News - page 1494

The Cartella Linen is Pad & Quill’s bookbindery case for the MacBook Air. I’ve been using the 13-inch version for a few weeks now and it’s great, if a little big. If you’re looking for a handsome, tough case that you can leave on all the time, which you can use on your lap and which you can carry under your arm down the street, then this is it.

Let’s take a closer look.

Apple’s added a lot of Yelp integration into iOS over the past two years, but despite providing copious amounts of reviews for every restaurant in the U.S., the app hasn’t let you actually write a review from your iPhone.

Yelp 7.0 was just pushed to the App Store and now gives users the ability to write reviews from their iPhone. Now you can trash a restaurant’s king salmon tartare on taro chips while waiting for your waitress to bring a check. Not finished with your praise? You can save a draft and publish it later, too.

The free update is available on the App Store now.

Source: iTunes

Steve Cheney is a pretty smart guy, with a serious background in technology and mobile marketing, both as a former TechCrunch author and the current head of business development for iOS and Android chat app, GroupMe.

Cheney’s written a fairly strong analysis of the current Apple/Android war for supremacy and, as he sees it, there’s a clear advantage for Apple in the actual mobile device arena. Cheney calls it “bang per watt,” and he attributes Apple’s dominance here to the vise-like grip the Cupertino company has on the vertical integration of hardware and software.

There’s been a recurring theme with the iPhone its debut in 2007, and that’s that every model Apple releases sells significantly better than the last. Phil Schiller once said that each new iPhone model sells as many units as all previous models combined, and analysts expect to see a similar trend this fall with the iPhone 5S.

In fact, one analyst predicts the new iPhone will be “the most successful product launch ever in the history of Apple.”

Ember for Mac, the terrific scrapbooking tool from Realmac Software, has just received its first update following its debut late last month. The release adds a new feature called “Smart Drawing,” which magically turns your shaky sketches into “beautifully-smooth shapes.”

Pocket Casts is arguably the finest podcast client on Android, and it’s pretty terrific on iOS, too. But it’s about to get even better. With the upcoming Pocket Casts 4 update, we’ll see a brand new user interface based on iOS 7’s new design, iPad support, cross-platform syncing for subscriptions, playlists, and play states, and lots more.

Apple announced a new charge trade-in program earlier this month, which gives those with third-party iPhone, iPad, and iPod adapters the chance to take them in and swap them for official ones at a special price. At first, it seemed the program was only available to customers in the U.S. and China, but that’s not the case.

According to a new support document on Apple’s website, those in the U.K., Canada, Australia, Japan, and parts of Europe can also take advantage of the offer.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster might be a bit of a laughing stock when it comes to the so-called Apple HDTV, but he’s still one of the go-to soothsayers for investors looking for an early heads-up on what Apple might do next. In a new report, Munster is making a rather strange claim: he says that Apple’s low-budget iPhone 5C will ship without Siri.

iTunes is having an absolutely bonkers sale right now on its movie selection: you can buy every single one of the eight films in the Harry Potter series for just $59.99. The regular price is over $125. And that’s just where the deals get started: chances are, if you’ve got a favorite film series, iTunes is selling it in a bundle right now, at a crazy low price.

Although it was hard to believe first, it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple’s forthcoming foray into the mid-range market, the iPhone 5C, will come in that cheap, colorful plastic casing we’ve seen leaking out of China time and time again over the past few weeks.

More proof for the pudding? We’ve seen the physical casing of the iPhone 5C before, but it never had any guts. Now, we’re starting to see other parts, and they match. Case in point? Volume buttons, in red, green, yellow and blue.

Ringflash: You love the harsh-yet-even light, and the donut-shaped highlights it throws into the subject’s eyes. You love that you can make magazine-style photos with a single, on camera flash. But you hate the bulky plastic adapter you have to carry around to make it all happen.

What you need, my creative-yet-lazy friend, is the RoundFlash. It’s a flash that’s round.

One of the best things about shooting with the iPhone is that it automatically puts all of your photos on a map. This is even better when you’re traveling, as you can relive the trip with a virtual tour, or use the geolocation data to check where that awesome restaurant was where you got poisoned.

It’s easy. Sadly, the same can’t be said about pictures snapped with a regular camera. But there’s an elegant solution that uses your iPhone, and without worrying about recording and importing GPS tracks.

A printer is already pretty much disposable, thanks to the environmentally hateful practices of manufacturers; it’s almost cheaper to buy a whole new printer than it is to pony up for replacement ink. So why not go the whole way and make the printer out of cardboard? That’s the idea behind Samsung’s concept designs, which take the metal and plastic guts of the printer and put them — literally — into a cardboard box.

This is pretty awesome: How do you fancy having a proper, optically-zooming lens on your iPhone? That’s what the Sony ‘Lens Camera’ will do for you. These leaked shots show one version of the new device, which is actually an entire camera that lacks a screen and controls. These are provided by your iPhone (or Android phone).

One of the most hopeful promises of augmented reality is that it will eventually help us understand the world immediately around us. I’ve always thought one of the best uses of AR technology in this respect was its application to cars: Pan your phone or tablet across an engine bay, for instance, and an AR app will tell you where to put oil or coolant, or which bolts to remove in order to access the battery.

Audi brought us a little closer to this (augmented) reality today with the release of an AR companion app, using technology from German-based AR powerhouse Metaio, for its entry-level A3 that explains features in the cabin and engine bay.

