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Facebook For iOS Gets #Hashtags, Ability To Make Restaurant Reservations With OpenTable

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facebook-opentable

Facebook released an update for its iOS app today that adds support for hashtags, an aspect of Twitter that Facebook recently added on its desktop site. Users can now add hashtags in statuses and such to filter topics.

Another notable new feature is the ability to make a restaurant reservation within the Facebook app through OpenTable. Using “Nearby Places” and official pages for restaurants that have added OpenTable integration, Facebook users can quickly make reservations without needing to open a separate Web page or app. Apple has integrated OpenTable into Siri to help make restaurant reservations as well.

TV listing information for U.S. prime-time shows and movie pages are now displayed in the app, too. Facebook notes that today’s update also introduces “faster loading and a cleaner design for timelines on iPad,” so be sure to grab it in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Help Your Kids Manage And Block Tracking And Targeted Ads On Their iOS Devices With Disconnect Kids

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DIsconnect Kids

I have to admit, I’m less than wary of all the tracking that goes on with the iOS devices my kids have access to. Now that they both have at least an iPod touch and access to my iPads, I’m feeling a bit on the worried side about them sharing any of their web or app activity.

Luckily, there’s an app called Disconnect Kids that installs on any iOS device and then helps kids (and their parents) understand what this tracking stuff is, and how to block it. It then helps those very same kids and parents do just that.

Visualize (And Touch) Your Evernote Data With Bubble Browser For Mac And iPad

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Apparently, I need to tag my notes more.
Apparently, I need to tag my notes more.

Evernote–it’s totally awesome, right? Track everything you do in Evernote, and access it on your Mac, the web, your iPhone, your iPad, or any other platform Evernote lives on, all with one login. Need that shopping list you created on your Mac while at the store? Pull it up on your iPhone at Costco. Want to show off that great website you saw while browsing the web at the coffee shop? Clip it to Evernote, and then pull it up on your iPad at home.

When you use Evernote as often and as regularly as many of us do, you’ll find that your own set of organization starts to break down. You’ve got so much stuff in there, across a variety of categories, notebooks, tags, and the like, that it starts to make less sense, perhaps, to your visual mind.

That’s where Bubble Broswer for Evernote comes in. This slick app, available for Mac as well as for iOS, re-visualizes your Evernote data into bubbles, making it easier to see patterns in your own data.

Hands-Free Leap Motion Controller Hits 1 Million App Downloads

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It's like magic!
It's like magic!

Remember the hands-free Leap Motion Controller for Mac that everyone went on and on about how cool it was going to be? The one that got delayed until July?

Well, it’s been three weeks since it actually started shipping, and the team behind the 3-D motion controller is reporting some significant numbers, including 25,000 downloads of its software developer kit (which allows developers to include code for the device in their own apps), and 1 million downloads of apps that work with the hardware.

That’s pretty fantastic, right?

CBS Sports iPad App Updated With Live Video Streaming

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With college football, the NFL and the MLB post-season all knocking on the door, CBS has pushed out an update for its iPad app which allows users to stream live video of sporting events.

CBS has been streaming video to the iPhone for a while now, but it’s finally bringing it to the iPad with a full tablet experience. Now you can stream on-demand clips or live events to your iPad and push it to your TV via AirPlay via the free update.

Here are the release notes:

The HoverBar By Twelve South Is The Best Mount For Your iPad [Review]

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Has your life been graced with a Twelve South product yet? The company’s Mac-only accessories line is imbued with such cleverness, it’s difficult to avoid complete ubiquity in the home or office. While I’m fond of many of their products — I use the PlugBug every day — it was their HoverBar that actually changed my life. All it required was a change in how to use the HoverBar.

HoverBar by Twelve South
Category: Stands
Works With: iPad
Price: $79.95

The intention of the “Tony Stark-inspired” HoverBar is to provide increased screen real estate on the iMac with a cool opposable arm. The mounting brackets fit an iPad 2, 3 or 4, providing the user not just with more screen real estate, but with touchscreen real estate. (Win!) I use an iMac primarily for film editing, so having an iPad near allows me to check email while I have all 27 inches of the iMac devoted to a project. The problem for me is that access to an iPad during this time is just a distraction.

