News - page 1599

Apple’s always looking to miniaturize its gadgets down to the slimmest, smallest form factor possible, which is why the venerable iOS home button is such a conspicuous space waster: although the button grounds users in the iOS operating system, it’s also a fairly big and bulky element of the front of the device.

According to Peter Zigich in his new concepts for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 mini and iPhone 6 Maxi, Apple should just eliminate it from the front of the device to make way for a nearly bezel-less screen. Bizarrely, though, he thinks it should be shifted to the lower left hand side of the device, in a lower location on each side.

Last week we asked you guys to show us just how amazing you can make your iPhone look with tweaks and hacks for the homescreen and lockscreen, and boy were we impressed. We received over 100 entries in the jailbreaking contest and pretty much all of them were spectacular.

To celebrate the launch of our new Flickr and Instagram groups, we’re giving the 10 best jailbreak screens a free copy of Kuvva Wallpapers. After some serious deliberation, we think we’ve got some drool-worthy winners.

Here are the 10 most amazing jailbreak screens:

Apple is an LGBT-friendly company that embraces all sorts of people as long as they are committed to excellence, so it’s bracing to see that they are urging the Supreme Court to support legalizing gay marriage.

The Leap Motion controller could very well be the future of modern desktop computing. It could also just be a really cool invention that is too ahead of its time. We’ll find out in the near future. An exact shipping date has been announced.

After previously saying that it would ship in early 2013, the folks behind Leap Motion have confirmed that the device will start shipping on May 13th to customers who already pre-ordered online. Everyone will be able to pick the Leap Motion up in Best Buy stores around the country May 19th.

Too cheap to actually buy Tweetbot, Tapbot’s awesome Twitter app for iPhone, iPad and Mac? Are you pirating it despite the fact that it only costs a couple bucks, and Tweetbot has a limited number of tokens that it can distribute before Twitter says they can’t sell their client anymore?

Well, Tweetbot’s not going to force you to do anything, but they have started autofilling the Tweet box in its iOS app to publically broadcast that they are no-good, dirty pirates.

Spotify has released a major update to its iPhone app that introduces a couple of nice user interface changes.

The app now features a sidebar that can be accessed by swiping from left to right, like Facebook’s iOS app. From the new sidebar menu you can quickly access search, new releases, radio, playlists, your inbox, friends list, and settings. You can swipe to reveal the left sidebar anywhere in the app expect when a song is filling the screen.

There have been a lot of theories floated for why Foxconn froze new hires earlier this month. Early rumors suggested that iPhone 5 production had slowed, while later reports said that Apple’s new measures to improve working conditions had caused fewer workers than usual to abandon their posts over Chinese New Year.

Now there’s a new theory: Foxconn’s getting out of China, at least in part.

Remember the Socialmatic concept camera? It was an Instagram icon made flesh, and it worked just like a Polaroid, spitting out a printed version of your filtered and light-leaked image.

Now, after extensive boardroom wrangling no doubt, the camera will actually become a real shipping product, and it’ll carry the Polaroid brand.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – I’m willing to bet that you have – at some point – been frustrated by the App Store. More specifically, you have been driven crazy trying to find apps via search. Even apps which you know are there, which you have used before, and about which you know almost everything but their names.

Quixey is a search engine for Apps, and it will ease your App Store pain.

It had to happen eventually: Photoshop for your phone. As of today you can buy Photoshop Touch for the iPhone and Android, and it pretty much does everything you can do on the iPad version.

Major League Baseball announced that it will be tripling the number of stadiums that will start accepting tickets from Apple’s Passbook app, with thirteen new stadiums coming online to enable paperless, Passbook ticketing, an increase from four stadiums that could do so last season.

Teams that will begin to accept tickets through the Passbook app include the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland A’s, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs, with the New York Mets, San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals continuing to accept paperless tickets this way. MLB mentioned that there are three more teams ready to go Passbook, but did not specify which ones.

While you may chalk up any pro-Apple sentiment here as only true to form, it’s perhaps even more telling when there’s another, more impartial group, claiming an Apple win.

Good Technology is one such independent group. The company provides mobile device, app, and data security to over 4000 customers, including banks, healthcare organizations, governments, and retailers. They also do a quarterly Device Activation Report, which looks at the type of mobile devices and uses in the Enterprise. The Q4 report, released today, details which and how many smartphone and tablet devices were activated by Good Technology’s enterprise customers.

Guess what they found? Hint: it’s in the headline.

Apple continues to add new capabilities to Siri, but there are still a lot of things the digital assistant can’t do. You can’t use Siri to control third-part music apps like Spotify, toggle settings, or search the App Store.

