News - page 1483

Can an iPhone 5s film itself being burned alive?

The answer, it turns out, is no, but that didn’t stop the wasteful doofuses at TechRax lit an iPhone 5s on fire with a combination of gasoline and Axe body spray anyway. They set the iPhone to record, lit it aflame, then dunked it in a bucket of water to cool it off. Incredibly, they then seemed disappointed they could not retrieve the video from the iPhone 5s — perhaps dropping it in a bucket of water had something to do with that? — so they then start smashing it with a hammer.

Ladies and gentlemen, all hail the gadget dork’s moronic, mindlessly destructive id!

Everpix users can now achieve some emotional closure to help with the stress caused by the shutdown of everyone’s favorite online photo-wrangling service. You’ll be getting an e-mail soon (or already) with a link to let you get a raw (but not RAW) dump of your stored images.

BitTorrent Sync is one of the best Dropbox alternatives out there. Drawing upon the power of BitTorrent, BitTorrent Sync allows you to keep folders synced between multiple Macs easily, but without storing them in the cloud or having to pay for things like storage.

If you’re a BitTorrent Sync user — and you really should at least consider being one — great news. BitTorrent Sync just got an iPad app.

What do you think of Siri? Laughable gimmick, or revolutionary interface of the future? Your answer to that question may well determine how excited you get about this: the engineer who oversaw Siri is now at Samsung, building their own Internet of Things API.

A judge has advised Samsung to prepare its defense after determining that the South Korean company probably violated a court order by leaking confidential Apple documents.

Apple provided Samsung with copies of its patent agreements with Nokia, Ericsson, Sharp, and Philips as part of the massive patent battle between the two that started last summer, but it seems the company ignored the protective order that said the information could only be used in the context of that case.

ThisLife is a new(ly resurrected) online photo-storage service from Shutterfly, the photo-book-printing people. It’s similar to other services like Picturelife and the now-dead Everpix, letting you pull in your photos from other popular photo sites like Flickr and Instagram. But it comes with one unique feature: face recognition.

Good news for lovers of extremely light, slim and functional iPad cases: Lioncase’s Folio Shield has been updated to fit the extremely light, slim and functional iPad Air. Regular readers will recall that the Lioncase cases are some of my favorite iPad cases of all.

Twitterrific 5 for iOS has received a nice new update that adds a number of new features and user interface improvements. In addition to a redesigned profile layout, there’s a new pull-to-refresh animation, and users now have the ability to view profile banners by tapping on them.

Before I got lazy and did everything in Snapseed and Instagram, Filterstorm was one of my favorite iOS apps, and now it’s back, bigger, faster and, uh, neuer than before. Developer Tai Shimizu started over and came up with a whole new take on his powerful photo-editing app, which is appropriately called Filterstorm Neue.

Apple is currently developing multiple iPhone models with larger screens and curved displays for release later in 2014, according to a new report from Bloomberg. While reports from other publications have previously said that Apple is working on larger screen sizes, this is the first report that says Apple is working on curved glass displays for the iPhone.

Not only are new display designs in the works, but the company is developing “enhanced sensors that can detect different levels of pressure,” according to the report.

Jony Ive. He’s the private man who some say is Apple’s own heart… and on our newest CultCast, our own Leander Kahney, with his new book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products hitting stores Nov. 14th, reveals inside information about the design icon, and how he and his teams create the world-renowned products we all use every day. Plus, J.D. Power says, for the first time ever, Samsung tabs are better than iPads… we’ll debunk!

Have a few laughs and get caught up on each week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let baseline roll!

Apple’s new proposal for the giant spaceship campus, originally envisioned by co-founder and rockstar, Steve Jobs, has gotten the go ahead from the Cupertino City Council. It’s on track to get built by 2016, and we’ve got a ton of inside info on the new building.

In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, reporter Luke Dormehl talks to a few architectural experts to fully understand how this new building is really just the largest Apple product ever built.

Rob LeFebvre looks at some area residents’ complaints about the construction and impact of the new campus, while also talking to an expert who thinks that the impact will be more good than bad, and we’ve got a pretty slick 3D video render of what the campus will look like.

Our exclusive Ask a Genius column lets you in on how those intrepid Apple employees deal with customer temper tantrums, a bit about the recent AppleCare+ price hikes, and how folks might have to act to get fired from the retailer’s employ.

