BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Bluetooth speakers are great in the kitchen. But the the Josiah from Kwamecorp is possibly the best kitchen speaker ever. Not only does its beautifully minimal styling fit right into any kitchen, but it’s fashioned from ceramic, and can even act as a snack tray.
We say “might,” because we haven’t tested it yet; but sandwiched between the hard exterior shell of Incase’s new Chisel case and the iPhone it protects is a second, soft case with a secret ingredient called Poron XRD — a material we’ve found almost unbelievably excellent at absorbing impact energy.
After texting on the iPhone for awhile, you get used to seeing the “…” bubble mid-conversation. Whenever someone with iMessage is typing to you, the ellipsis bubble appears in that thread of the Message app. It helps you know that whoever you’re talking to is about to respond, and it also gives people away when they choose to start an iMessage and then stop.
What if you could see when someone was sending you an iMessage no matter where you are in iOS? The iPhone’s status bar would be the perfect place to display such a notifier, wouldn’t it?
Today Amazon updated its Cloud Player iOS app with full support for the iPad. Amazon’s music streaming and storage service got its own iPhone app last summer, and now the app has been made universal with an interface that’s optimized for the iPad’s larger display.
With Cloud Player on the iPad, Amazon customers can stream music and download tracks to play offline. The app displays larger album artwork while music is playing, and it retains the same look and feel of the iPhone version.
Even though Steve Jobs gets credit for making the gutsy move to open Apple retail stores across the country, Ron Johnson deserves a lot of praise for the Apple Store’s success.
Johnson’s vision helped Steve create the most successful chain of retails stores on the planet. Then Johnson left to become the CEO of JC Penny, where he’s faced some heavy criticism for his efforts to revitalize the brand. According to Apple’s old marketing guru Ken Segall, Ron is a visionary in his own right, and he’s transforming JC Penny just like Steve Jobs transformed Apple.
At today’s Apple Shareholders Meeting, CEO Tim Cook admitted that Apple was “looking at new product categories” but that the company had no interest in just “pressing a button or two” to have Apple make the most products.
Steve Jobs pitched the idea of an Apple spaceship-like campus in the summer of 2011. He said that the project would be completed by 2015, but there have been a couple delays that have pushed the project back a little farther.
During today’s annual shareholders meeting, Tim Cook addressed the reports that the new campus won’t be ready in 2015, and said that they should break ground soon and be ready to move in by 2016.
Apple hosted its annual shareholder meeting today at Apple HQ in Cupertino. There were some big rumors yesterday that Tim Cook would announce a stock split during the meeting, but that never actually happened.
At this years shareholder’s meeting, all the board members were re-elected, and Tim Cook got 99.1% of investor approval. There were two proposals put to vote that Apple did not support, but both of those were struck down too.
Heads up! If you use Amazon’s Kindle app for the iPhone or iPad, don’t hit update! The new 3.6.1 update will, if installed, delete your entire book library from your device. Amazon’s working on the problem, and for a problem of this magnitude, expect a quick fix.
Update: And it’s now been fixed!
Back in November, we reviewed PanoPerfect, an iPhone app that let you easily share panoramas right from your phone. Today, the developers behind PanoPerfect, HalfPeeled LLC, released an all new iPad version of PanoPerfect, along with a web client.
The company Twelve South, which is well known for making iPhone and iPad cases that look like old books, has come out with a BookBook cover for the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
The cover protects your MacBook Pro with too hardback covers enclosed in genuine leather, plus a cushioned interior. It’s all enclosed with a zipper.
You can use the MacBook with the case still on, or remove it.
There’s a BookBook cover for the 13-inch and also the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It’s available now for $79.99.
The company also makes a BookBook for the MacBook Pro.
It was only yesterday that we found out that music streaming apps like Spotify and Rdio are helping kill music piracy, as the music industry reported that global revenue rose in 2012 for the first time in 13 years.
Well, according to a different report that crunched some serious numbers, Apple’s iTunes Store played a big part in the music industry’s growth, by accounting for 60 percent of global digital music revenues.
Apple’s always looking to miniaturize its gadgets down to the slimmest, smallest form factor possible, which is why the venerable iOS home button is such a conspicuous space waster: although the button grounds users in the iOS operating system, it’s also a fairly big and bulky element of the front of the device.
