News - page 1579

Auxo is one of the best jailbreak tweaks out there, period. It started as an iOS app switcher concept and has since matured into a full-fleged jailbreak tweak that puts Apple’s switcher to shame. Instead of tiny app icons, you can jump between apps by viewing large, card-like tiles. There’s also an enhanced music player and quick access to system settings, like screen brightness and WiFi.

While it works great on the iPhone, I’ve always thought that Auxo was better suited for the iPad’s larger display. The good news is that Auxo will finally be coming to jailbroken iPads everywhere sometime next month. An exact release date and price have not been given yet. Auxo for iPad will be going into private beta testing soon, and I’ll have more to share then.

Source: A³tweaks

Moxtra is a great, free app that allows groups of users to collaborate using files — video clips, images, PDFs — that they’ve stored in virtual notebooks; some collaboration can even be conducted in realtime.

Back in January, when Moxtra launched, I described the app as a sort of Evernote-Pinterest blend. Now there’s even more blending with the former, because Evernote has added Moxtra integration.

Apple’s making a big push in India, and it appears to be paying off. According to an article in The Times of India, Apple India’s revenue already rose by a factor of three last year, and analysts there expect the current brisk sales of iPhones to boost the company’s bottom line to over $1 billion in the current year.

While Apple does not disclose financials for the Indian sales unit, it does file with the Indian Registrar of Companies. In that filing, Apple reported a 431 percent rise in net profit this year, which the Times attributes to iPhone sales.

Apple has been keeping developers busy with a steady stream of beta builds for OS X 10.8.4.  The latest beta of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.4 Build 12E33a was just seeded to developers.

Like the last build of 10.8.4, the release notes don’t contain anything significant, but devs will surely find new stuff once they get to digging through the OS. Apple asks developers to focus on Wi-Fi, Graphics Drivers, and Safari and says there are no known issues with build.

OS X 10.8.3 was released to the public a couple weeks ago after going through 13 beta revisions over a period of nearly 5 months. The next version of OS X should be revealed by WWDC this year, if not before.

Cultured Code has updated its popular to-do app, Things, with several nice improvements and a lot of bug fixes. Moving in and out of different time zones no longer causes a task to show up on the incorrect day. General performance should be much faster for the Mac app in just about every way. Things Cloud Sync, a feature that was introduced last year, has also been made snappier.

Over 50 additional bug fixes have been included in Things 2.2, so you should no longer be seeing random crashes or weird glitches. Things 2.2 is available now on iOS and OS X. The app costs $50 on the Mac, $20 on the iPad, and $10 on the iPhone.

Source: Things Blog

6Wunderkinder’s popular task management app, Wunderlist, is about to go pro. Don’t worry, the current version will remain free on all platforms. Wunderlist Pro is coming for those interested in collaborative task management with a team. The goal is to make assigning tasks to different people “downright simple and a lot more productive.”

If you can’t beat ’em, talk trash.

That’s seems to be the popular sentiment among technologies most powerful companies, and Microsoft’s head executive for Windows Phone has been all too happy to do a little ribbing on Apple and Android lately.

At the All Things D conference yesterday, Terry Myerson,  took to the stage to talk about the future of Windows Phone, but he also took a few shots at Apple and Google during the interview and said that iOS is “boring.”

Last year it seemed like there was no end in sight for the rise of Apple’s stock price. Then things started to slip in October thanks to Apple Maps and the management shakeup, and it’s been all downhill from there.

Earlier this morning Apple shares were trading below $400 for the first time in over 16 months, as the stock has continued to slide from its high point of over $700 per share that it enjoyed just last year.

Siri hasn’t quite lived up to the hype that most Apple fans bestowed upon it after it debuted with the iPhone 4S, but it’s still a magical piece of software, and Apple’s competitors want their own version of Siri.

Adding to months of speculation that it’s working on its own smartphone, Amazon just bought a  Siri-like app called Evi, for $26 million. 

MacHeist — one of the Mac community’s finest deals-mongers — has just gone live with their latest nano bundle: $250 worth of quality Mac software for the song of $9.99.

This video (found after the jump) of 10,000 iPhone 5 dominoes toppling over one another in a long, complicated course is cool, but it’s a huge fakeout, for the following reasons.

I hate coins. When I receive change, it almost inevitable finds itself dramatically hurled on the floor, or trickled in between the couch cushions, or randomly dumped in tables and receptacles around the house.

