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:
We’re less than a month away from seeing what the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S will look like—fingerprint sensor and all—but some artists on Dribble have been dreaming of a new feature for the iPhone: an infinite screen.
Claudio Guglieri’s iPhone 6 Infinity mockup and template sparked a mess of awesome rebounds from other artists who added their own bits of flair to the idea of an iPhone with a display that wraps completely around the device.
Take a look at these other great mockups:
A rumored September 10 iPhone event has been given an all-important “yep” from The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple. It’s the closest we’ll get to an official confirmation before Apple sends out invites to the much-anticipated shindig, which will likely see the iPhone 5S and the plastic low-cost iPhone 5C get their official unveilings.
You don’t have to spend too much time in a public place before you hear the iPhone’s default “tri-tone” alert — it’s everywhere, and everyone knows exactly what it means. But do you know where it came from? You might be surprised to hear that it wasn’t actually composed for the iPhone, but for a 1998 MP3 player for the Mac called SoundJam MP.
The Skype app for iPad has been updated today to introduce support for HD video calling — but there’s a catch. The feature is only available on the fourth-generation iPad with Retina display, and not any of its predecessors or the iPad mini.
The fifth-generation iPad will use the same touch-panel technology as the iPad mini to allow it to become thinner and lighter, according to “people with knowledge of the matter,” who have been speaking to The Wall Street Journal. The device is expected to look just like the iPad mini, with narrow bezels and a significantly thinner shell, but it will maintain a 9.7-inch Retina display.
Although the new fingerprint sensor gets all the attention, another big draw of the forthcoming iPhone 5S is the rumored camera improvements. We’ve heard that we’re at least looking at a megapixel jump to 12MP, but dual-LED flash is also rumored to be in the cards, and when it comes to the latter, it looks like we may have just received our confirmation.
The big headlining feature of the iPhone 5S is believed to be the fingerprint sensor underneath the home button, which could necessitate a new, icon-less sapphire home button. But could problems with the new technology make for a muted iPhone 5S launch?
If Abbyy’s upcoming new Textgrabber+Translator app came in a tin, then the app would do exactly what it said on that tin. And the tin—to stretch the metaphor—would be a beautiful, iOS 7-styled container.
The updated app, which now comes in an iPad-shaped tin to match the iPhone-shaped one, uses the iPad/iPhone’s camera to scan text, turn it into actual editable text and—if you like—translate it into any of 40 languages.
At first, the iPhone came in just one color, like a Model-T: black. By the time the iPhone 3G came out, though, the iPhone settled into a two-tone color scheme: classic black, and equally classic white.
But this seems like the year that Apple experiments with color. Not only is it widely accepted that Apple will release a colorful budget iPhone this year, probably called the iPhone 5C, but it looks like Apple might add one more color to the classic iPhone line-up: gold.
The Atherton is — in name and in design — the iPhone case that 1970s- and 1980s-era U.K. football (soccer) managers would have used. Famous for their sheepskin coats, these hard-talking, hard-smoking sports trainers wouldn’t hold truck with lily-livered modern materials like nylon or — gasp — fleece. Nope. The only covering fit for a testosterone-filled football coach was the skin of a dead sheep.
When I pick up a guitar, pretty much the only thing I can do is tune the thing. Well, that’s not entirely true: I can coil the strings and keep a burning cigarette in there, Eric Clapton-style, but as I quit smoking a few years back that’s not so useful anymore.
However, I’m fully aware that there are people out there who can thrash some amazing sounds out of their axes, and yet have trouble keeping the things in tune. SteadyTune, a Mac app that’s always waiting in the menu bar, is there to help.
The last thing I want to do as I stumble into my bed through a bourbon-soaked fog is to set up my sleep-tracking device. It’s nice to have an app tell me how fitful is my kip, but the pre-sleep perambulations are a pain: you have to slip your Fitbit into a wrist strap, or plug in your iPhone and launch the sleep-tracking app.
Beddit takes a different approach. It’s a strap that stays permanently wrapped around your mattress, ready to record your snoozes.
Ever wondered why you can’t pick up a cheap used Mac Mini? No, me either—I always figured the new ones were already cheap enough.
But the answer is both interesting and unsurprising. Unsurprising, because it’s just down to supply and demand. Interesting because—well, let’s ask some people who really know about selling used Mac Minis: Macminicolo.