Bluetooth 4 is proving to be quite a lot more than just an incremental spec bump to the wireless protocol. Thanks to its super low power needs, Bluetooth 4 is finding all sorts of clever uses.
Example: The Hone, a key fob which can talk to your iPhone whenever you lose your keys, and yet still remain functional for up to six month between charges.
Google’s VP of Product Management, Bradley Horowitz, announced that Google has partnered with Flipboard to integrate Google+ streams into the popular magazine-styled reader. Google+ will join Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a host of other social services available on Flipboard thanks to new extended APIs. This new integration is a great step forward for users, especially those who enjoy accessing all of their social content from a single app such as Flipboard.
Apple’s new Maps app that’s coming to iOS 6 looks really incredible. Its detailed 3D maps blow the traditional satellite view right out of the water, and allow you to view high resolution images of cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas, and more. But what happens when those detailed images get into the wrong hands.
Well, U.S. Senator for New York, Charles E. Schumer, is worried the detailed images could be used to aid criminals and terrorists, and he has privacy concerns over the military-grade spy planes Apple uses to capture these images.
As I mentioned in my post about Sparrow for iPhone yesterday, it is by far my favorite mail client on both Mac and iOS. Despite a lack of push support — for now — Sparrow contains some really awesome features, which are detailed in my review. If you haven’t picked up this terrific app yet, now’s the best time, because it’s just $0.99 for the next 48 hours.
Apple mentioned during its unveiling of the MacBook Pro last week that it has made some substantial changes to the construction of the notebook’s display to help make it super thin. Unlike existing MacBooks, the new Pro does away with a cover glass and case to measure just 1.5mm thin, essentially making the entire display just an LCD panel.
It’s not uncommon for Apple to hide little treats within the icons of its Mac apps, but it’s always nice when we stumble across a new one. The latest comes with the new Notes application that will launch in OS X Mountain Lion next month, and it contains a famous quote used in Apple’s Think Different ad campaign.
Spotify is gearing up to issue an update to its iOS app today, which will bring its popular radio feature to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch for the first time and allow the service to take on rivals like Pandora or Slacker. What’s more, unlike its traditional music streaming service, the radio feature will not require a paid Spotify Premium subscription to use on mobile devices.
Microsoft today officially announced their new tablet, Surface for Windows, in two flavors, one with ARM chips (just like the iPad) and one with Intel chips, like standard laptops, including Macbooks. This is Microsoft directly competing with Apple for the iPad market, for sure.
It’s safe to say the majority of us already know the story behind Peter Parker and how he came to be Spider-Man. In case you aren’t familiar with this iconic story, Gameloft has released a prologue video to not only familiarize you with the history, but to show off some more in-game footage.
A recent update to both iPhoto and Aperture now allows both applications to share photo libraries for the first time. As noted by Apple, “All your photos stay together. And you get the best of both applications.”
Apple quietly updated its Mac Pro line last week. The update was an important move even though the actual changes were so minor as to be barely noteworthy. The minor refresh gave high computing customers a sense of confidence that Apple wasn’t going to abandon the Mac Pro line anytime soon. That sense of confidence got a boost from New York Times columnist David Pogue, who was assured more substantive Mac Pro upgrades were in the works for 2013.
The Mac Pro is something of a relic when it comes to Apple’s current strategy. It’s the only Mac that features significant expansion options using industry standard hardware – a point made by Lifehacker columnist Adam Dachis, who compared the Mac Pro’s specs and costs to three hackintosh options. Looking at the Mac Pro as simply a series of specs, performance, and cost is appropriate for most users – but not for some important niche markets.
In a post-9/11 environment, the TSA is suspicious of everything. Shoes. Bottles of water. What you look like underneath your clothes. Everything
So when Game Collage developer Juraj Hlaváč flew back from last week’s WWDC and was discovered with a mysterious black box in his backpack that resisted all attempts to be scanned by the airport’s security equipment, and mysteriously glowed to boot, the TSA quickly became suspicious.
Luckily, before it became cavity search suspicious, Hlaváč revealed the true nature of the black box in his bag: an Apple Design Award for his app, Bobo Explores Light.
If you’re in the market for a new MacBook Pro, particularly of the Retina display variety, expect to shell out a little more than usual for a new battery. Apple’s updated pricing list for MacBook battery replacements shows higher than ever battery costs.