As such, I end up generating a shocking amount of coinage every week, and buckets and buckets of rattling copper, nickel and silver every month. What to do with all of those coins, though? How about turn it into iTunes credit?

Why is it that some people can walk into their local Apple Store with a broken MacBook and walk away with a free replacement, and other people are turned away, with Apple claiming the repair is due to user error… even if it isn’t?

It has less to do with whether or not you actually voided your warranty than if Apple thinks they can prove you voided your warranty. And the most important tool Apple uses to prove you’re responsible for the damage to your own machine? It’s a tool that inspects dents.

For the many years I lived in Berlin, one of the perpetual frustrations I had was that there was no Apple Store in the city to shop at. A few weeks after I moved, Apple leased a historical theater in West Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm and started renovating it to be the country’s biggest Apple Store.

Now the scaffolding’s coming off, ahead of the official launch, and iFun.de not only has some great pictures of the process of the newest Apple Store being revealed… there’s some video of the inside. Video after the jump.

The iPad mini is still less than six months old, and already demand has dropped as fans await the second-generation model. That’s if you take any notice of DigiTimes, which is reporting that iPad mini shipments will decline by as much as 30% during the second quarter of 2013 due to dying demand.

I don’t know about you, but I find that displaying the battery percentage alongside the battery indicator in the iPhone’s status bar takes up too much room — particularly if you use tweaks that provide status bar symbols for outstanding notifications. I usually use Springtomize to remove the battery indicator altogether, leaving just the percentage.

But a new tweak called Live Battery Indicator gives you the best of both worlds — without taking up too much space.

Apple’s App Store has been included in a list of websites and app stores that have been investigated for providing pornographic content in China. The list, published by state-owned newspaper People’s Daily, comes just a month after a government regulator named the App Store as a source of “obscene pornography,” despite Apple’s strict policy against pornographic apps.

The DeskRail is a desk-tidy for the digital age. Whereas I spent hours in my school shop class cutting, glueing and painting acrylic tubes to hold pens, paperclips and other desktop detritus, the DeskRail is made to organize the junk we use today.

And by junk, I mean Moleskines, USB cables, iPhones and… hipster plastic-framed glasses?

I have used Mailplane on and off for years. I love that it turns the great Gmail interface into a proper desktop app, complete with drag-and-drop attachments, notifications and an icon in the dock and tab switcher. But I never liked its super power of spinning the CPU of my Mac at all times, even when supposedly idle.

Now v3.0 is out, and it seems to have solved the latter problem, while adding a few new features.

Got a few minutes to read something? Not sure which of your saved Read Later article to pick? Then you need Readtime, a new iPhone app which picks articles based on the time you have available. Dial in the length of your coffee break or the average time taken to clear your bowels in the morning, and Readtime will return a list of appropriately-long articles.

Who knew there was room for yet another iPhone currency converter in the store? The folks behind Currency, that’s who, a conversion app that is as minimal as its name.

It’s gotten to the stage that I’m so loaded up on cloud storage for my photos that I could toss my iPhone into the toilet and not lose a thing (well, apart from the action shot of the toilet bowl framing my shocked face as the iPhone shoots its last photo). But while Dropbox and Everpix are great, sometimes you just want to rock an old-school USB stick and transfer photos to and from you iPhone with a stick of plastic.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, all compact cameras looked like the Ricoh GR. they might not have been as sleek-looking, but they had big finger grips, a giant full-frame sensor (35mm) film and a fixed wideangle lens.

Now, proving that large sensors are the new black, the GR is packing a DSLR-sized APS-C sensor into its tiny body.

The time has come. Funny or Die’s Steve Jobs mockumentary featuring Justin Long has arrived. iSteve is available for streaming in non-Apple-friendly-Flash on Funny or Die’s website. The “biopic” lasts about 80 minutes.

Warning: It is not as hilarious as we thought it might be. In fact, it’s pretty bad. It’s also historically inaccurate in many, many ways. I barely made it through the first 10 minutes. Kudos to you if you can finish. Ashton Kutcher’s JOBS is starting to look a lot more legitimate.

Source: Funny or Die

Messaging alternative MessageMe just updated today with several new features, like the ability to chat in landscape mode if that strikes your fancy.

The iPhone app won’t save chat doodles to the camera roll by default anymore; you’ll be able to save them if you like, or turn the feature off completely, saving valuable space on your iPhone should you so choose. The Voice Notes feature has been improved, and you can search for other MessageMe users using their email.

Audio now works for messages with video, and you can save videos as well in the new version. There’s also other “minor fixes and performance improvements” to be found.