News - page 1545

If you’re like many of us in the tech journalist business, you rely on your RSS feeds to keep track of what’s going on in the blogosphere. That makes this transition time after the demise of Google Reader, a fantastic service (not an app!) that had great APIs to work with any third-party RSS reader client.

Now, however, that the search giant’s RSS system is dead and gone, Feedly has jumped into the fray, and basically created the second generation of the Google RSS system by cloning it onto their own servers. It’s a brilliant move, making Feedly a go-to site for all of us who want permanent sets of RSS feeds, but don’t want to have to manage it on a per-app basis.

Unfortunately, if you’ve grabbed the Feedly app for iPad lately, and managed to log yourself out of Feedly (that’s me!), you’ll get the above splash screen, which only looks like an over-capacity issue, but it really isn’t.

Instagram for iPhone has received a minor update in the App Store that brings a long overdue feature. You can finally shoot in landscape mode when taking stills or video. In the past, shooting in anything other than portrait wasn’t supported within the Instagram app. Now the orientation will adapt like the regular iOS Camera. When the iPhone is rotated, Instagram’s camera buttons rotate to match.

Cinema, an image stabilization feature that was introduced alongside video a couple weeks ago, has been added to the iPhone’s front-facing camera. Today’s update also packs bug fixes and other random improvements, so be sure to download it from the App Store.

Source: App Store

I know — if you see another @&#%$ post about a smartphone watch, you’re going to run screaming though the streets tearing out your hair. But bear with me, because this one’s different — and it’s got more tech packed into it than an entire region of Best Buys.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, inarguably the best turn-based, squad-level strategy game on the Mac, is now available from the Steam store — with some big differences from its Mac Store sibling.

In the ongoing smartphone culture wars, Samsung spent a reported $5 million engaging the latest song stylings of Jay-Z as an exclusive for Galaxy owners.

Owners of that phone contended for a million copies of the impressively-titled album “Magna Carta Holy Grail”  launched July 4 in a special app, three days before the rest of us can get it in iTunes. Media saw the promotion as a tactical move by Samsung to gain position on the music front over Apple.

The cachet lasted about as long as a cheap sparkler: there are thousands of torrents of the album available.

As one of the guys who decided to spread the work of Beyoncé’s husband up for everyone put it: “I should clarify it was available to the first million (I think…) Samsung Galaxy owners to chime in with an app for the album. My wife got it but I’m not rocking a Samsung :/”

JoliDrive is JoliCloud’s new iOS app and it’s pretty good, if a little basic. The general idea is that you use the app to log in to your various web servixes and then use a single app – JoliDrive – to access them.

Apple is expected to launch a new smartwatch called the “iWatch” as early as this fall, and we already know that it could face competition from Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and LG. But there’s another competitor that may want a piece of the pie: Dell.

Here’s a great idea: It’s the Satechi Bluetooth Wireless Smart Keypad and it combines a number pad for your Mac with an actual old-school calculator. It even matches your Apple Wireless Keyboard.

On-camera flash is usually a terrible idea (with just two – maybe three – exceptions I can think of). It lights up your subject, sure, but it totally kills the mood that made you want to take a photo in the dark in the first place.

But if you’re a fan of shiny, overexposed faces, red eyes and disappearing backgrounds then why not grab an iblazr, the world’s first all-lower-case iPhone flash. Kidding. It is all lower cae, but that’s not really its tagline. It’s real tagline is “is the first universal LED flash for smartphones and tablets.”

Lame.

Another supposed holiday; another super-useful tool from Brett “I just built this” Terpstra. This one is called GrabLinks, and it does just that: Fire the bookmarklet off inside your browser and you can quickly grab a bunch of links and save them out in Markdown. Nerdy? Sure. Useful? Hell yes.

Recently on Twitter, our deputy editor John “pipe and slippers” Brownlee posted a picture of his Mac keyboard, with wooden tiles stuck to the keycaps. It was utterly hideous, and yet completely in keeping with John’s fetish for anything made of wood. It was the real-world equivalent green felt or rich Corinthian leather.

This all-wood keyboard, on the other hand, is pretty gorgeous. It comes from French company Orée, it’s called the Orée Board and it costs a steep-ish €150 ($193).

See if you can guess what the app External Flash does. Hopefully you guessed “It’s an app that lets you control the LED lamps from up to 16 other iPhones and fire them in sync with your own iPhone’s camera," because then you’d be correct. If you guessed anything else, then you’re totally wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

Apple is on a quest to register the “iWatch” trademark worldwide ahead of its rumored smartwatch launch later this year, with filings already made in Japan, Taiwan, and Mexico. But the Cupertino company will hit a snag in the United States and the United Kingdom, where the iWatch name is already spoken for.

