News - page 1556

Rhapsody, the online music streaming service a few of your friends used ten years ago, has released a redesigned version of its iPhone app. Like Spotify and Rdio, Rhapsody allows you to create playlists, download tracks for listening offline, and look up artist/album information. It costs $10 per month for access to millions of tracks.

“Beautiful and fully redesigned, the latest incarnation of the Rhapsody experience gets the music playing faster than ever,” according to the company. Rhapsody is calling this the “Ferrari of iPhone apps,” which is a bit of a stretch. Today’s update brings a lot of interface elements that have been in competing apps for a long time. Rhapsody still doesn’t look any better than Rdio, or even Spotify. The iPad version blatantly copies parts of Spotify’s iPad app, actually.

Nice try, Rhapsody.

Source: App Store

Via: The Rhapsody Blog

As the most popular game franchise the App Store has ever seen, Rovio doesn’t like to giveaway its prized Angry Bird apps for free, but for the first time ever you can now download Angry Birds Space for free.

Apple named Angry Birds Space as its ‘App of the Week’, which means everyone gets to download it for free for the next 7 days. If you’ve ever wanted to slingshot cute little birds into the vacuum of deep space, then here’s your chance to do so risk free.

Source: App Store

Tim Cook survived his grilling during his appearance before the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee Hearing to Examine Offshore Profit Shifting and Tax Avoidance by Apple Inc. Even though some of the senators still aren’t happy with Apple’s international tax practices, a solution to the problem wasn’t given.

Not one to pass up the opportunity to make fun of senators, John Stewart broke down the Senate hearing on his show last night and jokingly proposed the U.S. create the ‘Tax Code Nano.’ The entire bit is pretty hilarious, you can watch it below:

Apple always kicks WWDC off with a big keynote on Monday morning and this year will be no different. AllThingsD reports that Apple has officially stated that the keynote for WWDC is scheduled for Monday, June 10th.

No word on who the speakers for the keynote will be, but you can expect to see at least Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Who knows, maybe Jony Ive will make an appearance to show off his changes to iOS 7, now that he’s the director of Human Interface. We’ll have to wait and see.

Source: AllThingsD

Starting in May, AT&T is introducing a new “Mobility Administrative Fee” to the bill of all postpaid customers. The new fee will cost AT&T customers an extra $0.61 per line, per month.

While the total cost of the fee is unlikely to break the bank on your next bill, it does mean that you’re going to pay an extra $7.32 per phone line per year on your wireless bill, so if you have multiple lines on your account, you’ll pay much more than an extra 7 bucks a year.

The new fee is crummy deal for customers, but AT&T is super excited to take more of your pennies because with over 70 million postpaid customers the new fee will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue every year.

Microsoft is obviously tired of everyone saying that Apple is the only tablet maker that innovates. Last night Microsoft published its first Windows 8 tablet vs iPad ad that made fun of Siri, but the company’s not stopping there.

Microsoft just posted another anti-iPad ad to its YouTube channel this morning. Rather than belittling Siri though, the new ad takes the iPad to task over its specs by comparing it to the extremely popular ASUS VivoTab RT.

If you drop your iPhone and you don’t have it covered by AppleCare or another insurance plan, it’s almost always cheaper to have it repaired by a third-party than it is to have Apple do it. Unless you have an iPhone 5.

Apple’s tight control over iPhone 5 components means that they’re so hard to get hold of, repair costs remain high — even with third-party services. Some have even been unable to offer iPhone 5 repairs because they cannot obtain the parts.

Shazam has today launched a universal app offering iPad support for the very first time. The release boasts a number of nifty new features, including auto tagging, a dynamic home screen, the ability to flip through recent matches, and more.

Evernote has today rolled out a new Reminders service to its clients on the Mac, iOS, and the web. The new service rolls three of Evernote’s most-requested features into one, delivering in-app and email alarms, quick note-based to-do lists, and the ability to pin notes to the top of your note list.

Mailbox, the hugely popular third-party Gmail client for iOS that has changed the way we manage our emails, is now available on the iPad. The update comes just over three months after Mailbox made its debut on the iPhone, and you’ll be pleased to know that you no longer have to wait in line to use it.

Clear, the popular list-making client for iPhone and Mac from Realmac Software, now allows you to email your lists thanks to a new update that’s available to download from the App Store today. The release also brings some new themes, and teases upcoming support for the iPad.

Waiting for Apple’s iWatch? Good luck with that if you’re expecting anything fancier than a fitness-tracking iPod nano with a wrist strap. You should save your money, your hopes and your time and buy Beloved Crapware Vendor™ Brando’s Fashionable Bluetooth Vibrating Bracelet + Watch instead.

