We’ve seen Philips’ Hue lightbulbs do some pretty cool stuff, but things are about to get crazy. Philips revealed that they have some open APIs and an iOS SDK for the Hue connected lighting system.
The official SDK for Hue means that third-party apps and hardware can pick up where Hue left off and bring new features to the Hue system that Philips can’t bring on its own.
The hardest working nerd and code-wizard on the internet, Brett “I just built this” Terpstra, has added a rather great new feature to his Markdown Service Tools pack for the Mac. Among many other updates, you can now convert Markdown to rich text, in-line.
Last month we heard that even though Apple just posted a record breaking quarter, sales of the iPad were lower than internal expectations.
Backing up claims that Apple is having a down month, Topeka Capital says that they’ve been monitoring Apple’s suppliers and February was a very bad month for companies that help make Apple products.
Apparently, the aluminum from this skateboard was repurposed from an old Mac Pro (or Power Mac G5?). Since Apple’s pretty much abandoned updating their Pro desktop, that’s one way to make sure all that pretty metal doesn’t go to waste.
Via: Reddit
https://youtu.be/gW2D_Votd2Y
It is often said that Japan is a weird country.
Case in point, can you imagine any other country in which Domino’s Pizza Japanese president Scott Oelkers would make a commercial in which, over the course of a two minute period, he shills a new iPhone app featuring a virtual anime girlfriend named Hatsune Miku who “exists in a software called Vocaloid which enables you to create songs” that Hatsune Miku then sings.
Not that the Domino’s app does any of this, mind you. It just allows you order pizza online and listen to Vocaloid songs written by the wage-slavers who heat up your pie. You can also, apparently, insert Hitsune Miku into photos of your choosing, the perfect way to simulate the experience of having a cartoom girlfriend who will do whatever you want.
“Have fun with Miku!” trills Scott Oelkers with wild, manic eyes. If you choose to do so, you can download the app here (Japan only).
Via: MacGasm
Apple is edging closer towards a settlement with Brazilian telecommunications firm IGB Eletronica over the “iPhone” trademark. IGB owns the brand Gradiente, which obtained the trademark in 2007 — the same year Apple announced its popular smartphone. The company has been keen to prevent Apple from using it, but it appears it’s now willing to reach a deal.
The National Geographic might have hit on something with its new “Found” service. Almost, anyway. Found is a Tumblr tmblg tumble-blog featuring photos from the 125-year history of the National Geographic magazine.
So far there are just a handful of pictures on the new Tumblr, but go take a look at it from the Tumblr app on your iPad be reminded that somebody already invented a time machine, and called it a camera.
The Apple TV, Cupertino’s “hobby” of a set-top box, is often used to test out new fabrication process for the A-series chips that go into iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. The last Apple TV ran a 32nm A5 processor built by Samsung with a single-core disabled, which eventually ended up (in a dual-core capacity) in the iPad mini.
With the new third-gen Apple TV, Apple’s at it again. The new Apple TV is functionally and physically identical to its predecessor, except for one detail: it features a 28nm A5 chip built by TSMC. But what does it mean?
Apple hasn’t announced the iPhone 5S yet, but Chinese clone specialist GooPhone has already created a cheap knockoff of it. And it has done a pretty incredible job. As you’ll see in the video below, the “i5S” looks identical to the real thing, and you probably wouldn’t even know it was a clone. That is, until you started using it.
Browsers on iOS run with a major disadvantage to Mobile Safari. Not only are they obliged to use Apple’s built-in WebKit rendering engine, but they have to use a slower version of Apple’s speedy Nitro JavaScript engine. The result? If you use any third-party browser on your iPhone or iPad, it will run slower than Safari… at least without a jailbreak.
It’s unfair, but various companies have still made excellent browsers for iOS, including Google Chrome and Opera. Mozilla, though, will not follow these company’s lead, having said at this weekend’s SXSW conference in Austin that Firefox won’t be coming to iOS any time soon.
As the story goes, before the iPhone was even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye, Jonny Ive came to him with a prototype for a tablet based on some new touchscreen technology he was working on. Steve Jobs took one look at it, and said it was the future, but “let’s make a phone with it first.” And that’s how the iPhone was born.
Now, an early prototype of a very iPad-ish iPhone prototype from 2005 has turned up, and it’s a marvelous beast, filled with USB, Ethernet and even serial ports.
Anyglove is a gel which turns any glove into a touch-screen-friendly glove. Buy a bottle, drip-drip-drip some drops onto the fingers and thumbs of your favorite gloves and voila! (or “viola!” or “walla!” as they say in internet forums) you can now operate a capacitive screen.
Apple works hard to ensure that inappropriate content doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, and it has strict ratings and approval processes for content distributed through the App Store, the iBookstore, and the iTunes Store. But it would seem the Cupertino company isn’t quite as careful with its social media accounts.
