It’s new iPhone announcement day! That customarily means a number of last-minute bombshells and leaks in the hours before the event, and this year is no exception: documentation for the new iPhone 5S has leaked out, giving us a closer look at the redesigned home button with fingerprint sensor… or, as Apple is calling it, the Touch ID sensor.
UPDATE [We said the case is available for the iPhone 5, which it isn’t.]
BikeConsole addresses the single biggest problem with using your iPhone as your in-bike computer: battery life. The iPhone clearly makes for an awesome brain for your bike, with maps, GPS and all manner of bike and fitness apps available, but leaving it running up there with the GPS and screen burning is a great way to kill your battery, fast.
So the BikeConsole does the obvious thing: it adds a battery.
NoteCube is another one of the “new generation” of note-taking apps, started by Q Branch’s Vesper, which are ultra-clean (in the iOS7 style) and work with pictures (the other one being Whitespace).
The USP of NoteCube is that it syncs with Evernote, which means that a) it actually syncs, unlike the other two apps, and b) it gets access to Evernote’s neat text recognition in photographs.
If you happen to have a bunch of Four Thirds lenses lying around, and your in the market for a new camera, then Olympus has you covered: The new OM-D E-M1 is an SLR-style body which will accept old Four Thirds lenses, as well as new Micro Four Thirds lenses. And more importantly, they actually work, and focus at a decent speed.
The iPhone 5S has already been expected to feature a fingerprint sensor for months, and now The Wall Street Journal has corroborated the rumor less than 24 hours ahead of Apple’s planned unveiling of the device tomorrow.
For those of us waiting for a hardcore iPad version of massively online battle arena (MOBA) game like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients, Open Feint founder Jason Citron might have the solution. His latest gaming company, Hammer & Chisel, has been hard at work creating the tablet-only MOBA, Fates Forever.
We spoke with Citron a while back about the development challenge of a more core game for iPads. Citron calls this one a “reinterpretation of the world’s most popular hardcore game,” Riot Games’ League of Legends, for tablets like the iPad.
Check out the video below.
We’ve already explained why the iPhone 5S will probably feature a redesigned home button with a fingerprint sensor, and now concept designer Martin Hajek has given the idea a proper treatment in Photoshop.
Hajek consistently makes some of the best Apple concepts around, and these are no different. His imagining of the ring around the home button looks great, and while the actual product may not look exactly the same, the concept gives a nice visual representation of what is being rumored.
After years of intentionally keeping its in-house marketing and ad team small, Apple is on a hiring spree and looking to double the department’s head count. According to a new report from AdAge, “the group could grow to 500 or 600 staffers from about 300.”
Under Steve Jobs, Apple would often outsource its marketing needs to firms like TBWA\Chiat\Day, and while it’s still doing that, the move to add more creatives to the payroll signals a shift in strategy.
Apple’s big iPhone extravaganza is tomorrow, and some colorful banners went up outside of the company’s Cupertino headquarters today.
Unlike most product launches, Apple is holding this event at Town Hall, its own auditorium on campus. The last time Town Hall was used was in the fall of 2011 for the iPhone 4S, and this year will reportedly be the unveiling of the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C.
The banners match the multi-colored dots in the event invite Apple sent out to the press last week:
Yahoo released a brand new video app for iOS today that aims to bring a TV-like experience to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. The new app – called Yahoo! Screens – allows users to browse through TV clips and episodes by swiping left-to-right as well as up-and-down.
Users can customize the experience to their liking and use Screen to discover new content and shows. To kick things off, Yahoo partnered with Viacom to pump out clips from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live, as well as other series and movies. The free app is available in the App Store now.
Here are the full release notes:
Simply put, Ona makes some of the nicest, most fashionable camera bags that Cult of Mac has ever had the pleasure of testing, and the Bolton Street camera backpack is no exception. But unlike their line-up of messenger bags, Ona’s Bolton Street is a bag for the kind of fashionable, London-trotting photog who can only carry his gear around by putting it on his back. It’s an expensive bag, and has a few niggles, but we love it. Read on.
Sir Jony Ive and famed designer Marc Newson have teamed up with Bono to a mega-auction of fancy master-pieces of design that will be sold to benefit (RED). Among the list of items up for grabs is a custom pair of Apple EarPods made of solid rose gold.
Jony and Marc actually did all the curation of the collection themselves over the past year, as well as collaborating on two custom made items – a Leica Digital Rangefinder Camera, and an aluminum desk produced by Neal Feay Studios. A total of 40 items will be auctioned off, including pieces from space travel, lighting, contemporary art and rare automobiles.
Here’s what Jony had to say about his contribution:
Apple’s first major product event of the year is set to take place on Tuesday, September 10th. There was WWDC in June, but this time around will be all about the iPhone, Apple’s crown jewel.