Maybe Distil Union’s ultra-minimal Wally iPhone “case” was a little too minimal for some, because the design outfit has come out with a more conventional case-wallet.

So, Ashton Kutcher, right? His first name is actually Chris. He met up with about a bazillion teen fans at Nickelodeon’s Teen Choice Awards last night to receive the Ultimate Choice Award from the kid-centric cable network, and told them some deep stuff.

First up, according to Kutcher, is that “opportunities look a lot like work.” He said that any job he ever had was never beneath him. And he worked at them hard, and never quit one job until he had another. He then said that “the sexiest thing in the entire world is being really smart, and being thoughtful, and being generous.” Everything else, said the handsome, well-off, successful actor, “is crap; I promise you.”

So far, so good. Then he laid some Steve Jobs wisdom on the young crowd, which got increasingly quiet during the five minute acceptance speech.

Tech pundits across the web have been arguing for years about whether Apple can succeed without Steve Jobs, but Steve’s close friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, says that we already know what the future holds for Apple.

In an upcoming interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, Ellison says we don’t need to postulate what’s going to happen to Apple because we’ve already seen the after-Jobs experiment:

Well, we already know. We saw — we conducted the experiment. I mean, it’s been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.

Here’s a clip of the interview:

A new report from Bloomberg reiterates previous reports on Apple’s plans for the iPad family this year. According to Bloomberg, the fifth-gen iPad will be thinner with a design that more closely matches the iPad mini. The Wall Street Journal reported the exact same thing this morning. Expect thinner bezels around the display.

Bloomberg has also said that the iPad mini will be Retina-ified “in the last three months of the year” alongside the release of the 10-inch iPad 5. Awhile back there was a scare that we wouldn’t see a Retina iPad mini until 2014 due to manufacturing problems, but things are looking good now.

At this point in the rumor mill, certain bits of news are all but confirmed, like the September 10th date for Apple’s next iPhone event. Bloomberg is backing that date after it was reported by multiple other sources recently. Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C.

Source: Bloomberg

Next Media Animation is a group of Taiwanese animators most famous for their video on the extramarital escapades of Tiger Woods. They’ve also done some pretty funny (and very weird) animated videos on Apple that we’ve covered in the past. A quick perusal of their YouTube channel reveals a trend; covering U.S. news and tabloid stories from an outsiders perspective with a touch of the bizarre.

The latest to come from NMA is a surprisingly informative breakdown of what to expect from the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, unannounced devices Apple is expected to launch this fall.

The animation is about as odd as it gets, and you shouldn’t watch if cartoonish decapitation and other bloody injuries disturb you. Please put down the chainsaw, Tim Cook.

Facebook released an update for its iOS app today that adds support for hashtags, an aspect of Twitter that Facebook recently added on its desktop site. Users can now add hashtags in statuses and such to filter topics.

Another notable new feature is the ability to make a restaurant reservation within the Facebook app through OpenTable. Using “Nearby Places” and official pages for restaurants that have added OpenTable integration, Facebook users can quickly make reservations without needing to open a separate Web page or app. Apple has integrated OpenTable into Siri to help make restaurant reservations as well.

TV listing information for U.S. prime-time shows and movie pages are now displayed in the app, too. Facebook notes that today’s update also introduces “faster loading and a cleaner design for timelines on iPad,” so be sure to grab it in the App Store.

Source: App Store

I have to admit, I’m less than wary of all the tracking that goes on with the iOS devices my kids have access to. Now that they both have at least an iPod touch and access to my iPads, I’m feeling a bit on the worried side about them sharing any of their web or app activity.

Luckily, there’s an app called Disconnect Kids that installs on any iOS device and then helps kids (and their parents) understand what this tracking stuff is, and how to block it. It then helps those very same kids and parents do just that.

Evernote–it’s totally awesome, right? Track everything you do in Evernote, and access it on your Mac, the web, your iPhone, your iPad, or any other platform Evernote lives on, all with one login. Need that shopping list you created on your Mac while at the store? Pull it up on your iPhone at Costco. Want to show off that great website you saw while browsing the web at the coffee shop? Clip it to Evernote, and then pull it up on your iPad at home.

When you use Evernote as often and as regularly as many of us do, you’ll find that your own set of organization starts to break down. You’ve got so much stuff in there, across a variety of categories, notebooks, tags, and the like, that it starts to make less sense, perhaps, to your visual mind.

That’s where Bubble Broswer for Evernote comes in. This slick app, available for Mac as well as for iOS, re-visualizes your Evernote data into bubbles, making it easier to see patterns in your own data.

Remember the hands-free Leap Motion Controller for Mac that everyone went on and on about how cool it was going to be? The one that got delayed until July?

Well, it’s been three weeks since it actually started shipping, and the team behind the 3-D motion controller is reporting some significant numbers, including 25,000 downloads of its software developer kit (which allows developers to include code for the device in their own apps), and 1 million downloads of apps that work with the hardware.

That’s pretty fantastic, right?

With college football, the NFL and the MLB post-season all knocking on the door, CBS has pushed out an update for its iPad app which allows users to stream live video of sporting events.

CBS has been streaming video to the iPhone for a while now, but it’s finally bringing it to the iPad with a full tablet experience. Now you can stream on-demand clips or live events to your iPad and push it to your TV via AirPlay via the free update.

Here are the release notes: