Where does Jony Ive get his inspiration? We’ve been asking that question for years, and while genius plays a part in it, like the best designers, Ive is profoundly influenced by the world around him.
The same is true with iOS 7. Ive’s new design might look radical with its bright colors and palette of pastels, but it is inspired by a color pattern that naturally occurs in the environs of Cupertino, and likely inside your own home. What is this inspiration? It might surprise you.
Sick of getting spam in your iCloud email? You’re not the only one. Apple’s sick of it too, and they’re making a hiring push to get spam and abuse under control in the iCloud.
For the last four years, T-Mobile has been just battered by the iPhone. Unable to ink the same deals with Apple as AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon to get the Jesus Phone on their networks at a subsidized price, T-Mobile tried to sell itself to AT&T, only to have the deal killed by the FCC.
In desperation, T-Mobile tried a new approach: they decided to call themselves an “Un-carrier” and start offering untraditional no-contract, upgrade-anytime-you-want plans. And you know what? It’s really paying off for them.
Grid is a pretty cool new app which brings a new approach to note taking. It uses a flat grid metaphor and some very easy-to-use gestures to add contacts, photos, notes and places.
Ever used your iPhone to take a photo through the viewfinder of your camera? Or tried to line up the iPhone’s lens with one half of a pair of binoculars? Then you’ll know how hard it is to get a good result. But if you’re willing to sacrifice an old iPhone case and pony up a few dollars for an SLR eyepiece, then you can make an adapter that’ll get you great Instagrammatical pictures every time.
The eTeleporter is a brand new box that will teleport humans from one physical location to another, instantaneously. Wait, no. Let’s start again. The eTeleporter is a kind of a phone booth for your iPad.
There’s a new option emerging for mobile apps that want to sync to the desktop: Evernote. No, Evernote isn’t new, but it’s fast becoming the service of choice for app developers who don’t want to develop a companion Mac app.
And the latest of these is Adventures for iPhone, an app which lets you save the places you’ve visited into a location-based journal.
Komoot (like commute, only not) is a gem of an app for German bikers and hikers. Or rather, it was: with today’s v5.2 update, the navigation app now comes in English, and adds support for a slew of new countries.
The short form: If you ever take to two wheels, then you need this app.
Live histograms, saving layered images as PSD files, clone stamping, geotagging, layer masking… I’m talking about a desktop class app like Acorn, right? Nope. I’m listing features from Leonardo, an absurdly powerful universal iOS image-editing app.
It should be apparent by now that wires are an endangered species, what with the recent explosive popularity of Bluetooth for transmission of sound and data, and the growing ability to keep everything constantly synced with the cloud.
The lone holdout restraining the iPhone from breaking free is the charging cable—but even that’s on its way out. Case in point, Buqu Tech’s Magnetyze wireless charging case for the iPhone 5 is now available.
The British Isles aren’t generally known for exporting headphones; mega boy bands and cycling superstars, yes, and perhaps Marmite. But headphones? All that’s changing though, with the impact RHA has made over the past year or so. The outfit has thus far produced a series of home run hits (or batted sixes, if you’re a cricket fan) with inexpensive headphones with sound way above their price.
If their past successes are anything to go by, these new ‘phones from RHA should sound amazing—because they’re the company’s most expensive yet.
When we first took a look at Anchor back in June after it had just launched, the social platform for coworkers was a decidedly walled-off environment; just like Hotel California, you could check out any time you like—but you could never leave. At least, your ideas couldn’t.
But that’s changed today, as the app sees its first big update and adds integration with Evernote, and the ability to email outside of the platform.
Not too surprisingly, the five major publishers originally named in the U.S. Department of Justice’s e-book case regarding their collusion with Apple on pricing have now themselves filed a complaint regarding the Justice Department’s proposal to eliminate the use of the agency model in any Apple agreements with publishers for a period of five years.
Publishers like the agency model as it allows them to set prices for e-books, instead of the distributor, as Amazon did before Apple’s own iBooks system launched on the iPad.
The cloud storage wars continue with a new tweet from Microsoft’s SkyDrive Twitter account. The service, typically offering seven gigabytes of online storage for free, just made an offer Apple’s jilted MobileMe members might not be able to refuse.
In a tweet today, @SkyDrive offered anyone who could forward the Apple downgrade email to a special SkyDrive email address would receive an extra 15GB of Microsoft’s own cloud storage system for one year for free.
You know the little Location Services triangle in the top right of your iPhone’s status bar well. It floats there faithfully every day, representing modern technology’s obsession with location data. Knowing where you are and what you do on a daily basis is incredibly valuable to advertisers and merchants looking to sell the next “x because you where at x.” Knowing your location also makes apps and iOS smarter, which ultimately makes the experience of using your iPhone more seamless.