Battery life on the iPhone 5 is pretty good when you compare it to other high-end devices with LTE connectivity, so if you’re having to charge yours more than normal, then you may need a new battery. But don’t worry — battery replacements are relatively cheap, and they’re so easy, you can probably do them yourself.

Teardown specialists iFixit show you how in a new five-minute walkthrough video.

Do you ever stop to think about how many albums your iPhone will hold? Probably not, as you most likely filled your iPhone or iPod up with music from the iTunes Store, or you stream from Spotify or Rdio. And even if you filled up your iTunes with music by ripping actual physical disks, you almost certainly didn’t do it from vinyl records.

I did fill my first 15GB iPod with music from ripped CDs, so I know just how big the stack was that I had to work thorough. But if you head over to ConcertHotels.com and click the little arrow, you’ll be treated to a stack of vinyl big enough to fill a 160GB iPod. That’s 40,000 songs in total.

According to the denizens of the Internet, the Airport Extreme you have sitting in your hallway or – nerd! – in your bedroom might be experiencing dropout. According to Marco “I just sold [x]” Arment of Instapaper fame, this problem might have something to do with the latest 7.6.3 firmware. The good news? Downgrading is stupidly easy.

I wouldn’t tell anyone else this, but I’m going to admit it to you: I spend far too many brain cycles pondering better ways to carry my camera and other essentials. Worse, I have a box full of bags and straps leftover from my efforts. So i’m not sure whether this tutorial for making a DIY harness is a great idea of the beginning of another foolhardy adventure. I suspect it might be both.

Glui is an antidote for those who think that Evernote’s Skitch has gotten a little too fancy. It’s a Mac app that sits in the Menubar and captures screen shots. It then lets you quickly annotate them and upload them to Dropbox, copying the URL to your clipboard along the way.

And that’s about it.

Did you know that the Mac only got full screen desktop wallpaper in System 8? It sounds amazing until you realize that the first iPhone didn’t have any wallpaper at all – just a black void hanging malevolently behind the home screen icons.

Over at the Egg Freckles blog, Thomas Brand details the history of wallpaper on the Mac. It’s not just a bunch of pictures either. In fact, there are no pictures at all (although there are lots of download links for you). What you get is a neat overview of how the desktop evolved closely along with the hardware it was running on.

And Thomas’ favorite Apple wallpaper of all time? Mavericks’ wave. It’s hard to disagree.

Source: Egg Freckles
Via: TUAW

Hey RSS refugees (RSS-u-gees?). Did you sign up for a Feed Wrangler account so you could import all your Google Reader feeds and keep using them in something like the Excellent Mr. Reader app? Me too. And did you see that Feed Wrangler pretty much just ignored all your carefully thought-out and painstakingly organized folders, instead dumping all your feeds into one big list? So you thought “Screw this” and used the free Feedly instead?

Me too.

But Feed Wrangler has now tweaked its import engine so all your folders will be converted into Smart Feeds. Better still, you just need to re-import your exported Google Reader OPML file and it’ll fix everything up for you.

What do Woz and Stephen Fry have in common, besides a fascination with technology and love of all things Apple? The answer: They’ve both been using (and plugging) a free iPhone app from Ireland called Soundwave Music Discovery that lets you see — in some rather novel ways — what other people are listening to. In a way, it’s sort of like Twitter for music.

Back in April, we told you about Rolomotion, a new gaming platform for iOS that leverages the iPhone’s hardware sensors to create a Wii-like gaming experience on the Apple TV. Developed by Rolocule Games, the first Rolomotion game is available in the App Store, and it’s called Motion Tennis.

As the name implies, it’s a tennis game that requires an iPhone and Apple TV. Unlike most iOS games, the iPhone acts as a motion-aware controller. While it’s certainly not as polished as playing Wii Sports, Rolomotion is forecasting the future of Apple TV gaming.

Apple released the third beta of OS X 10.8.5 (build 12F17) to developers today.  In the seed note Apple asks developers to focus on Wi-Fi, Graphics, Wake from Sleep, PDF viewing, and Mobile Device Management.

Given the planned release of OS X Mavericks this fall, 10.8.5 could very well end up being the last major version of Mountain Lion before Mavericks ships to the public. A developer beta of Mavericks was made available to developers the week of WWDC.

Source: Apple

iTranslate Voice has been the premiere language translation app in the App Store for awhile. Apple even featured it as one of the best apps of 2012.

Today Sonico Mobile, the company behind iTranslate, has released version 2.0 of the app with additional languages, a polished design, and a slick multi-lingual communication tool called AirTranslate.

Twitter’s Vine app was at the top of the mini-video sharing game until Instagram came along and crushed it by allowing users to upload 15-second video clips. With Instagram’s massive user base, you would think that Vine doesn’t have a fighting chance.

In the biggest update the iPhone app has seen yet, Vine has proven otherwise.