News - page 1783

Foursquare, Facebook, even Find My Friends… these are all services that are ostensibly designed to help us to find our real-life buddies when we’re around town. So why are they so bad at it? Why do they all feel so useless?

The reason’s pretty simple when you think about it: most of the time, you don’t really care where your friends are, or how many trophies they’ve earned, but when you do want to know where they are, you want to know exactly where they are at that precise moment, either because they’re running late or you’re hoping to meet up. And the only way to really know that with any certainty is to ask directly.

Tehula is a new iPhone app that makes asking people where they are just deviously simple. And it works even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPad: all you need is a phone with a GPS unit and a web browser.

Most of us never had the opportunity to meet Steve Jobs, but as Apple fans and users, we knew a lot about the company’s co-founder and former CEO. Even though we didn’t know him personally, we all felt an immense sense of loss when Jobs passed away last October.

In an effort to try to understand why Jobs’s death had such an affect on his fans, Dr. Andrew K. Przybylski from the University of Essex has conducted a three-part study that looks at how we felt connected to Jobs though his devices.

This is the Pear, and it might just be one of the most useful iPhone accessories yet devised. It’s a little, puck-like Bluetooth receiver that is designed to slot into any speaker dock and free your iOS device from its needy clutches.

Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell, who is said to be the richest woman in Silicon Valley, has reportedly purchased a $4 million home in Sun Valley, Idaho, where Apple CEO Tim Cook is attending the Allen & Company media conference this week. The new property is said to be located near a river’s edge in the wetlands area, and boasts three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms.

Your iPhone is more than a phone, it’s part of your life. It knows what you’re doing now (putting out fires with your boss? planning for drinks?), where you’re going for lunch and where you wish you were.

Even if you’re an open book — frequent Foursquare check-ins, Instagramming dinner, Spotifying all over the place — you probably wouldn’t broadcast every single thing you do with your iPhone, right?

That’s just what self-dubbed “interface artist” johannes-p-osterhoff will be doing for a year with his iPhone live project: letting the world see his every email, round of Mega run and lunch date on his Apple device. Berlin-based Osterhoff is a techno-provocateur whose previous exploits include pornifying iPad ads, creating a real-life OS X icon house and playing William Tell with iPhones.

He tells Cult of Mac why he’s doing it, what makes his mom worry and how you can reach him to be part of the project.

Steam has kicked off its summer sale, offering up to 75% off some of the hottest games for Mac and PC. The sale runs until July 22, Steam is adding new titles each and every day, with customers given the opportunity to vote for the titles they want to see reduced.

The big advantage Jambone’s Jambox has over its competitors is upgradeable firmware. The speaker is in fact a tiny computer which can be updated from time to time. Previous additions have been the spookily excellent surround-sound simulation called Live Audio, and you can also install one of many apps which add new voices, or let you access third-party services.

The Jambox might not be the loudest or even the best-sounding speaker out there, but it is certainly the most future-proof. And now another update adds yet more new features.

After landing on Android and iOS yesterday, Rovio has confirmed that Amazing Alex will be making its way to Mac and PC. The new physics-based puzzler is Rovio’s first break away from the hugely successful Angry Birds series, and it’s already gotten off to a great start, rocketing up to the number one spot in the App Store’s paid charts in several countries.

One of the reasons most of us jailbreak our Apple TV is to install aTV Flash (black), a terrific piece of software from FireCore that adds a ton of incredible features to your set-top box. In its latest update, aTV Flash delivers a number of features, including trakt.tv integration for those who never know what to watch.

Sparrow, my favorite mail client on both Mac and iOS, just received a new update that will be particularly exciting to those of you with the new MacBook Pro. In addition to support for OS X Mountain Lion and Notification Center, Sparrow 1.6.2 brings high-resolution graphics for the new MacBook Pro’s Retina display. It’s also on sale for just $4.99 until Monday, July 16.

The shipping delay for the new MacBook Pro with Retina display has decreased for customers in the United States the first time since the notebook made its debut on June 11. What was once a 3-4 week wait has now decreased to 2-3 weeks.

We all love Craigslist, right? I mean, this plain text website has changed the way I live, at least. I’ve posted a home for sale, advertised for job openings, sold musical equipment, and bought more than my fair share of similar items through the basic website since the early 2000s. In a short time the service replaced newspaper classified ads as my go-to method of finding local stuff.

But it’s just. So. Ugly. And it’s got super tiny on the screen, even when you’re using an iPad to access it. Which is where Craigslist the app comes in.

Both Samsung and Apple filed pre-trial juror screening questionnaires with the US District Court that is handling the patent dispute originally filed by Apple agains Samsung. Potential jurors will have to answer close to 750 questions unless Judge Koh, the District Judge who has been handling this case, asks for some winnowing of the number of questions. 49 of those questions are from Apple, with the remaining 700 filed by Samsung. That’s six pages to forty pages, respectively.

iPhoto for Mac just updated to version 9.3.1, bringing a few bug fixes to the table along with a couple of new features. The almost one gigabyte download is available in the Mac App Store now.

What’s New in Version 9.3.1
– Addresses a problem during the migration of albums from MobileMe Gallery that may cause photos to be moved from their original events into a new event called “From MobileMe”
– Fixes an issue that in rare cases could cause iPhoto to hang when upgrading libraries

As of version 9.3, iPhoto was able to open Aperture 3.3 or later files, supported AVCHD video, and added an expanding Description field to see while you enter more text. You can flag photos in Magnify view, keywords are now preserved when exporting GPS location embedded files, and the new Export option allows you to organize photos into event subfolders.

Source: Apple
Via: 9 to 5 Mac

Not too far back, we brought you the news that Apple would soon be adding a Food and Drink category to the App Store. Today, Apple has pushed the new category live, and you can go check it out for yourself.

The iPhone 4S has a great 1080p camera, but unfortunately, getting great video with it is still a challenge, due to the lack of stabilization options available for it. Tripod accessories have become more widespread within the last year, but there’s still been no good way to get creative, professional looking shots with the iPhone. With the iStabilizer dolly, all that changes.

You read that right, Sprint has finally unleashed a twister of LTE pockets in and around the Kansas City area. They may be mere corn kernels compared to the likes of Verizon and AT&T but it’s a start — and one that I’m sure will have Sprint customers skipping down the yellow brick road.

NBC just announced that it will be streaming all 302 medal events from the 2012 Summer Olympics in London to U.S. viewers via its new iPhone and iPad app. Not only will NBC be streaming everything live on its Olympics website, but these two new iOS apps will also stream each event as it happens in real time. Over 3,500 hours of event coverage will be streamed to desktop and mobile viewers, making this year’s Olympics coverage the most internet-friendly in history.

The only catch is that viewers will need to verify in-app that they are subscribed to a cable/satellite provider that includes CNBC and MSNBC.

By now, you’ve probably heard that Apple has a large data center in North Carolina which powers much of the iCloud ecosystem that Apple debuted in 2011. What you may not know, though, is that the small town of Maiden, North Carolina almost lost the contract with Apple. Thanks to GigaOm, we now know how it all went down.

Pixelmator, a beautiful image editor for the Mac that Apple could have designed itself, is about to receive a huge update. Version 2.1 Cherry will be going live “very soon,” and the folks at Pixelmator have revealed that the Cherry update packs full support for the new MacBook Pro’s gorgeous Retina Display.

Adobe has yet to update its Creative Suite for Retina, so Pixelmator will be the first image editing app of its class to be fully optimized for Apple’s newest display technology.

I’m a big fan of G-Form’s protective iPad cases. I use one on bike tours to keep my iPad safe in a pannier no matter what’s going on outside, and I love the relatively thin form-factor which comes courtesy of its special-sauce material which stiffens and absorbs shock on impact.

I even like the weird, retro-futuristic designs. But for those of you who prefer something a little more understated, there are now two new G-Forms to tempt you: the Reverse Ballistic Edge and the Extreme Hydro Sleeve.

News Corp., parent company of The Daily, could very well discontinue the iPad-only newspaper in coming months. According to The New York Observer, The Daily has been losing News Corp. $30 million a year, and the tabloid has been placed “on watch.” News Corp. will supposedly “reassess” The Daily after the presidential election this November.

The Daily was the first mainstream paper to be delivered exclusively on the iPad. Since The Daily was introduced onstage with Apple’s Eddy Cue in 2011, the publication has expanded to the iPhone and Android devices.

Since its debut back in 2009, the iPad has dominated the tablet market. At the time of writing this piece, the device holds around 55% of the market share in the United States. Rival tablets from the likes of Amazon, Samsung, and HTC have tried to do battle with it, but they’ve had very little impact on its success.

But there is one tablet that Apple will need to keep its eye on: Microsoft’s new Surface. It’s already being dubbed an “iPad killer” by some, and although we’re skeptical the Windows-powered slate will “kill” Apple’s device, there are a number of reasons why the “Pro” variant will have more of an impact than you think.

Nikon has gone all Microsoft on us and pre-announced a piece of hardware ahead of this year’s Photokina show. The kit in question is a huge monster of a lens, the 800mm ƒ5.6, which will take the place of the current 600mm ƒ4 as the longest autofocus lens in Nikon’s lineup.

Back in 1992, sci-fi futurist and console cowboy cyberpunk William Gibson of Neuromancer fame helped come up with a puzzle that has been puzzling computer cryptographers ever since.

At the 1992 Meeting of the Americas Society, a 3.5-inch disk meant to run on a Mac PowerBook was distributed alongside a limited print noir art book by Dennish Ashbaugh and Kevin Begos, Jr. On the disk was an unknown poem Gibson had penned called “Agrippa (a book of the dead)”. When the disk was plugged into a PowerBook, the text of the poem was displayed exactly once… and then a script on the disk caused the poem to be permanently scrambled so it could never be read again.

Two decades later, one cryptography student is trying to get to the bottom of how it all works.