty years because people are mugged violently so often for their iPhones.

In response to iPhone crime, Apple has made some important improvements to iOS, including requiring users to enter their iCloud password to turn ‘Find my iPhone’ off, and the new ‘Activation Lock’ feature in iOS 7which allows users to disable stolen or lost iPhones remotely.

Apple’s got the right solution, but you know who hates it? The carriers. In fact, as other manufacturers have tried to insert similar cellphone kill switches in their smartphones to Apple’s, the carriers are standing defiant against them. Why? Because they are afraid that it will affect their bottom lines.

Trent Reznor might have a head like a hole, but not a heart like one. During a recent show in Las Vegas, the Nine Inch Nails frontman pulled out his iPhone 5s mid-concert to FaceTime a dying fan and friend on stage.

With the new Mac Pro, Apple has once against shifted manufacturing of one of its products to the United States. Could other products follow? Even, say, the iPhone?

Foxconn chairman and president Terry Gou has hinted yes, saying that the company is actively looking into the possibility of setting up factories for high-end smartphone and tablet production in America. But how likely is it?

Due to a combination of laziness and… actually just laziness, I often use my iPhone to take product shots for the reviews you see here on Cult of Mac. And while my Snapseed usually lets me turn my snaps into usable photos, I could sometimes do with a little help trying to find a spot on my desk that isn’t covered in junk to use as a backdrop.

Yes, I could clean up, but as I mentioned above, I’m terminally lazy. So I might instead adopt Andrew Park’s Foldio, a tiny light tent for iPhone product shots and the like.

A few weeks ago it was iPads banned from the UK’s No. 10 Downing Street due to spying fears, and now Apple products will start disappearing from the German parliament too.

It almost doesn’t matter what the Urbanears Humlan headphones sound like, because however bad they are, they’ll still sound better than the pair of headphones you put through the wash cycle and killed. Why? Because the Humlans are washing-machine friendly, just like my old iPod Nano.

Finally, the perfect gift for the myopic or sight-impaired person in your life! It’s called the U See Tablet Magnifier, and it’s a stand that turns your iPad into a giant, zoomable, battery-powered magnifying glass for short-sighted folks like me.

I like Fetchnotes 3, a new and deceptively simple update to the iOS/web app which lets you take, organize and share notes. At first, it looks a lot like Simplenote, with a very plain and simple UI, plus tags and easy sharing. But it’s actually a lot more powerful than that.

Remember back when a button was a button, and not a skeuomorphic touch-screen fake complete with drop shadows and gradients? Me too. Back in the 1980s and beyond, kids had tougher fingers thanks to all the button-pushing that went on, not like the kids of today with their weak twiglets which threaten to snap if they squeeze their in–0line remote’s play/pause “button” too hard.

Which is my way of saying that you can keep your pathetic modern-day children from playing any music by simply loading your iPhone into this retro-tastic iRecorder.

Flickr takes another step towards “being awesome again” with a new book printing service, built right in to Flickr itself. And it’s so simple that you can have even a pretty long book put together in minutes.

Tumblr has redesigned its iOS app with a fresh look for iOS 7. The Dashboard, post compose screen, and post chooser have all been redone, and the finished product is an app with plenty of character that feels very at home in Apple’s latest mobile OS.

The official Tumblr app has never felt aesthetically clunky or old, but this most recent update is a huge step forward in terms of modernizing the interface and animations. On the feature side, tags can now be autocompleted, and faster reblogging for users with multiple accounts. There are plenty of other changes in the app to discover, like an improved photo uploader and trending tags design in the Explore tab.

Tumblr is a free universal download in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Just over a year after Drift Innovations dropped its impressively specced Ghost HD action cam, the company has upped the ante in the action-cam tech race by launching the improved Ghost-S, with big boosts in performance — notably low-light performance and a doubled frame rate — and a slew of trick new features.

Now that winter has hit the country, cycling has moved indoors for much of the U.S. That means straddling a stationary bike or throwing your trusty road or mountain bike up on a stand (or if you’re really brave, rollers).

That’s where the Xspin comes in. it’s a small box filled with sensors and a low-energy Bluetooth 4.0 radio that attaches to a crank arm and sends speed, distance and cadence data to an accompanying app — either one of two developed by its parent company, Pafers, or a handful of popular third-party cycling apps, like Strava or MapMyRide. It’ll also work with ellipticals (though it obviously attaches differently, since ellipticals don’t have cranks).

Today Tapbots released a big update for Tweetbot for Mac that brings smoother scrolling and the ability to quickly reply to mentions and DMs via Notification Center in OS X Mavericks. The update also brings a number of bug fixes and performance improvements for Apple’s latest desktop OS.

