News - page 1574

The term “patent troll” tends to be thrown around a lot when talking about Apple, Samsung, et al.’s endless patent litigation, but there’s a big difference between companies trying to protect their patent profiles in court and the sort of trolls who exist for no other reason than to sue other companies for violations on overly broad patents that they aren’t using, stifling innovation (for example, notorious in-app patent troll Lodsys).

Reforms to the patent system to neuter patent trolls is something that have been called for for years, but it seems like President Obama is finally doing something. The White House has just announced that they are taking on the patent troll problem with seven new legislative proposal. But even if Congress won’t budge? Obama says he’s going to take five executive actions to thwart patent trolls, which he can do even without congressional approval.

Following Gmail’s snazzy addition of categories for easily filtering your inbox mail, the Gmail iOS app has also been updated to support the functionality.

Apple just published a report prepared by Keyser Marston Associates that evaluates the “Economic and Fiscal Impacts Generated by Apple in Cupertino –  Current Facilities and Apple Campus 2.”

The report was prepared for the City of Cupertino under the contract of Apple, to evaluate the concerns the city has about Apple’s future Spaceship-like campus. The report states its principal objectives as the following:

• The on-going economic impact and benefits of Apple to the City of Cupertino;
• The ongoing economic impacts and benefits to the City of Santa Clara, City of Sunnyvale, and the broader region of Santa Clara County;
• Apple’s recurring annual fiscal impacts on the City of Cupertino;
•  The construction-related impacts of Apple Campus 2 on Santa Clara County; and
•  The construction-related tax and fee revenues to be received by the City of Cupertino and other local public agencies from the construction of Apple Campus 2.”

The full 82-page report can be read after the break –

There are a number of tweaks you can install on your jailbroken iOS device that’ll add quick settings toggles to your lock screen, but some of them are far more complicated — and more ugly — than they need to be. LockscreenToggles takes the concept back to basics to ensure it isn’t one of them.

Although Apple has been taking unprecedented measures in the industry to remedy the problem, the truth is that working on an assembly line mass-producing iPhones just sucks. But how bad a job is building iPhones in the grand scheme of things?

The Worst Jobs in the World Matrix, from Lapham’s Quarterly, tries to put the craptitude of working at Foxconn in a broader historical perspective. As you can see, slaving away in an electronics factory for 300 hours per month for $0.76 an hour is a difficult job, but it’s far less disgusting than being a Roman vomitorium attendant, less tedious than being a World of Warcraft gold farmer, less treacherous than being a Japanese subway pusher, and less fatal than being the court food taster for a 16th-century emperor. Perspective, people!

Source: FastCo. Design

Next time you drop your iPhone 5 and shatter the screen, you won’t have to pay a third-party to fix the display for you, or pay Apple the price of a new device to fix the screen for you. Instead, your friendly neighborhood Genius Bar will do it for $149.

At this point, the magic 8-ball is turning up “Yes” to the question whether or not Apple will announce their new streaming music service, iRadio, at next week’s WWDC keynote at a rate of almost 100%. A new report not only confirms the magic 8-ball’s whisperings, it says Apple is restructuring the iAds team to help support the new product. But don’t expect iRadio to launch at WWDC: you’ll have to wait until iOS 7 lands in September.

Yesterday, the Department of Justice published its case against Apple for allegedly conspiring with publishers to raise the price of ebooks. Now, Apple’s responded, calling the DoJ’s case “bizarre” and saying that they are twisting the words of Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs.

Byword, a wonderful Markdown editor for Mac and iOS, has today been updated to version 2.0. The release brings a number of new features to both platforms, with the most notable edition being the ability to publish directly to WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and more.

Apple is expected to refresh its iPad lineup this fall, but its next-generation tablets may not arrive together. According to supply chain sources in Taiwan, the fifth-generation iPad will enter production as early as next month in time for a launch during the third quarter, but we might have to wait longer for a new iPad mini.

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.