News - page 1758

Lots of people love to jailbreak the Apple TV, but the process of unlocking the little hockey puck’s full potential can be a pain. When you want to jailbreak an iPhone or iPad, it’s as easy as downloading the free Absinthe tool, plugging your device into your Mac, and clicking a button. Once you’re jailbroken, Cydia is automatically installed as an alternative App Store for finding tweaks and apps.

On the Apple TV, it’s not so easy. Sure, the actual process of jailbreaking isn’t that difficult, but aside from staple packages like aTV Flash (black), you have to manually install third-party Apple TV apps via a command line interface on a connected desktop computer.

A new installer app for the Mac called Nito makes it much easier to install third-party apps on a jailbroken Apple TV.

The Tweetbot for Mac public Alpha has received a significant update today that packs several new features, including the ability to edit a profile. Borrowing from the popular iOS version of Tweetbot, users can now setup muted keywords on the Mac. Many of you will be happy to learn that animated support for .gif images (like these) have been baked into this version as well.

Apple is expected to unveil the next iPhone at a rumored media event Wednesday, September 12th. Today iMore reports that Apple will start U.S. pre-orders for the sixth-gen iPhone on the same day as the announcement. International customers will reportedly have to wait until the first week of October to place pre-orders.

iMore originally reported the September 12th announcement date and an in-store U.S. release date of Friday, September 21st.

Apple is often accused by the likes of Samsung that it is unwilling to license its technology to competitors, but that’s not true. In fact, Apple has licensed many of its design patents to Microsoft, under the condition of an “anti-cloning agreement” that prevents Microsoft from releasing mere doppelgangers of the iPhone and iPad. You know, like Apple is accusing Samsung of doing.

Your iPhone contains a whole lotta information about your personal life. You got your bank apps, email, text messages, phone calls, browsing history, plus all those embarrassing songs you listen to on Spotify you don’t want people to know about.

You don’t expect to get hardcore encryption security on a tiny iPhone, and when the iPhone was first released in 2007 you didn’t. Huge security holes allowed  hackers to easily take over the device, but Apple learned from their mistakes, and now your iPhone is like a freaking Fort Knox for data. Even the NSA is having a hard time breaking iPhone encryption, and it’s frustrating the hell out them.

Rumors have been circulating recently that Apple will announce the new iPhone in mid-September, with the official launch set a few weeks after. A new report has given more weight to the rumors with claims that AT&T has cleared their calendars to prepare for the iPhone 5 launch during the third or fourth week in September.

Last week’s announcement that Starbucks is partnering with Square for mobile payments and credit card processing is big news for the nascent U.S. mobile payments market. It was also a warning shot fired by the startup across the bow of traditional payment processing companies, many of which have struggled to bring together an effective and successful digital wallet (or iWallet) solution. The move could also complicate any plans that Apple has to move into that market following the release of iOS 6 and its Passbook feature.

Scientific instruments usually look crazy weird and aren’t designed to be user-friendly for the every day, non-scientist man. Lapka is looking to change that with their beautifully designed, semi-affordable Personal Environmental Monitor.

Lapka allows iPhone users to attach four different measuring instruments which can test for radiation, nitrates, humidity, and electromagnetic frequency, so you can create a perfect climate in your home, make sure your food is truly organic, find the perfect spot for your router, and make sure you’re not going to get cancer.

Will the next iPhone have an 8 pin or 9 pin dock connector? The iOS 6 beta says 9, but if you count the pins on the leaked dock components, there are only 8. Which is correct? Both: according to a new report, the new dock connector’s aluminum shell teams up with the 8 gold pins to make a ninth pin, resulting in 60% less real estate than the existing 30-pin connector, and better transfer rates with a fraction of the electrical contacts.

While Apple’s latest iOS 6 beta didn’t make any significant changes to the platform’s front-end — aside from removing the YouTube app — it did make some changes under the hood. In addition to “bug fixes,” it appears the fourth beta has made some improvements to App Store download times that make updating your apps super snappy.

I’ve been a big proponent of the iPad in business since Apple first announced its tablet more than two and a half years ago. In that time, the iPad has more than proved its value in companies of all different sizes and across virtually every industry. That said, the iPad isn’t a fit for every job within every workplace. If a company is considering investing in iPads for its employees, one of the first things that company and its IT leaders need understand is how the iPad will be used.

That seems like a pretty basic step in the procurement process, but it’s one that seems to be getting overlooked by some companies – including one very large enterprise company that should have known better.

If I owned an iPhone, then I’d already have bought the Olloclip lens, a clip on widget which adds fisheye, macro and wideangle lenses to the iPhone using a slip-over clip. It’s impossible to line it up wrong, and it fits in a pocket or bag. But I don’t have an iPhone. I have an iPad. And I hate futzing around with all the magnetic lenses I have: they’re easy to lose, easy to get dirty and impossible to line up. What I need is a Mobi-Lens, a universal clip-on lens from Kickstarter.