According to Peter Zigich in his new concepts for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 mini and iPhone 6 Maxi, Apple should just eliminate it from the front of the device to make way for a nearly bezel-less screen. Bizarrely, though, he thinks it should be shifted to the lower left hand side of the device, in a lower location on each side.
Last week we asked you guys to show us just how amazing you can make your iPhone look with tweaks and hacks for the homescreen and lockscreen, and boy were we impressed. We received over 100 entries in the jailbreaking contest and pretty much all of them were spectacular.
To celebrate the launch of our new Flickr and Instagram groups, we’re giving the 10 best jailbreak screens a free copy of Kuvva Wallpapers. After some serious deliberation, we think we’ve got some drool-worthy winners.
Here are the 10 most amazing jailbreak screens:
Apple is an LGBT-friendly company that embraces all sorts of people as long as they are committed to excellence, so it’s bracing to see that they are urging the Supreme Court to support legalizing gay marriage.
The Leap Motion controller could very well be the future of modern desktop computing. It could also just be a really cool invention that is too ahead of its time. We’ll find out in the near future. An exact shipping date has been announced.
After previously saying that it would ship in early 2013, the folks behind Leap Motion have confirmed that the device will start shipping on May 13th to customers who already pre-ordered online. Everyone will be able to pick the Leap Motion up in Best Buy stores around the country May 19th.
Too cheap to actually buy Tweetbot, Tapbot’s awesome Twitter app for iPhone, iPad and Mac? Are you pirating it despite the fact that it only costs a couple bucks, and Tweetbot has a limited number of tokens that it can distribute before Twitter says they can’t sell their client anymore?
Well, Tweetbot’s not going to force you to do anything, but they have started autofilling the Tweet box in its iOS app to publically broadcast that they are no-good, dirty pirates.
Spotify has released a major update to its iPhone app that introduces a couple of nice user interface changes.
The app now features a sidebar that can be accessed by swiping from left to right, like Facebook’s iOS app. From the new sidebar menu you can quickly access search, new releases, radio, playlists, your inbox, friends list, and settings. You can swipe to reveal the left sidebar anywhere in the app expect when a song is filling the screen.
There have been a lot of theories floated for why Foxconn froze new hires earlier this month. Early rumors suggested that iPhone 5 production had slowed, while later reports said that Apple’s new measures to improve working conditions had caused fewer workers than usual to abandon their posts over Chinese New Year.
Now there’s a new theory: Foxconn’s getting out of China, at least in part.
Remember the Socialmatic concept camera? It was an Instagram icon made flesh, and it worked just like a Polaroid, spitting out a printed version of your filtered and light-leaked image.
Now, after extensive boardroom wrangling no doubt, the camera will actually become a real shipping product, and it’ll carry the Polaroid brand.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – I’m willing to bet that you have – at some point – been frustrated by the App Store. More specifically, you have been driven crazy trying to find apps via search. Even apps which you know are there, which you have used before, and about which you know almost everything but their names.
Quixey is a search engine for Apps, and it will ease your App Store pain.
It had to happen eventually: Photoshop for your phone. As of today you can buy Photoshop Touch for the iPhone and Android, and it pretty much does everything you can do on the iPad version.
Major League Baseball announced that it will be tripling the number of stadiums that will start accepting tickets from Apple’s Passbook app, with thirteen new stadiums coming online to enable paperless, Passbook ticketing, an increase from four stadiums that could do so last season.
Teams that will begin to accept tickets through the Passbook app include the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland A’s, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs, with the New York Mets, San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals continuing to accept paperless tickets this way. MLB mentioned that there are three more teams ready to go Passbook, but did not specify which ones.
While you may chalk up any pro-Apple sentiment here as only true to form, it’s perhaps even more telling when there’s another, more impartial group, claiming an Apple win.
Good Technology is one such independent group. The company provides mobile device, app, and data security to over 4000 customers, including banks, healthcare organizations, governments, and retailers. They also do a quarterly Device Activation Report, which looks at the type of mobile devices and uses in the Enterprise. The Q4 report, released today, details which and how many smartphone and tablet devices were activated by Good Technology’s enterprise customers.
Guess what they found? Hint: it’s in the headline.
