Apple’s Flyover feature in the new iOS 6 Maps app gives users are really cool way to explore their favorite cities by looking at 3D renderings of major metropolitan areas. You can zoom in and out to view buildings in greater detail kind of like you’re really there. Right now there are a limited number of cities that Apple has created 3D renders of, but here’s a look at all the cities currently supporting Flyover in the new Maps app.
Woz believes Siri went downhill the day Apple bought it.
If you’ve been an iPhone user for a number of years, you may remember that Siri was a third-party app long before it was purchased by Apple and integrated into the iOS operating system. Back then, although it couldn’t remind you to take out the trash or compose text messages, it offered a lot of the same search functionality it does today.
In fact, according to Steve Wozniak, Siri was actually better back then.
Foxconn has confirmed that a 23-year-old worker committed suicide this week by jumping from his apartment in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The worker only began his employment with Foxconn last month. Police are investigating the death.
Skype has just pushed out its latest update for Mac OS X, which includes a number of enhancements to existing features, as well as support for OS X Mountain Lion. The company promises that contacts lists, video calls to mobile devices, and screen sharing are all much-improved in version 5.8.
Imagine that you could just point your iPhone’s camera at your baby and it would immediately tell you his vital signs: heartbeat and so on. Or that you could fire up an app and it could pick out tiny, invisible movements from what looks like a still video. Using a process called Eulerian Video Magnification, boffins at MIT are doing this already.
The iOS 6 beta has been available for four days now, but we’re still stumbling across new features that Apple didn’t mention during WWDC. One of those is the ability to receive government AMBER and emergency alerts automatically on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
Too impatient to wait for iOS 6's public release? Install it now. Image courtesy of William Gamache ([email protected]).
Itching to get your hands on the iOS 6 beta Apple released on Monday? Well, right now, it’s only available to registered developers. But according to some, there is a way you can install iOS 6 on your device. The process is incredibly simple, and all you need is the latest iTunes release and the iOS 6 .ipsw file for your device.
Nikon has made two new lenses available for your photographic delectation. One is a dim superzoom for DX (crop-sensor) cameras — the 18-300mm ƒ3.5-5.6G ED — and the other is an equally dim short zoom for full-frame bodies, the 24-85mm ƒ3.5-4.5G ED VR.
It’s been just four days since Apple released its first iOS 6 beta to registered developers, and it has already been jailbroken by the iPhone Dev-Team. There was some concern that the Cupertino company’s latest iOS release would make jailbreaking very difficult, but the team behind the latest iOS 5.1.1 untethered exploit have now released an iOS 6 beta jailbreak for developers.
Being a Brit, one of the most disappointing things about Siri is that it doesn’t support location services in the United Kingdom. Unlike iPhone 4S users in the United States, I can’t ask Siri to find me a nice restaurant nearby, or for the nearest gas station. However, that’s no longer the case in iOS 6, because Siri now supports location services internationally.
The iPhone's best Google Reader client is now even better.
Reeder is, in my opinion, by far the best Google Reader client for both Mac and iOS. And it just got even better on the iPhone. After being rewritten from the ground up, Reeder now offers stacks of new features, like Fever syncing, support for multiple accounts, the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe from feeds, and more. It even has a pretty new icon.
Apple really wants you to buy into their beautiful Retina display future. So much so, that if customers want to buy an old style MacBook Pro with the same specs as the new MacBook Pro with Retina display, they’re going to have to pay an extra $300 to get it. That extra $300 comes with an optical drive, one extra pound of aluminum, and a lower resolution screen, just so the fatty MacBook Pro can keep up with its slimmer sister everyone’s drooling over, but hey, at least you’ll still have an Ethernet port.
Phil Zimmerman, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption for email in the 1990s, has come to the forefront yet again as the spokesman for Silent Circle, a company planning to beta test an encrypted phone call and text message app for the iPhone and other smartphones. The app will be free when it’s released in July of this year, but the service itself will cost somewhere in the $20 per month range.
Zimmerman, long a proponent of technological solutions to civil liberties, thinks people will pay for the privacy.
“I’m not going to apologize for the cost,” he told CNET, “This is not Facebook. Our customers are customers. They’re not products. They’re not part of the inventory.”
That may well be the case, but getting consumers to pay subscription fees is notoriously difficult. Silent Circle plans to offer a solution for easily encrypted email, phone calls, and instant messaging to start, with plans for encrypted SMS in the future.
In addition to the iPhone release, Zimmerman told CNET that the company was planning to roll out an app for Mac and PC as well, but that it’s not ready, yet. They’ll focus on the mobile app first, allowing customers to communicate securely if they both have the app installed. If only one does, the information will be encrypted to Silent Circle’s servers, but not from there to a recipient’s phone.
This sounds great for most consumers needing to keep their legal communication safe and private, but it’s unlikely that lawmakers will see it the same way. It’s possible that Phil Zimmerman may yet again fall under scrutiny as he did when he released his first encryption product nearly two decades ago.
Wow, those folks are quick. Looks like Google will be the first non-Apple company to update their Mac app, the Chrome web browser, to the higher resolution demanded of them by the just-barely-announced Macbook Pro.
Over at the Google Chrome Blog, the company promises to polish Chrome “until it shines on that machine,” referring to the sweet new bit of Apple candy from Cupertino.