Here’s the full change log:

iOS users that long for something other than Safari will be delighted to know that Google has released a free update for Chrome for iOS.

The new updated includes an Autofill feature that lets users complete forms with just a few clicks, similar to the autofill feature Apple introduced in iOS 7 with iCloud Keychain. Along with some stability enhancements and bug fixes, Google has also improved image searches by adding the ability to long press on an image to search for related images.

Here are the release notes:

Upcycling — Entertainment — Free

Green-lifestyle blog Eve of Reduction saw your landfill at Whole Foods the other day and thinks it looks tired and kinda flabby. It wants to help, so it has a thing you might want to check out.

Upcycling is a free app full of instructions and suggestions for repurposing and repairing out-of-use items. It’ll show you how to reupholster a chair, what you can do with used paint cans, and show you cool things other people have done with their would-be junk. It’s all arranged and indexed conveniently within the app, and even if you don’t do anything in there, it’s still interesting to browse through.

Upcycling

This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. But short of installing an air-gap, what can you really do to improve security on your iDevices?

The good news is that your iPhone is probably the safest phone you can use, but you would be correct not to trust any U.S-based company with your data, even Apple (which makes its money selling you shiny toys and may therefore be less interested in selling your data).

But if you want to move as much of your data as possible away from iCloud, here are some service and products to help you. You won’t find them as convenient as Apple’s built-in services, but they might keep your data a little safer.

The official Apple Store app is finally available on iPad, more than three years after it made its debut on the iPhone.

It offers almost all of the features you’ve come to expect from the iPhone version, including high-resolution photography that lets you see products in “amazing detail,” the ability to find your nearest Apple store and make Genius bar appointments, and lots more.

This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine

Thanks to Apple’s tireless vetting of App Store apps, it’s tricky for an app to flat-out snoop on you. Then again, the behavior of some apps could be thought of as snooping if you squint and look at them the wrong way.

Foursquare is all about location, but that’s because it knows exactly where you are. And Facebook is… Well, Facebook likes to know things about you.

But you can keep earning Mayorships and tweeting your pictures without telling everyone where you live, or letting them post your location to Facebook. Just follow our handy guide to the privacy settings of various famous apps.

In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple made sharing files between two Macs easier than ever before with AirDrop… but that only works if you’re on the same network. What if you want something as easy to use as AirDrop, but with people outside the range of your Time Capsule?

Enter Infinit, a slick new Mac file-sharing app that makes it effortless to send files to anyone, even if their computer is turned off.

Following yesterday’s somewhat underwhelming release of the Ace Power, the first iOS 7 compatible controller, accessory guru Logitech has gotten into the action, unveiling the Powershell game controller for iPhone 5, 5s, 5c and fifth-gen iPod touch.

A year ago, Microsoft released the SmartGlass app, an app for iPhone and iPad that let you navigate your Xbox 360 with swipes and taps on your touchscreen, and even use your device as a second-screen in supported games.

This morning, Microsoft officially released the Xbox One, their follow-up to the Xbox 360. If you loved SmartGlass, though, don’t worry that it has been dropped from the experience: the Xbox One Smartglass app is now here.

This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine

The safest way to use your iPhone is to switch it off, open it up and remove the battery. But this is clearly impractical if you want to do anything more than pretend you have an Android phone.

Some guides have shown us how to increase our security by switching off all manner of services, from iCloud to geotagging for our photos. But if you do that, why buy an iPhone in the first place? And even if you only want to make calls, no amount of on-phone hackery will help you if the folks from The Wire are on your tail.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t be aware of what your iPhone is up to, and with this in mind we bring you a guide to the hidden and not-so-hidden settings you’ll need in iOS 7.

Remember that time Cult of Mac reported that Apple’s oft-maligned iOS Maps function steered people the wrong way across Fairbanks Airport Taxiway? If you’re anything like this writer, you probably either chuckled at the egregiousness of the error or else were momentarily aghast, and then went on with the rest of your day.

Well, in the eyes of some what you should have been thinking is: “hey, I could probably sue over that.”

Perhaps it’s better that you didn’t, however, because the class action lawsuit that has been filed against Apple for iOS Maps is a bit of a headscratcher.

If you’re looking for a way to get rich overnight, here’s an idea: somehow borrow $1 billion without anyone knowing what you’re doing, invest it all in Apple shares the night before an earnings call (when the stock price is all but guaranteed to rise), immediately sell the next morning, return the original capital, and then pocket the profit without anyone the wiser.

Sound too straightforward to be true? That’s because it is — although that didn’t stop 40 year old trader David Miller from trying the stunt back in 2012.