News - page 1550

There isn’t a much sadder sight in the modern urban landscape than a pair of friends walking together, both isolated by their own music playing on their own headphones. Why even bother meeting your friend i all you’re going to do is ignore each other?

Now, it gets a little better – and quite a lot cuter – when those friends share one pair of earbuds, maybe to listen to the same piece of music.

And then Double Music comes along and ruins everything again. Double Music is an app that will play a different track into each bud, severing the couple’s connection even as they’re physically joined by white wires.

Every once in a while an app comes along that looks – at first glance – to be just like every other app in its category. Then, when you take it for a spin, it blows you away. Tayasui Sketches is such an app. It’s a painting and drawing app for the iPad, and it does just what you’d expect: multiple brushes, colors and a few control gestures. But when you use it the slick feel, high level of polish and great results will win you over.

Remember when it seemed like some special future high-tech magic to edit video in the web-browser? Now it’s almost as mundane as composing an e-mail inside Safari. But Pics.io is about to let you edit RAW photos in the browser. The site is currently in private alpha testing, but the promise is of fast online RAW editing on your iPad.

Pixter is an interesting idea, although one which is – possibly – doomed. Here’s the elevator pitch: Pixter is a for-pay Instagram.

Cables: I love what they do – keeping my beloved gadgets juiced and full of delicious data – but — unlike a playful kitten — I hate their tangled mess. Perhaps the perfect charger cable is here at last though: It’s the curly phone-style Lightning cable from Japanese company Sanwa.

Eye-Fi’s new Mobi cards are designed to work better with iOS and Android apps, making wireless transfers from your camera to your iDevice much easier. The iOS app has been updated, too, bringing support for the iPhone 5’s larger screen, just 8 months after it was launched. This, combined with the crappy non-native OS X app shows that Eye-Fi is getting really serious about Apple gear.

By now, the only folks worried they don’t have enough choices when buying a new pair of Bluetooth headphones must be the same folks who worry that this place doesn’t have enough of a beer selection.

The newest newcomer (Bluetooth headphones, not beer) is Outdoor Tech’s spartan-looking Tuis, which we’re assuming means “Bluetooth” in Esperanto.

When Google announced the shut down of Google Reader this past March, Feedly stepped up, promising to create its own Reader-like system for other third party RSS apps to connect to, and thereby lessen the impact of Google’s industry-standard takedown.

In a blog post today, Feedly announced the next step of its plan to rule the RSS landscape with the support of several third party RSS apps, including Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader. I use Reeder on a daily basis on both my Mac and my iPad (which continues to be free until Google Reader actually shuts down its service as of July 1).

DataMan was one of the first iPhone data trackers when it debuted back in 2010, after AT&T 86ed the utopian guarantee of unlimited data.

This new iteration, DataMan Next, is much prettier, but essentially does the same thing: It tracks your data usage and warns you before you spend money needlessly on data overage charges; it can even predict whether you’ll end up going over your monthly allowance. And today, it’s free.

The iOS developer behind Home Remind has published a blog post about the Facebook apps for iPhone, iPad and Facebook Messenger. He says that according to his testing, the Facebook apps consume way more CPU time than is strictly necessary. Excessive CPU time can lead to battery drain.

The developer used Apple’s own Mac-based app, Instruments, to look at what was running on his iPhone, and found that his Facebook app was activating, doing something for ten seconds, then going back to sleep. It did this all day long during his test. He tested the Messenger app and the Facebook iPad app, and found the same pattern.

If that’s the case, the Facebook app is never truly going to sleep and then terminating like a good app. As a result, it’s using up CPU time, and a lot of your battery.

Want T&A beamed directly into your eyeball? The first porn app has come to Google Glass and it’s named after what it shows you: “Tits & Glass.”

The U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Apple has gotten underway in New York. The DOJ has accused Apple of colluding with publishers to raise the price on eBooks.

To start the trial off, the DOJ has released an 81-page slide deck containing its opening statements against Apple. The trial is expected to run for about three weeks, and both sides gave their opening arguments today.

