News - page 1616

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 –

Keeping your posture in check likely isn’t something you often think about on a daily basis. With so many things going on everyday, you may not realize just how bad your posture is, though. That’s where the LUMOback sensor comes in.

The LUMOback is essentially a belt that you wear which detects exactly how you sit and stand throughout the day, and records the data to a companion iOS app. In addition, the sensor will vibrate to tell you if you’ve been sitting or standing poorly for too long.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 –

We’ve seen dozens of kinds of styli released over the last few years for the iPad, in order to make drawing and painting easier onscreen. While none have been quite perfect, the new Adonit Jot Touch might just be one of the best attempts so far, utilizing some features not seen before in other stylus options.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 –

Until now, there hasn’t been a great a way to use your iOS device to remotely control high end, DSLR cameras. While the iPad’s multi-touch display is great for monitoring your camera, it’s not always possible to have an internet connection when you’re out in the field shooting.

Thankfully, this problem might become a thing of the past thanks to the CamRanger, a neat device being shown off at Macworld that lets you remotely control your DSLR from your iOS device without an internet connection.

From the makers of World of Goo and Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure comes a brand new iPad game, Little Inferno. The game released just two days ago, and is already the number four top paid iPad app on the US iTunes Store. That’s no small achievement, but neither is this iPad-only game.

Spend a few minutes with Little Inferno and, while recognizing a similar vibe to World of Goo, you’ll start to understand that there’s something dark, twisted, and incredibly hilarious happening here.

If you’ve ever played with a wooden puzzle in your local educational toys store, you’ll instantly understand Interlocked, a new iOS game from developer Armor Games (Kingdom Rush). It’s a fun little universal puzzle app for the low price of $0.99, and it should keep you gently entertained for some time to come.

The concept here is to rotate each group of interlocked wooden pieces, sliding each piece out in the right order to fully disassemble the puzzle. Once you’ve moved all the pieces off and away from each other, you get a new puzzle to rotate and solve. It’s very zen, and the whole thing reminds me a bit of Zen Bound, another rotating puzzle game with wooden sculptures and a gentle vibe.

The iHook is back, folks, and it’s even better than it was the last time we told you about it. Unfortunately, it won’t open a beer for you, so that’s, um, out.

Recently re-upped at Kickstarter, the iHook Dual Edition will not only connect to your iPod Nano, making it an ideal way to mount the little square of joy, but it now allows you to connect an iPod Shuffle, too.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – WritePDF, a PDF editing application for iPad / iPhone, does things that even Adobe’s mobile PDF reader cannot do, according to New Zealand software developer EuroSmartz. With WritePDF you can convert any files including your calendar and web pages to PDF files, print to any printer using your mobile device, and share your PDFs using in-app e-mail function. And it’s all done safely in the Cloud so you don’t need to download first.

  SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – There are tons of cases here at   Macworld. Millions. Billions even. You can find cases for every sort of purpose. Want a case that can open your beer. Yep, it’s here. One that doubles as a mouse for your Mac. Sure thing.

Any case you can dream up for your iPhone, you will probably be able to find it here. But in one corner of Macworld there’s a booth that’s trying to sell Samsung smartphone cases to the hordes of Apple fanboys.

Jailbreaking has come a long way since the dark ages of the original iPhone. Now it’s a simple matter of plugging your iOS device into your computer for five minutes and following a few easy steps. But it used to be way more complex.

Let’s rewind to 2007, back when only a handful of hackers were tweaking and unlocking their iPhones and iPod touches. It took 74 individual steps to jailbreak the original iPhone OS.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – I’m not exaggerating — these headphones I found exhibiting at Macworld are just about the best iPod headphones I’ve heard. Full bass, beautiful high-end, loud, little incoming leakage from the outside world, really comfy and adjustable and look great in several bright color options. They are really well made. And the price! Guess how much they are?

 SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – When you walk onto the Macworld Expo floor you’re immediately assaulted by a cacophony of iPad cases and stands. Everyone thinks they have the perfect solution for you to rest your iPad on.

Honestly, a lot of the iPad accessories here are pure crap, but I roamed around the floor all day and this is the best one I could find. It’s called the Desktop Chair from Moku Woodware, and it’s the only iPad stand from Macworld I might consider buying.

Walk into any Starbucks and be cast by the glowing eye-con of a thousand MacBooks, staring at you, poor PC laptop user, with a piercing gaze of recrimination and scorn. “You are not one of us,” they murmur. “You are not of the seraphim.”

If you’re stuck with owning a Windows laptop but want to fit in with the Starbucks set, maybe consider an ASUS Taichi 21? It’s a cool piece of hardware in its own right, featuring a touchscreen display on the back, and you can make it do cool, obfuscating things… like, say, flash a glowing Apple symbol even bigger and brighter than the most expensive Mac.

Via: GigaOM

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – Witty, engaging, hilarious, beguiling — Saturday Night Live  and Portlandia actor Fred Armisen just gave a room of 2,000 people a Macworld experience they’ll never forget, and it had absolutely nothing to do with tech.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – If you’ve ever watched an episode of Portlandia then you probably have the feeling that its two stars, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, are huge fans of Apple products.

A lot of Portlandia’s comedy sketches revolve around society’s obsession for technology. They’re brilliant. Many of the sketches feature Apple products, but it’s very rare to see a PC or Android phone on the show. At Macworld this morning, Armisen said that they only put PCs in the show at places where it’s appropriate – like the DMV.

A number of Apple executives, including Vice President for Education John Couch, met with Turkish president Abdullah Gül today to discuss a deal that could see the iPad introduced to Turkish education. The Turkish government’s FAITH project was set up to put more than 15 million tablets into its schools at an estimated cost of around $4.5 billion.

Google won the award for Best Mobile Application at the sixth edition of the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards, beating out Grindr, Instagram, and Square.

“I see a few empty seats, so it looks like those guys haven’t downloaded the app and got lost somewhere,” said the Daniel Graf, Google’s director of mobile maps, accepting the statue of a gorilla smashing a TV set.

Apple has overtaken Samsung to become the largest mobile phone vendor in the United States for the first time. The Cupertino company captured a record 34% market share during the fourth quarter of 2012 with around 17.7 million devices sold, while Samsung captured 32% with around 16.8 million devices sold.

Got a “Universal” iPhone dock? Yeah, me too, and it’s pretty useless now most of my iDevices are Lightning powered. But Shapeways user nginear can help. He’s come up with an iPhone 5 adapter which will plug straight into your dock, letting you keep on using it for at least another year or so,.

Path, the mobile social network that first launched on the iPhone in November 2010, has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived its users by collecting personal information from their address books without their knowledge or consent. The settlement requires the company to establish a comprehensive privacy program and to have independent privacy assessments carried out every other year.

The company has also been fined $800,000 for illegally collecting personal information from children without their parents’ consent.

The Rocksteady XS is a Bluetooth speaker with a big difference: it’s designed to be “as loud as possible.” To that end, it features a sealed design so that the sound can punch harder out of the end-mounted speakers. It’s also tough (with an aluminum shell) and cheap at just $99, making it ideal for outdoor use.

Apple is on the hunt for two senior software engineers that will join its iLife development team to “re-imagine how user interfaces should be built and work.” Both positions, which were posted to the vacancies page of Apple’s website, are based at the company’s Cupertino headquarters, and indicate Apple is working to overhaul the iLife software suite, which consists of GarageBand, iMovie, and iPhoto.

Along with Evernote’s big Penultimate announcement yesterday came another big update. Evernote Hello, the person-remembering app, is now at version 2.0. It adds two great features: business-card scanning and a tie-in with social networks.

Yes, you’ve seen both these before, but not quite as slick as this.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – It was clear during his panel that playing Steve Jobs touched actor Ashton Kutcher in a deep and poignant way… but when he started choking back tears when speaking about the tech luminary, things started getting weird.

Yes, team Cult is here at Macworld 2013, and we’re reporting live from the show on our all-new CultCast.

Couldn’t make it this year? Don’t worry, we sat through 60 minutes of actors Kutcher and Josh Gad describing the process of making their new JOBS movie so you wouldn’t have to. Catch our new episode to find out what Jobs said that made Kutcher teary-eyed whilst reciting it, and why he and fellow actor Josh Gad feel Woz’s recent harsh criticism of their movie just isn’t fair.

Then—from the cool, to the useful, to the downright whacky—it’s our favorite Apple tech from the show!

All that on our newest CultCast plus, JJ Abrams, Star Wars Savior! Read on for the show notes.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – Fujitsu is making an appearance at Macworld this year to demonstrate their first scanner to work with an iOS device, the ScanSnap iX500. The scanner can connect right to your device using an iOS app to easily view your scanned documents immediately onscreen.

The ScanSnap iX500 is designed to be easy to use, implementing several innovative features. Since the scanner can handle up to 25 documents per minute, it has technology built in to make sure that only one sheet passes through at a time, eliminating time consuming paper jams.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – Lantronix is showing off at Macworld what they call the xPrintServer, a small device that you can attach to your network to allow nearly any printer to become compatible with your iOS device using AirPrint.

The xPrintServer comes in two models, a consumer edition that should suit the needs of the average user, as well as an office edition more suited for a corporate setting.