News - page 1749

There are many premium content services that use DRM to limit where and how you can watch videos. iOS apps like HBOGO, DirecTV, and Amazon Instant Video will all let you watch content on your device, but you’re blocked from streaming via AirPlay or through an HDMI cable. We know, it’s silly. It’s all because of the contacts and licensing deals Hollywood makes with digital distributors.

What if there was a world in which no DRM could keep your content shackled to an iOS device? A new jailbreak tweak makes it possible to stream what you’re watching—no matter what the source—to your TV through the magic of AirPlay.

There have been rumors for the last month or so that Apple is planning to release a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display later this year. While we haven’t seen any physical evidence of the MacBook’s existence, there have been a few Geekbench scores that support rumors that the new laptop will be coming soon.

Yes, this is yet another iPhone tripod thingy, but this one is a little different. First, it’s not a Kickstarter project, so you can order it right now should you choose to. And second, it fits onto your keyring, so you will always have it with you when you need it – handy, because nobody every pats there pockets as they leave the house and thinks “You know, I really should take that iPhone photo stand out with me today. Y’know – just in case.”

Earlier this week, I took a look at the ways mobile management has changedsince Apple introduced mobile management features in iOS 4 two years ago. The biggest change has been the evolution of what constitutes effective and secure mobile management, which has shifted from securing the physical and operating system features of iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices to securing the business data that is stored on those devices. That shift has refocused IT leaders and professionals on the need to secure data by securing mobile apps – a type of solution referred to as mobile app management or MAM.

Our friends over at Apperian, one of the major MAM vendors, decided to share their thoughts with me (and you) in a video. Check it out after the jump.

Nowherelse.fr has scored another major parts scoop: they say this leaked image shows what the new, smaller Apple dock connector looks like. Counting the pins, it looks as if iMore’s scoop that the new dock connector would only be 8 pins, and not 19 pins as previously reported, may have panned out.

Very, very interesting if true: expect a number of third-party iPod and iPhone accessories to be made obsolete by this move, even with an adapter. It’s also interesting to note that the pins seen in this image resemble traditional USB pins more closely than the pins used in Apple’s 30-pin dock connector. You can see more images of the part in question at the link below.

This story is developing…

Source: Nowherelese.fr

Panasonic’s new ruggedized SD cards are neat and all, protecting your precious photos from water, weather, impacts and even super-strong magnets (like the one used by Wil E. Coyote to try to catch the Road Runner) and X-rays. But, like Steve Rogers throwing himself upon a grenade in the Captain America movie, it will also sacrifice itself in order to save your data.

It seems like every time Apple releases a new version of iOS the battery life on iPhones would drop significantly. Now with a the newest version of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, some users are reporting a significant decrease in battery life on their MacBooks after they upgraded from Lion to Mountain Lion.

Our buddy Chris Foresman at Ars Technica looked into the issue and found that his new Retina MacBook Pro has lost about 38% of its battery capacity, which is pretty huge. Have you seen anything similar in your own use of Mountain Lion? What about any other bugs that Apple needs to fix immediately? We want to hear about it in the Cult of Mac Forums.

Click here to tell us about your Mountain Lion problems in the Cult of Mac Forums

We love the new Mac Guy in the latest Apple ads. Sure, the ads aren’t great, but he’s just so gosh darn likeable, in an annoying way. Like a cooler, techier version of Justin Bieber. On Monday we announced the Mac Guy Meme Contest where Cult of Mac readers could create a meme of the Mac Guy and enter to win one of 10 copies of FieldRunners 2. All the entries are in and the winners have been decided.

Here are the 10 best Mac Guy memes from the contest:

Remember that Chinesee teen last year who sold his kidney for an iPad 2? He wasn’t the only one: earlier this year, another Chinese teen named Wang swapped his kidney for an iPhone and iPad. Now the butchers who operated on him are in court, awaiting their verdicts.

Aviiq’s new “Quick Charge Universal Dock Adapter” is a handy three-in-one charger cable featuring miniUSB, microUSB and a 30-pin dock connector, all connected permanently to a regular-sized USB plug on the other end. Yes, it’ll cost you $30, but then again, you’ll never, ever leave an essential cable at home again.

We’ve always been curious about just how Samsung managed to sell 2million Galaxy Tabs. I mean, do you actually know anyone that bought one? Have you seen one in the wild? Because we haven’t. Yet in 2010 Samsung reported that they had shipped over 2 million units.

Turns out that there’s a huge discrepancy over the way Samsung reports “units shipped” and the amount of units that were actually sold. In some new court documents for the Apple vs Samsung trial, both companies had to reveal their sales figures for each device in the case. Turns out that Samsung really only sold 262,000 Galaxy Tabs in 2010, and their other sales figures were hugely disappointing as well compared to the iPad.

Downcast, my favorite podcatching app, has added a rather handy new feature with its latest update. Now it can automatically check for new podcasts when you arrive in a certain location. This clever use of iOS’ geofencing tech was first used by Instagram to grab unread articles, but now works for podcasts, too.

