News - page 1839

If you’re fed up with all the “who copied who,” “this one’s suing this one” nonsense currently consuming the mobile ecosystem, MIT has the solution for you. Raise your Switzerland flag with an affordable wooden DIY cellphone kit. No one will mistake your 9-volt powered laser-cut plywood for an iDevice or Android so you won’t have to worry about any impending patent litigation. All kidding aside, this little do-it-yourself kit is only in the prototype phase and is a far cry from the smartphones we’re used to using.

By all accounts, the Infinite Loop cafeteria has such great food that it’s pretty common for all sorts of Silicon Valley types to drop on by to visit a friend and catch some lunch.

The only problem? The constant influx of outsiders at Caffe Macs prevents Apple employees from actually talking about what’s going on and what they’re working on while they chow. That’s why Apple’s building an all new, off-campus restaurant, and only employees are allowed in.

Mobile management and security vendor Good released its quarterly device activations report. The report covers January through March and showed that the iPhone 4S was the commonly activated mobile device among Good’s business and enterprise customers followed by the iPad 2. The iPad overall (original, iPad 2, and new iPad) accounted for virtually all tablet activations.

Good’s quarterly report focused on iOS and Android device activations. The data is based on a mix of both business-owned devices and employee personal devices used in the workplace as part of a BYOD strategy.

We’re nosey as anyone here at Cult of Mac. We are also complete nerds, which means that we’re always peeking into people’s bags at conferences, or checking out what gear people use.

And we figured that you all might be just as bad, so we figured we’d rip open our man bags, handbags and purses and show you what’s inside, and why we carry what we do.

We’ll be doing this periodically from time to time. This week, we’ll be checking out what’s usually in the three (!) separate gadget bags of Cult of Mac Deputy Editor John Brownlee, and he’ll be filling us in on what everything is and why he carries it.

Earlier this week, Boston’s commuter rail system announced plans for a program that will allow riders to purchase tickets right on their iPhones and display a scannable code as proof of purchase. The model follows the success that Starbucks has had in using its iPhone app as a virtual gift card.

Not to be outdone, drugstore and pharmacy chain CVS recently added similar functionality to its CVS Pharmacy app.

Thanks to Ken Segall’s new book about Apple, Insanely Simple, we have heard about how Steve Jobs was willing to dress up as Willy Wonka, and how he felt about the negative reaction to the infamous hockey puck mouse.

Here are three more great anecdotes about Jobs from the book. They include Jobs asking the President to help with Apple’s Think Different campaign, the untold story of how NeXT got its name, and how Jobs almost integrated advertising into Mac OS.

This entire week we’ve been showing you guys how to take your DVD movie collection, rip the movie files off your DVDs, and get those movies playing on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Thanks to the software gurus at Digiarty, the entire process is free this week to Cult of Mac readers because Digiarty is giving away their popular MacX DVD Ripper Pro Stream Edition software absolutely free to anyone who reads Cult of Mac and has a pretty smile.

Yesterday we showed you how to rip your DVDs onto your computer, but what if you don’t want to waste all your iPhone or iPad’s storage space on movie files you might not watch for a while? Well, Digiarty has an easy-to-use solution which solves that dilemma. Air Playit is part of the free giveaway package Digiarty is handing out, and it turns your Mac into a server that will stream your ripped DVD movie files straight to your iPad or iPhone. It’s so simple your grandma can do.

Follow these three steps to get your ripped DVDs streaming to your iPad or iPhone right now:

Many of us pass our Macs and some external devices on to others when we upgrade. Family and friends may get our hand-me-downs, but quite frequently we’ll sell an old Mac, printer, or external drive on eBay or some other venue. Regardless of where our computers and related technology end up when we outgrow them, it’s important to make sure we scrub any personal data from them.

The importance of securely erasing personal and/or business data from hardware that is being passed on, sold, or even recycled was highlighted in a recent study by Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which discovered that half of all used hard drives contained information from their previous owners.

iOSLiveTV is a web-based TV service that allows you to watch premium TV channels on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch completely free of charge. It’s just like TV English Premium, the app we told you about last week, only it works… incredibly well. And it offers a lot more channels and AirPlay support.

Apple’s 2012 Worldwide Developer Conference sold out in just two hours yesterday morning, and most of the west coast got screwed because it all happened before many had even crawled out of bed. Now we’re here to tell you at the comfortable time of 8 A.M. PST about Indie Developer Lab, a conference for the devs who weren’t able to get into WWDC this year.

Helmed by developers Kyle Kinkade and Nate True with the help of Craig Fox, Indie Developer Lab 2012 will take place June 11-14th in San Francisco, California. As a response to the near-instantaneous sell-out of this year’s WWDC, the Indie Developer Lab is an alternative venue for iOS and Mac developers to meet, work, and share ideas.

Jibes at the iPhone and its users clearly aren’t enough to attract the attention of Apple’s customers, so Samsung is taking a more direct approach. Today the Korean company sent a screaming flashmob equipped with big “Wake Up” signs to protest outside of an Apple retail store in Sydney, Australia.

Evernote is planning on giving away over $100,000 in prizes in its second annual worldwide developer competition: the Evernote Devcup. Devcup challenges software developers and designers to create awesome products that integrate with the Evernote API for desktop, mobile or the web. The competition, which opens in 4 days, will award developers with over $100,000 in prizes and give finalists the chance to present their work to the attendees at Evernote’s Trunk Conference in San Francisco.

Business and career social network LinkedIn has finally released an iPad app – or, more accurately, a universal app for both the iPad and iPhone. In designing the new app, LinkedIn scrapped the clunky and somewhat confusing user interface of its earlier releases completely and built the new version based on the usage habits of users browsing the site from their iPads. The result is a complete new and stunningly simple app with a very Apple-like feel to it.

Apple’s iOS devices have been stealing market share from portable consoles since the day the App Store opened its doors. Four years later, they have led Nintendo to report its first ever annual operating loss of $454.4 million.

Six months after its initial debut on iOS, Jetpack Joyride is still receiving some terrific updates. In fact, its latest promises to be “the biggest and most anticipated update” yet. In addition to new achievements and new stats, version 1.3 brings 15 (yes, 15!) new gadgets, including the Gravity Belt, the Freeze-O-Matic, and the Missile Jammer.

Ken Segall’s new book, Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drive Apple’s Success, made its debut this week, and one of the more entertaining anecdotes within details Steve Jobs’s plans to celebrate the one millionth iMac purchase.

Rather than a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card like the company usually offers up for milestone App Store downloads, Steve wanted to play Willy Wonka and provide the lucky customer with a golden ticket that would entitle them to a full refund on their iMac purchase and a personal tour around Apple’s Cupertino campus.

One of the main reasons many of us turned to Apple’s machines and its OS X operating system is the belief that the company’s software is more secure than Windows, its biggest rival. However, Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Kaspersky, one of the industry’s leading security specialists, believes that Apple is “10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” and that Apple need to invest more into security audits for its software.

Twitter feed of the week – possibly the year – has got to be Text-Only Instagram, which gently pokes fun at Instagram and the kind of photos you often see there.

“Latte with foam shaped like a heart,” it reports. And later, simply: “Feet.”

It’s satire, yes, but the problem is that it really works. Read those tweets and you instantly conjure up an image in your head that fits the description.

Don’t let the satire make you mad, Instagrammers! It’s just a bit of fun. And you can subvert it by making your Instagrams increasingly weirder. Someone might even start by, say, taking Instagrams of the the Text-Only Instagram Twitter feed. Oh wait, that’s started already.

Popular social media tracker service Klout released its official iPhone app today in the App Store. The free app shows your Klout influence online with popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Never before has your online ego been so easy to track.

Sprint has always been adamant about its love for the iPhone. The carrier has taken a pretty substantial financial hit since it poured billions of dollars into the iPhone and Apple’s ridiculous subsidy rates. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has reiterated that being an iPhone partner is part of a greater strategy for his company, and he expects the decision to yield profitable results in the years to come.

Since AT&T and Verizon have terminated their unlimited plans, Sprint is the only iPhone carrier in the U.S. that offers unlimited data for new customers. With rumors saying that Apple’s next iPhone will have 4G LTE networking speeds, Sprint has said that it wants to keep offering its unlimited plan regardless.

Following legendary Apple retail guru Ron Johnson’s departure to JC Penny, former Dixons CEO John Browett has officially joined Apple has the new Senior Vice President of Retail. Apple announced that Browett would be coming to the company back in January, but a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that he has officially joined the company with $60 million in stock.

Here’s Barack Obama taking control of a Sphero during a visit to Boulder, Colorado yesterday.

WWDC 2012 is already like the VIP party everyone wishes they were special enough to attend. After selling out this morning in just two hours, every spot has already been taken by those who got to register before it was too late. If you missed the window of opportunity, you’re out of luck. No admission. We especially feel bad for you developers on the west coast.

One dev thought it would be a good idea to put his extra WWDC pass up on eBay. The current bid sits at $2,850. What this eBay seller sadly failed to realize is that you can’t actually resell a WWDC ticket.

Head on by the kiddy table at your local Apple Store and you used to see four iMacs, loaded up with educational software and games. Go on by with your kid today and you’ll see four iPads running educational iOS apps instead.

Hope they wipe those things down frequently: never seen a kid without at least several culture farms worth of germs on his or her pink, sticky hands. Those iPads are going to be disease-crusted petri dishes after a day’s worth of kids finish sliming them up.

Otherwise, great call. The only better learning tool for a child than an iMac is an iPad.

Apple has a patent for a touchscreen iMac with an arm that swivels the display down to allow you to manipulate the display more like an iPad, without getting “gorilla arm.” It’s a cool patent, but what would that iMac look like in real life? Motion graphics and 3D animation student Joakim Ulseth put together an awesome video bringing an iMac Touch running OS X Mountain Lion to life. There’s a lot of problems with this sort of design, and Apple would never in a million years release it, but it sure does make a sexy video. [via iFans]