News - page 1576

Loren Brichter is somewhat of a rockstar in the iOS app developer community. The Wall Street Journal has called him the “High Priest of App Design.” If you don’t know Brichter by name, you know him by his work: Tweetie and Letterpress.

Twitter bought Tweetie and turned it into the official Twitter app for iPhone and iPad. Letterpress is a hit word game Brichter created after he left Twitter. He also worked with a small team at Apple on the first iPhone back in 2006 and 2007. Now he’s helping out at Facebook.

Even though there are rumors that Facebook and Apple might be working to bring Facebook Home to iOS, it’s hard to believe Apple would give up so much control of iOS to Facebook.

For those craving for some Facebook Home action on iOS, there’s a new Facebook app update that will bring the most buzzed-about features of Facebook Home to your iPhone: “Chat Heads.”

Hot on the heels of this morning’s leak from casemaker Tactus of a new case mould for the iPad 5 (and the intriguing hint of a June 18th announcment), an entirely different Hong Kong casemaker is showing off a case mold for the iPad 5 which largely supports the previous report.

Looking for what to buy that sainted mother (or hard-drinking old bat) in your life? There’s an Apple product for every occasion, which is why Apple has already updated its website ahead of next month’s Mother’s Day to encourage you to buy an iPad, iPad mini, iPhone, gift card or photo book for your Mom… with free shipping, natch.

Source: Apple

The New York Times has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for “Explanatory Reporting” for its nine-part iEconomy series into Apple’s business practices and the working conditions inside Foxconn’s Chinese factories.

The Times was praised for its “penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers.”

iSteve, a Steve Jobs parody biopic from Funny or Die, will now premier on Wednesday, April 17. The movie was scheduled to start showing yesterday, but was delayed following the explosions during the Boston marathon.

One of the apps commonly toted as a replacement for iOS 6’s Maps app after the latter was released (and proved to be something of a debacle for Cupertino) was Waze, a crowd-sourced traffic app.

Now, according to a new interview conducted on-stage at AllThingsD’s Dive Into Mobile Conference, even Waze CEO Noam Bardim was surprised by how many people hated Apple Maps, and said that two years previously, consumers would have thought is was amazing.

A new case mould showing of the fifth-generation iPad’s new design has surfaced today, alongside a date on which Apple will announce the device. As expected, the mould points to an all-new thinner form factor for the device, with narrow bezels down either side of the display, much like the iPad mini.

The source of the mould claims the iPad 5 will be announced on June 18, which could see its unveiling during WWDC.

Following yesterday’s horrific blasts that left three dead and over a hundred wounded at the Boston Marathon, the nearby Apple Street Boylston store has been closed temporarily.

The iPhone 5 has one of the best cameras you’ll find on a smartphone, but Apple could be looking to make it even better for the iPhone 5S. According to the latest rumor surrounding the next iPhone, we can expect a 12-megapixel camera with improved low-light shooting, and HDR video recording.

Securities trader David Miller has pleaded guilty to fraud after buying $1 billion of Apple stock without permission and bringing down his company. The 40-year-old purchased 1.625 million Apple shares on the day the Cupertino company reported its third-quarter results in October 2012, hoping that he’d be able to make a profit when the share price rose.

Instead, the share price fell and Miller’s gamble backfired, sending Rochdale Securities under.

Photojojo’s Crankerator is a backup battery pack with a twist. Or rather, with a spin. You can charge it via boring old wall outlets, but when the juice finally runs low, you can reanimate it with a few twists of the crank-arm on the side.

I still type on my iPad, despite the gorilla-arm troubles that sent me back to the Mac for most of my work (I’m typing this post on an iPad Mini with a Logitech Easy Switch keyboard). But if I was still committed to the iPad-only working life, I’d be taking a long look at the Nomad Tablet Table.

Triage is an app which makes it easy to quickly whittle down your incoming messages using your iPhone. The idea is that you can quickly scan (or triage) your mails, archiving anything unimportant and saving the rest for later.

Triage doesn’t try to replace your desktop mail client. It lets you use your downtime to quickly remove the noise and stress.

Lightroom 5 beta has just been posted, and is ready for download and testing. Those of you who read my article last week about using a small, SSD-based MacBook Air for photos will be very interested in one new feature: Smart Previews. This lets you edit your photos using just the previews on your MacBook, and the changes all sync up to your actual photos next time you connect your big external drive.