Flick Quit Up To Three Apps At A Time In iOS 7 Beta [iOS Tips]

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flick quit

Back when iOS got “multitasking,” it was a matter of pride in my group of geeky friends to be able to double click the home button on their iPhones and then space three or four of their fingers *just* right to tap a bunch of apps’ little red circles to force quit the apps all at once. “Hey,” they’d say, “why settle for force quitting just one at a time?”

I suppose they had a point, as today’s tip is all about “flick quitting” up to three apps at once on the iPhone, provided said iPhone is running iOS 7 beta.

Forget A Fingerprint Sensor, iPhone 6 Infinity Concept Has A Wrap-Around Screen [Gallery]

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We’re less than a month away from seeing what the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S will look like—fingerprint sensor and all—but some artists on Dribble have been dreaming of a new feature for the iPhone: an infinite screen.

Claudio Guglieri’s iPhone 6 Infinity mockup and template sparked a mess of awesome rebounds from other artists who added their own bits of flair to the idea of an iPhone with a display that wraps completely around the device.

Take a look at these other great mockups:

Ultima Forever: Quest For The Avatar Is An Engaging, Free-To-Play MMO [Review]

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Combat is simple yet frantic.
Combat is simple yet frantic in Ultima Forever: Quest For The Avatar.

Created in 1981, the Ultima series of computer games has a long and storied history. Richard Garriott (Lord British in-game) created Ultima while working at a ComputerLand, selling copies out of Ziploc bags and eventually getting picked up by a publishing company, creating his own publishing concern (Origin Systems), and finally selling Origin to Electronic Arts in 1992. In 1997, EA released Ultima Online, widely accepted as the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar by Mythic Entertainment, EA
Category: iOS Game
Works With: iPad, iPhone
Price: Free

Fast-forward to today, and Mythic Games, along with publisher EA, has created a loving tribute to the Ultima franchise with Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar. These days, most EA games are created with a free-to-play aesthetic, and Ultima Forever is no exception.

What’s surprising, however, is just how little that matters: Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar is a delightful top-down MMO that’s easy to play without spending a dime. Which, ironically, is the reason many of us will.

How The iPhone’s ‘Tri-Tone’ Message Alert Was Taken From A 1998 MP3 Player

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iPhone-message-alert

You don’t have to spend too much time in a public place before you hear the iPhone’s default “tri-tone” alert — it’s everywhere, and everyone knows exactly what it means. But do you know where it came from? You might be surprised to hear that it wasn’t actually composed for the iPhone, but for a 1998 MP3 player for the Mac called SoundJam MP.

WSJ: New iPad Will Use iPad Mini’s Touch Technology To Become Thinner And Lighter

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iPad-Retina-Screen

The fifth-generation iPad will use the same touch-panel technology as the iPad mini to allow it to become thinner and lighter, according to “people with knowledge of the matter,” who have been speaking to The Wall Street Journal. The device is expected to look just like the iPad mini, with narrow bezels and a significantly thinner shell, but it will maintain a 9.7-inch Retina display.

Drag And Drop To Tag Your Files In OS X Mavericks Beta [OS X Tips]

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drag n drop tags Mavericks

One of the cool new features of OS X Mavericks is the ability to tag files in the Finder, making Finder labels a bit more useful. Want to sort a bunch of files for your upcoming vacation into one place? Make a tag for “vacation,” and then add the tag per file with a right-click as we showed you a while back.

Want to track some of those vacation files with the destinations they pertain to? Go ahead and tag them with a second tag. Can’t do that with a label.

While it’s easy to right-click on a file and choose a tag, it’s even easier to add tags with a simple Mac OS standard move. Here’s how.

Leaked Parts Confirm iPhone 5S Dual-LED Flash [Image]

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Double-Flash-iPhone-5S

Although the new fingerprint sensor gets all the attention, another big draw of the forthcoming iPhone 5S is the rumored camera improvements. We’ve heard that we’re at least looking at a megapixel jump to 12MP, but dual-LED flash is also rumored to be in the cards, and when it comes to the latter, it looks like we may have just received our confirmation.

Abbyy’s TextGrabber + Translator 4.0 Grabs Text And Translates It

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If Abbyy’s upcoming new Textgrabber+Translator app came in a tin, then the app would do exactly what it said on that tin. And the tin—to stretch the metaphor—would be a beautiful, iOS 7-styled container.

The updated app, which now comes in an iPad-shaped tin to match the iPhone-shaped one, uses the iPad/iPhone’s camera to scan text, turn it into actual editable text and—if you like—translate it into any of 40 languages.

Could The iPhone 5S Come In Gold? [Rumor]

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At first, the iPhone came in just one color, like a Model-T: black. By the time the iPhone 3G came out, though, the iPhone settled into a two-tone color scheme: classic black, and equally classic white.

But this seems like the year that Apple experiments with color. Not only is it widely accepted that Apple will release a colorful budget iPhone this year, probably called the iPhone 5C, but it looks like Apple might add one more color to the classic iPhone line-up: gold.

The Atherton Is The iPhone Case 1970s U.K. ‘Soccer’ Coaches Would Have Used

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athertoncognacwh_1_1024x1024

The Atherton is — in name and in design — the iPhone case that 1970s- and 1980s-era U.K. football (soccer) managers would have used. Famous for their sheepskin coats, these hard-talking, hard-smoking sports trainers wouldn’t hold truck with lily-livered modern materials like nylon or — gasp — fleece. Nope. The only covering fit for a testosterone-filled football coach was the skin of a dead sheep.

SteadyTune, A Beautiful Guitar Tuner That Sits Waiting In Your Mac’s Menu Bar

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When I pick up a guitar, pretty much the only thing I can do is tune the thing. Well, that’s not entirely true: I can coil the strings and keep a burning cigarette in there, Eric Clapton-style, but as I quit smoking a few years back that’s not so useful anymore.

However, I’m fully aware that there are people out there who can thrash some amazing sounds out of their axes, and yet have trouble keeping the things in tune. SteadyTune, a Mac app that’s always waiting in the menu bar, is there to help.

Beddit, A Permanent Sleep Tracker That Stays In Bed

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The last thing I want to do as I stumble into my bed through a bourbon-soaked fog is to set up my sleep-tracking device. It’s nice to have an app tell me how fitful is my kip, but the pre-sleep perambulations are a pain: you have to slip your Fitbit into a wrist strap, or plug in your iPhone and launch the sleep-tracking app.

Beddit takes a different approach. It’s a strap that stays permanently wrapped around your mattress, ready to record your snoozes.

Here’s Why Used Mac Mini’s Hold Their Prices So Well

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minivalue

 

Ever wondered why you can’t pick up a cheap used Mac Mini? No, me either—I always figured the new ones were already cheap enough.

But the answer is both interesting and unsurprising. Unsurprising, because it’s just down to supply and demand. Interesting because—well, let’s ask some people who really know about selling used Mac Minis: Macminicolo.

The Latest In iPhone 5S And 5C Rumors: Sapphire Home Buttons, Fingerprint Sensors

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5C and 5S mockups
5C and 5S mockups

The rumor mill is starting to kick into full gear when it comes to Apple’s plans for the iPhone lineup in 2013. Over the weekend, it was reported that Apple would be holding an iPhone event on September 10th, and the company is widely expected to unveil not one, but two new models: the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C. The 5S will be the successor to the flagship iPhone 5 and sport upgraded specs, while the 5C will have a plastic back and come in multiple colors.

When it comes to the iPhone 5S, this year’s upgrade could be pretty predictable—A7 chip, better cameras, etc. But then there’s the bet that Apple will do something radically different with the hardware and add a fingerprint sensor. Now the 5S could feature a redesigned home button made of sapphire. And we can’t forget about the iPhone 5C…

Why Google Needs to Sell an Android TV

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Yeah, I said it. Google should — and probably will — sell an Android TV.

No, not a dongle. And I’m not talking about a Google TV of the kind you can buy today in which Google technology puts the “smart” in the smart TV feature.

I’m talking about a full-blown, Android-based, big-screen, high-def TV set.

I’m going to tell you why, but first: Let’s understand why Google sells hardware at all.