The iPad mini is one of Apple’s biggest successes to date, but that doesn’t matter to the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has turned down Apple’s request for a trademark on the iPad mini because it is “merely descriptive.”
Tim Cook may be leading one of the most influential and valuable companies on earth now, but he used to be in high school just like the rest of us. Some yearbook photos of Cook’s early years at Robertsdale High School in Robertsdale, Alabama have surfaced. How adorable!
Cook was unsurprisingly voted “most studious” freshman year, and it was an obvious mistake to exclude him from the “most likely to succeed” list.
iMessages have taken the iOS world by storm, offering multi-device messaging services that go across the internet, rather than the SMS systems of your cell phone provider. For those who pay per SMS message, this is great news, and for the rest of us it’s still, well, great news.
Here are five ways to get the most out of Messages and iMessage on your iPhone, as well as other iOS and Mac devices.
Look, every once in a while a Mac app comes along that’s so incredibly useful, it becomes one of those rare staple apps no Mac should go without. On this week’s CultCast, we’ll introduce you to the incredibly talented Alfred, and reveal all the time-saving totally amazing feats this little bit of code can perform for you.
Plus! Word on the streets is T-Mobile’s getting the iPhone and their new plans could give the industry a shake down. We’ll tell you the pros and cons of big T’s contract free “uncarrier” plans and explain what makes them different from the pack.
All that and more on this episode of the CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes to download our new episodes or just hit play below.
Twitter has a released an update to its video sharing service Vine that adds a couple of new features. You can now quickly share videos taken by other people in your feed on Twitter and Facebook. Just tap the ellipsis on the bottom right of a video and then “Share this post.”
Another addition is the ability to embed Vine videos on the web like tweets. Anything in your Vine feed can be embedded with the new option. Getting the actual embed code is a little clunky in the app right now. Tapping “Embed” in the iOS app creates an email with instructions to use the code on the web. You can choose from the “Simple” and “Postcard” frames along with the width of the actual video.
Today’s update also includes some bug fixes, so be sure to grab it for free in the App Store.
Source: App Store
Apple has been rumored to release a Spotify-like music streaming service for quite some time, but complicated licensing negations with the record labels have kept the product at bay. Multiple reports from this year alone have suggested that Apple is finally starting to gain momentum; it seems clear that some kind of ‘iRadio’ is in the pipeline.
Previous speculation has said that Apple wants to release its upcoming music service sometime in 2013, and now a new report says the company is “pushing hard” for a launch this summer.
iOS is the most popular gaming platform in existence, and Apple has managed to create an incredible ecosystem of titles with only iOS devices. The company sells no actual controllers or joypads; everything is touch-based.
So does it make sense for Apple to make a physical game controller that somehow connects to your iPhone and iPad? According to a new report, the answer is yes.
LEGOs are one of the greatest toys ever invented. You can build pretty much anything you can dream of with them. Even a car. They’re amazing.
We’ve seen tons of Apple-inspired LEGO projects over the last couple of years, from LEGO Apple Store replicas, to a working LEGO Mac Pro. There is no limit to the creativity you can achieve with LEGOs, but these best LEGO projects we’ve ever seen:
Artist Maico Akiba takes everyday gadgets and then imagines them as they would look if dug up from a landfill a hundred years from now. This is what Akiba thinks the iPhone 3G will look like in 2107.
Got to say, I’m skeptical the screen will hold up that well. There’s more art by Akiba at the link below.
Source: Maico Akiba
Via: iSmashiPhone
If you think that last week’s huge security hole that allowed anyone with your Apple ID email address and birth date to reset your password was just a fluke, this damning report by Tim Carmody over at The Verge might just change your mind.
It’s a compelling argument that says that Apple is being extremely negligent and sloppy when it comes to your iCloud data’s security.
Things are crazy in North Korea right now. After hanging out with Dennis Rodman for a bit, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has decided to step up his propaganda by threatening to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S.
There’s no question that North Korea’s got nukes, but they might not be able to hit the U.S. for another few years. Plus, Kim Jong-un is running the show from an old 21-inch iMac that’s probably still running on OS X 10.5 Leopard, so we’re safe for now, right?
Source: BI
Do you hate in-app purchases? Sick of downloading an app only to discover its borderline unusable until you drop an extra five bucks? Sick of games that aren’t play to win, but pay to win?
Tough noogies. In-app purchases account for a staggering 76% of all iPhone App Store revenue, with 71% of all iPhone app revenue coming from in-app purchases for total free apps.
If there’s any comfort to be had from U.S. IAP haters, at least there’s this: Americans spend, on average, only about a buck in in-app purchases per download. In Japan, it’s four times that amount.
Source: Distimo
Without a doubt, my favorite Mountain Lion feature is AirPlay Mirroring, which allows me to easily mirror whatever is happening on my Mac to my Apple TV. My girlfriend and I use it pretty much all the time to watch movies at night — I digitized our vast DVD collection long ago to save space. It’s truly indispensible to me.
Although I love AirPlay Mirroring, the feature still has two main issues. First of all, AirPlay Mirroring doesn’t work at all on Macs released before 2011, meaning that my 2009-era 27-inch iMac can’t easily stream anything off of its 3.25 TB (rolled-at-home) Fusion Drive. There are apps like AirParrot that get around that limitation, but I’ve always found them to be a little bit strange and laggy, doing weird things like letterboxing my iMac’s display on all sides.
Even if you have a Mac that is newer than 2011, though, there’s one major limitation of AirPlay Mirroring: if you’re streaming a movie to your Apple TV using AirPlay Mirroring, you can’t actually do anything else with your Mac while the movie is playing. If you switch away from the video player to check your email or your Twitter account, it’s all mirrored on the screen.
What I have always wanted is this: the ability to easily stream a movie to my Apple TV from any Mac in my house, while allowing me to still use my Mac without disrupting the viewing experience.
Today, I discovered a gem of an app that lets me do all of this. It’s called Beamer and it frickin’ rocks.
Here’s a fantastic blast from the past. Back in the early 80s, there was a show called Computer Chronicles that was sort of a televised proto-podcast about the world of personal computing. In this episode from back in 1985, the Computer Chronicles put the vintage Apple Macintosh — released just a year before — through its paces, including a talk with Larry Tesler, a legendary engineer who was part of the Xerox PARC team, Palo Alto’s famous R&D center that gave Steve Jobs the idea for the Macintosh GUI and the venerable computer mouse.
Sadly, we can’t get the video to embed, so if this piques your interest and for more information on the show, be sure to check out this article on Wired for the whole thing. It’s a great way to wile away the morning on this Good Friday.
Source: Wired
We’ve openly speculated that the Evasi0n jailbreak might be the last public jailbreak now that Apple has closed the security holes that makes evasi0n work, but maybe we spoke too soon: well-known jailbreaker posixninjasays he’s collected enough new exploits in iOS 6.1.3 to patch together another jailbreak.
Apple can’t catch a break in China lately. The Chinese state run press has been targeting Apple in a series of increasingly vicious attack pieces, while Apple simultaneously defends itself in court against allegations of patent violation. Now, China’s oldest animation studio is accusing Apple of stealing their movies and selling them on the iTunes store, without paying a cent.
The ugly tan leather and stitching is still there, but Apple has a new feature for its Find My Friends app that users will find pretty useful. Apple just updated Find My Friends so that users can setup up geofences and receive a notification once a friend leaves a designated area.
Last week Apple launched its new ‘Why You’ll Love iPhone’ webpage that many viewed as a defensive effort to combat the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S 4. Today, Apple unleashed a similar website, only for the iPad.
The “Why You’ll Love iPad” webpage on Apple.com gives potential customers a number of reasons why the iPad and iPad mini are the best tablets on the market, including it’s apps, precision design, brilliant display, and battery.
Looks like even Steve Wozniak wants Apple to release a Siri API to third-party developers, and he has a pretty good idea how it would work: a lot like AppleScript, basically. For example, to do something in Foursquare, you’d launch Siri, say “Foursquare” and then anything you said after that would be parsed through the Foursquare app. Sounds good to me… maybe with iOS 7?
Hot on the heels of word that Apple was launching a new campaign to try to woo video professionals back into the embrace of Final Cut Pro, Apple has released Final Cut Pro X version 10.0.8, adding new features and shoring up some weaknesses.
A new report suggests that the next iPad mini will be getting a new touch panel supplier, and guess what? It’s not Samsung.
Here’s a little something that might get you formatted-text nerds excited: Rich Notes, yet another new text-editing app, lets you write on the iPad in rich text. That is, you can italicize and embolden your words right there on the page. Yes, this works with some other apps, but Rich Notes lets you use keyboard shortcuts to do it. If you have an external keyboard hooked up, CMD-B and CMD-I will do just what they do in every desktop app.
Rich notes comes from the developer DenVog, who also makes the excellent Index Card app for iPhone and iPad. It’s due to launch on February 20th. Let’s take a look:
While Apple’s Maps has certainly come a long way since its release last year, there’s still a lot of improving that needs to be done. The good news is that Apple is working to improve the accuracy of its mapping, and the company is hiring “Ground Truth” managers to help improve the “quality” of Maps in different regions around the world.
A “confidential presentation” that outlines the upcoming product plans for a manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China, suggests the iPhone 5S could launch in June this year. Most rumors have suggested the device wouldn’t arrive until this fall, around 12 months after the iPhone 5, but an accessory manufacturer with direct links to Foxconn is confident it’ll be here much earlier.
Earlier this week, T-Mobile announced that it will finally begin selling Apple’s iPhone next month, almost six years after the device first made its debut in the U.S. When you buy an iPhone 5 on T-Mobile, it will come with support for AWS bands, so that it can be used on the carrier’s LTE network.
Existing iPhone 5 handsets already in circulation don’t have this, but it can be enabled on the AT&T and unlocked models. And if your iPhone 5 is jailbroken, you can enable it yourself. Here’s how.