The event will be held in Apple’s Town Hall auditorium at its Cupertino headquarters, which is a venue that was last used for the debut of the iPhone 4S in 2011. The iPhone 5S is expected this year, and like the 4S was to the 4, the device will look nearly identical to the iPhone 5 and focus on internal improvements. For the first time in Apple’s history, the rumor mill is predicting the unveiling of not one, but two new iPhone models at once, with the second being the iPhone 5C.
Here’s everything to expect from Apple’s September 10th iPhone event:
At this point, we’re pretty confident that Apple will unveil two new colors for the iPhone 5S: a gold/champagne and white model, and a graphite and black model. If you’re wondering how the latter will look against the existing black iPhone 5, then this new hands-on video should give you a good idea.
We’re nearly 24 hours away from Apple’s iPhone keynote, but a new video just hit the web that shows what Apple’s budget iPhone looks like when in operation. A video posted by C Technology shows an alleged blue iPhone 5C powered-on before going through a quick tour of iOS 7.
While the short video doesn’t show many details of the device, it does look consistent with some of the other leaks we’ve seen, and could indicate that the iPhone 5C will be ready to ship shortly after tomorrow’s keynote.
You can watch the full video below:
https://youtu.be/E86uHpgWn4M
I am 100% on board this mock commercial of who will buy the gold iPhone 5S, from digital media company Andy Media. Even if the gold iPhone 5S does actually look pretty fantastic in real life, this is still largely the clientele I expect to be buying it. Absolutely hysterical.
Source: YouTube
I can think of little more boring than grinding away on a gym treadmill the thump, thump thump of your heavy feet slamming out a soporific beat over the even more mind-numbing whirr of the machine. Running outside is dull enough; running inside must be insufferable.
Which is why Steve invented the iPad. For reading while you’re at the gym: how else can you explain its bright, easy-to-read screen or it wipe-clean glass front? The problem? Jiggle. That is, your head is moving, your iPad’s screen isn’t and the mis-match makes reading hard, which is the problem the Run-n-Read purports to solve.
Quick, tell me what you thought when Facebook bought Instagram last year. Your first thought — more of a feeling, really — was probably an impending sense of doom, as if a planet with the face of a demon had just been announced to be hurtling towards Earth. But after that passed and you realized Facebook buying Instagram wasn’t going to be the end of the world, my guess is you mostly just shrugged and said, “I wonder how long it will take them to mess it all up with ads.”
Well, Facebook is taking it slow. In fact, seventeen months after they first purchased Instagram, they’re only now starting to talk about how they’re going to mess it all up with ads! Thanks for the restraint, Facebook.
Are you a big user of the iOS Kindle app? If you intend on updating to iOS 7 first thing when it drops next week, you might want to update your Kindle app sooner rather than later. A new critical update has been released that Amazon says will prevent iOS 7 from messing your Kindle library up.
You know the drill: you get some crazy attachment in the mail, and you need to convert it to a format you can use. And – of course – you’re on your iPhone or iPad.
Maybe it’a a FLAC file you want in AAC, or a Microsoft DOC file that you’d prefer to see as a PDF. On the Mac you can convert these with little problem, but on iOS? Well, it’s now actually even easier than it was on the desktop. If you use CloudConvert anyway.
Go figure. Just a week and a half before Apple is set to launch iOS 7 out into the world, someone has finally succeeded in hacking iOS 6.1.4. Oh, the irony!
Remember the Radius? It was an iPhone case so minimal that it was almost invisible when viewed from anywhere but the back, and weighed in at just 4.4 grams, a weight too light to even register on the scale of ounces [1]
The Corners 4 somehow manages to be even more minimal than the Radius, ditching that heavy x-shaped brace on the back and just putting a little round puck on each corner of the iPhone.
At an event in Japan today, Sony unveiled the new PS Vita TV, a tiny set-top box that will sell for around $95 and look to compete with devices like the Apple TV. Not only will it let you stream content from services like Hulu and Sony’s own Video Unlimited service, but if you connect a DualShock 3 controller, it will also allow you to play PSP and PS Vita games on your TV.
PRONGGGG! That’s the name of the company that makes the clevertastic PocketPlug, an iPhone case that comes with a built-in charger so you can just flip out its prongs and stick them into the nearest available wall socket.
If you’ve been running the iOS 7 beta, or have seen it up close, then you’ll be familiar with the ugly icon problem, in which some icons have janky edges thanks to a change of the corner radius in iOS 7. You can see the changes in this animated GIF from Czech site Letem Světem Applem (or something), which shows the design change as applied to the icons in the iTunes Store.