It seems like Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone will be the first iOS device to boast a brand new, mini dock connector when it launches this fall. But there have been rumors that claim Apple will refresh all its iOS devices to make the new connector a standard across its entire lineup.

Not only does this seem highly unlikely, but there’s one reason why it’s an impossibility: Apple’s supply chain just couldn’t handle a refresh that big.

The”leaked” asymmetrical screw we reported on last week has turned out to be a fake, put forth as an experiment by a Swedish design company on how Apple rumors propagate themselves across the internet.

The BBC has updated its iOS today, finally delivering high-resolutions visuals for the third-generation iPad. It also introduces “improved video performance,” better accessibility with VoiceOver controls, and more.

If you’re the proud owner of a Retina MacBook Pro and you’re on the lookout for great apps that showcase its high-resolution display, don’t spend your spare time wading through the Mac App Store searching the hard way. Check out RetinaMacApps.com — a simple site that brings together all the Mac apps that are now Retina-ready.

As we edge closer towards the unveiling of Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone next month, component leaks have hit their peak. Last week we showed you images of some of the handset’s internals — including a number of flex cables and a display shield — and today we get our first glimpse at what appears to be the iPhone 5’s logic board.

The latest Cult of Mac Deals offer delivers something that ensures you can create (and publish) your own professional-looking websites without having the skills of a professional web developer. That’s because MacFlux 4 makes it so easy – and we’re offering it for 50% off at just $50!

What is MacFlux 4?

MacFlux 4 is an advanced HTML5 website design application, capable of creating stunning sites completely from scratch. This powerful Mac web design software is a creative design environment rather than a template-based solution (although it does include free website templates to help get you started). And if you’d rather not create HTML5 websites, MacFlux 4 can handle standard HTML, PHP, Ruby, JSP, and more…no coding required.

Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a brand new Twitter client called Slices, which claims to be the world’s first Twitter app that allows you to break your timeline into individual streams, follow live events, browse Twitter by category, and more. We also have a “magical” app called Cardiio that accurately monitors your heart rate simply by looking at your face; the best blogging app for iPad yet called Pages; and more.

We told you earlier this week that Apple was preparing to release its first beta build of OS X 10.8.1 to developers, and the 10.8.1 beta has now been seeded for registered developers in the Mac Dev Center. Apple hasn’t noted any known issues or added features, and developers are asked to focus on compatibility with Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange in Mail, PAC proxies in Safari, SMB, USB, and Wi-Fi and audio when connected to Thunderbolt display.

This new version (build 12B13) is the first developer beta to be made available after Mountain Lion’s public release in the Mac App Store last month. Apple should be pushing out 10.8.1 as an official update for non-devs in the coming weeks. The current shipping version of Mountain Lion is 10.8.

Heading up this week’s must-have iOS games roundup is a brand new Ghostbusters game that promises to be the best augmented reality game in the App Store. We also have a great online strategy game in the form of Tiny War XD, Activision’s legendary Pitfall!, and more.

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Seriously, don’t. Why encourage the developer of this sneaky Trojan horse of an app when it’s only going to be pulled from the App Store, whether tonight, tomorrow, or on Monday? Paying $1.99 to a developer who’s fairly obviously hiding tethering features within a app isn’t the way to advocate for a loosening of the restrictions on such features.

The app, called DiscoRecorder, was released today by developer Michael Leatherbury. The screenshots uploaded to the App store (see above) show only a black and white skeuomorphic cassette tape recorder interface and some innocuous recorded voice memos. What the app really does is completely different.

Even with the iPad eating away at the time we spend in front of the bigger screens — in my case, the iPad is my screen of choice when watching Netflixed TV shows — cable subscriptions still have a ton of appeal. Want to watch the Olympics live on your iPad via the official NBC app? You’ll need a cable subscription; and then there are all the recent great cable shows: Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, etc.

But you’ll need a guide to sort through the mire, and that’s where the i.TV app and your trusty iPad or iPhone comes in.

It was time for another Apple expert witness today, who said that consumers would be willing to pay $100 for three specific, patented features that are at issue in the high-profile, high-stakes court case against Samsung. John Hauser, called by Apple as an expert due to his role as a marketing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said that in his internet survey, consumers were willing to pay this much more for features like scrolling or multitouch. The survey, Apple proposes, has relevance when calculating potential damages for Apple due to potential patent infringement. Apple is seeking over $2.5 billion from Samsung.

On the sixth day of the Samsung-Apple trial, deeply granular elements of each company’s products continue to be mined for infringement claims. Testimony from industry experts focused on innovations present in scrolling and pinching gestures used on touch-screen gadgets like the iPhone and whether Samsung blatantly ripped them off.

Judging from the cheap seats of the media bench, the claims appear valid. In particular, visual evidence comparing the functionality of the iPhone’s operating system to that of its rival makes similarities pop out. For example, two-finger gesturing to zoom in on web browsers on relevant Samsung and Apple products is practically the same.