If you’ve had Location Services turned on, then you’ve already been giving Apple permission to silently track your every move. A new setting in iOS 7 called “Frequent Locations” makes how and to what level you are tracked more transparent, right down to the minute you left your house yesterday.
Apple has released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 5 today following the release of the fourth preview two weeks ago. The update is available via the Mac App Store for registered developers already on the Mavericks beta, and a direct download is available in the Mac Dev Center. Apple’s iBooks for Mac app has been included for the first time in this particular beta release. General stability and performance issues have also been addressed.
The eighth beta of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5 was also seeded today. 10.8.5 will likely be the last Mountain Lion update to come out before Mavericks is released to the public this fall.
Apple has been generally sticking to a two-week release cycle for Mavericks and iOS 7 betas this summer, despite the Dev Center outage. Mavericks is continuing to get more stable with each preview release, and the finishing touches are being put on 10.8.5.
Source: Apple
Microsoft’s recent barrage of anti–iPad ads have nearly all featured third-party tablets rather than boasting about Microsoft’s own iPad-killer, the Surface RT. Now that it’s desperately slashed prices on RT units, Microsoft is feeling inexplicably cocky in its latest ad, which pits the hardware and software specs of the iPad against that of the Surface RT.
Basically, Microsoft is praying the iPad’s lack of a keyboard (that you have to purchase separately), Microsoft Office, and a USB port will be enough to entice some unlucky nerds to buy a Surface RT instead of an iPad now that it’s cheaper than ever but still deprived of quality apps.
Here’s the ad:
Instagram just pushed out a big update for its iOS and Android apps which gives users the ability to import video from their smartphone libraries into Instagram.
Now you can film video at any time and then splice it together later into a 15-second video to import into Instagram. The update also brings video support to Android 4.0 devices and has a new trim and crop feature so your vids can be molded into perfect squares.
iOS users also pick up a new Automatic Straightening feature that set your photos level with the tap of a button. The new Instagram 4.1 update is available now in the App Store and Google Play.
Source: Instagram
Spike Jonze is coming out with a new movie and this time, rather than dissecting the mind of a famous movie star, Jonze’s new film, Her, takes a look at what it would be like to fall in love with an operating system like Siri.
The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely dude with a non-ironic mustache who becomes intrigued with a new, Siri-like, advanced operating system named Samantha that’s powered by Scarlett Johansonn’s sexy vocal chords.
We’ll have to wait until November 20th to see what happens when you give Siri a soul and place her in the hands of anti-social men across the world, but here’s the first trailer to hold you over:
Are you unable to download content from the App Store and iTunes this morning? Don’t worry—you’re not the only one. Lots of people are experiencing the same thing, and Apple has acknowledged a problem affecting “some users” on its system status page.
By now we know exactly what the iPhone 5C is going to look like thanks to more component leaks than you probably care to look at. But the latest gallery is the only one you should care about, because these high-resolution pictures show off the iPhone 5C’s plastic rear panel better than ever before.
Apple has been trying to be less dependent on Samsung components for years now, but ditching its rival has been a lot more difficult than imagined, mostly because there’s not a single company that can churn out displays and RAM like Samsung.
A new report from NPD DisplaySearch claims that Apple’s dependency on Samsung displays has only deepened recently, thanks to shortcomings by LG Display and other manufacturers as the iPad mini 2 launch looms ahead.
One of Apple’s Best Apps of 2012, Pixowl’s The Sandbox is a fantastically inventive mobile game that encourages players to create entire worlds and works of art, right on their iOS or Android devices. The Sandbox has reached five million downloads across app stores, and has over 300,000 unique worlds shared in its Online Gallery. That’s a lot of stuff, folks!
The new update for iOS today brings vehicles to the pixel-based world-building game, letting you carry yourself and crafting materials in a Truck from one place to another much faster. Or, if you’re of a combative turn of mind, grab a Tank or twelve and create a battle world to experiences the horrors of war, digitally.
There are new, more advanced contraptions as well, like Conveyor Belts and Multi Electro contraptions, letting you create and manage even more complicated machines and systems within your world.
Infuse is my favorite third-party media player for the iPhone and iPad. And until VLC for iOS returned to the App Store, there was really no competition. FireCore, the maker of Infuse, isn’t letting other apps get the last word. In today’s big update, Infuse has received a number of great features, including support for AirPlay and file transfers over Wi-Fi.
Apple’s yearly music festival is set to kick off at the Roundhouse venue in London’s Chalk Farm next month, and while the festival already had 23 acts slated for the month long concert, Apple just added 17 more artists to the line-up.
The new additions include Avicii, Bastille, Janelle Monae, The Lumineers, Tinie Tempah and many more to go alongside Elton John and Justin Timberlake. U.K. residents can use the iTunes Festival app to get free tickets, while the rest of the world will be able to watch the shows live from an iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV.
Here’s the full line-up: