True story: Back when I was a university student, there was a local DJ called DJ Crap. He actually was pretty crappy, but nobody really cared, because DJ Crap had a signature gimmick: He used an old-style telephone handset to cue up his records. Come to think of it, this might be why his mixes never matched…
Now Numark will sell you a modern version of the same thing. It’s called the Redphone, and DJ Crap would love it.
Remember the Optimus Maximus keyboard from Art Lebedev? No, me either. But if I did I’d probably recall the LED keycaps which had two distinct functions: One, to display a tiny image on top of each key and two, to send the cost of the keyboard through the roof.
Today we bring you the e-ink keyboard, which is the same kind of thing, only way more practical.
Now, when we say Old School, we’re talking about the 2003 movie starring Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, and Will Ferrell as three old dudes trying to recapture the joy of their frat-bound youth, to hilarious (and naked) effect. Hard to believe it’s been ten years since the movie came out, really. We’re also talking about a new tower defense game, also called Old School.
As the tenth anniversary of the film’s release is next month, it’s fitting that Canadian developer, Big Blue Bubble, should bring Old School to the iOS platform in collaboration with the film’s distributor, Paramount Pictures.
Last summer, Apple won the biggest patent lawsuit in history against Samsung. After a long and tedious hearing, a California court ruled that Samsung had infringed on seven of Apple’s design patents. The jury for the trial decided that Samsung had willfully infringed five of the patents, which basically means that Samsung knew what it was doing when it tried to steal Apple’s mojo.
Samsung challenged the verdict, and Judge Lucy Koh has now ruled that Apple’s patents weren’t willfully infringed upon. This will save Samsung from having to pay Apple up to triple in damages on top of the $1+ billion it already owes.
This doesn’t mean that the case is over. There are still plenty of appeals to be made, and “Apple will presumably move at some point for an award of ongoing royalties for future use of its patents by Samsung,” according to FOSS Patents.
Source: FOSS Patents
Apple’s been surprising us left and right this week with iOS 6.1 dropping out of nowhere, and the a 128GB iPad announced today. There might be an Apple TV surprise coming in the near future too.
According to some FCC documents, Apple might release a smaller Apple TV pretty soon. The papers show an Apple TV with the same design and shape as the current generation except it’s nearly a half centimeter smaller.
It can be easy to get “unlocking” and “jailbreaking” confused, but the two terms mean totally different things. Unlocking refers to freeing your phone to work on any carrier instead of just the one you bought it on. Jailbreaking is the process of circumventing Apple’s security measures in iOS to install tweaks, hacks, and mods that aren’t allowed in the App Store.
The U.S. Library of Congress has ruled that it is now illegal for you to unlock your smartphone if it was bought after January 26th, 2013. Carriers can still legally unlock your device for you, but it’s illegal to go through a third-party unlock vendor.
Jailbreaking your iPhone has been kept legal through 2015 under an exemption in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The crazy catch is that jailbreaking the iPad has technically been made illegal, while the iPhone and iPod touch both remain exempt. So jailbreaking is safe mostly, but unofficial unlocking is not. This is important to mention as the iOS 6.1 jailbreak approaches.
Keeping up with the U.S. legal system is very confusing, so what does all this unlocking and jailbreaking legal jargon mean for you?
Apple is famous for its attention to detail and making the smallest tweaks to hardware and software most people wouldn’t even notice. It’s kind of silly to get excited about tiny animation details in iOS, but to us, they’re a sign that Apple really cares about its products.
Along with the new lockscreen music controls for iOS 6.1, Apple added some new light reflection details on the lockscreen as well. Now, instead of the music player bar being a flat surface, there is a small amount of light reflecting between the Pause button and Volume slider that moves as you tilt your device. Apple added a similar light feature to the volume slider knobs in iOS 6.0, so and it looks like it’s slowly creeping its way through the rest of iOS.
Here’s a video of the tiny feature in action:
People don’t trust Apple with all their personal data as much as they used to. That’s what the latest survey on privacy data claims, after ranking the top 20 companies that U.S. consumers trust the most with their private information.
Ponemon Institute has conducted its annual privacy survey for the past seven years that asks U.S. consumers to rate organizations that they feel are most likely going to keep their information private. Apple was ranked 14th on last years list, but didn’t make the cut this time.
If you’re an iPhone lover, this video of an excavator destroying one hundred and twenty-seven iPhones underneath its treads is sure to stand your hair on end. It’s like watching a bulldozer dig a mass grave.
Don’t worry, though: these aren’t real iPhones, convincing as they might seem. They’re merely convincing replicants.
Macworld/iWorld 2013 is coming in just two days, and Cult of Mac will be there, reporting live from the showfloor.
Macworld has an amazing history of being the launching pad for some world changing products. The iPhone debuted at Macworld. So did the MacBook Air. And iTunes. Again and again, products announced at Macworld have shifted the very pillars of technology.
Macworld is more than just a celebration on everything that is wonderful about iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apps, and the people who use them. It’s a summit that measures the very pulse of Cupertino’s incredible impact upon the world around us. With Apple at the top of it’s game, it’s more important than ever.
Not convinced? Here’s a ten minute history of the last 15 years of Macworld.
It’s back! 500px — the photo sharing app that was yanked from the App Store last week for letting users check out artful, non-pornographic nudes — has returned to the App Store, with some changes to keep genitalia and nipples away from impressionable eyes.
When it’s released, the new 128GB will be the highest capacity yet, but what does it mean in practical terms? How many games, apps, photos, songs, and videos will the new 128GB iPad store?
We did the math. Here’s what you can fit on your new 128GB iPad.
Here’s a great idea: put this magnetic paperweight on your desk and enjoy the relaxed tranquility of knowing that your cables will never fall to the floor again.
Or try this even better idea: go grab the super-strong rare-earth magnet from one of your disused iPad cases (or even its over-engineered packaging) and tape it to the edge of your desk. Voila! (or wa-la! or viola! as forum-posting morons like to say) – you have your own free cable tidy. And better yet it won’t actually untidy your desk by cluttering up its surface.
Foursquare, everyone’s favorite check-in service, has released a new app today, but it’s not for jokers checking into their local pizza place: it’s for the guys who own that pizza place.
Not so surprisingly, it’s called Foursquare for Business, and it allows you to do all sorts of business-y things to track how engaged your customers are and get the word out.
I consider Apple’s Lightning SD card adapter to be a step backwards – the original camera connection kit not only included an SD dongle and a USB port, but it also provided them in convenient, pocketable, non-be-cabled form.
Thanks to the fine folks at Photojojo, though, you can now relive the excitement of not using a cable to plug in your SD card with the Lightning SD Reader.
Apple and the U.S. carriers have always had a bittersweet relationship. Carriers love Apple because the iPhone brings people into their stores, but carriers are also pressured by Apple to pay high subsidies so that Apple can maintain its high profit margins.
Given that there’s way more competition for the iPhone these days, Apple’s chokehold on the industry is starting to loosen. Carriers are trying new business models for selling smartphones. T-Mobile recently announced that it would be doing away with subsidized two-year contracts altogether. Instead, customers will pay a cheaper price up front for a device like the iPhone and then pay monthly installments towards the full price of the phone.
Carriers want to drive retail prices down on smartphones so more people will buy, and Apple may have to adapt to that model in the near future.
For some reason, Apple released a 128GB iPad this morning. And a lot of people are scratching their heads over it.
It’s not that a 128GB iPad is an unwelcome thing, of course. More storage for apps, movies and music is always a good thing… except, if it’s just a matter of soldering in a couple of 64GB NAND modules instead of a couple of 32GB NAND modules, why the heck didn’t Apple release a 128GB iPad when they refreshed the iPad in October?
In other words, why now? Why announce it today, on a sleepy Tuesday morning at the tail-end of January? And who is this thing for, anyway?
I’ve got a theory.
Apple is all about the iCloud these days, and Microsoft is also betting on the cloud with its new Office productivity suite. Today Microsoft announced the availability of Office 365, its new paid subscription service for accessing and editing your content from any computer via the Office website. Office 365 also lets you install the Office suite on up to five PCs or Macs.
Office 2013 has also been released for Windows machines. Mac users are still stuck on Office 2011.
Writing Kit is one of the best text editors on the iPad (and iPhone), but it can be a little confusing at first. It’s made for people who write for a living, and specifically for those who write for the web. To this end, Writing Kit contains not only a world-class Markdown-friendly text editor, but a web browser, quick-research tools and connections to an embarrassment of other web services.
Once you get used to it, Writing Kit will quickly become your writing app of choice. With that in mind, here’s a guide to help you make the most of it.
I have a hate/hate relationship wireless SD cards. Hate because they never quite seem to work when I really need them to, and hate because they promise so much, and then they crash my damn camera. Again. Wait, I have another one: They also kill the battery.
The new ezSh@re from world-famous manufacturer 1 LZeal mightn’t do anything about the first two, but it can fix that last one.
Fact: I was once taking some notes about an exhibit in a gallery/museum in Berlin and a guard told me to stop using my cellphone. It was in fact an iPod touch, but whatever – try explaining that to a German security guard when you can’t speak German.
If I’d been in Gabriele Meldaikyte’s art exhibit, though, I could have continued pinching, tapping, swiping (and giving the finger to the guard) without even touching my “phone.” How? Interactivity.
Apple has officially announced a 128GB version of the fourth-generation iPad, coming in both WiFi and WiFi+ Cellular models. They’ll be available next week on Tuesday, February 5th, in black or white, and cost $799 for the WiFi model and $929 for the WiFi + Cellular model.
In the official press release, Apple’s not trying too hard to emphasize this as anything more than what it is: a doubling of storage capacity on the high-end. The timing, though, is curious, coming just a couple months before a (presumed) March or April iPad event; this perhaps implies that a fifth-gen iPad isn’t incoming until later in the year.
It’s curious that Apple has taken so long to release an iOS device with 128GB of storage, when the flash modules Apple has needed to do it have existed for years. Is a 128GB iPhone on the table next?
Sweden-based DICE game studio, owned by EA and known for high-end console and PC games like Mirror’s Edge and BattleField, recently posted a job advertisement for a Mac OS X Engineer to work on the company’s Frostbite gaming engine.
Here’s hoping that as many EA games as use the Frostbite engine will come to Mac OS X in the coming years.
Did you sign the Change.org petition to get a Mac port of super-popular multiplayer online battle arena game (MOBA), League of Legends? Have you waited with bated breath since it was first announced, and then wept with frustration when it was cancelled? Have you downloaded the unofficial iLoL port and suffered through any beta glitches just to get you some League of Legends on your favorite computing platform?
Well, the wait is (almost) over, as developer Riot Games has finally admitted that it is indeed working on a Mac client, and it will be available within a month.
Perhaps you’ve been combing through iOS 6.1 on your iOS device looking for the little changes that Apple hasn’t mentioned. A couple of our readers certainly have. One little change is pretty easy to spot: the lockscreen music controls have been redesigned with an aluminum finish.
Now we’re well aware that this tweak came in the first iOS 6.1 developer beta back in November, but for the many of you who just got 6.1 today, this is something totally new.
It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s nice to see that Apple is still interested in making smaller aesthetic changes to iOS on a regular basis.
Thanks: @RazrMann