News - page 1620

It’s being reported that a new Mac trojan is in the wild, but in truth, it’s pretty hard to infect your machine with it as long as you play it smart.

Samsung’s Android smartphones have this nifty feature that lets you quickly make calls from within contact cards and messages simply by raising the device to your ear. And thanks to a new tweak called RaiseToCall, you can now get the same feature on your jailbroken iPhone.

Apple’s suppliers are to begin shipping components for the next-generation iPhone by the end of May, ready for the handset’s launch during the third-quarter of 2013, according to sources in the supply chain. As suspected, the device won’t be a major upgrade, the sources claim, but rather a “slightly enhanced” version of the iPhone 5 that’s likely to be called the iPhone 5S.

We’ve seen a lot of iPad-enhancing accessories over the last couple of years. Speaker cases like the Belkin Thunderstorm, bring-your-own-keyboard cases like the Incase Origami, and even iPad battery cases. But here’s a new one: DOCKr, an accessory that brings all these advantages together in one Skittle-colored package.

NetNewsWire is a classic RSS reader. It came out on the Mac more than a decade ago, and it’s still used on OS X and iOS. As a staple application in the Mac community, NetNewsWire has remained a fan favorite despite the lack of updates it has received in recent years.

The world of RSS got rocked last week when Google announced that it was killing Google Reader, one of the most-used RSS aggregators on the internet. In the wake of Google Reader’s death sentence, NetNewsWire is about to be reborn.

If it isn’t already obvious: I’m a huge bike nut. I’ve sold bikes, fixed them, raced on them and even slept on one once (hey, cycling is tiring). So I get pretty excited when fellow bike nuts make something ingenious that’ll let my bike haul my Apple gear. Case in point: Timbuk2’s new Basket Case duffel and their Cog Pannier.

Apple has released a big update to GarageBand for iOS that brings support for Audiobus, an iOS app that routes audio between other apps. This means that GarageBand can record and work with other music creation apps from the App Store. You could make a beat in DM1 and bring it right into a multi-track GarageBand project, for instance.

In this latest version of GarageBand you can “turn off grid snapping to get finer control over region and note editing.” A feedback issue has also been resolved.

GarageBand costs $5 in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Good news for BioShock fans: the latest installment of the hit game will be available on the Mac this summer. Aspyr Media has confirmed that BioShock Infinite will be hitting OS X in a couple of months. A specific release date has not been given at this time. The PC and console version will ship on March 26th.

Looking for an alternative to Google Reader? The might I suggest Skimr, a rather minimal web app which will let you read your feeds right there in the browser. It shows your feeds in a big, bright and beautiful single-column list, and when you open a feed it shows you the articles in a similarly cruft-free view.

It’s just about perfect, as long as you don’t have more than a few feeds.

A couple of days ago I showed you two handy jailbreak tweaks for Notification Center. “Compose” and “Kamera” give quick access to Mail, Messages, and the iPhone’s cameras. Along with tweaks like NCSettings, there’s a lot you can do enhance Notification Center on a jailbroken iOS device.

A Cydia tweak called “Tap to Widgets” is one of the most useful Notification Center tools I’ve seen for jailbreakers.

A joint venture company between Philips and Sony called Intertrust, has decided to file a patent infringement suit against Apple, asserting that 15 of the company’s patents have been violated.

Intertrust’s patents cover a range of devices and services for digital restrictions management (DRM) to protect intellectual property.

Withings, the mobile-connected health-monitoring people, have just announced a brand new bathroom scale. Only this isn’t just another scale that’ll Tweet your weight to a disinterested world. It has hookups to monitor not just your body, but also the home you live in.

One of our biggest hopes for iOS 7 is that it will come with a huge update on UI. iOS is starting to look a bit old and everyone’s tired of the skeuomorphic features. It needs some innovative minimalist touches from Jony Ive.

