News - page 1695

Every year Oprah Winfrey makes a list of her favorite things in life and then she gives everyone in her audience free copies of everything on her list. When you got a few billion to burn you can do that. One year Oprah said she just loooooved the iPad. Like, she said the iPad was the greatest thing ever, and middle-aged women across the country wept with joy. Now, she’s saying she’s totally off that and onto the next cool tablet – The Microsoft Surface.

Yesterday, Oprah tweeted: “Gotta say love that SURFACE! Have bought 12 already for Christmas gifts. #FavoriteThings” Thing is, Oprah tweeted about her love for the Surface from her iPad. So you know, I guess you can love an object that you never use. That’s cool. Well played Oprah.

Source: Twitter

A year after Steve Jobs’ passing, the yacht he had been working on with famed French designer Philippe Starck finally made it out to sea. Venus is a beautiful ship that conforms to all of Steve Jobs’ philosophies on minimalist design, and it reveals a lot about Steve Jobs’ design process. that took five years to build.

The entire project took five yeas to complete as Jobs and Starck perfected the design of the yacht millimeter by millimeter. In a recent interview, Philippe Starck explains what it was like to work on designing the yacht with Steve Jobs and what the design says about Jobs’ design process.

There have been a few rumors over the last week or two claiming that Apple’s new ultra-thin iMacs won’t be available in stores until 2013 due to production issues with the display and other components.

Rumors of the delay are probably false though, as a new report claims production is still on track for 2012, but initial supply will be fairly low.

With Mac OS X now in its ninth edition, one of the biggest hurdles Apple must overcome for its OS X 10.9 release is which cool cat it will be named after. We’ve had Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion so far. So what next?

Well, according to one rumor, it’ll be named OS X 10.9 Lynx. But we’re a little skeptical.

As everyone who has ever read J.R.R. Tolkein’s classic fantasy novel, The Hobbit, knows, Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf, Thorin Oakshield and a company of twelve other dwarves make their way from Bag’s End to the Lonely Mountan to battle Smaug on a journey by way of Rivendell, the Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains.

Here’s what the actual trip looked like. Thank goodness they didn’t trust iOS 6 Maps as their navigator, right?

Via: Bullz-Eye

AuthenTec, the mobile security solutions company that was acquired by Apple back in July, has sold off its part of its business. The devision that supplies embedded security solutions and encryption algorithms to the likes of LG, Motorola, Samsung, and Nokia has been acquired by NFC specialists Inside Secure for $48 million.

Right now, if Apple sticks with a yearly product release cycle, all of Cupertino’s major products are scheduled to debut next year in October. The iPhone 5S. The iPad mini 2. The iPad 5. New iPod Touch. New iMacs. New MacBooks. All released right before Christmas.

It’s hard to believe that Apple would actually release all of their new products in October next year, though. It not only makes for a boring road map, but it positions all of Apple’s new products during the most expensive holiday of the year: if people want to get, say, a new iPhone and an iPad next year, they might have to choose one or the other, instead of getting both at launch during a more staggered road map.

That’s why there’s something about the latest Digitimes report that makes sense to me: they say the iPhone 5S and next-gen iPad will come out in the middle of next year, or around June or July.

Lightning might be the connector of the future, and quite frankly it already seems absurd to me that I have to plug Apple’s huge old 30-pin dock connector into my little last-gen Nano just to charge it, but the oversized, hard-to-insert adapter will be hanging around for as long as people still have their perfectly good last-gen iDevices.

And Tylt’s Band Wall Charger looks to be a rather excellent charger for you luddites out there.

President Barack Obama has called Apple CEO Tim Cook alongside other Fortune 500 chiefs to discuss economic growth and the looming “fiscal cliff.”

Android users got a bit of a surprise over the weekend when they opened up Google Play to find a number of popular Apple apps had been ported to their devices. Apps like Garageband, iMovie, iPhoto, and the iWork productivity suite were all available to download for a brief period before they were pulled again.

Those who managed to purchase them before they disappeared, however, quickly found out that they were not the real thing. Surprise, surprise.

These paper notepads are ideal. No, seriously: They’re called iDeal Notepads, they come sized to match your iPad or your iPhone, and they’re designed to be strapped to their partner device with rubber bands.

Can you imagine being this poor Apple Store specialist, Mr. Sam Sung? The glowers of suspicion, the titters of ridicule he must have to endure? But he’ll show them. He’ll show them all as he conducts his job with ruthless efficiency, schooling Apple Store customer after Apple Store customer in his way of doing things. The Sam Sung Way.

Source: The Loop

An airport worker accused of being an accomplice in a recent robbery at JFK airport that resulted in over $1.5 million worth of iPad minis being stolen has been arrested.

Apple’s App Store first made its debut on the iPhone 3G back in July 2008, much to the delight of iPhone owners whose only taste of third-party software prior to that was with web apps. Now, just over four years on, it has received more than 1 million app submissions.

There’s a point at which a cover becomes the main attraction. Iron Man’s suit is clearly a suit. But Ripley’s Power Loader? I’d argue that it’s a mini crane with a clever, human-shaped cockpit. And so it is with the ORA, which claims to be an iPad case but is in fact a miniature theater. A miniature theater into which the iPad can be clipped.

AC/DC is one of the highest-grossing bands of all time, but until today, you would have struggled to find their music in digital form via any legal means. Why? They were one of the last great iTunes holdout bands, refusing to sell their music online in order to preserve the hallowed “album” format. Looks like they finally realized the battle’s lost, though. Now the Australian hard rockers have finally released their entire back catalog to the iTunes Store.

Loren Britcher’s hit word game Letterpress has received its first major update in the iOS App Store. The game that forced us all to actually use Game Center has been given a number of improvements and bug fixes, including the ability to request a rematch.

The thermonuclear patent war may have a silver lining under its mushroom cloud thanks to some recent talks between Apple and Google’s Motorola Mobility. It appears the two companies are seriously considering putting and end to their global patent disputes via arbitration.

Launched in February of 2009, OpenFeint was the first useful leader board and multiplayer matching service for iOS games. It was originally developed by Jason Citron’s Aurora Feint development team, and went on to become an SDK that iOS, and later Android, developers could include in their mobile games without having to build their own multiplayer, leader board, or achievement system.

In 2011, social gaming company GREE purchased OpenFeint for a reported $104 million.

Today, GREE announced that OpenFeint will no longer be supported, and that the service will end on December 14, 2012.

Aspyr Media, one of the top Mac game porting houses, has released new downloadable content (DLC) for the Mac version of Call of Duty: Black Ops. Titled Annihilation & Escalation, the pack includes eight new multiplayer maps along with two new zombie levels–a fan favorite.

The maps included are Hangar 18, Drive-In, Silo, Hazard, Hotel, and more, each with its own distinct environment and tactical advantages.

What goes up must come down, in physics and in investment. Stock prices for Apple have hit a low recently, down about a fourth of it’s value. Analysts believe that upcoming taxes on capital gains and investment dividends have stock holders rushing to get rid of as much as they can to avoid record tax hikes.

“No individual investment can defy gravity,” said the deputy chief investment officer for Wells Fargo, Erik Davidson.

Apple has just sent out the following Email to OS X Lion users, alerting them that the Messages Beta program for OS X Lion will end on December 14th. Messages for Mac, originally launched as a beta application before the release of OS X Mountain Lion, was available for free to users until it officially launched as part of 10.8 in summer.

Last month we told you that Twelve South’s popular BookBook case would be available for the iPhone 5 sometime in November. Twelve South has now lifted the curtain on its newest case, and you can order your own online now. The first batch of orders will be sent out Monday.

And yes, the BookBook finally has a hole for the iPhone 5’s rear camera.

Back in October of 2010, iOS developer Applidium brought VideoLAN’s legendary VLC media player to the App Store. Unfortunately, the universal app had a short shelf life, as it was pulled at the request of VideoLAN a few months later. The issue revolved around VLC’s General Public License (GPL) licensing agreement. Because VLC is open source software, it was technically illegal for Applidium to sell a port in Apple’s DRM-restricted App Store.

Fast forward more than a year later, and a change in VideoLAN’s licensing means that VLC can be legally brought back to the App Store in all of its glory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GIFdBp8rbtA

This video of a young Jonathan Ive talking about the design of the famous 20th Anniversary Macintoshi back in 1997 is hypnotic for a number of reasons.

At first, it’s just kind of cute, watching Jony Ive standing next to this bulky plastic all-in-one and talking about it with the same intensity as he would talk about designing the iPhone 5, but then you get sucked in, and despite your first impressions actually starting to appreciate what he was trying to accomplish, and see the same echoes and reiterated design philosophies extending forward in time, right down to the latest iMacs. Everything Ive was trying to do then, he’s still trying to do with Apple’s latest products.

Via: iPhone in Canada