MakeDoc is a single-serve iOS app which costs just $3. That’s a lot less than the app it might replace for many of you: Microsoft Word. MarkDoc does (mostly) one thing: it takes a clipboard filled with Markdown text and turns it into a DOCX file. That’s it.

To be honest, I’m writing this post based solely on the awesome name of this iOS-compatible headphone amp: the Mobile Music Pump. What is it? An amp to boost the puny output from your iPhone’s headphone jack to make big headphones sound better.

You know how all your photos have a ton of extras tucked inside? Like – to pick a completely random example – the GPS data. And yet, whenever you send your vacation photos to your mom, she mails back to ask “where is that cool restaurant with the camel and the statue of Elvis outside?” or somesuch thing. Of course, you want to scream “Just look in the EXIF data, you idiot!” but, bring a good son/daughter, you just tell her. Again.

Well, a new app for the iPad and iPhone will help you make the implicit explicit. It’s called Map Camera.

Today Eton added the Rugged Rukus to their Rukus line of Bluetooth speakers. Like most of its Rukus siblings, the Rugged is solar-powered; unlike its siblings, the Rugged is splashproof. A great addition  for our all-hell-has-broken-loose list.

Hoping to see an Apple-branded smart watch this June at WWDC? How about next March at MacWorld/iWorld?

Don’t hold your breath, says Ming-Chi Kuo, a KGI Securities analyst.

Kuo tells investors that Apple might not have enough resources to make an iOS compatible with such a new form factor, especially given Apple’s probable current iOS 7 efforts.

Microsoft has released a new TV ad that slams the iPad touts Windows 8 on an Asus tablet. This is the most directly targeted attack campaign on Apple in recent memory—even the Samsung Galaxy ads had more tact.

The tagline of the ad is “Less Talking, More Doing,” a.k.a using apps like Powerpoint. Siri is used to mock the iPad, ending in the virtual assistant giving up with, “Should we just play chopsticks?” in Garageband.

You have to give it to Microsoft for not pulling any punches. It will be interesting to see if Apple responds. Remember the good ol’ days of Mac vs. PC?

Via: The Verge

Senator John McCain had a lot of fun grilling Tim Cook at yesterday’s Senate Sub-Committee Hearing, but before he was done he couldn’t help but let off one little joke as he asked Tim why he has to keep on updating all the apps on his iPhone manually.

“Can’t you guys fix that already?” McCain asked.

Cook let off a chuckle before stating that Apple is “working on making our products better all the time.” But we know what the southern gent was really thinking.

Source: Reddit

Popular iPhone case maker Otterbox has acquired LifeProof for an undisclosed sum. The news was announced today by the two companies at the CTIA wireless show.

The Omni Groups makes great, robust apps for OS X and iOS. Fans of the Omni apps will be pleased to learn that the company has released OmniPresence, its take on document syncing in the cloud. Instead of iCloud sync or Dropbox, The Omni Group has built its own solution using open standards like WebDAV and Apache.

Now files saved in OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniGraphSketcher on the iPad can be effortlessly synced with their Mac counterparts, and vice versa.

Google started rolling out voice search functionally for Chrome on the desktop earlier today, and now the company has revealed that the same feature is headed to iOS. Chrome for iOS will be receiving voice search in the App Store in the next few days.

We love picking apart the stupid things analysts say, but Michael Gartenberg is a rare example of a veteran analyst who doesn’t make wild, ridiculous predictions about Apple. He has worked for the Gartner research group, and Apple has even used Gartner’s market share figures multiple times in its keynotes.

After spending most of his career covering Apple and other tech companies, Gartenberg is now batting for the other team. He has reportedly accepted a job on Apple’s own marketing team, and he now reports to Phil Schiller.

After neglecting its Mac app for more than two years, Twitter is finally rolling out a steady supply of updates to the OS X desktop app. Last month the app finally picked up Retina display support, and the company just released another update that brings Notification Center integration to the app.

Twitter for Mac version 2.2.1 just hit the Mac App Store, and along with the Notification Center updates the app is also getting Growl notifications for OS X 10.7 and 10.8, as well as a number of bug fixes.

Here are the release notes:

There’s nothing worse on a road trip than battling the ZZZ’s while driving (except maybe a jack rabbit destroying your vehicle), so a chain of coffee shops has created an app called Drive Awake that tracks a drivers’ drowsiness and directs them to the closest coffee shop whenever they nod off.

Drive Awake works by using the iPhone’s front-facing camera to monitor a drivers eyes. You simply mount your iPhone to your windshield and it tracks your retinas to see if they’re open. Once the app determines you’re falling asleep it emits a loud and annoying parrot squawk to get your attention and help you find some coffee.

Here’s a video of the app in action: