News - page 1845

Ah, the wondrous findings of random polls. This one appears to favor my personal favorite company and therefore I won’t argue against it. The rest of you are free to sound off in the comments after reading the favorable findings of this ABC News/Washington Post poll. A random national sample of 1,007 adults were asked whether or not they had a favorable or unfavorable impression of the following four tech companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter.

Apple has said that its working on a tool to end the notorious Flashback botnet once and for all, but there’s still the remotest chance you could get infected. Keep in mind that only around 600,000 Macs have fallen prey to Flashback, and that number is a tiny fraction of the millions of Mac users around the world. Most of the machines that have been infected already are centralized in North America.

Your Mac is completely up to date and you’ve already checked to see if you’re infected by the Flashback trojan. If everything is squared away and you’re not infected already, here’s how to ensure there is zero chance you’ll get infected while you wait for Apple to save the day.

While you may be used to Siri’s familiar female voice, people around the world hear something different on a daily basis. Siri has many voices in different countries, ranging from foreign accents to even male voices. Here’s a compilation we put together of Siri’s many voices all across the globe.

Rumors have been relatively quiet on the iTunes front for awhile. We’ve had reports pop up here and there over the past couple years, but nothing that exciting has happened to Apple’s desktop music app for a long time.

iTunes is due for a refresh, and it looks like we’ll be seeing an iCloud-centric iTunes 11 alongside the release of iOS 6.

A Mac trojan called Flashback resurfaced in the news over the last week or so after it was revealed that 600,000+ Macs were infected by the nefarious botnet. We’ve showed you how to see if you’re infected by Flashback, and Apple has released two updates already to patch the malware.

Apple is about to get into the antivirus business, as the company has said that it is working its own tool for you to detect and remove Flashback once and for all. The folks in Cupertino will also be working with ISPs around the globe to hunt down the source of this botnet and kill it at the root.

Apple has released updates for three of its production apps, Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor. Verizon 10.0.4 of Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5.0.3, and Compressor 4.0.3 are all available now as updates in the Mac App Store. Overall stability improvements and multiple bug fixes have been included across the board.

Adobe Reader for Android and iOS received a hefty update today, adding a slew of new features and enhancing performance across the board. We’ll highlight these new features for you below and then send you over to the Adobe blog where they have done an excellent job at explaining what has been added and improved in the latest Adobe Reader update.

A new jailbreak tweak called Stride brings better-than-Android-like gestures to your iOS lock screen. Developed by talented App Store and jailbreak developer Adam Bell, Stride costs $3 in Cydia. Gone are the boring days of the ‘slide to unlock’ bar. Now you can unlock your jailbroken iPhone with a pre-set gesture of your choice! And boy does it look sweet.

Whispers have been circulating for months about Apple releasing a larger iPhone later this year. Since the original iPhone launch, Apple has kept the iPhone’s essential dimensions intact, and we still have the same 3.5-inch display size Steve Jobs demoed at Macworld in 2007. While the rest of the smartphone industry has been experimenting with all kinds of crazy screen sizes and aspect ratios, Apple has stuck with a simple 3:2 aspect ratio and 3.5 inches.

There have been plenty of arguments made for why Apple will release a 4-inch iPhone in the future, but one smart forum user has put together an argument that trumps the rest.

Apple has changed its mind about DragonDrop, the file moving utility that we reviewed here a few weeks ago, and granted the app a place in the Mac App Store after initially saying it would never back down.

Today CloudOn released the first major update to its cloud-based Microsoft Office solution. Like OnLive Desktop, which recently made changes to comply with Microsoft’s Windows licensing model, CloudOn delivers virtual copies of Windows versions the three core Office tools. Unlike OnLive, however, CloudOn doesn’t provide a virtual Windows desktop and the company doesn’t provide its own cloud storage for user documents.

Instead, CloudOn integrates with Box and Dropbox to provide document storage and sharing. The interface of the company’s iPad app provides a simple launcher and file browser. When one of the Office apps (or the newly added Adobe Reader app and File Viewer) is launched a virtual instance of that app is provided from the CloudOn servers.

Have you been following all the rumors and saving up your pennies for a new MacBook Pro or iMac the second Apple releases them? Well, looks like you might not have to wait, as two reports this morning suggest new models will be dropped imminently.

Right now, every Mac fan is looking forward to the major next revision of OS X, Mountain Lion, which will continue what Lion started and keep on blurring the line between Apple’s Mac and iOS ecosystems. But what’s the end goal here?

Cult of Mac reader Cameron Leask put his design chops to the test to imagine what a completely unified OS X / iOS experience would look like. The result: OS XI, an operating system that merges OS X and iOS’s best features while finally ditching the Mac filesystem and embracing an iOS-like approach to data and apps.

It certainly looks sleek, but we’ll let you be the judge of that. After the jump, take an imagination-fueled tour through the future of the Mac with OS XI. Let us know what you think in the comments.

We’re a big fan of BareBones Software here and endorse their incredible BBEdit app whenever we have the chance, but if you don’t want to parcel out fifty bones for it, BareBones has just done everyone a solid and brought over many of the new features from BBEdit 4.0 to their free, powerful text editing software, TextWrangler.

Following in the footsteps of his former boss and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Tim Cook will be speaking at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference next month in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. This is the first time Cook has appeared at D. He is officially the headlining speaker for the opening-night of D10.

Apple has been accused of avoiding paying a proper amount of taxes in the U.K. after making an incredible £6 billion in the last financial year, but paying only £10 million in tax. The Cupertino company runs what is described as a “significant operation” in Cork, Ireland, where tax rates are almost half those paid in the U.K.

2012 hasn’t been shaping up to be a good year for RIM. The company has already lost some major enterprise customers, developers have publicly announced they’re shuttering BlackBerry support, and the new iPad sales beat the total number of BlackBerry PlayBook shipments three times over in one weekend.

The one bright moment, if you can call it that, came during the company’s recent quarterly financials call when RIM’s newly minted CEO Thorsten Heins told investors that his first action on the job was to seriously evaluate RIM’s business. After months of delusional pep talks, his very sober assessment was like a burst of lucid thinking. Unfortunately, the company’s executives seem to be covering that lucid moment with more of the delusional spin that’s become typical of RIM

The latest bout of RIM denying its situation involve comments by executives on the state of the BlackBerry in government.

This is the iPhone Shutter Grip. Can you guess what it does? That’s right: It adds a handgrip and a shutter release to your iPhone, letting you snap pictures one handed, and generally take photos without dropping the iPhone.

It even has a built-in tripod mount, and a secret second button.

An SEC filing from computer security specialists Symantec reveals its former Chief Accounting Officer Phillip Bullock has joined Apple to head up the Cupertino company’s tax department.

Everyone knows the iPad’s speaker is, well, weedy. To compensate, Big Blue Audio has just released two new Bluetooth speakers to give a lift to music, movies and game-playing on your iPad.

Available from Brookstone, the Big Blue and Big Blue Live resemble kitschy white kitchen appliances. The $149.99 Big Blue packs 30-watts of aural pleasure for music lovers, while the speaker’s little sis, the $99.99 battery-powered Big Blue Live, is designed more as a portable companion for amplifying phone calls and apps. These new speakers are introduced to compete favorably both bang wise and buck wise versus other popular wireless speakers of similar specs / dimensions, for example the Logitech Boombox and the Jawbone Jambox, respectively.

With their sci-fi looks and packaging, they are certainly noticeable — but do they sound good too? Read on….

The infamous Flashback trojan has now infected more than 600,000 Macs worldwide. Apple has issues two Java updates in an effort to patch the vulnerability in Mac OS X, but unfortunately for some, it was just too late.

We’ve already published instructions on how to see if you’re Mac’s infected by using Terminal commands, but there is an easier way. FlashbackChecker is a simple piece of software that will quickly tell you whether or not your Mac is infected.

We firmly believe that Wacom’s Bamboo stylus is one of the best styluses money can buy for the iPad, but that was until this thing came along. The Wacom Bamboo Stylus Duo mixes a traditional ballpoint pen with Wacom’s famous iPad stylus to bring you the best of both worlds, whether you’re sketching a hobbit in Draw Something, or jotting down a phone number on an old envelope.

AT&T finally began unlocking iPhones for customers whose contracts had now expired over the weekend, allowing the device to be used with other SIM-cards from GSM carriers. But for deployed military personnel, the carrier will unlock iPhones still tied to a contract so that they can be used with others carriers abroad.

What. A. Day. The single most important mobile app acquisition to date has sent the internet into a flurry of disarray. In case you haven’t heard from everyone except your aged grandmother, Facebook has bought Instagram for a mouth-dropping $1 billion.

There will be (and already have been) thousands of articles written on the internet about this news today, and for good reason — it deserves discussion. But what exactly does this all mean for our beloved Instagram?

We reported last month on the legal and licensing issues surrounding OnLive and its OnLive Desktop for iPad, a freemium offering from the cloud gaming company that offered iPad users a full Windows 7 desktop experience complete with Office and the ability to watch Flash content. The company made a big entrance into the Windows/Office on iPad space in January and announced its premium and business plans the following month.

More recently, however, Microsoft announced that OnLive was violating its licensing agreements. Microsoft even went so far as to accuse OnLive and any OnLive Desktop users of illegally pirating Windows 7.

OnLive appears to have learned the error of its ways. Over the weekend, the company quietly adjusted its service to be compatible with Windows licensing.