The DOJ’s 81-page document includes a number of email between Apple execs, as well as sections of Walter Isaacon”s biography of Steve Jobs.

You can search through the DOJ’s opening arguments after the break:

Google just released Chrome 27 for iOS. The big update for Google’s third-party browser for iOS should have faster page reloading speeds as well as improved voice search.

Google included voice search in its Google Now app for iOS, but the conversational search tools are now being packed directly into Chrome as well. The update also gives Chrome the ability to speak search results back to you so you pretty much never have to look at your screen again if you don’t want to.

Here are the full release notes:

WordPress just released a new update for its iOS app that is sure to make WordPress bloggers happy. The new app features a overhauled UI that makes it easier and faster to blog from your iPhone than before.

The new update ditches the single pane view for a multi-pane view that users can swipe between to access different areas of the app (kind of like the Facebook and Rdio apps). WordPress also added a shortcut to the sidebar to make posting faster, there are also new translations for Russian, Danish, and Korean, improved Tumblr importing, and bug fixes.

Here are the full release notes:

AgileBits, creators of the popular 1Password tool for Mac and iOS, have today announced that 1Password 4 for Mac has entered beta. The release comes six months after 1Password 4 came to iOS, and you can get your hands on the early release by joining the AgileBits Beta Family.

Ever since Tim Cook ousted Scott Forstall last year, the Apple CEO has preached a lot about how collaboration within Apple is one of the most important aspects of the company’s culture.

Speaking at a reunion for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Tim Cook outlined what kind of attributes he looks for in employees and what it takes to be a great collaborator.

Here’s what Cook had to say about collaboration:

Google has just updated their official Drive app for iOS, making it easier to navigate between documents and collaborate with others upon them. Not only can you now comment upon Google Drive documents within the app, you can quickly swipe through images.

You probably already know the Macintosh Portable, Apple’s first Mac laptop released for $7,300 in 1989, which looked and weighed about as much as a small suitcase full of dark matter. No joke: you could ship an entire crate of MacBook Airs inside of one.

But can you believe that there was an even bigger, more unwieldy Mac laptop that preceded it? It wasn’t an official Cupertino joint, to be sure, but meet the Walkmac: a 1987 modded Mac SE with a working LCD screen and a battery pack.

Apple has released a new WWDC 2013 companion app for iOS, which is designed to give developers the opportunity to follow the event each day. Designed for both attendees and those who cannot make it, the app offers a WWDC schedule, the latest news, daily session videos for registered developers, and more.

PopCap has today confirmed the release date for the much-anticipated Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time, which will be exclusive to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The company has also released an awesome new launch trailer that teases some of the new plants and new worlds.

Apple is expected to announce a new low-cost iPhone later this year in an effort to compete with rivals like Samsung in emerging markets. Reports have suggested that to keep costs low, the Cupertino company will give it a plastic form factor similar to that of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS.

And now that plastic shell appears to have been leaked for the first time.

Thanks to Apple’s strict software approval process, iOS devices are generally considered some of the most secure. But you might want to be careful about where you plug them in for charging. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a modified charger capable of installing malware onto any device running Apple’s latest iOS operating system.

This is the Bracketron, a robot which will help you fill out your NCAA tournament charts. Not really. The Bracketron is in fact a robot which will help you put up shelves that won’t fall down as soon as you place something breakable up there.

NOT REALLY AGAIN. The Bracketron is a USB charger which leeches its power from an outlet that is already in use. Which actually makes it better than my first two lies… Except for the robot part.

This amazing little iPhone stand has two great features: it is the size and shape of a credit card, letting you carry it with you always. And it somehow manages to hold the iPhone at any angle you like, in vertical or horizontal orientations. Is it magic?

Brett “I just built this” Terpstra has been at it again. Inspired by Evernote’s new reminders feature, launched last week, Brett decided to add something similar to his app NValt, itself a fork of the notable Notational Velocity. It’s called “nvremind,” and it’s pretty awesome.

Now, just by tagging a note with “@remind,” you’ll be sent a notification or an e-mail at the chosen time, and in Mountain Lion, clicking the notification will take you to the note in NValt.