Today Twelve South unveiled its new BookBook Travel Journal for the iPad, a leather-bound traveling case that has the vintage look Twelve South is known for. While the outside has the appearance of an old book, the inside of the case allows for storing headphones, cables, and other accessories.
Typing in your password every time you want to unlock your Mac sucks. Apple still hasn’t added facial ID recognition to OS X, nor have we heard nary a mention of Touch ID coming to MacBooks, but if you’re looking for a neat way to quickly unlock your Mac, a new app called Knock allows you do it with two quick taps on your iPhone screen.
The free Mac app works in tandem with an iPhone app that turns your phone into an authentication device. Knock uses Bluetooth Low Energy to communicate from iPhone to Mac but you should be able to leave it on all day without draining battery.
Here’s a video of Knock in action:
We’re not sure why Google just doesn’t change the name of their Google Search app for iOS, as it does pretty much everything Google Now does on Android, but this new update is pretty fantastic, whatever you want to call it.
Google Search is “now” updated to version 3.1.0, with a whole new set of features, including Notifications, Reminders, new Cards, and a Siri-like Handsfree voice. This last bit lets you command your iPhone to do stuff with the phrase, “OK Google.”
How cool is that?
Cocktail Academy — Food & Drink — $3.99
Cocktail Academy is a new app for people who would like to make their favorite drinks themselves or try some new ones without embarrassing themselves in front of their friends. It has directions to create 110 cocktails and even includes video tutorials in which international-award-winning bartender Giancarlo Di Niso shows you exactly what to do (spoiler alert: It involves a lot of measuring and shaking and/or stirring). You can search for drinks several ways including alphabetically and by percentage of alcohol, and the app even lists caloric content for each concoction for your dieting convenience. Grog, for example, has 186 calories, and I never realized I was curious about that until just now.
Thinking about upgrading your old iPad to an iPad Air, or a new iPad mini with Retina display? Well, Target wants to help. The retailer is now offering customers at least $200 in store credit when they trade in any old iPad, including the original model.
Spotify for iOS has today been handed another new update with several nice improvements. In addition to adding artist tour details, it brings a much-improved search function, support for the Japanese language, and lots of bug fixes.
The iPad Air might be the lightest iPad yet, and a true glimpse of the future of tablets, but Apple’s still managing to make a healthy profit on each tablet sold. In fact, iHS iSuppli pegs the build price of each iPad Air is just $274 for a 16GB WiFi-only model. Apple sure does know how to make a margin, doesn’t it?
Something big is coming from Pebble, makers of everyone’s favorite e-ink smartwatch. We’re just not entirely sure what it is yet. But we have an idea, and it has to do with Pebble apps developers.
Sold gets bought by Dropbox. That’s a headline writer’s dream, and I just got to write it. Why? Because — wait for it — easy-selling service Sold just got bought by Dropbox.
Many people would have you believe that Apple is successful not because their products are superior, but because they’re advertising is. They actually have a point, but not in the way they mean. Yes, Apple’s advertising is superior, but it’s not because Apple spends loads on it. In fact, Apple’s advertising budget is far tinier than Microsoft and Samsung’s.
We’ve seen a few dongles that let you track your devices from your iPhone using Bluetooth, and we’ve seen some that let you fire your iPhone’s shutter the same way. But the Wise Button does both. I wouldn’t call it wise, but I would call it useful.
When Apple announced iTunes Radio at WWDC this June, it looked like a lot of subscription radio services would take a massive hit. But for Pandora, things couldn’t be better. Since Apple’s new service made its debut alongside iOS 7 back in September, listening has increased by 9 percent.
Leather gloves are useful for many things: driving, punching, jewel thieving, murdering and doing sex. But one thing they weren’t good at until now was iPhone-ing. Mujjo has totally fixed that.
The Braven 650 is one of the best portable speaker I’ve tested. It’s small, tough, light and it sounds great. It even manages to include a remote play/pause function, although you have to be in on the secret[1]. And now Braven has come out with the 710, an update which adds a whole bunch of neat extras.
The iPhone 5s wasn’t the first smartphone to offer a fingerprint scanner, but it’s undoubtedly the most popular one to date. In fact, it’s so popular that Touch ID is now driving massive growth in the smartphone fingerprint scanner market, with sales of fingerprint scanning handsets expected to reach 525 million units in 2017.
Wow. Nikon has finally announced its Df DSLR after a long teaser campaign, and it looks like a winner. It’s a full-frame DSLR with a bunch of retro-style knobs and dials all over its body.
All demand, but no supply!
24 hours after being launched in India, retailers sold out of the iPhone 5s — leading to retail chains asking for replenished stocks, following an unprecedented demand for the new smartphone.
Despite a budgetary increase of 32% from $3.381 billion in 2012 to $4.475 billion in 2013, Apple still spends less than 3% of its revenue (net sales total $170.91 billion so far this year) on Research & Development of new products: something that will surely give ammunition to those skeptics who claim less innovation is taking place under Tim Cook’s command than it ever did while Steve Jobs was at Apple’s helm.
Right?
In more welcome airport-related news than the reports that Apple’s Maps app steers people the wrong way across Fairbanks Airport taxiway, Apple has released an update (version 1.3.3) of its AirPort Utility — the app which allows you to manage your Wi-Fi base stations, including AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time Capsule, from the comfort of your iOS device.
Originally unveiled at Apple’s last iPhone media event, the Nike+ Move app has been released in the App Store for the iPhone 5s. The app utilizes the latest iPhone’s M7 co-processor to track the user’s physical activity and display it as NikeFuel, the same system used for Nike’s FuelBand.
Narrated running is probably the best way to describe the new Story Running feature embedded in Runtastic’s updated app, but the outfit’s new Libra scale is more interesting.
Apple is continuing to build its manufacturing presence in the U.S. with a new plant in Mesa, Arizona. The project is projected to bring 2,000 local jobs and the building will be completely powered by renewable energy.
Sapphire glass will be made at the Mesa plant in conjunction with GT Advanced Technologies. Apple uses sapphire—a material that is incredible durable—in small parts of the iPhone, like the protective glass over the camera sensor. The Touch ID sensor in the iPhone 5s is also made of sapphire.
Finnish developer and all-around success story Rovio Entertainment announced Monday a new cross-over collaboration with Korean-based GungHo Entertainment, the makers of the almost as highly successful match-three mobile game, Puzzles and Dragons.
The pissed-off avians will show up in the popular role-playing/color matching mashup as an Angry Birds-themed dungeon from November 18 through December 1 of this year. You’ll get to challenge the Angry Birds as enemies in the dungeon, in contrast to their hero role in the Rovio-produced titles.
Western Digital has been emailing customers and warning them about hard drives “experiencing data loss when updating to Apple’s OS X Mavericks.” The problem seems to effect multiple kinds of drives, including the company’s popular MyBook lineup.
According to Western Digital, the incompatibility with Mavericks isn’t a hardware-level issue, but something to do with the software that is shipped with the drives it sells.
When the iPad Air went on sale, it was discovered that T-Mobile was offering 200MB of free data per month to customers who bought the tablet on its network. What a steal! On top of that, you can walk into T-Mobile and pay $0-down for a 16GB iPad Air. T-Mobile all of a sudden looked like a much more attractive carrier choice.
But if you think you can just walk into a T-Mobile store, pay nothing up front, and walk out with a new iPad and free data plan, you are sadly mistaken.