A jailbreak tweak called AssistantEnhancer takes Siri to the next level by doing all these things and more. It’s the new crown jewel of Siri tweaks, and it contains a ton of useful features that make Siri a more valuable tool.

One of the best games of last year — XCOM: Enemy Unknown — is coming to the Mac, allowing Mac gamers for the first time to tactically repel a full-on invasion of the planet Earth, one turn at a time.

What was once an iPhone-only social network has quickly become one of the world’s largest social behemoths. Instagram’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, announced today that the photo-sharing network just surpassed the 100 million active users mark.

Compared to its parent company Facebook, 100 million active users doesn’t sound like much. But when you consider that Twitter just hit the 200 million active users mark last year, Instagram’s got something to be proud of because it’s a much younger service.

Want to hear a good argument for the possibility of Apple launching an iRadio service? According to a couple ofnew report, 2012 is the first time since 1999 that piracy is down, and the music industry has actually grown. And music streaming services like Rdio and Spotify can take all the credit.

Dropbox is a great service, and I use it both professionally and personally. I share files with friends, presentations and documents with co-workers, and I upload my iPhone photos as well as a secondary backup to PhotoStream, which can be touchy at times. Problem is, I need to ask people if they’re Dropbox users, get the email they’ve associated with the service, then log in to Drobpox and create a shared folder with that person’s email. It’s useful, and not too difficult, but it can be tedious.

That’s where ProxToMe comes in. This free app does all the discovery for you, letting you share any file from your Dropbox account with any other ProxToMe user nearby. Slick!

Rumors are swirling that Apple, a company which has been having a rocky time on Wall Street lately despite reporting their most profitable quarter ever, might announce a decision to issue a stock split tomorrow at their next shareholder meeting, to be held tomorrow.

Owners of late 2012 Macs like the Mac mini, the new iMac or the MacBook Pro with Retina Display are reporting a major problem with their machines: they can’t re-install Mountain Lion or even re-install from a Time Machine backup if their systems get corrupted.

Apple has a well documented history of banning everything that has anything to do with pornography, even if it’s only remotely related. It’s nice that Apple wants to keep the App Store clean, but their obsession with eliminating porn from computing has a lot of collateral damage.

In its latest push to get porn off your computer, Apple now deletes all iCloud emails that contain the phrase ‘barely legal teens.’ It doesn’t send the messages to spam, or flag them, it just straight up deletes them, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

There are a couple of different ways to protect your MacBook from abuse, but this is a new one to us. A Reddit user decided that he was tired of the dings and scratches on the front of his 2008 MacBook, so he grabbed a can of Plasti-dip and gave it a nice plastic coating to cover everything up.

It’s either the most brilliant way to cover up your MacBook’s scars, or the absolute worst. We’re not sure. Plasti Dip was originally created to help people rubberize the grips of their tools, but people have started putting it on everything from car bumpers to pieces of art.

Once you’re tired of the plastic coating you can just peel it off, but we think a protective case would be a better idea so you don’t get plastic in your USB port.

Here’s what the MacBook looked like after its final Plasti Dip coating:

Last summer we went hands-on with the Leap Motion, a futuristic controller for the Mac that lets you interact with OS X apps like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It was a stunning experience, and it made the mouse and trackpad feel suddenly obsolete.

Developers have been flocking to the Leap platform since last year, and now Realmac Software has a big announcement to make.

The folks at Realmac have been testing the Leap Motion controller with their most popular app, Clear. The Mac version of the task manager will be fully compatible with the Leap Motion when it ships to the public.

Keeping a cable on you at all times to charge your iPhone is a pain in the ass, mostly because the wires get all tangled and they take up too much space.

Last summer we saw the nifty Kickstarter project called ChargeCard that aimed to put an iPhone charging cable in your wallet. Well the project got funded and is now ready to make its way to your wallet.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – It’s not all announcements of exciting new Android handsets with fractionally faster processors here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Oh no. You’ll also find rose-tinted spectacles. Yes, Elecom – maker of some of the most accessorial iAccessories ever – now makes some specs that will stop your eyes from being ruined – ruined! – by blue light.

Last week a Staples Exec gloated that the office supply chain superstore had struck a deal to sell Apple products very soon. At the time, we didn’t know which Apple products Staples would sell, but for now it looks like they’re just selling accessories.

If you want to buy an Apple TV, Magic Mouse, Smart Cover, EarPods, or any other Apple accessories, you can now purchase them from Staples’ online store for the U.S.