Yesterday Apple announced that all of its consumer software, including OS X Mavericks, is now free. Customers who buy Apple’s hardware will have full access to the completely new versions of iLife and iWork at no additional cost. It’s a bold move that The New York Times called a direct attack on Microsoft Office.
The decision to make iWork free wasn’t Apple’s only jab at Microsoft during yesterday’s keynote, and now the Redmond giant has gone on the defensive.
During yesterday’s iPad keynote, Apple showed several new videos to the audience. Now four of those videos have been uploaded to Apple’s official YouTube channel.
Apple unveiled the new iPad mini with Retina display yesterday along side the iPad Air, and while we were expecting a bump up in resolution, we also got some nice internal hardware upgrades in the form of the A7 processor, M7 co-processor, improved cameras and faster WiFi.
We still think the iPad mini is the best 7-inch tablet on the market but the number of competitive Android tablets keeps growing every year, each with their own set of compelling features and ecosystems. To sort out whether the iPad mini really is the best purchase for you, check out the chart above that breaks down the iPad mini’s specs compared the Kindle Fire lineup, Nexus 7 II and the Galaxy Tab 3.
Source: BI
We’ve been trumpeting the tale of a fantastic game in development from the all-star team at Industrial Toys for a while now. Titled Morning Star, it had some serious pedigree and promise.
A sci-fi themed first-person shooter from Alex Seropian, the dude that co-created Bungie (Marathon, Halo) is huge news in the first place. A game that includes author John Scalzi and artist Mike Choi among many other hugely talented folks that will launch exclusively on mobile? That’s ginormous news.
Color us fascinated when President Tim Harris penned a blog post on gaming site Gamasutra about why the team had to rename the game, and how they went about it. It’s a super interesting behind-the-scenes look at the very real business side of game development, and it’s worth a look.
Calming Breath – Health & Fitness – Free
Breathing is simple, right? In, out, repeat? It is if you’re a normal, healthy person with a positive outlook on life and no major stress, but if you’re an anxiety-ridden mess like I am, you occasionally have some difficulty. Enter Calming Breath, a simple, one-screen app that sits you down and times your inhales and exhales. It works on a four-second inhale, six-second exhale system and includes an animation of a pair of lungs that fill and empty in time, if you’re a visual person. If you prefer to have your eyes closed, you can also set the app to vibrate at the beginnings and ends of breaths, and all of this sounds completely ridiculous, but if you’re in the middle of a panic attack, you need all the guidance you can get. Calming Breath is simple, easy, and it does what it needs to do.
Pixowl’s pixel art game, The Sandbox, has won a bevy of awards from Apple since its introduction in the App Store in May of 2012, and garnered 6.8 million downloads across iOS and Android. Apple has featured the game with three titles, Best of World-Building Games, Best of Games 2012: Hidden Gems, and Top Games – If You Like Minecraft.
The release onto Mac brings this fantastic, engrossing game to the mouse and keyboard set, guaranteeing a good time on a bigger screen. Just like the mobile version, you’ll learn the tools available to you to mix, match, and create all sorts of things. Then you’ll share them with the world via The Sandbox’s own online Gallery, which you can browse for inspiration. It’s amazing what folks can do with this little game.
After finally getting BBM on your iPhone this week, you may have upgraded to iOS 7.0.3 to find it no longer works properly. One of the fonts BlackBerry uses in its app is no longer supported by Apple, causing the app to crash when you open existing chats. But there is a way around it.
Pixelmator, arguably the best image processing tool for Mac (and a steal at just $30) has today received its “most advanced” update yet. The version 3.0 “FX” release delivers lots of new features and improvements, including support for Apple’s latest OS X Mavericks upgrade and the new features that brings.
Following the release of OS X Mavericks on Tuesday, Apple has updated iBooks Author for Mac to introduce compatibility with the desktop iBooks app. So, books created in iBooks Author can now be previewed and read in iBooks for Mac.
