News - page 1735

Apple released a small Java update for OS X users this Wednesday. The update effectively removed the Java applet plug-in that typically comes pre-installed in all web browsers on the Mac. Why? Well, Apple has been trying to distance itself from Java for quite some time, mainly due to the fact that most malware spreads via Java vulnerabilities.

Take the recent Flashback trojan, for example. Millions of Macs were comprised because hackers were able to exploit a security vulnerability in Java on the browser. You could visit a bad site with a corrupt Java applet and get infected. After this week’s update, Java is no longer included in browsers like Safari.

There are few jailbreak hackers in the world regarded as highly as Nicholas Allegra, also known as “comex.” In the earlier days of iOS, Allegra released JailbreakMe, the first and only web-based jailbreak of its kind. He has worked on numerous jailbreaks throughout the years, but recently he’s been working off the radar.

Allegra has been in hiding for the last year because of Apple. The 20-year-old Brown student’s expertise in iOS security was noticed by the all-seeing eye of Cupertino last August, and for the past year Allegra has been working as an intern at Apple, presumably helping patch the vulnerabilities he so adeptly reverse engineered. As of today, Allegra no longer works at Apple, and there’s no telling what he’ll do next.

Telltale Games announced today that iOS users can now download Episode Three of The Walking Dead: The Game, entitled “Long Road Ahead,” to their iPhone or iPad. It’s the third of five episodes in the critically acclaimed series based on Robert Kirkman’s zombie drama, The Walking Dead, which started as an award-winning comic book, then made its way to become a critically-acclaimed television series on AMC.

By now you’ve heard about the many problems with Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6. It can be unreliable and just flat out wrong pretty often, and many well-known locations are either missing or severely misplaced. Maps will get better over time, but Apple has a lot of work to do.

David Bonnefoy upgraded to iOS 6 on his iPhone and noticed many of the same issues that have been reported on for weeks. There were also several points of interest that were misplaced due to overlapping streets.

Although I’ve used a Mac exclusively since 2005, before that, I was a PC guy, which means I have lots of gauzy memories of halcyon days well-spent in front of a menagerie of beige boxes falling backwards in time through a decade of classic PC gaming, starting with the old 8-bit Ultima games and Nethack under DOS and continuing well into the Windows era with games like Grim Fandango, Half-Life, Planescape: Torment and System Shock 2.

I love the Mac, but the one thing I miss about having a PC is easily playing classic PC games without loading them up in Boot Camp or Parallels. Luckily, it looks like that’s about to change, as GOG.com — a digital distributor of classic PC games updated to work on modern machines and distributed without DRM — is now releasing their titles to work on Mac.

It seems financial printer RR Donnelley made one hell of mistake earlier today, causing Google’s stock to drop 9% before Google was able to halt trading. What did they do? They filed an early draft of Google’s earnings without authorization.

Aside from being fatter and heavier than the the last-gen model, and running hot, and taking like a year to charge, the iPad is almost perfect. Apart from all those problems, of course.

But while those issues all stem from jamming a multi-million-pixel display into a mobile device, the iPad’s speaker is another matter. It sounds just fine — if you’re standing behind the iPad that it.

The SoundJaw Unlimited — itself a sequel to a thinner product — fixes that. And fixes it good.

White gadgets became an iconic symbol under the careful craftsmanship of Apple. When Apple released the original iPod 11 years ago in classic Apple white, everybody wanted one, and eventually every gadget manufacturer in the world tried to copy that style.

Over the last few years though, black iDevices have started to gain in popularity over their white brethren. Black is classy, professional, and always down for a good time, whereas white is starting to come off as fun but a bit more feminine. Some people think white is making a comeback, but a new study  suggests that nearly 70% of Apple owners prefer black over white now, and there’s no turning back.

Google just announced their newest Chromebook. It runs Google’s Chrome OS. It has an 11.6-inch screen with 1366 x 768 resolution, 6 hours of battery life, a 100 GB flash storage drive and it only costs $249. It’s beautiful. It looks just like the 11-inch MacBook Air. And of course, it’s made by Samsung.

Image: Matt Buchanan

A flurry of rumors have surrounded the failed video app start-up Color over the past 24 hours. First a rumors hit that Color was going to completely shutdown after failing to gain widespread use after a year. A few hours later a second rumor claimed that Color wasn’t shutting down, they were just being bought by Apple.

It appears that both rumors were completely wrong and sort of right at the same time. Color – as a company – isn’t being purchased by Apple for an eight figure sum, but Apple is buying Color’s team of 20 engineers for a modest figure of $2 million to $5 million.

It’s finally here. After a long alpha and beta period, and months of teasing before it, Tapbot’s incredible Tweetbot client for Mac is finally here in polished, 1.0 form. That’s the good news. The bad news is the app in its final form costs $20, a price that is sure to scare off all but the most die-hard Twitter users.

Be-be, wo-wo, boo-bee. These are the kind of phrases a human being can only get away with uttering in public if still under the age of two. Fortunately, these are also the only words these underdeveloped fools can manage. There’s probably a lesson about ability vs. ambition hidden in there somewhere.

