When I first got my iPhone 5, I was desperate for a dock. As time has passed, and as the iPhone has picked up a few scratches and dents, I find I don’t really care anymore whether the phone is docked or not when it charges.
And I expect I’ll soon be saying the same about my new iPad mini. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need a place to prop it, especially when watching movies. Which is why I’m pretty impressed by Swedish Peter’s Ikea hack, which turns the Ribba picture ledge into a tablet stand.
Alien Skin makes the human-like disguises that the lizard creatures in “V” used to pass themselves off as humans, and… Kidding! Alien Skin makes high-end Photoshop plugins and Mac photo-processing software. It also makes an iPhone app called Alt Photo, which distills the features of its desktop app Exposure into an iPhone-sized package.
And now it is free.
Over the last few years we’ve seen all manner of Apple and iPhone shaped deserts, but this one takes the cake (zing!). It’s the most detailed iPhone cake we’ve ever seen, and it probably owes a lot of its beauty to the magic of fondant. It’s a cake even Jony Ive would be proud of. And the Happy Birthday reminder on the screen adds a perfect flourish.
Source: Facebook
Thanks: Grahame
Brett Terpstra, the hardest working nerd on the internet, has come up with yet another super-useful single-serve utility. It’s called Clip Text File, and it grabs the contents of a plain text file and copies it to your clipboard, all without opening the file.
Even though Apple’s headquartered in Cupertino, they’ve got operations all across the globe, and we don’t mean just retail stores. There have been rumors that Apple is opening up an R&D center in Israel, but according to a new rumor, that’s not the only place they’re considering.
Tim Cook recently talked to the mayor of Beijing, Wang Ashun, about the possibility of Apple opening an R&D center in Beijing.
It’s winter. It’s probably cold where you live. Running outside to start your car is probably one of the most dreadful experiences you have every morning, and then you gotta sit in your cold car for a few minutes before the heat really kicks in. You’re shivering. Trying to drive faster. And it all just sucks.
You could buy one of those remote ignitions, but then you gotta carry around an extra block on your keychain, and its range isn’t so great. Will O’Brien came up with a better idea – starting your car with your iPhone by sending it an SMS. It’s brilliant, and anyone can replicate his hack.
Analog media are great and all – vinyl, film, paper – but they all suffer by living in a non-connected vacuum. Lomo’s new Kickstarter project aims to fix that, for film photos at least, by turning your iPhone into a 35mm film and slide scanner.
Finally, you can post photographs with genuine light-leaks straight to your Instagram.
Apple got sued by the Swiss Federal Railway Service in October over use of their clock-face, and now another European railway has decided they want some money from Apple too.
Russian Railways has filed a trademark lawsuit against Apple for about $65,000 (2 million roubles). The reason behind the lawsuit isn’t really clear at this point, but it’s been speculated that Russian Railways is mad about people using their logo in the App Store without permission.
Awhile back we showed you a great concept for a redesigned iOS Notes app. The concept was part of Cult of Mac reader and designer Adrian Maciburko’s iOS 7 “Crystal Interface” idea. Now Maciburko has shared a redesigned Game Center interface that does away with the skeuomorphism in iOS 6. No more woodgrain or felt textures.
I have no idea what it’s like to try to use an iPhone when you have super long fingernails, but I have seen a bunch of women try to stab away at their screens like they’re Freddy Krueger. Your fingernail is not a stylus, but it could become one very soon.
Tech Tips is making a new product that will turn your fingernails into a conductive stylus, so you can stop looking so weird when you’re trying to send a text message.
Although Apple has already combined blockchain and retail for some time now to maintain a smooth flow of their entire process and also keep track of everything, they must now overhaul its supply chain in a bid to make its iPhone cheaper and meet the demand of low-cost smartphones in emerging markets, according to former CEO John Sculley. The Cupertino company has enjoyed plenty of success with the device in the United States and Europe, but Sculley feels that going forward, Apple will need to depend on growth in emerging markets, where the handset’s premium price tag just won’t work.
A lot of companies have tried to imitate Apple’s trackpads because they kind of just melt into the rest of computer. They’re one of the most underrated features of the MacBook, but it’s going to be harder for companies to completely ripoff the feature now that Apple has a patent on it.
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has cut its iPhone 5 component orders by as much as half following “weaker-than-expected” demand for device. The news sent Apple’s stock price plummeting, but according to some analysts, there’s nothing to worry about. iPhone 5 demand is doing just fine, according to Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu, and the component cuts are in no way related to poor demand.
Apple’s AppleCare Protection Plan has come under fire once again in Europe after Test-Aankoop/Test-Achats, a Belgian consumer watchdog, filed a complaint against the way in which the Cupertino company markets the product in Europe.
Customers within the European Union are entitled to a free two-year warranty with any consumer electronics purchase, but Test-Aankoop/Test-Achats claims that Apple’s warranty marketing doesn’t properly explain these rights to Belgian shoppers.
Apple’s Back to School promotion has begun in Australia and New Zealand ahead of the new school year. Like previous years, the promotion offers a free gift card with new Macs and iOS devices purchased for education, and it’s open to students, parents, and teachers. This year’s deal includes the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, the iMac and the Mac Pro, and the iPad with Retina display.
Poster, arguably the best WordPress blogging app for iOS, has received a major new update today, which adds a ton of new features and improvements. In addition to support for custom post types, version 2.0 brings the ability to edit a post’s excerpt and insert images anywhere you like, and the option to remove a post’s featured image. Check out the update notes below for the full list of changes and improvements.
Facebook is set to hold a press event later today, and it appears the whole thing’s going to be a massive kick in the teeth for Google. Not only is the social network expected to unveil its own smartphone, possibly powered by its own platform, but it’s also expected to hit Google where it really hurts — in search. Rumor has it the company will unveil its own search engine, which will rollout to users “very soon.”
Rumors of a cheaper, budget iPhone have been picking up steam in recent weeks. After the infamous Digitimes reported that Apple was gearing up to launch a low-cost iPhone later this year, mainstream publications like The Wall Street Journal chimed in with their own confirmations. Apple is “weighing retail prices of $99 to $149” for the unannounced device, according to Bloomberg.
Now Digitimes is saying that Apple could use plastic instead of metal or glass to cut costs for this new “entry-level” iPhone.
DeNA, the social gaming company that now owns ngmoco, just launched a new, free, 8-bit retro role-playing game, D.O.T. Defender of Texel, to the iTunes App Store and the Google Play store.
Texel is a world made of dots, at the end of a wormhole, waiting for you to jump in and save the world. The battles are turn-based, and you choose who will fight each battle by swiping across a grid of characters to place your fighters on the battle field.
Do you use Markdown to write for the web, or for publishing? And does it drive you crazy that every time you search through the Finder for your documents, you have to open them up in a text editor just to see which one is which?
Sure, you could use meaningful file names to identify them, but who has time for that? What you need is QLMarkdown, a neat Quick Look plugin for the Mac.
NEWSFLASH: Teens don’t want the iPhone! Parents beware! The Microsoft Surface and Samsung Galaxy phones are the new “it” things! Apple has lost its cool factor!!!
That’s what the Buzz Marketing Group, an organization that seeks to provide “lifestyle and buzz marketing services for brands seeking to attract teen audiences,” wants you to think. You may have recently seen some headlines from big sites saying that teens think Apple is uncool now.
As my British boss Leander Kahney would say, that’s absolute bollocks.
As we all know, sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. You can usually tell when an idea is a winner because it seems so obvious that somebody should have made it already. And the Tethercell is one of these ideas: it’s a remote control battery that will let you switch any AA-powered device on and off from your iPhone.
Apple just sent out a press release confirming that cellular models of the iPad mini and fourth-gen iPad will officially go on sale in China this Friday, January 15th. During a trip to China last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that WiFi + Cellular models of the company’s newest iPads would arrive this month. The WiFi-only versions went on sale December 7th, a little over a month after U.S. sales began.
According to the manufacturer Teenage Engineering, the original OD-11 speaker was hot stuff in Sweden in the 1970s. The OD-11 was a cube which packed an amp, subwoofer and speaker into one box, and it sold over 100,000 pairs in Sweden alone.
Now it’s back. The new version is called the Cloud Speaker, and it packs Wi-Fi and Bluetooth along with all the rest.
$100 might seem like a crazy amount to spend on an iPhone case, but if you paid around €850 ($1,140) for an unlocked iPhone 5 like I did, then it actually seems like a pretty good investment to protect your, uh, other investment.
And coincidentally, $100 is exactly what you’ll pay for Otterbox’s Armor series case, billed as “The toughest case ever built.”