Ember, the awesome scrapbooking tool for Mac from Realmac Software, has been updated to support Apple’s new OS X Mavericks update. It also comes with “two huge new features,” including the ability to search for colors, and the option to store your Ember library in iCloud.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s not interested in Apple’s new iPads because the neither model meets his needs. Woz didn’t get a chance to watch the keynote live because he was on a plane, but he caught up with the news when he landed and then emailed his wife to say, “nope, I don’t want one of those.”
Apple packed a lot into one hour and 20 minutes today, with announcements about OS X Mavericks, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, Mac Pro, and the stars of the show: iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. We think that this is about an hour and 18 minutes too long to watch, though, so we’ve condensed it to around 90 seconds.
Here is the Apple iPad Air and iPad mini keynote, right from Yerba Buena, in just 90 seconds:
With Apple disrupting the entire desktop operating system business by releasing OS X Mavericks for free, there is still at least one Mac operating system that Apple is still selling. Even more curiously, it’s a variant on OS X Mavericks… OS X Server for Mavericks.
With every new release of the iOS operating system, there’s a chance that Apple will close security holes that the Dev Team needs to make an untethered jailbreak possible. Luckily, it appears that Apple’s new iOS 7.0.3 update is safe, allowing motion sick potential jailbreakers to update with impugnity
If you keep a diary, you probably know about Day One, Bloom Built’s indispensible Mac journaling app. With the release of OS X Mavericks, Day One has received a major new update. The big feature? Integration with Mavericks’ Maps app.
One of the most common criticisms you hear of Apple’s iPad line is that they are expensive compared to the competition. When the iPad mini first came out, for example, it was widely criticized for its entry-level price of $329, with many saying it couldn’t succeed unless it was under $249.
Obviously, such predictions were laughably wrong. But Apple is now selling a $249 iPad mini: a refurbished one!
In all the hubbub yesterday, it’s possible you missed the most exciting iPad news of all: Apple has given the iPad Air and iPad mini an incredible new wallpaper!
We kid, of course, but featuring a lovely blue gradient, the new wallpapers are rather nice. With the iPad Air and iPad mini not shipping until November, though, you can only see it in Apple’s new iPad ads… or download it from us!
We last caught up with Pics.io back in the summer, when it was just starting out in beta form. Now the service has gone live, and you can convert and edit your RAW photos right there in the browser. Yes, the future really has arrived.
In a fit of either obliviousness or hubris, Evernote yesterday released an update to its iOS app in the middle of some other clearly less-important news. The update is actually pretty solid, although not nearly as radical as the last one which revamped the entire interface for the second time in less than a year.
Lost your keys? Sure you have, you absent-minded fellow you. And you iPhone? No frickin; way, right? What you clearly need is a way to replace your keys with your iPhone. That’s already been done for the home, and now you can toss the keys for your bike lock.
Not interested in a case for you new Retina iPad mini, or the gorgeous iPad Air? Nope, me neither – I want to show that thing off to passersby and pickpockets alike. But what I don’t want to do is carry it in my hand all the time, so I’ll be needing yet another bag for my man-sack collection. [1]
And that bag is the Outback Solo from WaterField Designs.
Just as night follows day, death follows taxes and blissful sleep follows energetic coitus, so a new iPad is always followed by a new case. And for me that case might just be Grove’s gorgeous new Wood Smart Case for the mini and the new iPad Air.
Apple’s pro apps aren’t being left out of the update-a-thon surrounding the launch of new iPads and Macs. Aperture has just gotten bumped to v3.5, and gets some nice new features, including full Photo Stream support and integrated Apple Maps.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how Apple peppers its keynotes with the same adjectives repeatedly. Apple has been this way for years, but videos such as the one above never get old. Just amazing.
Thanks: Lewis
“The zoom animations everywhere on the new iOS 7 are literally making me nauseous and giving me a headache.” That first post from an Apple support forum member on September 18th has since snowballed into a massive thread with over 640 replies and 57,000 views.
While it’s obviously a small portion of iOS 7’s 200 million+ user base, there’s a subset of the new operating system’s users that can’t handle all the zooming. Beyond the parallax effect, opening and closing apps is akin to jumping in and out of a mini vortex. “The whole look is just jarring,” said another forum member.
Apple released iOS 7.0.3 to the masses today, and nestled in the update is an amped up “Reduce Motion” option.