In fact, the highly experimental and heavily alpha Canary release channel already has the new retina-display enabled browser ready for download. That’s fast, guys!
As you can see in the helpfully supplied image above, the higher resolution will bring all sorts of shininess and clarity to every bit of the Chrome browser experience. While we assume that Apple’s own web browser, Safari, already has the retina display sewn up, this is some great, super quick work by the folks in the Chrome group, assuring that their browser won’t be left in blurry dust anytime soon.
It might be possible in the near future to violate copyright law simply by selling your old iPad 2 or iPod touch to a buyer from eBay or Craigslist, if a case soon to be seen in the Supreme Court goes horribly wrong. The Supreme Court has been asked to examine a lower court decision to prevent the sale of used electronics without securing permission from copyright holders involved in manufacturing the devices.
So, a mere two days after Apple quietly released an update for its brand-spankin-new MacBook Pro, the magical company is doing it again. This time, the as-yet-released MacBook Air is the target of a new software update.
About MacBook Pro (Mid 2012) Software Update 1.0
This update is recommended for MacBook Pro (mid 2012) models.
The update includes fixes that improve graphics stability, external display support, and USB 3 device support.
Sound familiar? That’s because these are the same fixes that Apple reported for the MacBook Pro model. Sounds like someone announced these babies just a bit before they were totally ready? Ah, well, at least it’s all fixed. Right, Apple?
Walter Isacson’s biography painted the 1970s version of Steve Jobs as a true hippy who didn’t like to take showers or wear shoes. Looks like Ashton Kutcher’s wardrobe team on the set of jOBS has really embraced that ethos and dressed Ashton in a nappy polo shirt and tussled hair while filming at Steve Jobs’s home where Apple was invented.
Making sure you know just how serious he’s taking this role, Kutcher’s rocking the facial expression of a tortured artists whose soul you could never hope to comprehend. Photos were also snapped of Josh Gad in his Woz costume and it looks like the director skinned a baby lama and superglued it to Gad’s scalp. Take a look :
Say goodbye to Messages. Apple's now killing it for Lion users.
Shortlt after Apple announced Mountain Lion would be shipping next month, Cult of Mac reported that Cupertino had already begun preparation for the operating system by pulling the Messages for Mac Beta from their official site. The app allowed users of OS X Lion to send iMessages to iPhones, iPads and other Macs, but since it’s a headlining feature of the $20 Mountain Lion operating system, it stands to reason they’d want to start curtailing access to the service for Lion users.
That’s not all Apple’s doing, however. According to a new report, Apple is actually forcibly disabling the Messages Beta for OS X Lion users. They really want you upgrading if you use Messages,
The redesigned App Store in iOS 6 provides a simplified layout for finding apps.
One of the longest running problems on the iOS App Store has been discovery of apps.
Since its launch in 2008, developers and users alike have been asking Apple for better ways to both promote and discover great new apps. With over 650,000 apps currently on the App Store, the current system of finding new apps is clearly being pushed beyond what it was intended for.
According to Apple’s senior vice president of world-wide product marketing, Phil Schiller, Apple is doing a “tremendous amount” of work to make sure that best applications on the App Store get promoted and receive the attention they deserve.
The official Apple Store app has just gotten an incremental update, which now makes it easier than ever to give Apple your money.
The big new feature is Express Checkout, which like Apple’s official website, lets you buy items with your default billing and shipping information with just a tap.
The other feature — exclusive to the iPhone 4S — is a geolocation feature that alerts local Apple Store employees when you’ve arrived to pick up an order. This should make it a lot quicker to pick up your new MacBook Pro than flagging down a random specialist when you arrive, then waiting for him to go in back and find your item.
You can download the new update through the App Store.
Since its introduction, the iPad has been missing some of the iPhone’s built in applications, such as Weather, Stocks, and Calculator. Until now, there’s been no sign of these apps making it to the iPad. With the introduction of iOS 6, though, it appears that Apple may finally be thinking about bringing the remaining iPhone apps over to the iPad.
As a user with multiple iOS devices, I have hated iOS 5’s handling of notifications across multiple devices with my very bones. Get a notification and read it and clear it on your iPhone? It’ll still be waiting for you on your iPad and your iPod touch. Someone call the Department of Redundancy Department. It’s just irritating.
Luckily, with iOS 6, Apple seems to have figured it all out. Now, as long as it’s an iOS 6 stock app, if you read a notification on one device, it’ll be whisked off your other devices magically, presumably through iCloud. Which is an interesting point in and of itself: will Apple soon be oiffloading all of their Push Notifications to iCloud?
The best podcasting app on iOS (alibeit one with a wonky and controversial pricing structure), Instacast has just gotten a huge update making it even better.
We know that you Cult of Mac readers are also a bunch of photo nerds, so we thought that this week’s best-of list could be about cameras. You’re iPhone might be great (and even makes it into this list) but sometimes you need something more powerful, more rugged or just plain better. Here’s our list of the best cameras out these.
Before Apple created the Notification Center for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, most of us depended on Growl as the most popular way to get app notifications. Growl has been the best way for developers to display notifications in their apps and was probably one inspiration behind Apple’s Notification Center.
Now that Apple is building notifications into Mountain Lion, many developers have feared the fantastic customizable powers of Growl notifications will become a dead relic. However, a recent post by the Growl team is laying those fears aside, announcing that Growl 2.0 will support Notification Center so that developers have even more options.