Which is to say that the Belkin Wemo baby monitor is probably the best-named baby monitor ever. Even your dumb infant can ask for it by name.

Each time Apple releases a new operating system, or new product, they publish a digital support manual for that device relative to the newest version of iOS or OS X. When “the new iPad” was released on March 15th, Apple published the user guide. Ditto for the iPhone 5. And each time a new version of iOS comes out, those guides are updated and published again.

All Apple user guides are up-to-date, except the iPad user guide, which hasn’t been touched since March. Some eagle-eyed observers have wondered why a month has passed since iOS 6’s release without Apple updating it, and it’s probably because Apple’s waiting for the iPad Mini keynote.

Days of Wonder have decorated their so-addictive-you-can’t-stop-playing-to-eat iPad train game, Ticket to Ride, with a new Halloween-themed update. As if I don’t lose enough time to this damn game.

Apple’s App Store review policy has received a lot of criticism in the past. Often times it rejects apps for a good reason, like if they contain nudity or they’re offensive. But on the odd occasion, its decision to reject a certain app leaves us puzzled. Here’s a good example of that.

Nuskha Labs recently submitted its new app to the App Store. Called Steve Jobs Timeline, it documents the life story of Apple’s co-founder, and includes famous quotes and images. It sports a nice, creative user interface; it’s not offensive, and it doesn’t break Apple’s App Store terms. But the Cupertino company rejected it anyway.

Here’s a neat idea: at least until all cameras have built-in Wi-Fi anyway: It’s a Wi-Fi SD card adapter — like the Eye-Fi cards, only instead of packing their own flash storage they have a hole which will happily hold a the microSD card of your choice.

Thus, you buy the adapter once, and stock up on a (small) pocketful of mini memory cards. This, the thinking goes, will be cheaper and more future proof than building Wi-Fi into every damn SD card you use.

Verizon announced its financial results for the third-quarter of 2012 today, and it has some impressive figures when it comes to the iPhone. The carrier sold more than 3.1 million iPhones in total during the three-month period, which is around 400,000 more then it sold during the second quarter. 21% of those were the new iPhone 5, according to Verizon, which translates to around 650,000 sales in less than a month.

The Jambox and its ilk of wireless high-tech boomboxes are fantastic, for both sound and freedom. But there’s no way my Mum would use one — it simply wouldn’t fit in with the crystal and porcelain knick-knacks (what I call “dust-catchers”) which carpet every horizonta surface like mushrooms on, well, you know.

The Joey Roth Ceramic Subwoofer, though, would probably be allowed.

EA’s free Theme Park game for iOS broke down yesterday, and gamers were unable to access the parks they’d spent time building. The company managed to get everything working again, but once the game was back online, users found that all of their progress had been wiped.

The parks they’d build, the achievements they’d earned, and worse, the items they’d bought using in-app purchases were gone.

Checkmark, the supper-slick location-aware reminders app for the iPhone, has gotten a feature bump in its newest update that almost (almost!) makes it a new app.

And if you don’t already have Checkmark, then shame on you — the $2 app not only makes location-based reminders on your iPhone way easier and way better than the built in reminders, but it also works on your iPad.

Apple’s upcoming iPad mini is set to shake up the tablet industry for a second time later this month. Its 9.7-inch tablet is the king of premium slates, and the smaller model is expected to dominate the entry-level market. But it won’t just cost rivals like Amazon and Google — it’ll cost Apple, too. You see, for every five iPad minis sold, the Cupertino company is expected to lose one 9.7-inch iPad sale.

You know how Apple is always calling its products “magical?” Well, it turns out that it may be right. Harry Potter author J.K Rowling not only uses a MacBook Air to write, but says that it has changed her life.

The cubicle wars continue unabated, sparking an arms race of unprecedented idiocy.

Now the conflict is escalating with a new weapons system coming online that could tilt the balance of power: A $130 iOS-controlled ping pong ball-dropping drone aircraft.

Called the iStrike Shuttle, the 3-channel office drone is remotely piloted via an iStrike Controller app on your iOS device by way of Bluetooth.

The app features G-Sensor and Joystick modes for flight control.

The iStrike Shuttle is available in November from Hammacher Schlemmer and Dream Cheeky.

Here comes the video.

Apple has lost its appeal against a High Court ruling in the United Kingdom that deemed the Samsung Galaxy Tab does not infringe its copyright for the iPad. Despite the similarities between the two devices, the Court of Appeal upheld its decision that Samsung did not copy the iPad when producing the Galaxy Tab.

Apple will now have to place “prominent advertisements” in magazines and newspapers, explaining that Samsung did not infringe its design.

US District Court Judge Lucy Koh today denied Apple’s request to have several documents sealed from public view in its fight to recoup more damages from Samsung than were even awarded by the jury several weeks ago. The documents include “product-specific unit sales, revenue, profit, profit margin, and cost data” that it also wants to use in its argument for a higher award from the court.

Judge Koh basically said that Apple can’t have it both ways. Her decision says to the Cupertino-based company that it can’t use documents in its arguments that it then in turn wants to keep secret. It just doesn’t work that way.