News - page 1490

Even as it stands, Thunderbolt is blisteringly fast, allowing up to 10 Gbps per lane, for a maximum throughput of 40 Gbps. Intel, though, has already upgraded Thunderbolt with the new Thunderbolt 2 spec, which not only doubles the possible transfer speed on a single lane to 20 Gbps (although not increasing total maximum throughout), but enabling 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously.

Since Thunderbolt debuted on the Mac, you’d probably expect Thunderbolt 2 to show up first in an Apple product, right? Maybe an updated Retina MacBook Pro? Alas, it’s not to be: the PC motherboard you see above is the first Thunderbolt 2 compatible product.

If you believe recent scuttlebutt, one of the reasons Apple is looking to release a gold iPhone 5S later this year is because gold is a color that sells really well in China. Is that supposition even remotely true though? If it is, it should be quantifiable.

Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt went looking for data to see if Chinese buyers really do like gold. Data’s actually pretty slim, but if the cars Chinese consumers buy are any concern, not only is gold not their favorite color… it’s only slightly more popular than puke green.

If you use Luxogram, or Webstagram, or any other Instagram compatible app, prepare yourself for the possibility of some change. Instagram has started approaching app developers and services, telling them that if they have “Insta-” or “-gram” in their names that they can expect to have their access to the Instagram stream cut off.

One of the brilliant ways in which Dropbox sort of ingratiates itself to users is the way it hands out extra storage for various tasks. For example, you might get extra Dropbox storage by allowing Dropbox to automatically upload your iPhone photo roll to their servers, or by recommending a new user.

Technically, Dropbox could pretty easily just give everyone a massive amount of storage — say, 100GB — and not impact their business model much (this is the strategy Flickr uses), the gaming aspect of Dropbox is part of its charm. It’s more fun to earn more storage than to simply have storage.

So here’s a nice trick on earning your next Dropbox level up. You can easily add 1GB to your Dropbox account just by linking it to the popular email app, Mailbox.

Brett Terpstra’s SearchLink is a System Service for OS X which automatically generates links from your text, without you having to bother to look anything up on Google first. It’s like having an unpaid intern inside your Mac.

And Editorial is that fancy new iPad text editor that incorporates workflows that you can roll yourself.

Now the two have been combined into one amazing iPad ball of goodness.

Paperback is a minimal read-later service that uses your Pinboard account as a source for articles. Any time you check the “Read Later” box when saving bookmarks to your Pinboard account, these items are added to a rudimentary queue. Paperback uses this list to provide you with a nice, clean, Instapaper-like web view of these links.

Logitech is taking another stab at making a good keyboard case for the iPad mini, and it certainly looks hot. It’s called the Ultrathin Keyboard Folio for iPad mini, and it’s a tiny and lightweight book-style case with built-in Bluetooth keyboard. But can any iPad-mini-sized keyboard actually be good enough to type on?

If you’re planning on buying a pressure-sensitive Bluetooth stylus for your iPad, then you should probably hold off until October; that’s when Wacom puts its new Intuos Creative Stylus on sale.

If all goes according to historical precedent, the ICS will follow the Bamboo along with all of Wacom’s plain styluses as best-in-class.

You’re going to college, which means plenty of sleepless nights, lots of good memories, and maybe a little studying on the side. The truth is that college can be stressful, so it never hurts to be too prepared.

Luckily, there are tons of excellent apps out there on both the Mac and iOS to help you survive. Here are 10 of the best:

The iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C are all but official at this point, but if you had any doubts that new iPhones are coming soon, The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has told its supplier Hon Hai to start shipping the new iPhones in September.

Apple’s suppliers have been mass producing parts for the new iPhone since June, but are ready to ship them out this Fall. According to the report, Apple will announce both a high-end and low-end iPhone at an event in September, but the WSJ says it’s not clear whether they will launch on the same day, or if Apple will opt to showcase one device.

Apple is expected to announce the new iPhones at a media event on September 10th, as well as new iPads and the final version of iOS 7.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Alzheimer’s is a debilitating cognitive disease that currently affects an estimated 5.2 million people in the U.S. alone, a number that’s expected to triple in the next 40 years, according to a recent study. There is no known cure.

Clevermind, then, is a new iOS app that has been designed to help seniors, family members, and caregivers to better deal with the effects associated with Alzheimer’s. The app is available now in the App Store, and it’s free for a limited time.

Apple announced today that some changes are coming to its Affiliate Program for digital content, as a new partnership has been forged to help the company expand the program into new countries.

The affiliate program — which allows partners to make money off iTunes content sales by directing users to certain pieces of content via affiliate links — will now be managed by two networks rather than four, as Apple has struck a deal with the Performance Horizon Group (PHG) to become a new affiliate platform partner and push the program into new territories in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Here’s the full announcement from Apple:

Rubicon, the developer behind successful iOS game, Great Big War Game, announced its latest game in development, Combat Monsters, an interesting mix of tactical, 3D monster battles with deck building card game mechanics.

The game is coming to iOS, Android, Mac, PC, and (what?) Blackberry fairly soon, so we thought it would be a good time to catch up with the Rubicon development team. We chatted with Paul Johnson, managing director and co-founder of Rubicon, about Combat Monsters. Here’s what he had to say.

Rumors of Apple releasing a gold-colored iPhone have been hard for some to swallow, but according to AllThingsD’s sources, Apple plans to introduce a gold iPhone at the September 10th keynote.

While many Apple fans are worried that a gold iPhone would look too gaudy and doesn’t match the Apple design aesthetic, John Paczkowski’s sources says the gold iPhone will have a white face with a gold black plate and chamfered edging.

Rather than using a bold ingot gold tone many have feared, the gold iPhone will be more of a champagne color. No word on whether the gold iPhone will be priced differently than other models (we doubt it), but we’ll just have to wait and see the final product on September 10th.

Source: ATD

Barnes & Noble’s efforts to become America’s next great tablet maker haven’t really gone too well, so the company announced today that it’s ready to try something new: iOS apps.

This morning, Barnes & Noble announced it’s bringing the Nook Video service to iOS, Android and Roku devices, giving users access to a wide range of TV shows and movie just incase offerings from iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime Video, WatchABC, WatchESPN, MaxGO, Showtime Anytime, and Crackle just aren’t enough to get the fix for your media addiction. 

The iPhone 5 has been on sale for almost a year now — in fact, its successor is right around the corner — and the award-winning physical puzzler World of Goo has finally been updated to support its larger 4-inch display. If you’re one of the many millions of people who love this title, this is a great excuse to play it all over again.

Apple is expected to make iOS 7 beta 7 available to registered developers today, just days after it released iOS 7 beta 6. This is expected to be the final beta before Apple seeds the Gold Master release early next month.

The most you can charge for an app on the iOS App Store is $999.99. In the early days of the App Store, a number of novelty apps came out, trying to make a quick buck by convincing gullible plutocrats to part with their money in the form of a $1,000 app download. The most notable example is I Am Rich, an iPhone app that literally did nothing except proclaim your affluence.

These days, though, the $999.99 club is made up of legitimate apps. Well, mostly.

If you bought an iMac between late 2011 and mid 2012 and your graphics have been acting up, you’re not alone… and Apple just might fix your iMac for free.

Remember Gameloft’s $80 Duo Gamer Controller? It was launched in October 2012 and it brought physical controls to our favorite Gameloft games on iOS — but it had a number of major flaws. The biggest one was that it was only compatible with Gameloft games, and that made its $80 price tag all the more bemusing.

But it’s not such a bad purchase at $6.36, which is all you’ll pay for it on Amazon right now.

Hey, did you see Jobs this weekend? If so, you probably saw it alone, in a theater completely empty except for yourself, a single loquacious cricket, and a theater usher sleeping one off. Why? Because Jobs absolutely tanked this weekend.

This post is as much for our Dear Leader Leander Kahney as much as it is for you, our wonderful and ever-curious reader. It solves a problem Leander struggled with for a full thirty seconds before tossing it to us minions in the Cult of Mac HipChat room.

The problem: How to get all the photos snapped by Leander’s twelve or so children into the same Photo Stream on the main family iMac.

For the solution, read on. Hint: it doesn’t need Photo Stream, and it uses a great feature of PhotoSync v2.0.

Can’t wait to see what Apple has in store for us with the iPad 5? Here’s what it will likely look like… face down!

Bulk editing photos? There are a few ways to do it. You could rent Photoshop every month and create some automated Actions (actually a totally sweet and powerful way to do things); you could use the command-line tool ImageMagick and wrap it in various OS X System Services; or you could just spend $10 and buy PhotoBulk.

Having been teased and tempted by so many similar gadgets in the past, I can’t quite believe that the DigiPod could ever be real. But the folks at Indiegogo at least seem to have some faith in the new pitch on their site. The DigiPod is a little insert which slips into your film SLR and turns it digital.