News - page 1491

Over the past ten years, some Apple customers have argued that the iTunes store is an illegal monopoly because songs purchased inside the store can’t be played on Apple devices, but an appeals court in California has finally thrown out those claims once and for all.

A three-judge panel confirmed that Apple’s digital right management system known as FairPlay has not broken any antitrust laws, after a long-running class action lawsuit claimed Apple is running a monopoly by forcing iTunes users to also buy Apple products to listen to their songs.

Apple has been on a hiring binge of ad executives lately as its ad-supported iTunes Radio product nears launch. During the month of August alone, Apple has posted over 40 job listings for iAd related positions on its own job board and LinkedIn. The positions range from account coordinators, ad design managers, and engineers, all of which will be used to create new media ads for iAds.

Are you jealous of all that Android/KitKat business in the news today? What you need is a chocolate-bar-related product for the Mac, and I have just the thing: It’s the CURB, a Toblerone-shaped stand for your MacBook.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – As I sit here on the 10th floor of Seattle’s public library, I’m trying to make some sense of the last four days of gaming conference, the Penny Arcade Expo.

It’s not like gaming is as important as, say, the current crisis in Syria, or attempts to fight poverty and homelessness, or even the inability of spaces like PAX to provide a safe place for women or people who are trangendered.

On the other hand, gaming is a massive cultural phenomenon. PAX’s founders, webcomic writers Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, wanted to create a convention that would focus on gamers, whether they play tabletop games, video games, or card games. That there is a massive interest in this convergence of different kinds of gamers, from D&D nerds to arcade geeks, is an understatement, as evidenced by quickly sold-out tickets months in advance of the conference as well as by the huge herds of human beings of all stripe who I saw traipsing from one booth to another this weekend in the Washington State Convention Center.

There are some truly awful things happening in Syria right now. For more information on exactly what is happening, and why, I suggest this excellent Washington Post round-up of what exactly is going on, and why Congress is now considering an intervention. But the takeaway is pretty bleak, and basically comes down to the notion that there’s not a lot America can do to stop what’s happening in Syria.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the hearings going on in the Senate about whether or not America should intervene aren’t important. Far from it. Which is why Senator John McCain is getting a lot of flack for being caught playing an iPhone poker app during the hearings.

iOS 7 isn’t for everyone. With its brightly-colored, flat candy chiclet design, it’s an update that many people are going to find jarring after playing in Scott Forstall’s skeuomorphic playground for so long. In fact, given how polarizing iOS 7 is, I imagine some long-time iOS users might decide not to come along for the ride at all.

Even if you hate iOS 7, though, there are some elements to love. For example, the new dock. Sure, functionally, it’s exactly the same, but the frosty two-dimensional glass looks just so much better than the faux-3D nonsense that was going on before.

Enter CopyDock. For jailbroken iDevice owners, CopyDock strips out the iOS 6 dock and replaces it with the iOS 7 dock. Simple, beautiful, and free. You can find it in the BigBoss repo on Cydia. Now how about bringing Control Center to iOS 6, jailbreak devs?

Via: ModMyi

Right now, Apple sells three generations of iPhone. The iPhone 5 is the high-end phone, starting at $199 on contract. The iPhone 4S is the mid-tier device, and costs $99 on contract. Finally, there’s the iPhone 4, which is free on contract.

Come September 10th, though, Apple’s going to change things up with the colorful iPhone 5C, a device that Cupertino has designed from the ground up to be a modern budget iPhone (rather than just a hand-me-down iPhone a couple generations old). So the iPhone 5S will take the high-tier, and the iPhone 5C will take the lower-tier.

What about the mid-tier, though? Evidence suggests it’ll be the iPhone 5.

With all the hubbub about new iPhones and new iPads coming, it wouldn’t be surprising if Apple slipped a small Apple TV update in there too. Although Apple dismisses it as their “hobby,” the Apple TV usually inherits the previous generation A-series chip when a new iPhone or iPad comes out. In this case, it’s the A6. In addition, Apple’s been building up steam when it comes to the Apple TV lately, releasing a number of entirely new channels in the last few months. It would be natural to follow that wth an update.

These are all good reasons to believe that Apple might try to slip in an update to their set-top box on September 10th, and lo and behold, a new report seemingly confirms that new Apple TVs are already making their way into the country.

Being a nerd, a pedant, and a Virgo, it’s painful to me to see terminology misused. Like when people say that a lens or photo has “a lot of depth-of-field” when they really mean a “shallow” depth-of-field, for instance.

I am destined to go through life constantly disappointed (and of course making my own dumb mistakes), but at least the depth-of-field problem has now been solved: there’s an app for that, and it’s called Lens•Lab.

You wait weeks for an invite to an Apple event, and then two come along at once. Shortly after the company invited the media to its September 10 shindig in Cupertino, it sent out invitations to a second event in Beijing on September 11. It’s the first time Apple has made an announcement in China, so it must be for something pretty special — but what?

Well, we have some ideas.

The secret iPad supply chain is starting to look as leaky as the roof of my 100-year-old building during a rainstorm. Only instead of aluminum saucepans covering every flat surface, there are aluminum iPad 5 parts strewn all across internet rumor sites.

The latest is this rather convincing effort from Unbox Therapy, and shows just how small the new iPad 5 case is compared to the fat monster we’re forced to use at the moment.

If you take a lot of pictures on your iPhone, I can highly recommend the Canon Selphy CP900, a dye-sub photo printer which spits out 6×4 prints, and connects wirelessly to iPhones, iPads and Macs.

I’ve had one for a couple months, and the result is that I have a bunch of iPhonographs littering the apartment. It’s addictive, but now I don’t know what to do with all these prints. This graffiti-ready picture frame, though, might provide an answer.

Identity is like a Smart Cover for your iMac… kinda. It’s an aluminum strips that sticks to the iMac’s “chin” using magnets, and, uh, adds a strip of color. There’s even a cutout to let the Apple logo show through, a phenomenon familiar to aficionados of iPad cases (I call these peek-a-boo cases “assless iChaps”).

But wait: the iDentity isn’t quite as useless as it first seems. The strip can be customized – using lasers – to any design you like.

Iterate, iterate, iterate. That’s the Apple mantra, according to anyone who pays attention: Launch a groundbreaking device that changes the entire market and people will flock to buy your improved version of a category that may have existed already for years. Then, every September, and pretty much every year, you release an incremental update.

Year over year, it doesn’t look like much is happening. But like a glacier carving valleys from mountains, the compound result is amazing.

Except we’re not talking about Apple here. We’re talking about Amazon and the Kindle.

Apple released the 7th Preview build of OS X 10.9 Mavericks earlier today, and while the release didn’t include any major new features, Apple did add eight new wallpapers that are absolutely gorgeous.

Mavericks isn’t expected to be released until later this fall, but you can already wrap your Mac’s display in the new Mavericks wallpapers by downloading them from our gallery below:

Today Apple released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 7 for those already on the beta software. The new preview doesn’t have any notable feature additions, but Apple has included several new wallpapers, one of which is pictured above.

Updates to the Mavericks beta have been pushed out systematically over the summer, and Apple will ship the OS to the public this fall. The September 10th event will focus on iPhones, and a separate media event is expected to take place next month. Apple could release Mavericks at any time this fall, but it’s likely that a release date will be given alongside new iPad/Mac hardware in October.

Every year Apple puts on the iTunes Festival in London, and many of the biggest names in music perform. One headliner and a lesser-known band play every day for the month of September. Tickets are free, but seating is extremely limited. Unless you’re a member of the press or happen to be best friends with a music executive’s daughter who loves Justin Timberlake, your chances of getting into a show are low.

But that’s ok, because over the past couple of years Apple has gotten really good at streaming the entire iTunes Festival for free—that’s right, no ads! For the whole month of September you can stream professionally shot shows in HD on just about any Apple device. It works great, and there are no strings attached. You can stream a show live or watch it over and over later for the rest of the month.

Apple has pushed out updates for its three iLife for iOS apps today that includes a number of compatibility fixes. iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand for iOS were all updated with compatibility fixes, while GarageBand also received some minor bug fixes for performance and stability.

With the official iOS 7 launch just weeks away, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is prepping the apps to play nice with the new OS, although we expect the icons and UI to get a redesign shortly after iOS 7 comes out.

Source: iTunes

While Apple has been getting dominated by Android in terms of the sheer number of smartphones sold, iOS users have still managed to capture the lion’s share of worldwide mobile web share company, but it looks like the size of their pie is shrinking.

According to the latest survey from NetApplications, iOS’s worldwide mobile web share has dropped 11% since August of 2012. While iOS is still at the top with 54.9%, Android has risen from 20.9% in August 2012, to 28.1% in August 2013.

It’s official. Apple sent out invites for its iPhone event on September 10th this morning. The tagline is “this should brighten everyone’s day,” which is a not-so-subtle hint at the Skittles-themed collection of colors expected for this year’s iPhones.

Now that the official unveiling is only a week away, why not get in the mood with a wallpaper version of Apple’s invite? Designer Thientam Bach has posted hi-res versions available for the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPad, and iPad mini. Visit the source link below to download.

Source: Dribble

The Wren V5AP is just about the best-looking speaker I’ve tested, with a tastefully contemporary case finished with bamboo and silvered cloth.

It’s also one of the best sounding, and although it might not be as convenient as some other AirPlay speakers, it makes up for it in other ways.

Ever feel like submitting your will, nay, your sanity, to an Elder God? iOS game Ball of Cthulhu aims to make your dream a reality, with a narrative right out of the pulp magazines of the Lovecraftian era to pull you from one Peggle-styled level to the next.

Spotify announced today that it is launching a new way to streaming music to connected speakers around the house with its new “Spotify Connect” feature that is coming to a line-up of Spotify-supported speakers.

The new AirPlay-like feature allows you to walk into your house and seamlessly switch from listening  to your playlist on your iPhone to playing music on your living room speakers. You current listening session is synced up to the cloud so you can switch faster without stopping the flow of music.

Unlike AirPlay though, Spotify Connect will cost you some money as the feature will only be available soon to  Premium subscribers. Third-party OEMs are expect to roll out Connect supported speakers later this year.

Here’s a promo video on how Connect works:

Following weeks of anticipation, Apple today issued invites for a September 10 press event that will finally see the grand unveiling of its latest iPhones. The Cupertino company is expected to show off both the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C, and announce a public release date for iOS 7.

We’ve been hearing all summer that the iPhone 5S will come with a fingerprint scanner, but it’s one of the few things that wasn’t being confirmed by the countless component leaks. That may have changed today, however. The flex cable pictured above could finally confirm that Apple’s next iPhone will have biometric security embedded within its home button.