Mohamed Kerroudj has created his own vision for what the iPhone’s Lockscreen should look like. The linen backgrounds have been replaced by flat white surfaces, but what’s better is you can actually respond to message right from Notification Center, or trash them, or schedule a date in your Calendar, or toggle your Wifi. It’d be great.

Take a look:

Tap Tap See is a camera app for blind people. Sure, any partially or non-sighted person could just snap bad, out-of-focus pictures of their shoes, or of the backs of their friends heads, with any camera app. But only Tap Tap See will then say to them, out loud, “Shoes,” or “Head.”

You see, Tap Tap See is like a sighted assistant that never grow tired of you asking “what’s that?”

WWDC 2012 sold out in under two hours last year. It was insane. A lot of people on the West Coast didn’t even get a chance to buy a ticket because Apple announced tickets were available at 5am.

Everyone who’s really wanting to go to WWDC this year is probably looking for the best method to alert them on tickets, so Oisin Prendiville has created a service that will call you as soon as tickets are available.

Wacom has announced a new baby Cintiq graphics tablet. The new 13-inch model joins the plus-sized 22 and 24-inchers in the lineup, and will let travelling designers and artists work on the go.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets have been some of the best competition to the iPad, mostly because they’re cheap but come with good software. It seems like Amazon would sell the Kindle for as cheap as possible if it meant taking a slice of Apple’s pie.

Earlier this morning, a rumor was floated by TechCrunch that Amazon is making a $99 tablet to compete with the iPad mini. It sounded crazy at the time because the Kindle Fire is already $130 cheaper than the iPad mini. Turns out that the rumor was too good to be true and Amazon’s already shot it down.

iOS 6.1 had not one, but two security exploits that allowed an attacker to bypass an iPhone’s lockscreen to gain access to a users’ data. Apple finally patched up those two holes yesterday with the iOS 6.1.3 update, yet the new version of iOS contains another passcode security flaw.

Using the iPhone’s Control feature, attackers can still bypass your lockscreen. The good news is that the new lockscreen exploit only works on iPhone 4 units right now.

Gramatica is just about the nicest Instagram-browser app I have yet seen. It’s essential on the iPad mini, on which the official Instagram app looks hideous thanks to the mini’s refusal to display Retina assets. And on the iPhone it’s even better than the Instagram app, thanks to its full-width pictures and fantastic gestural controls.

Meet Trygger, a new polarizing lens for the iPhone 5 that was born on Kickstarter and aims to provide you with better smartphone snaps. The device clips onto your handset in an instant, then removes unwanted glare and reflections and makes your images sharper and more vibrant. 

Depending on how well it works for you, the Apple Store app’s EasyPay system is either a dream of a convenience or a total nightmare that ends up getting you arrested. And now a similar experience is rolling out to over 200 Walmarts nationwide.

If you ever tried to explain Instapaper (or any other read-later app) to a “straight” (non-nerd) friend or family member, you’ll know why Apple added a reading list to Safari. Even without the terrible experience of adding a javascript bookmarklet to Mobile Safari, Instapaper requires way too many steps: save page; remember to open Instapaper before the internet goes off to load that saved page; remember to read.

Safari, on the other hand, just saves the page inside Safari. That’s it.

And so Amazon is now simplifying Instapaper’s Send to Kindle feature, allowing you to send a web page to your Kindle with one click.

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has today approved Apple’s application for a registered trademark for “iAd,” 21 months after the Cupertino company first applied for it.

What if Siri tried to kill you? That’s the plot of a new Dutch horror film called App that features a malevolent Siri clone called IRIS (get it?) that starts killing people. And as a cool twist, App allows you to download a free app to use while you watch the film.

Amazon hasn’t been able to beat the iPad in terms of features, apps or build quality, but the ace up the online retail giant’s sleeve was always the price: at just $199 for the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, getting Amazon’s tablet is at least $130 cheaper than Apple’s cheapest iPad mini.

Undercutting Apple on price, then, is the major way Amazon is competing ith Apple in the tablet space, and a new report suggests they are about to take that even further with the release of a $99 Kindle Fire.