When it comes to buying a smartphone right now, there are pretty much only two choices – Android or iPhone. Yeah, you could go buy a Windows Phone or a BlackBerry if you really want to, but no one else is.
Both the iPhone and Android ecosystems are growing so fast that competitors can’t catch up. According to the latest figures from Strategy Analytics, 92% of all global smartphone shipments in Q4 of 2012 where either an iPhone or Android.
ANAHEIM, Calif. – Jammit has been here at the NAMM show before, showing off its educational app to teach people how to play the guitar, bass, drum and vocal tracks of popular songs.
What’s new this year is the company has teamed with Line 6, makers of effect-laden amplifiers, to give iOS devices a genuine guitar sound. So if you are playing along to Nirvana or Sublime or Rush, the Line 6 connector will make you sound like those songs, and you don’t have to worry about fiddling with your guitar to get Kurt Cobain or Alex Lifeson’s unique tone.
Jammit lets you play along to your favorite songs, removing the instrument you are playing so you don’t have to play over it. You can isolate the parts, loop them to learn them, and even record yourself playing with the band. The app is free on the App Store, but songs, licensed from the artists, cost $2.99 and up. The Jammit song store has more than 1,200 titles.
You don't have to jailbreak to give your iPhone a little extra personality.
You should never steal an iPhone while wearing pink shoes. It doesn’t sound like a piece of vital information, but in the hard streets of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park it is, because those pink little things are going to get you caught.
One thief learned that lesson the hard way, after he stole an iPhone from a girl, and then the iPhone he stole was stolen, and then both of them got busted. It’s a crazy story, but it goes something like this:
Following up on their earlier reports about the cheaper iPhone, iLounge’s Jeremy Horowitz has followed up with details about what the rumored “budget” iPhone would look like: basically, just like an iPhone 5, but with a largely plastic casing and the rounded corners of an iPod classic.
ANAHEIM, Calif. – IK Multimedia has a number of Apple devices for musicians and is expanding some of them to other iOS devices. One example is iRig HD for iPad, a high definition audio recorder that makes quality recordings of vocals or acoustic audio.
iRig HD does a 24-bit A/D conversion for a signal free of background noise or crosstalk. An onboard gain control allows you to find the idea distance for the microphone to get the cleanest recording at the best audio levels.
iRig is already available for iPhone, iPod Touch and Mac. Pricing for the HD model is not available yet.
You don't have to jailbreak to give your iPhone a little extra personality.
Jailbreaking your iPhone gives you the ability to tweak and customize nearly every facet of iOS, but new jailbreaks are few and far between these days. For example, there still hasn’t been a full jailbreak for iOS 6 from last summer, although one is on the distant horizon.
People jailbreak their iPhones for all sorts of reasons, whether it be free tethering, themes, or quick access to settings. The most common reason to jailbreak is actually more of a philosophy. There are millions of iPhone owners out there who want to be able to have greater control over their iOS experience. What if you want to hide stock apps you don’t use, or even just get rid of your carrier logo?
Fortunately, you can actually do those last two things on a non-jailbroken iPhone with relative ease, and here’s how:
Ashton Kutcher played Steve Jobs in 2013 biopic. Photo: Jobs movie
Even though many people idolize Steve Jobs and the role he played in the tech industry, his dietary habits are not for the faint of heart.
While preparing to play Steve Jobs in his new movie JOBS, Ashton Kutcher decided he should try to walk, talk and even eat like Steve Jobs to fully embrace the role. It sounds like a good idea, except following Steve Jobs’ diet gave Kutcher’s pancreas all sorts of problems and he wound up in the hospital two days before the movie started.
The City of Shanghai has just confirmed via the Municipal Commission of Commerce that Apple will be opening a research and development center this summer.
We’ve been waiting a long time for an iOS 6 jailbreak to be released, and hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer. The iOS 6.1 jailbreak sounds like it’s going to be awesome because almost everyone will be able to use it, and it will be an untethered jailbreak which is always nice.
Making things even better, Evad3rs, the team behind the upcoming jailbreak, let it be known today that the upcoming iOS 6.1 untethered jailbreak will work on every device that can run iOS 6.1. That’s a whopping 22 devices in total, and maybe even 23 if the Apple TV 2 update is out in time.
Fed up with waiting to get yourself one of Apple’s new, super-slim iMacs? It looks like Apple’s finally making them faster, and supply constraints will soon be easing up accordingly.
This is fantastic. The block-based building game Minecraft has been used to recreate pretty much everything under the sun, from the U.S.S. Enterprise to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, but for the Apple fan, this is the best one yet: a complete recreation of Apple’s Infinite Loop campus put together by Reddit user Sam Schwab for his Discrete Mathematics class.