Traditionally, clicking on App Store links in iOS was a very jarring experience. Instead of being taken to an App Store preview page like you are on the desktop, you would be immediately thrown out of your current app, and shuffled over to the App Store. This problem seems to be alleviated with iOS 6, at least to some extent.
Fans of jailbreaking will most likely know about Display Recorder, the jailbreak app by Ryan Petrich, that, as its name implies, lets you record your iPhone’s screen. Display Recorder is one of the reasons I initially began jailbreaking my devices. It’s a handy tool if you need to show someone how to do something on your iPhone. That in mind, I was excited today when I saw that Display Recorder had been released into the App Store. That is, until I saw it had been developed by someone else.
In the run up to the release of the new iPad, there were many rumors that Apple was going to use Sharp IGZO display technology to make a much more bright and vibrant Retina iPad with much better battery efficiency.
That didn’t pan out: Sharp delayed the debut of IGZO, and Apple instead was forced to release a Retina iPad that was thicker than the iPad 2 in order to accomodate a bigger battery necessary to drive the display.
But according to one expert, IGZO may have crept into the new Retina MacBook Pros…
You all use and love Instapaper, right? Or perhaps Pocket, or Readability? These apps are the perfect way to put long articles aside for reading during downtime, or for browsing on a device better suited to the task than a desktop computer. But what about those times when you have a few moments and you just want to stop and read the website in front of your right now?
That’s where Read It Now comes in.
Here at Cult of Mac, we’ve been playing around with our new Retina MacBook Pro — look for our review tomorrow — and we decided to install Mountain Lion on our shiny new ultra high-res notebook and take Apple’s latest operating system for a spin.
It runs a peach, of course, but one thing we noticed when we were playing around in the Displays preferences in Mountain Lion was that there is an option to set your display resolution as for “Best for AirPlay,” along with the other two regular options which appear in OS X Lion: Best for Retina display, and Scaled.
Just a few weeks ago, Lomo started selling craptastic 110 film cartridges so you could relive those bad old days of ugly, grainy photos you thought you’d left back in the 1980s.
Now, the horror is complete, for Lomo will also sell you a 110 camera to go with the film.
We’re all familiar with the antitrust complaint that the Department of Justice filed against Apple and five major publishers back in April, but how much of an impact that case could have on the book business if the ruling goes against Apple and its partners is beginning to come into focus.
When Apple launched the iBookstore back in 2009, it had a huge impact on Amazon; it dramatically reduced the retail giant’s market share of the ebook business from 99% to just 60% in three years, breaking its monopoly on ebooks.
But it wasn’t all good for publishers.
The new Retina MacBook Displays may have an incredible resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels, but OS X doesn’t treat it as such. Instead, it treats the display as a 1440 x 900 HiDPI display in its default configuration, meaning that while text, video and images may look crisper, you don’t actually get 2880 x 1800 pixels worth of desktop space.
In the Displays panel in Systems Preferences, you can tell your Retina MacBook Pro to give you more desktop space, up to the equivalent of 1920 x 1200, but that’s as far as it goes. What if you want a 2880 x 1800 desktop, though, with each pixel mapped one to one? There’s an app for that.
The iPad has been popular with doctors and healthcare providers since it debuted two years ago. In fact, the iPad’s form factor and capabilities are almost tailor-made for many common and emerging uses in medicine like electronic health records, medical and drug reference guides, and even remote diagnosis using FaceTime.
With hospitals rolling out iPad deployments and many physicians in private practice buying them, it was only a matter of time before healthcare-specific iPad accessories hit the market. Griffin Technologies is one of the first companies to focus on making the iPad an even better fit for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals with a new case that’s designed specifically for medical environments.
Sparrow, my favorite mail client for Mac and iOS, has been updated today to introduce POP support to the iPhone — just over a month after it came to the Mac.
Once top dog next to Internet Explorer, Firefox has increasingly been losing its grasp on the desktop browsing experience, and consequently been spending more time paying attention to the possibilties of mobile. Firefox is already available for Android, and now it looks like it might come to iOS as well, but not as a mere port of the browser many of us have abandoned in favor of Chrome: it’s rebuilt for the ground up with iPad browsing in mind.
It’s been a week since Apple released its first iOS 6 beta, and we’re still digging up new features. We reported some improvements to the keyboard this morning, and now we’ve found some enhancements to Spotlight and wallpaper settings.