And there’s more.

Apple has started selling refurbished models of its latest iPod touch online. In this case, that means $50 off, which translates to a 12%-16% price cut depending on the storage size. A 32GB refurbished iPod touch costs $249 instead of the normal $299, and a 64GB model costs $349 instead of $399. A refurbished option is not available for the 16GB iPod touch, unfortunately.

Colors options are yellow, blue, pink, white, and black for each storage size. You can also get refurbished versions of the 4th-gen iPod touch (released in 2010) for considerably less.

There’s really no reason to not buy refurbished if you’re shopping for Apple products online. Everything is factory certified, and the warranty is the same.

Source: Apple Store

After the successful announcement of Facebook Home for Android, the Menlo Park-based social networking giant is apparently in talks with Apple and Microsoft to bring the software to iOS and Windows Phone.

Facebooks’s director of product, Adam Mosseri, spoke with Bloomberg today about these talks. “We’ve shown them what we’ve built and we’re just in an ongoing conversation,” he said, making sure no one thinks anything is a done deal.

As an Apple employee, you can take a private, roomy bus with onboard WiFi along a secret route to get to work in sunny Cupertino, California. But why not just take a bike and get some exercise?

Apple has given its corporate employees the option to use a company-issued bicycle since 2011, and now thousands of workers use them to get to and from Apple HQ. Wired snapped the above picture of an Apple employee on his bike after sleuthing about Cupertino. There are apparently 420 of these bikes available on campus for employees to rent.

Cult of Mac Reviews Editor Charlie Sorrel posted about these bikes at Wired back in 2011. He discovered that they were M3 Mixte models from Public Bikes, a company located down the road in San Francisco. Apple ordered a custom batch without logos. Colors are light blue, silver, and gray.

Source: Wired

Image: Alex Washburn / Wired

Adobe has released a public beta of Lightroom 5, the next major version of its photo editing and management application. The download is free for anyone to use until June 30th. Adobe says Lightroom 5 will ship later this year.

Apple may have some of the highest paid executives in the country, but that doesn’t mean employees are satisfied lower down the food chain.

Since Tim Cook became CEO at Apple, the company’s corporate culture has changed. A byproduct of that change is that more and more Apple employees are leaving Cupertino to work at other competitors and startups.

If you’ve ever been disappointed with the YouTube for iOS app’s inability to tune into Live streams, then we’ve got some great news for you today.

Google just released version 1.3 of YouTube for iOS, and along with some stability and performance improvements, the app now gives users the ability to view Live streams inside the app. There’s also a new Queue feature that will let you add a bunch of videos to a list to watch later, along with some UI improvements to give users quicker access to their My Subscriptions feed.

The free update is available in the App Store now.

Source: iTunes

We’ve reviewed a lot of Bluetooth speakers here at Cult of Mac, and yet to this day, the easiest one to recommend is still the speaker that launched the category: the venerable Jawbone Jambox.

Well, Jambox, move over: there’s a new king in town. We’ll be hard pressed to recommend you anymore after getting our hands on the JBL Flip, a Bluetooth speaker that has better (and louder) sound than the Jambox, at a cheaper price, and a killer trick up its sleeve: it’s also an external battery pack, capable of charging your iPhone on the go!

While companies like Samsung have been busy making mega-huge smartphones with gigantic screens, Apple’s aim has been to keep the physical footprint of the iPhone the same while adding better features, like the iPhone 5’s 4-inch display.

If Apple wants to make an iPhone with a 4.5-inch screen though, it’s going to come with some big changes. However, Ran Avni has created an iPhone 6 concept that gives big display fans the 4.5-inch screen they dream of, without making the device bigger. To achieve the thinner, smaller design all Apple would have to do is ditch the home button.

Here’s a video of the concept:

Grabby, a new tweak from esteemed jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich, allows you to quickly launch your most frequently used apps from your iPhone’s lock screen by extending the functionality of the built-in camera slider. Find out more about how it works and where to download it below.

With every new version of iOS, Safari ends up getting some new features, and designer Brent Caswell has some really good ideas about what should come to Safari in iOS 7, including a unified address and search bar, website push notifications, a better bookmarks manager, more advanced Reader options and more. Here’s a look at some of his better ideas: