News - page 1608

If you’ve been up on your Apple news the past few months, then you’ve probably heard about a “silly sideshow” that been going on about Apple’s stock. Basically, Greenlight Capital isn’t happy with the amount of cash their getting back on their investment in Apple, while Apple has been hoarding all their cash.

Hoping to convince Apple to give shareholders some of their cash, Greenlight Capitals found, David Einhorn, has a concocted a plan that would have Apple selling “iPref” stock to investors who want to eat Apple’s cake.

The only time I ever really care about Major League Baseball is during the Spring. And that’s only because I live in Arizona, where half of the league’s teams come for Spring training, and I can go watch tons of all-stars play games for cheap.

Whether you love baseball or not, you can certainly appreciate the amount of work that goes into the MLB At Bat app. It’s got tons of information, video, and photos, and it got a big update just in time for Spring training.

Every time I even go near a computer on a desk my wrists lock up and my carpal tunnels tighten. Still, even I can appreciate the amazing versatility and capacious storage power of this fully operational My Writing Desk, a beautiful plywood and fiberboard confection from etc.etc. designs.

Google has just unveiled an absolutely mystifying new product apparently created by insane millionaires, for even crazier millionaires: the Pixel, a $1,300 Chromebook with a Retina-like display. Although it’s attractive and well specced, it might be the most inexplicable product announced this year.

Sony and Microsoft, are all coming out with new gaming consoles this year, but when it comes to handheld gaming, Apple and Google have got them beat.

A new report claims that in the fourth quarter of 2012, gamers spend more money on iOS and Android games combined than the amount spent on dedicated handheld devices.

Following the public release of iOS 6.1.2, Apple has seeded the 6.1.3 beta to registered developers. Apple seeded the first iOS 6.1.1 beta towards the beginning of this month, and the minor release of 6.1.2 has caused the jump to 6.1.3 “beta 2.”

A crazy security flaw in the iOS lockscreen was recently discovered that could bypass a passcode, and Apple says it has patched the bug in this developer beta. There are also improvements to Maps in Japan.

Source: Apple

Now that you’ve jailbroken your iPad on iOS 6 with Evasi0n the right way, it’s time to install the coolest tweaks and apps from Cydia, the jailbreak alternative to the App Store.

Wondering what you should install? Here’s a roundup of the very best jailbreak tweaks available for the iPad:

Jailbreaking allows you to do all sorts of wonderful things to your iPhone that Apple wouldn’t trust you with. It’s totally awesome and can completely change the look of your iPhone, which could be great, or horrible depending on your taste in design, fonts, and wallpapers.

We’ve seen some really beautiful iPhone themes and tweaks over the last year, which got us thinking, “How beautiful could you make your homescreen with jailbreak tweaks?”

We could go down this lovely path alone, but we’d love to have our pals accompany us. So what do you say? Make your iPhone homescreen as pretty and different as possible, take a screenshot, and then post it in the Cult of Mac Flickr group. The five best homescreens will win a free copy of Kuvva Wallpapers, so hurry up and beautify your homescreens.

Here’s how to enter the contest:

We love photography at Cult of Mac. Whether it’s sharing photos at events through Instagram, or going outdoors and taking pictures for Flickr, snapping pictures and sharing them is one of our favorite ways to interact with readers. It’s also one of our favorite ways to write articles.

Today, Cult of Mac is introducing our new Flickr and Instagram groups. We want to see what life is like for all of our Apple fans across the globe, plus give you guys a way to get your pictures on the CultofMac.com homepage. The Flickr and Instagram groups will be the best place to see how Apple’s

Here’s how to join:

A petition against a phone unlocking ban that was introduced last month has now received more than 100,000 online signatures, the threshold petitions must reach to get an official response from the Obama Administration. The petition calls for the White House to make cellphone unlocking legal again, without having to go through a carrier.

Apple stock plummeted recently after a rumor went around that Foxconn had instituted a hiring freeze based upon a slowdown in iPhone 5 production. Foxconn quickly and emphatically deniedthat the freeze had anything to do with the iPhone 5… but what was the cause of the hiring freeze, then?

Here’s an interesting theory: Foxconn had to freeze hirings this year because, under pressure from Apple, they are treating employees so much more nicely that workers are no longer abandoning their jobs in droves after Chinese New Year.

Although these leaked images should be taken with a huge grain of salt, multiple photos purporting to be the rear aluminum shell of the second-generation iPad mini have leaked online, showing the next mini to be slightly thicker than the existing model… highly suggestive of the next iPad mini having a Retina display.

There’s this really cool, funny, slick video made by a bunch of Israelis called Sight, in which a guy walks around in a world where everything he sees is overlayed by augmented reality. Everything. All the time. Sounds far-fetched? Not so much anymore.

Today, Metaio announced that their new augmented-reality chip, called the Metaio AREngine, will make its debut in ST-Ericsson phones — in a handset(s) that may be available to the public as soon as the end of this year, or early 2014 if things move more slowly.

Rumors say that Apple is making an iWatch with a curved glass display, and the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office just granted a patent for such a device. The patent in question was filed by Apple back in August 2011, and it describes a “touch-sensitive” bracelet that wraps around the human wrist and locks into place.

Apple calls it a “wearable video device” with a flexible display that “conforms to an appendage of the end-user.” The watch would be used to communicate with another device, like an iPhone.

For many people who bought the third-generation iPad, the faster, Lightning-equipped fourth-gen model came far more quickly than expected. Here in America, that’s lead to a bunch of grumbling, but in Brazil, it’s sparked a class action lawsuit, claiming that the update was tantamount to planned obsolescence.

Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn is a very influential Wall Street investor who is going after Apple for proposing to allegedly eliminate preferred stock options from AAPL shareholders. Apple recently started issuing small dividends to investors, and preferred stock would entitle investors to fixed dividends instead of the fluctuating common-stock dividends.

Einhorn and Greenlight Capital will hold a conference call today with interested Apple investors to discuss their ideas on how Apple should use its massive cash pile.

Ray-Ban, the sunglasses company, has a rather neat take on Instagram-style retrification filters. Instead of releasing yet another photo-filtering app, Ray-Ban’s Ambermatic actually shoots your photos through a real pair of Ambermatic shades.

You know when your friend posts an awesome picture of their latte or the tasty dessert they had after their big plate of pasta last night to Instagram, and you really want to save that picture so that you can drool over it more than once? Well now you can, thanks to Instahancer, a new tweak for jailbroken iPhones.

As its name suggests, Instahancer enhances the Instagram app with a number of useful features, including zoom, the ability to share pictures to your camera roll, and the option to share them via email.

PopCap’s beloved Plants vs. Zombies has today been made available for free in the App Store. The reduction applies to both the iPhone and iPad titles, which were previously priced at $2.99 and $6.99 respectively. If you don’t already have it, it’s well worth adding to your collection.

Is it just me, or have SLR cameras gotten really boring in the last few years? I mean, I know they’re awesome machines and all, but they don’t do anything new. And all the while the rest of the camera world is pulling farther and farther ahead.

The iPhone in my pocket not only takes photos, it edits movies and shares my pictures with the world, wherever I am. And Sony’s incredible RX1 is pretty much a full-frame SLR in the body of a pocket camera.

Meanwhile, cameras like Nikon’s new D7100 would have been impressive a few years ago, but now they’re just that same old thing, with some bigger numbers on the spec sheet.

In the olden days, where getting the exposure of your photos right was much harder thanks to the fact that you didn’t get to see the result until your prints came back from the lab, people would sometimes rely on a separate incident light meter, which would measure the light falling on the subject, and not the light reflected by it.

Now, such a piece of hardware is being made for the iPhone…

Twitterrific for iOS has received its first major update since it was overhauled with version 5.0 back in December. In addition to mute filters for users, hashtags, and domains, version 5.1 brings support for new image services, a new font, and a whole stack of improvements. Check out the full list of changes below.

Netflix has today introduced an enhanced player interface for iPad with version 3.0 of its iOS app. The update also brings back the zoom icon so that you can quickly switch between fullscreen and widescreen viewing modes, and better placement of the player controls.

Flickr’s iOS app, which pretty much relaunched the company into mobile after years of creeping neglect, has gotten a pretty significant update. No, it has’t yet gotten an iPad-native version, but you will like the new features nonetheless.

About a month ago, right after the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Disney held a small, invitation-only press conference in Los Angeles where they revealed their ambitious, stunning new cross-platform Infinity game universe. They invited us, of course. Only problem was, Infinity had practically nothing to do with anything Apple.

After all the fanfare, when the event was almost over, I pulled aside one of the Disney folks and asked why the heck they’d invited me; turns out iOS is why I was there, and that they had a big mobile-related announcement coming — and this picture just might be its enigmatic messenger.