News - page 1612

Today is the iPad’s third birthday. It was on this consecrated day that Apple shipped the original iPad with WiFi. It’s hard to believe that Apple has invented and popularized an entirely new market in only three years, but it’s the truth. Tablets just weren’t a thing before the iPad, and now they’re cannibalizing PC sales. As Apple calls it, we’re in a post-PC era.

A lot of people mocked the iPad from the beginning. Sure, there were the faithful believes, but many wondered why anyone would want to use a limited, 10-inch slab of glass over a full-fledged laptop. It just didn’t make sense at the time. The iPhone and iPod touch filled the need for portable computing… or so we thought.

The question was, as always with Apple, whether the iPad could live up to all of the hype. Looking back, the answer is obvious: yes. The iPad has seen—and continues to see—monumental success, and competitors are still playing catch up.

In honor of the iPad’s birthday, let’s take a look at some of its early critics. As it turns out, the iPad was rather hated during its infancy:

It seems like we’ve been using iPads forever now, but the greatest tablet computer ever made is still an incredibly young piece of gadgetry. In fact, it’s celebrating its third birthday today.

What other three year old do you know who has changed the world like the iPad has?

A ton of tech luminaries and pundits thought the iPad wouldn’t even make it this far, but boy, were they wrong. Over the the last three years the iPad has become a cultural phenomenon.

Here are 25 ways showing how the iPad has taken over the world in just three years.

Twitter has updated its iOS app with new “App Cards” it introduced to developers yesterday. Twitter Cards let companies and advertisers embed media like photos and videos directly into tweets so you don’t have to load a separate webpage. Now developers can include download links with info about their apps for Twitter users to see without leaving the timeline.

Remember Amazon AutoRip?

It was a cool service Amazon launched earlier in the year which did something pretty cool: if you bought an AutoRip-compatible CD at any point since 1998, it’ll automatically show up in your Amazon Cloud Player, which can be accessed either online or through the free iTunes app

Pretty neat, and now, AutoRip is even neater: it now works with vinyl records you’ve purchased too. For example, I bought a copy of the excellent album Stranger by Balmorhea on vinyl a couple months ago, and it’s now in my Cloud Player.

This is pretty neat. Vinyl is already one of the more savvy ways to buy music, not just because of the improved sound quality and presentation over digital or CD, but because when you buy a vinyl album, you often get the digital version for free as a download anyway. With AutoRip now working with vinyl, buying a record is an even more compelling way to consume music.

Remember how word came down the pipeline the other day that Spotify wanted to start a video streaming service? Guess who just beat them to the punch? That’s right, Rdio — the better of the subscription music streaming services in the United States — and their new service is called, coincidentally enough, Vdio.

Duke Nukem II, the side-scrolling shoot ’em up first developed for PC, is back to celebrate its 20th anniversary on iOS. This is original Duke Nukem at its finest — only it’s been optimized and improved for touchscreen devices.

I really like Nikolai Lamm’s concepts for imaginary, rumored, (and possibly forthcoming) Apple products, and this transparent concept for a cheaper budget iPhone is no exception. I love how it merges the 2012 iPod touch’s candy colored backshell with the iMac G3’s transparent casing.

I think there’s little to no chance Apple would actually make an iPhone that looks like this — in the mind of Jonny Ive, transparent gadgets are so 1998, I bet — but heck, I’d buy a phone like this.

Source: Myvouchercodes.co.uk

Looking for a Retina iPad? Here’s a killer deal: Best Buy is having a clearance of up to 30% off third-gen iPads, meaning you can now buy a 16GB Retina iPad for less money than it costs to buy the entry-level iPad mini.

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is one of my favorite Sega games on iOS, and it’s making its way to the Mac thanks to Feral Interactive. The game will be available to download from the Mac App Store tomorrow, April 4, with support for Game Center and iCloud game syncing.

Brian White, an analyst with Topeka Capital Markets, brings us a crazy new rumor about the much-anticipated Apple television today following recent meetings with supply chain sources in China and Taiwan.

White claims that the “iTV” will finally launch during the second half of 2013, and that it’ll come with a miniature device called the “iRing”, which the user will wear on their finger to act as a pointer. The device will enhance the motion detection experience and take over some of the functions of the traditional remote control, apparently.

One would think that the self-evident answer to the question posited in this post’s headline would be “No,” followed by a pregnant pause, a licking of the lips and then followed it up with the words “You idiot.”

And, in fact, that probably is the answer. But if Apple’s not working on a robot, then why the heck is Apple hiring one of the country’s foremost robotics experts, John Morrell?

Remember when your phone seemed neat because it could actually tell you where you were on a map? That seems pretty quaint now that the gyroscopes and compasses and magic location beetles [1] not only tell our photons where they are, but how they’re moving and even which direction they’re pointed in.

And now that same quantum leap is about to happen in the world of personal fitness trackers. Oh boy.

App Store links mysteriously disappeared from Google search this week, making it more difficult to find iOS apps with a simple web search. Some suspected Google may have killed them intentionally, but it turns out that a technical issue is to blame for the glitch.

Google says it’s now working with “the team” to get it fixed.

Alan Kay is a bit of a legend at Apple. A computing pioneer, Alan Kay’s lab at Xerox PARC led Steve Jobs to commercialize the concept of a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, and Alan Kay’s philosophy that “people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware” is one of Apple’s core principles.

But Kay doesn’t think much of Apple these days, and in fact, seems to think the company has always been broken.

Ulysses 3, the awesome next-generation text editor from the Soulmen, has just landed in the Mac App Store. It's $20 for a week, going up to $40 after that, and is worth every damn penny. And lest you think I'm some pussy-assed blogger who gets everything for free, I'm not. I just dropped my $20 like everyone else. And this is despite the fact that, so Killian tells me, I have a quote right there on the MAS page.

You could easily make your own iPhone amplifier dock from a shoebox. Or better, an old wooden wine case. Or best of all, you could get out your clamps, drills, router and hot glue and go medieval on some pile of wood’s ass. If you choose the latter route, then you should download the plans (totally SFW) from Renee at Red Bird Blue – her amazing creation is what you see in the picture above.

What’s your favorite Instagram filter? We all have one. Mine is X-Pro, and I almost never use anything else (except for no filter, which – according to Statigram – is my second most used “filter.”)

But what does this excessive use of one particular look say about me? Or – less importantly – about you? Luckily, there’s an info graphic for that, and it tells you your personality type according to InstaFilter Preference:

X-Pro II

The Optimist

The users see the world a little brighter and they want you to see it that way too. So what if it’s a gray day? They’ll make sure those raindrops pop against a windshield – and will then make the photo their new wallpaper.

Better is the definition of a “Normal” shooter. Anyone who goes commando in Instagram is either a techno-illiterate idiot, incapable of even tapping on a brightly-colored thumbnail, or “tech-savvy frauds, passing off pictures they fixed in other applications as #nofilter works of art. You’re not fooling anyone.”

As somebody whose first Instagram picture was a “#nofilter work of art,” imported into my iPad 2 from a Panasonic GF1, I can say that this entry at least is pretty accurate. Go check the rest out at the links below.

Source: Marketo

Via: Apartmant Therapy

It seems like just yesterday that I was complaining about the lack of sharing and export in iOS reading apps… Maybe that’s because it was only yesterday. I was actually moaning about Read Later apps, but I mentioned Kindle and iBooks as being equally bad.

Now, just a day later, I discover that there’s a free Mac app which will suck the notes and highlights out of your iBooks and package them up in a nicely-formatted PDF, or direct to Evernote. It’s called Digested, and it does exactly what it says it does.

If you’re the proud owner of a Fujifilm X100s camera, then today is yet another happy day for you: Lightroom has been updated to v4.4 and now supports your camera’s wacky X-Trans sensor, the clever sensor which removes the need for an anti-aliasing filter by placing the color pixel filters in an irregular grain-like pattern.

And of course the update supports a whole bunch more camera (listed below), as el as fixing bugs.

Tim Schafer and Double Fine Productions have made some amazing games over the years, including gems like Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Costume Quest, and Brütal Legend. Then they took to Kickstarter to see if they could get their community to support them in the development of a new game, generically called “The Double Fine Adventure Game.”

Well, it’s named now, and it’s got its first trailer ready for you to see, above. The trailer itself looks at once whimsical and heartfelt, with a poignant musical piece and a bit of gameplay footage.

There’s a great discussion unfolding over on Branch between some Apple reporters about the future release date of iOS 7.

According to the sources of those involved in the discussion, Jony Ive’s fingerprints will be all over iOS 7, the only problem is it’s taking longer to develop than originally planned. In fact, Apple might have even pulled engineers away from OS X 10.9 to work on it.

In two days, Facebook will gather a bunch of people into a room and Mark Zuckerburg will tell them all about Facebook’s new smartphone. It’s made by HTC. It’s got a custom build of Android, and tons of Facebook integration. And it looks pretty boring.

Evleaks just posted a picture of what is probably Facebook’s smartphone. It’s called the HTC First, and it looks like millions of other Android handsets on the market. No details on the specs, but I’m sure Mark will give us an ear full on Thursday.

Source: Evleaks

Music streaming services like Spotify and Rdio are great because you get to listen to as much music as you want, without having to pay for it. They’re especially great on roadtrips, and if you have a car with Ford’s SYNC AppLink platform you can now keep the tunes cranking on your drive without touching a thing.

Spotify just updated its app to include Ford SYNC AppLink support. To get Spotify in your Ford all you have to do now is log into your premium account on your iOS device and connect to SYNC AppLink. You can manage all your music and playlists with SYNC’s voice-controls so you won’t get distracted while thumbing through albums in search of that new JT album.

The only way to get an iPhone on T-Mobile the past few years was to go out and buy an unlocked iPhone and put a T-Mobile SIM card in it. Now that T-Mobile has become an official carrier, a lot of iPhone users that are already on the carrier want to be able to use LTE but can’t.

To make things better, T-Mobile says they’re going to rollout an update for all unlocked iPhones on the network starting April 5th. The update will flip the switch on features that aren’t currently available, like LTE and Visual Voicemail.

We’ve heard rumors that Apple will unveil the iPhone 5S in June of this year, and it turns out that there might actually be some truth to the rumors.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Apple plans to begin production of the next iPhone in Q2 of 2013. The new iPhone will have the same shape and 4-inch screen as the iPhone 5S and will probably launch this summer.