Microsoft founder and renowned, mega-rich philanthropist Bill Gates recently sat down with The Telegraph to talk about current affairs and his relationship with the late Steve Jobs. Despite their professional rivalry, Jobs and Gates had been good friends for many years.
Gates revealed in the interview that he sent Jobs a personal letter that was kept by his bedside during his last days.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAvPrZePEd4
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — Next time you’re nodding off at school or in the office because there’s too much C02 in the room, a sensor can open the window and wake you up.
This is just one of the cool functions that a group of uber-smart high school students and an affable professor have designed through virtual reality in Hawaii.
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld on January 9, 2007, to thunderous applause. The revolutionary phone — a product that has now made Apple the top smartphone manufacturer in the world — then went on sale June 29, 2007, to long lines of eager customers and fanboys.
Several years later, Jobs announced that the iPhone’s software would be called “iOS.” These two names, iPhone and iOS, have not only become a part of Apple’s core, but also staple, household names worldwide.
Most people don’t know, however, the story of how Steve Jobs took both names from an enterprise/infrastructure company by the name of Cisco. Took? Well,
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / IWORLD 2012 — One of the highlights on the agenda on the second day of this year’s expo is the appearance of Rob Corddry (The Daily Show, Childrens Hospital) for a live recording of the popular Mac Power Users podcast. Both he and Merlin Mann of 43Folders fame were in fine form during the 45 minute session led by podcast hosts David Sparks and Katie Floyd.
The theme of the episode revolved around Corddry’s workflow, including the tools he uses to get his work done and some of the strategies he employs to keep on top of his myriad projects.
Apple’s excellent innovation of lining the sides of the iPad 2 with magnets is one that is distressingly uncapitalized upon by accessory makers. Oh, sure, a few case makers slap a magnet into their iPad 2 case to turn the screen on and off, but where’s the imagination?
That’s why I’m so pleased by the idea of the Magnus. It’s an iPad 2 stand that uses the magnets inside the tablet’s hinge to keep itself upright on your desk. Brilliant!
Once you’ve connected to a Wi-Fi network on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, your device remembers its credentials and, for your convenience, connects automatically next time. However, this isn’t always helpful. Sometimes we connect to hotspots accidentally, and it’s frustrating when your device connects to a network you don’t want it to.
You can prevent this by “forgetting” the networks you’ve previously connected to. Once forgotten, your device will no longer connect automatically, and only when you tell it to. Here’s how to forget a Wi-Fi network.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/IWORLD 21012 — Silo Ink’s refillable ink cartridges are the last inkjet cartridges you’ll ever buy, according to the company. It offers a lifetime replacement guarantee to back that up.
Once installed, the cartridges are refilled from bottles of ink, which cost about $15 and are good for 10 refills. A special chip that makes the cartridges appear as new to the printer after a refill.
A set of refillable cartridges cost between $100 and $200, depending on how many you need for your printer.
Here’s a quick look at the system, which is being showcased here at Macworld.
I’m not a huge fan of The Big Bang Theory, but this clip from the latest episode is too good not to post.
What if Siri wasn’t just Wolfram Alpha stapled onto a smart text-to-speech program, but instead an actual woman, working a call center, and just as slinky and sexually promiscuous as any bro showing off in front of his drunken friends by asking for a blow job could ever hope?
That’s probably not many people’s fantasies, but it is the hilarious chimera of Big Bang’s Raj, who is as cripplingly shy as he is addicted to his new iPhone 4S.
Getting ink inspired by your favorite company is a huge commitment. Our Portuguese friend Francisco decided he was ready to take the plunge and recently got this Steve Jobs portrait inked on his forearm. We’ve seen quite a few Apple tattoos over the years but Francisco’s is one of the best.
So what would compel someone to get a Steve Jobs portrait tattoo?
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/IWORLD 2012 — One of the closing events from the first day at Macworld / iWorld was the RapidFire session. If you wanted to learn about one cool thing about a variety of Apple-related stuff, it was the place to be.
Each presenter delivered a quick-paced talk that offered information, tips and tricks that shed some light on a little known or understood piece of software or hardware. The scope of the talks ranged from unconventional uses of Photo Booth to how to fix some of your Apple devices on your own, but here were the ones that I felt were the best of the bunch.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — If you want to create great photos from your iPhone, start by shooting everywhere. Including the dentist’s office or out the window of a friend’s bathroom.
Photographer Jonathan Marks has snapped his evocative pics in both those places, plus waiting at a traffic light and at a Whole Foods parking lot. He shoots and processes everything directly on his iPhone, thanks to a handful of key apps.
This is my last regular news post for the Cult of Mac. Since my arrival at the site’s inception, there have been many changes in the Apple landscape — and on these pages. It’s time to move on.
We already know from previous reports that Apple is working on a magnetic charging system for iOS devices, similar to the MagSafe connectors on its MacBooks. But one hurdle that stood in the company’s way was the MagSafe’s inability to transfer data.
However, a newly published patent entitled “Programmable Magnetic Connectors” seems to confirm that Apple is making progress on a magnetic connector capable of transferring power and data, which could spell the end of its 30-pin dock connector and even the headphone jack.
A Brazil-made iPad has been in the offing since July 2011. However, plans by Taiwan’s Foxconn to build the tablet in South America were held up by negotiations surrounding taxes that could double the cost of Apple’s tablet. Now comes word the government has exempted the iPad, freeing Foxconn to begin churning out iPads stamped “Made in Brazil.”
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/IWORLD 2012 — I spent the afternoon on the floor hunting down unique products and people.
The show is about the same size as last year: about 300 exhibitors. It’s not all iPhone cases, as it has been in years past. There are some interesting products tucked away, especially at the edges of the show floor. There are also plenty of booth babes. If you’re into that sort of thing.
Counterintuitively, for the fourth year running, the winners of 148Apps annual “Best App Ever” contest have just been announced at Macworld / iWorld 12012. And my girlfriend’s going to be positively giddy, because the app that she’s spent most of the last year grinding her fingers down to the bone playing has won: Halfbrick Studio’s Jetpack Joyride!
Although Apple sells millions of iPhones, 500,000 of the smartphones spell the difference between being No. 1 and runner-up in the race against South Korean rival Samsung. New numbers reveal the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant retook by a nose the crown of top smartphone maker in the world.
Did you know that your iPhone’s serial number says a lot about your device? It isn’t just a random string of digits. It reveals the factory in which your device was built, the year it was manufactured, its unique identifier, and more. Here’s how to decode your iPhone’s serial number.
One of the biggest criticisms of virtual keyboards on a touchscreen display is that they offers users no feedback, making them more difficult to type on than a traditional keyboard. Designers have attempted to provide solutions to this problem with third-party accessories that clip onto your display, but Apple may be working on its own solution using coded magnets and ferrofluids that could be built into future iPads.
When’s the last time you went shopping at JC Penney versus the Apple Store? The venerable retailer, overshadowed by the cheap-chic of Target, is looking to reshape itself by putting the iPhone maker’s former retail chief in charge. Ron Johnson, a 10-year veteran of Apple’s retail effort, explained the retailer and Cupertino, Calif. tech giant share much in common.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / IWORLD 2012 — The Neat Company has long been known for its scanning devices, like NeatReceipts and NeatDesk. Those devices let you take your paper receipts, documents and business cards and scan them into your Mac so that you can organize them in a way that makes sense to you.
But here at Macworld/iWorld 2012, The Neat Company is focusing on their latest venture: conquering the digital realm. The thrust of what they are presenting here is all about the cloud. NeatCloud and NeatMobile, to be specific.
Earlier this week, we confirmed that Pixelbit is set to launch a successor to its popular top-down arcade racer Reckless Racing. The title is set to hit the App Store next week on February 2, and just in case you weren’t already excited enough, its developers have released a second teaser trailer.
Following a lengthy New York Times report published earlier this week, detailing the harsh reality behind the mistreatment of Chinese factory workers, Apple CEO Tim Cook has responded to his staff with an email that brands the report “patently false and offensive.”
Cook revealed he is “outraged” by the report, and reassured his team that “we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers.”
Here’s a quick look at AppCubby’s $0.99 Launch Center app, a very cool and useful app launcher that’s like Automator for iOS.
The app allows you to set up all kinds of actions and schedule them. Version 1.1 adds actions to iOS’s Notification Center. Take checking your Facebook messages, for example. This normally takes several steps: searching for the Facebook app, launching it and finding the messages tab. In Launch Center, you can set it up to check your messages every morning from just one finger-tap on the Notifications screen.
The app can be configured to work with a ton of apps and perform pretty complex actions, like calling your mom every week or adjusting the screen brightness down every night. Today’s update has prope and is already in the App Store’s Top 100. Here’s the app’s creator, David Barnard, showing how it works.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — The inaugural edition of the Original iPhone Film Festival (OIFF) gave out awards to small-screen Steven Spielbergs.
OIFF founders Corey Rogers and Matt Dessner were on hand to talk about common iPhone filmmaking problems, like getting release forms and copyright snafus. (If you want to take your iPhone videos from crappy to snappy, check out our exclusive interview with some great tips from Dessner.)