Update: It looks like Jimmy is the one who got the first two iPhone 5s, one for himself and one for his mother in Indonesia. What a nice guy! The Herald Sun has a nice article on Jimmy and his bit of fame.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that the iPhone 5s goes on sale tomorrow around the globe. We’ve been watching the lines start to form via the magic of the internet, keeping an eye on Twitter and Instagram, for starters.
As you get in line tonight, and tomorrow morning, feel free to send us your photos of the queues you’re sitting and standing in to us via email or Twitter.
As we noted earlier this week, iOS 7 includes some code that will allow third party manufacturers create universal controllers for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch using Apple’s latest mobile operating system. It’s groundbreaking stuff, especially for a traditionally game-averse tech company, but we’re starting to see the first wave of controllers to come out.
By now you’ve probably already seen this story floating around the internet, but in case you haven’t, here’s your assigned Apple reading for the day. Bloomberg Businessweekhas an exclusive interview with Apple’s Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Craig Federighi for its latest issue.
Jony Ive with Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.
With the launch of two new iPhones, Apple’s top designer Jonathan Ive granted very rare back-to-back interviews with USA Today and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Having read everything he’s ever said in preparation for my book about him (due mid-November), I recognized the usual Jony Ive talking points; the striving for simplicity, the importance of caring, and so on.
But there are a couple of paragraphs in the USA Today that especially gave me a strong sense of Deja vu.
It wouldn’t be a major iOS release without another lockscreen bug. This time, you use Command Center into tricking iOS 7 to give you full access to the Camera Roll and sharing options. The method was uncovered by a veteran lockscreen-bug-finder named Jose Rodriguez, who admits that he likes to “submit my iPhone to cruel methods of torture” in his spare time (which he apparently has a lot of).
iOS 7 came out yesterday and if early adoption numbers are any indication, people love the hell out of it. Well, everyone except one young kid who hates that Jony Ive just changed everything. Check out the video Derek Colling posted to YouTube of his sons reaction to iOS 7.
Colling said he knew his son would be surprised, but a full-on mourning of Forstall’s fine green felts and leather stitchings came as a bit of a surprise. But hey, when you’re a kid and the smallest of changes feels colossal, is it too much to ask that your Angry Birds playing device have the same UI consistency throughout your tenure at pre-school? #firstworldproblems
iOS 7 finally lets you put the Newsstand app in a folder. To some that alone is reason enough to celebrate, but there’s also an awesome little bug that lets you hide all of Apple’s other annoying default apps that take up screen real-estate – we’re looking at you Stocks.
For the hack to work, you have to set up one of your iPhone’s pages with a full screen of apps. You’ll also need one folder on that page, and you should place the app(s) that you want to hide in your dock. Once you’re ready, tap and hold on the app you want to disappear, then hit the homebutton twice to bring your app switcher, then go back your homescreen and you’ll notice the app you want to delete is abnormally large. Tap your extra folder on the screen while all the apps are jiggling, and then press your homebutton and viola! the app is gone.
The process sounds a little convoluted, but it’s actually very simple. To make things easier, our friend Dom from AppAdvice made the video tutorial above. Best of all though is that once you magic an app into oblivion you can still access it via the finder search.
Previous iPhone launches have been crazy, and the iPhone 5s might be the most insane one yet. Be prepared.
So Apple won’t let you pre-order the iPhone 5s and the very thought of waiting in front of an Apple Store for eight hours send spasms of dread from your eye sockets all the way down the nether regions you don’t even want to think about. Standing in an a line, any line, for hours, sucks.
Yes, it’s a huge time investment, and no one really wants to sit outside an Apple Store for a couple of hours before the break of dawn, but we’re here to help you come prepared and make the most of your iPhone 5s launch line waiting experience. In fact, this could even be a lot of fun. Just follow this guide and you’ll be in and out of the store and cradling your precious golden iPhone in no time.
We met with Morgan Belford, Game It Forward’s co-founder, when we hit PAX last month, and he told us about his company’s new game, Quingo, a free-to-play mix of trivia and bingo for iOS. The game lets players of all skill levels, including kids, play the trivia game to earn money for some great charitable causes, including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Kiva, PAWS, Seattle Children’s, Splash, and The Martinez Foundation.
“We want to make sure our players can see the concrete results of their contributions, so we worked hard with our charity partners to define specific projects that will receive the funds,” said Belford in a statment. “To that end, players can see how much they’ve contributed and how well each project is doing.”
If you like trivia, it’s a great way to give something back while playing a game. Not too shabby, for sure.
