Patent trolls are everywhere these days, swaming over the hills of Silicon Valleys on the back of their patent wargs. Everyone is dealing with the frivolous lawsuits patent trolls make a living bringing against any technology company that experiences even a modicum of success, but hey, go figure: ultimately, patent trolls are more interested in suing Apple than anyone else.
It appears that today is officially App Update Thursday here on CoM, and I’m not even writing about all the great stuff that my iOS devices sucked down during the night. But I will tell you about Mailbox.
The Mailbox app, which lets you swipe and tap your way through your email, getting to “inbox zero” easily several times a day whilst turning your mail account into a kind of super-handy to-do list, will now search your entire Gmail archive. And that’s not all.
Did you ever find yourself using the amazing Snapseed and thinking to yourself, “man, I love this app more than a man should love a piece of photo-editing software, but I sure wish it could do more. Like, what if it could save my edits as presets?”
Well, you lucky, app-loving deviant, you: your wish has been answered. No, not by Snapseed, which Google will surely kill off soon enough anyway, but by a brand new app called Photoristic.
Evidence is mounting that Apple plans on releasing the next iPhone on September 20th. The latest proof? T-Mobile, the latest official American iPhone carrier, has told all of their employees to not even bother asking for any days off between Friday, September 20th and Sunday, September 22nd.
This might just be the kind of rumor only a Hutt could love. According to self-professed “intergalactic” news site Jedi News, the Apple TV could soon get a new channel dedicated entirely to Star Wars on-demand programming.
Flickr’s iPhone app has gotten big revamp, and if it weren’t for another great photo app release today (called Photoristic), it could actually become my new favorite iOS photo editor. But what the “What’s new?” section in the App Store doesn’t mention is the new UI that accompanies it.
The one thing I’ve never thought about my mouse is that it’s too thick, and yet here comes Logitech, fresh off its success with the Ultrathin Keyboard Cases for the iPad and iPad, making an Ultrathin Touch Mouse for your MacBook Air (or “Ultrabook,” as the gender-neutral marketing parlance has it).
Jeff Atwood (of Stack Overflow fame) decided that he needed a new keyboard for his coding adventures. So instead of just firing up the Amazon app and starting from there, he decided to make his own. And now you can buy it, too. It’s the CODE mechanical keyboard, and you can use it to clack away to yourself, silently and in the dark.
Half the country is perhaps unaware of this, but out in places like Tennessee, where Griffin is based, the camouflage color scheme is a pretty big deal. Obviously there are camo shirts, pants and gun cases. But there’s also a good selection of camo bedding, camo welding helmets and of course, camo lingerie (don’t worry, link is more or less SFW).
So it makes perfect sense that Griffin’s tough-as-nails Survivor case is now available in camouflage.
Mailbox, the popular email app for iPhone, has been updated with a big feature: the ability to search for Gmail messages stored in the cloud. Searching was previously limited to locally stored messages only.
It’s been a while since a mouse had me licking my MacBook’s screen with gadget lust, but a few seconds after first looking at Logitech’s new Bluetooth-powered Ultrathin Touch Mouse T630 and my rMBP’s glossy panel was covered with a thick coat of saliva. (Seriously, doesn’t anyone else lick their screen? Am I the only one?*)
We’re still waiting on Apple to send out the invites for its all-but-confirmed iPhone event on September 10th. While Apple is expected to announce the new iPhone(s) that day, nothing substantial has been rumored about in-store availability, until now.
According to an internal T-Mobile employee schedule, it looks like this year’s iPhone launch weekend will be September 20th-22nd. T-Mobile has blacked out these dates so employees can’t take vacations, which is the typical all-hands-on-deck approach that carriers reserve for new iPhone launches. Another report has said that the new iPhones will go on sale in Japan on the 20th as well.
“Like all good rumors, we should take this with the standard “subject to change” warning but my sources suggest this could be iPhone related,” reports TmoNews. Apple is expected to debut the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C next month, but it’s unknown if both devices will go on sale during the same weekend.
Source: TmoNews
When you see the word “BitTorrent” you probably think of pirating something like Game of Thrones. That’s not what a new app called BitTorrent Sync is about. Think of it like Dropbox without any storage caps or pricing tiers for data usage.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is one to shy away from sharing his opinions on the state of Apple, but rather than giving a speech on the advice he would impart to Tim Cook, Woz recently shared his Apple product wishlist, which includes wearable computers and bigger displays.