The summer break is winding up and many teachers are getting ready to head back to work for another school year (and many IT staffers in those schools are trying to make sure everything’s ready when those teachers return). Over the past several months, many schools and their IT departments have been struggling to keep spending down while also delivering a 21st century learning environment. That discussion has largely focused on how to most cost effectively deploy iPads, new MacBooks, and other technology systems.

One approach to that dilemma is moving away from traditional software purchasing and towards enterprise cloud solutions. That approach may give schools more control over expenditures and offer other advantages, but it also has downsides including the potential to raise costs and degrade the education experience.

I listen to music from a number of places while I’m working. Most of the time it comes from Spotify, but I’ll also call on albums or songs I’ve purchased from iTunes, or check out songs Spotify doesn’t have on YouTube. It’s kind of a pain switching between the three, but there’s never been a better solution.

Until now. Meet CloudPlay, a fantastic little app that sits in your Mac’s menu bar and pulls music from all kinds of sources, including iTunes, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Internet radio stations.

Why does the Curiosity rover only have a 2MP camera, along with just 8GB flash storage? Is it some special NASA trick that pulls more info from low-res sensors? Is it something to do with the kind of space radiation that turned Reed Richards and team into the Fantastic Four? Nope – it turns out that the reason that the Mars Rover is using 8-year-old camera technology is because the camera design was specced eight years ago, way back in the swirling mists of 2004.

Google has slowly been introducing its cleaner, richer, more interactive search answers. You may have noticed these interactive “card-like” results when searching for “weather” or “120 X 50.” Google continues to refine its search tools and yesterday announced a few improvements to make these interactive results even better.

A rare Apple promotional video for the original Macintosh has surfaced online today, courtesy of one of the machine’s creators, Andy Hertzfeld. The one-minute clip, which was produced in 1983 by Chiat-Day, features members of the Macintosh team — including Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, and Mike Murray — who praise their product for its affordability, reliability, and more.

Site24x7 announced its new iPhone app this week. Site24x7 is a robust enterprise server monitoring solution by the Zoho group, which is best known among iOS users for its Zoho Docs productivity suite.

Site24x7 offers a range of enterprise features for web servers that are hosting critical interactive web apps and cloud services as well as other mission critical services like internal and external DNS service and mail services. In addition to simple reports and alerts about a server issue the Site24x7 can be used to tune servers for optimal performance and uptime.

If you’ve been browsing the Internet every day in the hope that someone’s going to announce a jailbreak for the third-generation Apple TV you bought back in March, then look away now. iOS hacker Pod2g has confirmed that neither he, nor any other hacker he knows of, is working on an exploit for the Apple’s latest set-top box.

My experience of recording music is limited to bouncing down bedroom guitar recordings to free up tracks on a cassette-based Tascam Portastudio, way back in the 1980s. So anything that records 24 tracks simultaneously onto a tiny iPad seems astounding to me. That is costs just $40 makes it even crazier. We’re talking about the new musicians’ iFriend, Auria.

If you’re signed up to Blizzard’s Battle.net network, it’s time to change your password. The company has confirmed that its online service — which powers some of the most popular PC games including Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft — has been hacked. Although Blizzard is confident no financial information was taken, your email addresses and scrambled passwords have.

Turborilla, the developers behind Mad Skills Motocross — of the best side-scrolling racing games on iOS — has released its first teaser trailer for Mad Skills BMX, which is coming to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on August 16. The clip shows off the upcoming title’s gameplay, and offers a hilarious little cartoon alongside it.

At this point, most of our readers are familiar with what the next iPhone is going to look like, including the fact that it will feature a unibody design with a two-tone metal backplate. But what’s the story with that metal backplate? Has it been designed that way just to look good and set itself apart from the design of the iPhone 4/4S, or is there a more cogent design philosophy behind the three alternating stripes of metal and glass?

We won’t know for sure what Apple is thinking until the iPhone 5 is officially announced, but one industrial designer has a great theory about why the back of the next iPhone looks the way it does. As is usually the case with Apple’s design, the new iPhone’s back plate doesn’t just look good… it’s incredibly functional and magnificently strong.

I featured UX Write in one of my must-have apps roundups when it first hit the App Store, because it’s one of the best word processors available on iOS. It has now received its first update, and it’s a fairly major one, introducing support for external keyboards, autosave, dictation on supported devices, and more.

This is the next-gen iPhone’s new battery: a 3.8V 1440mAH lithium-ion pack with a watts-per-hour measurement of 5.45 wHR. Compared to the iPhone 4S’s 1430mAH battery — which runs at 3.7V and has a watts-per-hour measurement of 5.3 — this battery has at least 10% more capacity, making it perfectly possible (and very, very likely) that the iPhone 5 will finally get LTE. It’s also thinner, seemingly confirming that the next iPhone will be the thinnest one yet.

Source: 9to5Mac