On our recent Cult of Mac outing CES in Las Vegas, I introduced a few of your favorite writers to TripIt the fantastic trip organizing app/service. But sometimes you just need to know a little bit about your flights, your hotel, or where to eat. Enter Travel Essentials, an iPhone app that does just that, and does it beautifully.
Josh Gad played Woz in the 2013 Ashton Kutcher movie, Wozniak called "crap". Photo:
Reviews of the new JOBS movie starring Ashton Kutcher are mixed, but Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s sentiments about the film are certainly not. After the first clip of JOBS surfaced, Woz was quick to say that the scene portrayed never actually happened. That isn’t a surprise considering how Hollywood reconstructs history for narrative’s sake, but Woz’s also said that the portrayed personalities were “very wrong.”
Now it has been revealed that the makers of JOBS approached Woz to help with the project in its early stages, but he turned them down because the script was total “crap.”
Apple has released its fifth beta for iOS 6.1 to registered developers. Since the fourth beta was set to expire Monday, we were expecting Apple to seed a new release yesterday or Monday. Instead, the company has uncharacteristically seeded the new software on a Saturday. iOS 6.1 beta 4 was seeded on December 17th, 2012.
Everyone has been expecting the final iOS 6.1 GM build to arrive any day now, but Apple is still obviously pushing out betas. When the GM version does come out for devs, then a public release is not far behind.
A beta version of iOS has never gone past 7 beta revisions in years, and each version is usually about a month apart. That would put 6.1 on track for hitting beta 7 sometime around March, which happens to be around the time that Apple usually holds a press event.
Back in 2011, an app called iMAME surfaced in the App Store that allowed you to run thousands of classic arcade titles by sideloading the games onto an iOS device. Apple has never really allowed emulators in the App Store, and iMAME was swiftly pulled.
Now another app has crept into the App Store that allows you to emulate old games. It likely won’t be in the App Store long, so get it while you can!
Buck’s of Woodside doesn’t just serve eggs or coffee or toast. It serves you biomechanical sharks and surfing crocodiles. Sometimes, it even serves you up a photograph of Steve Jobs so incredible, so deserved of being considered iconic, that you simply can’t believe that no one has ever even heard of it. But for twenty-three years, no one has.
I can see myself spilling a cappuccino all over my iPhone screen with this thing.
Sometimes you see product concepts that straight blow your mind or make you scratch your head. The UpperCup does both.
This iPhone case comes from Amsterdam-based company Natwerk, and the creators are trying to raise $25,000 on Indiegogo to begin production. It will retail for $35, and backers get $5 off.
Anything that closely examines Steve Jobs’s life is bound to be controversial, and this movie has had a storm of anticipation swirling about it for quite some time. Does Kutcher give Steve Jobs a portrayal that’s engaging, and more importantly, believable?
Actor Ashton Kutcher tweeted out this photo from Sundance, where his new JOBS biopic is premiering. It’s a montage of Kutcher and the iconic picture of the older Steve Jobs. It’s an uncanny picture.
For the first time, we’re rolling our weekly must-have apps and games features into one to make them a little easier to digest. Kicking off this week’s roundup is an awesome new Ghostbusters game in which you’ll be freeing New York City from some creepy spooks and spirits. We also have a brand new video sharing app from Twitter called Vine, a great little app that’ll help you pack for your next trip, and more. Read on for this week’s best iOS releases.
Draw your own gear? Fight huge monsters? Yes, please.
Artizens is raising money on Kickstarter right now, and to judge by the funding activity, it looks like the Kickstarter community is as excited about the potential of this upcoming game as I am, as the project has already gathered over half of its $30,000 goal with 23 days to go.
The game looks like a side-scrolling platform gam, with shades of Shadow of the Colossus, with giant creatures to overcome by co-operative teams of players, each of whom will be able to create their own characters and gear. The gear creation here is unique, with materials for the armor and weapons gathered from the defeated monsters, and the look and feel of the objects created by…drawing them.
While we’ve been looking at various new ways to interact with sheet music on the iPad at the 2013 NAMM show this week, here’s an app that takes sheet music and brings an entire orchestra along for the ride.
You can take this free iPad app out for a spin and it will turn the page for you as well as let you play along with Piano, Cello, Violin, Viola, Guitar, Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Recorder, Clarinet, Trumpet, Saxophone, Horn, or Voice. Calling this “augmented sheet music,” the app brings the same service from the Weezic website to your iPad in a native app.
Every creative person knows that inspiration can come at inopportune moments. So what if you don’t have an instrument or sheet music handy when a great song pops into your head?
NoteFlight is a service that will give you access to sheet music any time and on any device. Company reps say they aim to be “the Google Docs of sheet music” in that regard.