Of course we’ll also have our signature roundups of all the best iTunes books, movies, music, and app, ready for your perusal.

The latest issue is available in the App Store.

We hope you’ll dig it – and keep in touch with comments, questions, shout-outs.

I have one of Doxie’s neat candybar-shaped paper scanners, and it’s great for getting through piles of paper. I can scan bills, flyers, photos and even whole books – I ripped all the pages from a beloved but falling-apart cookbook and scanned the pages one at a time to make a PDF.

But for anything less sheet-shaped, it’s useless. And often the next best option – your iPhone’s camera – isn’t much better. You have to focus it, hold it steady, and somehow wedge the pages of your Moleskine notebook open with one hand while lining up your scanning app with the other

That’s the slot that Doxie’s Flip wants to fill. It anything that’s not a big sheet of paper. Although it can kinda do that too.

Continue reading

Apple is still moving forward to build its $5 billion, 176-acre “spaceship” Campus 2 headquarters, expected to open in three years in Cupertino, California..

Critics have been attacking it since Apple CEO Steve Jobs first proposed it to the Cupertino City Council. And since that poignant moment, which was Jobs’s last public appearance, the campus project has evolved and changed. As I write this, the old HP buildings on the property are being demolished.

Here’s what we know about the spaceship campus so far, and also what the critics have been saying.

True Color — Entertainment — $1.99

True Color is one of those apps that definitely has a practical application but is also just fun to mess around with. Its purpose is to create “formulas” for different hues so that artists can properly mix paints to match, and you can easily take samples from your photos. You can also just mess around with the four component colors — red, yellow, blue, and white — to get the tone right before you go wasting all your acrylic on experimenting.

But it’s also good for curiosity. The picture over there, for example, is the exact color of Jake from Adventure Time. Did you know he was 24 percent red? Because I didn’t.

True Color

If you’re worried about your iPhone getting damaged the next time you’re involved in a heavy turf war, then check out Proporta’s new case for iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s. It looks like a standard leather folio case from the outside, but it’s lined with carbon fiber that’s so strong, it will comfortably withstand a shotgun blast from 20 yards.

After Apple announced the iPhone 5s in gold, we felt sure that the latest iPads would be available in the same color, but that wasn’t to be the case. But don’t be disappointed. As long as you have lots of spare cash that you’re itching to spend, you can buy a gold-plated iPad Air or iPad mini from Goldgenie with prices starting at just $1,860.

As expected, the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c are now available on Boost Mobile — alongside the iPhone 4S. The former starts at $550 for a 16GB model, while the iPhone 5c is $100 less at $450. The iPhone 4S starts at just $300.

But if you pick up your new handset before November 24, you’ll get a cool $100 off that price.

Last month, Facebook released an update that allowed iPhone users to edit posts and comments and even preview all of their changes. It was a small, but welcome update. Unfortunately, it was also exclusive to the iPhone, but now users of Facebook for iPad can avail themselves of the same trick.

When Apple launched the iPhone 5 last year, it was the most aggressive launch Apple had ever attempted, requiring entire armies of workers to aggressively line-manufacture their most advanced, difficult-to-make iPhone yet. But what was it like to be one of those workers? Businessweek has published a fantastic, haunting investigative report on one Nepalese worker, who almost starved to death after his stint as an iPhone tester.

What’s causing the Retina iPad mini to launch so late in the year, and why is demand expected to be so limited at launch? Display yield issues tend to be viewed as the culprit, but what exactly is happening? According to a new rumor, LCD burn-in is to blame.

It still hasn’t been officially confirmed by Apple, but reports suggest that the company will soon begin offering iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C repairs in its retail locations — providing minor repairs and screen replacements for the two latest iPhone models.

We just brought you a review of Maclocks’ MacBook Pro lock, and today we come bearing news that Maclocks is now taking pre-orders on the world’s first iPad Air enclosure, available December 2.

Writing that Amazon blasted iPad with its new Kindle Paperwhite ad, or that the iOS market share is about to explode may be an unfortunate choice of words after reports that an iPad Air did, quite literally, blow up in an Australian mobile phone store this week.

I hope you’re ready for yet another case that adds extra lenses to the iPhone’s amazing camera. This one has a twist. Well, I guess they all do, but this one has a different twist. It’s also ruggedized and waterproof.