During a recent interview with Reuters, Woz says that he wants Apple to make an iWatch that is as complete in functionality as the current iPhone. The wishlist also includes larger screens on the iPhone, more customizations, and a happy room full of Dreamers thinking up how to change the world with a product that you wouldn’t call a phone.
Here’s the full interview:
Twitter released a new update for its iOS app that makes it easier for users to keep track of conversations between friends. To keep tabs on who’s saying what to whom and when, Twitter has added a blue line that connects conversations and displays replies to tweets in chronological order.
Conversations can now be expanded by tapping the blue line to see more replies from people you don’t follow. Twitter also added new notification settings and bug fixes.
Here’s a video on how the blue line works:
Apple is no stranger to lawsuits and with all the cash its been making the past few years, the lawsuits from patent trolls have been piling up. According to a new study on lawsuits from non practicing entities (patent trolls), Apple got slammed with more patent lawsuits (171 total) in the last five years than any other company.
I can remember saving up my allowance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, itching to get just one more Star Wars action figure from the local department store. When I’d get there, money clenched in my sweaty little hand, I would bliss out at the sheer variety and number of action figures on display.
Which to choose? That robot bounty hunter looked super cool, but it certainly wasn’t Boba Fett, who took my money that day. My younger brother opted for Bossk, because apparently we’re a family who loves bounty hunters.
Today, however, you won’t have to choose. There are nine new videos detailing nine characters from the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II game, set to release on iOS on September 19th.
Philips Hue lights have quickly become one of favorite new iOS accessories thanks to a bunch of neat hacks and apps that have take advantage of the connected lights. Until now, Hue has mainly been controlled via an iOS app, but Hue Menu for OS X makes it so you can finally control Hue from your Mac.
Hue Menu is a new menu bar app that not only allows users to turn their Hue bulbs on/off, but you can also change the colors, create presets, pick custom colors using your own photos or the Mac OS color Picker and more. At $2.99, the app is an easy buy for Hue owners, plus the developer behind it says upcoming features will include alarms, timers, and geo-fencing.
Here are the full release notes:
The fifth-generation iPad’s new front panel, which sports thinner bezels down the sides of its display, has appeared yet again in a new high quality gallery. The panel already has its digitizer and flex cables fitted, and it appears to be a genuine Apple component straight off the production line.
Developer Inq Mobile has just announced a new version of a content discovery app, Material, now available for iOS users as well as those on Android. It’s a free app that aims to sort through millions of sites to find stuff you’ve already showed an interest in, via Twitter and Facebook.
Material grabs all of the sites you’ve linked to, shared, and re-tweeted to deliver a personalized, magazine-style collection of the online ephemera that you’re already checking out, but all in one place.
The app has been on Android for a while now, and has just come to iOS with a newly re-designed app for the iPhone, dropping updates twice a day to your chosen device.
An Apple iPhone event for September 10 has been all but confirmed in recent weeks, and we’re almost certain that we’ll see the unveiling of both the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C. But what about new iPads? There have been rumors that claim they won’t arrive until October, but according to a new Bloomberg report, they’ll be part of the September 10 event as well.
The virtualization maestros over at Parallels have long offered Mac owners a slick, easy way to run Windows apps on their Macs, but now they’re extending their mission in the other direction with a new app that lets you run Mac & PC apps… on your iPad.
If you purchased an iPhone 5 last year, you might remember how easily the black iPhone scratched and chipped. Christened ‘Scuffgate’ by upset owners, the black iPhone 5’s propensity for scratching even prompted Phil Schiller to comment upon the issue, saying such scratches were “normal.”
Well, no, they’re not, Phil. The white iPhone 5, for example, isn’t nearly as scratch prone as the black iPhone 5. Be that as it may, at this point, the iPhone 5’s scratchability can be taken as read. But what about the gold iPhone 5S? Will it be as scratchable as its black brother, or as pristine and unscuffable as the white model?
Nitro is a very promising new todo list app for the Mac (plus a bunch of hippie platforms). It keeps your notes in a plain text file on Dropbox, and is available free from the Mac App Store.
One of the best hacks to come to the Apple TV in the last year is PlexConnect, an amazing little program that hijacked the Trailers channel on your Apple TV and connected it to the Plex home media library running on your Mac. What the hack meant was that you could stream your Mac’s entire video or media library to your Apple TV just by navigating with the remote… no AirPlay required.
It was wonderful, but Apple doesn’t like hacks. That’s why PlexConnect is now dead. (Update: It’s back!)