Pixelmator is a very popular image editing tool for the Mac that serves as a much cheaper alternative to Photoshop. The app sports a gorgeous interface that looks like it could have been designed by Apple itself.
Version 2.0 of Pixelmator will launch tomorrow in the Mac App Store with a host of new image editing features, including content-aware fill and support for OS X Lion’s Versions and Auto Save features.
Most of us are hopefully unfamiliar with the prison scene, so Gizmodo has taken an interesting look at technology in California’s San Quentin State Prison. The series is called “Lockdown,” and the latest installment focuses on how smartphones are used behind bars.
Phones in prison are a hot item, going for $300 to $700 behind bars. Inmates use them to communicate with the outside world and orchestrate nefarious activities like drug drop-offs. Prisoners will do basically anything to keep an iPhone from being confiscated. And we do mean anything.
PBS will be airing a new, hour-long documentary next week about the life of Steve Jobs, and unique to the program will be rare interviews with His Steveness himself, including a never-before-broadcast interview from 1994 where Jobs expounds upon his life’s philosophies.
The program will be called “Steve Jobs – One Last Thing” and will air on your local PBS affiliate on November 2nd at 10:00pm. Here are some more details of what to expect.
There have been a lot of complaints on Twitter that most of the best bits of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs have already leaked. After reading sundry blog posts, news stories and tweets about Jobs’s life, is there anything left to read in the actual book?
Yes, there is. There’s plenty. Although the arc of Steve’s story is generally well known, Isaacson has added a ton of new detail to even the most well-trodden stories from Jobs’s life. Trouble is, a lot of it is about Jobs mistreating people.
Walter Isaacson’s book is an unflinching biography of a manifestly great man. But it’s not a fun read. In fact, sometimes it’s a lot like being locked in a room with a borderline sociopath. Powering through Isaacson’s bio will give you unique insight into how Steve Jobs changed the world, but it’s not necessarily a comforting one.
Up until now, the Angry Birds have stayed terrestrial, pushing their beaks no higher than the cumulus clouds in their squawking, feather-strewn war against the evil Pig Armada.
That’s about to change. The Angry Birds are going to outer space. No, Rovio’s not doing a sci-fi themed Angry Birds sequel, although that’s not a shabby idea: NASA is sending some iPads to the International Space Station, along with an Angry Bird plush toy.
A few weeks ago, we posted the video below to show how Apple saw Siri and the iPad coming back in 1987. We didn’t tell the story behind the video though, which is equally fascinating.
It appears the wave of early disappointment in the iPhone 4S that washed over U.S. consumers has now made it to the United Kingdom. A third of UK consumers were “disappointed” Apple’s new handset didn’t offer more features, according to an Internet survey.
You can hear a collective sospiro of relief from Italian Apple fans today after a judge in Milan denied a request by Samsung to block sales of the iPhone 4S in a preliminary hearing.
At stake was the launch of the iPhone 4S on October 28, the device that some Italians have already been buying on eBay just to say they’ve established intimate relations with Siri before anyone else.
Steve Jobs was a massive fan of English rock band The Beatles, and once revealed in an interview for 60 Minutes that his business plan was inspired by the group. To honor Steve’s life and his achievements, The Flaming Lips will provide a special performance at the O Music Awards on October 31 where they will perform a cover of The Beatles‘ “Revolution”.
Ever since it first landed in 2010, iPad users have been clamoring for a native port of the great Mint.com app, which allows people who use Intuit’s great personal finance tracking service to watch their spending and savings on the go. Mint.com’s website worked, but just barely: it was really designed with a desktop experience in mind.
Well, the wait’s finally over. Mint.com has just been updated to a universal app, and the iPad version is just a gorgeous piece of work.
Yet another publisher is singing the praises of Apple’s Newsstand appfor the iPad. Magazine publisher Condé Nast announced Tuesday a 268 percent hike in subscriptions after the tech giant released Newsstand as part of iOS5 unveiled in early October.
Apple has reportedly begun building a huge solar farm that will provide power to its data center in North Carolina. According to the report, the farm will be built on 171 acres of land, and will be situated right next door to the data center.
If you missed our editor and resident Steve Jobs expert Leander Kahney on Macbreak Weekly yesterday, you should check out the full episode below. Leander got to sit in with Leo Laporte and the gang to talk about his interview with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, the biography itself, and Steve Jobs the man. It was an interesting and entertaining roundtable.
Following Monday’s report detailing a new Apple pilot program that will allow online shoppers to collect their Apple order from their local retail store, the Cupertino company has now rolled out the service to stores in San Francisco, California. Orders made online can now be collected — often on the same day, if in stock — from the Chestnut Street, Stonestown and San Francisco Apple stores in San Francisco.
Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs hit the iBookstore earlier this week, and after a few hours, I wondered why it had such a low star rating. I read some of the reviews to discover that many users have had formatting issues, which made some pages of the book illegible. Apple has now issued an update to the book and begun instructing customers on how to get the new version.
Gameloft & Sega are getting into the Halloween spirit and offering tasty treats in the form of cheap iOS games. For a limited time you can grab a some of the most popular games for your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for just $0.99, including Order & Chaos Online, Driver, ChuChu Rocket!, and Virtua Fighter 2.
Here’s the full list:
The iPad has been a staggering success for Apple since its inception in 2009, but if it wasn’t for one loud-mouthed Microsoft employee, the tablet may have never been born. Steve Jobs decided that he would create the device after listening to a Microsoft employee boast about a Windows tablet over dinner. When he got home that night, Steve said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet really can be.”
My original plan when downloading this app was to use it as the basis for a little light humor.
“Sorry readers, can’t write another word, my phone is telling me to go and kiss someone.” That sort of thing.
But after downloading it, I made a terrible mistake: I actually tried using it. It turns out When Should You Kiss is the worst thing I’ve seen on iOS for a long, long time.
Carbon weave has got to be the Miracle Whip of gadgets — it makes anything taste better. We reviewed Sound ID’s 510 Bluetooth headset in a BT headset head-to-head (try saying that fast) a few months back; and while it sounded great and was pretty much our pick of the week, it wasn’t the coolest looking kid on the block — and you couldn’t order it to do stuff, like you could some other headsets. Sound ID’s new Six fixes all that, and adds a trick for Siri too.
This is pretty wild: the Kogeto Dot ($80) is a 360-degree lens that snaps onto the back of an iPhone 4, shoots 360-degrees worth of video; then a player in the cloud (if you upload the clip) or on your iPhone 4 in the form of Kogeto’s free Looker app (if you keep the clip on your phone) allows you to play the app and change to any viewpoint in a 360-degree circle during playback.
To commemorate the launch of the official Steve Jobs biography in Taiwan, a bookseller handed out apples and bags printed with two portraits of the Apple co-founder.
You were supposed to be dressed in a Steve-esque black turtleneck to get the snack and commemorative bag at bookchain Eslite, but as the guy holding his bag wearing a Steve McQueen t-shirt shows, the rules for the giveaway weren’t strictly observed. (Or maybe all Steves look alike?)
The news comes to us from tireless Steve Jobs spotter Dan Bloom, who notes that Eslite’s sales of the bio are expected to outstrip Harry Potter.
Now that’s truly magical.
Via Dan Bloom
Here’s a question for the nervous flyers: would you be reassured to know that an iPad was scheduling your plane’s upkeep?
Flightdocs, a Florida-based company that helps airlines keep track of the moving parts that keep the friendly skies safe, has just launched an iPad app.
Brent Schlender has worked for a number of publications over the years, and has served in positions like lead technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Now serving as a contributor for Fortune, Schlender has covered Steve Jobs for the past 25 years on numerous occasions.
In a recent article on Fortune, Schlender tells of “chapters in his [Jobs’s] story I was never able to tell, either because they would violate a personal confidence or because what I had learned didn’t really fit into a typical analytical business story.”
Some particularly fond memories of Jobs are included in Schlender’s anecdotes, including Jobs’s plan to ‘fix’ AOL in 2003, the time he previewed the original Toy Story to a group of kids, and when he decided to take extended medical leave from Apple in 2008.
“BOOM!” That’s what Steve Jobs said when he demoed the Slide to Unlock gesture on the iPhone in January of 2007. Whether you’re on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you always have to slide your finger across that slider to get past the Lock screen. It’s become a staple aspect of iOS and Apple’s mobile products.
The United States Patent & Trademark Office granted Apple the patent for Slide to Unlock today. This means that no other company can use the gesture without infringing on Apple’s new patent. Boom.
Friends sometimes tell me I have a hollow leg, but they don’t really mean it: they just mean that my rampant alcoholism is frequently imperceptible. If it were literally true that I had a hollow leg, I’d probably be tempted to do something crazy with it… like, say, run an Apple Dock Connector up through it and turn my upper calf into an easily accessible iPhone dock.
That’s why I’m so green with envy reading this Telegraph story about Trevor Prideaux, a British man born without a left arm who modified his prosthetic to be a smartphone dock. The only problem? He crammed a Nokia in there, not an iPhone!