NeatConnect by Neat Category: Scanners Works With:Anything with Wi-Fi Price: $500
I’ve been using Neat products for the past couple of years. I’ve got a NeatDesk for Mac and an active NeatCloud account. So when the folks at Neat reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in putting the company’s latest piece of hardware – NeatConnect – through the paces, I jumped at the chance.
I’m really not a fan of trivia games. Any time someone drags out Trivial Pursuit at a party, I’m the first to come up with an excuse not to play. But You Don’t Know Jack was always different. It’s a trivia game with attitude, a sense of humor, and a weird bald mascot. What’s not to like?
The original game launched in 1995, and now it’s on iOS with a new title: You Don’t Know Jack Party. This is a new, live multiplayer version of the trivia game that lets you connect up to four different iOS devices to one Apple TV and play together in the same room on the big screen, via a secondary, free JackPad controller app.
Sure, there’s also a single player experience, but it won’t be as much fun.
Puzzle Knights is a match-three game with tactical strategy, light RPG elements, and online arena battles created by Mojaro, a developer made up of some pretty experienced game development folks, like founder Laurent Ancessi, who has worked in the gaming industry for over 25 years, with a bunch of top gaming companies, like Electronic Arts, Sony, Radical Entertainment, and Naughty Dog.
The game has just launched into the app store, and is looking pretty good. Check out the launch trailer below.
If you were hoping to order a new iPhone 5s from the Apple Online Store tomorrow and have it delivered to your door on Saturday, then you may be out of luck. The new handset just went on sale in Australia, and no matter which color or capacity you go for, every single model comes with a 7-10 business days shipping estimate.
With the launch of iOS 7 yesterday Apple made some bold steps to ditch the rich textures, shadowing, and other skeuomorphic elements that have been a staple on the iPhone since 2007.
Thanks to the departure of iOS Software Chief Scott Forstall back in October, Sir Jony Ive was given a bigger role in iOS software development, so to hype up the launch of Jony’s first software masterpiece, he and Apple’s new SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, sat down with USA Today to give some details on what went into the creation of iOS 7.
According to Jony, the decision to strip iOS of all its shadows and physical references was pretty easy once they got Forstall out the door:
Calling it the “first Speed MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena),” Zynga released Solstice Arena to the iOS App Store this past June. The game garnered many awards and some fairly good reviews from around the web.
Tuesday, Zynga announced that Solstice Arena was available in the Mac App Store, bringing the streamlined real-time action battle arena game to OS X.
The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c has just gone on sale in Australia, and the team at iExperts have already gotten their hands on the new devices and given them their first teardown.
Thanks to all the leaks we’ve been enjoying in recent weeks, many of the components you’ll see below have already been seen before. But if you get a kick out of seeing expensive gadgets being pulled apart — or you just admire Apple’s incredible build quality — then you’re in for a treat.
The city of Cupertino this week published updated plans for Apple’s proposed new campus ahead of possible approval next month. A city council meeting is scheduled to go ahead on October 15, and providing all goes well, Apple will finally be able to begin clearing the land that the “Spaceship” campus will be built upon.
Good news, Google Wallet users — you can now access your account on your iOS device with an official Google Wallet app. You can use it to make payments to friends, track your loyalty cards, and access nearby offers. One feature you won’t find, however, is tap-to-pay, which relies on NFC connectivity.
Grab your iOS7-running iPhone and activate Siri. Now say one of the following…
Change the brightness
Adjust Bluetooth
… and various combinations thereof. You’ll be rewarded with switches and sliders to adjust these settings right there on the Siri screen. Pretty good huh?
The Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5S? It’s not limited to just human use. As Darrell Etherington over at Techcrunch has discovered, it works just fine with a cat’s paw too.
Boom! No, I mean it literally. This is a boom mic for the iPhone, although here is is pictured not on a boom but on the iPhone itself. Yes, for just $40, you too can make amateurish-looking movies where the mic dips into frame at just the wrong moment[1].
As seen in the iPhone 5s, Apple’s new A7 chip is the world’s first 64-bit ARM-based chip… but it’s not Apple’s first quad-core chip. Instead, the A7 is dual-core in a sea of Android competitors boasting 32-bit quad-core processors.
This is the Mac version, as the iOS version hasn't yet been seven-ified, and looks totally ugly.
One of the things that makes typing long-form text on the iPad bearable is TextExpander Touch, the iOS version of Smile Software’s amazing snippet-substitution app for the Mac. Sadly, iOS7 has broken the clever hack Smile was using to let it share its snippets with any app on your iDevice.
But happily, there’ a new hack, and it just requires third-party developers to make some tweaks to their own apps.