On Sunday night, Apple’s official iBookstore account on Twitter retweeted a lewd message that would certainly get a 17+ rating from the company.
Apple was caught last year selling Apple Certified refurbished hardware on eBay using the pseudonym Refurbished-Outlet. Allegedly.
The prices and details of these products were generally the same as refurbished products sold on the apple.com site. The products come with a one-year warranty and mobile devices contain a new battery.
But this week it emerged that Apple is lowering the prices on eBay, sometimes by quite a bit. For example, Apple normally charges $999 for a refurbed MacBook Air with 128 GB. But that same system with the same Apple inspection and one-year warranty went on sale in the eBay store for $899. Prices on other hardware products were slashed similarly.
(In addition, we learned, the company as been apparently working with “power sellers” on eBay to sell Apple hardware. For example, until they ran out of the 500 units put up for sale of 13-inch MacBook Pros selling for $999. These are new devices, not refurbished, and Apple is probably using the “channel” to clear out inventory.)
It seems to me that Apple is working behind the scenes to experiment with different models for selling refurbished and excess inventory. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple was also trying other channels for doing the same thing that we don’t know about. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if refurbished gadgets vanished from the Apple site altogether, and for those items to be sold in the darker alleys of the Internet (like eBay) exclusively instead.
But I think there’s a ginormous opportunity here for embracing “used” in a big way — and it’s something only Apple could pull off.
This week’s must-have apps roundup features three awesome new games that’ll keep you entertained this weekend, plus three new apps that’ll transform your photographs and help you explore the world around you. We have the latest releases from Sega and Google, the awesome 8 Ball Pool from Miniclip, and more.
There are a lot of silly apps out there that want to send you notifications whenever someone you know is nearby, or if you’re in the area of something cool.
There’s a new app for iPhone though called Now, that wants to take a different approach to local discover: it’s only going to alert you when your friends are doing really cool stuff nearby.
It seems like Angry Birds has been out forever. It’s probably one of the first iOS games that you decided to bust out your credit card for, and it was totally worth it, right? Well if you only had the patience to wait three years, then you could have scooped up Angry Birds for free.
Under no circumstance does Apple want to part with its company secrets. Even when it’s been ordered to do so by a U.S. Judge.
Apple must show in detail how it’s complying with a court order to turn over evidence related to its privacy lawsuit, because U.S. Judge Grewal says he can no longer rely on what Apple tells him in the case.
The Philips Hue LED lightbulbs were one of our favorite new gadgets of 2012. You can use your iPhone to turn the bulbs on, change colors, and create different themes.
Utilizing the power of Philips Hue, an iOS developer has made a crazy new app called Ambify which changes the color of your bulbs in tune with the music you’re listening to. It’s either the most fun thing to happen to your music since iTunes Visualizer, or the best way to self-induce a seizure. Or both.
It’s no secret that the best place to buy a MacBook or iMac is from the online Apple Store’s refurbished section. You get the same products, with the same warranty, for a few hundred bucks cheaper than buying it brand new.
But what you probably didn’t know is that Apple has a secret eBay store which sells the same refurbished items you can get from the online Apple Store, except they’re even cheaper.
Last week we had a lot of fun coming up with our vision for the next Mac operating system, OS X Lion-O. We then turned to our amazing readers and asked you guys to dream up the the perfect mascot for the next version of OS X.
We had a ton of readers submit their entries to our new Flickr Group, and the results were amazing. We’ve selected five winners who will get a free copy of Photoshop Touch for iPhone or iPad, along with our grand prize winner, who will get a free copy of OS X 10.9 when it comes out.
Here are the best mascot ideas for OS X 10.9:
Did you know you can search your iPhone’s notes using Siri? Neither did I. But according to Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger, you can not only get Siri to flip through your notes for you, you can even find notes from a particular day.
Here’s a great tweak if you’ve jailbroken: QuickShoot allows you to take quick pictures right from your iOS homescreen just by tapping the app icon. You can’t frame a shot or anything, but it does allow you to quickly (and secretly!) snap a picture of someone without anyone being the wiser: not the subject, not the person looking over your shoulder. And you can even change settings for Flash Mode, Camera Device, and HDR in the settings. Totally rad, and totally free.
Source: Big Boss
Via: Lifehacker
If you’ve been catching our Daily Freebie posts, you’ve no doubt snagged some of the fantastic free apps out there — or been alert enough to snag an amazing deal when this or that killer app goes free for a short time. But there are other tools that help make sure you don’t miss out on all those great free apps. Hubbl is one of those tools and we’ve mentioned it in the past — but now it’s got a cool new trick that we’ve never seen before.
Any of you out there familiar with the Muji CD player? It is/was a cute little box which you’d hang on the wall, press a CD onto and enjoy the tinny sound of tiny speakers spitting high-grade digital files into your ears.
Now you can — like any civilized person — ditch the spinning disk and just enjoy the music. Muji has now launched a Bluetooth speaker that looks a lot like the old CD box.